On August 9, 1982, the morning his trial was to begin in Houston, Coral Eugene Watts sat across from Ira Jones, an assistant district attorney for Harris County, and listened to a question about his own child. "Coral, you’ve got a daughter," Jones said. "If your daughter was missing, wouldn’t you want to know what happened to her?" Watts said yes. The bargain that followed would shape Texas prisons, parole boards and the lives of more than a dozen families for the next quarter century.
The prosecutors who make such deals are not naive. They know they are trading something the public wants, a murder conviction and sometimes a death sentence, for something only the defendant can supply: a name, a date, an account of the last hours of a life. The families who back them are rarely naive either. Most of them have lived for years without knowing whether a daughter or sister is alive, and they have come to measure justice partly in answers. What each side surrendered, and whether the answers were worth the price, varied enormously from one courtroom to the next.
The arrangement that Gerald Eugene Stano’s lawyer struck in Volusia County, Florida, set the pattern for much of what came later, and it was struck for a plain reason. The lawyer, Jacobson, wanted to keep his client out of the electric chair. In May 1980 he went to the prosecutor, Larry Nixon, and the two men reached terms. Stano would receive use immunity for the murders he confessed to before he entered a guilty plea, so long as the deaths fell within Florida’s Seventh Judicial Circuit, which takes in Volusia, Flagler, Putnam and St. Johns counties. Killings outside the circuit were not covered, and Jacobson told Stano so.
In March 1981 Stano gave four more confessions to detectives in Daytona Beach, one of them concerning a woman no one had identified. On September 2, 1981, he stood before Judge Foxman in the Circuit Court for Volusia County and pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Mary Carol Maher, Toni Van Haddocks and Nancy Heard. Under the agreement he received three life terms, and three other murder counts, for Ramona Neal, Linda Hamilton and the unidentified woman, were dismissed. A later defense brief to the Florida Supreme Court recorded that Foxman cited Stano’s cooperation in solving the crimes and in letting families stop wondering about young women who had been missing for so long.
The deal was generous, and its limits mattered. Jacobson warned Stano not to confess to anything else without a grant of immunity; the federal district court later concluded that the lawyer knew his client was responsible for more than the six Volusia deaths. Stano kept talking anyway. He confessed to a detective from Brevard County in August 1982 about Cathy Lee Scharf and Sandra DuBose, and then, according to the Brevard prosecutor’s later testimony, offered to plead guilty to both in exchange for a promise of life imprisonment. That offer was refused. A Brevard jury convicted him in the Scharf case in 1983, and that conviction carried him to execution. In March 1983, in Bradford County, he pleaded guilty to three more first-degree murders and received three more life sentences.
His later claim that he had pleaded falsely went nowhere. On January 2, 1991, the full Eleventh Circuit held that "the voluntariness of Stano’s pleas is beyond question." The court’s summary of his position was blunt: "Stano gambled and lost; he cannot challenge his election to plead guilty retrospectively." He was executed at Florida State Prison in Starke on March 23, 1998, at 46. In a written statement released afterward he wrote, "I confessed to crimes I did not commit." Crow, the Daytona Beach detective who took most of his confessions and later became the city’s police chief, told the Daytona Beach News-Journal in 2019 that he believed Stano might have killed as many as 88 people. The truth of the Volusia bargain sat somewhere between those two statements, and no court ever had to locate it.
Watts’s case was harder, because the State of Texas had almost nothing. It could prove the assault on two roommates that ended with his arrest in May 1982. It could not prove a single murder. District Attorney John Holmes told reporters his office had "not a stitch of evidence" in the killings. What it wanted, he said, was the women’s bodies and a sentence equal to life.
The agreement gave Watts immunity from murder prosecution for the killings he confessed to, in exchange for a guilty plea to burglary with intent to commit murder and a sentence of 60 years. Judge Douglas Shaver accepted it because there was no evidence on which to convict Watts of murder and because investigators needed his help. Shaver, a former prosecutor himself, said he would recommend that Watts never be paroled. "Sad to say," the judge said, 60 years was the most the evidence allowed. Jones acknowledged that people wanted Watts to "burn in hell," but said the answers meant a great deal to the families. The Dallas Observer later put the total of his confessions at 13 murders.
