A false confession is a story told against interest, and the police are not the only people who can be taken in by one. In the cases below the lie did different work each time. In one it was a cassette tape that bent a murder inquiry toward the wrong end of England. In another it was a statement that closed a case against an innocent man for four years. Some of the lies were told by men who had killed and wanted to have killed more. One was told by a woman who had killed no one and wanted out of a bad relationship. Taken together they show how reluctant investigators and courts are to throw a confession away, and how little it sometimes takes to make them accept one.
In March 1978 the West Yorkshire inquiry into a series of murders of women began to receive letters from a man who said he was the killer. The first, signed "Jack the Ripper," was posted to the police on March 8. A second went to a newspaper on March 13 and suggested the killer might next strike in Manchester. A third followed. In June 1979, after a newspaper reported in February that the police believed the letters genuine, the writer sent Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield a cassette. "I’m Jack," the voice began. It taunted Oldfield, telling him he was no nearer catching the killer than when he started.
Oldfield accepted the letters and the tape as authentic. Dialect experts placed the speaker in the Castletown district of Sunderland, and detectives were told they could eliminate suspects who did not have a Wearside accent. The tape was played to the press. The public could hear it by telephone, and it appeared on billboards and in newspaper advertisements in a campaign that cost about one million pounds. About 40,000 men in the North East were looked at. Voice experts and some detectives warned that the material was a hoax, the Press Association later reported, and were not heeded.
Twelve days after the murder of Barbara Leach in September 1979, the hoaxer himself telephoned the police to say the letters and tape were not genuine. He gave them nothing that could be checked, and the call was lost among many others. Meanwhile the real offender, Peter Sutcliffe, a truck driver from Bradford, was interviewed nine times. He was not a Wearside man, and his voice and handwriting did not match the tape or the letters. In July 1979, on his fifth interview, two detectives, Andrew Laptew and Graham Greenwood, were suspicious of him and said so in a report. It was filed away because of the mismatch. Laptew later said that the superintendent to whom he raised his concerns made him feel so small that he "could have crawled under the crack in the door." At one stage the inquiry ranked its suspects in a league table of 26 men in the first division, about 200 in the second and about 1,000 in the third. Sutcliffe sat in the third. Years later he said of the Sunderland hunt: "While ever that was going on, I felt safe."
Oldfield suffered a heart attack and was moved off the case. In November 1980 Detective Chief Superintendent James Hobson took over and reduced the weight the inquiry gave to the tape. Sutcliffe was arrested in Sheffield on January 2, 1981, over false number plates, and confessed at Dewsbury police station two days later. In May 1981 he was convicted at the Old Bailey of 13 murders and sentenced to life.
The government’s account to Parliament on January 19, 1982, was blunt. The police had made "major errors of judgment," and "excessive credence was given to the letters and tape from a man claiming responsibility." Had those errors not been made, the statement said, Sutcliffe would have been identified as a prime suspect sooner. In the Lords, Lord Elwyn-Jones said that lives could have been saved.
The voice was not put to a name for more than a quarter of a century. In 2005 a cold case review obtained a DNA profile from saliva on the seal of one of the envelopes. It matched a sample on the national database from John Humble, a laborer from the Ford Estate in Sunderland, who had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly. Humble was then about 50. He was arrested, said nothing at first, and then admitted it. Charged with four counts of doing acts tending and intended to pervert the course of justice, he pleaded guilty at Leeds Crown Court on March 20, 2006, the day his trial was due to begin, and was sentenced to eight years in prison the next day. The judge said that the turn of the hunt toward a Wearside man had given Sutcliffe confidence and that women targeted afterward would have stood a better chance had police resources stayed in West Yorkshire.
Sutcliffe was held for nearly four decades, most of it at Broadmoor Hospital, was given a whole life order in 2010 and died on November 13, 2020. On that day the chief constable of West Yorkshire apologized to the families for the language and terminology the original investigators had used about the women.
Between June 1962 and January 1964 a series of women died in Boston and neighboring cities, among them Mary Sullivan, 19, the last. Investigators grouped 11 of the deaths together. In 1965 Albert DeSalvo, a Malden laborer held at Bridgewater State Hospital on charges relating to other women, confessed to those 11 and to two more. He was never charged with any of them.
