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KANSAS CITY, Mo. - 2/15/2017 KSHB 41

A judge is expected to rule on Bryan Shepard's sentencing on March 3.

A man convicted of killing six Kansas City firefighters in an explosion over two decades ago is asking to be set free after being sentenced to life in prison without parole.

This podcast is from the Center for Investigative Reporting, which co-produces the “Reveal” radio show and podcast with PRX. “Reveal” features CIR’s reporting, as well as stories from public radio stations and a wide range of media partners, both nonprofit and commercial. For “Trial by Fire,” CIR relied on decades of reporting from Flatland’s Special Projects Reporter Mike McGraw, who first covered the story for The Kansas City Star.

By Julia B. Chan | Reveal Feb. 4, 2017

By Matt Campbell Kansas City Star Jan. 22, 2017

Patrick W. Peters, a former Jackson County assistant prosecutor who later found success at the defense table, died Saturday from a disease, cryptococcal meningitis, that is said to be rare in healthy people. He was 62.

His wife and law partner, Shelley Peters, said Peters had been battling the illness since early November after he traveled to Arizona to conduct depositions for a case.

“With most people, apparently our immune system would fight it and kill it,” Shelley Peters said. “They do not know why his did not, but it didn’t.”

Peters was hospitalized Nov. 13 “and it just went from bad to worse,” she said.

Peters was well-respected by prosecutors as well as defense attorneys.

“Pat was a warrior in the courtroom, known for fighting for his clients,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker tweeted on Monday.

By Mike McGraw Flatland KC Jan. 6, 2017

For the first time in nearly 20 years, details of one of the city’s most enduring tragedies are about to play out once again in a Kansas City courtroom.

Bryan Sheppard, one of five defendants convicted in the 1988 arson deaths of six Kansas City firefighters, will be asking a federal judge next month for his immediate release from a life sentence that came with no possibility of parole.

By Glenn E. Rice Kansas City Star Dec. 19, 2016

Legendary Kansas City television and radio newsman Charles Gray died Monday morning. He was 87.

Gray, with his booming, deep voice, covered many of the city’s most notable news events for five decades. Between 1958 to 1972, he served as anchor for KMBC. Gray then moved to WDAF radio, where he was the morning news anchor to thousands of morning rush-hour listeners.

“He saw pretty much anything that happened between the 1950s to the late 1990s in Kansas City. He had a front-row seat to it,” his son John Gray said Monday night.

Those events included the gasoline explosion that killed five firefighters on Southwest Boulevard in 1959, and the rioting and civil unrest in Kansas City that broke out following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Gray also covered the 1988 explosion in south Kansas City that killed six firefighters.