 Christopher Dunn embraced by his mother, Martha. (Photo: Sophie Proe/St. Louis Public Radio)
In the early morning hours of May 19, Stepp and Davis were interviewed by police. Police said they both identified the gunman as 18-year-old Christopher Dunn. Stepp viewed a photographic lineup and identified Dunn as the gunman.
Later that day, police arrested Dunn. On May 20, they put him in a live lineup. Stepp identified him as the gunman. Davis was unavailable.
Dunn was charged with first-degree murder, two counts of assault, and three counts of armed criminal action.
In July 1991, he went to trial in St. Louis City Circuit Court. The trial lasted a day and a half.
Stepp and Davis both testified. For the first time, Stepp now said he saw Dunn prior to the shooting, standing in the gangway.
In his initial interview with police, which was electronically recorded, Stepp had said he was talking with Davis and Rogers when they heard gunshots. During that interview, when police asked if he saw from which direction the gun was fired from, Stepp had said, “No, sir.” In that interview, asked how he knew it was Dunn, he said, “But you know how you see somebody and you don’t see ‘em, you know…I thought my mind was playing games.”
And for the first time, Stepp told the jury that Dunn was firing a nickel-plated handgun. He said Dunn was wearing a cap.
Stepp admitted that in January 1991, he had been charged with robbery, armed criminal action, unlawful use of a weapon, and tampering. He said that the prosecution had offered to dismiss the armed criminal action charge in exchange for his testimony. Stepp said he hoped to get a sentence of probation.
Davis testified and identified Dunn as the gunman, though he said he didn’t see Dunn until after the shots were fired. He said that after Rogers fell to the ground, he dropped down and played dead. He said he looked around and saw Dunn wearing sunglasses. He did not mention seeing a cap.
The prosecution presented photos of the house during the daylight hours, and a medical examiner testified that Rogers died of a single gunshot wound to the back of his head.
A detective testified that Stepp and Davis both identified Dunn during their initial interviews and then identified Dunn in separate photographic lineups.
Dunn’s defense attorney, who had not made an opening statement, presented no evidence, relying on cross-examination of the witnesses.
Later that day, after Stepp had completed his testimony, he pled guilty to robbery, tampering, unlawful use of a weapon, and carrying a concealed weapon.
On July 18, 1991, the jury deliberated 42 minutes before convicting Dunn of all the charges. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole plus a consecutive sentence of 90 years.
In August 1991, Stepp appeared for his sentencing hearing before the same judge who presided over Dunn’s trial. Stepp faced up to 42 years in prison. The prosecutor recommended 15 years. The defense lawyer for Stepp argued for probation, noting that he had testified for the prosecution against Dunn, who had been convicted. The judge sentenced Stepp to three years of probation.
In 1993, at a hearing on a motion for post-conviction relief, Dunn’s mother, Martha, and his sister, Arnetta, testified that Dunn was at home while they watched an episode of Hunter which came on at 11 p.m. Martha testified that Dunn was on the phone with Nicole Bailey around midnight. Bailey was in the hospital where she had given birth.
The motion was denied. In 1994, Dunn’s convictions were affirmed, as was the denial of the motion for post-conviction relief.
Over the years, Dunn and his family and friends insisted he was innocent. His legal team would ultimately include lawyers from the Midwest Innocence Project, as well as attorneys Justin Bonus and Kent Gipson.
In 2005, Stepp signed an affidavit recanting his trial testimony. He said that he did not see anyone on the night of the shooting. He said that he identified Dunn because he did not like Dunn, because he was afraid from witnessing his friend’s murder, and because police told him to identify Dunn.
Stepp also said that when he was facing a lengthy prison sentence on his robbery case, the prosecutor told him that he could go home if he testified against Dunn. In the statement, Stepp said it was “too dark to see anything that night” and that he “wasn’t sure who did the shooting.”