His confession had come through an unusual channel. At Bridgewater he met George Nassar, who was awaiting trial in another case, and Nassar’s lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, came to represent DeSalvo. Bailey left a meeting convinced that DeSalvo knew details only the killer could know, and took what he had heard to the authorities. DeSalvo then confessed at length to psychiatrists, to Boston police and to the attorney general’s office. Detective Phil DiNatale spent weeks checking his account and never doubted it. His son said later that DeSalvo knew too much to be anyone else. A prosecutor, Julian Soshnick, said in 2001 that DeSalvo had described the killings in a way that convinced him.
Against that stood the absence of any physical link. Nothing tied him to the places the women had died. He did not match the descriptions given by witnesses, and parts of his account were wrong. Colin Evans, in his account of the trial for Great American Trials, wrote that the confessions were uncorroborated, that DeSalvo had already been ruled incompetent, and that the Commonwealth chose to try him instead on the offenses against four women who had survived, while Bailey aimed to have him found insane.
The trial opened in Middlesex Superior Court in Cambridge in January 1967 before Judge Cornelius J. Moynihan. DeSalvo was tried on eight indictments covering armed robbery, assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon, unnatural acts, breaking and entering and larceny, committed against four women in the summer and early fall of 1964. A sanity hearing on January 10 had held him competent. The defense psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Mezer, said he was insane. Dr. Ames Robey, the former medical director at Bridgewater, was asked by Bailey on cross-examination whether DeSalvo had conned him. "I’m afraid so," he said. An inmate testified that DeSalvo had planned to confess, hire a lawyer and fake insanity. The prosecutor, Donald Conn, told jurors: "Don’t let this man con you right out of your shoes!" On January 18, 1967, they held him sane and convicted him, and he was sentenced to life. "Massachusetts has burned another witch," Bailey told reporters, according to Evans.
The Supreme Judicial Court affirmed the judgments in 1968. DeSalvo recanted his confessions and in November 1973 was killed in custody at Walpole State Prison; three inmates were tried, and no one was convicted. For forty years the matter stayed open, and the family of the last woman to die came to doubt that he had killed anyone. In July 2013 the Suffolk County district attorney announced that DNA testing of his body matched evidence preserved from the 1964 death of Mary Sullivan. Officials said it left no doubt about that one death and said nothing about the other ten, for which no biological evidence has been identified. In law, DeSalvo died a man convicted of robbery and sexual offenses, never of murder. His confession was, by turns, a true account, a performance, a bargain and a lie, and the record has never settled which parts were which.
Charles Hatcher, a drifter who had spent years in California mental institutions, was convicted of murdering two children in St. Joseph, Missouri: a four-year-old boy in May 1978 and an eleven-year-old girl in 1982. For the first death another man had already been convicted. M.L.R., then 24, was questioned for the last time on February 14, 1979. The National Registry of Exonerations puts that session at 12 to 13 hours of continuous interrogation, Samuel Gross at fourteen hours of questions, promises and threats, and M.L.R. himself, speaking to reporters in October 1983, at about 17. He said two state patrol officers threatened him with other charges if he did not confess. According to the Registry, he was told he could leave and see his fiancee if he admitted the crime. Gross records the moment he gave in: "I’ll say so if you want me to."
The confession was recorded, and parts of it did not fit the crime. M.L.R. got the length of time he had supposedly watched the boy wrong. Asked to describe what had been done to the child, he asked how he could describe something he had not done. Gross wrote that over the following weeks details were fed to him until there was enough to charge him. After a four-day trial in Buchanan County, a jury deliberated for seven hours and convicted him of second-degree murder. On October 12, 1979, he was sentenced to life. The case rested largely on the confession.
Hatcher was arrested in the 1982 case. Two United Press International reports disagree about when, one saying August 3 and another September, but both agree that his arrest led to a series of confessions and that police rushed across the country to examine as many as 15 other killings from the previous 13 years. Awaiting trial, he told an FBI agent that he had also killed the boy. UPI reported that the authorities reopened the 1978 case in late July 1983 after Hatcher wrote to the FBI admitting it, and that further investigation convinced them. The Registry says his account fit the facts far better than the confession of M.L.R. had.
