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Kansas Man Exonerated After Saying He Was Framed for Murder By Woman Who Took Care of His Elderly Dad
Pete Coones tragically died just 108 days after his murder conviction was vacated. He was imprisoned after allegedly being framed for the deaths of Kathleen and Carl Schroll.
In the final moments of her life, 45-year-old Kathleen Schroll placed a haunting phone call.
She called her mother in the early morning hours of April 7, 2008 and reported that Pete Coones — the son of an elderly man she had taken care of for years before his death — had broken in and was killing her husband, Carl Schroll, 64.
Before she hung up, Kathleen told her mom that she was afraid she’d be next, according to "The Phone Call" episode of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.
“You need to hurry and get somebody there,” Kathleen’s brother said in a call to 911. “She called crying and screaming.”
By the time police arrived just minutes later, Carl and Kathleen were both dead inside their Kansas City, Kansas, home. Carl had suffered two gunshot wounds to the chest and had blood dripping from his head, while Kathleen had been shot in the back of the head. The gun used — her own weapon — lay nearby on the floor, just a few feet from her left foot.
After learning about Kathleen's last phone call, police quickly arrested Pete, who had been in a heated legal battle with Kathleen at the time of her death. He was convicted of Kathleen's murder, but years after, new questions emerged about what really happened that night and whether Pete had ever been there at all.
Who was Kathleen Schroll?
At the time of their deaths, Kathleen and Carl Schroll had been together for more than a decade and were considered the “life of the party” by many who knew them.
“They were so happy and they were always laughing and joking,” Kathleen’s daughter Blair Hadley told Dateline of her mom and stepdad.
Carl was retired after a successful career working at a race track, but Kathleen was still working at a local credit union. For many years, she’d also worked caring for Olin Coones, an elderly man in his 80s with dementia.
“It was like her father,” Hadley said of Kathleen's relationship with Olin. “She really cared for him, really loved him a lot.”
When Olin died, his house was left to Kathleen and she was also listed as the sole beneficiary on a $42,000 life insurance policy — something that never sat right with Olin’s son, Pete.
Pete contested the beneficiary to the life insurance policy in court and was in the midst of a bitter legal battle with his father’s one-time caregiver.
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Kathleen told her friends and family that Pete was so angry that he started harassing her, leading to a confrontation at a convenience store just two days before she died.
“He passed her and said, 'You will not be spending no more of my dad’s money, b-tch,' and walked away,” Hadley told Dateline, adding that her mom said she was afraid for her life.
Two days later, Kathleen made that harrowing call to her mother at around 2:30 a.m.
What happened to Carl and Kathleen Schroll?
When officers arrived, they found Carl dead, lying on a bed with two gunshot wounds to the chest and a wound to his head. Authorities would later conclude that Carl had been struck in the head with some type of blunt object.
A few feet away, Kathleen’s body lay in the living room of the small home. She had a gunshot wound to the back of her head and her .38 revolver lay near her foot.
“There was no physical evidence to show that there was any type of breaking or entering,” Wyandotte County Prosecutor Mark Dupree said. “The windows were not broken, the door was not kicked in, furniture was not thrown all around. Nothing was rummaged through.”
Dupree, who was not in office at the time of the Carl and Kathleen's deaths but is familiar with the case, said officers at the scene initially believed it was a murder-suicide, with Kathleen shooting her husband before taking her own life.
But after Kathleen’s concerned mother and brother arrived on the scene and told authorities that Kathleen told them Pete had been in the house, the theory of what happened quickly began to shift.
Pete Coones is arrested
Less than 48 hours after the deaths, Pete — a married father of five and U.S. postal worker — was taken into custody at gunpoint as he drove two of his children to a school bus stop.
“There was an immediate onset of fear,” his son Ben, then just 17 years old, recalled of the encounter.
Pete’s family was astounded not only because they didn't believe he was a killer, but also because they said that he was home with them the night the Schrolls died and that he was playing on his computer.
Pete’s wife Dee remembered him waking her up around 2 a.m. with his coughing, and his oldest daughter Mariah and her boyfriend Ross said they had been watching a late night movie when he came into the room and told them not to stay up too late.
“We saw him,” Mariah told Dateline. “I mean we physically laid eyes on him at the time they said he was out of the house.”
Yet, authorities were convinced that Pete had killed Kathleen and Carl in a fit of rage over the inheritance, alleging he'd used some type of blunt object to knock Carl in the head before grabbing Kathleen’s gun and shooting them both.
Pete Coones convicted of killing Kathleen Schroll
Despite his insistence that he had nothing to do with the deaths, Pete went on trial in January of 2009. In a strange twist, he was convicted of killing Kathleen, but acquitted of killing Carl.
