Wearing a crisp gray suit, Christopher Dunn walked into the Division 18 courtroom just blocks west from the famed Gateway Arch in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, on May 21. He took his seat at a long table crowded with binders of legal exhibits and surrounded by a half-dozen lawyers working to free him from prison.
It was the same courthouse where Dunn, now 52, was convicted in July 1991 and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 15-year-old Recco Rogers. According to the state, under the cover of darkness Dunn opened fire on Rogers and two other boys while they were sitting on the front steps of a friend’s home.
There was no physical evidence linking Dunn to the murder; he has always maintained his innocence and says that on the night of the shooting he was at home with family watching TV and talking to a friend on the phone until after midnight. The state’s case against Dunn was built solely on the testimony of the two boys sitting with Rogers: 12-year-old Michael Davis and 14-year-old DeMorris Stepp. During truncated police interviews, each boy named Dunn as the shooter. At Dunn’s trial, the prosecutor boldly leaned into the lack of physical evidence: The boys’ testimony was “all the evidence in the case,” he told the jury.
As such, when Davis and Stepp later recanted their stories about Dunn being the assailant, there was nothing left to prop up the prosecution’s case. Although the situation was about as straightforward as they come, thanks to quirks of Missouri law, Dunn found himself in a legal quagmire. He had no way to effectively challenge his conviction. And so it was — until 2021, when a new law offered prosecutors an avenue to overturn convictions they believe were wrongly obtained by their office. In February, Gabriel Gore, St. Louis’ appointed circuit attorney, asked a court to exonerate Dunn. “Both witnesses … now state that it was too dark to see any shooter on May 18, 1990,” Gore wrote in a motion to vacate the conviction. “The recantations alone are enough to show clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence.”
In court last month, Gore argued for the release of the man his office condemned to life in prison decades ago. On the other side of the courtroom, meanwhile, there was an adversary arguing that Dunn’s conviction was righteous and should be maintained: the office of Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey.
“A jury deliberated and found Dunn guilty,” said Assistant Attorney General Tristin Estep during the two-day hearing. “Now, this court is being asked to disturb that jury verdict and to set a convicted murderer free.”
Dunn’s is the third case since the change in state law where an elected prosecutor has sought to vacate a wrongful conviction. It is also the third time the attorney general’s office has popped up to question the prosecutor’s judgment. To date, the office has failed in its efforts. By interjecting itself in the Dunn case, Bailey’s team appears to be angling for a three-peat.
Such obstinance is on brand for the Missouri attorney general’s office, which for decades has fought to maintain even the most tainted of convictions. (The attorney general’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.) The office has evinced a self-righteous political energy that has intensified during the Biden administration as it has increasingly carried water for MAGA-nation culture war priorities. That strategy has continued apace under Bailey, who was appointed to the office in 2023 and is running for a full term this year.
“Proven Liars”
It was nearing midnight on May 18, 1990, and Recco Rogers, Michael Davis, and DeMorris Stepp were hanging out on the front porch steps of their friend Marvin Tolliver’s house. (In some court records, Rogers’s name is spelled “Ricco.”) They were dancing and talking, Stepp told police, when shots rang out. The three boys jumped up, breaking east into the front yard as they fled. As Davis moved away from the sound of the gun, he saw Rogers fall forward into the grass. Davis mimicked his friend, dropping to the ground and playing dead while Stepp jumped a short chain-link fence and tore off down the street. When the shooting was over, Davis realized Rogers hadn’t been playing; he’d been shot once through the back of the head and was now bleeding out in the grass. Minutes later the police arrived.
Back at the police station hours later, during back-to-back 10-minute interviews that ended at 3:14 a.m., Stepp and then Davis gave confusing, and at times contradictory, accounts of what happened. It was dark and, they told police, neither was sure where the shots had come from. They then said that Dunn was the shooter.
Both boys initially identified Dunn as the shooter, despite not knowing him well. Stepp described Dunn wearing a white T-shirt and blue baseball cap, while Davis mentioned a white T-shirt and wire-framed sunglasses. Dunn was arrested and charged with murder based on their testimonies. During the trial, Stepp and Davis testified for the prosecution, leading to Dunn’s conviction and a life sentence without parole. Dunn’s appeal based on his lawyer’s failure to present alibi witnesses was denied.
Years later, both Stepp and Davis recanted their testimonies, stating they could not clearly see the shooter that night. This new evidence prompted Dunn’s return to court in 2018, where the judge acknowledged Dunn’s likely innocence but could not overturn the conviction due to legal restrictions. A similar case involving Joseph Amrine on death row for a murder he did not commit highlighted the legal hurdle faced by wrongfully convicted individuals like Dunn.
In 2023, a change in Missouri law allowed elected prosecutors to challenge wrongful convictions, leading to St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filing a petition to overturn Dunn’s conviction. Despite opposition from the Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Gardner pursued justice for Dunn. After Gardner’s departure, her successor, Gabe Gore, continued the review process and eventually filed a petition to free Dunn in 2024. This legal battle for Dunn’s innocence showcased the challenges faced by wrongfully convicted individuals in the justice system. Louis Post-Dispatch”>Louis Post-Dispatch
Tristin Estep, a prosecutor with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, cross-examined witness Eugene Wilson during the first day of the hearing to decide whether to vacate Christopher Dunn’s murder conviction. Dunn, 52, has maintained his innocence for more than three decades in the 1990 murder of 15-year-old Ricco Rogers in the city’s Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood.
