Teen held as ‘Barbie’ got 50 years for killing abuser. Did ‘superlawyer’ fail her?

She committed the murder. And Sarah Gonzales-McLinn, who was only 19 at the time, did not kill the man blandly referred to in news reports as her “52-year-old housemate” in the flush of a fight, either. No, she drugged Hal Sasko, back in January of 2014, lacing not his first but his fourth beer with crushed Ambien so he’d be less likely to notice the taste. Then she hog-tied him and nearly sawed his head off with a hunting knife.

After scrawling “FREEDOM” on the wall in his blood — a horror-movie visual that permanently defined the case — she took off on what the press coverage made out to be some kind of trippy criminal vacay that ended when a park ranger found her asleep in Sasko’s car in the Florida Everglades.

But somehow, the fact that she’d essentially been living in sexual slavery with Sasko, who owned several Cicis pizza restaurants in Lawrence and Topeka, was not a major focus at her 2015 trial, where she was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison.

‘I was a toy to him’

In answer to some written questions about her life with Sasko, used here with her mother’s permission, Gonzales-McLinn said she was never free to come and go as she pleased, though she did have a job for a couple of stretches. “I would leave the house sometimes when he was gone. I would have to sneek (sic) around because he would get mad … I think more than anything he made me feel he owned me. I was a toy to him like his personal barbie doll. That’s what he tried to make me.”

Her mother, Michelle Gonzales, in the first interview she has ever given, wonders why she sees “so many men who kill women, and they’re out in no time.” And why there was never any flicker of recognition that “there were two victims in this whole situation.’’

Gonzales, who is married to a police officer in Topeka, where her daughter grew up and is in prison, says she always thought Sarah should do time. “But not the rest of her life,’’ she said, her voice cracking, “because he had no business doing what he did to her.”

Gonzales-McLinn’s trial was less than five years ago, but it might as well have been 50. Her prosecutor was Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson — yes, who only recently dropped felony charges against a University of Kansas student falsely accused of falsely reporting a rape, and who has since quietly dropped charges against two other women for the same thing, but only after The Star asked him about their cases.

District attorney doubted abuse, rape

In court, Branson questioned whether Gonzales-McLinn had really been sexually abused as a child or raped and burned with cigarettes in high school, though she was treated for trauma nightmares when she was 13, told a doctor about flashbacks at 14, and was hospitalized and diagnosed with PTSD following a suicide attempt after the rape, when she was 16 years old.

The D.A. made her out to be the manipulator in her relationship — if it can be called that — with a man 33 years her senior who coerced her sexually and wanted to remake her through cosmetic surgery. A psychiatrist testifying for the prosecution referred to Sasko as Gonzales-McLinn’s “benefactor.”

The prosecution argued that she had killed for “entertainment” and used a knife instead of a gun to “maximize that experience” of “the hot blood when it went over her hands and her arms.” While Sasko, the prosecution argued, had never done anything except offer Gonzales-McLinn a job and a home.

Ill-served by ‘superlawyer’ Carl Cornwell

She was also ill-served by her own high-profile attorney, Carl Cornwell. And on Monday, Douglas County District Court Judge Amy Hanley will hear evidence on whether Gonzales-McLinn was adequately represented by counsel, as guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. If not, she could get a new trial.

Cornwell, who successfully represented Schlitterbahn water park co-owner Jeff Henry in the death of Caleb Schwab on an unsafe waterslide, is neither a beginner nor some overworked public defender. According to his website, he’s been named a “superlawyer” who has “provided premium representation for 39 years” and has “defended clients in hundreds of felony cases.”

Premium representation doesn’t come cheap, of course. Gonzales, whose family is by no means wealthy, says they paid Cornwell more than $40,000.

Yet Gonzales-McLinn’s current attorney, Jonathan Sternberg, expects Cornwell to testify that he failed to explain to his client the implications of turning down the district attorney’s plea offer of a minimum sentence of 25 years behind bars, instead of the “hard 50” she got.

Did client understand plea deal?

Cornwell was adamant that she should not take the deal but did not tell her what it meant, according to Sternberg’s court pleading. All she knew, the pleading says, is that he kept telling her, “We are going to win, young lady.”

