I read with pleasure and pride last week that Rick Armstrong, who had held a variety of leadership positions with the Kansas City, Kan., police department had been named police chief at age 50.
To many area residents, the name probably won’t mean anything, but he is well known in law enforcement circles, and he served patiently and steadfastly while keeping an eye on the top spot.
I first met Armstrong in the mid-1990s, not long after I took over as editor in The Star’s Kansas City, Kan., bureau. Our office was in the Security Bank building at Seventh and Minnesota, a block away from police headquarters, which then was in the basement of City Hall, on Seventh Street. (Police headquarters later moved to the old BPU building on the northwest corner of Seventh and Minnesota.)
At the time, Armstrong was a captain, working closely with then-chief James Swofford, whom I rarely dealt with. It was one of those deals where, if you had questions, Armstrong was the guy to go to.
Rick Armstrong
Another reason I got to know Armstrong is that his wife, Allison Armstrong, did some freelance work for the bureau, writing feature stories.
I always liked Armstrong because he was thoroughly professional, straight up and didn’t seem like he wasn’t trying to hide anything. He was in his late 30s at the time and wore a serious expression. I got the impression even then that I was talking to the future chief.
One case in particular cemented my impression of Armstrong as an officer who cared and wanted to do the right thing. It was the Pamela Butler case – the awful, almost unspeakable case of the totally innocent 10-year-old who was abducted on Oct. 12, 1999, by 24-year-old Keith D. Nelson while roller skating near her Armourdale home. Before racing away, Nelson taunted friends and relatives of Butler by shouting out the window of his truck, “You’ll never see her alive again.”
Nelson drove Pamela to a field in Grain Valley, where he raped her and killed her by strangling her with speaker wire. Three days later, police fished Nelson out of the Kansas River, alive, near the 12th Street Bridge.
He later pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder in U.S. District Court in Kansas City, Mo., and was sentenced to death. He remains on death row in federal custody.
There were several maddening aspects to the case: First, a man named Paul Wilt, who was close by the abduction scene, pursued Nelson along the streets of southern Kansas City, Kan., in his own vehicle but lost track of him near Rosedale Park. Second, Wilt called police with the truck’s license number — and presumably its location at that point — but KCK police didn’t apprehend him. And, finally, it took KCK police about 20 minutes to call KCMO police to tell them to be on the lookout for a white Ford F-250 pickup.
A month after the murder, I wrote a column suggesting that the KCK police department had not been on its toes that night and that faster action and smarter decisions could have averted the rape and murder.
In an interview in his office, Armstrong fielded all my questions and provided me with a lot of details about the department’s response, including that dispatchers had notified the Roeland Park Police Department at 5:54 p.m., about 10 minutes after the abduction, and that it had begun calling Missouri law enforcement agencies at 6:08 p.m.
Unfortunately, KCMO did not get notified until sometime between 6:30 and 7, by which time Nelson probably had been in an out of Kansas City on Interstate 70.
Armstrong did not argue that Kansas City should not have been contacted sooner, but he took some of the wind out of my second-guessing by saying that “you always have to look at what (information) is available at the time.”
And what was available at the time, he said, was ambiguous. “The truck was lost in southern Kansas City, Kan., ” he said. From there, he added, Nelson could have stayed in Wyandotte County or gone into Jackson County or Johnson County in a matter of minutes.
What struck me most about Armstrong that day, however, was his heartfelt regret that Nelson got away. His attitude wasn’t, “Those are the facts, let’s close the book on it.” He felt deep remorse. He said that many times he had replayed the events of that evening in his mind, working out various scenarios where Nelson would have been apprehended.
In one of those scenarios, Armstrong envisioned himself pursuing Nelson at high speeds, never letting the truck out of his sight. “The only thing that would have stopped me would have been if I’d wrecked,” he said.
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Congratulations, chief, I believe you will be very good for Kansas City, Kan.
