He killed a man in Missouri 26 years ago. Her husband secretly worked with investigators to obtain a confession

(CNN) — On the surface, Timothy Stephenson had an enviable life. She was married to a doctor and lived in a $2 million house with their twin daughters in a quiet suburb east of San Francisco.

But Stephenson kept a secret: Nearly two decades earlier, he shot and killed a man he met in a Kansas City bar.

The crime remained unsolved until 2021, when Stephenson’s dark past finally came to light.
He reached out to her. By then, his personal life was falling apart. Her husband had filed for divorce last year and the couple was embroiled in a legal battle over the custody of their daughters.

Authorities arrested him in December on murder charges and extradited him to Missouri. This month he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

For Stephenson, everything fell apart after police received new information that helped them piece together what happened that night in Kansas City in 1998. That information came from Stephenson’s estranged husband.

She told her husband 10 years ago that she had killed someone, court documents say

Stephenson’s conviction came a decade after she told her husband, Joseph Ginejko, about the murders in Missouri. According to a probable cause statement obtained by CNN, Stephenson told her husband in 2014 that she met a man named Randall Oliphant at a gay bar in January 1998 and they went to Stephenson’s home in Kansas City, where he shot her twice. the bathroom

Oliphant pleaded for his life after the first shot, Stephenson said. A probable cause statement does not specify a motive.

Oliphant’s body was found two months later in the woods of rural Benton County, Missouri, about 100 miles southeast of Kansas City. Missouri State Police said Stephenson was familiar with the area because his father and grandmother lived nearby and had been there several times.

In her confession to her husband, Stephenson told him that she later remodeled the bathroom to cover up the crime scene and hide the evidence.

Investigators interviewed Stephenson in 1998 and he admitted to driving an “unknown male” to his Kansas City home. But he said he later took her to another bar.

Stephenson’s phone records revealed roaming charges from a nearby cell tower
Where the victim’s body was found in a rural area of ​​Missouri.

In 1998, investigators also tracked down the man who bought Stephenson’s Jeep Wrangler in May of that year, four months after the murder. The new owner told them parts of the carpet were missing when he bought it. Police said they found traces of blood in the rear cargo area of ​​the Jeep, but DNA testing was inconclusive.

It is unclear why police stopped Stephenson in 1998. The Missouri State Highway Patrol declined to comment to CNN and referred questions to the Benton County Prosecutor’s Office, which did not respond to requests for additional details.

New research

In 2021, investigators planned an undercover operation to get more details. Stephenson and Genejko married in 2008 and live with their daughters in Danville, in San Francisco’s East Bay, once considered the safest suburb in California.

Court records show that Ginejko filed for divorce in January 2020, six years after her husband’s surprise confession in Contra Costa County, but it is unclear when the divorce was finalized. Genejko told police she tried to investigate Missouri’s murder after her husband’s confession, but little information was available online.

But between early 2020 and April 2021, Genejko spoke to the police. Ginejko told them details about the murder that had never been made public, according to the probable cause statement, suggesting she could only learn about it from her husband.

In a probable cause statement, investigators said they then planned a sting operation: an April 2021 meeting between Stephenson and Genejko that was secretly audio and video recorded.
During that conversation, in which the estranged couple talked about their daughters, Ginejko brought up Stephenson’s 2014 confession. Stephenson’s behavior changed and he “became paranoid,” court documents say.

Stephenson asked her husband if he was wearing a microphone and if he was recording the conversation, and also frisked him by searching his wallet, phone and coffee cup.

Genejko asked Stephenson several times why he killed Oliphant, and his answers were contradictory. Eventually, Stephenson admitted that she had confessed to the killings years earlier, but claimed that she had scared her husband into staying with her, according to the court document.

Stephenson’s 16-year sentence includes time served.