The Cop Who Killed a Murder Case
On the night of January 27, 2003, Danny Holmes and Shawn Hamre stood outside a prostitute’s door at an apartment building at 16 West 37th Street. The Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department officers were searching for a missing person, a 25-year-old tourist named Guy Coombs. The last trace of the missing man was his ATM withdrawal at a gas station around the corner. The neighborhood was their beat, and the cops relied on addicts and hookers as their informants.
When the prostitute answered the door, she glanced at the picture of Coombs that the officers had brought with them. “Even if he is still alive, the person you need to talk to is across the hall,” she whispered, motioning with her head in the direction of apartment No. 3. “That’s the person that he buys his crack from.”
Holmes and Hamre headed down the whitewashed, fluorescent-lighted hall. They could hear voices coming from apartment No. 3.
“This is Officer Holmes,” Holmes said after knocking. “I need to ask you some questions about a missing person. Don’t be alarmed. I’m not here for your drugs and your drug-dealing enterprise.”
An older black man opened the door. Holmes walked inside, followed by Hamre. A young black guy sat in front of a television. The room had no furniture. A blanket and a pillow lay at one corner of the room. Strewn about were DVDs, car stereos, CD cases and a plastic bag of green leaves. A black .357-caliber revolver sat on the floor in front of the younger man.
Holmes pulled out his own .40-caliber and told Hamre to secure the two men. Holmes lunged forward to retrieve the .357 from the floor. He took it to the kitchen and placed it in the freezer, so it would be out of reach of the residents in the small studio apartment. Holmes ran background checks on the two men. The younger one had no record, but the older man, Edward Z. Henderson, who went by “Butch,” had served time in Kansas on a drug charge, making him a felon illegally in possession of a firearm.
Holmes and Hamre handcuffed the two men. They weren’t sure what to do next. They were patrol cops, not detectives, and they didn’t have a warrant to be in Henderson’s apartment. Holmes stepped out of the apartment and used his cell phone to call Mike Hutcheson, the detective who had ordered the two cops on this search. The missing tourist’s family had been in town for three days, complaining to local TV news that Kansas City cops were neglecting the case. Holmes knew the area and its criminals well. So, as a favor, Hutcheson had asked Holmes earlier that evening to look for Coombs around the area of 37th Street and Main.
“I got the missing tourist’s drug dealer,” Holmes told Hutcheson. “He’s got a gun inside the apartment.” Holmes claims that Hutcheson told him to leave the two men and the gun in the apartment and come back to the station.
Holmes went back to Henderson’s apartment and uncuffed the men. Hamre felt strange about leaving the scene as it was, but if those were the orders Hutcheson gave, the patrolmen had to follow them. As they turned to go, Holmes noticed a box of bullets on top of the TV. Holmes asked himself, Why leave a box of shells in the hands of a felon when the only thing they’re going to do with them is something wrong? He took the bullets and put them in his pocket. Later, he moved them to the duffel bag he kept in his patrol car.
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According to Holmes, Hutcheson insisted that Holmes’ report include everything that Hamre and Holmes had done that evening until they got to the drug dealer’s door. The search of the apartment should be left out.
Holmes wrote neatly, in all capital letters, about a Hispanic man at the Lost Sock Laundromat at 35th Street and Main who told him that Coombs had been asking about cocaine and meth, just before he was reported missing. He wrote about two street people who told him that they’d met Coombs at a gas station at 37th and Main; they said they’d put Coombs in contact with a Raytown meth dealer. He wrote about a male prostitute who had heard that Coombs was smoking crack and spending money with other male prostitutes at Buddy’s, a bar on the 3700 block of Main. He wrote about the hooker who had said if Coombs wasn’t dead, perhaps Henderson, the dealer, knew where he was. He wrote that Sgt. Kenneth Frederick of the Homicide Unit knew of this investigation, as did Holmes’ patrol sergeant, John Bryant.
Holmes had a rapport with the small-time drug users and petty thieves who came to know him on midtown’s streets, but he didn’t have a lot of friends within the police department. As he wrote his faulty report, Holmes didn’t think that it could cost him his job. It could also cost Jackson County prosecutors a murder case.
By all accounts, Guy Coombs liked to party.
He grew up in the small coastal town of Wells, Maine. He was tall, handsome and athletic, a star on his high school football, basketball and baseball teams. He earned good grades and got a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In 2001, the Cerner Corporation hired Coombs as a salesman, and he spent six months in training sessions in Kansas City. The Kansas City-based medical software company allowed him to work as a sales associate from home in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He lived with his fiancée, Isa Simmons.
