By Andy Rose, CNN
(CNN) — Freedom for Richard Glossip cost $50,000. It also cost 29 years of his life.
The former death row inmate convicted of murdering the owner of the motel he managed walked out of jail Thursday for the first time since 1997, after 10% of his $500,000 bond was paid by celebrity and criminal reform advocate Kim Kardashian, her publicist told The Oklahoman.
“It’s overwhelming, but it’s amazing at the same time,” Glossip said outside the Oklahoma County Detention Center, his now-gray hair flapping in a stiff wind.
A judge’s order Thursday setting bond for Glossip, 63, came after two trials, two independent investigations, and so many appeal documents and hearings that it’s difficult to count.
Judge Natalie Mai said in her order that a 2023 statement by Oklahoma’s attorney general that there was reasonable doubt in the case meant she “cannot deny bail to Glossip.”
Although Glossip – who has maintained his innocence – was able to leave jail Thursday with an ankle monitor and mandatory curfew, his legal case will continue, as prosecutors vow to try him a third time for the January 7, 1997, murder of Barry Van Treese.
Here’s how Glossip got to this point, and what’s still ahead in this unresolved case.
Glossip narrowly escapes execution multiple times
Nine execution dates have come and gone since Glossip’s first murder conviction. Three times, Glossip has come close enough to death to be served a “last meal” before his execution was delayed.
“It’s still scary, it will always be scary until they finally open this door and let me go,” Glossip told CNN in 2023.
One thing that has never been in dispute: Van Treese was not killed by Glossip. The man who wielded the baseball bat that ended the motel owner’s life was a maintenance worker named Justin Sneed.
That fact has been a repeated source of frustration for Glossip’s supporters.
“We actually know who the murderer is, and yet somebody is on death row that’s not the murderer,” said attorney Stan Perry, who helped conduct an independent review of the case at the request of state lawmakers.
The then-19-year-old Sneed was allowed to live at the motel by Glossip in exchange for his labor at a time when Van Treese appeared to be growing suspicious of his manager because of missing money, court records say.
Sneed testified Glossip had promised to pay him $10,000 to carry out the murder, testimony that came as part of a plea deal that spared Sneed’s life. Glossip acknowledged Sneed had told him about killing Van Treese – information he did not report to police – but said he only found out after it was done.
Sneed, now 48 years old, is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole, a deal Glossip also was offered but refused, saying he wouldn’t plead guilty to a crime he didn’t commit.
Sneed has never publicly recanted his testimony. But Glossip’s legal team has produced witnesses who claim Sneed exonerated Glossip in private conversations and a handwritten note from prison in which he asks, “Do I have the choice of re-canting my testimony at anytime during my life, or anything like that.”
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals – the state’s highest court in criminal cases – overturned Glossip’