jlambe@kcstar.com.

The Kansas City Star

Both sides outline evidence ahead

By JOE LAMBE
Opposing lawyers opened the third trial in a controversial child sex case Wednesday with a sharp clash over what constitutes key evidence.

A prosecutor told jurors to focus on the testimony of the teenage victim and not soap-opera elements like her mother's sexual relationship with the lead detective in the case.

The defense countered that the case against former Lee's Summit businessman Theodore White hinges on how White's ex-wife manipulated the investigation and her daughter — the alleged victim.

White, 42, faces 12 sex-related charges that include statutory rape and statutory sodomy. The acts allegedly occurred between 1995 and 1998, when his stepdaughter was about 10 to 12 years old.

Six years ago, a jury not informed of the sexual relationship of the mother and detective convicted White of all counts. That verdict was overturned on appeal. Last year, a jury aware of the relationship deadlocked on 11-1 for not guilty.

Now this jury must consider whether White is an innocent man held behind bars for five years or whether he is guilty, and the girl, now 19, has been wrongly attacked by defense lawyers.

Assistant attorney general Elizabeth Bock, a special prosecutor on the case, told jurors the victim would tell in detail how White molested her for years. Besides the acts he is charged with, the teen will tell of other incidents that include sex acts on a pontoon boat and at a lake resort cabin, Bock said, as well as how he made her perform oral sex on him at least 15 times.

Evidence will show that the investigating Lee's Summit detective did not start his relationship with the girl's mother until after the investigation was submitted to prosecutors, she said.

Though Bock did not dispute that the detective kept seeing the victim's mother after his chief ordered him not to, she said that was not the heart of the case.

“This case may sound like a soap opera…” she said, but “keep your eye on the issue… what happened to (the victim) in these three years.”

The victim will testify that she never learned of her mother's relationship with the detective until after the first trial, Bock said.

The teen's testimony will be that she first told her mother of the incidents on March 21, 1998, after the sex acts became more violent and White started talking of making pornographic videos with her and her friends, Bock said.

When she told her mother, “She was shaking; she was sweating; she'd had enough — at 12 she was sick and tired of it,” Bock said.

Defense lawyer Cynthia Short countered that evidence would show that the girl told her mother of the alleged sex acts when she was angry and hurt that White had taken her brother on a Boy Scout camping trip and not taken her.

“As the boys drove away that day, a little girl stood alone on that driveway,” Short said, and then went in to talk to her mother.

Her mother — who already had a divorce pending against White — got paper, interviewed her daughter for two hours, wrote it all down and locked in false statements, Short said.

The mother, in that interview, “begins to aid and encourage false allegations against Ted White for her own gain,” Short said. The mother later got about $100,000 worth of stock in the divorce, Short said.

The mother's relationship with the detective also gave her control of an investigation in which the detective hid their relationship from lawyers and never reported the pending divorce, Short said.

“Divorce and custody cases are red flags for allegations of sexual abuse and they must be examined carefully,” Short said.

She said the detective was still listed as the lead investigator when he rode to the mother's house on his BMW motorcycle to pick her up for their first date.

“She next hops in bed with him on several occasions in the month of May (1998), when her daughter is going through supposedly the worst time of her life,” Short said.

Now the case has consumed families and others caught in it for six years, Short said, including the teen trapped in lies.

“Your job is to set the truth free,” she told jurors, “and when you do, you will set her free.”

The case has captured media attention for years, since White fled to Costa Rica before sentencing after his 1999 convictions. He was sentenced to 50 years. An appeals court overturned those convictions.

Wednesday afternoon, for the third time, the teen with short hair walked to the witness box. Wearing a pink shirt, with a water glass at her side, she spoke quietly and started to testify.

Her testimony is expected to last at least through today.

To reach Joe Lambe, call

(816) 234-4314 or send e-mail

to

tkoppelman@wdaftv4.com

Posted:1/19/2005
FOX 4 News
Ted White Re-Trial, Search for Truth Begins
Kansas City, MO - A real-life drama is unfolding in a Jackson County courtroom, as both sides in a child sex abuse case search for truth. Ted White has been behind bars for about five years, convicted of sexually molesting a child. But today his second re-trial got started, his third trial in five years. After opening statements, Ted White's accuser took the stand. The now 19 year-old spoke quietly about what she says White did to her when she was 10 to 12 years old. Prosecutor Elizabeth Boch detailed in her opening statement what the teen says happened. As she described the events, White often hung his head, shaking it back and forth. Prosecutors say the jury needs to remember this case is about a little girl and the abuse she endured. But the defense says this case is also about what White has gone through. The defense described a little girl, desperate for her mother's attention, and a mother who had much to gain from these allegations against her ex-husband.

White was found guilty in 1999. He fled the country, but America's Most Wanted aired the story and he was captured in Costa Rica. But then evidence began surfacing about his ex-wife Tina's affair with the lead detective in the sex abuse investigation. EVen though White shouldn't have been able to get a re-trial, because he fled the country, a landmark court decision allowed White the re-trial, saying White had fled from injustice, not justice. That re-trial ended last year in a hung jury, with the vote 11 to one to acquit. Some jurors say the lone hold out was irrational and refused to follow the judge's orders. Those same jurors say evidence supporting White's innocence is so overwhelming, they couldn't stay silent. They've gone to the media and public forums to tell people about what they call a miscarriage of justice. Many of those jurors were in the courtroom Wednesday for the start of White's trial.

Tess Koppelman, Fox 4 News

The Kansas City Star
jlambe@kcstar.com.

Third trial now looms for sex-case defendant

11 jurors in second trial favored acquittal
JOE LAMBE

A former Lee's Summit businessman must stand trial a third time in a child sex case after a Jackson County judge on Wednesday denied a motion to acquit him.

Circuit Judge Charles Atwell also denied a motion to reduce Theodore White's $2 million bond, leaving White in jail to await a Jan. 10 retrial.

The rulings are the latest in an unusual case that has attracted national media attention and set state legal precedents.

In June, 11 jurors voted to acquit White on 12 sex-related charges, including statutory rape and statutory sodomy. The defense later argued that White should be freed because the holdout was a rogue juror who allegedly refused to deliberate, lied on jury selection forms and subverted the jury system.

Many of the jurors appeared with dozens of White's relatives, friends and supporters at a recent hearing on the motions that was taped by the television show "48 Hours."

Prosecutors argued then that a judge-ordered acquittal would set a standard that makes holdout jurors fodder for attack by lawyers and allows judges alone to determine verdicts.

Among support for the defense argument that the holdout juror lied on selection forms is a sealed filing that remains a mystery.

In his ruling, Atwell wrote that even if the allegations in that filing are true, "the court does not believe that an appropriate remedy for the alleged misconduct of juror number 40 is a judgment of acquittal."

A spokesman for the Missouri attorney general's office, whose lawyers are acting as special prosecutors on the case, said they would now prepare for retrial in January.

Defense lawyer Sean O'Brien said he is studying whether and how to appeal the ruling refusing an order of acquittal.

"Ted (White) was denied a fair and impartial jury and now he's denied a remedy," O'Brien said.

Josephine Hawk of Independence, one of the 11 jurors who voted for acquittal, said she was disappointed by the rulings but not really surprised.

"It's kind of an unprecedented case," she said. "It's kind of sad for Mr. White. I was hoping for lowering the bond."

Atwell wrote that while the 11 jurors who believe that White is innocent or should not have been found guilty are responsible citizens, so were 12 other jurors who found White guilty of the same charges in 1999. Those verdicts were later overturned after White fled before sentencing.

Authorities captured White in Costa Rica after his case was on "America's Most Wanted" and a judge sentenced him to 50 years.

Normally, a defendant who flees before sentencing loses all appeal rights. But in 2002 the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City overturned his conviction because Jackson County prosecutors did not disclose that the victim's mother - White's estranged wife - had had an affair with the Lee's Summit detective who investigated the case.

That nondisclosure was so wrong that White's right to a fair trial outweighed the so-called escape rule, the appeals court wrote.

In the June retrial, O'Brien was among a new team of defense lawyers who presented weeks of new evidence that convinced the 11 jurors the state had not proved its case.

In the Wednesday ruling, Atwell wrote that preserving the sanctity of the jury system is critical to justice and much case law suggests matters discussed in deliberations cannot be used to impeach a jury's work.

"While in the abstract there is a well-reasoned argument that Ted White should be acquitted," he wrote, he believes the body of law "designed to guarantee the overall fairness of the jury system ... dictates otherwise."

To reach Joe Lambe, Jackson County courts reporter, call (816) 234-4314 or send e-mail to

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Posted on Thu, Sep. 23, 2004
 
'We have to do the right thing'
Judge hears case involving holdout juror

By JOE LAMBE

The Kansas City Star
 

Lawyers for a former Lee's Summit businessman charged in a child sex case argued Wednesday that a judge should release him following a mistrial where 11 jurors voted to acquit.

One rogue juror lied on jury selection forms, refused to deliberate and should not be allowed to subvert the jury system, Theodore White's defense lawyers told Jackson County Circuit Judge Charles Atwell.

Prosecutors countered that a judge-ordered acquittal would set a standard that makes holdout jurors fodder for attack by lawyers and allows judges alone to determine verdicts.

Atwell said he would rule later. For now, a third trial for White is scheduled in January on 12 sex-related charges, including statutory rape and statutory sodomy.

A camera crew from the television show “48 Hours” filmed Wednesday's hearing, another chapter in an unusual case that has been widely featured in the media and set state legal precedents.

The crowded courtroom included about 60 supporters of White. They wore “Free Ted White” buttons and included friends, family and many of the 11 jurors from his retrial this year.

The case began in 1999, when another jury convicted White of the same 12 counts, and he fled to Costa Rica before sentencing. Authorities captured him there later that year after his case was on “America's Most Wanted.” A judge sentenced him to 50 years.

Normally a defendant who flees before sentencing loses all appeal rights. But in 2002, the Missouri Court of Appeals in Kansas City overturned his conviction because Jackson County prosecutors didn't disclose that the victim's mother — then White's estranged wife — had had an affair with the Lee's Summit detective who investigated the case. That failure to disclose was so wrong that White's right to a fair trial outweighed the so-called escape rule, the appeals court ruled.

In the retrial that ended in June, a new team of defense lawyers presented weeks of new evidence that 11 jurors said had convinced them that White was innocent. On Wednesday, Jill Miller of Lee's Summit, one of the 11 jurors who voted for acquittal, testified about the holdout. She said he refused to deliberate, was combative, screamed and was irrational. He also said his favorite movie was “The Runaway Jury,” Miller said.

