This story is part of a series by Kansas Reflector and The Handbasket to examine the one-year anniversary of the raid on the Marion County Record.
MARION — When police raided the Marion newspaper office in August 2023, the initial explanation seemed fairly straightforward: Police Chief Gideon Cody was seeking revenge against local press for an investigation into his past, and was using a local businesswoman with a DUI as a pawn.
While Cody’s grudge played a role in the unprecedented Marion County Record raid, in the year since, details of messy relationships in this small town paired with the inner-workings of a corrupt local government paint a picture that’s more complicated. And even though the special prosecutors report released Monday clears everyone involved but Cody of criminal wrongdoing, it does nothing to diffuse allegations of police malfeasance.
Information provided in the five federal lawsuits filed in connection to this case makes it clear that while certain names — like Eric Meyer, the owner and publisher of the Marion County Record whose office and home were raided, Ruth Herbel, the city councilwoman whose home was also raided, and Kari Newell, whose driving record kicked off this whole fracas — dominated the story, others flew under the radar in the immediate aftermath.
“The story unfolded just like it was a novella or something. Literally every day there was something new,” said Kansas Rep. Mari-Lynn Poskin, a Democrat from the Kansas City metro who earlier this year proposed a resolution to support the freedom of the press. “I definitely remember every day just going, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
It is now clear that then-Marion Mayor David Mayfield and Marion County Sheriff Jeff Soyez were instrumental in the raids and harbored resentments of their own against the targets. And Mayfield’s wife, Jami, helped stoke the flames from the outside.
“Cody had it in for us, I’m certain,” Meyer said in his office in late July as he reflected on last year’s raids, “but somebody had to overrule the city administrator and say, ‘Cody, go ahead.’ And that was David Mayfield.”
Mayfield, according to one of the lawsuits, asked Soyez to help him find a new police chief in late 2022 after the previous one quit. Soyez was friends with Cody when they both worked in Kansas City, and Soyez “strongly urged” Mayfield to hire him for the job. It was difficult for Mayfield to say no: In addition to being mayor, the former Kansas Highway Patrol trooper also works part-time for Soyez transporting local prisoners.
Shortly after the raids, The Handbasket learned the Record had been investigating claims that Cody had been demoted at his last post for inappropriate conduct toward other officers, as the Record later reported. Multiple sources also alleged to the Record that Cody “ran over a dead body at a crime scene.”
Cody’s loathing for the Record helped explain the motivation for the raids in the early days, but it didn’t capture the whole story.
Two weeks before the raids, Mayfield posted the following on his personal Facebook page: “The real villains in America aren’t Black people. They aren’t white people. They aren’t Asians. They aren’t Latinos. They aren’t women. They aren’t gays. They are the radical ‘journalists,’ ‘teachers’ and ‘professors’ who do nothing but sow division between the American people.”
Meyer, who taught journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, believed the post targeted him. In his lawsuit, Meyer accuses Mayfield of spurring Cody to investigate the newspaper.
But they didn’t act alone. Sheriff’s deputies drafted the search warrant applications and helped carry out the raid. Soyez threw a pizza party when the officers seized computers and cellphones from the newspaper office and Meyer’s and Herbel’s homes.
Herbel worked closely with Mayfield in her official capacity. In a recent conversation at Newell’s former coffee shop in Marion, now under new management, Herbel said she had supported Mayfield’s campaign for mayor, but then “he just flipped.”
Herbel recalled a combatant relationship with Mayfield, which she attributes, in part, to her gender and outspoken nature.
