Legendary Crimes People Can’t Stop Falsely Confessing To
Most people caught up in the criminal justice system spend most of their time trying to convince people they didn’t do crime, but false confessions are still a huge problem. Mostly, it’s when police manipulate confessions out of suspects, but surprisingly frequently, people march in off the street, confess of their own accord… and get laughed out of the station.
The Black Dahlia
An upsetting number of people want to take credit for slicing up a young woman’s face and cutting her in half. Specifically, more than 500, one of whom couldn’t identify Elizabeth Short in a photograph. Another man showed up to confess on four separate occasions, earning him the nickname “Confessin’ Tom,” and one woman claimed, “Short stole my man so I killed her and cut her up.” The claims continued to flow in for decades, to the point that some purported killers hadn’t even been born before Short’s 1947 death.
The Yogurt Shop Murders
In a bizarre twist, the four men convicted of the murders of four teenage girls in an Austin yogurt shop in 1991 were initially ruled out as suspects because police didn’t believe one of their confessions. Sure enough, they were later exonerated by DNA evidence. Two inmates in a Mexican prison later confessed to the crime, though they immediately recanted and claimed it was beaten out of them, and serial killer Kenneth McDuff confessed just before his 1998 execution. He had actually been in the area at the time of the murders, but the details he provided the police were wrong. Exactly how many serial killers were in Austin in 1991?
D.B. Cooper
At least four men and, fascinatingly, one woman have taken responsibility for the plane hijacking and ransom committed by a figure identifying himself as D.B. Cooper in 1971. One was ruled out when his story didn’t match up, another wasn’t even in the area at the time, and one was, you know, a woman. (She also later recanted, but seriously, she didn’t match the description at all.) Two deathbed confessions were disregarded on the basis of faulty details or DNA mismatch. That last guy confessed to his wife, who he must have just really wanted to impress.
JonBenét Ramsey
In 2006, a former teacher hiding out in Thailand from child pornography charges apparently decided he was tired of doing that and confessed to the 1996 murder of JonBenét Ramsey. It turned out, though, that he didn’t match any physical evidence, he got details of the crime wrong and he was across the country at the time. For decades, another man with charges of child pornography has been claiming he killed Ramsey in calls and letters to a childhood friend, but he didn’t match DNA evidence. Again, it seems like a case of wanting to oddly impress someone.
Jimmy Hoffa
More people have confessed on their deathbeds to the murder and burial of Jimmy Hoffa than have claimed to be Spartacus. The most famous, Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, was ruled out after blood stains at the house where he claimed to have killed him didn’t match Hoffa. Another was literally laughed off by a former FBI agent. One former mobster claimed Hoffa was buried in a field near Detroit, and a former landfill worker claimed to have buried him in a drum in New Jersey, but searches of both sites turned up nothing.
What’s the endgame here? Who thinks “You know what would be really funny?” as they lay dying? Someone with a deep commitment to the bit, that’s who.
