December 1, 2025 • 38 mins
When Niko, Khadijah and Nikki finally come together, they instantly form a sisterhood. Niko tells her girlfriends the story of her older sister, Stacey. A woman whose life was turned upside down when she met Roger Golubski at 15 years old.
US resources for Violence and Sexual Assault: https://rainn.org/
International resources for Violence and Sexual Assault: https://nomoredirectory.org/
US Suicide & Crisis Helpline: https://988lifeline.org/
International Suicide & Crisis Helplines: https://blog.opencounseling.com/suicide-hotlines/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, it's nicky. This is an episode about sisterhood, both
the ones were born with and those we choose for ourselves.
It's full of love, but there's also a lot of
pain and stories that explore substance abuse, violence, murder, and
sexual assault. One of those victims is a minor. There
(00:23):
will also be some strong language, so if you or
someone you love has been affected by any of the
themes in the show, we've left some links in the
description that offer resources and support take care of yourself.
(00:47):
When I was a kid, I used to hang out
near Quindera Park, a few minutes from my family's home.
From the outside, it's nothing remarkable, bright green grass, a
kid's playground, benches to watch.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
The world go by.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
As I grew up, I began to learn more about
how this place was once a part of the Underground Railroad,
a stop along the route enslaved black people took on
the road to freedom. It's a part of our city's
history that's all too easy to forget. When the Black
Lives Matter movement swept across the world in twenty twenty,
(01:25):
that history took on a whole new meaning. I'm no
stranger to the racism and the prejudice black people face
at the hands of police, but seeing the violent deaths
of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor made this century's old
(01:46):
fight feel more urgent than ever. It also gave me
a greater awareness of cases involving police corruption happening right
on my doorstep, like that of Lamont McIntyre. He was
released after twenty three years in prison, but the detective
who had framed him was still walking free. Roger Glupski
(02:09):
had retired from police work in twenty sixteen on what
seemed like his own terms, and none of the women
he'd abused had seen justice. So in twenty twenty, I
organized a petition calling for greater police accountability in Kansas City, Kansas.
As a result, I was invited to my first rally
(02:33):
calling for an end to police violence and prejudice. One
of the speakers instantly caught my eye. I was trained
to look around, know my surroundings. That woman was Kadiza Hardaway,
so I'm.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Looking forward in deep when I saw her, and literally
she is a full length of a block away and
I noticed her walking up to me.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It was just almost like this weird eye contact.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
I really saw this ray of light.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It was Nikki.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
She was walking up. We had never met each other before.
We just gravitated to each other. I had just immediately
hugged her, and she hugged me. We introduced ourselves, but
it felt like we already knew each other. It was
just this automatic sense of familiarity. I can't even describe it.
(03:32):
I've never had a feeling like that in my life.
It was like meeting a sister. I didn't even realize
I needed. We locked arms that day and we've been
by each other side ever since. Kadija and I spent
hours talking about Detective Kulupski, the reports that he'd abused
(03:52):
his authority, and the stories we'd heard from the women
he assaulted. We needed to do something, so the next
day we set up Justice for Wyandotte, an organization named
after the county casey k belongs to. Our aim was
to give voice to those who had suffered as a
result of Gulupski's actions, like Nico Quinn, who had been
(04:14):
coerced into giving false testimony against Lamont McIntyre and the
lead up to Lamont's exoneration, Nico had become the target
of intense public scrutiny. It was like her own city
had turned against her.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I would get calls from friends and family members telling
me to stop talking to the media because they was
making me look bad.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Part of her wanted to move on, leave it all
in the past, but rumors about Gallupski were coming to
light and Nico wanted to join the fight, which is
how she got put in touch with Khodija.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
I was in my worst when I met Khadija. I
was kind of like Larry to talk to her. But
then we finally talked to each other. Oh, we was
on that phone for a long time and it was
like we have always knew each other.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
We talked on the phone for probably about five or
six hours the very first time we talked.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
The three of us got to know each other pretty quickly.
We were united by our experiences as black women fighting
for justice and our shared goal of creating a better
future for Kansas City. Kansas a city we love, but
it was going to take a lot of work. I
just knew that.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Like after George Floyd and watching the communities around the
world come together because they saw the injustice, it was
a time like no other.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
We shared stories during dinners, made plans over coffee and
spent hours getting to know each other until our friendship
began to feel like something deeper, a sisterhood. Police had
failed to stop Glupski from putting the community at risk.
(06:04):
The authorities hadn't held him accountable for the abuse he
inflicted on the women we heard from, and it was
starting to feel like nobody was coming to fight for
the women of Kansas City. So we decided to fight
for ourselves.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Oh God, Oh God, God.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I'm Nikki Richardson and from the teams at Novel and
iHeart Podcast, this is the Girlfriend's Untouchable Big Episode four,
(06:57):
three Sisters. When Kadija and I decided to join the fight,
the woman we gravitated to was Nico Quinn. We thought
we knew her story, her cousin's shooting, the witness intimidation,
(07:22):
and the threat of her kids being taken away, But
it turned out there was even more to Nico's connection
to Glupski than we had realized, so we asked her
to tell her story. From the very start.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
I grew up in Wanda County, Kansas City, Kansas. I
was born to Josephine Quinn, who had three daughters.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Nico, her older sister Liz, and their oldest sister Stacy.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Stacey was beautiful. She was so beautiful. I used to
love her eyes. And all the people that I know
that knew her talks about how beautiful her spirit was,
how very respectful she was, because that's how we was raised.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
The Queen sisters were like best friends.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
We used to have fun, used to act like we
was singers, acting like we like the brags and sisters
or stuff like that watching movies, you know, mocking the
stuff that's in the movies.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
But they were regular sisters who would pick her and
wind each other up too.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
Stacey used to be so honor I remember when we
was little. Mamma used to be like, we said, Mama,
can we ask some cookies or whatever? She say, clean
up and y'all can get them hub. She was like, Stacey,
get them kids a few of them cookies. She goes
eh when she lick every cooky and didn't give it
to us. She was honory, but she used to protect us.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Nico needed a protective presence in her life because her
family was fractured. The father hadn't stuck around, and Josephine
had a lifelong battle with mental health issues.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
My mother was in and out of the psychiatric hospital,
mental facilities all my life. She got paranoid schizophrenic. She'd
be okay for a couple of months or maybe a
few years, and then she'd go back into the mental hospitals.
