Karen Dillon

Journalist

Mo/Kan

To my great enjoyment, I've spent most of my career as an investigative reporter in the Kansas City area. I've covered cops and courts, city, county, state and federal governments and the environment. After 30 years of working mostly for newspapers, I've decided to try my hand at freelancing. Look for my stories that will continue to focus on government indiscretions to be posted here in coming months.

Karen Dillon

Journalist

Mo/Kan

In dealing with the Ogallala Aquifer, western Kansas is running out of water and time
In western Kansas, painful losses feel increasingly imminent. There’s literal loss – the essentially irreversible depletion of Ogallala Aquifer groundwater after the large-scale pumping of it to irrigate crops in recent decades. But there are also the economic losses that might follow and hurt more and more farmers, their families, businesses and communities across the region in the decades to come.
Can Powell Gardens fight a CAFO and win?
Situated on nearly 1,000 acres of land 40 miles southeast of downtown, Powell Gardens is one of the Kansas City area’s most beautiful and serene spots. The botanical garden boasts thousands of plant varieties, a nature trail, an indoor conservatory. It hosts weddings, field trips, galas, and other special events.
Cathy Stepp, this region’s unlikely No. 2 administrator at the EPA, dislikes regulations — and transparency
Donald Trump’s surprise factory pumped out a local mystery in August when the White House appointed Cathy Stepp to a top position at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 7 headquarters in Lenexa. Stepp is well known in Wisconsin, where she has taken sharp stances against environmental regulation.
The Pitch
Prison Broke: The Missouri Department of Corrections can't escape its own worst habits
Each day, as she prepared herself to work another shift at the Missouri Department of Corrections prison, Lashonda Reid knew to expect one thing. Reid had been called a “nigger,” a “token nigger,” “sexual chocolate.”. She had been complimented on her lips — made for “sucking dick.”. Maybe this would be one of the days when the psyche-destroying talk was trained on her workmate and friend — the Hispanic woman who’d been called a “Tijuana crack whore,” a “wetback,” a “fence cutter.”.
The Pitch
THE DARK STATE: Lack of open records prevents complete picture of many Kansas criminal cases
The Sunflower State has very little sunshine for law enforcement records. Most Kansans are unaware of their inability to see records collected about themselves or loved ones. They're either forced to spend thousands of dollars to open them or can't afford to even try. This story is part one of a three-part investigation that shows what can happen when records are restricted in Kansas.
NBC 41 Action News
Cop Donald Hubbard said he had no choice when he shot and killed firefighter Anthony Bruno last fall. That's because he'd already made some bad decisions
The evening of November 30 was going the way any couple planning to live the rest of their lives together would have hoped. The family members and friends invited by Anthony and Stephanie Bruno to the Town Pavilion's rotunda almost overwhelmed the opulent venue. Here were 350 people, all of them eager to toast the newlyweds.
The Pitch
Web of lies, indifference to justice led to wrong Kansas brother being imprisoned for more than 15 years
In the beginning, even before the 14-year-old girl’s body was found on that unusually warm November day in 1999, authorities knew it was Tom Bledsoe who killed her. He told his parents he did it. He left messages on his pastor’s phone saying he was sorry for doing it. With his attorney, he led the police to the body hidden by a trash dump near his parents’ home outside Oskaloosa.
Lawrence Journal-World
Douglas County says Kobach was not shown favoritism in building case; failure to be strict on building codes was result of new, unwritten policy
Early last year, Douglas County administrators decided that they needed to repair their reputation for being inconsistent in their code enforcement with people building in the county. Instead of being known as an operation trying to fine and punish people for failing to “dot i’s and cross t’s,” the county needed to be an agency that helped builders get into compliance, County Administrator Craig Weinaug said.
Lawrence Journal-World
KU chancellor’s husband knew about UNC’s massive academic fraud case
Kansas University Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little has said that she was unaware that one of the worst academic fraud cases in U.S. history was occurring while she held top positions at the University of North Carolina. “He knew, I knew, we all knew,” said Willingham, who, with Shade Little, was a staff member in the athletics tutoring program.
Lawrence Journal-World
Shawnee's fractious government rides a storm of criticism
Shawnee may be Johnson County’s third-largest city but sometimes City Hall seems to still have its roots in the small town of decades ago when cliques and feuds would have been less surprising. These days, anyone interested in city government can witness any number of oddities. The Shawnee councilwoman saw a former colleague walk into the meeting — a man she saw as an annoying pest.
The Kansas City Star
Sunflower, Kansas regulators consulted on permit
Hundreds of e-mails document that officials of a Kansas coal plant enjoyed a cozy relationship with the Kansas regulators who issued them a building permit in December. The Sunflower coal plant already has been controversial, with critics claiming it is not needed and would pollute the air. So the Kansas Department of Health and Environment had promised an impartial review of the permit.
The Wichita Eagle
E.Coli Reached Unsafe Levels in Lake of the Ozarks
Missouri agency withheld report of E. coli reaching unsafe levels in Lake of the. OSAGE BEACH, Mo. | State officials sat for four weeks on a report that showed E. coli was above safe levels in. Heavy rains in May washed thehazardous bacteria into thelake, which has since returned to safe levels.
Kansas City Star
A $1 billion Hepatitis C settlement in Canada linked to Kansas City Star investigation
Because of evidence uncovered by The Kansas City Star, the Canadian government awarded $1 billion to Canadians with Hepatitis C, according to the lead plaintiff.
The Kansas City Star
FDA delayed for years large-scale search for patients infected with hepatitis C
In 1999, federal health officials pledged to pursue a nationwide hunt for at least 188,000 people who had received. It was urgent to notify those people that they might be carrying the potentially deadly virus, officials explained as. A delay, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, would increase each recipient s risk of serious.
The Kansas City Star
To Protect and Collect: Across U.S., police dodge state seizure laws
Police and highway patrols across the country are evading state laws t o improperly keep millions of dollars in cash and property seized in drug busts and traffic stops. Most states don't want law enforcement agencies t o profit so easily from such confiscations they see it as a dangerous conflict of interest. For that reason, they have passed laws blocking seized property from going directly back t o police, and many states designate seizures t o be used for other purposes, such as education. But a yearlong examination by The Kansas City Star reveals that police agencies in every one of more than two dozen states checked by the newspaper have used federal law enforcement t o circumvent their own laws and keep most of that money for themselves.
The Kansas City Star
T-Acct, Day 1: Police keep millions of dollars in little known fund
For years, the KansasCityPoliceDepartment has asked voters for higher taxes to put more officers on city. At the same time, the cityhas given the department millions more in tax dollars to fight crime. But there was one thing taxpayers and most cityofficials didn't know: All the time it was asking for more money,
Kansas City Star

