Sooner or later most men who have been caught say that someone else was there. The claim has a particular usefulness. It cannot be proved in the moment, it cannot be dismissed without work, and if it were true it would mean that a person was still at large. Detectives answer it the only way they can: by looking.
The seven cases here have one feature in common. In each, a man who was convicted, or who pleaded guilty, pointed to a second person, a second self or a group, and in each the people whose job it was to test the claim ended with no one to charge. They are not all the same kind of claim. William Heirens spoke of a man called George, and later said the name was invented for him. Kenneth Bianchi produced a personality that called itself Steve. David Berkowitz, years after his pleas, spoke of a satanic group. Carlton Gary named other men in three different states. Edward Wayne Edwards described two or three strangers. Anthony Kirkland named a man he called Pedro. Cody Legebokoff described three men whom he would identify only by letters. Each claim is told here for what it was, with what was done to test it and what the courts did with it. A claim is a claim: none of the people mentioned below as being blamed was charged on the strength of it, and the convictions in these cases stand unless a court has said otherwise.
William Heirens was 17, a University of Chicago student, when Chicago police arrested him in 1946. He was questioned about the killings of two women in 1945 and of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan in January 1946. On September 4, 1946, he pleaded guilty to all three murders and to 26 other indictments for burglary, robbery and assault, and he received three consecutive life sentences.
What happened between the arrest and the pleas is set out in the 1954 opinion of the Illinois Supreme Court, which reviewed the evidence taken at his post-conviction hearing. For two days he was questioned at intervals, and through the whole of the second night. His answers were incoherent. On the third day, at the direction of the State’s Attorney, a psychiatrist gave him an injection of a drug, without his permission or his parents'. Officials listened from behind screens while a stenographer took notes. Under the drug he talked about the crimes and blamed someone he called "George." The doctor who examined him testified that he was "a mentally sick boy," a psychotic schizophrenic and not a malingerer.
On June 30 police gave him a lie-detector test, also without his consent; he did not answer the questions. That evening he said he would tell everything and made a statement blaming a "George Merman," as the court spelled the name. Other accounts write Murman. He printed out the text of the ransom note in the Degnan case, and a handwriting expert later said that the printing matched his.
On August 6, by the court’s date, he gave long statements about all three killings, took officials through reenactments, and was examined by three psychiatrists. Their report, the court recorded, described no psychosis, average intelligence and emotional instability. The sequence is the point of the case. The only other person in his early accounts was a figure who arrived under questioning, in a statement obtained by a drug, and who left no mark on any later stage of the case. The pleas of September 4 covered all three killings, with Heirens the only defendant named in them.
Heirens recanted soon after he was sentenced and kept his denial for the rest of his life. He told The Chicago Maroon, the University of Chicago student paper, that the police had invented the name George Murman and had fabricated the fingerprint evidence, and that they had picked him out because he was a known burglar. He also told the Maroon that his questioning was rough but that he did not remember being beaten or drugged. The Maroon reported that the university would not let him take its courses, so he studied by correspondence.
The courts never reopened the pleas. In April 1983 a federal magistrate in southern Illinois ordered him released on parole grounds, staying the order for 20 days; the Seventh Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Coffey on February 24, 1984, reversed. That dispute concerned the standard the parole board applied, not his guilt. His 2007 parole request, CBS Chicago reported, was his last. He died on March 5, 2012, at 83, after more than 65 years in prison.
Suzanne Degnan’s sister, who had attended his parole hearings for decades, told CBS Chicago: "After he was caught, his horrible crimes stopped." Her brother told ABC7 Chicago that the family’s account had never changed and that Heirens had never answered where he was when the crimes happened. The man named George did not figure in either side of that argument.
Carlton Michael Gary was convicted in August 1986 of the murders of three older women in Columbus, Georgia, in the autumn of 1977: Florence Scheible, 89, Martha Thurmond, 69, and Kathleen Woodruff, 74. A Muscogee County jury convicted him on three counts each of malice murder, rape and burglary. Prosecutors told the jury that a single man had assaulted nine older women in Columbus between September 1977 and April 1978, seven of whom died, and that the man was Gary. He was never charged with the other four deaths. He denied all of it from his arrest in 1984 until his execution.
