There was a Kansas City, Missouri long before there was a State of Kansas or a Kansas City, Kansas. Situated at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri rivers, early residents of the area found inspiration for the word Kansas from the Kansa Native American tribe. Kansas City, MO produced two uniquely American geniuses/imagineers that forever altered the physical and cultural landscape of the country. One of these men built a magic kingdom, a fantasy world that offered non stop family fun, and a complete escape from reality. The other one moved to Hollywood and opened a theme park. The last one is Walt Disney, of course. The first is J.C. Nichols, the city’s major real estate mogul, who built the stunning Country Club Plaza in 1923, the first planned outdoor shopping mall. Nichols also helped introduce racial segregation to the city’s neighborhoods, having developed about 50 blocks worth of residential homes with covenants that forbade black or Jewish residents from ever buying them.
In 1955, the all-white Kansas City, Missouri school board did not resist the Supreme Court ruling that ordered the desegregation of public schools. But the members did manipulate attendance boundaries to ensure white schools were separated from black schools. Troost Avenue was the most obvious border. It has been Kansas City’s symbolic and literal boundary by explicit design ever since and is widely seen as one of America’s most prominent racial and economic dividing lines. In the early 1920s, Walt Disney, a man with a Brobdingnagian talent for the fantastic and chief architect of enchanted alternate reality, fed a tame mouse he’d named Mortimer at his desk in a red-brick building near Troost. This mouse later became the model for a character known as Mickey Mouse. Disneyland, Walt Disney's metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy and futurism, opened on July 17, 1955.
Missouri is a magnet for stranger-than-fiction true crime stories. The saga of a self-proclaimed priest who spent several years in Missouri is the subject of a fascinating new podcast, Smokescreen: Fake Priest. Father Ryan, who also goes by Ryan St. Anne Gevelinger, Ryan St. Anne Scott, Ryan Patrick Scott, Father Ryan St. Anne and Randell Stocks, was accused of stealing from his followers — mostly older women, widows and aspiring nuns who yearned for a traditional Catholicism. The fake priest came to Armstrong, Missouri in April 2014, presenting himself as a Benedictine abbot — black robes, clerical collar and all. The podcast provides a worthwhile glimpse into the life of a grifter, and the consequences of unquestioned faith despite rampant warnings about danger. Meanwhile, Richard Scott Smith is the subject of Love Fraud, who over the past 20 years used the internet and his dubious charms to prey upon unsuspecting women around Kansas City, Missouri in search of love — conning them out of their money and dignity. The series is a fascinating journey, mostly because of the women’s collective effort to catch him. But it also serves as a cautionary tale of how apparently intelligent, sensible people can be susceptible to the snake oil being peddled by a clever salesman.
No One Saw a Thing tells the story of Ken Rex McElroy who terrorized the town of Skidmore, Missouri for decades. On July 10, 1981, 60 townspeople surrounded his truck and shot him dead. The shocking circumstances of his murder garnered international attention. However to this day, no one's claimed to have seen a thing. This gripping true crime mini-series examines the unsolved and mysterious death of McElroy, now considered one of the most infamous acts of vigilantism in American history, and explores the corrosive ripple effects of violence in small-town America. As if things couldn't get any more strange, Kansas City was also home to Tyler Deaton, the Pied-Piper-like leader of a radical Christian cult known as IHOP (International House of Prayer). It was claimed in December 2012 that Tyler Deaton was involved in sexual affairs with at least three other men who lived at the religious community he led. The charismatic Christian’s wife, Bethany Deaton, was killed for fear that she would tell her therapist about being sexually assaulted. Somehow it makes total sense that hiding 150 feet below the city is Subtropolis, a 55 million square foot storage cave that hosts a wide array of businesses seeking to cut costs and utilize the underground for efficiency. Here, you will find one of the most protected data centers in the world where all our internet information lives. You might say it's a city that is literally built on secrets. And make-believe.