Girls in the ‘Hood
Tara Larson and her children are stringing Christmas lights on a fence in the Armourdale neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas. Larson glances toward the intersection of South 11th Street and Scott Avenue. On the other side of the street rests the house where Pamela Butler lived.
“It’s quieter around here than it used to be,” Larson says.
Larson last saw 10-year-old Pamela as she pushed off on her Rollerblades to buy cookies at a nearby gas station. Pamela was a happy and bright girl, says Larson, a 26-year-old mother of four who was struck by Pamela’s air of wisdom. Larson mentions the time her 7-year-old daughter, Kayla, disobeyed her orders while in Pamela’s company. In stepped Pamela, admonishing Kayla: “Don’t talk to your mother that way. Go do what your mom asks.”
Larson says every mother should have a daughter like Pamela.
“I think Pamela was the kind of girl that when she had a chore she probably did it,” she says. “Maybe her mother taught her to be well-behaved and well-mannered. That was the sad thing. She definitely seemed to be a caring young girl.”
Larson is standing in the same spot on the sidewalk where Pamela said goodbye to her and the kids. It was late in the afternoon of October 12, 1999. Larson’s boyfriend was inflating their youngsters’ bike tires, and Larson was talking to a woman drinking a beer — Patty Butler, one of Pamela’s older half sisters, who lived a few blocks away. Patty and Pamela were daughters of Paul A. Butler, who preferred giving his children names starting with the letter P.
Paul’s progeny — he had at least a half dozen children with three Armourdale women — included Penny Butler. Pamela and 11-year-old Penny were from Paul’s relationship with Cherri West. After Paul and West broke up, the girls were being raised by their mother and staying in a crowded house with another half sister, Casey Eaton, as well as Eaton’s infant daughter and West’s mother, Sandy Campbell. Other friends, children of friends, and relatives took residence with them from time to time.
From the outside looking in, Larson wondered whether West was having difficulties keeping her house in order. She and Paul, an alcohol and drug abuser, had split years earlier while Paul was tangling with his demons. Cherri West was now married to Danny West, but he was in prison at Lansing Correctional Facility for drug-related problems. Casey Eaton’s father, Danny Eaton, was in prison at Lansing too. His crime was second-degree murder, related to drugs. Cherri West didn’t seem to have much luck with men.
“Cherri and I were not the best of friends, but we knew each other,” Larson says. “I think she was a good mom, a single parent for a while who worked hard for her money. I knew she was poor — poorer than us — but I think she was doing a good job with her kids.”
When Pamela went to get cookies, sisters Penny Butler and Casey Eaton were at home with their grandmother and Casey’s baby. Cherri West, an inventory supervisor at Arrow Speed Warehouse, a high-performance auto parts store in Armourdale, was at work. In a rare moment, Pamela was on her own.
“I keep close, tight ends on my kids, and usually (West’s) girls were always together,” Larson says. “But I don’t let my kids play in the street anymore because it’s really isolated over here.”
Within minutes after Pamela left, Larson heard tires “peeling like a bat outta hell. Casey Eaton was jumping and saying, ‘They took my sister! They took my sister!'”
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Just like that, Pamela was gone forever.
Larson saw a late-model white pickup truck squealing down 11th Street, past Pamela’s house, and then swinging out of sight onto Kansas Avenue. Casey called her mother at work and then dialed 911. A man hanging out in the neighborhood tried to chase the truck in an older pickup; Patty Butler couldn’t do the same because her car was on empty. Larson saw Cherri West drive up minutes later.
“She was devastated,” Larson says. “You could see it in her face. I felt bad for Cherri. She was telling them to get a picture of Pamela off the top of the TV.”
Three days later Pamela was found dead in a field near a church in Grain Valley, Missouri. The house where she had grown up became the epicenter of a murder case that riveted the news media, law enforcement, and the public for months. A 25-year-old construction worker, Keith D. Nelson, was indicted for kidnapping, sexually assaulting, and killing her. If he’s convicted, Nelson faces the death penalty.
Nelson’s arrest followed a highly publicized manhunt that included a futile high-speed chase, the first local use of a child-abduction emergency response called an Amber Alert, and Nelson’s caught-on-video apprehension on the banks of the Kansas River the day before Pamela’s nude body was discovered.
Cherri West braved the TV cameras and reporters converging on her like hornets to a nest. In her gruff voice, she pleaded for help finding her daughter and then mourned openly in the harsh, senseless reality of her child’s death. Almost from the start, well-wishers showed their support by sending hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions directly to the 35-year-old mother and to a trust fund established at a local bank. People who never knew Armourdale existed were dropping by to leave donations. Nightly vigils brought more people into the neighborhood.
“It was like a tourist attraction,” Larson says.
