‘He’s enjoying it’: KC murder defendant tortures family of victim Tabitha Birdsong
More than two years after what was left of Tabitha Birdsong, cut beyond recognition, was found in Roanoke Park with her protective order in her back pocket, the man who everyone in her life said had tortured her for nearly a decade was finally going to be made to pay.
Gene Birdsong, Tabitha’s husband, who found her again every time she got away, had been expected to plead guilty to a second-degree murder charge on Wednesday, in exchange for a sentence of 23 years.
Tabitha’s mother, Diana Theisen, was sleepless the night before, working and reworking the victim’s statement she hoped to be able to get through. She wasn’t sure how she’d handle seeing Birdsong again, even in a virtual courtroom. “I don’t know if I can even look at him tomorrow,” she told me on Tuesday night.
Since his arrest on Nov. 6, 2018, just hours after her daughter’s gruesome but not unexpected death at age 40, Diana has been terrified that he’d somehow escape justice again, just as he had every one of the many times Tabitha had called the police on him. But now, at last, Diana thought, she would be able to stop worrying that he’d beat this, too, and then would make good on his threats to kill everyone Tabitha loved. If everything went as expected in court, she said, weeping with anticipatory relief, “He’s not going to be able to hurt us no more.”
But the hearing did not go as expected.
From the beginning of the proceeding, Birdsong, who is 45, seemed awfully casual for a man charged with murder.
When Judge John M. Torrence asked if he was in court to plead guilty, he responded, “I dunno, sure.”
“Do you swear the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“Sure,” Birdsong said again, in the tone you’d use in response to a question much more along the lines of, “And would you like fries with that?”
Asked if any mental illness or defect “might provide you with a defense in this case,” he started blaming Tabitha for her own death.
“While I was getting stabbed and kicked, I blacked out, and when I woke up, when I came through, I was on the other side of town with blood all over me. She stabbed me before, and the last thing I remember was getting stabbed and kicked.”
Birdsong said that his blackout might have been caused by his PTSD, but then again might have been “due to being kicked in the head.”
And again and again, he didn’t say whether he thought a mental problem of any kind might have been a factor.
“If you’re unclear,” the judge told him, “I’d strongly urge you to talk to your lawyer about it. It needs to be resolved one way or the other.”
“Nah,” he said, “I’m just here to plead guilty.”
Then, he said that no, he wasn’t all that satisfied with his defense attorney, Joshua Peter, because “there was two other guys there” when Tabitha died, “and I knew one of them. I told him who he was and he hasn’t done shit about it.”
Gene Birdsong seemed to enjoy court’s frustration
Not surprisingly, the judge finally pulled the plug on the hearing, and on the defendant’s clear non-acceptance of the deal on the table.
“I don’t think we can go forward here today,” Torrence said. “All through this, for the record, Mr. Birdsong has been flippant and sort of recalcitrant to answer questions and he’s complaining now that his lawyer hasn’t properly investigated the case. … There’s no point in going forward here.”
Told by prosecutor Danielle Sediqzad that the state would not reextend the offer once it had been rejected, he said no no no, he was accepting it.
But he still didn’t seem to mean it, and what’s more seemed to be enjoying his attorney’s frustration, the judge’s pique, and yet another opportunity to keep others guessing: What would he do next?
His attorney asked if he could have one more day to speak to his client, and the prosecutor agreed, so now it’s not clear whether the case will go to trial in May, or whether he’ll get yet another last chance to take the deal.
“He’s just doing it to torture us,” as always, Tabitha’s mother said later. “He has no remorse! Sick, sick, sick. And now he’s saying some guys jumped him? That has nothing to do with my baby.”
What she had been intending to tell the court, she said, was just this: “I was going to explain to people how my baby girl was, and what he put her through, and now he’s still doing it. He’s enjoying it.”
If the case does go to trial, he will surely wish he had skipped the pleasure of playing mind games with Tabitha’s loved ones one more time.
But that would also mean months more worry and uncertainty for Diana, for Tabitha’s grandmother and for Tabitha’s children, too.
Tabitha wrote down abuse shelter addresses, safety tips
The system never worked for the victim in this case. In the nine years between the day Tabitha Gardner married Gene Birdsong in one local park and the morning she was found dead in another, with her umpteenth protective order in her back pocket, Birdsong was arrested dozens of times. Often but not always, the charges against him were for hurting her, in at least five different states.
Yet because hurting your partner is not considered that big a deal, no matter how much we say otherwise, right up to the time abuse becomes a homicide, nothing serious ever happened to him. At the time of her death, Tabitha was living with her grandmother and calling the cops on Gene every single time he showed up, or tricked a friend into arranging for them to meet.
“She called several times a week with things that were going on,” Overland Park Detective Doug Rison told me at the time. Yet somehow, he never expected her to wind up on a slab.
Tabitha herself was very aware of the risk, and filled many notebooks her mother showed me with phone numbers of domestic violence shelters and lists of safety strategies.
For a long time, the system did work for Gene Birdsong, who was first found guilty of battering Tabitha in 2009, the same year they married. In 2008, when he was charged with raping another woman, he was found not guilty at a trial in which it was the victim who was painted as unstable.
On Wednesday, he had one more laugh, hopefully his last, on his dead wife and all of those who love her.
And as he was telling the court that he did want to plead guilty, and then two seconds later blaming the crime on others, it wasn’t hard to imagine all the times he’d told Tabitha that he would do better, but also that it would be her fault if he didn’t.
This story was originally published February 4, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
