All Alone in Lone Jack

Bernie Standiford awoke, startled from a heavy slumber as his wife stood over him in her pajamas and insistently shook his shoulder. “Bernie!” she said, a sharp edge of worry in her voice. “Didn’t Mike come home? He’s not in his bed!” Their teenager should have been home hours earlier.

Bernie jerked his head up and looked around the living room of his comfortable ranch-style home just outside Lone Jack. He had dozed off on the couch waiting for his son to come home before midnight curfew. But now it was 4 a.m.

Bernie stumbled to his feet and told Jean to get dressed. Gruff and beefy, Bernie was used to being the strong, unemotional one in the family. But his hands trembled as he grabbed for his car keys and tried to imagine some harmless explanation for his son’s uncharacteristic absence.

Mike Standiford, a dark-eyed sixteen-year-old football player, was kindhearted and close to his family. He frequently visited his older sister at her nearby house. His dog, an old boxer, was usually with him. As far as Bernie knew, Mike wasn’t much into partying or drinking, though he enjoyed a jockish popularity with girls. That night, Mike had gone to see Christine, one of his new friends in Lone Jack, where the family had moved from Lee’s Summit a year earlier. The two had planned to hang out at her house, shoot some pool and listen to music.

Bernie and Jean rushed into the warm August night. After driving just a few hundred yards south, Bernie spotted emergency vehicles’ flashing red lights on the other side of Highway 50, less than half a mile away. And he knew. “I just knew that was my boy,” Bernie says grimly.

Arriving at the scene, Bernie saw an ambulance, a Jackson County sheriff’s patrol car and a blue-uniformed deputy. He saw a mangled, smoking Camaro rammed into a tree, and his gaze froze on its license plate. It was Mike’s.

“Is my son dead?” Bernie managed to choke out the question. The deputy told him yes. Bernie yelled in anguish and fell to his knees while his wife heaved and sobbed and tried to crawl to the ambulance. Bernie’s natural impulse was to shield his wife from the gruesome sight, so he put his arms around her and took her home.

The crash seemed an ordinary tragedy on a deadly country road. And that’s exactly what Lone Jack’s police chief and firefighters expect Bernie and Jean Standiford to believe.

Jackson County Sheriff¹s Deputy David Dinwiddie had been dispatched to the scene, just beyond Lone Jack’s city limits, a little after 2:30 a.m. on August 6, 1996. Surveying the wreckage, he determined that the Camaro had been headed north on Lover’s Lane when it skidded across the road, slammed into a tree and caught fire. Mike Standiford’s badly charred body was in the front seat.

The rural road in the county’s extreme southeastern corner was pitch dark, without streetlights, but the straight, dry pavement was familiar to the boy, and the night was clear. Deputy Dinwiddie wrote in his report that the vehicle had made an “improper” lane change, which probably contributed to the crash. Dinwiddie declared the wreck to be a one-car accident. For the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, the investigation was over.

The fire had burned so long that the county medical examiner relied on Mike Standiford’s dental records to identify the driver.

During the weeks following the crash, the Standifords cried all day each day, and Jean would wake crying in the night. One morning at 2 o’clock, the older of their two daughters banged at their door, sobbing that she missed her brother. The family buried Mike in Independence at Mount Washington Cemetery with no headstone.

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Mike’s youth and the violence of his death made his passing almost unbearable. “It nearly killed my wife,” Bernie remembers.

Bernie Standiford began to obsess over details of the crash, little questions that nagged him. He wanted some explanation for why his son, a confident driver, swerved off a dry road and into a tree less than half a mile from home. His first suspicion — which he found improbable — was that maybe Mike had been drinking that night.

Bernie had to know, so he visited Christine, the friend Mike had been with the night of the crash. “I said, ‘Tell me straight: Was there any drinking at all going on that night?’ And she swore up and down that Mike wasn’t drinking.” Tests on Mike’s body confirmed the absence of alcohol or drugs in his system.