Gary’s habit, in the record the courts reviewed, was to place another man beside him. In the Albany, New York, case of April 14, 1970, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported, he told police he had robbed Nellie Farmer, 85, and that another man had killed her. That man, identified in the paper’s account only by initials, J.L.M., was tried and acquitted. Gary was convicted of robbery, sentenced to 10 years and served about half. He was never charged with her death.
In Syracuse, on January 2, 1977, a 55-year-old woman was assaulted during a burglary. She survived. Gary was in possession of her watch two days later. He said he had been only a lookout and blamed another man, D.H., who was never convicted. Gary was convicted in early 1977 of possessing stolen property, and a few months later, the Journal-Constitution reported, he escaped from a county jail and returned to Columbus. The Columbus killings began that September. A separate 1975 Syracuse assault was introduced by the state at his Georgia trial; the 2017 Muscogee County order says forensic evidence matched him to it. He was never charged with it.
In Georgia, by the state’s account, he admitted being at the burglary and being present at, or knowing about, eight of the nine Columbus crimes. He said a boyhood friend, M.C., had committed the rapes and killings while he committed the burglaries. The Eleventh Circuit noted in 2012 that he had blamed other men in New York and South Carolina as well, and that no evidence apart from his own statements supported any of those claims.
Gary later said he never confessed. He told 11Alive in March 2018 that the statement police relied on was unsigned and uninitialed, and his lawyers told the Associated Press that it bore the marks of a false confession. The interview had not been recorded.
His defense was starved, his lawyers argued, and the argument was an old one in this case. Before trial they asked repeatedly for money to hire experts and an investigator, and the trial court refused, according to the Eleventh Circuit’s 2009 opinion. The jury was drawn from Spalding County, and the trial was held in Columbus; it began on July 28, 1986. On August 26 the jury convicted him on all nine counts, and on August 27, having identified two aggravating circumstances for each murder, it returned death sentences on the three murder counts. The defense presented no evidence in the penalty phase, and Amnesty International said the jury deliberated for less than an hour.
For three decades his lawyers argued that the science pointed away from him. On December 16, 2009, about four hours before the scheduled execution, the Supreme Court of Georgia voted 5 to 2 to stay it and sent the case back for a hearing on DNA testing; Chief Justice Carol Hunstein and Justice George Carley dissented. Every court that reviewed the case afterward left the convictions in place. A Muscogee County judge denied an extraordinary motion for a new trial on September 1, 2017, and the Supreme Court of the United States denied review on March 15, 2018. Georgia executed Gary that night at 10:33 p.m. He was 67. None of the men he had named across three states was ever charged because of him.
In the summer of 1976 and the following year, 13 people were victims in eight incidents in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn, and six of them died. The man behind them signed letters "Son of Sam." David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker from Yonkers, was arrested on August 10, 1977. Time reported that he told investigators the killings had been commands: "Sam told me what to do and I did it." Sam, he said, was the Devil, and the messages reached him through a neighbor’s dog. UPI reported in 2004 that Berkowitz had since admitted making that story up.
His first accomplice, in other words, was not a person at all. The lawyers who wanted an insanity defense did not get one: Berkowitz insisted on pleading guilty, and on May 8, 1978, against their advice, he pleaded guilty to six counts of second-degree murder before three judges. On June 12 he received the maximum, 25 years to life for each murder. The Associated Press reported the total as 315 years.
The second claim came later and was of a different sort. By the early 1980s Berkowitz was saying that he had not acted alone. In a 1981 letter quoted in the 2021 documentary series The Sons of Sam, he wrote, "I am guilty of these crimes. But I didn’t do it all." The series was built on the long investigation of the writer Maury Terry, who argued that a satanic group had shared the crimes. No one else has been charged.
Reviewers who looked at the theory were not persuaded. Time noted that Terry’s questions to Berkowitz in their recorded interview were highly leading, and the critic Brian Tallerico wrote that the interview, in which Terry feeds answers to Berkowitz, undermines the theory. A 2025 documentary series, Conversations with a Killer: The Son of Sam Tapes, rejected the cult theory and argued that Berkowitz acted alone, noting that the crimes stopped when he was arrested. Berkowitz, now in his seventies, was refused parole at his twelfth appearance in May 2024. The only account of the crimes ever tested in a courtroom is the one he gave in his own pleas.
