This week I became aware of this article published in the Kansas City Star.
For readers of Saving Nikki, the Bill, or "Willie" Cadwalader in this article is the Anthony in the book.
In 1993 I called the Kansas City Police department to see if the murder had been solved. It hadn't, but they said they would never file it without it being solved. I think this explanation of Robert Gross and his obsession with Wanda makes sense, and although the killer hasn't been charged with this specific crime, I am glad that this answers some of the questions about the murders.
"Robert Gross had become a regular customer at the V.I.P. But that didn’t make him a valued client. The women there didn’t tell police exactly why, but if they had Gross as a customer once, they didn’t want him again. Despite his reputation, Gross found one V.I.P. employee willing to date him: Wanda Conkling.
“She was an innocent person,” said Kathy Zeysing, who befriended Conkling around this time. “A real sweet little thing, real cute girl.” Conkling, a mother of two young boys, had grown up attending the Shawnee Church of the Nazarene and graduated from Shawnee Mission West High School. She had been a bank teller before finding work in massage parlors. She was temporarily separated from her hus- band William Cadwalad- er, a sometime painting contractor who ran with a crowd of professional shoplifters on the margins of organized crime. With Cadwalader, Con- kling endured a tumultu- ous, on-again-off-again relationship punctuated by frequent beatings.
“Not again! Not again!” Conkling cried as Cad- walader laid into her for what would turn out to be the last time. Desperate to get away, Conkling ran straight to Gross. “When Willie would knock my teeth out, Bob would pay to fix them,” she told a friend. For a while, the pair seemed to supply each other with something essential: Conkling’s need to be needed, and Gross’ demand for control. “Wanda thought he looked like Burt Reynolds,” Zeysing said.
“He was kind of handsome, I guess.” Zeysing’s skepticism turned to alarm when she realized a startling coincidence. Conkling’s new boyfriend was the same guy who, as a teenager, had been caught sneaking into her older sister’s house on Tracy Avenue a decade before. She called Conkling to warn her: Be careful with Robert Gross. A SECOND HONEYMOON In early 1979, Conkling and Cadwalader reconcil- ed, living together again at their house in a cul-de-sac near Bannister Road and McGee Street. Conkling stopped see- ing Gross, but he didn’t accept that it was over.
He stewed over the idea that Conkling rejected him, and he complained to anyone who would listen: “She made me love her and then she did this to me.” Gross kept calling the couple’s house. Afraid of what would happen if her husband picked up the phone, Conkling asked friends to tell Gross to stop. Conkling told friends she was getting scared because a car kept pulling into her driveway at night, shining its head- lights through her front windows and driving away. On Monday, Feb. 5, 1979, a friend told Gross to let it go, that Conkling and Cadwalader were leaving the next day on a second honeymoon.
Gross snapped back that he was going over to confront them before they left. Conkling and Cad- walader were never seen alive again. Friends called the house the next day, but no one answered. For the rest of the week, every time the mailman came by, he noticed the front door was left open. The family dog, a Great Dane named Cleo who usually barked at him, had dis- appeared.
Finally, that Friday, a neighbor called police. Officers discovered the bloodied bodies of hus- band and wife inter- twined on their living room floor, killed execu- tion-style with a shotgun. Cadwalader’s body showed scattered wounds from 12-gauge pellets in the arm, shoulder, back and head. Conkling lay with her head over her husband’s chest as if she had come to his aid. A shotgun blast had obliterated her face.
Someone had come through the front door and killed them just as they prepared to leave on their trip. The couple had plane tickets to California booked for that Tuesday — the day after they were last seen alive. A suitcase, also torn by a shotgun blast, sat by the front door. Wanda’s friend Kathy Zeysing saw it on the news. She couldn’t mistake the couple’s home.
Dur- ing their recent rocky period, Cadwalader had painted a large heart on the front of the house with the inscription “Wanda and Wil 1976- 1979.” Zeysing went straight to the nearest police station and told officers Gross was the killer. Conkling’s two sons, ages 7 and 12, lived with their father. He spared them the details but told them it was Gross who killed their mother and stepfather. For most of their lives, the brothers didn’t know much about what hap- pened to their mother, or about Gross’ other crimes. Only decades later did they learn the rest of the story.
