From the Kansas City Star Archives: Stories from the Explosion
	This story originally appeared in the July 3, 1997 edition of The Kansas City Star HEADLINE: Despite Conviction, Five Insist: We Didn't Set the Blast By TOM JACKMAN The Kansas City Star Seething in jail as they awaited the life sentences they were given Wednesday, the five Kansas Citians convicted of causing the 1988 deaths of six firefighters maintained that they had nothing to do with the fatal explosion. In a series of individual interviews conducted at the federal jail in Leavenworth before the sentencing, each defendant also insisted that he or she had never admitted any role in the blast. At the trial, dozens of witnesses said they heard one or two defendants admit involvement in the arson that caused the explosion. Their testimony formed the foundation of the government's case against Frank Sheppard, Skip Sheppard, Darlene Edwards, Bryan Sheppard and Richard Brown. Now, the five must pin their hopes on an appeal. They remain defiant, but not optimistic. "I believe I'll spend the rest of my life in prison for a crime I did not commit," said Bryan Sheppard, 26. "They couldn't find no one else to pin that case on," said Skip Sheppard, 37. "They just picked some bad lemons out of the neighborhood." All of the defendants came from the Marlborough neighborhood of south Kansas City, near the blast site. All but Brown had previous felony convictions. Three defendants - Frank Sheppard, 47, Edwards, 43, and Brown, 27- noted that prosecutors offered them each a plea bargain: a five-year sentence in exchange for their guilty plea and testimony. "I told them, 'Forget it,' " Edwards said. All five believed a jury would acquit them. "I thought the jury was smart enough," Frank Sheppard said, "just common-sense kind of people (who) could understand, could see through (the government's case)." On Feb. 26, a jury convicted all five defendants of one count of arson resulting in the death of public safety officers. The jury foreman said in March that jurors agreed with the government's theory that the defendants "wouldn't have said they did it if they didn't do it." The jury also couldn't believe that dozens of witnesses would all be untruthful. "It just didn't make any sense for them to lie," the foreman said.

Sticking to their stories The alibis the five gave in the interviews did not waver from the stories they had told investigators over the years - that they were asleep long before the first explosion at 4:08 a.m. on Nov. 29, 1988. But none of the defendants took the witness stand to tell the jury his or her version of events. Some regretted that decision; some said it wouldn't have affected the outcome. "I regret it 110 percent," Frank Sheppard said. "I feel ... that these people felt if the federal government indicted us, we must have been guilty. Then, on my part, not to relieve these jurors of that shadow of a doubt against me as to why I'm not testifying. 'If he's not testifying, he must be guilty; he must be hiding something."' Brown said: "It wouldn't have made a difference ... each witness that got up there, we knocked them down, and proved that they was liars, and proved that the federal system puts nothing but liars on the stand. I knew my case was won." The six-week trial featured witnesses who said that one or two of the defendants made incriminating comments to them at some point in the previous eight years. Each of the defendants was emphatic - he or she never made such a comment. Asked why the witnesses would provide such testimony, the defendants listed individual grudges that some witnesses had against them, the $50,000 reward money that some witnesses admitted they sought and the deals witnesses made with prosecutors in other cases. "The only thing I ever said about this in my life," Skip Sheppard said, "I said, 'I'm glad I don't know anybody that had anything to do with this."' Bryan Sheppard was charged in state court in 1989 in connection with the explosion, based on his alleged confessions to fellow inmates. But after those charges were dismissed, "I wouldn't talk about it," he said. He said that when people asked him about the case, he would say either, " 'They released me because they didn't have enough evidence,' or, 'I don't want to talk about it.' Depends on what they ask, but mostly, it's just those two comments, and I ain't going to sit there and discuss it. ... I've never admitted to nobody." Even Brown, whose lawyer tried the defense that Brown's comments were merely street braggadocio, denied ever once claiming a role in the blast. "I never in my ... life said anything of any sort," Brown said, "that I had any ... thing to do with this or anything. No part. ... The only thing I've ever ... said is that I was at home in ... bed."