The deal stopped at the state line. Watts offered to confess to 22 killings in Michigan if he received the same immunity there, The Michigan Daily reported in August 1982. Michigan refused. The Washtenaw County prosecutor, William Delhey, said a Texas sentence that could be parolable after 20 years was not long enough to justify immunity, though he would give a deal favorable consideration if the full 60 years could be guaranteed. Paul Bunten, a Michigan detective who had followed Watts for years, put the refusal more simply: you do not give immunity to someone who has committed murder.
Shaver tried to fence the sentence in. On September 3, 1982, he entered a finding that a deadly weapon had been used, which under Texas law limited the good-time credit Watts could earn. In 1989, after a ruling by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on notice of such findings, the finding was deleted. Watts became, in law, a nonviolent offender, and the release date began to approach. By the early 2000s it had a month attached to it: 2006.
The families had backed the 1982 plea bargain because they wanted to know what had happened to their daughters, sisters and wives. Now they organized against its consequences. Laura Allen, whose daughter Anna Ledet was among the women Watts confessed to killing, had long before written to him to say she forgave him. "I just want him to stay in prison," she said. Joe Tilley, whose daughter Linda was another, said: "Forgiveness cannot be bestowed when forgiveness is not sought."
Michigan, which had refused the deal in 1982, ended the problem. An Oakland County jury convicted Watts on November 17, 2004, of the first-degree murder of Helen Dutcher in Ferndale in 1979, and he received a life sentence. He was convicted in Kalamazoo in 2007 of the 1974 murder of Gloria Steele and died in custody that September. The Texas bargain had bought answers. It had not bought a life sentence, and only the prosecutors who declined it in 1982 were able to supply one.
A smaller version of the same transaction played out in Windsor County, Vermont. Gary Lee Schaefer, a Navy veteran and auto mechanic from Springfield, was arrested in April 1983 in the death of Catherine Richards, an 11-year-old girl known as Katy. Two other Springfield girls had died in the previous four years, Sherri Nastasia, 13, in 1979, and Theresa Fenton, 12, in 1981. William Bos, the Windsor County prosecutor, made the legal problem plain at the time: "You can’t charge a man with murder because it’s similar to another murder."
Schaefer never faced a jury in the Richards case. He pleaded no contest and was convicted of her murder, with other charges, and sentenced to 30 years to life. The plea agreement brought a confession in the Fenton case. Under it, the Bennington Banner reported, he admitted killing Theresa Fenton; the Chester Telegraph reported that he made the admission after his sentencing and had been granted immunity. He was never charged with her death.
The Nastasia case ran the other way. Schaefer later confessed to a Vermont State Police detective that he had killed Sherri Nastasia, and in 1985 prosecutors dropped a first-degree murder charge after a judge ruled that the confession was improper evidence because it had been obtained under hypnosis, VTDigger reported, citing the Brattleboro Reformer. VTDigger summed up his record in 2023 in one sentence: he "pleaded no contest to one murder, confessed to another one and was a suspect in a third, all involving girls from Springfield."
Vermont sent him to the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville in May 1985, under the Interstate Corrections Compact. He served his minimum term but was never eligible for release, a Department of Corrections spokesperson said, because he had not completed the treatment programs the state required. He died in custody on November 26, 2023, at 72. The confession to the Fenton killing remained what the agreement had made it: an admission that closed a question and could never be tried.
Not every bargain for a name produces one. In 1981 Howard County detectives in Maryland interviewed Charles William Davis Jr., already serving life for the murders of three young women, about the 1975 death of Roseann Sturtz, a 20-year-old who went by Ann. The same year the county’s state’s attorney, William R. Hymes, signed a letter granting Davis transactional immunity on the condition that he cooperated fully and told what he knew, The Baltimore Banner reported. Shown her high school photograph, Davis did not identify her. The case stayed open. Over time the tape of the interview and the immunity letter were misplaced.
They resurfaced through a term paper. In the fall of 2023 Kiliane Gateau, a senior in a cold case class at Loyola University Maryland, chose the Sturtz case and came upon newspaper reports about Davis’s convictions that resembled it. Cpl. Wade Zufall, who runs the Howard County cold case unit, then located the 1970s files, among them an unmarked cassette holding the 1981 interview and the prosecutor’s letter. In 2024 Zufall showed Davis a different photograph of Sturtz, taken in July 1975, a month before she was reported missing. "She still had the scar," Davis said, according to Zufall. He then confessed to killing her.
