"We are trying to understand your theory. You don't have any idea why Roger Golubski would want to frame you?"
"I don't know the motivations," Brian Betts answered Adam Stolte, who heads WyCo's Conviction Integrity Unit. "That ain't my job."
By Melinda Henneberger
When I first wrote about cousins Celester McKinney and Brian Betts five years ago, I said this is one twisty, mucky story, so put on your hiking boots and meet two more men who’ve been in prison half their lives for a Kansas City, Kansas, killing that the evidence says they did not commit.
After all I’ve learned about this case since then, though, I need to amend that slightly: What evidence? According to testimony at a Monday hearing in McKinney’s case, there was almost no investigation into the 1997 murder of 17-year-old Gregory Miller. The victim was the nephew by marriage of disgraced and now deceased former KCKPD Detective Roger Golubski, who killed himself on what would have been the first day of his first federal trial last year.
I only learned from Monday’s testimony that neither McKinney nor Betts — nor McKinney’s brother Dwayne McKinney, who was also tried for first-degree murder in Miller’s death, but was acquitted — was at any point interviewed by the KCKPD. Feel free to read that over again. They didn’t feel the need to talk to these young men, even to try and get them to confess or implicate one another? “No one even came to me and said, ‘Hey, where were you?’” Betts told the court.
Betts and McKinney were paroled three years ago, after 25 years behind bars, but are still trying to prove their innocence. An expert for McKinney, who is represented by the Midwest Innocence Project, testified that in the hours after Miller was shot to death in the middle of the night on Dec. 30 of 1997, police talked to only three people. One was Miller’s uncle, Jimmy Spencer, with whom he had been living. Miller’s relationship to Golubski was never disclosed to the defense, and neither was Spencer’s.
Spencer, Golubski’s brother-in-law, initially said he’d heard shots but had seen nothing. Later, he not only remembered hearing “up to 16 to 17 shots” but could tell that “they sounded like a 12-gauge shotgun and an SK.” According to court filings by attorneys for Betts and McKinney, Spencer told a friend that Golubski had fed him that information.
By the time of the trial, Spencer had remembered that after hearing the shots and running to the door “I can see through a light that somebody was standing there shooting a gun” and standing over his nephew’s body.
Another neighbor, Alfred Burdette, now deceased, said he saw two men running away down the alley behind the house where Betts and both McKinney brothers lived with their uncle, Carter Betts. Later, Burdette changed his story and said the men — somewhere between 5’ 8” and 6’ tall — had instead run into the Betts home. Celester McKinney is 5’ 3”.
The third person police spoke to at the scene, a Miss Fuller, also said she saw two men running away. She was apparently never interviewed again at all.
It was weeks later that police got around to contacting Carter Betts. He says he was eventually coerced into saying his nephews, who were barely on speaking terms with each other at the time, and were asleep in different apartments in the house at the time of the shooting, had confessed after he found them gathered around the murder weapons. According to his statement, they told him they’d killed “that Greg cat,” which is not something any of them would have or did say or do, Brian Betts testified on Monday.
None of them had a criminal record, or any record of violence, or a motive, but left their beds — Betts was in his with a girlfriend and their newborn — at 3 a.m. to kill a neighbor kid for no reason, then sat around waiting to tell Uncle Carter about it.
The expert for the defense at Monday’s hearing, federal agent Jennifer Steel, found fault with the fact that the KCKPD detectives had knocked on no other doors, that night or ever. They did not seem to even have looked for the guns used to kill Miller, which never were located, and did none of the forensic testing that was available at the time.
Had they done so, Steel said, the shell casings could have been matched to a gun, or even to the suspect’s DNA. The round found in the victim’s body wasn’t sent for testing, either, she said, and though multiple drugs were found in the victim’s system, “I didn’t see any follow-up related to drugs at all.”
Brian Betts testified on Monday that Spencer’s home, where Miller lived, very near them, was a drug house where Golubski was known to spend time.
‘Rotten from the beginning’
In his opening statement on behalf of McKinney, Evan Glasner, senior staff attorney of the Midwest Innocence Project, said, “This case has been rotten from the very beginning.” The WyCo prosecutor of the case, Dan Cahill, now a judge, said at trial “that even he had questions about the way police handled it,” Glasner said. “It reeks of ineptitude and misconduct.”
This hearing is about whether McKinney had ineffective counsel at his 2022 hearing on Golubski’s potential involvement in the case. But McKinney is hoping that it will lead to either a dismissal of his case, or a new trial.
