KS prosecutors let murder case against DA’s nephew sit, then say it’s too old to try

Deleisha Kelley’s entire family had already taken off work for the murder trial that was supposed to start last Monday. You know, the one in which Billy Dupree, nephew of Wyandotte County DA Mark Dupree, was to have gone on trial for strangling 16-year-old Kelley to death in 2014.

It was only the Friday before the trial was to have started, Kelley’s mother told me, that the family was informed that there would be no trial. Kellie Blewett, Kelley’s mother, said she learned only the day “when everybody found out” that Billy Dupree had been offered and had accepted a gold-plated plea deal taking the charge of first-degree murder down to involuntary manslaughter.

Dupree, a registered sex offender who had just gotten out of prison six months before he ended Kelley’s life, is already in prison now, for another violent crime. He will receive a sentence of only 15 years in this plea deal.

And the cherry on this caca sundae is that this new sentence will run concurrently with the one he’s already serving, so that he’ll end up serving only 4 or 5 additional years for strangling a 16-year-old —very much on purpose, according to testimony in the pretrial hearing.

Given that police had a 2015 DNA semen hit, cell phone tower information that said she’d spent the entire last day within .1 mile of Dupree’s apartment, and that she placed her last, aborted call to 911 from there, too, this looks like a complete cave.

Her body was dumped on the Missouri side of the state line, where a homeless man looking for cans found her covered with branches, tires and trash in an abandoned garage on East 24th Street. Carpet fibers found on the blanket she was wrapped in matched samples taken from Dupree’s apartment, also according to pretrial testimony.

Dupree’s next door neighbor testified at the September 2023 pretrial hearing that Dupree had knocked on his door on the morning of Dec. 18, 2014. He woke him up, asked if he was a “REAL n***a,” and then asked for help dumping her body. “He said he had a underage little girl over there and he had to kill her, choke her out,” the neighbor testified.

Why? Prosecutors said at the pretrial hearing that Dupree had just found out she was 16, and “did not want to go back to prison if someone had found out he had had sex” with yet another underage girl.

Nothing prosecutor Jessica Domme said to Kelley’s family in explanation — again, a very last-minute explanation — made any sense, said the victim’s mother. For instance, according to Blewett, Domme and others in the AG’s office said that they had a strong case they no doubt they could win. But then, they also said that the choice left to the family came down to “taking something instead of nothing. I was not told it was a lack of evidence.”

Prosecutors also told the family that the case was awfully old. “Oh, this is old, so you can’t guarantee” a conviction at trial, Blewett says she was told. But she would rather have seen the case go to trial, as painful as that would have been.

“My daughter did not have a chance to get old,” she said. And sure the case was old, after authorities let it sit for nearly a decade.

The case was not old when it was sent to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation and the AG’s office in 2016. So why, under AGs Derek Schmidt and then Kris Kobach, was it allowed to gather dust? Not that anything important has changed since then, as far as Kelley’s family knows.

As the pretrial hearing showed, the case had already been solved in early 2015, by the KCMO detectives who first handled the case.

Later, though, because the crime occurred in KCK, authorities there took over, and if there was any further progress on the case, it’s not reflected in any public records.

In August of 2016, Mark Dupree was elected Wyandotte County district attorney, and the defeated incumbent, Jerome Gorman, turned the case over to the Kansas AG’s office. Under the circumstances, that had to happen.

But then, year after year after year went by with no charges filed.

Everyone who thinks that four or five extra years for killing a teenager in cold blood is not a just outcome might want to ask former Kansas AG Derek Schmidt or current AG Kris Kobach about why the family waited so long for so little.

Dupree has two previous convictions involving sex with minors. He’s 39 now, and when he gets out of prison, Blewett says, “he won’t be too old to prey on other people’s kids.”

I take it Jessica Domme, lead prosecutor on the case for the AG’s office, is not very happy about what I’ve written about the case already.

I say that because Kansas defense attorney Carl Cornwell got in touch with me on Friday, unbidden, to say that he had talked to Domme about the case, though she hadn’t gotten into any details. He said he wanted me to know that he trusted that she must have had a good reason for doing what she did. “Jessica Domme is a hard prosecutor; she’s not going to cave. There must have been a legitimate reason.”

