JimmyCsays

I apologize in advance for the length of today’s post, but I think you will find it worth the extra words.

Yesterday, Mark Morris, The Star’s courts reporter, had an excellent story about a terrible, practical effect that the Washington budget cuts, euphemistically known as the “sequester,” have had on a memorable local case.

If you were around Kansas City in 1999, you must remember the kidnapping and murder of 10-year-old Pamela Butler. A disgusting, thoroughly rotten man/animal named Keith D. Nelson snatched Pamela off the sidewalk very close to her Armourdale home while she was roller skating. One minute she was happy and playing, and the next she was in the clutches of a predator.

As he drove off in his Ford F-250, Nelson taunted a few people who witnessed the abduction, yelling out the window of the truck, “You’ll never see her again.”

Pamela, an A-student in her KCK grade school, was found three days later, raped and strangled in a field in Grain Valley, in eastern Jackson County, Missouri.

Nelson was arrested three days after the crime and later was convicted in U.S. District Court and sentenced, in March 2002, to death.

Appeals have dragged the case out and spared Nelson so far. And now — now — the sequester is giving Nelson, now in his late 30s, a further, undeserved reprieve. In his front-page story, Morris reported that the appeals “have ground to a halt because his federally funded lawyers don’t have the money to pay for travel and witness fees for a critical hearing in July.”

I can’t imagine anything more maddening for Pamela’s mother, Cherri West, whose picture appeared on the front page, with her holding a photo of a smiling, innocent Pamela.

Pamela

For me, the latest news was another punch in the gut. The case has haunted me from the time I first heard about it on the local, late news the Tuesday evening that it happened.

I was KCK bureau chief at the time of the abduction, and I edited the first two major stories about the case — stories that appeared on Thursday morning and Friday morning of that week. It was all I could do to stay with the story for two days, however. The reason was that our daughter Brooks was 11 at the time, and mentally I couldn’t separate Pamela from Brooks. It drove me crazy, and on Friday I dropped the story and went ahead with a planned vacation day. That was the day Pamela’s body was found and the day after police fished Nelson, alive, out of the Kansas River near the 12th Street Bridge.

It was that week that I realized that fatherhood had changed me as a journalist. I couldn’t take a third long day of dealing with that awful case. On that Friday, I took Brooks and our son Charlie, who was 10 at the time, bowling at Ward Parkway lanes. I remember watching on TV at the bowling alley as police searched that field Pamela. I was very glad to be at the bowling alley instead of at the office when Pamela’s body was found.

The next month, I wrote a column about the case in what was then the Wyandotte-Leavenworth Neighborhood News, which was a weekly insert to The Star. Before writing it, I drove along the same route that a witness said Nelson had taken — west on Kansas Avenue, south on 18th Street Expressway, across Southwest Boulevard and up into Rosedale Park, where Nelson lost the witness, who had been trailing him in his own vehicle.

Here is a truncated version of that column, which was titled “Could anything have saved Pamela?” (The column revolved around Capt. Rick Armstrong of the KCK Police Department. Armstrong is now police chief in KCK.)

***

Over and over, Capt. Rick Armstrong of the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department has replayed in his mind the events immediately following the Oct. 12 kidnapping of Pamela Butler. He asks himself what his and other law enforcement agencies might have done to apprehend the abductor while he traveled through Kansas City, Independence and Blue Springs on his way to Grain Valley, where he probably killed 10-year-old Pamela.

In retrospect, Armstrong believes there’s not much the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department or any other agency could have done to turn the story of an abduction and killing into an abduction that ended with the kidnapper being apprehended and Pamela being set free.

I’ve also replayed those events in my mind the past four weeks and have come to the same conclusion. At the same time, I wish the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department had done some things differently.

On two occasions recently, Armstrong reviewed the department’s response to the abduction. His biggest regret is that the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department’s system was not in place for issuing an “Amber Alert” notifying media outlets quickly of a child abduction.

The day before Pamela’s abduction, metropolitan area police chiefs adopted the Amber Alert, putting implementation under the Metro Squad board, a collaborative group of law enforcement agencies in the area. But several departments, including Kansas City, Kan., had not worked out the mechanics at that point and had not informed officers how the system would work.

Despite the unreadiness, the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department issued an Amber Alert the day Pamela was abducted, but it came out an embarrassingly long 4 1/2 hours after the abduction – long after Pamela was dead, in Armstrong’s opinion.

Armstrong hopes that in the future his department will be able to issue an Amber Alert within 45 minutes.

In the Butler case, he said, if an Amber Alert could have gone out on radio and television within about 30 minutes of the abduction – which occurred between 5:40 and 5:44 p.m. – the abductor might have been caught while Pamela was still alive.

In the absence of a speedy Amber Alert, the best chance to apprehend Pamela’s kidnapper quickly – in my opinion and with the benefit of 20-20 vision in hindsight – lay in speedy notification of other law enforcement agencies.

On that front, the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department’s performance was spotty.

The department notified the Roeland Park Police Department at 5:54 p.m. – about 10 minutes after the abduction – that the truck had last been seen a few blocks west of Southwest Boulevard and Interstate 35. That came from a man, Paul Wilt, who had chased the truck several miles, starting near the Butler home. Wilt got the truck’s license number and called it in to 911 before the abductor eluded him near Rosedale Park.

At 6:08 p.m. Armstrong said, the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department began calling Missouri law enforcement agencies and telling them to be on the lookout for the white Ford F-250 pickup that the abductor was driving. Armstrong said he didn’t know exactly which departments were notified, or the order in which they were notified.

(The Kansas City, MO, police department wasn’t notified until sometime between 6:30 and 7 p.m.)

In retrospect…the Kansas City Police Department should have been notified sooner… But, again, that’s hindsight, and, as Armstrong noted, “you always have to look at what (information) is available at the time.”

What was available at the time, Armstrong said, was ambiguous.

“The truck was lost in southern Kansas City, Kan.,” he said. From there, the abductor could have stayed in Wyandotte County or gone into Jackson County or Johnson County in a matter of minutes.

In sum, Armstrong said he believed the Kansas City, Kan., Police Department acquitted itself capably and professionally. But, like other people who were deeply affected by the abduction, he can’t help but wish things had unfolded differently.

Sometimes, for example, he envisions himself spotting the pickup.

In his imagination, he corrals the pickup, arrests the abductor, and Pamela is safe.

But that’s all in his mind. The harsh reality is that the abductor got away in the fading minutes of that warm Tuesday afternoon. And Pamela turned up dead in a field three days later.