Finalist: Melinda Henneberger of The Kansas City Star

It started as soon as her family, along with all of their belongings and their dog Kingston, arrived in Kansas City from Southern California not quite two months ago, Maureen Roland says: The smiles that froze and then disappeared when her new Northland neighbors, near Parkville, caught a glimpse of her Black husband and biracial children. The woman down the street who put her hand up and said, “No, thank you,” when Maureen introduced herself. The slurs shouted from across the way, the pointing, the pretending to retch.

“Kansas City nice” is real, but so is Kansas City not-so-nice. There are people in our town who yell, “You’re disgusting!” at the Rolands’ house as they walk by, and who have gotten out of line at the Best Buy to avoid them.

The Rolands have lived all over the world, so it’s not a revelation that there’s racism in it. But “I have not experienced it to this degree,” she says. “I have not experienced it this much. I have not experienced it this vocally.”

Her husband, Jamari Roland, is a 37-year-old U.S. Army veteran, originally from Los Angeles, who works for the State Department. A special agent to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, he’s here for a year of training at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth.

As a law enforcement officer, you’d think he’d have been welcomed by all of the police officers and firefighters who live in the Northland. As someone who has served in Afghanistan and has kept our diplomats in Israel safe, you’d think the neighborhood would be throwing a socially-distanced parade.

Instead, Jamari says, “It’s been a unique situation for me. I went to school in Hollywood. Growing up in a diverse community, I’ve had people call me slurs. I’ve had teachers ask my friends why they were hanging out with me. But we got here, and it’s so out in the open. I don’t know if it’s a sign of the times, but to openly go up to someone or make sure they get your attention and acknowledge that they don’t agree with your family?” And all of this very much in front of their two toddlers. “Although they don’t know what the words mean, the expressions and body language are very clear: ‘What are you guys doing here?’ ’’ Jamari said.

‘PARENTING IN A HATEFUL WORLD’

Maureen Roland is 33 and from New Jersey, where Jamari was working when they met. At home full-time now with their 13-month-old son and 3-year-old daughter, she monitored State Department grants before they started their family. When they moved here, she thought she’d keep an online journal of their latest adventure, just as she had been doing, on the blog she calls “Rollin’ with the Rolands.”

Her last entry before leaving the L.A. suburb where they had been living said, “I arrived in California from overseas and very pregnant with Audrey. I knew no one and struggled to enter into motherhood without any friends. I joined a church, Gymboree, and started knocking on neighbors’ doors and from that I created a tribe of lifelong friendships that have guided me through both the toughest and happiest moments of early motherhood. I will miss those faces the most.”

Tribes take time, but so far, their only friends here are some folks they already knew. One woman down the street who has a dog her daughter adores has been lovely, they said, and the guy who lives behind them introduced himself. They are exceptions, though.

Maureen’s first blog entry after their move in early July is mostly upbeat, detailing their hot but fun trip to the zoo and first taste of Kansas City barbecue: “The bugs are big, the heat is in your face, and they definitely drive slower than I am used to, but I think we will really enjoy our time here. I love the area we live in, and every store I could possibly imagine is within 10 minutes of my house.”

Last week’s post, which got a lot more attention, and wound up being widely shared on social media, was headlined “Parenting in a hateful world.” I saw it because someone in my neighborhood posted a link to it along with this comment: “Do better, K.C.!”

“We’ve been in Kansas City for two months now,” she wrote, “and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t extremely disheartened with the welcome our family has received. I didn’t expect to have a neighborhood welcome committee when an interracial family moved into the suburbs of a Midwest city, but I absolutely didn’t expect the hatred we’ve experienced. … Jamari and I have traveled the world and experienced less hatred than in our own country.”

In an interview with the couple, as their daughter Audrey wandered in and out of the room with a popsicle, Maureen said that never having even visited the Midwest before, “I guess I didn’t know what to expect, but moving across country with small children during a pandemic, racism was the last thing I was really thinking of.”

That didn’t last long: On Day One, “the moving truck was there and it was kind of interesting because people would wave at me and say hi and then as soon as they would see my husband, their attitude would change. The neighborhood was not happy.”

