A BAD TRIP

Rebecca Beach didn't kill the drug dealer from Topeka. But she's
in prison for life because Kansas' felony murder law says she did.

Rebecca Beach had bad taste in men -- and Jose Arevalo was no
exception. Sweet-talking, brown-eyed and slender, he had a nice smile
and he paid attention to her, which was something she craved. In the
spring of 2000, 22-year-old Beach was feeling even more vulnerable
than usual. Her brother had died a few months earlier, she was having
money problems and she had two small children to feed.

Arevalo, who was a little younger than Beach, started telling her he
loved her. He didn't tell her, though, about the time he'd spent in
prison on robbery and drug charges. And she didn't take a hint from
his nickname, "Rascal." Later, in court, Arevalo's friends would
testify that he had used her, lied to her and then dumped her.

But that wasn't the worst of it. Arevalo was a really, really bad
boyfriend. According to Beach's later testimony, he plotted a murder
and left Beach to take the blame for it.

Now Beach, who had never been in trouble with the law, is sitting in
the Topeka Correctional Facility doing life with a hard 20 -- no
chance of parole until she's in her early 40s.

Unless a clemency petition filed in May by the University of Kansas
Law School is successful, Beach will have decades to wish she had
never met Arevalo.

Beach's life had started to go bad months before, on January 15, 2000,
when police visited the Raytown home that Beach and her two young
children shared with Beach's mother, Carla Simpson. It was about 3
a.m. Beach didn't hear the knocking, but she woke up to the sound of
her mother screaming. Officers had just informed Simpson that her son,
Beach's 20-year-old brother, Joseph Beach, known as "Bo," had been
shot and killed at a house in Kansas City, Kansas.

The killing appeared to be drug-related, and police later arrested two
men in connection with the shooting. A brief in The Kansas City Star
with the headline "Man Slain" said Joseph Beach Jr. had been the
city's third homicide of the year. The family buried Rebecca Beach's
brother a few days after she turned 22.

Beach and her younger brother had always been close. They'd navigated
a rough childhood that left Beach seeking love and attention from any
man who'd give it to her. As grade schoolers growing up in the
Argentine neighborhood of Kansas City, Kansas, they'd watched their
alcoholic father yell at and hit their mother, then rip the phone out
of the wall so she couldn't call the police. After the family moved to
Roeland Park when Beach was in fifth grade, the other girls made fun
of her clothes and stuck gum in her hair on the bus. When an older boy
offered her a ride home from Taco Bell one afternoon when she was 13,
she let him take her to his house to watch a movie and ended up
fighting him off when he tried to rape her, she says.

By the time she was 15, she wasn't doing well in school anymore. Soon,
she met a guy at the mall, a 19-year-old who drove a convertible. She
got pregnant and dropped out of school but broke up with him when he
grew possessive and started fights over her. Then, before her son was
born, she started dating a guy named Joey Burke, whom she'd known from
Argentine. He treated her decently, and when Dylan was born he acted
like a father -- as much as a teenage boy could. She got pregnant
again, and by 16 she had a daughter, Maranda. She and Burke didn't
have much money, and they constantly moved in and out of friends' and
relatives' homes with their kids. In the mid-'90s, they split up, and
Beach lived with Burke's parents for a while.

"My kids forced me to grow up," Beach says. Though she couldn't
provide them with the most stable home, she spent almost all of her
spare time with them and tried to make sure they didn't have to go
through the same sort of childhood she'd had. Family photos show Beach
in the backyard on Easter, smiling as her kids collect colored eggs in
baskets. And on New Year's Eve 2000, all three of them are dancing
around the living room in their pajamas. "They had to wake me up at
midnight," Simpson recalls.

