Hey, it's Nicky.

I just wanted to let you know that this is a pretty tough episode.

It's a story of love, resilience, and the links the women of Kansas City went to try and look out for each other, but in the process we delve into stories about substance abuse, violence, murder, and sexual assault.

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.

After seeing her older sister Stacy get kidnapped and losing two friends to murder, Nico was at a loss.

Stacy was working on the streets addicted to drugs, and Roger Glubski, the police officer who lurked in the shadows of their lives, seemed unstoppable.

Then in the fall of nineteen ninety nine, Nico got a call.

She had got caught in somebody's house, a drug house, and basically she took the rap for everything that they found.

Stacy was arrested and charged her what The judge told her that she was pretty to be out here and he wanted her to get her life together and get cleaned up.

He was gonna give her thirty seven months in prison, and I was relieved.

Nico reasoned that Stacy would be safer behind bars than surrounded by temptation in Quendero.

At some point, she went to visit her sister in prison.

It took them by thirty forty five minutes for them to let me go.

Up to see her.

When the sisters came face to face, it was in a cubicle that separated them with a pane of glass.

Stacy was late and I'm like, where was you at?

And she was sitting up on the little thing and we on the phone.

She laughed, She said, I was in Galuski's office.

You know, they walked in on us.

She didn't need to say what had happened for Nico to understand what the guards had seen.

Stacy was supposed to be safe from Gelupski behind bars, but it turns out he was using his authority to take her back and forth between his office and her cell.

As the weeks passed, Nico heard other things about Stacy's life behind bars, that she was getting better treatment than other prisoners, and that she was trying to negotiate an early release.

Nico suspected something was going on.

So one day, not long before Christmas, she decided to try and get to the bottom of it and ran her other sister, Liz.

So I called my sister and she said, girl Stacy snitching.

Nico knew that people could shorten their sentences by becoming confidential informants.

They wondered whether Stacy might be trying to do the same thing.

As soon as I hung up the front with my sister, Stacey came walking through the door.

It was only around four months into what Nico says was supposed to be a thirty seven month prison sentence, but there was Stacy walking back into their home as if it was just a regular Tuesday.

I started asking her, how does she get there?

What is she doing there?

She says, they let her out on good behavior.

I said, no, Daddy, adding up, because I know what the judge said.

I asked her how she got there.

She says she got a ride.

Stacy then starts to walk around the house haphazardly, picking up clothes and belongings.

I'm like, well, where are you going?

She said, I'll be all right.

She was talking fast.

I just came to get some clothes and I'm leaving, so I'm like, how did you get out?

I'm asking her this.

You got some money for me as well?

She said, I said no.

When she walked out the door, I went to my back balcony to see went down the driveway and she got in a car.

Niko's friends comes in and tells her Gallupski's the one driving the car.

She said, she's just ran out there, got a car with him.

I was like, what she watches on as Gallupski drives Stacy away.

Maybe a couple of days later, she had came to my house and she was in a corner.

She would just shake it and I'm going off on her, what is wrong with you?

You having a withdrawal whatever?

And she was shaking.

She said, this.

Police officer, that smoking cigar told me that if he catched me out there again, he gonna kill me.

And this, that and the other.

And I'm like, who is he?

He be riding up and down the street.

I'll tell me.

I said, so why are you going up there?

And that's what she looked at me.

She said, you never smoke crack before.

He says, you never got high before, so you wouldn't understand.

I said, I don't.

But if somebody tell you they're gonna hurt you or harm you, and all the stuff you didn't been through.

Why would you go back out there?

Nico could do nothing but watch on as Stacy left the house again, walking straight out into danger.

Oh God, my got it.

I got.

I'm Nikki Richardson and from the Team's at Novel and iHeart Podcasts, this is the Girlfriend's untouchable.

I I Got you.

I'm you, by God, I got you.

I got you, I.

Got you, I got you, I Got.

You, Episode five, I Smell a Wrath.

I Got You.

I Got You.

Nico had led with love for years.

She knew how much trauma her sister had experienced and understood how hard it was to break free from addiction.

But by the year two thousand, she was exhausted by Stacy's self destructive lifestyle.

So they had the kind of intense, honest fight you can only have with someone you love.

She was arguing with me about this money that I had, so I told her, I'm gonna give you this money and forget you.

You don't know me, You dead to me.

You see me on the streets, don't even talk to me.

I'm gonna keep going, and we both said that to each other.

They fell out of contact for a while until January.

