Decades after Missouri prosecutor suppressed evidence, Larry Callanan is finally free
One summer night when he was 19 years old, Larry Callanan had drinks with some friends in St. Louis. Then he stopped to check on his dad, who had heart problems, got “shot down” by the girl he’d hoped would be coming back to his place and oh well, went to sleep untroubled at his cousin’s instead. Late that next morning — or was it early that afternoon? — he came home to the news that his buddy had been murdered right after they’d said goodnight. The police had been by and wanted to talk to him.
Last week, 45-year-old Larry Callanan joined the not-as-elite-as-we’d-like-to-think group of those freed from prison after spending decades there for no reason. In this case, because a prosecutor had broken a few rules to put him there. That prosecutor, Dan Diemer, had suppressed evidence that would have reduced the one-witness case against Callanan to no case at all.
Being freed from Potosi Correctional Center after all this time was almost as surreal a scene as getting sent away in the first place, Callanan told me, via Zoom videoconference, in his first post-prison interview. “When word spread through the prison, I was surprised at the positive reaction, honestly, because that can be a dark place. But I felt none of that leaving. Everybody was cheering, guys who were behind doors were kicking doors, screaming and cheering. Guys coming up and hugging me, some guys with tears rolling down their face, although I won’t name them or they would never forgive me. I even got a few congrats from the staff.” Maybe because everyone at Potosi knows how rare it is for a wrong like the one done Callanan to ever be righted.
Before that sendoff, though, which sounds like something out of the movie, “Just Mercy,” were the years of incomprehension over what had happened to him. “Even if I could see inside his head,” Callahan said of the man who put him behind bars, “I don’t think I’d want to.”
The worst part of the whole twisty tale, for those of us who cling to the increasingly wishful idea that our criminal justice system is just, is that only a few years after Callanan went to prison for the 1995 murder of 24-year-old Johnny Schuh, the prosecutor admitted to his former law partner that there were, well, problems with the case.
Diemer signed an initial affidavit to that effect in 2002. Yet it took 18 more years for Callanan’s wrongful conviction to be vacated by the Missouri Supreme Court in what really was his last chance.
Evidence included no motive, no weapon
A lifetime ago, when I was a baby cop reporter in Dallas, a homicide detective there told me that either out of conscience or cockiness, the guilty will almost always tell someone what they’ve done. I’ve had reason to remember that a few times over the years.
And sure enough, Diemer let on to his former colleague that while the whole case hung on one witness — Kara Weinstein, the same 18-year-old with whom Callanan had hoped to spend what was left of that night in 1995 — the truth was not quite as he’d presented in court.
The state’s theory of the case was that around 3 a.m. on July 2, Weinstein had dropped Callanan, Schuh and another friend off at a house in Spanish Lake, Missouri, in St. Louis County, where a party was still in full swing. She drove away, but then heard gunshots, turned her car around and headed back toward the house, where she saw Callanan crossing the street to his truck, a white GM Sierra pickup.
She saw no one else, she said in court, so Callanan had obviously had an “exclusive opportunity” to have killed Schuh, whose body his friends had found on the front porch, covered with pine needles and bullet holes.
That was it. No motive, no weapon, no other evidence. And as Diemer suggested to his former law partner, no “exclusive opportunity” either, since contrary to what Weinstein had said in court, she had also seen a second car around that same time and place.
The prosecutor told her not to mention that little detail in court unless someone asked her directly. Even when the defense attorney did ask her exactly that, on cross-examination, she stuck to her story, and the prosecutor didn’t correct the record.
Instead, he asked the jury, “Why would Kara come here and point-blank lie to you people? How smart is this girl to make this type of stuff up?” After a trial that lasted 3 ½ days, the court sentenced Callanan to life without parole.
That’s how easy it is to put a man in prison, but getting one who shouldn’t be there out again takes years of work, with the right outcome far from guaranteed. “There is nothing more frightening than having an innocent client, and you know it’s his last chance,” said Kansas City-based attorney Cheryl Pilate, who with her colleague Lindsay Runnels has been working on Callanan’s case for 13 years.
Of the six innocence cases Pilate has handled, “there was no motive in any of them, and often no connection” to the victim. “At least Larry knew Johnny.”
The major difference between this case and the others, though, is that unlike Callanan, everyone else she’s gotten out from under a wrongful conviction is black. Which mirrors the national study that found African Americans seven times more likely than white people to be wrongly convicted of murder.
Prosecutor evasive in review hearing
At the end of all these years of working on and worrying about this case, the “pure joy” for Pilate was getting to call Callanan’s mom, Harriet Ojile, late last month to tell her there was news. “I said, ‘Harriet, your baby is coming home.’”
The first real break for Callanan and his legal team happened in 2016, when they finally got the Missouri Supreme Court to order a hearing to review evidence in the case.
At that hearing, held over 10 days in 2018 and 2019, Diemer tried to take back what he’d said in two earlier affidavits about coaching Weinstein not to mention anything about a second car. The Missouri Supreme Court-appointed special master eventually reported back that she’d found him evasive, illogical and the least credible witness who had testified.
