At 19, Kansas woman killed ‘sexual predator’ after years of abuse. Will governor free her?

Sarah Gonzales-McLinn was a perpetrator — and a victim. She wants the state of Kansas to recognize that both of those things are true.

At age 19, Gonzales-McLinn murdered Harold “Hal” Sasko, a 52-year-old man and her boss at a pizza shop she began working at when she was 14, who later asked her to live with him in Lawrence.

Now 30, she has spent over a decade behind bars.

In a phone interview from Topeka Correctional Facility, Kansas’ state prison for women, Gonzales-McLinn said she knows what she did was wrong.

“I’ve never just had this mentality, like I just want to get out scot-free, and you know, act like this never happened,” she said.

But, she continued, “I think that both sides do need to be taken into consideration.”

Gonzales-McLinn says the court should have factored in that Sasko had manipulated, financially exploited and sexually abused her in the years before she killed him, treating her as “his personal Barbie doll.” She says she did what she did because she felt like there was no way out.

Soon after she turned 18, Gonzales-McLinn said Sasko began coercing her into a sexual relationship. She estimated that he sexually assaulted her about 100 times.

During court testimony after her conviction, her appellate attorney Jonathan Sternberg asked, “Did you ever refuse (to have sex with him)?”

“Yes.”

“What would happen when you refused?”

“I feel like he would just act like he didn’t hear me. And just continue,” she answered.

Sternberg helped get Gonzales-McLinn’s hard 50-year sentence reduced to 25 years in 2021 on the basis that she had received ineffective counsel during her initial trial. He said he supports going even further and granting her clemency.

In December 2022, advocates submitted a 68-page clemency application to Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly. It contends that Gonzales-McLinn was groomed, trafficked and indentured by Sasko. They’re asking for her sentence to be substantially reduced or for her to be freed because of the abuse.

Gonzales-McLinn’s request is under review, said Grace Hoge, a spokeswoman for the governor’s office.

“Governor Kelly thoroughly reviews clemency requests based on the circumstances of each individual case prior to making a decision,” Hoge said in a statement.

The request was also reviewed by the Kansas Department of Corrections’ Prisoner Review Board. Over the past nine years, the board has recommended clemency 4.5% of the time.

Not everyone supports an early release for Gonzales-McLinn.

Glenn Sasko said his older brother’s murder “wrecked me for quite some time,” and that it has been difficult to wrap his head around the 25-year sentence reduction. He said he only knew his brother to be a great guy, but added “let due process do its thing.”

Kimberly Qualls, Sasko’s former girlfriend, said she does not agree with clemency due to the violent nature of Sasko’s death, but that she prays Gonzales-McLinn is getting the counseling she needs to heal.

“She knew it was wrong,” Qualls said.

“The man she murdered was not a monster. What she did were the actions of a monster.”

Meanwhile, Gonzales-McLinn’s large group of supporters continue to hope Kelly will reconsider what justice looks like for a victim who became a convict — and is a survivor.

In recent years, the criminal justice system has grappled with the challenge of how to handle cases where a victim becomes a perpetrator. On Monday, Chrystul Kizer was sentenced to 11 years for killing a man who had sexually trafficked her as a teen in Wisconsin, The Associated Press reported. Earlier this year, Oklahoma passed the Survivors’ Act, allowing victims to be re-sentenced if they could prove abuse was related to their crime.

Abuse, manipulation and coercion

Gonzales-McLinn got a job at one of Sasko’s Cicis Pizzas locations when she was 14. He entered her life during a time when she and her family were in turmoil.

Her parents had gone through a difficult divorce. She was dealing with the lingering effects of being sexually assaulted as a child. Then when she was 16, an acquaintance raped her and burned her with cigarettes. She said those traumas caused her to act out, cutting herself and self-medicating with alcohol, and left her in a particularly vulnerable state.

Gonzales-McLinn said she grew to see Sasko as a father figure over those first few years. Then he invited her to move in with him when she was 17. She was making $8.50 an hour and agreed to pay him $400 in rent a month.

According to Gonzales-McLinn, Sasko said he would pay for a nose job she wanted. Then he added $6,000 to a running bill of what she owed him.

Eventually, after she turned 18, he told her he was falling in love with her, Gonzales-McLinn said. She did not feel the same way and told him that. He began to regularly supply her with alcohol and coerce her into sex.

“I just felt really disgusting,” she testified in court. “And I told him that I didn’t want it to happen again.”

But the assaults continued. When she spoke up about not wanting to have a sexual relationship, he began leaving the bill showing her debt around the house.

The bill had grown to about $6,000 with expenses like rent and her dog’s vet bill. When she talked about moving out, he told her she would be homeless, the clemency application said, and he threatened to sue her. There were periods he controlled her phone and paychecks, documents show.

The debt ballooned to about $16,000 after Sasko found a doctor to give her surgery for gluteal implants, a procedure she said she didn’t want. She said she became more depressed after it.

“I was a toy to him like his personal barbie doll,” Gonzales-McLinn wrote in a therapy exercise.

By then, she testified, she was isolated from her family, full of shame and felt like she “was just his at that point, like he owned me.”

Gonzales-McLinn wrote in the clemency application that she never anticipated the abuse that would occur when she moved into Sasko’s house, but that she came to believe to her “very core” that there was no way out.

The night of the murder

On the day of his murder, Sasko sent Gonzales-McLinn a text saying, “I apologize for trying to sleep with you last night.” In another text, he asked her to put some beer in the refrigerator. According to the clemency application, she believed that meant he would be drinking and would rape her.

