If suspect did kill other women in the 20 years since DNA hit, that’s on the KCKPD | Opinion

Two years ago, Kansas City, Kansas murder victim Christina King’s daughter April Parks told me how devastating it had been for her entire family that the KCKPD didn’t really seem to care who’d beaten her mother to death and dumped her body in the driveway of an abandoned nursing home, where metal scavengers found her on Christmas morning in 1998.

This wasn’t conjecture, Parks said, but exactly what then-KCK police detective Terry Mast told her grandmother, Penny Barnett, when Barnett called to see how the investigation into her 26-year-old daughter’s murder was going.

“She got off the phone crying and my grandpa asked her why,” Parks told me in June of 2021. “She said Mast had told her, ‘She’s just another crackhead off the streets and we really don’t investigate’’’ those homicides. “She didn’t call back no more after that.”

Barnett died in 2016, without ever knowing that the police had all the way back in 2003 gotten a DNA hit on the condom that police said they found next to her daughter’s battered and half-naked body.

It took them 14 months to even get around to questioning Gary Davis, though according to court records, he was under the highest level of “intensive supervision” by Wyandotte County Community Corrections at the time. So in theory, they knew where he was at all moments.

It took them a full 20 years to arrest Davis.

And then, they actually bragged about their crack investigative work.

Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree and KCK Police Chief Karl Oakman even called a news conference to congratulate themselves.

That is some A1 chutzpah, guys.

Dupree said the detectives had “tirelessly” investigated.

Oakman did not let on that the department had received notice of the DNA hit decades earlier. He underplayed how important that evidence was, too.

“The DNA may tell you something,” he said at the news conference, “but to get a case, you got to make sure you have a thorough case, a thorough investigation. And there is still no substitute for outstanding investigators.”

His cold case detectives might be Philip Marlowe, Andy Sipowicz, V.I. Warshawski and Easy Rawlins all rolled into one, but taking 20 years to charge the guy whose DNA you’ve had in a drawer all this time is a disgrace rather than a reason to hold a victory parade.

In March of last year, Kansas City attorney Cheryl Pilate practically drew police a map.

Ahead of a pretrial conference in Lamonte McIntyre’s ultimately successful civil suit against the Unified Government, she filed a statement with the court that was intended to indict not just disgraced longtime KCKPD detective Roger Golubski, who was in charge of the murder investigation that led to McIntyre’s wrongful arrest, but the corrupt culture in which Golubski thrived. The longtime former KCKPD detective, who has since been charged with federal crimes that include kidnapping, rape and trafficking, has always denied all wrongdoing.

“From at least 1983 through 2008,” Pilate wrote in the court order, “the KCKPD was aware that multiple women were murdered in KCK in strikingly brutal and similar ways, which were characterized by the following: (1) the women were often homeless or drug addicted or worked as prostitutes; (2) the majority of the women were Black; (3) nearly all of the women were murdered in a “hands on” and brutal manner, frequently by strangulation, asphyxiation, blunt force trauma and/or stabbing; (4) the women were dumped in remote or isolated locations or abandoned buildings; (5) the women were all partially or fully nude, almost always with the pants pulled off or shirts pulled down, resulting in the exposure of breasts or genitals or both; and (6) the victims’ clothing items were scattered nearby.”

All of the above applied to Christina King: “I know she was known to be a prostitute; she had just been released from jail the day before” she died, Parks told me two years ago. “After my dad went to prison, she gave up. From what everyone said, she was a good person, and she lived on the streets.”

Pilate also wrote in the court order, “Despite the fact that Roger Golubski knew most, if not all” of the women who were killed, “none of the homicide files reflect that he provided his knowledge of these women. … Despite the abundance of potential physical evidence that could be analyzed, most of the above-mentioned homicide cases received inadequate forensic attention, with either limited evidence collected or limited efforts to identify possible assailants with whom any DNA or other forensic results could be compared. In one case, the homicide of Christina King, the KCKPD received a DNA match with a potential suspect, but did no follow up investigation.”

Even after that public prodding, it took police 18 more months to make an arrest.

Had evidence

The KCKPD’s cold case unit, formed in January of 2022, has now solved three other cases in addition to King’s, officials said at the news conference. One victim was a newborn allegedly left in a dumpster in 1976 by her grandmother, who has since died, and a second was a teenager that a man dying in a Kansas prison recently confessed to killing in 1997.

The third was Sameemah Musawwir, also known as Pearl Barnes, who was stabbed some 40 times and found in her deceased mother’s vacant house in northeast KCK in 1996. Gary Davis has also been charged with her murder, and he might be charged with some other killings, too.

