After hours on an afternoon in 2010, in a courthouse in Bergen County, New Jersey, a judge told a man already serving a life sentence to turn around and face the children of a woman he had admitted killing 43 years earlier, and to apologize to them. Richard Cottingham, a former computer operator, began to sweat as soon as the recorder was switched on. Afterward, the detective who had spent years coaxing the admission out of him recalled, Cottingham said: "You’ll never get me to do this again." It took about two years before he would talk again.
That hearing is a fair picture of what a prison confession is. The speaker has nothing left to lose in the ordinary sense. He is already sentenced, often for life, and sometimes for death. The detective sitting across from him has an unsolved case and a family that has waited, in some instances for half a century. What passes between them can look like surrender or like trade, and the people who sat in those rooms have often described it as both. A confession in prison can close a case that no forensic test could close. It can also be an offer, a performance, a bargain for a color television, or a bid for attention that investigators then spend months trying to disprove.
The cases run from the 1980s to the autumn of 2026. In each, a man who was already behind bars said something about a killing, and the outcome was either a charge, a plea, a sentence, a closed file, or nothing at all. Where a confession was never tested in court, it remains a confession and nothing more.
Richard Cottingham was arrested in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, on May 22, 1980. He was 33, a computer operator for Blue Cross Blue Shield in Manhattan and a father of three from Bergen County. In the early 1980s he was convicted at trials in New Jersey and New York City of the murders of five women, and sentenced to prison terms that added up to more than 200 years in New Jersey, plus life terms in New York. For about thirty years that was the whole public record.
From 2010 a Bergen County detective named Robert Anzilotti began to draw confessions out of him in prison, one case at a time. Rolling Stone reported that Anzilotti had spent about six years talking with Cottingham before the first of them, in 2010, the admission to the 1967 death of Nancy Schiava Vogel. It was made after hours at the courthouse, a time Anzilotti chose to keep the press away, and the judge was asked to keep the proceeding low key. It was a confession made in court; whether it ended in a formal conviction has not been reported.
The next group came into the open on January 3, 2020. The Associated Press reported that Cottingham had admitted to the killings of three girls in Bergen County in 1968 and 1969: Jacalyn Harp, 13, of Midland Park, killed on July 17, 1968; Irene Blase, 18, of Bogota, killed on April 7, 1969; and Denise Falasca, 15, of Closter, killed in July 1969. Detectives in North Bergen and Montvale and county investigators had worked those cases for years and the leads ran out. After the 1980 arrest, investigators could not tie him to the girls' deaths. In the account that Townsquare Media and the AP gave that week, the official count of his victims then stood at nine women and girls, with the possibility that the true figure was far higher. No charges were filed in those three cases, and they were closed on the strength of his word.
Then came the first new prosecution. On April 14, 2021, he gave Anzilotti, by then the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office chief of detectives, a detailed sworn statement confessing to the 1974 killings of two teenagers, Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Marie Kelly. Thirteen days later, on April 27, 2021, at 74, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder before Superior Court Judge Keith Bachmann. He appeared by video from prison, in a wheelchair and khaki prison clothes, and gave one-word and two-word answers. Under the plea agreement he was expected to be sentenced in July 2021 to two life terms, to run at the same time as the sentences he was already serving. A relative of one of the victims, who watched the hearing, said she had waited nearly fifty years for answers.
His lawyer, John Bruno, said Cottingham had confessed to bring the families closure and to keep a promise to Anzilotti, and that he had "deep regrets." Anzilotti, who was days from retiring, had interviewed him many times over about fifteen years. He said Cottingham enjoyed making cold-case detectives work for each confession, and had told him he would not have confessed publicly if Anzilotti were not leaving. Alan Grieco, a retired Bergen County chief of detectives who had helped convict Cottingham of a 1977 murder, said Cottingham had "played games" with investigators for years, trading information for better treatment in prison. "We had nothing, other than what he would tell us," Grieco said.
The Nassau County case had begun with a family’s long wait. Diane Cusick was a 23-year-old dance teacher from New Hyde Park, on Long Island, who was killed on February 15, 1968, in Valley Stream. Police collected biological evidence in 1968, but DNA testing did not exist, and the case went cold. Her parents and one of her brothers died without knowing who had killed her.
