KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Rodney Lincoln was convicted of the gruesome murder of a St. Louis woman in 1983. Thanks to former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, he’s now a free man.
41 Action News interviewed Lincoln in 2016, as the Midwest Innocence Project took his case in front of a three-judge panel. Lincoln said then his, “Confidence in the system has slipped some, but not the expectation that I will walk through that front door.”
He’s maintained his innocence since his 1982 arrest, citing failed DNA tests and the sole eyewitness recanting her testimony. Days after his release, Lincoln chuckled, “I’m in the free world. I may not know all the things going on in it, but I’m in the free world.”
In 2003, Lincoln’s daughter Kay started looking into his case.
“I don’t care about the sleepless nights. I don’t care about the hours upon hours spent researching. I don’t care about the letters that we had to write and the phone calls and recruiting people and the pounding the pavement and doing everything we had to do. None of it matters. It was all worth it. It was all worth it,” Kay said.
Now, the MIP is fighting for full exoneration, because Lincoln is still guilty in the legal system. The group also set up this GoFundMe page to assist him as he starts his new life as a free man.
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story misidentified the Midwest Innocence Project as the Missouri Innocence Project. The story has been updated.
