In the spring of 1984, while a jury in San Angelo, Texas, listened to Henry Lee Lucas tell a sheriff on tape that he had killed 360 people, detectives from across the United States were waiting their turn to see him in a county jail in Georgetown. They came with case files. Agencies that could not spare a man mailed in their questions instead, and at the peak, an investigator later told the Associated Press, Lucas was confessing to 70 or 80 killings a day by post. By April 1985 police had closed 210 homicides on his word. Most of those confessions were false, and every case closed on one of them was a case in which no one went on looking for the person who did it.
Serial investigations run on time, and time is the thing a false lead takes. A tip that sounds right, a confession that fits the headlines, a clairvoyant with a confident description, a letter from someone who claims to be the killer: each draws detectives away from the work that might have ended the series. Some of these detours were harmless. Others sent innocent people to prison while the real offender kept going. The cases that follow, from Texas to Mashhad, show how the detours began and what they cost.
Lucas was arrested in Montague County, Texas, on June 11, 1983, on a charge of illegal possession of a pistol by an ex-convict. He had served time in Michigan for the 1960 second-degree murder of his mother. Within days he admitted killing two people that local officers already suspected him of killing: Becky Powell, 15, his young traveling companion, and Kate Rich, an elderly widow in Ringgold. Those cases held. He pleaded guilty to murdering Rich on September 30, 1983, and was sentenced to 75 years, and in November a Denton County jury convicted him of murdering Powell and gave him life. ABC News reported at his death that physical evidence tied him to those two murders and no others.
What came after was something else. Eleven days after his arrest his count stood at 77, the Associated Press reported. When he was sentenced in Denton he claimed 165. The Texas Rangers and Sheriff Jim Boutwell of Williamson County set up a task force to help other agencies clear their books, and Lucas was moved to the jail in Georgetown, where visiting officers were given appointments to interview him. By early 1984 he was claiming something near 600 killings in 26 states and Canada.
Rod Ponton, who later represented him, said the Rangers let him "review the case file the day before the investigator would come to town." The officers who fed him that information then heard it back as a confession.
The case that came closest to costing a life was the one Texas tried as a capital murder. On Halloween 1979 a young woman was killed in Williamson County. No one claimed her, and for 40 years she was known only by the orange socks she wore. Lucas confessed to her death in a statement begun on June 22, 1983, and a San Angelo jury convicted him of capital murder in April 1984 and sentenced him to death. The conviction rested mainly on his confessions, the federal appeals court later said. His defense had offered payroll records showing that he was working on a roofing job near Jacksonville, Florida, at the time.
In April 1985 the Dallas Times Herald, in reporting by Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Henderson, set out the records that showed Lucas in other states on the days of killings he had confessed to. One set of receipts showed him selling blood in one state on the day of a killing in another, the Dallas Observer later recounted. Lucas told the paper that all but three of his confessions were false. On April 15, 1985, Attorney General Jim Mattox said his office doubted that Lucas had committed all the killings he claimed. "There’s no evidence there with the exception of his own confessions," Mattox said. "I know that there is substantial desire among law enforcement people to clear cases. And sometimes, cases are cleared even when it’s not justified."
The doubts had come partly from the families. A couple in Lubbock had been told in 1984 that Lucas confessed to the 1975 killing of their 18-year-old daughter. They said his account was wrong on nearly every point, and they worked with reporters to show it, the AP reported. In Waco, the McLennan County district attorney, Vic Feazell, had a prime suspect in one case whom his office believed was close to confessing until Lucas claimed the killing, D Magazine wrote. The false confession had not only cleared a case. It had shielded a suspect.
The Attorney General’s report, published in April 1986, concluded that Lucas had perpetrated a massive hoax, drawing much of his information from officers who had shown him reports and photographs, Amnesty International summarized. On the Orange Socks case it cited reliable alibi evidence placing him in Jacksonville. The courts nonetheless upheld the conviction through every appeal. In June 1998 the Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended commutation, and Governor George W. Bush commuted the death sentence to life, the only death sentence he commuted as governor. Lucas died in custody in March 2001. In August 2019 the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office identified the woman as Debra Jackson, 23, of Abilene. "We haven’t solved the case," the sheriff said.