In June 2022 Nassau County prosecutors announced that DNA tied Cottingham to her killing, and a grand jury indicted him for second-degree murder. On December 5, 2022, he pleaded guilty. CBS News and the Associated Press reported that, as part of the arrangement, he admitted four more killings of women on Long Island and in Rockland County, with immunity from prosecution for those admissions: Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heiman and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves. Under the plea he was sentenced to 25 years to life, to run after his existing terms, for Cusick’s death.
Here the confession did the opposite of what it did in the Bergen County hearings of 2020. The Nassau case was a prosecution built on an old biological sample and a modern test. The four admissions that rode along with it were different: they were words, given under immunity, and they closed files without a charge or a trial.
The most recent case in this line is an old one. Alys Eberhardt was an 18-year-old nursing student in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, killed in September 1965. Fair Lawn police reopened the case in 2021 under Chief Glen Cauwels. Detective Brian Rypkema and Sergeant Eric Eleshewich led the work and spent more than 50 hours talking with Cottingham. "He would give us little clues, things of that nature," Eleshewich told ABC7 New York.
In late 2025, as his health declined, Cottingham admitted the killing. The detectives said he gave them details that had never been made public. Rypkema said Cottingham told them there was "just something about her" that had drawn his attention. The department announced the confession on January 6, 2026. By then Cottingham was 79, held at South Woods State Prison in a medical unit. "Alys was a vibrant young nursing student who was taken from our community far too soon," said the chief, Joseph Dawicki, who said he hoped her family could find some peace. No charges were filed. Under earlier agreements with prosecutors Cottingham was not to be charged, and the department closed the case. Her nephew said the family had waited since 1965 for the truth. Eleshewich said Cottingham had told them many times that he would never give up his first murder, and that he did not believe this was it.
The numbers around Cottingham remain loose. Authorities have officially linked him to somewhere between a dozen and about twenty deaths, depending on the count. He has said that the figure could be as high as one hundred. No investigator accepts that number, and nothing in the court record supports it.
Samuel Little is the case in which the gap between what a prisoner says and what a court can say is widest. He was convicted of eight murders. He confessed to ninety-three.
His first conviction came after DNA tied him to three women who died in Los Angeles in 1987 and 1989. He had been arrested on September 5, 2012, in Louisville, Kentucky, on a 2009 Los Angeles narcotics warrant, and in January 2013 he was charged with the three murders. Prosecutor Beth Silverman said in 2013 that his rap sheet, which ran to more than 100 pages and covered 24 states over 56 years, was "the craziest rap sheet I’ve ever seen." "He’s gotten break after break after break," she said. In 2014 a Los Angeles County jury convicted him on all three counts, with a multiple-murder special circumstance, and he was sentenced to three consecutive terms of life without parole. He was 74.
He had been charged before. In Florida, a jury acquitted him of murder in 1984 in the death of Patricia Ann Mount, a 26-year-old Gainesville woman. Decades later, by his own account, he told investigators that he had killed her.
In 2018, while serving his Los Angeles sentences, he began talking to a Texas Ranger, James Holland, about a woman killed in Odessa, Texas, in 1994. The Odessa case ended in a guilty plea in Ector County, Texas, in December 2018, to the murder of Denise Christie Brothers. Over roughly 700 hours of interviews, in the Wise County jail in Decatur, Texas, he described 93 killings between 1970 and 2005. He often could not name the women. He drew their faces. The FBI released the portraits in the hope that someone would recognize them, and the bureau said in October 2019 that it considered all of his confessions credible and that he was the most prolific serial killer in United States history.
What did the confessions turn into? In Ohio, on August 23, 2019, he pleaded guilty to four murders: Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans in Cuyahoga County, and Anna Stewart and an unidentified woman in Hamilton County. He received two consecutive life terms in Cuyahoga County and two consecutive terms of 15 years to life in Hamilton County. Add the three Los Angeles counts and the Texas plea and the total of convictions came to eight.
Other charges never reached a courtroom. Julia Critchfield, 36, had died in Harrison County, Mississippi, in January 1978. On October 31, 2018, investigators from the county interviewed Little in Wise County. He admitted the killing, giving details that, the sheriff’s office said, only the person responsible would know, and they charged him with murder. He was never brought to Mississippi to face the charge. A Warren County, Kentucky, grand jury indicted him in December 2018 in the death of Linda Sue Boards in 1981; no trial or plea was reported. A third indictment, in Taylor County, Florida, also never came to trial. They are the unfinished business of a confession program in which the confessor outlived most of the machinery that would have tested it.
