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

When I read in The Star last week that the half brother of Cass County murder suspect Kylr Yust had died in the Jackson County jail, apparently having committed suicide, I didn’t attach much significance to it.

The story was by longtime police and courts reporter Tony Rizzo, a versatile and reliable hand who has more than 30 years experience at The Star.

Neither the print nor the online version of the story indicated that Jessep Carter, the half brother, was in any way linked to the cases in which Kylr Yust is charged — the 2007 murder of Kara Kopetsky and the 2016 murder of Jessica Runions.

The victims had one thing in common: Both had dated Kylr Yust.

The story immediately took on much bigger proportions, however, after Steve Porter, a regular reader of the blog and a former reporter for the Olathe News, sent me an email saying he believed Carter had been expected to testify against Yust when the Runions case went to trial. (A date has not been set.)

Steve wrote, “Carter had told prosecutors that Yust admitted to him that he killed Runions, and Carter placed Yust at the scene of Runions’ burning car when he picked up his half-brother.”

If Porter was correct, I thought, it would dramatically ramp up the significance of Jessep Carter’s suicide.

Yesterday I did some checking and discovered Porter was absolutely correct when he said it appeared Carter was expected to be “the state’s key witness” in the Runions case. (He was in jail on an arson charge that apparently was not connected to either of the murders.)

**

The operative document in the Runions case is a “probable cause statement” filed by a Belton police officer in October 2017. The document says that on Sept. 10, 2016, a man whom the officer identified as “J.C.” had told police Yust had told him he had strangled and killed Runions.

Investigators had earlier determined that Runions was last seen the night of Sept. 8 leaving a party with Yust.

The probable cause statement says…

“Yust further told the witness that he (Yust) dragged the victim’s body into an undisclosed wooded area, but he could not drag her very far in. The witness further stated that Yust wanted help with burning (Runions’) car. J.C. was with Yust when Yust intentionally set the victim’s vehicle on fire.”

On the basis of J.C.’s account, law enforcement officers arrested Yust the next day at a mobile home owned by J.C. Yust has been in custody ever since.

…It’s fair to assume that J.C. is Jessep Carter. Making Carter’s suicide all the more pivotal is the fact that he was the only person, at least as of October 2017, who offered any highly incriminating evidence against Yust in regard to Runions’ death.

**

Now let’s look at the Kopetsky case.

Fortunately, Yust apparently told at least four people he had choked Kopetsky to death at a time when both were still students at Belton High School.

Kara was last seen at 9:19 a.m. May 4, 2007, leaving the school. Phone records show that Kara had called Yust at 9:13 a.m. and that he had called her at 9:20 a.m. Surveillance footage shows Kopetsky leaving the school but apparently does not show if she met someone.

The probable cause statement identifies by their initials four people to whom Yust allegedly confessed. The initials of the first three people are “K.F.”, “A.C.” and “S.D.”

The initials of the fourth person are “J.C.”

From the context of the probable cause statement, however, I believe that J.C. is not Jessep Carter. The officer who wrote the statement identified J.C. as a cellmate of Yust at an Oklahoma prison in September 2015.

I would find it incredibly coincidental if Yust and his half brother were in an Oklahoma prison together. Beyond that, I would think that if that had actually occurred, prison officials would not have allowed the brothers to be in the same cell…I doubt that wardens put family ties at the top of their priority list in determining cell assignments.

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Taken together, the information in the probable cause statement and the apparent suicide of Jessep Carter point to two main threads of thought…

:: Unless police and prosecutors have developed additional incriminating evidence in the Runions case, that case could be in serious jeopardy. It wouldn’t surprise me to see that murder charge dropped.

:: The evidence in the Kopetsky case appears much stronger, but keep in mind that case is 11 years old. Time almost always works in the defense’s favor, with witnesses sometimes forgetting key elements, deciding against testifying or just disappearing or even dying, a la Jessep Carter.

It sounds like prosecutors have been trying to drum up new evidence against Yust. Checking records at the Jackson County Courthouse yesterday, I came across an Aug. 22 court order — requested by defense attorneys — prohibiting the state from “sending agents or informants into the Cass County Jail for the purpose of creating witnesses against defendant.”

That tends to indicate prosecutors may have tried to plant one or more people in the jail in hopes of getting Yust to yield incriminating information.

Watching how these two cases develop is guaranteed to be interesting, especially in light of Carter’s death.

The mystery of the moment, however, is why Tony Rizzo omitted from his story the pivotal fact that Carter had been identified in the probable cause statement as holding the most incriminating information against Yust in Jessica Runions’ murder. The way he wrote it, it was just another jail suicide.

Question: Do any of you remember the TV drama series Naked City from the ’50s and ’60s? Each episode concluded with the narrator intoning the iconic line: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”

Kansas City isn’t New York, and we aren’t the Naked City. But there sure are a lot of strange stories coming out of 1601 McGee these days…