As murder trial begins, widow describes horror of lawyer’s 2017 death outside KC home

On the morning of Oct. 25, 2017, Emily Riegel was in her Brookside home when she said she heard gunfire.

She raced outside and found her husband of 16 years sprawled on the sidewalk in front of their home, dead from a fatal gunshot wound to the head. She saw a white van with a driver inside pulling a black mask or hood over his face and driving away.

“I started screaming for help. I was screaming stop the van,” Riegel told jurors in a Jackson County courtroom Tuesday as she began to cry.

Pickert, 39, had just returned home after walking his two sons to school when the shooting occurred.

Nearly five years later, prosecutors began to lay out the case against his alleged killer this week.

David G. Jungerman, a Raytown farmer and self-made millionaire, is charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action.

Jungerman, 84, is accused of shooting Pickert after the lawyer won a $5.75 million judgment for a homeless man who Jungerman shot in 2012 because he thought the man was stealing copper from the property of Jungerman’s baby furniture business.

The victim in that shooting, Jeffrey Harris, had to have his leg amputated.

Daniel Ross, who is representing Jungerman, gave a roughly 30-minute opening statement Tuesday. Ross has long challenged the credibility of the police investigation. He denied that his client had anything to do with the shooting.

Tim Dollar, an attorney working on behalf of the Jackson County prosecutor’s office, laid out for jurors how investigators identified Jungerman as a suspect after Riegel told them that her husband had won a multi-million dollar verdict against him.

Speculation fell on Jungerman within hours of the shooting, in part because of his connection to Pickert. Yet the murder went unsolved for months. Kansas City police even said at one point that Jungerman, who was the focus of media scrutiny, was not a suspect in the killing.

A week before the shooting, Jackson County court officials had started the process of seizing Jungerman’s real estate to pay the $5.75 million judgment. The court filed paperwork that would prevent Jungerman from selling or transferring the property, according to prosecutors.

Investigators captured on video a van that belonged to Jungerman traveling from Raytown to Pickert’s neighborhood on the day of the killing.

Dollar also told jurors that investigators executed a search warrant on Jungerman’s home in Raytown. There detectives found a bevy of evidence that included a printout of an online Jackson County property tax record for Pickert, which listed his home address.

They also found a folder with press clippings about the homicide and handwritten notes.

Investigators also recovered an audio recording that contained a conversation Jungerman allegedly had with one of his employees, Leo Wynne, about the killing. Jungerman apparently recorded the conversation by accident.

In the recording played to jurors, Jungerman told Wynne: “People know that I murdered that son of bitch. The police know, too, Leo. We are going to just have to stop saying a word about it.”

Jungerman continued: “When I think about it, I grin. That (expletive) has caused me a lot of problems Leo.”

Dollar said Jungerman searched Google to apparently figure out which firearm to use.

“You now know what this case is about?” Dollar told jurors. “His motive. His van. His voice.”

But Ross said the prosecutor’s case is riddled with sloppy police work, missing reports, destroyed evidence and detectives who failed to follow established police procedures.

A man who a witness described driving the van away from the crime scene did not look like Jungerman but was someone who was younger, shorter and heavier, Ross said.

Ross told jurors that Kansas City police may have wanted to frame Jungerman for the killing.

“All they (prosecutors) have in this case is motive. A million dollar judgment against a man worth many times over that is motive to kill,” Ross said. “The rest of it is made up folks.”

On Monday, attorneys on both sides selected a jury from a pool of more than 75 people. The trial is expected to last almost two weeks. It is not known whether Jungerman, who has pleaded not guilty, will testify in his own defense.