After Bo's death, Beach's mother fell apart. She temporarily quit the
waitressing job she'd held for four years, because she couldn't handle
breaking down in tears every time regular customers asked how she was
doing. She started doing meth, and she would take the family's only
vehicle -- Bo's car -- and drive to North Kansas City to hang out at
Harrah's, Argosy Casino and the Isle of Capri, leaving Beach unable to
get to her job at Wal-Mart. "I didn't have any money, but you can
sometimes find money in the machines, so I'd do that and just wander
around there so I didn't have to go home," Simpson says. "I hated
going home. I hated thinking about it."

"I was the one that had to be strong and keep everything together,"
Beach recalls. But with no car and no one to care for her own children
and her brother's daughter, Beach lost her job. The bank started
threatening to foreclose on the family's Raytown house.

Meanwhile, the Wyandotte County district attorney's office charged the
man who had killed Beach's brother, Benjamin Tribble (then 24), with
involuntary manslaughter and possession of methamphetamine with intent
to sell. A judge sentenced him to one year in jail. His companion was
not charged in the killing.

It was a few months before she began dating Jose Arevalo, and Beach
needed an understanding friend. So she started writing to a distant
cousin who had been in and out of prison and had gone back in shortly
after her brother's funeral.

"He wasn't exactly the kind of guy your mom would approve of, but I've
known him practically my whole life, and he was someone I could talk
to and say what I needed to say," Beach says.

Her cousin told her that if she needed to make extra money, he knew a
guy named Land Grant from Topeka who was looking for a meth supplier
in Kansas City. If Beach could find one and hook him up, she'd be paid
for each transaction. It would be easy money.

Beach had never dealt drugs; the worst legal trouble she'd ever been
in was a speeding ticket. She was apprehensive. But she told her
cousin she could probably get in touch with the meth dealers her
brother had known.

"Land and I first agreed to meet each other without the drugs, just to
see if we felt OK with each other," Beach tells the Pitch. They agreed
to do a deal that March. It was simple: Grant would call Beach
whenever he planned to come through town, then Beach would contact her
brother's old friends and tell them how much to have available. Grant
usually would buy 2 to 4 pounds of methamphetamine for $6,000 a pound.
Grant would pick up Beach and drive her to the suppliers' house in
south Kansas City. She'd go inside and trade tens of thousands of
dollars for drugs. And Grant would pay her $1,000 for her time. Grant
and Beach trusted each other -- neither one carried a weapon.

"At the time, $1,000 seemed like a dream," Beach later wrote in a
letter to her mother. "I didn't even know enough about dealing drugs
to realize I should have gotten a lot more than that. It sounded like
a lot to me. I would only have to do it a few times and maybe by then
mom would be back in the real world, and being caught up on things, we
could get our lives back together."

Beach and Grant did three or four deals.

Then, sometime in late spring, while her children were visiting their
grandparents, Beach went to hang out at a friend's house in Kansas
City, Kansas. There, she met Jose Arevalo. He started flirting with
her right away, and she was hooked.

"I don't know why, but I'd be with any guy who paid the smallest bit
of attention to me," Beach now says. Arevalo was attentive -- he acted
smitten right away, saying he wanted to be with Beach all the time.
Soon he, too, grew possessive; he asked to carry her pager so he could
check for messages from other guys. Beach was flattered. She told
Arevalo all about her life and even confided in him about her money
problems and the drug deals with Grant.

One day in June, though, Arevalo got involved in the business, and
everything went wrong.

Land Grant was a drug dealer in Topeka. With a friendly smile, a gold
chain, cornrows and enormous biceps, he drew attention from women when
he flashed his money at the Cabaret USA strip club, just off
Interstate 70, west of Topeka. That's where he met Margaret Thomas, a
delicate, 20-year-old blonde who worked at the club. Perhaps because
of her meth habit, she looked a little older.

Sometimes Grant would call her for companionship, and she'd go
somewhere with him in exchange for drugs. Occasionally she bought from
him. She later told police that she hadn't known about the 37-year-old
Grant's criminal history in Shawnee County, a record that dated back
to his 20s.

