Investigative Reporting

by Ronald J. Lawrence

"It never occurred to me to look closer. There was nothing suspicious."

A witness

12:13 p. m. July 24, 1970 – Philip J. Lucier, president of Continental Telephone Corp., drove his black Cadillac into the parking lot of the Pierre Laclede Building, 7701 Forsyth Blvd., in the Clayton business district of suburban St. Louis. He and two telephone company vice-presidents, James Robb and James Napier, had decided on the spur of the moment to have lunch at the St. Louis Club. No one knew they were going there.

by Ronald J. Lawrence

"I never thought anything about cracking a guy.
So what? It was just something you had to do.
I figured the guy deserved it."
Jesse Stoneking

It was a little after 1 a.m. in 1988 when the swarthy, ruggedly handsome man stepped out onto the porch of his mother's house in north St. Louis County. The mid-summer day had been one of stifling humidity and heat. He could hear a distant rumbling of thunder and see a glimmer of lightning. Above him rain-laden clouds low on the horizon forebode an approaching storm. It was what much of Jesse Stoneking's life of 42 years had been about. One storm after another, endless crises, and of late, countless burdens that would break the wills of weaker men.

by J. J. Maloney

There are those who call Randy Kraft the ''Freeway Killer'' and they are wrong. William Bonin, executed at San Quentin in 1996, was the Freeway Killer.

There are police agencies who say the media were wrong to name Bonin the Freeway Killer – that that 'title' belonged to Kraft, whose murder spree began before Bonin's. They too are wrong.

Dennis McDougal's 1991 book Angel of Darkness touts Kraft's murders as ''...the most heinous murder spree of the century.'' That is wrong. McDougal's book is compelling, shocking, detailed, well written and inaccurate.

You cannot discuss the murders Randy Kraft committed without also discussing the Freeway Killer case.

by J.J. Maloney

He didn't have a name so we called him the Freeway Killer.

He was a murky presence, cruising up and down the freeways of Orange County and neighboring counties, stalking the dimmed tinsel byways of Hollywood, picking up those sad youngsters who came there in search of a dream and found a nightmare instead.

The police would later find the nude bodies sprawled behind filling stations, or in dumpsters -- cast off the way a child discards a doll that has served its purpose.

In January, 1980, I had never heard of The Orange County Register. I had heard of smaller papers and larger papers, but The Register remained anonymous beyond the boundaries of Orange County.

by J.J. Maloney

Every city dreams of greatness. To achieve an identity it constructs symbols (the Eiffel Tower, the St. Louis Arch), or, like New Orleans, has an area, such as the French Quarter, that assumes an identity of its own.

Traditionally Kansas City has been known as a cowtown. It was famous for its stockyards, and the biggest annual event still is the American Royal, during which journalists shake cow patties from their shoes. Kansas Citians are sensitive about that image, feeling it gives them a "hick" reputation.

They point with pride to the Country Club Plaza or Westport, but neither has ever achieved a national reputation. They promote Kansas City as the birthplace of jazz, a claim other cities dispute. They go so far as to call Kansas City the home of great barbecue; local politicians devote great amounts of space to that subject. Such is the desperation for an identity.

It is in this context that River Quay must be seen. River Quay was a light industrial area at the north edge of the city. In the early 1970s a movement began to convert River Quay into a "family entertainment area" filled with rustic restaurants, shops, nightclubs and artists—-a miniature Greenwich Village.

by J.J. Maloney

Carol Drummond could feel feel the noose tightening around her throat.

For more than five years the 38-year-old Belton resident had been stalked, threatened and vilified by the friends of Phillip Hancock, her late husband.

In August, 1991, Drummond called police after Hancock threatened her with a bayonet. In December, 1991, the 6-foot-2-inch Hancock hurled Drummond to the ground, breaking her collarbone because her dog had urinated on the floor. A judge ordered Hancock to stay away from Drummond.

Hancock then lived with a friend, Mark Lassince, until he made up with Drummond and moved back in with her, in January, 1992. Also living in the house were Jeffrey Wayne Gardner, an attractive, soft-spoken, 28-year-old boarder, and Jackie, the 8 year old daughter of Hancock and Drummond (she kept her own name after the marriage).

by J.J. Maloney

[Editor's Note: to read more about this case go to http://kcfirefighterscase.com ]

For many years Frank and Skip Sheppard were the Injun Joes of Marlborough - the down-on-its-heels neighborhood in southeast Kansas City where six firefighters were killed in an explosion Nov. 29, 1988. Like the character by that name in Tom Sawyer, they were perceived by many as evil characters in whose wake woe would surely follow.

These two brothers - large, forbidding Native Americans, scared people. When Skip Sheppard was in a car wreck that killed his fiancée and left him in a coma, some people said he deliberately drove in front of a truck to get rid of the fiancée.

So it's no surprise that Frank and Skip were among the early suspects in the firefighter case - and that Frank's girlfriend, Darlene Edwards, Frank's nephew Bryan Sheppard, and Bryan's best friend Richard Brown, would be included as well.

When the firefighter case had gone unsolved for eight years - and seemed incapable of being solved - these five became expendable.

April 5, 2009 by J. Patrick O'Connor

Mumia Abu-Jamal's 27 years on Death Row for a murder he did not commit would have turned almost anyone else into an embittered, defeated man. Instead, he has remained what he always was, "the voice of the voiceless," as he demonstrates yet again in his most recent book, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A. (City Lights Books, 2009.)