Many of his admissions were verified in other ways. By December 2021, a year after his death, the Texas Department of Public Safety reported that investigators had verified 62 of the 93 confessions. The rest were unconfirmed; they were not disproved. In Macon, Georgia, after Little confessed to two killings there, Captain Shermaine Jones of the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office traveled with Amy Hutsell of the Georgia Criminal Justice Coordinating Council to Wise County in 2019 to test his account against the files, and after interviewing him Jones closed both cases. In 2022 the two returned to a third Macon case, that of a woman who had been unnamed for more than four decades. On May 18, 2023, the sheriff’s office and the council announced her name: Yvonne Pless, about 20 when she died in 1977, whom the release described as Little’s first Macon victim. The identification came from forensic genetic genealogy, not from his statements. His statements pointed investigators to the right place. A modern laboratory supplied the name.
Samuel Little died on December 30, 2020, at 80.
A decade before Little, a Texas inmate’s words did something Little’s rarely did: they became the evidence for a death sentence.
Daniel Lee Corwin, a parolee living in Huntsville, Texas, was arrested in late October 1988, at 30, in connection with the assault of a Texas A&M University student who survived. He had served about nine years of a 40-year sentence for a 1975 offense in Bell County, and had been paroled in November 1985, The Battalion, the Texas A&M student newspaper, reported at the time. In early 1989 he pleaded guilty in Brazos County to attempted capital murder in the A&M case and was sentenced to 99 years. Under the plea agreement prosecutors dropped a second charge. He would be eligible for parole after 15 years.
While he was serving that sentence, he talked. In 1989, The Battalion reported in November, Corwin confessed to investigators that he had killed three women in 1987: Alice Martin, 72, Debra Ewing, who was 26 or 27 depending on the source, and Mary Risinger, 36. Peter Speers, the Montgomery County district attorney, said his office had "numerous signed statements of these murders" and a videotape of Corwin confessing. An Associated Press report in 1993 said he had confessed to six crimes in all. Only the three killings of 1987 were charged. When the prosecutor suggested at trial that there were "more dead women out there," the judge struck the remark, and no other killing was charged.
Speers announced in November 1989 that he would seek the death penalty. The charge rested on a provision of Section 19.03 of the Texas Penal Code that makes it capital murder to kill more than one person "during different criminal transactions" when the murders are committed "pursuant to the same scheme or course of conduct." The Associated Press described the Conroe trial as one of the first tests of that law. Hearings in the 359th District Court were to decide whether the confessions could be used as evidence, and Speers expected jury selection to begin by the middle of January 1990. In March 1990 a Montgomery County jury convicted Corwin of capital murder, and Judge James Keeshan sentenced him to death.
The trial court’s ruling on the hearings over the confessions has not been reported. What the Fifth Circuit said, when Corwin asked it in 1998 for a certificate of appealability on eight issues, is on the record. A panel of Judges King, Higginbotham and W. Eugene Davis denied it in an opinion by Davis, revised August 26, 1998. The court rejected his argument that the "same scheme or course of conduct" provision was unconstitutionally vague. It assumed, without deciding, that one exhibit should not have been admitted, and held that the error was harmless because "the evidence against Corwin was overwhelming." It judged the instruction to disregard the "more dead women" remark adequate. Corwin was executed at Huntsville on December 7, 1998, at the age of 40.
His case shows one thing the others do not. A prison confession can be the beginning of a death-penalty prosecution. Corwin, serving 99 years and eligible for parole in 2003, had little to gain from confessing. What he gave prosecutors was signed statements, a videotape and a capital conviction.
Roberto Arguelles was serving consecutive terms of nine years to life in Utah for offenses against two young children when, on Friday, April 26, 1996, he confessed to four killings from 1992 in an all-day session with a corrections investigator, Jenny Glover, and his then-attorney, Bob Steele. The Deseret News reported that in return he asked to be moved to the maximum-security block that housed death-sentenced inmates and to be given a color television, which other inmates had to earn by good behavior and pay for each month.
