Morgan Stewart was at brunch with family in Missouri when her phone started to blow up with calls from Oklahoma relatives. She ignored a few, then picked up because they kept calling, over and over.
“You need to get here now,” said Misty Stewart, a cousin. “Your dad has been found. He’s gone; he’s died.”
Morgan Stewart, 26, couldn’t process it at first. Her parents divorced years before. She moved with her mother to a Kansas City suburb but remained close to her father, Bob Stewart, a lieutenant in the Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office. In Morgan Stewart’s eyes, her father was the embodiment of a man; everyone knew that Bob Stewart could handle himself. His daughter had watched him survive numerous travails: another divorce, the unexpected death of a daughter, Morgan’s sister, and even a tornado that had sheared off 90% of his Shawnee home just five days before.
Morgan Stewart didn’t remember much from the drive that day from Missouri to Oklahoma. But she recalled only too well the shock that came next. She told someone, she didn’t remember who, that she would be going to her father’s house to begin the process of organizing his things.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” they said. “What about the blood?”
That was how Morgan Stewart learned that her father had died of a single bullet to the head, a suicide, according to the medical examiner’s report.
It didn’t make sense, Morgan Stewart said. Her father had been through a lot, but he wasn’t down or depressed. She’d checked on him just the other day, and he seemed great. He was talking about making a fresh start in a new house, doing things for the future.
That was April 2023. More than two years later, Morgan Stewart still wasn’t buying it.
“No,” she said. “He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t leave his dog. He’d gotten through my sister’s passing. He’d gotten through his divorce.”
Something else was afoot, she thought. Morgan Stewart was in no way anti–law enforcement — today, she’s engaged to a law enforcement officer in Missouri — but she found her mind turning to the deputies he’d worked alongside.
There was tension there, a lot of tension. She remembered her father saying that he worked with some bad people.
“I really cannot stand my job,” he told his daughter, the last time she saw him alive.
Brooke Stewart, Morgan’s mother and Bob Stewart’s first wife, was quick to reference a huge gun safe in his house. Both mother and daughter believed the near-on immovable safe was a critical piece in the puzzle of what happened to Bob Stewart. The safe explained everything, Brooke Stewart said. It was the reason he’d kept on residing in a house mostly destroyed by a tornado, and it was the instantaneous focus of the sheriff’s office, she said.
“From the time that Bobby died, they wanted in that safe,” Brooke Stewart said.
Beyond the question of whether Lt. Bob Stewart was an impulsive suicide or the victim of something more nefarious, members of the family he left behind have been haunted by unanswered questions resulting from an abbreviated investigation, and by the toxic fallout that descends on law enforcement officers who call out corruption among their own ranks.
Bob Stewart’s Journals
The sheriff’s department said they needed to get into the safe to retrieve Bob Stewart’s service weapon, Morgan Stewart said. She didn’t buy that either. If whatever gun they wanted was locked in a safe no one could open or move, couldn’t it wait until after the funeral?
In the days to come, they found a spare key to the safe hidden in what was left of the attic, but that was after Morgan Stewart went through the protracted ordeal of finding a locksmith to open it. Bob Stewart’s will was inside, and there were a lot of guns — he was an ardent enthusiast and collector.
At the very bottom, hidden away in back, they found a small stack of handwritten journals.
That tracked, Morgan Stewart said. At the funeral, she said, Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office Administrator Jennifer Bowers-Baker told her that the sheriff’s department believed Bob Stewart had been keeping evidence about possible wrongdoing in the department.
“Jennifer said something about crimes in the safe,” Morgan Stewart said.
Bowers-Baker did not respond to outreach from Oklahoma Watch.
Regardless, when Morgan Stewart found her father’s journals, it all clicked.
“I think people knew he was keeping track,” she said.
Longing for Justice
A 2020 article in Crisis, Stress, and Human Resilience: An International Journal, identified the stresses and persecutions suffered by whistleblowers, which the authors described as a misunderstood and often miscategorized group of employees.
Whistleblowers endured shunning and black-balling, the article’s authors said, and the study, based on survey responses from 100 whistleblowers, found that 88.7% felt threatened for their whistleblower activities, and 99% felt harassed. Seventy-five percent worried for their physical safety.