In 1985, prosecutors charged Grant with battery on a law-enforcement
officer, and he was sentenced to probation. In 1986, he was arrested
for driving while intoxicated, earning more probation. In 1987, police
caught him with cocaine and the district attorney charged him with
possession, but a judge gave him a suspended sentence that included
three years' probation, alcohol counseling and full employment training.

But he was arrested again in 1991 and charged with possession of
narcotics. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison at the Lansing
Correctional Facility in Lansing.

That's where Grant had become friends with Beach's cousin, himself a
frequent inmate.

One Friday morning, June 23, 2000, Grant called Beach to tell her he'd
be coming through Kansas City that night and would want to make a buy.

Beach agreed to make the deal. But this time, she couldn't reach her
brother's old contacts. Frustrated, she was about to call Grant and
cancel the deal when Arevalo stopped her. "I can get some," she
remembers her boyfriend telling her. Arevalo knew a guy in Kansas
City, Kansas. All they had to do was go pick him up.

"I trusted Jose," she later testified.

She shouldn't have. Court testimony later revealed that Arevalo and a
friend he'd met in prison, Gerald Zugelder, had talked about faking a
drug deal -- they even imagined wrapping up flour in blue plastic --
to lure and rob Grant the next time he came to town.

On this night, Arevalo and Beach took Bo's car -- a bright-green Dodge
Stratus with glitzy, gold Dayton wheels. Arevalo told Beach where to
drive. As they rolled down Kansas Avenue, Arevalo spotted his friend
Jesse Jimenez driving toward them in an SUV. Beach pulled over.

The two men greeted each other and chatted for a few minutes in
Spanish, according to Beach's testimony. Then they both got into
Beach's car. Arevalo told Beach they were going to Jimenez's house at
714 Homer, where he kept his drugs. On the way there, Beach got a page
from Grant. Beach dropped off the two men at Jimenez's place and
headed for what was then the Chaplain Truck Stop on 18th Street near
I-70.

Grant was waiting there in a rented Cadillac with bags of money --
$36,000 in all. Margaret Thomas, whom Beach didn't know, was sitting
in the passenger seat.

Beach and Grant chatted for a few minutes, and Beach used a pay phone
to call her mother and say that she was OK and would be home in an
hour. Then Beach told Grant to follow her. She drove down Central
Avenue to 7th Street, then made a right onto Homer, a dead-end street
across from a deserted soccer field and next to what was then the 7th
Street Cafe. Beach pulled into an alley beside Jimenez's house, a
tiny, run-down bungalow on a scraggly patch of grass, and Grant parked
nearby.

Beach walked over to Grant's car to get $12,000 for 2 pounds of meth.
Thomas would later tell police that Grant asked Beach if she wanted
her $1,000 now or later, and Beach told him he could just give it to
her later. Beach walked off toward the house as Thomas watched.

Beach knocked on the door of the house. "Hello?" she called out.
Nobody answered, so she pushed the door open and walked inside.

Within seconds, two men -- Thomas later identified them as Arevalo and
Jimenez -- ran from behind the house, at least one of them shooting at
Grant's car. Thomas ducked against the floorboard. "Get down!" she
told Grant. But he was slumped over, not moving.

Inside the house, Beach later testified, she heard gunshots and
dropped to the floor in a fetal position. During her trial, Beach said
she had been terrified, not knowing what was happening or who was shooting.

Grant had been shot eight or nine times at close range. (The coroner
testified that he couldn't tell how many times Grant had been shot,
because the wounds were so extensive.) Thomas, who had escaped the
first shots, saw a man's face in the driver's-side window. She later
testified that Arevalo said, "Bitch, you're gonna die," and shot her
in the chest.

After the gunfire ended, Beach opened the door of the bungalow and
walked outside. She saw Arevalo slowly backing away from something,
she later testified, but she couldn't see what. She heard a girl screaming.

