Shoddy investigation into 2021 death has ignored ties to ex-cop Roger Golubski | Opinion

Even as kids, Serberthia Bassett’s children knew that she had regular dealings with Kansas City, Kansas Police Detective Roger Golubski. More than once, they saw him approach her on the street, and heard her tell him “to leave her the f--- alone when she was with us,” her son, Daniel Sharp, told me.

Bassett, known as “Cissy,” was 64 when her body was dumped under the bridge over the Kansas River at KCK’s Turner Boat Ramp in June of 2021. She was a home health aide, a mother of three, grandmother of 14 and great-grandmother of 22. And she was a fierce lady — someone who talked back and fought back.

But her family believes she was also one of the many women forced into service by and for the longtime KCKPD detective, whose trial on federal charges involving kidnapping, rape, conspiracy and sex trafficking still hasn’t been scheduled more than a year after his arrest.

“I’d always known he was the man harassing her,” said Bassett’s daughter, Canisha Tiller. “He’d ride past and she’d say, ‘Get the f--- away from me; I’ve got my kids with me.’ ”

In recent years, Bassett’s family knew, too, that she worked without pay for a convicted KCK drug dealer widely believed to be a police informant, and known as “the next Golubski,” because he operates with such impunity. Bassett cleaned up after his dogs, in a longtime drug house on 9th Street that has since stopped serving. “Sometimes, they wouldn’t let her leave for days,” Sharp said.

She was there cleaning on Wednesday, June 9, 2021, the last time Sharp, with whom she lived, ever heard from his mom, whose body was found on Saturday, June 12. Though she never drew a paycheck, she also worked in the dealer’s restaurant, which closed right after she turned up dead.

Yet according to her family, the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department, which investigated her death, showed no interest in her connection to either of these two men.

Investigator praised food at drug dealer’s restaurant

When Sharp told Detective Tomas Zamora that he had reason to believe that Golubski might have had something to do with her death, “he blew me off,” and didn’t want to hear any more, Sharp said.

When he mentioned the coincidental timing of the drug dealer’s restaurant closing, “he said something about it being tax season,” which it wasn’t, “and that there was an election coming up. He was talking crazy.” Then, Sharp said, Zamora added, “We eat there sometimes,” and praised the food.

Sharp said Zamora told him that officers had followed up by driving by the drug house on 9th Street, but when they pulled up, whoever lived there drove away, and cops supposedly couldn’t go in “without someone to put her in the house” other than her family. “And that was the end of it.”

When asked about the investigation for this piece, Undersheriff Emmett Lockridge said that if the drug dealer had ever been mentioned to detectives, then that connection must have been thoroughly investigated. But, he said, there was never any reason to think that her death had been anything other than the accidental drug overdose that the autopsy, filed five months after her death, ruled that it was.

Lockridge said there was no reason to look into any relationship between Bassett and Golubski, either: “That’s a pretty big stretch.” The family “didn’t mention that in any interview. None of that came up. Do you think they could be trying to get in on a lawsuit?”

No, I think they feel 1) genuinely terrified, 2) dismissed, and 3) desperate to know what happened to their mom.

But since detectives refused to ever even meet face-to-face with Sharp and his wife, it’s possible that the Golubski reference really didn’t register.

According to the Sharps, it only seemed to annoy the detective when they forwarded him evidence, including the ATM and phone records they had collected.

These could have been critical, since someone used her phone and also tried to make a withdrawal after her body was found.

Then, in exasperation, “when I said this looks like something going on with y’all,” — a police-related crime or cover-up, in other words — Zamora “said I was disrespecting him and hung up on me.” That was their last conversation.

Delayed autopsy doesn’t explain missing pants

Bassett’s autopsy was started the day after her death but was not signed or filed until five months later, apparently because the initial coroner, Dr. John Ralston, took a medical leave. He has since died.

It concludes that Bassett’s death was caused by a drug overdose — cocaine “detected at a concentration where deaths have been reported.”

Only, that wouldn’t explain the deep gash on her forehead, or why her shirt and bra were soaked in blood.