‘STAY WITH YOUR OWN KIND’

One of the comments she’s since “overheard,” just as she was meant to, was, “He must be a rapper; that’s why she’s with him.” Another was aimed right at her head: “Stay with your own kind!” One day, “We were at Costco, in the parking lot, and a woman pointed at my husband. She was parked very close to us. She pointed at my husband, she pointed at me, she made a gesture like are you two together, and I smiled, I didn’t have my mask on yet, I smiled and nodded. I thought she was going to say something positive. She pointed at my daughter, who I was getting out of her carseat, and she gestured as if she was throwing up. And it’s things like that that my daughter sees.”

She finally wrote about all of this, she says, “because I’m sitting at my breakfast table and my kids are right there and a guy stops as he’s walking by.” A guy who has in the past shouted, “You’re disgusting” at her family.

“He was looking at the house with this disgusted look on his face. And I thought, I’m done. I’m so tired of worrying about going out in public with my gorgeous, peaceful family in my own community. So I wrote it in 30 minutes while I was really pissed off about the situation.”

No one wants to hear this is happening, not somewhere but here, not in the distant past, but in 2020. But shouldn’t we all be pissed off on this family’s behalf?

Isabel Wilkerson’s new best-seller, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” which explains how we got here — to Ferguson and Milwaukee and Kenosha and Kansas City — more clearly than any book I’ve ever read, describes how endogamy, or restricting marriage to people within the same caste, “was brutally enforced in the United States for the vast majority of its history and did the spade work for current ethnic divisions.”

The Rolands are trying to “buffer” their kids from that legacy, but they need our help.

‘THEY’RE LOOKING FOR MY HUSBAND TO BE ANGRY’

When confronted, they never react. “Could you imagine getting into a conversation or an argument with someone who felt vocal enough to come at my husband with the n-word?” Maureen asks. “That would go nowhere. They’re looking for my husband to be angry.”

Instead, she said, the Rolands focus on telling their daughter, “What that man yelled, that’s not OK to do. We don’t do that. He’d have a time-out for that if he lived here. We treat everyone nice. We’re teaching our children, ‘This is not the America that you will live in.’ ’’

Not because they’ll not always be in America, though that’s also true. But because, Maureen says, they want their kids to know that “you will not yell at people or dislike people because of race, religion or sexual orientation.” Or political orientation, Jamari adds.

“You’re either Republican or Democrat, Black or white, you like the place or you hate them,” he said. Only, those binaries don’t fit everyone, and “when you see someone, the first thing you see shouldn’t be race. It should be, ‘That’s a human,’ ’’ and worthy of respect.

Because Maureen can’t put an angry stranger in a time-out, she wants her neighbors to think about “hate being aimed at a toddler.” And yes, she thought twice and then three times before talking to me, because she does fear that things could get worse and even turn violent.

All of this flies straight into the mountain of how our city sees itself, and Maureen still wants to experience the Kansas City that much of the city sees when it looks in a mirror: “We never feel uncomfortable walking downtown, and I want to be clear: We like what we’ve seen of Kansas City outside of our immediate neighborhood. It seems like it’s family-friendly. It seems like there’s a lot to do. It seems like there’s great pride in the city. We say we’ve never been anywhere where they have more people wearing shirts with their own city’s name on it.”

It’s good to be proud of our city. And even better to make sure Kansas City lives up to all of that pride.

I was about ready to see if we couldn’t put Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith’s face on a milk carton: Have you seen this man?

Because until Sunday, when he finally appeared at a news conference at Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas’ personal invitation, Smith had said zero words publicly about the sight of George Floyd pleading for air and for his mama, as dying men have always done.

He’d said nothing about the Minneapolis cops who killed Floyd like you’d squash a bug, or about the many other cops across the country who lit the match and now can’t believe there’s a fire.

For six days, Smith had no comment on the officer who’d held his knee on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. For five days, he kept to himself his thoughts on the protests Floyd’s murder had set off in other cities. For two days, he said nothing about protests here in Kansas City.

Smith didn’t have the week off or anything; he was at the protests, though not visible, working from the police command center. But it was Capt. Dave Jackson, a public information officer, who was sent out to speak.

That’s not leadership.

