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By 1994, both
teams of investigators had come to such dead ends that, for all
intents and purposes, the investigation was over. The killers had
escaped the wide net; the most horrific crime in Kansas City history
would remain unsolved.
With nothing to
lose, the local Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office and the Kansas
City Police Department decided to join forces and conduct one
investigation. To accommodate the ATF, the Police Department agreed
to replace its Crime Against Persons investigative team with
detectives from its Bombs and Arson unit. This seemingly innocuous
switch would put ATF Special Agent Dave True in firm control and give
full throttle to the "cowboy" investigation tactics for
which ATF nationally has come to be known.
Toward the end of
1994, the investigation got the jump start it has been seeking after
True announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the arrest
and conviction of those responsible for the killings. The reward was
posted in all Missouri and Kansas prisons and jails, on numerous
highway overpasses, and was widely publicized in the news media. In
early 1995, True also orchestrated coverage of the firefighters case
on the TV series "Unsolved Mysteries." More than 50
convicts and ex-convicts responded. So did a handful of Marlborough
neighborhood residents, including several who'd recently run afoul of
the law.
Although no two of
the informants who surfaced would ever tell the same story, much less
name the same cast of perpetrators, True eventually focused the
investigation on five Marlborough neighborhood residents with shady
pasts. He then used entrapment, deception, and intimidation in an
effort to turn each of the suspects against one or more of the
others. Although three of them would rat out various combinations of
the others, none of the five ever admitted any personal involvement
in the crime, nor did any ever take the Fifth Amendment. Only one
ever asked for a lawyer, and the suspect - Skip Sheppard - only one
time, just before going into face a federal grand jury. None of the
suspects accepted the prosecutors' offer to turn government witness.
The three who were given polygraph tests took them willingly, and
each passed. The two others were never polygraphed, although one -
Darlene Edwards - had volunteered for it.
Most striking of
all, though, is how implausible it is that these five people would
have worked in unison to commit this crime. To think so is to know
nothing about them. The defendants were broken into two distinct
camps of alliance, each with a fervid antipathy for the other side.
And they had no motive. If theft was the motive, as was widely
assumed, a construction executive dashed that possibility by
testifying at trial that no equipment or personal property was ever
stolen from the site. |
