Even the judge cried at innocence hearing for KCK postman now free after 12 years
Even the judge cried as he talked about all of the wrongs done to Olin “Pete” Coones — by the Kansas City, Kansas police detectives who missed crucial evidence, by the Wyandotte County medical examiner who blew the autopsy, and by the prosecutors who coerced testimony from a mentally ill inmate.
“The court does not know whether Mr. Coones is innocent,” said Wyandotte County Judge Bill Klapper, “but it does know he did not get a fair trial.”
He vacated Coones’ 2009 murder conviction, and then the current Wyandotte County district attorney, Mark Dupree Sr., whose conviction integrity unit had initiated the hearing, said his office was dropping all charges. After a dozen years behind bars, the 63-year-old former mail carrier was finally free to go.
His lawyers have always said that it was really Kathy Schroll who’d killed her husband Carl and then herself, after framing Coones, who had never before been in any trouble with the law.
But through what seems to have been a combination of corruption and incompetence, authorities set Coones up, too, suppressing some evidence and presenting testimony that they had to know was sketchy at best.
Bank account looted, will changed
Police had already been investigating Schroll, who had worked as a caretaker for Coones’ elderly father while he was suffering from dementia. Though they’d found plenty of evidence that she had been abusing and stealing from him — draining his bank account and changing his will — the criminal case against her went nowhere after Olin Coones Sr. died.
“I don’t know what happened to the case after that,” said the officer who worked that case, Bryan Block. And what happened to the file? “I don’t know,” he said on the stand this week. “It might have still been in my desk when I resigned.”
Block testified that Schroll had made herself the beneficiary of Coones’ life insurance policy more than once, even after his family got it changed back. She was also embezzling from the credit union where she worked, coworkers testified, and knew she was about to be fired and prosecuted.
The day Schroll was found dead, one of her former colleagues said under oath, her phone rang all day long, and every caller was a creditor.
Evidence at the crime scene pointed away from Coones: There was no sign of a struggle at the Schroll’s home. When police arrived, they found the front door ajar. Inside, nothing showed that Coones had ever been there. The gun used to kill the couple was Schroll’s own weapon, and there was gunshot residue and blood spatter on her left hand.
The gun was found next to her body, on her left side, with only her fingerprints on it. The medical examiner who did the original autopsy now says she shot herself in the back of her head, at an angle.
Coones was at home that night, according to his wife and five children. Sometime between 2 and 2:30 a.m. on April 7, 2008, Coones got up and cut through the living room on his way to the bathroom and back. Don’t stay up too late, he told his college-age daughter and her boyfriend, who was staying with them, too. And please, he told them, sleep in your own rooms, OK?
Implausible ‘Machiavellian’ murder plot
Coones was still trying through legal means to get his modest inheritance back from Schroll, who at 2:21 a.m., just before she died, called her mother to say that Coones was in her house, had stolen her lawnmower — you have to give her credit for that quirky touch — and told her that he was going to kill her and Carl. It was her mother who called 911.
Initially, police took in the scene and figured that it was a murder-suicide. But once they heard about Schroll’s call to her mom, they never let evidence to the contrary convince them otherwise. After two trials, Coones was found guilty of killing Kathy Schroll, though not Carl, and was sentenced to life in prison.
His lawyers called the dead woman’s plan a “Machiavellian plot,” but really, she was no Machiavelli. This week’s hearing was both an indictment and an exoneration of our system, but that Coones was ever convicted in the first place defies all logic.
To believe the version of events that put him away, you’d have to believe that Coones crawled out of his window and knocked on Schroll’s door at 2 a.m. Despite the animosity between them, she’d then have to have let him in, since there was no sign of forced entry.
You’d have to believe that after explaining that he was there to kill her with her own gun, he then allowed her to calmly place a 45-second call from the land line near the front door. And that, given the chance, she didn’t run out that door, or even call the police, but instead dialed her mother to implicate Coones. Right.
In the days before her death, Schroll told several people that Coones had threatened her when she’d brushed past him in the doorway of the QuikTrip. Only, every time she told the story, the day that this had supposedly occurred shifted. Security footage from the convenience store camera, pointed right at the door, showed neither Coones nor Schroll.
The former cellmate who testified at Coones’ second trial had offered to testify in more than one case, had a history of mental illness and dishonesty, and after trying to back out, was threatened with more jail time if he didn’t go ahead and take the stand.
Much of the correspondence between him and prosecutors was withheld from the record. And when he did testify, his version of Coones’ supposed confession got almost all details about the crime scene wrong.
Coones interviewed without a lawyer
Beyond this case, you couldn’t really sit through all this testimony about lost files and dropped balls without worrying for older people everywhere — and wondering how many other cases like this there have been in Kansas City, Kansas.
You somehow never told your Kansas City, Kansas Police Department colleagues in homicide about your elder abuse case against Schroll, Judge Klapper asked Detective Bryan Block. “Excuse me for being dense, but you go to an autopsy where the deceased is a potential defendant in a case you’re investigating,” and you say nothing to your buddies in homicide? No, that doesn’t make sense, Block agreed, especially since the homicide detectives working the Schrolls’ case sat next to him at work: “My cubicle was right next to theirs.”
“It would have been unusual almost to the point of unbelievable,” Klapper said, and Block didn’t argue.
When they interviewed Coones, with no lawyer present, they told him the case was already as good as cleared.
Yet “he’s always said he believed the system would fix it,” said one of his attorneys, Branden Bell.
On the stand on Thursday, Coones said that in all these years in prison, he’s never second-guessed his decision to reject a plea deal because his good example was all he had to offer to his children: “All I had was to tell them to always tell the truth, never lie to save yourself, and it will all be OK.”
And see? It finally was.
As moving as an Aaron Sorkin drama
In announcing his ruling, Klapper was the kind of human that every judge should be. First, he said his heart went out to Schroll’s family: “You’ve been here every day. Sometimes I think you get lost in the shuffle, and I want you to know that the court is sensitive to your feelings.”
When you’re sworn in to do this job, he said, pacing back and forth behind the bench, his voice breaking with emotion, “someone you love puts a robe on your back, and it feels light, but some days, it feels heavy, and this is one of those days.”
He told Coones that “despite all of the things that have happened to you,” he was so, so lucky to have a team of lawyers who don’t mind being hated and making no money while standing up for the poor and the powerless.
Still pacing, he said that amid all of the divisions and dissension and talk of Republican judges and Democratic judges, “there should be neither.” People in our system make mistakes, he said, and people can fix them. An Aaron Sorkin monologue couldn’t have been more moving.
But these weren’t honest mistakes, as Klapper also said: “The state suborned perjury,” and the prosecutor, Ed Brancart, not surprisingly “failed to disclose the threats he made” to get the testimony that put Coones away.
When the hearing was over and Coones had given a long, sweet, teary hug to Dee, his wife of 41 years, he said, “I was praying for it,” but had tried not to get ahead of himself. “I make no expectation,” he said, still holding his wife’s hand.
We should, though. Because it’s not too much to expect that what happened to Pete Coones should never happen to anybody.
This story was originally published November 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
