New book takes deep dive into KCK injustice that took 20 years to come to light
His story started in the shadows, and it stayed there for more than two decades.
Lamonte McIntyre was 17 in 1994 when he was arrested in Kansas City, Kansas, for a double murder he didn’t commit. He was convicted and got two life sentences later that year, then served 23 years in prison.
In 22 of those 23 years, The Kansas City Star couldn’t figure out how to spell his first name, publishing all of four paragraphs on his case in two separate instances.
When McIntyre’s case finally emerged from the shadows in 2016, it became a cause célèbre, attracting intense local coverage and national attention while revealing the immense corruption in the Kansas City, Kansas, legal system — underscored by the notoriously unscrupulous cop Roger Golubski.
Now the case is the subject of “Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom” by Rick Tulsky. Released Feb. 3, it is the first book by the 75-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
“What attracted me to do the book was it was not just a bad cop, it was also a prosecutor who was overzealous to the point of unethical,” Tulsky said. “And it was a system of providing Lamonte with court-appointed attorneys who failed him over and over again. And it was a system where the judge who was overseeing it all had an undisclosed affair with the prosecutor.
“So it was a single case that offered a window into everything that can go wrong in a court case.”
Anatomy of a frame job
“Lamonte’s case got no publicity,” Tulsky said. “He spent 23 years in prison, and for much of that time he was on his own and there wasn’t any attention to it at all.”
That includes The Star. The newspaper published the following news brief on April 19, 1994 (four days after the homicides):
“A teen-ager was charged Monday with the slayings Friday of two men in Kansas City, Kan.
“Two counts of first-degree murder were filed in Wyandotte County Juvenile Court against Lamont McIntyre, 17, in the killing of Daniel L. Quinn, 21, and Donald E. Ewing, 34.
“Police allege that McIntyre walked up to a 1987 Cadillac in which the two men were sitting about 2:10 p.m. at 18th Street and Quindaro Boulevard and shot them with a shotgun. Quinn was dead at the scene, and Ewing died at a hospital.”
Within hours, Detective Roger Gobulski — a name that already was anathema in KCK’s Black community and would become synonymous with the city’s rampant police corruption in the years to come — zeroed in on McIntyre as his designated culprit. Tried as an adult, the teen was convicted five months later at a trial replete with errors and unethical behavior — but almost no real evidence. No motive, no murder weapon, nothing tying McIntyre to the crime scene, nothing showing he knew the victims.
The Star printed nary a word about the double-murder investigation or trial.
In March 1996, it did publish this tidbit in a roundup of news from the Kansas Supreme Court:
“In other first-degree murder cases, the court upheld convictions of:
“… Lamont E. McIntyre, who was convicted of two counts of murder for the April 1994 shooting death Donald Ewing and Daniel Quinn, who were sitting in a parked car in Kansas City, Kan.”
From that point, there was a 20-plus-year news blackout on McIntyre’s case in The Star and other local outlets. But he and his mother, Rosie McIntyre, who accused Golubski of framing her son after she rejected his sexual advances, never gave up.
After spending years writing letters trying to persuade media outlets, lawyers and legal-justice organizations to listen to his claims of innocence, they finally found Jim McCloskey and his Princeton, New Jersey-based exoneration investigation and legal group Centurion Ministries (now simply Centurion).
McCloskey and Kansas City lawyer Cheryl Pilate began looking into McIntyre’s case in 2009 and spent several years investigating before deciding to file suit in Wyandotte County District Court in summer 2016. The suit claimed, “In light of the overwhelming new evidence of McIntyre’s innocence, it is clear that no reasonable juror would have convicted him if this new evidence had been presented at trial.”
The new evidence indicated that witnesses were “manipulated and coerced” by the prosecutor and police and that evidence favorable to McIntyre’s case — including statements by witnesses — was withheld from his attorney, Gary Long. The suit also revealed that a previous personal relationship between the prosecutor and the judge who handled the case was never disclosed to Long.
McIntyre’s new attorneys even identified the likely real killer, an enforcer for a drug operation known on the street as “Monster.” They presented affidavits from Monster’s associates indicating Quinn and Ewing were killed because Quinn was suspected of stealing from the drug dealers.
Meanwhile, Tulsky, who had spent most of his professional career at newspapers reporting on these kinds of cases and had co-founded the Chicago-based nonprofit Injustice Watch, began following the case after learning about in late 2016 or early 2017.