Photo: Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via Pool
Doubling Down
For the Missouri attorney general’s office, the hearing in St. Louis would mark the second time in recent years that its lawyers have showed up to argue against Dunn’s innocence. Assistant Attorney General Andrew Crane represented the office’s losing position at the hearing before Hickle. Later, Crane would also be on the team arguing in opposition to the exoneration of Kevin Strickland in 2021 and of Lamar Johnson, who was freed last year.
In the ongoing quest to keep Dunn locked up, Crane was joined by Estep — who was also on the team that opposed Johnson’s exoneration.
Estep argued to Sengheiser that the whole notion Dunn is innocent is a ruse, a fanciful story backed up by recantations and eyewitness evidence that Dunn somehow puppet-mastered with the help of people “either inside or outside prison.” The one thing that should be clear to the judge was that the “present-day version of events is a well-crafted story,” she said. “And who doesn’t love a good story?”
The state didn’t have much in the way of evidence to back up its claims. Estep questioned why Wilson didn’t approach the cops on his own and suggested he was standing somewhere other than when he claimed at the time of the shooting. Crane argued that Davis’s recording shouldn’t be allowed into evidence because Davis never confirmed that it was his voice on tape (even though Davis stated his name during the interview). Estep suggested that Bailey’s memory was tainted by all the meds she was on after delivering her child. To be fair, Bailey was on some drugs, but according to hospital records, the only ones she’d been administered anywhere remotely near in time to the call were a coagulant and a gas relief medicine.
The AG’s lawyers called to the stand lead detective Gary Stittum, to confirm that he did a good job on the investigation. He testified that if Dunn had offered him evidence of innocence, he surely would’ve checked it out. “Nobody gave me anything to cause me to investigate anything,” he said. He also said he never would’ve shown Davis any photos of his dead friend or put his mother on the phone to try to coerce Davis into testifying about something that didn’t happen; the former prosecutor, now a retired judge, said the same. “No, no, no,” he said. “I’d never do that.”
(Notably, Stittum was also an investigator on the Johnson case, which was similarly based on the testimony of an eyewitness who later recanted and leveled an identical charge of coercion.)
And then there was Stepp, upon whose questionable credibility the attorney general’s office hung its case for keeping Dunn in prison.
Just over a decade after Stepp recanted his story, an investigator for the attorney general’s office visited him in prison and, according to an office memo, Stepp offered a new version of events. This time, he said he saw Dunn that night, but that Dunn was with another unknown individual and that was the person who shot at the boys. In 2018, when Stepp testified at the evidentiary hearing before Hickle, he said that his most recent story wasn’t accurate but confirmed that Dunn was not the person who shot at the boys in May 1990. The AG’s current take appears to be that Stepp has changed his story so many times that it only makes sense to trust his initial statements implicating Dunn.
Estep leaned into this idea, dismissing the notion there were any inconsistencies in Stepp and Davis’s initial stories about seeing Dunn. The two boys simply focused on different details of their assailant’s appearance: Stepp said Dunn was wearing a ball cap, Davis said it was a pair of sunglasses. “No two people experience everything the same,” she said.
To hear Estep tell it, there is no manner of inconsistency — let alone recantation — that could make the boys’ trial testimony unreliable. The boys’ identifications were “correct and accurate,” Estep said. The inconsistencies in their stories start with the recantations, she claimed. “This is where the lies begin.”
Throughout the hearing, Stepp remained in a holding cell behind the courtroom. The attorney general’s office never called him to testify.
Bombastic Arguments
When Kevin Strickland was exonerated in the fall of 2021 after spending 43 years behind bars, Sean O’Brien, a veteran lawyer and law professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, noted that the attorney general’s opposition had only increased the toll of Strickland’s wrongful conviction. Had the office not opposed Strickland’s release, he could have been out of prison in time to see his mother before she died. O’Brien has worked on numerous wrongful conviction cases over the years — including the Amrine case — and the attorney general’s office had reflexively opposed innocence claims “forever, for as long as I’ve been a lawyer,” he said. “I have never seen this office admit that a mistake was made.”
“I have never seen this office admit that a mistake was made.”
Yet the attorney general’s office doesn’t shy away from pointing out the alleged mistakes of others in its seemingly daily work of attacking the Biden administration and so-called blue-state policies.
Missouri’s Republican governor appointed Bailey as attorney general in 2023 to fill the seat of fellow culture warrior Eric Schmitt, who was elected to the U.S. Senate. In the past year, Bailey has been actively involved in various legal actions opposing policies of what he calls “radical states” related to the “alleged ‘climate crisis’.” He has also pushed for the construction of a border wall and has spoken out against Title IX policies promoting what he refers to as a “radical transgender ideology.”
Bailey has also taken on the defense of Elon Musk, suing Media Matters for not revealing the identities of donors in Missouri who he claims were defrauded. He has criticized the media watchdog for allegedly using donor funds to pressure advertisers on a social media platform he believes is dedicated to free speech.
Additionally, Bailey’s office has investigated diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in St. Louis County’s Hazelwood School District, connecting them to an off-campus student altercation. Bailey has emphasized his background as a combat veteran and prosecutor who fights for Missouri communities.
In St. Louis, Bailey’s team has adopted his aggressive stance, arguing against releasing a man they believe to be a violent criminal. The case involves Christopher Dunn, who has maintained his innocence in a murder case for over three decades.
During a court hearing, Dunn showed emotion as he looked at his wife, Kira, who had traveled from California with their son. The judge delayed the ruling, allowing for further legal arguments to be made. Kira expressed hope that the judge would see the truth despite the accusations against Dunn. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore pointed out that the only evidence against Dunn was recanted testimony from children, emphasizing the need for a fair assessment of the case. Please paraphrase this sentence.
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