Murder By Numbers

Early on the morning before his thirtieth birthday, Larry Platt got stoned and fell asleep in the back of an Oldsmobile Cutlass that belonged to a guy he'd met in prison, a 24-year-old named Cornelius Peoples. Sitting beside Peoples in the passenger seat was another ex-con, 34-year-old Xavier Lightfoot. By the time Platt awakened, the sun was up and the three men had traveled from Kansas City to Omaha, Nebraska, where they'd planned a midmorning robbery of a strip-mall jewelry store.

Platt had previously worked with Peoples on after-hours smash-and-grab operations -- the pair would toss a giant ball bearing through a jewelry store window and snatch as many valuables as possible. But Lightfoot and Peoples had developed a knack for quick daytime trips to Omaha, and as Platt regained consciousness that November morning, he watched their new system in play. First, they lifted an SUV and parked it. Then they drove the Cutlass to a suburban strip mall and scouted their target: this time, Malashock's Jewelry.

When the trio returned to the stolen SUV, they began dressing for the job. Platt watched as his two partners slid into Kevlar vests and armed themselves with handguns. Then they handed him a hammer and a pillowcase held open with a clothes hanger. All three men wore ensembles of dark clothing, gloves, masks and hooded sweatshirts to tighten over their heads.

At 11 a.m., the SUV pulled into the strip mall's parking lot. Lightfoot stormed through the door at Malashock's first, followed by Peoples, then Platt. Together, they ordered employees and customers to the floor while shattering display cases and shoveling handfuls of gold chains and loose diamonds into the pillowcases. Then they fled in the SUV and drove straight back to the stowed Cutlass. Peoples and Platt raced from the SUV to the car. Lightfoot ditched the SUV, then caught up with Peoples and Platt on foot for the 200-mile drive back to Kansas City. Back home, Lightfoot called a pawnshop owner whom he knew would fence the stolen jewels and deliver their money a few days later. Platt expected to make more than $1,000 for less than half a day's work.

Three weeks later, on November 28, 1997, the group made another trip to Omaha. Again, they stole a bulky getaway car, this time a blue conversion van, parked it, then cased their target. Again, they donned gloves and dressed in dark clothes with masks and hoods pulled over their heads. This time, shortly before noon, they knocked over a bank -- Educator's Credit Union in the south part of the city. Instead of jewels, they made off with thousands of dollars in cash and nearly $100,000 in travelers' checks and money orders.

Again, they ditched the stolen car and sped back to Kansas City.

They didn't know they were driving toward trouble, not away from it. Back in Kansas City, Lightfoot's abused lover was hurt and upset and ready to talk about her boyfriend's criminal enterprise. Her disclosure would provoke an ill-conceived murder conspiracy that continues to confound prosecutors nearly five years later.

Lightfoot's live-in girlfriend was born John Wayne Hogsett but had since assembled a feminine wardrobe and renamed himself Jovan Jackson and then later Jovan Ross. Ross' physical transformation was strictly cosmetic, not surgical, but Lightfoot's confederates played along, routinely referring to Ross as a woman. Later, witnesses and lawyers, in volumes of documents stored at the federal courthouse in Kansas City, Missouri, would do the same.

Lightfoot and Ross had lived together for just a few months. They shared a boxy, flat-roofed, stone rental home in a wooded cul de sac south of Brush Creek Boulevard at East 56th Street.

On December 2, 1997, the 33-year-old Ross crossed the state line and spoke with Overland Park Police Department officers, with whom she apparently felt comfortable. She talked about Lightfoot's violent abuse but then offered police something more interesting: She knew of at least one robbery Lightfoot had committed that fall.

Three days later, Ross again met with police, but this time she also told her story to Special Agent Joan Neal, an eleven-year FBI veteran assigned to the Educator's Credit Union robbery. A week after that interview, investigators searched the couple's home. They found $92,000 in bank notes in a crawl space below the house, just as Ross had reported. Authorities arrested Lightfoot the following day and charged him with armed bank robbery. He was sent to a privately owned Leavenworth jail to await a federal trial in Nebraska.

In the weeks that followed, Ross played amateur cop, telling Neal that she could fetch more information on Lightfoot's partners. She eventually turned over nicknames and phone numbers, information the FBI agent used to identify Peoples and Platt as suspects. But Neal uncovered no further evidence of their involvement, and both men remained free.

By early 1998, the Omaha U.S. Attorney's office revealed to Lightfoot's lawyers the evidence Neal had amassed. For the first time, Lightfoot learned that Ross had sold him out. Soon thereafter he sent copies of the government's argument to Peoples.

Worried that Ross' involvement could lead to his own arrest, Peoples called a meeting at his Kansas City, Kansas, home to discuss the problem with his live-in girlfriend, Karen Cockrell, and four criminal associates, including Larry Platt and a 26-year-old named Vincent "Devil" Irvin.