Two months after her daughter was buried, Cherri West and Casey Eaton appeared on The Montel Williams Show during an episode about missing children. An area recording group called Shades released the tribute song, “Princess Pamela,” on CD. And last month, just before the first anniversary of Pamela’s abduction, Pamela’s schoolmates; Kansas City, Kansas, officials; a biker group; and a small army of volunteers and onlookers gathered to see a memorial playground being built at Armourdale’s Bill Clem Park. Local radio host Johnny Dare turned into a lop-eared puppy for the event, kindly barking out for more volunteers during his morning broadcast from the site.
One man who stayed home from work to attend the event said: “I remember the tragedy that happened here last year.”
Who could forget?
More than a year after she vanished, Pamela has remained a fixture on the collective consciousness, the victim of a brazen crime in the one place she should have felt most safe — at home. In the months leading up to Nelson’s trial, which is scheduled for April 2001, the litigation involving her alleged killer will resharpen any blurred memories about the incident. Nelson’s lawyers are attempting to get the federal case moved out of Kansas City, Missouri, for fear Nelson will not be able to get a fair trial. In the court of public opinion, he’s as done as done can get.
But behind the cameras, behind the headlines, and behind the radio broadcasts telling us the painfully obvious, there’s been another, more insidious trial in the court of public opinion. The unlikely defendant is Pamela’s mother.
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Cherri West has been vilified in the community where she spent all of her life — until her youngest daughter was mysteriously taken off their street in broad daylight. Among dozens of residents, business owners, friends, family, and law-enforcement officials in her neighborhood, West has sometimes been characterized as a low-grade Mommy Dearest whose role as a victim was opportunistically staged for television in an attempt to push sympathy buttons for donations.
The talk that blankets Armourdale looms as a crazy quilt of rumor stitched together with fact, and it is not necessarily centered on the fate of Nelson. It’s about Cherri West and the possibility that her not-so-innocent upbringing and lifestyle might have prevented her from keeping Pamela out of harm’s way.
Cherri West left Armourdale after Pamela’s death. She needed court approval to use donated money to buy a house in a different neighborhood about five miles northwest, just off I-70. But the old house, guarded by two imposing cottonwood trees, is a stark reminder of Pamela’s existence.
A 4-foot-tall purple cross — purple was Pamela’s favorite color — decorates an unkempt yard bordered by a lumpy brick sidewalk. Large pieces of moldy carpet remnants are piled in front. From a distance a printed sign on the front door could be mistaken for a “condemned” notice. If one looks closer, it reads: “Warning: The occupant of this house is a SLEEPER. He hates salesman (sic), beggars, conmen and bill collectors. You have been warned. Unless you are blind, or cannot read this sign, you can bet your ass i (sic) am going to stomp the shit out of you, if you bother me!!”
The only person still occupying the house is Pamela’s grandmother, Sandy Campbell. At 56, Campbell has been prematurely withered by disease and alcohol. Half of her tongue has been surgically removed because of cancer, but she still smokes and cusses like a sailor. Campbell never has been the kind of person to contain her anger, and she hurts when she thinks about Pamela’s death. In the weeks after the incident, Campbell kept her daytime ritual of drinking at the Oasis Club, an Armourdale bar around the corner on Kansas Avenue. (The bar formerly was called the 1111 Club and is not to be confused with the Oasis nightclub on Southwest Boulevard in Kansas City, Missouri.) At the Oasis, Campbell was on speaking terms with Nancy Nelson — the mother of Pamela’s accused killer, Keith Nelson.
“We weren’t friends or anything. We were just acquaintances,” Campbell says. “When I found out it was her son, I became unglued. People said to me, ‘She didn’t do it.’ But do you want the straight language for what I said? I said, ‘She’s the motherfucker who had the dumb son of a bitch, the retarded cocksucker, that did it. So she’s just as responsible as him.’ I don’t spare words.”
Campbell says that on one occasion after her granddaughter’s death, she attacked Nancy Nelson and punched her in the head at the Oasis.
“I hit her and I was aiming to do damage,” Campbell says. “I was sitting at the bar and she spoke to me. I said, ‘Get the fuck away from me. I’ve got nothing to say to you.’ I was mad and I don’t feel guilty or bad. I would do it again if I had the chance.”
Neither bar workers nor Nancy Nelson say they can recall a fight involving the two women, but Campbell stands by her tale. Cherri West doesn’t know whether her mom is telling the truth. “I wholeheartedly believe my mom could have popped that lady in the head,” West says. “There are three things you don’t mess with when it comes to my mom: her family, her money, and her booze.”
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Cherri West was roughly Pamela’s age one day back in the 1970s when she witnessed Sandy Campbell shoot her live-in lover, Frank McKay, in the abdomen with a 12-gauge shotgun while they were living near South 13th Street and Scott Avenue. McKay survived the shooting.
