The Girlfriends S4/E4: Three Sisters

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Hey, what up, y'all? It's DJ Envy from the Breakfast Club. Now, picture this: you open the car door, you step inside, and there's no driver in the front seat.

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It's full of love, but there's also a lot of pain and stories that explore substance abuse, violence, murder, and sexual assault. One of those victims is a minor.

There will also be some strong language.

So, 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.

When I was a kid, I used to hang out near Quindara Park, a few minutes from my family's home.

From the outside, it's nothing remarkable. Bright green grass, a kid's playground, benches to watch the world go by.

As I grew up, I began to learn more about how this place was once a part of the Underground Railroad, a stop along the route enslaved Black people took on the road to freedom.

It's a part of our city's history that's all too easy to forget.

When the Black Lives Matter movement swept across the world in 2020, that history took on a whole new meaning.

I'm no stranger to the racism and the prejudice Black people face at the hands of police.

But seeing the violent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor made this centuries-old fight feel more urgent than ever.

It also gave me a greater awareness of cases involving police corruption happening right on my doorstep, like that of Lamont McIntyre.

He was released after 23 years in prison, but the detective who had framed him was still walking free.

Roger Golupski had retired from police work in 2016 on what seemed like his own terms. And none of the women he'd abused had seen justice.

So in 2020, I organized a petition calling for greater police accountability in Kansas City, Kansas.

As a result, I was invited to my first rally,

calling for an end to police violence and prejudice. One of the speakers instantly caught my eye.

I was trained to look around, know my surroundings. That woman was Khadija Hardaway.
So I'm looking far and deep when I saw her. And literally, she is a full length of a block away.

And I noticed her walking up to me. It was just almost like this weird eye contact.
I immediately saw this ray of light. It was Nikki.
She was walking up. We had never met each other before.

We just gravitated to each other. I had just immediately hugged her and she hugged me.

We introduced ourselves, but it felt like we already knew each other. It was just this automatic sense of familiarity.
I can't even describe it. I've never had a feeling like that in my life.

It was like meeting a sister I didn't even realize I needed. We locked arms that day, and we've been by each other's side ever since.

Khadija and I spent hours talking about Detective Kalubski, the reports that he'd abused his authority, and the stories we'd heard from the women he assaulted. We needed to do something.

So the next day, we set up Justice for Wyndot,

an organization named after the county KCK belongs to.

Our aim was to give voice to those who had suffered as a result of Golubski's actions, like Nico Quinn, who had been coerced into giving false testimony against Lamont McIntyre.

In the lead up to Lamont's exoneration, Nico had become the target of intense public scrutiny. It was like her own city had turned against her.

I would get calls from friends and family members telling me to stop talking to the media because they was making me look bad. Part of her wanted to move on, leave it all in the past.

But rumors about Goloopski were coming to light and Nico wanted to join the fight, which is how she got put in touch with Khadija.

I was at my worst when I met Khadija. I was kind of like Leary to talk to her, but then we finally talked to each other.
Oh, we was on that phone for a long time.

And it was like we have always knew each other. We talked on the phone for probably about five to six hours the very first time we talked.

The three of us got to know each other pretty quickly.

We were united by our experiences as black women fighting for justice and our shared goal of creating a better future for Kansas City, Kansas, a city we love.

But it was going to take a lot of work.

I just knew that like after George Floyd and watching the communities around the world come together because they saw the injustice, it was a time like no other.

We shared stories during dinners, made plans over coffee, and spent hours getting to know each other until our friendship began to feel like something deeper.

A sisterhood.

The police had failed to stop Goloopski from putting the community at risk. The authorities hadn't held him accountable for the abuse he inflicted on the women we'd heard from.

And it was starting to feel like nobody was coming to fight for the women of Kansas City. So we decided to fight for ourselves.

I'm Nikki Richardson and from the Teams at Novel and iHeart podcast, this is the girlfriends, Untouchable.

Episode 4: Three Sisters.

I got you, I got you, I got you.

When Khadija and I decided to join the fight, the woman we gravitated to was Nico Quinn.

