She’s not the first to accuse this former KCK cop. But she had a rape kit done the next day
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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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The woman I interviewed recently was not the first to tell me about being sexually assaulted by former Kansas City Kansas police detective Roger Golubski.
Neither is she the first to tell me that he’d threatened to kill her — and told her he’d “have something done” to her brother, too, she said — if she reported him.
But she is the first I’ve met who went to the hospital afterward and had a full rape kit done.
In other words, authorities might have had DNA that could prove what he is and does in their possession all along.
The hospital then known as Truman Medical Center, where she got the forensic exam in 1990, typically turns rape kits over to the “appropriate jurisdiction crime laboratory.” It’s not clear where hers would have gone, since this happened in Kansas and the exam was in Missouri. But in theory, anyway, these kits are preserved for 30 years in Missouri and for five years in Kansas. She is working with both Truman and the Kansas City Police Department to get her records and trace the kit. If that evidence still exists, the FBI could prove her allegations beyond any doubt.
Sure, or disprove them. Though why, if there were any question, would this woman put herself in danger by coming forward to announce that there may be DNA out there that would show who and what KCK officialdom has been defending all these years?
She’s 54 now, and is prepared to testify. She is planning to call the FBI on Monday, so agents won’t even have to look for her.
Golubski is accused of exploiting and raping mostly poor Black women, whose male companions and relatives he abused differently, threatening arrest and worse, throughout his 35-year career at the KCKPD.
A lot of time has passed since that 1990 hospital visit, of course. Law enforcement agencies across the country have been found to have violated their own policies by destroying rape kits, in some cases within months of receiving them, without ever testing them.
But if that kit has been preserved, then the years of official amnesia and what certainly looked like foot-dragging to the Golubski victims who talked to federal agents years ago, and never heard from them again, are finally coming to an end.
Police lost files, misplaced evidence
Even if they didn’t keep the kit, so many victims, witnesses and even some cops have come forward at this point that I’m prepared to hope that all of the KCKPD’s lost files, missing evidence and “Gosh, I never heard any of this” denials are about to end exactly as they should have long ago. That is, with Roger Golubski in handcuffs and the organization that made him possible declaring moral bankruptcy.
No matter how many times we’re told that if any of this happened at all, it was so long ago that it no longer matters, the truth for victims is that decades of debilitating fear will really only be over when he is behind bars.
So why did the woman who says Golubski raped her three decades ago call me now — as it happened, just a few days before the news broke about the federal grand jury that’s finally looking into Golubski and friends?
“Because my brother just recently passed,” she said. As far as she was concerned, only when he died, in a June hit-and-run accident in California, did Golubski’s threat finally expire.
“After my brother passed, I sat down and had a long talk with God and just told him to give me some answers and help me, and I came to my decision” to report what happened all those years ago, she said.
It took a while for her to follow through, because “I didn’t know if I was ready to be revealed. And I’m still scared, because he’s still out there. I don’t know who he’s still connected to. He has friends in higher places or he wouldn’t still be walking around.” You’d have to be naive to think otherwise, and none of those accusing the former captain has enjoyed the luxury of being overly trusting in quite a while.
Then, in September, she saw my column reporting rape allegations against another Kansas City, Kansas, cop. A former police officer said that same officer, Ed Saunders, had also tried to sexually assault her. That even someone “on the inside” could be at risk of sexual violence from a fellow officer got to her, she said.
Picked up in police car from KCK park
So finally, two weeks ago, after a lot more thought and prayer, she called me, and recently, we met for breakfast near the factory where she works.
Golubski raped her, she told me, when she was 23 and living with a boyfriend near KCK’s Parkwood Park. One warm night, after she and her boyfriend had argued, she walked out in anger and wound up sitting alone in the park’s pavilion sometime around midnight.
“The next thing I know, Roger Golubski pulls up” in his police car. “He said it was after hours and I couldn’t be in the park. He said he’d take me somewhere safe.”
This is the point in the fairy tale when the wolf still seems harmless to the girl in the woods. Or in the horror movie, it’s when only the audience knows that something not at all good is about to happen.
