The Cop Who Killed a Murder Case

On the night of January 27, 2003, Danny Holmes and Shawn Hamre stood outside a prostitute's door at an apartment building at 16 West 37th Street. The Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department officers were searching for a missing person, a 25-year-old tourist named Guy Coombs. The last trace of the missing man was his ATM withdrawal at a gas station around the corner. The neighborhood was their beat, and the cops relied on addicts and hookers as their informants.

Holmes and Hamre headed down the whitewashed, fluorescent-lighted hall. They could hear voices coming from apartment No. 3.

"This is Officer Holmes," Holmes said after knocking. "I need to ask you some questions about a missing person. Don't be alarmed. I'm not here for your drugs and your drug-dealing enterprise."

An older black man opened the door. Holmes walked inside, followed by Hamre. A young black guy sat in front of a television. The room had no furniture. A blanket and a pillow lay at one corner of the room. Strewn about were DVDs, car stereos, CD cases and a plastic bag of green leaves. A black .357-caliber revolver sat on the floor in front of the younger man.

Holmes pulled out his own .40-caliber and told Hamre to secure the two men. Holmes lunged forward to retrieve the .357 from the floor. He took it to the kitchen and placed it in the freezer, so it would be out of reach of the residents in the small studio apartment. Holmes ran background checks on the two men. The younger one had no record, but the older man, Edward Z. Henderson, who went by "Butch," had served time in Kansas on a drug charge, making him a felon illegally in possession of a firearm.

Holmes and Hamre handcuffed the two men. They weren't sure what to do next. They were patrol cops, not detectives, and they didn't have a warrant to be in Henderson's apartment. Holmes stepped out of the apartment and used his cell phone to call Mike Hutcheson, the detective who had ordered the two cops on this search. The missing tourist's family had been in town for three days, complaining to local TV news that Kansas City cops were neglecting the case. Holmes knew the area and its criminals well. So, as a favor, Hutcheson had asked Holmes earlier that evening to look for Coombs around the area of 37th Street and Main.

"I got the missing tourist's drug dealer," Holmes told Hutcheson. "He's got a gun inside the apartment." Holmes claims that Hutcheson told him to leave the two men and the gun in the apartment and come back to the station.

Holmes went back to Henderson's apartment and uncuffed the men. Hamre felt strange about leaving the scene as it was, but if those were the orders Hutcheson gave, the patrolmen had to follow them. As they turned to go, Holmes noticed a box of bullets on top of the TV. Holmes asked himself, Why leave a box of shells in the hands of a felon when the only thing they're going to do with them is something wrong? He took the bullets and put them in his pocket. Later, he moved them to the duffel bag he kept in his patrol car.

According to Holmes, Hutcheson insisted that Holmes' report include everything that Hamre and Holmes had done that evening until they got to the drug dealer's door. The search of the apartment should be left out.

Holmes wrote neatly, in all capital letters, about a Hispanic man at the Lost Sock Laundromat at 35th Street and Main who told him that Coombs had been asking about cocaine and meth, just before he was reported missing. He wrote about two street people who told him that they'd met Coombs at a gas station at 37th and Main; they said they'd put Coombs in contact with a Raytown meth dealer. He wrote about a male prostitute who had heard that Coombs was smoking crack and spending money with other male prostitutes at Buddy's, a bar on the 3700 block of Main. He wrote about the hooker who had said if Coombs wasn't dead, perhaps Henderson, the dealer, knew where he was. He wrote that Sgt. Kenneth Frederick of the Homicide Unit knew of this investigation, as did Holmes' patrol sergeant, John Bryant.

Holmes had a rapport with the small-time drug users and petty thieves who came to know him on midtown's streets, but he didn't have a lot of friends within the police department. As he wrote his faulty report, Holmes didn't think that it could cost him his job. It could also cost Jackson County prosecutors a murder case.

By all accounts, Guy Coombs liked to party.