The Girlfriends S4/E4: Three Sisters

Hey, it's nicky. This is an episode about sisterhood, both the ones were born with and those we choose for ourselves. It's full of love, but there's also a lot of pain and stories that explore substance abuse, violence, murder, and sexual assault. One of those victims is a minor. There will also be some strong language, so if you or someone you love has been affected by any of the themes in the show, we've left some links in the description that offer resources and support take care of yourself.

The world go by.

As I grew up, I began to learn more about how this place was once a part of the Underground Railroad, a stop along the route enslaved black people took on the road to freedom. It's a part of our city's history that's all too easy to forget. When the Black Lives Matter movement swept across the world in twenty twenty,

Looking forward in deep when I saw her, and literally she is a full length of a block away and I noticed her walking up to me.

It was just almost like this weird eye contact.

I really saw this ray of light.

It was Nikki.

She was walking up. We had never met each other before. We just gravitated to each other. I had just immediately hugged her, and she hugged me. We introduced ourselves, but it felt like we already knew each other. It was just this automatic sense of familiarity. I can't even describe it. I've never had a feeling like that in my life. It was like meeting a sister. I didn't even realize I needed. We locked arms that day and we've been

I would get calls from friends and family members telling me to stop talking to the media because they was making me look bad.

Part of her wanted to move on, leave it all in the past, but rumors about Gallupski were coming to light and Nico wanted to join the fight, which is how she got put in touch with Khodija.

I was in my worst when I met Khadija. I was kind of like Larry to talk to her. But then we finally talked to each other. Oh, we was on that phone for a long time and it was like we have always knew each other.

We talked on the phone for probably about five or six hours the very first time we talked.

The three of us got to know each other pretty quickly. We were united by our experiences as black women fighting for justice and our shared goal of creating a better future for Kansas City. Kansas a city we love, but it was going to take a lot of work. I just knew that.

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

We shared stories during dinners, made plans over coffee and spent hours getting to know each other until our friendship began to feel like something deeper, a sisterhood. Police had failed to stop Glupski from putting the community at risk. The authorities hadn't held him accountable for the abuse he inflicted on the women we heard from, and it was starting to feel like nobody was coming to fight for the women of Kansas City. So we decided to fight for ourselves.

Oh God, Oh God, God.

I'm Nikki Richardson and from the teams at Novel and iHeart Podcast, this is the Girlfriend's Untouchable Big Episode four, three Sisters. When Kadija and I decided to join the fight, the woman we gravitated to was Nico Quinn. We thought we knew her story, her cousin's shooting, the witness intimidation, and the threat of her kids being taken away, But it turned out there was even more to Nico's connection to Glupski than we had realized, so we asked her to tell her story. From the very start.

I grew up in Wanda County, Kansas City, Kansas. I was born to Josephine Quinn, who had three daughters.

Nico, her older sister Liz, and their oldest sister Stacy.

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

The Queen sisters were like best friends.

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

But they were regular sisters who would pick her and wind each other up too.

Stacey used to be so honor I remember when we was little. Mamma used to be like, we said, Mama, can we ask some cookies or whatever? She say, clean up and y'all can get them hub. She was like, Stacey, get them kids a few of them cookies. She goes eh when she lick every cooky and didn't give it to us. She was honory, but she used to protect us.

Nico needed a protective presence in her life because her family was fractured. The father hadn't stuck around, and Josephine had a lifelong battle with mental health issues.

My mother was in and out of the psychiatric hospital, mental facilities all my life. She got paranoid schizophrenic. She'd be okay for a couple of months or maybe a few years, and then she'd go back into the mental hospitals. But then we end up moving to a home with my grandmother, grandfather, auntie, uncles, cousins, so probably about fifty of us in a six bedroom house. Nico.

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

I lived in nothing but chaos all my life as a kid. I see my uncle's fighting. The police was in and out of my grandmother's house, I almost say every other weekend. My grandfather was an active alcoholic. We was taught to be tough, have tough skin.

Their grandparents tried their best, but they failed to fully protect the queens sisters. One of their relatives, a man who was supposed to take the girls to school, took advantage of them.

My mom would have my uncle take us to school, and he would take us back to the house and would rape us before we would go to school. When it started, Stacy was eight, Liz was six, and I was four.

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

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

The Quinn's sisters went through a lot together, but they still had dreams. Stacey wanted to dedicate her life to taking care of people.

She was going to school to be a nurse.

In the mid nineteen eighties, Stacy, who was around sixteen years old, was doing a clinical placement at a local health center. She finished late some nights and usually got a ride home from one of her other relatives, but if they couldn't pick her up, she would make her own way back.

