Benjamin Beale arrested in killing of woman whose dismembered body was found in bus

The woman whose frozen, dismembered body was found this week in a bus at a suspected meth lab in New Orleans had been beaten and strangled, police said.

Investigators disclosed Julia Dardar’s cause of death in an application for a warrant to arrest the person with whom she had been living: Benjamin Beale, also known as Kelley Kirkpatrick. Police were booking Beale late Friday with second-degree murder.

Dardar, 36-year-old mother of two teenaged daughters, was in the process of divorcing her husband when she moved in with Beale in 2021. Her husband reported her missing Dec. 23, three days after a friend said the husband saw Beale driving her car without her.

Police went to question Beale twice over the coming days. They said Beale told them Dardar had been in the process of moving out of the house, and that she might have taken her own life or overdosed on illegal substances.

Officers say they doubted the story, so they obtained a search warrant and returned Tuesday at midday to Beale's property in the 2300 block of Pauline Street, in the Florida neighborhood. Inside a deep freezer, in a bus that was parked in the backyard, they found a woman’s headless torso, a head, hands and other body parts. The freezer was connected to the house's electricity. Nearby was a power saw, goggles, plastic garbage bags and a face shield.

Police booked Beale, 34, with obstruction of justice and running a methamphetamine laboratory at the house, saying they found ingredients and equipment used to produce the highly addictive drug.

Authorities couldn’t immediately identify the corpse or determine the cause of death, however, because the remains had to thaw. By Friday that had happened, and they confirmed it was Dardar, as they had suspected all along.

An autopsy showed she had been strangled and beaten. Investigators obtained a warrant to book Beale with second-degree murder.

Beale was initially jailed in lieu of $400,000 bail. That amount will almost certainly increase with the murder charge.

Dardar’s survivors include two daughters, ages 13 and 17. Loved ones remembered the Slidell resident as an artistic person who loved working on cars as a mechanic and doting on her girls, before she developed a meth addiction that precipitated a split from her husband, among other things.

One of the things over which Dardar and Beale reportedly bonded was their affinity for Burning Man, the free-form art and music festival held annually in the Nevada desert. Last year, they wrote online that they went to California together to collect a bus that a fellow "burner" had left to Beale in a will. Dardar helped fix the bus before the pair returned to New Orleans some time after Hurricane Ida struck Aug. 29, according to neighbors and some of her writings online.

Late Friday, Dardar’s estranged husband, in a Facebook post, told Beale and another person to “burn in hell.”

“No matter who did it,” the post read, “I hold you two assholes responsible … in leading her down this path and not stopping it.”