On the afternoon of April 15, 1994, Donald Ewing and Doniel Quinn were in an idling car in Kansas City, Kansas, when a man dressed in black opened fire with a shotgun, killing them both. Ruby Mitchell saw the shooting from her house and told police that the killer looked like her niece’s boyfriend, Lamont. Lamont was reportedly out of town, but Detective Roger Golubski’s investigation quickly zeroed in on someone with a similar name: Lamonte McIntyre, who was seventeen. (A transcript of the interview police conducted with Mitchell on the day of the killings shows her naming “Lamont McIntyre” as the man she saw, but Mitchell insisted, years later, that she did not know McIntyre, and had not given the police his name.) Golubski, who would go on to helm the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department’s homicide unit, had a reputation for closing cases quickly. This one was settled even more swiftly than most. Mitchell picked McIntyre’s face out of a photo lineup; six hours after the shots were fired, McIntyre was under arrest. During the murder trial, that fall, another witness also identified him as the shooter, and Golubski claimed that “confidential informants” and “street talk” further confirmed the teen-ager’s guilt. Throughout, McIntyre proclaimed his innocence. He was convicted and given two consecutive life sentences. “God and I weren’t speaking for a while,” McIntyre later said.

McIntyre’s case eventually came to the attention of Cheryl Pilate, a Kansas City attorney who worked with Centurion Ministries, a nonprofit that investigates incarcerated people’s claims of innocence. Glancing at the files, Pilate saw a police investigation that seemed flawed and incomplete. McIntyre had no apparent connection to the victims. He didn’t resemble the Lamont that Mitchell had initially identified. The photo lineup had included only five photographs instead of the typical six, and three of the people pictured were related. No physical evidence tied him to the scene, and witnesses placed him at a relative’s house at the time of the shooting. McIntyre’s court-appointed attorney was on probation for legal misconduct at the time of his trial and was disbarred in 1998 (a decision unrelated to McIntyre’s case). The court-appointed lawyer who had handled McIntyre’s post-conviction petition was also disbarred for misconduct. The prosecutor, Terra Morehead, was previously in a relationship with the judge, a fact that was not disclosed at trial. Pilate’s initial conclusion was that McIntyre’s case looked “not real difficult,” she told me last year.

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But exonerating McIntyre turned out to be much more complicated than Pilate realized at first, in part because of what it revealed about Kansas City’s criminal-justice system. The circumstances of McIntyre’s wrongful conviction, and the years of work it took to get him free, are the subject of the investigative journalist Rick Tulsky’s comprehensive and sobering new book, “Injustice Town: A Corrupt City, a Wrongly Convicted Man, and a Struggle for Freedom.” Since the founding of the Innocence Project, in 1992, which uses DNA evidence to overturn convictions, exoneration stories have become a familiar genre. The organization has contributed to the release of more than two hundred and fifty people; Centurion, which specializes in cases without DNA evidence, which tend to be more challenging, credits itself with seventy. McIntyre’s story is no less affecting for not being unique: Tulsky details McIntyre’s naïve certainty that the truth would come out during his trial, his alternation between hope and despair as his case went through the legal system, and the many obstacles before his eventual exoneration, in 2017.

The story of McIntyre’s time in prison is interwoven with that of the legal work done on his behalf. Rosie McIntyre, his mother, did some digging of her own, with help from a private investigator whom she found in a phone book. Doniel Quinn’s relatives, convinced that McIntyre wasn’t the culprit, joined the effort. Eyewitnesses said that Morehead, the prosecutor, had pressured them into testifying. (Morehead surrendered her license and was disbarred in 2024, owing to a career-long pattern of misconduct.) Eventually, a more likely account of the crime emerged. Quinn was the doorman at a nearby dope house where, shortly before the murders, drugs were stolen. The shooting seems to have been a retaliation for the theft. Centurion’s investigation pinpointed another local teen-ager, known by the nickname Monster, as the gunman. (He has denied involvement in the murders.) Jim McCloskey, Centurion’s founder, managed to arrange a prison interview with a notorious Kansas City drug kingpin named Cecil Brooks, who was rumored to have ordered the hit on Quinn. “Your man didn’t do it,” Brooks told McCloskey, naming Monster as the shooter. “Maybe we should have stepped up and did something, but that wasn’t how it worked,” Brooks added.

Kansas, the hub of John Brown’s militant abolitionist activism, once had a reputation among Black Americans as a kind of promised land; those who flocked there from the South, after the failure of Reconstruction, were known as Exodusters. By the early nineteen-nineties, that optimism had eroded. Kansas City, Kansas—widely known as K.C.K., to distinguish it from its wealthier, larger sister city across the river, in Missouri—was hit particularly hard by the crack-cocaine epidemic. Wyandotte County, the county that contains K.C.K., had among the highest rates of unemployment and lowest median incomes in the state. Crime rates were nearly double the Kansas average; in a city of a hundred and fifty thousand people, Quinn and Ewing’s murders were the fifth shooting in three days.

