Charles Ray Hatcher was born in Mound City, Missouri, on July 16, 1929. He was in and out of custody from his teens for theft, assault and sexual offences against children, and used at least twenty aliases across a dozen states. Between sentences he was repeatedly committed to state mental hospitals, found incompetent, treated, and released, and the pattern repeated for thirty years.
He killed a twelve-year-old boy in Antioch, California, in 1969, was charged, found unfit to stand trial, and released in 1977. On May 26, 1978, he abducted and killed four-year-old Eric Christgen from the riverfront in St Joseph, Missouri. He was known as Crazy Charlie.
That murder produced a second injustice. Melvin Lee Reynolds, a young man with learning difficulties and no connection to the case, was questioned over months by police who had settled on him, and confessed. He was convicted in 1979 and served five years. Hatcher, arrested in 1982 for the murder of eleven-year-old Michelle Steele in the same town, confessed to the Christgen killing in detail, and Reynolds was released and pardoned.
Hatcher pleaded guilty to Christgen's murder in 1983 and was convicted of Steele's, receiving life terms. He told investigators he had killed sixteen people, and provided enough detail on several to be believed. He was found hanged in his cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary on December 7, 1984. The Christgen case remains one of the most-cited American examples of a false confession obtained from a vulnerable suspect.