The immunity held. On March 11, 2025, State’s Attorney Rich Gibson reaffirmed the promise Hymes had made 44 years earlier, and police announced that the case had been exceptionally cleared. "While this outcome does not provide specific justice for the killing of Ms Sturtz," Gibson said, according to WMAR-2 News. Davis, then in his 70s, would remain in prison on his existing sentences. The family’s statement said they could "finally put to rest the answers we never had." Another line, reported by WMAR, was simpler: "We just wanted Roseann to rest in peace, and now she can." The family learned the actual date of her death in November 2024. It had cost them nothing to obtain except the possibility of a trial that, by then, no one was seeking.
The largest of these bargains was made in Seattle’s King County, and the prosecutor who made it had sworn never to make one like it. Norm Maleng’s office had a policy against trading away the death penalty in plea negotiations. When Gary Ridgway’s lawyers proposed in 2003 that he would account for the killings and help investigators recover the women still missing if the state did not seek his execution, Maleng refused at first and then spent weeks on the question.
He accepted. The plea agreement, signed on June 13, 2003, required Ridgway to account truthfully for his killings and to plead guilty to every murder he had committed in the county, including any that came to light later. If he refused to plead to a later case, he could face the death penalty for it. He would serve life without release. Over the following months he sat for interviews with detectives and prosecutors that ran to hundreds of hours. On November 5, 2003, he pleaded guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder, HistoryLink recorded.
Maleng, whose own daughter had died in an accident in 1989, told the Associated Press afterward that he felt at peace with the decision. "I know the greatest loss anybody can sustain is for a parent to lose a child," he said. Some relatives disagreed strongly, and so did some supporters of capital punishment, who argued that the deal would make it harder to seek death against men who had killed fewer people.
The clause about later cases proved its value. In February 2011 Ridgway pleaded guilty to a 49th count, in the death of Becky Marrero, without facing a death sentence, KOMO News reported; her family spoke publicly that day about the long wait. Four of the 2003 counts had been entered for women whose names were unknown. Genetic genealogy and new DNA work named them one by one: Sandra Majors in 2012, Wendy Stephens, a 14-year-old from Denver, in 2021, Lori Anne Razpotnik in December 2023, and Tammie Liles, 16, of Everett, in January 2024. With that last identification, CBS News reported, no unidentified victim connected to the case was left. In September 2024 detectives took Ridgway back to King County to look for women never recovered; in December 2025 KIRO Newsradio reported court documents showing that nothing had come of the trips, and that some investigators believed he had invented the locations.
Roger Kibbe’s bargain in San Joaquin County, California, was written with unusual precision. Kibbe, a furniture maker from Citrus Heights, was already in prison for the 1987 murder of Darcie Frackenpohl, 17, when DNA and trace evidence tied him to older killings of women in Northern California. Prosecutors in San Joaquin, Sacramento and Napa counties agreed that San Joaquin would lead the case.
They decided not to seek death. The Lodi News-Sentinel reported their reasons: his age, the cost of a capital trial with witnesses long scattered, and the slow pace of executions in California, which made it very likely he would die in prison before any death sentence was carried out. On a Tuesday in September 2009, at 70, Kibbe said "guilty" six times as the judge read each name and each charge. The six counts of first-degree murder covered Lou Ellen Burleigh, Lora Heedick, Barbara Ann Scott, Stephanie Brown, Charmaine Sabrah and Katherine Kelly Quinones.
The price of the deal was spelled out. Kibbe had to cooperate with law enforcement, be interviewed by a psychologist, take a polygraph examination and, possibly, take investigators to the places where the crimes occurred. In return he would face no further charges if he told the truth. If a lie came to light before sentencing, the agreement was void. "It’s a fair resolution to Mr. Kibbe and to the victims' families, who don’t have to be traumatized by a trial," said Deputy Public Defender Miriam Lyell. The prosecutor, Mayo, said: "This is just an opportunity for him to tell us what he did with his life."
