Part 1: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill? >> Part 2: Kirkwood, Meacham Park and the Racial Divide >> Part 3: The Return to City Hall >> Part 4: The Man Who Threw Chairs
On March 6, people pour into the stately City Hall past a gantlet of reporters—“Excuse me, are you a resident of Kirkwood?”—and upstairs to the council chamber. It’s the first meeting in this room since Charles Lee Thornton—who’d been affectionately known as Cookie Thornton by most of Kirkwood—murdered five city officials here, critically wounded the mayor and was shot to death by police.
I look up and realize I’m staring at the balcony railing city attorney John Hessel almost leaped over after he hurled chairs at Thornton to stop him from shooting the rest of the council. But people keep moving, climbing the stairs and filing into the chamber. Soon it’s standing room only, and people line up along the sides and back of the crowded room, leaning against walls that were spattered with blood on February 7.
The only African-Americans in the audience happen to be sitting together in the back row—the kind of unintended symbolism that keeps reminding people that the historically black Meacham Park neighborhood, annexed by Kirkwood in 1992, still isn’t comfortably part of Kirkwood. In the rush of emotion after the tragedy, some saw Thornton’s acts as a crusade for racial justice for his Meacham Park neighborhood—and that tangle of context, motive and madness is still getting sorted.
There’s a slight stir as former Kirkwood High principal Franklin McCallie walks down the aisle, tall and a little stooped, Lincolnesque. McCallie’s one of the pillars of Kirkwood, and while his detractors tire of his courting of the media and his self-appointed role as the liberal conscience of a conservative community, his supporters were practically on their knees begging him to be a write-in candidate for mayor. (He eventually refused.)
The meeting moves with determined normalcy into public hearings on the budget. Like a workaholic after major surgery, Kirkwood is going through its routine determinedly, a little shaky from the loss of blood. “And there will be spring plantings for a festive and friendly atmosphere in downtown Kirkwood,” a speaker is promising when the man next to me whispers, “Wonder if there’ll be another firestorm tonight.”
I nod nervously, glancing at the police officers posted in all four corners.
And then I realize he means a verbal firestorm.
On February 28, when the council met at Kirkwood’s community center, there were heated calls to delay the April 8 mayoral election and accusations that the city attorney was maneuvering to preserve a long-entrenched status quo. The tragedy had scraped the skin off all sorts of old wounds, inflaming racial tensions as well as the frustrations of white residents tired of “the club” that’s governed Kirkwood for more than a dozen years.
Council member Connie Karr had been running for mayor; when Thornton shot her, it left the other candidate, Art McDonnell, unopposed. Uncontested races aren’t that unusual—but Karr had been the great hope of a number of Kirkwood residents. They had found her more willing to listen, study both sides of the issues, work on behalf of Meacham Park, control commercial development and infill McMansions, preserve historic houses and green space and the comfortable hodgepodge of different socioeconomic levels. She’d pushed back in 2003 to have the city change from an at-large council, highly unusual for a city of 27,000 people, to a ward system with two representatives elected from each of four wards.
“She made a tactical error,” McCallie told me. “She pushed the ward system, and it lost badly. The power structure really put out the word, saying some of ‘our best people’ would never be able to run because they aren’t living in these wards. This was an unwritten, very powerful statement.”
Kathy Paulsen, who helped Karr campaign, recalls, “They said you had seven people you could go to instead of two. But it’s not like all seven take on your problems; you’re lucky if you get one. And Connie was the one who took on everybody’s problems.”
The proposal was roundly defeated in 2003. But now people were saying that if one of the council members had been accountable to Meacham Park residents, Thornton might have felt he had representation. Karr had long said that the first thing she’d do as mayor was find a way to resolve his issues—a way that did not include roping off the council, insisting on advance comment cards, timing each comment for 3 minutes and refraining from any discussion or debate. Those methods were devised by the council to inhibit Thornton—but they’d also inhibited everyone else who wanted to speak.