Hatcher pleaded guilty to murder in the boy’s death in October 1983. A Buchanan County judge ordered M.L.R. freed, and the original prosecutor, Michael Insco, called the imprisonment "a terrible tragedy." M.L.R. said he had always assumed the authorities would find the right person, and that he did not plan to sue. He left prison on October 14, 1983. On November 21 his conviction was reversed and the charge dismissed, with Judge Frank Connett, who had presided at the trial, declaring that he had been wrongfully convicted.
Hatcher’s own claims were another matter. UPI reported in 1983 that he "may have confessed to as many as 16 killings," and in 1984 that he told federal officers he had murdered 16 people in his travels. The Registry, posted in 2018, calls him a suspect in fourteen other murders, and Gross, writing in 1998, put the number he confessed to at three. UPI said authorities believed he had given them a map relating to one death in Illinois, and that he reportedly told them where 13 others could be located. None of it was tried. He was convicted of the girl’s murder in September 1984, given life, and reported hanged in a segregation cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary on December 7, 1984. Samuel Gross used the first case as an example of a false confession in a 1998 article on miscarriages of justice in capital cases. Decades later, the Registry and Kansas City public radio linked some of the same officers to the case of Sandra Hemme, who falsely confessed to a 1980 killing in St. Joseph.
John Sapp was arrested in Nevada County, California, on April 25, 1986, on a weapons warrant. Within days he had confessed to three killings that had gone unsolved for years: his best friend from high school, John Abono, in December 1975; a former girlfriend and coworker at Chevron Research in Richmond, Elizabeth Duarte, in January 1981; and a Concord man who owed him money, Robert Weber, in August 1985. During four days in the Nevada County jail, he told investigators he could tell them about 20 murders, raised the question of a lawyer, and, a day later, summoned the investigators back on his own and confessed to the three. "I killed Abono; I killed Weber; I killed Duarte," he said on a taped telephone call. To the investigators he said of the first: "I did it for personal reasons."
The trial court suppressed what he had said on April 25 and admitted everything from the evening of April 26 onward. Because the Abono and Duarte killings came before the California Constitution changed the standard in 1982, the prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that those confessions were voluntary. The court held that it had, and the California Supreme Court agreed in 2003.
At the 1991 trial in Contra Costa County his lawyers told the jury that Sapp was a chronic false confessor. Their principal witness was a Contra Costa County deputy district attorney, Lawrence Barnes, who testified that Sapp had falsely confessed to another killing, in a case Barnes prosecuted in 1986 and 1987 against another defendant. Barnes told the jury that Sapp’s account did not match the physical evidence and that Sapp had much to gain by "taking the rap" for that defendant. On cross-examination the prosecutor turned the testimony around. Barnes agreed that when Sapp was asked whether he had committed other crimes since October 1984, he said he had, and that when asked about other homicides he said he had committed those too. The defense did not object.
The prosecution called a psychologist who diagnosed antisocial personality disorder and a neurologist who disputed the defense’s brain-imaging claims. Abono’s wife testified that Sapp had bragged of having a mass in his head that he could use in a criminal defense. The jury deliberated for three full days. It convicted him of all three murders, and on October 16, 1991, judgment was entered with death sentences for the Duarte and Weber killings. Because California had no death penalty law in force when Abono died, that count could never carry one. The California Supreme Court affirmed on July 31, 2003, and the United States Supreme Court denied review on May 3, 2004. As of June 1, 2026, Sapp remained under sentence of death.
A man who offered twenty murders and was in fact convicted of three is a hard figure to classify. The defense case was built on the premise that the first number was a symptom of the second.
Yoo Young-chul was convicted of 20 murders in Seoul in 2003 and 2004, at the time the largest number a South Korean court had attributed to one person. He was arrested in July 2004. On July 18 the Seoul police chief, Heo Jun-young, announced that he had confessed to at least 19 killings, eight people in four houses in 2003 and eleven women in 2004. The number then began to climb. A Japan Times report on July 24 said he might have murdered 26. At his second court hearing, in September 2004, Yoo claimed five more victims beyond 26, including a pregnant woman and a minor, and later put the total at 31 besides one other case. The officer who led the investigation called the new claims absurd. Police told the press that they thought most of the additional claims were probably false, with one exception, though they did not rule out unreported victims.
