KC Framed 5 | Firefighters Case | Firefighters Case: Part I [Pg 1]

5 Innocent People Were Convicted

Feature Article

Firefighters Case: Part I
by J.J. Maloney
Copyright 1997

Reprinted with permission.

INTRODUCTION

For many years Frank and Skip Sheppard were the Injun Joes of Marlborough - the down-on-its-heels neighborhood in southeast Kansas City where six firefighters were killed in an explosion Nov. 29, 1988. Like the character by that name in Tom Sawyer, they were perceived by many as evil characters in whose wake woe would surely follow.

These two brothers -- large, forbidding Native Americans, scared people. When Skip Sheppard was in a car wreck that killed his fiancée and left him in a coma, some people said he deliberately drove in front of a truck to get rid of the fiancée.

So it's no surprise that Frank and Skip were among the early suspects in the firefighter case - and that Frank's girlfriend, Darlene Edwards, Frank's nephew Bryan Sheppard, and Bryan's best friend Richard Brown, would be included as well.

When the firefighter case had gone unsolved for eight years -- and seemed incapable of being solved -- these five became expendable.

On Feb. 26, 1997, a U.S. District Court jury found all five guilty of causing the explosion that killed the firefighters. They would soon be sentenced to life in prison without parole by Judge Stevens. All five of those convicted are almost certainly innocent of that crime. The five became expendable because of the marginal lives they'd led.

The firefighter case, in the end, became not so much a search for truth as a quest for closure. Over the years, the pressure for closure had grown intense.

The families of the dead firefighters ached for this dark chapter in their lives to come to an end, so they could go on with their lives. These families had the overwhelming sympathy of the people of Kansas City.

The firefighters of Kansas City needed to know that you couldn't just kill six firemen and get away with it.

Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) Special Agent Dave True wanted to retire -- but not with the biggest case of his career unsolved. True, who had said for years that organized labor was responsible for the explosion, deliberately misled a grand jury in order to get these five defendants indicted.

The deaths of the six firefighters on Nov. 29, 1988, constituted the most horrific, unsolved criminal case in the city's history. A year after the explosion, voters approved a nickel-a-pack increase in the cigarette tax to fund a Haz-mat (hazardous materials) unit in the Fire Department. That unit is dedicated to the dead firefighters. Three years after the explosion the Firefighters Fountain was dedicated at 31st and Pennsylvania, and six months after that the 30-41 Memorial to the slain firefighters was dedicated at the site of the explosion.

As late as February, 1995, ATF Special Agent True said on the TV series "Unsolved Mysteries" that the fire and explosion were consistent with previous acts by organized labor in the year preceding the explosion.

The five people indicted: Darlene Edwards, 43, Frank Sheppard, 46, Earl "Skip" Sheppard, 37, Bryan Sheppard, 26, and Richard Brown, 26, had no connection to organized labor. (Frank and Skip were brothers and uncles to Bryan, although estranged from him. Frank and Darlene had been living together for a number of years. Bryan and Brown were best friends. There was no love lost between them and Frank, Darlene and Skip.) At the time of the indictment, all but Brown were in prison on unrelated charges. Although Brown had no felony convictions, he was nonetheless well-known to police.

For Bryan Sheppard, it was the second time he had been indicted for the murders of the six firemen.

In 1989, after several jailhouse snitches said he had confessed to them that he was involved in setting the fire that caused the explosion, he had been charged with six counts of second-degree murder in Jackson County Circuit Court. (He'd been in jail for stealing a bicycle.) The murder charges were dismissed when it turned out the jailhouse snitches were lying. Specifically, informant Chris Sciarra said Sheppard had confessed while a particular Saturday morning television show was on. John P. O'Connor, Sheppard's attorney, was able to prove through jail records that Sheppard had been in the visiting room, in a different part of the jail, while that show was on.

John Driver, the key informant against Bryan Sheppard in 1989, has since stated publicly that the police intimidated him into signing a prepared statement implicating Sheppard. Driver, who'd been held on $100,000 bond for several felonies, including a charge of bombing the Brothers III nightclub in Kansas City, was then released on a signature bond. The police deny Driver's allegations.

Sciarra later gave O'Connor a sworn statement saying the whole scheme had been dreamed up by Driver, who wanted to collect the $50,000 reward.