Miller said the holdout also told jurors that he believed the girl who testified that White molested her from 1995 to 1998, when she was about 10 to 12 years old. The other jurors thought the girl's testimony had too many discrepancies and was unsupported by evidence, Miller said.

Atwell repeatedly asked lawyers if it would not be a slippery slope for him to acquit White, especially because most hung juries that split 11 to one involve 11 jurors who vote for guilt. He asked whether such a ruling wouldn't work against defendants in the long run.

Ellen Suni, a University of Missouri-Kansas City law professor working with the defense, said the case was so unusual it had little precedent value.

“It's a rare lawyer who has ever seen a case like this,” she said. “We have to do the right thing in this case.”

The case does not involve just a holdout juror but a rogue juror who refused to deliberate, she said.

But Elizabeth Bock, a special prosecutor in the case, countered that the holdout juror did deliberate — “they just weren't interested in what he had to say.”

“This gentleman stuck by his guns,” she said. For the judge to order an acquittal would subvert the jury system and set bad precedent, she said. “The message this sends is that you don't dare vote your conscience, because you will be raked over the coals and dragged through the dirt.”

In an alternative to acquittal, defense lawyers asked that White's bond be lowered from $2 million to $25,000. The prosecution opposed the motion, noting White's previous flight to Costa Rica. Atwell said he would also rule on that matter later.

To reach Joe Lambe, Jackson County courts reporter, call (816) 234-4314 or send e-mail to

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The Kansas City Star August 22, 2004

11 jurors declare justice was denied
ERIC ADLER

It was shortly after lunchtime, June 2, the Wednesday after Memorial Day. Twelve jurors - six men and six women, exhausted, frustrated, some on the verge of tears - filed back into the jury box in the case of The State of Missouri v. Theodore W. White.
They settled into their seats on the eighth floor of the Jackson County Courthouse. Few, if any, looked at the defendant.

Juror No. 2, Jill Miller, a legal secretary and mom from Lee's Summit, fought to keep from crying. Juror No. 8, Jamie Holman, felt sick to her stomach. Darrel Priddle, a drama teacher at Raytown South Middle School and Juror No. 9, just kept thinking, "This is wrong."

For 12 days the jury sat in this polished wood courtroom listening to the disturbing and graphic details of how White, on numerous occasions between 1995 and 1998, allegedly molested his adopted daughter when she was then 10, 11, and 12 years old.

For 2 1/2 days more, the jury deliberated - with 11 of 12 jurors convinced that the 42-year-old man sitting in front of them in a blue blazer, a once-affluent businessman from Lee's Summit, was not guilty. More than half felt that the state had failed to prove its case; they also were convinced that every act White was accused of never happened.

Instead, they believed, the accusations were invented by a neglected and lonely girl who desired her mother's attention and got caught in a story.

But 11 jurors were not all jurors. One did not agree.

With the jury hopelessly deadlocked at 11 to 1, Judge Charles Atwell declared a mistrial.

Ted White, devastated, was led back to prison, where he already had spent close to five years - a fact that so aggrieved much of the jury that they are now speaking out.

A number of them have written the Missouri attorney general. They have spoken at defense fund-raising rallies, including one scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. They are telling the story of what happened in the jury room. The anger. The yelling. The recriminations and tears.

"That poor man shouldn't be rotting in jail," Juror No. 10 would later say.

"As I said before, and I have not changed my mind," said Juror No. 6, John Duncan, a retired school principal. "It was a miscarriage of justice."

"He did not do it," said Juror No. 3, Sarah Mehl, a mom from south Kansas City. "There is no doubt in my mind. He did not do it."

Not so fast

Just days before, on the first day of deliberations, Mehl thought reaching a verdict would be simple.

As the 12 entered the jury room at 9:20 a.m. on Friday, May 28, the court clerk said what she'd always say.

"If you think you're going to need lunch, be sure to tell me by 10 o'clock."

Mehl and Miller, side by side at the conference table, traded doubtful looks. "Lunch? Nah, we're going to be out of here," Miller thought.

Holman, a 27-year-old bride-to-be, was so confident of the outcome, she told her fiance to plan a fun Friday night. She'd be home early. They'd go to happy hour.

Inside the jury room, the foreman, Juror No. 7, a businessman chosen for his calm and methodical manner, read the court's instructions to the jury on all 12 counts against White: rape, child molestation, sodomy, supplying pornography to a minor.

Writing on pieces of paper, the jury held a preliminary vote.

They folded the pieces, handed them down the table: four guilty, eight not.

It was one of the last moments the room would remain quiet.

Miller thought, "We're going to need lunch."

At 10:10 a.m. the foreman sent a note to the court: "Please provide all evidence...," along with tape, markers and a flip chart.

For the next seven hours they pored over their notebooks, checked dates against dates, witness statement against witness statement, asking whether it made sense and knowing, full well, that they were not the first set of jurors to hold the fate of Ted White in their hands.

In February 1999 the county tried White for the same alleged crimes. The jury declared him guilty after a three-day trial. But White never showed up for sentencing.

He fled. He turned himself into a fugitive, and his face was flashed on "America's Most Wanted." He was captured seven months later, on Labor Day 1999, in Costa Rica, selling time shares under the alias John Christopher Richardson. Four months later, the authorities shipped him home.

White claimed he escaped because, as an innocent man, he didn't want to go to prison.

On March 27, 2000, the court sentenced him to 50 years.

That's where he would have stayed - escapees generally lose all rights to a new trial - had it not been discovered that in the first trial Jackson County prosecuting attorney Jenni Mettler, now Jenni Vincent, had withheld information from the defense:

The Lee's Summit detective in charge of investigating the case against White was having an affair with White's wife, mother of the accuser, casting doubt on the objectivity of the investigation.

The prosecutor's office argued that the affair was immaterial because it allegedly didn't start until shortly after the detective finished his investigation. But on April 30, 2002, the Missouri Court of Appeals threw out White's conviction.

With bond set at $2 million, White was still in jail. But once again he was assumed innocent until proven guilty in a new trial.

Trial No. 2

This time, the Missouri attorney general's office, not the county, would prosecute. White had a new defense team, Sean O'Brien and Cyndy Short, who would present so much new evidence that the trial would take three weeks rather than three days.

So the jurors were trying to piece it together. For weeks, they'd been ordered by the judge not to talk to each other about the case until this moment.

Excited, unsure of how to proceed, they leafed through their notebooks. One juror filled five, both sides of every page. Chatter filled the room.

"There's no guidelines. No script of how to do this," Priddle, Juror No. 9, would say later. "You feel at sea, thrown to the lions. When to vote? How to vote? Who talks when?"

They decided to create a time line, jotting down the 12 counts against White.

Miller, Juror No. 2, the legal secretary, ripped sheets off the huge flip pad. She taped them to the far wall of the jury room. With thick black marker, she printed at the top of one page: "Counts 1, 2, 3. The Onyx House."

Although there were 12 counts, the crimes corresponded to five events spread over 33 months. Each event came to have a name:

The Onyx House events (counts 1, 2 and 3) for the things that supposedly happened on a day in the summer of 1995 when White's stepdaughter was 10 and the family lived on Onyx Street in Lee's Summit.

The "tummy tuck" incidents (counts 4, 5, 6, 7) for what allegedly happened around Sept. 27, 1996, when the family lived in a big house in the Lakewood subdivision of Lee's Summit. It was the weekend that White's wife was in the hospital having a tummy tuck operation. His stepdaughter was 11.

The "Christmas gift wrapping" acts (counts 8 and 9) alleged to have occurred first in the fall of 1997 and then just before Christmas.

The "blanket" incident (count 10) alleged to have happened in the living room under a blanket sometime between September 1997 and March 8, 1998.

The "big business meeting" acts of molestation (counts 11 and 12) that allegedly occurred on March 8, 1998, when White's stepdaughter was 12.

There were more alleged incidents, too, though ones that White was not charged with. Because the incidents were revealed at trial, the jury could consider them.

One was an act of molestation that allegedly occurred on a pontoon boat, not far from where the girl's brother was sleeping. Another was said to have happened in the back of a limousine under the cover of a fur coat. The girl's mom and brother, completely unaware, allegedly sat nearby.

Doubts grow

At re-trial, the girl, now 19, gave compelling, disturbing and graphic testimony of every act.

"I had nightmares quite a bit ... and I still have them today," she testified.

Prosecutor Michael Hendrickson argued that from year to year, deposition to deposition and trial to trial the substance of the girl's accounts - dates, situations, what happened - had remained fundamentally the same. The bold, outlandish natures of the crimes, he said, only spoke to their truth.

"If she wanted to lie," Hendrickson argued in his closing, "she would always create a story where it always happened behind a closed door. Or it always happened when they were in seclusion. Or it always happened when they were alone. But instead, she tells about what was really happening and the attitude - the tenaciousness, the boldness of the defendant to abuse her."

But the prosecution had no physical evidence, no witnesses.

Medical testimony revealed no clear sign of sexual intercourse.

Even the Lee's Summit detective who investigated the case testified that a diary kept by the girl during the years of alleged abuse - a diary lost before the first trial and never recovered - made no mention of her father acting abusively.

Slowly, methodically, the defense attorneys chipped away at the case. As the inconsistencies grew, so did doubts in jurors' minds.

What was said in sworn depositions became different at trial. What was said in the first trial changed in the second.

Times changed. Memories changed. Acts changed and were added. People who were said to be in certain places at certain times would later testify they were not.

Like the alleged business meeting molestation of March 8, 1998. The girl testified that White molested her that Saturday in the living room. The defense presented evidence and witnesses proving that White had been in a hugely important business meeting all that weekend.

On Friday and Saturday he was at his office with business partners. The only time he came home on Saturday was to hurry, pack and rush to the airport for an investor's meeting in Dallas. His wife helped him pack.

The defense raised the question: In what five-minute period did White have time to molest someone in the living room?

The same with the molestation under the fur coat inside the limousine: In front of the mother? And the pontoon molestation: In front of the brother?

The "tummy tuck" molestation seemed questionable to jurors, too. At trial, the girl testified that certain acts were interrupted by a telephone call from her mom who was in the hospital.

The defense showed that the mother was still in surgery when the call supposedly happened.

White was accused of showing his stepdaughter pornography. But when the tapes were played, the scenes the girl said she remembered weren't there.

The defense also presented evidence to show that the girl, who'd become White's stepdaughter when he married her mom in 1991, expressed feeling good when White adopted her in 1996, after the abuse allegedly started.

