Court dismisses Roger Golubski case after ex-KCKPD detective dies by suicide. What now?
Federal District Judge Toby Crouse dismissed the case against former Kansas City, Kansas, police officer Roger Golubski midday Monday after prosecutors confirmed Golubski had died. Jury selection for the federal trial was set to begin Monday morning.
Prosecutors said in court that Golubski was dead but did not elaborate on timing or cause of death.
However, three sources familiar with the investigation who spoke on condition their names not be used told The Star that the disgraced former detective died by suicide in his Edwardsville home. One of those sources said Golubski died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
On Monday afternoon, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation said it is investigating Golubski’s death. Officers found his body on his back porch with a fatal gunshot wound and said they found no indications of foul play.
Golubski, who worked in the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department from 1975 to 2010, was facing six felony charges related to the sexual abuse of two women, one of whom was 13 years old when the alleged abuse began.
What would have happened in the trial?
The trial was expected to be as long as 17 courtroom days, including two for jury selection.
To secure a conviction, prosecutors would have needed to prove to jurors that Golubski abused his official authority as a police officer, committed sexual assaults that deprived the women of their right to bodily integrity, and did so willfully.
The government was set to call to the stand as many as nine women who say Golubski raped, stalked or attempted to assault them.
Now, those women will not get to tell their stories before the court.
Both women Golubski allegedly abused in connection with the federal charges were set to testify to instances of rape and sexual misconduct during the 1990s and early 2000s at his hands.
Prosecutors had also planned to call on up to seven additional witnesses, called “Other Victims,” to show a pattern of abuse of power and sexual violence. Those witnesses would include accounts from five women who allege Golubski had sexually assaulted them, and two women who say he attempted to assault them.
Prosecutors had said the women’s accounts, spanning from 1983 to 2004, were “strikingly similar,” showing a pattern of Golubski allegedly targeting vulnerable Black women and girls.
One of the women met Golubski, who was a longtime detective, when he was assigned to investigate her husband’s murder, according to prosecutors. He then allegedly raped her on three occasions.
Another of the women alleges Golubksi threatened to arrest her sons around 2004 unless she had sex with him, which she refused. She is a former law enforcement officer, prosecutors disclosed in a previous filing. When she tried to report Golubski to KCKPD’s Internal Affairs Unit, she was told it was her word against his, the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote.
“When he talked to me like that, and him being in law enforcement ... it was really insulting, degrading,” prosecutors quoted the woman as saying. “You feel helpless ... less than a woman or like you’re nothing.”
Prosecutors had wanted to call the seven other women to also “rebut a defense of fabrication or consent.”
“This trial will turn entirely on victim credibility,” prosecutors wrote in their motion, “and the defendant chose his victims because he was confident that they would never be believed.”
‘So many unanswered questions’
Lamonte McIntyre had hoped that Golubski’s trial would shed light on what he described as a corrupt system that had allowed Golubski to commit such abuses for so many years.
“This is not justice,” said McIntyre, who in 1994 was wrongly accused and spent 23 years in prison for a double-murder he never committed. McIntyre was 17 when he was incarcerated, based largely on what was held to be Golubski’s corrupt police work. He was released and exonerated in 2017.
“Justice,” said McIntyre, who had flown from Arizona to Kansas to see Golubski face trial in Topeka, “is facing your accusers. If you commit a crime against the society that you are a part of, justice is facing that society. Him killing himself is not justice. That’s him avoiding it.
“The root of this whole thing is still here,” Lamonte McIntyre said. “We don’t know what happened, right? It never came out in court. This was the time for people to see the truth behind not just him as an individual, but as a system.
“We were expecting to see and hear about the other players, everybody else that was involved, because he didn’t do it alone. A lot of people feel like the real culprit, the real people (to be held culpable) are the people who allowed this to happen for so long and are still there.”
“I mean, there’s so many unanswered questions now.”
William Skepnek, an attorney for Ophelia Williams, one of the victims in the Topeka trial, said those questions run deep.
“Obviously justice can’t be served without a public hearing,” Skepnek said. “It’s frustrating for all of these women after all these years.
“I mean, I guess I’m not really surprised. I’ve been feeling this way for a while that, you know, there are too many people that would not want this thing to be publicly aired.”
Skepnek said, “For Roger Golubski to do what he did for 30 years, he wasn’t alone. He had enablers. How many were there? How many people either actively assisted him or put blinders on and just let him do whatever he wanted to do?
“And how many of those people are really happy right now about the fact that Roger Golubski’s case will not be aired publicly?”
The Star’s Eric Adler and Bill Lukitsch contributed reporting.
This story was originally published December 2, 2024 at 12:55 PM.
