Criminal - The Raid

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

In 2023, police raided the Kansas newspaper where Eric Meyer worked with his mother, Joan. Seven officers also searched their home. Joan had a heart attack and died the next day. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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stands for total fund savings adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. or maybe reach out to TV Direct Investing. On August 11th, 2023, police arrived at the home of a man named Eric Meyer in Marion, Kansas. I was just sitting there at the house checking email, doing normal stuff, and they came to the door. What did they say they wanted? They said they were serving a warrant.

Eric Meyer is the editor and publisher of a local newspaper, The Marion County Record. Marion is a small town about an hour north of Wichita, and at the time, the paper had about 4,000 subscribers. Eric took over as editor of the newspaper in 2021, after working as a reporter and editor and as a journalism professor for decades. This is purely a retirement gig. When the police came to his door, Eric asked to look at their warrant. The warrant said they were searching for evidence of identity theft, and quote,

unlawful acts concerning computers. At the same time, police were also searching the newspaper's office, blocks away. They searched the house in the newspaper office for several hours. At least seven officers were involved in the raid, including the chief of police, a man named Gideon Cody. They eventually started taking things as evidence, Eric Meyer's laptop, a hard drive, his mother's computer, her router. Down at the office, they took the reporter's cell phones

or personal cell phones and all the computers that we used to in the news operation, along with our file operation, along with our file server, along with our backup drives. They'd been bragging around to other officers that this was going to be the biggest raid in the history of Marion County. They brought every officer they had. They even brought extra on.

They brought a state fire marshal to come in as extra help to do the rating. Had you ever heard of the police raiding a newspaper office before? No. No. It's unheard of. No one ever expected anything like this to ever happen. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

Eric Meyer and his parents bought the Marion County Record in 1998 to keep it from being sold to a newspaper chain. His father had worked at the paper since 1948 as an editor, and his mother was a columnist and editor. Eric started working at the paper when he was a kid. I started doing menial things like stapling. We had a job printing operation, and I would staple and trim things. And then I was about sixth or seventh grade, I started developing all the pictures and making all the, in those days, we had to make engravings of pictures. I did that all through high school. I became the vacation relief for my parents. And actually, my grandmother who had retired from the Wichita

Eagle was also working there. So, I guess this is a family retirement thing. And what does the paper typically cover? Everything local. If it happens in Marion County, we cover it. So anything that happens from, you know, cars hitting deer, chicken dinner type stuff, the honor roll at the schools, everything that happens in local government. That includes reporting on local police. We've tried to be aggressive at this. There was a time when this was sort of boosterism, cheerleading for the community. But we've tried to do a different approach and really bring serious journalism to the newspaper.

When Gideon Cody was sworn in as the new police chief of Marion, the record covered it, writing that he would make $60,000 a year as police chief and that he was one of three candidates who'd interviewed for the position. Before that, he'd been working as a police captain in Kansas City. As soon as he was appointed was we started hearing from people he'd worked with. We had numerous sources, more than a dozen sources, telling us that he was in trouble in Kansas City. He was about to be demoted.

Their sources said that he was under internal review by the police department for allegedly making insulting and sexist comments to a female officer. Reporter Deb Groover at the Marion County Record started working on a story about Gideon Cody's past. Did he know that you were looking into, that the record was looking into his backstory? Oh, yes. He knew and threatened to sue us if we ran it. I regret now that we didn't. We didn't have a document. We didn't have a name source.

We had multiple sources. And some people would say that's enough to go on. But we were wanting to get something that was on the record. And he had been threatening us with a defamation suit if we ran it. A few months later, on August 1, 2023, a local congressman held an open forum at a coffee shop in Marion. Police Chief Gideon Cody was there. So was Eric Meyer and another reporter from the Marion County Record. The coffee shop was owned by a woman named Carrie Newell.

She ordered Gideon Cody to come over and throw us out saying she didn't want us there. She reserved the right to refuse service to anyone. Why, why would, why didn't she want you there? She didn't like the media, she said. She later said it was just us, not the media. But at the time, she said no media allowed. We were the only media that were there and had us thrown out. Carrie Newell later said that the Marion County record has, quote, a longstanding reputation for twisting and contorting comments within our community.