"There was just a lot of lying, misrepresentations, contradictions," Juror No. 10, a widow from Independence, would later say.

A family in disarray

Throughout the trial, both the prosecution and defense talked about the White family as one in turmoil. White and his wife - their divorce was official in October 1999 - yelled, screamed and argued frequently, particularly over money and work.

White, a workaholic entrepreneur, was building a new business after selling an old one. They were living on savings, hemorrhaging money, paying close to $6,000 per month on a $350,000 house that had been mortgaged twice. Separated once, White's wife had earlier filed for divorce. Even though they'd reconciled, the petition was still active.

In the middle of it all were the kids. The defense painted a picture of a young daughter left out. They argued that she was a girl who was fed up with the constant fighting in her home, who felt deprived of her social mother's attention and jealous of the close relationship White seemed to have with her younger brother.

The defense asked her: "So the things you're writing about in your diary upstairs in your room are about feeling neglected by your mother?"

The girl answered: "I wouldn't say neglected."

But most on the jury didn't believe her.

Indeed, many believed the defense.

On March 21, 1998, White left his stepdaughter once again - this time to go on a camping trip with his stepson. Soon after White and her brother left, she walked into the house where her mother was busy on the telephone.

Her mother hung up. The daughter told her, as given in testimony, life is going to change when you hear what I have to tell you, "Dad's been touching me. ..."

"I think she made it all up," said Milanez Harrison, a 31-year-old bank employee and Juror No. 11 . "I think she did it for her mother's attention. I don't think she realized how far it would go."

Throughout the morning the jury bandied, discussed and jotted down evidence in black marker. Soon after lunch, they took another vote.

Three jurors switched, including the foreman and Juror No. 4, a retired postal worker whose daughter is a judge.

"I can't convict a man where there is some doubt," he said later.

The tally now: one guilty, 11 not.

The holdout

The one is Mike Cannavan, Juror No. 5, a 52-year-old printer from Independence. He didn't like what was going on with the rest of the jury.

The defense attorneys presented lots of evidence, but he didn't buy it. He didn't like them.

It drove him nuts the way attorney Cyndy Short began and ended her questions with the phrase "is it fair to say?" Is it fair to say this? Is it fair to say that? It made Cannavan feel the defense was trying to twist things its way.

By the end of the trial, he believed "the little girl." He believed her.

Did her story change? Yes. Were there plenty of inconsistencies? Yes.

But when the girl testified, "I have testified under oath and everything I have said is the truth. I can't remember every single incident that happened," Cannavan believed that, too. It made sense to him. The crimes happened six to nine years ago.

"You think your story is going to be exactly the same? It's reasonable to think it would change," Cannavan would later say.

The way he saw it: He had his opinion, they had theirs. That's that. Guilty.

Tension slowly began to build, because most of the others in the jury argued that is not the way it goes. They were not there to give their opinions, they told Cannavan. Their job was to deliberate and do their best to reach a unanimous verdict.

So if Cannavan voted "guilty," he needed to tell them why. He needed to make a case. Convince them. Tell them why he believed White was guilty.

"You are entitled to your opinion, but you need to back it up," Priddle recalled saying.

But Cannavan said he didn't have to convince anyone of anything. He believed that every time he tried, his words were turned inside out.

"This is how I feel right now," he recalled saying. "I don't feel I have to justify how I feel."

Besides, he would explain later, "Our job is not to be unanimous. Our job is to hear testimony and come to our conclusions."

So the jury was stuck. Other jury members tried to point out all the reasons for "reasonable doubt." But Cannavan wouldn't listen, they said. They said his arguments were confused and made no sense. Cannavan felt they weren't listening to him.

What made it all the more infuriating for his fellow jurors was that Cannavan told them, yes, it was remotely possible that White didn't molest anyone. Yes, he knew there were inconsistencies and he had some minor doubts.

But he still thought White was guilty, which one or two jurors accepted.

"I figured he's got a right to his opinion," said Juror No. 4, the postal worker.

Things get heated

Tempers flared, particularly among the eight jurors who originally voted "not guilty."

For three weeks everyone in the jury had gotten along, Cannavan as well as anyone. They went to lunch together. They talked about their kids and upcoming vacations. They brought in cookies, swapped recipes, played cards. Everyone liked Cannavan.

Now jurors were yelling at him. Some claimed he was breaking the law.

If he had doubts, as he claimed, then he must vote to acquit, they said. Those are the rules. Those are the instructions.

"You're sending a man to prison for the rest of his life," a juror shouted.

"He kept saying he had doubts," Harrison would later say. "I told him, `If you have doubts, you have to find him not guilty.' I don't know if he was understanding it."

Some jurors began to wonder: If Cannavan's not paying attention to the evidence or the instructions, is there some way to get him removed from the jury?

"Mike," Holman recalled saying, "just convince us. Show us your facts."

Cannavan, feeling persecuted, would yell back.

"I have no evidence," he recalled saying. "I didn't come in with evidence. It's not my duty to have evidence."

His only duty, he figured, was to listen to the evidence. And he did.

"I don't have to explain anything to you people," he said. "I believe the little girl."

By the end of the first night of deliberations, Miller and Mehl were in tears. At times, jurors felt Cannavan was playing cat-and-mouse, saying that he was open to being convinced, and then just smiling and shutting down.

The jury was mired.

On Tuesday, June 1, they returned for the second day of deliberations. Nothing changed. If anything, it got worse.

Five hours into deliberations, at 3:15 p.m., the foreman sent a note to the judge:

We are unable to reach a unanimous decision on any of the 12 counts.

Many of the jurors are of the belief that one of us does not fully understand the instruction of the court and may not be following the instructions of the court in determining guilt or not guilty.

Please advise our next step.

The answer came back:

I would request you thoughtfully continue your deliberations...

Then, at 4:12 p.m., another note:

We appear to be in a deadlock ... the majority of the jurors are convinced we will not reach a unanimous decision.

The atmosphere in the jury room was bitter.

"I hope you're able to sleep at night," one juror said to Cannavan that day.

"I hope next time he (White) is touching someone," Cannavan remembers shooting back to another, "he's not thinking of you."

The next morning, June 2, Judge Atwell delivered "the hammer," a particularly strident instruction for the jury to work hard to reach a unanimous verdict.

But already it was too late.

At 12:08 p.m., the foreman sent another note:

The jury is currently 11 to 1 for not guilty on all counts. One juror is of the opinion of guilty on all counts, however, has difficulty expressing the reasons for guilt.

It is very apparent that nothing the other jurors will say or identify as inconsistencies during the trial which leads to "reasonable" doubt is going to convince the one juror to change his mind.

"By the time we were walking out of deliberations I knew we were sending an innocent man back to jail. And I was sick to my stomach about it," Holman recalled.

"As jurors, our hands were tied," Miller said. "We just couldn't believe that one man could do this to us. There were 11 of us. We had one man who could hold us up."

Shortly after 1 p.m. Atwell declared the mistrial and dismissed the jury. Several broke into tears.

"I did what I felt was the honest, right thing to do," Cannavan said later. "I did what I had to do. It just happened to be different than 11 others. ... I didn't send an innocent man to jail. He was already in there."

White's defense has two motions filed with Atwell's court.

The first motion calls for reducing White's $2 million bond to a level that would allow him to be released pending a new trial.

The second calls for Atwell to declare Cannavan's vote void and, in effect, become the 12th juror and set White free.

The hearings are expected to be scheduled in September.

A new trial, White's third, is set for Jan. 6. This Labor Day will mark White's fifth year in jail.

To reach Eric Adler, call (816) 234-4431 or send e-mail to

Editor's note

Three weeks ago The Star began contacting jurors for this story. Ten were found and agreed to interviews. Some requested that their names not be used.

The Star chose to honor the privacy requests, even though other media have revealed all names in the case.

It also is The Star's general practice not to identify the alleged victims of sexual abuse. Although a matter of public record, the name of the alleged victim in this case is not revealed, nor is the name of her mother. A trial transcript and court records were also used in reporting this story.
 

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Pitch Weekly Article from August 19th
Unreasonable Doubt
BY ALLIE JOHNSON
Allie.Johnson@pitch.com 

One jury found Ted White guilty of child molestation. A second jury says White is the one who got hurt.
When a child claims abuse, adults are supposed to listen.
This past spring, however, when 12 adults spent 3 weeks listening to an adolescent girl's accusations that her father had molested her, 11 of them found it hard to believe.

Her father has served 5 years in jail because of those allegations. He remains imprisoned because of a shoddy investigation by a Lee's Summit cop who was sleeping with the accused's wife, and because an assistant prosecutor withheld evidence in a 1999 trial, and because of one obstinate juror when the case was retried.

When lawyers select a jury, they attempt to find people who will listen to all the evidence, weigh it fairly and follow the law. For the attorneys handling the father's second trial this past spring, that turned out to be harder than they thought.

In May, 150 prospective jurors were called to Judge Charles Atwell's Jackson County courtroom, where they learned a few facts about the case they would decide if they were selected.

Though they didn't yet know his name, they learned that a man -- Ted White -- was found guilty of 12 counts of sexual abuse against his adolescent daughter when he first went to trial in 1999. After he was sentenced to 50 years in prison, White fled to Costa Rica.

Under a Missouri law known as the escape rule, a judge can deny the appeal of a convict who flees. But the circumstances surrounding White's trial were so troubling that he had been given a second chance.

Shortly after White fled, his attorneys learned that his wife, Tina White, had been having an affair with Lee's Summit police detective Richard McKinley -- the detective who was investigating White's daughter's allegations that White had sexually abused her.

Tina White and Richard McKinley later testified that they had begun dating after McKinley completed his investigation but before White's 1999 trial. Prosecutors had known that McKinley was sleeping with Tina White when they called Tina White and McKinley as witnesses against Ted White, but they didn't tell the jury.

In 2002, Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District Judge James Smart wrote that Assistant Jackson County Prosecutor Jenni Mettler had violated White's constitutional rights by withholding that information. He also noted that McKinley had discovered one of White's daughter's diaries -- in which she had written nothing about any sort of abuse -- but had failed to seize the diary as evidence. "The suppression [of evidence] undermines confidence in the verdict," Smart wrote. He ordered a new trial for White.

During jury selection for that new trial this past spring, White's defense attorneys asked whether any members of the pool would be unable to render a not guilty verdict for someone who had fled the country. One man stood up, a juror recalls, but the other 149 said they'd be able to weigh the evidence fairly anyway. This time around, Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon's office was prosecuting the case; Jackson County prosecutors had recused themselves. Over 2 days, attorneys for both sides worked together to select 12 jurors.