That night, Gonzales-McLinn drugged Sasko’s drink, bound his wrists and ankles, and killed him by cutting his neck with a hunting knife.

She wrote the word “freedom” in his blood on a wall before driving away.

She was captured in Florida. She did not disclose the nature of her relationship with Sasko to authorities then.

However, reports from the Lawrence Police Department indicate that officers were aware of allegations that Sasko was “grooming” two 15-year-old girls he met at one of the Cicis Pizza locations he owned. Their mother told investigators that she tried to cut off his relationship with her daughters, but he lured them with offers of car speakers and a place to stay. They called him “dad.”

Police also interviewed another man who said he had once viewed Sasko as a father figure. Later the man became a manager at Cicis. Sasko’s relationship with Gonzales-McLinn began with Sasko helping her, but then turned sexual, the man told authorities.

He “described this as Sasko telling him, ‘It is amazing to have an eighteen year old,’” a police report said.

During the 2016 trial, Douglas County District Judge Paula Martin did not allow the jury to hear information about Sasko’s relationship with Gonzales-McLinn. Her defense attorney told jurors she was suffering from dissociative identity disorder when she killed Sasko.

The jury convicted her.

The push for clemency

A fuller picture of what led up to the murder emerged after Gonzales-McLinn was sent to prison.

Michelle McCormick, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual & Domestic Violence, said she believes Sasko made himself up “to be powerful and to be in control long before he started being sexually exploitative to her.”

His age and role as her employer created a power imbalance, McCormick said.

“That’s what’s difficult about almost all of domestic and sexual violence, is frequently the people who are perpetrating those kinds of violence, they know their victim well, and they know their vulnerabilities,” she said. “Then they use that, either to, you know, inform the strategies they’re going to use in order to victimize, or they use it as leverage points.”

McCormick’s organization supports Gonzales-McLinn’s clemency request, as do dozens of others who signed her application.

“If I am judging whether or not justice has been served, I feel like she’s been incarcerated long enough in order to be punished, and now justice, in my mind, has flipped into justice would be served by helping this young woman re-enter into our society, continue her healing journey,” McCormick said.

David Ranney was a volunteer at the prison who led a self-help group that Gonzales-McLinn joined.

“The group’s overarching goal was to help the women understand why they are the way they are and to expose them to hope and healing,” he said.

At first, Gonzales-McLinn was “really, really shy,” he said.

But “in her own quiet way, Sarah took that ball and ran with it. I mean, clearly, she is not the person she was 10 years ago. She’s rebuilt herself; she’s done everything that’s been asked of her and more.”

Ranney helped organize Gonzales-McLinn’s clemency efforts and noted that throughout the process, she was evaluated by two forensic psychologists who concluded she does not pose a threat to society.

Leah Sakala, a researcher who wrote on clemency when she was with the Urban Institute, said public safety is a priority for governors reviewing clemency requests.

Decisions are usually made on a case-by-case basis.

“Many governors look to things like individual stories,” Sakala said. “So looking at the reason that somebody was incarcerated in the first place, this is particularly salient when, for example, very specific personal circumstances like victimization played an important role why somebody ended up in the criminal justice system.”

‘Searching and healing’

The Star spoke to Gonzales-McLinn by phone earlier this month after she had gotten off work. She’s had a job in the prison’s activities department for a few years where she opens up the gym, distributes equipment and helps facilitate activities.

Throughout her time in prison, she has participated in several programs, including training service dogs and an initiative called Reaching Out From Within, a group for victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse. She is enrolled in an academic program through Washburn University and is finishing up her associate’s degree.

“I just never gave up trying to see who God wanted me to be,” she said. “I think it’s really only after this like accumulation of years and like searching and healing that I can finally say now that I’m not that young girl that I was, that just had so many problems, was just going through all that suffering, was just generally terrified.”

The process has not been easy. Shame “ruled my life for a long, long time,” she said.

The first time she told someone about what Sasko had done to her, she said she “felt like I was gonna die.”

“I couldn’t even get the words out to describe what was happening for quite a while.”

When the judge blocked evidence about Sasko’s relationship with Gonzales-McLinn at trial, she said she felt like no one wanted to hear about what really went on in that house.

Support from McCormick, Ranney and several others has helped Gonzales-McLinn understand what she went through.

In the clemency application, Gonzales-McLinn wrote that it was only after she was incarcerated that she came to realize she had been indentured — kept under his control because of the money she owed — and coerced into sex.

At the same time, she recognizes the trauma and loss she has caused for Sasko’s family.

“There’s obviously nothing that I could ever do or say that would take away their pain and what they have lost,” she said.

But she continued, she knows “without a shadow of a doubt that I am not the person that I used to be.”

Sharing her story with other women in prison, many of whom have also suffered abuse, has also helped, as has repairing relationships with her family.

Her mom Michelle Gonzales visits her at least every other week. The changes she’s observed have been immense.

“She is a confident person,” Gonzales said. “She is in charge of her life.”

Gonzales said she looked up the word “clemency” in the dictionary and it said “to be merciful.”

“I am just asking Gov. Kelly to take an opportunity to be merciful,” Gonzales said, adding that she hopes Kelly will “just give pause to why this happened.”

“He was a sexual predator,” Gonzales said. “She just did not wake up and this occurred. There were events that led up to it. There was trust violated by Mr. Sasko.”

If Kelly granted clemency, Gonzales-McLinn said she plans to live in a Kansas transitional home for abuse and trafficking survivors.

She hopes to finish school and help others.

“I am willing to talk about what happened. I’m finally able to talk about what happened,” she said. “And there are so many young people and women who haven’t gotten there yet. I want to let them know that they’re not alone.”