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62 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.16 6 2 Romans verses lost their touch, replaced with, "Whoa, God, you crazy?!" At KSR, he played the game, waged the bets. Cigarettes, Nutty Bars, Honey Buns for 41 cents. "We played cards and bet on pride," he says. Pride soaked with what were called "cockroaches" and "hound dogs." "If I owed you a cockroach, we could be in the chow line, 100 people deep, and you say, 'Bitch, give me my cockroach.' I'd have to get down on my back, kick my feet in the air and go eek, eek, eek like a dying cockroach. Hound dog is get on all fours and bark." VonAll- men played ball in the yard, called himself "Commander." He worked toward his associate degree in liberal arts. Worked for the prison mak- ing desk nameplates. Went to counseling. "It was the frst time I'd ever really re- fected on my emotions," he says. "Before it was always, 'Rock on.'" He read rabbi Harold Kushner's When Bad Tings Hap- pen to Good People, realized "shit happens." He dismissed reason and rolled on. Freedom is a waiting game. For 11 long years it was ups and downs. News of other serial rapists convicted had VonAllmen thinking, "Tis has to be the guy!" and "God is real." Ten his hope defated: One rapist didn't confess to the Oct. 10, 1981 crime; the other was "as black as the ace of spades." VonAllmen almost made parole fve years in, even packed his junk and got "caked." "Te other inmates smash cake in your face. It's part of the ritual of leaving," he says. But, nope, false alarm. He went back in front of the parole board for the fourth time in 1994. "Like the surprise in Shawshank Redemption, I was released," he says. (His father had managed to get the chief of police to write a letter to the parole board on VonAllmen's behalf; he thinks this helped.) VonAllmen ran out of his meeting not knowing what to feel. "I'm wanting to cry, but I'm still in prison and you better man up quick," he says. It's like that Lynyrd Skynyrd song VonAllmen likes. Te one that goes, Give me three steps out the door, and I'll take it from here. "All I needed was a chance to show them who Mike VonAll- men was or who he could be," he says. Day one, the world whizzed by. All the cars down the Watterson Expressway moving so fast they made VonAllmen nau- seous. He had his frst meal at his father's: take-out from Mike Linnig's. He rode to pick up the food, followed his father and brother inside, not expecting anything. "I swing that door open and it intimidated the hell out of me. Too many faces. It was overwhelming," he says. "Straight out of prison, you're looking at everyone as a potential aggressor." Quickly, the world slowed down — with routine, responsibility. Te parole monitoring, the required 40-hour work- weeks. Te embarrassment of having to tell a potential employer, "I'm a convicted sex ofender." Te eventual steadiness of plumbing, pulling a pretty union check. Te heart sped up. Once at a stoplight and VonAllmen still fresh in the old world he once knew. A corrections ofcer pulled up next to him and VonAllmen spit at that car with the rage of injustice. Hit his own side mirror instead. Te heart sped up again when he heard William Gregory was exonerated in 2000. VonAllmen went to see Gregory at his job at Sears in Oxmoor Mall. "I was like this man out of nowhere, bubbling with emo- tion, choking up," VonAllmen says. He remembers saying something like, "Man, you ain't the only one! I am with you, brother. I am with you!" Te heart pumped again 16 years into parole. Front page of the Courier-Journal: "Kentucky Gets Grant to Investigate Wrongful Convictions." VonAllmen at the kitchen table sputtering and stuttering: It can't be. "I drove to work crying," he says. A hopeful cry. Could this really be the end? With help of the Kentucky Inno- cence Project's then-attorney Ted Shouse, a DNA test was administered on the rape-kit hairs and determined all 16 hairs were the victim's. So KIP looked to other sources, other witnesses. Tey found a new confession from one Rayetta Smith, met with her, investigated her testimony. VonAllmen frst knew Smith as the girl down the street, his sister's friend, dolls and cooties. VonAllmen's mom once ran into Smith while visiting KSR, and Smith was shocked to hear VonAllmen was in for rape. Smith wrote VonAllmen's betting buddy in prison, and ended one letter with: "Oh, by the way, do you know Mike VonAllmen? I believe my ex committed his crime." VonAllmen was still locked up at that point. Te ex: Ronald Tackett. A 200-some- thing-pound guy with pale blue eyes and a shock of curly brown hair. Te driver of a green Mercury. A convicted felon charged with abducting a 16-year-old girl in 1978 and beating, raping and robbing her in Iroquois Park. (He was given a plea bar- gain — a misdemeanor assault, 90 days in jail.) A dead man done in a high-speed car chase with the police in '83. "Tat was a huge defating moment for me, really," VonAllmen says now. "I was looking for someone to confess." VonAllmen recalls Smith's testimony: In the six years she was married to Tackett he often took her to Iroquois Park and beat her. Sometimes Tackett would come home with strange lipstick on his belly and shirt. Around the time of the 1981 rape, she said he pulled his fnely functioning green car into the backyard, let it sit there for several days. "How do you mess that up?" VonAll- men says. "Because it was too damn easy. You see this picture of me looking almost like the guy and say, 'We've got our man.' I was there frst. Don't give it a second thought. I know people that work like that — they take the easy road." VonAllmen was exonerated in 2010. Te conviction erased. No successful law- suit; VonAllmen lost. Te judge saying, "Well, sorry, Mr. Tackett isn't here…" then, whish, the pen across the page. Tere were no right words to say, but there was the feeling of Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston, victory on the mat. He calls it a long pause. VonAllmen, the same guy on both sides of the sentence. Te common man, the knuck- lehead. Same lady in his arms, now his wife, and back in the South End. If he would've made it to Colorado, he says he'd still be the same knucklehead in a diferent location. But perhaps then, as he believed destiny intended, he would've grown into Walter, the grouch. "I wouldn't have been voiceless, but I wouldn't have raised my voice, either," VonAllmen says. Twenty-seven years wrongfully con- victed, and VonAllmen knows there are certain people who probably think he's Police never searched VonAllmen's apartment for the gun the perpetrator had threatened the victim with or the Lindy star ring that was supposedly stolen; didn't check for fingerprints in the victim's vehicle; didn't canvass the area or bar for witnesses.