Gideon Cody appears in footage from inside Marion County Record newspaper office during raid in August (KSHB/YouTube).
Former Kansas police chief Gideon Cody has been charged with felony obstruction of justice in connection to an August 2023 raid of the local weekly newspaper The Marion County Record.
Cody also faces a single charge of interference with the judicial process.
He resigned in October 2023 after police bodycam footage showed him rifling through Marion County Record documents pertaining to himself both at the newspaper’s offices and at the publisher’s home. As Law&Crime reported, Cody ordered the raid on the paper. Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey determined that prior to Cody’s resignation there was “insufficient evidence” to justify the raid and seizure of records from the newspaper’s office as well as from the home.
The Marion County Record is owned by Eric Meyer, but at the time of the raid, he shared ownership with his 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer. She was present at the home during the ransacking by Cody and a small throng of officers. She died the next day after having a heart attack.
Joan Meyer had forewarned the police that the stress of their conduct and raiding of her home would kill her, and as Law&Crime previously reported, Eric Meyer ended up suing Cody, Marion’s current police chief Zach Hudin, the county’s board of commissioners, the former mayor of Marion David Mayfield and several others in a sprawling lawsuit after her death.
Notably, the Meyers were not the only ones raided. A raid was also done by police at the home of Ruth Herbel, a Marion City Council board member.
The Associated Press reported that the charge of interference is related to Cody’s alleged attempt to persuade a witness to withhold information about the raids less than a week after they occurred. Nothing more was described in court records at the time.
Background: In a still photo from body camera footage of the raid on Eric Meyer and Joan Meyer’s home in August 2023, Joan Meyer can be seen sitting in her chair clutching her walker (court filing). Inset: Facebook post made by a former Marion County mayor a couple of weeks before the raid (court filing).
Meyer told AP that he believed prosecutors were making the former police chief a “fall guy” since the misconduct went beyond just one man at the police department. Meyer said he thinks Cody will strike a deal with prosecutors so that a trial won’t ensue and this way, details of the raid will be far less likely to emerge for public scrutiny.
“We’re just being basic journalists here,” Meyer told AP. “We want the whole story. We don’t want part of it.”
The charges against Cody were anticipated.
Special prosecutors released a 124-page report revealing that evidence they accrued in their investigation of the raid would likely lead them to charge Cody with the felony, but other Marion police involved were unlikely to be charged.
According to the report compiled by Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett and Riley County District Attorney Barry Wilkerson, there was “no evidence that Marion law enforcement agents recognized the inadequacy of the investigation or intentionally or knowingly misled either other law enforcement agents or the court.”
“The evidence strongly suggests they genuinely believed they were investigating criminal acts,” Bennett and Wilkerson also wrote.
As for Cody, Bennett and Wilkerson said they found text messages between the former police chief and local business owner Kari Newell indicating that Cody asked her to delete texts between them. He was concerned, prosecutors said, that people would get the wrong idea about their relationship which she said was purely platonic.
Newell told the AP in an interview last October that she “foolishly” deleted the texts when he asked.
“I foolishly did it and immediately did have regrets,” she said.
As Law&Crime reported, the raid was sparked after Cody said he had learned that the Marion County Record and one of its reporters had inappropriately obtained private information about Newell and then published it.
But the paper stated that it was a confidential source, later identified as Pam Maag, who told them that a “local caterer” had been convicted of drunk driving but continued to drive her vehicle without a valid license. And this was ongoing while she was in the middle of applying for a liquor license.
Meyer said Marion County Record reporter Phyllis Zorn worked to verify the tip because they suspected it had come from Newell’s ex-husband since the couple had only recently filed for divorce. So, instead of publishing, Meyer contacted the police to alert them. Zorn, Meyer said, used a public website to search Newell’s history and confirmed the woman had lost her driver’s license because of a DUI.
Newell was informed by police about the impending story, and this kicked off a furor at a local city council meeting where Newell accused the paper of illegally gaining access to her records. Meyer said it was Maag who gave him Newell’s driver’s license number and birth date. That was all his reporter needed to conduct a search.
A day after the Marion County Record published the story about Newell, Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar signed off on a search warrant for police and the raid ensued. As Law&Crime reported, the warrant itself came under scrutiny for a possible violation of the Privacy Protect Act, a federal law that prohibits searches and seizures of materials from journalists. A Kanas resident filed a complaint against Viar and it was eventually dismissed.
Law&Crime’s Elura Nanos contributed to this report.
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