Nor is it the least bit surprising from a man whose idea of accountability and transparency is to write periodic blog posts complaining about the lack of community cooperation with the Kansas City Police Department.

When Smith finally did show himself on Sunday, and was asked why it had taken him six days to make a sound, this was his answer: “I think we put out a statement when it happened.”

Here is that May 28 statement in its entirety: “The tragedy in Minneapolis has impacted all of us. We recognize our community has questions. KCPD is committed to training our officers to protect and preserve life. We are reiterating to our officers our commitment to reasonable use of force to further our mission to protect and serve with professionalism, honor and integrity.”

The next day, the department also issued a news release on police procedures.

Across the country, other police chiefs and former police chiefs, including Kansas City’s former chief, Jackson County Sheriff Darryl Forté, knew how important it was to speak out, and they did so, forcefully condemning the police killing of yet another black man who should still be alive.

Even when Smith did step to the microphone Sunday, his central message was to tell protesters to “stop destroying our reputation as a city.”

More than once, he claimed “every single officer got assaulted yesterday,” at the protest on the Plaza, while “every single protester” did not. He said that because “I asked if anyone who was there last night did not get hit by an object, and not one officer could raise their hand.”

He volunteered nothing about any other injuries, and nothing about why there were protests in the first place.

Asked why pepper spray and tear gas had been used on even peaceful protesters, he said that once they’d been asked to leave and didn’t, they could no longer be considered peaceful.

What would he say to those worried about police brutality? That the Kansas City Police Department does a good job, by and large, and that we want to have the best police department in the country, Smith said.

Only when he was asked why he’d waited six days to so much as allude to Floyd’s death did he say this: “The whole thing that happened is disheartening. There’s nothing worse to see what you watch on TV, on video. Like I said to someone else, this is my chosen profession, the one I love. It is hard to watch things like that for me. It’s hard to see a citizen who’s totally compliant, who appears to be handcuffed on the ground treated like that. You know, it hurts all of us. I wish it never happened. I wish some officer would have stepped up and said, ‘Don’t do that.’ I wish he wouldn’t have put a knee on him. I wish circumstances didn’t unfold that way.”

And still, he couldn’t bring himself to say these two words: George Floyd.

Kansas City should be better than this, he said to protesters, and he’s right about that; breaking glass and throwing rocks helps nobody. But Kansas City also deserves better than this, better than a police chief in hiding.

When you think of municipal court, maybe you think of unpaid parking tickets or various lawn-related violations.

But think again, because Kansas City’s Domestic Violence Court handled 867 strangulation cases last year. And these weren’t felonies, or even misdemeanors, but city ordinance violations, right up there with jaywalking.

Strangulation can kill you, of course, and is a known marker for “lethality” in the future. In other words, someone who’d do this might someday get the job done.

But in Kansas City, for reasons that seem unclear to all of the relevant parties, Domestic Violence Court Judge Courtney Wachal deals all day every day with the city ordinance violation of whipping your partner with a power cord, the city ordinance violation of shooting at your partner but missing, the city ordinance violation of stalking and the city ordinance violation of violating a protective order.

Do I really need to say that these are not minor matters? Apparently, yes.

“It’s been that way for years,” Annie Struby, longtime advocate at the Rose Brooks Center, says of the gravity of the cases being handled by the city court. In fact, when it comes to intimate partner violence, “Nine of 10 cases go to muni.”

“I don’t understand why these cases are filed here,” says Judge Wachal. “Not only because of their severity, but the people who come in over and over and over” with cases involving strangulation and also guns, another flashing danger sign. “This is a high lethality docket.”

Sit in her court for a couple of days, as I did, and walk away in awe at what she does with the resources available, but also in alarm at both the seriousness and the tsunami of cases that wash up on her shore.

And since one thing mass murderers tend to have in common is a history of domestic violence, our Class C response to these crimes is not just outdated but deadly.

One veteran of the municipal domestic violence court recently killed herself, and another was murdered, though not by her abuser. As many as one in every five homicides in Kansas City is the result of domestic violence, says Mayor Quinton Lucas. (Though our statistics don’t accurately reflect that because they’re just terrible.)

