Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree’s nephew, Billy Dupree, who was to have gone on trial for first-degree murder on Monday , instead has been given a sweetheart plea deal in the December 2014 killing of 16-year old Deleisha Kelley.
Kelley was strangled in Kansas City, Kansas and then dumped in Kansas City, Missouri, where a homeless man looking for cans found her body covered with branches, tires and trash in an abandoned garage on East 24th Street.
The DA’s 39-year-old nephew has a long criminal history — including sex crimes against minors in 2003 and 2005, according to Kansas Department of Corrections records. And yet, according to a Sept. 13 filing in Wyandotte County District Court, he has been allowed to plead no contest to involuntary manslaughter.
Without an admission of guilt, what acceptance of responsibility is there? None, really, though after he pleaded no contest, the court entered a finding of guilt, as is usual in no contest pleas.
Involuntary manslaughter is the lowest level of homicide; in fact, a defendant with no criminal history could get probation if found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
Originally, Billy Dupree was facing a life sentence for this gruesome crime.
And there is a staggering amount of evidence against him in this case. Yet once again, a well-connected defendant gets off with the deal of a lifetime, while so many others in tough-on-crime Kansas are sent away forever on a thimble’s worth of evidence, or none at all.
Dupree will be formally sentenced in a Wyandotte County court on Nov. 22, according to the court filing.
Jalelisa Jeffery, a witness in the case named in court documents, sent me an audio recording of her conversation with the trial assistant in the attorney general’s office who told her that at his sentencing, he would get “an upwards departure for him to serve 15 years.’’
Which means, if the trial assistant is right, prosecutors have settled on a 15-year sentence. When he was finally charged in Kelley’s death, Dupree was already in prison for another violent crime. Jeffery said that in a second conversation with the trial assistant, which was not recorded, she was told Dupree’s new sentence would run concurrently with the one he’s already serving. If that’s what happens, he will serve only eight or nine additional years for brutally ending Kelley’s life.
There is still some reason to hope that might not happen: The maximum sentence for involuntary manslaughter in Kansas does depend on one’s criminal history. And ultimately, Billy Dupree’s sentence will be decided by District Court Judge Dan Cahill. Judges can even reject a plea deal, as we saw in a tax case against Hunter Biden last year .
The lead prosecutor in the Dupree case, Kansas assistant attorney general Jessica Domme, did not respond to my email asking the rationale for this generous deal, especially given his history.
The victim’s uncle, Vinson Smith, told me in an interview that to him, the deal can only have been based on Billy Dupree’s family connections.
“From the beginning, I thought that. The whole city knows what he did,” Smith said, referring to KCK, where the killing occurred.
His niece’s murder “was practically solved by the Missouri Police Department” — the KCPD, Smith means — because her body was dumped in KCMO. But then, because the crime occurred in KCK, the case was turned over to the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.
For years, the victim’s family waited for charges to be filed.
And now, nearly a decade after their loss, the case has been dumped as unceremoniously as Deleisha Kelley herself was.
Mark Dupree was not yet DA when Kelley was killed. Neither he nor his spokesman responded to a request for comment on his nephew’s plea deal.
‘I don’t understand how this is possible’
But Jalelisa Jeffery is furious. She has a daughter with Billy Dupree’s brother, Glen Blount, Jr., who is also listed in court documents as a witness in the case.
A witness at a preliminary hearing in the case testified that Billy Dupree told him that Blount helped him get rid of Kelley’s body.
“It’s a literal spit on Deleisha’s grave” to let Billy Dupree off so lightly, said Jeffery, who now lives in Texas. “She was 16 years old,” and yet her life and death meant nothing?
“I don’t understand how this is possible. He got a sweet deal.” Billy Dupree, she said, “is a registered sex offender who shouldn’t see the light of day again.”
The trial assistant who let her know that the trial was off told her she had “promising news.” Which was that Billy Dupree had taken a plea deal, so Jeffery didn’t have to worry about coming up to Kansas for trial. Only, Jeffery wanted to testify, because “nobody is above the law.” Or so she thought.
The only good news she can see now is that “Billy just admitted guilt,” and in doing so strengthened her argument for regaining custody of her daughter, who according to her motion for temporary custody and child support, filed last Monday in Wyandotte County District Court, has been in the custody of the extended Dupree family since 2017.
The motion argued that the child should not have been anywhere her father could have contact with her. It notes that a January 2015 search warrant affidavit says Blount was both at the scene of the crime and where Kelley’s body was dumped.
“Police documents from as far back as January 2015,” the motion says, “show that Glen Blount Jr.’s cell phone” was in both locations.
Billy Dupree did not actually admit guilt, but again, after he pleaded no contest, the court entered a finding of guilt. That’s why all that’s left to be decided now is his sentence.
There was so much physical evidence in this case, including a 2015 DNA hit, that it’s hard to imagine that the state could not have won in court.
In a preliminary hearing in September of 2023, a man who had been sleeping on his uncle’s couch in the apartment next door to Billy Dupree’s testified that on the morning of Dec. 18, 2014, Dupree woke him up and “said he had a underage little girl over there and he had to kill her, choke her out.”
Why? In pretrial motions, prosecutors said that Dupree killed Kelley because he had just learned that she was a minor, and he feared being sent back to prison for having sex with an underage girl. If he “had to kill her,” then that’s premeditated, and hardly involuntary.
The same neighbor also testified that he peeked into Dupree’s open apartment door and saw feet sticking out of his bedroom. At that point, he said, “I got the hell out of there.”
Later, “I seen a lot of bleach bottles in his trash. … I knew he was trying to clean the s--- up.” Dupree told him, the man said, that he “took her over town” — in other words, dumped her body across state lines, in KCMO.
A childhood friend who reconnected with Billy Dupree when both were serving time in Lansing testified that he “said he strangled the girl, and he, like, bleached her hands, and him and his brother — he called his brother to move her” to near where “I used to live on 23rd and Monroe in Kansas City, Missouri.”
A cousin of Kelley’s testified that she had been staying with Billy Dupree and that he “beat her up.”
Former KCMO homicide detective Leland Blank told the court that Kelley had been found nearly naked, wrapped in a blue sheet, with a plastic bag over her head. Ropes that had been tied around her wrists had left marks, he said.
A medical examiner ruled that the cause of death was “asphyxia due to strangulation and possible smothering.”
Why did it take 8 years to charge Billy Dupree?
So why did eight years go by between the time Billy Dupree was first brought in for questioning on Jan. 28, 2015, and the time he was charged in January of 2023?
Why did it take eight years after the DNA hit from semen found in the young woman’s vagina was matched to Billy Dupree for him to be charged?
I guess we’ll never know now.
Nor are we likely to learn why six search warrants of Billy Dupree were separated by years, with the first two being executed in January and February of 2015 and the last two in 2022.
But there is so much more evidence against Billy Dupree than against so many who have been sent away for good that it’s stunning, if not entirely surprising.
The last call placed from Kelley’s cellphone, at 4:33 p.m. on the day of her death, was to 911. It lasted two seconds, and never really connected. According to a motion from the prosecution, cell tower information “places the victim’s phone within .1 miles of the defendant’s residence.”
Blount’s cellphone also places him there. But there will be no accountability now for whomever helped Billy Dupree dispose of a 16-year-old girl’s body — after, as the court just found, Dupree ended her life.
And once again, faith in the criminal justice system is made to look ridiculous.
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