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

A paper is fortunate, indeed, if it has one or more reporters who can assess the passing parade of stories, reach in and pluck out the occasional ones that have the potential to be something special.

Such a reporter is The Star’s Mark Morris, who has been a courts reporter the last 13 years and before that was a City Hall reporter and, earlier, an assistant metro editor.

From the outset, Morris has covered, with great perspective and clarity, the story of “Okies run amok” at the University of Kansas ticket office as several KU employees (now former employees) raped and pillaged the ticket cache under the un-watchful gaze of former KU athletic director Lew Perkins.

Last week, a different type of story piqued his interest. It was a follow-up to breaking news from March 29, when an Independence police officer shot and killed a career criminal, 41-year-old Lonnie Moore, after the criminal shot at the officer.

The story didn’t get a lot of attention when it happened: the goofball, driving a stolen car, began firing at the officer; the officer fired back and fatally wounded him.

Had the officer been wounded or killed, or if one or more bystanders had been injured or killed, it would have been a very big story. As it was, the TV and radio stations played it routinely, quickly consigning it to history.

Morris

But Morris, an award-winning investigative reporter, saw the glimmer of a good story. Just who was this Lonnie Moore? What was his background? What led up to the fatal encounter? And why would he choose to draw his personal and final line in the sand  “on a patch of Interstate 70 overlooking the Bass Pro Shop”?

So, on the front page of Saturday’s paper, Morris gave us the full, strange portrait of Lonnie Moore. It was the picture of an aimless, rootless, apparently poorly educated soul — the child of a single mother — who was convicted of his first felony when he was 18. It was the picture of a man who woke up most days with no goal in mind other than how he might create an illegal opportunity to come into possession of someone’s else’s property or money.

In the first few paragraphs, we learn that Moore was a longtime car thief, who usually surrendered quickly and quietly when the cops closed in on him.

In the fourth paragraph, the last one that appeared on the front page before the story “jumped” to an inside page, Morris set the hook: “The afternoon of March 29 was different.”

When you go to the jump, you find out that, within the last year, Moore had  upped his game from car thief to bank robber: He was the prime suspect in seven area bank robberies, the last one taking place in mid-March.

That revelation makes it clear why Moore drew that fateful line in the sand, and it also set the stage for the flashback that fleshes out “The Lonnie Moore Story.”

Like a jeweler slowly bringing out the finest stones, Morris unveils many rich nuggets about Moore that draw the reader closer to this strange fellow, whom you wouldn’t have wanted within arm’s length in real life.

Among the details:

— He was born in Chillicothe and moved to North Kansas City when his mother got a job with the Total Petroleum co.

— His mother died in 1995 at age 46. Moore had two brothers, neither of whom Morris could run down.

— At some point, Moore moved to the state of Washington and married a woman 28 years older than he.

— After being apprehended trying to break into a van in Milton, Wash., in 2003, Moore told police that he needed the van to visit his sick son in a Seattle hospital. But he didn’t know which hospital.

— Four months later, when he was stopped in a stolen car, he was carrying 15 “jiggler” keys, which had been shaved to fit in different car ignitions.

— In 2006, his wife filed for divorce and he moved to the town of Duluth, Minn., where he became “a regular police-blotter figure in the county’s weekly paper.”

— Wanted for probation violation, Moore left Minnesota last June, returned to the Kansas City area and apparently began robbing banks.

Oddly, and perhaps as a sign that he knew his walk on the wild side was nearing an end, he never showed a gun during the robberies and never disguised himself.

As Morris reported, “At least two sets of surveillance photos clearly show his face.”

So, on March 29, along I-70, Moore had nothing to hide and no realistic hope of remaining free.

It was the end of a rotten, pointless life that cost the taxpayers a considerable amount of money along the way but, fortunately, did no lasting damage to any innocent people, as far as we know.

And, thanks to Mark Morris, it was a life that made for interesting reading and reflection.

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