Tonight, the blue velvet rope is gone—and the council has run out of comment cards, so everyone will speak. But first, Hessel gives a crisp summation. He notes again that the law allows for postponement of an election as “an emergency measure necessary for the peace, health or safety” and insists that Kirkwood’s shootings do not qualify. “If the city council wants to ignore my legal advice, you can certainly do so,” he says. “But if you do that, I’m compelled to remind you of a couple things. The good part of my job is, I never testify. You have to testify. One or more of you would have to stand before a three-panel judge and explain why this election has to be postponed. And be careful what you ask for—because if an election cannot be held, it will be the entire election, I predict. And we will be shut down until August.
“If you want to argue that you cannot proceed with the mayoral election because one candidate is not with us, I’ll again advise you: Be careful,” Hessel continues. “You would be asking a three-judge panel to set a dangerous precedent.” He scans the room, his blue eyes bright in a thin, handsome face. “Everyone in this room deserves respect, and I suggest to you that some in this room have earned that respect. I am not going to be treated with the disrespect that I had at that last council meeting.”
He gets a standing ovation from most—not all—of the audience members.
Steve Eagleton, nephew of former Democratic powerhouse Sen. Thomas Eagleton, stands against the back wall—but only because he couldn’t find a seat. “The city attorney basically runs Kirkwood,” Eagleton told me earlier. “The city council members defer to him for virtually every question from what color socks to wear to which zoning to approve. He makes it very clear that he does not represent the citizens, he works for the council. So you have a group of people that defers to one guy, and that guy turns around and says, ‘I represent you.’ This has been Hessel’s little baby for years.”
Eagleton, a developer with a law degree who moved to Kirkwood last summer, says, “We’ve called the Missouri attorney general’s office and the secretary of state’s office and the board of elections, and none would bring action against Kirkwood for postponing its election.”
“We have to move on and take the advice of our attorney,” council member Iggy Yuan is saying. “This is America, democracy is very important, but we need to move on.” Paul Ward, a former council member swiftly sworn in after the deaths, says, “I’m not about to break the law for anybody.” Art McDonnell, the council member who’s about to become mayor, adds, “The man who caused this terrible incident felt the law did not apply to him” and urges a write-in vote rather than a postponement.
McDonnell’s a mild-mannered, chatty grocer who grew up in Kirkwood, now lives in its oldest house (construction began in 1816) and has been president of the chamber of commerce, president of the Rotary Club, a city council member and an appointee to a long list of committees and commissions. Even some of the people pushing for postponement concede that he might be open enough to make Kirkwood government more inclusive. Earlier I’d asked him why didn’t he simply withdraw his name so the election could be rescheduled? “Stability in the community is important after all this,” he says. “It would be unfair to the citizens of Kirkwood to resign, because it would be very hard for Kirkwood to function legislatively until probably August. Having an opponent would be nice—it’s more in the American way. But nobody was lining up to oppose me.”
That’s because Connie Karr was running, her supporters say. Everybody knew her plans—and her vision. And nobody expected her to be murdered.
Finally, to the relief of the TV cameramen who have been waiting, cameras poised, for over an hour, deputy mayor Tim Griffin opens the public comment section. “Don’t put all of us in the awkward position of having to debate,” Griffin warns. “Just come up and make brief comments.”
Dick Reeves walks to the microphone. “Can you all hear me?” he asks, turning to the rest of the audience. “I do want to be heard.” He takes a deep breath. “What we have had is truly a disaster. The rules are gone. The rules are out the window. What we are looking for now is democracy. That’s the only thing that’s going to heal people.”
Signs about healing are all over Kirkwood, but I keep wondering what exactly is to be healed: The grief? The fear? The anger at Thornton? The rift with Meacham Park? All the other social tensions the tragedy has blown open? The damage to Kirkwood’s sense of itself—and its reputation—as a safe and golden place? “All this talk of heal, heal, heal,” one longtime resident says. “As Kirkwood Presbyterian’s minister said, ‘You cannot heal a wound until you clean it out.’”
Kinji Bailey, a Meacham Park resident who’s been fighting Kirkwood’s order to demolish his house, says, “With the mayoral race, I think they are using the tragedy to get the same people back in. Everybody’s trying to make it a racial thing—yes, we have racial problems in Kirkwood, but I think it’s greed, not race. And I’m sick of it.”
