BACKGROUND FROM KANSAS CITY STAR ON THE PAPERS IMPACTFUL REPORTING ON KEVIN STRICKLAND'S STORY: "The Kansas City Star has been covering Kevin Strickland and his innocence claim since September 2020, when we published a deeply reported story from Luke Nozicka that explored the details surrounding the 1978 triple murder Strickland is accused of helping to carry out, as well as the men who have admitted guilt, and the the only witness to the murders saying Strickland is innocent. That report from The Star served in part as the basis for local prosecutors’ review of Strickland’s case in November 2020. Now, Jackson County prosecutors, Kansas City’s mayor and others agreed he deserved to be exonerated, but the state, and specifically the Attorney General’s Office maintains he’s guilty."
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "In a 2020 investigation, The Star reported that, for decades, two men who pleaded guilty swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the killings. A third, uncharged suspect also said there “couldn’t be a more innocent person” than Strickland. The Star also reported that Douglas tried to recant her testimony for years. John O’Connor, a defense attorney who worked on the case at the time as an investigator for the prosecutor’s office, recalled that the case against Strickland “rises and falls” on Douglas. The testimony from Douglas’ loved ones illustrated that alleged wrongful convictions harm not only prisoners proclaiming their innocence, but at times also the witnesses who helped send them away. Strickland, 62, donned an orange prison uniform with a red shirt underneath, his hands cuffed. He sat in a wheelchair as he watched each witness testify. Earlier in the day, he took the stand and told the judge he had “absolutely nothing to do with these murders.” He also said he once spoke on the phone with Douglas after he was convicted. She “immediately apologized,”.
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STORY: "'The Wrong Guy': Eyewitness relatives say she recanted her ID of Kevin Strickland," The Kansas City Star (Reporter Luke Nozicka) reports, published on November 8, 2021.
PHOTO CAPTION: "Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker questions Kevin Strickland during an evidentiary hearing regarding Strickland’s innocence on Monday, Nov. 8, 2021 in Jackson County Circuit Court in Kansas City. Many people, including Peters Baker, believe Strickland was wrongly convicted of a triple murder in 1978. Strickland has been incarcerated for the past 43 years."
GIST: "The mother, sister and daughter of the only eyewitness to a 1978 triple murder, whose testimony was paramount in sending Kevin Strickland to prison, said Monday she confided in them that he was wrongly convicted.
“She said, ‘Mother, I picked the wrong guy,” the eyewitness’ mother, Senoria Douglas, testified during the first day of Strickland’s evidentiary hearing at the Jackson County courthouse. “She was very disturbed about it.”
On that fateful night April 25, 1978, four suspects tied up and shot four victims at a bungalow at 6934 S. Benton Ave. in south Kansas City.
The lone survivor, 20-year-old Cynthia Douglas, suffered a shotgun wound above her left knee and played dead.
After the killers fled, Douglas — who was covered in her best friend’s blood and brain matter — stumbled out of the home, screaming.
Before Douglas was placed in an ambulance, detectives came away with the names of two suspects she knew and recognized: Vincent Bell, 21, and Kilm Adkins, 19. She could not, however, identify two other suspects who also fled into the night.
The next day, though, she described a shotgun-wielding suspect to her sister’s boyfriend, who suggested the gunman might be Strickland because he knew Bell and Adkins. Douglas later identified Strickland as the shooter at his two trials.
But on Monday, three of Douglas’ relatives and a former co-worker testified she told them over the years that she identified the wrong person.
Douglas, who died at age 57 in 2015 due to complications of heart disease, also told some of them she was pressured by police detectives to pick Strickland during a lineup.
Douglas’ sister, Cecile “Cookie” Simmons, 65, said Douglas was haunted by the shooting and suffered from survivor’s guilt.
She continued to have nightmares about the execution-style killings; she couldn’t get it out of her head.
She wished she had died, Simmons said. She was also deeply bothered by what she believed was her wrongful identification of Strickland, then 18. “I didn’t never choose that boy,” Simmons recalled Douglas say, adding that Strickland’s conviction was based on “guilt by association.”
In answering questions from Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who is trying to free Strickland, Simmons said her sister reached out to a host of officials in her effort to get Strickland’s case back in court: a judge, a well-known civil rights leader, a member of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, a now-former Missouri governor.