“I couldn’t actually believe my mom did it,” Cherri West says. “I think she was aiming at the bottom of the door, but when the gun kicked, it raised. He fell back right out the door and he was laying there saying, ‘Please help me. Please help me.’ He had 150 pellets in him and some of them are still there. Half of his stomach is plastic now.”
Cherri West cleaned up the bloody clothes after emergency workers cut them off McKay, who was taken to Bethany Medical Center.
“They operated on me for 17 hours and I was in the hospital for a year,” McKay says. “She shot me in my belly and blew my insides out. My bladder, my intestines. There was no reason for her doing it really.”
McKay didn’t press charges, but he avenged the shooting by stabbing Campbell in 1980. Campbell says the knife attack nearly ripped out her liver. “When he put the knife in, he twisted it,” she says.
“Hell, yeah, I did it,” says McKay, proprietor of the old Doodle Bug neighborhood bar in Armourdale. Campbell worked there. “She came in and stole my money,” he says.
Campbell didn’t press charges, either. These days, McKay works as a used car dealer at Car City USA near at 63rd Street and State Avenue, a couple of blocks from Cherri West’s new home.
“They couldn’t live together, but I’ve never seen anyone get along drinking,” Cherri West says. “Him and Mom don’t have hard feelings. In a way, he feels he deserves what he got. He feels part blame for that.”
As Cherri West grew older, she started thinking about how nice it would be to leave Armourdale. But for her to break the cycle of poverty, dysfunction, abuse and crime that had plagued her family and neighborhood for generations, something had to happen.
Historicallly, Armourdale never has been easy on families, particularly women. Laid out in June of 1880 by the Kaw Valley Town Site and Bridge Co., Armourdale was named after the Chicago meat packers named Armour. Bordered on three sides by water and on the fourth by railroad tracks, it was known as a “city within a city” for its blend of residences and factories in an area now measuring 2.9 square miles. It was one of the three communities — Wyandotte and Argentine being the others — that began consolidation to form Kansas City, Kansas, three years later.
The flood of 1903 hindered Armourdale’s growth as a neighborhood, but with the influx of factory workers it was one of the most congested and ethnically diverse areas in Kansas City. The congestion created rat-infested streets, pneumonia outbreaks, and dilapidated housing. According to a 1919 University of Kansas study, these conditions, plus the “lack of education among the mothers,” contributed to a higher-than-average infant mortality rate.
Most of Armourdale’s dwellings were deemed substandard and overcrowded, and the flood of 1951 ruined nearly half of the area’s homes — building inspectors condemned 47 percent of them. But Armourdale was blighted before the 1951 flood and continued to be that way afterward.
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In 1990 the 1,255 occupied housing units in Armourdale had a median value of $20,000. During the past 10 years, only one new home has been constructed there, and 100 have been demolished. According to census figures, in 1996 Armourdale’s population was 3,222, about one-fourth of its total during the early part of the 20th century.
But some people who live and work there say Armourdale suffers from an identity crisis. Terry Yadrich, a teacher at John Fiske Elementary School, says the neighborhood is fertile ground for a new generation of young minds capable of overcoming the obstacles their elders faced. Pamela was among those on the way to writing her own ticket out.
“I know people say things about Armourdale, but if I could choose anywhere to teach, I would never leave,” says Yadrich, who has taught in the neighborhood for 28 years, mostly at Morse Early Childhood Center. “The kids are good, and most of the parents are supportive of the school. There is a cycle, but there are parents that work their rear-ends off, and it can be broken.
“We had a student graduate from Yale and a teacher who went to Morse who was hired here recently,” Yadrich says. “In Armourdale, you hear the negative, but not about the successful people.”
Pamela was one of Yadrich’s fifth-grade students. She had shown strong academic potential, and Yadrich wishes she’d had more time to be with the student who enjoyed reading and drawing pictures of the Kansas City Chiefs.
“She was an excellent student,” Yadrich says. “She tried everything you gave her. Some things were difficult for her, but she never gave up. She had trouble spelling and her mom came up to school. We had a conference and talked. Her mom would say, ‘Pammy, you’ve got to get a good education. Do what your teacher says.'”
Pamela’s mother had never made it through high school.
Cherri Lynn Campbell was born a day after the Fourth of July in 1965, the first of two children by Sandy Campbell and James Campbell Sr. They had a son, James Jr., a year later. James Campbell worked as a logger, and Sandy Campbell held a variety of factory, painting, bartending, and baby-sitting jobs. Cherri West remembers that her parents had arguments about money.
