Lamar Johnson served 28 years for a murder he didn’t commit—when he was finally released after years of work by an advocacy group, there was one person he knew he wanted to see first.
It was a pen pal who wrote to him faithfully through nearly all the years of his imprisonment and came to all his court proceedings, pleading for his release on the strongly-held belief he was innocent.
Rewinding 20-some years back, one day a letter arrived in the hands of a congregant of Mary, Mother of the Church in St. Louis County named Ginny Schrappen. It was a letter addressed from the Jefferson City Correctional Center, to whomever at the church decided to open it.
Schrappen described herself as being “blown away” by Johnson’s elegant longhand script, and she decided to reply; with small details at first, but to say hello to a human who was obviously intelligent.
That reply spawned a more-than-two-decade snail mail relationship, with each letter revealing more and more about one to the other.
Johnson was convicted in 1994 of the first-degree murder of 25-year-old Marcus Boyd, one of his best friends. He had a simple alibi—he was at his girlfriend’s house that night, but the sole witness identified him as one of the shooters.
Several years later, the true culprits confessed to the crime, but this did not amount to an overturning of Johnson’s sentence. It took years of advocacy from the Innocence Project, a non-profit that investigates shut cases to try and get innocent people released from prison.
Innocence Project wasn’t alone in Johson’s advocacy—Schrappen always wrote letters to him ahead of his court appeal dates saying she would be there for him—all despite being a mother of three and eventual grandmother of two.
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Despite several failed appeals, Schrappen never stopped coming, and over the years of letter writing their relationship became more important—she visited him occasionally in prison, which created a feeling of joy she described to the Washington Post as sending her “almost out of my skin.”
The Innocence Project eventually got Johnson freed after 28 years of time served, and a GoFundMe set up in the aftermath has raised nearly $600,000 at the time of publishing to give the man a new start.
He now enjoys spending regular face-to-face time on equal footing with his long-time friend Schrappen, but isn’t angry about the course of his life.
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“If you hold onto anger, you’re just going to swap one prison for another,” Johnson told the Post. “As much as there was a lot of setbacks over the years, there is a lot to be happy and grateful for.”
“Reach out to somebody that might need a friend,” Schrappen said. “It could mean more than you know.”
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