Dean McKee beams and waves when the doorbell chimes, as three of his regulars walk in with new ideas they’re willing to wear forever.
They are more like family friends than artist and clients. A tattoo is a serious commitment. But inside Inside Ink, McKee’s tattoo shop in Pinellas County, the atmosphere is far from it.
“When did you know you were different than the other kids?” McKee jokes with Dale Krueger, one of the customers.
“From the get-go,” Krueger deadpans.
McKee, 53, considers his shop, in Indian Rocks Beach, a half hour northwest of St. Petersburg, a sanctuary. He enjoys helping people express themselves and overcome their troubles.
“See, this is what you get here,” he tells another visitor. “It’s just light hearted banter.”
McKee said he’s kind of a therapist for his customers.
“They’ve had traumatic experiences in their life,” he said. “A lot of their pain in the past was stuff that was done to them. So this is a way of taking ownership and choosing to feel this way.”
But McKee’s not just rewriting the past for others. He’s also rewriting his own.
McKee has the patience and wisdom of someone who spent 30 years behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit. He opened his studio, a decades long dream, in 2020, a year after his exoneration.
After sketching a floral design and tracing it onto the right forearm of Kruger’s wife Robyn, McKee says getting in “the zone” of tattooing in his own shop is a blessing.
“It hasn’t been easy,” he says. “But it’s not a mark of weakness.”
On Dec. 20, 1987, the death of a homeless Vietnam War veteran, Isiah Walker, outside the Tampa Museum of Art set the stage for a tale of justice delayed.
According to the Innocence Project of Florida (IPF), Scott McKee and Dean McKee, then just 18 and 16, respectively, and a group of friends came upon Walker, 41, near the museum. Walker was beaten and fatally stabbed on the museum’s steps.
In March 1988, the McKees’ mother, Lowell McKee, called the police. About a week earlier, she reported, she had a troubling conversation with Dean that hinted at her sons’ connection to the crime. The brothers were arrested and charged with first degree murder. Scott McKee plead no contest to a charge of attempted murder. He was sentenced to five years in prison but served one.
“From the initial arrest to the interrogation for hours and hours with the good cop, bad cop, they had it wrong from the beginning,” Dean said of the police.
Though proven years later that Scott stabbed Walker, Dean refused to snitch. On June 17, 1988, a jury convicted him of first degree murder, and he was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
“He was an adult, on probation, and they were going to put him in the electric chair because that’s what we had back then,” Dean said. “I was caught in a rock and a hard place, so I took the hit.”
Adjusting to his new normal was more than a notion.
“You see death around you,” McKee said. “People were getting killed and brutalized.”
Over the next 16 years, McKee filed several unsuccessful motions for a new trial. He eventually began acting as his own lawyer and filed a motion requesting further DNA testing.
“I stood up in court with a belly chain and red jump suit – because I’m dangerous with a life sentence,” McKee said, making air quotes around “dangerous.”
A judge refused to call for a collection sample of Dean’s DNA for comparison.
Meanwhile, Dean focused on self-improvement, earning his GED and developing his art and tattoo skills. “It was a positive outlet for a really negative place,” he said.
In January 2011, Seth Miller, executive director of IPF, based in Tallahassee, took on McKee’s case. “They were watching my progress: denied, denied, denied,” McKee recalled.
Their request for collecting DNA evidence was granted two months later. But it took two years before Miller could finally file a motion to vacate his client’s conviction based upon the DNA results. “The wheels of justice turn slowly,” McKee said.
Miller said: “If we demonstrate that someone is innocent, we should get them out of prison.”
IPF also presented testimony from two new witnesses who corroborated McKee’s claim that his brother had framed him. On Oct. 20, 2017, a judge overturned McKee’s murder conviction. State prosecutors appealed, and so it wasn’t until Jan. 9, 2018, before he left prison a free man.
In December 2018, prosecutors ended their appeal. All charges were dropped a month later.
Now six years after his release, McKee said he still struggles adjusting to the outside world. And yet, he said, “The worst day out here doesn’t compare to the best day in there.”
According to the most recent data available from the National Registry of Exonerations, 32,750 years’ worth of wrongfully served time has been lost by innocent people since 1989. There have been 3,659 exonerations since then. Of those, 610 count as DNA exonerations.
“It’s a lot, but in terms of the thousands of people that are convicted every year, it seems like that’s just a drop in the bucket,” said Brian Cahill, an associate instructor professor in the department of psychology at the University of Florida.
Cahill, who often serves as an expert witness in criminal cases regarding eyewitness issues, said the public’s perception and knowledge of wrongful convictions doesn’t match the numbers. “People think that it doesn’t happen that often,” he said. “It happens a lot.”
The professor also said the leading factors contributing to wrongful convictions are eyewitness identification, false confessions, faulty forensic evidence, ineffective assistance of counsel and official misconduct. But no matter the cause, he said, the emotional toll weighs the same.
“It’s got to be extremely detrimental to one’s health and mental health to tell people, ‘I’m innocent,’ and have no one believe you or want to fight for you,” he said. “Everyone just assumes you were found guilty, you were arrested, you were tried, you were guilty of the crime. Once you’re convicted in this country, it’s very, very difficult to get that overturned.”
McKee put it this way: “They want you to give up and to give in.”
He decided to do neither. Remembering that he used to doodle as a child, he used whatever drawing materials he could find, from colored pencils to coffee grounds, just to pass the time.
McKee became the resident artist in prison: Cupcakes on canvas. Landscapes along cell block walls. A portrait of his wife Daine (still preserved after all this time).
His talent didn’t go unnoticed. Another man in his cell block taught McKee how to do his first tattoo. From that moment, he gained a sense of purpose – and perfected over the next three decades how to use a Bic pen as a makeshift tattoo gun.
“I learned inside how to put the ink on the inside,” he said.
Once freed and ready to open a business on the outside, McKee named it Inside Ink. Its logo embraces his past – with three cell bars included – as well as his resiliency.
He’s grateful for the little things that make his life so full now: “To be able to walk outside at night, no barbed wire, no gun tower, no authorization to shoot you. … If I feel like having something to eat, I can go make it.”
McKee still has triggers that bring up the past but keeps moving forward, one satisfied customer at a time. Still, he urges others to stay alert.
“Don’t think that it can’t happen to you, your parents, your kid,” he said.
That said, with every line drawn and ounce of ink etched into skin, McKee helps others take control of their lives, just as he fought to do for his.
Take, for example, a customer casting aside an abusive boyfriend. “To cover that up, it’s an amazing thing,” he said. “The final wipe, in that kind of situation, they just cry, but a good cry.”
