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

Lamar, Mo. — Local journalists like myself love to have a dateline at the start of stories once in a while because it means one thing: You’ve gotten out of town and reported from the road!

And so it was that the JimmyCsays journalistic juggernaut roused itself out of the comforts of Kansas City and headed down I-49 early this morning for court business related to the case of David Jungerman, the Raytown man who was questioned in the Oct. 25 murder of Kansas City lawyer Thomas Pickert and is separately facing an attempted burglary charge in southern Missouri.

Everyone who has been following the Pickert case is now focused on the attempted burglary case because it appears to be the best chance the state has to get Jungerman off the streets and into prison.

Despite Jungerman having a strong motive to kill Pickert (Pickert represented a client who won a $5.75 million civil judgment against Jungerman last summer) and despite the fact Jungerman has a history of shooting people, authorities apparently do not have enough evidence to charge Jungerman in Pickert’s slaying. Police questioned him, but the interview ended after he requested an attorney.

Stymied on the murder case, the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office is cooperating with the Vernon County Prosecutor’s Office — Nevada, Mo. — on the attempted burglary charge. The hope is to gain a conviction and get the 79-year-old Jungerman into prison. Fortuitously for the public as well as the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, the attempted burglary charge has been hanging for a year and a half, and now authorities hope to get the maximum seven-year sentence against Jungerman, if a jury convicts him.

A trial date is not set but appears to be coming early next year. Today a pre-trial conference was held in the Barton County Courthouse in Lamar, where the case would be tried. (Although the Vernon County Prosecutor’s Office is handling the case, it was moved to nearby Barton County last year on a routine “change of venue.”)

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Barton County Courthouse (JimmyCsays photo)

I said I started out early this morning…but not early enough. The conference was scheduled to start at 9 a.m. at the Barton County Courthouse, and I didn’t arrive until shortly after 10. (If I’d still been working for The Star and had been assigned to cover the case and had missed the conference, I might have been fired, but, you know, I’m on JimmyC time now.)

A bailiff told me the hearing had concluded a few minutes before I arrived. At that point, Judge David Munton, presiding judge of the 28th Judicial Circuit, was hearing subsequent cases. As I’m wont to do, I chatted up various people and found out what had come out of the hearing.

So here’s the development: A hearing was scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 9, in Vernon County, at which time Judge Munton will take up two motions Jungerman filed recently.

One motion is to dismiss the attempted burglary charge, as well as a misdemeanor charge of harassment.

The other motion seeks the return of a .40-caliber Glock semi-automatic handgun — loaded with hollow point bullets — that Vernon County Sheriff’s deputies recovered from Jungerman’s vehicle the day of the alleged burglary incident, June 28, 2016.

A tenant of Jungerman’s — along with two other witnesses — allege that Jungerman attempted to kick in the door of the tenant’s residence and, while brandishing and touching a gun in his waistband, yelled at the tenant, “When are you getting out of here, you mother fucker?”

From my perspective, it appears Jungerman has zero chance of getting his dismissal motion approved. One reason is that, as in the civil case that resulted in the $5.75 million damage judgment, Jungerman is representing himself — “pro se,” in legal jargon. Judge Munton has strongly encouraged Jungerman to hire an attorney, at one point saying something to this effect in open court: “If you have appendicitis, you can cut yourself open with a knife and remove your appendix, but most people seek help.”

For his part, Jungerman contends he doesn’t have access to adequate funds to hire an attorney — even though he admitted in the civil trial that he was a multi-millionaire– and at one point he asked Judge Munton to appoint an attorney to represent him at state expense. (The motion was denied before the proverbial ink had dried.)

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To some extent, Vernon and Bates counties are Jungerman country. In the course of the civil trial, he said either he or a family trust owns about 7,000 acres of farmland in those two counties. Several years ago, Jungerman took the opportunity to promote his political philosophy on the side of a tractor-trailer that sits on the west side of I-49 in the southern end of Bates County. The tractor-trailer has been in the same place for at least seven years, and I photographed it today, on the way back from Barton County.

Here it is:

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Also on the way back from Lamar, I stopped by the Vernon County Courthouse in Nevada, hoping to meet Vernon County Prosecutor Brandi McInroy, who is handling the burglary case. I was not optimistic, primarily because Jungerman has unnerved McInroy to the point she has requested beefed-up security at the Vernon County Courthouse and has asked Judge Munton to order Jungerman to keep his distance from her in court.

McInroy

When I first called McInroy a couple of weeks ago, I left a message, but she didn’t return my call, which further made me think my chances of getting a face-to-face meeting with her today would be slim. I was right. When I got to her office, a receptionist greeted me behind a “top-and-bottom” door that was open at the top. She told me McInroy was eating lunch in her office but took my card, and I sat down in the outer office. About 15 minutes later, the receptionist reappeared at the door and told me McInroy would not see me because she “cannot talk about active cases.”

“But she’s got your card,” the receptionist added, smiling. I smiled back and departed.

McInroy graduated from the University of Missouri School of Law in 2005 and worked for the 28th Circuit’s Juvenile Office before being elected prosecutor in 2014…She’s probably never had a case as sensitive as this.

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The non-judicial highlight of my day was having lunch at a diner called Cap’s Cabin (“Home of the Crispy Cod”) on the Barton County Square, across from the courthouse. Waitresses were running tray after tray of fried cod from the kitchen to customers’ tables, and oldies from iHeartRadio were playing on the speakers…The place was vibrant.

On the bathroom wall hung a likeness of a fish — a fish that carries a message that could soon be invoked in court and bring David Jungerman’s days as a free man to an end.