But then we end up moving to a home with
my grandmother, grandfather, auntie, uncles, cousins, so probably about fifty
(09:27):
of us in a six bedroom house. Nico.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Was surrounded by family, but it didn't always feel like
a loving home.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
I lived in nothing but chaos all my life as
a kid. I see my uncle's fighting. The police was
in and out of my grandmother's house, I almost say
every other weekend. My grandfather was an active alcoholic. We
was taught to be tough, have tough skin.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Their grandparents tried their best, but they failed to fully
protect the queens sisters. One of their relatives, a man
who was supposed to take the girls to school, took
advantage of them.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
My mom would have my uncle take us to school,
and he would take us back to the house and
would rape us before we would go to school. When
it started, Stacy was eight, Liz was six, and I
was four.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
They were just kids, but Stacy stepped in to try
and shield her younger sisters from the worst of it.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
She would put herself in horms away so he wouldn't
get us. She was a big sister. She was a protector,
especially me because I was the baby.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
The Quinn's sisters went through a lot together, but they
still had dreams. Stacey wanted to dedicate her life to
taking care of people.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
She was going to school to be a nurse.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
In the mid nineteen eighties, Stacy, who was around sixteen
years old, was doing a clinical placement at a local
health center. She finished late some nights and usually got
a ride home from one of her other relatives, but
if they couldn't pick her up, she would make her
own way back.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
She was walking home one night because my grandfather had
got drunk and my uncle didn't pick whatever was they
she didn't get picked up from her clinicals.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
When Stacy walked through the door, she looked shaken. Her
sisters immediately asked her what had happened. After a moment,
she burst into tears. Stacy told them about the police
officer she'd seen on her way home, a white man
with brown hair, pushy eyebrows in a thick mustache. It
(11:41):
was dark out, so he offered her a ride home.
Being a kid who had no reason to distrust the police,
Stacy had accepted the offer. When she got into his
police car, his friendly demeanor faded. The officer forced himself
on her.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
She got raped and came in and told us and
was holding her crime.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Stacy was their older sister, their protector. It was painful
to see her so broken.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
And we would telling her to tell and she was
like she couldn't because of the threats.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That he made. Nico didn't know what the police officer
had threatened to do to her sister if she reported him,
but she was beginning to discover how much power and
influence the police wielded over her community. Nico came of
(12:44):
age in the eighties, and as she grew up, she
began to notice the ways her neighborhood was changing. There
were patrol cars all around them, regular house raids across Guendero,
and rumors of friends and relatives was getting locked up
by the police in record time. Because in the eighties,
(13:05):
Kansas City, Kansas was hurtling into a devastating crisis. Nico
can still remember the moment it hit her neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
They had this big old community meeting up on Fifth
Street at the Jack reard In Center. Our grandparents and
parents used to go to these things, I mean where
their packed houses standing room only.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Her grandmother came home from the community meeting with a
handful of pamphlets.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
And I'll never forget the one that said, Hi, my
name is crack Cocaine. It said, I'll make a preacher
forget how to preach, a teacher forget how to teach,
a beauty queen forget her looks, a schoolgirl forget her books.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
The beauty queen forgetting her looks, and the schoolgirl forgetting
her books. Nico realized that is what was happening in
real time to her sister.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Stacey started experimenting with drugs. I know, she used to
smoke and then she went to crack and that was
her way of escaping.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Because Gulupski hadn't just assaulted her once and moved on.
He tormented her all the way through her adolescence into adulthood,
Stacy's life began to spiral.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
I noticed that a lot of people that have talked
to that start using drugs from childhood trauma, are things
in their life that they don't understand and know how
to deal with. A lot of women end up on
the streets on drug prostitution.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And that's what happened to Stacy. She got addicted to
drugs and became a sex worker to earn the money
she needed to pay for them. It was dangerous work
that led her to spend long nights walking up and
down shady streets interacting with ceed men, one of whom
was a constant presence Detective Roger Glupski.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
I got you, I got you, I got you.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
It's the nineties in Guendero, a neighborhood on the northeast
side of Kansas City. By day, it's a normal, slightly
chaotic neighborhood filled with families and ordinary people living their lives.
But at night it can become a pretty eerie place.
(15:42):
Men selling drugs, women selling sex, sketchy individuals who linger
around street corners buying both. It's an area officer Max
Zeifert knows well, and he recently heard that one of
his fellow officers, Detective Glupski, had been seen hanging around
(16:03):
in the area while off duty.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
Rumors were going around. You know that he was spending
a lot of time up in the northeast part of town,
which is a high crime area.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
People were seeing him hanging out there off duty, not
in his official role as a cop.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
I received a phone call from the informant of mine.
He's very animated in Basically, what he was saying was
that Gallupski was at their patronize and prostitutes.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
It turned out that the northeast side of the city
wasn't just the area Galupski had been assigned to the CD.
Streets in the dark back roads had become his hunting ground.
Kadija and I wanted to find out how Gallupski had
gotten started, what had shaped and enabled him to become
the kind of police officer who abused his authority and
(16:51):
harmed the people he had been trained to protect. We
wanted to see if we could find any clues, so
we went all the way back to the k c
KPD's graduating class of nineteen seventy five, and.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
They definitely was on a budget because these uniforms look
out of.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
The public servants they are.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
But Kadishi and I found a photo of some of
the officers that joined the police force that year much more.
They looked younger than we thought they would. Some of
them even had baby faces. But we could tell they
were police officers from the light blue uniforms.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
They look like Jill House uniform.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
They dodge, they really do.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
I mean just very.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, very baggy blue shirts they've got. But ill fitting
uniforms weren't our main concern. It was the people wearing them,
in particular. A man on the second row from the top,
so Glupski is I mean, he looks creepy. I mean
he does look creepy, but he also looks like just
(18:00):
kind of the guy you just walk past the grocery store,
you know, just average build, a little bit on the
pudgy side, wide pie face with you know, big old seventies.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Eight, I tell you, in this picture he has the largest,
stickiest mustache. He looked like a gangster cop. To me,
he's not very happy I'm a people reader because his
lips is supporting the upside down frown.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
He just seems very unassuming. I mean, yeah, he might seem.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
He looks like the person who would cut up the
cat and put it in his freeze.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
He does look hard, but he looks like somebody who
would get away with it for so long because you would, just.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
You would.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That's all to say that. Back then, Roger Gulupski looked
like a young, pretty unassuming new recruit. Another one of
the officers in that photo is Max Seifert, a retired
detective who graduated alongside Gallupski and worked with him during
his time in the Crimes against Persons unit.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
The Crimes Against Person's Union handled assaults, aggravated battery, rapes,
child abuse. He wasn't a person that would share things
or talk about things, you know. He was always kind
of a quiet person. Now he was very close and
kept things close to him.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Glupski quickly rose up the ranks because he gained a
reputation for clearing up crimes in record time. He was
given a private office, the kind of space where he
could hold sensitive meetings and make confidential calls. But according
to one of Max's colleagues, Gulupski took advantage of the
privacy his office gave him to abuse his position.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
A detective that was serving in his unit one day
went to his office and what happened was the detective
sees the doors shut and he just opens it and
walks in. He didn't knock or anything. He walks in
and he catches Glupski involved in a sexual compromising situation
with a black female in his office.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
According to Max, the detective immediately shut the door and
walked away, taking in what he had just seen. A
high level policeman having sex in the workplace. Max says
someone reported it to their supervisor.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
Nothing was known about it.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Even when it was allegedly reported to a division commander.