NO WITNESSES Immediately after find- ing the bodies, Kansas City police assigned a special 12-member squad to investigate. It would be the first of several teams assembled to solve Gross-related crimes over the next 40 years. This one started at a disadvantage, with about four days passing between the killings and the dis- covery of the crime scene, no eyewitnesses, no use- ful fingerprints and no physical clues. The murder weapon, being a shotgun, would make any kind of ballis- tics evidence more diffi- cult. The shotgun left behind pellets — not a bullet that could be matched to a particular gun.
And the killer had taken the gun with him. In the late 1970s, it was also getting harder to solve murders in Kansas City. By the end of the decade, about three out of every 10 homicides went unsolved. In 1978, the homicide count had jumped to 120, the most in nearly a decade, kick- ing off a vicious four-year period of fast-paced kill- ing. The Conkling and Cad- walader homicides went down as the seventh and eighth of 1979.
The year would end with 119. Detectives soon learned about the love triangle and Gross’ collision course with the newly- reunited husband and wife. They surmised that a jealous Gross killed the couple. But members of the squad also pursued a competing theory that started with Cadwalader as the real target, assassi- nated by criminal associ- ates who killed his wife to eliminate her as a wit- ness. Police knew Cadwalad- er was part of a shop- lifting ring connected — tenuously — to the Kansas City mob run by brothers Nick and Carl Civella, who were then at the height of their reputation for gangland hits.
These were wild times in Kansas City. A mob war rocked the city with explosions, bodies left in car trunks and shotgun murders in restaurants. Four days after the bodies were found, a police major told The Star that the investigation was shifting toward Willie Cadwalader as the main target of the killing. Members of the special squad plumbed the depths of Cadwalader’s under- world connections, plod- ding through a labyrinth of blind alleys, running down bits of gossip and searching for reasons why someone might want Cadwalader dead. They probed his stand- ing among the crew of thieves selling stolen merchandise through Tiger’s Records, a store on Independence Avenue operated by mob figure Anthony “Tiger” Carda- rella.
They questioned associ- ates nicknamed “Blondie Joe,” “Big John” and “Bobby D.” They drove to the fed- eral prison in Leaven- worth to interview an inmate who dismissed them with a four-letter word. They flew to Portland, Ore., where they were told Cadwalader feared being murdered at the behest of a fellow crook whose wife he had an- gered. Then they came back and drove all the way across Missouri to find out that story was bunk. They put the couple’s mailman under hypnosis. At the same time detec- tives came up empty- handed with the Cad- walader theory, members of the homicide squad were still conducting a parallel investigation focused on their first suspect: Robert Gross.
‘YOU KNOW IN YOUR HEART’ Police found out how Wanda Conkling met Gross at the V.I.P. mas- sage parlor. The women who worked there told detectives that Gross was “weird.” Technically, company policy forbade Wanda from dating Gross, be- cause he was a customer. But the owner made an exception. He knew about the beatings Wanda was taking from her husband.
Women working in massage parlors had rea- son to be on edge in 1979. Wanda Conkling was the third to be killed in the area within a year. The previous May, a massage parlor worker had turned up dead in the Missouri River, killed by her boss. In October, in Sedalia, a suspicious fire at a massage parlor killed employee Cherrilyn Stark. Police investigating Gross talked to his neigh- bors and started putting together a picture of a dangerous man.
Some told of the guns Gross kept in his house, including a 12-gauge shot- gun — the same as the gun used in the killings. One neighbor described how Gross ranted about hating women, hating his mother. Learning that Gross had a job with a construction company, a couple of detectives interviewed his boss at a work site at the University of Kansas FROM PAGE 1A GROSS SEE GROSS, 5A SHELLY YANG syang@kcstar.com Jason Conkling, son of Wanda Conkling, who died with her husband in a double shotgun killing in 1979, has been researching the case for years. He made a notebook with newspaper headlines from the case on the front cover. SHELLY YANG syang@kcstar.com Deena Caywood was a neighbor of Robert Gross while living in south Kansas City in the late 1970s.
She thinks Gross burned her house down and stalked her, but Gross was never charged. SHELLY YANG syang@kcstar.com Kathy Zeysing is pictured outside the house in south Kansas City where her friend Wanda Conkling and William Cadwalader were killed in 1979. Robert Gross was a suspect in the killings but has never been charged. FILE A house in a cul-de-sac near Bannister Road in south Kansas City was the scene of a double shotgun killing in 1979. The slaying of Wanda Conkling and William Cadwalader remains unsolved, but police named Robert Gross as a suspect..