We thought we knew her story, her cousin's shooting, the witness intimidation, and the threat of her kids being taken away.

But it turned out there was even more to Nico's connection to Gloopski than we had realized. So we asked her to tell her story from the very start.

I grew up in Wanda County, Kansas City, Kansas. I was born to Josephine Quinn, who had three daughters.
Nico, her older sister Liz, and their oldest sister Stacey. Stacy was beautiful.

She was so beautiful. I used to love her eyes.
And all the people that I know that knew her talks about how beautiful her spirit was, how very respectful she was, because that's how we was raised.

The Quinn sisters were like best friends.

We used to have fun, used to act like we was singers, acting like we liked the Braxton sisters or stuff like that, watching movies, you know, mocking the stuff that's in the movies.

But they were regular sisters who would bicker and wind each other up too. Stacy used to be so honoring.
I remember when we was little, my mom used to be like, we said, mama, can we have some cookies?

Or whatever. She'd say, clean up and y'all can get them hub.
She'd be like, Stacey, get them kids a few of them cookies. She go, Elf, and she'll lick every cookie and then give it to us.

She was irony,

but she used to protect us.

Nico needed a protective presence in her life because her family was fractured.

Their father hadn't stuck around, and Josephine had a lifelong battle with mental health issues. My mother was in and out of the psychiatric hospital, mental facilities, all my life.

She got paranoid schizophrenic. She'll be okay for a couple of months or maybe a few years, and then she'd go back into the mental hospitals.

But then we ended up moving to a home with my grandmother, grandfather, auntie, uncles, cousins. So, probably about 50 of us in a six-bedroom house.

Nico was surrounded by family, but it didn't always feel like like a loving home.

I lived in nothing but chaos all my life as a kid. I seen my uncles fighting.
The police was in and out of my grandmother's house almost every other weekend. My grandfather was an active alcoholic.

We was taught to be tough, have tough skin. Their grandparents tried their best, but they failed to fully protect the Quinn sisters.

One of their relatives, a man who was supposed to take the girls to school, took advantage of them.

My mom would have my uncle take us to school and he would take us back to the house and would rape us before we would go to school.

When it started, Stacey was eight, Liz was six, and I was four.

They were just kids, but Stacy stepped in to try and shield her younger sisters from the worst of it.

She would put herself in harm's way so he wouldn't get us. She was a big sister.
She was a protector, especially me because I was the baby.

The Quinn sisters went through a lot together, but they still had dreams. Stacy wanted to dedicate her life to taking care of people.
She was going to school to be a nurse.

In the mid-1980s, Stacy, who was around 16 years old, was doing a clinical placement at a local health center.

She finished late some nights and usually got a ride home from one of her other relatives. But if they couldn't pick her up, she would make her own way back.

She was walking home one night because my grandfather had got drunk and my uncle didn't pick her up, whatever it was, she didn't get picked up from her clinicals.

When Stacy walked through the door, she looked shaken. Her sisters immediately asked her what had happened.
After a moment, She burst into tears.

Stacy told them about the police officer she'd seen on her way home. A white man with brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and a thick mustache.
It was dark out, so he offered her a ride home.

Being a kid who had no reason to distrust the police, Stacy had accepted the offer. When she got into his police car, his friendly demeanor faded.

The officer forced himself on her.

She had got raped and came in and told us, and we told her crying.

Stacy was their older sister, their protector.

It was painful to see her so broken.

And we was telling her to tell and she was like she couldn't because of the threats that he made.

Nico didn't know what the police officer had threatened to do to her sister if she reported him.

But she was beginning to discover how much power and influence the police wielded over her community.

Nico came of age in the 80s, and as she grew up, she began to notice the ways her neighborhood was changing. There were patrol cars all around them, regular house raids across Quindaro.

and rumors of friends and relatives getting locked up by the police in record time.

Because in the 80s, Kansas City, Kansas was hurtling into a devastating crisis. Nico can still remember the moment it hit her neighborhood.

