Alleged killer in Kansas City cold case arrested on meth charges while awaiting trial

It’s been a cruel July for Timothy Stephenson. First his aunt Billie found his drugs and ratted him out to the cops. Then a grand jury indicted him on murder charges.

Stephenson has been in Missouri since January, when authorities extradited him from California and arrested him for the murder of Randall Oliphant, a Kansas City man who’d gone missing in January 1998. His body was found in the woods outside Warsaw a few months later. Two decades after the case went cold, law enforcement revived the investigation; Stephenson’s ex-husband allegedly told police Stephenson had privately confessed to killing Oliphant.

In May, after pleading not guilty to second-degree murder in Benton County, Stephenson was granted a bond reduction that allowed him to live under house arrest under the supervision of his aunt in her nearby Clinton home, about 75 miles southeast of Kansas City, until his preliminary hearing in August.

But after the events of the past few weeks, Stephenson is no longer on house arrest. And there will be no preliminary hearing.

On July 1, Stephenson’s aunt, Billie Banks, contacted Clinton police to report that he had been “using drugs and having people at her house” while she was gone, according to court documents. Banks told police she “did not feel she could hold Timothy to the pre-trial conditions any longer.”

Clinton police executed a search warrant for Banks’ home. They found Stephenson in his bedroom smoking meth out of a glass pipe and $7,000 in cash in the closet, court papers say. He was charged with Class D felony possession of a controlled substance and deposited back inside the Benton County jail, where he remains.

More bad news for him arrived this past Friday, when Stephenson learned that the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office — which is serving as special prosecutor on his case — had elected to forego the preliminary hearing and put the matter to a Benton County grand jury, depriving his attorneys of making the case that the charges should be dismissed.

Stephenson had been investigated for the murder of Oliphant, 26, back in 1998. A bartender at the Dixie Belle Saloon, a gay bar in downtown Kansas City, told police he’d seen the two leave together on the night Oliphant went missing. The following day, Stephenson’s cellphone records incurred roaming charges in the area of Benton County where Oliphant was later found.

But DNA evidence wasn’t pursued, and Stephenson was never charged. He later moved to northern California, where he married a doctor named Joseph Ginejko and raised two twin girls, now 9 years old. According to a probable cause statement filed earlier this year, sometime in 2014 Stephenson told Ginejko that he had killed Oliphant in the bathroom of his home at 5125 Tracy in Kansas City. This new information eventually led to an undercover operation and the collection of new DNA evidence, leading to Stephenson’s arrest earlier this year.

On July 15, the grand jury indicted Stephenson for second-degree murder.

Stephenson’s attorney Stacy Shaw told The Star on Wednesday, “We are still maintaining (Stephenson’s) innocence and the belief that he will be completely exonerated of the charges.”

A bond revocation hearing set for Wednesday was continued after Shaw filed a motion acknowledging recent “unexpected issues” that have required the defense to seek a substitute for Banks, who told police she feared Stephenson “would cause her harm” if he was released again from jail. The state did not object to the motion for continuance.

Shaw also told The Star the grand jury caught her side by surprise.

“The prosecutors insisted that they would not take the case to the grand jury because one had not been impaneled,” Shaw said. “They decided to change their mind without telling defense counsel and sent the case to the secret grand jury.”

“Indeed,” replied Michael Mansur, communications director for the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, in an email to The Star, “all grand juries are secret by law.”

Stephenson’s trial date has not yet been set.