Editor's note: The audio content posted with this report is a more brief version, first broadcast during Morning Edition local newscasts on Friday, July 26.
Ted Salveter is 88 years old. He’s a well-known local lawyer, elected to the Springfield school board and the Missouri legislature back in the 1960s and ’70s. He also says he taught Sunday school for 30 years and served in the U.S. Marine Corps.
Next week, Salveter could be fined or incarcerated by a Missouri judge who’s currently considering whether Salveter is guilty of four counts of harassment charges — two of them felonies. The case is a “bench trial,” meaning no jury is involved, but the judge both decides the facts of the case and applies the law.
The criminal case was originally filed three years ago, but it went to trial Thursday in an unusually dramatic hearing at a Greene County courtroom. Those who attended open court heard references to alleged sexual assault, multiple uses of foul language and several stern admonishments by visiting Judge Dean Dankelson.
Dankelson, who serves the 29th circuit court in the Joplin area, was assigned Salveter’s case because 11 Springfield-area judges recused themselves, citing close connections to the main parties in the case — all three of whom are local lawyers.
In a brief interview with Ozarks Public Radio early Friday morning, Salveter said the trial Thursday at the courthouse had been “a very trying day” for him.
“It’s been a trying seven years,” Salveter added, claiming he’s been “deluged” with “elder abuse” over his conflict with Springfield City Councilman Abe McGull and his wife, Crista Hogan, the director of a prominent local lawyers’ association.
What is the Salveter case about?
McGull, a former U.S. attorney himself, is Black, while Hogan is white. Their racial identities are relevant to the criminal case against Salveter because the case turns on a series of letters Salveter wrote about McGull and Hogan. Prosecutors and the alleged victims characterize Salveter's letters as “racist” and “sexually prurient.”
The people who got the letters from Salveter included McGull and Hogan’s friends and family, officials at their church, McGull’s office landlord, and even the Springfield News-Leader's letters to the editor page — which didn’t publish the letters, according to court testimony. (The newspaper’s editor, Amos Bridges, declined to comment when contacted by KSMU on Thursday.)
Along with writings that lean hard on racialized stereotypes about Black men, Salveter also sent letters alleging that in 2018, McGull sexually assaulted Salveter’s then-wife, Becky Hogan, at a country club wine-tasting.
Along with race and McGull and Crista Hogan’s marriage, Salveter’s letters cover topics including Salveter’s marriage to Becky Hogan that ended in 2020 and Salveter’s ties to the Hogan family.
What did McGull and prosecutors, Salveter and defense say about the letters and their racial content?
Called to the witness stand by the prosecution, McGull — who in the late 1990s also served as mayor and city council member in the Kansas City suburb of Pleasant Valley, Missouri — pushed back on the concept of racial identity. Later, Salveter's ex-wife testified that McGull didn't assault her.
“Is your race a character trait?” First Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Elizabeth Kiesewetter Fax asked McGull, after he was sworn in. She also asked whether McGull’s race had anything to do with his policy positions at City Council.
“Absolutely not,” McGull answered.
Earlier Thursday, McGull testified, “I’ve tried to live my life in a way that my emphasis is not on my color, my race, or anything like that. I like people to judge me by my character and my conscience and what I bring to the table.”
For Councilman McGull, the letters were “very disturbing,” “very hurtful,” and “incessant,” according to his testimony. He said he and his wife were on “high alert” due to Salveter’s letters. McGull testified he altered his work routines to spend more time at home with his spouse, and that he bought a gun for protection.
“We never had a firearm in the house before that,” McGull said in court.
In many ways, the case is a family dispute: Salveter’s ex-wife, Becky Hogan, is the mother of McGull’s wife, Crista Hogan. Called to the witness stand Thursday afternoon, Becky Hogan denied that McGull assaulted her.
Becky Hogan testified in court that after McGull, her son-in-law, greeted her at the 2018 wine-tasting, “he may have touched my shoulder.”
On cross-examination of Becky Hogan, Salveter’s attorney, Brady Musgrave, suggested during questioning that “maybe [Salveter’s] perception seemed to be askew from reality” with regard to the sexual assault Salveter alleges took place at the wine-tasting.
Meanwhile, in a March 2024 court filing, First Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Elizabeth Kiesewetter Fax wrote that Salveter’s accusations of sexual assault by McGull “are completely baseless, fabricated, and damaging.”
The assault allegations became part of an interpersonal and legal saga that’s gone on since at least February 2019, when the first anonymous letters were sent by Salveter. That's according to reports by Crista Hogan documented in a Springfield police probable cause statement filed on the same day as prosecutors opened the case against Salveter, back in mid-2021.
