05 Aug Femicide and State-Sanctioned Brutality Against Women Warning: Johnson County, Kansas and the Kansas City Metropolitan Area
Reason 1. The Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe.
Howe’s record of police brutality and femicide cover-ups that defame and frame people for crimes is confirmed by the Washington Post, as well as investigations and reprimands by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Kansas Supreme Court. The Kansas Office of the Disciplinary Administrator also reprimanded Howe by private letter, formatted to shield it from to open records laws, a sign that Kansas is dangerous for women and the state supports police brutality.
Brandon Apperson with Steve Howe, district attorneys in the Johnson County, Kansas suburbs, accepting a “Certificate of Appreciation” from the Kansas City Police Department in 2025
Perhaps most seriously, the Assistant District Attorney Brandon Apperson, from Kansas City, KS, where the police department is now infamous for this exactly, expressed opinions that he doesn’t think sex criminals or institutions they work for would frame their victims to get out of trouble themselves.
Howe, Apperson and WPD continue to protect Woodside, General Manager Katie Swetala, and the sexual predator who Ms. Herster warned young female staff about immediately after he creepily, rapidly thrust his pelvis toward her from behind a glass door as if simulating sex (or as Michelle Durrett, attorney with the Johnson County Public Defender, described it, “flapping his dick on himself at you [Herster]”) while moving through the facility with body language consistent with a sexual predator and stalker. Herster also took responsibility for staff safety in handling clean up of the song bowl she was trying to use for aqua sound bath therapy when she hastily removed herself from the threat of the sexual predator and it broke.
Swetala and Woodside’s Facility Director responsible for staff, member and tenant safety did not. They ran to straight to the police and lied, deleted Ms. Herster’s payment transactions to fabricate theft, and didn’t look to see if there was any damage at their facility or who did it before falsely accusing Ms. Herster of criminal damage per their testimony in preliminary hearing.
– Johnson County District Court court document filed August 3, 2026. Read the most recent court filing in 20CR2514, the State of Kansas v. Herster below.
2020514_Herster_Motion to Dismiss or Alternatively Notice of Appeal_Aug 3 2026 with exhibits copy
Reason 2. The Johnson County Sheriff Byron Roberson.
As a police officer in Prairie Village, Sheriff Roberson killed Susan Stuckey, charging toward her inside her home and shooting her from behind with bullets entering her back and neck. Roberson was dispatched to provide mental health support after a call reporting Stuckey as crazy by her landlord who wanted to evict her. Afterwards, Roberson whined to the press about how he was aggrieved by the city putting him on leave to investigate the police-involved killing, showing disregard for the woman he killed, her family in mourning and others who police brutality terrorizes.
Steve Howe is the District Attorney who oversaw this femicide cover-up. He refused to investigate or write the charges that should have been filed against Roberson, and possibly others, for Starkey’s murder. Several police officers in Johnson County, including Roberson, have accepted awards such as the Kansas Police Chief Association’s “Valor Award” for killing the person who they were dispatched to provide aid to.
Byron Roberson sworn in as Sheriff at Johnson County District Court after murdering a woman and coordinating femicide and misconduct cover-ups with Steve Howe.
Johnson Countians elected Byron Roberson as their sheriff thereafter. Johnson Countians also re-elected Steve Howe despite that the largest police departments in the county endorsed his opponents.
That should be enough to know that Johnson County, the largest and wealthiest suburb of Kansas City, is dominated by violently misogynistic governance and politics.
Reason 3. The Johnson County District Court.
Corruption and tolerance for government malfeasance is status quo. A few recent examples:
Johnson County District Court embezzled more than $1M in public funds that belonged to Kansans from 2007 to 2017. Shortly thereafter, they built a new courthouse building that they allege cost $193M with a budget approved by the county commissioners that contains many improbable costs for the project as built such as $30M for “design/consulting.” They paid $2M to tear down their 1952 historic building to justify need for the new building and promised a design that separates victims and witnesses from exposure to criminal defendents, which it does not achieve throughtout the building. Judges and prosecutors work in the building also claim they cannot use video systems installed in the new building to separate victims and perpetrators in courtrooms without violating the confrontation clause and defendents rights to be present, which they misapply in current vindictive prosecution and bail bond embezzlement schemes.