“It’s like you’re in a real bad movie,” Pete said. “It’s like you’re watching something happen to somebody else. You’re sitting there thinking, 'How do you have this so wrong?'”
Pete was sentenced to 50 years behind bars without the possibility of parole, but shortly after the verdict, his defense attorney Patti Kalb learned there was data that prosecutors had waited until the trial to hand over that showed someone had been using the computer at the Coones home the night the Schrolls died, just as Pete and his family had said.
She filed a motion for a new trial and it was granted. Just 11 months after the first trial, Pete was once again fighting for his life in front of a jury of his peers. The state’s case was similar to the first one, but this time they also called jailhouse informant Robert Rupert, who claimed that Pete had confessed to the crime, allegedly telling him that he had snuck out a bedroom window with the help of his wife Dee.
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But there were several issues with Rupert’s story. He'd claimed that Pete had driven a red Jeep to the crime scene — yet Pete had sold the Jeep in question more than a year earlier. Pete also weighed around 300 pounds at the time of the murder and insisted there was no way he would have been able to fit through a window.
Despite it all, Pete was convicted in Kathleen’s death a second time and given a 50-year sentence without the possibility of parole.
Suspicions arise that Pete Coones was wrongfully convicted
For more than a decade, Pete spent his days in prison as his children grew, got married and had children of their own.
Pete was starting to lose hope and was considering taking his own life until Dupree took office and started a unit devoted to wrongful conviction claims in the fall of 2018.
Pete wrote a note from prison insisting he’d never killed anyone and pointing out all the inconsistencies of the case. Dupree's new unit believed Pete may have had a legitimate claim and took on the case alongside the Midwest Innocence Project and Pete’s team of defense attorneys.
Defense attorney Branden Bell was examining photos from the crime scene when he noticed a dark mark on one of the bedroom pillows. He had authorities pull out the pillow from the evidence room and they discovered a pristine bullet hidden inside. Authorities realized that Carl was never hit in the head with a blunt object like they'd originally thought. Rather, he was grazed in the head by a bullet. That meant that Kathleen’s gun was the only weapon used in the crime.
“The state’s theory — it was impossible, it made no sense,” Bell said. “No one stopped to think like, 'Wait a second, why — why is she calling her 78-year-old mother and not 911?' The cell phone’s right there and the front door is five feet away from her. If this guy has really come in and is killing her husband and says he’s going to kill her, why didn’t she just run out the front door?”
It was also discovered that swabs from Kathleen’s hands in the evidence boxes had never been tested. When they were tested, they revealed gunshot residue on Kathleen’s hands. The gun itself also only had Kathleen’s DNA on it. There was no physical evidence inside the house that connected Pete to the crime at all.
At the time of Kathleen’s death, she was facing possible criminal charges after authorities found evidence that she had taken more than $30,000 from Olin’s savings account. The beneficiary on Olin's life insurance policy had also been changed online, leading Pete to believe it was never his father’s intention to have Kathleen be named on the policy.
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Pete had also reported Kathleen to police for elder abuse after finding his father covered in bed sores, bruises and sores on his nose.
To add to her troubles, Kathleen was also facing allegations that she had stolen around $11,000 from the credit union where she worked.
As for that jailhouse informant, he later recanted his story and admitted he lied to try to get a better deal in his own case.
Authorities now began to believe that it may be more likely that Kathleen, feeling desperate, may have taken Carl’s life and then shot herself, in a diabolical plot to use her final moments to frame Pete for the deaths with that phone call to her mom.
“To frame me, that’s pure evil,” Pete told Dateline.
Defense attorney Lindsay Runnels said authorities may “never know” why Kathleen seemingly framed an innocent man, but speculated on her possible motivation.
“If there’s life insurance policies, and there were, it enables those to be paid out to people who are important to her,” she said. “I imagine that Pete is somebody who, you know, she has probably some real animosity toward, right? He’s called her out and he has made public what she has done to his father.”
Verdict against Pete Coones is overturned
After hearing all the evidence gathered by Pete’s legal team, a judge threw out his conviction and ordered him to be set free in November of 2020.
As for Kathleen’s daughter, she told Dateline that she was “confused” about the case and didn’t know what to think about the new theory that her mom had been the one to pull the trigger.
“If that did happen, I feel so bad for [Pete's] family,” Hadley said through tears.
Pete was thrilled to finally be reunited with his family after more than 12 years in prison, and he was determined not to get stuck in the past.
“Down the road, five, 10, 20 years, I'd like to say it’s nothing but a speed bump in the rearview mirror,” he said. “If you don’t dwell on it, you win and I just want to spend the rest of my life being happy with what I have, not sad about what I lost.”
Where is Pete Coones today?
Tragically, Pete didn't get much time with his family. After being diagnosed with lung cancer, he died at age 64 in February of 2021 — just 108 days after his release from prison.