The four killings dated from February and March 1992: Margo Bond, 42, on February 21; Stephanie Blundell, 13, on March 19; and Lisa Martinez, 16, and Tuesday Roberts (14 in the Utah Supreme Court opinion and 15 in most news reports), both on March 30. All four had happened in Salt Lake County while he was on parole. He had been released in June 1991 on intensively supervised parole with electronic monitoring after eleven years in prison, over the recommendation of a judge who had urged at his 1980 sentencing that he be kept in prison as long as possible. When the Deseret News examined the decision in 1995, it located no written record in his board file of that recommendation and no written reason for granting parole.
For four years none of the four killings had been solved. Officials told the Deseret News in 1996 that he had been a suspect for nearly two years before he confessed. The investigation had turned on people who knew him: a former girlfriend told detectives in August 1995 that he had boasted to her about the killings and had shown her jewelry that belonged to Margo Bond.
The confession was followed three days later by four counts of capital murder, and he was arraigned on May 7, 1996. From the start, he said he wanted to plead guilty and be executed. Glover later testified that Arguelles told her the only way he could atone for the murders was through his execution. He told a Deseret News reporter in May 1996, "I felt like (confessing) was the right thing to do," and added, "I know right and wrong." The former girlfriend doubted it. "He definitely confessed because there was something in it for him," she told the paper.
Both versions can be true. On May 12, 1997, he pleaded guilty to all four counts of capital murder, with other charges, and on June 20, 1997, Judge David S. Young sentenced him to death, in the manner he had chosen. The Deseret News called him, in a 1997 report, Utah’s most prolific known serial killer. The Utah Supreme Court upheld the sentence on October 25, 2002, with an amended opinion on January 14, 2003. The execution, set for June 2003, was stayed for a competency evaluation. Arguelles died on November 15, 2003, in the prison infirmary at 41. The death was ruled natural.
Lisa Martinez’s grandmother, who learned of the confession from a friend and then from television news, told the Deseret News, "It hurts, but it’s better to know who did it." She wanted to know how her granddaughter died, she said, but did not want Lisa’s mother to hear the details.
Roger Kibbe, a furniture maker from Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento, was convicted by a jury in 1991 of the murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, a 17-year-old who had run away from Seattle. Detectives suspected him in six other killings of women in Northern California, the cases the press had grouped together as a single series. Prosecutors could not file charges in those cases, the Associated Press reported, because they did not have the evidence. For the next decade and more he was a prisoner serving time for one murder, and the families of the other women had no answer.
The break was old evidence. In 2002, according to CBS San Francisco, an investigator for the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office resubmitted DNA evidence from five killings of the 1980s. The results pointed to Kibbe, who was already in prison. In 2003 investigators interviewed him there. The Associated Press, writing in 2011, said authorities had confronted him that year with the evidence about the other women, and that he admitted the killings. The prosecutions came six years later.
In September 2009, in San Joaquin County, Kibbe pleaded guilty to six counts of first-degree murder, covering Lou Ellen Burleigh (1977) and Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones (all 1986). The crimes had taken place in six counties, the Associated Press reported: Amador, Contra Costa, Napa, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Stanislaus. He was sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole.
The 2003 admissions had a limit. Vito Bertocchini, the former lead homicide detective on the case for the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Office, who spent 24 years on it, told CBS Sacramento in 2021 that he believed there were more victims. "Absolutely. He’s responsible for many more," he said. He recalled Kibbe once telling him, "I have two cans in my head. I’m opening the lid to one can and letting some secrets out." No further killings were ever charged or admitted; the Associated Press reported in 2021 that Kibbe never admitted to killings beyond those he was charged with.
Kibbe was killed in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison, in Ione, in the early hours of February 28, 2021, at 81. His death was reported as a killing inside the prison.
William Scott Smith’s case includes two confessions separated by 23 years, and the first was a legal problem.
In April 1984, Smith, then a Salem, Oregon, man jailed on a sentence for obscene telephone calls, was questioned about the deaths of Katherine Redmond, an 18-year-old Willamette University freshman, and Rebecca Ann Darling, a 21-year-old convenience store clerk. Police had seized his car on April 11. A Marion County grand jury indicted him for the aggravated murder of Redmond and charged him in the killing of Darling; the indictments were announced in late April 1984.