On Friday, January 17, 2003, Coombs traveled to Kansas City to attend a sales meeting at Cerner’s headquarters. The night he arrived, Coombs and his Cerner friends went out drinking on the Plaza and in Westport. Coombs downed Red Bull and vodkas.
The party headed downtown, ending up at Totally Nude Temptations. The strip club doesn’t serve alcohol, so the group split its time between Temptations and the bar next door, the Cigar Box. At Temptations, members of Coombs’ party asked the strippers for sex. Someone complained, and the club kicked out Coombs and his friends. Everyone headed back to the hotel — except Coombs.
At three in the morning, Coombs called his fiancée.
“What are you doing?” Simmons asked Coombs. “It’s, like, three or four. Don’t you have work tomorrow?”
“I’m getting something,” Coombs said. “I’m in a shady situation. Pray for me. I’ll call you back.”
Coombs didn’t hang up his phone right away. Listening from their home in Connecticut, Simmons could hear his footsteps bang loudly, as if on a set of steps. “Hey, Black,” Simmons heard Coombs say before the line disconnected. Alarmed, Simmons stayed up, waiting for her phone to ring again.
Coombs called back an hour later. Simmons could hear male voices in the background. Coombs told her that he was with some friends in a cab heading back to the hotel. Simmons figured they must be people he’d met at the Cerner training session, so she relaxed and went back to sleep.
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By daylight, Coombs’ roommate at the Marriot, another Cerner employee, awoke to find that Coombs hadn’t made it back. But the roommate didn’t report his absence to anyone, figuring Coombs would return eventually. Coombs failed to check out of the hotel and never made his return flight that Monday morning, leaving an expensive laptop and the rest of his belongings unclaimed in his room.
On Thursday, January 23, Simmons and Coombs’ mother, Denise Marby, filed a missing-person report with the KCPD. After Simmons told police that he might have been on drugs, she says the cops no longer took the report seriously. The police, she says, acted as though Coombs were an addict who would simply turn up when he was done with his binge. Simmons says she knew it was more serious than that.
“I mean, he partied,” Simmons says. “He didn’t have a problem. He didn’t do crack or anything. It was the party thing — just, like, cocaine or whatever.”
Simmons shared a checking account with her fiancé, so she asked the bank to give her the locations of ATMs where Coombs had withdrawn money. His last withdrawal was at the Conoco at 37th and Main.
Simmons and Marby boarded a flight to Kansas City to look for Coombs themselves. They checked in at the Hyatt at Crown Center and took a cab to midtown. Simmons says she expected to see quaint, Midwestern Americana; instead, she saw drug transactions made openly on the street. Simmons grew up in Brooklyn and had seen her share of bad neighborhoods, but she was intimidated.
Simmons and Marby handed out homemade fliers with Coombs’ picture to people they passed on Main. They knocked on doors in the neighborhood. They even walked into a crack house to ask about Coombs. The people there said they needed to find the local cop, Danny Holmes. They said that he knew everything and everyone in the neighborhood.
Simmons got a call that day from a detective. According to her recollection of the conversation, the detective wasn’t pleased that they had been snooping around. He said he feared for their safety. He said an undercover police informant was building a case against drug dealers in the neighborhood where she and Marby had been searching and that the informant might find Coombs.
Unconvinced, Simmons demanded to speak with Holmes.
Holmes was an old-school cop. He wanted nothing more than to patrol a beat, according to ex-KCPD officer Chad Gardner, Holmes’ partner before Hamre. Gardner says Holmes’ interest in police work began when he was 9 years old, growing up near Chicago’s Wrigley Field. His grandmother worked the night shift at a hospital, and Holmes would wait on the front stoop as she got off the bus. One morning, he watched as a stranger followed behind her and struck her in the head with a rock. The man stole her purse and ran down an alley. Holmes chased him, but the thief kicked him in the stomach and got away. After high school, Holmes got married, joined the Army and served in Somalia, Gardner says. He worked a few months for the Wyandotte County Sheriff’s Department before joining the KCPD in September 1997. Holmes earned the nickname “Turbo” because he drove fast, talked fast, chain-smoked and had a quick temper. In 2001, Holmes and four other officers received certificates of commendation for pulling people from a burning apartment complex.
Detective Hutcheson called Holmes and Hamre on January 26 and told them to meet with Simmons and Marby in their room at the Hyatt in Crown Center.
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When the cops showed up at the hotel, they were wearing all black. Simmons thought they looked like street people, like undercover cops on a TV show.
“How did you hear about me? What did you hear?” Holmes asked.
“Oh, they said you were a good officer,” Simmons lied, “and we should ask for you.”