Cornwell did not ask the court to instruct the jury that lesser included charges were possible, though they were.

And he does not seem to have seriously considered pursuing what’s been known since the ‘80s as the “battered woman syndrome” defense. Carmen Bakarich, a family friend of Gonzales-McLinn’s who is a lawyer herself, says she will testify at the hearing that she asked Cornwell why he wasn’t pursuing that defense, which expands the concept of self-defense for defendants in abusive relationships.

‘Battered women don’t leave’

In response, Bakarich said, Mr. Cornwell told her, “Battered women don’t leave and she left.’’

Branson, the district attorney, did not respond to messages seeking comment. But in his response to Gonzales-McLinn’s claim filed with the court, the state said that Cornwell was in no way deficient and will say that at the hearing.

No one ever testified that Gonzales-McLinn was in mortal fear of Sasko, the state wrote, but instead showed “that the only threat at issue is the ‘continual financial and sexual abuse’ at his hands.” So, if being raped on a regular basis, which is what we’re talking about, is “the only threat,” then she had nothing serious to fear?

Cornwell, the state says, tried one of the earliest battered woman syndrome cases in Kansas, and he intends to testify that Gonzales-McLinn did not fear Sasko.

He does? Cornwell took my call but said he was not going to talk about his handling of the case before the hearing. “Probably you want to wait until I take the stand,” he said. “I’m not going to say anything until I’m under oath.”

Hal Sasko asked friend to kill him

Gonzales-McLinn’s family hopes that at the very least, a fuller picture of this whole tragedy will come out at the hearing, and show that she’s more than the sum of her diagnoses. They talk about the reserved girl, home-schooled for years, who was protective of her younger brothers with special needs and once rescued an abused horse too wild to ride.

Some of those who knew Sasko say the jury never got a clear sense of him, either.

“He wanted to die,” said Ann Tau, who met Sasko when both her son and daughter worked for him. Her children were so young they could work only short shifts, so she’d wait for them in the parking lot, and Sasko would come and sit in her car and “vent.”

“He was Catholic, so he didn’t believe in suicide, but he asked me if I would kill him” a year before the police found him covered in his own blood. “He told me how to kill him,” Tau said, “and I’m convinced he told Sarah the same thing. He was a very sick person.”

“The jury should have heard how he was messed up, and that this was the environment Sarah was part of,” said Tau, who says she told all this to an assistant district attorney but was never called to testify.

“I’m an adult woman with five children, high functioning, and he weighed me down” just listening to him. Tau sat through the whole trial, she said, and didn’t recognize the Hal Sasko who was described in court.

‘Wolf in sheep’s clothing’

Neither did Terry David, who managed one of Sasko’s restaurants in Topeka and saw him as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” He played up his Christian faith with his young employees and their parents, David said, “but he had ulterior motives, and I know that for a fact.”

“He told me to only hire young, attractive girls,” and lashed out when it got back to him that David had warned some of them to watch out for him. When David heard that Sasko had been found dead, “the first thing I said to my wife was, ‘I wonder which one of those girls’ dads went over there and killed him.’ ”

In a pre-sentencing statement to the court that was not heard by the jury, Sasko’s older brother Thomas said he did see both Hal and Sarah as victims. “If I were a lawyer,” he said, “I would have tried it exactly opposite of what he’s trying it. I thought it’s a crime of passion, that Hal had his issues and she thought she was doing him a favor. I feel that way. I don’t know whether it’s true. That’s just the way it’s felt to me.”

Sasko hired Gonzales-McLinn the month she turned 15. He invited her to move in with him when she was 16 and she did at 17, when she’d just graduated early from Topeka High School and he was 50 years old.

‘He said he would show me a better life’

Her mother objected, and “that’s why we fought,” Gonzales says. “She’d say, ‘He’s a Christian man!’ He preyed on that whole Christian thing with her” and wanted to rescue her from her “broken home.”

In answer to the written questions, Gonzales-McLinn herself said she moved in with Sasko because “he said he would show me a better life and pay for me to go to college.” He told friends that she was his stepdaughter, and he was listed on her cellphone as “Dad.”

