TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A white Kansas police detective accused of sexually assaulting Black women and girls — and terrorizing those who tried to fight back — is dead, prosecutors said as his trial was set to begin Monday.
Prosecutors say female residents of poor neighborhoods in Kansas City, Kansas, feared that if they crossed paths with Roger Golubski, he’d demand sexual favors and threaten to harm or jail their relatives.
Golubski, 71, was facing six felony counts of violating women’s civil rights. But he did not appear in court Monday morning for the start of jury selection. Prosecutors later confirmed in court that Golubski has died. They did not say how or when he died.
Allegations at the heart of the case — that Golubski preyed on women for decades with seeming impunity — have outraged the community and deepened the historical distrust of law enforcement. The prosecution followed earlier reports of similar abuse allegations across the country where hundreds of officers have lost their badges after allegations of sexual assaults.
Cheryl Pilate, an attorney representing women who've said they were abused or threatened, called for a thorough investigation of Golubski's death by officials with no ties to local police.
“The community was looking forward to justice, to a full and public accounting and now that has been denied to them," Pilate said.
About 50 people had a short rally in sub-freezing temperatures outside the federal courthouse in Topeka to show their support for the women accusing Golubski of abusing them, breaking up before the announcement of his death. They held signs with slogans such as, “Justice Now!”
Golubski had pleaded not guilty to the charges. After he failed to appear in court Monday, his lead attorney, Christopher Joseph, said his client “was despondent about the media coverage.” He did not elaborate.
U.S. District Judge Toby Crouse dismissed the case against Golubski at prosecutors’ request. Joseph called the death “truly unexpected.”
“I don’t know the details,” he told reporters as he walked away from the courtroom.
Golubski was accused of sexually assaulting one woman starting when she was barely a teenager and another after her sons were arrested.
Decades of allegations from poor neighborhoods
The case against Golubski was part of a string of lawsuits and criminal allegations that has led the county prosecutor’s office to begin a $1.7 million effort to reexamine cases Golubski worked on during his 35 years on the force. One double murder case Golubski investigated already has resulted in an exoneration, and an organization run by rapper Jay-Z is suing to obtain police records.
Joseph had said lawsuits over the allegations were an “inspiration for fabrication” by his accusers. But prosecutors said that, along with the two women whose accounts are the heart of the criminal case, seven others were going to testify that Golubski abused or harassed them.
“We have to keep fighting,” said Starr Cooper, who was in the courthouse Monday to watch jury selection and said Golubski victimized her mother before her death in 1983.
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.
Prior to his death, Golubski had been under house arrest and undergoing kidney dialysis treatments three times a week. That angered women who said he victimized them. Anita Randel-Stanley, a Kansas City, Missouri, resident who said Golubski started harassing her decades ago when she was a teenager, called the house arrest “a slap on the hand.”
“There is no justice for the victims,” she said.
Stories about Golubski remained just whispers in the neighborhoods near Kansas City's former cattle stockyards partly because of the extreme poverty of a place where some homes are boarded up. One neighborhood where Golubski worked is part of Kansas' second-poorest zip code.
Crime was abundant there, as were drug 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 sex 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 conceal a motorist’s beating by a federal agent in 2003.
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 homicide, within hours of the crimes. He had an alibi; no physical evidence linked him to the killings; and an eyewitness believed the killer was an underling of a local drug dealer. Golubski and the dealer have since been charged in a separate federal case of running a violent sex trafficking operation.
The eyewitness only testified that McIntyre was the killer after Golubski and a now disbarred attorney threatened to take her children away, she alleged in a lawsuit.
McIntyre's mother said in a 2014 affidavit that she wonders whether her refusal to grant regular sexual favors to Golubski prompted him to retaliate against her son.
In 2022, the local government agreed to pay $12.5 million to McIntyre and his mother to settle a lawsuit after a deposition in which Golubski invoked his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent 555 times. The state also paid McIntyre $1.5 million.
Women say they were threatened and mocked
Prosecutors said Golubski drove one of the women at the center of their criminal case to a cemetery and told her to find a spot to dig her own grave. He sexually 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 homicide. They ultimately admitted to the crime so police would free their 13-year-old brother, Williams said in a separate lawsuit.
Golubski began sexually assaulting her, alternating between threatening her and claiming he could help her sons, according to court records in the criminal 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 sexual assault, 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."
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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.
Heather Hollingsworth, Nick Ingram And John Hanna, The Associated Press