Pete Coones, RIP: Kansas convicted him with lies. Now we should name a law after him
After a judge tearfully vacated Olin “Pete” Coones, Jr.’s murder conviction in November, the former Kansas City, Kansas mail carrier spoke with so much joy about the future that he’d never really thought he’d get to have with his wife Dee, “the most beautiful girl in the world,” and “my girl since we were 7.”
He couldn’t wait to take her and their five children — “the loves of my life, because they’re all the loves of my life” — fishing, and to get to know his six grandkids. “How taken I am,” he told me in an interview, “to look out a window that doesn’t have bars on it.”
As it turned out, the future only lasted 108 days, and did not include any fishing trips. Coones fell ill soon after his release from prison after 12 years. He died on Sunday, at age 64, from the cancer throughout his body that had gone undiagnosed behind bars.
Meeting Coones twice after he was freed was like meeting a Frank Capra character come to life: No, he hadn’t even considered taking the plea deal of five years, he said — though he was later sentenced to 50 — because pleading guilty when he wasn’t would have taught his kids that it’s OK “to swear an oath and know you’re telling a lie.”
For years after his conviction, he tried to get Dee to divorce him, because “I didn’t want her to be sad and lonely.”
And after all his children had gone through while growing up as “the killer’s kids” he was so grateful that they’d still achieved what he saw as the greatest success there is in this life: “None of them have ever been in trouble, and they’re all successfully married.” Except the youngest, he always added, who just hadn’t gotten there yet. Among his own points of pride, he said, was that “I never had a disciplinary report written on me.”
One of the many things he was looking forward to after his release was an eye exam, he said, because it had been ages since he’d been able to see out of the glasses he’d had for 16 years. He didn’t say it, but a basic physical would also have been nice.
Mentally ill jailhouse informant coerced
At least he did live to hear Wyandotte County Judge Bill Klapper say that he’d been wronged. Specifically, by the Kansas City, Kansas police detectives who’d missed crucial exculpatory evidence, by the Wyandotte County medical examiner who’d completely blown the autopsy, and most of all, by the WyCo prosecutor who’d coerced testimony from a mentally ill inmate.
“The state suborned perjury,” in the case, Klapper said. The prosecutor, Ed Brancart, presented evidence that was “patently untrue,” the judge said, and “failed to disclose the threats he made” to get the testimony that convicted Coones.
No physical evidence ever connected the crime and Coones, who was home with his family that night and had never been in any trouble. And yes, a man really can lose his freedom, and as a result his life, on the say-so of a jailhouse informant known to be unstable and dishonest.
When that informant, Robert Rupert, did take the stand, to repeat what he claimed Coones had told him during the one day they shared a cell, Rupert got almost every detail about the crime scene wrong.
Brancart, who is still working as a prosecutor for Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt, did not respond to an email seeking comment. If he has any remorse about denying Coones a fair trial, or denying him the 12 years he should have had with his family, or as a result, denying him the medical care that might have saved his life, he’s keeping that to himself.
A spokesman for Schmidt’s office said they wouldn’t have any comment, either. But Brancart’s continued employment there speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
Pete Coones’ “life was stolen,” his attorneys said in a statement after his death, “because his innocence did not matter.”
Framed in murder-suicide
Authorities now acknowledge that Kathy Schroll wasn’t a victim at all, but killed her husband Carl and then herself in 2008, after framing Coones by calling her mother to say that Pete was in her house and was going to shoot them both. Oh, and he was stealing her lawn mower, she told her mother, which was a particularly deft touch, I always thought.
Do I need to say that there was no lawn mower theft, just as there was no murder?
Coones had been suing to get his modest inheritance back from Schroll, who as a caretaker for his elderly father had helped herself to his bank account and made herself the beneficiary of his will.
At the time of Schroll’s death, she was about to be busted for embezzling from the credit union where she worked. But the jury was never told that, and neither were Coones’ lawyers.
They did know she had spent Olin Coones Sr.’s savings, but Brancart told the jury that police couldn’t determine whether any crime had been committed. That just wasn’t true; detectives had brought the case to the district attorney’s office, and Brancart himself had declined to prosecute.
In the Schrolls’ home, where their bodies were found not long after her mother called 911, there was no sign of a struggle or of forced entry. Both Kathy and Carl were shot with her gun, which was found next to her body, on her left side, and there was gunshot residue and blood splatter on her left hand. Initially, detectives had correctly sized up the scene as a murder-suicide. Until, that is, they heard about the call to mom.
Hours after that call, police arrested Coones, and told him they wouldn’t be looking any further for the killer. Even then, though, “I didn’t panic,” Coones said, “because I always believed the system was built to work...I had no idea that anybody was capable of concocting stuff.”
‘Something valuable to teach them’
Now, thanks to those detectives’ determination not to listen to what the evidence and lack of evidence was telling them, it’s painful to remember all Coones said after his release: “I hope I have something valuable to teach them,” he said of his kids.
And “I hope I can do something for the children of people wrongly incarcerated,” especially since “so few people reached out to mine and said there’s somebody who cares about them.”
He also hoped to “work to help change the laws” so that other jailhouse snitches who trade lies for better deals can’t help convict other innocent men and women.
Since 1966, more than 140 people convicted in murder cases that involved jailhouse informants have been exonerated, according to ProPublica.
Again this year, Kansas lawmakers could choose to make it harder to send innocents to prison on the word of proven liars. In honor of an honorable man, they should pass House Bill 2366 and name it for Pete Coones.
“When you think you know who the victims are,” he told me, “you might be wrong.”
This story was originally published February 24, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
