In a recent court filing, Jackson County prosecutors have set out a definitive line of argument they intend to use at trial against David Jungerman.
At the request of prosecutors, Judge David Michael Byrn swept aside the strenuous and persistent objections of Jungerman’s lead defense attorney and given the state the right to secure testimony from officials at two banks, UMB and Blue Ridge Bank and Trust, where Jungerman apparently keeps millions of dollars in assets.
It has been clear from the beginning of this case that prosecutors cannot physically place Jungerman near the Brookside front yard of lawyer Thomas Pickert, who was gunned down Oct. 25, 2017, while talking on his cellphone after walking his two young sons to school.
Prosecutors do have, however, a mountain of circumstantial evidence — some of it created by Jungerman as he shuffled assets in an attempt to shield them after Pickert won a $5.75 million civil judgment against him while representing a trespasser Jungerman shot in 2012.
As a result of the shooting, the trespasser, Jeffery Harris, had to have a leg amputated.
David Jungerman at a court hearing last May
Within days of the July 2017 civil verdict, Jungerman began moving money held in his name and that of his business, Baby Tenda, which produces baby high-chairs.
Specifically, prosecutors said in the recent filing, “He began opening and closing accounts, creating purported ‘irrevocable’ trusts, and transferring money and real property to his daughter, Angelia Buesing, his ex-wife Sandra Jungerman, and to other third parties.”
For decades, Jungerman, a gun nut, has lived by the conviction that he can take matters into his own hands whenever he feels someone represents a threat against him, his property or his money. He has shot at least three trespassers outside his Baby Tenda business in northeast Kansas City since 2012, and decades ago he detained at gunpoint a group of teenagers who were trespassing on property he owns in Raytown.
A hallmark of Jungerman is his off-the-charts recklessness in deed and word. That recklessness has not abated since he was jailed last March. Recently, prosecutors divulged that they had assembled 122 pages of notes from phone calls Jungerman made from the Jackson County Detention Center.
At the beginning of every call, a recording warns that inmate calls are monitored. That didn’t deter Jungerman from making scores of calls concerning the movement of money and property among various individuals, trusts and accounts.
This from the state’s recent filing…
The vast majority or all of the accounts and all of the persons listed in the subpoenas are discussed repeatedly by the Defendant himself on his jail calls. The Defendant discussed his interests at UMB as recently as May 29, 2018, and at Blue Ridge Bank as recently as November 2, 2018. He repeatedly referenced transfers to his daughter Angelia Buesing, and her daughter, Julianne Kiene, and to his ex-wife, Sandra Jungerman.
The State believes that this evidence strengthens the State’s motive evidence by showing how obsessed the Defendant is with his money, and the abnormally extensive lengths to which the Defendant will go to protect his money even in the face of legal judgments.
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As I’ve said before, Jungerman got very lucky the day Pickert was shot with a rifle by someone sitting in a van parked across the street his home. No one can positively put Jungerman at the scene. But…
Two people said they saw an older, gray-haired man and a white van in the area…Jungerman has gray/white hair and a white van.
In addition, KCMO detectives have been able to piece together video from “traffic cameras, businesses, residences and two ATA buses” indicating Jungerman’s van was driven from Raytown to the Brookside area an hour before the shooting and driven back to Raytown after the shooting…Jungerman told police the van was on his Raytown property that morning and went nowhere.
The evidentiary coup de grace, though, is a recording police obtained of Jungerman confessing to the crime while talking to one of his employees.
That was another instance of his recklessness: He had inadvertently left an audio recorder running after having turned it on earlier to record part of a court hearing in an unrelated criminal case, which was later dropped.
The way I see it, assuming the prosecution makes no fatal legal missteps, David Jungerman is going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. In addition, that $5.75 million judgment will be paid, and Thomas Pickert’s survivors will probably win millions in their wrongful-death civil suit.
The murder trial is scheduled to start Feb. 25.
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 