‘A terrible thing’: KCK man exonerated of murder calls for jailhouse informant reforms
Olin “Pete” Coones was driving two of his children to a bus stop before school one morning in April 2008 in Kansas City, Kansas, when two men jumped out in front of them with guns drawn.
Initially, Coones thought he was getting carjacked. Then a police officer pulled up in a squad car and pointed a shotgun in the face of his 16-year-old son, Ben. Children in the approaching bus watched as police handcuffed Coones and his kids.
Coones, 50, soon learned he was being charged with first-degree murder in a fatal shooting that unfolded hours earlier. It took the lives of Carl Schroll, 64, and his wife, Kathleen Schroll, 45, in their Kansas City, Kansas home.
“I didn’t panic because I had always believed the system was built to work,” said Coones, who told detectives he had been home with his family at the time. “I’m one of these people who thinks, ‘They don’t make these kinds of mistakes.’”
But the charge was only the beginning of a more than 12-year journey in which investigators failed to find crucial physical evidence at the crime scene and an assistant Wyandotte County prosecutor turned to a questionable jailhouse informant. All the while, Coones, pleading his innocence to anyone who would listen, fought desperately to get home to his wife, Dee, and their five children.
That finally came last week, after Coones was exonerated when Judge Bill Klapper found his trial was marred by prosecutorial misconduct. Coones was freed at the end of a multiple days hearing, during which his attorneys presented evidence arguing Coones was framed in a “Machiavellian” murder-suicide plot carried out by Kathleen Schroll.
“You kept me going,” Coones, becoming emotional, told his wife Wednesday as they sat surrounded by their sons at Morgan Pilate, the law firm where some of his attorneys work. “You didn’t realize it.”
Now 63, Coones recounted the weddings, birthdays and Christmas celebrations he missed behind bars. He’s grateful he can walk outside without fences, that he can look out of windows without bars.
His freedom has been met by an array of emotions: he’s been elated and terrified in a world in which he is not forced to do what officials in the criminal justice system ask of him. He’s already forgotten to eat once because no one around him yelled “chow,” as they would behind bars.
“What happened to me is wrong,” he said. “It shouldn’t happen to anybody.”
When Klapper vacated Coones’ conviction, he found that the prosecutor, Ed Brancart, suppressed exculpatory evidence, presented testimony that was “patently untrue,” and relied on a jailhouse informant who may have had mental health issues.
Brancart, the judge continued, knew the informant, a man named Robert Rupert, wanted a deal in exchange for testifying against Coones and claiming Coones had confessed. The prosecutor threatened Rupert with jail time if he did not testify, the judge said. After Rupert did not get what he wanted, he offered to testify against another detainee.
Now a senior assistant attorney general in Kansas, Brancart did not return an email seeking comment Wednesday. The Attorney General’s Office said it was aware of the judge’s ruling but offered no additional comments.
Klapper also overturned Coones’ conviction after the medical examiner reversed his findings, determining the shooting was more likely a murder-suicide than a double homicide. The forensic pathologist changed his conclusions after learning that a fourth bullet — which police and crime scene technicians failed to find — had been discovered.
That bullet was recovered when one of Coones’ attorneys, Branden Bell — whom Coones called “a hero” — thought he saw it in a crime scene photograph and called investigators. They quickly found it in a pillow in a property room.
“It took them two minutes to find it,” Coones said. “Two minutes is a poor trade for 12 1/2 years of somebody’s life.”
In announcing his decision last week, the tearful judge paced back and forth at the bench in front of the courtroom. “Today,” Klapper told those gathered in the wooden pews, was one of those days when the robe he wore “feels heavy.”
Klapper told Coones that “despite all of the things that have happened to you,” he was lucky in one respect: he had a team of attorneys who, without people like them, the justice system “would not work” as it should.
The current prosecutor, Mark Dupree, moved to drop the charges against Coones. Dupree’s conviction integrity unit — the first created in Kansas — reviewed his case. Coones’ freedom marked its first exoneration.
Asked if it would investigate Brancart’s other cases, Dupree’s office said the unit reviews claims of innocence on their merits, regardless of the prosecutor. “No one individual is singled out,” spokesman Jonathan Carter said in an email.
Prosecutorial or police misconduct contributed to more than half of the 2,400 exonerations from 1989 to early 2019, according to a recent National Registry of Exonerations report. Concealing evidence favorable to defendants — identified as the most common type of misconduct — was found in 44% of those injustices.
Meanwhile, more than 140 people since 1966 have been exonerated in murder cases that involved jailhouse informants, according to ProPublica, an investigative news organization.
Asked what it was like for him to watch Rupert testify against him, Coones — who said he rejected a plea deal that would have led to his freedom in five years — thought for a moment.
“What a terrible thing to do to people,” he said. “I had no idea that anyone was capable of concocting stuff, telling lies.”
The story Rupert presented at trial included serious inconsistencies. He testified, for example, that Coones told him he was not worried that police confiscated his van, because he used his Jeep during the crime. But Coones couldn’t have driven the Jeep on the day of the shooting because he sold it the year before, his attorneys have said.
Coones believes Kansas desperately needs to create a system to track its use of jailhouse informants. Other states, such as Texas and Nebraska, require prosecutors to maintain a record of testimony from jailed witnesses and any benefits they may have received, according to the Midwest Innocence Project, which also represented Coones.
“We’re never going to know how many (cases) that the snitch in my case, Robert Rupert, testified on,” Coones said. “There’s no way to find out.”
Once Coones has had time to relax and better understand the world around him — he is “lost” when it comes to cell phones — he wants to help the children of other inmates who are wrongly incarcerated. So few people reached out to his children, but those who did made a difference. He’d like to take them fishing.
“I’d sure like to help the families of the real victims,” Coones said. “When you think you know exactly who the victims are, you might be wrong, because it’s not always black and white.”
This story was originally published November 11, 2020 at 5:29 PM.
