He’s ‘definitely a sexual predator’: Former KCK cop says colleague assaulted her, too
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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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“Ed is definitely a sexual predator,” the longtime Kansas City, Kansas, police officer told me when we met — in an empty suburban parking lot, because everyone she knows, she said, would hate that she was talking to me.
This former officer first got in touch with me after I wrote about Natasha Hodge, who in February of 1996 reported to KCK police that one of their own, then-officer William “Ed” Saunders, had raped her earlier that same day.
So how is Saunders’ former colleague so sure that he is a predator? Because, she said, in the summer of 1999, “he actually came to my house, after being told no a number of times.” After pushing his way in, “he locked my front door, so my kids couldn’t get in, and got me in a lock from behind.”
Fortunately for her, she said, the phone rang as she was fending him off, and it was a buddy of hers from the department. “He can tell from my voice” that something is very wrong, and said he was on his way.
That call, she feels sure, kept something worse from happening; Saunders was “afraid of him,” and gone by the time her friend arrived. She might not have — no, probably would not have — reported what happened at all, she said. But her friend did tell his captain, who reported it to internal affairs. When asked, she told them the whole story, and went through with the whole formal complaint process.
For what, though? “They never did anything,” she said, except that “I got blackballed for it. All they did was put him on a desk for a while, and it was ‘unfounded.’ I was flirting, he said.”
Another female officer told her that she, too, had filed a sexual misconduct complaint against Saunders, and with the same result.
The department did not respond to questions about those reports, and Saunders didn’t respond to my text.
But another former KCK officer did confirm her story, though I did not get his name from her, and the two aren’t friends. “I know they had him sitting on a desk at one time, when he’d always been in the field, and it had to do with her. What I heard was that he’d sexually harassed her.”
That former officer didn’t want his name in the paper bad-mouthing the department: “People have turned up dead for less here,” he said. And he certainly wasn’t surprised that nothing had come of the complaint: “You get these allegations of sexual misconduct, but who down there had the moral high ground to say, ‘You shouldn’t do that’?’’
Superiors made sexual requests of female officers
The culture that made former KCKPD detective Roger Golubski’s many alleged predations possible was completely out of control, the officer who reported Saunders said.
“It’s been slowly getting better since Terry Zeigler left,” she told me, referring to Golubski’s former partner, who only stepped down as chief of police in 2019. “But this is just what you go through as a woman there.”
She showed me copies of internal affairs complaints she’d filed about superiors asking to see her breasts and asking her for oral sex in the office. These complaints did not result in any punishment for the men involved either, she said, because there were naturally no witnesses to these conversations, so they were dismissed as unverifiable. They did, however, result in her reputation as “non-compliant” and someone with “a big mouth.”
“The stress in the department is worse than the stress on the streets,” she told me. “I’m more scared of the people in the department. You’re scared to say anything, or if you do, you get froze out and they make your life hell.”
She called me, she said, for one reason only: to let Natasha Hodge know that she is not alone, and never was. “I needed her to know she’s not the only one, and he needs to pay for the things he’s done. When I read that” column about Natasha, she said, “it haunted me.”
She wanted me to tell Natasha this: “Not all police officers are bad. Some of us really do care.”
Of course they aren’t, and of course they do. The question is when the other kind — those who abuse their power and abuse other people — are going to be held to account. And when more of those who aren’t bad and do care are to speak up.
Hodge still has PTSD nightmares about Saunders, who she says handcuffed and pretended that he was arresting her, then put her into his police car and took her to a vacant crack house. Once inside, he never took his hand off his gun as he forced her to service him.
He never uncuffed her, she said, and “the whole time he was raping me I was crying my eyes out thinking will I see my daughter again? I really thought he was going to kill me, and I kept wondering how long it would be before they found my body.” Later that same day, she said, she led police to the condom he’d tossed in the snow in the yard and to her nose ring that had fallen out and was still in the carpet inside. After filing her report, she never heard back from anyone in the police department or the DA’s office. Ever.
Will new Police Chief Karl Oakman investigate?
In response to my questions about what happened after Hodge accused Saunders all those years ago, a spokeswoman for the KCKPD answered that “the allegations were investigated in 1996. Forensic evidence was submitted to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation in March of 1996. That same year the case was forwarded to the Wyandotte County District Attorney who declined to prosecute.” The DA at the time was Nick Tomasic, who held that job from 1972 until 2005.
Has anything changed since then? The former officer who reported Saunders said she’s a little bit optimistic that the new chief, Karl Oakman, might be more willing to “dig things up” than his predecessors were. And the former deputy police chief, Tyrone Garner, who is running for mayor, “has always been professional.” Which is why others made fun of him, she said, and called him “Tyronius.”
What Natasha Hodge and others really deserve from a system that harmed so many for so long is some form of reparations.
But since victims of the department, most of them poor, Black and powerless, have never even been acknowledged, the only satisfaction she may ever get is that there is at least one former KCK cop who says she knows that Hodge told the truth — and deserved a real and respectful response. As she herself did, of course.
When I told Natasha all of this, she was surprised that someone with a badge and a gun not only knew what she was talking about, but cared enough to be willing to say so.
Her message back to the former officer is this: “It takes a lot to be willing to step up like she is. It’s a huge deal, and ‘thank you’ doesn’t begin to cover it. Tell her we’re sisters in our strength. When you see her, give her a huge hug and tell her it’s from Tasha.”
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
