Charles Hatcher was convicted of killing two children in St. Joseph, Missouri. Eric Christgen, four years old, was abducted and killed in May 1978. Michelle Steele, eleven, was abducted and killed in 1982. For the first of those killings another man, Melvin Lee Reynolds, had already been convicted and sent to prison for life on the strength of a confession he gave after a long interrogation. When Hatcher was arrested in the Steele case, he told the FBI that he had killed Eric as well. In October 1983 he pleaded guilty to Eric's murder, and Reynolds walked out of prison after four years. Hatcher was convicted of Michelle's murder in September 1984 and given life. He also told federal officers that he had killed 16 people in his travels across the country. None of those other killings was ever tried. In December 1984 he was found hanged in his cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary.
The case is remembered as much for the wrongful conviction as for Hatcher himself. Legal writing on false confessions has used it as an example, and some of the officers who worked on it were later linked to a second wrongful conviction in St. Joseph.
Wire reports gave Hatcher's age as 54 in October 1983 and 55 in December 1984. Federal officials told UPI that his trail of violence ran from San Francisco to Rock Island, Illinois.
Eric Christgen was four years old and lived in St. Joseph. UPI described him as the son of a St. Joseph lumber executive. On May 26, 1978, he was abducted from a shopping mall in the city, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. He was killed. The prosecutor, Michael Insco, later said the boy had been suffocated. Witnesses told police they had seen an older man with gray hair walking down a road with a young boy who matched Eric's description.
In early June 1978 an anonymous caller told police he had seen Melvin Lee Reynolds near the mall on the day Eric disappeared. Reynolds was 24, a house painter, according to the Registry (the law professor Samuel Gross gave his age as 25 and described him as a man of limited intelligence). He did not fit the witnesses' description. He was much shorter than the man they had seen, and his hair was brown, not gray. A neighbor said she had been talking with him on his front porch at about the time of the abduction; the Registry says police set her account aside.
Police questioned more than a hundred people in the case, Gross wrote. Reynolds was brought in nine times over eight months. He took a polygraph test, was hypnotized and was questioned under a drug then used as a truth serum; Gross names it as sodium amytal. Under the drug he misspoke while describing his movements on the day of the abduction, and investigators treated the slip as a sign of guilt, the Registry says.
Reynolds was questioned for the last time on February 14, 1979. The Registry puts that session at 12 to 13 hours of continuous interrogation, Gross at fourteen hours of questions, promises and threats; KCUR, the Kansas City public radio station, said in 2025 that he was promised he could go home if he confessed. According to the Registry, police threatened him and told him he could leave and see his fiancee if he admitted the crime. Gross records that Reynolds finally told them, "I'll say so if you want me to." The confession was recorded.
Parts of it did not fit the crime. Reynolds gave the wrong length of time for how long he had supposedly watched the boy at the mall. Asked to describe what had been done to the child, he asked how he could describe something he had not done. He described the scene wrongly, and the next day he led police to the wrong place when they asked him to show them where the boy was killed. Gross wrote that over the following weeks Reynolds added details that had been fed to him, and that this was enough to charge him.
Speaking to reporters in October 1983, Reynolds said two state highway patrolmen had questioned him for about 17 hours, from 8 a.m. one day until 1:30 a.m. the next, and had threatened him with other charges if he did not confess. He said he never learned why he became a suspect, beyond the fact that he had been in the general area when the boy disappeared. He later took the confession back.
After his arrest the case drew heavy publicity. Threats were made against Reynolds and his family, his family had to move, and he was held in a jail in another town, the Registry says. The Innocence Project has noted that he had also spent time at the St. Joseph State Hospital.
The trial in Buchanan County lasted four days, according to the Registry. Lee Nation defended Reynolds, Michael Insco prosecuted and Circuit Judge Frank Connett presided. After seven hours of deliberation the jury found Reynolds guilty of second-degree murder. On October 12, 1979, he was sentenced to life in prison. The case rested largely on the confession.
In 1982 eleven-year-old Michelle Steele of St. Joseph was abducted and killed. Insco later told reporters that the two cases had much in common: both children had been taken from the same St. Joseph shopping mall, both had been suffocated, and both were found dead in St. Joseph.
Hatcher was arrested in the Steele case. Two UPI reports give different dates for the arrest: one says it came on August 3, 1982, the other says September 1982. His arrest, UPI reported, led to a series of confessions, and police rushed across the country to look into as many as 15 other killings from the previous 13 years.
Awaiting trial in the Steele case, Hatcher told an FBI agent that he had also killed Eric Christgen, according to the Registry. UPI reported in October 1983 that the authorities had reopened the Christgen case in late July after Hatcher wrote to the FBI admitting the killing, and that a further investigation convinced them he was the killer. The Registry says his account fit the facts far better than Reynolds's confession had: he described the scene accurately, and he matched the witnesses' description of the gray-haired man.