Friday night, I had got off of work.

I was coming down Brown and she was standing on the corner of twenty nineteen.

She kind of put her hand up and put it back down.

So I heard the voice said turn around, and I went up there, turned around and came back.

I said, what's up.

It was Stacey, tired and strung out.

She was like, hey, sis, and I get a couple of dollars.

I said for what.

She said, I want to get something to eat and I need some cigarettes.

I said, I ain't buying no crack.

I'm not buying no drugs.

I said, if you want to eat, you can come back home and get something to eat.

If you need to take shower, whatever, you can come to the house.

And she's like, can I just get some money for some cigarettes?

I said, yeah, don't go buy no dope with this.

And I got her ten or twenty dollars something like that, and I said, it's food at the house.

You can come back home.

If you need to come home, you always welcome, you can come back home.

I was angry.

I apologized for the things I said.

She told me that she loved me, and I told her that I loved her too.

She told me she was gonna take the money go buy her some cigarettes.

She was gonna come to the house.

She came to the house that night.

We talked and she was just telling me how she loved me, and told me if anything happened to her, to make sure I take here her son.

It was getting difficult for Nico to relate to her sister.

The drugs were making Stacy suspicious of everything.

She would often tell their other sister, Liz, that she was worried about mysterious people trying to hurt them.

Her words to my sister is I'm trying to save y'all.

I'm trying to protect y'all.

They assumed it was paranoia, a side effect that the drug Stacey was taking.

On Saturday night, Nico went to hang out at her then fiance Chris's house.

We was gonna go to church, me his mother.

So we splent on going to church Sunday morning.

But at around three am, the phone rang.

It woke the whole house up.

His mama answered the phone.

The house went quiet for a moment until she called out for her son.

His mother was screaming like Chris, somebody on the phone.

Somebody on the phone.

I don't know what's going on.

So he got the phone.

There was silence again, and.

He answered it that.

He said, Babe, you better come and get this phone.

I got the phone and I just dropped.

A lifetime flashed through her eyes.

The girlhood days playing pretend, the teenage nights spent dancing to their favorite songs.

The conversation they had less than two days ago that ended with I love you and a hug.

I don't care what she done, I don't care what she took.

I always loved her, I always will love her.

But Nico would never be able to hug her sister again.

Nico listened as the police told her that early on that at around one thirty am, neighbors had been woken up by the sounds of a woman being chased through the neighborhood by man carrying a gun.

Nobody had intervened, but the people who'd witnessed the shooting recalled how hard Stacy had tried to save herself.

Every time she got shot, she got up, it was begging and pleading for her life.

It had no mercy on her.

My sister was shot twenty two times.

People who lived near the crime scene said Stacy had told the shooter that she wanted to go home, that she'd repeatedly shouted, please don't kill me, don't kill me, but the shooter had refused to back down.

He'd chased her down the block, relentless in his pursuit.

Stacy's son, Joannelle, had seen his mother the day before.

They had a quick conversation, and then he noticed she was shivering in the early January cold.

She asked for my coat, and I gave it my coat.

A red Chiefs jacket.

They'd exchanged I love you, and then Janelle had headed out with his friends.

We had a little thing for like teenagers, you know, to keep us from being on block.

So they had something for us, you know, come there and play chill.

It was like a little RECU action center.

Janelle had fun at the party, but as he left the building, he started to hear gunshots.

It was just power and then power, you know what I'm saying.

You could tell like somebody was running or something while they were shooting.

It was crazy.

Though.

It wasn't until his Auntie broke the news that Janelle made the connection between what he heard and what it just happened to his mother.

At this time, he's about fifteen, sixteen years old, and he gets in the car with us and he just kind of like rocking a little bit, and I never forget Joanette was in a car with me.

He said, ain'tie, I knew that was my mama when I heard the guyshots.

I heard my mama get killed.

I heard it, and he was just.

Stonefaced like he didn't I don't know if he was just trying to be strong for me, but I just broke down.

I couldn't imagine being in his shoes.

And my grandmother just was rocking and she said, I can't believe they did my baby like that.

Why would anybody do my baby like that?

That was her first granddaughter.

At just thirty one years old.

Stacy Quinn was that the family was devastated.

Things only got worse when the police arrived at their front door because the lead investigator on her sister's murder case was Detective Roger Gallupski.

And my uncle said, I smell Aurette.

I had you.

I got you, I had you.

Roger Gallupski had been tormenting Nico Quinn's sister Stacy, since she was a fifteen year old girl.