Some of the damage surfaced decades later. Lucas confessed in 1983 to the killing of Laura Marie Purchase of Houston and was convicted of her murder in 1986. In 2008 DNA testing excluded him and his former companion, Ottis Toole. In May 2021, after genealogy work on the DNA, Montgomery County authorities charged a 75-year-old Kansas man with capital murder, CBS Texas reported; he died in jail that July before any trial, the Patch reported. Thirty-eight years separate the killing and that charge. For most of them the case was officially solved.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, Lucas confessed in 1984 to killing a store clerk on a day he was reported to have been in Jacksonville; another man, S.S., had already been convicted of that killing and was later granted a new trial. Feazell said in 2019 that the real killers were being identified, and that none of them was Lucas.
The hoax even produced its own hoaxer. In 1994 a woman came forward claiming to be Becky Powell, alive. She passed a polygraph, and Lucas said he believed her. She turned out to be a 40-year-old woman from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, who admitted following a story Lucas had supplied in letters, the Dallas Observer reported. By 1996 Lucas was telling the Roanoke Times he had killed no one at all, his mother included.
Ottis Toole was a Jacksonville drifter and handyman, and in April 1984 a jury there convicted him of first-degree felony murder in the death of George Sonnenberg, 64, who died after a fire set on January 4, 1982. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction in November 1985 and vacated the death sentence. Toole told the jury he had signed his confession only so that he would be sent back to Jacksonville.
He was also Lucas’s chorus. In many of the cases Lucas described, Toole was named as an accomplice and confirmed what Lucas said. By May 1984 UPI reported that he had been linked to about 100 killings nationwide. The confessions spread into other courtrooms. That month a Louisiana death row inmate recanted his own confession to the 1978 killing of an off-duty deputy after learning of statements by Lucas and Toole about the case, and prosecutors were left to weigh whether to charge the two drifters instead, UPI reported. WJCT, Jacksonville’s public radio and television station, reported in 2017 that investigators had confirmed no link between the two men and most of the 108 killings Toole claimed.
The most painful of his claims concerned Adam Walsh, 6, who was abducted in Hollywood, Florida, in July 1981. Toole first confessed to the killing in October 1983, Time reported, and then recanted. He confessed again in May 1984, days after his death sentence in the Sonnenberg case, in an interview with The Florida Times-Union; defense lawyers suggested he might be seeking publicity. ABC News counted 24 documented admissions in all. In 1988 he wrote to the boy’s parents demanding $5,000 for information. He took back his admissions as readily as he made them. Toole died in prison in 1996. In December 2008 the Hollywood police announced that they considered him responsible and closed the case. He was never charged, and no court heard the evidence.
In January 1990 Taunja Bennett, 23, was killed near Portland, Oregon. Within weeks the case appeared solved, by a woman with her own reasons for wanting it solved.
L.P., a 57-year-old Portland woman, had been in a relationship for about ten years with J.S., a farmhand 18 years younger. She said he abused her. After reading news coverage of the Bennett killing, she saw it, in the words of the National Registry of Exonerations, as a way to end the relationship. She made anonymous tips first, then called detectives herself and named him. Her account grew. She said the two of them had met Bennett together and that he had forced her to take part. J.S. denied everything, and a search of his belongings turned up nothing. The details she knew, she later said, had come from newspaper coverage and the search warrant.
Both were arrested in February 1990. At her trial L.P. recanted and told the jury she had invented the story to get away from J.S. Prosecutors played the tape of her confession, and in January 1991 a Multnomah County jury convicted her of felony murder. In March 1991, fearing a death sentence, J.S. pleaded no contest to murder and kidnapping. Both were sentenced to life.
The man who had killed Bennett, Keith Hunter Jesperson, a long-haul trucker, kept driving. In 1994 he sent anonymous letters to The Oregonian and to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office confessing to the Bennett killing and to others, signing them with a drawn smiling face. The letters were never tied to a name, and the two people convicted of Bennett’s death stayed in prison, the Registry records. Jesperson was arrested in March 1995 in the killing of Julie Winningham, 41, of Camas, Washington, and pleaded guilty to her murder in Clark County that October. "I wanted to get those two people out of prison," he said.