A court document later said that Carrie Newell said that people were, quote, high-fiving her for making the reporters leave. After the forum, the Marion County Police Department posted about the event on Facebook, writing, Thank you, Carrie Newell, for the invite. The next day, Eric Meyer and Marion County record reporter, Phyllis Zorn, wrote about what happened in an article with the headline, media ejected at open forum.

That day, they got a Facebook message. We received this tip that said that, you know, that Carrie Newell has been driving illegally for almost 20 years. Reporter Phyllis Zorn had received a screenshot of a letter from the Kansas Department of Revenue. It outlined all of the steps Carrie Newell would need to follow to get her license reinstated. She lost it after a 2008 drunk driving conviction.

The person who sent the tip also said police were aware that Carrie Newell did not have a valid driver's license and was driving anyway. Eric and Phyllis wanted to figure out whether the document was real. So we called the state. Phyllis Zorn called the Kansas Department of Revenue, also known as the KDOR, and asked if she could find the document on their site. The person on the phone told her how to do it. So we got it and we verified that it was, in fact, a legitimate document. And then we decided whether we were going to use it or not. The Facebook tip had come from someone who was friends with Carrie Newell's soon-to-be

ex-husband. We decided we didn't want to get in the middle of a divorce. But we were a little concerned if the police were aware of this and not enforcing the law. So I wrote a letter to the police chief and to the sheriff saying, we got this document, we verified it's true, we don't plan to use it in any way, shape or form, but you should be aware that there's an allegation that officers are ignoring this and allowing her to drive. The vice mayor of Marion was also sent the same document on Facebook.

She forwarded it along to the city administrator, because Kerry Newell was applying for a liquor license. The city administrator said in response to that, we're not going to investigate this at all. It's up to the state to worry about liquor licenses. The city police department's going to do nothing with this story. That was Friday. Somewhere Monday morning following that, someone changed their mind.

On Monday, police chief Gideon Cody sent Kerry Newell a text message. Said, this is Chief Cody. I need you to contact me back as soon as possible. We believe you've been the victim of a crime. Kerry Newell, speaking with a Kansas City TV reporter. And he said, they went to the KDOR site, and they accessed your case files and had downloaded that information. I said, who is they?

And he said, fill a soren. That night, Kari Newell went to a city council meeting. Eric Meyer was there, too. And Kari Newell formally accused the newspaper of stealing her information by illegally accessing the state's website.

She said that not only had they stolen her information, but they'd shared it with the city's vice mayor, Ruth Herbal. It was brought to my attention today that my private and personal information that illegally obtained obtained by a local reporter was shared with Councilmember Ruth Herbold. Ruth then took it upon herself to share that information with others. And I'm very disappointed that as a representative of our community and your elected position that you would behave so negligently and maliciously. And I really hope that your team members here today take note of exactly how vile your behavior. Eric Meyer asked to speak next.

And I got up afterward and said, no, that is not what happened. I will tell you that it was material provided to us and we chose not to disseminate it any further. Four days later is when police knocked on his door with their warrant to search his house and the newspaper office. In the warrant, Gideon Cody had written that downloading the document from the state's website involved either impersonating Kerry Newell or lying about the document from the state's website involved either impersonating Carrie Newell or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought.

I informed them that I thought this was a setup deal, that the police chief was aware we had information on him and he had animus toward us. Your mother was also at the house when the police arrived. How did she react? She actually was in her bedroom when they arrived. She came out of her bedroom. She was very upset that they were there and became increasingly upset. In home security footage, Eric's mother, Joanne Meyer, is wearing a housecoat, holding on to a walker. She's 98. Don't you touch any of that stuff.

Ma'am, you're wasting your time. This is my house. There are six police officers in her living room. One is holding a flashlight, looking at a desk. What are you doing over there going through the tables? How many computers do you have in the house, man? I'm not going to tell you. Get out of my way. It's all right.

I want to see what they're doing. Well, they're working. I don't care what they're doing. You can go on through if you want. What are you doing? Those are personal papers. They were just standing there guarding her so that she couldn't touch anything. They were there for two and a half hours.

