Why KCKPD won’t investigate: ‘She was a streetwalker. What else do you want us to do?’

April King was in the fifth grade when her 26-year-old mother, Christina Ranae King, nicknamed “Cricket” by her family, because she was so tiny, was found beaten to death in Kansas City, Kansas. That was on Christmas Day, 1998.

And from that day to this, the most painful memory associated with the most painful loss of April’s life is what her grandma always said that then-KCK police detective Terry Mast told her when she asked him how the investigation was going. “She got off the phone crying and my grandpa asked her why. She said he 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.”

Mast did not respond to my messages or certified letter. One of the most recent posts on his public Facebook page says that some poor guy who’d come through the food line multiple times one day when he was helping his Moose Lodge staff a soup kitchen had reminded him “why I don’t like volunteering, because I don’t understand what this asshole’s gripe was, as a society we don’t owe him or anyone shit.”

Is that why “we really don’t investigate” certain murders? Mast was true to his word to April’s grandmother, Penny Barnett, in any case, because her family never heard another whisper about any investigation.

Barnett died in 2016, but April King is available to receive your apology, Detective Mast. Or better yet, some information about what happened to her mother.

That “crackhead” comment was from another century, of course. But it was just two months ago that Star Cooper heard something all too similar when she called the KCKPD hoping to get them to reopen the investigation into the 1983 murder of her mom, Dorothy Fay Cooper.

Current KCKPD Capt. Rodney Smith, who was sympathetic when Cooper first reached out, called her the morning of March 26th, the day they were supposed to meet, and told her that wouldn’t be happening after all: “He said, ‘My boss said there was no reason for us to open this case. We don’t have any more evidence.’ He got really rude with me after that. He said, ‘I mean, she was a streetwalker. What else do you want us to do?’ ”

Treat her murder like it mattered, maybe? Because that’s a human being you’re talking about, with a family still suffering and still looking for answers.

The culture that made Roger Golubski possible

A spokeswoman for the KCKPD said in an email that “in regards to the comments made to Ms. Star Cooper, we have initiated an internal investigation.’’

Comments like that are no small thing, because they reflect a culture, in 1983 and today, that counts certain people as unworthy of even worrying about. And that culture, then and now, is what made depraved former KCK police detective Roger Golubski possible.

It was the view of the women Golubski preyed on as disposable that freed him to treat them as such, for decades using his badge to help him sexually exploit poor women, most of them Black. At least six women connected to Golubski were murdered, and some of those murders were investigated by him, too.

It was that attitude that allowed him to assault several women — including one screaming her head off — right in his office, secure in the knowledge that no one with the juice to stop him was going to bother.

It’s also why Golubski has never been brought to justice: For one thing, that’s because so many others were complicit in his predations. For another, it’s because more of the public, even now, isn’t demanding his immediate arrest.

Thought experiment: Let’s say young women on Ward Parkway kept turning up dead. And let’s say a bunch of them had been extorted and “messed with” by this one cop, who — and now this would have to be a total coincidence — also wound up investigating some of their murders. Would Kansas City just keep walking, and maybe note that those Ward Parkway women really need to make better decisions? Of course not.

And if these homicides had happened years ago, but had never been solved or sweated, would the consensus be that oh well, that was then? No again. There is a reason there’s no statute of limitations for murder.

‘Some evidence was missing.’

Cooper was just a baby when her 20-year-old mother, known as Dot, was found naked and quite inexplicably dead, covered only in mud and grass, on the bank of Turkey Creek in April of 1983.

The autopsy ruled the death a homicide, but also said the cause of death was unknown. Since Dorothy had been missing for three weeks, but according to the autopsy had been dead only a couple of days when she was found, where had she been in the meantime?

If police ever had the slightest intention of finding her killer, why had they dropped off the only piece of her clothing they’d recovered, a denim jacket, at the funeral home, instead of keeping it as evidence?

Star’s grandfather tried for three years to get a copy of the autopsy, and never did succeed. The case was still under investigation, he kept hearing, so that just wouldn’t be possible. But if it was under investigation, why didn’t Dorothy’s family ever get an update on this long-running inquiry?