The previous trial had lasted 3 days, but this year's trial went on for 3 weeks, ending the first week of June.

During the 1999 trial, White had been represented by a private defense attorney, Jim Speck. This time, White was represented by attorneys Sean O'Brien and Cyndy Short from the nonprofit Public Interest Litigation Clinic. PILC attorneys usually handle only death penalty cases and appeals, but O'Brien, who had represented White during his appeal, had taken the unusual step of asking to represent White at his trial because he believed White was innocent.

O'Brien and Short spent hundreds of hours investigating claims, interviewing witnesses, obtaining documents and creating timelines in the case -- which Short says Speck never did.

Many of their prospective jurors might not have been able to relate to Ted White Jr. -- a rich Lee's Summit workaholic with questionable taste in women who hired nannies to spend time with his children. But most of them could understand that anyone could be falsely accused of a crime.

As hard as it is to fathom a little girl making up sexual allegations against her father and sticking to the story for years, Short and O'Brien had discovered a family situation in which that seemed plausible.

By the end of deliberations, 11 of the 12 jurors agreed with them.

During the course of the 3-week trial, Short and O'Brien retraced Ted and Tina White's family history. The account that follows is essentially what the jury heard, according to the Pitch's examination of court records and interviews with jurors.

White, a good-looking former high school football star from southwest Missouri, was attending chiropractic school in Lee's Summit when he met Tina McKenna, a twice-divorced mother of two, in 1990. A few weeks after they started dating, she and her children moved into his apartment. The couple married in the winter of 1991. Ted White's mother, Myrna White, a reserved woman, disliked Tina from the start -- she disapproved of the way her new daughter-in-law dressed in low-cut dresses and tight sweaters. After the wedding, Myrna White stopped speaking to her son.
Ted White dropped out of school and discovered a talent for sales; he eventually started a company that helped consumers get discounts on vision products. In his spare time, he played golf with business associates and socialized with his wife and their neighbors. They kept pornographic tapes and assorted sex lotions in their bedroom; sometimes they had sex loudly enough for the children to overhear them.

The Whites talked about the possibility of Ted adopting Tina's children: Jami, who was 6 at the time of the marriage, and Danny, then 5. But it took several years to convince the children's father, Danny McKenna, to sign away his parental rights. At one point during their battle over child support, Tina White filed an order accusing McKenna of beating her and threatening to kill her. (In a later deposition, though, she admitted that he had never been violent toward her.)

Eventually Tina convinced McKenna to give up the children. (Later, according to court testimony, Tina White would confide to one of the family's nannies that she had wanted Ted White to be the official father because he had "deeper pockets." And she would tell a friend that if McKenna hadn't signed the papers, she would have accused him of showing pornography to Jami and Danny.)

As the adoption worked its way through the courts, and social workers, lawyers and psychologists conducted investigations to make sure the adoption was in the children's best interest, Tina White gave birth to her and Ted's child, Tanner, in June 1995.

Months later, in October, the Whites moved from a modest home on Onyx Street in Lee's Summit to a $300,000 house in the city's exclusive Lakewood subdivision. The following January, a judge finalized the adoption. A nanny who worked for the family at the time, Sharon Beaty, would later recall that the family celebrated the adoption that night and that everybody was happy about it, including Jami.

The family's two nannies noticed that Ted White seemed to be a loving father but a strict disciplinarian. He appeared to be madly in love with Tina, doting on her and buying her expensive jewelry and furs. But the two had always had a volatile relationship, and they fought often, sometimes in front of the children.

As Jami got older, her parents heaped more responsibility on her. By the time she was 11, she was babysitting Tanner and changing his diapers, doing the family laundry and cleaning her parents' bedroom. Ted White's mother, Myrna, who had come back into her son's life when Tanner was born, thought they treated Jami like a servant. Jami complained to relatives that she had to do the family's chores without help from Danny, presumably because he was a boy.

When Jami started middle school at Hall McCarter in Blue Springs, she wrote in her diary that she felt neglected by Tina, who seemed always to be talking on the phone. Around that time, Tina White told a counselor that she had trouble relating to Jami, a tomboyish child with straight red hair and freckles who favored T-shirts and sweatpants, played basketball at school and ran around outside with her brother and the neighbor boys.

Despite Jami's interests, her new father usually didn't include her in his activities with Danny. He left her behind when the two of them went on camping and fishing trips to the family's cabin on the Lake of the Ozarks. Danny would later remember that Jami repeatedly asked her father to take her on a trip to the lake, just the two of them, the way he did with Danny. The family recalls that White made several promises to do so but always backed out.

Ted White began traveling more frequently for business. Tina White accused her husband of neglecting the family. They went to marriage counseling, but their discord intensified.

In September 1997, the couple had yet another fight, and Ted White left. His wife's mother spotted him at a casino and called Tina to report it; Tina had Jami and Danny put all of Ted's belongings in garbage bags and throw them in the garage, then she locked him out. When he came home late that night, he broke down the door and went to bed. Tina called the police and had them arrest her husband. As usual, however, the couple made up afterward; he was back the next day.

A few days later, according to court testimony by one of the nannies, Lee's Summit detective McKinley, who has a side business as a handyman, arrived in street clothes to fix the door frame Ted had broken. (Tina White and McKinley would later deny that McKinley had gone to the Whites' home that day. McKinley testified that he had never seen Tina White before the day he was sent to her house to investigate Jami's allegations.)

Also that month, Tina White opened her own bank account with half the money she and her husband had received from refinancing their house.

The Whites' financial problems began to strain the family -- they were finding it difficult to maintain their lifestyle. When Ted's company went public, he left under duress with no job lined up, and he tried to start a new business. But the family needed cash, and a desperate Ted White borrowed more than $10,000 from one of the nannies, Nina Morerod. In November 1997, Ted and Tina separated, and in the middle of that month, she filed a petition for divorce.

When her father packed up and left, Jami acted happy. "I hope he never walks though that door again," she told Morerod.

But to Jami's disappointment, the couple reconciled at the end of the month, and White moved back into the house. The marital sniping resumed almost immediately.

Then Jami's life seemed to get even more miserable. In January 1998, she got a bad haircut that looked like a boy's. At school, where she had few friends, the other kids teased her about her hair, making comments such as "Jami has a penis." She was visibly upset about the ongoing teasing -- several relatives noticed it. That winter, Jami went on a ski trip with a group of kids from church. When she came back, she told her mom about two girls who were cousins and seemed to know a lot about sex -- they had told Jami stories of having been molested. One said her grandfather had "fingered" her and made her give him "blow jobs."

During the winter, Ted White was often out of town on trips to Dallas, trying to get investors for his new company, which provided insurance for small-business owners. In February 1998, Jami, a basketball fan, begged him to take her to the upcoming Big 12 women's basketball tournament in Kansas City in early March. He agreed, and Jami was looking forward again to spending time with her dad. It was probably the only day she'd get with him for a while -- his next few weeks were booked.

Jami was so excited about the tournament that she had arranged to miss school that day. But at the last minute, White backed out of taking her, saying he had to work. Jami was crushed. Her Uncle Ryan took her instead. He recalled later that she held his hand the whole time they were at the tournament.

The following weeks were all business for Ted White. The first weekend in March he had more than a dozen business associates fly in from various cities to prepare for a big meeting in Dallas the following week. They spent all day Saturday at Ted White's office, then came to the family home for a dinner that Tina had prepared. They had planned to work all day Sunday before flying to Texas that night. But when they heard that a freak spring snowstorm was on the way, they broke off early and rushed to the airport to get earlier flights so they wouldn't be stranded.

White finally took a break from work 2 weeks later to take Danny on a Boy Scout trip the weekend of March 21. As they packed to leave that Saturday morning, Jami bounced her basketball in the driveway. She came into the house and argued that she should be able to go along on the trip. But her father told her this was a trip for boys only. He said she should use the weekend to spend some time with her mother.

White and Danny pulled out of the driveway and drove off, leaving Jami behind. She continued to bounce her basketball in the driveway. After a while she went inside. Her mother was on the phone. Jami tried to get Tina's attention, but Tina made her wait. When Tina got off the phone, Jami said, "Mom, I have to tell you something."

Jami prefaced her statements by saying, "Mom, you're going to have to divorce dad after what I tell you," Tina White later recalled. "Mom," Jami said, "Dad's been touching me where he's not supposed to."

Jami told her about numerous times her father had "fingered" her as they sat under blankets on the family couch with Tina sitting nearby. Sometimes, Jami said, he made her give him "blow jobs."

Tina called the police. Officer Richard Bledsoe from the Lee's Summit Police Department arrived and talked to Tina alone and then to Jami, to corroborate what Tina had told him.

Tina White sent Jami to sleep at Tina's mother's house that night and waited for Ted and Danny to arrive home the next day. When Tina confronted her husband, in front of his mother (whom Tina had called to the house the day before), he yelled, "Bullshit!" White accused his wife of having found a way to make sure she got the house in the divorce proceedings, and he demanded that Jami get a physical exam. Tina told him to get out of the house, and he left with his mother.

A few days later, Detective McKinley was assigned to the case, and he met with Tina and Jami White.

McKinley interviewed only Jami, Tina, Danny and a nanny. Including the transcript of Jami's videotaped interview with the Child Protection Center at Children's Mercy Hospital, the investigative file was only fifty pages long. McKinley spent a week investigating, then turned his findings over to the Jackson County prosecutor's office. In mid-April, after an arrest warrant was issued, McKinley went by himself to Ted White's office and arrested him.

Two weeks later, McKinley drove his Harley Davidson to Ted White's house to take Tina on their first date.

According to Mc-Kinley, the two quickly fell in love. When he told Lee's Summit Police Chief Ken Conlee about the relationship, Conlee ordered him to stop seeing Tina. McKinley disobeyed -- instead, he and Tina made up an alias, "Curt," so the children wouldn't know who Tina was dating, and they started spending weekends at a bed and breakfast in Lawrence.

Conlee notified the prosecutor's office about the relationship and launched an internal investigation into McKinley's conduct. Afterward, the chief placed a letter of reprimand in McKinley's file, noting that McKinley had made a "serious breach of ethical conduct."

At the trial in mid-February of the following year, jurors heard only a fraction of the information that jurors would hear 5 years later. Much of the testimony came from Tina and Jami; they heard that an exam at Children's Mercy Hospital had found no physical evidence of abuse, but the prosecution's expert witness testified that the lack of such evidence didn't mean that abuse hadn't occurred. The jury found Ted White guilty on all 12 counts, and a judge sentenced him to 50 years in prison.