I may be 90-some years old, but I know what's going on. Yeah. And what's going on is illegal as hell. She started comparing what they were doing to Nazi tactics. And she's not one who would use the word Nazi casually, but she wanted to know why they were allowed to do this, why there were police in her house. Eventually, by the end of the day, there were seven officers in her house. Weeks earlier, they had had a case where they were searching for evidence in a rape case, a child rape case. They went into a guy's house, who was the suspect of this,

known to have firearms in his house. They took two people. Why they needed seven to go after a 98-year-old woman to try to get her computer, I do not understand other than the fact it was designed to embarrass and harass and put us in our place. At the newspaper's offices, police told reporters they needed to wait outside while they conducted their search. Reporter Deb Gruver later said when the police initially came in, she thought there might

have been a bomb threat. When she realized what was happening, she tried to call Eric Meyer. She said that Gideon Cody told her she couldn't call anyone, and that he grabbed her phone out of her hand. Deb Groover was not involved in the reporting on Carrie Newell, and said so to Giddy and Cody. But she had been the reporter, asking questions about his past. When they were searching the newsroom, they got to her desk, and an officer was going

through her desk, Deb Groover's desk, and found the investigative files we had on Gideon Cody and calls out to Gideon Cody, you should come look at this, and shows Gideon Cody the file we had, the first page of which was the LinkedIn profile of our main source, so he knew who it was. He looked at it and put it back in the desk drawer. On body camera footage, you can hear Gideon Cody saying, keep a personal file on me. I don't care. The sheriff's office threw a pizza party for the officers after the raid. Gideon Cody left his body camera running during the party and can be heard telling the Marion County Sheriff that taking the phone out of Deb Groover's hand, quote, made my day. The police had also raided a third location, Vice Mayor Ruth Herbals' home, where they

seized her laptop and cell phone. You can hear her reacting in body camera footage. This doesn't put a very good light on the police department. After the raid, Eric Meyer says his mother, Joanne Meyer, wasn't doing well. She just sat in a chair and kept talking over and over again, where were all the good people? Well, I've lived in this town for 98 years. I've spent 60 years working on the newspaper.

What was it all for? The next day, Joanne Meyer had a heart attack and died. She'd been working for the paper for almost 60 years, writing her column up until her death. Were you able to publish a paper that week after the raid? Yeah, oh, there was absolutely no way we were not going to publish a newspaper that week. That would have been defeat.

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Upgrade your closet this year without the upgraded price tag. Go to quince.com slash criminal for 365-day returns plus free shipping on your order. That's quince.com slash criminal to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash criminal. When you first heard about the raid on the Marion County record, what did you think? Here we go again. Felicity Beringer is a journalist. She's worked for newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times. And I was the editor of the Stanford Daily in 1971 when the Palo Alto police searched

our offices. The Stanford Daily is the student-run newspaper at Stanford University. In the spring of 1971, the paper was covering two protests, one after a Mexican-American professor was denied tenure, and one after a Black janitor had been fired. Those protests coalesced into a major demonstration that took over an adjunct building at the medical school. The Stanford Dailies photographer was there and took photos of a clash between police and protesters. He took photos as police entered the building.

And the protesters burst out, swinging clubs, beat the officers, and escaped out the other side. Thirteen police officers were injured. At the time, the staff of the Stanford Daily had a policy about its photographs and how they could be used. They'd print any photo that was newsworthy, but they said, We will not store photos so that either prosecutors or defense attorneys could use our material

in court. A few days after the protest, on April 12th, 1971, Felicity Beringer had just left an English class and was about to walk into the newspaper office. And I was met at the glass doors by one of the top editors. The first thing he said was, I couldn't do anything. They had a search warrant. The Palo Alto police were inside their offices. A judge had issued the warrant because he believed that the newspaper had photos that would show who

would hurt the police officers. When I moved into the office, I could see people in, you know, the uniforms of Palo Alto police officers, although there was at least one plainclothes officer, going through the office looking at desks and going particularly to our darkroom and looking at all of our photographs and negatives. It was an odd, I would say it was a terrible feeling, but it was just an odd feeling.

It's a feeling of violation. This is our space. This is our material. This is our material. These are our notes. You're going through drawers. I've never been burglarized, but I imagine the sense of violation is analogous. This is our stuff that we do our work with. What are you doing here?

