Cemetery Plot

The family desperately wanted to find a living suspect, and Byron resented mistrust directed at him. In an e-mail to Anastasia's godfather, he wrote, "I can't help but feel that if this were the dark ages, Anastasia's family would have had me burned at the stake out of sheer suspicion."

One young woman, a close friend of Anastasia's named Peige Turner, was in Westport a few days after the killing when she heard a disturbing story from one of Byron's friends. The tall, thick-shouldered young man with long, dark hair and a pointy goatee told Peige that he'd heard the four teen-agers were playing Russian roulette in the graveyard that night and that Byron had shot Anastasia.

Peige spilled the story to her mother. "We need to go and tell this to the police," her mother said. Peige talked to Sergeant Gary Kilgore, the Jackson County sheriff's investigator assigned to Anastasia's murder. Peige believed her conversation with the detective would be confidential.

Later, she learned that when the detective questioned Byron's long-haired friend about the story, Kilgore blurted Peige's name. Soon after he was questioned, Byron's friend accosted Peige's mother, Karen Turner, in public, yelling, "What in the hell is Peige telling the police?"

A few days later, Peige told her mother that Kilgore had asked her to gather more information from the friends who might know about the murder.

"Needless to say I was livid over the whole thing," Turner remembers. She called Kilgore and berated him, saying, "You do not ask a seventeen-year-old girl to gather information for you. That's your job. This is a murder investigation!" She went on to complain about Kilgore's releasing Peige's name.

In a memo to county officials, Kilgore defended his disclosure of Peige's name. He agreed that it would be "improper" to ask a juvenile to do work for the sheriff's department and wrote that he would not have done so, though he refused to release transcripts of his conversations with Peige.

Turner remembers that Kilgore finally apologized and said that if any threats resulted from the disclosure, he would provide protection for Peige and be available 24 hours a day to help.

Soon Peige began receiving threatening e-mails signed "Jesus." Turner suspected the sender was the same person who told Peige that Byron had pulled the trigger. Peige also got threats on her pager and phone calls at home. One caller threatened to rape and kill Peige, then burn down her family's home. Turner recalls that when she called Kilgore about the threats, she waited two days for a call back. She finally went to Kansas City, Missouri, police, with whom she filed a report about the threats.

Fearing for her daughter's safety, Turner moved Peige out of state and filed a formal complaint with the county's Office of Human Relations and Citizen Complaints, kicking off a long and costly struggle with Jackson County that has left her embittered and drained her savings. She had to sue the complaint office under the state's open-records "Sunshine" law to see documents generated by her complaint. Under the same law, she protested the office's illegal closing of meetings in which officials discussed her complaint. She requested transcripts or recordings of the closed meetings. The county's complaint officials denied such records existed until questioned under oath.

Robert WitbolsFeugen, impatient with Kilgore's pace in pursuing clues and angry that Kilgore's betrayal of Peige Turner might discourage other witnesses from coming forward, filed his own grievance with the county's complaint office.

WitbolsFeugen's complaint asserted that Kilgore failed to compare tire tracks found at the scene with suspects' cars, failed to contact some potential witnesses promptly and disclosed too much information about the crime to potential suspects.

Kilgore responded, writing that investigators were diligently gathering evidence, that they lacked the authority to force witnesses to provide statements and that he was unaware of any information about the crime that had been improperly disclosed.

Convinced that Kilgore wasn't aggressive enough in his pursuit of Anastasia's killer, WitbolsFeugen became relentless. He sent about 150 e-mails to the detective's personal account in the span of several months. At one point, Kilgore replied with a terse letter ordering the father to "stop harassing [him], both indirectly and directly."

Kilgore defends his investigation, noting his many attempts to get more information from Kelly before she contacted the prosecutor's office. "Only two other people knew about what happened," Kilgore says. "And until one of those people came forward, there wasn't much we could do."

WitbolsFeugen joined Turner's fight with the complaint office, and the two contacted the Missouri attorney general's office, which sent a letter to the county asking for the release of documents the parents requested under the open records law. Months passed. The county prosecutor's office and the attorney general's office declined to pursue the matter, so Turner and WitbolsFeugen hired their own lawyer. After filing a lawsuit, spending $35,000 and going to court, they finally had the satisfaction of hearing a judge rule that the county had violated the open-records law.

Still, the documents they had struggled to get weren't particularly damning. County legislator Victor Callahan, who has tried to help Turner and the WitbolsFeugens, blamed County Executive Katheryn Shields. "I think the Shields administration has engaged in a very dangerous pattern of deception and stonewalling," Callahan says. "I think they have tried to make the Sunshine law toothless." He is crusading to force the county legal staff to disclose its costs in fighting Turner and the WitbolsFeugens.