“He was very nice at first and called me his daughter,” Gonzales-McLinn wrote. “After the relationship turned sexual he was very mean, he would always belittle me.”

Asked whether he was violent, she answered, “Not very often. I would just lay there and ‘check out.’ ’’

Sarah’s parents had separated the month before she went to work for Sasko, and she was taking their breakup so hard that she wasn’t speaking to her father or speaking civilly to her mother.

It was to Sasko that Gonzales-McLinn told all her troubles, Gonzales says, so he knew all about her history of abuse. “He was right there,” her mother says angrily, “to take her away from this terrible divorce,” all the while talking about God.

Coerced into sex and surgery

Yet around her 18th birthday, according to Dr. Marilyn Hutchinson, the psychologist who testified for the defense, Sasko began coercing her into sex, too.

“He began to insinuate that unless she did that, she would have to move out,” said Hutchinson, who interviewed Gonzales-McLinn for more than 17 hours. He’d leave her running tab out for her to see, and say that she could leave as soon as she paid it. So finally, Hutchinson testified, “she got really drunk and agreed.”

According to Hutchinson, that’s how they always had sex — after he’d worn her down and she’d had so much to drink that she was barely conscious. Gonzales-McLinn told the psychologist that Sasko gave her all sorts of other pain-numbers, too — ecstasy, cocaine, pot. She was on hydrocodone the whole summer after she got implants in her buttocks “because he wouldn’t stop talking about” wanting a curvier Barbie.

When she finally went back to work after that surgery, Hutchinson said, Gonzales-McLinn was turning her whole paycheck from Bed Bath & Beyond over to Sasko to pay him back. But by his reckoning, it never made much of a dent in her bill. “I think her sense of captivity was pretty intense,” Hutchinson said on the stand.

If this isn’t servitude, what would be?

“She told me she thought she couldn’t come home,” her mother said, “because he told her no one would want her there.”

Insanity defense so hard to prove it might be unconstitutional

Yet instead of concentrating on that sense of subjugation, Cornwell argued that she was not guilty because of a mental disease or defect. When Kansas effectively did away with the insanity defense more than 20 years ago, it became significantly — and maybe even unconstitutionally — harder to prove a defendant not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.

And while meandering down that road, Cornwell seems to have lost the jury in the waist-high overgrowth of Hutchinson’s diagnosis of dissociative disorder, or DID, which we used to call multiple personality disorder.

He argued that Sarah in a sense hadn’t killed Sasko at all. It was her alter Alyssa, “a very bad person,” who had done that to prevent another alter, the vulnerable, weepy Vanessa, from following through on her plan to escape Sasko by committing suicide. Also on board in the “System of Sarah” were Myla, who quoted Bible verses, to Alyssa’s extreme irritation, and No Name, who carried some of Sarah’s earliest memories of abuse. “At this point,” Hutchinson said, “there is no Sarah,” who disappeared after she was raped at age 16 and hasn’t been heard from since.

‘Trouble wrapping my brain around it’

All of this clearly confused even the attorney who was arguing it: “I’m as perplexed as I have been in a long time,” Cornwell told reporters before Gonzales-McLinn’s trial began. “What got my client to that day and why she did what she did, I am having trouble wrapping my brain around it.”

DID is real — a coping mechanism usually brought on by childhood sex abuse — but this was a lot to ask of jurors who’d been shown gory slides of Sasko’s near-decapitation.

The psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution, Dr. William Logan, said she might have DID, but testing definitely showed evidence of PTSD, major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and more. Still, he said, she was capable of forming intent. Cornwell barely rebutted him, though this was central to the case.

‘I am inclined to make a plea offer’

Sarah’s family kept telling themselves that Cornwell must know what he was doing, even if it didn’t look that way to them: “We were out of our realm and trusting that these people know more than we do,” her mother said. “I felt like he genuinely cared for her. It was hard for her because it was another guy saying, ‘Trust me.’’’