In 2017, Dunn filed a state petition for a writ of habeas corpus and attached numerous affidavits supporting his claim of innocence. In addition to Stepp’s affidavit, the petition contained an affidavit from Davis recanting his identification of Dunn because he “could not even say where the shooter was or where the shots came from.”
In 2015, during an interview with a private investigator for Dunn’s defense team, Davis said he did not see the gunman. He said they brought up Dunn’s name at the time “because we [Stepp and Davis] didn’t like him. He was terrorizing the neighborhood.”
Davis said that by the time Dunn went to trial, he did not want to testify because it felt like he was “snitching.” He said the police “pulled me from California back to St. Louis, showed me some pictures…they had Rickey’s mom [call] me and coerced me and called and cried and coerced me down…they showed me pictures of Ricky that night” and told him, “this is what he did to your friend. You better go up in there and get him out of the way ‘cause he can do it to somebody else…So I went in there…and just said it was him. I didn’t know it was him. Never seen him.”
In 2016, Davis provided an affidavit saying that he could not even say where the shots came from, let alone identify the gunman. “I also know that because of where DeMorris Stepp was standing that night, he did not see the shooter…he was next to me on the porch and could only see what I could see, which was nothing.”
Another witness, Eugene Wilson, provided an affidavit saying that he saw the shooting. He said it was so dark that “none of us could see the shooter.” He had not been contacted by police at the time.
Catherine Jackson provided an affidavit saying that she spoke to Dunn on the phone for 40 to 60 minutes between 10 and 11 p.m. on the night of the shooting. Bailey also gave an affidavit saying that she was in the hospital after giving birth to her daughter. She said she talked to Dunn while she was watching Hunter from her hospital bed.
A hearing on the motion was held in 2018. Stepp testified and repeated that he did not see the gunman, only the fire coming from the gun. He testified that he knew Dunn and identified him because police told him that Dunn was the gunman. He said he made his false identification because he had lost his friend. “[Y]ou want to do something so bad to try to rectify what’s going on,” he said.
Stepp also asserted that the prosecutor had promised him probation if he testified. He was confronted with a memorandum of an interview with the Attorney General’s office in 2017 which said he was “positive” he saw Dunn. Stepp said he didn’t recall saying that.
Curtis Stewart testified that he was incarcerated with Stepp in 1991. Stewart said he overheard Stepp talking on the telephone with someone, and saying he did not really know who killed Rogers. Stewart said he heard Stepp say, “You know, I’m getting a deal out of it.”
Wilson testified that he and Martin Tolliver were walking back to Tolliver’s house after getting food from a nearby Chinese restaurant when they saw gunfire coming from the side of Tolliver’s home, where Rogers, Davis and Stepp were hanging out. Wilson said a tree blocked the streetlight, and “you couldn’t see nothing at all.”
Wilson also said that a few days before the shooting, Rogers had gotten into an altercation with his mother’s boyfriend because the boyfriend had physically abused her. In retaliation, Rogers, Tolliver, Wilson, and others had beaten up the boyfriend.
Bailey testified and affirmed her affidavit statement that she spoke to Dunn after giving birth to her daughter. She said she was on the phone with him from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. when a nurse came to check on her vitals. Corroborating medical records were presented showing that a nurse had noted that she checked Bailey’s vitals at 1 a.m. on May 19. The defense also presented a copy of a newspaper television listing for May 18, 1990, which showed that Hunter aired at 11 p.m.
On September 23, 2020, Texas County Circuit Court Judge William Hickle declared that based on the new evidence, “[T]his Court does not believe that any jury would now convict Christopher Dunn under these facts.” However, Judge Hickle said he could not grant the petition because Missouri law only allowed freestanding innocence claims in cases in which defendants had been sentenced to death. But because Dunn had been sentenced to life in prison without parole, Judge Hickle ruled that Dunn’s petition was barred and dismissed it.
Bonus appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court. Those efforts were unsuccessful.