The injustice of hearing Glupski proudly announced that he'd be leading the investigation into Stacy's murder.

Was almost too much for Nico to bear, but her family sat and waited to hear what his investigation had found.

Marcus Washington, a local man in his early twenties, had been arrested.

He told the police that he had been driving home late that night when Stacy had flagged him down to ask for drugs and a arry.

She'd gotten in the car with him, and everything had been fine until another car had crashed into them.

The incident had supposedly triggered Marcus's PTSD induced paranoia that someone wanted to kill him, so he and Stacy had started arguing.

At his trial, Marcus admitted to shooting Stacy.

He said things had gotten heated to the point where they'd started fighting over the gun he kept in his car.

Then Marcus had chased her through the neighborhood with his gun until he killed her.

He said it was self defense, but in October two thousand, he was convicted of he first degree murder and sentenced to fifty years in prison.

Nico didn't trust Glupski's investigation or the outcome.

Given her experience of being coerced into a false accusation, she finds it hard to believe Marcus is responsible for her sister's murder.

I know Marcus didn't do it.

There's no way he could have shot her like that.

He couldn't have.

He couldn't.

There's no way he could have shot her like that.

Nico had seen the bullet wounds for herself when she identified Stacy's body.

She said the way that the bullet holes hit her internal organs made her feel like it had been done by someone who really knew what they were doing, not someone from the neighborhood with what she thought was a flimsy motive.

But the case was over and she knew she would never persuade the CASEYKPD to reopen the investigation, so she focused her energy on looking after her family, especially Stacy's only child, Dreanelle.

Because her last words to me was to take care of her son, and she told me that I've been trying to do that.

Still.

Nico couldn't help, but wonder if there was another reason why her sister was murdered.

She kept thinking back to the conversation Stacy had with her loved ones in the weeks before her death.

There's too many predators.

There's too many devils out here, snakes, is what she would tell me.

My sister said that they were going to kill her, she told everybody, because she was supposed to come out here and do something they wanted her to do, but she couldn't do it.

As Kadija and I listened to Nico telling us this part of the story, our minds wandered back to the phone call between Nico and her sister Liz about the rumors that Stacy was snitching in prison.

It reminded us of something Kadija hadn't covered in her conversations with women during and after La McIntyre's exoneration, that Gallupski had an unusual relationship with confidential informants.

There are a number of reasons why someone would agree to become a confidential informant and work with the police to secretly gather the kind of information needed to build and close a case.

Some are innocent bystanders who want a dangerous person in their neighborhood to face justice.

Others might be people who've committed a crime cutting a deal to reduce their jail term.

Either way, there's a lot of stigma around working with the police.

Being a snitch into the black community means that you have no loyalty to the community.

Rumors that you're helping the police are the kind of whispers that could ruin your life as a cop.

Glupski was no stranger to confidential informants, but it was how he got them that intrigued us.

We know he arrested women like Stacy who were caught soliciting on the northeast side of Kansas City, Kansas.

If you're brought into questioning, they took a Polaroi picture of you.

The photos were kind of like mugshots, but Glupski wasn't just using the photos to record these women's arrests.

He would take that polaroid and set it in front of them and tell them, either you do what I want you to do, or your picture goes out there as you being a snitch.

If their photos were somehow leaked, the community would think there were confidential informants, So most of them agreed to whatever Glupski wanted them to do, including giving him sexual favors or information from the street and the ones who pushed back, they found out just how far Gulupski was prepared to go to get what he wanted.

The stories of the cemetery, Oh my god, the cemetery stories were hard to hear.

I couldn't imagine someone putting me in that much fear.

Cadiza heard that if he arrested them and they refused to bend to his will, he would pick them up in the dead of night, take them out of the residential areas and slowly drive them north of eighteenth Street, passed the railroad tracks, out of sight, and over to the cemetery.

The whole time he's driving them to the cemetery, he's holding a gun to their head.

He drove them through the field of headstones.

He showed them polaroids of other women who hadn't complied, women who had mysteriously disappeared, and women who had been killed in violent, in gruesome ways.

Most of the time, they're sitting on the floorboard of his truck where no one can see him, with the gun just pointed down at him.

Don't make them move, don't move a muscle.

Gulupski's methods went beyond threats.

He also used the car drives through the cemetery to abuse his terrified passengers.

Committing sexual acts on him as they go and doing exactly what he wants them to do and commanding them to do, even physically abusing them in those moments.

