Boyfriend Retraces Murdered Model's Last Moments
Revisits Miami Club where Paula Sladewski was last seen
By DIANA GONZALEZ and BRIAN HAMACHER
Updated 9:02 AM EDT, Wed, Feb 10, 2010
The boyfriend of an aspiring model who was killed during a New Year's trip to Miami has been retracing her final moments in the hopes of finding her killer.
Kevin Klym has spent the past few days in Miami, handing out flyers and looking for leads as he tries to find out who killed Paula Sladewski.
Sladewski, 26, disappeared after a night of clubbing in the early hours of Jan. 3. Her body was found a short time later, dumped in a trash bin and set on fire. Klym returned to the area where her body was found yesterday.
"Whoever did this to her is from this area, because you would not find this, this is off the beaten path, this is the middle of the residential neighborhood," said Klym. "You wouldn't know that there's a little industrial complex here so whoever did that knows this area and has spent time here and I'm just showing pictures around if anybody's seen him here."
Sladewski's charred body was found in a bin on NE 130th just off Archer Road, some 12 miles from the place she was last seen, Club Space.
Sladewski was captured on a surveillance video leaving the club alone, but witnesses may have seen her leave with a suspect after she got outside the club. Authorities released a sketch of the possible suspect last week.
Klym went on the "Today Show" last week and identified the man in the sketch as a bouncer at the club.
"This is one of the reasons I came down here, just to see if I could look at the bouncers and see if it was the same guy," Klym said. "But those bouncers are no longer employed by Club Space, I don't know who they are or where they are."
Space owner Louis Puig said yesterday that there's no way the killer could have been an employee.
"If he were one of our employees the police would have come by to pick him up a long time ago," Puig said.
Though police are focusing on the suspect in the sketch, Klym still has the eyes of the police on him.
"Just about everything that he has told the detectives, they are verifying, there's just a few more things that they need to confirm and come to some conclusion on but in the meantime, he still remains a person of interest," said Lt. Neal Cuevas with the North Miami Police Department.
Klym said the only thing he's guilty of is leaving Sladewski alone at the club after he was kicked out.
"I didn't feel I was abandoning her, she knew...I asked her to come with me, they said they talked to her, she saw me getting thrown out, and she didn't come with me," he said.
Sladewski's family believes that Klym had nothing to do with the murder, though they've been critical of his leaving his girlfriend alone.
"He's guilty of being a coward, that's what I think," Sladewski's brother, Thomas Bussell, said last month. "He was responsible for her, he was responsible for her safety, her well being. He left her there without a cell phone. He left my little sister there to fend for herself. Had he waited outside that club, it was only 20 minutes, 20 minutes could have saved her a lifetime."
For Klym, the realization that he should have stayed at the club is hard enough.
"Do I regret it? Everyday of my life," he said. "I just, that's my nightmare, this is my living nightmare, I wake up every day thinking if I just would have waited."
First Published: Feb 9, 2010 7:07 AM EDT
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