Speaker 5 (20:18):
Instead of saying, hey, you know this is outrageous. You know,
we're not going to tolerate this. You can't do this
bring a discredit to the department, he said, don't you
people have locks on your doors? Sexual miss condec was
something the you know that just wasn't considered to be
a bad thing. You know, Roger just being Roger. That's
kind of like a boy's will be boys.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
We reached out to the division commander Max is referring to,
and his response was, this is an old rumor spread
around the police department that was followed up on years ago.
Had it occurred, an investigation would have resulted. Max says
some officers in the police department knew about Glupski's misconduct.
Others even witnessed his behavior in the office and on
(21:01):
the streets, but he wasn't stopped. Gulupski kept his position
of power and continued to target women like Nico Quinn's
older sister Stacy. He would give her drugs to encourage
her dependence and then force her into having sex with him.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
He would arrest her for prostitution and put her in
jail drugs or whatever, and she would like she didn't
understand because he was the one bringing to her.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
It was a vicious cycle that was not only destroying
her life, but affecting the people who loved and dependent
on her too, because Stacy was a mother. In her
teenage years, Stacey had given birth to her only son,
a boy named Joranelle, and in spite of everything, she
(21:48):
spent the eighties and nineties trying to be a good
mom My.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
Mama was really outgoing. You know, when music come on,
she had to be saying it. Dance out that, well,
you used to dance. She used to connect with me
on that, like different songs that I used to listen to.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
There's one song they both loved, the early nineties classic
jump by Chris Cross. Remember it, Jump Jump, Chris Cross
will make you.
Speaker 6 (22:16):
She turned the music all the way up, and she
turned a little light on and she clashed music and
we just started dancing. Just she'll robing. She was on
my level and the hype me up, you know, and
made me feel better.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Stacy would take Joannelle to the park and show him
her backbends. She spent hours teaching him how to play
chess and making sure he felt loved. But as Joanelle
got older, he began to notice his mother's issues.
Speaker 6 (22:48):
I knew exactly what was going on, but I didn't
know like was that normal or not?
Speaker 4 (22:54):
You feel me?
Speaker 6 (22:55):
When I got older, I realized it gets bad like that.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Stacy's addiction, trauma, and mental health issues made it hard
for her to be a present and stable parent, so
his family arranged for Janelle to move out and be
taken care of by their relatives.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
I always thought about her just like she thought about me,
because it don't matter what you know. My mama is
a mama. It wasn't a day she hadn't seen me.
Let me know she's doing good, Get me kisses.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
While Stacey could no longer look after her family, the way.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
She used to.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
She still had a protective streak, which brings us back
to where the story started the spring of nineteen ninety four,
when tragedy hit Guendero and Stacy and Nico's cousins Danielle
and Donnie were murdered. When Stacey saw her younger sister, Nico,
(23:51):
being drawn into detective Glupski's orbit during the murder investigation,
her protective older sister instincts kicked in. Nico remembers the
moment when she and Gallupski ended up in the room
together around the time of Lamon's trial.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
We've sitt in this little room and man Galuski was
in his room. That's when he started hitting on me.
Or I heard you dance, or I heard you used
to be a dancer. Once you get on the table
and let me watch you dance, I'll pay you. I'll this.
At this time, my sister walked in and she looks
at him, and she looks at me. He had the
(24:31):
little grid on his face. So she pushed me, pulled
me back and put her hand in his face and said,
this one right here, you're gonna leave alone. You ain't
gonna touch this one. You ain't gonna get this one.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Stacey turned away from Gallupski and looked at Nico, her
face serious, and she.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Said, don't ever mess with this dude. This dude is
the devil. He's a snake, he's dangerous, He'll hurt you.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Glupski had ruined Stacy Quinn's life, corr s Nico into
a false testimony, and sent an innocent man to prison
for murder. But as we were about to discover, Gulupski
had even more power over their city than the Quinn
family could have possibly imagined. We knew he assaulted women
(25:22):
and abused his power. But there was another mystery at
the heart of the story, and the Quinn sisters were
about to find themselves right in the.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Middle of it. We got here.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I'm sitting in a room with Khadisha. So this looks
like an affidavit. We're looking through a bunch of files
and papers AffA David, State of Kansas, County of Jefferson.
Oh this is for Stacy. Stay Stacy Quan.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Well, the first thing I can tell you, just the
form itself looks historic, right, yeah, I mean you can
tell it goes back decades.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
In fact, the Affidavid was signed in nineteen ninety six,
two years after LaMonte McIntyre was convicted for her cousin
Danielle's murder. It turned out that, like Nico, Stacey was
desperate to do what she could to free Lamont from
his wrongful conviction. Because Stacy had been at the scene
of the shooting too, she had actually seen the shooter's face,
(26:45):
but for some reason, Nico was the only sister called
in as a witness. Stacy describes what happened in the Affidavid.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
The man had braids in his hair and had on
black pants with a white T shirt with black riding
on it. The man walked up to the passenger side
of the light blue car, pointing the shotgun at the
passenger and fired twice.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Stacy saw the shooter, but she was never called in
to make a witness statement.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
And I think it was because she already had the
relationship with Roger Gluspi.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Kadija and I couldn't help. But wonder if Gulupski had
kept Stacy away from the murder investigation on purpose. Was
he worried about bringing a woman he'd abuse to the
police station. Was he trying to avoid the risk that
she might expose him. A year went by and Nico
(27:42):
moved on, But then she got an unexpected phone call
from Minneapolis.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
Somebody had kidnapped her and took her to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
They told us they had found her beaten. She was
naked in Excreuse of Minnesota in the wintertime. So me,
my sister, my mom, and my cousin drove up to
go get Stacy.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
The police reassured them that Stacy was alive, but when
they arrived in Minneapolis, they were distraught to see just
how violently she'd been attacked.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
She said that two guys in a truck kidnapped her,
beat her up, raped her, sodomized her, and took out
her clothes and stuff, and left her in the middle
of the street of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was so beat
up in Bruce and my thought was, aren't you tired
(28:38):
of going through this?
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Nico doesn't know why her sister was kidnapped, but it
wasn't the first time Stacy's life on the streets had
led her to become a victim of brutal violence. It
was painful to witness her sister's downward spiral love. Nico
realized would not be enough to break Stacy out of addiction.
