Teen-Age Stripper Accused of Having Boyfriend, Pal Killed

HOUSTON —  A teen-ager angered because her boyfriend told her parents she was working as a stripper and took them to watch her dance has been charged with paying $300 to have the man and a friend of his beaten to death.

Kelly Jo Koch, 18, was charged Thursday with capital murder for hire in the death of Wendell Ray Birdsong, 28. She was held without bond.

Birdsong and Greg Elsnick, 29, were found beaten to death last Saturday in the apartment they shared. Koch has confessed to paying $300 for the slaying, police said, but has refused to name the assailants.

Koch had lived with Birdsong since she was 14 but moved home with her parents in January after he told her to get a job, said Harris County Sheriff’s Lt. Grace Ozmer.

Koch found a clerical job but quit because the pay was too low. She took a job at the Executive Suite topless club.

“She told her parents when she quit her first job that she had gone to work in a bakery at a mall,” Ozmer said. When Birdsong was unable to get Koch to return to him, he took her parents to the club.

Koch quit the job after her parents took away a car they had given her and told her to move out of their house, Ozmer said. Although Koch and Birdsong had been fighting for several months, his decision to take her parents to the club was the “icing on the cake” that prompted Koch to hire the killers, Ozmer said.