After a triple homicide on the night of April 25, 1978, two men pleaded guilty and were sentenced to 20 years in prison. A third suspect was never indicted, and a fourth, a 16-year-old teenager, escaped prosecution.
A fifth man, Kevin Strickland, who was watching TV at home at the time of the murder, was imprisoned for 43 years. Black, he was sentenced by an all-white jury to life in prison, without the right to parole for 50 years. This Tuesday (23), he managed to have his sentence overturned and will leave prison.
The Kansas City case is the longest confirmed wrongful conviction in the state of Missouri and one of the longest in the US, according to The Washington Post. The story of the late 1970s was a settling of scores, in which Strickland was mistakenly involved.
That night, he stopped to chat with four acquaintances in the neighborhood in front of his house. They were Vincent Bell, then 21—Strickland was friends with his sister and was a driver for their father—Kilm Adkins, 19, Terry Abbott, 21, and a 16-year-old teenager.
Strickland soon left the group to be with his daughter, a seven-week-old baby, and the others headed to the home of Larry Ingram, 21. Adkins and Abbott had discussed how they could get revenge for being cheated in a craps game at which lost $300.
Arriving at the rented property Ingram used for gambling, they tied up their host and shot him dead, also murdering two friends who were with him. His girlfriend, Cynthia Douglas, 20, survived with only non-lethal leg injuries after playing dead, according to court records.
Meanwhile, Strickland had dinner with family members, talked on the phone and played games at home, where he admitted to drinking and smoking, according to the Washington Post. At 10 pm, I learned of the crime on TV. Nothing connected him to the crime, and his family confirmed the alibi. Still, the next morning, as his daughter’s mother left the baby, the police knocked on the door. He was taken to the police station and was slow to realize that he was accused of something.
When he realized, Strickland asked for a reconnaissance. Douglas, still smeared with blood —as she later reported to her friend Eric Wesson, now editor of the Kansas City Call newspaper—, was called to the police station. Court records indicate she remembers cops urging her to point at Strickland: “You can move on and not worry about these guys anymore.”
The case was then mounted. The first trial, in 1979, was based entirely on the testimony of the survivor, who, according to the Post, was increasingly convinced that she had seen Strickland, even though she initially expressed uncertainty to the police.
Asked by the county attorney whether there was any doubt as to whether it was Strickland who had the gun, the young woman replied: “It’s a fact.” The jury, however, did not reach a consensus, as the only black member refused to find him guilty. In a retrial, this time with a jury made up entirely of white people, he was found guilty of triple homicide.
Strickland cried a lot when he heard the decision. His brother, LR Strickland, told the Washington Post that he was relieved that the sentence was not the death penalty but life imprisonment.
Afterwards, a battle to defend his innocence began. Two months after the crime, in June 1978, Bell and Adkins had already been arrested for their involvement in the case. Abbott was once considered a suspect, but he and the 16-year-old were not indicted.
Four months after Strickland was arrested, Bell told the court that Douglas made a mess by linking him to the case. Again, in 1979, he repeated, “I’m telling you the truth today, that Kevin Strickland wasn’t in the house that day.” Bell, who died earlier this year aged 64, and Adkins pleaded guilty and received a 20-year sentence.
Douglas later tried to reverse his testimony, according to the Post. The first time she went to a prosecutor, however, he threatened her with a charge of perjury. Something similar happened again in the 1990s.
In 2004 and 2009, she turned to Wesson of Kansas City Call for help. The second time, he suggested seeking out the Midwest Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization that helps wrongfully convicted.
Strickland had also gone to the institution. When Tricia Rojo Bushnell, now his lawyer and director of the organization, joined the project in 2013, she was assigned to review old applications and came across the case. Immediately, according to the Post, she saw a shaky conviction.
Strickland’s path, however, would have one more hurdle. Douglas died in 2015, aged 57, without being able to rectify his testimony. By that time, he thought the chances for the overturning of his judgment were over. “I think I cursed God: ‘Why me? Why did you provoke me like that, God?'” he told the American newspaper.
His luck began to change when the Kansas City Star newspaper revisited his case last year. Months later, Bushnell contacted Jackson County Attorney Jean Peters Baker, asking for an investigation. Among the new discoveries were dozens of fingerprints, including those from the weapon used in the murders, and none belonged to Strickland.
The case was again mounted, this time in Strickland’s favor. Still, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt — who is expected to run for the Senate in 2022 — said he believed he was the author of the killings. Gov. Mike Parson, also a Republican, agreed and said pardon was not a priority — despite granting pardons to Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a white couple who left their homes armed and threatened anti-racism protesters last year.
Spokespersons for Parson and Schmitt did not respond to the Washington Post.
Even without that support, Strickland went on trial again. “Given this unique circumstance, the court’s confidence in the conviction is so shaken that it cannot be maintained, and the sentencing judgment must be overturned,” Judge James Welsh ruled Tuesday. “The state of Missouri must immediately release Kevin Bernard Strickland from custody.”
Now, Strickland can envision the realization of two dreams: visiting the grave of his mother, who died in August at 85 years old without seeing her son in freedom, and seeing the sea for the first time.
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