A man who is HIV-positive was charged with murder and felonious assault after his mistress died of AIDS.
51-year-old Ronald Murdock, a married man from Toledo, Ohio, was indicted last week in the 2017 February death of his longtime girlfriend Kimberly Klempner. He is being accused of not telling her that he was HIV-positive, according to the Associated Press. On Tuesday, a judge set bond at $1.5 million for Murdock.
The two have been in a relationship for five years, Klempner’s son told the AP. “She would have done anything for that man,” Josh Klempner said. “And for him not to come out in the beginning and tell her what was going on was not right.”
In a video by WTVG-TV he shows his mother’s death certificate, and on it, AIDS is listed as the cause of death. “It would be different if he would let people know that he had it before he got in that relationship. He didn’t so that right there tells me and everybody else that he has no care. The only person he’s worried about is himself,” Klempner said.
A police report said that Murdock’s wife discovered that he was having an affair and told the mistress. It also stated that Kimberly Klempner told investigators she was HIV positive in 2015, but when she disclosed this information to her partner “he didn’t seem bothered by it,” WTVG-TV reported. At that point, she had an inkling here partner was keeping something from her.
“My mother found out about some pills he had. She stayed the night at his house one night and she felt something was up. She did some snooping and ran across a few pill bottles. She did a little research on them and found out that way,” said Klempner.
According to Ohio Law, people commit the crime of felony assault if they fail to disclose with sexual partners that they are infected with HIV. During the early years of the HIV epidemic, many states enacted what are called HIV-specific criminal exposure laws– laws that impose criminal penalties on people living with HIV who know their HIV status and who potentially expose others to the virus.
By 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Department of Justice researchers found that a total of 67 laws focused on persons living with HIV had been implemented in 33 states, according to the CDC. Twenty-four states had laws that required people aware of their HIV status to disclose it to their sexual partners, 14 states required disclosure to needle-sharing partners, and 25 states criminalized one or more behaviors that pose a low negligible risk for HIV transmission, the CDC and DOJ found in their analysis.
There is a growing force of opposition to these laws. Advocacy groups such as The Center for HIV Law Policy have described these laws as being based on “outdated and erroneous beliefs.” A majority of these laws were passed before there was antiretroviral therapy, an HIV medication designed to slow down and prevent the growth of the virus. “Punishments imposed for non-disclosure of HIV status, exposure, or HIV transmission are grossly out of proportion to the actual harm inflicted and reinforce the fear and stigma associated with HIV,” CHLP wrote in their analysis of HIV-specific criminal laws. It continued to say, “Public health leaders and global policy makers agree that HIV criminalization is unjust, bad public health policy and is fueling the epidemic rather than reducing it.”
According to the CDC, there about 1.1 million people in the United States living with HIV, and one in 7 don’t know.