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

When Stacy walked through the door, she looked shaken. Her sisters immediately asked her what had happened. After a moment, she burst into tears. Stacy told them about the police officer she'd seen on her way home, a white man with brown hair, pushy eyebrows in a thick mustache. It was dark out, so he offered her a ride home. Being a kid who had no reason to distrust the police, Stacy had accepted the offer. When she got into his

She got raped and came in and told us and was holding her crime.

Stacy was their older sister, their protector. It was painful to see her so broken.

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

That he made. Nico didn't know what the police officer had threatened to do to her sister if she reported him, but she was beginning to discover how much power and influence the police wielded over her community. Nico came of age in the eighties, and as she grew up, she began to notice the ways her neighborhood was changing. There were patrol cars all around them, regular house raids across Guendero, and rumors of friends and relatives was getting locked up

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

Her grandmother came home from the community meeting with a handful of pamphlets.

And I'll never forget the one that said, Hi, my name is crack Cocaine. It said, I'll make a preacher forget how to preach, a teacher forget how to teach, a beauty queen forget her looks, a schoolgirl forget her books.

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

Stacey started experimenting with drugs. I know, she used to smoke and then she went to crack and that was her way of escaping.

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

I noticed that a lot of people that have talked to that start using drugs from childhood trauma, are things in their life that they don't understand and know how to deal with. A lot of women end up on the streets on drug prostitution.

And that's what happened to Stacy. She got addicted to drugs and became a sex worker to earn the money she needed to pay for them. It was dangerous work that led her to spend long nights walking up and down shady streets interacting with ceed men, one of whom was a constant presence Detective Roger Glupski.

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

It's the nineties in Guendero, a neighborhood on the northeast side of Kansas City. By day, it's a normal, slightly chaotic neighborhood filled with families and ordinary people living their lives. But at night it can become a pretty eerie place. Men selling drugs, women selling sex, sketchy individuals who linger

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

People were seeing him hanging out there off duty, not in his official role as a cop.

I received a phone call from the informant of mine. He's very animated in Basically, what he was saying was that Gallupski was at their patronize and prostitutes.

It turned out that the northeast side of the city wasn't just the area Galupski had been assigned to the CD. Streets in the dark back roads had become his hunting ground. Kadija and I wanted to find out how Gallupski had gotten started, what had shaped and enabled him to become the kind of police officer who abused his authority and

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

The public servants they are.

But Kadishi and I found a photo of some of the officers that joined the police force that year much more. They looked younger than we thought they would. Some of them even had baby faces. But we could tell they were police officers from the light blue uniforms.

They look like Jill House uniform.

They dodge, they really do.

I mean just very.

Yeah, very baggy blue shirts they've got. But ill fitting uniforms weren't our main concern. It was the people wearing them, in particular. A man on the second row from the top, so Glupski is I mean, he looks creepy. I mean he does look creepy, but he also looks like just kind of the guy you just walk past the grocery store, you know, just average build, a little bit on the pudgy side, wide pie face with you know, big old seventies.

Eight, I tell you, in this picture he has the largest, stickiest mustache. He looked like a gangster cop. To me, he's not very happy I'm a people reader because his lips is supporting the upside down frown.

He just seems very unassuming. I mean, yeah, he might seem.

He looks like the person who would cut up the cat and put it in his freeze.

He does look hard, but he looks like somebody who would get away with it for so long because you would, just.

You would.

That's all to say that. Back then, Roger Gulupski looked like a young, pretty unassuming new recruit. Another one of the officers in that photo is Max Seifert, a retired detective who graduated alongside Gallupski and worked with him during his time in the Crimes against Persons unit.

The Crimes Against Person's Union handled assaults, aggravated battery, rapes, child abuse. He wasn't a person that would share things or talk about things, you know. He was always kind of a quiet person. Now he was very close and kept things close to him.

Glupski quickly rose up the ranks because he gained a reputation for clearing up crimes in record time. He was given a private office, the kind of space where he could hold sensitive meetings and make confidential calls. But according to one of Max's colleagues, Gulupski took advantage of the privacy his office gave him to abuse his position.

A detective that was serving in his unit one day went to his office and what happened was the detective sees the doors shut and he just opens it and walks in. He didn't knock or anything. He walks in and he catches Glupski involved in a sexual compromising situation with a black female in his office.

According to Max, the detective immediately shut the door and walked away, taking in what he had just seen. A high level policeman having sex in the workplace. Max says someone reported it to their supervisor.

Nothing was known about it.

Even when it was allegedly reported to a division commander.

Instead of saying, hey, you know this is outrageous. You know, we're not going to tolerate this. You can't do this bring a discredit to the department, he said, don't you people have locks on your doors? Sexual miss condec was something the you know that just wasn't considered to be a bad thing. You know, Roger just being Roger. That's kind of like a boy's will be boys.