About a month before the trial had even begun, the prosecutor had called the defense attorney and said that if Gonzales-McLinn agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder, he’d withdraw the state’s motion for a 50-year minimum sentence and ask for 25 years instead. Obviously, that was a lifetime of difference — a chance at parole at age 45 instead of age 70.

But Cornwell wasn’t interested. .

Branson summarized their conversation in a letter dated February 6, 2015. “Now that I have a better understanding of her situation and her past,” Branson wrote Cornwell, “I am inclined to make a plea offer” of 25 years.

“I recognize this is not an outcome you personally agree with, after you commented that McLinn ‘would have to get a new attorney if she wanted to take this plea.’’’ Still, “I trust that you will give her full counsel on the benefits of a plea and the risks of a trial.”

Sarah’s older sister and closest friend, Ashley Adame, says Cornwell only told her and her parents that they were not taking the 25. “He was going to get her a lower sentence” than that. “He used the word ‘promise.’ He was so sure and so amped up — like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got this,’ — but he didn’t represent her right, and he shouldn’t have promised us.”

Because he did not “have this.”

Cornwell: ‘I am struggling here’

Branson argued that there was no proof she’d been penetrated with garden tools by a neighbor as a child, and no proof she’d ever been raped, either: “No one was ever charged, correct?” In Branson’s telling, Gonzales-McLinn killed Sasko for fun, and was just being honest when she told the cop who arrested her that she’d slit his throat to see what that felt like.

During Cornwell’s final argument, as the judge kept correcting him on what he could and could not tell the jury, he finally told the court, “I am struggling here, because this is the first time I have one of these mental disease and defect cases.”

After deliberating for only about four hours, the jury found Gonzales-McLinn guilty.

Then, during the sentencing phase, Cornwell argued that “this is, judge, a nice little girl.” The killing couldn’t be considered especially heinous or cruel, he said, given that Sasko had been unconscious as she was sawing through his neck. It’s not like she’d kept him alive and tortured him daily, he said.

The jury didn’t see it that way, of course, and again sided with prosecutors, who presented Gonzales-McLinn as a faker, and quite a talented criminal.

Will Gonzales-McLinn get a new trial?

“She carried it out with almost flawless execution,” Branson said. “If she hadn’t got caught in Florida, we probably wouldn’t know where she was at today.”

Branson, who has charged three young women with filing false rape reports in the last two years, seems more concerned with stamping out that mostly imaginary crime than in addressing real sexual violence in Douglas County.

But in Sarah Gonzales-McLinn v. the State of Kansas, he owed all of those hurt by her crime to take her history of abuse seriously, and to take it into account. And her own attorney owed her a defense if not from this century, then at least from the last one.

So will Gonzales-McLinn get a new trial? I’m going to dare to hope so, though ineffective assistance of counsel is so hard to prove that even having a defense lawyer who fell asleep, was drunk or dying or delusional doesn’t guarantee defendants another day in court.

In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in Frye v. Missouri that the Sixth Amendment does require defense attorneys to communicate formal plea offers, though.

Looking back, Michelle Gonzales thinks Cornwell may have cared not too little but too much, often saying with tears in his eyes how much Sarah reminded him of his own daughter.

If he does care, and if Cornwell’s explanation to Gonzales-McLinn was as subpar as her family and current lawyer say that it was, he will have a chance to make it up to her at her hearing.

Gonzales-McLinn worked with accused prison dentist

Gonzales-McLinn called her mother while I was with her, nervous about her own upcoming testimony. In the women’s prison in Topeka, she’s not getting any therapy or other treatment, which is why her mother never tries to get her to reflect too deeply on all that’s happened. “I don’t encourage her, because if I open that box, who’s going to help her” with what falls out?

She reads a lot — at her trial, much was made of her fondness for Sue Grafton mystery novels — and spends her days working in the dental lab, where one of her instructors, Dr. Tomas Co, was charged with fondling inmates.

There have been rapes at the prison, too, in the time she’s been there. Yet compared to her life out in the world, Gonzales-McLinn feels less threatened behind bars. “What’s saddened me the most about her being there,” Gonzales said, “is she told me she’s safe now.”

This story was originally published December 11, 2019 at 5:00 AM.