(29:01):
Nico could use her experiences, though, to support other women
in her community struggling with their mental health addictions and
the dangers of working on the streets. By nineteen ninety eight,
Nico was twenty six and had gotten a job at
the local post office. She had her own place, and
while it wasn't grand, she believed in helping as many
(29:23):
people as she could with the resources she had. So
if you'd walked into Nico's house back then, you would
have seen a revolving door of friends, relatives, and neighbors
who found refuge within those welcoming walls.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
I talked to a lot of the women on the
streets that I kind of made my house like a
safe house, and that made me feel good because I
was able to do something for these people that nobody
else would do because they looked down at them. I
knew about twenty of them that would come and sit
and talk to me, or come and if it's hot,
maybe they just want to come and cool all for
(30:04):
our glass of ice water. The Bible said, if you
can't do anything else, give your brother or sister a drink.
Give them shelter, give them food if they're hungry, and
that's what I try to do.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Nico's home was a sanctuary, a place to sleep for
a few nights while they got ready to pick themselves up.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
I will make sure they eat, make sure they was
warm or cool. When it was summertime. I'll let them
wash their clothes, take showers, and just relax from whatever
it is they've been through. And just sitting there talking
to a lot of the women, they are human, just
like we are.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
They just got dealt a bad hand. One of those
women was Ronda Tribute.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
Ronda had moved up on twenty second in fen Dura.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
On an early autumn night, Ronda came over for a chat.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
She was just talking to me about her kids and
her husband and the stuff her husband said and told her.
And I asked her how did she end up getting
out on the streets, and she was saying she was
being abused and she confided in me on some things.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Nico suggested something to take Ronda's mind off things.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
I said, do you want to go across the street
and have some drinks? And she was like, yeah, but
I want to take a bath, change my clothes.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
So they did what friends did, listened to music and
got ready together, going back and forth about who they
might see that night and what they would wear.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
She was saying, I got this shirt in my bag.
It was a black shirt with like some orange and
different colored flowers on it, and I gave her some
rust orange Kaylee jeans to put on.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Then it was time to do their hair and makeup.
It was the nineties, so they went for an old
school look.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
I gave her like a frieze, some fingerways, then you
pull it up like scrunches. She had a short haircut
with a little brown or auburn color in our hair,
like a blonde in her hair. And I'll never forget that.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
They crossed the road for a couple of drinks. Then
they went back to Nicos.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
We came back and sat on the porch and she
was like she's waiting on a rod.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
A car drove up the road. Inside was a white
man with bushy eyebrows and a thick mustache, Detective Roger Gallupski.
Speaker 4 (32:35):
Galuski went up the street, went down the street.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
After a moment, Ronda got up, leaving Nico in the porch.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
She said, well, I gotta go. I watched her walk
out my door, walk up the street, make the right,
then a left. She walked around the band from my house.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Ronda took a turn and left Nico's line of sight.
A few moments later, of Glupski's car drove back down
the road. Nico leaned forward to take a closer look.
Ronda was in the passenger seat.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
She was sitting back in a chair like she had
the chair reclining back, but I could see the hair
and I think a day or two later day end
of finding her in the middle of K thirty two.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Deceased, Nico was heartbroken. Her friend had been killed. She'd
been the last one to see her, and she knew
who Ronda had left with Gallupski. She was terrified and
(33:45):
desperate for answers. The autopsy report found that Ronda had
died from multiple blows to her head, but while the
police launched an investigation, they never pinned down the suspect.
After that, Nico held her love once tight and continued
to do what she could to support the women in
her community. One of those women was Monique Allen, a
(34:10):
twenty six year old who was down on her luck.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Monique ended up coming to my house. She ended up
staying with me.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Nico had young children, and so Monique would help her
with them.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
She would do my daughter's hair or my boys hair
because my son had long hair, and get them dressed,
had them pretty cute going to school.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
They were good friends. They would talk about their children
and their lives growing up on the northeast side of
Kansas City. But like Rond and Stacy, Monique had gotten
caught up with the life on the streets. Nico can
still remember one of the times they hung out at
her house in the winter of nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
She braided my hair. Frinch braided my hair, and she
said she was going to see her mom. I believe
she took a ship. She told me she was gonna
call somebody, so who you call.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
A Monique had a card with a phone number.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
She set it on the table and I looked at it,
and she said, girl, I'm about to go give me
some money. I need to get some money. I watched
her walk out my door, walk up the street and
over to a blue police vehicle. She got into the
car and then it drove away. And then the next
morning they find her dead in the middle of the street.
(35:29):
Off of Eighteenth and the side street.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Like Rhonda, Monique had been murdered, she.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
Had been bludget, they had beat her. I think.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
The phone number Monique had dialed it belonged to Detective
Roger Glupski.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
It was so crazy to me because I probably was
the last one to see them alive or even talked
to them that day. And I'm like, father, God, why
is this so? Why am I the last one to
talk to these women? And then they're gone.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Monique and Ronda's murders were investigated by the KCKPD, but
no one was arrested or convicted. Nico didn't know what
to do. The women in her community were in crisis,
Her friends were being killed, and the man who lurked
in the shadows of their lives seemed untouchable. Quindero felt
(36:40):
more dangerous than ever, and things were about to get
worse because for Nico, her greatest, most terrifying heartbreak lay
just around the corner, coming up on the girlfriends untouchable.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
There's too many predators, there's too many devils out here.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
The whole time he's holding a gun to their head.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
I'm trying to save y'all. I'm trying to protect y'all.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Hey about to issue a warrant go look for his
mother pleasure?
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Is this worth risking my life for it? The Girlfriend's
Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more
from Novel, visit novel Dot Audio. The show is narrated
(37:36):
by me Nicki Richardson. It was written and produced by
Rufaro Masarura. The editor is Joe Wheeler. Our assistant producer
is Mohammed Ahmed. The researcher is Zaiyana Yusef. Production management
from Shari Houston and Joe Savage. The fact checker is
Fendel Fulton. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kimpson
(37:58):
with additional engineer by Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by Rufaro Mazurura,
Nicholas Alexander and Joe Wheeler. Original music by Amanda Jones.
The Girlfriend's Theme was composed by Amanda Jones and Louisa Gerstein.
The series artwork was designed by Christina Limcool. Story development
(38:19):
by Olivia Smart and Nel Gray Andrews. Novel's director of
development is Selena Metta. Willard Foxton is Novel's creative director
of Development. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers
for Novel. Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etour are the executive
producers for iHeart Podcasts. The marketing lead is Alison Cantor.
(38:40):
Special thanks to Will Pearson and his special thanks to
Carley Frankel and the whole team at wm E
Hey, it's nicky. This is an episode about sisterhood, both
the ones were born with and those we choose for ourselves.
It's full of love, but there's also a lot of
pain and stories that explore substance abuse, violence, murder, and
sexual assault. One of those victims is a minor. There
(00:23):
will also be some strong language, so if you or
someone you love has been affected by any of the
themes in the show, we've left some links in the
description that offer resources and support take care of yourself.
(00:47):
When I was a kid, I used to hang out
near Quindera Park, a few minutes from my family's home.
