BENTON, Mo. — Carl Rose is in debtors’ prison.
It pretty much says so on the order that Scott County Associate Circuit Court Judge Julia Koester signed to send Rose to jail for at least seven days. It was for a civil contempt charge related to a business dispute lawsuit. Rose can’t get out of the Scott County Jail, Koester’s order says, unless he pays the court $10,500.
He doesn’t have it. He said so in a court document he filed himself to seek his release. His husband says Rose doesn’t have any money. His lawyers in another case say he doesn’t have any money.
He’s been in jail 11 days and counting.
“He’s exhausted all his resources and he’s going to let fate run its course,” says Rose’s husband, Drew Rodgers-Rose.
Carl Rose, left, and his husband, Drew Rodgers-Rose, pose for a photo with their daughter, Novie, and their dog, Maggie.
The couple has lived in Scott County, in southwest Missouri, for more than a dozen years. It’s where Rose grew up, where he used to be a police officer and a sheriff’s deputy.
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Rose was sent to jail because the judge found him in civil contempt amid a two-year-old legal battle with his former business partner, John Caudle.
The two men started a funeral home business together in 2020. Things went sour. Caudle accused Rose of improper financial transactions and using company money to buy a truck and an SUV. Caudle, who is represented by attorney Phil Dormeyer of Cape Girardeau, filed a lawsuit. Rose hired an attorney, later fired him and ended up representing himself.
Last year, as the case was about to go to trial, Rose was charged with 50 counts of criminal fraud, including 47 felonies, related to the dispute. After seven days in jail, he bonded out. He has been monitored by an ankle bracelet, which costs him $160 every two weeks. That case, based on the same underlying issues as the civil case, was moved to Butler County and is scheduled for a trial in October.
But the civil trial, with Rose representing himself, took place last summer. In a one-day trial — Rose skipped the afternoon part of it — Koester ruled against him. She also issued a civil judgment of more than $400,000 against him.
Caudle tried to collect, including seizing items from the Sikeston house where Rose and Rodgers-Rose live. That’s when St. Louis attorneys Hugh Eastwood and Chris Hoell got involved. When the sheriff showed up at the house with Caudle and Dormeyer to seize Rose’s assets, they started taking at least some things that were marital property.
“Basically, anything that wasn’t bolted down, they took,” Rodgers-Rose says.
That’s an unconstitutional taking of marital property, Eastwood and Hoell contend. They filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in February, naming former Scott County Sheriff Wes Drury, Dormeyer, Caudle and Scott County as defendants.
The search was meant to “humiliate and harm” the homeowners, not to collect on the civil judgment, the lawsuit contends.
In the suit, Rose’s attorneys address the underlying small-town drama that is difficult to separate from the case. Rose used to be a sheriff’s deputy. Drury fired him after Rose announced a plan to run for sheriff against his boss. Drury won the race. Rose later ran and lost a race for coroner.
Last year, as Rose and Caudle were involved in their legal dispute over the failing business partnership, Caudle ran for and won the office of coroner.
The sheriff’s sale of the property that was seized from Rose and Rodgers-Rose netted only a couple thousand dollars. Then, Dormeyer filed a motion for contempt in the Scott County case because Rose hadn’t fulfilled elements of the civil judgment.
Earlier this month, the judge found Rose in contempt, in part because he didn’t follow her instructions to open an account at a specific bank to track deposits he would have to make.
Though it’s not clear in court records how she determined it, Koester found Rose was “willfully” refusing to comply with her order. That’s important, says Peter Joy, a Washington University law professor. Joy says a judge can only hold a person in jail over a failure to pay monetary damages if the judge believes they have the ability to pay.
“If the person doesn’t have the capacity to pay, then they can’t be put in jail,” Joy says.
Eastwood and Hoell say Rose doesn’t have any money. He’s unemployed. Caudle and Dormeyer already took whatever possessions they could, including Rose’s truck. He isn’t going to magically come up with the money to get out of jail, his husband says.
“It is shocking and outrageous that in a 2025, a judge is willing to indefinitely lock up a person until they pay a $10,000 ransom that they cannot afford simply at the request of an overzealous attorney,” Hoell says.
Because of ethics rules, Eastwood and Hoell can’t represent Rose in the civil lawsuit in Scott County to try to get him out of jail. That’s because they filed the federal lawsuit that also names Dormeyer, an attorney on the state case.
Attorneys for Caudle, Dormeyer and the other Scott County defendants have said in court documents that the search and seizure of Rose’s property was lawful. They have sought to get the federal lawsuit dismissed, arguing it is essentially a state matter already being handled by a different judge.
“Plaintiffs’ repeated casting of Mr. Rose as a victim of ‘political lawfare’ is a transparently disingenuous framing of the underlying civil and criminal cases against him,” Dormeyer alleges in a filing.
To date, Rose hasn’t been convicted of a criminal offense. But he sits in jail, with an ankle monitor attached, as a judge tries to help the elected county coroner collect a business debt. The folks at the jail, under the supervision of a new sheriff, have been nice, Rodgers-Rose says. They don’t seem to understand why Rose is there, he says.
“How long is Carl supposed to sit behind bars before the judge decides enough is enough and releases the man whose only crime is not having $10,000 laying around?” Hoell asks.
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