Lamar Johnson, who was exonerated after serving 28 years in prison, reunites with his pen pal, Ginny Schrappen, who wrote him weekly
While languishing in a prison cell, receiving regular letters from Schrappen — a retired teacher in St. Louis — was a lifeline for Johnson, he said. Unlike others, she never doubted his innocence.Johnson and Schrappen became pen pals by chance. When they first connected, Johnson was a few years into his imprisonment, and was feeling lost and lonely.
One letter ended up in Schrappen’s hands. She was a congregant at Mary, Mother of the Church in St. Louis County, and a deacon who received the letter passed it along to her and asked her to find someone to reply to it. She decided to do it herself.When she opened Johnson’s letter, “I was blown away by his handwriting,” Schrappen said. “His cursive just put me to shame.”
“That drew us closer, because we had honest conversations and not surface conversations,” Johnson said. “We just connected so well.”“I did share things with Lamar, and he shared things with me, because we were that connected,” she said. “I was always happy when I saw a letter in the mailbox that was from him.”
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