Tom Archdeacon: Wrongly imprisoned for 20 years, Dean Gillispie now working to save others
Jan. 7—FAIRBORN — When Dean Gillispie says the Ohio Innocence Project "saved my life," he's not exaggerating.
Falsely convicted and incarcerated for 20 years — before state and federal courts and the Ohio Supreme Court finally released him, exonerated him, and admitted he'd been "wrongly imprisoned" — the Fairborn man spent years behind bars, literally fighting for his life.
Just 24 when he was yanked out of everyday existence — he had a union job, a second home he was rehabbing, a new truck, a girlfriend, tight friendships with several high school buddies — he soon found himself in the Lebanon Correctional Institution, where he was egged into numerous fights.
"There's no way to prepare for that life," he said. "It's like the young guys dropped into D-Day. You've got to find a way to survive.
"My first five years it was continually fight, fight, fight. That's the prison mentality. But there wasn't nobody who was gonna call me a rapist and walk away without me busting him in the mouth.
"But just because I could handle myself before I went in, didn't mean I could handle prison. Those dudes are for real. The mentality there is they want to kill you unless someone steps in.
"Nothing prepares you for seeing your first person killed, much less a half dozen others right in front of you."
The 6-foot-2, now 300-pound Gillispie reached up and tapped the side of his head and said quietly:
"Those images ... they stay right here."
We were talking in the living room of his home, built in 1900 and decorated — except for the dining room that's filled with parts of a 1953 Chevrolet wagon he's refurbishing in the barn out back — to represent the period.
Above him was the framed painting of a cowboy he'd done in prison.
More than a hobby, his artwork was a way to mark time and mentally escape his prison cell.
He's best known for his small dioramas made from prison trash that evoke hometown nostalgia: a gas station, a bait shop, an old movie theater, an Airstream trailer.
His original efforts were confiscated by the guards. But when he discovered some of his commandeered work displayed in the warden's office, he lobbied to form an art club and got more leeway.
His mother, Juana — a woman from Paintsville in Eastern Kentucky with a strong backbone and an unwavering love of her son, who steadfastly maintained his innocence — began storing his prison art in the garage.
A few years after Gillispie's release from London Correctional Institution in 2011, five of his miniature pieces were chosen by Hamilton native Nicole Fleetwood, who curated an exhibit — "Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration" — that was featured in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Soon he was getting offers of five and six figures for his individual pieces.
He was celebrated in The Atlantic, the New Yorker and the New York Times, and the exhibit eventually moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and the Freedom Center in Cincinnati before returning to the Schomburg Center in Manhattan.
"It's just a crazy (expletive) story to go from wrongly convicted to MoMA artist," the 58-year-old Gillispie said.
"Just as insane is me travelling around the world as part of the Innocence Project."
A member of the OIP board now, he spoke during the past year in both Italy and Ireland, each for the second time, and visited colleges across America — recently Brown University and the University of Dayton, where he's a regular — and "almost every high school in Ohio."
On Jan. 18, at 7:30 p.m., he's being featured in a special program — "The Scourge of Wrongful Convictions in Our Own Backyard" — at The Neon movie theater. It will include a 40-minute portion of the new documentary being made about him by director Barry Rowen, along with a film on the Ohio Innocence Project.
The evening — part of a two-event effort to raise funds for the non-profit OIP, which has gained the release of 43 wrongly imprisoned people in the state who'd served over 850 years — is the brainchild of Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Steve Dankof.
Following the pair of film clips on Jan. 18, Gillispie, Rowen and Mark Godsey, the former New York federal prosecutor who's the director and co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project, will take part in a panel discussion moderated by Dankof.
A second big event is Feb. 29 at the Victoria Theater, when the keynote speakers will be Amanda Knox, the American student wrongly imprisoned in Italy for four years after her roommate was murdered, and Gilbert King, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who wrote "Devil in the Grove," the horrific tale of the Groveland Boys in the Jim Crow South and who now has a popular podcast centered on wrongful imprisonment.
Gillispie said he learned the importance of taking the OIP stage after one of the first times he spoke in public:
"One of the people who'd listened ran and got in the elevator with Mark and me and handed Mark a check for $25,000. Right then, I said, 'This is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life. If this gets money for us to keep going, they can send me wherever to talk.'
"I owe the Ohio Innocence Project everything. If it wasn't for them, I'd still be in prison."
In November 2022, Gillispie won a $45 million civil lawsuit — the largest civil rights payout in Ohio history — after a jury found former Miami Twp. police detective Scott Moore suppressed evidence and tainted eyewitness identifications to get Gillispie's conviction.
Last November, Miami Twp. was ordered to pay the $45 million judgment on Moore's behalf. That decision has been appealed in federal court.
While some people focus only on that large payday — Gillispie just turned down a reality TV show called "Millions After Lockup" — he stressed "money doesn't solve everything."
"What I went through isn't worth $100 million," he said.
"People say, 'Man, you got it made. You were compensated.' And I say, 'Kiss my (rear end)!'
"Compensation would be making me 25 again. My life stopped for 20 years. I missed out on everything."
Tapping his head again, he admitted: "Nothing erases what I went through, what I saw. The PTSD is intense.
"And it didn't just affect me, it nearly killed my parents.
"My mom fought for me like Patton on the front lines. And my dad stayed back and worked nonstop. One year he worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Just to make money to keep us from losing everything."
Wrongly imprisoned
Gillispie's roots often drew him back to Kentucky, and in August of 1988 he said he and three buddies were at Cave Run Lake southwest of Morehead when one of the Dayton-area rapes occurred.
