Blood for Blow

Curry helped Johnson in other ways. She testified that she exchanged smaller bills for $100s at several Commerce Bank branches.

The arrangement continued when Curry moved to an apartment on 38th Street. An outstanding bill with Missouri Gas and Energy kept her from getting the utilities hooked up. Johnson offered to pay the bill if he could store his drugs, money and guns at Curry's place. She agreed again.

Johnson didn't keep everything at Curry's apartment. On the east side of the city, at 2415 East 75th Street, Johnson kept a magazine for a Glock handgun and several boxes of bullets. Investigators found the ammo as well as a marijuana pipe, a digital scale, unpaid Jackson County tax bills and three boxes of Diesel shoes when they searched the house on April 22, 2003. Investigators tested the shoes but found no traces of DNA from Raya or Rios.

After Masterson stopped Johnson for speeding, detectives with the Kansas City Police Department interviewed Johnson about the Raya-Rios slayings. Phone records showed that Rios' final call was to Johnson. In a nearly 30-minute exchange, Johnson admitted knowing Rios and having been to Rios' house. Johnson told detectives that he'd met Rios through a mutual friend. He also claimed to have heard about the killings through another drug dealer.

The detectives told Johnson that the last call Rios made was to him.

A lot of people end up dead after talking to me, Johnson told investigators.

Three years after the slayings of Rios and Raya, their pictures still appeared on billboards throughout Kansas City. The $10,000 reward for information about the case doubled to $20,000 as the years went by. The Rios and Raya families held vigils and passed out fliers to keep the search for the killers in the public eye.

The break in the case came July 1, 2005. Anthony Smith, a high school dropout and convicted felon, told detectives that Michael Dale, his friend for 18 years, was the triggerman in the slayings.

The dreadlocked and goateed Smith wanted to cut a deal. Serving a 94-month sentence for felony possession of a firearm, Smith wanted his sentence reduced. He also wanted to collect the $20,000 reward.

Smith told detectives that he went to Dale in August 2003 looking for work after he was released from prison. Work, in this case, meant selling drugs.

Dale was in business with 35-year-old convicted crack dealer Mitchell Powell.

Dale and Powell ran a crack house near 42nd Street and Campbell from 2002 to 2004, Powell would later testify. He claimed that he and Dale were at the house every day by 10 a.m. selling $10 and $20 rocks to the addicts who knocked on the front door. Dale bought cocaine, and Powell cooked the powder into rocks of crack, he claimed.

When Smith went to Dale in August 2003, Dale told him that murder was his new thing. He claimed credit for killing "the Mexicans."

Dale would allegedly kill again on September 15, 2003. Jackson County prosecutors have accused Dale of unloading 40 rounds from an automatic weapon into 20-year-old Torrez E. Rodriguez. The case is still pending in state court.

Two years later, Smith agreed to get Dale to admit that he'd killed Raya and Rios. It was August 30, 2005, and a van carried Dale and a wired Smith from the Bates County Detention Center to the federal courthouse in Kansas City.

As the vehicle hummed toward the courthouse, Smith pressed Dale for information about the homicides over the course of an hour. Smith told Dale that his lawyer was pushing him for information.

"I heard they found the gun in Troost Lake," Smith said.

"They in the wrong neighborhood," Dale scoffed. "They ain't got no motherfucking gun.... It ain't in Troost Lake, nigger."

Dale didn't say where he had stashed the gun. But he did tell Smith something that police already knew.

"I didn't leave no shells in nowhere," Dale told Smith.

Dale was calm throughout the conversation. But he seemed agitated when Smith told him that there was a buzz around his name among other inmates. Their old drug-dealing friends were talking about Dale being involved in the killings, Smith told him.

"They ain't got nothing but niggers ... snitching, cuz." Dale said. "Hear me?"

"Right," Smith agreed.

"Snitches gonna get theirs," Dale warned.

Dale was confident that the police didn't have anything linking him to the killings.

"I'm a ghost, blood," Dale said. "I ain't called this dude. They don't know me. They can't place me on these Mexicans' phone."