The authors provided a comprehensive accounting of the emotional toll whistleblowing could take.
“Whistleblowers may suffer from negative self-esteem, anger at injustice, confusion about legal processes, loss of trust, remain horrified by the harm caused, become disinterested in previously satisfying or enjoyable activities while ruminating about the wrongdoing and their complaint, and feel a growing detachment and estrangement from others,” the authors wrote.
In 2021, USA Today published a comprehensive series of articles based on 300 cases of police whistleblowers stretching over a decade.
A year of fighting for public records and conducting interviews with police and victims left the series’ journalists with firm convictions about a nationwide phenomenon.
“Around the country, police departments hunt down and silence internal whistleblowers to cover up misconduct with impunity,” the journalists wrote. “They've been fired, jailed and, in at least one case, forcibly admitted to a psychiatric ward.”
USA Today’s investigation found that police leaders weaponize internal affairs over minor rule infractions to discredit whistleblowers. They had only rarely faced consequences for having done so.
Almost as bad were the effects on the families of those who felt compelled to speak out.
“Law enforcement’s code of silence can also leave families longing for justice that may never come,” the journalists wrote.
You Should Look Into This Yourself
Morgan Stewart shared her father’s journals with Oklahoma Watch. They have never been shared with any law enforcement agency.
On the cover of each small book was a warning, in Mandarin, to those who would trespass into the private sandbox of Bob Stewart’s mind.
“Gun Kai!” the warnings read, which means “go away,” or “get out.”
Chronicling approximately 18 months prior to Bob Stewart’s death, the journals paint a portrait of a complex figure with a wide-ranging intellect and imagination, and include the unfiltered passions of a red-blooded American man who was susceptible to occasional online preoccupations.
The journals feature brief meditations on minutiae and deep scruples-testing philosophical quandaries. How does an iron work? What is the definition of fascism? Did Andre the Giant once drink 15 gallons of beer in a single sitting? Where is Latvia? Why are snipers praised when serial killers do the same thing? What does it mean to make a deal with the devil?
The vast majority of the journals record Bob Stewart’s growing anxiety with a sheriff’s department that, to him, seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
Colleagues conducted sloppy investigations or refused to investigate crimes at all, he recorded. He complained that the public had direct access to what the department was using for an evidence room. One deputy, Bob Stewart wrote, kept a soiled sweatshirt from a rape investigation in her vehicle for several days. Sheriff Mike Booth, approaching retirement, was increasingly difficult to contact, and the sheriff chided Bob Stewart at a meeting when he questioned whether a particular order was lawful.
You don’t need to know whether it’s lawful, Sheriff Booth told him. You only need to know that you were told to do it.
What Morgan Stewart found in the journals chimed with something she was told by an officer of the Citizen Potawatomie Nation Tribal Police at the family viewing that followed the memorial brigade that escorted her father’s remains from the medical examiner’s office to a funeral home.
Morgan Stewart was too distraught to catch the officer’s name, and Oklahoma Watch has been unable to confirm the exchange. Nevertheless, the exchange helped to inspire Morgan Stewart’s decision to conduct her own investigation into her father’s death.
“Don’t believe anything the sheriff’s office tells you,” Morgan Stewart said the tribal officer told her. “You should look into this yourself.”
The Full Truth of That Night
The first thing Morgan Stewart did was make a harrowing video of the bathroom in which her father’s body was found. Hushed and tense, the video pans slowly around the small room, hesitating over the sink filled with refuse and beer cans where Bob Stewart’s gun was said to have been discovered. The view continues on to blood spatters on the wall, but there was no exit wound; the medical examiner's report indicates a bullet was recovered from inside Bob Stewart’s head. The recording then goes to a pile of crumpled, bloody clothing stuffed around the base of the toilet.
Wouldn’t you think they would have collected the bloody clothes as evidence? Morgan Stewart asked.
The clothes were one of a list of items that left Morgan Stewart uncertain of what happened to her father.
For example, the timelines didn’t match up, Morgan Stewart said. Bob Stewart was supposed to have died before witnesses reported seeing him call to his dog, she said. Furthermore, police had refused to share a neighbor’s security video that might have shown whether Bob Stewart was alone when he died, Morgan Stewart said.