In late October 1995 L.P. told the AP that she had expected the police to arrest J.S. and discover her lie, and that the matter had "snowballed" from there. She was upset, she said, that the authorities had simply accepted her word. Jesperson pleaded no contest to Bennett’s murder in November 1995, and on November 27 a judge ordered both L.P. and J.S. freed. "There’s no longer any doubt that these two individuals are innocent," Judge Paul Lipscomb said. He set aside J.S.'s conviction but would not set aside hers. "Her persistence in this manipulation resulted in her own conviction," he wrote. Of the eight women Jesperson is known to have killed, seven died after the wrong two people had been charged with the first.
In St. Joseph, Missouri, a four-year-old boy, Eric Christgen, was killed on May 26, 1978. In early June an anonymous caller told police he had seen M.R., a 24-year-old house painter, in the area that day. M.R. did not match what witnesses had described: they had seen an older man with gray hair, and M.R. was much shorter, with brown hair. A neighbor said she had been talking with him at about the time of the abduction; the Registry says police set her account aside.
Police brought him in nine times over eight months. He took a polygraph, was hypnotized and was questioned under a drug then used as a truth serum. Under the drug he misspoke about his movements, and investigators treated the slip as a sign of guilt. His last interrogation, on February 14, 1979, ran 12 to 13 hours by the Registry’s count; he later told reporters it lasted about 17. He was told he could leave and see his fiancee if he admitted it. "I’ll say so if you want me to," he said, as the law professor Samuel R. Gross recorded. Parts of his account did not fit the crime. 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 he added details that had been fed to him. A Buchanan County jury convicted him of second-degree murder, and on October 12, 1979, he was sentenced to life.
In 1982 an 11-year-old St. Joseph girl, Michelle Steele, was killed, and Charles Ray Hatcher, a drifter, was arrested in the case. Awaiting trial, he told the FBI that he had also killed Eric Christgen. His account fit the facts far better than M.R.'s had, the Registry says, and he matched the witnesses' description. In October 1983 Hatcher pleaded guilty to the boy’s murder and was sentenced to life with no parole for 50 years. M.R. left prison on October 14, 1983, after four years. "A terrible tragedy," said Michael Insco, the prosecutor who had convicted him. On November 21, 1983, the judge who had presided at his trial declared him wrongfully convicted.
Hatcher was convicted of capital murder in the Steele case on September 22, 1984, and was given life after asking the jury for death. He told federal officers he had killed 16 people, UPI reported, and police went across the country to look at as many as 15 other killings; none was ever tried. He died in custody at the Missouri State Penitentiary in December 1984, UPI reported.
In Gaffney, South Carolina, the false lead was a husband. Annie Lucille Dedmond was killed near Gaffney on May 19, 1967, and her husband, R.D., then 28, was arrested.
Police testified at his trial that he had confessed in custody. He denied it, saying he had been questioned for more than two days without a break and had never admitted knowing anything about her death. Witnesses placed him in a cafe in Spindale, North Carolina, at the time she was killed. The jury did not believe them. On December 12, 1967, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 18 years.
The man who had actually killed her told a newspaper so. On February 8, 1968, the managing editor of a local paper, Bill Gibbons, took a call from a man who would not give his name and who said he had killed Mrs. Dedmond. Four days later the same man called again, said more people would die, gave details of her killing that had not been made public, and said her husband "should be released," as the Registry quotes him. A 15-year-old girl was killed the next day. Police traced Lee Roy Martin, a 30-year-old textile worker and father of three, within days, and he admitted four killings. R.D. was released on February 29, 1968, after about ten months in prison. Martin pleaded guilty to Annie Dedmond’s murder, and the charge against R.D. was dismissed on September 16, 1968. The Registry lists false confession and official misconduct among the causes of his conviction.
Chicago in January 1946 offered every condition for a false lead. Suzanne Degnan, 6, was taken and killed on January 7, and the city’s newspapers made the case their obsession. Four days later an AP report described "the collapse of one clue after another." The first suspects were two janitors in the Edgewater district, H.V., 65, and D.S., 35. The State’s Attorney had no evidence on which to charge either. The older man, the Chicago Maroon later reported, was treated brutally during his questioning and afterward won $20,000 from the police in a lawsuit.
