Jury only heard about ‘this young bride and this young hoodlum’ in KCK murder case
On a Monday in May almost 30 years ago, two young women, just a year apart in age, parked in front of a Kansas City, Kansas, Walmart that’s not there anymore, at 65th and State.
One of them, 22-year-old year-old Brenda Jean Wassink, had stopped on her way home from her new job at KU Med to buy some material for the wedding dress she was going to make for herself. She and her fiance were so looking forward to starting a family that she’d already bought baby shoes for the children they hoped to have. On what turned out to be her last full day alive, she’d gone to church twice, and had played the piano for her congregation’s evening services.
Then there was 21-year-old Meka Richardson, who barely knew where she was, or why. Because that day, like every other day, she had gotten blackout drunk. To stop herself from thinking about a lot of things, including being raped as both a child and as an adult, she had since age 14 knocked back Budweiser “from the time I got up in the morning until I went to bed.” Often, her family had to go find her and bring her home from wherever she’d lost consciousness that night. Then, for the next few hours, they could at least feel some relief that she and the baby she adored but couldn’t care for had survived another day.
When the two women crossed paths, at around 5:30 p.m. on May 11, 1992, Richardson drew the pistol she’d just gotten to protect herself from her lunatic cousin, who’d shot up her car with her son inside. Wassink had put her purse down on the roof of her car, Richardson told me, and she does remember that when she saw that, she pulled out her gun and grabbed it.
Only, when Wassink tried to take the weapon away from her — “I was so little, I think she thought I was a kid,” Richardson said, in one of a series of phone interviews — it went off. “She had a hold of the barrel, and when I pulled it back, it fired. It made me snap back to reality when she grabbed it; I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t remember her face, but I remember that.”
The bullet hit Wassink in the cheek, and she died while strangers tried to stop what looked like a geyser of blood by plugging the hole in her face. Every news story about the shooting mentioned that Wassink had been a Habitat for Humanity volunteer.
‘Stumbling’ and urinating on herself, but not impaired?
Years later, a prison guard observed to Richardson that the whole narrative about what happened that day told the story of “this young bride and this young hoodlum” who’d killed her for $32.
According to Richardson’s sister, Kendra Dean-Martin, she would have been in rehab if their family had been able to afford health insurance. Instead, she became the first woman in Kansas to be judged so irredeemable that she deserved a “Hard 40” — the stiffest punishment that existed in the state at that time.
A few months later, she was found guilty of premeditated murder, and got life without possibility of parole for 40 years, plus 15 years to life for aggravated robbery.
“I needed to be held accountable,” Richardson said, because “somebody lost their life.” No one, including her, thinks that what she did in that parking lot was defensible.
But neither is the way that Richardson, who first wrote to me more than a year ago, has been treated by a system that throws away lives with the indifference of the most hardened hit man.
All over the trial transcript is evidence that she was quite literally piss drunk on the day of the shooting: She urinated on herself, was “hysterical,” “stumbling,” and said things no one could understand.
Yet the prosecution kept making the point that no one smelled alcohol on Richardson. The judge, former prosecutor Bill Robinson, ruled that there was no proof she’d been drinking.
If alcohol or drug use easily excused criminal behavior, the prisons would be empty. But “voluntary intoxication” can be a valid legal defense. Because at a certain point, intent is no longer possible.
And maybe because you can’t be found guilty of premeditated murder, or sentenced to a Hard 40, for an impulsive act committed while completely clocked out, the prosecution told a very different story.
DA dramatized a 30 second pause that no witness described
In District Attorney Nick Tomasic’s version of events, Richardson and her two younger sisters had gone to the shopping center not to get some Pampers but to commit a robbery.
As he told it, Richardson put the gun to Wassink’s head and then, in full possession of her wits, pulled the trigger, even as her sister begged her not to.
At the sentencing hearing, Tomasic made the story even better. He said Richardson had held the revolver against Wassink’s head for a full 30 seconds before firing. Tomasic paused for 30 seconds of silence in court, to dramatize how long that half-minute would feel with steel against your temple.
One woman did testify that she’d seen the person who’d shot Wassink put the gun to her head right before she heard a shot fired. But no one took the stand and described seeing the actual shooting. Not one of the 11 people who saw a Black girl in a red shirt running away could identify Richardson. And no one said anything about her holding a gun on Wassink for 30 seconds.
Richardson says police threatened to charge Richardson’s sister, Kendra Dean-Martin, who was 19 then, with murder, too, unless she testified against her sister. When she wouldn’t, they charged her with perjury. And for the seven years Dean-Martin was on probation as a result, she couldn’t get a job, which just about ruined her life.
From the beginning, Tomasic took a personal interest in the case, which he tried himself. Richardson’s court-appointed defenders, meanwhile, seemed to her to take no interest.
