How two men watching over crime evidence turned into accused criminals themselves
An arrest affidavit lays out how a pair of sheriff’s office employees responsible for watching over crime evidence seized by law enforcement allegedly abused their positions and turned into accused criminals themselves.
The document, released by a Sedgwick County judge last week following requests from news media, details how Robert D. White and Marc E. Gordon allegedly stole from the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office’s Property and Evidence building at 815 W. Stillwell, without drawing suspicion from anyone for months.
White, a now-former property and evidence supervisor, and Marc Gordon, an ex-property and evidence technician, thought they had a foolproof set-up that would go unnoticed, the affidavit suggests:
They were the only full-time, on-site workers at the building for at least a year. They had ready access to keys, safes and the computerized systems that the Sheriff’s Office used to inventory and track seized items. Often the items pocketed were headed for destruction — stuff no one would miss. Sometimes the thefts were concealed by altering inventory logs.
The illegal enterprise might have gone on longer than it did.
But an eroding marriage, a greedy wife and a lie about cocaine set aside for drug dog training — among other events — helped the entire scheme unravel.
Earlier this month, following a meticulous criminal investigation and inventory audit, prosecutors filed charges against 53-year-old White and 45-year-old Gordon, including counts of felony official misconduct and theft. White was also charged with several counts of distributing drugs including pills, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine. Both men’s employment had been terminated by Feb. 27.
Neither of the men’s defense attorneys returned messages seeking comment.
In announcing the thefts in May, Sedgwick County Sheriff Jeff Easter said the inventory audit and criminal investigation into the actions of Gordon and White started after an employee noticed the property and evidence building’s storage area in disarray on Jan. 24.
But the affidavit points to an undoing that might have started months earlier.
Here’s how the stealing worked, according to police interviews summarized in the affidavit, and how White and Gordon eventually got caught:
As property and evidence building employees, White and Gordon were responsible for handling incoming and outgoing evidence, managing items inside the facility, updating computerized evidence logs and controlling and documenting the flow of people in secure areas. The building had a locked exterior door and an internal locked cage that prevented unauthorized access to its office and evidence storage areas.
A separate “drug and gun room” and safes for storing money are in a locked high-security area under video surveillance. After cases conclude, evidence can be returned to its owner or destroyed — or in the case of money, disposed of or transferred to upper ranks for deposit into government accounts.
It’s unclear from court records exactly when the misconduct began, but in White’s case it might have been as early as spring 2019. In Gordon’s case, it might have started in 2018.
By May 2019, White met and had started dating a 28-year-old woman he later married, whom he confided in and gave money. He also asked her to help get stolen drugs and guns to dealers to sell. She agreed and visited White several times while he was at work.
When they were alone, White would retrieve evidence bags filled with drugs and gun evidence boxes out of the secured “drug and gun room,” and put their contents into a suitcase or duffel bags.
White would then tote drug-and-gun-filled bags out of the building and put them in his wife’s car.
After driving away, his wife would take the drugs and guns to a one-legged man she knew by the nickname “Peg Leg,” who either gave to roommates to sell or sold himself “to get a little bit of money ... to get a hotel room.” The one-legged man gave at least one .40-caliber Glock 22 handgun to a roommate to pawn that authorities later tracked down after reporting it stolen.
White’s wife took any empty evidence bags in a purse to her on-again-off-again lover to burn or put in a dumpster.
Sometimes, the lover would also buy drugs from her, and they would get high and joke about smoking “evidence weed.”
When it came to the stolen money, White would write in the computerized log books that it had been transferred to upper management even though it hadn’t. Sometimes he shared it — once he allegedly sent $17,000 to a woman — or kept it in bundles in a drawer to spend on luxuries like a $3,500 vacation.
Within a few months, though, the trust between husband and wife was eroding.
In October 2019, White’s wife went to the property and evidence building to meet him and tried to hide in her jacket a bag of cocaine bricks wrapped in black tape. She later told investigators she distrusted her husband and wanted to sell them on her own.
White caught her and scolded her for taking the drugs because they had been lying in a spot under camera surveillance and because they were evidence in a 2018 case that hadn’t yet resolved.
The cocaine also had been set aside for a deputy who wanted to use it to train police K-9s.
But White told his wife to take the bag anyway because she had touched it. The cocaine bricks each weighed around 2.5 pounds.
On Jan. 30, the deputy who wanted the cocaine for police dog training went to the property and evidence building to ask about it. When White lied and told the deputy that the cocaine had been destroyed, the deputy got upset and asked how that happened since he’d taken steps to prevent that.
White shrugged his shoulders and said: “I don’t know, it was destroyed.”
After the deputy left, the log that tracked the cocaine’s whereabouts was changed to say it had been ordered destroyed by the court.
By March — after the investigation into discrepancies in the property and evidence inventory was already underway — White’s wife was spilling information about how the scheme worked to deputies who arrested and questioned her following a traffic stop.
Among her statements to authorities: White told her that any unclaimed cash in the property and evidence building “could be kept by the employees” and that he split it with a partner.
Authorities interviewed Gordon about the thefts in February and again on June 3. He admitted that he had stolen a black samurai sword with a dragon’s head handle in mid-2019 and a metal billy club with a hidden blade in 2018. He said he kept the stolen weapons in the basement of his Wichita home, where investigators recovered them as well as a smaller samurai sword that also came from the property and evidence building around mid-2019. Gordon told authorities he took some of the weapons from a display board of seized items hanging there, without having permission to do so.
White was arrested June 26 in connection with the case and remains in the custody of the Sedgwick County Jail. Gordon was jailed on July 1 and is currently free on bond.
This story was originally published July 24, 2020 at 1:49 PM.
