In the middle is a reporter, with his own legal pad in a binder that displayed a Detroit News business card. I’d never asked to have a photo taken with people I was writing about before, but this was special. For years, I was the only journalist who wrote about the case. In the end, I played a role in getting Love out of prison, and I wanted a memento. Dwight put his arm around my shoulder; Sarah did the same.

In the movies, the snapping of that photo in February 2001 would be the moment the music swells and the credits roll, the happy ending.

Today, Love and Hunter are dead.

Love, who spent 16 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit because Detroit police hid exculpatory evidence, died in 2014 while waiting 46 minutes for an ambulance in Detroit after he suffered a heart attack. In essence, Detroit took his life twice. Hunter, who became addicted to prescription amphetamines while working night after night on the case, spiraled into mental illness and deeper drug addiction. Divorced, unemployed, her law career gone, she apparently committed suicide in May.

It was easy to romanticize their story, Love the victim and Hunter the heroine, fighting against a corrupt system. But their real stories were messier than what you’d see on the screen, and raise unsettling questions about whether the years-long fight was worth it. Both lives were irreversibly changed by the case. Despite the smiles in the photograph, it’s likely their lives changed for the worse.

This is a story about what happened after the happy ending.

‘I needed the money’

They met in 1994 at a time when both were desperate. Hunter had left the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office to start her own practice, and she’d placed an ad in Michigan Lawyers Weekly looking for clients in Michigan prisons. Love wrote her a letter, and she drove to Chippewa Correctional Facility in the Upper Peninsula.

“I answered everyone who wrote me,” Hunter told me two years later, when I wrote an initial article about the case for The Detroit News.

They were an odd couple. Hunter, 37 when they met, had adolescent children at her suburban Birmingham home she shared with her lawyer husband. Love, 34, was a high school dropout and about to become a grandfather.

Hunter was intense and loud. Love seldom spoke above a whisper. He talked about being stabbed in the prison yard and of mice that shared his cell in a laconic voice, as if recounting a story he’d read in a magazine.

Dwight Love: “To keep from going crazy, I never ask ‘Why me?’”

“You don’t want to be in prison for (life) and be angry, or you’ll lose your mind,” Love told me when I first met him in 1996 in the Wayne County Jail, where he was being held during his post-conviction relief hearing. “To keep from going crazy, I never ask ‘Why me?’”

Love had a record of petty crimes and car theft before police arrested him for the 1981 shooting death of James Connelly in a botched robbery outside The Interchange, a gay bar, near Love’s Holden Street apartment not far from the Motown Museum.

Police never found a gun and eyewitness identification was sketchy, but Love had no one to corroborate his alibi that he was in his apartment when the shooting occurred. The jury deliberated just two hours before finding him guilty of first-degree murder. Just 21-years-old, Love was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Thirteen years later, the short, hunch-shouldered convict told Hunter he was innocent. As an assistant prosecutor, Hunter had seen hundreds of defendants proclaim their innocence in the face of incontrovertible evidence. She doubted Love was any different, she told me later, but she took the $1,500 Love had saved from his prison job making license plates. “I needed the money,” she said.

Sarah Hunter: “You dream about the case where justice happens. And then you get out and you get jaded. You see that most cases are about the bottom line.”

She wasn’t being cynical, she was being realistic. “When you get out of law school, you’re starry-eyed,” Hunter told me later. “You dream about the case where justice happens. And then you get out and you get jaded. You see that most cases are about the bottom line.”

Yet two years later, when I met Hunter, she was working on the case full-time for no money.

After I wrote an initial story about the case, Hunter continued to stop by the Birmingham office of The Detroit News with the latest court filings, often not leaving until I agreed to write another article.

“How can you not if you know he’s innocent?” Hunter would ask, staring at me until I squirmed in my chair.

Love had passed a lie-detector test, and the more Hunter delved into the case, the more holes she found. A private investigator (who Hunter had cajoled into also working on the case for free) uncovered evidence raising doubts on Love’s guilt. Hunter became convinced this was a once-in-a-career case where “justice happens.”

“People think I’m nuts, that I’m a ditzy blonde,” Hunter said. “All they see is a black guy with a record. I’m not a softy. I think people are crud. But if you’re a doctor, are you going to walk away from a half-dead person on the road?”

She learned that lesson from her father, a doctor in the hills of West Virginia caring for Appalachian coal miners whether they had money to pay or not.

“Sometimes you do things,” Hunter said, “because they’re the right thing to do.”

Things began to fall into place in 1996 and 1997.

Hunter discovered that the police had hidden from Love’s original defense attorney a file of evidence that included tips on other suspects and potential witnesses to the murder. Meanwhile, articles I wrote in The Detroit News raised doubts about his guilt, including discovering the identity of the alleged killer described in the hidden files. Detroit Recorder’s Court Judge Daphne Means-Curtis cited The News’ discovery in her ruling granting a new trial in 1997.

The case dragged on for another four years as the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office delayed a retrial. Finally in 2001, Means-Curtis dismissed the case.

Love walked out of the courtroom that day with Hunter. The two hugged. I asked to take a photo with them.

“When you’re poor and you have no money, everyone thinks you’re guilty,” Love said. “I guess I can start living my life now.”

A new nightmare

Recently, I showed LeTrisica Day the 2001 photo of her father, Hunter and me in that courtroom hallway. She began to cry.

“He looks so happy,” Day said.

Life after prison had not been happy for Love. He could never hold a job, his daughter said. Sometimes he’d get fired after employers learned of his criminal past. Sometimes he’d quit because he struggled to get out of bed due to a debilitating lung ailment he contracted in the Wayne County Jail, where he lived for two years during his drawn-out post-conviction hearing.

After almost two decades in prison, Love had trouble reconnecting with family. The man who was subdued behind bars was prone to loud outbursts at a wife he’d married while in prison, his children and grandchildren.

In prison, Love didn’t like to think about how he’d been screwed by the system. Back in the city where he’d grown up, it was all he could think about.

“He was an angry man when he got out,” Day said. “I remember him talking about how the justice system had failed him. He felt like his life was stolen from him and he just couldn’t put the pieces back together.”