MISSOURI'S 911 ATTACK: THE STORY OF JEFFREY WEINHAUS

Fourteen years ago today, a Missouri journalist met a state trooper in the dirt parking lot of a remote gas station in St. Clair to pick up equipment the state had taken from him.

Thirteen seconds later, he was on the ground with four bullet holes in him, and by the next year he was wearing a prison number for a gun that never left its holster.

That's the day this all started, and it's the day I sit down every year to make sure Missouri doesn't get to forget it.

This is Jeffrey "Bulletinman" Weinhaus's story, put together in one place.

THE BULLETINMAN

Thirty years ago this past August, on the 24th, Jeffrey R. Weinhaus put out the first issue of Bulletinman. He kept it running for sixteen years, using it to call out local corruption, police conduct, and regional authorities across Missouri.

That work is what put a target on him. It came to a stop in September 2012 after state law enforcement met him at a gas station and shot him four times. He survived. He never stopped saying he was innocent.

In 2013 they convicted him anyway, on assault of a law enforcement officer and armed criminal action, and handed him thirty years. He's still sitting in a Missouri prison today, more than 5,000 days into that sentence, while the people who love him keep pushing for somebody, anybody, in that state to take an honest second look.

SIXTY-SIX YEARS OF FIGHTING INNOCENCE

None of this happened in a vacuum. The Missouri Attorney General's Office has spent decades — spanning Democrat and Republican administrations alike, Eagleton, Webster, Nixon, Koster, Danforth, Hawley, Schmitt, Bailey, and now Hanaway — defending over 150,000 convictions without ever formally admitting a single one of them was wrong, even when the evidence of innocence is sitting right in front of them.

In twenty-seven separate exonerations since the turn of the century, the office has never formally admitted an error. A former Missouri Supreme Court justice, Wolff, said it plainly: the office acts like its job is to keep the conviction count intact, guilt or innocence be damned.

You don't have to take my word for the pattern. Look at the record:

Sandra Hemme served forty-three years for a murder three separate courts said she didn't commit. When it came time to let her go in July 2024, the Attorney General's Office fought it, and a circuit judge had to threaten contempt before they'd release her.

In the 2001 appeal for Joseph Amrine, the Attorney General's Office stood up in front of the state Supreme Court and argued that procedural finality justified execution even where a man had a valid claim of actual innocence.

The office dragged out the imprisonments of Christopher Dunn and Kevin Strickland by appealing evidentiary rulings long after the local prosecutors who'd originally built those cases admitted the wrong men were locked up.

Donald Nash's conviction got overturned in 2020 once it came out the DNA evidence behind it had been fabricated by an outside investigator, a regional partner, and a Missouri State Highway Patrol lab technician. That one ended in a $34 million federal verdict against the state. Different names, same playbook, every time.

THE RUSE AND THE THIRTEEN-SECOND ENCOUNTER

Jeffrey Weinhaus's case follows that same playbook to the letter. The trouble started on August 18, 2012, when Circuit Court Judge Kelly Parker picked up the phone and called Sergeant Henry James Folsom directly about a video Weinhaus had posted online, one that challenged local judicial corruption.

Folsom watched the video himself, then four days later, on August 22, he and his partner, Corporal Scott Mertens, showed up at Weinhaus's home to question him face-to-face about the threats he'd made in it.

During this encounter, Folsom claimed he smelled marijuana to get around a search warrant. Corporal Mertens testified under oath that he never smelled anything of the sort.

On September 11, 2012, Jeff was lured out to a public gas station in St. Clair under the pretext of getting his seized computers and production equipment back.

Within thirteen seconds of stepping out of his vehicle, Sergeant Folsom shot him four times, in the head and chest. His pistol never left the holster. Audio and video from that day back that up.

He was convicted anyway, on assault of a law enforcement officer and armed criminal action, and sentenced to thirty years.

THE LAW THEY BROKE TO GET THERE

The search that set all this in motion never should have happened the way it did.

Missouri Revised Statute Section 43.200.3 says flat out that Highway Patrol officers can't execute search warrants without working alongside the local elected sheriff. Folsom served that warrant alone. No sheriff, no authorization, nothing. That makes the whole search extrajudicial on its face.

On top of that, the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 protects a journalist's work product, his equipment, his footage, his files, from a standard search warrant.

Federal law requires a subpoena duces tecum instead, which would have let Jeffrey challenge it in court before anybody touched his gear. As an independent journalist running his own channel and publication, Jeff's computers and cameras were covered by that protection.

They seized them anyway, no subpoena, straight federal violation, and it's a violation that's never been answered for in any court record I can find.

PHYSICS DON'T LIE

The state's whole story hangs on the idea that Jeffrey tried to draw on armed officers in the blink of an eye. It doesn't hold up.

Jeff had shifted his holster over to his left side so the seatbelt buckle wouldn't dig into it while he drove. He's right-handed. That left-side placement puts the gun in a cross-draw position, which takes a deliberate, multi-second motion to bring into play.

There's no version of that draw that happens in a fraction of a second.

Then there's the location itself. Instead of a secure precinct, law enforcement picked a public, remote gas station.

No bulletproof vests. No secured perimeter. That tells you they didn't walk in expecting a real threat.

A construction crew working nearby saw the whole thing unfold and said Weinhaus was fired on almost the instant he got out of his car.