How he came to confess was examined in detail by the Ninth Circuit. The court’s account begins with an interrogation on April 23 that lasted about an hour, in which police gave him no Miranda warnings. He said he did not want to talk and asked for a lawyer. The questioning went on. Officers spoke about his need for professional help, and one slapped the table and urged him to confess. He cried, asked several times to be taken back to his cell, and was eventually returned to it. He made no incriminating statement that day.
On April 24, more than a day later, his father and stepmother visited, asked whether he was guilty and told him he needed psychiatric help. He confessed first to his fiancee and then to his mother. His father then came into the room and persuaded him to confess to the police. The father told officers that his son would confess if burglary charges pending against him in Vancouver were dropped. The charges were dropped, police read Smith his rights, he waived them, and he confessed. He later admitted that he had confessed because his father thought he should. In July 1984 he was convicted of both murders and given two life sentences.
He challenged the confessions in federal court. The Ninth Circuit rejected all three of his arguments in an unpublished memorandum on April 29, 1994. It held that his relatives were not acting as agents of the government. It agreed that his April 23 remark had been an equivocal request for a lawyer, that police should have stopped questioning him, and noted that the state conceded he should have been given Miranda warnings. It called that interrogation troubling. But it held that the session had been short, that he had said nothing incriminating in it, that more than 24 hours had passed with no contact in between, and that Smith himself had started the later conversation after the deal over the Vancouver charges. Those facts, the court said, cured any taint.
The second confession was the work of a cold case squad. Sherry Eyerly, an 18-year-old pizza delivery driver, had been killed in Salem in July 1982. The Marion County Sheriff’s Office, which kept her file open for a quarter of a century, said the original investigators had ruled Smith out on the strength of alibi information. A cold case squad worked the case for two years, following hundreds of leads and conducting hundreds of interviews. A behavioral analysis identified many similarities between Eyerly’s death and his other crimes. Investigators set out to eliminate him as a suspect; instead they uncovered information that undermined his 1982 alibi, and follow-up interviews pointed more and more toward him. Detectives confronted him in prison, and in those interviews, the sheriff’s office said, he admitted his part in her death. The accomplice was not named when he pleaded, and no one else was charged.
On Tuesday, December 18, 2007, Smith, 48, pleaded guilty to the murder of Sherry Eyerly at a brief hearing before Marion County Presiding Judge Paul Lipscomb. Law enforcement officers and members of Eyerly’s family were in the courtroom. Under the agreement with prosecutors he began a third life sentence at once, running concurrently with the two he was already serving. Eyerly’s body has not been recovered. For her family, the plea answered after 25 years the question of what had happened to her. The sheriff’s office lists the case among the cold case squad’s solved cases.
Dellmus Colvin, a long-haul truck driver from Toledo, Ohio, pleaded guilty in 2006 to the deaths of five women in northwest Ohio. The reports describe the plea in two ways: WNWO said in June 2010 that he had confessed in 2006 to killing five women between 2000 and 2005, and in April 2011 that in October 2006 he had admitted that he killed four women and helped to murder a fifth. Which death was the one in which he helped has not been reported. It had begun with a separate complaint. In 2004, according to the Toledo Blade as cited by WFTV, a woman got away from him and called the police, and investigators took a DNA sample from him. In 2005 his DNA profile was linked to the deaths of Melissa Weber and Jackie Simpson. He was charged with murder in those two cases, which carried the possibility of a death sentence. He pleaded guilty in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty, and is serving life sentences. After his plea he admitted a sixth killing, that of Dorothea Wetzel, 40; no charge or sentence in her death has been reported, so it stands as an admission rather than a conviction.
New Jersey reopened a death that had been ruled an accidental overdose in 1987. Detectives in Atlantic City learned in 2009 that Colvin was under investigation in Ohio for killing six women, WPVI reported. By June 2010 he had been indicted in the death of Donna Lee White, 27, of Somers Point, and prosecutors in Mays Landing said they believed he was responsible. On Friday, April 8, 2011, he pleaded guilty in New Jersey to killing her, and a judge sentenced him the same day to 30 more years. The charge, the judge, and whether the term runs after his Ohio sentences or alongside them have not been reported. WFTV, citing the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said in 2020 that he had been in prison since 2006 for the deaths of seven women.
