A white Kansas detective accused of preying on Black women for decades faces trial

[Pelican Press 0]

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A white Kansas detective accused of preying on ****** women for decades faces trial

KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — A white Kansas police detective accused of ********* assaulting ****** women and ****** and terrorizing those who tried to ****** back is about to go on federal trial, part of a tangle of cases tied to decades of alleged ******.

Prosecutors say female residents of poor neighborhoods in Kansas City, Kansas, feared that if they crossed paths with

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he’d demand ******* favors and threaten to harm or jail their relatives. He is charged with six felony counts of violating women’s civil rights, and jury selection in his trial is set to begin Monday in a federal courthouse in Topeka.

The case has outraged the community and deepened the historical distrust of law enforcement, often seen as being more heavy-handed in predominately ****** neighborhoods.

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Golubski, now 71, is accused of ********* assaulting one woman starting when she was barely a teenager and another after her sons were arrested. If a jury convicts him, he could **** in prison.

The trial is the latest in a string of lawsuits and ********* allegations that has led the county prosecutor’s office to begin a

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effort to reexamine cases Golubski worked on during his 35 years on the force. One double ******* case Golubski investigated already has resulted in an

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, and an

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is suing to obtain police records.

Golubski has pleaded not guilty, and his attorney has said that lawsuits over the allegations are an “inspiration for fabrication” by his accusers. But prosecutors said that, along with the two women whose accounts are the heart of the ********* case, seven others will testify that Golubski abused or harassed them.

“Every time I turn around, I’m looking,” said Jermeka Hobbs, who has filed a separate lawsuit against Golubski and is not a witness in the trial. Her lawsuit says she was groomed to be one of “Golubski’s ******” and submitted to ******* advances fearing that he would bust her for drugs. “I’m thinking somebody is after me. I have no peace at all.”

A veteran detective patrolling poor neighborhoods

Fellow officers once revered Golubski for his ability to clear cases, and he rose to the rank of captain in Kansas City, Kansas, before retiring there in 2010 and then working on a suburban police force for six more years. His former partner served a stint as police chief.

Golubski now looks nothing like the influential officer he was. He is under

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and undergoing kidney dialysis treatments three times a week. That will limit his trial to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

His attorney, Chris Joseph, said in a statement that some of the allegations against Golubski are 20 to 30 years old, adding, “In public filings, the prosecution has acknowledged that the verdict will turn entirely on the accusers’ credibility.”

But Jim McCloskey, founder of Centurion, a New Jersey nonprofit working to free innocent people, described Golubski in a court hearing as the “dirtiest cop I’ve ever encountered.”

Stories about Golubski remained just whispers in the neighborhoods near Kansas City’s former cattle stockyards partly because of the extreme ******** of a place where some homes are boarded up. One neighborhood where Golubski worked is part of Kansas’ second-poorest zip code.

****** was abundant there, as were ***** dealers and prostitutes, said Max Seifert, a former Kansas City, Kansas, police officer who graduated from the police academy with Golubski in 1975.

A fellow officer: ‘A boys will be boys type of thing’

Seifert said police misconduct was tolerated in the department. He described how informants and Golubski’s ex-wife complained that Golubski was soliciting prostitutes. Golubski also was caught having **** with a woman in his office, he said.

“It’s kind of like a boys will be boys type thing,” said Seifert, who was forced into early retirement for refusing to

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by a federal agent in 2003.

McCloskey said in an interview that Golubski had women “at his mercy.”

The inquiry into Golubski stems from the case of Lamonte McIntyre, who started writing to McCloskey’s nonprofit nearly two decades ago.

McIntyre was just 17 in 1994 when he was arrested and charged in connection with a double *********, within hours of the *******. He had an alibi; no physical evidence linked him to the killings; and an eyewitness believed the ******* was an underling of a local ***** dealer. Golubski and the dealer have since been charged in a

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of running a violent **** trafficking operation.

The eyewitness only testified that McIntyre was the ******* after Golubski and a now disbarred

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threatened to take her children away, she alleged in a lawsuit.

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said in a 2014 affidavit that she wonders whether her refusal to grant regular ******* favors to Golubski prompted him to retaliate against her son.

“She, like many people in the community, just viewed the police as all-powerful,” said Cheryl Pilate, an attorney who helped

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in 2017.

In 2022, the local government agreed to pay $12.5 million to McIntyre and his mother to

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after a deposition in which Golubski invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent 555 times. The state also

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$1.5 million.

“That was the thread that gave people some courage,” said Lindsay Runnels, who serves on the board of the Midwest Innocence Project.

Women say they were threatened and mocked

Prosecutors say Golubski drove one of the women at the center of their ********* case to a ********* and told her to find a spot to dig her own grave. He ********* assaulted her repeatedly, starting when she was just in middle school, leading her to suffer a miscarriage, court filings say.

Once, prosecutors say, he forced her to crawl on the ground with a dog leash around her neck in a remote spot near the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers. With no one around, he is accused of chanting, “Down by the river, said a hank a pank; Where they won’t find her until she stank.”

Golubski introduced himself to Ophelia Williams, the other woman at the center of the case, by complimenting her legs and nightgown as police searched her home, prosecutors said.

Williams was terrified at the time because her 14-year-old twins had just been arrested in a double *********. They ultimately admitted to the ****** so police would free their 13-year-old brother, Williams said in a separate

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Golubski began ********* assaulting her, alternating between threatening her and claiming he could help her sons, according to court records in the ********* case. The twins are now 40 and remain behind bars. The lawsuit she is part of questions their confessions.

The Associated Press generally does not name alleged victims of ******* ********, but Williams has told her story publicly.

Williams said in her lawsuit that she once mentioned making a complaint. She claims Golubski told her: “Report me to who, the police? I am the police.”

___

Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.

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