Another veteran of municipal domestic violence court was Gene Birdsong, who goes on trial for murder next month. His wife, Tabitha Birdsong, who died with the last of her many protective orders in her pocket, was found dead on a jogging path by a woman out on an early morning walk in Roanoke Park in November of 2018.

In the nine years they were together, Gene Birdsong had been arrested dozens of times, in at least four different states, on allegations of assaulting his wife, so the city court was far from the only one that failed to stop him.

But that morning she was found with her face cut off, he still had an outstanding warrant in municipal domestic violence court. And though no one can claim she’d still be alive if only someone had served that warrant, it’s a problem that those warrants are never served. “I issue a warrant, and it just sits there,” says Wachal.

Let’s say that again: If a warrant is issued for your arrest in municipal domestic violence court in Kansas City, absolutely no one is coming for you. Only if you happen to be pulled over for something else and police run a check will you actually be arrested.

Even when trials are held and defendants found guilty of these not-so-minor matters, the maximum sentence Wachal can give is six months — really four, because of jail overcrowding. And if instead, as in the vast majority of cases, you are given two years of probation, often on the condition that you surrender your firearm, there is no one coming for that gun, either.

Lucas, who has only been in office for six months, quickly pushed through an ordinance on taking guns away from convicted abusers. But just recently, he learned that even with the new ordinance on the books, there is no one who actually goes to get these guns.

“We started seeing the enforcement scheme is nonexistent,” Lucas said.

Judge Wachal says Kansas City Police Chief Rick Smith told her his officers just can’t do that job. A Kansas City Police Department spokesman said that’s because “we are not an enforcement arm of the court. A probation violation has to be monitored by someone attached to the court.”

Only, the court hasn’t had even one such a person, so what some call “paper probation” is really more like pretend probation.

In next year’s budget, which Lucas will present this week, he is going to propose funding for two probation officers who would for the first time actually go out and confiscate the guns that these violators have already been required by city law to surrender.

The details are still being worked out, but this would cost less than $150,000 a year, and as Lucas says, “could save so many lives.”

Kevin O’Neill, the Kansas City councilman who’s working on the proposal, says Chief Smith told him, “Good luck on hiring somebody for the job.”

Yes, it will be dangerous duty. But why are so many strangulation and other serious cases referred to the city in the first place? “We shouldn’t have these cases,” says Judge Wachal. “The county should be sending them to prison. But if they are going to be here, give us the resources.”

Turn pretend probation into something real.

As to why just under 900 strangulation cases are essentially in traffic court, Mike Mansur, a spokesman for Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said, “There’s a big difference between listing it as strangulation because someone said that” versus being able to prove it in court.

That’s always true, but doesn’t answer the larger question of why so many cases that look, talk and walk like felonies really aren’t.

“I believe the police have been conditioned about what goes where,” Mansur said.

Domestic Violence Court Prosecutor Abby Pannell said that “sometimes we go back to KCPD and say, ‘Have you talked to Jackson County about this?’ They make the assumption that Jackson County doesn’t want it.”

A Kansas City Police Department spokesman, Sgt. Jacob Becchina, said that it’s not actually up to the police, but is up to prosecutors to decide whether to file charges. “We don’t make the decision. We present the case to the county, and if they decline, we write a Class C ticket” and send it to the city.

Domestic violence that ends in a homicide is never a first offense, though, Becchina said, so it’s true that “these lower-level crimes are many times the precursor of something serious. Everyone knows that.”

If everyone does know that, then why isn’t it reflected in the funding and the charging? And why isn’t it at the center of Kansas City’s efforts to cut the hellish number of homicides in this city?

“When we talk about solving our homicide problem, this is a huge area we’re missing,” said Lucas.

We do not have to keep doing that.

Chief Smith has said in the past that he believes that marijuana leads to murder. But strangulation leads to murder a lot more reliably.

We always say that actions have consequences, but that depends whose actions we’re talking about.

Olin “Pete” Coones, for example, is a working man from Kansas City, Kansas. A mail carrier with five kids, one wife, no police record and zero connections or clout, Coones spent 12 years in prison after a jury found him guilty of murder. You know, because actions have consequences.