Kenneth Bianchi was arrested in Bellingham, Washington, on January 12, 1979, the day after two young women, Karen Mandic and Diane Wilder, were killed there. Within days Los Angeles detectives were at work on him. On January 13 a Bellingham detective called the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department about Bianchi’s California driver’s license, and the call reached a member of the task force investigating a series of ten killings of women and girls in Los Angeles between October 1977 and February 1978. Sergeant Frank Salerno and his partner Dudley Varney flew to Bellingham the next day, HistoryLink says.
In March 1979 he changed his plea to not guilty by reason of insanity; HistoryLink dates the change to March 30, and the psychiatrist Martin Orne and his co-authors, writing in 1984, to March 29. His lawyer said he had no memory of the killings and that three psychiatrists had diagnosed severe multiple personality disorder. The prosecutor, McEachran, gave notice that the state would seek the death penalty, and Judge Jack Kurtz appointed a panel of six experts, two chosen by each side and two by the court.
The accomplice here was a second self. On March 21, 1979, John G. Watkins, a psychologist retained by the defense, hypnotized Bianchi, and a personality calling itself Steve appeared and claimed the killings. Steve also implicated Bianchi’s cousin Angelo Buono in the Los Angeles murders, according to HistoryLink. Watkins diagnosed Bianchi as a multiple personality. Ralph B. Allison, a psychiatrist who examined him as a friend of the court, also used hypnosis; at one session, the paper says, Bianchi acted surprised to find cigarette filter tips that Steve had supposedly left behind. Donald T. Lunde, who examined him for the defense without hypnosis, reportedly called him a pathological liar.
Orne, a University of Pennsylvania psychiatrist and an authority on hypnosis, was called by the prosecution and first met Steve on May 27, 1979. He set a series of tests. In one, he remarked to Bianchi that it was "pretty rare for there to be two" personalities. A third personality, Billy, described in the paper as "an enthusiastic, pleasant hustler," appeared soon after. Orne concluded that Billy had been created by the hint. In another test, he suggested that Bianchi’s lawyer was sitting in the room when he was not. Bianchi got up, shook hands with the imagined lawyer and asked whether the examiner could see him too. Orne’s team wrote that they had never seen a deeply hypnotized subject behave that way, and read it as an effort to convince the examiner.
The paper listed further problems. Steve began as a passive figure and grew aggressive and profane over about two months, a change the authors called "incompatible with the pre-existence of a distinct, well-integrated alter personality." Investigators located no one who had seen any sign of other personalities or sudden shifts in Bianchi’s earlier life. The name Steve Walker turned out to belong to a real psychologist, who had answered a classified ad Bianchi placed in May 1978; Bianchi had then written to schools in that man’s name to obtain diplomas, which were altered to show his own name. Orne concluded that "Mr. Bianchi was simulating a multiple personality." The panel of six, according to HistoryLink, split three ways: two members believed in the multiple personalities and thought him not competent, two believed he was faking, and two could not be sure.
The matter was settled by a plea bargain, not by the experts. In October 1979 Bianchi pleaded guilty to the two Bellingham murders and to five murders in Los Angeles County. Judge Kurtz sentenced him on October 19 to two consecutive life terms in Washington, and Judge William B. Keen imposed five life terms for murder, a life term for conspiracy and five years on a sex-offense count, all concurrent, on October 22. He was to testify against Buono. He did not do so cleanly. Buono’s preliminary hearing lasted ten months, then the longest in Los Angeles County history, and Bianchi used his testimony to make contradictory statements that weakened the case. In July 1981 the district attorney moved to dismiss all ten murder charges against Buono, and Judge Ronald M. George refused. Pretrial hearings began on November 2, 1981, and Judge George ruled that Bianchi had faked both his hypnosis and his multiple personalities and that his testimony was admissible. Buono was convicted of nine of the ten murders in 1983.
After the plea, the Orne paper notes, Bianchi stopped keeping the diary he had kept during the psychiatric evaluations and blamed the Bellingham killings on a man who had died in an accident after the murders. Police established that the man had not been involved and that Bianchi knew of his death. That was a third attempt at an accomplice, and the least durable: the man was dead and could not answer.
Bianchi, who legally took the name Anthony D’Amato in 2023, was refused parole in California in August 2010 and again in July 2025. On July 14, 2025, the Washington board also declined release and added 120 months to his minimum term. The state’s records showed him in custody at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla as of October 22, 2026.
Edward Wayne Edwards was a man with a long record who built a second career as a reformed speaker. He had been a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list in the 1960s, and after his parole he toured giving talks to young people about avoiding crime; his book carried the message "Don’t be a crime victim. Be a crime stopper," the Associated Press reported. In July 2009, at 76, he was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky, for the 1980 killings of two 19-year-olds from Jefferson County, Wisconsin, Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, after DNA from Kelly Drew’s clothing matched a sample he gave that month.
At first he said nothing of the kind. He denied the Wisconsin killings for nine months, according to the Summit County prosecutor’s office. Then, as the case moved toward trial, he gave investigators another account, recorded in the criminal complaint as reported by the Daily Jefferson County Union. He said he had been nearby when the couple were killed, that he had been with Kelly Drew in a field outside the dance hall, and that he had seen two or three other men assault the couple. He said he did nothing to help and did not report it because he did not want to be involved. No such men were ever identified.
The account did not survive his own decisions. His trial was set for June 14, 2010. On June 9 he pleaded guilty in the Hack and Drew case. On June 11 he pleaded guilty in Summit County, Ohio, to the 1977 murders of William "Billy" Lavaco, 21, and Judith "Judy" Straub, 18, and on June 21 a Wisconsin judge, William F. Hue, sentenced him to two life terms for the 1980 deaths. In mid-June he told the Associated Press that he had also killed his foster son, Dannie Boy Edwards, in 1996, and that he wanted to be executed. On March 8, 2011, a three-judge panel in Geauga County, Ohio, gave him that sentence, with an execution date of August 31, 2011. In every plea he took responsibility himself; the men in the field stayed where he had put them, in a sentence in a complaint.
Anthony Kirkland had already served 16 years for a 1987 killing when he came to the attention of Cincinnati police again. He pleaded guilty in 1987 to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated arson in the death of Leola Douglas, 27, and was paroled in 2003. Between 2006 and 2009, two women and two girls died in Cincinnati: Casonya Crawford, 14, Mary Jo Newton, 45, Kimya Rolison, and Esme Kenney, 13. He was arrested on March 7 or 8, 2009, depending on the account. A twelve-count Hamilton County indictment followed on March 17, 2009.
His account of the girl’s death moved in stages, as the Supreme Court of Ohio recorded it. At first he said he did not know why he had been arrested and assumed it was about old warrants. He admitted meeting her, said there had been a confrontation, but that he had left her alive. Told that she was dead, he said he could not remember, then again that she had been alive when he left. Then he blamed a man he called Pedro. Pressed, he admitted he had known she was dead. He still would not say directly that he had killed her; she died, he said, "because of my hatred." The man called Pedro is identified in the record by a first name only. The jury at each trial saw Kirkland’s videotaped interviews.
In a recording played at his 2018 resentencing he gave a reason that left no room for anyone else. He said he had flown into a rage when he saw, in Esme’s face, the mother of his son. "It was a combination of a lot of things," he told the detective, naming his sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
A jury convicted him on March 12, 2010, of aggravated murder, with other charges, in the cases of Casonya Crawford and Esme Kenney; he had pleaded guilty to the murder charges in the Newton and Rolison cases. He was sentenced to death, and the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed in 2014. In 2016 the sentences were vacated, and after a second sentencing hearing a jury recommended death on August 6, 2018, after a little more than two hours of deliberation. Judge Patrick Dinkelacker imposed the sentences on August 28, 2018. Kirkland told the court that he could not explain "my atrocious acts." On August 18, 2020, the Supreme Court of Ohio affirmed again, writing that he "failed to identify any significant error; he was resentenced in a fundamentally fair proceeding." The state’s corrections record, checked October 25, 2026, shows him at the Ohio State Penitentiary; no execution has taken place.
Cody Legebokoff, of Fort St. James, British Columbia, was 20 when he was arrested on November 27, 2010. He was convicted in September 2014 of the first-degree murders of Jill Stuchenko, 35, Natasha Montgomery, 23, Cynthia Maas, 35, and Loren Leslie, 15, in and near Prince George. The charges for the three women followed those for the girl: he was charged with three more murders in October 2011, while in custody. The trial opened on June 2, 2014. The Crown called 93 witnesses and closed its case on August 1.
The defense came late and in his own voice. On August 26, 2014, Legebokoff took the stand. He said he had been "involved" in the deaths of the three women, but that the killings were carried out by a drug dealer and two other men, whom he called only X, Y and Z. He denied killing Loren Leslie. He refused to name X, Y or Z, saying he did not want to go to prison known as a "rat."
Under cross-examination the next day, the Crown prosecutor, Joseph Temple, put it to him that he was the killer and that X, Y and Z were invented. "No, I did not," Legebokoff answered. Temple pointed to differences between his account and the physical evidence. Legebokoff agreed he had not told police the truth after his arrest, and that the story he had told on the night of his arrest, about a friend who had been poaching a deer, was false. In each story, Temple said, the main actor, Mr. X or the friend from the poaching story, had "vanished into the night." The judge, Justice Glen Parrett, said an application to find Legebokoff in contempt of court for refusing to name the three men would be heard at the end of the trial.
In his closing argument Temple told jurors that the X, Y and Z accounts were "completely and utterly improbable" and "just fabrication." He also argued that even if the other men existed, Legebokoff would still be guilty of first-degree murder, because by his own account he knew of the plan: "you have made yourself a party to a planned and deliberate murder." His own lawyer asked the jury for verdicts of second-degree murder, saying that Legebokoff admitted involvement in all four deaths but had not acted in a planned and deliberate way. The jury returned four verdicts of guilty of first-degree murder on September 11, 2014.
On September 16, 2014, Justice Parrett sentenced him to life imprisonment on each count, concurrent, with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. Of the X, Y and Z account he said: "Nothing is ever his fault. There is no evidence." The British Columbia Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on September 26, 2016, and the Supreme Court of Canada refused leave to appeal on February 16, 2017. X, Y and Z never acquired names.
Set side by side, the seven accounts share little except their timing. Several arrived when the case against the man was already strong: Gary named other men once the New York cases were tied to him, Edwards produced his field only after DNA matched him, and Legebokoff waited until the Crown had closed its case. Two arrived in the interview room under pressure, Heirens’s "George" and Kirkland’s "Pedro," and both dissolved when the questioning moved on. One, Bianchi’s, was staged for experts with training in hypnosis and failed in front of one of them. One, Berkowitz’s, was a voice and then, years later, a group, and the group has never been put in front of a court.
Where a court spoke, it was blunt. The Eleventh Circuit observed that nothing but Gary’s own statements supported what he said about other men; Justice Parrett told Legebokoff there was no evidence; Judge George ruled that Bianchi had faked. In none of these cases did a person emerge to be charged on the strength of the claim.
• 1946: William Heirens, 17, questioned for days in Chicago; blames "George" under questioning; pleads guilty September 4 to three murders.
• April 14, 1970: Nellie Farmer, 85, killed in Albany, New York; Carlton Gary says another man killed her; that man is tried and acquitted; Gary is convicted of robbery.
• July 1976 to July 1977: eight incidents in New York City; six deaths. August 10, 1977: David Berkowitz arrested.
• January 2, 1977: a woman survives a burglary assault in Syracuse; Gary, in possession of her watch two days later, blames D.H.
• May 8, 1978: Berkowitz pleads guilty to six counts of second-degree murder; sentenced June 12.
• January 12, 1979: Kenneth Bianchi arrested in Bellingham.
• March 21, 1979: "Steve" appears under hypnosis.
• May 27, 1979: Martin Orne first meets "Steve"; "Billy" appears soon after.
• October 1979: Bianchi pleads guilty to seven murders; sentenced October 19 and October 22.
• November 2, 1981: pretrial hearings open in the Buono case; Judge Ronald M. George rules that Bianchi faked his hypnosis and multiple personalities.
• 1983: Angelo Buono convicted of nine murders.
• August 1986: Gary convicted; sentenced to death August 27.
• March 2009: Anthony Kirkland blames "Pedro" in a police interview; indicted March 17.
• July 2009: Edward Wayne Edwards arrested in Louisville, Kentucky.
• June 2010: Edwards pleads guilty in Wisconsin and Ohio; sentenced June 21 in Wisconsin.
• August 26, 2014: Cody Legebokoff testifies about X, Y and Z; convicted September 11; sentenced September 16.
• March 15, 2018: Gary executed.
• August 18, 2020: Supreme Court of Ohio affirms Kirkland’s death sentences.
• May 2024: Berkowitz refused parole for the twelfth time.
• July 14, 2025: Washington board declines Bianchi’s release and adds 120 months to his minimum term.