And then when they got to the cemetery, the beutilization, the way he beat him, the way he would yeah doing it.

It was just it sounded awful.

There was even one woman who recalled Glupski telling her to get out of the car and find a spot to dig the grave her body would end up being buried in if she refused him.

It was heart wrenching, it was heartriching.

It was just yeah, kind of hard to put into words because you can't imagine someone being treated that awful.

It's not easy to hear about such brutal violence and intimidation, but it's important to understand what Gelupski was really doing and getting away with to truly understand this story.

Kadija had her own way of coping when you heard these accounts.

I have one way where I just get in the shower hot water and I'm on my knees and I just scream and cry it out.

It was horrible.

I spent many days in the shower just crying because the stories were awful.

As spoke to more women in Guendero, the same story came up over and over again.

Once Glupski had successfully frightened victims into submission, he coerced them into becoming the informants he would use to help make arrest, solve investigations, and lock his chosen suspects away.

The ownership he had over these women became so well known in the KCYKPD that some of his colleagues began to call them Gallupski's girls.

If Stacy Quinn was one of Glupski's girls, is it possible that her role as an informant played a part in her brutal murder.

We couldn't know for sure, and when we initially heard Stacy's story, we decided to accept the official outcome of her murder investigation, thinking she was an outlier.

But then we heard about the list.

I Got you, I Got you, I Got You.

In twenty sixteen, Kadiza was called in for a confidential meeting with Lamont McIntyre's lawyers.

This was before Lamont was exonerated for the double homicide and freed from prison.

They wanted to discuss the evidence they gathered about Roger Glupski and share some of the information they'd then covered.

It was unnerving because she asked me several times during the course of our meeting not to record her.

I mean, it was just like she was so edgy about it and shake it about it, and I was just.

Like, I'm not recording you.

Why would I record you.

Kadija gets the sense that the lawyer was on edge because she thought there was more to glue actions then just coercion and abuse.

She pushed the list across the table and the list was, I guess an excel spread.

She a list of women's names, where it had the women and their date of birth, then it had their address, and then it had what happened to him.

It was so unnerving to me because the way the things are written up, like if they were hit with a blunt force object, it was the initials of blunt force object, or if they were shot, it didn't necessarily say shot, is it caliber or something like that.

Phyxiation and suffocation, and I was just like what.

The brutality of those reports.

Listen, baby, it was nerve racking that Oh my god, you know, at that point my mind was just like already blown.

Like the thirty three women on this list.

Thirty three murdered women who were said to have, at some point in their lives been associated with Roger Glubski.

Thirty three women with friends, family, loved ones, and dreams who'd been tormented by him for months or sometimes even years before meeting violent, tragic deaths.

There were names you've heard already, Rhonda Tribute, Monique Allen, two of Nico's friends who were seen with Glubski just before they were murdered, and then of course her sister, Stacy Quinn.

But we found so many other women who'd been linked to Glubski, either as informants, women he'd arrested, or women he allegedly had sexual relations with, like Rose Calvin, Diane Edwards, Liza Michi, Vicki Holland, shed Do, Aisha King, Stacy Wilson, Paulina Henderson.

The list goes on and on.

If you hear Stacy's story, it sounds like it's an anominae or something like it, just like she's just a freak tale, right, But there are so many stories like Stacy's.

Stories of women who are being pressured into doing something they didn't want to do, who were too scared to speak out.

But we know that Stacy did try to share with her sisters what was going on in the final months of her life.

She told them that a police officer was threatening her and warned them to stay at home at night because there were snakes and predators around.

If dangerous people were relying on her to stay silent, maybe speaking out was her final act of love.

I think Stacy was at the point where it didn't matter.

Yeah you know what I mean, They're either going to kill me or not, and so I might as well go out trying to do the right thing.

And I really feel like that's a horrible place to be in, Like, you know, your life is going to come to an end, so at this point it really don't matter.

But how many people can I protect in this process so that nobody else is getting hurt but me?

The ability to think about everybody and have such a big heart, that is the wildest thing.

I don't think we fall too far from that tree, though, because it was the fact that I recognized that Stacy was willing to risk her own life for it.

That forced me and I'm assuming you too, He said, Okay, is this worth risking my life for it?

Because speaking out has consequences.

The more we dug into Glupski, the more style Ksek began to feel.

We tried to reach out to the authorities, but the more questions we asked, the more resistance we were met with.

In fact, we started to feel like they were actively trying to intimidate us out of investigating.