Problematic statements In convicting the five, jurors cited two crucial pieces of evidence: a taped statement by Edwards and the testimony by Edwards' 18-year-old daughter, Becky. In a taped statement to federal agents in February 1995, Edwards said that Brown and Bryan Sheppard awoke her two hours before the explosion. She said the two had run out of gas and asked her to drive them to a gas station. After doing that, Edwards said, she drove the two to the blast site but left when she figured out what they were planning. Two days before giving that statement, Edwards, unaware she was being videotaped, repeatedly declared her innocence to agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. U.S. District Judge Joseph E. Stevens Jr. did not allow the jury to see that tape. Edwards said that in that first meeting she had been shown a typed statement by Brown, unsigned, in which Brown said he saw the four other defendants buying gasoline the night of the explosion. "I wanted out of jail," Edwards said, explaining that the ATF had just arrested her on drug charges. "I was angry; I couldn't believe Richard was saying something. ... I mean, if he's gonna lie about me like this, I might as well lie about him, which is stupid on my part." Edwards later retracted her statement. She said she was intimidated into making it. Stevens, however, allowed the jury to hear it. Brown said that it made no sense to walk from the construction site to Edwards' house when a QuikTrip store with gas pumps was visible from the site. "Why ... would somebody walk a half a block past QuikTrip," Brown asked, "and two miles out of the way, on foot, to have her bring them right back to the same spot? But they (the jurors) believed it." The only witness who ever placed all five defendants in the same place at the same time was Becky Edwards. When she was 11, she lived with her mother and Frank Sheppard. A week before the explosion, Becky Edwards testified, she saw all five defendants and two other men sitting around the kitchen table at her house, planning to raid the construction site where the blast occurred. "No way possible," Frank Sheppard said. He is Bryan Sheppard's uncle, and he said: "I don't run with my nephew. Never have run with Bryan on the street." Skip Sheppard said: "We sat around the kitchen table doing a little dope every now and then, you know. But I never did hang out with Bryan or Richard." Brown, who was a close friend of Bryan Sheppard's, said he hated Frank and Skip Sheppard because he thought they burglarized his grandfather's house. "Back when I was 17, I was fighting them," Brown said. "I never ... associated with them."

Cracks in the case The defendants also attacked the logic of the government's case. Prosecutors said that after security guards drove away from the construction site, the defendants set one of the guards' trucks on fire as a diversion. The fire by the side of U.S. 71 actually caused the guards to return to the scene, where they also found a tractor-trailer of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil on fire. "Why is somebody going to set a diversion," Brown asked, "when they (the security guards) done left?" Other damaging witnesses included Carolee Ann Smith, a next-door neighbor who said she saw Frank and Skip Sheppard return to their mother's home after the first of the two explosions; and Karen Baird, a neighbor who said Brown and Bryan Sheppard were gritty and smelled of smoke when they visited her at 7:30 a.m. the day of the blasts. Frank and Skip Sheppard said that Smith had a longstanding dislike of her rowdy, hard-drinking neighbors. Skip Sheppard said he believed Smith suspected them of burglarizing her house. Brown and Bryan Sheppard said that they were rarely awake at 7:30 a.m. and that they probably visited Baird later that day after working on a car. The jury never heard these explanations, for several reasons. Defense lawyers believed that the government hadn't proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Many witnesses reported being told stories by the defendants that had factual inaccuracies. No one ever gave an account of how the defendants came together, acted at the construction site and set a fire. In the case of all three Sheppards, different witnesses placed them in different places at the same time. The defense lawyers thought, and the defendants agreed, that those inconsistencies would trouble the jury. All the defendants said they would gladly cooperate with prosecutors, to reduce their sentences, if they had any information about the crime. "If I knew who did this," Edwards said, "they would be sitting here, you know?"

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