Unreasonable Doubt

When a child claims abuse, adults are supposed to listen.

This past spring, however, when 12 adults spent 3 weeks listening to an adolescent girl's accusations that her father had molested her, 11 of them found it hard to believe.

Her father has served 5 years in jail because of those allegations. He remains imprisoned because of a shoddy investigation by a Lee's Summit cop who was sleeping with the accused's wife, and because an assistant prosecutor withheld evidence in a 1999 trial, and because of one obstinate juror when the case was retried.

When lawyers select a jury, they attempt to find people who will listen to all the evidence, weigh it fairly and follow the law. For the attorneys handling the father's second trial this past spring, that turned out to be harder than they thought.

In May, 150 prospective jurors were called to Judge Charles Atwell's Jackson County courtroom, where they learned a few facts about the case they would decide if they were selected.

Though they didn't yet know his name, they learned that a man -- Ted White -- was found guilty of 12 counts of sexual abuse against his adolescent daughter when he first went to trial in 1999. After he was sentenced to 50 years in prison, White fled to Costa Rica.

Under a Missouri law known as the escape rule, a judge can deny the appeal of a convict who flees. But the circumstances surrounding White's trial were so troubling that he had been given a second chance.

Shortly after White fled, his attorneys learned that his wife, Tina White, had been having an affair with Lee's Summit police detective Richard McKinley -- the detective who was investigating White's daughter's allegations that White had sexually abused her.

Tina White and Richard McKinley later testified that they had begun dating after McKinley completed his investigation but before White's 1999 trial. Prosecutors had known that McKinley was sleeping with Tina White when they called Tina White and McKinley as witnesses against Ted White, but they didn't tell the jury.

In 2002, Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District Judge James Smart wrote that Assistant Jackson County Prosecutor Jenni Mettler had violated White's constitutional rights by withholding that information. He also noted that McKinley had discovered one of White's daughter's diaries -- in which she had written nothing about any sort of abuse -- but had failed to seize the diary as evidence. "The suppression [of evidence] undermines confidence in the verdict," Smart wrote. He ordered a new trial for White.

During jury selection for that new trial this past spring, White's defense attorneys asked whether any members of the pool would be unable to render a not guilty verdict for someone who had fled the country. One man stood up, a juror recalls, but the other 149 said they'd be able to weigh the evidence fairly anyway. This time around, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon's office was prosecuting the case; Jackson County prosecutors had recused themselves. Over 2 days, attorneys for both sides worked together to select 12 jurors.

The previous trial had lasted 3 days, but this year's trial went on for 3 weeks, ending the first week of June.

During the 1999 trial, White had been represented by a private defense attorney, Jim Speck. This time, White was represented by attorneys Sean O'Brien and Cyndy Short from the nonprofit Public Interest Litigation Clinic. PILC attorneys usually handle only death penalty cases and appeals, but O'Brien, who had represented White during his appeal, had taken the unusual step of asking to represent White at his trial because he believed White was innocent.

O'Brien and Short spent hundreds of hours investigating claims, interviewing witnesses, obtaining documents and creating timelines in the case -- which Short says Speck never did.

Many of their prospective jurors might not have been able to relate to Ted White Jr. -- a rich Lee's Summit workaholic with questionable taste in women who hired nannies to spend time with his children. But most of them could understand that anyone could be falsely accused of a crime.

As hard as it is to fathom a little girlmaking up sexual allegations against her father and sticking to the story for years, Short and O'Brien had discovered a family situation in which that seemed plausible.

By the end of deliberations, 11 of the 12 jurors agreed with them.

During the course of the 3-week trial, Short and O'Brien retraced Ted and Tina White's family history. The account that follows is essentially what the jury heard, according to the Pitch's examination of court records and interviews with jurors.

White, a good-looking former high school football star from southwest Missouri, was attending chiropractic school in Lee's Summit when he met Tina McKenna, a twice-divorced mother of two, in 1990. A few weeks after they started dating, she and her children moved into his apartment. The couple married in the winter of 1991. Ted White's mother, Myrna White, a reserved woman, disliked Tina from the start -- she disapproved of the way her new daughter-in-law dressed in low-cut dresses and tight sweaters. After the wedding, Myrna White stopped speaking to her son.

Ted White dropped out of school and discovered a talent for sales; he eventually started a company that helped consumers get discounts on vision products. In his spare time, he played golf with business associates and socialized with his wife and their neighbors. They kept pornographic tapes and assorted sex lotions in their bedroom; sometimes they had sex loudly enough for the children to overhear them.