Former KCK police detective accused of multiple rapes still living on taxpayers’ dime
As Roger Golubski stories go, this is mild stuff: The woman first met the much-accused then-Kansas City, Kansas, police detective in the 1990s through Cecil Brooks, the convicted drug trafficker who she says paid Golubski to torture his enemies and leave his friends alone. As this woman and two other former dealers have told me, Golubski was just one of the KCK cops who were in the drug business, too, through both random rip-offs and regular shakedowns. So I guess you could say they were all colleagues.
The detective showed up at her house once, she said, and told her that if she’d have sex with him, he could make any legal problem she might have go away. “He said he liked dating Black girls, and if I had any tickets, he could get them cleaned up.” That didn’t happen, then or ever, though “he kept reaching out to me. I was worried that he was going to try to extort me, like he did everybody.” He’d already raped an aunt of hers, she said. “It made my blood boil.”
On another occasion, she was asked to deliver some crack to Golubski for one of the women he gave drugs in return for sex. She was nervous about doing that, and wouldn’t put the drugs directly into his hands, but he did pay $200 for the crack, and then disappeared into the bedroom with the woman for whom he’d bought the cocaine.
The woman says she saw Cecil Brooks and Golubski meeting in a car in front of her apartment building on several occasions, and heard Brooks and others refer to him as their protector.
In a 2016 affidavit, Brooks described himself as someone who “throughout the 1990s and beyond” was “a major figure in the Kansas City, Kansas, drug business. … I am also acquainted with an employee of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department named Detective Golubski. On at least two occasions, I personally witnessed Detective Golubski confiscate drugs from someone and not arrest that person. … Golubski never searched me for drugs. He knew I never carried them on my person. We all knew that Golubski would take drugs and then give them to drug-addicted black hookers in exchange for sexual favors.”
“Men and women alike, they were scared of this man,” the woman who once sold him crack told me. “He was hated; his name was ringing out in the streets.” Had anything ever happened to him, she said, the list of suspects would have been long. But nothing ever did, she said, protected as he was by what she, as a committed Christian of many years now, sees as the “principalities and powers” that Ephesians refers to as “the rulers of the darkness of this world” and “wickedness in high places.”
While he is still uncuffed and unencumbered, “scouting out girls and being him,” she doesn’t want her name in the paper. Initially, I was interviewing her about a completely different matter when she brought him up in passing.
But unlike other Golubski associates and victims I’ve talked to, this woman is not living in fear. In fact, she is looking forward to testifying against him if he ever does get arrested. Two FBI agents interviewed her a couple of years ago, and then she never heard from them again.
“It was kind of like they were scared, too,” of taking in someone from the law enforcement family. “They were saying, ‘It’s gonna take a lot. This is not going to be an overnight thing. It’s not going to be easy.’’’
Grand jury had questions for alleged victim
So here I am, ending the year as I began it, asking why Roger Golubski is still walking around free, living on his taxpayer-funded pension and complaining that his retirement party wasn’t much of a send-off.
I know a lot more than I did when the year began. For instance, about the poor Black women he was exploiting who were later murdered, including some whose homicides he was then assigned to investigate.
I know one woman who told me, as she has now told the FBI, too, that he tried to rape her right in his office in police headquarters, while she screamed her head off. She’s been interviewed by agents several times, and recently answered some additional questions that the grand jury had.
I also learned that Golubski was not the only accused rapist in the department. Natasha Hodge immediately reported KCKPD officer William “Ed” Saunders to the police after the attack, and never heard from them again. Though there was DNA evidence, then-Wyandotte County District Attorney Nick Tomasic declined to take the case. And Saunders, too, spent the rest of his career at the department and retired in good standing. Yes, even though he was briefly put on desk duty after a female officer I interviewed said he also tried to sexually assault her. Hodge talked to the FBI a couple of years ago as well, and never heard from them again, either.
I have also learned a lot more in the last year about the culture inside the KCKPD that enabled Golubski then and protects him still: “She was a streetwalker,” the daughter of one murder victim was told by a current police captain — not way back when, but on March 26 of 2021. “What else do you want us to do?”
Is FBI investigation of police just for show?
The department says they have been cooperating with the FBI for years now, but to what end? That the grand jury investigation is still going on might mean they’re on the verge of multiple indictments.
Or, it might mean what former agent Alan Jennerich told me: He was assigned to KCKPD corruption cases decades ago, and met with overwhelming, uniform resistance from both his superiors and from prosecutors. He sees the investigation going on now as just for show.
Roger Golubski, who has diabetes, is not a well man, and the speculation among victims is that KCK officialdom is hoping he’ll die — and that all of their shady secrets will be buried with him — before the slow-walking law ever gets around to arresting someone who will always be one of their own. “He’s never going to jail,” one of them told me.
I keep hoping to be proven wrong in suspecting that she might be right. And loved it when the woman who says she once sold crack to Golubski answered my question about how she remains optimistic and unafraid by quoting my favorite Bible verse.
“For nothing is secret that will not be revealed,” she said, reciting from Luke, “nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light.”
Amen, my sister. But the question I ask God every day is this one: When?
This story was originally published December 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