White left the country. Federal investigators went to his hometown of Aurora, Missouri, to try to track him down but had little luck. After a nationwide manhunt, during which White's mug shot was broadcast on America's Most Wanted, a tipster helped U.S. marshals catch him. He was selling vacation time shares from a kiosk at the Hotel Del Rey in San Jose.

Less than 2 months after the 1999 trial, Tina White and her children moved in with McKinley, and the children began calling the detective "Dad." Tina and McKinley were married in July 2000. (Ted and Tina White's divorce was granted in October 1999.)

During White's second trial, Short would suggest that McKinley might have had ulterior motives -- his relationship with Tina -- for failing to investigate the case more thoroughly.

The affair obviously could make a jury wonder about the fairness of McKinley's investigation -- and Jackson County prosecutors must have known this when they debated whether to keep that information from White's defense attorney.

In June 1998 Jenni Mettler (now Vincent) had taken over the case from another prosecutor, who told Mettler about the affair. After meeting with her cocounsel, Kate Mahoney (who now works for the office of Todd Graves, U.S. attorney for the western district of Missouri), and her supervisor, Ted Hunt, Mettler decided not to tell the defense about the relationship, despite the prosecution's duty to disclose information that might be favorable to the defense.

Before McKinley's 1999 deposition, he later testified, he had a meeting with Mettler and, at his request, they devised a secret signal: Mettler would clear her throat if the defense attorney asked a question that required him to admit that he was Tina White's lover. During the deposition, she never cleared her throat, he says, so he fudged the truth. Mettler, however, denied that she and McKinley had arranged a signal.

Ted White's defense attorneys didn't find out about the affair until after the trial, when they got a phone call from one of Tina's male coworkers. Attracted to Tina and resentful of her other suitor, the man told them that Tina was dating McKinley and had been for a while. Eventually, Mettler told the defense that she had known about the affair.

Mettler's lack of disclosure became a crucial argument for White's appeal. Even though White had gone to Costa Rica, the appeals court judge concluded that he deserved a new trial because the information about the affair could have affected the outcome of his first trial. Mettler's assumption that the information was immaterial, Smart wrote, was incorrect.

When Mettler took the stand during the second trial (she'd been called as a prosecution witness), she insisted she had done the right thing, despite the appeals court's opinion.

"The basis of my decision was that, legally, I did not believe that it was relevant," Mettler testified at the 2004 trial.

After White's second trial, the idea that a man could be put away by a shoddy investigation conducted by someone who seemed more eager to bed the accused's wife than to find the truth appealed to jurors' senses of right and wrong.

"I thought it was a cut-and-dried case," says juror Darrel Priddle, a high school drama teacher from Raytown who was convinced of Ted White's innocence.

Several jurors reconstructed their deliberations for the Pitch.

Sitting around a conference table, they took an anonymous poll on paper. One juror asked what the undecided ones should do, and Priddle suggested that they write whatever verdict they were leaning toward. By law they would ultimately have to reach a unanimous decision -- guilty or not guilty -- on each of the 12 counts. Jury foreman Lawrence Smith collected all of the votes: The vote was eight to four in favor of acquittal.

Prosecutors had fought a request that the jurors be allowed to take notes during the trial, but White's attorneys had prevailed and most of the jurors had each filled between two and six notebooks with reminders about the testimony.

So the jurors turned to their notes, and Smith wrote an outline of the testimony on a flip chart.

Only one juror, Mike Cannavan, hadn't taken notes. He was convinced that Ted White was guilty.

The process took several hours, and when it was finished, Smith took another vote. Several jurors had changed their minds, and the tally was 11 to 1 in favor of acquittal. Cannavan was the holdout. Other jurors say they asked him to explain his decision. "He kept saying, 'I just think he's guilty,'" Priddle remembers.

Many of the jurors said that, because prosecutors had no physical evidence, their entire case rested on Jami's testimony. The jurors returned to what Jami had said each time she claimed to have been abused: her videotaped interview with the Child Protection Center, her interview with Speck, her testimony in the 1999 trial and her current testimony. Jami's story had changed many times.

For instance, Jami said that when she was 10, Ted White had used a beaded lotion and had tried to penetrate her in Ted and Tina's bedroom. In her interview with officer Bledsoe, Jami said her father never had or attempted to have intercourse with her. In her interview with Speck, she said Ted White had put his penis inside her for 1 minute. During the 2004 trial, she said Ted White had tried to put his penis in her but had stopped when she cried. When they charted other incidents, jurors found similar variations in her testimony.

"That in itself, to me, made it hard to believe her -- she added things and changed things," juror Sarah Mehl, a Kansas City mother of three, tells the Pitch.

To some jurors, certain events that Jami described were not plausible. Jami testified that during the winter of 1997, her father had rented a limousine to take the family to FAO Schwarz on the Plaza and to dinner at Skies restaurant. Jami said that, while her mother and brother were sitting across from them, facing them, Ted White had placed his wife's fur coat over himself and Jami and reached down her pants and "fingered" her without the rest of the family noticing anything unusual.

"I just don't think a 12-year-old girl could hide that from her mom to where her mom wouldn't know anything was going on," Priddle says.

Other details bothered the jurors, too. Priddle points out that Jami wore braces during the time her father was supposed to be forcing her to give him "blow jobs," which didn't seem right. "A 10-year-old with braces? I don't think he'd want her to do it a second time," Priddle says.

Timelines didn't match, either. Jami claimed one incident of abuse had happened right after she got home from school on the day her mother was in the hospital for "tummy tuck" surgery; Jami claimed that her father was interrupted by a phone call from her mother, which Danny answered. Yet hospital records showed that Tina White was under anesthesia until almost 9 p.m. that day. And in court, Danny didn't remember answering such a phone call.

Moreover, many jurors didn't believe that on March 8, 1998, Ted White, in business meetings until the afternoon and then in a rush to get to the airport before a snowstorm grounded flights, would take the time to stick his head underneath an afghan to give his daughter oral sex for 10 minutes in front of her 2-year-old brother, who was watching Peter Pan on TV.

But jurors say Cannavan told them he believed Jami White's testimony and that he thought the defense witnesses were lying.

On the afternoon of the first day of deliberations, foreman Smith followed Cannavan into the storage room where Cannavan took smoke breaks. They talked for about 2 hours, jurors say. Then Priddle talked to Cannavan.

"I begged him, just give me one reason why you think he's guilty," Priddle says.

Other jurors say that Cannavan got so angry at them that he began yelling, getting out of his chair, pacing the floor and cursing at them. Sometimes he stormed away from deliberations to go to the smoking room.

Cannavan, a 52-year-old press operator from Independence, told the other jurors that he had dealt with people like them his whole life, other jurors say. "He kept saying, 'You all think you're smarter than me,'" says Josephine Hawk, an Italian-born grandmother in her sixties. "I told him, 'I'm not any smarter than you. I'm just a plain housewife.'"

The next day, the 11 jurors talked to Cannavan about reasonable doubt. Several jurors say he admitted he had reasonable doubt of White's guilt. Some jurors explained to Cannavan that the law says a juror who has reasonable doubt must vote not guilty, but Cannavan reportedly just got angry. They considered sending a note to the judge to complain that one of the jurors was not following the law, but the diplomatic Smith refused.

"I kept telling Larry to tell them that we had a juror up here who was ignoring the instructions of the court. ... He would not send it down. I said, 'He needs to know what's going on up here,'" says Milanez Harrison, a 30-year-old bank employee who lives in midtown.

By the afternoon of the second day, the jury decided to send the judge a note saying they could not reach a unanimous decision. Atwell told them to keep trying. At one point, 27-year-old Jamie Holman, who works in human resources for a company in Overland Park, says she followed Cannavan into the storage room and talked to him while he smoked. She says he told her that he could read faces and he knew Ted White was guilty.

Later, back in the jury room, she got mad and snapped at Cannavan. "I said, 'Mike, maybe you should just admit to everyone here that you think you can read faces and you think Ted has a child-molester-looking face,'" she recalls. Jurors recall that Cannavan rose and leaned toward her, saying, "I hope you have a little girl one day, and I hope she gets molested by someone like Ted White."

By the end of the third day, several of the jurors say, they were so upset that they couldn't even look at Cannavan anymore. Priddle says he felt he had failed. Others felt the system had failed, allowing 11 reasonable people to be thwarted by a single unreasonable one.

They again sent a note to Atwell that they were deadlocked. He declared a mistrial.

Cannavan did not respond to several attempts by the Pitch to contact him. Regardless of what might have motivated him, defense attorney Short classifies Cannavan's behavior as a freak occurrence, an aberration that resulted in an unfair outcome for Ted White. "Usually, the system works," Short tells the Pitch. "You couldn't anticipate something like this happening."

Several jurors told Short that they felt they had to do something to help Ted White. "They don't feel their service is over until Ted is freed," Short tells the Pitch. "That is enormously unusual."

According to the spokesman for the Missouri Attorney General's office, Ted White, now 42, will go on trial again in January 2005. If he wins, he'll be set free. He says he would like to spend time with his mother, father and brother, who have mortgaged their home a second time to help pay for his defense. If he's found guilty, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

White's attorneys are still trying to decide whether their client should talk to reporters. Earlier this summer, 48 Hours sent a camera crew to Missouri to conduct interviews with people who know White. For now, White's only statement has been a videotaped one taken by his lawyers. In it, White talks about the pain he's been through and the difficulty of enduring "false allegations" from a daughter he loved.

"We believed in the justice system -- we being my family and I -- and we trusted in the beginning that the truth would prevail," White said on the tape. "We were very naïve, we were too trusting, and we were wrong."

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The next two articles are from The Aurora Advertiser , July 23, 2004

White family, lawyers, friends gear up for the third round;
Town Hall Meeting reviews facets of controversial case
By Kim McCully-Mobley
Managing Editor

Downtown Aurora was a busy place last Saturday night as Bootleggers had quite a line up for the weekend dinner crowd.  Parents dropped their children off, at the Princess Theatre to see their choice of “Spiderman’’ or “A Cinderella Story”.   But around the corner and down the street on Madison Avenue, Kaffe Metropolitan had standing room only crowd for a Town Hall Meeting aimed at garnering support for former Aurora High School graduate Ted White, Jr., 42, who is looking at a third trial on charges of child molestation and pornography in Kansas City next January.

White was convicted of the charges involving his stepdaughter after charges were filed in 1998 and earned a massive 224-year prison sentence.

