‘Y’all never monitored him and we were never safe’: Golubski plays God one last time | Opinion
Ex-KCK police detective Roger Golubski did not show up in court on Monday on account of being dead.
Rather than face even the first minute of jury selection in the first of two federal trials about his decades of raping Black women and girls in the community he was supposed to be protecting, he apparently shot himself.
If that is what happened, it’s criminal that someone charged with terrorizing so many for so long managed to have a gun and the opportunity to use it.
And if, as his defense attorney Chris Joseph said in court, 71-year-old Golubski really was “despondent about the media coverage” — which would surprise me, given that he’d been getting this same kind of coverage for years — then he should have been in protective custody.
Then again, Joseph said on his way out of the courthouse that Golubski’s apparent suicide was “truly unexpected,” and that he’d had no clue his client was thinking of such a thing. I’m not sure why this possibility wouldn’t have crossed your mind if you actually believed your client to be despondent, but that’s what he said.
I also don’t know what happened on Golubski’s back porch, where Edwardsville police found him dead just after 9 a.m. on Monday. But I do know that Magistrate Judge Rachel Schwartz’s decision to allow the former homicide captain to sleep in his own bed for the last two years, even after he was charged with sex trafficking minors, turned out to be fatal.
So was her decision to let him stay at home pending trial even after he was caught violating the terms of his release by stopping for lunch in a KCK Culver’s, where someone in the restaurant filmed the outing. When that happened, prosecutors again asked that he be jailed and Schwartz again said no. That day, he left the courthouse “cracking up.” He has always enjoyed special treatment.
A condition of pretrial release: No guns
One of the conditions of Golubski’s pretrial release, according to his detention order, was that he have no access to guns. Did anyone supposedly overseeing his probation ever check on him? This was someone’s job, and clearly, that job did not get done. Will there be any accountability for that failure now that there will be no accountability for him?
The same system that was prosecuting this man for terrible crimes somehow never seemed to fully appreciate how dangerous he was. Yes, he had been in kidney failure for years, but could also have gotten dialysis in jail. His three co-defendants in the second sex trafficking conspiracy case against him remained behind bars pending trial, but not him.
And now, as a result, his victims have been cheated again, after risking so much to come forward. Still, two of the three women I spoke to who had expected to tell their stories in court said that they see his suicide as a guilty plea, followed by a self-imposed death sentence.
The third is the Navy veteran I wrote about in 2021, who told me that Golubski tried to rape her in his office in police headquarters while she screamed and no one responded: “I got loud because I got scared — hysterical, screaming, kicking. Everyone had to have heard me,” she told me then. “I know my head hit the door a couple of times.”
Until today, I had not talked to her in several years; she had never told anyone else outside her family what had happened that day, and after I wrote about her, the FBI interviewed her and then asked her not to speak about the case again to anyone.
Since we last spoke, she said, she had been forced to move to another state to avoid being harassed by a private investigator Golubski had hired. “That scared me pretty bad, and it was not cool, triggering” the post-traumatic stress disorder she was already suffering as a result of the assault. She was just getting on the plane on Monday, she said, to come to Kansas to testify, when federal prosecutors called to tell her that she didn’t need to come after all.
And now? “What a coward! I screamed and cried. So many people worked so hard for this” trial to happen, and “I feel like a bullet in the head just wasn’t good enough for him. But I’m not going to lie, I feel some closure that he’s gone. Dead, jail — I would have taken either one.”
She wonders how the other eight women who were going to testify about what happened to them feel, because she’s never talked to any of them and has been steering clear of news reports about the case, too.
‘In charge of getting himself to court’
Ophelia Williams, who says Golubski raped her for the first of many times after he came to her house to arrest her 14-year-old twins for a double homicide, told me she had been nervous about testifying but also hopeful that she might finally hear him pronounced guilty in a court of law.
“Oh boy, I wanted that.” But to her, “He killed himself because he was guilty, so the truth prevailed.”
Just one thing, though, before she fully believes he’s no longer a threat: “I want to see the body.” And that thing about him supposedly being “despondent over media coverage” was so silly: “In that case, he would have been dead a long time ago.”
Monday night, she said she thought she’d watch the movie “A Few Good Men” again, just to hear Jack Nicholson’s character say what she’s feeling, which is that this whole legal system “can’t handle the truth.”
Michelle Houcks, who was going to testify that Golubski raped her after offering her a ride home in his patrol car, and then threatened to kill her and her brother if she reported him, is plain angry. “I’m glad I don’t have to tell the things that happened to me, but I wanted him to face what he made so many others face” even when they had done nothing wrong.
She’s not sure that his death was a suicide, but if it was, then “all it did was show the guilt.” And if it was, then what she has to say to the government she trusted with her story is, “Y’all never monitored him and we were never safe at any time because this man had a gun!”
“This is the feds’ fault, too, because he should not have been out. Y’all never knew what this man was, so our lives were in danger this whole time and y’all didn’t do anything about it.”
After Golubski’s lawyer said in court on Monday morning that his client couldn’t be reached, someone from the U.S. Marshals Service told the judge that Golubski was “still in his house” as of 8:57 a.m., according to his monitoring device. That’s when U.S. District Court Judge Toby Crouse said yes, he’d issue a warrant that he be picked up and brought in.
The U.S. Marshal for Kansas, Golubski’s former boss Ron Miller, said when I called him that because Golubski had been on pretrial release, “he was in charge of getting himself to court.”
For an hour and 44 minutes, Miller impressed on me how sorry he was that the case had been dismissed, because now there wouldn’t be testimony, including from him — “I’d probably have been on the stand” — on how what I’ve been writing about Golubski’s superiors knowing anything about anything that he might have done was “crap” and “not true, not true, not true.”
“It would have been nice for that to have come out in trial,” he said, “with you taking notes and hopefully a sketch artist.”
“I’m stunned by such a statement; this was well-known” that Golubski was who he was and did what he was charged with doing, said Cheryl Pilate, the attorney for Lamonte McIntyre, who after being framed by Golubski served 23 years for a double homicide he did not commit. She said that virtually all of the many Golubski victims she interviewed while investigating McIntyre’s innocence case and civil suit told her the same thing: Golubski did not act alone.
’The bullet is an admission of guilt’
The only possible good news here is that the truth may still come out in a courtroom in a civil suit brought by some Golubski victims against the Unified Government and several former KCKPD chiefs, including Ron Miller.
William Skepnek, the Lawrence attorney bringing that case, said he wasn’t really surprised by Golubski’s death because so many of the ex-cop’s enablers stood to gain from it. “The bullet is an admission of guilt. The only question is who pulled the trigger.”
All of the defendants in that civil case are making a statute of limitations claim, saying the allegations are too old to be heard in court. If the suit is the “crap” that Miller says that it is, then maybe he should drop that claim and look forward to this second chance to have his testimony heard.
This gory, gutting outcome is exactly what so many of Golubski’s victims said all along would happen — that he would either shoot himself or else would be helped to his death by those who had reason to fear what would come out in court.
As I wrote only a couple of days ago, I never believed that either of those things would happen, and obviously, I could not have been more wrong. Somehow, I actually underestimated the bullying former cop’s cowardice.
But how like him to play God, and to kick his victims one last time on his way out.
This story was originally published December 3, 2024 at 7:27 AM.