The autopsy calls the gash, which is plainly visible in the autopsy photos obtained through an open records request, a “superficial laceration.” It also mentions but does not document blood clots as a contributory factor.

Neither an overdose nor blood clots would explain why, like other dead women connected to Golubski, Bassett was found with no pants and no shoes, wearing nothing below the waist except one black sock. She had no purse or anything else with her, either.

Zamora, Sharp said, “asked me if maybe she’d been down there fishing.” And he “said dumping a body is not a felony in Kansas, so no use looking for this person. That hurt my feelings so hard I wanted to cry.”

Fishing with no pants, really?

It was a fisherman who found Bassett’s body, though, and called 911 at 6:49 that Saturday morning, June 12. Bassett, who had no car, walked everywhere. But she would never have ventured miles from home to that remote and notorious WyCo dumping ground up under a bridge to fish, her children said.

Even in daylight, it’s a creepy spot, down a long path under the Turner Diagonal Bridge, half a mile off the road. On the afternoon I went out to have a look around, a guy with a couple of big dogs in the car with him was parked there, at the water’s edge, keeping watch on something.

Lockridge, the undersheriff, told me that his investigators had assured him that there was just no reason to think that any crime had been committed. Even, I asked, the fact that she wasn’t wearing any pants?

“Maybe she took a squat,” he said. “We don’t know.”

We do know that her pants didn’t walk away, though.

Undersheriff: ‘We interviewed several people’

Was a rape kit done? Yes, he said. “We interviewed several people, and based on those and the autopsy report,” there was just zero reason to think she’d been murdered.

And did investigators look into the drug dealer she worked for, in the house where her family had last known her to be?

“They’re speculating” that he may have been involved, Lockridge said, but “if they supplied that information,” he said, then “I’m sure” it was run to ground.

I’m not. Though based on what the Sharps told me about Zamora’s level of interest in the information they were trying to convey, it’s possible that that connection did not register, either.

“I believe they’re covering up for a drug dealer” with pull, Bassett’s daughter Tiller told me. I believe it’s equally possible that this is the thoroughness with which the deaths of Black women with no pull are investigated. And I’m not sure which would be worse.

“I was told,” Lockridge said, that “the family was uncooperative, up to a point.”

Maybe if investigators had agreed to meet in person with Sharp and his wife, who knew Bassett’s comings and goings best because she lived with them, any miscommunications and mistaken assumptions that did happen could have been avoided.

The bottom line, Lockridge said, is that the case was closed because “the evidence does not support any foul play.”

I am willing to believe that investigators believe that, but hope they will reopen the case and look again anyway. The FBI, too.

If there was no foul play, after all, then why did Bassett leave Tiller what sounded like a panicked message around 3 p.m. on the Thursday before the Saturday her body was found: “Pick up the phone, Candy, damn it! It’s like she’s trying to whisper,” her daughter said.

It was someone other than his mother, Sharp believes, who texted him from her phone on Friday night, saying she’d be home soon.

What the investigator kept focusing on instead of any of this, Sharp said, was that there were supposedly needle track marks on his mother’s arm. These so-called track marks were on her right arm, even though she was right-handed. In the autopsy photos, it’s plain that these marks do not follow a vein, and they look more like insect bites.

Friend saw victim in unmarked white van

Oh, Bassett did get high, her children said, but smoked her crack, because she was so deathly afraid of needles that “if she’s broke, she isn’t going to donate plasma,” said her daughter-in-law, Kelesha Sharp.

Everybody who knew her knew that, just like they knew she had some kind of business with Golubski.

“She used to talk to him a lot; she told me that,” said Bassett’s closest friend of many years. “They got along good as far as I know.” Meaning that there was something between them? “He was a friend of hers; that’s all she said. I don’t know what she was doing with him.”

This friend also saw Bassett on Thursday, June 10th, in a white van with no tags that she’d never seen before. She was waving and smiling from the passenger seat as she passed her friend’s house. Her friend didn’t see the driver, but figures it had to have been someone Bassett knew.

Police never tried to interview this friend, and out of concern for her safety, I’m not naming her here.