That started to dawn on her, too, after only a few minutes. “When we were driving, he said he had to make a stop.” After they passed what was then the Church’s Chicken, where J’s Fish and Chicken is now, “we went up 27th past the Delavan Apartments.” Where are we going, she kept asking.
“He ended up turning up some street by these duplexes, and there was some woods and a little field right there. I’m like, ‘What are we doing here?’ And he got out, came and got me out of the back, and told me I had to perform oral on him.
“I’m crying and I’m telling him I don’t want to do that, so then he put his hand around my throat. He choked me and pushed me down in the back seat. He forced me to have sex with him, and then he forced me to perform oral sex, and I’m crying and he told me, after he got done, that if I ever said anything, he would have something done to my brother.”
Though she wouldn’t have known it otherwise, he was so sure he was untouchable that “he told me what his name was, and he told me he could have me killed or arrested if I went to the police, and they wouldn’t believe me anyway. Why would they believe me over him? And after he got through doing what he was doing, the crazy thing is, he took me back to the park.”
Multiple reports on Harvey Weinstein, Larry Nassar, too
I wonder sometimes — as in, every single day — how many women would have to come forward before they would be believed over Roger Golubski. Then I remind myself that 87 women told the truth about Harvey Weinstein before he ever saw the inside of a cell. Fifty women had to complain before Larry Nassar was even forced out as Olympic gymnastics team doctor, and 156 spoke in court before he was sentenced.
Most rapes are never prosecuted. But the terror that this one man with a badge, a gun and no fear of accountability inflicted on an entire community was more the symptom than the cause of corruption on a scale I haven’t seen anywhere else in 37 years in journalism.
Golubski’s lawyers never answer questions, other than to say that they can’t respond. But he did get the opportunity to answer for himself in a 2020 deposition in the civil suit being brought by Lamonte McIntyre, who, thanks in large part to Golubski, spent 23 years in prison for a double murder Golubski had to have known McIntyre did not commit. During that deposition last November, Golubski rolled his eyes, shook his head, and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself a nice round 555 times.
After he dropped the woman I met recently back off in Parkwood Park, she says, “I walked back home, scared the whole way,” and when she got there, she told her boyfriend “I was raped by two dudes, because I couldn’t tell him the real story. Then I ended up going to Truman Medical.”
After the full exam, which typically takes between four and five hours, nurses called the police. And that’s when she left, afraid that one of the officers answering the call to interview her might be her assailant.
Her then-boyfriend, to whom she hadn’t spoken in years, told me she’d come home that night “hysterical crying. She told me what happened” — though, no, he said, he never was able to get her to say exactly who had hurt her. “I took her to the hospital. She was messed up a little bit.”
Depression, suicide attempt in rape’s aftermath
“It affected me bad,” the woman said. So much so that she became seriously depressed and two months later took some pills out of a medicine cabinet in the home on Ward Parkway where she had a cleaning job.
“I ended up trying to kill myself” and was hospitalized for several days. “That it was somebody who was supposed to be protecting me — I trusted him, and got in the car thinking he was going to help me. I go see a therapist right now for that.”
The female friend she immediately told about being raped, though she never said by whom, told me she “was upset and she didn’t want to be alone after that. She was having nightmares.”
That wasn’t the end of the threats from Golubski, either: “I seen him one other time, walking up and down Quindaro, and he told me I’d better keep my mouth closed. I told him I hadn’t said nothing to anybody, and after that, I stayed in Missouri and stopped going to Kansas. I didn’t want him to be able to do that to nobody else in my family, or go after my brother.”
Her view of law enforcement was never the same: “When I grew up, police were nice.” After her encounter with Golubski, “I was scared of every cop I saw. And I’m still scared, because he’s still protected. He has to still have people on the inside.”
That’s why the former KCK cops who talk to me about all of this say things like “People have turned up dead for less here,” than telling the truth about crimes committed by their colleagues.
“You just have to compartmentalize” to survive, another said. “Once you got to a certain point” in the chain of command, that officer said, “it didn’t matter what you did. It’s still scary now, to be honest.’’
With the FBI closing in, Golubski’s “people on the inside” must be scared, too. Because if he ever is indicted, we’ll be hearing a lot more about them.
This story was originally published October 24, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