At sentencing in Stockton, Charmaine Sabrah’s mother told the court she had forgiven him, the Ceres Courier reported. Lou Ellen Burleigh, missing since 1977, was the case the cooperation clause was meant to resolve, and it failed to. Under the agreement Kibbe was to help investigators account for her, and he could not. The forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz interviewed him under the same terms. In June 2011 a DNA laboratory confirmed her identity, after independent work by a Napa County sheriff’s deputy, Michael Bartlett, CBS San Francisco reported. Kibbe was killed in his cell at Mule Creek State Prison on February 28, 2021, at 81.
Samuel Little’s confessions came late in a long life and were bought with the promise that the state would not kill him. In 2018 a Texas Ranger, James Holland, began interviewing Little about the 1994 death of Denise Christie Brothers in Odessa. Little pleaded guilty to her murder in Ector County in December 2018 and received a life term. In Tallahassee, the state attorney, Jack Campbell, later said he had waived the death penalty in the fall of 2018 so that Little would talk to state investigators, WCTV reported.
The talking produced a catalogue. Little drew portraits of the women from memory, often with rough dates and places. On October 6, 2019, the FBI announced that it considered all 93 of his confessions credible and that 50 had been verified, and released 30 of the portraits in the hope that someone would recognize a face. "We want to give these women their names back," an FBI spokesperson said earlier that year.
Some jurisdictions turned the confessions into convictions. On August 23, 2019, Little appeared by video from a California prison at two Ohio hearings. In Cuyahoga County he pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated murder in the deaths of Mary Jo Peyton and Rose Evans and received two consecutive life terms, the prosecutor’s office announced. In Hamilton County he pleaded guilty to the 1981 killing of Anna Stewart and to that of a woman never identified, and received two consecutive terms of 15 years to life. His lawyer, Timothy McKenna, said Little wanted to make things as right as he could by cooperating. The prosecutor, Joe Deters, said the terms were made consecutive so that if any future governor shortened the sentence, the county could bring him back. Stewart’s daughter and sister did not attend, and Deters said they were grateful.
Little died in custody on December 30, 2020, at 80. A year later, on December 1, 2021, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the FBI and the Justice Department released new details on 31 of his confessions that had still not been matched to anyone, spread across nine states. More than 60 had been matched by then. "It’s critical that anyone with information comes forward, as time is running out," said Steven McCraw, the department’s director. The bargain had been struck in exchange for names, and many of the names were still missing.
Richard Cottingham’s confessions came in installments, and each one had terms. Convicted in the early 1980s of five murders in New Jersey and New York City, he spent decades in prison before a Bergen County detective, Robert Anzilotti, began drawing admissions from him one case at a time. Alan Grieco, a retired Bergen County chief of detectives, said Cottingham had "played games" with investigators for years, trading information for better treatment in prison. "We had nothing, other than what he would tell us," Grieco said.
On April 27, 2021, at 74, Cottingham pleaded guilty in Bergen County to the 1974 murders of Mary Ann Pryor, 17, and Lorraine Marie Kelly, 16, of North Bergen. Under the plea agreement he was expected to receive two life terms, to run concurrently with the sentences he was already serving, CBS New York reported. His lawyer, John Bruno, said Cottingham had confessed to bring the families closure and to keep a promise to Anzilotti, who was days from retirement. Mary Ann Pryor’s sister watched the hearing and said she had waited nearly 50 years for answers. The historian Peter Vronsky later told Rolling Stone that the 2021 confessions were part of an arrangement that included the guilty pleas; Anzilotti disputed that account. Cottingham told the magazine he had "always planned on confessing."
The Nassau County bargain of December 5, 2022, was explicit. Cottingham pleaded guilty in Mineola to the 1968 second-degree murder of Diane Cusick, a 23-year-old dance teacher, and as part of the plea admitted four more Long Island killings: those of Mary Beth Heinz, Laverne Moye, Sheila Heiman and Maria Emerita Rosado Nieves. In exchange, the district attorney, Anne Donnelly, agreed not to prosecute them. He received 25 years to life, to run after his existing sentence. Donnelly said investigators had kept the details of the other cases from him so that his statements could be tested. "We did not want a scenario where a serial killer claimed credit for a murder he did not commit," she said.
The families spoke to the press afterward. Darlene Altman, Diane Cusick’s daughter, who has no memories of her mother, said: "I never thought I would see this day, but all these people got justice for my mom." Randi Childs, Sheila Heiman’s daughter, said her family had lived for decades without hope of learning who had killed her mother. John Moye, Laverne Moye’s son, said that "today the sun shines brightly because justice has been served."