“OK, I’ll look into this,” Holmes said. He took a picture of Coombs from them, then walked out.
On January 28, 2003, the day after Holmes and Hamre searched Henderson’s apartment, the KCPD received an anonymous 911 call. The woman said the body of “the missing white guy” could be found in the basement of the Boston apartments at 38th Street and Main.
Coombs was still dressed in the black coat and pants he had worn to the Cerner meeting. He’d been shot three times in quick succession from more than 6 feet away. One .357-caliber bullet had pierced the back of his hand, entered through his chest, passed through a lung and through his heart and exited out his back.
In his mouth was a plastic bag of crack rocks.
The missing-person case had become a homicide investigation. Detective Hutcheson called Holmes. “Were you wearing gloves when you put the handgun in the freezer?” he asked. Holmes said that he was. “We don’t want your fingerprints on it,” Hutcheson said, according to Holmes.
The detectives got a search warrant to find the gun Holmes had hidden in the freezer. But they wrote apartment No. 1 on the search warrant instead of apartment No. 3 and returned without the gun.
Looking for a new lead, detectives asked the narcotics unit for help. According to court documents, Henderson’s address had been the subject of a narcotics investigation since at least January 7, 2003, when undercover KCPD officer Larryn Lewis bought crack from Henderson. Narcotics cops recommended finding the owner of a Mazda Protégé with the license plate “HYDACO,” which was often spotted outside Henderson’s building. The car was registered at 4411 East 54th Terrace, where detectives found Hykeshia D. Coleman and her boyfriend, Jeffrey Tubbs.
Tubbs came to the door when cops showed up. He announced, “This is about that dead white boy on 38th Street.”
Detectives took Tubbs to the police station. Meanwhile, Coleman agreed to let the cops search the house.
In a KCPD interview room, Det. Joseph Marinella asked Tubbs if he’d mind answering a few questions. “I could stay here all night to clear things up,” Tubbs said. It was in his best interest to try to prove that he had nothing to do with the murder of the tourist, even if it meant discussing the details of his drug business.
Tubbs, who was 29 years old, said he’d learned the drug trade at age 14 from his brother. They ran with street gangs in his native Los Angeles. The family moved to Kansas City in the early 1980s. He met Henderson in 1986 in the neighborhood of 24th Street and Olive, where he said they both sold $10 and $20 crack rocks. In 2000, Tubbs explained, he and Henderson set up shop at 29th Street and Prospect. By the summer of 2003, they were buying half-kilos of coke weekly to cook into crack.
He told Marinella that on January 28, the day the body had been found, he drove by his operation at 16 West 37th Street and saw police tape and cop cars outside the building where Coombs’ body was found.
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Tubbs picked up Henderson. In the car, Tubbs told the detectives, Henderson told him that he’d met Coombs through a prostitute who went by the name Red. Tubbs said Henderson told him, “The white tourist tried to get up on me, so I had to do him.”
“We’re gonna hold it down,” Tubbs says he replied. Tubbs told the detectives that he went back to the apartment, took the gun out of the freezer and hid it at his sister-in-law’s house. He told the detectives exactly where they could find the .357 that killed Coombs.
Marinella interrupted the story: “Earlier in your statement, you said Mr. Henderson told you that you needed to get rid of the gun. Why didn’t you?”
“Because I knew all of this was going to come back to me sooner or later, and I was going to keep the gun as my ace in the hole so I could get out of it,” Tubbs replied.
Police found the gun at the address Tubbs had provided. Kansas City police officers arrested Henderson and charged him with first-degree murder and armed criminal action. He also faced federal drug charges.
After the interview, police brought Tubbs back to Coleman’s house, as promised. There, Drug Enforcement Administration agents were waiting to arrest him. While he told his story about the killing, police found, in the bottom compartment of the oven, a brown paper bag containing 494 grams of crack. Tubbs would now face federal drug charges. On the way to be booked, Tubbs scuffled with the DEA agents in their vehicle; they pulled over to call for a KCPD wagon to transport him.
As Tubbs was led away, he wailed, “It’s my third strike!”
On November 22, 2005, Henderson’s murder trial was a week away. Prosecutor Denise St. Omer was looking over her case file, frustrated because her only link between Henderson and the gun was Tubbs’ testimony. The report Holmes had written failed to mention that he’d entered the apartment, so there was no mention of the gun he had found and hidden in the freezer.
St. Omer knew Tubbs could easily be discredited. Tubbs was a twice-convicted felon, facing life in prison if convicted of the drug charges. He had a motive to finger Henderson for the crime. It would be easy enough for Henderson’s public defender, Bill Raymond, to label Tubbs the killer.