And now that the charges against 63-year-old Coones have finally been dropped? Now that a judge has found that the cops missed crucial evidence and the medical examiner got the autopsy wrong and worst of all, the prosecutor suborned perjury, suppressed exculpatory evidence and presented testimony that was “patently untrue,” where are the consequences for those actions?

The prosecutor in the case, Ed Brancart, is not only still practicing and still prosecuting, but is now the senior deputy attorney general for the state of Kansas under Attorney General Derek Schmidt.

He puts away nursing and home health aides and other service providers for Medicaid fraud, for which Kansas paid him just over $92,000 last year. Brancart also serves on the board of trustees of the Kansas Prosecutors Foundation, which describes its mission as helping to “strengthen the criminal justice system for the benefit of the public and the integrity of professional prosecution services.”

Only, suborning perjury — inducing someone to lie under oath — is a crime, too. It’s to lawyers what plagiarism is to a journalist, or what falsifying research is to a scientist. It’s not like a malpractice finding against a doctor, which is usually the result of a mistake. Because suborning perjury is not a mistake, nor is suppressing evidence. These acts are intentional.

When I asked Stan Hazlett, who heads the Kansas office that disciplines attorneys, the Office of the Disciplinary Administrator, where suborning perjury falls on the spectrum of seriousness among all of the allegations his office looks at, he let out a little laugh. Which is the appropriate reaction, because this is like asking a judge in a criminal court where homicide falls on the spectrum of stuff not to do.

“That would be really serious,” Hazlett said, and is a “very uncommon” finding.

What Brancart did, according to Wyandotte County Judge Bill Klapper, in his decision last week vacating Coones’ sentence, is coerce testimony from Robert Rupert, a jailhouse informant he knew to be unstable and knew to have a history of dishonesty.

“The state suborned perjury,” Klapper said. And Brancart “failed to disclose the threats he made” to get the testimony that ultimately helped convict Coones.

POLICE ‘SHOVED A SHOTGUN IN MY FACE’

Then working as a Wyandotte County prosecutor, Brancart knew Rupert had offered to testify in another case after he didn’t get the deal he wanted in return for offering to testify against Coones — in a case in which there was no physical evidence implicating him.

Brancart also stole, though the judge did not say that. He stole 12 years from Coones, who wasn’t there for his children’s graduations or weddings, for the death of his biological dad or the birth of any of his six grandchildren, the oldest of whom is 11 now.

In fact, none but the youngest of his grandchildren even knew of his existence until recently. Because Coones never thought he’d be free again, he’d begged his children not to pass the weight of the knowledge of his conviction on to the next generation.

At exactly 7 a.m. on April 7, 2008, Coones was driving his youngest daughter, Melody, then a high school freshman, and her brother Ben, who was a senior that year, to meet their school bus when police pulled in front of his car. At first, he thought he was being carjacked when officers in plain clothes jumped out with guns. But then other officers arrived in squad cars and handcuffed Pete, Ben and Melody, who was wearing her cheerleading uniform that morning, in full view of every kid on that school bus.

Even the one teacher who was nice to Ben, and was trying to talk him out of dropping out of school at 17 to help support his family, told him, “You don’t want to let other people’s actions define you.” That she thought she knew what those actions were was almost as hard on him as the taunts and the taint.

His father’s actions, as Ed Brancart almost had to have known, weren’t at all as presented in court.

CAN AG DEREK SCHMIDT LET BRANCART CONTINUE?

So what are the consequences? No one at the Kansas attorney general’s office has been willing to say a word, Brancart included, though Schmidt surely can’t think his senior deputy can continue to represent him or the people of Kansas in a court of law, or even with his signature on a legal document.

A complaint has been filed with the Kansas Office of the Disciplinary Administrator, though Hazlett can’t acknowledge even that much, because the whole process is confidential. After an investigation and hearings, the office could recommend disbarment.

Meanwhile, what of all the other cases Brancart touched, both as a prosecutor in Wyandotte County and for the state?

There have to be serious consequences for all that was stolen from Pete Coones, whose only previous brush with the law was the speeding ticket he got en route to his mom’s house on Mother’s Day in 1977.

