Supporters of Kansas woman who killed rapist ask public to pressure governor for clemency

Dave Ranney and Sharon Sullivan argue that Sarah Gonzales McLinn deserves clemency during a presentation May 20, 2024, at the Lawrence Public Library. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

LAWRENCE — Advocates for a woman who is serving a minimum 25-year prison sentence for killing a man who sexually abused her have launched a public awareness campaign to pressure Gov. Laura Kelly to grant her clemency.

The advocates say Hal Sasko’s abuse of Sarah Gonzales McLinn, which involved emotional and financial control, is a textbook example of human trafficking.

In two-hour presentations this week at the public libraries in Lawrence and Topeka, retired journalist Dave Ranney and Washburn University professor emeritus Sharon Sullivan asked the crowd to consider how they define justice for a woman who kills her rapist. They provided handouts with information on how to write the governor and advocate for clemency.

“We’re asking Gov. Kelly to see that Sarah was a sex-trafficked and labor-trafficked traumatized young woman who killed her trafficker, who was also her serial rapist,” Sullivan said. “She’s now 29 years old. She’s been incarcerated for 10 years, and that’s one-third of her life. She won’t be eligible for parole for another 15 years.”

By the time McLinn drugged and murdered Sasko in January 2014 at the house where they lived together in Lawrence, the 52-year-old man had forcibly raped the 19-year-old woman almost daily for months. Sasko convinced her that she owed him $17,000, even though she had surrendered her meager paychecks to him for more than a year, and that she wasn’t attractive enough for any other man to want her.

A Douglas County jury convicted McLinn of first-degree murder in 2015 after hearing evidence of her unsettled mental state and details of her grisly crime, which involved slashing Sasko’s throat and writing “freedom” on the wall in his blood. Lawrence police had gathered evidence that Sasko abused McLinn, but District Judge Paula Martin blocked the jury from hearing about the abuse after prosecutor Charles Branson argued that it was “irrelevant information.” McLinn was on trial, he said, not Sasko.

During closing arguments, assistant prosecutor David Melton told the jury: “There is no evidence … that there was abuse suffering at the hands of Hal Sasko.”

Martin sentenced McLinn to a minimum of 50 years in prison. In 2021, McLinn accepted an offer from newly elected Douglas County District Attorney Suzanne Valdez to reduce the sentence to a minimum of 25 years in exchange for forfeiting her right to appeal.

McLinn’s advocates filed a clemency application in December 2022. Grace Hoge, a spokeswoman for Kelly, said this week that “McLinn’s clemency request is under review.”

Kelly and her four predecessors combined used their clemency power 18 times in 20 years, including eight times by Kelly in 2021. Typically, the cases involve drug or financial crimes.

Roxanne Merriman, speaking Monday at the library forum in Lawrence, said she shared a cell with McLinn at the women’s prison in Topeka for a little more than a year.

“I remember lying in my bed at night listening to Sarah cry in her sleep — sobbing crying, like physically crying,” Merriman said. “She was thrashing, screaming, ‘No, no, stop.’ She would be moaning — not like the movies when someone’s dying, but more like they were terrified, and shuddering almost. She’d be kicking, jerking, almost like she was trying to fight somebody off of her. At first, I would try to wake her up. She wouldn’t wake up. Like she was stuck. That went on nightly for Sarah. And I finally just gave up on trying to wake her up.”

Merriman said McLinn told her once, “I deserve to do time.” Merriman was shocked by the admission, “because everybody in prison is innocent.”

“And then she started crying,” Merriman said.

Sullivan, a subject matter expert in human trafficking, said when young people suffer trauma, it changes the structure of their brain. Sasko leveraged emotional and financial abuse to gain control of McLinn, she said. McLinn saw no way to escape.

“The question we always get is, ‘Why didn’t she leave?’ ” Sullivan said. “If she thought she could have left, she would have.”

The advocates have copies of the evidentiary files that police compiled when investigating the murder. The files include transcripts of interviews with Sasko’s friends and family members, as well as a woman who said Sasko was grooming her 16-year-old twin daughters.

The mother said she had gone to a counselor two days before Sasko was killed to ask for help seeking a no-contact order. She said Sasko had tried to persuade the girls to leave their mom and move in with him. He had clandestine meetings with the girls, gave them money and promised to buy them a car.

The advocates also hired a private investigator to track down two of Sasko’s ex-wives, who were not interviewed by police. According to the PI’s written report, which Ranney provided to Kansas Reflector, the ex-wives said they divorced Sasko because of his infidelities. One of the ex-wives said he was attracted to underage girls.

Ranney, who met McLinn as a volunteer at a writing program at the women’s prison, said the effort to persuade the governor to grant clemency has “dragged on long enough.” Kelly has no deadline to make a decision.

“We need to do something, and we’re doing these sessions in an effort to keep the attention alive and to stimulate responses to the governor,” Ranney said. “And then it’s hurry up and wait. It’s a political situation. We’re not going to get s***ty about it. We’re not going to protest and whatever. She doesn’t have to do anything. She has 51 cards and we have one.”

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