The exception sits at the center of the case. In February 2004 a 24-year-old woman who worked in a clothing store was killed in Imun-dong, in Dongdaemun-gu. After his arrest Yoo first denied the killing. Late in the investigation he confessed, and police included it as the 21st death in the indictment.
On September 21, 2004, at his second hearing, he retracted the confession. He said a senior police officer had promised that his son’s university education would be paid for through a third party if he confessed using the police version of events, and that he had agreed because he expected to die anyway. At a later hearing he argued that the wounds did not match his knife. The officers denied making any promise and said his account had included details that only the killer could know. At the end of that hearing he told the court he would attend no more sessions because he had already confessed to everything. When the judge urged him to return, he climbed onto the stenographer’s desk and lunged toward the bench before guards pulled him out.
On December 13, 2004, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced him to death for 20 murders. It acquitted him on the Imun-dong count and on a theft charge, the first because his confession conflicted with the physical evidence and had changed as the investigation went on. He did not appeal, and the death sentence became final. Prosecutors appealed the acquittal. On June 9, 2005, the First Division of the Supreme Court rejected the appeal, finding that his confessions did not match the victim’s wounds, that the circumstances and motive of the confession were questionable, and that there was no proof he had committed the crime. The Imun-dong death remained unsolved in law. A former police official later said that Yoo had also included a May 2004 death in Wonnam-dong in a handwritten list; no charge followed. South Korea has carried out no execution since December 30, 1997, and Yoo was held on death row at the Seoul Detention Center in Uiwang as of October 6, 2026.
William Lee Neal, who called himself Cody, was an Army veteran living in Lakewood, Colorado, in the summer of 1998. Between June 30 and July 5 he killed three women he knew, Rebecca Holberton, 44, Candace Walters, 48, and Angela Fite. He took money from two of them. Before he gave himself up he recorded a long confession on tape.
On July 8, 1998, he spoke by telephone for about three and a half hours with a Jefferson County sheriff’s deputy. He told the negotiators he was armed. According to the disciplinary judge who later described the call, he made statements that could be taken as threats to kill others and rambling claims about work for the CIA, the FBI and the White House, while saying things that suggested he wanted to end matters without hurting anyone else. At one point, a law review account of the record says, he claimed to have killed 500 people and said he would kill again if provoked. He was asked whether he would surrender. He wanted a lawyer first, and a chief deputy district attorney, Robert Pautler, joined the line posing as a public defender. Neal surrendered. The Colorado Supreme Court on May 13, 2002, upheld discipline against Pautler for the deception, rejecting his argument that he had acted to protect lives.
Nobody who investigated the case treated the 500 as a number. The lead investigator, asked at the sentencing hearing whether Neal had killed others, answered no, adding that investigators did not know for sure. No other killing was charged. In an interview on September 14, 1998, lasting nearly eight hours, Neal called the three deaths "a mercy thing," said he identified with Ted Bundy, whose story was his favorite reading, and claimed he had been better than Bundy would have been. He also said that he had at least thirty more people lined up to kill over three days. Those claims, like the earlier one, were never tested.
The rest of his autobiography was equally unreliable. Westword reported, as his own unconfirmed claims, the military careers he described to the women in his life: service as a Green Beret, on an Alaskan mountain rescue team and as an Airborne Ranger. He described himself as part-owner of a security company, and later admitted taking close to $70,000 from it. The sentencing panel said plainly that it distrusted his account of an abused childhood because of his record of lying.
In February 1999, representing himself, he pleaded guilty before Judge Thomas Woodford to three counts of first-degree murder and a series of other charges. "Without a doubt, your honor," he said. A panel of three judges sentenced him to death on September 29, 1999. A Westword reporter who met him in jail that July saw him with a tape recorder, a VCR, extra law library time and ten minutes a day on a cell phone, and quoted him as saying there was "no excuse for this crime."