St. Omer called Holmes to see if he knew anything more.
According to St. Omer, Holmes said he was the officer who recovered the gun and that some of his investigative methods were “a little unorthodox.” Holmes explained to her that he had also taken bullets from Henderson’s apartment. He still had them. He offered to show St. Omer.
Holmes was off-duty, working security for the Landing Mall at 63rd Street and Troost. St. Omer and her assistant prosecutor, Robert Sanders, went to see Holmes around 5 p.m. on November 22.
Holmes explained that he had forced his way into Henderson’s apartment, according to St. Omer and Sanders. (Holmes would later deny that he forced his way in.) Holmes said he’d seen the murder weapon on the floor and put it in the freezer. Because none of these details was written in any of the reports, the prosecutors regarded Holmes with disbelief. He got angry, thinking they were accusing him of lying. He offered to show them the bullets that he had kept for two years in a bag in his patrol car.
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Holmes explained that the “defectives,” as he called them, wouldn’t have been able to solve the case without a street officer like him. The detectives couldn’t talk to the prostitutes and drug dealers the way he could. He hadn’t received credit for solving the crime because the detectives were embarrassed, he said.
After their conversation with Holmes, St. Omer called KCPD Capt. Rick Smith. She asked that he get someone from the crime scene unit to go to the Landing and recover the bullets from Holmes.
St. Omer knew that an illegal search and hidden evidence could sink her case. She also knew that she was legally required to pass on what she’d learned to Raymond, Henderson’s public defender. After she called Raymond, Circuit Judge Thomas Clark agreed to delay the trial while the attorneys examined the new evidence.
Meanwhile, the KCPD’s Department of Internal Affairs opened an investigation. Holmes’ powers of arrest were revoked, and he was assigned to a desk job, the unglamorous task of writing down the public’s police reports. Holmes says one sergeant told him that his troubles would go away if he just resigned. Holmes remained resolute, certain that he would be vindicated.
During interviews with IA investigators, Hutcheson claimed he didn’t remember telling Holmes to enter Henderson’s apartment. He said he never told Holmes to omit anything from his police report.
The only person to support Holmes’ story was his partner, Hamre. But it had been Holmes who spoke on the phone with Hutcheson. And it was Holmes who moved the gun and took the bullets.
Holmes and Hutcheson were both required to take polygraph tests. Each was asked whether Holmes had contacted Hutcheson that night to tell him what he had found in the apartment. Hutcheson said no. Holmes said yes. Both failed the polygraph test.
On July 21, 2006, Patrol Bureau Deputy Chief Kevin Masters recommended a five-day suspension for Hamre and an eight-day suspension for Hutcheson. Hutcheson’s suspension was later overturned based on questionable results from his polygraph test. “I’ve received no discipline,” Hutcheson told the Pitch. He declined to comment further.
As for Holmes, Masters wanted him fired. “I don’t think Officer Holmes has the intelligence or common sense to understand his actions violated the rights of the individual and severely threatens the relationship of this department and the overall community we serve,” Masters wrote in a letter that summed up the two-month internal-affairs investigation. “I don’t think Officer Holmes understands the fact that his actions were inappropriate and, if placed in a similar situation, I think he would respond with similar decisions.”
Police Chief Jim Corwin agreed with Masters’ recommendation to fire Holmes.
On August 29, 2006, Capt. Don Sight showed up at Holmes’ house to collect his badge. Holmes was placed on unpaid leave. He decided to fight the charges and requested a public hearing before the Board of Police Commissioners. Such hearings are rare. Usually, cops would rather quit.
Holmes’ hearing began at 9 a.m. on March 8 in a sixth-floor boardroom at police headquarters. Holmes sat at a folding table. He wore a black suit and a tie with an aqua-colored pattern. His face was somber and mostly expressionless as his name and actions were brought up over and over again.
The Fraternal Order of Police assigned him an attorney, Luke Harkins. Lawyer James Rawls acted as the prosecutor. Mark Berger, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor, served as the judge. Berger will make a recommendation to the Board of Police Commissioners whether to uphold Holmes’ firing.
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There were few observers. Captain Smith watched from a folding chair, next to Sgt. Hutcheson’s pregnant wife. Hutcheson was on the witness list for the department, but he wasn’t present. Gardner came to root for his old partner — the only onlooker present to support Holmes.
Rawls’ first witness was St. Omer. She had left the prosecutor’s office for a job with the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation.
