LONG BEACH, Miss. (WLOX) – Ten years ago, Kim Watts was found stabbed and strangled in her Long Beach home. Since then, family members, including her son, have lived with the weight of this unsolved murder and still ask themselves the question: who killed Kim?

“She was special. A beautiful young woman. Very dedicated nurse, very attentive to her patients,” recalls Long Beach Mayor George Bass, Kim’s brother-in-law.

“Oftentimes we thought of her as a sister rather than an aunt,” added Kim’s nephew, Damian Holcomb. “She was fun, full of life. That’s what I miss the most, how full of life she was.

On the cloudy morning of Nov. 7, Kim Watts’ family gathered at Bayou View Park in Gulfport to plant a tree in her honor — and to mark ten years since her murder. The weather that day was eerily similar to that fateful day in 2014.

“I had been retired from the fire service for four or five months by then,” George said. “I was about to take a shower before my phone rang.”

On November 11, 2014, Kim Watts failed to show up for work. George’s wife, Sherry, asked him if he was going to check on his sister.

“The whole ride I just had the feeling that something was wrong. I prayed, God, that nothing would go so wrong that it couldn’t be fixed.

At Kim’s house, George noticed that Kim’s car was still in the driveway. When he approached the house, he took out the house key and realized that the door was already open.

“I was like, oh, something’s wrong.”

Inside, he makes a horrible discovery.

“I glanced to my left and saw her on the floor, partly in her bedroom and partly in the living room. I said, ‘Oh my God, no.’

Unsure if the killer was still inside the house, George ran outside to call the Long Beach Police Department. He was so shocked he didn’t remember calling 911.

When police arrived on scene, they discovered that Kim Watts had been stabbed twice and then strangled. The attack was so brutal that the blade of the knife broke.

Detectives began their investigation. George Bass was questioned and cleared as a suspect. A prime suspect was later identified, but that person refused to answer questions.

Three years have passed and the case remains unsolved. When George Bass was elected mayor of Long Beach in 2017, he requested that the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office handle the case to avoid a conflict of interest.

“(Sheriff Troy Peterson) put his investigative team on it. He called in more state investigators and the FBI.

Ten years later, the case is still cold. But Harrison County detectives aren’t giving up.

“You could tell there was a struggle. It looked like Kim had just come home,” said MP Hanna Hendry. “Her purse, her things were there with her as if she had gotten out of her car and had been attacked.”

Detectives hope new DNA evidence can give them the respite they need.

“We have made some progress in DNA technology. New DNA was found on her purse. We entered it into the system hoping to find a match.

Kim Watts’ family thinks they know who the killer is — the same person Long Beach detectives identified as the prime suspect in 2014. Yet that person was never arrested.

“I will say that this person was not cooperative in the investigation. We had no information on where this person was the night of the murder, what they were doing, anything, because they were completely uncooperative,” Hendry said.

For George Bass, he hopes that the weight of the killer’s actions will convince them to come forward.

“This has gone on long enough,” he said. “First, confess your sins to the Lord and ask for forgiveness so that one day you will be in heaven and not hell. Second, do the right thing. I don’t know what happened, how it happened, but I feel like it’s time.

If you know anything about the murder of Kim Watts, Harrison County Detectives I want to hear from you. Anonymous tips can also be submitted via Crime Stoppers on the Mississippi Coast.

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