“My mother would take money and booze out of his pockets,” she says. “I told my dad, ‘Mom took your money.’ They got divorced when I was young (in 1968), and I lived with Grandma most of my life because partying was more important to my mom than her children.”
James Campbell moved to Arkansas, and Sandy Campbell became involved with other men, including McKay. He and Sandy Campbell also fought often.
“I saw him beat up on her,” Cherri West says. “Eventually you run out of faith and hope that things are going to get better.”
But things seldom got better in Sandy Campbell’s home. “I drank hard when I was out to drink and party,” she says. “Cherri didn’t want to live with all the abuse I did. She’s had more than her share, and I’ve had a lot of my friends killed and stabbed and beat to death.”
Cherri Campbell attended John Fiske Elementary School, where a purple-and-white-trimmed bench now stands in memorial to her daughter, Pamela. After graduating from Argentine Middle School, Cherri Campbell made it to her junior year at J.C. Harmon High School, where she developed extracurricular interests — fast cars and even faster men.
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On May 13, 1984, Cherri Campbell was arrested along with about 60 others watching illegal street drag races off of Kansas Avenue.
“That cost me a $50 fine, but I still go to drag races now in Topeka,” she says. “Because I work at Arrow Speed, I get free tickets all the time.”
At the time of her arrest, Cherri Campbell already had dropped out of high school because she had given birth to a girl. “I was 17, and they say you can’t get pregnant on the first time. Wrong! I got pregnant, and the hardest part was telling my grandmother.”
She named her first daughter Casey, pronounced “Cassie.” “I spelled it how I thought it sounded,” Cherri West says. “I didn’t know the difference. I’m not the brightest person in the world. I am blond. It’s not fake. It’s real. Just call me a dumb blonde.”
Casey Eaton’s father was Danny Eaton, whom Cherri Campbell met when she was about 15. Danny Eaton was in the early stages of building a criminal record that started in his 20s with arrests for petty larceny, vandalism, armed robbery, possession of a weapon, obstructing an officer and forgery. He became the first in a line of Cherri West’s crime-riddled partners.
“Because of what I’ve gone through, I’ve always taught my girls to be independent — you don’t need a man, and don’t you support a man,” she says. “You don’t need a man to do the things that they say you do, like work on your car. You don’t need ’em. I work on my own car, and I get the grease from my fingertips to my elbows.”
Danny Eaton was trapped in revolving doors between court and jail, but he managed to keep a close relationship with his daughter. Casey Eaton was staying with Danny Eaton two years ago when he was arrested for his role in the murder of Michael D. High.
Police dubbed High’s murder the “Jack-in-the-Box” case. Using a wired undercover informant to set up a drug bust, the cops unexpectedly learned that High had been shot to death. Authorities found his body wrapped in plastic and duct tape, stuffed into the back of a wooden toy box in a truck behind Danny Eaton’s house on South 10th Street, a block away from where Cherri West lived.
One police source says: “At first glance, (we) thought (High’s body) was cut up. Then we got a search warrant for the house and found evidence that everything had taken place in the basement. The bullet had gone through the cement floor in the basement. There was blood in the drain, and (the suspects) had cleaned it up.”
When police arrived to raid her father’s house late on the night of April 15, 1998, Casey Eaton had opened the door. “When the cops came, they were drawing their guns at our rottweiler, and they said were going to shoot him if I didn’t get him,” she recalls. Casey was taken in for questioning by authorities and returned home to live with her mother.
Danny Eaton pleaded guilty to a second-degree murder charge in High’s death. Three other men were charged in the killing, including Michael “Joker” Kraus, who was convicted of first-degree murder and aggravated kidnapping. Andrew Rivera pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and Kevin Colwell was convicted of aiding a felon.
Cherri West says she had broken off her relationship with Danny Eaton because his friends and “partying” kept getting him into trouble. “It was OK at first when he was young and dumb, but I kept telling him I wasn’t going to keep putting up with it,” she says. “I tried to learn from my mistakes.”
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Paul Butler and Cherri Campbell met on the job. He was a mechanic at Martin Car Co. near 12th Street and Kansas Avenue, and she took a position washing and detailing cars. Paul, married once before, was 17 years older than Cherri.
“I thought she was a nice young lady,” Paul Butler says.
In May of 1986 they started living together near South 13th Street and Scott Avenue. Paul Butler was a heavy drug user whose fixes of choice — cocaine and meth — forced his reliance on others for quick cash. His habit dominated the relationship.
“I was doing about $150 a day,” he says. He points to his needle-branded arm. “I was the only one who had the bad problem. I had to have it everyday and I couldn’t help it. I don’t know why. I’d give Cherri some once in a while to energize her while she cleaned up the house or something. The drug (use) was mainly myself, but she would get her own weed. She had to have that wacky weed, as I call it. She’d snort a line of (cocaine) every once in a while, but she’d have to have that wacky weed.”
