Kansas failed John Calvin, put away by an indicted cop and now facing terminal cancer | Opinion

Maybe you remember John Keith Calvin, who is serving a life sentence for a 2002 Kansas City, Kansas, murder the actual triggerman has for years said that Calvin did not commit or even know about.

Only recently told he has stage 4 colon cancer, his medical records suggest that signs of an untreated recurrence may go back to 2019. Calvin has been in the hospital since Thanksgiving weekend and finally had surgery on Tuesday. Now his doctors are recommending hospice.

“I’m in a place where I shouldn’t even be,” Calvin told me in a Monday message, “locked up, and I’m suffering from cancer that I didn’t even know I had.”

Where is that place, you ask? Even his family can’t know, supposedly because he’s such a serious security risk, though his sisters say that their brother, who wasn’t big to begin with, has lost 70 pounds, down from about 170, and at this point is too weak to stand.

All this while the indicted former KCKPD detective who put him away is in his own home, out on bond, out of concern for his fragile health.

Roger Golubski, who is under federal indictment on allegations that he raped Black women and trafficked underage girls, supervised the investigation into the murder of John Coates, for which Calvin is serving a life sentence.

Golubski also had a relationship with Calvin’s sister, Rose Calvin, who constantly told them how dirty he was even while he waited outside for her, according to her family. After Rose was murdered in 1996, it was Golubski who identified her body. “He said she had a stick stuck up her vagina, she was stabbed multiple times and she was strangled” and badly decomposed, so they couldn’t see her, said her sister, Oradean Walton.

Rose Calvin’s niece had seen her alive only the day before, so her body had not decomposed, and the autopsy mentioned no stick or stabbing, so why tell a grieving family that? It was Golubski, who had also for a time stalked Walton, she said, who investigated Rose’s homicide. You know, as is perfectly normal nowhere.

Will Wyandotte County DA Mark Dupree reopen case?

The lead investigator of the murder for which Keith Calvin was convicted was former KCKPD Maj. John Cosgrove. In a sworn deposition last year, former Chief Terry Zeigler said Cosgrove had at one point been disciplined for violating a suspect’s constitutional rights and later, in 2014, had been fired for dishonesty by then-Chief Ellen Hanson.

Calvin has always said that police coerced his statement. And “there’s no question this is a Golubski case,” said Calvin’s attorney, Cheryl Pilate. “A Golubski-Cosgrove case.”

Yet it’s only a case worth reopening if Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree says that it is. He has not said that, and given Calvin’s prognosis, has apparently saved himself of trouble of ever having to do so.

“We’ve been trying to work with Mr. Dupree’s office,” Pilate said before her client’s surgery. “Only recently has he taken the position that he would only reopen the case” in any of Golubski’s old cases “if it was a CIU (Conviction Integrity Unit) case, which he would decree independently. He won’t provide anything from his files to attorneys representing innocent persons unless he first determines it’s a CIU case. They fight discovery.”

Wait, so he’ll only look into whether it’s an innocence case if he’s already decided it’s an innocence case? Got it.

Dupree has also said that he’s working with the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department to review every one of Golubski’s old cases, and that he’ll look into any case that the KCKPD tells him needs reviewing. Those are very different promises, so which is it?

On what basis should we trust someone who has said at various times that he was done looking at Golubski, that his (at the time) imaginary CIU was already reviewing Golubski’s old cases and, just lately, that they would have long since been investigated if only the files had been digitized, for which he had never before lobbied publicly?

If he had at any point said that was what was keeping him from reviewing Golubski’s cases, people with no spare funds at all would have rallied to raise that money asap. Again, we should trust this man why?

‘Set up’ in crack dealer John Coates’ death

Melvin Lee White, Jr., who actually did kill John Coates, and has always said he’d do it again, was offered a plea deal, took it and served only five years. Since 2005, he’s said in various affidavits that Calvin is innocent.

In an interview this week, White told me he only took Calvin with him to Coates’ home on the night of Dec. 12, 2002, because he knew that Coates was Calvin’s crack dealer and that Coates would let Calvin in. Coates would not have opened his door to White, because they had been fighting over a woman both had been seeing. According to White, Coates and his son had threatened to kill him.

“I kind of set Keith up, because (Coates) was cool with him. When I seen he got in the door, I tiptoed up there” and shot him. Keith “didn’t know I was going to do anything. I just used him to get in the house. Keith just got railroaded.”

Why was that? “Keith got nervous” and said what detectives were pressuring him to say, which was that he’d known when he went to try to trade Coates some CDs for drugs that White had planned to rob him.

White said that while he was still in county jail, and hadn’t yet been offered a deal, Golubski visited him and offered to make the whole thing go away if White would do him a favor and kill one more person — Coates’ son.

“He came to me. ‘How you doin’?’ He said, ‘Man, this case is weak.’ He said, “I can make this case go away, but I have to ask you to do something.’”

Why would Golubski have wanted White to kill Coates’ son? “He said because he won’t come on in” and work for Golubski’s drug operation instead of competing with him. “He was a greedy old cop. He was big dope,” and went around acting like “he was Jesus, or a king.”

Deserving of compassionate release from prison

Golubski’s defense attorney, Christopher Joseph, suggested the idea that anyone could get charges dropped or would ask a man behind bars to kill someone on the outside was ridiculous on its face. “Why would Roger ask him to commit a murder when Mr. White was not going to get out of prison anytime soon, perhaps not for life? The allegation is nonsense and does not even pass the smell test. The Star should not dignify such a ridiculous claim by running the story. Wild claims with no corroboration should not make the news.”

We keep hearing from current officials that anything Golubski and the KCKPD may have done is lost in the mists of time, but for John Keith Calvin it’s still happening. Unlikely as he is now to survive to get the innocence hearing that he should have had years ago, Kansas must immediately grant Calvin a compassionate release.

The Kansas Department of Corrections is right on track to repeat the injustice done to Pete Coones, who served 12 years for a Kansas City, Kansas, murder he did not commit.

The wrongfully convicted mailman, who had never been in trouble a day in his life, was exonerated in 2020, just 108 days before he died of cancer that had gone undiagnosed in Lansing, where Calvin has also spent the almost 20 years since his August 2003 trial. Calvin was in recent years moved to El Dorado.

The further outrage here is that for many months, despite Calvin’s dramatic weight loss, severe pain, rectal bleeding and jaundice, he was not told that the cancer he’d had in 2018 was back. His medical records show that since 2019, he’d regularly been told that he was in remission. He’d also been told that he needed surgery, but not why he needed it.

According to the notes in his records, he kept telling doctors that he’d have any surgery he needed once his innocence had been proven and he’d been released.

In January of 2019, there’s a notation: “He wants to proceed with the surgery, but preferably on the outside.” In July of 2021, a note says, “Patient still in need of surgery but not sure he understands this.” No kidding.

Now that we know his prognosis, and also know the malignancy of the system that sent him away, we know, too, that Kansas is letting him die of the same disease and the same indifference that killed Pete Coones.

And if Calvin’s case, and his sister’s, too, haven’t warranted review, then maybe Mark Dupree should just stop pretending that any case might.

Melinda Henneberger is former Kansas City Star vice president and editorial page editor. She won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her columns about Roger Golubski.