There have to be repercussions for cheating Dee Coones out of the husband who calls her “the most beautiful girl in the world” and “my girl since we were 7 and met in 4-H.” And for cheating his kids out of the kind of father who knows to be proudest that they “are all successful in their marriages. Except the youngest, and he’s not old enough.”

The fraud that Brancart sold to the jurors in the case against Coones is surely no less serious than the Medicaid fraud cases he tries.

Authorities now believe, as they should have seen all along, that Kathy Schroll wasn’t murdered at all, but killed her husband Carl and then herself, after framing Coones by calling her mother to say that Pete was in her house and was going to shoot them both.

CARETAKER STEALING FROM COONES’ ELDERLY FATHER

Why? Coones had been suing to get his modest inheritance back from Schroll, who as a caretaker for his elderly father had helped herself to his bank account and made herself the beneficiary of his will.

At the time of her death, she was about to be busted for embezzling from the credit union where she worked. But the jury was never told that, and neither were Coones’ lawyers.

They did know she had spent Olin Coones Sr.’s savings, but Brancart told the jury that police couldn’t determine whether any crime had been committed, which was untrue. In fact, detectives had brought the case to the district attorney’s office, and Brancart himself had declined to prosecute it.

No physical evidence tied Coones to the deaths in Schroll’s home, where there was no sign of a struggle or of forced entry. Both Kathy and Carl were shot with her own gun, which was found next to her body, on her left side, and there was gunshot residue and blood splatter on her left hand. Initially, detectives had correctly sized up the scene as a murder-suicide. Until, that is, they heard about the call to Kathy Schroll’s mom at 2:21 a.m.

Less than five hours after that call, and two hours after first hearing Pete Coones’ name, police stopped his kids from getting on the school bus. As they told Coones, who still wasn’t as worried as he should have been, they knew they had their man. Detectives told them straight out that they wouldn’t be looking any further, and that at least was true.

In the end, though, it was the testimony from Rupert, the jailhouse informant, who claimed that Coones had confessed to him during the one day they’d shared a cell, but who got almost all the details about the crime scene wrong, that put Coones away, at his second trial.

And if there are no consequences for the fact that, as Judge Klapper found last week, Brancart threatened Rupert with more jail time if he didn’t go ahead and take the stand, well then what’s to prevent other prosecutors from perverting the system that Pete Coones had always taught his kids they could believe in?

The selectively pro-life Trump administration has brought back the federal death penalty with what I think we can safely call a vengeance during this tough-on-crime campaign season. Did Attorney General William Barr, only recently honored at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast for his “Christlike behavior,” even flinch when ordering that a Kansas woman will be murdered in our name on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception?

Most of those who suffer great cruelty as children do not go on to brutalize others as adults. But Lisa Montgomery, the woman we’re killing by lethal injection on December 8, isn’t one of those victims who never made the news.

In 2004, she strangled a pregnant 23-year-old, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri. The scene was so grisly that when Stinnett’s mother found her body, she told police that it looked like her stomach had exploded; Montgomery had cut Stinnett open with a kitchen knife and had stolen the baby girl she then tried to pass off as her own.

At her 2007 trial, a psychiatrist testified that Montgomery had for years “suffered from significant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.” Even when her mother finally caught him raping her, the doctor said, it was her daughter she blamed, and saw as “a seducer or home-wrecker.” Yet Montgomery “still strived for approval from her mother,” who was herself so violent that she killed the family dog in front of her children to punish them. At 18, Montgomery married her stepbrother at her mother’s urging. Her life did not get better.

The prosecution wrote all of this off as “the abuse excuse” of a “wicked” criminal who was only faking mental illness. “As a society, we can’t let people use the fact that they had bad parents or didn’t have a good childhood as an excuse to murder people,” said Matt Whitworth, the lead prosecutor in the case.

If even one juror had held out against her execution, she would have spent the rest of her life in prison. But no, it was unanimous, and jurors told reporters that they, too, saw her as the prosecution did, as a Star news story put it, as a “scheming, dishonest manipulator who used false pregnancies to gain advantage in her interpersonal relations.”

Now, all these years later, we’re going to do to Lisa Montgomery what she did to Bobbie Jo Stinnett. Which I’m sure is going to deter other victims of severe child abuse from being damaged in ways that we’ll then pretend are just an excuse for their crimes. And who is it who’s faking, again?