And what gives you the right to do it? Walter Cronkite said about the raid, This sounds like some remote totalitarian state. Later, the Palo Alto police said they'd gotten a search warrant rather than a subpoena because they worried that the newspaper staff would destroy photos if they knew the police wanted them. In the end, the police raiding the Stanford Daily didn't find any incriminating photos of protesters at all. The staff of the newspaper reached out to a Stanford law professor for help.

We were just thinking, the courts are a way to make this kind of behavior illegal. And so we thought that was our obligation, was to make sure it didn't happen again. The paper filed a lawsuit against the Palo Alto police chief, James Zurcher. They argued that by entering their offices with a search warrant, their First Amendment rights to free speech and free press, and their Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure were being violated. And I followed it closely and was particularly happy with the initial district court decision

which agreed with us on our First and Fourth Amendment claims, and the Court of Appeals decision that essentially said, this should not be done, freedom of the press is too important. The Supreme Court reviewed the case in 1978. James Zurcher, the police chief, gave an interview to the Stanford Daily and said that if the Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision and decided in favor of the police, quote, I would certainly give a lot of thought to any third party searches in the future. In the end, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Palo Alto police, deciding that using

a warrant to search the newspaper was constitutional. It was extremely disappointing. The Boston Globe called the decision, quote, a first step toward a police state. There was so much outcry that then-President Jimmy Carter encouraged Congress to take up the issue. In 1980, Congress passed the Privacy Protection Act, which barred law enforcement from using warrants to search newsrooms in almost all situations.

If you want information from a newspaper, you send a subpoena, and the subpoena can be challenged in court. If newspapers can be searched by law enforcement, trust is completely undermined. Trust between the newspaper and its sources, trust between the newspaper and its readers. The newspaper becomes, in some ways, even if involuntarily, an agent of government. And that is something that can never happen. If a newspaper is gonna have the integrity and the ability to provide information that the citizenry needs. Since the Privacy Protection Act passed in 1980,

newsroom raids have been rare until the raid on the Marion County record. We'll be right back. Clear your schedule for U time with a handcrafted espresso beverage from Starbucks. Savor the new small and mighty Cortado, cozy up with the familiar flavors of pistachio, or shake up your mood with an iced brown sugar oat shaken espresso. Whatever you choose, your espresso will be handcrafted with care at Starbucks. care at Starbucks. Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert Floride Kennedy Jr. went before the Senate today in fiery

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Five days after the raid, the Marion County Record put out its weekly paper, the first since the police raided its newsroom. It took two all-nighters. We didn't even have our nameplate, you know, the thing on the front of the paper that says Marion County Record. We didn't even have that. We had to recreate everything. We pulled computers out of an old storage closet. That's

a fancy name for it, junk room. And we had old Windows XP computers that we set up in a temporary network. The one thing we still had was that we'd posted a PDF, as we always do on the website of our paper, but it was a low-res PDF. So we pulled it down and tried to grab some material from it. Our normal deadline is midnight on Tuesday night. We were there until 6.30 before we got the paper sent out to our printer at 6.30 a.m. But we made it. And what was the headline? Seized, but not silenced. The day after the raid, the Marion Police Department wrote a Facebook post defending their search,

acknowledging the Federal Privacy Protection Act, but suggesting it doesn't give special protection. Quote, when there is reason to believe the journalist is Act, but suggesting it doesn't give special protection, quote, when there is reason to believe the journalist is taking part in the underlying wrongdoing. The newspaper's lawyer, Bernie Rhodes, responded in a letter to Police Chief Gideon Cody, Your characterization of the law is wrong. Here he is speaking with KCUR, a public radio station in Kansas City. The only justification they've given is what's on their Facebook page, which is that they were looking at a criminal suspect. But again, you're a criminal suspect only if reporting is a crime.

And in this country, it's not. In videos at the time, you said, you know, this will make national news and the police didn't seem to believe you. BD – Oh no, they laughed at it. And later on in body cams, they're joking about, oh yeah, sure, he thinks it's going to make national news. Well, it made international news. AMT – On the Wednesday after the search, the Marion County attorney said that he was

withdrawing the search warrant that had been used for the raid. He said that there was, quote, insufficient evidence for it. A judge ordered that the items the police had taken be returned. When the newspaper's lawyer realized that the sheriff's office had made a copy of data from their hard drive and hadn't returned that copy, they went back to court. And the judge basically wrote back, said, you didn't listen to my ruling. My ruling said, return it now.