That’s possible, sure. But if she did have one, the family should have been given that reason, in detail and at length, instead of being told that there was a “last-minute” plea hearing that they could tune into via Zoom, because there wouldn’t even be time for them to get to the WyCo courthouse.

The only legit reason for a reduction of this magnitude, said former WyCo assistant DA and former Kansas federal prosecutor Mike Warner, who is running as a Republican for Douglas County District Attorney, “would be if the prosecution couldn’t meet the burden of proof. But you’d explain that to the family.”

One thing I will say for Domme, though, is that ultimately, this fiasco lands at her boss Kris Kobach’s feet.

And at those of Kobach’s predecessor, Derek Schmidt, who is now running for Congress. “Let’s bring common sense back to Kansas,” his campaign website says. Not like this, please.

Charges were not even filed against Billy Dupree until January of 2023, soon after Kobach was elected.

On Schmidt’s last day in office, January 8, 2023, his office put out a press release about the case. “In August ‘22,” it said, “the Kansas Attorney General’s Office requested the KBI join the investigation when the KCMOPD determined the murder had taken place in KCKS and not in their jurisdiction.”

That’s simply not true: Court records show that the KCPD knew soon after the murder, by early 2015, where the crime had occurred. Schmidt did not answer a detailed phone message seeking a comment. If he ever does respond, I will update this column.

Kobach’s spokeswoman, Danedri Herbert, told me what prosecutors have said the deal of a lifetime is not about: “Any suggestion that the judge or the Attorney General’s Office was influenced in any way by Mr. Dupree’s family connections is false.”

Here’s the complete statement from Herbert: “In determining whether to enter into a plea agreement, ethical prosecutors must consider a host of factors, including the interests of the victim, the likelihood of obtaining a conviction at trial, the desirability of prompt and certain disposition of the case, the probable sentence or other consequences if the defendant is convicted, the probable effect on witnesses, and the expense of trial and appeal.”

“In this case, after consultation with the victim’s family, prosecutors determined that it was in the interests of justice to enter a plea agreement that guaranteed Mr. Dupree would serve many years in prison. It should be noted that, in exchange for his plea, Mr. Dupree has agreed to a sentence that is more severe than what the Kansas sentencing guidelines would ordinarily require.”

Let’s take all of those points in order.

First, again, the interests of the victim were not served, according to her family. If there was some late-breaking problem with getting a conviction, they should have been brought onboard, which according to them did not happen.

A prompt disposition of the case? That boat sailed and sank a while ago.

Re: the expense of a trial and appeal, please don’t talk to me about what an unaffordable luxury justice for a 16-year-old is.

The reference to “consultation to the victim’s family” is wildly misleading in their view. “I would never be fine with going from a charge of first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter,” Blewett told me. “I was advised of it.” She was asked her opinion, she said, and then that opinion was ignored. “Knowledge is not agreement, and yes, my feelings are hurt.”

Four or five years tacked onto Dupree’s current sentence is not “many years in prison.” And while Dupree has agreed to a sentence that’s longer than in other involuntary manslaughter cases, it’s shorter than for other premeditated, cold-blooded homicides.

Billy Dupree’s defense attorney, Antwone Floyd, who used to work for Mark Dupree, did not return my message asking him what happened.

This is Billy Dupree’s third violation as a registered sex offender, and the Kansas Sentencing Commission should take a look at this, though both Jessica Domme and Mark Dupree are on that 17-member commission.

This Friday, the AG’s spokeswoman called to offer me an interview with prosecutor Jessica Domme after the formal sentencing hearing on Nov. 22.

I said sure, I’d love to sit down with her, but would be writing a lot sooner, as in right away. The interview offer was “conditional,” she said, on what I might write between then and now. She’ll give the interview to someone, Herbert said.

If in that interview, which my spidey sense tells me I will not be getting, Domme reveals a perfectly reasonable explanation, then I’ll take it all back.

But until then, every time I hear Derek Schmidt talk about common sense and Kris Kobach talk about how much he cares about victims, my thought bubble will contain just two words: Deleisha Kelley.

“They ripped off the scabs for nothing,” her mother told me. “The system has failed.” The system is people, and yes, they did.

This story was originally published September 23, 2024 at 5:06 AM.