They had this big old community meeting up on Fifth Street at the Jack Reardon Center. Our grandparents and parents used to go to these things.
I mean, where they're packed houses, standing room only.

Her grandmother came home from the community meeting with a handful of pamphlets. And I'll never forget the one that said, hi, my name is Crack Cocaine.

It said, I'll make a preacher forget how to preach, a teacher forget how to teach, a beauty queen forget her looks, a schoolgirl forget her books.

The beauty queen forgetting her looks and the schoolgirl forgetting her books. Nico realized that is what was happening in real time to her sister.

Stacy started experimenting with drugs. I know she used to smoke and then she went to crack.

And that was her way of escaping.

Because Golubski hadn't just assaulted her once and moved on. He tormented her all the way through her adolescence into adulthood.
Stacy's life began to spiral.

I noticed that a lot of people that I've talked to that start using drugs from childhood trauma or things in their life that they don't understand or or know how to deal with.

A lot of women end up on the streets on drug prostitution.

And that's what happened to Stacey. She got addicted to drugs and became a sex worker to earn the money she needed to pay for them.

It was dangerous work that led her to spend long nights walking up and down shady streets interacting with seedy men, one of whom was a constant presence:

Detective Roger Galupski.

Hey, what up, y'all? It's DJ Envy from the Breakfast Club. Now, picture this.
You open the car door, you step inside, and there's no driver in the front seat.

The car is driving itself, handling everything from pickup to drop off. That's what hits you.
Waymo isn't just another ride share. It's the future of ride share.
It's a total Waymoment.

It's the feeling when you finally get a minute to yourself where you can sit back, relax, and actually enjoy the ride. No mystery car, no small talk, just you and your moment on the go.

Download the Waymo app and request your first ride today. Get 30% off your first three rides with promo code B Club30.
That's B Club30. That's B C L U B 30.
See terms in the app.

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Hey, audiobook lovers. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with musician, producer, and walking encyclopedia, Quest Love.

We're talking about Mark Ronson's memoir, Night People, How to Be a DJ in 90s New York City.

All right, like we talked about before, Mark Ronson found sanctuary in the DJ booth. What's a tool or piece of equipment in the studio or on stage that gives you the most control?

So I have two microphones on stage.

We have the microphone that you hear as the audience. Then we have a second microphone in which we communicate with each other.
I feel like that second microphone kind of saved all of our friendships.

No band likes each other after 20 years or 25 years.

The Beatles broke up in seven and a half years, and we're going on 35.

Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

I got you, I got you, I got

It's the 90s in Quindaro, a neighborhood on the northeast side of Kansas City. By day, it's a normal, slightly chaotic neighborhood filled with families and ordinary people living their lives.

But at night, it can become a pretty eerie place.

Men selling drugs, women selling sex.

Sketchy individuals who linger around street corners buying both.

It's an area Officer Max Seifert knows well, and he recently heard that one of his fellow officers, Detective Roger Golubski, had been seen hanging around in the area while off duty.

Rumors were going around, you know, that he was spending a lot of time up in the northeast part of town, which is a high crime area.

People were seeing him hanging out there off duty, not in his official role as a cop. I received a phone call from an informant of mine.

He's very animated, and basically what he was saying was that Golubski was up there patronizing prostitutes.

It turned out that the northeast side of the city wasn't just the area Golubski had been assigned to. The seedy streets and the dark back roads had become his hunting ground.

Khadija and I wanted to find out how Golubski had gotten started, what had shaped and enabled him to become the kind of police officer who abused his authority and harmed the people he had been trained to protect?

We wanted to see if we could find any clues. So we went all the way back to the KCKPD's graduating class of 1975.

And they definitely was on a budget because these uniforms look out of.

They are public servants. They are, but.
Khadija and I found a photo of some of the officers that joined the police force that year.

They looked younger than we thought they would.

Some of them even had baby faces.

But we could tell they were police officers from the light blue uniforms.

