It's Sandersman!

Investigators had linked several victims to drugs or prostitution, but Prospect corridor residents were no less outraged because the women had lived dangerous lives.

Acting Police Chief Rachel Whipple gathered a task force of officers to pursue leads night and day. By mid-September, Whipple's officers presented Sanders' office with evidence implicating a paroled murderer named Terry A. Blair.

Officers were justifiably proud of their police work and eager to put the public at ease.

But cops aren't exactly known for their public-relations skills.

"We would not have been presumptuous enough to have called a press conference ourselves ... to say we have concluded this case and we're now handing it over to the prosecutor," says Greg Mills, who was acting head of investigations for the Kansas City Police Department. (He is now the police chief in Riverside.)

Typically, it's the prosecutor's job to announce criminal indictments. But Mills had reason to expect that he'd be invited to Sanders' announcement — often, the law-enforcement lineup is a show of force and cooperation during such press conferences. (Recently, U.S. Attorney Todd Graves called a press conference that involved no fewer than 10 people, including Sanders, to announce that he had filed civil rights charges against two Jackson County murder suspects.)

Not when Blair was indicted back on September 14, though.

"We found out about the press conference because one of the detectives on the squad investigating those murders was approached by a television reporter asking if we were going to be at the press conference," Mills says.

Mills, Whipple and a couple of detectives crossed the street at 5 p.m. to find a podium set up on the north side of the Jackson County Courthouse. A group of black ministers had assembled to help spread the good news.

Like the police, Mayor Kay Barnes also hurried over uninvited, Mills says. He also recalls that Whipple made a beeline for Sanders and chewed him out for the snub. "You would not have wanted to have chatted with her in that way," Mills says.

Sanders tells the Pitch that he'd planned to hold a traditional press conference the next day at 9:30 a.m. to announce that Blair had been indicted in connection with one of the six killings, but he was forced to change his plans when a TV reporter found out about the indictment. The resulting news coverage, predictably, focused on the lifestyles of the dead women. Sanders says he rescheduled the press conference at the last minute to ensure the accuracy of the news coverage and to be sensitive to the women's families. He adds that he called the mayor, the police chief and Mills to let them know. (Mills says he doesn't remember receiving a call from Sanders.)

Overall, Sanders says, his use of the media has helped make Jackson County safer. He cites several examples when a media call for witnesses or a warning about an offender on the loose has led to tips and arrests.

"With one exception, we've been very successful," he says. That one exception is the Porter case. Despite Sanders' coastal junket and the help of Dr. Phil, the children are still missing.

However, to the city's great relief, one other long-standing mystery has now been solved and is winding its way through the legal system.

One of the most serious decisions Sanders now faces is whether to seek the death penalty in the case of Harrell L. Johnson, who is accused of kicking 3-year-old Erica Green in the head, allowing her to lie unconscious in a Kansas City house for 10 hours until she died, and then cutting off her head and abandoning her remains in Hibbs Park.

This will be Sanders' fifth death-penalty decision. He has formalized the process, breaking it into two parts. First, a team of senior assistant prosecutors gathers to discuss whether the law supports prosecuting the case as a capital offense. Then, a group of mostly nonlawyers working in the office discusses whether it's ethical to seek the death penalty. Sanders also invites defense attorneys to make their cases.

"We want to be sure there is nothing overlooked," Sanders says.

But the decision rests with Sanders. So far, he has split it evenly, seeking the death penalty for Blair and Lorenzo J. Gilyard (a former trash collector now charged with strangling three girls and nine women between 1977 and 1993) and pursuing life in prison for Givon Clemons, who is accused of killing two women in 2004, and Dawud Abdelmalik, who has been linked by DNA evidence to a 1980 murder.

Sanders has yet to try a case as prosecutor, but he says he will try the case against Johnson, as well as the cases against Blair and Gilyard.

Cleaning up Kansas City's bloody streets may be only slightly more difficult than navigating Jackson County politics. But the way the office works, politics is a major part of the job that Sanders so actively sought.

The universal support he enjoyed at the beginning quickly dissipated.