It just didn’t make sense, Bernie thought. And as he sought information about the crash, Bernie was a little surprised that he and his grieving family didn’t get more help and cooperation in the tiny town just beyond Kansas City’s suburbs.

The chief of the Lone Jack volunteer fire department had told Standiford he had no report from the accident and gruffly refused to release pictures he had taken of the crash; finally, he grudgingly relinquished one photo of the burning car. “Who wouldn’t want to help emotionally wrecked parents whose child had died?” the Standifords wondered.

Named for a long-dead blackjack oak tree that once marked a pioneer trail, Lone Jack, about ten miles east of Lee’s Summit on Highway 50, has just 528 residents. The “Welcome to Lone Jack” sign points the way to the three churches within city limits. Hungry visitors will find only one restaurant, the Lone Jack Family Café.

Bynum Road, which crosses Highway 50, is the main drag. The police headquarters, with a few battered pickups in its parking lot, sits by the post office and the library. Two brown horses graze in a corral out back. Across the street is Kuttin’ Kathy’s Korner styling salon. In a tradition that dates from the early 1900s, townsfolk each year stage a reenactment of the Civil War Battle of Lone Jack, complete with uniforms, horses, Confederate flags, a parade, a pig roast, a talent show and a baby beauty contest.

In keeping with the town’s rural-Missouri roots, the Lone Jack High School’s sports teams are called the Mules. Students proudly wear royal-blue letter jackets, each adorned with a toothy, braying mule.

The town’s local news source is a monthly tabloid that recounts city council meetings, explaining in detail which elderly citizen complained about her water bill and offering instructions from police officers for disposing of brush. The News Stand recently featured a two-page spread of high-school homecoming photographs. Graduating classes typically boast few more than twenty students.

When the Standifords chose to build a home near Lone Jack, it was partly because the town fit Bernie’s idea of what family life ought to be. In a small town, he figured, neighbors would rally around anyone who needed help.

But the Standifords didn’t dive into Lone Jack’s politics or get entangled in the privacy-robbing relationships that unnerve many newcomers to small towns. Mike continued to attend Lee’s Summit High School rather than join the Mules.

Bernie was often on the road for his tractor-trailer business while Jean continued her role of stay-at-home mother and homemaker. Mike helped his dad at the office and on the road. On one trip to Wisconsin, Bernie purchased a used black-and-red Camaro for Mike, and Mike drove it back to Missouri, following Bernie.

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The night of Mike’s crash, Bernie had just returned from a California road trip and had time only for a brief chat with Mike before his son drove off. Bernie often remembers the banality of that last conversation beside the Camaro. Bernie gave Mike a hard time for having snagged Dad’s new white denim shorts to wear for his night out. They talked about taking another road trip together before school started.

The air was weary with the weight of summer, and autumn seemed an impossibility. Yet Mike had a promising junior year before him — homecoming, football, basketball, concerts, girls, prom.

Weeks later, Bernie and his family were at home one day when a young man they didn’t recognize knocked at the door and shocked them with a question: “Did they ever catch who ran Mike off the road?” That was the family’s first clue that the accident may not have been a one-car crash, though it sounded like just a fragment of twisted small-town gossip.

Yet Bernie’s grieving gave way to a new, macabre duty as detective in his son’s death. The persistent doubts and occasional sleuthing into the events of Mike’s death turned into an all-out quest. If the boy’s death were criminal — manslaughter or homicide, hit-and-run, someone’s not having called for help — someone out there, maybe someone in Lone Jack, would be found out.

A little more than three months after his son’s death, in November 1996, Bernie Standiford contacted the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department and reported that a private investigator had given him reason to believe that another driver had hit his son’s car and then fled the scene. The sheriff’s department reopened the investigation and asked for help from the Missouri Highway Patrol.

The Greater Kansas City Crime Stoppers printed posters asking anyone who had information about Mike Standiford’s wreck to call and anonymously leave information. The group offered a reward if a tip led to an arrest and conviction. Bernie Standiford even offered some of his own money, boosting the reward to $10,000.

