In the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus, a state-farm mechanic named Gennady Mikhasevich was convicted in May 1987 of murdering 36 women between 1971 and 1985. Before he was caught, investigators had convicted 14 other people of killings in the series, according to Zerkalo and Lenta.ru. One of them was executed. When Mikhasevich confessed, the convictions fell apart. That figure, 14, is the largest number of wrongly convicted people attached to any single series among these cases, and it is the standard against which the others are measured.
The cases below are ordered by the largest figure stated for each series, and where accounts disagree, both figures are given. Mikhasevich comes first with 14 people convicted. Chikatilo and Tkach follow, close together: a former prosecutor said twelve people were held in pretrial detention on false charges during the hunt for Chikatilo, and sources on Tkach range from nine to twelve other people punished for his crimes. Brian Dugan’s case produced three men charged and two sentenced to death for a murder he later admitted. Eddie Lee Mosley, Keith Jesperson and Zhao Zhihong each stand behind two or fewer wrongful convictions, but those convictions carried consequences as severe as any in the list: in China an 18-year-old was executed for a killing that another man confessed to nine years later. And in France a teenager served 15 years before a third trial acquitted him of killings Francis Heaulme was later convicted of.
The question of what led police to the wrong people has a short answer in most of these cases: a confession, usually obtained under pressure, from someone who could not resist it, and in several cases a person who volunteered a false account. What cleared them is a different list, and it is usually the arrest of the right man. What changed afterward varies from a bill filed for the relief of an estate to the prosecution of police officers.
Most of the people wrongly held in these cases are given by initials or described; those named have been named publicly in court rulings, official statements or published reports.
Mikhasevich killed women in the Vitebsk region for 14 years, from 1971 to 1985. In May 1987 a Soviet court convicted him of the murders of 36 women, with other charges, and sentenced him to death, according to the Belarusian human rights center Viasna. He confessed to 43 killings. He was a mechanic on a state farm, a married father of two, a member of the Communist Party who served as a party secretary, and a volunteer in the druzhina, the civilian auxiliary that helped the Soviet police. In that role, Lenta.ru reported, he took part in checks connected with the search for the man responsible for the killings.
The case is remembered in Belarus less for the number of deaths than for what happened while he was free. Before his arrest, investigators convicted 14 other people of killings in the series, and one of them was executed. Zerkalo, the Belarusian news site, has written that the confessions of those people were obtained by force. The former regional police chief Mechislav Grib, who led the investigation in 1985 and later became Belarus’s head of state, has said that the case convinced him the death penalty is wrong. He said the executed man died for nothing.
The wrongful convictions are the best-documented part of the case. Zerkalo, Viasna and Lenta.ru all describe them, and their figures differ in places. The first to be punished was O. G., convicted of the murder of Lyudmila Andaralova, 19, in 1971; Zerkalo gives his sentence as 15 years, Viasna as 10, and Viasna says he confessed under threats.
In 1972 three young men, V. P., V. K. and N. Ya., were convicted in the killing of a woman, according to Viasna. Lenta.ru describes a group of three friends who had been walking a dog and who were forced into confessions and sentenced to terms of 2 to 15 years. V. P. received 12 years; Zerkalo says he served the full term, while Viasna says he was freed about two weeks after Mikhasevich’s arrest. V. K. received 15 years and served 12, and in prison he harmed himself several times in protest, Zerkalo reported. N. Ya. received two and a half years by Zerkalo’s account, or three by Viasna’s, and served them. His father believed he was guilty until he was rehabilitated in 1986.
V. G. was sentenced to 15 years for a woman’s murder, Viasna reported, although the biological evidence did not link him to the crime. He went blind in prison and was released after six years. By then he had lost his family. He was rehabilitated in 1986. O. A. was acquitted at his first trial, but the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal and he was sentenced to 15 years, Viasna reported. Zerkalo says his false confession followed a forged forensic report and threats. He served less than two years. "Frankly speaking, I would have never returned to normal life had I served 15 years," he said in 2011, as quoted by Viasna.
Lyusya Ovlasenko was killed in Polotsk on July 7, 1982, Zerkalo reported. Her partner was convicted of killing her and sentenced to 10 years; he was released after three, Zerkalo said, when the real killer was found.
N. T. was sentenced to death in 1979 and executed in 1980, according to Viasna. The sentence was passed by the Vitebsk Regional Court, Grib said in remarks published by Viasna. A woman who knew him, L. K., had testified against him and was sentenced to 10 years as his accomplice; Lenta.ru says she was pressured into giving evidence. She was rehabilitated in 1986. N. T. was rehabilitated after the real killer was caught, Zerkalo reported.
Viasna lists six more people who were sentenced and later rehabilitated on the strength of Mikhasevich’s confessions. Zerkalo gives some of their sentences. V. M. received 10 years and served them all. N. O. received 15 years and served 7 years and 8 months. Ye. B. confessed under the threat of beatings and was released after the real killer was caught. Ye. M. was pressed into a false confession with the promise of a one-year suspended sentence. Lenta.ru also describes a driver who confessed after two weeks and ten interrogations, once investigators had planted a victim’s photograph in his residence; he needed sedatives for the rest of his life.
The numbers vary with the source. Zerkalo and Lenta.ru say 14 people were convicted. Grib, in remarks published by Viasna, said 13 people were unlawfully sentenced to long prison terms and one was executed. Viasna’s own account says Mikhasevich confessed to 13 murders for which 14 innocent people had been convicted. Lenta.ru’s total for the whole series is 36 women, and it notes that other sources give 38.
