He killed a man 26 years ago in Missouri. His husband secretly worked with investigators to get a co

On the surface, Timothy Stephenson had an enviable life. He was married to a doctor, and they lived in a $2 million home with their twin daughters in a quiet suburb east of San Francisco.

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But Stephenson harbored a secret: About two decades earlier, he had shot and

killed a man he met at a bar in Kansas City.

The crime remained unsolved until 2021, when Stephenson’s dark past finally

caught up with him. By then, his personal life was unraveling. His husband had filed for divorce the year before and the couple were locked in a legal battle over custody of their children.

Authorities arrested him on murder charges that December and extradited him to

Missouri. And this month, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 16 years in prison.

For Stephenson, it all came crashing down after police received new information

that helped them piece together what happened that night back in 1998 in Kansas

City.

That information came from Stephenson’s estranged husband.

He told his husband 10 years ago that he’d killed someone, court documents say

Stephenson’s sentencing came a decade after he told his husband, Joseph Ginejko,

about the killing he’d committed in Missouri. According to a probable cause statement obtained by CNN, Stephenson told his husband in 2014 that he met the man, Randall Oliphant, at a gay bar in January 1998 and they drove to Stephenson’s house in Kansas City, where he shot him twice in the bathroom.