Now means now. And so they wouldn't give it to us, but they destroyed it. So we had a ceremony in which the Sheriff wanted no part of it. So the undersheriff took a hammer and a chisel and broke the hard drive into little bitty pieces, put them in a plastic bag and gave them to us. By then, the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, or KBI, had announced that it was taking over

leading the investigation from the local police. In a statement, the director of the KBI said, no one is above the law, whether a public official or representative of the media. But a spokesperson from the Kansas Department of Revenue, which runs the website that reporter Phyllis Zorn accessed, said that it was legal to check the status of someone's license on their

website, that it's, quote, public-facing and anyone can use it. Almost a year later, in August of 2024, an investigative report was released. The report that came out in August basically said, first of all, we'd never committed a crime. The report, prepared by two special prosecutors, found that reporter Phyllis Zorn had not broken any laws by accessing Kerry Newell's driving record online. It found instead that when a Marion County police officer called the Department of Revenue to ask about her search, he reached a quote, erroneous conclusion that Phyllis Zorn lied about her identity in order to access the record.

The report added quote, other than this single phone call, no additional investigation was done. The report also addressed the question of whether the police chief, Gideon Cody, was retaliating against the newspaper for looking into his background. They wrote that it was more likely that the police, quote, genuinely reached the conclusion that they had uncovered a crime. The report went on to say that, quote, it is not a crime under Kansas law for a law enforcement officer to conduct a poor investigation and reach erroneous conclusions. But the special prosecutors did find probable cause to believe that Gideon Cody had broken

one law. A former Kansas police chief tied to a raid on a local newspaper last year has been charged with felony obstruction of justice. As often as the case in scandals, it's not the thing that happened that was important. It was the cover-up afterward. Restaurant owner Carrie Newell told investigators that in the days after the raid, Gideon Cody had told her to delete text messages between the two of them. She said that he asked her to delete them because

he didn't want anyone to misconstrue anything, like a smiley face emoji. I did delete those messages against my better judgment and instantly regretted it. Gideon Cody was suspended and then resigned. He was charged with obstruction of justice in August of 2024, and the case is still ongoing today. We reached out to his lawyer for comment and didn't hear back. How did this raid change your newsroom? Well, the reporter who had her cell phone ripped away from her resigned. She couldn't take working in Marion anymore.

She couldn't deal with being around the same people because, you know, the magistrate's still there, the county attorney's still there, the sheriff's still there, the sheriff's investigator's still there. You know, there were some nice things that happened. People supported the newspaper. I mean, we got tens of thousands of messages of support. We are the 122nd largest town in Kansas, not very big. As of today, we have the eighth largest paid circulation in the state of Kansas because of thousands of people who subscribe to the paper in support of it. In addition to the criminal charge against Gideon Cody, the newspaper has filed a federal lawsuit against him and other officers, and the former mayor of Marion, David Mayfield,

who allegedly authorized the raid. Eric Meyer had written critical editorials about him, and the lawsuit states that David Mayfield wrote on his Facebook page about two weeks before the raid that, quote, "...the real villains in America are the radical journalists, teachers, and professors." The lawsuit also states that the raid violated the newspaper's constitutional rights, along with the Federal Privacy Protection Act. We reached out to the lawyer defending

David Mayfield and other city officials named in the lawsuit, and she declined to comment. The issue here is not just the raid, it's the idea that law enforcement can be weaponized politically, personally, to attack journalists who report things that people don't want to have reported. There's a memorial honoring Eric Meyer's mother, Joanne Meyer, outside of the Marion County Records offices. The video of her standing up to the police during the raid went viral. She and Eric received a number of awards, and she was posthumously inducted into the

Kansas Press Association Hall of Fame, along with her son. How do you think your mother would feel about what has happened since the raid? My mother was a person who never really liked having much attention. But in an odd sort of way, I think she'd kind of feel happy about what happened. Her death meant something. And it's not common for a 98-year-old person to be able to say that their death meant something, that she became a symbol of a cause. I think she would appreciate that. Criminalist created by Lauren Spohr and me.

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