Oakman said at the news conference that “in my experience, based on him killing two women, most likely he’s killed more.”

That’s true. But if there are other victims, how many of them would still be alive if KCKPD had moved on the information they had in hand?

And again, why did it take police 20 years to arrest someone whose DNA they’ve had all this time?

What Mast told April Parks’ grandmother, that police wouldn’t be spending a lot of energy looking into the death of a “crackhead off the streets,” is the only explanation that makes sense. But was that out of callous indifference, or something even worse, like self-protection?

Mast never got back to me two years ago, when I sent him multiple messages asking about the case and what, according to the victim’s family, he’d said about Christina King. He hasn’t answered my recent messages, either.

But the way April Parks’ grandmother described that conversation to her family mirrors some of the language found in the thin police file on their investigation, which Parks has never seen.

In it, one of the handful of people police interviewed who had known Christina King described her as a “Central Street crack whore.”

Police did not, according to what is and is not in the file, interview any of the other women who worked on Central, nor did they at the time follow up even on the leads that they did have.

KCKPD spokeswoman Nancy Chartrand told The Star that in 2001, Davis was charged with domestic aggravated battery and burglary. When he was convicted, he was swabbed for DNA, which was entered into the national database known as the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS.

That’s how, in 2003, KCK detectives came to be informed that Davis’ DNA matched the evidence collected at the scene of King’s murder.

“In the aggravated battery,” an officer wrote in a report at the time, “he beat this woman with his fist, similar to King’s death.”

The scene that metal scavengers stumbled on Christmas morning in 1998 was a grisly one. King’s face had been smashed in, and she had died of multiple blunt trauma blows to thet head. Her pants were partially pulled down, and her bra, shoes and other belongings were scattered nearby.

So how did 14 months go by between the time the KCKPD was notified about the DNA hit and the time detectives brought Davis in for questioning in 2005?

“Mr. Davis may not have been responsive to detectives’ requests, he may have canceled meetings and more likely than not, detective availability may have delayed things,” Chartrand explained in an email to my Star colleague Luke Nozicka.

While under close county supervision, he would not have been able to ignore invitations to talk to detectives.

The police chief at the time was Ron Miller, who as the U.S. Marshal in Kansas is currently in charge of security for the federal agents investigating his former employee Golubski.

Once Davis finally was brought in for questioning, another DNA sample was taken and sent to the KBI, Chartrand said, and it, too, tied Davis’ DNA to King’s murder.

And then? Then 18 more years went by before Davis was finally arrested.

If you’re thinking that Kansas City, Kansas sounds like a great place to get away with murder, you’re not the first.

Missing mom

April King was only in the fifth grade when Christina King, nicknamed “Cricket” by her family, because she was so tiny, was murdered. April’s younger sister, Ashley Goodall, was 7 when they lost their mother and 14 when she started living on her own.

Neither woman has ever gotten over that loss, and neither necessarily believes what the KCKPD is saying now.

“I used to walk up and down Quindaro looking for the person who killed my mom,” Ashley told me a few days ago. “I put myself in some situations, and I didn’t care, because I needed closure.”

Eventually, she says, she got in a truck with someone who she thinks did have something to do with her mom’s death, which according to those who’d known Christina was in retaliation for the theft of some drugs by a cousin of Christina’s and two other women. That man, Ashley says, was not Gary Davis.

But she’s also been told, and firmly believes, that whatever really happened, “Golubski covered it up.”

Federal prosecutors have charged Golubski with conspiring with convicted drug kingpin Cecil Brooks and two other men in the trafficking of underage girls at an apartment complex Brooks ran on KCK’s Delavan Avenue. Some of the victims, prosecutors say, were recruited straight out of a juvenile correctional center, then were held “in a condition of involuntary sexual servitude” — raped and used “like chattel” while Golubski protected the operation from any real scrutiny.

When KCK cold case detectives recently rolled up on April Parks to tell her that they had made an arrest in her mother’s murder, “they didn’t explain nothing” about what had taken them so long after the DNA hit, Parks told me. “They didn’t want to talk about that.”

“None of it makes sense to me,” she said. “They said he’s a suspect in 8 other cases, but is that just so they can not have so many unsolved cases?”

If Davis is responsible for other murders, and any of those deaths occurred after 2003, then the KCKPD owes every one of those victims’ families an explanation and an apology, along with a lot more deference than they ever showed the traumatized loved ones that Christina Ranae King left behind.