In 2021, a law passed by the Missouri legislature went into effect which allowed prosecutors to go to court to request that a conviction of any type of case be vacated.
In May 2023, Kimberly Gardner, the St. Louis City Circuit attorney, sought to vacate Dunn’s conviction. By then, the Midwest Innocence Project was involved in the case and retained Dr. Nancy Franklin, a memory and identification expert, to review the evidence in the case.
Dr. Franklin reported that the identifications by Stepp and Davis were highly unreliable, very likely arose through witness inference, and were very likely perpetuated through repeated exposure to post-event suggestive and coercive influences by police. Dr. Franklin said that numerous factors that undercut the accuracy of eyewitness identifications, including poor lighting, weapon focus, exposure time, distance, and event stress were present. She concluded there was a "strong likelihood" that “none of the eyewitnesses had sufficient opportunity to view the shooter, let alone form an accurate, detailed, and stable memory of his face.”
However, Gardner left office not long after, and Gabriel Gore was appointed to head the office. He vowed to conduct his own investigation of the case.
Dr. Franklin's report was turned over to Gore's office.
In February 2024, Gore filed a new motion to vacate Dunn’s conviction. The motion said that Dunn’s case “presents all of the hallmarks of a wrongful conviction: witnesses who have now recanted – whose faulty eyewitness testimony under poor lighting and recall conditions already called their testimony into question – coupled with perceived police and family pressure.”
The motion noted that Wilson also identified another suspect who “certainly had a motive to commit the shooting” – the ex-boyfriend of Rogers’s mother. The motion noted that Wilson had testified that before the shooting, the then-current boyfriend of Rogers’s mother abused her. A few days before the shooting, in retaliation for the abuse, Rogers, Tolliver, Wilson, and a few others beat up the mother’s boyfriend “real bad.” The motion noted that Davis’s memory was that Ricco Rogers shot the boyfriend the day before Rogers was killed. The motion said that Judge Hickle had noted that “the victim’s brother, Dwayne Rogers, had made statements that [Dunn] was not the man who had killed his brother and that he knew the identity of the actual shooter.”
The motion said, “[T]his is certainly much stronger evidence of motive for someone other than Dunn, particularly in comparison to the complete lack of motive for Dunn. Judge Hickle has already found Wilson’s testimony credible.”
The motion also noted that while the recantations alone were “enough to show clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence,” the testimony of Wilson, a “credible, independent eyewitness,” corroborated the recantations. In addition, multiple alibi witnesses, none of whom were called to testify at Dunn’s trial, “can attest that Christopher Dunn was at home and talking on the phone at the same time that Ricco Rogers was shot,” the motion said.
The motion said that the evidence of Dunn’s innocence was “overwhelming.”
A hearing on the motion was held in May 2024, during which Dr. Franklin testified to her analysis of the case and re-iterated the problems with the identifications.
On July 24, 2024, Judge Jason Sengheiser granted the motion, vacated Dunn’s conviction, and ordered him released on bond by 6 p.m. Judge Sengheiser ruled that the “Circuit Attorney has made a clear and convincing showing of ‘actual innocence’ that undermines the basis for Dunn’s convictions because in light of new evidence, no juror, acting reasonably, would have voted to find Dunn guilty of these crimes beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which had been fighting to preserve Dunn’s conviction, went to the state’s Supreme Court, which issued a ruling blocking Dunn’s release. At the time the ruling came down, Dunn was signing paperwork to be released. Dunn’s wife, Kira, was on the way to the prison to pick up Dunn, who was just about 50 feet from freedom when his release was blocked.
On July 30, 2024, the state Supreme Court issued a ruling saying that Gore needed to confirm that he would not retry Dunn before Dunn could be released. Gore filed a memorandum saying he would not seek to take the case to trial again.
On July 31, 2024, the case was dismissed, and Dunn was released. He had spent more than 33 years in prison since the date of his conviction.
– Maurice Possley
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