After 25 years in Kansas prisons, cousins convicted of killing Golubski nephew go free | Opinion

On Thursday morning, cousins who’d spent the last quarter century in Kansas prisons on murder charges finally walked free, paroled although not cleared, as they should have been.

Their moms, who are sisters, were waiting for them outside the Norton and Winfield Correctional Facilities. And now, at age 52 and 46, Celester McKinney and Brian Betts will get the chance to — not start over, but start again.

“I’m praying for God to bless them both with long lives — time to do something meaningful” with their liberty, Brian’s mom, Ellen Betts, told me on Wednesday. “I laid in bed last night thinking, ‘This is it!’ I’ve just been walking around the house,” getting ready and thinking about so many things, “it’s like I’m having this conversation with him spiritually.”

Last December, following an October hearing in Kansas City, Kansas, a judge denied the two a new trial, saying their attorneys had not been able to prove that Roger Golubski, then a KCKPD detective, had coerced the key witness — Betts’ and McKinney’s own uncle, Carter Betts, who almost immediately recanted.

Carter Betts has said for years that two police detectives and a prosecutor had threatened and pressured him into implicating his nephews in the 1997 murder of 17-year-old Greg Miller in KCK. But it was never revealed at trial that the victim was Golubski’s wife’s nephew, or that one of the two other witnesses was the detective’s brother-in-law.

Golubski, now 70, was indicted last year on federal civil rights charges that accuse him of sexual assault, kidnapping, and in separate charges, of conspiring with drug kingpins in a sex trafficking ring. He’s denied all allegations.

There was no physical evidence tying either Betts or McKinney to the murder. No weapon was ever found, the two other witnesses besides their uncle repeatedly changed their stories, and the one related to Golubski, whose testimony just kept improving, could not possibly have seen what he said he did from his vantage point. He also claimed to be able to tell from the sound of gunshots what ammunition was used.

Golubski testified at the hearing that he did not recall interviewing any witnesses in the investigation, which “wasn’t my case.” And he had never coerced any witness, he said. I wasn’t in the courtroom that day, so I can’t say whether anyone laughed.

But retired Judge Gunnar Sundby, who was acting in a senior judge role, decided that the uncle he did not find credible was Carter Betts, who identified Golubski as the heavy white cop with a mustache who’d threatened him all those years ago.

“It would be easy, under this new cloud of doubt cast about Mr. Golubski, to use that as leverage to secure relief from conviction,” Sundby said. “I do not find his testimony to be credible.”

There was nothing in records kept by the KCKPD, where files seem to go to die, indicating that Golubski had been involved in the case. But then, if Golubski had any reason to cover his tracks, that his name isn’t in the file is just what you’d expect.

Kansas Court of Appeals granted hearing

Sundby ruled that Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree did not have to turn over his full file to the defense team, though Kevin Shepherd, Betts’ attorney, told the judge that Betts and McKinney were being “handcuffed” by him and by the DA’s office by having to pursue their innocence claims without seeing the entire file.

When McKinney’s lawyer, Sarah Swain, asked Dupree on the stand how his mostly theoretical Conviction Integrity Unit was coming along in reviewing all of Golubski’s old homicide cases, the DA said they had looked at dozens of cases, and that there is no unit like his CIU anywhere in Kansas. That last part I definitely believe; hopefully, there’s no unit like it anywhere.

The murder victim’s relatives do believe Betts and McKinney are guilty, and urged officials to keep them in prison, saying they were just “trying to use the situation” of Golubski’s arrest. But the evidence says otherwise.

In October of 2020, the Kansas Court of Appeals ruled that the new context of Golubski’s possible role in a case involving his own family should at least entitle McKinney to the evidentiary hearing on a new trial that was finally held two years later. Proving his involvement without access to all the records was not possible, but the evidence of McKinney’s and Betts’ guilty was nonexistent.

At McKinney’s original trial, Detective Michael J. Shomin, who was called to the murder scene, was asked whether the main detective on the case was Detective W.K. Smith. He said, “Detective Smith and I believe Detective Golubski. I believe.”

At trial, all witnesses changed their stories quite a bit from what they’d said when they were first interviewed in the early hours of Dec. 29, 1997. A boy named Greg Miller lost his life that morning, and McKinney and Betts, who’ve always said they were asleep in their nearby home at the time, lost life as they’d known it.

Celester and his younger brother Dwayne McKinney had been in KCK only a few weeks. They’d come up from Atlanta to help their Uncle Carter with his janitorial business. That night, Brian was in his separate apartment at the back of Carter’s house with his girlfriend and their new baby.

Carter, Dwayne and Celester had been cleaning a car dealership in Raytown. They hadn’t gotten home until almost midnight, and then had gone straight to sleep in the house they shared. That’s what Carter Betts told police the first time they asked — that he’d heard some shots, but since that was an almost-every-night occurrence in their neighborhood, he’d gone right back to sleep.