No one would listen to her, Simmons said.
Simmons described the night her sister was shot. Many people, including Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, believe Strickland was wrongly convicted of a triple murder in 1978.
Douglas was a survivor and the lone eyewitness to the shooting.
Before she took the stand, Simmons signed an August affidavit saying that if her younger sister were still alive, she believes she would “tell others that Strickland was innocent and needs to come home.”
Judge James Welsh also heard from Douglas’ daughter, 41-year-old Sherri Jordan, who is named after Sherri Black, Douglas’ best friend who was killed in the shooting.
Jordan testified that her mother told her about her wrongful identification about four or five times, starting more than a decade ago.
Douglas knew Strickland was not there that night, Jordan said, but she felt rushed and pressed by police to identify him. “Ever since then she’s been trying to get him out,” Jordan said.
During cross-examination from a lawyer with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which contends Strickland is guilty, Jordan said she, herself, does not know if her mother’s trial testimony was accurate or not because she did not witness the shooting — which unfolded before she was born.
Jordan’s grandmother, Senoria Douglas, also said her daughter tried to set the record straight.
In a previous interview with The Star, Senoria Douglas said her daughter told her she was pressured — by whom, she did not know — to identify Strickland. She was traumatized and didn’t know any better, relatives have said.
She recalled how officers guarded their home after the shooting and how her daughter had to leave town — to Oklahoma City — for protection. “You put that in your report,” she told a reporter in 2019, speaking slowly but confidently, an emphasis between each word. “Let. Him. Go. Set that man free.”
In a 2020 investigation, The Star reported that, for decades, two men who pleaded guilty swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the killings. A third, uncharged suspect also said there “couldn’t be a more innocent person” than Strickland.
The Star also reported that Douglas tried to recant her testimony for years.
John O’Connor, a defense attorney who worked on the case at the time as an investigator for the prosecutor’s office, recalled that the case against Strickland “rises and falls” on Douglas.
The testimony from Douglas’ loved ones illustrated that alleged wrongful convictions harm not only prisoners proclaiming their innocence, but at times also the witnesses who helped send them away.
Strickland, 62, donned an orange prison uniform with a red shirt underneath, his hands cuffed. He sat in a wheelchair as he watched each witness testify. Earlier in the day, he took the stand and told the judge he had “absolutely nothing to do with these murders.”
He also said he once spoke on the phone with Douglas after he was convicted. She “immediately apologized,”
Strickland claimed, and he said she needed to sign an affidavit.
The AG’s office has noted, though, that Douglas never signed one before she died.
At least two other witnesses are expected to testify that Douglas recanted. One of them, Eric Wesson, publisher of The Call, Kansas City’s Black newspaper, has said Douglas twice tried to get the weekly paper to write about Strickland. “She wanted to right or correct that wrong,” Wesson told The Star.
Douglas realized she was wrong to identify Strickland after she sat through the plea hearing of one of the men who admitted guilt in 1979, her ex-husband has said.
At that hearing, Bell repeatedly professed Strickland’s innocence. At that moment, Douglas approached a prosecutor and told him she should not have picked Strickland.
As Douglas related to her former husband, the prosecutor told her to go away and threatened to charge her with perjury.
Prosecutors on Monday also called to the stand Julia Snyder, a latent print examiner with the Kansas City Police Department. She testified she recently compared 60 prints at the South Benton home to Strickland’s fingerprints at the request of the attorney general’s office — and that none matched him. One found on the murder weapon also did not belong to him, she said.
Kenneth Blucker — an attorney at the Midwest Innocence Project from 2008 to 2011 — was called to testify about an email sent by Douglas’ work address to the innocence group in 2009. Prosecutors say the email sent from her family courts account — which ended with “@courts.mo.gov” — is a full recantation, while the AG’s office has argued it is impossible to know if she, herself, sent it.
Its subject line: “Wrongfully charged.” “I am seeking info on how to help someone that was wrongfully accused,” it said. “I was the only eyewitness and things were not clear back then, but now I know more and would like to help this person if I can.”
Blucker responded that it was the nonprofit’s policy to only move forward if a request came from the prisoner seeking services. He told her to have the incarcerated person write them. He ended his email by saying: “Best wishes in your quest for justice.” Testimony is expected to continue Tuesday morning."
The entire story read:
https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article255631561.html
