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LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.16 61 6 1 the 10th? Tat was three weeks past. He scrambled for an answer. Oh, yeah, the movies, An American Werewolf in London. Te morning of the 10th? He forgot. Couldn't really recall the night of the 9th, either. Te uncertainty must've been encour- aging for the police ofcers. VonAllmen's previous possession charge was no help. And worse, the victim elsewhere with her fnger on VonAllmen's mugshot — the only big, curly-headed dude in the pho- topack lineup. So certain, despite the fact she'd written "blue" for eye color in her initial statement, and the mugshot eyes were brown. (At our Starbucks meeting, VonAllmen is prepared with a manila fold- er. In it, the composite sketch and a mug- shot of him and the mugshot of the man whose crime he was punished for. "Tis is how easily it can happen," he says.) After his arrest on Oct. 29, 1981, came the January trial. Te losing of the voice. VonAllmen listened to his public defend- er saying there isn't enough evidence to be certain of guilt. 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 fngerprints in the victim's vehicle; didn't canvass the area or bar for witnesses. Te results of a rape kit, which sampled and analyzed the victim's combed pubic hair, proved inconclusive. "Tey couldn't prove the hair was hers or mine," VonAllmen says. He listened to the TV brought into the courtroom. A taped testimony from Von- Allmen's girlfriend — the defense's prima- ry witness, whose agoraphobia prevented her from attending the trial — saying that she was, in fact, with him at the apartment when the woman was raped in Iroquois Park. He listened to the prosecutor cross-ex- amining VonAllmen's old high school bud- dy, the one who threw a party just because on the night of the rape. Te prosecutor asked wheres and times. Te buddy said he remembered seeing VonAllmen at the keg by a tree out back. Te prosecutor replied, "What, do you have a clock on your tree?" VonAllmen remembers that chillingly. "I hated seeing the pain in my friend's eyes being drilled into like that," he says. "I think he felt some guilt afterward, like he didn't say the right thing." Te verdict. Guilty. VonAllmen sen- tenced to 35 years in prison on Feb. 18, 1983. "Immediately I'm thinking, 'What have I done to deserve this?' I'm going through all the bad things I've done. Even small stuf. Is it because I pulled that girl's pigtails back when? Shoved that kid against the locker?" he says. In the courtroom, VonAllmen's family sat behind him. His mother, who had tried to bring her son to God — "Boy, you need to repent and give to the Lord" — prob- ably prayed. His father knew his son was innocent because he asked him if he did it and VonAllmen said, "No." You couldn't get a lie past Dad, whether it be about a stink bomb or the rape of a woman. His youngest sister wailed at the word "guilty." VonAllmen says he couldn't turn around when he heard that shriek. Couldn't bring himself to speak. At the Kentucky State Reformatory in LaGrange, VonAllmen's voice lost its depth, went fast, sounded like, "You rat mother fucker punk ass bitch!" It was like an alter ego, this inmate voice. "When in Rome," he says, "you gotta be Roman." Wasn't easy at frst. Wasn't right being away from his family, his girlfriend's kids who'd started knowing him as Dad. He'd known tight quarters because of the Navy, but, oh, the thought of his apartment and the heated water mattress that kept him warm through winter. He got used to the conversations that always began: "What are you in for?" VonAllmen always pro- claimed his innocence. "Of course, when I frst got convicted, I had to say, 'Why the hell is this hap- pening?' I moved to Christianity. God's got a reason for it. When I got convicted: 'Mom, I think I'm listening to you now. What ya got to tell me?'" VonAllmen says. Te voice of God wore of after a year. "For the wages of sin is death..." and other Kentucky Innocence Project investigator Jimmer Dudley (second from right) teaching University of Louisville law students.