On the morning of August 13, 2017, Steven Gibbons boarded a Kansas City bus at 75th Street and Troost Avenue. He was fifty-seven, a husband and father of two whom his friends called Gibby. A young man carrying a thirty-two-ounce bottle of Brisk iced tea with a blue screw top got on directly behind him. Three minutes later, near 67th Street, Gibbons got off, and the young man got off after him and followed him down Troost, keeping a long gap between them. A camera caught the man drinking from the bottle, then panned away. Less than a minute later it picked him up again, running from the spot where Gibbons lay shot in the back of the head. Detectives found the empty Brisk bottle at the scene. Four days later an officer came upon a man who matched the stills from the video, sitting on a wall at 97th Street and Holmes Road and smoking. He gave his name as Fredrick Scott. When he walked off, the officer picked up the cigarette butt and sent it to the crime lab. The DNA on it matched the bottle.
For a year by then, south Kansas City had been afraid of its trails. The Indian Creek Trail runs through the neighborhoods along the creek, and since the summer of 2016 people had been turning up shot along it and near it, most of them white men in their fifties and sixties, some out walking their dogs. On August 17, 2017, two days short of a year after the first body was found, police arrested Scott, who was twenty-two and lived nearby, and who admitted that he used the trail all the time.
The first had been John Palmer, a cook, found on the afternoon of August 19, 2016, by someone using the trail near Bannister Road and Lydia Avenue. He had been shot several times and dragged into the woods just off the path, a day before his fifty-fifth birthday; the prosecutor's office gave his age as fifty-six. For months his death looked like a single killing. Then on February 27, 2017, David Lenox, sixty-six, a Vietnam veteran, was shot dead while walking his dog, Snickers, in the parking lot of the Willow Creek Apartments, a short walk from the trail. Around April 3 or 4, Timothy Rice, fifty-seven, a homeless man, was found under a shelter house near the trail, shot several times, once in the head. On May 18 Mike Darby, the owner of Coach's bar, a philanthropist and a fixture of Kansas City's cycling community, was shot once in the back of the head while walking his two dogs on the trail, as he did every morning. Television reports gave his age as sixty-five.
After Gibbons, investigators went back over all of it. A search of Scott's home turned up a nine-millimeter handgun. A red shirt found beside Palmer's body carried Palmer's blood on the outside and Scott's DNA on the inside. Prosecutors also came to believe that another death that summer belonged in the series, though it broke the pattern: Karen Harmeyer, a homeless woman, had been shot in the 1200 block of Blue Ridge Boulevard in Grandview, the suburb just south of the city, and her body was found in July. The prosecutor's office gave her age as sixty-four, television reports as sixty-five. Detectives speculated that, from the clothes she had been wearing, she might have been mistaken for a man. Scott was charged first with Gibbons and Palmer, indicted for Harmeyer in the fall of 2017, and on March 2, 2018, a grand jury added Lenox, Rice and Darby: six counts of first-degree murder and six of armed criminal action.
In a recorded interrogation that ran about eleven hours, much of it with his head down, mumbling, Scott admitted shooting Palmer and dragging his body off the trail. He admitted that he had lied when he reported the gun he used stolen, two days before that shooting, and that the red shirt was his. He admitted shooting Gibbons too, with the gun the police had found in his house, which he had also reported stolen the month before, but said it had gone off by accident as he pulled it from his pocket. At one point he claimed that Gibbons had called him a racial slur. "Did you light him up then, did it feel good?" the detective asked. Scott did not really answer. "You're smiling," the detective said. He denied the other killings, though he acknowledged visiting a friend at the Willow Creek Apartments and being on the trail around the time Darby was killed. Asked why, he kept returning to his brother, who had been murdered in 2015, and said he had felt grief afterward. The police never offered a motive, and no connection between Scott and any of the six was ever shown.
Then the case stalled for eight years. Scott had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and he moved in and out of competency in the Jackson County jail, which could not force him to take medication; the state's mental hospitals, which could, had waits of six to nine months for a bed. Judges changed, and so did his lawyers. The families came to the hearings and watched each date slip. In July 2025 a judge found him competent again, and the trial was set for the following year.
It opened on September 3, 2026, ten years after Palmer was found. Scott sat in a light blue shirt and tie; his mother sat in the front row behind him and left at the first break and did not come back. Across the aisle the benches were full of the victims' families. Prosecutors told the jury that the killings followed a distinct pattern, in places Scott knew well, and that the guns they believed had been used had been fraudulently reported stolen by him, sometimes days before a shooting. A pawnshop owner testified that Scott had bought several nine-millimeter guns from his store. A state firearms examiner testified that bullet fragments and casings from the Gibbons and Harmeyer scenes matched the recovered pistol. The defense did not dispute that Scott had killed Palmer and Gibbons. It argued that he had not acted with the cool deliberation first-degree murder requires, that he was a confused, mentally ill young man in turmoil, that only one of the guns had ever been found, and that his statements reflected a detective pressing hard on someone the police should have known was ill. On the tape he had told the detective he had been diagnosed as bipolar, with depression, during probation for an earlier shoplifting case; his lawyers said he had already been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The judge denied a defense motion for a mistrial. Over three weeks the state called more than seventy witnesses.
On September 22, 2026, the jury of seven women and five men found Scott guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the deaths of John Palmer, Mike Darby, Karen Harmeyer and Steven Gibbons, and not guilty in the deaths of David Lenox and Timothy Rice. It recommended life without parole on each murder count and the maximum fifteen years on each weapons count. Darby's son, Brian, called the day bittersweet. "Every family has its own kind of grief, and this is ours," he said. His sister, Alison Boddicker, said it was the first thing she thought about every morning and the last thing every night. Palmer's widow, Kathy, said that losing him had felt like being torn in half. The prosecutor, Melesa Johnson, said she was heartbroken for the Lenox and Rice families and wanted them to know the trial team had fought for them. "It is unfortunate that their chapter is not closed," she said. Formal sentencing was set for November 23, 2026.