Two months removed from his release from prison, Chris Dunn is still seeing the world with new eyes.
For the 52-year-old, it’s a world of firsts: Visiting a farmer’s market. Gazing at the St. Louis skyline. Sitting down to an anniversary breakfast with his wife, Kira — their first anniversary outside the prison where, 10 years ago, they were wed within the walls that had confined him for most of his adult life.
After his release on July 30, “We're still taking it in,” Chris Dunn told St. Louis on the Air. “Right now I still feel like a child being reborn into a world in which I've lost all contact.”
Chris and Kira Dunn are finally starting to make up for the years they spent separated. Speaking to St. Louis on the Air this week, the couple reflected on Chris Dunn’s long, frustrating journey to freedom.
“When I got out, and I got a chance to feel the wind on my face, listen to the birds sing, the barks of the dogs in the alleys — that was new. That was like my touch of reality returning back to me,” he said. “I was thinking to myself the other day: I don't ever want to know what it's like to not experience those sounds and those smells again in life. I don't.”
Charged at age 18 with first-degree murder in a fatal shooting in St. Louis, Chris Dunn was eventually found guilty at trial and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 1991. He maintained his innocence, but it would take two key witnesses recanting — and a new state law — to change his fate.
In 2023, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner announced she would file a motion to vacate Dunn’s 1991 murder conviction. The development sent Chris and Kira Dunn’s hopes soaring — only to be dashed days later when Gardner resigned as the city’s top prosecutor amid internal turmoil in her office and external political pressure.
It was the latest setback in a series of disappointments. A few years prior, in 2020, Texas County Circuit Judge William E. Hickle acknowledged in court that there was no evidence connecting Chris Dunn to the 1990 murder, stating: “This court does not believe that any jury would now convict Christopher Dunn under these facts.”
Yet, even that wasn’t sufficient for Missouri law to free him. After Gardner’s resignation, her motion to vacate became just one more loose end for a prosecutor’s office in disarray. For Chris and Kira Dunn, what seemed like an open door had instead slammed shut. His case for release was in limbo.
“I felt betrayed,” he said of that time. “I felt like the hope that I was looking [for] drained from my body, and I was lost. I didn't know what to do, because the law itself, it didn't make no sense to me. How can you be declared innocent but still remain in prison?”
But a new source of hope soon arrived.
Nine months later, St. Louis’ new circuit attorney, Gabe Gore, filed his own motion to vacate Chris Dunn’s conviction. The case progressed quickly, and by July, it seemed there were no more barriers between him and freedom.
Then, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey intervened, appealing to the state Supreme Court to put Chris Dunn’s release on hold. Although prepared for his release, prison guards returned Chris Dunn to his cell.
Outside the prison in Licking, Kira Dunn remembered feeling foolish for believing Missouri would simply let her husband go.
“We'd come so far with two declarations of innocence from two judges, and the support of two prosecutors, which is still quite a rare thing,” she said, “and it had been snatched away from us yet again. … I thought, ‘Why did I ever think that Chris could come home and that he could be free?’ This is Missouri.”
It took several more days of anxious waiting, but, on July 30, the Missouri Supreme Court lifted its emergency order on his case. That afternoon, he left the courtroom in downtown St. Louis a free man — and faced a new world, for the first time, with his wife by his side.
There’s still so much of life he wants to experience. The past, though, remains a heavy burden.
To those who worked to send him to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Chris Dunn said he forgives them. But he can’t forget.
“[Don’t] believe that this is actually justice, what they did by freeing me,” he said. “What they did is technically what I deserved. I deserved to have been liberated.”
To hear more from Chris and Kira Dunn, including how the two fell in love after Kira accepted a magazine assignment to write about his case in 1999, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Jada Jones is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr. Send questions and comments about this story to talk@stlpr.org.
