photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Branden Bell, standing, and Jennifer Amyx are pictured with defendant Rodney Marshall Friday, April 3, 2026, in Douglas County District Court.

A Douglas County judge on Friday denied a murder defendant’s claim that he should be immune from prosecution based on self-defense.

The denial came in a nearly four-year-old case in which Rodney Marshall, 55, is accused of murdering two men in July 2022 and attempting to murder multiple police officers as he fled Lawrence on Kansas Highway 10.

Self-defense is the most recent of several explanations he has given for the fatal shootings, and he apparently claimed it only with regard to one of the slain men.

Marshall, who confessed to the killings almost immediately after his arrest — telling Detective M.T. Brown that he shot Shelby McCoy, 52, and William D. O’Brien, 43, because the country singer Charlie Daniels had somehow inspired him to seek justice against “child molesters” — did not take the stand Friday to explain to the court why he felt his life was in danger when he encountered McCoy.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Detective M.T. Brown testifies at the immunity hearing of Rodney Marshall on Friday, April 3, 2026.

(Authorities have said they had no reason to believe McCoy and O’Brien were child molesters, despite appearing on a molester “list” Marshall had compiled.)

Judge Amy Hanley noted that not testifying was Marshall’s absolute right, but it also gave her little to go on regarding his state of mind, which is central to a self-defense claim. Under Kansas law, a person may justifiably use lethal force against another when he subjectively believes such force is necessary to protect himself and his belief is also objectively reasonable under the same circumstances.

In the immunity claim, Marshall’s attorneys argued that McCoy had shot at Marshall when Marshall came to his apartment on Tennessee Street, prompting Marshall to return fire, but the state contended that no evidence at all supported this. No shell casings from McCoy’s gun were found at the crime scene, but numerous ones from Marshall’s gun were, according to investigators, and Marshall never told police at the time of his arrest — when he was confessing —  that he had been shot at.

The state called a handful of law enforcement witnesses to testify Friday about the gun Marshall used; how he shot at police with it; how it was found in the center median along K-10 as he reportedly tossed it out of his car before he was apprehended; how spent shell casings were recovered at the two crime scenes; and how ballistics tests confirmed they had come only from Marshall’s gun.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence Police Officer Kevin Henderson displays a semi-automatic handgun that reportedly was thrown from the vehicle of Rodney Marshall during a police pursuit in July 2022, Friday, April 3, 2026, in Douglas County District Court.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Lawrence Police Detective Mike Verbanic displays a Smith & Wesson 9mm gun that reportedly belonged to Shelby McCoy, Friday, April 3, 2026, in Douglas County District Court.

The defense had claimed that circumstantial evidence existed to show that McCoy had fired a shot — namely that a bullet was “missing” from McCoy’s gun and that a 911 caller had reported a single shot followed by half a dozen others (presumably McCoy’s first shot followed by Marshall’s six shots).

But Deputy District Attorney David Melton said the “missing bullet” was meaningless because no one knew how many bullets might have been in McCoy’s gun to begin with. A police officer testified Friday that McCoy’s gun was later retrieved at the residence of McCoy’s stepdad in Topeka and that others also had access to the weapon over a long period before and after McCoy’s death.

At an immunity hearing, it is the state’s burden to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that a defendant was not justified in the use of force — a burden that had been easily met, Hanley concluded.

Numerous pieces of evidence cut against Marshall’s claim of self-defense, she said, including his confession that he had been taking “vigilante” justice against perceived pedophiles; his donning a costume to disguise himself as he rode his moped to McCoy’s apartment carrying a loaded gun; his driving directly afterward to a second person’s house, where O’Brien was killed and where self-defense wasn’t alleged; that both men were on Marshall’s “list”; and that Marshall fled Lawrence, shooting at police from his vehicle.

The circumstantial evidence offered in support of Marshall’s belief that deadly force was justified was simply “not credible,” Hanley said, noting as Melton had, that no evidence presented to her suggested that a bullet was “missing” from McCoy’s gun.

“What we know is how many there were” when police located the gun, not how many had been in the gun when it was in McCoy’s possession, she said.

As to the sequence of shots reported in the 911 call, the description of one shot followed by six shed no light on who actually fired the shots, she said.

Marshall’s case has been plagued by a series of delays, mostly related to conflicts with his appointed attorneys. Before his latest set of lawyers — Branden Bell and Jennifer Amyx — he had half a dozen others who asked to be removed from Marshall’s case, largely, it appears, due to the difficulty of working with him. In the case of two lawyers, as the Journal-World reported, withdrawal was allowed after Marshall reportedly instigated a physical altercation with them. In other instances, conflicts — not publicly detailed — arose that made representation not “viable.”

Marshall has been held on a bond of $1.5 million since his arrest in 2022. His trial — for two counts of first-degree murder and multiple counts of attempted capital murder, among other charges — is scheduled to begin on May 4.

photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Rodney Marshall is pictured Friday, April 3, 2026, in Douglas County District Court.

photo by: Lawrence Police Department UAV Drone Image

The Lawrence Police Department on Monday, Aug. 22, 2022, showed video of a suspect in a July 2022 double homicide being arrested.