About

Karen Dillon

Reporting

One of the best jobs in my lifetime was to be not just a reporter, but to be an investigative newspaper reporter. I can tell you from first-hand experience, there is not a greater feeling for a journalist than when a government official, or officials, tell you, "Yeah, I screwed up, we screwed up, but we're gonna fix it”…and they do.
It’s been a long time since I started work at the Boone News-Republican in Iowa as a typesetter and figured out I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. I scrambled through college and several internships, and during those years, freelanced for the Kansas City Times _ which is now extinct.
My first job out of college was night cops reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, a newspaper I still love. But that only lasted 22 months before I landed a job at The Kansas City Star in my hometown. Back then major metropolitan newspapers took seriously the role of “watchdog reporters,” those journalists who cover government institutions to ensure that tax dollars and public monies are being spent properly and that policies, rules, regs and laws are being followed.
We didn’t have laptops, cell phones, texting, emails, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Nor did we have equipment readily available to snap photos or take videos. But government has always had documents, and I made my reputation knowing where to find those or getting someone to give them to me, which is the way it still works today.
I and many of my colleagues thought we would retire from The Star, but the digital revolution took the industry by surprise. Mass layoffs began in earnest in 2009, and I watched as many of my Star colleagues were told to leave every few months year-after-year until 2013. That’s when I got my notice, and after 22 years, I left William Rockhill Nelson’s building on Grand for the last time.
After freelancing for NBC 41 and The Pitch, I landed a job at the Lawrence Journal-World as an investigative reporter 22 months ago.
In July, unfortunately, the Lawrence Journal-World held a mass layoff, as many of you know, and I was given my walking papers: investigative reporters are expendable.
But they are a tough lot, it’s hard to keep us down.
In an unusual venture for this part of the country, I now plan to freelance investigative stories. For a new business, it’s a cheap go, you only need a laptop and iPhone and some experience digging up documents and finding sources.
For this webpage, I plan to spotlight some of my past stories but also post new ones. So check back from time to time. And if you have any story ideas, please pass them along.