After being released on his own recognizance, White fled and a much-publicized search found him in Costa Rica. He was extradited, brought back home to the United States and began serving his sentence.

A Missouri appellate ruling was handed down in 2002 granting White a new trial on grounds of prosecutor misconduct and the withholding of information in the first three-day trial. The second trial was heard before a Jackson County jury just this year. After more than three weeks, this jury was hopelessly deadlocked with an 11-1 vote for acquittal.

White’s incarceration has included a prison beating, surgery, a newfound faith in God and hundreds of supporters jumping on the bandwagon to get his story told to his home-town citizens, his Kansas City colleagues, the nation and the world.

A website (www.freetedwhite.com) is getting hundreds of hits on the internet and several jurors have indicated they won’t find closure until Ted White comes home and justice is served.

While White urged his family and friends to stay on a moral high road, stories continue to fly regarding the handling of the initial charges and the people involved. In fact, White himself called it “egregious misconduct” on the part of the Jackson County prosecutor’s office in 1998.   

One item of information withheld from jurors at the first trial was that the lead detective in the case, Richard McKinley, was having an affair with White’s wife, Tina. The two were later married and information provided by a family nanny has placed McKinley at the White home as a handyman of sorts prior to the time charges were filed in 1998.

State prosecutors were apparently aware of the affair at the time of the first trial, but they deemed it irrelevant and reportedly believed the affair started after charges were filed, explained Cyndy Short, one of the members of White’s defense team, which is part of the Public Interest Litigation Clinic in Kansas City. Short and Sean O’Brien were on hand Saturday night and vehemently indicated their desire to get White’s story told and find justice.

They have filed a request with Judge Charles Atwell to name himself as the 12th juror in the second trial and make legal history by reviewing the evidence, the testimony and casting his vote.

A hearing on that request and other briefs in the case will be held within the next two months in Kansas City. In the meantime, a third trial has been set for January of 2005.

Dr. Ted White, a Mount Vernon optometrist who makes his home in rural Aurora, spoke to the crowd Saturday in behalf of his family and indicated it was a crowd of “awesome people” willing to stand for what’s right.

In his opinion, “we won, but we didn’t get to bring Ted home,” he stated. He said God and his son had taught about love, faith and hope in recent years.

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Aurora Advertiser
Meeting filled with: tears, laughter, and quest for truth, funding and support
By Kim McCully-Mobley
Managing Editor

Forty years is a long time to call a place home.

Ted White, Sr., said he has lived in Aurora area for 40 years and is proud to be a Houn Dawg and is equally proud of his family, his friends and even the strangers who have stepped forward to rally around his cause.

White gave some introductory welcome remarks at the July 17 Town Hall Meeting in downtown Aurora at Kaffe Metropolitan.  While some of those in attendance took time to partake in refreshments, the real reason more than 75 people and at least four camera crews crowded into the local restaurant was to hear what former jurors of Ted White, Jr., had to say.

The younger White is a 1980 graduate of Aurora High School, where he excelled in academics and athletics.  He is jailed now on a string of charges involving the molestation of his stepdaughter and pornography. (See today’s front page story for more information.)

White, a local optometrist, called his son’s attorneys a blessing and credited God and his family with teaching him a great deal in recent years about faith, hope and love.  He said he learned a great deal about life in general from the movies when he was young and cited examples of John Wayne coming to the rescue.  He spoke to a Former Aurora Football Coach Harvey Welch who was seated in the crowd and said he was sure his son would love to tell him it’s not a good thing to turn the sprinklers on when the band is on the football field.  He also thanked Former Basketball/Golf Coach Don Sparks for coming to the meeting and said his son once asked his coach and mentor how to cure a shank on the golf course and Sparks replied: “I don’t know. I never had one.”  As the laughter subsided, White went on to indicate his son loved his children and even forgives the daughter who made the accusations against him six years ago.  He said if he could say one thing to his son right now it would be: “Ted, you hang in there, because John Wayne’s a comin’.”

Cyndy Short, an attorney with the Public Interest Litigation Clinic representing Ted’s case. She said she felt his defense team’s main roles in this case is to prove Ted’s innocence and get his story told.

She credited Judge Charles Atwell with running a good courtroom during the second trial, which ended June 2 with a hung jury. Jurors deliberated for several days before announcing they were hopelessly deadlocked at 11-1 for acquittal. A third trial is now expected to take place in January of 2005.

“The rules were applied fairly…and we felt so strongly our story had been told,” she told the crowd of some 75 people amidst the glare of television cameras in the Summit City.  She said for the first time in six years, she was proud to be able to bring Ted home via video, where he could finally speak.

White, clad in a chambray shirt, addressed the crowd via video and thanked everyone for coming. He posed three questions for people to ponder.

“How does an innocent man defend himself from horrible false allegations from someone he loves? Especially a daughter?”

“How does a man who is falsely accused and wrongfully convicted defend himself when the justice system fails to protect his rights?”

“Now that we know the truth, what should we do about it?’

White spoke about the irony of the system and how many people believed in his guilt from the moment charges were filed.

He said things had changed somewhat over the years and people seem willing now to look at the evidence. He said some of the jurors who heard his case just a few weeks ago are speaking out.

He said several things resulted in his initial conviction, including judicial errors, perjury, investigative cover-ups and the withholding of evidence.

He said things initially began to turn around for him when the 2002 appellate ruling granted him a second trial. He said he regrets some of the things he has said about his prosecutors. He said he no longer thinks about revenge or hate. The answer, he said, is love.  “The hardest thing I ever had to do was get on my knees and pray for my enemies. I still do,” he stated.

Attorney Sean O’Brien later served as a mediator while former jurors on hand told their stories to the crowd.  All three indicated they had concerns about the lack of real evidence in the case and said they wanted both justice and closure on the matter.  Darrell Priddle, Jill Miller and Milanez Harrison all made the trek to Aurora last weekend to support the White family and their quest for justice.   They all agreed how their emotions had run the proverbial gamut during the course of the trial and several inconsistencies in the state’s case plagued them to this day.

“Jami’s story didn’t add up,” stated Harrison. Jami McKinley is White’s stepdaughter and accuser in the case.

Harrison recalled a family ride in a limousine where an assault was allegedly recalled by the stepdaughter. Most jurors found it hard to believe an incident would occur while White’s wife was just a few feet away in the same vehicle.

Jurors told a story how testimony from Jami said her mother had been hospitalized for a “tummy tuck” and had interrupted an incident of molestation with a phone call on a certain day.  Miller took up the story and said when medical records were acquired, the time of the phone call would have been while the mother was under anesthetic. The brother, Danny White (whom Ted White adopted), could remember no such phone call when he was on the stand.

Priddle described the detective work in the case as “sloppy and unfair.”  He indicated a crucial piece of evidence was Jami’s diary, which contained no reports of White’s wrongdoing, according to police. The diary later disappeared.

Priddle said he prayed for wisdom during his stint as a juror and said he believed God is a “God of justice”.

He said he didn’t believe in coincidence and felt sure he was a part of this story for a reason. But, right now, he describes the chain of events as one leading up to “unfinished business.”   “I’m unequivocally convinced of his innocence,” he stated.   He cited some aspects of the trial that bothered him and said he didn’t intend to go into great detail about all of them.

O’Brien reiterated some of the testimony and said he didn’t want to talk about some of the things in a “room full of polite people.”   However, Priddle went on to say the stepdaughter had worn braces from the time she was 10 on (as a series of photographs indicated) and her stepfather wouldn’t have wanted her to do those things she described in court while wearing braces.

When the meeting closed with a passionate talk from White’s sister – Tiffany Means of Aurora, lawyers paused to answer questions from the floor.

When asked if White had wanted to testify in court, O’Brien paralleled the chain of events to a game of Blackjack. “If you’ve got 20 showing you don’t say hit me,” he explained, referring to the gambler’s game of 21 with a deck of cards and a dealer.

He said White wanted to testify at both trials; however, the defense team felt good about the testimony, the evidence and the ability of the jury to come to a just conclusion. “We thought we had proved our case“, he explained.

The jurors on hand nodded their heads in agreement, saying they didn’t need to hear White’s testimony. “I didn’t have to hear from Ted White”, stated Priddle.

For now, people in the White camp seem to be waiting for a decision by Judge Atwell regarding a request to disqualify the holdout juror and name himself the 12th juror.

January 6, 2005, has been marked on the calendar as the date for a third trial to begin in the case. And funds are being gathered to further the case.

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From FOX 4 News website
Posted:7/16/2004 10:55:45 PM
Modified:7/18/2004 9:55:15 PM

Town Hall Meeting for Ted White

Aurora, MO-- Eleven of the 12 jurors said he was not-guilty, but Ted White remains in jail. Now several of those eleven jurors are now advocates for ted White and hope to get his story out into the public. Saturday, July 17th, the jurors who sat on Ted White's re-trial and White's defense team will hold a town hall meeting in White's home town of Aurora, Missouri. They will discuss the case with the public and the media in an effort to raise awareness about the case. Attorney Sean O'Brien says they also hope to raise money for White's defense, because White's parents have been devastated financially. "They've mortgaged and re-mortgaged their home as much as they possibly can," O'Brien said, "and if we end up going back to trial it'll cost hundreds of thousands of dollars." For more information about the town hall meeting or the trial background, go to www.FreeTedWhite.com

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From FOX 4 News website
Posted:7/17/2004 3:11:23 PM

Modified:7/19/2004 6:45:56 AM

Jurors say Mistrial Keeps Innocent Man in Prison

Kansas City, MO - A man accused of child molestation now has some strong supporters fighting for his freedom. One jury convicted Ted White of child molestation in 1999. But a court of appeals judge ordered a re-trial, which ended last month in a hung jury. Now that second set of jurors is speaking out. They say their job was to see justice done. Even though the trial ended in a hung jury, they say justice was not done, so their job isn't over yet.

Ted White sits in Clay County Detention Center today, six years after his adoptive daughter accused him of molesting her. He was found guilty in 1999. His attorney Sean O'Brien says White and his family thought his life was over, so "he did a not wise thing legally and hoped a plane and fled to Costa Rica." America's Most Wanted ran White's picture and some tourists in Costa Rica called police when they saw him working at a hotel. White shouldn't have been able to appeal his conviction, since he fled the country, but new evidence was surfacing. The defense found out Tina, White's wife, was having an affair with the sex crimes investigator assigned to the case. A court of appeals judge was convinced White deserved a new trial.

