Olin “Pete” Coones Jr. spent over a decade in prison for a double murder that a judge ultimately ruled was a murder-suicide he had nothing to do with. NBC’s Dateline told the story. We were part of it.
On the morning of April 7, 2008, Kathleen and Carl Schroll were found dead inside their home in Kansas City, Kansas. Kathleen, 45, had been shot in the back of the head with her own .38 revolver. Carl, 64, had two gunshot wounds to the chest and a head injury. Hours earlier, in the middle of the night, Kathleen called her mother and said Pete Coones had broken into the house and was killing her husband. Within eight hours, police arrested Pete Coones, a postal worker and father of five.
Investigators first suspected Kathleen had killed Carl and then herself. Her family told police what she had said in that early-morning call, naming Pete as the intruder, and the investigation turned away from murder-suicide and toward Pete as the shooter.
Pete went to trial in January 2009. A jury convicted him of Kathleen’s murder, acquitted him of Carl’s murder, and the court sentenced him to 50 years without parole. A second trial in 2010 produced the same result, built in part on testimony from a jailhouse informant named Robert Rupert. Rupert later turned out to matter more than anyone on the jury knew.
In 2019, we began working to clear Pete’s name, along with the Midwest Innocence Project. First, we had to convince the court that keeping him in prison would be a manifest injustice: that he was actually innocent.
The court held an evidentiary hearing over four days in November 2020. We presented 15 witnesses and 154 exhibits. By the end of it, the State’s own attorneys told the court they believed Pete had met his burden on nearly every claim we raised.
The evidence that never reached Pete’s original juries told a different story than the one that the prosecutor had used to convict him. Investigators had failed to disclose a fourth bullet recovered at the scene, one that undercut the State’s own theory of the crime. The medical examiner who first called it a double homicide later changed his opinion to murder-suicide, and a second pathologist, Dr. Susan Roe, agreed with him. Investigators had found gunshot residue on Kathleen’s left hand and none in Pete’s vehicle.
The State also knew things about Kathleen Schroll that it never told the defense. She had forged checks on the account of Pete’s elderly father, Olin Coones Sr., and faced allegations that she had embezzled from her credit union employer. She had recently become a beneficiary on Olin Sr.’s life insurance policy while she was in serious financial trouble. None of that proves what happened inside the house on April 7, 2008. It gave Kathleen a motive to take her own life that no jury ever heard about.
What happened with Robert Rupert was worse. The State had evidence that Rupert was unreliable, that he may have had mental health issues, and that he wanted a deal in exchange for his testimony. None of that information reached the defense. Prosecutors misused a Kansas legal process called an inquisition to compel Rupert’s testimony without ever swearing him in the way the law required. They told the court Rupert had sent three letters seeking a deal; in reality, he had sent six. They told the court Rupert’s own criminal case was already resolved; a prosecutor had it continued specifically to keep talking to him. The court later found that the State knowingly put on false testimony from Rupert and never corrected it once it was on the record.
On November 5, 2020, the court ruled that the State had obtained Pete’s conviction in violation of his constitutional rights. It vacated the conviction and ordered him discharged from custody, more than 12 years after his arrest.
Pete didn’t get long to use what that ruling gave back to him. He died of lung cancer in February 2021, 108 days after his release. NBC’s Dateline told his story in an episode called “The Phone Call.” We were glad it did. Cases like Pete’s depend on people outside the courtroom understanding how one early phone call, and years of the State keeping what it knew to itself, can cost a person everything.
NBC News — Dateline: The Phone Call (Full Episode)
This post is for general informational purposes only and is not legal advice. It does not create an attorney-client relationship. Case results depend on the specific facts of each case and do not guarantee a similar outcome in any other matter.