Skidmore, Missouri, population 284, where Montgomery knocked on Stinnett’s door pretending to want to buy a puppy, is really only known for two things: murder and mob justice.

Four years before Stinnett’s killing, in 2000, her 25-year-old cousin, Wendy Gillenwater, had been stomped to death by the “boyfriend” who’d left her with 14 fractured ribs, a punctured lung and lacerated liver. The next year, in 2001, another cousin, 20-year-old Branson Perry, disappeared and was never found.

There have been precocious murderers and elderly ones in surrounding Nodaway County: Benny Kemper was just 15 when he sneaked into his classmate’s basement, waited until the Merrigan family was asleep and killed them one by one in their beds in 1972. Lloyd Jeffress was 71 when he shot up Conception Abbey in 2002, killing two monks and wounding two others before ending his own life. A local farmer, William Taylor, made national news after he ran over his wife Debra with a combine in 1994.

But it’s the can-do vigilantism that sets this far northwest corner of the state apart.

In 1931, a crowd of thousands watched the Maryville lynching of Raymond Gunn, a Black man the mob tied to a pole on the roof of a one-room schoolhouse and burned alive. That’s where Gunn was suspected of having murdered a 20-year-old teacher, but there was no trial, and the local sheriff never called in the National Guard troops who were in town to protect Gunn. He didn’t want any of them to get hurt, he said later. The Gunn family’s home was burned, too, and many Black residents fled that day. Burned fragments of what had been the schoolhouse were pocketed as souvenirs.

Half a century later, in 1981, Skidmore pulled together again, for the broad-daylight murder of “town bully” Ken Rex McElroy. Dozens of people saw him shot in his truck on Main Street, with at least two guns, and yet no one was ever arrested.

Isn’t it in that same bloodthirsty spirit that we’ll call the death of Lisa Montgomery justice? Unlike Gunn or McElroy, she was at least convicted in court. And unlike Gunn, her guilt is not in doubt. But in taking the life of a woman who never had much of a chance of one, neither is ours.

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot from rape victims about how retraumatized they’ve been by the police officers who took their reports. By cops who were insulting, cops who were indifferent, cops who not only sympathized with the accused but in one case slapped handcuffs on the victim instead of the perp.

Yet I’d never actually seen a police interview for myself until Heather Woodward recently sent me a copy of the Kansas City Police Department video of her April 26, 2019, meeting with Detective Zac Usher of the sex crimes unit.

Every rapist should have to watch a tape like this one on an endless loop, because it’s excruciating and because I’m not sure they always realize the damage they’ve done. But the rest of us can learn from it, too — for starters, what not to say to a victim.

When Usher tells Woodward he’s glad she’s doing better now, for instance, she says no, she isn’t. His rejoinder? “Well you’re alive, right?” By that standard, yes, all of us are doing better than we might be.

“Playing devil’s advocate,” he says, he asks her to tell him why a court would believe her: “This is what the defense attorneys are going to do. … This is our justice system.”

And yes, it is. Just watching the interview is difficult because Woodward is in so much pain, looking away, sometimes focusing on the wall as she speaks, and laughing when things get too intense, as if trying to put the cushion of a laugh track between herself and her own not at all funny story. But it’s also hard because Usher seems so uncomfortable.

‘JESUS, THIS IS PAINFUL.’

“He’s not sure he believes her,” says Jackson County District Attorney Jean Peters Baker, who agreed to watch the video with me and share her thoughts on it.

When Usher says, “Well you’re alive, right?” Baker shakes her head. “So are you, buddy.”

When he says he’s going to play ‘devil’s advocate,’ she shouts, “No! Don’t!”

“Jesus, this is painful,” Baker says as the interview goes on and on. “He doesn’t believe her and thinks if he keeps going, he’ll crack a hole in her story. He’s saying, ‘Convince me you’re not a nut.’ This is almost like a teaching session of all of the perils of the criminal justice system.”

Why, Usher asks Woodward, did she wait so long to report? “I guess because when you’ve been silenced as long as I have, and in the ways that I have, what is talking about it going to do? It’s going to be a situation where somebody says to me, ‘Why didn’t you fight back? Why did you go to his house?’ And then, if he’s found not guilty, he will have a legal argument that in fact he didn’t rape me.”