Additionally, documents described different locations of Bob Stewart’s headwound, some consistent with a suicide, but others indicating that his wound was in his forehead, a position that was difficult to reconcile with a self-inflicted injury, Morgan Stewart said.
Lastly, a representative of the Shawnee Police Department told Morgan Stewart that a 9mm round was recovered from her father’s head when the police incident report indicated that he used a .38 caliber weapon. Morgan Stewart learned that a .38 can fire a 9mm round if properly modified, but why would her father opt for the wrong bullet when he had plenty of .38 ammunition at hand?
In April 2025, two years after Bob Stewart’s passing, Morgan and Brooke Stewart had a phone call with Detective Charles Swantek of the Shawnee Police Department to express frustration with portions of the investigation that remained incomplete.
Unbeknownst to Swantek, they recorded it.
At first, Swantek attempted to quash any suspicion of foul play. He attested to friendship with Bob Stewart and suggested that, as an experienced officer, it would be highly unlikely for anyone to get the jump on him. Furthermore, Bob Stewart’s upbeat behavior in the days before his death could be explained, Swantek said, by a phenomenon common to distressed persons: a serenity that comes over them after they have resolved to end their lives.
Swantek dismissed the Stewarts’ concern that no gunshot residue test had been performed on Bob Stewart’s hands. He argued that residue tests in real life weren’t like what you saw on television; they were useless after two hours. That, however, failed to jibe with the incident report, which indicated that the medical examiner had bagged Bob Stewart’s hands for later analysis.
Swantek’s recorded voice betrayed hints of a common police frustration: law enforcement fictions and true crime documentaries have left the public unaware that investigations may remain untidy but nevertheless provide enough certainty to enable investigators to arrive at decisive conclusions about events.
That said, Swantek was at a loss to explain away Morgan and Brooke Stewart’s most significant complaint: no ballistics report was ever compiled on the gun.
“Yep, you’re right, it wasn’t done,” Swantek said. “So it’s being done now.”
Pressed for more information, Swantek had nothing more to say.
“I can’t answer for that, ma’am,” he said. “What’s your next question?”
Swantek did not respond to an interview request from Oklahoma Watch. Shawnee Police Public Information Officer Corporal Vivian Lozano indicated that a year after the request for a ballistics report was submitted, it had not yet returned from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.
I Fear For My Job
What is Vril? Had Rothschild, worth $500 trillion, financed every war since Napoleon? What is electrolysis? What is the difference between a narcissist, a sociopath and a psychopath?
The Pottawatomie County Sheriff’s Office had begun to crumble, Bob Stewart’s journals suggest, as Sheriff Booth approached retirement and several of those around him angled for the position of favored heir in a looming succession crisis.
The concerns over wrongdoing within the department, however, stretched back further than that and were not limited to what Bob Stewart scribbled in his notebooks.
Bob Stewart attested to friendship with two other deputies who left the department prior to his first recorded journal entry. Of these, the more prominent was a deputy named Chad Pope, who is now attached to the office of the attorney general but is assigned to the U.S. Marshals Service.
Pope refused to speak to Oklahoma Watch about the nature of his friendship with Bob Stewart, but Morgan Stewart revealed what Pope had told her as she began asking around about her father’s death.
Pope left the department under a cloud of suspicion that he, too, had been keeping a record of wrongdoing, Morgan Stewart said. At first, Pope told her that the sheriff’s department had obtained a warrant to search his home — he subsequently denied having said this, Morgan Stewart said. Regardless, Pope was forced to retain a lawyer in a dispute with his former employer.
Although Pope refused to comment, he could not deny that he made several prominent appearances in Bob Stewart’s journals.
Throughout the journals, Bob Stewart reminded himself again and again that his position within the department had been diminished and that he would be better off keeping quiet.
“I need to just shut up,” he wrote on one occasion. On another, he scribbled, “Don’t speak. I know better.”
He lived in constant fear that he would be ousted.
“Again I fear for my job,” he wrote.
Morgan Stewart said that Chad Pope may have attempted to help her father follow in his footsteps to the U.S. Marshals. Bob Stewart did not document that in his journals, but on multiple occasions, he took pains to indicate that the strife he was suffering was directly related to his loyalty to his friend.