In the 2020 telephone interviews, he said something else. In August 2020 Phil Chalmers, a Florida-based criminal profiler and author, released a 43-minute podcast episode built on calls with Colvin, then 61 and held at Lebanon Correctional Institution. Colvin said he had killed women across the United States between 1987 and 2005 and put his total at as many as 52. "I never counted," he said. He explained his plea in his own terms: "I was on my way to death row, so I made a deal with them at the last minute," he said, adding that he had told investigators he could give them some cold cases. None of this has been tested in court.
Chalmers told Shaw Local that many of Colvin’s statements had been corroborated and that Colvin had never boasted of crimes he did not commit. He put the confirmed total at 40 or more, a figure that comes from neither a court nor a police agency.
The most specific claim in the interview concerned La Salle County, Illinois. Colvin described meeting a woman at a truck stop in the county and killing her; after a follow-up call he told Chalmers it had been in 2005. On September 2, 2020, La Salle County sheriff’s deputies searched the area near La Salle and Peru. Shaw Local reported on October 26, 2020, that the search had been halted. Nothing turned up that investigators could tie to a victim. A second, quiet search the week before had produced nothing either, and an earlier find had proved to come from an animal. Sheriff Tom Templeton said Colvin was credible. "He was and is telling us the truth," he said. Peru Police Chief Doug Bernabei said recovery and identification was "highly unlikely" after so long, and Templeton said there were no immediate plans to resume. Six deaths are covered by guilty pleas and a seventh by an admission. The rest of the 52 rest on a voice on a telephone.
Hugo Bustamante Perez has been convicted in Chile of three killings in two separate events, both in Villa Alemana, in the Valparaiso Region. In January 2005 he killed his former partner, Veronica Vasquez, 49, and her nine-year-old son, Eugenio. The oral criminal court in Vina del Mar sentenced him to 12 years for the one death and 15 for the other, 27 years in all, Emol reported. BioBioChile reported that he had confessed to the detectives of the Investigations Police on his own, on the day of his arrest, January 25, 2005. In April 2016, after about 11 years, a parole commission of the Valparaiso Court of Appeals released him, against the advice of the prison service, whose report had concluded: "Therefore it is not recommended to grant conditional release."
Then, in July 2020 in Villa Alemana, came the case of Ambar Cornejo, the 16-year-old daughter of his new partner. Bustamante and the girl’s mother were detained on August 6. In December 2021 a court in Vina del Mar sentenced him to presidio perpetuo calificado, the most severe penalty in Chilean law, for her murder, with other charges. The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence in June 2022.
The confession that matters here came later, and it came through a journalist. In January 2024 Ivonne Toro Agurto interviewed him in prison for CIPER, the Chilean investigative outlet. At that point he did not admit responsibility for anything new. He said a man named Eduardo Paez had been kidnapped, that he had tried to help free him, and that he had contacted Paez’s mother to look for a way to do so. He also told Toro that Paez "had a problem," that he had got involved where he should not have and spent money he should not have spent. Paez and Bustamante had met in prison in the 1990s, according to BioBioChile and CIPER, and had stayed in contact after their release; Meganoticias reported that they had been cellmates.
By June 2024 the account had changed. CIPER published Toro’s report of what it called his last confessions on June 6, 2024, and 24horas reported the next day on the interview, in which he told her, "Le tengo un regalo," a gift. He had confessed to the 1996 killings of Elena Hinojosa, 55, and her son Eduardo Paez Hinojosa, 27. Mother and son had lived across from each other in Villa Alemana. Eduardo’s sister told investigators in 1996 that she suspected Bustamante. The file was later archived without result, and for almost three decades the family did not know what had happened. Prosecutors confirmed the victims' identities on September 2, 2024.
What the justice system did with the confession is the part that shows the limit of the form. The 1996 killings fell to the old criminal procedure, and the reports of March 2025 describe the case passing to the old justice system. In June 2024 the prosecution had taken the position that the crimes were not time-barred. In January 2026 a Villa Alemana judge concluded that Bustamante killed Paez and Hinojosa on June 27, 1996, in a dispute over money he owed Paez, and BioBioChile reported a new sentence of ten years. On October 26, 2026, the Valparaiso Court of Appeals revoked the conviction and dismissed the case: it reclassified the killings as simple homicides and held that the time limit for prosecution had expired, Emol, Meganoticias and G5noticias reported. The victims' family has asked the Supreme Court to restore the conviction. That appeal was reported as filed as of October 26, 2026.
