KANSAS CITY, KANSAS—A vigil at dawn, on the empty square in front of City Hall earlier this week, was led by the “women who wait for justice,” a year after 71-year-old former detective Roger Golubski shot himself in the head rather than face them in court, on what would have been the first day of his first federal trial.
Had he shown up, nine black women were going to testify that “while acting under color of law,” he raped, sexually assaulted, kidnapped, or otherwise preyed on them, in one case starting when she was only 13 years old.
Former Kansas City, Kan., Police detective Roger Golubski.
Edwardsville Police Department
Golubski, who was white, was also charged in an ongoing sex trafficking conspiracy case, along with three black men, one of them a self-described former “major figure in the Kansas City, Kansas, drug business.” Their defense, if you want to call it that, is that they were operating a drug operation very much out in the open – one of them was a DEA informant – but couldn’t have been trafficking girls, or their friends in law enforcement would have known that, too.
Like Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, the women who were denied the chance to testify against him had already waited for decades – since the 1990s in most cases – and yet have not given up on accountability for those still breathing and still unnamed who they say enabled predation that went on throughout Golubski’s 35 years on the force. He retired with a party and a taxpayer-funded pension in 2010, and then worked in the nearby Edwardsville Police Department for six more years. It was Edwardsville officers, responding to a 911 call, who found his body last Dec. 2.
Some victims told me long before his death that they never believed he would stand trial, but would, as he had always said, “eat his gun” rather than face punishment. Even his autopsy mentioned his “history of suicidal ideation.” That history went back at least 20 years, according to a woman who knew him then, which made all the more galling a judge’s decision to allow him to stay at home on pre-trial release for the two years after his arrest. Out of concern for his kidney failure, she said, and on the assumption that despite the serious charges against him, he somehow posed no danger.
And as in the far more well-known Jeffrey Epstein case, what happened to these women isn’t over because their abuser is dead.
Lora McDonald, who leads a local interfaith group, Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity, that organized the vigil, laments that no one in power in this city has ever even tried to make amends to them: “Could you tell these women in public that you believe them?” she asked. “Until somebody comes out and says, ‘We’re sorry and this isn’t going to happen again,’ there are women terrified to drive through here on I-70.”
As long as the official story remains that this one man, unbeknownst to anyone who could have stopped him, was solely responsible for the way he terrorized an entire community, that will continue to be the case.
Kansas state Sen. Cindy Holscher, D-Overland Park, expressed frustration that the Golubski case had received so little attention from other elected officials.
AP
The lone elected official at the early morning vigil was Kansas state Sen. Cindy Holscher, who has been standing with victims from the beginning. She’s the one who introduced the 2018 Golubski-inspired bill that made it against the law for an officer in Kansas to have sex with anyone in custody. (Yes, really.)
“Why aren’t there more elected officials speaking out?” even now, asked Holscher, a Democrat who is running for governor. “There’s corruption that’s never been addressed, and what bothers me the most is that these women came forward and justice was stripped from them.” Then, instead of looking for other ways to make them whole, “they’re just trying to wait out the clock” by waiting for witnesses to die.
Though Holscher didn’t say it, I’ve never heard either Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly or U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, both of whom are also Democrats and feminists, speak out against the wrongs done to these women.
“There are some disturbing parallels with the Epstein situation, namely officials ignoring for many years grotesque abuses of powerless women, and then when facts eventually rise to the surface, dodging accountability,” said Cheryl Pilate, a lawyer for Lamonte McIntyre, who because of Golubski and now-disbarred Wyandotte County prosecutor Terra Morehead spent 23 years in prison for a 1994 double murder he did not commit.
“Golubski may be gone,” Pilate said, “but the results of his corruption remain. The officials in charge of the system have not yet reckoned with the enormous damage that Golubski left in his wake, and the many injustices yet to be corrected.” Right now, she’s pursuing a case involving public housing residents allegedly being pressured to turn over their food stamps to get a unit. A decade ago, women in public housing here were extorted for sex by staff at the same agency, the Kansas City Kansas Housing Authority.
At McIntyre’s 2017 innocence hearing, just before the court was to have heard testimony that the judge in McIntyre’s criminal case had previously had an affair with Morehead, the prosecutor, District Attorney Mark Dupree said he had heard enough and ended the hearing early. He declared what had been done to McIntyre a “manifest injustice” and dropped the criminal case against him.
In 2020, Dupree created a Conviction Integrity Unit that has been ballyhooed, broken apart, and put back together several times. But the one and only time Dupree’s CIU worked to successfully set a wrongfully convicted man free was that same year, when Olin “Pete” Coones was released after serving 12 years for murder in a case in which prosecutors suppressed exculpatory evidence and coerced testimony from a mentally ill inmate. Coones, a KCK mailman with five children and no previous trouble with the law, died of cancer soon after his release.
District Attorney Mark Dupree’s Conviction Integrity Unit has largely been unsuccessful in overturning questionable convictions related to Golubski.