In his fervor to find answers, Bernie purchased a second Camaro late in 1996, although Mike’s wrecked car was still available for examination. Lacking engine and transmission, the extra car would allow Missouri Highway Patrol investigators to take measurements and reconstruct the crash. On the original crash vehicle, highway patrol investigators found an obvious dent in the back — a dent the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department had failed to mention in its original report.

“The right rear area, near the tail lamp, revealed an indentation,” wrote trooper Corporal D.E. Holt on December 7, 1997. The indentation seemed to have come from the left front bumper of another vehicle. Holt measured both Camaros and found that the vehicle that hit Mike’s car would have measured 26 inches from the ground to the top of its bumper.

The dent proved to be a valuable clue. Bernie Standiford made arrangements with A&A Bumper Plating in Independence for investigators to examine a variety of bumpers from different types of vehicles. The dent was very distinct — not likely to have been made by the soft plastic bumper of a passenger car, but by a hard, metal bumper. The investigators, Holt wrote in his report, concentrated their investigation on pickup truck bumpers.

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“After comparing bumpers from several trucks, we found that a bumper from a Chevrolet S-10 pickup or Blazer or GMC S-15 or Sonoma fit the damage almost perfectly,” Holt wrote in his report. “Thus it is believed that the vehicle that made the damage to the right rear of the burned Camaro was a 1982 through 1993 Chevrolet S-10 or Sonoma-type vehicle.”

The dent in the Camaro was only a few inches wide, so investigators figured that a vehicle that struck it would show damage on its left front bumper. Holt surmised that as Mike Standiford drove north on the two-lane rural road, another driver rammed his Camaro, sending it out of control off the road and into a tree trunk.

Bernie Standiford had heard enough. He was persuaded that someone had killed his son by negligence at least, if not by foul play. “This person just left my boy there…. Who would do something like that? I mean, to not even make a call and say, ‘Hey, there’s someone who needs some help.’ Wouldn’t have had to give their name or anything, but just get some help.”

Bernie and Jean placed the Crime Stoppers reward posters on bulletin boards, on store windows and on stakes in the yards of anyone who would let them. Mike’s cousins and friends came in from Lee’s Summit to hand out Crime Stoppers leaflets on the streets of Lone Jack. The posters had a picture of Michael and briefly described his crash, asking anyone with information to call the 474-TIPS hotline.

But oddly, on a few occasions, Lone Jack police harassed the grieving kids and told them to go home. And the signs immediately began disappearing. Placards announcing lost dogs, work-at-home business opportunities, the Lone Jack Rodeo and Hope Methodist Church’s Free White Elephant Bingo event remained in place, while the Crime Stoppers posters vanished.

The Standifords were shaken, but a more stunning revelation was to come. Bernie Standiford, suspicious that someone in Lone Jack was protecting a driver who had run his son off the road, staked out the Crime Stoppers posters to see who was taking them down. He and Jean were shocked to see that Lone Jack police officers and volunteers from the Lone Jack Fire Protection District were removing the posters from public and private property. One day Bernie Standiford, with his video camera rolling, caught a Lone Jack firefighter taking a sign.

Bernie was in his car with his wife and daughter. As soon as the firefighter realized he’d been caught on tape, he began yelling and cursing at the family — even calling Jean a “bitch.” That enraged Bernie, who yelled back, “Come on, I’ll kick your ass right here.” The firefighter summoned Lone Jack police, who issued Bernie a ticket for “assault by verbally threatening” but refused to take Jean Standiford’s countercomplaint of verbal assault. Bernie refused to pay the fine, and the county court eventually overturned the ticket.

When Bernie paid a visit to Lone Jack police headquarters, Chief Jeffery Jewell told him, “You need to learn how to live in a small community.” It was an ironic statement coming from a bureaucrat who commutes from Independence, but Bernie Standiford thought he understood the implications: Shut up, mind your own business and don’t go looking for trouble.

