Ken Register Takes Away a Mother’s Only Child
(“The Alibi,” Forensic Files)
Before launching into the recap, I wanted to offer good wishes and empathy from here in the epicenter as everyone copes with the coronavirus pandemic.
The Crystal Todd case seems like a good choice for this week’s post, because it includes extensive on-camera interviews with such a sympathetic protagonist.
Even toward the end of the show, when Bonnie Todd says she wishes that her daughter’s murderer got the electric chair, she does so in her own gentle way.
Surprise package. The case distinguished itself as the first time that South Carolina prosecutors used DNA as evidence, but what really made the episode memorable was the way it portrayed a mother’s love.
Bonnie talked about being grateful for having a baby at 39 — a common age for a first pregnancy today but not so much back in the early 1970s.
“She was a miracle to me,” Bonnie said. “I just couldn’t believe I had her, and I was proud of her, too.”
Odd wrinkle in case. The two were close. Crystal had confided in Bonnie that best buddy Ken Register, 18, got a little out of line with her once. But neither could foresee the savagery he unleashed on the night of Nov. 17, 1991.
For this week, I searched for information on what happened to Bonnie Todd from the time the Forensic Files episode first aired in 2002 to her death in 2014. I also looked into Ken Register’s whereabouts today.
In the process, I discovered an unusual twist in the case that either happened after the Forensic Files episode finished production or was just too weird for the show’s producers to mentally process. Frankly, I’m having a little trouble with it, too.
Dad gone too soon. So let’s get started on a recap of the “The Alibi,” along with additional information drawn from internet research:
Crystal Faye Todd was born on Jan. 4, 1974, in Conway, South Carolina. Her father, Junior Todd, died when she was 11, but she grew into a happy, fun-loving teenager, according to Forensic Files.
After Crystal and a girlfriend attended a party on the evening of Nov. 17, 1991, the friend dropped Crystal off in a mall parking lot where she’d left her brand-new Celica.
Women’s intuition. When Crystal didn’t come home by her midnight deadline, her mother called the Horry County police. She was so overcome with anxiety that the police at first could barely make out her words or tell whether the caller was a man or a woman, according to the book An Hour to Kill: The True Story of Love, Murder, and Justice in a Small Southern Town by Dale Hudson and Billy Hills.
Next, she contacted her daughter’s longtime close friend Ken Register, who said that he hadn’t seen Crystal all night and that he would check the local hospitals, according to the ID Network series Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.
Bonnie located her daughter’s vacant blue 1991 Toyota, which she’d given her for an early graduation present, in a middle school parking lot.
Disturbing to pros. Sadly, Bonnie didn’t have to wait long to justify her sense of dread.
Hunters found the body of a teenage girl in a ditch the next day. She was wearing a class ring with a shiny purple gemstone and “Crystal Faye Todd” engraved inside.
The murder scene horrified even veteran homicide detectives. In addition to bruises and abrasions, Crystal had 31 cut and stab wounds, including an ear-to-ear gash across the throat, according to court papers.
Lecherous outsider. They found a defensive injury on Crystal’s left hand, but she was no match for the attacker’s weapon, which investigators believe was a 3.5-inch knife with a locking blade.
At first, police had a promising suspect in dark, handsome Andy Tyndall, a grown man who liked to hang around teenage girls. Crystal had known him for a week and already had a little crush on him, according to “Killer Instinct,” a 2011 episode of Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.
Although Crystal and her friends could tell Andy Tyndall was past high school age, they probably didn’t know he was married and wanted by Alabama authorities on a felony charge.
Call the clairvoyants. When law officers came to arrest him in South Carolina, he fled on foot into the woods, with tracker dogs in pursuit.
But all the drama was for naught. Andy Tyndall was quickly cleared.
Next up, investigators turned to criminal profilers. They predicted that the killer would be an angry young white male who was confident the law wouldn’t catch him — and he was probably a friend of the victim.
Revealing genes. Local homicide detective Bill Knowles, who had just visited the FBI Academy, suggested adding the then-new science of DNA testing to the investigation.
Police asked 51 of Crystal’s male friends and acquaintances if they would give samples.
They all said yes.
A lab determined that DNA from the rape kit matched none other than Ken Register — full name, Johnnie Kenneth Register II — the blond-haired blue-eyed onetime varsity football player who Crystal considered her best pal.
