“The kids would eventually call him The Creeper. The adults would denounce him as a monster. The prosecutors who put him away for child sexual abuse would describe him as a master manipulator ‘who groomed the community.’” As part of its series, Abused by the Badge, the Washington Post investigates smalltown police chief Kevin Coffey, of Maypearl, Texas. Maypearl was the eighth law enforcement agency that Coffey had worked at in 11 years, because of a long trail of misconduct. Yet at first, some of his victims in Maypearl did not want to report him. A Post investigation identified 47 heads of law enforcement agencies who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022. Three-quarters of them worked in departments with less than 10 cops.
To report the story about Coffey, Washington Post reporters interviewed dozens of people across Texas and obtained hundreds of records and court filings to reconstruct events in Maypearl and the other communities where Kevin Coffey worked. One important day in 2015, they found, a 16-year-old girl approached farmer and grandmother Geneva Zoll, an outspoken advocate in the town. On her cell phone were countless questionable messages from the chief. He flashed his police cruiser lights into her window; he frequently touched her, she said, rubbing her arm, running his hand through her hair. He took photos of her in his patrol car. He sent her a picture of his handcuffs, saying, “One of these days.” As the Post reports, repeated incidents like this were behind why he had worked in eight police departments over an 11-year-span.
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