Thursday’s courtroom testimony — and documents provided to Ozarks Public Radio by Salveter — both show that Salveter sent letters over a period of years, some of them anonymous and featuring phrases like “Do All Black Lives Matter?”, cut-up photos of McGull, or references to McGull using comments or epithets that would attempt to depict him as a self-serving politician on the make, marrying into a prominent Springfield family and attending their church for the sake of gaining wealth and influence.
How does a deferred prosecution agreement relate to this case?
The case is complicated by something known as a “deferred prosecution agreement.” Essentially, it means that Salveter’s trial this week didn’t have to happen. In March of 2023, Judge Dankelson wrote an order indicating “the Court specifically finds that the ends of justice are served” by cancelling a previously-set trial date.
The reason? Prosecutors worked out a deal with Salveter. If he ceased sending the allegedly harassing letters to McGull and Hogan, and also stopped sending letters referencing the married couple to “any other entity,” then “no further proceedings will be scheduled unless requested” by prosecutors, according to the judge's order on the agreement.
But despite that deferred prosecution agreement, nine months later, Salveter sent another letter to McGull and Hogan’s church. The document was introduced in court on Thursday as state’s evidence.
Court papers and witness testimony show that the letter was received on December 5 of last year at the church office, and it featured a photo of Salveter and Becky Hogan, along with a photo of McGull “that had been cut and pasted to said document.”
Above the photos, Salveter hand-wrote the following: “If City Councilman Abe McGull had never come to Springfield Attorney Ted Salveter and Becky Hogan would still be happily married,” a phrase prosecutors view as an implied threat. Below the photos, Salveter quoted from the biblical Book of Matthew: “Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.”
Salveter says Becky Hogan divorced him in 2020. By his account, his stepdaughter Crista Hogan turned his then-wife against him; prosecutors argued that Becky Hogan left Salveter after she became aware of the anonymous letters Salveter was sending about her daughter and son-in-law.
In court on Thursday, Brady Musgrave, Salveter’s attorney, argued that the content of the December 2023 letter to the church “certainly does not qualify as defamatory correspondence” that would break the deferred prosecution agreement Salveter signed nine months earlier.
But Greene County prosecutors had a sharply different interpretation of the December 2023 letter sent to McGull and Hogan’s church. Two days after Christmas of last year, prosecutors re-started the case against him, adding two misdemeanor harassment charges specifically tied to that letter.
What arguments did the defense offer in court?
In court on Thursday, Salveter took the witness stand to testify in his own defense, after being advised that he was not obligated to make such a move.
“I’m a fool if I don’t testify,” Salveter told members of the public lingering in the courtroom during a recess shortly before 2 p.m.
Salveter’s lawyer, Brady Musgrave, at times grew visibly frustrated with his own client after advising Salveter to answer questions clearly on the witness stand, and only if he could hear and understand each question properly.
Salveter testified, “I did not feel that — knowing what I know about [McGull] and what he’s done with my wife — that he was fit to be on City Council. And the letters were written with that in mind.”
That sentiment formed the core of the defense argument on Thursday.
Musgrave advocated the idea that Salveter’s letters constitute protected free speech because their subject was communication of opinions about a politician’s character, regardless of how "stupid and tasteless and vile,” in Musgrave’s words, the letters might be. Musgrave said the only threat involved was comments by Salveter that he might sue McGull and Hogan in civil court.
Musgrave argued that a Missouri law criminalizing harassment had become a “catch-all” for prosecutors unable to prove a case under criminal law for domestic violence or other offenses.
“Oh, we can’t really get them on a domestic, we really can’t get them on X, Y or Z,” Musgrave argued. “It hurt their feelings, though. That’s a felony. Now, [Salveter’s] conduct is not a felony.”
Musgrave later added, “I don’t want to live in a world where everybody is so sensitive that words are felonies. That annoyances are felonies.”
What comment did Crista Hogan have?
McGull and Hogan declined a request for comment by KSMU during a break from Thursday court proceedings. But in a text message sent after Judge Dankelson adjourned the courtroom and took the case under advisement, Crista Hogan said Thursday’s trial was “closure” for her and McGull.
Hogan’s written statement said, “As victims of harassment, we have not publicly spoken while we have waited for the case to work its way through the system. It has taken five-and-a-half years, during which time the defendant has continued to send countless letters filled with racist and sexually prurient content, and we have silently endured his lies and defamation. Today’s trial was closure, and we are grateful to the Greene County Prosecutor’s Office and have faith in the criminal justice system.”
What's next in the case?
As he ended court proceedings late Thursday afternoon, Judge Dankelson requested complete copies of letters and documents submitted by prosecutors and the defense and said he’d examine Missouri’s harassment statute and court precedent on the subject.
A ruling in the case is expected next week, Judge Dankelson said.