A confession had produced the identities of two victims after 28 years, a finding of fact by a trial judge, and, within nine months of that judgment, a ruling that the law no longer allowed anyone to be punished for it.
The case that stands as the warning is Henry Lee Lucas, whose confessions numbered in the hundreds and whose word closed more than 200 files before it was tested.
Lucas was arrested on June 11, 1983, in Montague County, Texas, for possessing a pistol, a crime for an ex-convict. Sheriff W.E. Conway made the arrest, and Phil Ryan, then a Texas Ranger and later sheriff of Wise County, investigated the case with him. Lucas began to talk. He confessed to killing Kate Rich, an elderly widow for whom he and his teenage companion, Frieda "Becky" Powell, had done chores, and to killing Powell herself. He then began telling Conway and the Rangers about other killings. Eleven days after his arrest the count stood at 77, the Associated Press reported. At a hearing in Montague County that year he claimed 100. At his arraignment he asked what was going to be done about "these other hundred women."
The first two confessions were real. On September 30, 1983, at a pretrial hearing, Lucas pleaded guilty to killing Kate Rich, and District Judge Frank Douthitt set the sentence at 75 years. In November 1983 a jury in Denton convicted him of murdering Becky Powell, 15, and sentenced him to life the next day. District Attorney Jerry Cobb had urged the jurors to "have the guts" to send him to prison for life. "I expected it," Lucas said. "I am relieved. This is what I asked for." He told reporters he would plead guilty to the eight other murder charges then pending against him, and would ask for death. ABC News reported in 2001 that physical evidence linked him to only two murders. These were the two.
By then the confessions had moved far beyond Montague County. Lucas’s count doubled to 156 in conversations with Jim Boutwell, the Williamson County sheriff, who belonged to a task force looking into deaths along a central Texas interstate. The Texas Rangers and Boutwell set up a special task force to help other agencies clear cases, and Lucas was held in the jail at Georgetown, the Williamson County seat, where visiting officers were given appointments to interview him. Texas Ranger Bob Prince headed it.
The numbers grew. Lucas claimed more than 150 killings in at least 17 states by the fall of 1983, 360 in a taped statement to Boutwell, and something near 600 by early 1984. He confessed to killings in 26 states and Canada. He said he belonged to a satanic cult called the "Hands of Death," which he said had been involved in the deaths at Jim Jones’s compound in Guyana and was linked to the fate of the labor leader Jimmy Hoffa. In October 1983 lawmen from at least 28 agencies met in Monroe, Louisiana, to trace his supposed travels. Agencies that could not send a detective mailed in their questions. At one stage Lucas confessed to 70 or 80 killings a day this way, the investigator Mike Feary told the Associated Press in 1990. Rangers later estimated that about 3,000 homicides were discussed with him. A 1985 D Magazine account put the cost of 18 months of task force investigations at about $180,000. By 1985 police had closed more than 200 killings on his word.
It came apart in 1985. In April the Dallas Times Herald published records showing that Lucas had been in other states on the days of killings he had confessed to, and he told the paper his confessions were a hoax. Attorney General Mattox opened an inquiry. Investigators also established that Lucas had not met his supposed partner, Ottis Toole, until February 1979, which undercut at least one confession in which he had placed Toole in a 1978 killing. The Texas Attorney General’s office spent a year on the case and issued its report in 1986, calling the confessions a hoax. Even afterward, Feary told the AP in 1990, police were "pretty sure" that Lucas had killed three people.
The courts had by then convicted him of murder several times over. He was convicted of the second-degree murder of his mother in Michigan in 1960. In 1984 a San Angelo jury convicted him of capital murder in the death of a young woman who had been known for years only as "Orange Socks," and sentenced him to death. A decade later the case was looked at again. The state Attorney General’s office located work records placing Lucas in Florida when she was killed, and in June 1998 Governor George W. Bush commuted the death sentence to life. It was the only death sentence he commuted as governor. The woman was identified in 2019 as Debra Jackson, 23, of Abilene. Laura Marie Purchase, of Houston, was the subject of a murder conviction of 1986; DNA testing excluded Lucas in 2008, and another man was charged in 2021 and died before trial.