Early that month a woman was abducted coming out of a pharmacy on North Dixie, driven to a parking lot and forced to perform oral sex on her attacker.
Fifteen days later, 22-year-old twin sisters from Sidney said they were outside of a shop near the Dayton Mall when they were approached by a man who claimed to be security guard. He pulled a weapon, forced them to drive to a wooded area and made them perform oral sex on him.
The description of the attacker in both rapes was similar: reddish-brown hair, no chest hair, acne on his jaw line, a deep tan, a smoker and a deep, commanding voice.
Gillispie had prematurely graying hair, thick chest hair, clear facial skin and fair skin that burned easily instead of tanning. He disliked the odor of cigarettes — he had a "No Smoking" sign in his truck — and spoke with a Kentucky drawl.
A sketch of the attacker was circulated and hung for two years in the Harrison Radiator plant where Gillispie worked as a security guard.
After he had a run-in with his supervisor, that supervisor, a former Miami Township policeman, went to his old department, brought along Gillispie's ID photo, and suggested he looked like the attacker.
The two detectives working the case disagreed and ruled him out as a suspect.
But when one of the detectives retired, the supervisor returned to the police department and convinced a new, young detective, Scott Moore, to consider Gillispie as a prime suspect, which he did.
Gillispie said evidence Moore collected — including receipts from the Kentucky campground — ended up missing.
With no physical evidence connecting Gillispie to the crimes, Moore put together a photo lineup in which the other pictures were smaller and had glossy blue backgrounds while Gillispie's photo was larger and backed with yellow matte.
The three women all identified Gillispie as their attacker,
Gillispie's legal team noted that in an FBI analysis of 19,000 cases solved by DNA, 25 percent involved eyewitness identifications that were inaccurate.
In a retrial a few months later Gillispie's conviction, the state court of appeals upheld the verdict and the Ohio Supreme Court refused to overturn it.
During that time, Gillispie's mom learned of the fledgling Ohio Innocence Project run by Godsey.
She convinced him to take on her son's case, and then Jim Petro, the former Ohio Attorney General, joined Gillispie's legal team pro bono.
The more the OIP, which is a legal clinic at the University of Cincinnati law school, investigated Gillispie's conviction, the more discrepancies and improprieties it found.
In 2010, the Dayton Daily News published an editorial urging then-Ohio governor Ted Strickland to free Gillispie.
A year later, U.S. District Magistrate Michael R. Merz ruled Gillispie didn't get a fair trial and ordered him freed.
Four years after that, the case landed in the courtroom of Dankof, who blocked prosecutors from retrying the case because the state couldn't produce Brady material, evidence that might have been favorable in Gillispie's defense but went missing.
In 2017, the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the case, and four years later, Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Susan Solle declared Gillispie a "wrongfully imprisoned individual."
"Mr. Gillispie, I can't ever imagine what the last 30 years have been like for you," Solle said that day. "Hopefully, today will take you into the next and final chapters of this nightmare that has been your life for the past 30 years and the next part will be a lot smoother."
From garbage to art
Gillispie now is into that next chapter, and the other day he reiterated it was "crazy."
"I went from a dead stop in life to full tilt," he said.
A lot of that has had to do with his artwork. He has miniatures displayed around the country and recently completed an outdoor sculpture in Chagrin Falls that includes 43 butterflies — representing the wrongly convicted whom the Ohio Innocence Project has freed — lifting away a heavy chain.
Friday, the five pieces displayed in New York for almost four years were returned to his parents' home in Fairborn.
Beforehand, he said he gave his dad, a retired GM worker from Salyersville, Ky., some specific instructions:
"I had to make him understand that this 4-by-8 crate coming in was now worth more than his house combined with the neighbor's house and a new Lincoln, if he had one, in the driveway.
"It's insanity. This literally was garbage out of prison cells."
That includes heavy, pressed cardboard he found lining the bottom of wooden pallets in the kitchen, tin foil from packages of Bugler cigarette tobacco, part of a tea bag that was used as a curtain and pin heads made to look like rivets.
For tools, he'd used a toenail clipper to cut ridges in a paper clip to make a tiny, serrated saw. He took out the blade in a disposable razor and inserted it in a pen like a X-Acto knife, though he had to pitch the blade every night, so he didn't appear to have a weapon in his cell.
As he worked, he listened to music — usually the Allman Brothers — and suddenly was able to escape the confines of his cramped cell.
While making his Airstream miniature, a friend turned him on to "Soulshine" written by Allman Brothers' guitarist Warren Haynes.
"That just exploded in my brain," Gillispie said. "That was the life I was living. It became my anthem."
Although someone in New York recently offered $150,000 for that miniature, Gillispie didn't sell it.
He hasn't sold any of his art:
"Those pieces are the only thing I've got for 20 years of my life. I go see my buddies and they've got their houses, cars, careers, kids, but I don't have any of that. I've just got some garbage I turned into something."
That's not quite correct though.
He has a girlfriend, Pam, and that 124-year-old house, and his parents are nearby, as are many of the pals who stuck with him through everything.
And then there are moments like the one he recently had when he spoke in Bologna, Italy.
He shared the stage with Angelo Massaro, who spent 21 years wrongly imprisoned in an Italian prison and whose story now has been told in the documentary "Dead Weight."
"They closed all the schools and filled the theater with high school kids," he said. "They were blown away by what happened to us.
"Young people are the ones I like talking to most. They're the ones who can fix these problems and make the changes that need to happen. Hopefully, they'll take some of that away from my talks."
These days, Dean Gillispie is intent on saving other people's lives.