There wasn’t much stability in their relationship after they had two children. Pamela Irene Butler was born March 13, 1989, 14 months after Penny Ann Butler. The girls bounced between two homes near South 13th Street and Scott Avenue as their parents subsisted on an emotional merry-go-round that became abusive, Cherri West says. “When Paul and I got into arguments, he would put choke-holds on me. At one point, he knocked me down and I called the police on him. The cop went next door to my grandma’s to get him and the police told me to put a restraining order on him.”
In early August 1992, Paul Butler and Cherri West separated for good. Three months later, Cherri sued him for paternity and child support — $217 a month. Court documents alleged that Paul Butler had “physically abused and threatened to kidnap” the girls. He received weekend visitation rights, but rarely came to see his children and failed to make his support payments. In March 1993 Cherri West sued him again for $1,302 in back payments. And in 1998, the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services filed a claim against Paul Butler for half of $1,472 in medical expenses for Pamela and Penny. When Paul Butler failed to pay that amount, a judge ordered that $30 a month be held out of his paychecks — but he couldn’t make the payments. “I worked and he didn’t,” Cherri West says. “I worked until my ninth month with Penny when I was at the car lot, and after I had her, Paul told them not to hire me back.”
Pamela wasn’t the first of Paul Butler’s children to die violently in Armourdale. On September 7, 1997, Precious Antoinette “Toni” Butler, 23, was killed by David Minish, her estranged husband, in the 600 block of South 11th Street. About a week later, Minish shot himself to death in a house on Ferree Street after a police siege.
“I’ve lost two of my girls in this environment,” Paul Butler says, “and I wish I could have done more for them.”
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Minish had argued with Precious Butler — one of Paul Butler’s children from his marriage to Sharlot Butler — before shooting her and another man, Walter Shields III, as they sat on Shields’ back stoop up the street from Pamela’s house. Paul Wilt, who then lived around the corner from Shields, gave Precious Butler mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as she lay mortally wounded. (Two years later, it was Wilt who jumped in his pickup truck to chase the suspect in Pamela’s abduction. “I don’t know why I’m involved with that family like that. I can’t call it coincidence; it’s too bizarre,” he told the Kansas City Star.)
Paul Butler says the loss of Pamela scared him straight. Looking gaunt and haggard in the days following her abduction, Paul Butler now has some color in his cheeks and weighs about 60 pounds more than he did a year ago. He attributes his robust physical appearance to clean living.
“All I wanted to do before was get high,” he says. “I don’t want to do it no more. I have no urge to do it. I don’t want to be around anybody that does it. I don’t even have an urge for it. I’ve never gone to no counseling. It’s just something that said, ‘You’re done, Paul.’ I don’t want alcohol no more and I can’t even explain it. It just hit me, boom, and I was doing it everyday, everyday, everyday.”
But after Pamela’s abduction, Paul Butler says, he scored drugs at the Oasis while he was helping authorities hunt for his daughter’s whereabouts. “I think I was in there twice after she died,” he says. “Everybody knows that. The FBI knows it. I was trying to stay awake, looking for her.”
In 1992, with her relationship to Paul Butler failing, Cherri Campbell began dating Danny Ray West, whose family name, according to narcotics officers in Kansas City, Kansas, had developed a familiar ring during the years. Danny West has spent almost 20 of his 44 years behind bars. He went to prison in 1984 for second-degree murder after killing a man in a robbery attempt. Danny West was out on parole when he met Cherri Campbell.
Cherri Campbell knew about Danny West’s troubles, but she thought he was special. He treated her like a lady, or at least like no man had ever treated her before.
“I thought Danny was different,” Cherri West says. “He took me out to places to eat, and it wasn’t like he was ashamed to be with me. He let me dress up and I couldn’t do that with Paul. I wouldn’t ever wear shorts with Paul.”
It wasn’t long before Pamela adopted Danny West as her father figure.
“She worshipped the ground he walked on,” Cherri West says. “Danny stayed home a lot while I worked, and he took care of the girls.”
Paul Butler never embraced the idea of Danny West’s looking after his daughters. “(Cherri) and I were still living together when he got out of jail,” Paul Butler says of Danny West. “I did go after Danny for a while, chased him. I threatened to get Danny. Those were real tough times in my life.”
Cherri Campbell filed a restraining order against Paul Butler in 1992, and on April 17, 1993, after six months of living together, she married Danny West. He promised her a trouble-free existence.
“Danny was real good when we got married,” Cherri West says. “He was good with the girls, and Pamela really liked him.”