From the outside, it's nothing remarkable, bright green grass, a
kid's playground, benches to watch.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
The world go by.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
As I grew up, I began to learn more about
how this place was once a part of the Underground Railroad,
a stop along the route enslaved black people took on
the road to freedom. It's a part of our city's
history that's all too easy to forget. When the Black
Lives Matter movement swept across the world in twenty twenty,
(01:25):
that history took on a whole new meaning. I'm no
stranger to the racism and the prejudice black people face
at the hands of police, but seeing the violent deaths
of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor made this century's old
(01:46):
fight feel more urgent than ever. It also gave me
a greater awareness of cases involving police corruption happening right
on my doorstep, like that of Lamont McIntyre. He was
released after twenty three years in prison, but the detective
who had framed him was still walking free. Roger Glupski
(02:09):
had retired from police work in twenty sixteen on what
seemed like his own terms, and none of the women
he'd abused had seen justice. So in twenty twenty, I
organized a petition calling for greater police accountability in Kansas City, Kansas.
As a result, I was invited to my first rally
(02:33):
calling for an end to police violence and prejudice. One
of the speakers instantly caught my eye. I was trained
to look around, know my surroundings. That woman was Kadiza Hardaway,
so I'm.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Looking forward in deep when I saw her, and literally
she is a full length of a block away and
I noticed her walking up to me.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
It was just almost like this weird eye contact.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
I really saw this ray of light.
Speaker 2 (03:09):
It was Nikki.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
She was walking up. We had never met each other before.
We just gravitated to each other. I had just immediately
hugged her, and she hugged me. We introduced ourselves, but
it felt like we already knew each other. It was
just this automatic sense of familiarity. I can't even describe it.
(03:32):
I've never had a feeling like that in my life.
It was like meeting a sister. I didn't even realize
I needed. We locked arms that day and we've been
by each other side ever since. Kadija and I spent
hours talking about Detective Kulupski, the reports that he'd abused
(03:52):
his authority, and the stories we'd heard from the women
he assaulted. We needed to do something, so the next
day we set up Justice for Wyandotte, an organization named
after the county casey k belongs to. Our aim was
to give voice to those who had suffered as a
result of Gulupski's actions, like Nico Quinn, who had been
(04:14):
coerced into giving false testimony against Lamont McIntyre and the
lead up to Lamont's exoneration, Nico had become the target
of intense public scrutiny. It was like her own city
had turned against her.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
I would get calls from friends and family members telling
me to stop talking to the media because they was
making me look bad.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Part of her wanted to move on, leave it all
in the past, but rumors about Gallupski were coming to
light and Nico wanted to join the fight, which is
how she got put in touch with Khodija.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
I was in my worst when I met Khadija. I
was kind of like Larry to talk to her. But
then we finally talked to each other. Oh, we was
on that phone for a long time and it was
like we have always knew each other.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
We talked on the phone for probably about five or
six hours the very first time we talked.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
The three of us got to know each other pretty quickly.
We were united by our experiences as black women fighting
for justice and our shared goal of creating a better
future for Kansas City. Kansas a city we love, but
it was going to take a lot of work. I
just knew that.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Like after George Floyd and watching the communities around the
world come together because they saw the injustice, it was
a time like no other.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
We shared stories during dinners, made plans over coffee and
spent hours getting to know each other until our friendship
began to feel like something deeper, a sisterhood. Police had
failed to stop Glupski from putting the community at risk.
(06:04):
The authorities hadn't held him accountable for the abuse he
inflicted on the women we heard from, and it was
starting to feel like nobody was coming to fight for
the women of Kansas City. So we decided to fight
for ourselves.
Speaker 4 (06:20):
Oh God, Oh God, God.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
I'm Nikki Richardson and from the teams at Novel and
iHeart Podcast, this is the Girlfriend's Untouchable Big Episode four,
(06:57):
three Sisters. When Kadija and I decided to join the fight,
the woman we gravitated to was Nico Quinn. We thought
we knew her story, her cousin's shooting, the witness intimidation,
(07:22):
and the threat of her kids being taken away, But
it turned out there was even more to Nico's connection
to Glupski than we had realized, so we asked her
to tell her story. From the very start.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
I grew up in Wanda County, Kansas City, Kansas. I
was born to Josephine Quinn, who had three daughters.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Nico, her older sister Liz, and their oldest sister Stacy.
Speaker 4 (07:48):
Stacey was beautiful. She was so beautiful. I used to
love her eyes. And all the people that I know
that knew her talks about how beautiful her spirit was,
how very respectful she was, because that's how we was raised.
Speaker 1 (08:05):
The Queen sisters were like best friends.
Speaker 4 (08:08):
We used to have fun, used to act like we
was singers, acting like we like the brags and sisters
or stuff like that watching movies, you know, mocking the
stuff that's in the movies.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
But they were regular sisters who would pick her and
wind each other up too.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
Stacey used to be so honor I remember when we
was little. Mamma used to be like, we said, Mama,
can we ask some cookies or whatever? She say, clean
up and y'all can get them hub. She was like, Stacey,
get them kids a few of them cookies. She goes
eh when she lick every cooky and didn't give it
to us. She was honory, but she used to protect us.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Nico needed a protective presence in her life because her
family was fractured. The father hadn't stuck around, and Josephine
had a lifelong battle with mental health issues.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
My mother was in and out of the psychiatric hospital,
mental facilities all my life. She got paranoid schizophrenic. She'd
be okay for a couple of months or maybe a
few years, and then she'd go back into the mental hospitals.
But then we end up moving to a home with
my grandmother, grandfather, auntie, uncles, cousins, so probably about fifty
(09:27):
of us in a six bedroom house. Nico.
Speaker 1 (09:31):
Was surrounded by family, but it didn't always feel like
a loving home.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
I lived in nothing but chaos all my life as
a kid. I see my uncle's fighting. The police was
in and out of my grandmother's house, I almost say
every other weekend. My grandfather was an active alcoholic. We
was taught to be tough, have tough skin.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Their grandparents tried their best, but they failed to fully
protect the queens sisters. One of their relatives, a man
who was supposed to take the girls to school, took
advantage of them.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
My mom would have my uncle take us to school,
and he would take us back to the house and
would rape us before we would go to school. When
it started, Stacy was eight, Liz was six, and I
was four.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
They were just kids, but Stacy stepped in to try
and shield her younger sisters from the worst of it.
Speaker 4 (10:30):
She would put herself in horms away so he wouldn't
get us. She was a big sister. She was a protector,
especially me because I was the baby.
Speaker 1 (10:43):
The Quinn's sisters went through a lot together, but they
still had dreams. Stacey wanted to dedicate her life to
taking care of people.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
She was going to school to be a nurse.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
In the mid nineteen eighties, Stacy, who was around sixteen
years old, was doing a clinical placement at a local
health center. She finished late some nights and usually got
a ride home from one of her other relatives, but
if they couldn't pick her up, she would make her
own way back.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
She was walking home one night because my grandfather had
got drunk and my uncle didn't pick whatever was they
she didn't get picked up from her clinicals.
