Deposition: Golubski asked 13-year-old ‘if I want to see my sweet little grandma again’

Officially, no one at the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department ever heard a word against Roger Golubski during his decades on the force. OK, maybe they’d heard “gossip” that he “liked” Black girls. But allegations that he’d raped, harassed, stalked, threatened, trafficked and murdered some of these women? Well now this was new, and of course absurd.

How odd, then, that several of the declarations and sworn depositions filed last Friday in the civil case against Golubski and the Unified Government go into great detail about repeated but unsuccessful efforts to get someone, anyone, at the KCKPD to stop then-detective Golubski from continuing to abuse these women he supposedly liked so much.

Let’s start with the declaration, signed under penalty of perjury, of highly decorated former KCKPD Sgt. Tim Hausback, who worked for the department from 1972 until 1989, when he had to retire because of an injury suffered in the line of duty. “I took great pride in being a police officer,” he said, and cared about the North End community he was proud to protect and serve.

Many in the neighborhood “were poor, or addicted to drugs, or without stable housing,” he said in his April 21 statement. And “one thing that really troubled me as an officer was when I saw such persons being abused or exploited. While there were some officers who were sincerely committed to serving this vulnerable population, others leveraged the authority of their badge to prey on the vulnerable. In particular, some took advantage of poor, struggling or addicted women, including those who worked on the streets as prostitutes.”

“In the mid to late 1970s,” Hausback said, “I discovered that one of my fellow KCKPD officers, Roger Golubski, was taking advantage of some of the women who worked as prostitutes. On many occasions, I saw Golubski sitting in his patrol car in the ‘Bottoms,’ an industrial area next to the river at Third and James Street, which was well known as an area where prostitutes were available.”

“Golubski had no reason to be in the Bottoms at those times. In fact, he was violating KCKPD orders by being ‘out of district’ when he should have been patrolling his assigned area. Golubski seemed quite comfortable shirking his assignment and made no effort to disguise that he was looking for prostitutes.”

None of this was a secret to anyone, Hausback said. “Golubski’s activities were widely known within the department, especially in Division 1, where his familiarity with prostitutes would sometimes come up during daily roll call. … What deeply troubled me was that Golubski’s pursuit and exploitation of prostitutes in the Bottoms seemed to be accepted in the department. No one questioned it, and no one was doing anything about it.”

When Hausback reported all of this to his commanding officer, Maj. Daniel Monchil, who died in 2012, all that happened was that a pimp soon made a false complaint about Hausback, accusing him of extortion. Next, Hausback reported Golubski to internal affairs investigators, to Chief Allan Meyers, who is also deceased, and to an assistant city attorney. They never took any action, either, he said.

Teen victim described being raped repeatedly

Another declaration, also given on April 21, came from Tina Peterson, who when she worked for a battered women’s shelter, the Joyce H. Williams Center, in the late 1980s “encountered numerous victims of Roger Golubski. As many of these women, including those who worked on the street, described they abuse they suffered, one name came up repeatedly: Roger Golubski.”

Women who named him came in bleeding, shaking, crying and afraid. Peterson called the KCKPD’s internal affairs department twice to report him, each time leaving all of her contact information and why she was calling. Someone would get back to her, she was told. But no one ever did.

In the most chilling deposition filed in the case, a woman described in gruesome detail how Golubski regularly raped her from the time she was 13 in 1997 until she was almost 18.

She’d grown up in a series of foster homes, and had just gone to live with her grandmother when Golubski called her out of the blue one day, and told her that her name had been mentioned in connection with a criminal case. Unless she wanted to go to jail, he said, she needed to meet him right away, but not at the police station.

“I really thought he was trying to help me, you know. Like, I thought it was a mix-up, but we would get it straightened out.”

Though she had no idea what case he was talking about, she agreed to meet him in the parking lot of a Walmart that isn’t there any more, at 64th and State. When she got there, he never brought up any crime, but asked her to tell him about some of her best friends, and name the person she cherished most in the world.

“He came off … as if he cared. And so when I gave him a little bit about my history and the abuse and stuff that I’d been through in foster homes and things, I thought he would empathize with me, and you know, maybe even help me get justice at some point.”

Instead, he remarked that women sometimes lead men on, and “play victim.” Then he put his hand on her thigh, and told her that “if I want to see my sweet little grandma again” she’d shut up and do as he said.

“Either you love your grandma or you don’t,” she says he told her. “You make the decision.”

He told her what color scrubs her grandmother had worn to work that morning, and she believed his threats.

Told her about dumping bodies in the river

Over the next five years, he choked her for sexual pleasure, punched her “at his convenience,” made her wear a dog collar and walk on all fours, and sold drugs in front of her, conducting his business on burner phones. He complained that she didn’t know what she was doing sexually, and waited outside her school on a regular basis, not to pick her up, but to monitor her.

Many times, she said, he took her down to the Bottoms and threatened her with a twisted lullaby: “Down by the river, said a hanky-pank, they won’t find her until she stank.” Anyone who disrespected him was dumped there, he told her, and took personal credit for the foul odor of the water.

“Every encounter by the river I thought was my last day on Earth,” she said in the deposition. “It’s not been a day that went by that that song don’t come up in my head,” even now.

When she finally told her aunt what had been happening, the older woman went down to the police station and reported everything, but came back to the car convinced that it was her niece who has been telling lies. “It couldn’t be true,” her aunt told her, “because he’d been on duty the times I said.”

Her sister saw the busted lip and black eye she came home with that night, after Golubski punished her for being, as he called her, a snitch and a rat.

This woman talked to the FBI long ago, as so many other victims now have. And you know, maybe when there are enough accusers to fill Arrowhead, they’ll take some action.