They look like jailhouse uniforms. They do, actually.
They must look when they got a badge on them. They really do.
I mean, just very baggy inmates. Yeah,

very baggy blue shirts. They've got pinpoints.
But ill-fitting uniforms weren't our main concern. It was the people wearing them.
In particular, a man on the second row from the top. So Golubski

is, I mean, he looks... Creepy.
I mean, he does look creepy, but he also looks like just kind of the guy you just walk past the grocery store, you know, just average build,

a little bit on the pudgy side, wide pie face with, you know, big old, what is this, 70s? But I would tell you in this picture, he has the largest, thickest mustache.

He looked like a gangster cop to me he's not very happy i'm a people breeder because his lips is supporting a upside-down frown he just seems very unassuming i mean yeah he might seem

creepy he looks like the person who would cut up the cat and put it in his freezer he does look like but he looks like somebody who would get away with it for so long because you would just

under the tent yeah you would just that's all to say that back then roger golubski looked like a young pretty unassuming new recruit another one of the officers in that photo is Max Seifert, a retired detective who graduated alongside Golubski and worked with him during his time in the Crimes Against Persons unit.

The Crimes Against Persons Unit handled assaults, aggravated battery, rapes, child abuse.

He wasn't a person that would share things or talk about things, you know, he was always kind of a quiet person. Now, he was very close and kept things close to me.

Golubski quickly rose up the ranks because he gained a reputation for clearing up crimes in record time.

He was given a private office, the kind of space where he could hold sensitive meetings and make confidential calls.

But according to one of Max's colleagues, Golubski took advantage of the privacy his office gave him to abuse his position. A detective that was serving in his unit one day went to his office.

And what happened was the detective sees the door shut and he just opens it it and walks in. He didn't knock or anything.

He walks in and he catches Glubski involved in a sexual compromising situation with a black female in his office.

According to Max, the detective immediately shut the door and walked away, taking in what he had just seen. A high-level policeman having sex in the workplace?

Max says someone reported it to their supervisor. Nothing was done about it.
Even when it was allegedly reported to a division commander.

Instead of saying, hey, you know, this is outrageous, you know, we're not going to tolerate this, you can't do this, bringing discredit to the department, he said, don't you people have locks on your doors?

Sexual misconduct was something that, you know, that just wasn't considered to be a bad thing. You know, Roger just being Roger, you know, that's kind of like a boys, will be boys.

We reached out to the division commander Max is referring to, and his response was, This is an old rumor spread around the police department that was followed up on years ago.

Had it occurred, an investigation would have resulted.

Max says some officers in the police department knew about Golubski's misconduct. Others even witnessed his behavior in the office and on the streets.
But he wasn't stopped.

Golubski kept his position of power and continued to target women like Nico Quinn's older sister Stacey.

He would give her drugs to encourage her dependence and then force her into having sex with him.

He would arrest her for prostitution and put her in jail, drugs or whatever, and she was like she didn't understand because he was the one bringing it to her.

It was a vicious cycle that was not only destroying her life, but affecting the people who loved and depended on her too, because Stacy was a mother.

In her teenage years, Stacy had given birth to her only son, a boy named Journell.

And in spite of everything, she spent the 80s and 90s trying to be a good mom. My mama was real outgoing, you know, when music come on, she'd be singing, dance, all that.
Well, we used to dance a lot.

She used to connect with me on that, like

different songs that I used to listen to. There's one song they both loved.
The early 90s classic Jump by Chriss Cross. Remember it? Jump, jump, Criss Cross will make you.

She turned the music all the way up and she turned the little light on. Yeah, she plays music and we just started dancing.
Just feeling vibing.

She was on my level and it hyped me up, you know, and

made me feel better. Stacy would take Journelle to the park and show him her back bends.

She spent hours teaching him how to play chess and making sure he felt loved.

But as Journelle got older, he began to notice his mother's issues.

I knew exactly what was going on, but I didn't know, like, was that normal or not, you feel me? When I got older, I realized it gets bad like that.

Stacey's addiction, trauma, and mental health issues made it hard for her to be a present and stable parent. So his family arranged for Janelle to move out and be taken care of by their relatives.