Speaker 1 (11:20):
When Stacy walked through the door, she looked shaken. Her
sisters immediately asked her what had happened. After a moment,
she burst into tears. Stacy told them about the police
officer she'd seen on her way home, a white man
with brown hair, pushy eyebrows in a thick mustache. It
(11:41):
was dark out, so he offered her a ride home.
Being a kid who had no reason to distrust the police,
Stacy had accepted the offer. When she got into his
police car, his friendly demeanor faded. The officer forced himself
on her.
Speaker 4 (11:59):
She got raped and came in and told us and
was holding her crime.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Stacy was their older sister, their protector. It was painful
to see her so broken.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
And we would telling her to tell and she was
like she couldn't because of the threats.
Speaker 1 (12:20):
That he made. Nico didn't know what the police officer
had threatened to do to her sister if she reported him,
but she was beginning to discover how much power and
influence the police wielded over her community. Nico came of
(12:44):
age in the eighties, and as she grew up, she
began to notice the ways her neighborhood was changing. There
were patrol cars all around them, regular house raids across Guendero,
and rumors of friends and relatives was getting locked up
by the police in record time. Because in the eighties,
(13:05):
Kansas City, Kansas was hurtling into a devastating crisis. Nico
can still remember the moment it hit her neighborhood.
Speaker 4 (13:14):
They had this big old community meeting up on Fifth
Street at the Jack reard In Center. Our grandparents and
parents used to go to these things, I mean where
their packed houses standing room only.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Her grandmother came home from the community meeting with a
handful of pamphlets.
Speaker 4 (13:32):
And I'll never forget the one that said, Hi, my
name is crack Cocaine. It said, I'll make a preacher
forget how to preach, a teacher forget how to teach,
a beauty queen forget her looks, a schoolgirl forget her books.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
The beauty queen forgetting her looks, and the schoolgirl forgetting
her books. Nico realized that is what was happening in
real time to her sister.
Speaker 4 (14:01):
Stacey started experimenting with drugs. I know, she used to
smoke and then she went to crack and that was
her way of escaping.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Because Gulupski hadn't just assaulted her once and moved on.
He tormented her all the way through her adolescence into adulthood,
Stacy's life began to spiral.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
I noticed that a lot of people that have talked
to that start using drugs from childhood trauma, are things
in their life that they don't understand and know how
to deal with. A lot of women end up on
the streets on drug prostitution.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
And that's what happened to Stacy. She got addicted to
drugs and became a sex worker to earn the money
she needed to pay for them. It was dangerous work
that led her to spend long nights walking up and
down shady streets interacting with ceed men, one of whom
was a constant presence Detective Roger Glupski.
Speaker 4 (15:17):
I got you, I got you, I got you.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
It's the nineties in Guendero, a neighborhood on the northeast
side of Kansas City. By day, it's a normal, slightly
chaotic neighborhood filled with families and ordinary people living their lives.
But at night it can become a pretty eerie place.
(15:42):
Men selling drugs, women selling sex, sketchy individuals who linger
around street corners buying both. It's an area officer Max
Zeifert knows well, and he recently heard that one of
his fellow officers, Detective Glupski, had been seen hanging around
(16:03):
in the area while off duty.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
Rumors were going around. You know that he was spending
a lot of time up in the northeast part of town,
which is a high crime area.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
People were seeing him hanging out there off duty, not
in his official role as a cop.
Speaker 5 (16:20):
I received a phone call from the informant of mine.
He's very animated in Basically, what he was saying was
that Gallupski was at their patronize and prostitutes.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
It turned out that the northeast side of the city
wasn't just the area Galupski had been assigned to the CD.
Streets in the dark back roads had become his hunting ground.
Kadija and I wanted to find out how Gallupski had
gotten started, what had shaped and enabled him to become
the kind of police officer who abused his authority and
(16:51):
harmed the people he had been trained to protect. We
wanted to see if we could find any clues, so
we went all the way back to the k c
KPD's graduating class of nineteen seventy five, and.
Speaker 3 (17:05):
They definitely was on a budget because these uniforms look
out of.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
The public servants they are.
Speaker 1 (17:13):
But Kadishi and I found a photo of some of
the officers that joined the police force that year much more.
They looked younger than we thought they would. Some of
them even had baby faces. But we could tell they
were police officers from the light blue uniforms.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
They look like Jill House uniform.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
They dodge, they really do.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
I mean just very.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Yeah, very baggy blue shirts they've got. But ill fitting
uniforms weren't our main concern. It was the people wearing them,
in particular. A man on the second row from the top,
so Glupski is I mean, he looks creepy. I mean
he does look creepy, but he also looks like just
(18:00):
kind of the guy you just walk past the grocery store,
you know, just average build, a little bit on the
pudgy side, wide pie face with you know, big old seventies.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
Eight, I tell you, in this picture he has the largest,
stickiest mustache. He looked like a gangster cop. To me,
he's not very happy I'm a people reader because his
lips is supporting the upside down frown.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
He just seems very unassuming. I mean, yeah, he might seem.
Speaker 3 (18:30):
He looks like the person who would cut up the
cat and put it in his freeze.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
He does look hard, but he looks like somebody who
would get away with it for so long because you would, just.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
You would.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
That's all to say that. Back then, Roger Gulupski looked
like a young, pretty unassuming new recruit. Another one of
the officers in that photo is Max Seifert, a retired
detective who graduated alongside Gallupski and worked with him during
his time in the Crimes against Persons unit.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
The Crimes Against Person's Union handled assaults, aggravated battery, rapes,
child abuse. He wasn't a person that would share things
or talk about things, you know. He was always kind
of a quiet person. Now he was very close and
kept things close to him.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
Glupski quickly rose up the ranks because he gained a
reputation for clearing up crimes in record time. He was
given a private office, the kind of space where he
could hold sensitive meetings and make confidential calls. But according
to one of Max's colleagues, Gulupski took advantage of the
privacy his office gave him to abuse his position.
Speaker 5 (19:39):
A detective that was serving in his unit one day
went to his office and what happened was the detective
sees the doors shut and he just opens it and
walks in. He didn't knock or anything. He walks in
and he catches Glupski involved in a sexual compromising situation
with a black female in his office.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
According to Max, the detective immediately shut the door and
walked away, taking in what he had just seen. A
high level policeman having sex in the workplace. Max says
someone reported it to their supervisor.
Speaker 5 (20:12):
Nothing was known about it.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
Even when it was allegedly reported to a division commander.