“My boyfriend doesn’t want me involved with this,” she said. Nobody’s partner would; the folks for whom Bassett worked are not nice people.

Tiller said she’s scared as well: “They could kill me off, too.” But she’s decided to come forward anyway, because “I have to find out what happened to my mother.”

She and her brother need to know whether Bassett’s death is linked to her former employer the drug dealer, to whom she seemed to owe more money than she could ever repay, or whether it “has something to do with Golubski trying to get rid of witnesses and informants.”

Cousin: I was Golubski victim

I first heard about Bassett in a letter from Bernard Smith, a cousin she grew up with and thought of as her brother, who is serving time in the Hutchinson Correctional Facility. Smith said when he and Bassett lived together in the ‘80s, Golubski used to come over, force her to have sex with him and coerce him sexually, too. He also said Golubski eventually threatened to take Bassett’s children away unless Smith agreed to help him “clean up” some burglary cases.

“So I did what he asked,” pleading guilty to those crimes and also performing oral sex on Golubski. Smith said that although he’s never read anything about Golubski sexually abusing boys or men, “I’m one of those guys” who can say otherwise. “This happened in 1988 and 1989.”

“For years, I been afraid,” he wrote in the letter. “I’m 61 now and don’t care any more.”

Golubski’s defense attorney, Chris Joseph, responded to that allegation in an email: “If you write an article about this, I hope that you include information about Mr. Smith being incarcerated, his criminal history and his disciplinary history” in prison, as well as “if he sent a letter to the FBI making the same allegations and whether the FBI found them credible.”

Of course, all of those Golubski has been accused of abusing have a criminal history or were in other serious trouble at the time, which is what made them vulnerable. And unfortunately, that the FBI doesn’t always follow up on or take complaints from those in or out of prison seriously isn’t news, either.

Joseph questioned Smith’s motivation in coming forward and said that where Bassett is concerned, Golubski was already under 24-hour video surveillance by the FBI at the time of her death, so “there would be concrete evidence of his whereabouts on June 12, 2021.”

“I would love to refute each allegation as you print them. But it has to wait for trial.” Meanwhile, he suggests “additional investigation.” And on that point, I couldn’t agree more.

So how did Bassett’s children first learn that their mother even knew Golubski?

One day, way back when he was a student at Central Middle School, said Sharp, who is 44 now, “I see this detective car coming up 10th Street.” Unlike every police chief for the 35 years Golubski was with the KCKPD, “I already know who this man is; he’s the cop who harasses all the women. He said, ‘Tell your son to stop staring at me or I’ll put him in juvie.’ ’’

Another time, even before that, and before there was a casino at Ann and 7th, he and his mom and sister were waiting at the bus stop there, “and he pulls up with some type of problem with my mama. He wanted her to do something, but she wasn’t going for it.”

On that day, according to her son, she not only yelled right back at him — “Not today; I got my kids with me!” — but “pulled a knife, and he just left,” leaving her son amazed that she hadn’t been arrested for acting like that with a police officer.

Reopen the case. FBI should investigate

Tiller remembers that day well, too. Whenever women Bassett knew were found dead, including her friend Rose Calvin, “she always said the police did it,” her daughter said. She also used to mutter, when she was angry, that she was going to “turn his ass in,” though who or what she was planning to report was never clear. “I should have asked more questions,” Tiller thinks now.

And so should those whose job it was to investigate Bassett’s death.

It’s possible, of course, that Serberthia Jean Tiller Bassett’s death had nothing to do with either her drug-dealing employer or with Golubski.

But that someone with such long and demonstrable ties to the disgraced cop turned up dead only two years ago, and the investigation, such as it was, seems to have been over before it started, is 10 kinds of wrong.

The law enforcement community in KCK should stop claiming that Golubski’s alleged predations, if there were any, happened so long ago that there’s nothing to worry about.

The lack of official curiosity about Serberthia Bassett’s association with Golubski and with the drug dealer makes it look like police don’t even want to know.

Which, after all that’s happened, can’t possibly be right. Right?

It’s not too late for investigators to hear what her family has to say, reopen the case, and see where the evidence leads. Now that they do know about all of these connections, how can they not?