Dead Man's Camp

Hidden in a patch of trees north of the Kansas River, four drifters sat by a fire and watched a battery-operated television. They'd fallen out of society, living in a camp by the Kaw. It was the evening of another June scorcher in which temperatures had topped out in the 90s. Three of the four had just returned from eating dinner at the Topeka Rescue Mission.

The camp was one of several by the river. Homeless people flowed in and out of the clearing in the woods, just off a gravel road that ran past the mission and south of the humming grain elevators in north Topeka.

The four were guests in the camp, invited to stay by a man named Mark Brown. Kimberly Danielle Sharp, recently divorced and a few days away from her 27th birthday, had battled a meth addiction from age 14. In the past seven months, she had twice been arrested for domestic battery in Emporia.

Her new lover, 18-year-old Charles Hollingsworth III, was a muscular teenager who had passed through the juvenile justice system. The 6-foot-1-inch, 230-pound Hollingsworth always kept a knife with him, and he had a habit of flicking the blade open and shut.

Sharp and Hollingsworth had met in Garfield Park a couple of weeks earlier. She was hanging out with a friend when she spotted Hollingsworth drinking whiskey and went to talk to him.

Later, Sharp would tell the Pitch that she needed a companion. "I basically dumped my friend and stayed with him that night. He didn't yell at me. He didn't hit me. I just wanted somebody who was nice."

In the two weeks they'd been together, Hollingsworth had talked about marrying Sharp. After her own marriage had failed earlier in the year, Sharp wasn't thinking about that. But Sharp's two children — 3-year-old Autumn and 6-year-old Edward — had taken to calling Hollingsworth "Daddy."

Sharp's children called another camper, Carl Lee Baker, "Grandpa." (That night, her children were staying with Sharp's mother in Emporia.) Other campers had a different nickname for Baker; they called him "Outlaw."

Baker, 60, was a registered sex offender. Ten years earlier, he had been convicted of raping his former sister-in-law at gunpoint. Baker had a rap sheet in Kansas dating back to the mid-60s — attempted robberies, aggravated burglaries, assault and parole violations — for which he spent time in correctional facilities across Kansas until 1980.

Baker rarely spoke. His skin had a pinkish hue, which accentuated his white beard and eyebrows.

The last camper, 35-year-old John Ray Cornell, was a high school dropout whose 250-pound body and untrimmed brown beard made him look like a mountain man — "Big John," the other campers called him. (Hollingsworth would later describe Cornell as a "fat motherfucker.")

Six months earlier, Cornell had hopped a train out of Poteau, Oklahoma, and ridden the rail to Kansas City. Then he'd hitchhiked from Kansas City to Topeka. Cornell was wanted in California for a parole violation — from 1994 on, he had bounced in and out of California correctional facilities; in 2001, he was arrested for auto theft.

Cornell had been living at the Topeka Rescue Mission but was booted for drinking and staying out late. He was living under the Kansas Avenue Bridge when he met Brown, who invited him to his camp.

During the day, they'd all leave to hustle money by panhandling or working odd jobs. Fearing another arrest, Baker never ate at the mission. The others brought him food.

That night, an unexpected visitor barged into the camp a little after 7. Cornell was recovering from a hangover but recognized the man from under the Kansas Avenue Bridge. The man had once invited him to an all-night prayer vigil and talked with him about calling home to his family. He had shown Cornell a photo album. As Cornell leafed through the pages, he saw pictures of torn-up homeless camps. The man told Cornell that sometimes he had to get "Nazi" with the homeless. He didn't want them getting comfortable living outdoors.

The man was David Patrick Owen, a 38-year-old self-appointed advocate for the homeless (“The Lonely Guy,” March 9, 2006). Owen had registered as a lobbyist for his one-man organization, Homeless Come Home, and he spent most of his days roaming the halls of the state Capitol. He was also a registered sex offender. In 1998, Owen was arrested for downloading child pornography at the Wichita State University library. A psychologist who evaluated Owen said he was so aggressive that other inmates would probably harm him if he went to prison. The psychologist also suggested that Owen may be a paranoid schizophrenic.

In 1999, a judge sentenced Owen to four days in jail for the pornography charge; he then served three years of probation under house arrest at his parents' home in Cimarron, Kansas, a small farming town in southwestern Kansas. In 2002, Owen moved to Topeka to lobby the Kansas Legislature. His message was simple: He wanted to reunite homeless people with their families. He would offer homeless people phone cards or his cell phone to make the calls.

He believed that he could end homelessness by reuniting families, but his tactics were confrontational. Owen told the Pitch that he'd been beaten up at least four times by homeless men. He also said his father had bought him a burial plot in case a homeless person killed him.