Put the tactical setup next to the physical mechanics of that holster, and the state's version of events doesn't add up, not mathematically, not physically.

RELEASED, NOT CHARGED — THEN ARRESTED WEEKS LATER

Jeffrry spent weeks in the hospital and in rehab recovering from those four gunshot wounds, including surgery to repair a collapsed lung.

On October 11, 2012, he was released from the hospital to continue outpatient physical and cognitive therapy. At that point, even with an arrest warrant still outstanding against him, he was not taken into custody.

By Sergeant Folsom's own account, in an interview given the day after the shooting, he was told by his commanding officer that Weinhaus was being released from the hospital and was not being charged with any crimes.

It wasn't until November 1, 2012, three weeks after his release, when Jeff showed up for a bond-reduction hearing, that he was finally taken into custody, and the charges against him were upgraded to attempted murder, along with armed criminal action and resisting arrest. A Franklin County grand jury indicted him on those charges just weeks later.

Nobody in Missouri has ever had to explain under oath why a man walked free for three weeks with a warrant hanging over him, only to be locked up and hit with heavier charges the moment his most expensive medical care was behind him. I'll let you draw your own conclusion on that timing. I've got mine.

HOW THE COURTROOM FAILED HIM

Jeffrey Weinhaus's own trial defense left the physical facts on the table. His attorneys never brought in an independent audio-forensic expert to break down the timeline on the recording Jeffrey captured that day.

That recording shows Folsom shouting his command and firing almost in the same breath, no gap for Jeff to react, draw, or aim anything. Forensic timing backs that up.

The defense also never called the local deputies who arrived after the shooting and saw for themselves that the firearm was still in its holster. No cross-draw expert. No frame-by-frame walkthrough for the jury.

The state's narrative went unchallenged, not because it was true, but because nobody in that courtroom stood up and tore it apart the way the evidence allowed.

A JUDGE ON THE PHONE, A SYSTEM WITHOUT A WALL

None of this started with routine police work. It started with a sitting judge calling a state trooper directly about a video that criticized his court.

From there, orders moved up through Highway Patrol supervisors who greenlit an arrest at a public gas station instead of a police station.

The line between the judge who felt criticized, the police force that acted on his call, and the prosecuting authority that carried the case forward got blurred past any reasonable standard of impartiality.

That's the kind of conflict of interest that should have blown the case up before it ever reached a jury. It never did.

5,000 DAYS AND COUNTING

July 11 of this year marked exactly 5,000 days that Jeffrey Weinhaus has spent locked up for a gun that stayed in its leather the whole time.

For nearly fourteen years now, the Missouri Attorney General's Office has defended that conviction and kept the evidentiary door shut, leaving the audio and video that could clear him unexamined in any formal post-conviction review.

THE COST OF UNCHECKED POWER

Jeffrey "Bulletinman" Weinhaus is not some one-off mistake. He's what happens, predictably, when a system decides protecting its own authority matters more than the truth.

True justice can't exist where finality gets prized over factual innocence.

When state power runs without local accountability, statutes get ignored and federal press protections get tossed aside, and that's how an independent journalist ends up shot four times and sentenced to thirty years for a crime he didn't commit.

The cost of that kind of unchecked power doesn't just land on Jeffrey Weinhaus. It lands on every one of us.

When law enforcement and the judiciary operate as insulated entities, answerable to nobody local, the ordinary citizen is left standing there with nothing.

Real oversight can't come from inside the same apparatus that caused the harm in the first place. It has to come from outside, from people who refuse to let the official story stand when the physical evidence and the statutes say otherwise.

Until the full, unaltered audio and video from that gas station are forced into the light of a real, formal review, Missouri's justice system carries this stain.

The fight for Jeffrey's exoneration is bigger than one man. It's a fight to make the law mean the same thing whether you're wearing the badge or holding the pen.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

We're calling on Missouri state officials to open an independent review of the 2012 shooting and conviction of Jeffrey R. Weinhaus, and we're calling on local news outlets to dig into this record themselves.

If you want to make your voice heard, here's where to send it:

Governor Mike Kehoe Missouri State Capitol, 201 W. Capitol Ave., Room 216, Jefferson City, MO 65101 Phone: (573) 751-3222 Email: boards@governor.mo.gov

Attorney General Catherine Hanaway Supreme Court Building, 207 W. High St., Jefferson City, MO 65101 Phone: (573) 751-3321 Contact form: https://ago.mo.gov

Tony Messenger, Metro Columnist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Phone: (314) 340-8518 Email: tmessenger@post-dispatch.com

St. Louis Post-Dispatch 901 N. 10th St., St. Louis, MO 63101 Phone: (314) 340-8000 Newsroom: news@post-dispatch.com | Letters: letters@postdispatch.com

James Bartle, Publisher & Editor, Sullivan Independent News 411 Scottsdale, Sullivan, MO 63080 Phone: (573) 468-6511 Email: news@sullivanindependentnews.com | Web: https://mysullivannews.com

Jefferson City News Tribune 326 E. Capitol Ave., Jefferson City, MO 65101 Phone: (573) 636-3131 Email: editor@newstribune.com

Fourteen years ago today, a gun stayed in its holster and a man's life got taken from him anyway.

Missouri's shameful secret only stays a secret as long as we let it.

— Vincent Easley II https://reallibertymedia.com/author/https-reallibertymedia-com-author-vine