Thomas Eugene Creech was convicted of five murders in three states. Two were house painters, Edward Arnold and John Bradford, in Valley County, Idaho, in November 1974. Two more were men killed in Oregon and California the same year. The fifth was David Dale Jensen, a 23-year-old fellow prisoner, in May 1981 at the Idaho State Correctional Institution, while Creech was already serving life. A jury in Arizona acquitted him of the one other killing for which he stood trial, that of Paul Schrader in Tucson in 1973.
Creech has told many more stories than that. At various times he claimed 40, 42 or as many as 50 killings. At trial, the Idaho Statesman reported, he testified that he had killed 42 people by the age of 24, not counting Arnold and Bradford. In 1993 the United States Supreme Court recorded that he had admitted killing or taking part in killing at least 26 people. Ada County prosecutors put the number of victims at no fewer than 11. His lawyers say he grossly exaggerated, and the Associated Press reported that many of his early confessions were given under so-called truth serum drugs that have since been discredited. In January 2024 he told the parole commission he did not know the number.
The unproven claims are scattered. KIVI cited reports in the Journal-News of Hamilton, Ohio, that Creech claimed to have drowned a friend in New Miami at 17, and to have killed five members of a motorcycle gang in cult rituals, and a 1986 United Press International report that he claimed to have killed a man in San Francisco in 1965. None led to a charge. Authorities told the Associated Press they believed he was responsible for the Tucson death, of which a jury acquitted him, and for the 1974 death of Sandra Jane Ramsamooj in Salem, Oregon, for which he was never convicted. Ada County prosecutors told the parole commission in January 2024 that he was responsible for the 1974 death of Daniel A. Walker in San Bernardino County, California, and called the case solved. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office said only that it had reopened the case. Creech denies it and has never been charged, and Walker’s younger brother later said, "The cold case wasn’t solved."
The commission denied clemency on a tie vote on January 29, 2024. On February 28, 2024, Idaho tried to execute him by lethal injection, and the medical team, after eight attempts to set an intravenous line, gave up. A second date in November 2024 was stayed by a federal judge. In 2026 Creech and another prisoner sued over the state’s new firing squad procedures. As of October 1, 2026, he remained on death row with no execution date reported.
The mass of claims does a particular job in this case. Prosecutors used the Walker accusation, which was never charged, at the clemency hearing, and defense lawyers disputed it. For a man who has admitted one prison killing and five convictions, the larger number had become both a boast and a liability.
Between January 1990 and March 1995 Keith Hunter Jesperson, a long-haul truck driver born in British Columbia, killed at least eight women, according to his own letter, in several states. His first killing was of Taunja Bennett, near Portland, Oregon, in January 1990. It was solved almost at once, and wrongly.
L.P., a 57-year-old Portland woman, had been in a relationship of about ten years with J.S., a 39-year-old farmhand eighteen years her junior. She said he abused her. After reading news coverage of the Bennett killing she saw it, in the Registry’s words, as a way to end the relationship. She began with anonymous tips that J.S. had bragged about the crime. When the police did not act, she called detectives, told them about the abuse and named him as the killer. Her account then changed. She said that the two of them had met Bennett at a bar and that he had forced her to help him. J.S. denied all of it, and a search of his belongings turned up nothing. L.P. then said that items in the trunk of her car matched a warrant list. Police concluded the items had been planted. She had learned the details she gave from the newspapers and the search warrant, she later said.
Both were arrested in February 1990, and both said they were innocent. The case rested mainly on her recorded statements. At trial L.P. recanted and told the jury she had made the story up to get away from J.S. Prosecutors played the tape, and in January 1991 a Multnomah County jury convicted her of felony murder, with a sentence of life and a ten-year minimum. In March 1991, fearing a death sentence, J.S. pleaded no contest to murder and kidnapping and was sentenced to life.
Jesperson, meanwhile, kept driving, and in 1994 newspapers and authorities in Oregon received anonymous letters from a man who said he had killed Bennett. They went to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office and to The Oregonian, which said in 2022 that he confessed to five murders in them and signed with a drawn smiling face. The paper’s coverage gave him the name the Happy Face Killer. No one tied the letters to a name, and the two people convicted of Bennett’s death stayed in prison.