In a small town, people talk. And there was at least one powerful Lone Jack figure who made no secret of his displeasure with those Crime Stoppers posters around town: Gene Collins. The Collins family had lived around Lone Jack for generations. Collins had been a longtime chief of the volunteer fire department; at the time of Mike Standiford’s death, Gene, his wife, JoAnn, and their nineteen-year-old son, Timothy, were all volunteer firefighters. Like the Standifords, they lived just outside city limits.

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The firefighting Collinses seemingly knew local police well. Timothy Collins regularly accompanied Lone Jack police officers on ride-alongs as a participant in the local Explorer program, and Chief Jewell had contact with the Collinses when police work coincided with fire department business.

Former city clerk Debra Brewington (wife of current fire chief Gary Brewington) has testified that Gene Collins would come into the police department regularly, complaining that he didn’t like the Crime Stoppers signs. Brewington let the complaints go “in one ear and out the other … it was the same thing each time,” but she remembers that Collins wanted something done about the signs. Several times, Collins talked privately with Chief Jewell, but Jewell has always denied accusations that, as a favor to Collins, he had ordered officers to remove the signs. The Collinses have not returned phone calls from the Pitch.

“I never saw or heard of any of my police officers while in the line of duty took down any signs,” Jewell later said. “[But] after Mr. Standiford had made a complaint that someone was taking down his signs and that he had video of a police officer taking down the signs, I met with my officers.”

Yet the department’s internal-affairs investigator, Thomas Goodner, who was later fired after complaining to the mayor about Jewell, would later claim in a lawsuit that “Chief Jewell participated in arranging to have the Standiford family’s posters (asking for help regarding their son’s death) taken down and destroyed. Furthermore, Chief Jewell thereafter lied to Mr. Standiford about his knowledge of the posters’ destruction.”

Sometime after the sheriff’s department reopened its investigation, Jewell spoke to Sergeant Gary Kilgore, the primary detective on the case, “off the record.” Jewell called the probe a “bullshit” investigation. Later Jewell testified that he made that comment out of concern that investigators weren’t doing enough to find a killer.

“I wanted to know,” Jewell later said, “you know, if you are going to do a homicide investigation … why wouldn’t you get local law enforcement involved and start tracking leads, and I just didn’t feel they were doing an investigation like they should have been doing.” Yet Jewell admitted in a deposition taken by the Standifords’ attorney that he told a grand jury Mike Standiford’s vehicle had been struck in the rear before the deadly accident, explaining away the suspicious dent that caught the highway patrol’s attention.

If Jewell thought the investigation needed to be done better, Bernie Standiford never heard Jewell say so. In fact, Standiford thinks Jewell hindered the search for answers, and he, too, accuses Jewell of ordering or condoning police officers’ removal of Crime Stoppers signs.

The Lone Jack Family Café is in a large, white shed on the corner of Highway 50 and Bynum Road. Its name appears in faded red script beside an image of a steaming cup of coffee. For years, almost everyone knew that Chief Jewell required delinquent local kids to work in the kitchen and dining room as “community service” sentences. They also must have known that café owner Sonja Callaway’s son Donnie had been nabbed for his involvement in a burglary ring in Lone Jack in 1999.

This past summer, Jackson County Prosecutor Bob Beaird filed, then dropped, misdemeanor charges against Jewell for his freelance juvenile judicial work.

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Among the charges against him were “impersonating a judge” and illegally sentencing at least twenty juveniles to “community service” for petty crimes. Beaird withdrew the charges after Jewell promised to stop sentencing kids. Kansas City Star columnist Barbara Shelly chalked up the chief’s troubles to “relying too much on heart” and declared that the town was “fortunate” to have such a chief. But a Missouri State Highway Patrol report on the charges hardly paints the picture of a loveable chief full of caring concern for children.