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But in spite of his promises, Danny West couldn’t avoid trouble. His meth addiction saw to that. He also earned a 60-day jail sentence for a domestic dispute with a son, Danny Jr., from his first marriage. (“He was 17 or 18, running with gang-bangers and I told him he couldn’t do it,” Danny West says. “I had run all the gang-bangers off and slapped him around a bit when the police got called.”)
Cherri West says she gave Danny West an ultimatum after he slipped back into his old ways.
“His friends started coming around,” she says. “Then we started arguing and fighting over nonsense. I told him, it’s either your family or these people.”
She says Pamela wanted Danny to stop going to jail. “He was really close to Pamela, even though she wasn’t his,” Cherri West says. “I can’t condemn him for anything with the kids, but I wished he would have changed his behavior and habits.”
When Danny West violated his parole for twice failing drug tests, he returned to prison in 1998 for 14 months.
“Most of the money I made, I bought dope with it, and she paid her bills with her money,” Danny West says, “but (Cherri) did dope right along with me — meth and weed.”
Danny West was at Lansing Correctional Facility at the time of Pamela’s death. He was granted permission to attend her October 20, 1999, funeral at the CrossRoads Church. Two guards accompanied him, and he was allowed to address the audience. “I didn’t get to say what I wanted to,” Danny West claims. “I had to write down what I could say; the prison censored me. When you are locked up, you are property of the state.”
Danny West remembers how he and Pamela would exchange letters, poems, and drawings while he was in prison. About a month and half before she was killed, Danny West says, Pamela and Cherri West visited him. A born-again Christian, he said a prayer with Pamela to “save” her. “Cherri wouldn’t do it. She pulled her hand away, but Pammy did it. Pammy was saved before she died.”
Cherri West says she has every intention of following through on her divorce from Danny West, who had confronted her during a visit to Lansing about a man living with her at the house on South 11th Street. Cherri West says the man is a friend who has four children and lives in the basement of her new home. “(Danny West’s) whole problem was that I wasn’t going to go through this (prison) again,” Cherri West says. “He’s not going to put the blame on me this time. It’s not like I cheated on him. He made his choice, and that’s my private life.”
Danny West says he had made his choice — before his release from Lansing in June, he already had become involved with another woman who was writing letters to him. She is the daughter of a Sunday school teacher at CrossRoads Church. “I’m thinking about marrying this other girl because she’s a good Christian woman. That’s what I need. I’m not as bad a person as they say I am. I admit it, I’ve gotten a problem with drugs, but I’m a good-hearted person.”
Within days after being interviewed by the Pitch, Danny West failed a urinalysis and entered a drug-treatment facility.
When Cherri West became visible to the public during the tense hours after Pamela disappeared, people all around town were touched by her sorrow. Among the concerned was another convict locked up at Lansing — Jerry D. Rice.
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The 55-year-old Rice, in a phone interview from Lansing, says he is responsible for starting the trust fund for Pamela. Rice, owner of the Bar None Lounge (formerly the Risky Business) near South 12th Street and Osage Avenue, made a call to one of his employees, Joyce Judd, the day after Pamela was taken. Rice suggested starting a collection for her family. He says Judd later went to First State Bank on Kansas Avenue, where bank employees told her she needed a minimum deposit to open a trust account. Rice told Judd to use $200 of the bar’s cash to get the fund started.
“When I saw Cherri West on TV, I wanted to do something for the family,” Rice says.
In 1994 Rice was convicted of murdering his wife, Dorlinda Stakley-Rice. He is one of only five persons ever convicted of murder in Kansas without the discovery of a victim or a witness to the murder. He was sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 40 years and has failed in his appeals.
Judd and Irene Wall went to open the account and planned to remain behind the scenes. But as donations surged into the six-figure range, the bank filed a temporary injunction to put a freeze on the account. Judd says the bank’s action defeated the purpose of setting up the account.
“They kept the poor girls’ money and tied it up,” Judd says. “I wanted to give the whole lump sum to (Cherri West). No matter how much she had, she couldn’t bring her daughter back. Never.”
Wall, who has lived in Armourdale since the flood of 1951, helped conduct a background check of Cherri West as the court worked out the trust fund. “We have a very dysfunctional situation here. We had a dysfunctional father and mother, and now a child is dead. With a lot of girls out here, you don’t know what’s going on with them. But look at Pammy’s record. She was an overachiever. That says something about the child and that says something about the mother.”
First State Bank officials refused to comment on their handling of Pamela’s fund, which was later transferred to Security Bank of Kansas City and then to Valley View Financial Group Trust Company.
Rice suspects his murder conviction might have played a part in the bank’s actions. “I don’t understand how the bank could take control of the funds. It kinda teed me off the way the bank did. My feeling is I think they got wind I had something to do with it,” he says.
