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Kansas City Man Fredrick Scott Charged in Two Killings Near the Indian Creek Trail

DNA from a cigarette butt and an iced tea bottle tied the 22-year-old to a fatal shooting in August and to a killing on the trail a year earlier, prosecutors said.

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Illustration of stacks of paper-clipped documents, a pen and a manila folder on an office desk in bands of sunlight through venetian blinds.

The man on the bus was drinking from a bottle of iced tea. Surveillance video showed Steven Gibbons, 57, riding a Kansas City bus and a man following him, and it was the first thread detectives had in Gibbons's fatal shooting in the south of the city on August 13, 2017. They went looking for the man in the footage, found someone who looked like him, asked for his identification, and collected a cigarette butt they watched him smoke. The DNA on the cigarette matched the DNA on the iced tea. It also matched DNA from a killing a year earlier: John Palmer, 56, found on August 19, 2016, on the Indian Creek Trail near Bannister Road and Lydia.

On Tuesday, August 29, 2017, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker announced that Fredrick D. Scott, 22, had been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and two counts of armed criminal action in the deaths of Gibbons and Palmer. According to the court papers filed that day, Scott told police that he shot Palmer and dragged his body away from the trail.

Baker went further than the two charges. Scott, she said, was a suspect in other homicides over the past year near the popular trails of south Kansas City, and at a press conference she asked the public for information about him, his use of guns, and three more killings in the same area. The charges, her office noted, were only accusations; Scott was presumed innocent.

The accusations grew. Later in 2017 Scott was also charged with the murder of Karen Harmeyer, 64, whose body was found in July in neighboring Grandview. On March 2, 2018, a grand jury indictment accused him of three more: David Lenox, killed on or about February 27, 2017; Timothy Rice, found around April 3, 2017; and Michael Darby, shot on May 18, 2017. That made six murders in all.

What this story covers. It draws on the Jackson County Prosecutor's Office press release of August 29, 2017, which summarizes the charging papers filed that day, and its release of March 2, 2018, for the later charges. What Scott is said to have told police comes from those court filings and was an allegation at the time, not a finding. Whether the three killings Baker asked about in August 2017 are the three named in the 2018 indictment is not stated in either release.

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