Local politics were insular and marred by accusations of corruption, with the K.C.K. Police Department reputed to be particularly unscrupulous. An F.B.I. agent investigating a cocaine ring in the early nineties blamed the extent of the city’s drug problem on “corruption with the police department and general investigative incompetence.” Civil-rights violations, including “severe beatings,” were “routine,” he noted in an internal memo; when he tried to get copies of complaints against officers, he was told that the department regularly destroyed them. “The KCKPD does not investigate civil right violations against its officers any more than it investigates allegations of drug dealing or robberies committed by officers,” he wrote.

None of this will be shocking to anyone who’s lived in an American city crippled by disinvestment and self-dealing—or even to anyone who’s watched a David Simon show on HBO. Even so, having it all laid out is bracing, and Tulsky’s book makes for a worthy entry in the canon of American injustice. Beyond individual bad actors, there is a system with many flawed elements, including the fact that Wyandotte County was the rare urban jurisdiction that, until recently, didn’t have a public defender’s office. But, parallel to the standard story of corruption and false imprisonment, another narrative emerges from “Injustice Town,” one that never fully comes to the forefront.

Centurion took up McIntyre’s case in 2009, and Pilate was tasked with investigating the case and putting together the legal documents petitioning for his release. The work, which was initially supposed to be completed in a year or two, took much longer than expected. “Injustice Town” has a light touch with its do-gooders, but it’s clear that the delay frustrated McCloskey, Centurion’s founder, and weighed heavily on McIntyre, who had spent more than half his life behind bars. The delays occurred, in part, because Pilate had become preoccupied with amassing evidence about Roger Golubski that was beyond the scope of McIntyre’s case. Born into a working-class family, Golubski was a heavyset man who had considered becoming a priest before entering the police force. Among his colleagues, he was known to be well sourced, with an extensive network of confidential informants who helped him close cases. Among Black residents of the neighborhoods Golubski patrolled, he had a different reputation.

Ophelia Williams encountered Golubski in 1999, when he was investigating her twin sons for murder. According to Williams, while Golubski was at her home, he put his hand on her leg. She slapped it away. He told her he was friends with the D.A. and might be able to help her sons, and then put his hand up her skirt. Then he raped her. Golubski would return and assault Williams several more times in the following months. Usually, he was on duty, driving his official vehicle. On two occasions, he was particularly rushed; he told her that his partner was waiting in the squad car outside. Williams didn’t report him at the time. “He was the police,” she said later. “What was I going to say; this policeman just raped me?”

Compared with the extensive coverage of police violence in recent years, there’s been relatively little discussion of sexual exploitation by law enforcement. In 2015, the Associated Press published a report that said nearly a thousand police officers in the U.S. lost their licenses as a result of sexual misconduct between 2009 and 2014—a figure that represented a “sure undercount,” the report noted, since nine states, including New York and California, didn’t keep relevant records. Women engaging in drug use and sex work are particularly vulnerable. When researchers recruited three hundred and eighteen women from St. Louis drug courts for a study on H.I.V. intervention, seventy-eight of them disclosed having experienced police sexual misconduct, defined by some researchers as a “sexually degrading, humiliating, violating, damaging, or threatening act committed by a police officer through the use of force or police authority.” Of more than three hundred sex workers in Baltimore interviewed for a 2023 study, roughly a third reported recent sex with police, including situations that ranged from paid sex work to implicit or explicitly coercive encounters and violent assaults. In some instances, the interaction may have a veneer of consent, or of quid pro quo. (In the Baltimore study, a number of women said that they were pressured into sex as a way to avoid arrest; forty-four per cent of them were arrested anyway.) Victims are not exclusively female: in 2015, a Florida officer pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting undocumented men while on duty. Numerous officers fired for sex offenses have been hired elsewhere and continued to work in law enforcement, sometimes re-offending, according to the A.P. In 2023, the Department of Justice established the first nationwide database documenting instances of police misconduct. On the first day of the second Trump Administration, it was eliminated.

Pilate’s sources told her that Golubski frequented sex workers in his patrol area while on duty, stole drugs from dealers and provided them to women in exchange for sex, and was reputed to have had multiple children with women in the area. The confidential informants who helped him close cases so swiftly included women he had sexual relationships with, some of whom were addicted to drugs. He threatened to arrest women if they refused sex. Golubski’s predatory behavior seemed to have been not so much an open secret as just open. Ruby Ellington, the first Black woman to work as a police officer in K.C.K., was in the same police-academy class as Golubski. In a 2015 affidavit, she said that Golubski used his badge as “leverage to get what he wanted,” and that his exploitation of Black women was “no secret”: “Everyone in the Department knew that when Golubski would go out on calls, that any black female involved would likely end up in his police car with him.” Several other officers shared similar stories; one Black officer said that the higher-ups thought that Golubski’s predilections were “funny.” (Golubski’s superiors admitted to knowing something about what one described as his “affinity” for Black women, but denied knowledge of rampant sexual exploitation, and said that there were no complaints filed against him.)