His defense counsel in 2022, Sarah Swain, who had no previous post-conviction experience but took the case pro bono after McKinney wrote to her from prison, “knew little and sought to learn even less,” Glasner told the court. She “was ignorant of 100s of relevant documents. There was clear evidence of motivation of others to kill Gregory Miller,” because of his involvement in the drug business, and potentially, as a witness in two police cases, but none of that came out at the hearing.
“This case made no sense,” Glasner went on. “ The killing “was a message,” he said, “but it was a message that these boys could not and did not send.”
Swain called me out of nowhere — I’d never spoken to her before — and shared documents that convinced me of McKinney’s innocence five years ago. She’s since surrendered her law license, and I haven’t talked to her in at least a year, but it’s only right to say that she threw herself into her client’s defense.
And that the recanted testimony of Carter Betts was always the whole case.
Yet when Golubski took the stand in 2022, while already under federal indictment for civil rights violations involving rape and kidnapping, his word still seemed to have counted for something. He testified that he’d had nothing to do with the Miller case, didn’t even know the victim and had never coerced anybody.
On Monday, McKinney’s team said Miller had been a police witness in two previous murder cases. They produced a document from the KCKPD’s investigative files that showed that Golubski had reported that Ethel Spencer — to whom he was married at one point — had called to report that Gregory Miller and another of her nephews had information to share about a murder.
So according to Golubski himself back in 1996, he did know Miller.
“Roger Golubski is a well-documented liar,” Glasner said on Monday. Correction: Was a well-documented liar. “When he testified before this court in ‘22 he lied,” including about whether he knew the victim.
From the DA’s office, there were the usual mixed messages on Monday.
‘These cases should have sunlight’
Adam Stolte, who heads Wyandotte County DA Mark Dupree’s Conviction Integrity Unit, stood and said “my appearance represents a shift in how we’re going to handle” cases that might involve Golubski. “Our theory is that any of these cases should have sunlight. We have a responsibility to not hinder anybody from making one of these claims.”
I definitely liked the prospect of shifts and sunlight.
But, “that being said,” Stolte continued, he did not think defense could prevail in this particular case even if they did manage to prove ineffective counsel. And when Stolte cross-examined Betts, it did not seem like anything had shifted.
He wanted to know more about what Betts meant when he said Golubski was a constant presence in the neighborhood, always parked at one of several women’s houses.
“That would have been important to know” when he was there, Stolte ventured, “because you’d watch out when he was around.”
“We’re trying to understand your theory,” he told Betts. “And is it your theory that you were framed? And that was by Roger Golubski?’
He made this sound like a wild impossibility, though it’s happened before, and surely the Conviction Integrity Unit is pursuing other such cases, or so we keep hearing.
You’ve said you never dealt drugs, Stolte said to Betts on the stand. No, Betts said, he hadn’t said that, and no, he had not. “I have dealt drugs in my life, yes I have.”
“And is there a special reason why Golubski would want to frame you and your cousins rather than find the actual killer?” Again, the tone of incredulity.
No, Betts said. “I don’t know the motivations. That ain’t my job.”
“You don’t have any idea why Golubski would want to frame you?” Stolte repeated. “No, no I don’t. All I know is I was not involved. Golubski was involved.”
The least of his crimes
Senior Judge Gunnar Sundby is presiding at this hearing, just as he did at the one in 2022. Back then, Sundby denied a motion opposed by DA Mark Dupree’s office that would have granted the defense access to its full file on the case. After that, the defense said it was fighting in handcuffs.
That Golubski lied on the stand at that hearing was the least of his crimes. But that he seemed to have been taken more seriously than others who testified under oath shows how hollow the talk of of a brand new day in WyCo can seem.
In 2022, Sundby said it would be “very easy” to use “this new cloud of doubt cast about Mr. Golubski” to try to throw out convictions, but he wasn’t going to do that. It was Carter Betts and the recantation he’s been making for decades that he did not find credible.
The judge seemed to be struggling to stay awake in court on Monday, which I mention because it’s such a metaphor for a system that still seems so underreactive to ongoing injustices.
On Tuesday, Sarah Swain is expected to testify.
Thanks for sticking with this. There may be sunlight in Wyandot County one day, but the clouds are pretty heavy.
Keep at it. Nobody else will. Looking at justice, past and present, in Wyandotte County is like looking down into a pit of snakes.