Robert Elmer Kleason

Robert Elmer Kleasen (September 20, 1934 – April 21, 2003) was an American who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1975 for the murder of two missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, near Austin, Texas. The murders have popularly, albeit inaccurately, been cited as an inspiration for the horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Kleasen's conviction was later overturned and Kleasen immigrated to the United Kingdom, where he remarried and was eventually imprisoned on gun violations. Kleasen died in the UK while fighting extradition back to the US for retrial on the murder charges.

Early life Robert Elmer Kleasen was born on September 20, 1934, in Buffalo, New York. He was the only child of a store clerk and his wife. Guns and hunting were a passion of the boy as well as his mentally ill father.

In 1950, 16-year-old Kleasen stepped on a rusty nail while hunting in the woods and his mother took him to the hospital. While waiting impatiently for doctors to see him, he hit his mother, got a gun from her car, and returned to the emergency room shooting. No one was hurt, but the outburst landed him in a psychiatric facility until 1952. In 1971, a year after gaining a sociology degree, he shot Dennis Dubois in the foot on Brasser Road in the town of Williamson, NY during a dispute. He later jumped bail in the state and moved to Texas.

Texas Upon arrival in Austin, Texas, Kleasen made a multitude of wild claims to his acquaintances, most notably that he was a Korean War veteran and former CIA operative. He also used several aliases, at least one of which has been speculated to have been a dissociated personality.

Kleasen was baptized into a local congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In December 1973, he was arrested for theft of bison, becoming angered when the church did not send a lawyer to get him out of jail. After his release, members of Kleasen's church became increasingly uneasy with his behavior. Two Mormon missionaries, Gary Darley (20) of Simi Valley, California, and Mark Fischer (19) of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, routinely visited Kleasen, who lived in a trailer behind a taxidermist's shop in Oak Hill, on Austin's southwestern outskirts. Despite being warned by Kleasen's bishop to stop their visits due to Kleasen's behavior, Darley and Fischer decided to see him one final time.

On October 28, 1974, Darley and Fischer disappeared in Oak Hill. He was 68 years old.