On March 24, 1995, a day after learning that investigators were on his trail over the death of a woman in Washington, he telephoned a Clark County detective from a truck stop and confessed to that killing. He was arrested in Cochise County, Arizona. He also wrote a letter to his brother saying he had killed eight people in five years. "I had been worried about this for a long time," he said in 1995. "I wanted to get those two people out of prison." He knew things about the Bennett killing that persuaded prosecutors that he was the killer.
On November 27, 1995, a judge ordered both prisoners released. "There’s no longer any doubt that these two individuals are innocent," he said. He set aside J.S.'s conviction, ruling that his plea had not been voluntary. He refused to set aside L.P.'s conviction, writing that "her persistence in this manipulation resulted in her own conviction," and criticized her for abusing the judicial system. But he ordered her freed because keeping an innocent person in prison would be cruel and unusual punishment. L.P. died in 2003. The Registry lists her case with the contributing factor of false confession and his with perjury or false accusation.
Jesperson pleaded guilty in Washington in October 1995 and later in Oregon, Wyoming and California, where the last of his victims was identified in August 2026. As of August 27, 2026, he was serving multiple life sentences in Oregon.
In each of these cases a confession was asked to carry more weight than it could bear. A tape from Sunderland, a long night of questions in St. Joseph, a woman’s account of her boyfriend, a prisoner’s tale of thirteen murders: the fact that someone spoke is treated as proof that what was said is true. The cases differ on what the speaker wanted. The Sunderland hoaxer wanted a fame he did not earn. Yoo and Creech, convicted already, wanted the larger number. L.P. wanted a man gone. Courts took years, a second killer’s telephone call or a DNA profile on an envelope to sort the true statements from the false, and in several of these cases they did not finish.
• June 1962 to January 1964: the series of deaths of women in the Boston area, the last being Mary Sullivan.
• March 8, 1978: the first letter signed "Jack the Ripper" is posted to West Yorkshire police; a second goes to a newspaper on March 13.
• May 1978: the four-year-old boy in St. Joseph, Missouri, is killed.
• February 14, 1979: M.L.R. is questioned for the last time and gives a recorded confession; sentenced to life October 12, 1979.
• June 1979: the cassette tape is sent to George Oldfield.
• September 1979: the hoaxer telephones the police to say the letters and tape are not genuine.
• January 2, 1981: Sutcliffe is arrested in Sheffield; convicted of 13 murders on May 22.
• January 19, 1982: the government statement on the West Yorkshire inquiry is delivered in the Lords.
• October 14, 1983: M.L.R. leaves prison after Hatcher pleads guilty to the 1978 murder; his conviction is reversed November 21.
• September and December 1984: Hatcher is convicted of the 1982 murder and reported dead in his cell on December 7.
• April 25 to 27, 1986: Sapp is arrested on a weapons warrant and confesses to three killings.
• January 1990: Jesperson commits his first killing; L.P. and J.S. are arrested in February.
• January and March 1991: L.P. is convicted; J.S. pleads no contest.
• October 16, 1991: judgment is entered against Sapp, with two death sentences.
• 1994: anonymous smiling-face letters reach The Oregonian and Portland prosecutors.
• March 24, 1995: Jesperson telephones a detective and confesses; the two innocent prisoners are freed November 27.
• July 8, 1998: Neal claims 500 killings to a negotiator; he pleads guilty in February 1999 and is sentenced to death September 29, 1999.
• July 18, 2004: the Seoul police announce Yoo’s arrest and confession; he retracts the Imun-dong confession September 21 and is sentenced to death December 13.
• June 9, 2005: South Korea’s Supreme Court upholds the Imun-dong acquittal. DNA from an envelope seal matches John Humble the same year.
• March 20, 2006: Humble pleads guilty; sentenced to eight years the next day.
• July 2013: Suffolk County announces a DNA match between DeSalvo and the 1964 Sullivan death.
• February 28, 2024: Idaho’s execution attempt on Creech is halted.
• October 6, 2026: Yoo is reported still on death row.