30 Years For Matawan College Wrestler Who Killed His Father

MATAWAN, NJ — A Matawan man was just sentenced to 30 years in state prison for killing his father and then hiding his body in the basement of their home, said Monmouth County Prosecutor Raymond Santiago.

Kenneth Knapp Jr., 33, was sentenced yesterday, Thursday, April 18, by Monmouth County Superior Court Judge Henry P. Butehorn.

He must serve 85 percent of those 30 years before being eligible for parole.

At approximately 12:35 p.m. on Sunday, May 1, 2022, Matawan Police responded to a home — on the 200 block of Matawan Avenue — to do a welfare check on 58-year-old Kenneth Knapp Sr., after friends and family members said they could not contact him over the previous week.

In the home’s basement, officers located Knapp’s body, wrapped and bound inside a tarp, hidden inside a large plastic container.

Police say his son, a former collegiate wrestler, assaulted and killed his father in the home’s bathroom a week earlier, and then hid his body in the basement.

The cause of death was blunt-force trauma, according to the autopsy.

The son was arrested in Somerset County on August 19, 2022. Earlier this year, he pleaded guilty to first-degree aggravated manslaughter and desecration of human remains.