O'Brien says his office was always convinced of WHite's innocence "otherwise we wouldn't have taken on they case." They knew a new, unbiased investigation would prove his innocence. O'Brien says the new trial brought out many inconsistencies in White's accuser's story. Eleven of the jurors agreed. Juror Jill Miller says the jury quickly reached an eleven to one verdict. "Like a smoking gun we never found anything like that to convict him on," she said. "I absolutely think he's innocent it's beyond reasonable doubt," said juror Darrel Priddle, "the mound of evidence, the contradictions, you couldn't understand unless you sat there for 17 days."

The jury voted eleven to one to acquit -- again and again. The lone hold out, juror Michael Cannavan, wouldn't vote to acquit and refused to explain to the others why. He even admitted having reasonable doubt to the other jurors. After almost three days of deliberation, the jury had to tell the judge they were deadlocked. "When he declared a mistrial some of us cried," Miller said. "I felt like I failed," Priddle said, "if I can do something to help an innocent man out of jail I would feel good about that."

White's attorneys are appealing hoping the case will be dismissed. If that fails, his new trial will begin in January. Juror Michael Cannavan and White's ex-wife Tina could not be reached for comment. The Attorney General's office says it can't comment because of the re-trial. See Fox four's story "Town Hall Meeting for Ted White" for details about efforts to help in his defense.

Tess Koppelman, Fox 4 News

tkoppelman@wdaftv4.com

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From KOLR 10 News website
http://www.kolr10.com/news/default.asp?mode=shownews&id=860

Jurors Fight to Free Man Accused of Molestation

An Ozarks native, accused of molesting his stepdaughter, is getting unprecedented help from many of the jurors in his last trial, who say he is wrongly accused.

Theodore White couldn`t attend the rally held on his behalf in his southwest Missouri hometown because he remains in a jail in northwest Missouri awaiting a third trial on charges of molesting his stepdaughter.

But the roughly 100 people who gathered at a restaurant Saturday night believe in White`s innocence - as did 11 of the 12 jurors in his latest trial, some of whom are now speaking publicly.

The lone holdout in last month`s hung jury in Jackson County Circuit Court conceded there was reasonable doubt of White`s guilt but refused to vote for his acquittal, according to at least four jurors now urging freedom for the 42-year-old former businessman from Lee`s Summit.

White`s case has rested partly on his wife`s romance with the Lee`s Summit police detective who investigated the molestation charges. Prosecutors knew of that affair but did not disclose it at his first trial.

Defense lawyers have contended that the wife and stepdaughter concocted the charges against him. The wife and detective are now married, and White remains held in the Clay County jail in Liberty.

"From the moment those false words left my adopted daughters lips, I was guilty," White said in a statement videotaped at the jail and played for the rally Saturday night. "Automatically, without question. So why even have a trial?"

The case began with allegations that White molested his stepdaughter over three years beginning in 1995, when the girl was 10 years old. He was convicted in February 1999 in Jackson County Circuit Court by a jury that recommended he be sentenced to more than 200 years on 12 criminal counts.

White fled to Costa Rica while awaiting sentencing but was captured in September 1999 and brought back to Jackson County, where he was sentenced the following March to 50 years in prison.

Citing prosecutors` failure to disclose the affair between White`s wife and the investigating detective, the Missouri Court of Appeals ordered a new trial.

The ruling was unusual because almost all Missouri prisoners who escape before sentencing lose appeal rights. White`s right to a fair trial, the appeals court ruled, outweighed the so-called escape rule.

In this year`s second trial, the girl, now an 18-year-old college student, testified again last month, as did her mother and the detective, experts and others. Jurors deliberated for about 20 hours over three days before Jackson County Circuit Judge Charles Atwell declared a mistrial.

Those in favor of acquittal said the news of the mother`s affair was a factor, but discrepancies between the victim`s testimony and her past statements created reasonable doubt of guilt.

Milanez Harrison was one of the 11 jurors who voted to aquit White. "I thought her story was inconsistant," Harrison said of White`s stepdaughter`s allegations. "If those things happened to her, she should have remembered. I feel he should have been freed. I should be over.

Jill Miller, who served on White`s latest jury, said she felt the state`s evidence fell short of what was needed to convict him.

"I think that the 11 of us feel very strongly about (White`s) innocence," said Miller, of Lee`s Summit. "We feel like justice was not done."

But a twelth juror refused to change their position during deliberation - the lone holdout, which resulted in a hung jury.

White`s third trial is now set for January 2005. In Aurora, where he graduated from high school in 1990 as an outstanding athlete and student, the gathering Saturday night was called to inform friends and supporters about the case and raise money for his legal defense.

"I couldn`t walk away from him, knowing what I know," Harrison said.

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July 17th, 2004 Joplin Globe - Family plans rally for convicted son

Jeff Wells
Globe Staff Writer
7/17/04

AURORA, Mo. - Prosecutors apparently didn't tell Ted White Jr.'s lawyers the whole truth.

White, a graduate of Aurora High School, was convicted in 1998 of molesting his adopted stepdaughter. White's family, including his parents, Ted White, a Mount Vernon optometrist, and Myrna White, believe he is innocent and say he is a victim of the criminal justice system.

"As a family, we have fought to clear his name from the very day the accusations were made," his father wrote in a letter to the Globe. "Our goal has been to reveal the truth and set Ted free so that he might rebuild his life."

They are asking residents to attend a town-hall meeting at 8 p.m. today at Kaffe Metropolitan, 129 S. Madison, in Aurora. They say they want to tell the people of Aurora about their son's case and try to raise money to pay his legal fees.

According to an appeals court ruling, Jackson County prosecutors knew during White's trial that White's wife, Tina, and Lee's Summit police Detective Richard McKinley were having an affair while McKinley investigated claims that White sexually abused the couple's daughter. The two are now married. The prosecutors never told White's attorneys about the romance, according to court documents.

A jury convicted White, and he was sentenced to prison. White's lawyers later learned that prosecutors withheld the evidence and won a second trial.

During three weeks of testimony at the new trial, which was conducted May 6 to June 2 this year, White's attorneys convinced 11 of the 12 jurors that the prosecutors did not prove White's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; however, one juror voted to convict White.   Jurors say the lone guilty voter never revealed his reasons for wanting to convict White. One juror called the man "a nut on a personal mission."
Judge Charles Atwell declared a mistrial. White's third trial is slated to begin in January 2005.
Several of the jurors from the second trial are now working to free White.

"I personally am unequivocally convinced that Ted White Jr. is innocent on all charges," juror Darrel Priddle said in a letter to Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon.  "We debated heatedly for about twenty hours over a three-day period. The lone holdout could not clarify his feelings about Mr. White's guilt and was unable to sway the rest of us from our opinions of not guilty."

Priddle asked Nixon to dismiss the case.

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July 4th, 2004 Springfield News-Leader  -   Jurors Fighting to Free Defendant

Published July 4, 2004 in the Springfield, MO News-Leader

Jurors fighting to free defendant
For 11 jurors in Ted White's molestation retrial, the evidence didn't add up.

By Sarah Overstreet
News-Leader

Theodore W. White has some powerfully persuasive new allies in his long battle to get out of jail — members of the jury that fell one vote short of acquitting him in a retrial ordered by a Missouri appellate court.

"I'm on a mission," says juror Darrel Priddle, a Raytown theater arts teacher who is moving to Nixa to teach this coming school year. "I'm going to do whatever it takes to fight for this guy. ... I felt like I was selected on that jury and it was a call to seek justice."

He and at least three other jurors plan to join White's attorneys in trying to tell his story to the press, to fellow citizens, to anyone they believe will listen. They want to free White from the Clayco Detentional Center in Liberty, where he has been held in isolation since he was brutally beaten at the Jefferson City Correctional Center.

They will be in White's hometown of Aurora on July 17, where they hope to enlist citizens' aid in getting contributions to the legal firm helping White's parents, Myrna and Ted White Sr.

And what a story they have to tell.

Ted White Jr. was an Aurora honor student who won a college scholarship to play football. He eventually moved to Lee's Summit, married and adopted his wife's two children.

In 1998 he was convicted of molesting his adopted stepdaughter. While awaiting sentencing, he fled to Costa Rica. He was found and brought back to serve a 50-year sentence.

He says he was wrongly convicted, in part because of prosecutorial misdeeds. The Public Interest Litigation Firm in Kansas City, best known for winning the freedom of wrongly convicted death-row inmate Joseph Amrine, took an interest in White.

In April 2002, the Missouri Court of Appeals-Western District ordered a new trial. In its opinion, the court cited an earlier state appellate decision that said, "Judicial discretion is abused when a trial court's ruling is clearly against the logic of the circumstances ... and is so arbitrary and unreasonable as to shock the sense of justice."

White's latest trial lasted from May 6 to June 2 in Kansas City. For 11 of the 12 jurors, there was no doubt of White's innocence.

"There's just not one thing that I feel uneasy about," says juror Jill Miller, who works as a legal assistant in a Kansas City law firm. "He is not guilty, for sure. There is not one bit of evidence the state brought us to prove his guilt."

She was disgusted when a mistrial was called because one juror would not budge. "When it was over we just cried," Miller says. "It was so outrageous, there are no words to describe it. ... After the verdict, (several jurors) went out together, and said, 'We want to do anything we can to help them out. We just can't let it end like this — we have to do something to help them.'"

That's included writing letters to Attorney General Jay Nixon, urging him to drop the charges against White instead of proceeding with a January re-trial for White. Scott Holste, the attorney general's spokesman, said it would be inappropriate to comment before that trial.

What left no doubt in 11 jurors' minds that White was innocent?

•Jackson County Assistant Prosecutor Jenny Mettler Vincent, who argued the state's case in the 1998 trial, knew about an affair between Lee's Summit Detective Richard McKinley and White's wife, Tina, while McKinley was investigating allegations that Ted White was molesting his daughter.

Court testimony showed that Vincent never revealed information about the affair in White's original trial. Rather, she accepted McKinley's explanation that his romantic feelings for Tina White did not affect his investigation. Court testimony also revealed that McKinley found a diary belonging to White's daughter, but did not enter it into evidence and returned it to Tina White and her daughter. It has since disappeared.

Tina White and McKinley are now married and live in Lee's Summit. Both said they could not comment because of the new trial scheduled in January.

•The Whites' elderly former nanny, Nina Morerod, testified that when a broken door needed to be fixed at the Whites' home in September 1997 — six months before their daughter first alleged sexual molestation on March 21, 1998 — the person who fixed it was Richard McKinley.

In White's original trial, McKinley and Tina White claimed not to have met until March 25, 1998.

"When the nanny said McKinley had come to fix the door six months before, my jaw dropped," Priddle says.

