Book publisher who served 30 years for murder is trying to prove the innocence of convicted killer Marni Yang
Criminal defense attorney Jed Stone was on his fifth subpoena request of the morning when his command of the massive Marni Yang case file faltered.
He wanted the judge to order a debt collection agency to release its notes on a phone conversation one of its employees supposedly had with Yang the morning Rhoni Reuter and her unborn child were murdered — a conversation that, if proven, could provide Yang a crucial alibi.
But when had the call arrived? Stone wasn’t sure. So he turned to a woman in black seated behind him — a woman who might know the case better than anyone.
“Shortly after 9 a.m.?” Stone guessed.
“Mm-hmm,” she replied with a confident nod. The exact time, as she knew perfectly well, was 9:13 a.m.
That small moment in a Lake County courtroom earlier this year illuminated the influence that Tammy Koelling, a petite, tastefully dressed, carefully spoken book publisher from the southern Illinois town of Salem, has over Yang’s exoneration effort.
Yang was given a life sentence in 2011 for the murder of Reuter, her rival for the affections of ex-Chicago Bear Shaun Gayle. Last year, she filed court papers asserting her innocence, and is seeking a new trial or an outright reversal of her conviction.
Koelling is deeply involved in the case. She has read the 30,000-page file several times and committed hundreds of data points to memory. She has organized news conferences and Facebook livestreams to further Yang’s defense. She has paid experts from her own pocket to poke holes in the prosecution’s case.
It’s nearly a full-time job, and she’s doing it for free. To understand why, you have to know about Koelling’s past.
In 1987, Koelling, then a 23-year-old mother of two who worked in an insurance office, was convicted with five co-defendants of the murder of a small-time drug dealer outside Salem. Prosecutors described her as the mastermind, saying she wanted to silence a man she thought was about to snitch on her own marijuana-selling enterprise.
“The evidence in this case illustrates that (Koelling) is coldblooded and ruthless,” Marion County State’s Attorney Robert Matoush told the judge at sentencing. “I submit to your honor that you should not let her appearance fool you. There is evil in her.”
Koelling, who says she feels responsible for the murder though she denies taking an active role, spent the next three decades in prison. There, she overcame what she describes as violence and despair to become a jailhouse lawyer who used her paralegal training to help fellow inmates appeal their cases.
That’s how she met Yang. After several conversations, Koelling said she grew convinced that Yang had been wrongfully convicted, and pledged that once released from prison, she would try to help her new acquaintance prove her innocence.
It promises to be an uphill, possibly quixotic effort. Lake County prosecutors have dismissed Yang’s legal arguments, saying there is no doubt she is the killer. Recently, they turned a critical eye on Koelling, alleging in court filings that she has business ties with Yang and her family that render their credibility suspect.
Koelling denies having any deals with the family outside of publishing a book by Yang’s three children that has netted them only a few hundred dollars. She said her company has signed a contract with a film producer, whom she would not name, to assist with a documentary about the case, but the family is not involved.
Speaking in a suburban hotel during one of her trips north to work on the case, a prison-trained emotional support dog named Sir Victor at her feet, Koelling said she is just trying to do the right thing. Since starting work on Yang’s case, she has expanded her focus to other inmates who say they’re innocent, aiming to track down exculpatory evidence through ingenuity and persistence.
“One thing you learn in prison is to do something with nothing,” she said. “And if you get really good at it, you can do a big something out of nothing. I can cook an entire meal in a clothes dryer. I can cut my hair with fingernail clippers. We learn to use the very limited materials we have to do whatever we need to do.”
Discord, drugs and murder
Tammy Koelling was born into chaos. Before she was 3, according to a court filing, her mother abandoned her and her four siblings in a deer shack near their hometown of Metropolis, Illinois. The children were rescued — Koelling doesn’t remember the circumstances — and sent to live in different homes.
Koelling was taken in by a couple in Salem, a town of 7,000 people 65 miles due east of St. Louis. She said she didn’t learn she had been adopted until she was 12, and was badly thrown by the revelation.