That included even Weinstein, who dramatically changed what she’d said on the stand in 1996. First, she said the man she’d seen crossing the street that night in the darkness was not Callanan at all but another friend, Ron Claggett, who had been inside the house talking to his girlfriend on the phone when shots were fired.
He told police right away that he had fled the party in fear after finding Schuh dead on the porch, and he was never a suspect.
Two people in the neighborhood saw Claggett’s burgundy Camaro leaving right after the shots, just as he’d said, yet of nine neighbors and partiers who ran outside after hearing the noise, no one but Weinstein saw Callanan.
So, was it Claggett she’d seen? He is 10 inches shorter and much slighter than Callanan. After saying it was Claggett, Weinstein then said she couldn’t be sure who she’d seen in the dark, because all she’d really been able to make out was a figure in silhouette. “I don’t know who it was,” she said. Then she went back to saying it was Callanan, and that he looked “stressed.”
Because there seems to have been no corner of this case that was uncorrupted, there’s also the problem of the juror whose brother was a cop.
She testified at the evidentiary hearing that she had heard something quite damning about Callanan during the trial. She thought she’d heard this in the courtroom, but since there was no such testimony, she couldn’t have. The gun used to kill Schuh wouldn’t be entered into evidence, she was told, because it was being held in another shooting in which Callanan was involved. Only, no murder weapon was ever found, and there was no other case.
The police officers who had done the investigation admitted at the hearing that they had only formally interviewed Weinstein once, two hours after the shooting, and never brought her back to the scene to try and recreate what she’d seen when from where.
They never searched Callanan’s home, lead detective Butch Albert testified at the hearing, because they had so little evidence against him that no judge in St. Louis County would have given them a warrant.
Suggestions of family mob connections
The early news accounts, based entirely on information from police, were all wrong, too. They mentioned prominently — in the first sentence, in one case — that Callanan’s grandfather had been the longtime head of the Pipefitters Local 562, and that both of his parents had been injured in car bombings in the 1970s.
In court, Diemer did everything but scream “mobbed-up family!” even though the judge had ruled that suggestion out-of-line and off-limits. Callanan always felt that he’d been targeted by law enforcement for, as he put it, things that happened before he was born.
“There’s a controversial history there,” he told me. “I don’t know how much you know about my family, but it was pretty clear the way Dan Diemer treated my father” even at an initial bond hearing, that that history “seemed to be either part of it, or a tactic on Diemer’s part to facilitate a win that he didn’t have coming.”
Finally, on May 29, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that in failing to turn over exculpatory evidence and in eliciting perjured testimony, Diemer’s misconduct required that Callanan’s convictions be vacated.
The court did not say Callanan is innocent, which is even harder to prove. But current St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell had already written to the court on Callanan’s behalf, excoriating Diemer and praising Callanan’s life inside Potosi, where he volunteered in the hospice ward, lived in the honor wing and worked in the administrative offices. Bell said he would not retry the case.
Today, Diemer is a St. Louis criminal defense attorney — yes, he still has a law license in Missouri — and advertises himself as someone who has “branched out” from his early experience as a prosecutor.
Kara Weinstein won a good citizenship award from the St. Louis County Police Department after her testimony against Callanan, and later did an internship with the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Now Kara Armbruster, she has a master’s degree in social work, owns a fitness center for women and works as a school therapist.
And Callanan, of course, is starting over at age 45. “I’m starting from scratch to try to build a life,” he said, “and I’m not complaining. I’m definitely not complaining.”
When I spoke to him and his mom, he was wearing a Notre Dame cap and she a Notre Dame shirt. “There was a time I was into sports,” he said when I asked him about the fan wear, but “the last couple of decades not so much. It’s more the Irish part I’m wearing the hat for. Fighting Irish, right?”
Harriet said she’s been trying to get him to eat — ribs and beef stew were first on the menu — though he’s still so flooded with adrenaline that he hasn’t been able to put much of it away. “Whatever he wants to do,” is the immediate game plan, she said. “They never stop being your baby.”
He’s glad about that. “She put her life on hold for 25 years to support me, and she’s my number one priority out here, you know? It’s actually hard to talk about,” he said, overwhelmed for a minute.
Doesn’t blame teenage witness for testimony
“Sitting here today,” he said, he doesn’t blame Weinstein for her testimony. “She was an 18-year-old girl, the person they were using to build their case, pressured from all sides.”
“I had actually planned on trying to hook up with her” the night Schuh was killed. But “I leaned over to give her a kiss and she gave me the cheek, so I seen that wasn’t happening.”
What really did happen after he got out of her car, he said, is that he and Schuh talked for a minute in the street and then he got into his truck and drove away.
“He was staying and I was going.” Schuh told him he was meeting someone up at the house to score some drugs, and asked Callanan to stick around, but he took a pass. “It was 3 o’clock, I just got shot down by Kara, it was time to go.”
Who he was meeting Callanan has no idea, though he does wish he’d listened a little harder to what his friend had been saying in those last minutes they were together.
Not that knowing who really killed Johnny Schuh would have made any difference.