William Heirens, a 17-year-old University of Chicago student with a record of burglaries, was arrested on June 26, 1946, and police soon said fingerprint and handwriting evidence tied him to the Degnan case and to the 1945 deaths of two women, Josephine Ross and Frances Brown. What followed became, for his later defenders, a catalogue of how a confession is made. The Illinois Supreme Court recorded in 1954 that he was questioned for days and injected with sodium pentothal without his consent or his parents'. Under the drug he blamed someone he called "George." On July 16, 1946, before he had confessed to anything, the Chicago Tribune published a detailed account presented as his confession, and other papers reprinted it. He pleaded guilty to all three murders on September 4, 1946, under a plea agreement, and received three consecutive life terms. In later years he said he had been "tried and convicted in the newspapers," ABC7 Chicago reported at his death.
The Illinois Supreme Court called the questioning and the drugging "flagrant violations of his rights" but held that his pleas, entered more than a month later on the advice of his own lawyers, were not caused by them. The convictions stood, and no court ever set them aside. Heirens died in custody on March 5, 2012, at 83, maintaining his innocence. His supporters pointed to another false lead running the other way: a man, R.T., who confessed to the Degnan crime from a prison in Arizona and was released because police did not believe him, and whom one advocate later came to suspect, the Maroon reported. Suzanne Degnan’s family never accepted any doubt.
Psychics have offered their help in serial cases for as long as there have been serial cases, and their record is poor. In Düsseldorf in 1929, when the city was living through a series of killings by someone no one could identify, the Berlin detective Ernst Gennat came to support the local police, and more than 100 clairvoyants offered their services. The psychiatrist A. A. Friedländer reported in 1931 that every one of them had failed. The killer was Peter Kürten, who lived quietly in the city with his wife. He was arrested in 1930 after he had confessed to her. Before trial he took back his own confession and then returned to it, according to the dpa report on his rediscovered investigation file. In April 1931 a Düsseldorf jury court convicted him of murder in nine cases and attempted murder in seven, and he was executed in Cologne on July 2, 1931.
Forty years later, in Upper Franconia, a clairvoyant arrived by invitation. Between December 1968 and November 1969 three girls, one aged 14 and two aged 16, were killed in the countryside around Coburg, Lichtenfels and Kronach. After the second death, of Helga Luther, 16, of Lichtenfels, police arrested a young man from Tettau and held him at Kronach. Investigators believed they had their killer. They did not, the Fränkischer Tag recalled in 2016, and the girls' killer struck again in November. No charge against the young man has been reported.
A Coburg paper meanwhile ran the headline "Der Mörder lebt unter uns," the murderer lives among us, and brought in Erwin Grünig, a self-styled clairvoyant known as the Seer of Lake Constance. Grünig described a man with dark, wavy hair and attached earlobes who worked with machines. Not all of it was accurate, the Fränkischer Tag noted in 2020, but some of it fit Manfred Wittmann, a concrete and bitumen mixer from Kaltenbrunn, who was then boasting in the village that the killer was "zu schlau," too clever, to be caught. Police arrested Wittmann on December 12, 1969, and he confessed about eight hours later. The paper wrote that Grünig’s appearance seemed to have played some part in pushing him toward that confession; no court ever said so. On December 15, 1971, the Coburg jury court convicted Wittmann of three murders, with other charges, and sentenced him to life three times over. He was released on probation to a care facility in June 2013, after 43 years.
The psychic who surfaced on Oahu belonged to a different category. Between May 1985 and May 1986 five women were killed on the island, and Honolulu police came to believe one person was responsible. On May 3, 1986, a man telephoned investigators to say that a psychic had given him information about Linda Pesce, 36, the fifth of the women, Honolulu Magazine recounted. The caller, H.G., was arrested on May 9 in connection with her death and released for lack of evidence. Police watched him for years. He was never charged and died in 2003, and nothing in the record proves he was responsible for any of the deaths. As of July 2025 no one had been charged in any of the five.
Some people confess because they want something that has nothing to do with the crime. In the Ruhr, where Joachim Kroll’s confessed killings of girls and women ran across two decades before his arrest in Duisburg in July 1976, some of his crimes were blamed on other men. The forensic biologist Mark Benecke, reviewing the criminologist Stephan Harbort’s study of the case, gave one example: a man, K.M., confessed to one of Kroll’s killings because, by his own account, he wanted a "time out from life" in prison. The case shows, Benecke wrote, how many innocent people can end up in court while an offender like Kroll stays free. Kroll was sentenced in 1982 to nine life terms.