Tony Martinez, a lawyer representing Cherri West, says the institution made the proper decision in allowing the court to decide how the money should be distributed. “Cherri is an uneducated person,” Martinez says. “The court wasn’t going to let someone like that handle the money. It was for the best.”
The court-approved trust fund provides Cherri West with money for “adequate” housing ($45,000), living expenses ($12,000, in $1,000 monthly payments through next month), a car ($6,000), furniture ($4,000) and a clothing allowance for the children ($600 semi-annually). Distribution of the remainder of the trust will continue on a monthly basis starting in February. The fund also will provide for educational expenses for Penny Butler and Casey Eaton and will mature when Penny Butler turns 22. Officials of Valley View Financial Group Trust Company would not disclose the total amount of the trust fund bearing Pamela’s name.
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Paul Butler filed a suit last December seeking $10,000 — $1,000 in monthly installments — for being Pamela’s natural father and for counseling. In court documents he expressed his concern that the donations to Cherri West “will be wasted.”
The court awarded him $500.
Conversely, Cherri West filed papers against Paul Butler seeking back child support totaling $18,292 from January 1993 to November 1999. During that same six-year period, Paul Butler was credited with making just $370 in payments. Cherri West says Paul Butler’s bickering about money only reinforces his deadbeat reputation, and that Paul didn’t have any right to show up at the bank looking for a cut of the money and speaking to the media on the family’s behalf when Pamela died.
Paul Butler says Cherri West and Casey Eaton were not the best role models for Pamela. He says Cherri West sometimes got high in the house or went away to do so while reporters and news crews waited outside as the kidnapping unfolded.
“When it happened, I didn’t have any clothes to wear to the funeral. I asked Cherri to ‘give me a little something so I can go down and buy me some clothes to wear to the funeral for Pamela.’ Well, I stood on her front porch and collected money — coffee cans full — and cards. A lot of that money didn’t go to the bank. In my own personal opinion, a lot of that money went to drugs. All the money I got from the people I handed it to Cherri. She got tired of standing out there talking to all those people. She’d take off for an hour, an hour and a half, and she’d come back in a better mood. A much better mood.”
Paul Butler says he bought drugs from Casey Eaton’s father, Danny Eaton, before Danny Eaton went to prison for murder. And when Danny Eaton wasn’t around, Paul Butler says, Casey Eaton did his work for him.
“I used to buy from Danny all the time,” Paul Butler says. “I’d go there and (Casey Eaton) would go into Danny’s bedroom, bring it to me and I’d pay her for it. But I only cared about myself. You forget all other aspects of life. All you want to do is get a little more dope and get high.”
Cherri West and Casey Eaton deny Paul Butler’s allegations.
“Casey had nothing to do with Danny Eaton’s problems,” Cherri West says.
As a “city within a city,” Armourdale possesses certain unavoidable small-town qualities. Gossip is one of them. Tony Martinez, Cherri West’s Overland Park-based attorney (who also represented Cherri West’s ex-boyfriend, Danny Eaton, in his murder case), says rumor and innuendo are typical of Wyandotte County.
“Wyandotte County is poor, and I’m from there,” Martinez says. “There is a different mentality in Wyandotte County because it’s poor and a lot of people have a lot of time on their hands. I can tell you that a lot of these rumors come from people who are not working … and they are dubious characters. I don’t think she deserves any of the B.S. she’s getting.”
Facilitated by the Amber Alert, the Pamela ordeal landed Cherri West a lead spot in a made-for-television drama that unfolded before viewers’ eyes. She appeared vulnerable yet forceful, and teary-eyed yet composed. She was a simple woman from harsh surroundings dealing with the kind of loss any parent would dread. Her story was universal.
But West had detractors practically in her own back yard. At the Oasis and the Little Giant restaurant, both within a block of Cherri West’s home, the scuttlebutt was scathing.
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“If I lose one of my children, don’t patronize me like that,” says Oasis owner, Cinda Wyman. “It was, ‘Oh, poor me. Oh, poor me.’ You can’t put a monetary value on my children. It was, ‘Let’s see how much sympathy we can get.’ It sickens me to have made the family capitalize on something so tragic.”
Martinez says he thinks Cherri West is misunderstood. “She’s not living in a castle, for God’s sake; it’s not Mission Hills. She’s still in Wyandotte County. She didn’t ask for a trust account, and she didn’t know what to do. She came to me and she was really upset. I said, ‘Sit down and grieve. Take care of the kids you have left.’ Maybe (Pamela’s death) was God speaking to her.”
But Cherri West’s move out of Armourdale couldn’t keep her from hearing the Armourdale whispers.
“People don’t know I paid $65,000 for the house, but I had to take a loan out for the rest,” she says. “I’m making $305-a-month house payments.”