"Come on!" Arevalo yelled at Beach, but she remembers that she just
stood there and shook her head no. Jimenez later told police that she
looked "frozen."

Though injured, Thomas managed to reach over and shift the car into
drive. It rolled down Homer and out into traffic on 7th Street before
crashing into the brick wall at the entrance to the Pala Vista
apartment complex. Bleeding, Thomas stumbled out of the car and tried
to flag down cars before passing out in the street. A medical
technician on his way home from work stopped to help.

Back on Homer Street, Beach wasn't moving, so Arevalo pointed his
Luger 9-mm at her, cocked it and told her to get in the car, she later
testified. She got in on the driver's side, and Arevalo sat on the
passenger's side. As she drove up the alley, Jimenez appeared in front
of the car and then jumped into the back seat.

"Man, why didn't you tell me it was gonna go down like that?" Jimenez
shouted at Arevalo, speaking in English for the first time, Beach
later testified.

Arevalo didn't answer. He told Beach to drive to the home of Gerald
Zugelder, who lived in Independence. At Zugelder's house, Arevalo and
Jimenez went inside with the bag of money Grant had given Beach. They
were in the house for about 20 minutes, Beach said. Beach didn't know
that Zugelder had originally planned to be there, too, as one of the
shooters.

They dropped off Jimenez at a friend's house, and Arevalo told Beach
they'd drive back to her house -- and that she'd better act normal so
her mother wouldn't get suspicious.

The next morning, Beach's mother mentioned a story she'd seen on the
evening news the night before: A black male from Topeka had been shot
and killed in Kansas City, Kansas. Beach didn't say anything.

Arevalo stopped telling Beach he loved her after that, but he kept
calling and stopping by to make sure she hadn't told anyone about the
crime. "He said, 'You don't want to go to war with me, 'cause I live
for this shit and I'll take you down with me,'" Beach says he told
her.

The only other witness, Thomas, was in a coma at KU Medical Center
after hours of surgery to remove bullet fragments and a damaged spleen
and to repair wounds in her stomach. When she woke up more than a week
later, she described the two gunmen, the woman who had met her and
Grant at the truck stop, and the distinctive green car with gold wheel
rims.

Even though Beach wanted to tell her mother what had happened, she
kept her mouth shut. She says she could imagine Arevalo harming her or
her mother or children if she went to the police.

Soon, though, Kansas City, Kansas, police caught up with Beach. They
had retrieved a cell phone from the floor of Grant's car, and her home
phone number was all over it.

A few weeks after the murder, in July, Detective Bob Howard grabbed
another detective and drove to the home that matched the phone number.

Beach answered the door and let the detectives in. At first, she told
them she didn't know Land Grant. When the detectives told Beach her
number had come up as one of the last ones Grant had dialed before he
was killed, she admitted that her cousin knew him.

The detectives heard some rustling in the back bedroom -- Arevalo was
there -- and began to feel uneasy, so they asked her to go down to the
station with them. On the way, she admitted that she had acted as a
go-between for Grant. She said she was supposed to set up a drug deal
for him on the night he was killed but that he never showed up.

Howard realized that Beach matched Thomas' description of the woman
who had met Grant at the truck stop, and the detectives asked her to
give a formal statement. She still claimed she didn't know what had
happened to Grant, and she made up an absurd story about leading him
to 714 Homer and then getting hit on the head with a skillet. The
detectives took her home.

They arrested her the next day, July 21, 2000. On the phone from the
Wyandotte County Jail, she told her mother the whole story.

"I told her, 'Just tell the truth. Tell them what happened,'" her
mother says. After that, Beach was ready to talk.

She gave police a full statement, which stayed consistent throughout
her trial: Beach had known nothing of the plot to rob and murder
Grant; she had gone into the house on Homer to get the drugs for
Grant; she heard gunshots, and when she came out Arevalo was standing
there with a gun telling her to get in the car and drive.

