Cemetery Plot

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.

But WitbolsFeugen put most of his energy into trying to determine who killed his daughter, trying to keep the case in the public eye, hoping someone with information would come forward.

He occasionally persuaded news outlets to run stories on the case, telling a reporter in 1998, "The police have closed their eyes to the other possibilities because of Justin's actions." WitbolsFeugen had asked the sheriff's department to bring in the Kansas City Metro Squad, which specializes in investigating murders, but Sheriff Phillips told the same reporter that doing so was unnecessary because sheriff's investigators had followed up all leads.

Byron and Kelly were having problems. Byron remembers that the emotional toll of the deaths, combined with his father's AIDS death on Christmas Eve of 1997, left him uncommunicative and "emotionally dead."

Kelly quit school and started using crack. She would lie to her parents to get drug money. Sometimes she would just disappear. Eventually her parents kicked her out of the family home, demanding she get clean. She was in and out of drug rehab several times.

"Sometimes she would call me from crack houses, crying and apologizing," Kelly's mother says.

Kelly sometimes had no place to stay. Many of her old friends wanted nothing to do with her. She was an alcoholic, a drug addict, a mess. She attempted suicide once. Her parents suspected that her disastrous downward spiral was somehow connected to Anastasia's murder.

She cheated on Byron several times, and he stewed about her indiscretions on his Web page. Within eighteen months of their friends' deaths, the couple had broken up.

Byron wrote another letter to his fictional friend:

Mr. White,

There has been much suffering since I began writing you.... Since my last letter, I have endeavored in every way possible to restrict Kelly from bringing further harm into my life. She is a destructive force in the guise of a seraph and I will have no further part in her little charades. The happiness was short-lived and I miss the sweet girl she once was, but I am making efforts to prevail over my melancholic state....