We reached out to the division commander Max is referring to, and his response was, this is an old rumor spread around the police department that was followed up on years ago. Had it occurred, an investigation would have resulted. Max says some officers in the police department knew about Glupski's misconduct. Others even witnessed his behavior in the office and on the streets, but he wasn't stopped. Gulupski kept his position of power and continued to target women like Nico Quinn's

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

It was a vicious cycle that was not only destroying her life, but affecting the people who loved and dependent on her too, because Stacy was a mother. In her teenage years, Stacey had given birth to her only son, a boy named Joranelle, and in spite of everything, she spent the eighties and nineties trying to be a good mom My.

Mama was really outgoing. You know, when music come on, she had to be saying it. Dance out that, well, you used to dance. She used to connect with me on that, like different songs that I used to listen to.

There's one song they both loved, the early nineties classic jump by Chris Cross. Remember it, Jump Jump, Chris Cross will make you.

She turned the music all the way up, and she turned a little light on and she clashed music and we just started dancing. Just she'll robing. She was on my level and the hype me up, you know, and made me feel better.

Stacy would take Joannelle to the park and show him her backbends. She spent hours teaching him how to play chess and making sure he felt loved. But as Joanelle got older, he began to notice his mother's issues.

I knew exactly what was going on, but I didn't know like was that normal or not?

You feel me?

When I got older, I realized it gets bad like that.

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

I always thought about her just like she thought about me, because it don't matter what you know. My mama is a mama. It wasn't a day she hadn't seen me. Let me know she's doing good, Get me kisses.

While Stacey could no longer look after her family, the way.

She used to.

She still had a protective streak, which brings us back to where the story started the spring of nineteen ninety four, when tragedy hit Guendero and Stacy and Nico's cousins Danielle and Donnie were murdered. When Stacey saw her younger sister, Nico, being drawn into detective Glupski's orbit during the murder investigation, her protective older sister instincts kicked in. Nico remembers the moment when she and Gallupski ended up in the room together around the time of Lamon's trial.

We've sitt in this little room and man Galuski was in his room. That's when he started hitting on me. Or I heard you dance, or I heard you used to be a dancer. Once you get on the table and let me watch you dance, I'll pay you. I'll this. At this time, my sister walked in and she looks at him, and she looks at me. He had the little grid on his face. So she pushed me, pulled me back and put her hand in his face and said, this one right here, you're gonna leave alone. You ain't

Stacey turned away from Gallupski and looked at Nico, her face serious, and she.

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

Glupski had ruined Stacy Quinn's life, corr s Nico into a false testimony, and sent an innocent man to prison for murder. But as we were about to discover, Gulupski had even more power over their city than the Quinn family could have possibly imagined. We knew he assaulted women and abused his power. But there was another mystery at the heart of the story, and the Quinn sisters were about to find themselves right in the.

Middle of it. We got here.

I'm sitting in a room with Khadisha. So this looks like an affidavit. We're looking through a bunch of files and papers AffA David, State of Kansas, County of Jefferson. Oh this is for Stacy. Stay Stacy Quan.

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

In fact, the Affidavid was signed in nineteen ninety six, two years after LaMonte McIntyre was convicted for her cousin Danielle's murder. It turned out that, like Nico, Stacey was desperate to do what she could to free Lamont from his wrongful conviction. Because Stacy had been at the scene of the shooting too, she had actually seen the shooter's face, but for some reason, Nico was the only sister called in as a witness. Stacy describes what happened in the Affidavid.

The man had braids in his hair and had on black pants with a white T shirt with black riding on it. The man walked up to the passenger side of the light blue car, pointing the shotgun at the passenger and fired twice.

Stacy saw the shooter, but she was never called in to make a witness statement.

And I think it was because she already had the relationship with Roger Gluspi.

Kadija and I couldn't help. But wonder if Gulupski had kept Stacy away from the murder investigation on purpose. Was he worried about bringing a woman he'd abuse to the police station. Was he trying to avoid the risk that she might expose him. A year went by and Nico moved on, But then she got an unexpected phone call from Minneapolis.

Somebody had kidnapped her and took her to Minneapolis, Minnesota. They told us they had found her beaten. She was naked in Excreuse of Minnesota in the wintertime. So me, my sister, my mom, and my cousin drove up to go get Stacy.

The police reassured them that Stacy was alive, but when they arrived in Minneapolis, they were distraught to see just how violently she'd been attacked.

She said that two guys in a truck kidnapped her, beat her up, raped her, sodomized her, and took out her clothes and stuff, and left her in the middle of the street of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She was so beat up in Bruce and my thought was, aren't you tired of going through this?

