Sarah McLinn
For more than a year the obvious went unaddressed by the mainstream media in Kansas City, Lawrence and Topeka…
Only KC Confidential reported that there was something very fishy about 52 year-old CiCi’s Pizza owner Harold Sasko shacking up with 17 year-old hottie Sarah McLinn who slashed his throat in January 2014 in his Lawrence bachelor pad.
Did none of the other media even ask about a romantic connection?
Oh they’ve asked all right, McLinn’s lawyer Carl Cornwell, told me last year before declining to answer the question.
At which point which KCC examined the details of the case pointing in that direction.
“He took the girl in and was supposed to be getting her back on track, but I heard he was having an affair with her from a manager at CiCi’s Pizza here,” said a Lawrence business owner who asked not to be named. “The manager told me that they were having a big time affair…that it was a pretty torrid affair and (Sasko) had kicked her out five or six times and she had worked at CiCi’s and she’d been fired there a number of times.”
Staffers at Bed, Bath & Beyond in Lawrence – where McLinn worked at the time of Sasko’s murder – described her as quiet, with fashion model good looks and said she tried to cover up her romance the thrice married Sasko by telling them he was just her stepfather.
Even Sasko’s ex girlfriend Kimberly Qualls – the Public Affairs Manager at Kansas Department of Transportation – told me she’d never suspected any hanky-panky between Sasko and McLinn. Although she did confirm their stepfather ruse.
“That was kind of a discussion they had when I was dating him,” Qualls told me.
Qualms was Sasko’s girlfriend in 2012 at the time McLinn first moved in with him.
“I think (it was) just to help with the age difference thing, because people would think that an older guy was going for a younger girl.”
Qualms however never suspected anything romantic between the two, even when she and Sasko broke up later that year after eight months of dating.
“He did that with other attractive young women too,” Qualls says of Sasko’s penchant for helping struggling teens. “He would go to their graduations, their birthdays – he was a friend – and there was no – trust me, I would have seen it if there was anything going on.”
So much for women’s intuition…
In courtroom testimony yesterday, McLinn said that practically from the minute she moved in, Sasko plied her with booze and pot and pressured her to have sex with him.
There’s more.
Instead of the father figure McLinn initially thought was going to have her back, Sasko turned out to be the dirty, old man who bought her a nose job, a butt bump and wanted to buy her a boob job.
Nice nose job
Testifying on McLinn’s behalf, a counselor said that Sasko had told McLinn that “no man would find her attractive because her breasts were not big enough and her butt was not big enough.”
And that Sasko had threatened to kick her out if she didn’t have sex with him, which she finally did after getting “really drunk.” From that point forward Sasko and McLinn would have sex once or twice a week.
McLinn had resisted Sasko’s requests to have the enhancement surgeries, but finally broke down in 2013 and had her butt done.
Qualls wasn’t oblivious to the fact that of all the other kids Sasko had “helped” – her 19 year-old son included – none of them had been invited to move in with him.
“It just never felt good,” Qualls told me. “In my gut it just felt like it wasn’t a good arrangement.”
So what sort of dude was Harold Sasko?
“One of my clients is a trainer for the guy and says he was a creep,” a Lawrence source who also asked not to be named said of Sasko. “And that he had a tattoo of a girl on his chest and he said it was his daughter. He said he was estranged from his daughter.”
Interestingly, the Kansas City Star covered the snot out this tawdry tale with a dozen stories last year, but for some reason or another dropped the ball three months back. So while the Lawrence Journal World has been going balls-to-the-wall with daily front page coverage, not a peep out of the Star on the trial for the readers it spent all last year getting interested in the tale. Weird.
The bottom line:
While nobody deserves to be brutally murdered, what outpouring there may have been for Sasko as a stand up guy with a penchant for helping troubled teens, is out the window.
Completely out the window.
What remains is the freshly minted image of Sasko as a predator, dirt bag who crassly took advantage of an unfortunate, mentally unstable young woman.
And that’s a sad commentary for Sasko’s daughter and family to have to deal with amidst this sad, sorry mess.
Love the chest thumping bravado of our intrepid reporter who thinks everything he does is evidence of maleficence from organizations housing real journalists.
It is fun to watching someone constantly punch up (albeit with punches that wouldn’t harm a feather).
And then we have this…
> 17 year old hottie
Gross. Who is the dirt bag?
Easy Brian, down boy…
That a 17 year-old girl is a hottie grosses you out? Funny, it had the opposite effect on Sasko
The guy might have been a dirtbag, but I don’t think he deserved to have his throat slashed. The article reads like it was written by the woman’s defense attorney.
I stated the same, Terrance…
And the defense attorney for McLinn stated the same. Nobody is defending Sasko’s killing – obviously that was wrong – just noting that he was far from being the role model some have tried to paint him as.
“17 year-old hottie”
I smell a possible Pulitzer brewing…
“with fashion model good looks”
In what universe would this “hottie” have fashion model good looks? Is Lawrence as bad as Topuka these days woman-wise?
Hey, that was a quote from one of McLinn’s coworkers – a woman btw – at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
Oh, OK. Well that says it all.
“In courtroom testimony yesterday, McLinn said that practically from the minute she moved in, Sasko plied her with booze and pot and pressured her to have sex with him.”
Ick. Is every man-child pizza/fast food owner like this?
“Convicted”.
Prosecutors are seeking a 50 year sentence with no chance of parole.
I’d say the girl had to come up with a different version of “no.” The last one seemed more effective to me, no?
I hear she is getting the hard 50 and will be forced to correspond daily with harley. That last part seems a bit harsh.
Wow. That’s exactly why we need judicial reform now!
Too bad Harley’s mom was pro life because he’s the abortion / birth control poster child! “Take precautions, this could happen to YOU “
Hearne you sure find the dirt stories and roll. Interesting for sure.
You are pretty judgmental for someone on their second wife who is dating someone 25 years their junior.
She was above the age of consent and knew what she was getting into. Nobody was taken advantage of, except of course the victim.
Before nearly decapitating him she bound his hands and feet with zip ties and cut his throat like an animal.
Him purchasing her elective cosmetic surgery (like 90% of these sugar daddies and their ‘innocent’ sugar babies) does not give her a defense.
You just like crapping on the dead because they cannot sue you for libel.
the first sentence is confusing. My point is that you are with a much younger woman. I have no idea about your fidelity one way or the other but it seems hypocritical.
Dear Sour:
You’re wrong about my marriages and wrong about my wife’s age. Which makes you two for two.
17 may or may not be the age of consent, but when someone in their 50s presents himself as a mentor and almost immediately starts working on her with booze and pot while trying to bed her, that’s creepy and wrong.
And pressuring her to get her butt and boobs amped up is a little sleazy seeming as well.
Maybe it’s just me, but I have two daughters that just turned 18 and the thought of some creep like Sasko trying to take advantage of them when they were going through an emotionally unstable period spells, sicko.
Wait– did BM just out himself on his first comment?
he has me shadow banned on wordpress or that wordpress hiccup. If you are able to see my email address I use the same one or two ones so you can easily see which ones I wrote, full transparency here. I just find I dont get bouceback if you change the name sometimes.
Gotcha.