AP
Last December, Dupree’s office steadfastly opposed the motion to vacate Cedric Warren’s 2009 conviction – right up until the judge ruled in Warren’s favor, threw out his conviction, and said the state could, if it chose, start over.
Warren, along with his codefendant, was charged with killing two people and attempting to kill a third man in a shootout in a KCK drug house. He was arrested only an hour after police finished taking the formal statement of the surviving victim – a severely mentally ill man, homeless at the time, whose testimony was the only thing tying Warren to the shooting.
This was an investigation supervised and signed off on by Golubski, who, according to Cedric Warren’s father, had been sexually harassing his mother and called her even as their son was being arrested. Warren’s family believes that’s the real reason he was framed – for the same reason Lamonte McIntyre was. Golubski had sexually assaulted McIntrye’s mother in police headquarters and apparently wanted to get back at her for moving residences and changing her phone number to avoid ever seeing him again.
The key witness in the Warren case was so ill at the time that some follow-up interviews were conducted in the inpatient psychiatric hospital to which the KCK police had themselves driven him the day after the shooting. Neither this information nor the existence of a previous case in which the same witness had been found incompetent to stand trial because of his severe schizophrenia was disclosed to Warren’s defense attorneys.
But it was only after the judge ruled for Warren that Dupree reversed course and said he would not retry the case, because “what the previous administration did was, indeed, improper.” He also told reporters that Golubski had not been involved in the wrongful conviction, though a motion in the case said police records showed that on the night of the shooting, “Captain Roger Golubski entered the scene at 1:21 a.m. and assumed command.”
The $1.7 million allocated to Dupree’s office in 2022 to digitize old case files to find and review every case ever touched by Golubski has not so far led to any exonerations, either.
In August, Dupree told a local NPR host that he’s currently reviewing “more than 19” such cases, and he defended his troubled Conviction Integrity Unit: “This office, this district attorney’s administration, has taken this ball further in the last nine years that I’ve been in office than the last 90 years before me,” he said. Which is both true and not saying a lot.
In response to a petition lodging other complaints about Dupree’s office – mostly, that failing to properly prosecute major crimes has made the community less safe – Dupree pointed to racist graffiti on the church where he preaches, and said he’s sure that this was done by those who have criticized the way he runs the office.
Long before the most recent complaints, however, the argument in Wyandotte County had already gone from being that there was no need for any reckoning with the past, to that the reckoning had in fact already occurred – and what’s more, that anyone who says otherwise is a racist.
At Mayor Tyrone Garner’s last commissioner’s meeting before leaving office last month, he once again suggested that since he became mayor and two other black men became the police chief and district attorney, any problems brought forward by Golubski’s victims have nothing to do with them.
“Shame on anybody who thinks that three black men are going to stand by and not do anything about allegations of wrongdoing against black women of this community. Shame on you,” he said in the public meeting.
Kansas state Sen. Cindy Holscher with Golubski victim Ophelia Williams after the “Women Who Wait for Justice” vigil.
Melinda Henneberger
“Well, shame on us black women, then,” answered Saundra Newsom, one of the women who filed a civil suit against Golubski, the Unified Government of Kansas City, Kansas, and Wyandotte County and former KCKPD police chiefs under whom Golubski worked. “Where are these black men” supposedly standing up for them? “Where?”
“That’s crazy for real,” Ophelia Williams said in response to Garner’s “shame on you” remarks – and “so male chauvinist it’s pathetic.” Williams would have testified at Golubski’s first trial that she met him on the 1999 morning that he arrested her 14-year-old twins for murder. A few days later, the government said, he came back, raped her for the first time, and told her that he would help her boys. They were interviewed for hours, including by Golubski, without any lawyer or parent present, and are still in prison.
Niko Quinn, another of those who filed the civil suit, also scoffed at Garner’s remarks: As a candidate, “you told us you were going to give us peace and you’ve done nothing. I wanted to sit down with Mark Dupree and he won’t even return my phone calls.”
Michelle Houcks, who had been set to testify that Golubski offered her a ride home from the public park where she’d gone after a late-night argument with her boyfriend and then raped her in his detective car, said Garner’s remarks “seem like bullshit to me. He didn’t stick by nothing he said he was going to do.”
Houcks said she doesn’t feel any differently now than she did a year ago, when she and the others first got the news that Golubski was dead, and so was their case: “They picked us up and dropped us,” she said of federal prosecutors. “Everyone wanted us to tell our stories, and what was it all for?”
William Skepnek, her attorney in the civil case, which was dismissed on the grounds that the statute of limitations had long ago run out, will be arguing in the appeal of that decision at the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver next month.
His argument is that the clock on the two-year statute of limitations for filing suit shouldn’t have even started until Golubski was arrested: “Ophelia was raped, and he makes it clear to her and to Michelle what’s going to happen if they say anything, so when is it they feel safe” enough to come forward?
“Everybody knows the fix is still in; I’d make an argument it still hasn’t run.”
