Timeline: How Roger Golubski rose through ranks of KCK police despite suspected crimes | Opinion

1975: Wyandotte County native Roger Golubski, who had attended high school at Savior of the World Seminary, which closed in 1987, and then college at Rockhurst University, chose courses that indicated an interest in both abnormal psychology and Catholic theology.

But instead of becoming a priest, as he’s said he wanted to do, Golubski graduated from the police academy in 1975, and at age 23, joined the Kansas City Kansas Police Department.

1978: On Page 4 of the April 24, 1978, edition of The Kansas City Times, the paper reported that Golubski had been cleared in the death of an intoxicated 41-year-old man, Kenneth Borg, who had died from internal bleeding after Golubski hit him with a nightstick.

The coroner’s jury that ruled the death accidental, and that attributed it to alcoholism, included the wife of a police colleague of Golubski’s. “Asked about the propriety of allowing the wife of a police officer to serve on the jury,” the story said, “Nick A. Tomasic, district attorney, responded: ‘Anybody has a right to serve. She’s not exempt because she’s a policeman’s wife.’ ”

Golubski said he struck the man a “glancing blow” after Borg took a swing at him in the police garage. The newspaper account said the ruling disregarded testimony that the man had been handcuffed at the time, and alas, “No one said they saw Golubski strike Borg at the police station, including another policeman who was in the nearby patrol car that had brought Borg to the garage.”

Wyandotte County Coroner Alan C. Hancock, now deceased, who later signed many of the death certificates of murdered women connected to Golubski, testified that the kind of blow that Golubski had said he had delivered could not have caused Borg’s death.

Golubski was not internally sanctioned, then or ever, and continued to be promoted throughout his 35 years in the department.

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, according to an affidavit from now retired FBI agent Alan Jennerich, “I investigated officers of the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department who were suspected of engaging in a variety of illegal activity including drug trafficking, soliciting, payoffs, using excessive force and stealing from those they were sworn to protect. In all, I investigated perhaps 15 to 20 officers who were suspected of civil rights violations and other offenses under federal criminal law.”

“Investigating those officers posed a significant challenge,” he said, “as the culture of the KCKPD tended to protect the wrongdoers. The ‘blue code’ of silence meant that the officers did not report the misconduct of other officers, even when that misconduct was criminal. Further, as I discovered, corruption at the KCKPD was longstanding and systemic, and many of the commanding officers swept wrongdoing under the rug rather than confronting it and rooting it out.”

While looking into police corruption back then, Jennerich became aware that Golubski “used the authority of his position to extort sexual favors,” he said in the affidavit.

But prosecutors were protective of officers, Jennerich told me in an interview in 2021, and in his view, that’s why the investigation was aborted and nothing ever happened.

“The FBI’s never going to do anything. It’s not in their interest. They irritate a police department, that’s not going to get them a promotion. They’re going through the motions, punching a ticket,” by investigating at all, he said. “Saying what’s going to stop corruption over there is like saying what’s going to stop it in Chicago,” where Jennerich was also an agent.

“It would take a thermonuclear device. And in the U.S. Attorney’s office? Some of them are married to cops. That’s just KCK. We used to call it ‘Sodom’ and ‘the land that time forgot.’ Going across I-70 over there, I’d expect to see long-necked dinosaurs eating the tops off trees. Golubski knows everything, so no one’s ever going to get him.”

By 2010, KCK officialdom was well aware that the many serious allegations against Golubski were likely to become more widely known outside the Black community in KCK as a result of Lamonte McIntyre’s innocence case.

Golubski was accused of railroading McIntyre, who in the end served 23 years in prison for a 1994 double murder that he did not commit. Officially, the killings of 21-year-old Doniel Quinn and 34-year-old Donald Ewing have never been solved.

McIntryre’s innocence case and his later civil suit accused Golubski of having sexually assaulted McIntyre’s mother years earlier, and coercing testimony that implicated then-17-year-old McIntyre in the murders.

When Golusbki finally retired from the force, also in 2010, he walked away with a taxpayer-funded pension, a new job as a police detective in Edwardsville, and even a commission as a reserve KCKPD officer. In a later deposition, he complained that he hadn’t gotten much of a sendoff.

In October of 2017, McIntyre was freed after Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree asked that all charges be dropped, and called his conviction a “manifest injustice.” There was never any physical evidence tying McIntyre to the killings, and Golubski and WyCo prosecutor Terra Morehead allegedly coerced eyewitness testimony from the victims’ cousin, Niko Quinn, who then tried for years to set the record straight.

In February of 2020, McIntyre was awarded a certificate of innocence and $1.5 million from Kansas. For years, local officials had continued to whisper that he was not really innocent and had successfully urged the state attorney to fight his compensation claim.

In November of 2020, in a deposition for McIntyre’s civil suit, Golubski invoked his 5th Amendment right not to incriminate himself 555 times in a single day. Among the questions he wouldn’t answer were these: Did he have a sideline in selling drugs and “facilitating prostitution” while he was a police detective?

Ever get charges dismissed in return for sex? Ever rape a minor in his cop car? Or threaten to harm a woman if she turned him in?

Also, he took the Fifth in response to this one: “You closed dozens of cases by manipulating witnesses to give false testimony?” And this one: “Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, you used your network of women on the streets to provide false information to close your cases, correct?”

In July of 2022, the Unified Government agreed to pay McIntyre and his mother $12.5 million to settle the civil case against them.

In September of 2022, Golubski was arrested by the FBI, and charged with denying two women their civil rights by raping and kidnapping them. Prosecutors said he also raped other women, including a 13-year-old, and exploited mostly poor Black women over the course of his career.

In November of 2022, Golubski was also charged in a sex trafficking conspiracy, along with drug kingpin Cecil Brooks and two other men.

Now, more than a year after the initial charges, no trial has been set.

The next status conference on the two cases against him is scheduled for Oct. 25.