Star herself called the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department looking for answers for the first time in 2008, and was told that the only person who could talk to her about the case was a Roger Golubski.

Today, that name sets off 19 alarm bells, but it meant nothing to Star when she went down to the police headquarters with her uncle, Oscar Cooper, to meet with him in the summer of ‘08.

Golubski told them he was looking into the killing but “no one is talking. He told me that he went to look for evidence in the evidence closet and some evidence was missing.”

What evidence, he wouldn’t say. “I said you know, as a little girl I always had a dream that a police officer killed my mom. He said, ‘That’s bullshit.’ I said, ‘Who else can get back in your evidence closet to get rid of evidence?’ He was done talking to me after that. When I tell you that man turned red, he turned red. He was pissed that I said anything like that.”

‘Hold on, my boss was on this case.’

Her uncle, Oscar Cooper, told me that once his niece mentioned her dream, “he was really on fire, like y’all need to leave.”

Oscar had been living with his father, his sister Dorothy and her two small children when she went missing. He went with his father to a police station in KCMO, where they lived, to report that she hadn’t come home. They refused to take the report, though.

“They said they couldn’t until it had been 24 hours. It had already been 30 hours, but they still wouldn’t take it. I don’t know why.”

Oscar had seen his sister at a party on the night she disappeared, but no one ever wanted to hear about that, either during the horrible weeks she was missing or the even worse days and years after her body was found.

Dot was working as a prostitute then, her daughter said, “but she still came home every night to make sure my brother and I were in bed,” so her family knew something was seriously wrong when she didn’t.

April King says of her mom, “I know she was known to be a prostitute; she had just been released from jail the day before” some metal scavengers found her body in the driveway of an abandoned nursing home at North 27th Street and Sewell Avenue. “After my dad went to prison, she gave up. From what everyone said, she was a good person, and she lived on the streets.”

The desperation of Christina King and Dorothy Cooper’s circumstances in no way diminished all that these women were to those who loved them. Nor did it make their murders any less illegal. But one detective, officially or not, seems to have been the point man on all of these killings, and why was that?

Oscar Cooper is just shy of 100% sure that Golubski was the officer who came to the house to tell them about Dorothy’s murder. And if Golubski wasn’t involved in the investigation, why could Star Cooper and her uncle only talk to him about it?

After Star read a story I wrote about Golubski a couple of months ago, “it touched me so much that I went down to the KCK police station again. It felt like you were talking about my mom.”

The lady at the desk said she would have to talk to Capt. Rodney Smith.

She called him a few times, and when she heard back, found him solicitous. “He said, ‘I’m all down for you. I don’t care who it was. If it was a police officer or someone on the streets, I want to help.’’’

Later, “he’s looking over the files while I’m on the phone with him and he said, ‘Hold on, my boss was on this case.’ He said he’d have to talk to him to see if it was worth opening back up.”

Then, on March 26, she heard back that no, it wasn’t worth opening back up.

Why had one of Dorothy’s hands been cut off?

One of the many questions the Cooper family has is why, at the funeral home, they saw that one of Dorothy’s hands had been cut off.

Was she found that way, Star Cooper asked coroner Alan Hancock, back in 2008? He told her no, he’d done that during the autopsy, because he needed to get her fingerprints. Hancock, who is dead now, didn’t even do the autopsy, though he did sign it.

Her family wonders if maybe her hand was cut off to hide that she’d been handcuffed during the weeks she was missing.

But then, they’ve been left to wonder about lots of things, because police have never treated them like they were worth taking seriously, either.

Star Cooper is 39 now and the mom of six, including three foster kids she adopted. After her mom died, she and her older brother bounced around between relatives. “I was molested as a little girl, and no one ever believed me. Life for me growing up, it was hard.”

Just this last year, she got a headstone to mark the grave of the mother she doesn’t remember, but has missed all her life just the same.

And for her, her mom’s case is still open, whether the police department ever looks at it again or not.