“I am now being discriminated against for continuing my friendship with Chad Pope,” he wrote.
Dogs Make Better Friends Than People
In July 2022, Bob Stewart wrote in his journal of an effort on the part of Sheriff Booth to secure a successor to his position.
At a meeting seemingly aimed at confounding the county-wide electoral process, the sheriff called for a vote among the command staff for a replacement. They would all agree to support the winner of that vote, and the sheriff threatened anyone who subsequently did not vote accordingly, Bob Stewart wrote.
Booth did not respond to requests for comment from Oklahoma Watch.
A few months later, Bob Stewart wrote of attending an Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association lecture on how often law enforcement officers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“Don’t share your personal life with anyone,” Bob Stewart wrote in January 2023. “Dogs make way better friends than humans.”
There is nothing in Bob Stewart’s journals like a smoking gun or a final straw, but a few months before he died, Booth asked him to procure from their collection of seized guns a weapon that could be used in a law enforcement demonstration exercise. Bob Stewart wrote of being uncomfortable with the request and equally uneasy with a seized AR-15 that Booth kept in his office.
“This is the story that haunts me,” Morgan Stewart said.
Come Forward
Ted Kleber, a retired major of the Del City Police Department, knew a thing or two about suffering persecution for standing up for protocol and the rule of law.
In 2012, then a lieutenant and detective, Kleber was assigned to investigate a shooting that left a young man dead from a bullet from a police captain’s gun. Kleber’s investigation led to the captain being charged with manslaughter, and though Kleber’s superiors supported him, he was nevertheless subjected to unnerving taunts from fellow officers.
The charged captain’s son confronted Kleber. “Do you know what a Blue Falcon is?” the young man said. The term is a polite substitute for a profane phrase for one who screws over their friends.
Kleber recalled that a number of retired officers who felt that he had done wrong by the blue wall showed up in dress uniform during the trial to intimidate him. The judge forced them to leave their firearms outside the courtroom, Kleber said.
“Did I catch myself looking over my shoulder for a few months after?” Kleber said. “Absolutely I did.”
Based on a description of Bob Stewart’s journals, Kleber said that he could not rule out either theory as to Bob Stewart’s demise: suicide or something more troubling. Nevertheless, he was unflinching in his advice for any officer who might be sitting on knowledge of wrongdoing.
“Come forward,” Kleber said. “If you’re in the right, and you did everything by the book, come forward.”
Everybody Has Demons
Current Pottawatomie County Sheriff Freeland Wood, who, as a member of the Shawnee Police Department, ran to fill the position Booth left in 2024, recalled Bob Stewart as a friend but knew little of the investigation into his death, he said.
In the election, Wood soundly defeated one of Bob Stewart’s colleagues, Deputy Travis Dinwiddie. Dinwiddie appeared frequently in Bob Stewart’s journals; now a deputy in Cleveland County, Dinwiddie did not respond to messages from Oklahoma Watch.
Wood believed that Bob Stewart committed suicide.
“I loved Bobby,” Wood said. “He was a good man. He was a character — he had his demons. But everybody seems to have some.”
Today, Morgan Stewart continues to grieve for her father — April 22, 2026, marked the three-year anniversary of his death — and she continues to hope that a full investigation will one day come.
Morgan Stewart knew only too well that she was not a trained investigator. Her darkest fears were just that, suspicions that may not be susceptible to proof. But in a story full of unanswered questions, she was left with a single certainty: not enough had been done to uncover the full truth of what happened to her father.
In 2024, author, blogger, and police chief-turned-priest-turned-reform-advocate David Couper reflected on the work of one of the USA Today journalists, who decried the fact that not much had been done to improve the lot of police whistleblowers.
Couper was more hopeful and envisioned a path forward that would come from law enforcement supporting law enforcement.
“This is how it will change — officer to officer,” Couper wrote. “It won’t be by rules, it will be because police officers truly care for one another. This is how it begins.”
This story is the second in a series called “Unaccountable: Rural Justice in Oklahoma,” investigating problematic law enforcement practices in the state’s 60 non-metropolitan counties. It’s a follow-up to our Justice in No Man’s Land series.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