Nico doesn't know why her sister was kidnapped, but it wasn't the first time Stacy's life on the streets had led her to become a victim of brutal violence. It was painful to witness her sister's downward spiral love. Nico realized would not be enough to break Stacy out of addiction. Nico could use her experiences, though, to support other women in her community struggling with their mental health addictions and

I talked to a lot of the women on the streets that I kind of made my house like a safe house, and that made me feel good because I was able to do something for these people that nobody else would do because they looked down at them. I knew about twenty of them that would come and sit and talk to me, or come and if it's hot, maybe they just want to come and cool all for our glass of ice water. The Bible said, if you can't do anything else, give your brother or sister a drink.

Nico's home was a sanctuary, a place to sleep for a few nights while they got ready to pick themselves up.

I will make sure they eat, make sure they was warm or cool. When it was summertime. I'll let them wash their clothes, take showers, and just relax from whatever it is they've been through. And just sitting there talking to a lot of the women, they are human, just like we are.

They just got dealt a bad hand. One of those women was Ronda Tribute.

Ronda had moved up on twenty second in fen Dura.

On an early autumn night, Ronda came over for a chat.

She was just talking to me about her kids and her husband and the stuff her husband said and told her. And I asked her how did she end up getting out on the streets, and she was saying she was being abused and she confided in me on some things.

Nico suggested something to take Ronda's mind off things.

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

So they did what friends did, listened to music and got ready together, going back and forth about who they might see that night and what they would wear.

She was saying, I got this shirt in my bag. It was a black shirt with like some orange and different colored flowers on it, and I gave her some rust orange Kaylee jeans to put on.

Then it was time to do their hair and makeup. It was the nineties, so they went for an old school look.

I gave her like a frieze, some fingerways, then you pull it up like scrunches. She had a short haircut with a little brown or auburn color in our hair, like a blonde in her hair. And I'll never forget that.

They crossed the road for a couple of drinks. Then they went back to Nicos.

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

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

Galuski went up the street, went down the street.

After a moment, Ronda got up, leaving Nico in the porch.

She said, well, I gotta go. I watched her walk out my door, walk up the street, make the right, then a left. She walked around the band from my house.

Ronda took a turn and left Nico's line of sight. A few moments later, of Glupski's car drove back down the road. Nico leaned forward to take a closer look. Ronda was in the passenger seat.

She was sitting back in a chair like she had the chair reclining back, but I could see the hair and I think a day or two later day end of finding her in the middle of K thirty two.

Deceased, Nico was heartbroken. Her friend had been killed. She'd been the last one to see her, and she knew who Ronda had left with Gallupski. She was terrified and desperate for answers. The autopsy report found that Ronda had died from multiple blows to her head, but while the police launched an investigation, they never pinned down the suspect. After that, Nico held her love once tight and continued to do what she could to support the women in

Monique ended up coming to my house. She ended up staying with me.

Nico had young children, and so Monique would help her with them.

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

They were good friends. They would talk about their children and their lives growing up on the northeast side of Kansas City. But like Rond and Stacy, Monique had gotten caught up with the life on the streets. Nico can still remember one of the times they hung out at her house in the winter of nineteen ninety eight.

She braided my hair. Frinch braided my hair, and she said she was going to see her mom. I believe she took a ship. She told me she was gonna call somebody, so who you call.

A Monique had a card with a phone number.

She set it on the table and I looked at it, and she said, girl, I'm about to go give me some money. I need to get some money. I watched her walk out my door, walk up the street and over to a blue police vehicle. She got into the car and then it drove away. And then the next morning they find her dead in the middle of the street. Off of Eighteenth and the side street.

Like Rhonda, Monique had been murdered, she.

Had been bludget, they had beat her. I think.

The phone number Monique had dialed it belonged to Detective Roger Glupski.

It was so crazy to me because I probably was the last one to see them alive or even talked to them that day. And I'm like, father, God, why is this so? Why am I the last one to talk to these women? And then they're gone.

Monique and Ronda's murders were investigated by the KCKPD, but no one was arrested or convicted. Nico didn't know what to do. The women in her community were in crisis, Her friends were being killed, and the man who lurked in the shadows of their lives seemed untouchable. Quindero felt more dangerous than ever, and things were about to get worse because for Nico, her greatest, most terrifying heartbreak lay just around the corner, coming up on the girlfriends untouchable.

There's too many predators, there's too many devils out here.

The whole time he's holding a gun to their head.

I'm trying to save y'all. I'm trying to protect y'all.

Hey about to issue a warrant go look for his mother pleasure?

Is this worth risking my life for it? The Girlfriend's Untouchable is produced by Novel for iHeart Podcasts. For more from Novel, visit novel Dot Audio. The show is narrated by me Nicki Richardson. It was written and produced by Rufaro Masarura. The editor is Joe Wheeler. Our assistant producer is Mohammed Ahmed. The researcher is Zaiyana Yusef. Production management from Shari Houston and Joe Savage. The fact checker is Fendel Fulton. Sound design, mixing and scoring by Daniel Kimpson