JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

One prison story leads to another…

My good friend and former KC Star colleague Mike Rice, a paralegal at an Independence law firm, reminded me in an email about the strange case of Paula Barr, a former Star reporter who married a murderer.

I don’t remember much about Barr, except that she seemed like an intense reporter. She was a single mother and talked about her little boy a lot. She was tall, large boned and had long blond hair.

She worked out of the 18th and Grand building at one time, but at some point got transferred to the Independence bureau, where Mike Rice was also assigned at the time.

While in Independence, Barr covered the gruesome murder of a 47-year-old At&T supervisor named Richard Drummond, an Excelsior Springs resident.

…Before I get into more about Barr, here’s the backdrop of that case, which occurred in August 1994.

While driving west on I-70 near Kingdom City, Drummond pulled over and offered a ride to three men whose car had broken down. The men were Dennis Skillicorn, Allen Nicklasson and Tim DeGraffenreid. Hours earlier, the three had burglarized a home in the area, and they were armed.

A 2009 post on a blog called Missouri Death Row: Capital Punishment in Missouri summarizes what happened that day and in the next few days…

Nicklasson held a 22-caliber pistol to Drummond’s head and ordered him to drive to a secluded area in Lafayette County where Nicklasson took Drummond into the woods and killed him.

Skillicorn and Nicklasson dropped DeGraffenreid off in Blue Springs and kept driving Drummond’s car until it got stuck in the Arizona desert. They walked to a nearby home where Joe Babcock offered to pull them out of the sand. As Babcock was trying to scoop sand from the car’s tires, Nicklasson killed him. They then went back to the house and killed his wife, Charlene, and took the Babcocks’ vehicle.

DeGraffenreid was quickly apprehended and led police to Drummond’s body. Several weeks later, Skillicorn and Nicklasson were captured in California.

…Now, back to Barr.

She wrote about the Missouri and Arizona murders and covered the subsequent trials of Nicklasson and Skillicorn.

Mike Rice said: “As I recall, she became very close to Skillicorn and claimed The Star was not allowing her to publish ‘the truth’ about the case. I think she may have thought Nicklasson was the only one responsible and that Skillicorn was innocent of those murders. She was upset about that, and she left The Star not too long after that.”

For a while, Barr wrote freelance articles for The Star and was doing so when she married Skillicorn in a ceremony at the Potosi Correctional Center, southwest of St. Louis.

The maid of honor was a receptionist in the Independence bureau. The best man was another death-row inmate named Leon Taylor.

Mike Rice said: “I was out of town when she married Skillicorn…Paula did not volunteer the news of her nuptials to any of us, as she probably knew that it would be the end of her free-lancing gig. And indeed, it was.”

**

Curious about what happened with Barr after she left The Star, I poked around on the Internet. I found that after Skillicorn was transferred to the Bonne Terre correctional facility, east of Potosi, Barr (somehow) got a job as a reporter at the Daily Journal newspaper in nearby Park Hills, Missouri.

While lobbying to keep Skillicorn out of the execution chamber, Barr covered a variety of stories for the Daily Journal. Below are two photos I found of Barr on the Daily Journal’s website.

Paula Barr interviewed then-Gov. Matt Blunt sometime in the late 1990s.

In this photo, Barr, then a reporter at the Daily Journal in Park Hills, MO, took a sledgehammer to a junker as part of a fund-raising event.

This morning I put in a call to the Daily Journal, and a woman who answered the phone (she was in the finance department) remembered Barr as a “very nice” person. “Everybody liked her,”  the woman said.

While at the Daily Journal, however, Barr’s main focus was trying to rehabilitate Skillicorn and keep him alive.

Perhaps she succeeded at the former…The Missouri Death Row post, written May 20, 2009, says Skillicorn “went to his death this morning with an apology and with faith.”

Skillicorn

In a “final statement” read by a Department of Corrections spokeswoman, Skillicorn said he had lived every day the last 15 years remorseful about the killing of Drummond.

In his statement, he went on to say: 

“The sorrow, despair and regrets of my life would most certainly have consumed me if not for the grace and mercy of a loving and living God who saved me. As a husband, I’ve been overjoyed to know the love of a woman unlike any I’ve ever known. She shall forever be by soul mate and I hers.”

Skillicorn was 49 when he was executed.

**

A few loose ends:

:: DeGraffenreid, the accomplice whom Skillicorn and Nicklasson dropped off in Blue Springs, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

:: Nicklasson was convicted of first-degree murder and executed in 2013.

:: Taylor, the best man at the Barr-Skillicorn wedding, was executed in 2014 for the 1994 killing of an Independence gas station attendant. Taylor shot 53-year-old Robert Newton in front of Newton’s 8-year-old daughter. (Taylor also pointed the weapon at the girl and pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed.)

…And Barr? Well, the lady at the Daily Journal said she understood that Barr had moved to Arizona “a couple of years ago.”

I ran Barr’s name through whitepages.com and found a listing for a Paula Barr, aged 60 to 64 — which would be right — in Scottsdale.

No phone number was listed, and I didn’t call directory assistance to see if they had one.

So, the last word about this bizarre story goes to Mike Rice:

“I thought what Paula did was extremely unethical _ not to mention, of course, an utter act of madness. She made The Star look so very bad.”