“It changed things for me,” she said. “It changed my perspective. It would have been better had I grown up thinking they were my real mom and dad.”
Her seemingly normal small-town life — school, friends, church youth group — grew stormier as she moved through her teens, she said. She got pregnant her senior year of high school and married the father, then divorced him after her daughter was born and married another man who had grown up in her neighborhood.
That marriage produced another daughter, born at only 29 weeks with severe health problems. Koelling said the infant required constant monitoring, and despite taking “handfuls” of caffeinated diet pills to stay awake, she lived in terror she would sleep through the alarm signaling that her daughter needed immediate care.
Her husband worked nights, so she was on her own for most of the time. When she confided her fears to him, she said, he offered a solution.
“He showed me how to do these little lines,” she said. “It was a month later before I figured out it was cocaine. I thought he had opened up the capsules of those pills, like it was another way to use these pills to stay awake. That’s how naive I was.”
Her husband had been dealing marijuana to cover their medical bills, she said. She insisted she had nothing to do with the business but was pulled into it when a young man named Red Alderson showed up at her door, pleading for help.
In Koelling’s version, Alderson, 22, had been dealing for her husband but ran afoul of competitors. As she was trying to negotiate a truce, she said, she mistakenly delivered Alderson to the men who wanted him dead. In a wooded clearing known as The Bottoms, one of the men, a paroled rapist named Gary Daubman, shot Alderson three times in the back of the head.
“I will never, ever forget that,” Koelling said, her voice trembling. “I will never be able to. I tried to help him and I ended up with his demise on my hands.”
Police, prosecutors and some of Koelling’s co-defendants offered a different story. In their telling, Koelling was a full participant in the family drug business and the architect of the murder. Daubman said in a statement to police that she suspected Alderson might be an informant.
“Tammy said she wanted me to waste a guy, to kill a guy, because this guy was messed up with the cops and she didn’t want this guy to bring up her name,” he said.
Alderson’s body was discovered three days after his murder by teens riding three-wheelers through The Bottoms. It had been severely burned but was still identifiable.
Daubman was arrested in a rape case two days later and volunteered a confession about Alderson’s murder during a lie-detector test, authorities said. Koelling, her husband and four other alleged conspirators were quickly rounded up.
Koelling said prosecutors offered to downgrade her charges if she gave false testimony against the others (Matoush, now retired, said that is untrue). She refused, she said, and after an unusual proceeding in which the judge relied mostly on the transcript from the trial of one of her co-defendants, she was convicted of murder.
Her attorney asked the judge for mercy.
“Her medical problems are such — her size, her frailty — prison is going to be a rough life for her in Dwight,” he said. “A lengthy prison sentence. … I don’t know if she can live through it. Might as well be tantamount to the death sentence.”
The judge, while accepting Koelling’s remorse, said her role in the murder had been “coldblooded and ruthless,” and gave her an extended sentence of 60 years in prison. Under the rules in place at the time, she would serve half.
Jailhouse lawyer
Koelling describes prison as hellish. An attack by another inmate left her face scarred, she said, and the misery of incarceration compelled her to attempt suicide three times.
But after one of those attempts, she said, her father visited and urged her to think about how she could overcome “the biggest mistake in (her) life.” The path Koelling chose was education, and she took prison classes in everything from theology to dog training.
“You do anything to stay busy,” she said. “If you’re going to survive prison, you leave the housing unit very early in the morning and don’t come back until 9 p.m. when you’ve done all your prison jobs. Fall into your bunk and fall asleep.”
She became a certified paralegal, she said, which allowed her to work in the prison law library, helping other inmates with their cases. One day, as Koelling neared the end of her sentence, Marni Yang introduced herself.
In a letter sent from the Logan Correctional Center, Yang said it was not an instant connection: Koelling had grown jaded after years of sorting through false and hopeless claims, and assumed Yang’s fell into that category too.
“However, once she began to piece together some of the details that I shared with her, she came to firmly believe in my innocence,” Yang wrote. “Up to that point, I never felt like anyone actually listened to what I was telling them, or really cared about what I was saying.”