Jewell intimidated juveniles by threatening them with the consequences they’d face in the Jackson County Family Court’s detention center in downtown Kansas City if they didn’t cooperate with his bogus “sentences,” the state’s report says. Jewell coerced one boy into signing an agreement to do 120 hours of “community service” at the restaurant by saying that if he didn’t sign it, “it will be you and Bubba in the cage.”

Another boy complained, according to the report, that Jewell told him if he didn’t agree to perform free labor at the café, he would land in “juvie,” where Jewell “indicated there would be a sexual assault on [the boy].”

The report said Jewell told another boy he would send him “where all the black kids will have fun with you” and threatened another boy, saying, “I am going to make sure you are the only white kid at juvenile. They will know you are from Lone Jack. It will be stamped all over your back. They will know you came from a redneck town that doesn’t like black people.”

The report also lists former police officer James Nauser as a suspect. He’d purchased a stolen electrical generator for the city of Lone Jack from convicted burglar Donnie Callaway in 1999. Callaway got $400 for the generator after telling Nauser it was stolen, or “hot,” the highway patrol report says. (Nauser lost his police job after Callaway’s burglary ring was shut down, but he still works for the city and was never charged.)

Sonja Callaway tells the Pitch that her restaurant got little free labor from the arrangement and that news reports exaggerated the number of hours juveniles worked there.

Last summer, Jewell complained to the Lee’s Summit Journal that he used to be Jackson County’s “golden boy” but is now its “whipping boy,” and that the charges of impersonating a judge had dashed his dream of someday running for Jackson County sheriff.

But his record was less than spotless before last summer. In 1993, he and a former girlfriend filed adult abuse suits against each other while fighting for custody of their three children. In her request for a restraining order against Jewell, the woman complained that he had punched her in the mouth, pulled her hair, punched her in the stomach and “threaten[ed] to kill me with his gun, [but] shot in the air instead, just scaring me…. He always hits me and threatens my life if I mess with his job at the police department because of info I know!” He complained that she bit, punched and clawed him.

Brewington, the former city clerk, complains in a sworn deposition that Jewell permitted an “unprofessional” environment in the police station, loudly used vulgar language and engaged in inappropriate sexual banter with another clerk, Kendra Laudenslager. Brewington was so offended by the behavior that she contacted then-Mayor John Nipper to complain, but she says no action was taken.

What finally pushed Brewington to quit was witnessing how Jewell and other employees dealt with Bernie Standiford’s attempts to find out whether the police department was investigating the death of his son. When the public-records requests came in, Brewington remembers, there was “panic” in the office. Instead of telling Standiford that they did not have many of the documents he wanted, Jewell and Laudenslager, who Brewington says were “close friends,” set about faking daily police logs, using timesheet information maintained by Brewington.

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“Chief Jewell engaged in illegal activities through his reconstruction [and] falsification of documents,” says the lawsuit filed by Officer Goodner, the fired Lone Jack police internal-affairs investigator. “Chief Jewell wholly created some daily activity reports and also altered some incident reports. He did not like the information on the original reports and did not want Mr. Standiford to see it.” Goodner’s lawsuit claims that he witnessed the activity. None of the lawsuits details what the counterfeit documents say, and none of the parties involved was willing to describe the alterations for the Pitch.

Laudenslager became angry about the document requests at times and declared, “Fuck Bernie!” which offended Brewington. Eventually Goodner went to then-Mayor Nipper to blow the whistle on Jewell and others who had created the phony documents.

Jewell responded by accusing Laudenslager of doctoring the records; he fired her. Laudenslager has filed a civil discrimination suit against the city of Lone Jack, complaining that she was fired while male city workers who falsified records — such as Jewell — kept their jobs. Goodner also sued in federal court, asking for damages and to be rehired. (Jewell had fired him for allegedly mishandling unrelated evidence.) His lawsuit against the city, Mayor Howard Hensel and Jewell accuses Jewell of firing him in retaliation for reporting the chief’s activities — and makes some other serious charges against Jewell (see “Whistle Blower’s Lawsuit,”).

