Why is Roger Golubski, an accused rapist and former KCK cop, still walking around free?
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Former KCK detective Roger Golubski
Roger Golubski, a former Kansas City, Kansas, police detective, has been accused of using his badge to exploit and rape vulnerable Black women. Here’s the story so far.
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A 5-foot-9-inch, 250-pound white male accused of sexually assaulting dozens of mostly poor Black women is at large in Kansas City, Kansas.
No need to put out an APB, though, because the suspect, former homicide detective Roger Golubski, who retired in good standing and with a full pension from the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department, isn’t in hiding. There’s no mystery about his whereabouts, right in Wyandotte County, where he’s lived all his life.
In a November deposition in a civil case against him, Golubski mostly declined to answer questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. He did that a nice round 555 times.
Among the questions he wouldn’t answer were these: Did he have a sideline in selling drugs and “facilitating prostitution” while he was a police detective? Ever get charges dismissed in return for sex? Ever rape a minor in his cop car? Or threaten to harm a woman if she turned him in?
Also this one: “You closed dozens of cases by manipulating witnesses to give false testimony?” And this: “Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, you used your network of women on the streets to provide false information to close your cases, correct?”
Golubski did, however, talk about the four years he spent in a Catholic seminary, studying to become a priest. And noted that though he is so faithful that he kept a prayer book in his police office “until someone stole it,” he never lost sight of how important it is to observe the separation of church and state. (For the record, that’s one line he does not stand accused of crossing.)
He also complained that the department didn’t throw him much of a retirement bash 10 years ago when he left after 35 years on the force. A plate of cookies from Price Chopper is “not my definition of a party,” said Golubski, who is 68. Nor did he get a gold watch. “It must have got lost in the mail.”
He did not go away empty handed; the police department’s platinum-plated gift to Roger Golubski was silence: Roger who? Even now, a department spokeswoman says nobody there knows anything about the allegations against him, though his former partner, Terry Zeigler, only stepped down as chief of police a little more than a year ago.
Women who say Golubski held his badge over them for years are finally ending their silence, though, despite very real fears for their physical safety.
Said he goes drinking with district attorney
One such woman, who also gave a deposition in November, testified under oath about meeting Golubski when he arrived at her home, along with a bunch of other Kansas City, Kansas police officers, early one morning in 1999.
Her sons were marched to a squad car, and while other officers searched her home, Golubski never left her side. “I asked him questions about what was going on. He was too busy looking at me, staring at me, telling me how nice I looked and that I had nice legs.”
And how did she feel about that? “I didn’t feel too good, because they had my sons out in the police car, and I was mainly worried about them and he making all of these side comments about my body. I didn’t like that at all. I thought it was inappropriate.”
That was only a preview, she testified. A few days later, while she was “devastated” and “sick” with worry for her boys, Golubski, who was the lead investigator in the case against them, dropped by again.
And once again, “I was talking about my son. He was talking about my legs and how a friend he can be to me … He said he can help me out with my kids. He said he knew the D.A. because they are friends and that they go to the bar.”
She was scared, as he “kept moving close to me. I really didn’t know what was going to do until he put his hand on my leg and I slapped it off. And then he said he can really help me out, help my sons out. And then he put his hand back. But that time, he pushed the hands all the way up under my skirt … I asked him what was he trying to do. And so I stood up. He stood up. And next thing I know, he pushed me on the couch and unzipped his pants.”
Golubski raped her, she said, all the while telling her he wasn’t going to hurt her and that it would be over soon. When it was, he wiped himself off, took the roll of paper towels he’d used to do that with him, and left. “I was sitting there crying, and he didn’t say nothing.”
This happened many times, she said, and no, she never called the police. “He was the police. What was I going to say — this policeman just raped me?”
On one occasion, she testified, Golubski told her that his partner, Zeigler, had come with him and was waiting in the car outside. The former police chief did not respond to multiple messages from The Star seeking comment, and Golubski’s lawyer declined to comment.
Her account of being targeted when she was most vulnerable is not unlike the story of another woman I interviewed months ago, Teresa Randolph, who said that on the 2008 night that a SWAT team came to her home to charge her father in a fatal shooting, Golubski made his way to her bedroom and closed the door behind him. “I was in my bedclothes, he was sitting on my bed, and it felt almost violating, very uncomfortable.”
Then and in a number of later phone calls, she said, he told her he could help her father if she’d meet him alone. “I always suggested that there would be another party there, and he said, ‘I’ll call you another time.’’’ The last time they spoke, “he got angry with me and said I was too educated for him.”
Helped send innocent Lamonte McIntyre to prison
What Golubski is really accused of is playing God in Kansas City, Kansas, for decades, stealing from some and giving to others, behaving violently with some women and buying groceries for others. Sometimes, his accusers say, he offered carrots like help getting a new apartment in return for testimony, while at other times threatening women that their children would be taken away or that the men in their lives would be sent to prison if they didn’t do as he said.
The case that’s finally bringing all of this to light started with Lamonte McIntryre, who served 23 years in prison for a 1994 double murder that he didn’t commit, and that Golubski was in charge of investigating. When the former detective was deposed, it was as part of the civil case being brought by McIntryre and his mother Rose, who has said in sworn testimony that Golubski sexually assaulted her and framed her then 17-year-old son when she refused to continue being coerced. In Golubski’s legal answer to the suit, he has denied any wrongdoing.
Behind all of the corruption that he’s accused of getting away with for so long was the assumption that no one was ever going to believe the word of a bunch of powerless Black women over a man with a badge and a gun, who by the time he retired had risen to the rank of police captain.
But it’s long past time for their stories to be told, listened to and acted on.
If even one of them is true, why is Roger Golubski still walking around free, glum that he didn’t get a better send-off from the job? When is the FBI, whose investigators have been interviewing those who’ve known him off and on for years, finally going to do something?
Is no one in the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department at all curious about the extent and the impact of these alleged crimes? Or the potential abuse of power by those who were supposed to be protecting the community? If not, what does that say about the culture of the department, not just then but now?
Is no one in authority willing to take a second look at Golubski’s old cases? Or worried about how they’ll ever have any credibility until all of the facts are known and acknowledged?
It was Roger Golubski who inspired the Kansas law that spelled out that cops can’t have sex with anyone they’ve arrested or detained. In his honor, such as it is, the state should also change the statute of limitations on rape so that even a case from, say, 1999, could be prosecuted.
In the past, Zeigler has suggested that any allegations against his former partner and the department that he until recently led are old news. They are not. And until they’re addressed, what has changed?
Officials can continue to plead ignorance, but at a terrible price, and not only for those whose trust wasn’t so much betrayed as it was never allowed to grow. There is no statute of limitations on complicity.
This story was originally published January 3, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