UPI also reported that, about nine months after his arrest, Hatcher was believed to have given the authorities a map leading to the remains of James Churchill, 28, of Lewiston, Illinois, and that he reportedly told them where 13 other bodies could be found. He was never tried for Churchill's death or for any of those other killings.
In October 1983 Hatcher pleaded guilty in Buchanan County to murdering Eric Christgen, Insco told UPI. He was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for 50 years. Insco did not seek the death penalty. At that time Hatcher was held in the Buchanan County Jail, awaiting a January 9 trial in the Steele case, in which he had pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect.
A Buchanan County circuit judge ordered Reynolds's immediate release. Insco, who had prosecuted Reynolds in October 1979, called his imprisonment "a terrible tragedy" and said he would file a writ to free him. Reynolds told reporters that he had first heard of Hatcher's confession from his mother the previous Saturday, after his lawyer told her that someone else had confessed. He said he had always assumed the authorities would find the right person. He said he did not plan to sue; he wanted only his freedom.
Reynolds left prison on October 14, 1983. On November 21, 1983, his conviction was reversed and the charge dismissed, and Judge Connett, who had presided at his trial, declared that he had been wrongfully convicted, according to the Registry.
On September 22, 1984, Hatcher was convicted of capital murder for the 1982 killing of Michelle Steele, UPI reported. He had asked the jury to sentence him to death. He was given life in prison instead.
Hatcher was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. UPI reported that he had been held in a segregation cell since a recent assault on an officer. In a report dated December 7, 1984, UPI said a guard had found him hanged in his cell, according to the warden, Bill Armontrout. He was 55.
Hatcher's own count of his killings was never tested in court. UPI reported in 1984 that he had told federal officers he murdered 16 people while traveling the country; in 1983 the same agency wrote that he "may have confessed to as many as 16 killings." The Registry, posted in 2018, describes him as a suspect in fourteen other murders across the country, several of them committed after Reynolds was convicted. Gross, writing in 1998, put the number he confessed to at three, including the Christgen killing. The authorities believed one of his statements led them to the remains of James Churchill. None of these accounts was tested at trial, and the only killings for which he was convicted were those of Eric Christgen and Michelle Steele.
In a 1998 article in Law and Contemporary Problems on miscarriages of justice in capital cases, Samuel R. Gross used Reynolds's case as a good example of a false confession, and wrote that it was far from the only one. He cited earlier studies by Hugo Bedau and Michael Radelet. The National Registry of Exonerations lists the case with two contributing factors, false confession and official misconduct.
The case came back into the news decades later. Several of the officers who worked on the Reynolds investigation, the Registry says, later played important parts in the case of Sandra Hemme, who falsely confessed to a 1980 killing in St. Joseph. KCUR reported in 2025 that Hemme had been wrongfully convicted on a false confession and that the Registry had linked the two investigations through the same officers.
The number of killings: 16 confessed (UPI 1983 and 1984), 15 other killings investigated (UPI 1984), 14 other killings of which he was suspected (Registry), three confessed (Gross). Only two convictions.
The arrest date: August 3, 1982 (UPI, December 1984) and September 1982 (UPI, October 1983).
The length of the final Reynolds interrogation: 12 to 13 hours (Registry), 13 hours (KCUR), 14 hours (Gross), about 17 hours by Reynolds's own account to UPI.
Reynolds's age: 24 (Registry; Innocence Project) or 25 (Gross).
How the Christgen case was reopened: through a letter Hatcher wrote to the FBI (UPI) or statements to an FBI agent while he awaited trial (Registry).
The James Churchill case: UPI said only that Hatcher was believed to have given a map leading to the remains. No charge or trial followed.
May 26, 1978: Eric Christgen, 4, is abducted in St. Joseph, Missouri, and killed.
June 1978: An anonymous caller points police to Melvin Lee Reynolds.
February 14, 1979: After a long final interrogation, Reynolds confesses.
October 12, 1979: After a four-day trial and a guilty verdict for second-degree murder, Reynolds is sentenced to life.
1982: Michelle Steele, 11, is abducted in St. Joseph and killed. Hatcher is arrested in the case.
Late July (as reported by UPI in October 1983): The Christgen case is reopened after Hatcher admits the killing to the FBI.
About nine months after his arrest (UPI): Hatcher is believed to have given the authorities a map leading to the remains of James Churchill.
October 1983: Hatcher pleads guilty to Eric Christgen's murder and is sentenced to life with no parole for 50 years; a circuit judge orders Reynolds released.
October 14, 1983: Reynolds leaves prison.
November 21, 1983: Reynolds's conviction is reversed and the charge dismissed.
September 22, 1984: Hatcher is convicted of capital murder for Michelle Steele's death and sentenced to life.
December 1984: Hatcher is found hanged in his cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City.
1998: Samuel Gross cites the Reynolds case as an example of a false confession.
2018: The National Registry of Exonerations posts Reynolds's case.