The District Attorney, Steve Howe, his prosecutors and criminal investigators, and the Johnson County criminal judges have their offices in the building where cash payments, including bail, disappeared and employees wrote falsified government checks in a scheme to transfer state funds to personal use for a decade.
Investigators and detectives for the city of Olathe police department, the county sheriff and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, all under the control of Howe, worked in this building. The State of Kansas never charged anyone involved in the scheme for their crimes.
Only one person, Accounting Supervisor Dawna Kellogg, at 61 years old, was charged in a Federal investigation meddled with by Howe and his proscutorial team. She was sentenced to 30-months in prison in 2022 and ordered to pay the court over $1M in installments for the rest of her life.
In another frauduent scheme, board members of an Overland Park charitable police non-profit, who were police officers themselves, made fake fundraisers promising donors to spend their money on grants to families of officers injuried or killed in the line of duty. Instead, they transferred funds raised to themselves. Again the State of Kansas didn’t charge anyone because Howe refused to prosecute the police officers who stole from their injured colleagues. He publicly cited a reason for not charging was these police officers committed another crime, destruction of evidence. Howe had all evidence he needed for probable cause and convictions that would have required restitution payments to those they stole from.
In 2025, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a public interest lawsuit against the Johnson County criminal court judges for unconstitutional patterns and practices equivalent to running a for-profit courthouse and debtors’ prison where women are disproportionately indefinitely entrapped. The ACLU sued on behalf of mostly female complainants who are the minority in the criminal system.
The Johnson County Court, District Attorney and Sheriff continue embezzlement schemes. As of 2026, the Court has stolen approximately $3,000 from Bill and Sarah Herster by falsifying failure to appear records to seize bail bond payments then issuing invalid warrants in a perpetual cycle ongoing since 2020. They also misapply state funds via the public defenders office to attorneys who do not do the work they bill for and falsify court records using off-the-record means like email to communicate with judges instead of the court record. This obscures the way these lawyers and judges, whose work and facilities are paid for with state and county taxpayer funds, conduct official business and violates fundamental rights guaranteed by the First Amendment and open government laws. Because deliberations and reasons for decisions are hidden from the official court record for appeals, with documentary evidence and sworn testimony obstructed and spoliated, it can also make it more difficult for wrongly convicted, wrongly sentenced and overcharged defendants to appeal to superior court judges or sue for financial fraud because the record of their case is manipulated.
The Johnson County judges, including the Chief Judge and judges en banc, regularly write unconstitutional thus unenforceable orders and courtwide policies to block press coverage, harass and jail members of the media, and individually name and ban known civil and human rights complainants from their building that houses the law library and help center for filing civil and human rights lawsuits. They also write orders that charge illegal court fees and bail bonds that violate constitutional doctrine and Kansas statutes.
Police departments, cities and companies in Johnson County are aware that they can deploy the Johnson County District Attorney and District Court for vindictive prosecution schemes. In 2020, Westwood officer Marcus Burke openly talked to Woodside managerment about how to fabricate felony evidence to ensure their vindictive prosecuton of Herster was filed in county court, and not municipal court where it had no legs. In 2026, KCUR investigative reporter Sam Zeff found emails describing Johnson County’s MYOC (“make your own case”) scheme used by Westwood and Woodside, when Lenexa police used it after issuing a BOLO (“be on the lookout”) to surveil the Lenexa-based writer Canyen Ashworth in attempt to detain him on fabricated charges after he publised an op ed critical of the city and questioned its policing in the Kansas City Star.
First, Lenexa tried to collect evidence to support charging Ashworth with criminal damage for fliers the city wanted to take down near city hall (and did) because someone didn’t like their political content. The city had no reason to suspect Ashworth posted them, and the fliers did not damage property. When that failed, apparently because none of the 17 patrol officers sent to surveil Ashworth could find him wearing the same shoes as the person that surveillance video showed posted the fliers, they issued a MYOC instructing the officers to come up with something else. Lenexa also investigated its councilwoman Melanie Arroyo after her op ed critical of ICE and U.S. immigration policy in the Kansas City Star, based only an anonymous tip from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation that she has Mexican heritage, which she wrote about in the op ed.