I always thought about her just like she thought about me, because it don't matter what, you know,

my mama is a mama. It wasn't a day she haven't seen me.
Let me know. She doing good.
Give me kisses.

While Stacy could no longer look after her family the way she used to, she still had a protective streak.

Which brings us back to where this story started.

The spring of 1994, when tragedy hit Quindaro, and Stacy and Nico's cousins, Danielle and Donnie, were murdered.

When Stacy saw her younger sister Nico being drawn into Detective Galoopsky's orbit during the murder investigation, her protective older sister instincts kicked in.

Nico remembers the moment when she and Galoopski ended up in a room together around the time of Lamont's trial. We've sitting in this little room and man Galewski was in this room.

That's when he started hitting on me. Oh, I heard you dance.
Or I heard you used to be a dancer. Why don't you get on the table and let me watch you dance? I'll pay you all this.

At this time, my sister walked in and she looks at him and she looks at me. He had that little grin on his face.

So she pushed me, pulled me back, and put her hand in his face and said, This one right here, you're going to leave alone. You ain't going to touch this one.
You ain't going to get this one.

Stacy turned away from Galoopski and looked at Nico, her face serious.

And she said, don't ever mess with this dude. This dude is the devil.
He's a snake. He's dangerous.
He'll hurt you.

Goloopski had ruined Stacey Quinn's life, coerced Nico into a false testimony, and sent an innocent man to prison for murder.

But as we were about to discover, Goloopsky had even more power over their city than the Quinn family could have possibly imagined.

We knew he assaulted women and abused his power, but there was another mystery at the heart of this story. And the Quinn sisters were about to find themselves right in the middle of it.

Hey, what up, y'all? It's DJ Envy from the Breakfast Club. Now picture this.
You open the car door, you step inside, and there's no driver in the front seat.

The car is driving itself, handling everything from pickup to drop-off. That's what hits you.
Waymo isn't just another ride share, it's the future of rideshare. It's a total Waymoment.

It's the feeling when you finally get a minute to yourself when you can sit back, relax, and actually enjoy the ride. No mystery car, no small talk, just you and your moment on the go.

Download the Waymo app and request your first ride today. Get 30% off your first three rides with promo code B Club30.
That's B Club30. That's B C L U B 30.
See terms in the app.

Meet Lisa, a mom who starts the holidays full of cheer until the to-do list takes over. Untangling lights, prepping for the class party, wrapping gifts.
She was running out of time and energy.

Then Lisa discovered Air Tasker. She posted her tasks, set her budget, and local taskers helped with everything.
Lights, strung, cupcakes, baked, gifts, wrapped.

Even a cardboard sleigh for the school play. Suddenly, her holiday spirit was back.
Now she spends less time scrambling and more time making memories.

Download the the Airtasker app or go to airtasker.com. Airtasker, get anything done.

10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

You are the fittest of the fit. Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.
This is when mindset comes in. Someone will be eliminated.
Pressure is coming down.

This is Trainer Game. Watch it on Prime Video starting January 8th.
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hey audiobook lovers this week on the podcast i'm sitting down with musician producer and walking encyclopedia questlove we're talking about mark ronson's memoir night people how to be a dj in 90s new york city All right, like we talked about before, Mark Ronson found sanctuary in the DJ booth.

What's a tool or piece of equipment in the studio or on stage that gives you the most control? So I have two microphones on stage.

We have the microphone that you hear as the audience. Then we have a second microphone in which we communicate with each other.
I feel like that second microphone kind of saved all of our friendships.

No band likes each other after 20 years or 25 years.

The Beatles broke up in seven and a half years and we're going on 35.

Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

And what do we got here?

I'm sitting in a room with Khadija. This looks like an affidavit.
We're looking through a bunch of files and papers. Affidavit, state of Kansas, County of Jefferson.
Oh, this is for Stacy.

Stacy. Stacy Clinton.

Well, the first thing I can tell you, just the form itself, looks historic, right? Yeah. I mean, you can tell it goes back decades.