Speaker 5 (20:18):
Instead of saying, hey, you know this is outrageous. You know,
we're not going to tolerate this. You can't do this
bring a discredit to the department, he said, don't you
people have locks on your doors? Sexual miss condec was
something the you know that just wasn't considered to be
a bad thing. You know, Roger just being Roger. That's
kind of like a boy's will be boys.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
We reached out to the division commander Max is referring to,
and his response was, this is an old rumor spread
around the police department that was followed up on years ago.
Had it occurred, an investigation would have resulted. Max says
some officers in the police department knew about Glupski's misconduct.
Others even witnessed his behavior in the office and on
(21:01):
the streets, but he wasn't stopped. Gulupski kept his position
of power and continued to target women like Nico Quinn's
older sister Stacy. He would give her drugs to encourage
her dependence and then force her into having sex with him.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
He would arrest her for prostitution and put her in
jail drugs or whatever, and she would like she didn't
understand because he was the one bringing to her.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
It was a vicious cycle that was not only destroying
her life, but affecting the people who loved and dependent
on her too, because Stacy was a mother. In her
teenage years, Stacey had given birth to her only son,
a boy named Joranelle, and in spite of everything, she
(21:48):
spent the eighties and nineties trying to be a good
mom My.
Speaker 6 (21:52):
Mama was really outgoing. You know, when music come on,
she had to be saying it. Dance out that, well,
you used to dance. She used to connect with me
on that, like different songs that I used to listen to.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
There's one song they both loved, the early nineties classic
jump by Chris Cross. Remember it, Jump Jump, Chris Cross
will make you.
Speaker 6 (22:16):
She turned the music all the way up, and she
turned a little light on and she clashed music and
we just started dancing. Just she'll robing. She was on
my level and the hype me up, you know, and
made me feel better.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Stacy would take Joannelle to the park and show him
her backbends. She spent hours teaching him how to play
chess and making sure he felt loved. But as Joanelle
got older, he began to notice his mother's issues.
Speaker 6 (22:48):
I knew exactly what was going on, but I didn't
know like was that normal or not?
Speaker 4 (22:54):
You feel me?
Speaker 6 (22:55):
When I got older, I realized it gets bad like that.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
Stacy's addiction, trauma, and mental health issues made it hard
for her to be a present and stable parent, so
his family arranged for Janelle to move out and be
taken care of by their relatives.
Speaker 6 (23:12):
I always thought about her just like she thought about me,
because it don't matter what you know. My mama is
a mama. It wasn't a day she hadn't seen me.
Let me know she's doing good, Get me kisses.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
While Stacey could no longer look after her family, the way.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
She used to.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
She still had a protective streak, which brings us back
to where the story started the spring of nineteen ninety four,
when tragedy hit Guendero and Stacy and Nico's cousins Danielle
and Donnie were murdered. When Stacey saw her younger sister, Nico,
(23:51):
being drawn into detective Glupski's orbit during the murder investigation,
her protective older sister instincts kicked in. Nico remembers the
moment when she and Gallupski ended up in the room
together around the time of Lamon's trial.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
We've sitt in this little room and man Galuski was
in his room. That's when he started hitting on me.
Or I heard you dance, or I heard you used
to be a dancer. Once you get on the table
and let me watch you dance, I'll pay you. I'll this.
At this time, my sister walked in and she looks
at him, and she looks at me. He had the
(24:31):
little grid on his face. So she pushed me, pulled
me back and put her hand in his face and said,
this one right here, you're gonna leave alone. You ain't
gonna touch this one. You ain't gonna get this one.
Speaker 1 (24:43):
Stacey turned away from Gallupski and looked at Nico, her
face serious, and she.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
Said, don't ever mess with this dude. This dude is
the devil. He's a snake, he's dangerous, He'll hurt you.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
Glupski had ruined Stacy Quinn's life, corr s Nico into
a false testimony, and sent an innocent man to prison
for murder. But as we were about to discover, Gulupski
had even more power over their city than the Quinn
family could have possibly imagined. We knew he assaulted women
(25:22):
and abused his power. But there was another mystery at
the heart of the story, and the Quinn sisters were
about to find themselves right in the.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
Middle of it. We got here.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I'm sitting in a room with Khadisha. So this looks
like an affidavit. We're looking through a bunch of files
and papers AffA David, State of Kansas, County of Jefferson.
Oh this is for Stacy. Stay Stacy Quan.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
Well, the first thing I can tell you, just the
form itself looks historic, right, yeah, I mean you can
tell it goes back decades.
Speaker 1 (26:20):
In fact, the Affidavid was signed in nineteen ninety six,
two years after LaMonte McIntyre was convicted for her cousin
Danielle's murder. It turned out that, like Nico, Stacey was
desperate to do what she could to free Lamont from
his wrongful conviction. Because Stacy had been at the scene
of the shooting too, she had actually seen the shooter's face,
(26:45):
but for some reason, Nico was the only sister called
in as a witness. Stacy describes what happened in the Affidavid.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
The man had braids in his hair and had on
black pants with a white T shirt with black riding
on it. The man walked up to the passenger side
of the light blue car, pointing the shotgun at the
passenger and fired twice.
Speaker 1 (27:10):
Stacy saw the shooter, but she was never called in
to make a witness statement.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
And I think it was because she already had the
relationship with Roger Gluspi.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Kadija and I couldn't help. But wonder if Gulupski had
kept Stacy away from the murder investigation on purpose. Was
he worried about bringing a woman he'd abuse to the
police station. Was he trying to avoid the risk that
she might expose him. A year went by and Nico
(27:42):
moved on, But then she got an unexpected phone call
from Minneapolis.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
Somebody had kidnapped her and took her to Minneapolis, Minnesota.
They told us they had found her beaten. She was
naked in Excreuse of Minnesota in the wintertime. So me,
my sister, my mom, and my cousin drove up to
go get Stacy.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
The police reassured them that Stacy was alive, but when
they arrived in Minneapolis, they were distraught to see just
how violently she'd been attacked.
Speaker 4 (28:15):
She said that two guys in a truck kidnapped her,
beat her up, raped her, sodomized her, and took out
her clothes and stuff, and left her in the middle
of the street of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was so beat
up in Bruce and my thought was, aren't you tired
(28:38):
of going through this?
Speaker 1 (28:40):
Nico doesn't know why her sister was kidnapped, but it
wasn't the first time Stacy's life on the streets had
led her to become a victim of brutal violence. It
was painful to witness her sister's downward spiral love. Nico
realized would not be enough to break Stacy out of addiction.
(29:01):
Nico could use her experiences, though, to support other women
in her community struggling with their mental health addictions and
the dangers of working on the streets. By nineteen ninety eight,
Nico was twenty six and had gotten a job at
the local post office. She had her own place, and
while it wasn't grand, she believed in helping as many
(29:23):
people as she could with the resources she had. So
if you'd walked into Nico's house back then, you would
have seen a revolving door of friends, relatives, and neighbors
who found refuge within those welcoming walls.