•Jurors found the daughter's testimony to contradict itself on several occasions. Others' testimony and investigation also contradicted it.

On one occasion the daughter, now 18, testified that abuse occurred while her mother, Tina McKinley, was having "tummy tuck" surgery. The girl testified that the abuse was interrupted when her younger brother took a phone call from his mother between 3:30 and 4:40 p.m.

But hospital records show that Tina McKinley was in surgery and under anesthesia from approximately 2:50 until after 9 p.m. that day. Her brother, now 17, testified that he remembers no phone call from his mother.

The girl also testified that during that afternoon period, Ted White's brother Ryan came from his home in Maryville with his former girlfriend and interrupted the abuse. Ryan White and his former girlfriend, Lindsay Gray Hagan, testified that Hagan didn't get off work in Maryville — two hours away — until 6:30, and didn't arrive at the White home until 9 p.m.

"There was no physical evidence, no witnesses, and (the daughter) changed her story so many times," says juror Sarah Mehl, a Jackson County homemaker. "One thing that was huge to me was that when she was supposedly being abused, testimony revealed that the son was always getting to go to the lake with Ted and (the daughter) said, 'Why can't I go? Why does Danny always get to go?' An abused child isn't going to want to go off alone with her abuser."

•Danielle Camp, one of the daughter's former classmates, testified she thought the daughter's stories sounded strange back then. She kept notes passed to her from the daughter in eighth grade, after White had been barred from having any visitation or contact with the children.

Camp testified that in the spring and summer of 1998, the daughter wrote to Camp that she was afraid because she had a court-ordered visitation with White that weekend. "Ted had no visitation, period," says White's attorney, Sean O'Brien.

"She told friends about vaginal intercourse, but a hospital exam at a children's hospital showed her hymen was still intact," O'Brien says.

Notes passed to Camp also tell about going to "Curt's house" — a code name the daughter used for McKinley, according to Camp's testimony — six months before White's first trial to look at their new rooms and pick out paint and wallpaper.

•Testimony and Missouri Revenue Department documents filed in the new trial revealed that Tina White McKinley was claiming her residence as Richard McKinley's house at least two months before she admitted it to court officials.

•Marilyn Valentine, once a friend of Tina White McKinley, testified how Tina had arranged for Ted White Jr. to adopt her children. She told the children's biological father that if he didn't give up parental rights, she would accuse him of molesting the children, Valentine testified.

The children's father has since died in a car accident.

So how did this case end with a hung jury and a mistrial?

Fellow jurors say it was juror Mike Cannavan's refusal to obey instructions given to the jury that any "reasonable doubt" required a vote of not guilty.

"He was verbally abusive, cursing, admitted he had reasonable doubt," Miller says. "We were all given notebooks, and we took almost 200 pages of notes, but this guy took no notes. We asked him several times to just explain why he thought Ted was guilty, and he said, 'I don't have to explain it. I can just feel the way I feel.'

"I said, 'Yes, you do, you have to convince us, we are here to reach a unanimous verdict. Maybe we're not seeing things the way we should. I'm willing to give you the floor for two hours to let you explain your viewpoint.'

"He wouldn't. At one point, he stood up and pointed at me and said he couldn't wait for Ted White to get out of jail and do these things to my daughter someday."

Juror Milanez Harrison, a secondary marketing specialist for Commerce Bank, remembers telling Cannavan that he had to find White innocent if Cannavan had any reasonable doubt. "He said, 'I don't have to do anything, and the more you all keep trying to convince me, the more I'm not gonna do it,'" Harrison says.

Priddle says he talked to Cannavan in the men's room and practically begged him to give him some proof of why he believed White was guilty. "He never would answer."

Four phone messages left over the past week at Cannavan's home in Independence were not returned.

After jurors described Cannavan's behavior, O'Brien and co-counsel Cindy Short decided to investigate whether Cannavan had been truthful on his jury application.

O'Brien says he hadn't.

"On his form, he said he'd lived in Jackson County 29 years. He's been there since 2002," O'Brien says. "He claimed not to have ever been a party to a civil or criminal suit. But we found four actions where he'd been sued by landlords, credit-card companies and filed bankruptcy."

O'Brien filed a motion Monday, asking the judge to disqualify Cannavan for lying on his application and not following instructions to the jury. (The motion calls on the judge to acquit White and dismiss the case, and to reduce White's bond so he can have a chance to leave jail until the judge reaches a decision.)

"It asks the court to consider all the evidence of not guilty, presenting all the evidence from all jurors, including the alternates," Short explains. "We're hoping we can get that done in either August or September."

And in the meantime, Miller, Priddle, Mehl and Harrison say they will be doing whatever they can to help White out.

"I'm meeting with Cindy Short on Monday," Harrison says. "It was heartbreaking to see the way it turned out. I told (Cannavan) 'You better pray nothing like this ever happens to you.'"

Contact News-Leader columnist Sarah Overstreet at 417-836-1188.

May, Aurora Advertiser - Jury deadlocks 11-1 in Ted White retrial

Jury deadlocks 11-1 in Ted White retrial

By Kim McCully-Mobley, Editor

Maybe the third time (or trial) will be the proverbial charm for a former Aurora man jailed on a series of sexual abuse and pornography charges involving his stepdaughter some nine years ago at this Kansas City home. The changes weren’t filed until 1998.

Following an intense, emotion-filled, three-week trial, a Jackson County jury deadlocked 11-1 last Wednesday for acquittal for Theodore (Teddy) White, Jr., 42, in a retrial granted in the wake of withheld evidence in the state’s first trial.

White is a 1980 graduate of Aurora High School, where he earned numerous academic and athletic honors.

His parents are Ted and Myrna White of Aurora. A brother, Ryan White, and a sister Tiffany Means, also make their homes in the Summit City.

Cyndy Short, one of the attorneys representing White, said the non-profit legal firm called Public Interest Litigation Clinic in Kansas City, will aggressively be seeking a dismissal of the charges against White, who was in the midst of marital problems when the allegations were first waged.

His ex-wife, Tina McKinley, and the lead detective in the case (Richard McKinley), became involved in an affair during the initial probe of the stepdaughter’s accusations and later married in the wake of a $500,000 divorce settlement outlined in a 2002 Missouri Court of Appeals opinion issues from the Western District.

The lengthy document contains numerous allegations of misconduct and points out several apparent inconsistencies in the
state’s case.

Representatives of the State of Missouri were aware of the affair and withheld evidence regarding the relationship in the first trial after officials deemed the information as irrelevant according to the 2002 opinion which laid the groundwork for this year’s retrial of White, who was sentenced to some 224 years on charges of 13 counts of raping, sexually molesting, sodomizing and providing pornographic material to his minor daughter, now identified in court records as and 18-year-old college student.

White’s first trial lasted three days. A jury found him guilty and he was granted a temporary release after his family posted his bond.

Prior to turning himself back in to serve his prison sentence, White fled the country and was reportedly spotted in Arkansas, Florida and South America. He was apprehended in Costa Rica and extradited back to the United States, where he began serving his sentence.

At one time, White’s photo appeared on America’s Most Wanted’s website underneath a photo of Osama Bin Laden.

“There’s a difference in fleeing from justice and fleeing from injustice”, Short explained.

Four years ago, a judge refused an initial request for a new trial and change White’s sentence to 50 years.

After the 2002 appellate ruling for a new trail, white had the opportunity to use the state’s witnesses to get his story told – once and for all, Short explained Friday afternoon in a telephone call to The Aurora Advertiser.

“This time, we were able to show the breakdown of the marriage with the use of a big calendar.” Short explained, saying the timeline for the three years of the allegations focused on dates and times that White, an entrepreneur and finance man, was out of town on business.

She said the state’s own witnesses were also able to show the jurors that the lead detective didn’t do “much independent investigating” into the case and never interviewed White’s colleagues and business partners about his conduct or whereabouts on critical dates in the state’s case.

“Ted was able to speak with his family in the wake of the trail and told them the fight goes on. He urged them to not dwell on the ill feelings for any one person or persons. He says these things happen for a reason”, Short explained, adding that White seems to rely heavily on his faith, his religion and the support of his friends and family.

He remains optimistic and his spirits are good, she said.

Jury selection began on May 6. The screening process was held in court on May 10-11. The trial itself began on May 12 and concluded by the end of the day on Thursday May 27.

Jurors were able to take notes during the course of the trial and some filled as many as seven small notebooks, short stated.

When deliberations began on Friday, May 28, jurors reported an 8-4 vote in favor of acquittal. By noon the vote was 11-1, where it stayed until Wednesday evening (June 2) when the jury foreman reported a hopeless deadlock.

The lone holdout, Short said, took no notes and would not discuss his reasons with his fellow jurors – other than to say he didn’t have to and that he believed the state’s main witness.

“The system usually works. You can’t anticipate a wildcard of this nature”, Short explained.

Some interesting highlights of the trial from Short’s perspective, included the facts that the stepdaughter was able to be in the courtroom for most of the proceedings under the auspices of a new constitutional amendment.

Another aspect included the testimony of one of the state’s witnesses, Danny White, White’s adopted son who had been with White on a Boy Scout outing when the allegations first arose.

“His presence was powerful and sad”, said Short, who said he painted a loving, supportive relationship with White and admitted his love for a man who loved him back.

“We were lifted up in many ways. Eleven people were firmly convinced of Ted’s innocence and we were able to show some unreliability in the state’s main witnesses”, Short said.

In fact, she said the state’s own closing arguments at trial pointed out that there was no physical evidence.

If the state pursues another retrial, Short hopes to request a speedy on and said it could happen by this September.

She was assisted in the case by Sean O’Brien.

White remains jailed at the Clay County jail in Liberty.

His sister spoke with the newspaper the day after the trial ended and said his family was convinced of his innocence and was ready to “persevere”.

“We are disappointed. We wanted to bring him home”, she said.

A Kansas City Star story, published on June 3, said Michael Hendrickson, an assistant in the Attorney General’s office, served as special prosecutor during the scope of the trial. The Star’s story, written by Joe Lampe, said Hendrickson was ready to retry the case.

The Public Interest Litigation Clinic has a website and focuses on helping those the judicial system has allegedly failed in some way, Short said. They exonerated two death row inmates last year, she said.

The White family has worked to help pay for the legal expenses; but more money will be needed to pursue another trial, she said.

Those wanting to donate to his defense fund can send donations to: Public Interest Litigation Clinic, c/o Cyndy Short, 305 E. 63rd Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64113.

(Additional stories on this case will follow this summer.)

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jlambe@kcstar.com.