After she began cooperating, police hinted that she would be their
star witness against Arevalo, Beach's mother says.

And Beach probably would have been the state's main witness -- if
Arevalo, tipped off by a friend who worked at the Wyandotte County
Court House, hadn't fled after learning that the district attorney's
office had issued a warrant for his arrest. The clerk, Angelica
Guerrero, was fired and charged with aiding a felon in August 2000.
But that didn't help Beach, who had told police everything she knew
without asking for an attorney.

She didn't know that she could be charged with a crime she didn't
commit.

But under Kansas' felony murder law, a defendant can be charged with
first-degree murder for any killing -- even if the defendant didn't
kill anyone -- if the murder happened during the commission of a
dangerous felony.

The law is designed to deter criminals from committing felonies, or at
least from acting in a way that might lead to a death. But like Beach,
many criminals don't know about the law, and opponents argue that it
doesn't have much effect on crime. The statute dates back to English
common law from the Elizabethan period of the 1500s, though England
stopped enforcing it in 1957 because it was considered too harsh. Most
states have a version of the law, though a few have abolished it. In
Missouri, the law is slightly more lenient, classifying felony murder
as second-degree murder.

Established by territorial government in 1855, Kansas' law states that
murder in the first degree includes any killing that happens while the
perpetrator is committing, attempting to commit or fleeing from any
"inherently dangerous felony" -- that is, a felony during which a
criminal could foresee that someone might be killed. Since the late
1990s, the list of inherently dangerous felonies has included
kidnapping, robbery, rape, child abuse, arson, treason and endangering
the food supply.

For example, it was enforced in May when a jury convicted a
22-year-old man for a second time for felony murder in the 1999 death
of a Lenexa couple. (His first conviction was overturned because of
improper jury instructions.) Benjamin L. Rogers was a teenager when he
and two friends stole motorcycles from an Olathe dealership and, with
police in pursuit, crashed their getaway truck into the couples' car.

At her trial, Beach took the stand and told her version of the story.
But prosecutors had offered Zugelder a plea bargain for his testimony
against her, and he testified that Beach had known about the plan to
rob and murder Grant. That contradicted his testimony at a preliminary
hearing, when he'd said Arevalo hadn't told Beach about the plan
because he was afraid she'd back out.

In February 2001, a jury acquitted Beach of aggravated robbery and
conspiracy to commit murder.

But they found her guilty of felony murder and of attempted
second-degree murder in the case of Thomas. Judge J. Dexter Burdette
didn't inform the jury members that they had to agree on which
underlying felony Beach had committed at the time of the murder, just
that they had to agree she had committed a felony. The following
month, Burdette sentenced Beach to life in prison with a "hard 20" --
no possibility of parole for 20 years.

The details of the trial are fuzzy in juror Brenna Palmer's memory.
"There was some argument," Palmer remembers. "Anytime someone's life
is at stake, there should be argument. Some of us didn't feel she
should have been blamed for all of that."

When police finally caught Arevalo, he pleaded guilty to first-degree
murder, attempted first-degree murder and aggravated robbery. In
November 2002, a judge gave him the same sentence as Beach for Grant's
murder -- life with a hard 20. Arevalo got an additional eight years
for his other crimes.

Then 27-year-old Zugelder -- who, a few days before the murder, had
discussed with Arevalo a plan to rob and kill Grant but had been
unable to make it on that day -- pleaded guilty to conspiracy to
commit murder. He received a 13-year sentence.

All of the charges against Jimenez -- first-degree murder, attempted
murder, aggravated robbery and conspiracy to commit murder -- were
dropped. Jimenez had been scheduled for trial along with Beach, but he
petitioned the court to give him a new lawyer because his public
defender had once represented one of the state's witnesses in the case.