St. Omer recounted the conversation she had with Holmes at the Landing. She said Holmes told her that he and Hamre pushed their way into Henderson’s apartment. St. Omer said she was furious. “In my opinion,” she said, “the entire police investigation is now so muddied that the case will no longer be able to be prosecuted.”
It wasn’t just the Coombs murder case that could fall apart. St. Omer said that because Holmes was suspended, the prosecutor’s office felt obligated to dismiss every case in which Holmes was a potential witness.
When it came Harkins’ turn to cross-examine St. Omer, he asked her, “You would agree that if Danny Holmes is telling the truth, as far as being directed to leave things out of his report, that that would seriously discredit the KCPD?”
“Yes,” St. Omer said.
“It would be a conspiracy?” Harkins asked.
“Yes.”
“It would damage the police department?”
“Yes.”
Rawls called Police Chief Corwin to testify. He sat at the folding table, facing Berger, wearing his full formal uniform, navy-blue with yellow stripes. Medals dangled from his chest, and he wore polished patent-leather shoes. He told Rawls that he had signed off on Holmes’ termination because he believed that Holmes had acted on his own when he entered Henderson’s apartment, hid the gun in the freezer and took the box of bullets.
“Was there any legal reason for him to be in that apartment?” Rawls asked.
“No,” Corwin said.
During the cross-examination, Corwin was cagey, often saying that he could not recall specific details.
“What’s wrong with calling detectives ‘defectives’?” Harkins asked.
“Demeaning,” Corwin replied.
Holmes’ partner, Hamre, took the witness table next. He wore his police uniform, and his shaved head reflected the overhead lights. He said they hadn’t barged into the apartment. Henderson had stepped back to give them room to come in.
“But you had no paperwork, no exigent circumstances, no warrant and no specific request?”
“Just the sources of information that led us there. Holmes did the majority of the talking.”
Harkins asked Hamre, “Have you heard other officers call detectives ‘defectives’?”
“Yes.”
“Is there a rivalry between patrol officers and detectives?”
“Unfortunately, there seems to be.”
In the hallway, during a break in the hearing, Hamre and Holmes shook hands. Captain Smith offered to buy Holmes a Coke.
When the hearing resumed and Rawls rested his case, Harkins called Holmes to the stand. The room had gone from chilly to hot over the course of the day. Testimony was punctuated by the sound of sirens from the street.
Holmes faced forward, telling his story directly to the judge, Berger. He told him that he’d never taken a sick day. He said that he’d been instrumental in solving other crimes, such as the case of the “barroom bandits,” a group of robbers who had terrorized midtown. He said he’d been out of work for months. His voice had a pleading, earnest lilt. The back of his neck and the tips of his ears turned bright-red.
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Holmes went through his involvement in the Coombs case. When Holmes came to the bullets, he said he had eventually forgotten about them. “I was told not to recover them, so I put them in my trunk, and that’s where they stayed. It was a small box in a large duty bag. They didn’t jump out at me every day.”
Harkins asked him how this entire experience made him feel. He said he was being made into a scapegoat. “At first, I believed that the system — that the captains, the commanders, the sergeants — will get to the truth and that I would get a fair shake,” Holmes said. “It’s all coming on me. Nobody else is accepting any kind of responsibility or even knowing who I am. I believed in the system.”
Holmes said he thought he had helped Coombs’ family by solving the crime. “I’m not a homicide detective, so I don’t know the real tricks of their trade, but I want to give these people some kind of service, some kind of closure to where their loved one was.”
He said he still believed that his reputation could be repaired. “To this day, I still feel that somehow, the powers that be will be able to see through this and … that things will be right.”
Finally, after several minutes of Holmes’ speech, Berger cut him off. It was Rawls’ turn to cross-examine him. But it was 4:50 p.m. Berger called for a recess. Harkins will continue with Holmes’ defense when the hearing continues on March 22. Berger will then make a recommendation, and the Board of Police Commissioners may take a month or longer to make their final decision on Holmes’ fate.
Henderson sits in the Jackson County Jail. He’s already been sentenced to serve 20 years on federal drug charges. But the murder case against him appears shaky. His public defender plans to file a motion later this year to dismiss the case, based on his view that the investigation was botched.
After the hearing, Holmes left KCPD headquarters and drove to his father’s house in Kansas City, Kansas. He says the ordeal is an embarrassment to his family.
“Since when, in this country, has a police officer been fired for telling the truth?” Holmes tells the Pitch. “They haven’t proved that I was deceptive about anything except for something they want to shape in their favor.” The Cop Who Killed a Murder Case Officer Holmes says a supervisor made him lie. But KCPD brass say he bungled a murder investigation.
