The Cellar - Too Close to Home...Way too Fucking Close

It seems that my dead psycho pal had killed before...and none of us knew.

This just keeps getting better and better.

Quote:

Mall gunman had killed before
Victim’s wife had a relationship with mall gunman. Case ended with no indictment.

By CHRISTINE VENDEL
The Kansas City Star

When David Logsdon fatally shot two shoppers at the Ward Parkway Center 10 days ago, it wasn’t the first time he gunned down someone.

He shot a 24-year-old Northland man during a fistfight over a woman six days before Christmas 1981, The Kansas City Star has confirmed.

At first, Logsdon and two others told detectives that Steven J. Foster committed suicide. But the coroner disputed that, saying it was impossible for Foster to have been holding the pistol.

After detectives pressed, Logsdon claimed the gun accidentally fired. The first bullet hit no one, but the second struck Foster in the middle of his forehead and exited the back of his head, near an ear, the autopsy report says.

A Clay County grand jury declined to indict Logsdon, then a five-year security officer for Kansas City International Airport.

The outcome disappointed homicide detectives.

“None of us bought any of their stories,” said Pete Edlund, one of those detectives and now a Platte County deputy. “But we never had enough to get him charged.”

Foster’s death crushed his family.

“They initially reported it on the news as a suicide. That was so hard to get over,” said his mother, Yvonne Foster. “We never got to say our son was murdered.”

The family trusted the legal system, but it failed, she said.

Steven Foster’s father briefly considered revenge.

“It was a hard decision not to go kill him” (Logsdon), said Foster’s father, J.W. Foster. “But I had too much to give up. I couldn’t avenge Steve, but I could look after his kids.”

Though most of the case’s investigative records are sealed, The Star pieced together this story using Foster’s autopsy report and death certificate, police documents kept all these years by his family, and city employment records and interviews with Foster’s family and others involved in the case.

His family fondly recalled that Steven Foster looked like a bear — with an appetite to match — but that he had a gentle spirit. The hunter and fisherman cherished childhood memories of low-budget family camping trips. After graduating from Oak Park High School in 1975, he worked at service stations before becoming a mechanic for a truck company.

Days before his death, he moved back in with his parents. He and his wife, Sherlene, had been married three years when they separated. They were raising two children, a preschool girl and a toddler boy.

Sherlene Foster, a KCI gift shop employee, secretly began a relationship with Logsdon.

On Dec. 19, 1984, Steven Foster went to Sherlene’s house— his former house — to pick up his children and take them to see the Country Club Plaza’s Christmas lights.

When he saw Logsdon, he became suspicious of his intentions. But Sherlene and her 16-year-old sister, Reva, lied and said Logsdon came to see Reva.

Steven Foster stormed off in a huff, driving away with his son but leaving his daughter standing in the doorway, crying and calling, “Daddy!”

He soon returned for the girl and encountered Logsdon and Sherlene wearing coats and about to get into Logsdon’s car. Reva and her boyfriend were outside watching.

“I remember this part like it was yesterday,” recalled Reva Neubauer, now a 41-year-old resident of Columbia. “He said, ‘You lied to me, Sherlene. I knew you did.’ ”

Steven Foster punched Logsdon, igniting the fistfight. Neubauer grabbed the couple’s preschooler and ran inside to call police. Her boyfriend soon followed and announced, “They got a gun! Hurry up!”

Sherlene retreated inside in tears. Logsdon soon followed, shut the door behind him and announced that Steven Foster had killed himself.

Logsdon then asked Neubauer to lie. Neubauer recalls him saying something like: “You know your brother-in-law committed suicide, but he used my gun — a gun that I wasn’t supposed to have. If we could just say that I brought the gun here for you guys, for protection and that he took it off the table, then I wouldn’t get in trouble. It’s really not my fault, right?”

Neubauer believed Logsdon, who also told her he was supposed to leave his gun at work. Neubauer went along with the plan to say that Foster had grabbed the gun from a table.

After Neubauer returned home from giving a statement at police headquarters, she shoveled the bloody snow off the driveway.

“I couldn’t stand to see it out there,” she said.

Edlund, one of the investigators, said the story didn’t add up.

“We all had a feeling in our gut that this guy had gotten shot,” Edlund said. “There were all kinds of things that smelled.”

When police received the coroner’s report, they brought Logsdon, Sherlene Foster and Neubauer downtown to confront them.

All three changed their stories, but Sherlene Foster and Neubauer maintained they were inside when the shot was fired. Logsdon maintained it was an accident.

Neubauer thinks Logsdon probably thought he was acting in self-defense.

“But I don’t know if it was necessary,” she said. “He had the gun. He could have just run away.”

Neubauer said she regrets lying to police and letting Steven Foster’s parents think their only son committed suicide.

“It was the worst mistake of my life,” she said. “I disgraced Steven’s name when I did it. He was a good man. He loved my sister. It wasn’t his fault.”

Sherlene Foster, who died about five years later, didn’t see Logsdon again, Neubauer said.

Steven Foster’s parents adopted the children when they were 7 and 10.

The children — and the rest of the family — were shocked to learn of Logsdon’s shooting rampage at Ward Parkway.

When Yvonne Foster first heard a television news anchor announce the gunman’s name, it sounded familiar, but she said the anchor mispronounced it.

She turned to her husband and asked if he heard the name. He didn’t.

It wasn’t until a Star reporter called last week that relatives learned the man who killed Steven was the same man who apparently beat his neighbor to death and later tried to kill multiple shoppers before a police officer killed him inside the mall.

“There was no joy,” Yvonne Foster said of the news of Logsdon’s death. “We were just stunned. And after that, we prayed for the people who had to go through what we did.”

Logsdon didn’t tell his sister, Kathy Cagg, about the 1981 shooting. Cagg said she doubted he told their mother, either.

A high school dropout, he served one year in the Air Force before working about nine years at KCI, Cagg said. He later held a variety of jobs, including delivering medical documents and once wrecking a school bus while intoxicated. At one point, he hurt his back and received workers’ compensation. Later, when he had gotten used to not working, he drank heavily, she said.

He worked one year recently as an unarmed guard for the Target store at Ward Parkway. But he lost his job last year.

Sandra Foster, who was 4 when her father died, said Logsdon “walked away from murder, and he knew that.”

Now Steven Foster’s relatives want to learn all they can about how he died. They are trying to get the homicide case file from police, but were told it was a closed record.

“I just want to know the truth,” said Steven Foster II, who was nearly 2 when his dad died. “I got a lot of pieces to the puzzle, but I don’t have them all and some are conflicting.”

“I didn’t get to know my father … through the consequences of his (Logsdon’s) actions. I’m sorry to know he’s taken more lives.”