This time the indictment against Sheppard and the four others was by the U. S. government. It charged the defendants with arson resulting in the deaths of the six firefighters (i.e., that they set fire to a trailer containing ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, which then exploded while the firefighters were trying to put out the fire). The case would be tried by Assistant U. S. Attorney Paul Becker, the chief of the federal Organized Crime Strike Force. And, instead of two jailhouse snitches, the ATF had rounded up scores of prison and jail informants, along with a handful of Marlborough residents.

Since the five defendants were all paupers, the federal court appointed private lawyers to represent each of them: Will Bunch, a 29-year veteran in criminal law, and the first criminal lawyer to be elected president of the Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association, to represent Darlene Edwards; the previously mentioned O'Connor, a former Jackson County assistant prosecutor who had achieved wide recognition for his defense of Bryan Sheppard in 1989 and in subsequent high-profile cases, to once again represent him; Patrick Peters, a former Jackson County assistant prosecutor who became known as "Doctor Death" for his numerous death-penalty convictions as a prosecutor, to represent Frank Sheppard; John Osgood, who had recently retired as an assistant U. S. attorney who had lost only one criminal jury trial case in his long career (to Will Bunch), to represent Brown; and Susan Hunt, who frequently handled appointed cases in federal court, to represent Skip Sheppard. Hunt was assisted by attorney Elena Franco, who had recently been nominated to become a Kansas City municipal judge. (She was not appointed.) I assisted Bunch in the defense of Darlene Edwards.

The trial ran for five weeks in January and February, 1997. The jury returned with guilty verdicts on Feb. 26, 1997.

The word heard most often in the days following the verdict was "closure."

Then, on April 19, 1997, as the nation was mourning the anniversary of the bombing in Oklahoma City, a small group of people picketed the Firefighters' Memorial, protesting the convictions in the firefighter case -- signs protesting the fact that the bulk of the government's case consisted of testimony from convicts and ex-convicts. One sign pointed out that the three defendants who had taken polygraph tests had passed them. (Although Darlene had volunteered to be polygraphed, she never was, nor was Skip Sheppard.)

Frank and Bryan Sheppard and Brown had passed polygraph tests years earlier concerning their involvement in the explosion. Several Marlborough residents had claimed the defendants took valium to pass the tests --but Frank Sheppard was in Municipal Farm when police asked him to take the test. At the time of his indictment, Frank Sheppard didn't even remember taking the test.

THE EXPLOSION

Nov. 29, 1988 was a crisp night with a full moon. At 87th Street and South 71 Highway the Bruce R. Watkins Memorial Drive was under construction. The 10 mile, $200-million project was the biggest concrete job in Kansas City in many years. The work crew from Mountain Plains Construction, on the east side of 71 Highway at 87th Street, had left at 5 p.m. Across the highway (the west side) was the equipment for Brown Brothers Construction, the general contractor. Brown Brothers had subcontracted with Mountain Plains Construction to do the blasting (Mountain Plains then hired Maynes Explosives).

The east construction site was atop a hill, which had an eight-foot earthen berm. Behind that berm were two trailers loaded with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in cloth "socks." Holes were drilled in the bedrock, then packed with these long, cylindrical socks of ammonium nitrate, which were then detonated with dynamite. Ammonium nitrate in its pure form is simply fertilizer, but mixed with fuel oil it becomes a "blasting agent." The two trailers contained nearly 50,000 pounds of the ammonium nitrate/fuel oil mixture. The ammonium nitrate also contained 5 percent aluminum pellets, to increase the blast force, since the contract called for the bedrock to be broken into rock chunks of no more than 15 inches in diameter.

At 6 p.m. Donna Costanza and Kevin Lemanske, employees of Ameriguard, arrived at work. Their jobs were to guard the two construction sites. Costanza was the roommate and common-law companion of Deborah Riggs. Robert Riggs, Deborah's brother, owned Ameriguard along with his wife Jenny. Deborah Riggs, six-and-a-half months pregnant by artificial insemination, was on pregnancy leave from the Ford Claycomo plant and had recently begun moonlighting for her brother's company.

At 10 p.m. Costanza and Lemanske were replaced by Robert and Deborah Riggs (as with many aspects of the Riggs's story, there is some dispute on who relieved whom, and when).

At 3:40 a.m. the Kansas City Fire Department received a call from Robert Riggs, which was recorded. Riggs reported a pickup truck on fire on the west side of 71 Highway. On the dispatch tape Deborah Riggs can be heard saying, "Oh, the explosives are on fire."