Reeves continues: “Nothing in the city charter provides for postponing the election, but nothing in the city charter prohibits postponing the election, either. The overwhelming majority of Kirkwood residents want an elected mayor, not an appointed one. This is Kirkwood, not Hesselville—”
Griffin stops him right there. Disrespect will not be tolerated. People rise one after another to say how ashamed they were of the previous meeting’s tone, and Paul Cartier, a friend of Hessel’s, reads a letter given to him by Hessel’s daughter, from an alderman in another community who applauds Hessel’s heroism and sensitivity and calls the comments made at the previous council meeting by Franklin McCallie and others “the most repugnant display I’ve ever witnessed in my life.” A voice calls from the back of the chamber: “I thought insults were not allowed!”
“I grew up in Kirkwood,” another speaker says, “and there was never this anger and this emotional outrage. I hope we can go back to the old Kirkwood.”
Founded in 1853, Kirkwood was the first planned suburb west of the Mississippi, a refuge for middle- and upper-class families fleeing from urban congestion and the dangers of the 1849 fire and cholera epidemic. Kirkwood’s had traumas since, but nothing like the events of the past three years: Kevin Johnson shooting Sgt. William McEntee point-blank in what he thought was revenge for his baby brother’s death; Michael Devlin holding young boys captive; this February’s massacre. “For some, it’s akin to Mister Rogers suddenly lobbing hand grenades into the Neighborhood,” writes Toby Weiss, who works for the Mosby Building Arts firm that helped rebuild the council chamber.
Everybody flew into action after the shootings. Moms and kids raised money for the victims’ families by selling cookies (Kirkwood doesn’t have much of a sense of irony) and cocoa. Leaders in Meacham Park invited Hodges and McCallie to co-chair dialogues for peace and understanding.
But there was no way to understand.
No way to know how the bomb ticking inside Cookie Thornton’s mind could have been defused. No way to know why here—God, if I heard the word Mayberry one more time, or Camelot or Petticoat Junction, I was going to scream. But the nicknames are possible because Kirkwood is a peaceful, delightfully old-fashioned community. When Kristina Sauerwein interviewed officer Tom Ballman—the second man Thornton shot—about the Devlin case last fall, Ballman joked about how safe Kirkwood was.
Violence is a shock here. One guy wrote on insidestl.com that he dropped off his daughter, then sat dazed in his car outside his regular Starbucks, so shocked he couldn’t move, because his community was on CNN.
“How could this happen in Kirkwood?” sounds smug to people who live in places where bad things happen quite readily. But Kirkwood is so self-conscious it’s practically an intentional community. People pour everything they’ve got into this ground, so they can put down deep, strong roots and never leave. Many grew up within a mile of where they live today. They volunteer, they fight passionately for historic and green-space preservation, they bring casseroles to neighbors in crisis; they behave—politics excepted—politely. Kirkwood—at least the 95 percent of it that’s well above the poverty level—isn’t just a place; it’s a dream, a vision of how life should be.
“You see a lot of lemonade stands,” real-estate agent Patty Heidger notes. “People want their kids to have the childhoods they had.” Property values keep rising, and the pride of place is fierce, personal, idealized. There’s not just peer pressure, there’s block pressure, to keep your lawn pristine and dangle Easter eggs and handkerchief ghosts from your trees. Moms compete to make the best goody-bags for birthday parties (“It’s best if you go to Michael’s and your container is hand-painted—and you have to have the best toys and candy, but not real candy, because some kids might have an allergy, so it has to be Whole Foods kind of candy,” one mom tells me, admitting that Mayberry can feel a bit more like Desperate Housewives at times.)
Still, it’s idyllic, both historically and deliberately so. And the thought that the peace Kirkwoodians, as they call themselves, have so carefully preserved could be shattered in a second—that kids could be held against their will in a place where everybody looks out for each other (unless they live on the other side of the tracks, in transient apartments, as Devlin did, or in Meacham Park, where white kids are warned not to venture) throws all of that into question.