Yang’s story, which she has since repeated in court filings, was that she made a phony confession to take police pressure off her teenage son. She also said a 9 mm pistol she owned — the same type of weapon used in the killing — had been stolen before the crime.
Lake County prosecutors scoff at Yang’s version, saying in a court motion that she could have gotten another gun after the alleged theft, and that details in her supposedly made-up admission match what a friend had earlier relayed to police.
But Koelling said Yang’s story rang true. She made an offhand promise that she would help, she said, and stuck to it when she was finally paroled in 2016.
“There was something about this case that resonated with me,” she said. “I started searching for it online and seeing what happened. I was just like, ‘This makes no sense at all. Why would people believe this?’”
‘The other side'
Koelling moved back in with her elderly mother in Salem and, having self-published two books while incarcerated, started a small press called Words Matter Publishing. A month later, she contacted Yang’s father, Larry Merar, to pitch the idea of a book that would “tell the other side of the story.”
As part of that, she conferred with Yang’s lawyer and hired private investigator Perry Myers to look into what she considered to be discrepancies, such as a mysterious set of keys captured in a crime scene photograph. They turned out to belong someone from the coroner’s office, she said, a sign of what she called sloppy evidence processing.
Myers said Koelling eventually became the “coordinator” of Yang’s defense, hiring experts to look for weaknesses in the evidence and even helping to interview possible witnesses.
“Tammy has lived and breathed the case,” Myers said. “She has the luxury to read through most of the file from the original trial and look at that. She really has a good knowledge of the case, much better probably than any of us.”
Stone said while he makes the final decisions on legal strategy, Koelling has been “a great and valued assistant,” and that her criminal background gives her a unique lens through which to view the evidence.
“She’s very good at what she does,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “While I’m sure that some less thoughtful individual may make an attack on her to gain an advantage in litigation, the truth is she’s an outstanding member of this team and greatly respected.”
Credibility questions
The “attack” Stone anticipated finally came in late June. Lake County prosecutors filed court motions revealing Koelling’s history and raising questions about her credibility and motivation for being involved in Yang’s case.
“(It) appears that Words Matter Publishing has provided financial compensation or other inducements to the defendant or her children for multiple book deals and media contracts,” reads one document. “The People contend that the financial inducements to those witnesses by Words Matter Publishing would relate to the bias, interest and motive of those witnesses.”
The prosecutors asked for a subpoena that would force Koelling to turn over any paperwork she has detailing business ties with the family, along with investigative material they suspect her of holding. They also sought permission to bring up Koelling’s criminal record if she testifies in the case.
Merar said other than a book Yang’s children wrote, for which they received minimal compensation, the family has no deals with Koelling.
“I know every cost and benefit involved,” he said. “There’s nothing there.”
Koelling said she believes the motions are payback for her denunciations of Lake County authorities, aired via a series of Facebook Live videos. She noted that three days after she posted a video titled “Continual Corruption in Lake County Illinois,” prosecutors filed their motions.
“It was retaliation,” she said. “It was clearly retaliation.”
State’s Attorney Mike Nerheim responded: ”We remain focused on this case itself and (are) not concerned with the personal opinions of Ms. Koelling.”
The matter is due to come before a Lake County judge in September.
Meanwhile, Koelling has organized the investigators who have worked on Yang’s defense into a team that, for a fee, will examine other supposed injustices. One case they’ve accepted is that of Diana Thames, convicted on circumstantial evidence in 2008 for the murder of her friend and business partner in Palatine.
Thames, serving a 35-year sentence at Logan, has argued in appellate court that someone else is the killer. She did not respond to a letter from the Tribune seeking comment.
Koelling, who has faced social media scorn from some people who have learned about her past, said her transformation into a crusader for those she believes were wrongfully convicted is about seeking justice, as much for the victims as the incarcerated.
It is not, she said, an attempt at redemption.
“There is no way to clean up a murder that I was involved in and found guilty of,” she said. “You can’t clean that up. There’s nothing that makes that type of mistake go away.”
Twitter @JohnKeilman
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