When Bernie Standiford attempted to pick up the police documents he had requested and instead got a story about a clerk being fired for fabricating logs, he and his wife filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Lone Jack, Jewell, Nauser, several police officers, the fire chief, Laudenslager, Hensel and firefighters Gene, JoAnn and Timothy Collins. That suit offers some insight into the bizarre behavior of Lone Jack officials in the Standiford case and points out the odd movements of Timothy Collins the night of the wreck.

Timothy Collins was at the site of Mike Standiford’s fiery crash two or three times, but not to render aid. The Collins family lives on Lover’s Lane — very close to the scene. The wreck occured on the night of Timothy’s nineteenth birthday. He told Deputy David Dinwiddie that he had been on his way home from work when he spotted Standiford’s car smashed into the tree, the last flames of the fire still flickering.

Collins did not stop to help. Instead, he said he went home and returned with his mother to the accident scene. They then noticed a body in the wreckage and contacted the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department, according to Timothy Collins’ first version of the story.

But JoAnn Collins’ deposition to Standiford’s lawyers tells the story differently: The two returned to the scene and lingered, assuming that the driver had escaped and been taken to a hospital, although no emergency vehicles were on hand. They did not use her radio to call for help because JoAnn Collins figured that Lone Jack firefighters would be asleep, she testified. They did not return to her house to call 911.

Instead, she said, mother and son drove into Lone Jack looking for a police officer — even though the accident happened in the county sheriff’s jurisdiction — but failed to find one. They then drove back to the accident scene, finally noticed the body in the wreckage, and returned to their home to call for emergency assistance.

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“At no time during the entire period, until they returned home and dialed 911, did defendants JoAnn Collins and Timothy G. Collins, attempt to summon emergency fire equipment or any other emergency rescue entities, even though defendant JoAnn Collins was provided radio communications equipment by the Lone Jack Fire Protection District, lived near the accident scene and had driven to the City of Lone Jack in search of a policeman,” the Standifords’ lawsuit charges.

The lawsuit also alleges that, along with Nauser, Laudenslager and other police officers, Gene Collins removed Crime Stoppers posters from bulletin boards, utility poles and other public locations around the city. Collins had a reason for not wanting those signs up: His son, Timothy Collins, was investigators’ main suspect in Mike Standiford’s death.

Soon after the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department reopened the case, deputies obtained a search warrant and impounded Timothy Collins’ 1987 Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck.

Kilgore’s application for the warrant laid out his reasons for focusing on Collins. Not only did the young man’s alibi contradict his mother’s account of the evening, but Collins had contradicted himself as well. He’d told Kilgore he had been at a friend’s house (not at work), tinkering with a motorcycle before driving past the flaming Camaro on Lover’s Lane.

Highway Patrol investigators found that Collins’ pickup had damage on the left side of its front bumper. The damaged section of the bumper had been repaired — a shoddy, unprofessional job — and the color of that part of the bumper did not match the rest. The investigators measured the height of the truck’s bumper from the ground: 26 inches.

“Damage to the 1987 Chevrolet S-10 pickup would be consistent with what I would expect to find by a vehicle that would have struck the Camaro,” Highway Patrol Corporal D.E. Holt wrote. “The left end of the bumper shows contact damage in the area of the bumper strip, and a buffing of the metal on the top of the damaged area of the bumper…. The width of the damage to the S-10 bumper is only a few inches wide, consistent with the width of the damaged area on the Camaro.”

Jackson County Prosecutor Bob Beaird says that a grand jury heard the evidence against Timothy Collins but did not find probable cause to indict him in the death of Mike Standiford. Now the Standifords hope the civil courts will do what the criminal courts could not: solve the mystery of their son’s death and put their minds at rest.

Bernie and Jean Standiford have not placed a tombstone on Mike’s grave. A few times, they tried to buy one, but they found they couldn’t write his epitaph. So they decided not to put up a stone until they have solved the mystery of his accident. Then they will ask an engraver for these words: May You Rest in Peace.