By state law, a defendant's trial must be scheduled within 90 days,
and the change of attorneys gave the courts another 90 days to
reschedule Jimenez's trial. But the new date fell a few weeks too
late, and the district attorney's office neglected to buy more time by
requesting a continuance. In May 2001, Wyandotte County District Court
Judge Cordell Meeks Jr. dismissed the case, ruling that Jimenez's
right to a speedy trial had been violated. The district attorney's
office decided not to appeal the judge's ruling.

As of this spring, Beach has been in prison for three
years.

Sarah Liggett has spent the past year thinking about how to free her.
An articulate law student in her mid-20s, she seems to have little in
common with Beach except for her age.

"We've had very different paths," Liggett says. "And I think she's
been struggling from day one of her life to make it, with very limited
support, and that's part of what led her to where she is today. But I
do think it's kind of scary how this law was applied in this case. I
think a lot of people could be stuck in her situation."

Liggett, who grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado, moved to Lawrence two
years ago to attend law school at the University of Kansas. For the
past year, she's worked only on Beach's case as part of KU's Paul E.
Wilson Defender Project, one of the few programs in the country that
handles post-conviction work for free. Professors there pore over
dozens of cases, usually after requests from prisoners or their
families, and are able to take on only a few cases a semester.

Beach's case had been referred by her appeals attorney, Rebecca
Woodman of Topeka, who had been dismayed to lose Beach's appeal in
2002 and thought the Defender Project was her last resort.

Woodman says Beach's case highlights the felony murder law's
unfairness.

"It was very unusual because she was the girlfriend of the main
perpetrator, and she basically took the rap for the whole thing,"
Woodman says. "I'm not convinced that she was culpable at all, but she
was definitely the least culpable of all of these people, and she was
the one that was the most vigorously prosecuted."

Few of the Defender Project's cases involve clemency
petitions.

"There are not a lot of cases that come through our office that seem
to cry out for clemency, but all of us here have been really compelled
by the facts in this case," says Beth Cateforis, the KU law professor
who is supervising Liggett's work.

At the end of May, the Defender Project sent a 17-page petition to the
Kansas Parole Board for review. The parole board must forward it to
Governor Kathleen Sebelius' office within three months. In the
petition, Liggett asks the governor to pardon Beach.

Beach lives in a cubicle with three other women. A curtain hangs in
front of the toilet they share.

She takes a creative-writing class with a volunteer professor from
Washburn University and writes awkward, rhyming poems, sometimes with
misspelled words, to express her feelings. In a poem called "Jail,"
she writes haltingly about living in a tiny concrete room and wearing
an orange outfit.

How did this happen to me?/I am in a place I thought I'd never
be.

She speaks in a soft voice. "I am miserable," she says.

"I am not a suicidal person," she says. "But when I first got here, I
used to wish I was dead. I used to pray I wouldn't wake up. "

She misses her kids. The worst part of being in prison, she says, is
seeing them, now 8 and 9, cry when they have to leave after a visit.
Her daughter lives in Topeka with Burke, and her son is in Kansas
City, Missouri, with his grandparents.

Beach's trip to prison shocked her own mother into making some
changes. Simpson says she felt guilty about all the years she stayed
with Beach's abusive father and about her frequent trips to the
casinos after her son's death.

"I thought, if I had been there for my daughter, maybe none of this
would have happened," Simpson says. Now she's back at her waitressing
job at Chubby's restaurant in Independence. That's where she met her
fiance, whom she says is the first man she's been with who has treated
her well. The two of them recently bought a modest ranch-style house
in southeast Kansas City. It's filled with knickknacks and family
photos. "It was his idea," she says. "He wanted the grandkids to have
a nice place to play."

Simpson sometimes baby-sits her grandchildren. And she tries to assist
in the efforts to free her daughter.

"It's too late for Bo, but it's not too late for Becky," Simpson says.
Rebecca Beach didn't kill the drug dealer from Topeka. But she's in
prison for life because Kansas' felony murder law says she did.