According to a transcript of the later hearing at which Richardson unsuccessfully argued that she’d been deprived of a fair trial by the ineffective counsel of her attorney, Gerald Jeserich, he spent a total of one hour with her before her trial.
After reading the entire record, I don’t think he was as incompetent or conflicted as she thinks he was. But he barely knew his client, and maybe that’s why he did not more aggressively argue her impairment, or ever mention her childhood history.
Later testing that showed a 9th percentile reading comprehension, 6.9 percentile math comprehension and “borderline mental retardation” wasn’t an issue, either. Those with an intellectual disability aren’t even supposed to be eligible for a “Hard 40.”
Nick Tomasic got away with a lot in his hot closing
Jeserich, who did not return my phone message about Richardson, did make this argument at her trial: If she really had held the gun to Wassick’s head and fired, then why was the only speck of blood on her a drop of menstrual blood on the back of her jeans?
But Tomasic got away with a lot in his hot closing:
“Premeditation means to think it over beforehand. It could be a split second like that.” (That argument has been rejected in a long list of Kansas cases.)
“What ‘reasonable doubt’ means is that in your heart and conscience you know the defendant is guilty.” (No, it isn’t. Kansas law doesn’t define “beyond a reasonable doubt.”)
Tomasic said finding Richardson guilty of a lesser charge would mean jurors felt sorry for Richardson, which isn’t true, either. And it would mean they believed the defendant’s witnesses, the DA said, which completely misstates the burden of proof.
“This case calls for the most serious finding you can make, that she’s guilty of premeditated murder and guilty of felony murder. You have to send a message back to her: We don’t believe your evidence or your theory of the case. … We believe this was intentional and deliberate and with premeditation. We believe you should pay the ultimate price for this.”
A murder case, or one involving a traffic ticket, for that matter, is supposed to be decided on the evidence, rather than on the desire to “send a message.”
In her 29th year of incarceration, Meka Richardson does not dispute her guilt, but only says, as she has since 1992, that the worst day of her life, and the last day of Brenda’s Wassick’s, did not happen the way Nick Tomasic said that it did.
The best and least that can be said of the now 89-year-old former DA, who did not return my message asking for comment on this case, is that he didn’t follow the law in the way he went about convicting her.
The jury was also misled at the sentencing hearing, when the state was allowed to introduce evidence that implied that Richardson had an earlier violent crime on her record.
She didn’t, but as a result, The Star’s coverage of her trial described her as “a 22-year-old mother with a criminal past.”
At sentencing, Tomasic argued that “what we’re here to decide is if there’s any reason by Meka Richardson should be forgiven,” but forgiveness wasn’t at issue.
I know from experience that for some readers, the takeaway from this column will be that I fully support killing Habitat for Humanity volunteers.
But it’s really just that I agree with those advocates of criminal justice reform, on the right as well as the left, who have for many years argued that prison is supposed to be for people we fear, not people we’re mad at.
Why is it, then, that our prisons are full of people we’re mad at? And why are we willing to spend the millions on incarcerating them for life that we would never spend to, say, make sure everyone who needs it has access to drug and alcohol treatment?
Does Wyandotte County conviction integrity unit still exist?
Richardson’s case, like so many others, should be reviewed by the Wyandotte County conviction integrity unit that District Attorney Mark Dupree ran on creating. The unit fell apart months ago, because of its own lack of integrity.
When I asked if it was back up and running, Dupree’s spokesman, Jonathan Carter, responded, “The Community Integrity Unit is running,” as if that answered anything. Asked for details, he provided none, so maybe it’s operating in secret, and like so much in KCK, accountable to no one.
Prosecutors continue to have no reason to fear they’ll pay any price at all for improving their cases by ignoring the law. Which is what happened here, though because Richardson is not innocent, the case against her needed no improving. A Hard 40 for an impaired 21-year-old incapable of premeditation is not what justice looks like.
Can anyone honestly believe that if she’d been able to afford the kind of representation that listened to her for more than an hour before her trial, she would have paid what Tomasic, in his furious closing argument, called “the ultimate price” in a case that “cries out for justice”?
Hang around any courthouse in America and you’ll see the extent to which our rotten-to-the-core system is based on race and resources — as in, whether or not the defendant can afford a real defense. As Sister Helen Prejean says, there are no millionaires on death row.
Richardson has seen the double standard firsthand during her years in the Topeka women’s prison: “My brother was murdered, by our second cousin, and (the woman who killed him) came here and in 10 years was gone” again. Because his Black life was deemed less of a loss, “also in Wyandotte County.”
Richardson may never get the second chance that we all say we believe in, but that our system only selectively, and quite predictably, makes possible.
In 1992, Nick Tomasic was free to show how angry he was at Meka Richardson. That so little has changed since then makes me angry.
This story was originally published December 22, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