McIntyre was exonerated barely a year after McCloskey and Pilate filed suit.
On Friday, Oct. 13, 2017, McIntyre walked free after Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree Sr. stunned a courtroom two days into what was expected to be a weeklong hearing by saying the county would no longer contest the facts of McIntyre’s innocence.
Lamonte McIntyre was 41.
A book is born
When McIntyre was exonerated, Tulsky co-wrote a piece about the case for The New York Times.
Still, he had no plans to write a book, largely because he’d “never done that kind of reporting before.” As a newspaper reporter, he had been trained to find as many cases as possible involving similar wrongful behavior to establish a pattern within the legal system.
“When you do a book,” he said, “instead of gathering a whole bunch of cases, you’re taking one and going way down deep into the rabbit hole.”
Tulsky decided to take that dive a couple of years after McIntyre’s exoneration.
“I’ve spent my career writing about flaws in criminal justice,” he said, “and it hit me at some point … that there is so much richness to the (McIntyre) case that it gave me the chance to really write bigger picture about criminal justice flaws.
“One example that jumps out to me, Lamonte got appointed an attorney to represent him who was already on probation for his failures in previous cases. If you study the trial, the trial attorney, Gary Long, failed Lamonte in a number of ways that I dug into in the book and explored.”
Tulsky discusses Native Americans, Quindaro, meatpacking plants, Carrie Nation and events throughout the 20th century — all to illustrate how corruption not only developed but thrived in Kansas City, Kansas.
He follows the story through FBI investigations, bribery trials and discrimination against Black people in KCK before detailing McIntyre’s background and developments from his case, including the disbarments of the two primary court-appointed lawyers who represented him as well as of the Wyandotte County prosecutor.
“When you’re doing a book, you’ve got an arc,” Tulsky said. “And originally when I went into it, I thought the arc would end with the exoneration. Then, as I’m reporting it, doing more, I see that more is developing, more is coming out, and the arc kept moving out. So it moved out to cover (McIntyre’s) civil suit, and then it moved out to cover Golubski’s indictment.”
The book tracks how Golubski finally was arrested and faced charges on civil rights and sex-trafficking violations before he killed himself Dec. 2, 2024, on the eve of his first trial hearing.
Ultimately, the state granted McIntyre a certificate of innocence and $1.55 million as part of the settlement of his wrongful conviction lawsuit, and the Unified Government of Wyandotte County paid McIntyre and his mother $12.5 million. The McIntyres initially sought $93.6 million in damages.
Tulsky wraps up “Injustice Town” with a lengthy concluding section examining the failings of the criminal justice system, including how the Trump administration’s actions have added to the challenge of correcting them, as well as possible fixes.
“If you’re looking at how the system goes wrong,” he said, “I think maybe people saw pieces but hadn’t stepped back and looked at it how I looked at it.”
The result is an ambitious undertaking for a debut book. But at 75 and with a Pulitzer Prize under his belt, Tulsky is hardly a typical first-time author.
“I think people should do at least one book every 75 years,” he said.
‘Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom’
By Rick Tulsky
Pegasus Books (Feb. 3), 432 pages, $29.95
About the author
Rick Tulsky, a Chicago native, has degrees from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and the Temple University School of Law. He reported for newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times and worked at the Center for Investigative Reporting. His work has received more than two dozen national awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 1987 with two colleagues for a series revealing transgressions in the Philadelphia court system. He also has twice been a Pulitzer finalist. Tulsky joined the faculty of Northwestern University’s journalism school in 2011 and co-founded the nonprofit newsroom Injustice Watch in 2016. He served as editorial director until he retired in 2020.
Excerpt
“While I certainly had seen my share of cases involving a bad cop, an overzealous prosecutor, poor defense work by a publicly funded attorney, and certainly, judges who tipped the scales, to Lamonte’s misfortune he experienced all of the above, emphatically. As a result, State v. McIntyre afforded an examination of systemic problems needing attention from those in search of a just system.”
Upcoming events
7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25: Journalist Peggy Lowe moderating as Tulky appears with Lamonte McIntyre at Unity Temple on the Plaza, 707 W. 47th St. $37.21 for one ticket and one book, $42.46 for two tickets and one book. rainydaybooks.com
1 p.m. Saturday, March 21: Lamonte McIntyre also will appear. Kansas City Kansas Public Library, Main Library, 625 Minnesota Ave. Free, but registration is required and will close at 2:38 p.m. March 19. kckpl.org