Lucas died on a Monday night in March 2001 in his bed at the Ellis I Unit at Huntsville, Texas, at 64. Prison officials said the death appeared to be from natural causes. By then he had said, over time, that he had killed hundreds, that he had killed only a few, and that he had killed no one at all.
In every one of these cases but the last, the confession produced something that could be put in front of a court or a family. Cottingham’s gave Bergen County two guilty pleas and a handful of closed files. Little’s gave the Texas Rangers 93 accounts, of which 62 had been verified by the end of 2021, and eight convictions. Corwin’s gave Montgomery County a capital conviction on three killings and nothing on the other crimes he mentioned. Arguelles’s came with a request for a color television and a cell on a death-row block, and gave four families a plea. Kibbe’s came in 2003 and became a plea in 2009. Smith’s second confession followed the collapse of an alibi that had stood for 25 years. Colvin’s earlier pleas stand; his later claims reached a field in La Salle County and stopped there.
The confession that grew past its evidence is the warning. Bustamante’s shows a different failure: a confession accepted by a trial judge and then voided on a point of limitation. The detectives who were most successful with prison confessions were, as Alan Grieco said of Cottingham’s, working with "nothing, other than what he would tell us." The ones who succeeded in court tended to have something besides the statement: a DNA match in Nassau County, a reanalyzed alibi in Salem, a laboratory result in Macon. The rest depended on whether a prisoner who might gain a television, a transfer, an apology on his own terms, or simply an audience, was telling the truth about a death that only he could describe.
• 1960: Henry Lee Lucas is convicted in Michigan of the second-degree murder of his mother.
• September 1965: Alys Eberhardt is killed in Fair Lawn, New Jersey.
• February 15, 1968: Diane Cusick is killed in Valley Stream, New York.
• 1970 to 2005: the period of the killings Samuel Little later confesses to.
• May 22, 1980: Richard Cottingham is arrested in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey.
• June 11, 1983: Lucas is arrested in Montague County, Texas; within days he begins confessing.
• September 30 and November 1983: Lucas pleads guilty to the Rich killing and is convicted of the Powell killing.
• April 1984: William Scott Smith confesses to police after his father urges him to; he is convicted in July 1984.
• April 1985: Lucas tells the Dallas Times Herald that his confessions were a hoax.
• 1986: The Texas Attorney General’s report calls the Lucas confessions false.
• 1989: Daniel Corwin confesses to three 1987 killings while serving a 99-year sentence.
• March 1990: Corwin is sentenced to death in Conroe, Texas.
• April 26, 1996: Roberto Arguelles confesses in Utah; charges follow three days later.
• June 20, 1997: Arguelles is sentenced to death after pleading guilty on May 12.
• June 1998: Governor George W. Bush commutes Lucas’s death sentence to life.
• December 7, 1998: Corwin is executed at Huntsville, Texas.
• March 2001: Lucas dies in prison at 64.
• 2003: Investigators interview Roger Kibbe in prison after San Joaquin County resubmits evidence.
• November 15, 2003: Arguelles dies in prison.
• 2006: Dellmus Colvin pleads guilty in Toledo, Ohio.
• December 18, 2007: Smith pleads guilty to the murder of Sherry Eyerly.
• 2009: Kibbe pleads guilty to six murders in San Joaquin County.
• 2010: Cottingham admits the 1967 killing of Nancy Schiava Vogel in a Bergen County courthouse.
• April 8, 2011: Colvin pleads guilty in Atlantic County, New Jersey.
• 2018 to 2019: Little confesses to 93 killings; the FBI calls them credible in October 2019.
• January 3, 2020: Cottingham’s admissions to three Bergen County killings of 1968 and 1969 are announced.
• August 2020: Colvin tells a podcast host he killed as many as 52 women; a La Salle County search is halted on October 26, 2020.
• December 30, 2020: Little dies at 80.
• February 28, 2021: Kibbe dies in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison.
• April 27, 2021: Cottingham pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder in Bergen County.
• December 5, 2022: Cottingham pleads guilty in Nassau County and admits four more killings.
• June 2024: Hugo Bustamante’s confession to two 1996 killings is published.
• January 6, 2026: Fair Lawn police announce Cottingham’s confession to the Eberhardt killing.
• January 2026: A Villa Alemana judge convicts Bustamante for the 1996 killings.
• October 26, 2026: The Valparaiso Court of Appeals revokes that conviction as time-barred.