Cherri West says she has refused to buy a new car with her share of the trust money because she is afraid of what people might say about her. Instead, she has gone under the hood of her ’87 Mercury Sable (a black garbage bag is taped over the rear driver’s side window) to keep it in running condition until she feels ready for a change.
Cherri West has heard all the rumors.
“They had me as the one that did this to Pamela,” she says. “It went around that (Pamela’s murder) was done for an insurance deal and that (Keith Nelson) got the wrong person and they were supposed to get Casey. I’ve heard all kinds of stuff. I don’t have any insurance on my girls, never have. So, it can’t be an insurance payment. It’s just like they saw me and (Keith Nelson) go into the bar for a drink. I don’t go into bars, so how that one ever got started, I don’t know.”
Police sources say numerous calls taken by the local crime hotline insinuated that Cherri West might have known Keith Nelson and, worse yet, that she could have been involved in her own daughter’s disappearance. Officials with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office have declined to comment about the case. In an interview with the Pitch, Keith Nelson said he and Cherri West never have met before.
“It was getting so bad,” Cherri West says, “the FBI came back to question me about it. Do you think I’d be standing here if I had anything to do with it? But I don’t care what the people say. The people don’t know me.
“I like to think of a sign they have up on the bulletin board at work: ‘Great minds talk about ideas. Average minds talk about events. Small minds talk about other people.’ But I don’t want people to think I’m sponging off the account. I won’t get the car. That money doesn’t mean shit to me. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but as long as my car is working, I’ll work on it.”
Cherri West, however, is no saint. During most of the 10 hours of interviews with the Pitch, she denied allegations of substance abuse until she reluctantly opened up about her use of drugs — including marijuana and meth — over the years. Cherri West says she shared them with Danny Eaton, Paul Butler, and Danny West on occasion, but she never got hooked. The most important thing, she says, was that she never ignored the needs of her daughters, Casey, Penny, and Pamela.
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“I might have tried it, but I don’t like it,” Cherri West says of her drug use. Danny Eaton, Paul Butler, and Danny West, she says, “would say, ‘A lil’ bit ain’t gonna hurt you.’ I’m not going to lie. I’ve done things, but it’s not something I made my life out of like they did. It’s not like I want it all the time. I’ve done things infrequently; it wasn’t an everyday habit. I didn’t have the money to blow like they did. Their money was their money, and I’ve got many more important issues than to sit there and get high with them. I never did anything like that in front of my children. And I tell them, ‘What Danny Eaton does doesn’t mean you can do it.'”
A handful of cars in various states of repair clutter the front lawn and driveway. A glowing light placed in the living room window — a neon sign with ambient purple tubes forming a pair of Rollerblades and Pamela’s name — welcomes visitors to Cherri West’s new house. Inside, pictures of the little girl (including a painting done by Leonard Peltier, imprisoned in Leavenworth for killing two FBI agents on a South Dakota Indian reservation in 1975) make the living room a shrine.
“I don’t want people to forget what happened to my daughter,” Cherri West says. “I figure as long as I keep it up, that won’t happen. A kid should be able to play in their own front yard without somebody stealing them.”
No fewer than 10 children — from shirtless tykes to rawboned teen-age boys in baggy jeans — zip in and out of the place on a Friday night. Some munch on pizza, others flip through the cable channels. It seems like old times for Cherri West’s household — except for the fact that someone’s missing.
The mother picks up a “Pammy” doll and nestles it on her lap. The 23-inch-tall vinyl replica of Pamela, a special-ordered likeness made by My Twinn Doll Co. of Colorado, has blond hair done in curls. Cherri West strokes the hair and laughs. “When Pammy was born, I thought she was a Chinese girl. She had coal black hair and a built-in tail. With hair that black, I never thought she would be blond,” she says.
Then Cherri West laughs as her mind drifts back to Pamela; laughter has been one of her best coping mechanisms. Every once in a while, she and the surviving sisters will listen to a tape of Pamela’s rambunctious snoring. Just for kicks, or for the memories. Or Cherri West will think about the trips with her daughter to Stoopid Shop, a local gag gift store.
“I have to go the rest of my life without her,” Cherri West says. “I miss her smile, her jokes. When I was sad, she was the one who came to hug me. I don’t think I ever saw her sad. We’ve had hard times, and we’ll make it.”
On the days she visits Chapel Hill Memorial Gardens, the mother looks into the near distance and sees Kansas City International Raceway, the stock car track where engines are scheduled to start next summer. A fan of drag and stock races around the area, she can’t wait for the new track to open. And since Pamela’s burial at Chapel Hill, her mother has considered a remarkable possibility.
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“I probably could stand in the graveyard,” Cherri West says, “and watch the races from Pamela’s grave.”