At one point, some police officers even showed up at my grandmother's door trying to question me for a speeding offense that I hadn't even been on the right side of the city to commit, So don't be mistaken.

We started that journey scared as hell.

Hearing those stories and understanding what the women went through was like, do you really want to do this?

Do you really want to put yourself in this situation?

Fear wasn't going to protect our community, so Kadija and I got to work.

At the time, we didn't have an office or any official place to operate, so we just met wherever we could coffee shops, libraries, and at local businesses.

When we did decide we would meet, it would be locally owned, ye black owned and very community friendly.

Kadija have been getting calls and messages ever since Lamon's exeneration case, so we set up a Facebook page and email address for anyone else who wanted to get in contact with us.

We made data for each one of the women putting their identity out there, who they were saying, say their name.

In twenty twenty one, we spent the first thirty two days of the summer sharing stories of injustice in Kansas City, involving Roger Gulupski.

Hello out there, my name is Nikki, and you were about to listen to the very first episode of my brand new podcast called Seventh Street.

I started a podcast where I interviewed their loved ones and drew awareness to what had happened to them.

He got messages from mothers, sisters, aunts, and daughters, painting a picture of the women they lost and the lives they lived beyond the way the world saw them.

Most of them were labor, prostitutes or drug addicts.

Most of these women didn't ask for what they got, didn't ask to be a prostitute, didn't ask to be a drug addict or an informant.

They didn't ask for this.

Some of them had been victims of childhood abuse, others had grown up in the midst of the crack epidemic, and many of them were mothers who ended up having to leave their children behind.

But none of that should have even mattered.

You shouldn't have to have a perfect record of behavior for your death to be treated as a tragedy, and you don't have to be a mother, daughter, or saint for the authorities to be serious when it comes to investigating your murder.

And then the way the world saw them was just as horrible as what they had experienced.

I wanted to change that narrative.

I wanted to put real understand into these spaces of these women.

We spoke to survivors, helped them get the counseling they needed, and put them in contact with lawyers who could give them legal support.

But the more stories we heard, the more we came to understand how deeply Glupski had affected so many of the women in our community.

I grew up in Quandero, in the same area as a lot of the victims we've heard from.

As a kid I had no awareness of how dangerous the place I called home actually was, but my mother did, so I told Kadija our story.

My mother knew Roger Glupski.

He used to pull her over and hit on her, and she had her issues with him, and so what she did was she befriended him because she thought that would probably be a better thing to do, and what have him patrol when she knew I was walking from high school to home because that was in his beat, to patrol to make sure that I got home safe, because she was worried about the sex offenders that lived across the street on me.

Then I realized he was a sex offender in the midst of it all.

And so you know, not only did we look like it, but we could have easily been a target.

It is just simply because I was a good student that went to Sumner Academy.

But if I didn't come from that kind of background or that easily easily could have been preyed upon.

The victims were just a few degrees of separation from me.

The fight was personal.

So in spite of our fears, we set out to work towards three main goals, try and figure out why so many of the women who'd crossed paths with Roger Glupski were really murdered, pushed for their cases to be reopened and make sure Gallupski was finally held a cauntable for the years of pain he'd inflicted.

My mindset was to see that man with handcuffed shackled.

That was literally my.

Endgame, and we would do everything we could to try to make that vision a reality.

Coming up on The Girlfriend's Untouchable, I think a lot of people knew what Klupski was doing.

There's a lot of crimes that he committed that we could have prevented by taking him out.

Listen, if it was your mom that got killed in the eighties and you did not grow up with no parents, what would you had have done?

They said, we would have left it alone.

Well, I'm not, y'all.

Could you pay your full name for the record.

The Sir Roger I told Roger Golupski, You're gonna see my face till the day that you die.

The Girlfriend's Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts.

For more from Novel, visit novel dot Audio.

The show is narrated by me Nicki Richardson.

It was written and produced by Rufaro Mazarua.

The editor is Joe Wheeler.

Our assistant producer is Mohammed Ahmed.

The researcher is Zayana Yusef.

Production management from Shuri Houston and Joe Savage.

The fact checker is Fendell Fulton.

Sound design, mixing and scoring by Nicholas Alexander with additional engineering by Daniel Kimpson.

Music supervision by Rufarro Masarua, 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 develop 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 Norvel and Nikki Etour are the executive producers for iHeart Podcasts, and the marketing lead is Alison Cantor.

Special thanks to will Pearson and his Special thanks to Carley Frankel and the whole team at w me E