Police arrested him in February 1992.
Sterling reputation. Bonnie knew that Ken Register had once offended Crystal by propositioning her for sex despite that he had a girlfriend, but he was the last person she suspected of the murder.
“He’s been our friend for years and years,” said Bonnie, the Herald Rock Hill reported. “He was everybody’s friend around here.”
Ken and Crystal had dated briefly in their early teens and stayed happily friend-zoned afterward, and he seemed like an asset to the community. He got good grades in school and helped out by scrubbing floors at the little church his family attended. He and his father, Kenny, had recently built a wooden altar for the congregation, according to An Hour to Kill.
Just got tarnished. Little did Crystal’s mother know that Ken had a police record for exposing himself to two Coastal Carolina University students not long before Crystal’s disappearance.
It was not the first time that Ken had come to law enforcement’s attention. At 15, he did something that suggested he was no ordinary budding pervert.
He made an obscene phone call to a grown woman and described in sickening detail how he wanted to slit her body open and kill her — in the same way he eventually murdered Crystal, according to Stolen Voices, Buried Secrets.
Registering an excuse. Ken might have enjoyed menacing women with talk about blood and gore, but he probably didn’t realize that different bodily fluids contain the same telltale genetic code, which is why he willingly gave samples for DNA testing.
Forensic evidence notwithstanding, Ken had alibis. His girlfriend said they were together at the Dodge City go-cart track in the town of Aynor on the night Crystal died.
In an on-camera interview, Ken’s mother, Shirley Register, sweetly explained that her son got home from his date too early to match the timeline of the crime.
He needed his mom. Nonetheless, law officers arrested Ken Register on Feb. 18, 1992.
While riding in the police car, he asked twice for his mother, according to court papers.
At first, Ken didn’t want to answer questions without his mother present, so officers went to Shirley Register’s house to pick her up, but instead she gave them a note to hand off to her son.
Unauthorized revision. According to Forensic Files, the note told Ken to clam up until they got a lawyer. But court papers said that she simply wrote that she loved him and knew he was innocent.
It mattered little because police, who are legally entitled to lie while questioning a suspect, told him that they had found his footprints at the murder scene (they didn’t) and that the note from his mother instructed him to tell the truth (it didn’t).
The interrogation tricks worked. Ken cracked.
Hidden blade. The night of the murder, he and Crystal spotted each other at a traffic light, he said. She then parked her car at the middle school and got into his vehicle, where they had consensual sex — but she threatened to accuse of him of rape, so he panicked and stabbed her, he contended.
Investigators begged to differ. There was no consensual sex. She had severe wounding consistent with rape. After killing her, Ken further defiled and stabbed her body, investigators determined.
They never found the murder weapon. Ken said he tossed away the knife as far as he could near the scene of the crime, according to an AP account.
What a spectacle. As if Ken needed any more bad publicity, in a separate court action before his homicide trial kicked off, he was found guilty of exposing himself to the college students. Ken claimed he was actually clothed during the incident and that he stood up in his car and shimmied himself around because the women “wouldn’t give me the time of day” and “made me feel like trash,” according to An Hour to Kill.
The homicide trial didn’t go so well either.
In front of 400 spectators, Ken Register was convicted of Crystal Todd’s sexual assault, murder, and kidnapping.
Girlfriend backs away. The jury declined to give him the death penalty because of his young age. Circuit Judge Edward B. Cottingham sentenced him to life without parole and 35 years to be served consecutively.
Ken’s sweetheart, Angela Rabon, made a few “dutiful” visits to him in prison, then wrote him a breakup letter and headed to college, according to An Hour to Kill.
Over the years, Ken and defense attorneys Morgan Martin and Tommy Brittain made efforts to get him out of prison on two feet.
Character assassination. In 1996, the supreme court of South Carolina was not impressed by Register’s claims that police violated his rights during questioning and that the DNA testing method was below par. In fact, the prosecution had given the defense an opportunity to do its own independent DNA tests, but Ken Register told his lawyers not to, according to An Hour to Kill.