Speaker 4 (29:42):
I talked to a lot of the women on the
streets that I kind of made my house like a
safe house, and that made me feel good because I
was able to do something for these people that nobody
else would do because they looked down at them. I
knew about twenty of them that would come and sit
and talk to me, or come and if it's hot,
maybe they just want to come and cool all for
(30:04):
our glass of ice water. The Bible said, if you
can't do anything else, give your brother or sister a drink.
Give them shelter, give them food if they're hungry, and
that's what I try to do.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Nico's home was a sanctuary, a place to sleep for
a few nights while they got ready to pick themselves up.
Speaker 4 (30:25):
I will make sure they eat, make sure they was
warm or cool. When it was summertime. I'll let them
wash their clothes, take showers, and just relax from whatever
it is they've been through. And just sitting there talking
to a lot of the women, they are human, just
like we are.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
They just got dealt a bad hand. One of those
women was Ronda Tribute.
Speaker 4 (30:53):
Ronda had moved up on twenty second in fen Dura.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
On an early autumn night, Ronda came over for a chat.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
She was just talking to me about her kids and
her husband and the stuff her husband said and told her.
And I asked her how did she end up getting
out on the streets, and she was saying she was
being abused and she confided in me on some things.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Nico suggested something to take Ronda's mind off things.
Speaker 4 (31:19):
I said, do you want to go across the street
and have some drinks? And she was like, yeah, but
I want to take a bath, change my clothes.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
So they did what friends did, listened to music and
got ready together, going back and forth about who they
might see that night and what they would wear.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
She was saying, I got this shirt in my bag.
It was a black shirt with like some orange and
different colored flowers on it, and I gave her some
rust orange Kaylee jeans to put on.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Then it was time to do their hair and makeup.
It was the nineties, so they went for an old
school look.
Speaker 4 (31:55):
I gave her like a frieze, some fingerways, then you
pull it up like scrunches. She had a short haircut
with a little brown or auburn color in our hair,
like a blonde in her hair. And I'll never forget that.
Speaker 1 (32:11):
They crossed the road for a couple of drinks. Then
they went back to Nicos.
Speaker 4 (32:17):
We came back and sat on the porch and she
was like she's waiting on a rod.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
A car drove up the road. Inside was a white
man with bushy eyebrows and a thick mustache, Detective Roger Gallupski.
Speaker 4 (32:35):
Galuski went up the street, went down the street.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
After a moment, Ronda got up, leaving Nico in the porch.
Speaker 4 (32:44):
She said, well, I gotta go. I watched her walk
out my door, walk up the street, make the right,
then a left. She walked around the band from my house.
Speaker 1 (32:54):
Ronda took a turn and left Nico's line of sight.
A few moments later, of Glupski's car drove back down
the road. Nico leaned forward to take a closer look.
Ronda was in the passenger seat.
Speaker 4 (33:09):
She was sitting back in a chair like she had
the chair reclining back, but I could see the hair
and I think a day or two later day end
of finding her in the middle of K thirty two.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
Deceased, Nico was heartbroken. Her friend had been killed. She'd
been the last one to see her, and she knew
who Ronda had left with Gallupski. She was terrified and
(33:45):
desperate for answers. The autopsy report found that Ronda had
died from multiple blows to her head, but while the
police launched an investigation, they never pinned down the suspect.
After that, Nico held her love once tight and continued
to do what she could to support the women in
her community. One of those women was Monique Allen, a
(34:10):
twenty six year old who was down on her luck.
Speaker 4 (34:15):
Monique ended up coming to my house. She ended up
staying with me.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
Nico had young children, and so Monique would help her
with them.
Speaker 4 (34:22):
She would do my daughter's hair or my boys hair
because my son had long hair, and get them dressed,
had them pretty cute going to school.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
They were good friends. They would talk about their children
and their lives growing up on the northeast side of
Kansas City. But like Rond and Stacy, Monique had gotten
caught up with the life on the streets. Nico can
still remember one of the times they hung out at
her house in the winter of nineteen ninety eight.
Speaker 4 (34:52):
She braided my hair. Frinch braided my hair, and she
said she was going to see her mom. I believe
she took a ship. She told me she was gonna
call somebody, so who you call.
Speaker 1 (35:03):
A Monique had a card with a phone number.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
She set it on the table and I looked at it,
and she said, girl, I'm about to go give me
some money. I need to get some money. I watched
her walk out my door, walk up the street and
over to a blue police vehicle. She got into the
car and then it drove away. And then the next
morning they find her dead in the middle of the street.
(35:29):
Off of Eighteenth and the side street.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
Like Rhonda, Monique had been murdered, she.
Speaker 4 (35:37):
Had been bludget, they had beat her. I think.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
The phone number Monique had dialed it belonged to Detective
Roger Glupski.
Speaker 4 (35:56):
It was so crazy to me because I probably was
the last one to see them alive or even talked
to them that day. And I'm like, father, God, why
is this so? Why am I the last one to
talk to these women? And then they're gone.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Monique and Ronda's murders were investigated by the KCKPD, but
no one was arrested or convicted. Nico didn't know what
to do. The women in her community were in crisis,
Her friends were being killed, and the man who lurked
in the shadows of their lives seemed untouchable. Quindero felt
(36:40):
more dangerous than ever, and things were about to get
worse because for Nico, her greatest, most terrifying heartbreak lay
just around the corner, coming up on the girlfriends untouchable.
Speaker 4 (37:01):
There's too many predators, there's too many devils out here.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
The whole time he's holding a gun to their head.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
I'm trying to save y'all. I'm trying to protect y'all.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
Hey about to issue a warrant go look for his
mother pleasure?
Speaker 1 (37:12):
Is this worth risking my life for it? The Girlfriend's
Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more
from Novel, visit novel Dot Audio. The show is narrated
(37:36):
by me Nicki Richardson. It was written and produced by
Rufaro Masarura. The editor is Joe Wheeler. Our assistant producer
is Mohammed Ahmed. The researcher is Zaiyana Yusef. Production management
from Shari Houston and Joe Savage. The fact checker is
Fendel Fulton. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kimpson
(37:58):
with additional engineer by Nicholas Alexander. Music supervision by Rufaro Mazurura,
Nicholas Alexander and Joe Wheeler. Original music by Amanda Jones.
The Girlfriend's Theme was composed by Amanda Jones and Louisa Gerstein.
The series artwork was designed by Christina Limcool. Story development
(38:19):
by Olivia Smart and Nel Gray Andrews. Novel's director of
development is Selena Metta. Willard Foxton is Novel's creative director
of Development. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers
for Novel. Katrina Norvell and Nikki Etour are the executive
producers for iHeart Podcasts. The marketing lead is Alison Cantor.
(38:40):
Special thanks to Will Pearson and his special thanks to
Carley Frankel and the whole team at wm E
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