In fact, the affidavit was signed in 1996.

two years after Lamont McIntyre was convicted for her cousin Daniel's murder. It turned out that, like Nico, Stacy was desperate to do what she could to free Lamont from his wrongful conviction.

Because Stacy had been at the scene of the shooting too.

She had actually seen the shooter's face. But for some reason, Nico was the only sister called in as a witness.

Stacy describes what happened in the affidavit.

The man had braids in his hair and had on black pants with a white t-shirt with black riding on it.

The man walked up to the passenger side of the light blue car, pointed a shotgun at the passenger, and fired twice. Stacy saw the shooter, but she was never called in to make a witness statement.

And I think it was because she already had the relationship with Roger Galuski. Khadija and I couldn't help but wonder if Goloopski had kept Stacy away from the murder investigation on purpose.

Was he worried about bringing a woman he'd abused to the police station?

Was he trying to avoid the risk that she might expose him?

A year went by and Nico moved on.

But then she got an unexpected phone call from Minneapolis.

Somebody had kidnapped her and took her to Minneapolis, Minnesota. They told us they had found her beaten.
She was naked in the streets of Minnesota in the wintertime.

So me, my sister, my mom, and my cousin drove up to go get Stacy.

The police reassured them that Stacy was alive.

But when they arrived in Minneapolis, they were distraught to see just how violently she'd been attacked.

She said that two guys in a truck kidnapped her, beat her up, raped her, sodomized her, and took out her clothes and stuff and left her in the middle of the street of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

She was so beat up and bruised, and my thought was, aren't you tired of going through this?

Nico doesn't know why her sister was kidnapped, but it wasn't the first time Stacy's life on the streets had led her to become a victim of brutal violence.

It was painful to witness her sister's downward spiral. Love, Nico realized, would not be enough to break Stacy out of addiction.

Nico could use her experiences, though, to support support other women in her community struggling with their mental health, addictions, and the dangers of working on the streets.

By 1998, Nico was 26 and had gotten a job at the local post office. She had her own place, and while it wasn't grand, she believed in helping as many people as she could with the resources she had.

So if you'd walked into Nico's house back then, you would have seen a revolving door of friends, relatives, and neighbors who found refuge within those welcoming walls.

I talked to a lot of the women on the streets. I kind of made my house like a safe house.

And that made me feel good because I was able to do something for these people that nobody else would do because they looked down at them.

I knew about 20 of them that would come and sit and talk to me or come and sit if it's hot. Maybe they just want to come and cool off for a glass of ice water.

The Bible says you can't do anything else. Give your brother or sister a drink.
Give them shelter. Give them food if they hungry.
And that's what I tried to do.

Nico's home was a sanctuary, a place to sleep for a few nights while they got ready to pick themselves up. I would make sure they eat.
Make sure they was warm or cool when it was summertime.

I'll let them wash their clothes, take showers, and just relax from whatever it is they've been through. And just sitting there talking to a lot of the women, they are human just like we are.

They just got dealt the bad hand.

One of those women was Rhonda Tribute.

Rhonda had moved up on 22nd in Funduro.

On an early autumn night, Rhonda came over for a chat. She was just talking to me about her kids and her husband and the stuff her husband said and told her.

And I asked her how did she end up getting out on the streets and she was saying she was being abused and she confided in me on some things. Nico suggested something to take Rhonda's mind off things.

I said, do you want to go across the street and have some drinks? And she was like, yeah, but I want to take a bath and change my clothes.

So they did what friends did.

listened to music and got ready together, going back and forth about who they might see that night and what they would wear she was saying i got this shirt in my bag it was a black shirt with like some orange and different color flowers on it and i gave her some rust orange kaylee jeans to put on then it was time to do their hair and makeup it was the 90s so they went for an old school look

i gave her uh like a freeze some finger waves then you pull it up like scrunchies she had a short haircut with a little brown or auburn color in her hair, like a blonde in her hair.

And I'll never forget that.

They crossed the road for a couple of drinks, then they went back to Nico's.

We came back and sat on the porch, and she was like, She's waiting on a ride.

