Wrongful Conviction, Freed 13 years later: The Walter Dunn Story

What happens when you wake up craving a cigarette at 2 a.m. and end up spending the next 11 years in prison for a crime you didn’t commit?

When I sat down with Walter Dunn, I knew I was about to hear one of those stories that stops you in your tracks. But nothing could have prepared me for the sheer injustice of what this man endured, or the incredible strength it took for him to fight his way back to freedom.

The Night That Changed Everything

It was March 5th, 2013, when Walter’s world came crashing down. He’d woken up around 2 a.m. with a craving for a smoke, searched groggily for a lighter, couldn’t find one, and decided to go back to sleep. The next thing he knew, his house was full of police officers with guns drawn, calling his name.

“I remember they wouldn’t talk to me when I got to the police station,” Walter told me. “The detective came in and once he started asking me questions, I knew what the situation was about. So basically I just told him the truth, I told him where I was, I didn’t know anything about the fire, I wasn’t there.”

The fire in question had killed two people, including a man who was dating Walter’s mother. What Walter didn’t know was that a jailhouse informant named Jennings, someone he barely knew from the music scene, had come forward with fabricated testimony six months after the incident. Even more shocking was that the original medical examiner had ruled the deaths accidental, caused by someone smoking on a couch. Only after prosecutors got involved did that testimony mysteriously change.

When the System Fails You Completely

The trial was a nightmare of lies and withheld evidence. Walter’s court-appointed attorney wouldn’t listen to him, wouldn’t interview key witnesses, and basically left him defenseless against a prosecutor building a case on quicksand. The jailhouse informant received $5,000 for his testimony and a reduced sentence for his own crimes. Critical evidence, including a lighter found at the scene that would have supported Walter’s innocence, was never turned over to the defense.

The most heartbreaking part? Walter could see it all falling apart in real time. “After a while it was so many lies being told and I would write a question down to my attorney and I’ll push it to him and then push it back,” he recalled. “At a certain point I kind of just stopped paying attention… I just was like, there’s nothing I can do here. These people telling lies, nobody’s challenging it, this guy isn’t listening to me.”

When the jury came back with a guilty verdict after initially saying they were deadlocked, Walter knew they had simply given up. “I remember thinking that they just wanted to go home,” he said.

Fighting Back From Behind Bars

After his appeal was rejected, Walter made a decision that would ultimately save his life: he was going to educate himself and fight his own case. “If I was going to stay in prison, somebody was going to keep me there and I would prefer it to be me doing something,” he told me with quiet determination.

Walter wrote an estimated 70,000 letters to everyone from the President to mayors to innocence projects. Finally, the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic took notice and provided an expert report showing the fire investigation used improper methodology. That opened the door to the Wayne County Conviction Integrity Unit, and eventually to Clemency Investigations in Kentucky.

The breakthrough came when Walter discovered that crucial evidence, that lighter, had been hidden from his defense team. “Once I let them know about the lighter, I think that kind of… I mean, I started showing people, I started okay now I’mma get somewhere.”

On June 18th, 2024, after 11 years behind bars, Walter walked free. His convictions were vacated, and he was granted bond in the same hearing, something his own attorney didn’t think would happen. The weight of those years finally lifted from his shoulders.

Today, Walter still faces uncertainty. The prosecutor’s office that helped free him could still decide to retry his case. But after everything he’s endured, Walter Dunn has proven that truth has a way of surfacing, even when the system seems designed to bury it.