The arrangements continued. In January 2026 the Fair Lawn, New Jersey, police announced that Cottingham, then 79 and in failing health, had admitted the 1965 killing of Alys Eberhardt, an 18-year-old nursing student. Under earlier agreements with prosecutors he was not charged, and the department closed the case, ABC7 New York reported. As of January 2026 he was serving life sentences at South Woods State Prison in Bridgeton.
Read together, the cases show how differently the same bargain can come out. Stano’s prosecutors traded dismissed counts for confessions that he later disowned. Texas traded murder prosecutions for answers and very nearly released the man who gave them. Vermont took a no contest plea and a confession that could never be tried. Maryland’s immunity letter sat unused in a box for four decades and then delivered a name to a family who had waited 49 years, on the condition that no one would ever be charged.
The later deals were written with more care. King County kept the death penalty in reserve for any killing Ridgway left out, and used it in 2011. San Joaquin County made Kibbe’s agreement void on a lie and his cooperation a condition of sentence. Hamilton County stacked Little’s terms so that a future governor could not quietly shorten them. Nassau County withheld facts so that Cottingham could not invent his way into a confession. In each, the prosecutor gave up a trial and the defendant gave up silence, and the families received the one thing neither side could otherwise provide. Some of them said it was enough. Others, like Joe Tilley in Houston, said it could not be.
• May 1980: Gerald Stano’s lawyer and the Volusia County prosecutor agree on use immunity for confessed killings in the Seventh Judicial Circuit.
• 1981: Howard County, Maryland, grants Charles William Davis Jr. transactional immunity in the Roseann Sturtz case.
• September 2, 1981: Stano pleads guilty in Volusia County to three counts of first-degree murder; three other counts are dismissed.
• August 9, 1982: Coral Eugene Watts agrees in Houston to confess in exchange for immunity from murder prosecution; Michigan declines a similar offer.
• September 3, 1982: Watts is sentenced to 60 years for burglary with intent to commit murder.
• March 8, 1983: Stano pleads guilty in Bradford County to three counts of first-degree murder.
• 1983 or 1984: Gary Lee Schaefer pleads no contest in the Catherine Richards case and, under the agreement, confesses to the Theresa Fenton killing.
• 1985: The murder charge against Schaefer in Sherri Nastasia’s death is dropped.
• 1989: The deadly weapon finding in Watts’s sentence is deleted.
• March 23, 1998: Stano is executed.
• June 13, 2003: Gary Ridgway’s plea agreement is signed in King County, Washington.
• November 5, 2003: Ridgway pleads guilty to 48 counts of aggravated first-degree murder.
• November 17, 2004: Watts is convicted in Oakland County, Michigan, of the murder of Helen Dutcher.
• September 2007: Watts dies in custody.
• September 2009: Roger Kibbe pleads guilty in San Joaquin County to six counts of first-degree murder.
• February 2011: Ridgway pleads guilty to a 49th count.
• June 2011: Lou Ellen Burleigh is identified.
• December 2018: Samuel Little pleads guilty in Ector County, Texas.
• August 23, 2019: Little pleads guilty in Cuyahoga and Hamilton counties, Ohio.
• October 6, 2019: The FBI calls all 93 of Little’s confessions credible.
• December 30, 2020: Little dies in custody.
• February 28, 2021: Kibbe is killed in custody.
• April 27, 2021: Richard Cottingham pleads guilty in Bergen County to the murders of Mary Ann Pryor and Lorraine Marie Kelly.
• December 1, 2021: Texas and federal authorities release details of 31 unmatched Little confessions.
• December 5, 2022: Cottingham pleads guilty in Nassau County to the murder of Diane Cusick and admits four more killings under a non-prosecution agreement.
• November 26, 2023: Schaefer dies in custody in Kentucky.
• January 2024: Tammie Liles, the last unidentified victim in the Ridgway pleas, is identified.
• 2024: Davis confesses to the Sturtz killing.
• March 11, 2025: Howard County announces the Sturtz case closed and reaffirms Davis’s immunity.
• January 2026: Cottingham admits the 1965 killing of Alys Eberhardt and is not charged.