At 3:47 a.m. pumper 41, manned by firefighters James H. Kilventon, Robert D. McKarnin and Michael R. Oldham, told the dispatcher there were two fires, and they asked for a second pumper.

At 3:57:20 pumper 41 told the dispatcher it was an arson, and asked for the police to be sent. They also told the dispatcher to tell pumper 30 (on the way) to stay away from the trailer (on the east side of the highway), that explosives were involved in that fire.

At 3:58 a call went out to Battalion Chief Marion Germann, who was in car 107, along with his driver, Charles D. Gentry.

At 3:59:31 pumper 30, manned by Captain Gerald Halloran, Thomas M. Fry and Luther E. Hurd, asked the dispatcher: "Can you confirm as to whether there is explosives in this trailer or not?" . . . pumper 30: "Could you send 41 out there?" Pumper 41: "10-4. We're on our way now." 4:02:13: Pumper 41: "We've got a trailer and part of a compressor going up here."

They asked for a 4-wheel drive to haul some water in.

4:04:20: Pumper 41 then told car 107 they were on the east side of the construction site. "Yeah apparently this thing's already blowed up. We've got magnesium or something burning up here." They told car 107 that both companies were back by the burning trailer.

4:06:23: Car 107 arrived.

4:08:19: Car 107 reported the first explosion.

In their later statements to police, Chief Germann, his driver and the Riggses all described the same scene prior to the explosion: The firemen were using a long pole to pull a Mountain Plains pickup away from the burning trailer. The trailer itself was so hot it seemed to be transparent -- they could literally see the socks of explosives through the thin metal walls of the trailer. There were no flames, and no mention of smoke. Just this white-hot, hellish heat with countless sparks leaping from it and the sound of tiny explosions, like strings of M-80s going off (the aluminum pellets.)

The explosion had five times the impact of the bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City. It was so catastrophic that one of the two fire department pumpers evaporated. Literally. It was never found. The explosion broke windows and cracked walls for miles around and was heard as far away as Warrensburg, Mo., some 45 miles to the east. One woman, who lived a mile away, told police the explosion bent the car key laying on her kitchen table into an L-shape and broke her dog's eardrums. (She would testify for the government.) Many thousands of people claimed to have been knocked out of bed, or at least jarred awake, by that first blast.

In the wake of the explosion, more than 1,300 individuals and businesses would file $18-million in property-damage claims, and would eventually collect $4.5-million from Brown Brothers Excavating, Inc., Mountain Plains Construction, Maynes Explosives and Ameriguard, Inc. Mountain Plains, which had a million dollars in assets at the time of the explosion, went out of business because no bonding firm would underwrite it.

The explosion heavily damaged car 107 and Robert Riggs's station wagon. A gloved, smoking hand landed next to Battalion Chief Germann's car -- several hundred yards from the explosion. Deborah Riggs said later that the firefighter closest to the trailer seemed to explode from the inside out. Robert Riggs wanted to go up and see if any of the firefighters could be helped, but Deborah Riggs refused. As she would say later, at a deposition:

Q: (Attorney): You made a reference in here to one of the firemen in the car being Manson like. Do you remember that?

A: (Deborah Riggs): Yes.

Q: What was that; what were you talking about?

A: Because he was up underneath the dashboard.

Q: What Manson are you talking about?

A: Charles Manson.

Q: The mass killer?

A: It had nothing to do with him being a killer. It was because supposedly when they caught Manson, he was in a cabinet, in a kitchen cabinet. He had crawled inside a cabinet.

Q: When you saw this fireman, that is what came to your mind?

A: Yes, because he also was supposedly in charge and he was underneath the dashboard.

Q: So it kind of was analogous in your mind?

A: Yes.

Q: What was his demeanor, the fireman, not Charles Manson?

A: I don' t know what you mean.

Q: Did he seem upset: was he crying; did he -- was he uttering anything; was he bemoaning the loss of friends?

A: He was saying "call an ambulance," which didn't make a lot of sense to me. The firemen didn't need an ambulance.

Following the explosion, Germann, his driver, and the Riggses immediately left the site. The police blocked off the area, setting up a command post farther south on 71 Highway at 95th Street. Two firefighters -- ignoring orders -- entered the explosion site to see if any of the firefighters were still alive. They didn't get far, however, before they began to discover body parts. They could see dead firefighters scattered around. They left before the second explosion occurred, approximately 40 minutes after the first.

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