Everyday obstructions of First Amendment rights that affect all residents of the Kansas City metropolitan area include that Johnson County judges, who are attorneys and know they are violating the Kansas Open Records Act, charge prohibitive fees for public records to obstruct public interest litigation and journalists, as covered by the Kansas City Star. In 2023, the court administrator, Laura Brewer, invoiced Herster over $1,000 just to search for two records requests (email correspondence with her name in it and court hearings audio in one courtroom on a single day). Brewer indicated the judges may charge more, after they locate the records, to let her and the public see them and hung up the phone on Herster when she called her. Under typical agency policy, Herster’s access to the records should have been free and under Kansas law no more than about $20.
The General Counsel’s office for court adminstration at the Kansas Supreme Court contacted Herster in attempt to mediate another open records request for transcripts and court hearing recordings unlawfully refused by Judge Neil Foth and that appear deleted in the transcriptions for the record on appeal. After invoiced and paid to the court reporter assigned to transcribe them, the court reporter said Judge Foth had a missing hearing audio transcript in his chambers that is supposed to be filed with the Clerk of Court so she couldn’t easily access it to transcribe. In the missing hearing transcript, Foth made embarrassing, male supremaccist hate-based statements that Herster followed court rules to challenge and made objections relevant to appeals and civil litigation while the District Attorneys office set up falsification of failures to appear to seize bond money, jail and physically injure Herster.
Reason 4. Murders of female journalists while reporting on (or believed to be reporting on) politicians, law enforcement and courts involvement in state-sanctioned violence and corruption.
Aviva Okeson-Haberman, Missouri politics and government reporter for Kansas City public radio station KCUR. Murdered in 2021 and remains unsolved.
Fatal bullets struck Aviva Okeson-Haberman through her bedroom window while she was a rising investigative reporter covering elder and child abuse. Okeson-Haberman’s work sparked demands that Lee’s Summit candidate for Missouri state representative, Rick Roeber, who had a long history of domestic violence, remove himself from the race in which he hoped to take his wife’s congressional seat after she died unexpectedly on a family vacation.
Five years later, Federal prosecutors punished another woman, Lupi Gardner, who adamantly denied involvement and was never charged or tried, and publicized it as solving the killing of Okeson-Haberman. They tacked it into an enhanced 15-year prison sentence that exceeds the maximum allowed for unrelated felonies that Gardner pled guilty to. Neither prosecutors nor the judge who approved the sentence had jurisdiction to do so. State prosecutors in the Kansas City court responsible for handing criminal charges related to Okeson-Haberman’s murder found no evidence that Gardner was responsible and Gardner had no opportunity to contest these accusations against her in any court.
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Marion County’s new police chief Gideon Cody and his department killed Joan Meyer when they executed an invalid search warrant that they got Judge Vier to sign. They raided Meyer’s offices and home to search and seize confidential news materials and reporting equipment. Precipitating the raids, whistleblowers reached out to the Record to inform its journalists that the Kansas City Police Department retired Cody for bullying and male supremacist misconduct after their department failed to adequately warn of the reasons for his departure. The pretext of the invalid warrant derived from the Record‘s online access of open records to investigate an anonymous tip, suspected to be from a restaurant owner’s ex-husband post-separation, about her suspended business license and DUI records. After Meyer’s death, her son, the newspaper’s editor, said they had not planned to publish about either tip.
Lisa Lopez-Galvan, host of the Kansas City radio show A Taste of Tejano. Murdered in 2024 at a parade and remains unsolved.
Over 1,000 law enforcement and medical professionals were working at or near the site of Lopez-Galvan’s murder and more witnessed at the hospital. Video captured by the city of Kansas City, Missouri and by partnering local, state and federal law enforcement cameras remains withheld from public scrutiny.
From her roofdeck, Herster saw law enforcement in military combat-style camouflage arrive during the Union Station parade finale preparations before Lopez-Galvan’s murder and mass shooting where dozens were injured. Minutes after Lopez-Galvan’s fatal injuries, Herster watched on her street as people fled in the Crossroads neighborhood across the train tracks. Some said they heard gunfire ongoing in the Crossroads. Others assumed they heard fireworks.
Firsthand witnesses caught in cross-fire reported suspicious behavior of people nearby them and in range of Lopez-Galvan at the time she was shot who were never reported as suspects, charged for crimes or investigated by news media.