A car drove up the road. Inside was a white man with bushy eyebrows and a thick mustache.

Detective Roger Golupski. Golupski went up the street, went down the street.
After a moment, Rhonda got up, leaving Nico in the porch. She said, well, I gotta go.

I watched her walk out my door, walk up the street, make the right, then the left. She walked around the bend from my house.
Rhonda took a turn and left Nico's line of sight.

A few moments later, Detective Golupski's car drove back down the road.

Nico leaned forward to take a closer look. Rhonda was in the passenger seat.
She was sitting back in the chair, like she had the chair reclined back, but I could see the hair.

And

I think a day or two later, they ended up finding her in the middle of K-32.

Deceased.

Nico was heartbroken. Her friend had been killed.
She'd been the last one to see her.

And she knew who Rhonda had left with,

Golubski.

She was terrified and desperate for answers.

The autopsy report found that Rhonda had died from multiple blows to her head, but while the police launched an investigation, they never pinned down a suspect.

After that, Nico held her loved ones tight and continued to do what she could to support the women in her community.

One of those women was Monique Allen, a 26-year-old who was down on her luck.

Monique ended up coming to my house. She ended up staying with me.
Nico had young children, and so Monique would help her with them.

She would do my daughter's hair or my boy's hair, because my son had long hair and get them dressed, had them pretty cute going to school. They were good friends.

They would talk about their children and their lives growing up on the northeast side of Kansas City. But like Rhonda and Stacey, Monique had gotten caught up with the life on the streets.

Nico can still remember one of the times they hung out at her house in the winter of 1998.

She braided my hair, French braided my hair, and she said she was going to see her mom, I believe.

She took a shower. She told me she was going to call somebody.
So who you calling? Monique had a card with a phone number.

She set it on the table and I looked at it and she said, Girl, I'm about to go give me some money. I need to get some money.

I watched her walk out my door, walk up the street, and over to a blue police vehicle. She got into the car and then it drove away.

Then the next morning, they found her dead in the middle of the street, off of 18th and the side street.

Like Rhonda, Monique had been murdered. She had been bludget.

They had beat her, I think.

The phone number Monique had dialed,

it belonged to Detective Roger Galupski.

It was so crazy to me because I probably was the last one to see them alive

or even talk to them that day.

And I'm like, Father God, why is this so?

Why am I the last one to talk to these women and then they're gone?

Monique and Rhonda's murders were investigated by the KCKPD, but no one was arrested or convicted. Nico didn't know what to do.

The women in her community were in crisis. Her friends were being killed.
And the man who lurked in the shadows of their lives seemed untouchable.

Quindaro felt more dangerous than ever, and things were about to get worse because for Nico, her greatest, most terrifying heartbreak lay just around the corner.

Coming up on the girlfriends, untouchable.

There's too many predators. There's too many devils out here.
The whole time he's holding a gun to their head. I'm trying to save y'all.
I'm trying to protect y'all.

They're about to issue a warrant and go look for this motherfucker. Is this worth risking my life for it? I got you.
I got you. I got you.

The Girlfriend's Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcast. For more from Novel, visit novel.audio.
The show is narrated by me, Nikki Richardson.

It was written and produced by Rufaro Mazzarura. The editor is Joe Wheeler.
Our assistant producer is Mohamed Ahmed. The researcher is Zayana Youssef.

Production Management from Cherie Houston and Joe Savage. The fact checker is Findall Fulton.
Sound design, mixing, and scoring by Daniel Kimpson with additional engineering by Nicholas Alexander.

Music supervision by Rufaro Mazzarura, 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 development by Olivia Smart and Nell Gray Andrews.
Novel's Director of Development is Selena Mehta.

Willard Foxton is Novel's Creative Director of Development. Max O'Brien and Craig Strachan are executive producers for Novel.

Katrina Norvell and Nikki Nikki Etor are the executive producers for iHeart Podcast. The marketing lead is Allison Cantor.
Special thanks to Will Pearson.

And a special thanks to Carly Frankel and the whole team at WME.

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