Dirt on Marion police chief, video of raid published by Kansas newspaper

Deb Gruver, a reporter at the Marion County Record, has now published an account of her April reporting process looking into Police Chief Gideon Cody while he was in the process of being confirmed for the job. And the details are shocking.

You’ll recall that the paper ultimately decided not to publish Gruver’s reporting because none of the sources would go on the record—but it was enough to anger Cody. And as The Handbasket first reported last week, Gruver’s digging may have factored into the eventual decision to proceed with the raids. 

Gruver wrote Monday that, “multiple sources recalled a conversation in which Cody was talking about his career and mentioned how much he loathed working in communications, or dispatch” and was glad they recently allowed him to transfer to a different department.

“Cody said that if they hadn’t transferred him when they did, he would have found ‘the skinniest and prettiest girl down there and f*cked her’ to force a move.”

Another former colleague of Cody’s told Gruver he was “not a man of character” and “a morale killer.” Three of her sources recalled a time when Cody ran over a dead body at a crime scene.

But perhaps most important of all, Gruver writes that Cody expressed his anger about her investigation, adding credence to the idea that the Record office and Meyer home were raided under false pretenses. “He said he had been angry since April 21, when [City Councilman Zach] Collett called to tell him that a reporter had interviewed several police officers.”

“Cody has a shiny exterior, but when you dig deeper, it’s not very pretty,” a former colleague of his told Gruver.

The Record also published a video Monday afternoon showing security camera footage from the home of the paper’s co-owners Eric and Joan Meyer as it was raided by police on August 11th. It’s an upsetting video, but even worse when you remember that Joan, 98, died the very next day.

The video, which begins 90 minutes into the unlawful search, shows Joan standing in the corner of her living room with her walker while Marion PD officers rifled through her home. “Don’t you touch any of that stuff!” she can be heard shouting. “This is my house!” She [deservedly] calls them “assholes,” and then walks up to Police Chief Gideon Cody, asking, “Does your mother love you?”

Joan then pushes her way past the chief and another officer to get a closer look at what the others are collecting from her home. Her understandable agitation is met with officers speaking to her like a child. 

When I spoke with Eric last week, he told me the house that was so grossly violated by police was the very same home Joan and his late father Bill moved into the day before he was born. It’s the home where Eric grew up, and the one he returned to a few years back to care for his mother and run the Marion County Record. 

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