In Mashhad, Iran, in 2000 and 2001, the false leads came from two directions at once. In April 2001 a 22-year-old laborer confessed to a series of killings of women in the city, saying he wanted to cleanse society; he was released when his claim appeared to be a hoax, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported. In parliament, rumors that the killings were the work of a network of religious extremists rather than one man reached the floor. A deputy, Ali Zafarzadeh, said the killers were "definitely" part of an intricate network with access to court documents. The man eventually charged, Saeed Hanaei, confessed that summer to killing 16 women, according to Mashhad police and press reports. He was convicted, sentenced to death and executed in Mashhad in April 2002.
The clairvoyants, in the end, did the least harm. Grünig’s description may even have unsettled the man it half described. The serious damage came from confessions, and most of all from confessions that investigators wanted to hear. Lucas was given files, and the cases he cleared stayed cleared for decades; one of them waited 38 years for a charge. M.R. was questioned under a drug and promised he could leave. Heirens read his own confession in a newspaper before he made it. In Gaffney, police testified to a confession R.D. always denied, and the man who had killed his wife had to telephone a newspaper to say so.
The other common thread is that the real offender usually told someone. Jesperson wrote to The Oregonian. Martin called the editor in Gaffney. Hatcher told the FBI. Kürten told his wife. Each of those messages arrived while an innocent person was in prison or under suspicion. In Oregon and Missouri a wrongful conviction ended because the real offender confessed, not because anyone had gone back over the case against the innocent. Mattox put the problem plainly in 1985, standing over the wreckage of the Lucas task force. "Sometimes," he said, "cases are cleared even when it’s not justified."
• 1913 and 1929: Peter Kürten’s killings in Mülheim and Düsseldorf; in 1929 more than 100 clairvoyants offer help, and all fail.
• January 7, 1946: Suzanne Degnan, 6, is killed in Chicago; two janitors are questioned and released without charge.
• July 16, 1946: the Chicago Tribune publishes an account presented as William Heirens’s confession before he has made one.
• September 4, 1946: Heirens pleads guilty to three murders.
• May 19, 1967: Annie Lucille Dedmond is killed near Gaffney, South Carolina.
• December 12, 1967: her husband is convicted of manslaughter.
• February 8 and 12, 1968: Lee Roy Martin telephones a Gaffney editor claiming the Dedmond killing.
• February 29, 1968: the husband is released; the charge is dismissed on September 16, 1968.
• December 1968 to November 1969: three girls are killed in Upper Franconia; a young man from Tettau is held, and the clairvoyant Erwin Grünig is brought to Coburg.
• December 12, 1969: Manfred Wittmann is arrested and confesses.
• May 26, 1978: Eric Christgen, 4, is killed in St. Joseph, Missouri.
• October 12, 1979: M.R. is sentenced to life after a confession given under prolonged questioning.
• June 11, 1983: Henry Lee Lucas is arrested in Montague County, Texas, and begins confessing.
• October 1983: Charles Ray Hatcher pleads guilty to the Christgen murder; M.R. is freed on October 14. Ottis Toole first confesses to the Adam Walsh killing and recants.
• April 1984: Lucas is convicted of capital murder in San Angelo; Toole is convicted in Jacksonville.
• April 15, 1985: Attorney General Jim Mattox says Lucas did not commit all the killings he claimed.
• May 1985 to May 1986: five women are killed on Oahu; on May 9, 1986, H.G. is arrested and later released without charge.
• April 1986: the Attorney General’s report calls the Lucas confessions a massive hoax.
• January 1990: Taunja Bennett is killed near Portland; L.P. names J.S., and both are convicted in 1991.
• 1994: Keith Hunter Jesperson writes anonymous letters to The Oregonian; a woman poses as Becky Powell.
• November 27, 1995: L.P. and J.S. are ordered released.
• June 1998: Governor George W. Bush commutes Lucas’s death sentence.
• April 2001: a laborer’s confession in the Mashhad killings is dismissed as a hoax.
• April 2002: Saeed Hanaei is executed in Mashhad.
• 2008: DNA excludes Lucas and Toole in the Laura Purchase killing; in December, Hollywood, Florida, police close the Walsh case.
• August 7, 2019: the Orange Socks victim is identified as Debra Jackson.
• May 2021: a Kansas man is charged in the Purchase killing; he dies before trial that July.