“In addition to the grief anyone would feel, it’s almost personal,” Sauerwein says. “There’s a sense of superiority that they have bought into the perfect world, and they are insulated—and that’s false. They thought they were buying an insurance policy that nothing awful could happen.”
After the council’s reverential talk about obeying the law, lawyer Joe Soraghan suggests letting the judges of the appeals court decide. Another speaker questions the legality of McDonnell’s vote on the motion, made at an emergency meeting February 15, to go to Kevin Karr and ask if he wanted his wife’s name removed from the ballot. Wasn’t that a conflict of interest, given that the act essentially left McDonnell mayor?
“Art does not have a conflict when you are abdicating your discretion to someone else,” Hessel tells me later. “The vote was to remove Connie’s name if Kevin wanted to do it.” A second motion was made for the council to remove her name if Kevin could not decide, Hessel continues. “That’s when Art said, ‘I don’t want to participate in this.’ I said, ‘Art, if you do that, it can’t be considered at all; we won’t have a quorum.’ So we had the discussion, and he abstained. But there’s no way I was going to file any petition based upon that motion.” So why vote on it? “If it was 3-0, at least I’d have had some idea as to what they wanted to do.”
If Connie Karr’s name had stayed on the ballot, either someone would have sued, declaring her ineligible and leaving Art mayor, or the election would have been declared null and void—which is what a lot of Kirkwood residents feel would have been more fair. “Do they realize Kirkwood’s the only city in America where you can be mayor without an election? It’s a power grab,” a Democrat insists, pointing out that Karr was the only Democrat on a supposedly nonpartisan council.
Paulsen started making regular public comments and Sunshine Law requests when she felt ignored and insulted for protesting a medical-building development and trying to preserve a wooded area near here neighborhood. Tonight, she states that when she read the minutes of that emergency meeting, she learned that the notice was posted not 24 hours in advance, as the media had reported, but rather two hours in advance, at 7 a.m. on February 15.
“You give notice whatever is reasonable,” Hessel says. “It was between 5 and 5:30 p.m. Thursday when I spoke with Steve Garrett.” The deadline to amend the ballot was February 26, but Hessel says Garrett needed an order the next day, Friday, February 22, because the ballots were being prepared. “And let’s assume we didn’t adequately post the notice of that meeting,” Hessel adds. “It doesn’t invalidate the meeting. At the end of the day, so what? Take me to task because we didn’t publish notice of the meeting. I promise you, if I ever have five friends murdered in front of my eyes again, I’ll think more clearly.”
Toward the council meeting’s end, Nancy Lutzow says simply, “Why not heed the wishes of so many voters calling for delay? Otherwise, we will have allowed Charles Thornton and his violent acts to cast our votes for us.” Others point out how unfair it is to keep referring to dissenters as “a vocal minority,” “axe-grinders” or “malcontents” who are “divisive.” People have bristled at all the shaming talk of the last meeting, and now they start to counter. “I was at that meeting, and I do not condone everything that was said,” Ellen Wentz remarks, “but what I heard was free speech.”
Finally, Kathy Paulsen’s daughter comes to the microphone. She starts softly, explaining she’s never come to a city council meeting before; her mother used to go to them and come home sad. Sarah looks from one council member to the next. “Mr. Ward, I went to school with your daughter. Mr. Hessel, I believe your daughter swam with my sister. Mr. Griffin? I taught your daughter to swim. Mr. McCallie was my teacher. Art, when I was really little, my mom would drive me up to McDonnell’s Market in my red wagon. I think I might have stolen the only candy bar of my life in your store.”
“I forgive you,” he interjects, smiling.
Sarah finishes by saying that, just as her mother visited Mayor Mike Swoboda to wish him well, she hopes McDonnell will visit her mother and listen to people’s concerns.
The tension in the room uncoils, and people beam at her. This is the Kirkwood where they want to live. If only it could stay this way forever …
It can’t, of course; they of all people know that now.
But the dream won’t die.
Part 1: Why Did Cookie Thornton Kill? >> Part 2: Kirkwood, Meacham Park and the Racial Divide >> Part 3: The Return to City Hall >> Part 4: The Man Who Threw Chairs