Later, that story turned into this one: He heard the shots around 3 a.m., then heard his front door open and close. When he went down to the basement to see what was happening, he found all three of his nephews with the murder weapons — an SKS assault rifle and a shotgun, neither of which police ever found. Later still, after recanting, Carter testified that he’d never even heard of an SKS until police told him to say that.

In the version of the narrative that stuck in court, though, his three nephews all said they’d killed Miller because they’d suspected him of breaking into Brian’s apartment. Only, there was no such burglary. None of these men had ever been in any legal trouble, yet after a night of hard physical labor and caring for a newborn, they’d grabbed a rifle and a shotgun and shot a young neighbor 18 times in retaliation for something that never happened.

The only door to the front part of the house was locked from the inside, all of the men said. Since only Carter Betts had a key and there were bars on the windows, Celester and Dwayne, who was also charged but was acquitted, said they couldn’t have gone out that night if they’d wanted to.

Golubski’s brother-in-law, Jimmy Spencer, initially told police he’d heard shots but had seen nothing. Later, he not only remembered hearing “up to 16 to 17 shots” but could tell that “they sounded like a 12-gauge shotgun and an SK.”

According to court filings by attorneys for Betts and McKinney, Spencer told a friend that Golubski had fed him that information.

By the time of the trial, he’d remembered that after hearing the shots and running to the door “I can see through a light that somebody was standing there shooting a gun” and standing over his nephew’s body.

Given where Miller’s body was found, that would have been impossible. Both before and since, Spencer has spent stretches in prison on multiple drug charges, and for breaking into and stealing from neighborhood churches. At the hearing, he testified that yes, he’d been a drug dealer at the time of Miller’s murder. But no, he told Swain on the stand, he wasn’t working in a drug house run by Golubski.

A third witness, Alfred Burdette, initially told police he’d heard shots as well, then saw two men running up an alley behind the Betts house. Later, he decided he’d actually seen these men run into the house where Betts and the McKinneys were living.

The testimony of both Spencer and Burdette, who is no longer alive, was so unbelievable that prosecutors have since acknowledged that the long recanted testimony of Carter Betts was really the only evidence in the case.

Family party, reunion with grandchildren

In February, the parole board granted both McKinney and Betts parole on their first try. And every one of the 86 days since they got that news, their loved ones have been texting their countdown to freedom.

“I’m not going to sleep a wink tonight, I’m so excited, and I know he’s not,” Patricia McCoy, Celester’s mom, said on Wednesday.

When I wrote about their case two years ago, Celester told me in a phone interview that he was working very hard “not to dine on the past.”

The boy who was murdered, Greg Miller, was no one he’d ever had any problems with, he said. “He was just a kid,” a decade younger than Celester. “He’d come by to speak to me and talk about girls, but I didn’t hang out with him. He was a baby” when his uncle found him face down in the snow.

After that first story ran in The Star, Brian Betts wrote to me. “Every single day for the past 23 years has been torture to me,” he said. “I have been incarcerated since my son was eight months old. Now the youngest of my 3 grandchildren is close to that age. … The thing that makes the pain intolerable is the fact that I am incarcerated for something I did not do and the evidence has pointed to this since prior to my being sentenced.”

“I used to pray for the day to come that I will be blessed to be freed from this wrongful conviction and be able to be a daily presence in my son’s life, helping to raise him. Now I say that prayer hoping for the opportunity to be there for my grandchildren. Hopefully that day is near.”

Now that it is not near but actually here, said his mother, Ellen Betts, “nothing negative” will be allowed in the door at the family party for 30-some of their loved ones on Thursday evening. “It’s going to be memorable and indescribable and I’m going to be praying for healing and nothing negative,” she said. Carter Betts will be there, too. “We’re all going to be looking forward.”

Brian already has a job lined up, she said. He’s going to be living with her initially, back in KCK, where he’s already got a Friday appointment to get his driver’s license. “He’s got four grandbabies now, and I know that’s at the top of his list,” along with finally getting to work on clearing himself from the outside.

By Friday, Celester will be on his way back to Atlanta with his mom, where she lives and where he has been given permission to relocate. He earned an associate degree while in prison, and wants to work in renewable energy.

“He keeps saying, ‘I gotta get a job!’’’ Patricia McCoy said. “We’ve got some leads on some, and we were even talking about starting a family business. He’s going to live with us at home for a few months, but he wants his own place, and he’s still young enough to have children. He’s got some nieces and nephews there he’s never met, and we’re going to take some time and revisit Georgia with him.”

The plan for their initial Thursday reunion outside the prison, though, she said, was pretty simple: “We’re going to say a prayer, scream, and then hit the road.”