Sexual exploitation appears to have been fundamental to how Golubski practiced law enforcement. During the brief investigation that resulted in McIntyre’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment, Golubski asked one of the victim’s mothers if she dated white men, made lewd comments to a witness, and requested that another witness dance for him. Pilate had wondered why an eyewitness named Stacey Quinn had never been interviewed. She learned that, according to the Quinn family, Stacey had been in a years-long sexually exploitative relationship with Golubski that began when she was a teen-ager. Rosie, McIntyre’s mother, also had a history with the detective. According to Rosie, a few years before her son’s arrest, Golubski had threatened to file charges against her boyfriend unless she met him at the police station. When she did, he sexually assaulted her in the detectives’ room. Afterward, he called her repeatedly until she changed her number. She wondered whether her rejection was one reason the investigation had targeted her son.

The arc of a wrongful-conviction story bends toward exoneration and release—a flawed but heartening correction of past wrongs. Stories of police sexual abuse, laced with stigma and rarely so redemptive, are harder to hear. In “Injustice Town,” they remain in the background, more evidence of endemic malfeasance. But the sexual exploitation practiced by Golubski—and, according to several victims, by other officers as well—was central to his corruption, not a by-product of it. Such actions are possible only within a culture that resists seeing certain categories of people—Black women, poor women, sex workers, drug addicts—as potential victims. In the guise of offering a form of protection, Golubski coöpted women into becoming instruments of the criminal-justice apparatus that corroded their community.

In 2010, Golubski, who had reached the rank of captain, retired from the K.C.K. police force in good standing. A few years later, his former partner became the city’s chief of police. Even after McIntyre’s exoneration made the accusations against Golubski widely known, it seemed as though he might never face consequences; he was still receiving his full pension and working for a nearby police department, in the suburb where he lived. When McIntyre filed a civil suit against Wyandotte County, a judge ordered settlement talks, fearing that a hefty jury verdict might bankrupt the struggling county. McIntyre came away with a $12.5 million payout, but neither the police department nor Golubski was required to admit culpability. (In a statement, Wyandotte County’s legal counsel said that, “at the time the alleged conduct is said to have occurred, none of the former Chiefs had knowledge of these allegations.”)

Then, in 2022, the Department of Justice charged Golubski with six counts of depriving two individuals (named in the indictment as S.K. and O.W., who was identified as Ophelia Williams) of their civil rights, through sexual assault, kidnapping, and attempted kidnapping. Prosecutors, in detailing the assaults against Williams and S.K.—who was around thirteen or fourteen at the time of her first encounter with the detective—argued for Golubski’s detention while awaiting trial. They failed, and instead he was released on house arrest. A second indictment against Golubski was released later that year. In it, Golubski was charged with conspiracy and involuntary servitude, stemming from a sex-trafficking enterprise run by Cecil Brooks, the K.C.K. drug kingpin. (Brooks was also, at one point, an informant for the D.E.A.) According to prosecutors, Brooks held girls as young as thirteen, many of whom had been released from juvenile detention, in apartments he owned, where they were forced to perform sex acts. (Brooks, who was indicted along with Golubski, has pleaded not guilty.) The indictment said that Golubksi protected the sex-trafficking operation from law enforcement and assaulted girls who were ensnared in it. “We tried many times to bust Cecil Brooks and bring charges against him,” Ellington, the former K.C.K. detective, said, in her 2015 affidavit. “During the years I worked in vice and narcotics at the Department, we used informants, we attempted controlled buys, and we obtained search warrants. But we never were successful. Whenever we got there, Brooks was always clean.”

On December 2, 2024, the day Golubski was finally scheduled to stand trial for the civil-rights violations, he got in his red Ford Taurus and headed toward the federal courthouse in Topeka. His police badges were still stored in the car’s center console. Before he reached the highway, he turned around and returned home. Around 9 A.M., he walked onto his back deck and shot himself in the head. Some K.C.K. officials seemed to be eager to move on. “I can tell you from talking to all the members on the police department, his name doesn’t come up,” the new police chief said, after taking office in 2021. Golubski’s victims were left at a loss. Although he left multiple suicide notes, rumors circulated that someone else had killed him, or that he wasn’t really dead. “My first thought was, Where is the body? I want to see the body,” Williams told a reporter. It was as if the spectre of something still lingered in the city, shadowy and unresolved. ♦