Ken also tried the requisite smear-the-victim ploy in hopes that some nefarious acquaintance of hers would be accused. He said that he heard rumors that Crystal used drugs and he had seen her drink alcohol and smoke marijuana, contradicting his own statement from 1992 that he had never seen Crystal using marijuana, according to reporting from the Horry Independent.
He claimed he initially lied because he didn’t want Crystal’s alleged drug use to somehow sully his own reputation — he had only used the recreational drug a few times in his life when someone happened to pass around a joint, Ken said, as reported by the Horry Independent on Feb. 3, 2000.
Oh, please. Always a gentleman, Register also said he didn’t know whether it was true, but he heard rumors that Crystal “slept around” and that she had helped distribute LSD, the Horry Independent reported.
Shirley Register chimed in, saying she heard Crystal would sometimes leave a party with one guy, then return to pick up another guy or two. She also tried to lend credence to the drug-dealing theory by suggesting that Bonnie and Crystal had too meager a combined legitimate income to afford their lifestyle — and that Crystal rode to school with a student rumored to sell LSD, according to the Horry Independent.
Ken claimed that, at the same time that Crystal’s morals were deteriorating, he himself was embarking on the straight and narrow, thanks to his serious relationship with Angela Rabon.
Writer in their corner. Though vexing to Crystal’s friends and family, the Registers’ tactics are pretty standard, something Forensic Files watchers have seen countless times.
The outlandish twist in the case came after a world-famous author caught the trial coverage on court TV.
Mickey Spillane, writer of the 1940s detective mystery novel “I, the Jury” — and 25 other books in that genre that sold a total of 200 million copies — thought Ken Register got a raw deal.
Audience with a convict. He and his wife, Jane Spillane, who lived in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, believed prosecutor Ralph Wilson framed him.
The Spillanes met with Ken in person and “came to the conclusion that the young man was incapable of committing such a heinous act,” the Washington Post would later report.
Jane Spillane went so far as to run for county prosecutor herself so that she could personally bestow justice upon Ken.
Drama continues. She didn’t win, and both Spillanes later admitted that the law had weighty evidence against Ken Register. They ultimately concluded that Crystal’s murder couldn’t be the work of a single assailant.
The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, however, didn’t find Ken Register particularly endearing and refused to hear his case.
Ken’s bid for post-conviction relief failed as well. “It’s the best thing I’ve heard in a while,” Bonnie Todd commented upon the ruling, as reported by the Charlotte Observer.
Gang assault. Today, Ken Register resides in Broad River Correctional Institution, a high-security prison that houses South Carolina’s death chamber.
The Department of Corrections doesn’t list any escape attempts or disciplinary problems for Ken. And at 5’8″ and 223 pounds, he isn’t staging any hunger strikes either.
It would serve him well to keep a low profile. In 2019, DOC police charged a female Broad River guard after she allegedly unlocked an inmate’s door and allowed 11 other prisoners to enter his cell and beat him up.
Closing the loop. Fortunately for Ken himself, he still has a large support network of family members living in and around Conway, South Carolina, to speak up for him should he face abuse while on the inside.
But enough about Ken Register — what about the mother of the girl whose life he took?
By the time Bonnie appeared on Forensic Files in 2002, Crystal had been gone for 11 years, but her melancholy clearly hadn’t lifted.
Sojourn to Gotham. The murder “devastated her more so than any other family member I’ve ever dealt with,” longtime Horry County homicide detective Bill Knowles would later tell a local ABC affiliate.
But Bonnie, who told Forensic Files that the only time she wasn’t thinking about Crystal was when she was sleeping, did get to have a bit of an adventure.
In the 1990s, she traveled to New York City to appear on Sally Jesse Raphael’s popular talk show along with county prosecutor Ralph Wilson, who later recalled that Bonnie packed instant grits in her travel bags in case Manhattan’s eateries didn’t serve them, according to a Sun News account.
Honored with a song. She also enjoyed a friendship with Ralph Wilson for years after Register’s conviction and often brought him small gifts of food from a garden she cultivated.
Bonnie Faye Todd died at age 79 on Sept. 3, 2014.
Toward the end of her life, she had become close to a niece who she “affectionately referred to” as her “adopted daughter,” according to Bonnie’s obituary.
A music video that two local gospel singers made as a tribute to Bonnie and her lost daughter has so far scored 12,000 hits on YouTube.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube
