Nineteen entries in this archive record the same event from the killer's side: before he was caught, somebody else was convicted of what he had done.
The wrongful convictions article on this site tells these stories from the other end, through the people who were imprisoned. Read from the killer's entry instead, a different thing becomes visible. In almost every case the true offender was still at liberty and still killing while the wrong man served his sentence.
Nie Shubin was shot in China in 1995, ten months after his arrest, for the rape and murder of Kang Juhua. Wang Shujin confessed to that killing in 2005. The courts refused to accept the confession, convicted Wang of three other murders, and executed him in 2013. Nie's conviction was quashed in 2016. Nobody now stands convicted of Kang Juhua's death. Huugjilt was shot at eighteen for a killing Zhao Zhihong confessed to in 2005; the authorities did nothing for nine years, and the exoneration came eighteen years after the execution.
Andrei Chikatilo's first murder, of nine-year-old Yelena Zakotnova in 1978, was attributed to another man who was executed for it. Chikatilo killed for another twelve years.
The American cases follow one pattern, and it is DNA that ends them.
Chester Turner killed women in South Los Angeles while a man with an intellectual disability served eleven years for three of them. Eddie Lee Mosley is responsible for murders that two other men were convicted of, one died of cancer on death row after being refused testing, the other confessed under questioning and served twenty-two years. Gerald Parker was identified in 1996 when California ran its unsolved cases against the offender database; another man had already served seventeen years for one of the killings. Altemio Sanchez went on attacking women in Buffalo throughout the twenty-two years Anthony Capozzi served for two of the rapes. Walter Ellis was identified by the DNA that exonerated Chaunte Ott, who had served thirteen years. Timothy Spencer's conviction came after David Vasquez had already been convicted of one of the murders.
Matthew Macon's case ended differently. When he was arrested, the earlier conviction of Claude McCollum was reviewed, and surveillance footage was found that placed McCollum elsewhere at the time. The footage had been available throughout.
Three of the nineteen turn on the killer volunteering it, which is not a safeguard but an accident.
Keith Jesperson began writing anonymous confessions signed with a smiley face after another couple were wrongly convicted of his first murder and served four years for it, he wanted the credit. Tommy Lynn Sells's confession exonerated a woman who had been convicted of murdering her own son. John Fautenberry, after his arrest, confessed to a 1984 murder for which another man had already been convicted.
Edward Tenney's is the cleanest administrative example: another man had been convicted of the same murder, and that conviction was vacated on the prosecution's own motion once Tenney was charged. Eric Edgar Cooke had two other men convicted of murders he committed, one of whom, Darryl Beamish, waited until 2005 for his conviction to be quashed. Alexander Bychkov and Dallen Bounds each have an entry recording the same sentence in different words: another man had already been convicted. Hubert Geralds was sentenced to death in 1997 and one of his convictions was later vacated when another man's DNA matched, so the archive holds him on both sides of this pattern at once. Robert Zarinsky, convicted of one murder and acquitted in later trials over two other deaths, is recorded in connection with the shooting of a police officer for which another man had already been convicted.
Set the nineteen together and the cost is not only to the person who was imprisoned.
In every one of these cases, a conviction closed an investigation. Chikatilo killed for twelve more years, Sanchez for twenty-two, Turner and Mosley for the length of the sentences other men were serving. The wrong conviction did not merely take one person's liberty. It told the police the case was finished, and the man who had actually done it read that in the newspaper along with everyone else.