She also had a mountain of self-blame to climb. “And if I can’t protect even my own self from me, hearing that from somebody else is unbearable.”

“So you’re afraid you’re not going to be believed?” Usher asks her.

“Yeah, I guess so, but I’m willing to do that now,” says Woodward, a nurse and mother of three. “I’ve been reading and learning, and I feel prepared in a way I never was before to say this is not OK and that my silence not only hurts me, but it hurts all of my sisters. I want to fight.”

When Usher says, “You’re done with not fighting?” she hears that as a reproach. As in next time, do better, OK?

TOO FEW QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CRIME

Woodward was at police headquarters that day to finally put on the record that 15 years earlier, a man she’d once been involved with had raped her. She’d asked to talk to him about a painful part of her past. Had wanted to talk to him as someone who’d known her when she was at a low point over the abuse she’d suffered as a child.

Usher nods and writes down what she says. He isn’t, you can see on the video, trying to intimidate her or get rid of her. He does say he’s sorry this happened to her. At least to me, he seems to be reaching for the right thing to say. But because he doesn’t seem to know what that might be, he winds up making her feel worse anyway. And unintentionally or not, winds up being part of the reason that even now, less than 1% of rapes result in a felony conviction.

Baker says Usher isn’t asking nearly enough about the actual crime, that “he’s a little out of his element.” That he’s letting Woodward wander all over the place, in ways that would have compromised her case later, if there had been any “later.”

Everything she’s telling him, about other rapes in her past, going back to her childhood, is supplied to the accused and would have been used against her if the case had gone to court.

It not only didn’t but couldn’t have, at least in part according to Baker because Usher so mishandled the interview: “Based on that interview, no way we’d file that.”

Instead of starting by playing “devil’s advocate,” Baker wishes he had started with the presumption that “I get to fight for her.” Because he didn’t, “now I don’t. It’s too late.”

“People like her do get raped over and over,” Baker said. Former child victims, she means. “Molestation victims are marginalized, so they’re good picks. If you’re someone who’s been a victim a lot, you don’t fight back.”

Previous attacks aren’t supposed to be relevant in court. And we never ask, Baker says, “Were you burglarized before? Ohhh, this is your second burglary? What’s wrong with your house?”

Everything she’s telling him, about other rapes in her past, going back to her childhood, is supplied to the accused and would have been used against her if the case had gone to court.

It not only didn’t but couldn’t have, at least in part according to Baker because Usher so mishandled the interview: “Based on that interview, no way we’d file that.”

Instead of starting by playing “devil’s advocate,” Baker wishes he had started with the presumption that “I get to fight for her.” Because he didn’t, “now I don’t. It’s too late.”

“People like her do get raped over and over,” Baker said. Former child victims, she means. “Molestation victims are marginalized, so they’re good picks. If you’re someone who’s been a victim a lot, you don’t fight back.”

Previous attacks aren’t supposed to be relevant in court. And we never ask, Baker says, “Were you burglarized before? Ohhh, this is your second burglary? What’s wrong with your house?”

Woodward says she knows they were never in contact of any kind again after he raped her, because she was planning to give him hell if he ever called her again, and he never did.

Not only was he “not that kind of person,” the accused man told Usher, but neither was she: “If someone like Heather was raped, they would go to police on the day it happened.”

Usher noted that he “appeared nervous throughout the interview” and “stated several times how shocked he was.” He didn’t respond to my messages looking for comment for this column.

Usher didn’t, either. He forwarded my request to talk to him to a Kansas City Police Department public information officer, who said they don’t talk about open investigations, which this unfortunately is not.

Woodward tried to file a complaint about Usher but got a letter back that said no, she couldn’t do that. Because, wait for it, she’d waited too long before speaking up.

When I called her to relay that Baker does believe her, and though it doesn’t change the disposition of the case, wanted her address so she could send her some flowers, Woodward burst into tears.

“That’s the nicest thing the system has ever done for me,” she said. On what happened to be her 48th birthday, just that acknowledgment felt like the most unexpected possible gift.