Mikhasevich was arrested in late 1985: on a Sunday in November, by Grib’s account as reported by Zerkalo, just after graphologists confirmed a handwriting match; in December, by Lenta.ru’s. Lenta.ru reports that graphologists compared about 560,000 samples; Grib, via Zerkalo, gave 600,000. Grib said Mikhasevich offered no resistance and then confessed. According to Lenta.ru, he decided after several days of questioning to pretend he was mentally ill, and began to confess. Psychiatrists found him sane.
All of the living people wrongly convicted were released and rehabilitated, Zerkalo reported. Lenta.ru adds that they were given money in compensation and apartments in one district of Vitebsk, and that not all of them were able to return to normal life.
After the trial, Lenta.ru wrote, heads rolled at the Interior Ministry. Responsibility for the wrongful convictions was shared by about 200 people, Viasna reported, but most of them received only reprimands or were expelled from the Communist Party. Zerkalo puts the number of officials prosecuted or disciplined between 1983 and 1986 at about 200. Mikhail Zhavnerovich, the senior investigator for especially important cases who had led several of the earlier cases, was expelled from the party and dismissed from the prosecutor’s office, and a criminal case was opened against him, Zerkalo reported. He was amnestied because he was a Second World War veteran with a disability, and he died in 1987. Viasna says he was never prosecuted because of his war service. At a discussion in Minsk in October 2013, Viasna reported, Grib said that 13 people had been unlawfully convicted in the case and one of them executed. Mikhasevich was executed in autumn 1987 by Lenta.ru’s account, or on January 19, 1988, by Viasna’s.
Andrei Chikatilo killed children, teenagers and young women between 1978 and 1990, most of them near the railway and bus routes linking the towns of the Rostov region. He was charged with 53 murders. The Rostov Regional Court convicted him of 52 in October 1992 and sentenced him to death. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Russia removed nine of those murders from the verdict for lack of proof and upheld the sentence on the rest, so that 43 murders stand as legally proven. He was executed on February 14, 1994.
The case is remembered as much for the failures of the hunt as for the offender. A man named Aleksandr Kravchenko was executed in 1983 for the first killing Chikatilo later confessed to, that of a nine-year-old girl, Yelena Zakotnova, in 1978. Chikatilo described that killing after his arrest in 1990, before investigators had located a matching file. The Rostov Regional Court included it in his conviction in 1992, and the Supreme Court of Russia removed it from the verdict in 1993 for insufficient evidence. The killing of Yelena Zakotnova therefore stands legally unsolved: Chikatilo is not convicted of it, and neither is Kravchenko.
Kravchenko’s account changed repeatedly. He confessed, then withdrew the confession, saying it had been forced out of him. A court first sentenced him to 15 years in prison; the girl’s relatives pressed for a harsher outcome, the case was sent back, and at a retrial he was sentenced to death. His clemency petition ran to 42 pages, the investigator Issa Kostoyev recalled. Amurkhan Yandiev, an investigator who later worked on the Chikatilo case, told TASS in September 2026 that he had learned afterward that a cellmate had tormented Kravchenko, and that this was why he took the blame.
Then came the arrests that never became convictions. Investigators assumed the offender was mentally ill and searched psychiatric registers. On September 8, 1983, police arrested a 19-year-old on a psychiatric register, Kostoyev told Lenta.ru; other detainees included a resident of a residential facility for people with intellectual disabilities. They confessed under pressure, their acquaintances began confessing too, and their accounts contradicted one another. Yandiev told RIA Novosti in 2020 that three or four mentally ill people were detained in all and held as suspects for three to four months each. Because so many of the detainees had intellectual disabilities, the file became known as the delo durakov, "the case of the fools." The killings went on while they were in custody, and by 1984 the confessions had been discredited.
Aleksandr Kuyumdzhi, a former state prosecutor in the Chikatilo case, told Novaya Gazeta in 2005 that twelve people were held in pretrial detention on false charges during the hunt. In Kostoyev’s account, after the Moscow investigator Kazakov reported falsified evidence, a criminal case was opened against Rostov police officers on August 19, 1985, and closed on November 25, 1985, for insufficient evidence. When Kostoyev took over formally on November 10, 1985, the cases against the earlier detainees were closed and they were released.
The right man was also arrested, and released. A 1981 police report, later recovered by Kostoyev, recorded that Chikatilo had been detained at a railway station that year. Kostoyev told Lenta.ru that police had checked him as a suspect in 1979 and 1981. In September 1984, police detained him in Rostov. Investigators examined him over the March killing of Dima Ptashnikov in Novoshakhtinsk, Conradi reported. There was no direct evidence tying him to any murder, and a blood test seemed to rule him out. Conradi wrote that he was released in early 1985.
The forensic evidence that cleared him in 1984 became the most debated point in the case. Investigators had concluded from biological traces that the offender belonged to blood group IV. Chikatilo’s blood was recorded as group II. After his arrest in 1990 the discrepancy was explained for years as "paradoxical secretion." Investigators and criminologists have since rejected that. In 2021 Zigmund Lozis, head of the Main Forensic Directorate of the Investigative Committee of Russia, said the phenomenon did not exist and that what happened was an error. Kostoyev told Lenta.ru that the first expert recorded Chikatilo’s group as II and that later testing confirmed group IV. Kommersant reported in 2026 that the likelier causes were contaminated material and an expert conclusion stated too categorically.
The search grew into one of the largest operations in Soviet policing. Operation Lesopolosa, or "forest strip," ran for years; Conradi reported almost half a million people questioned, and the operation solved more than 1,000 other crimes. Chikatilo himself carried a card as a volunteer police auxiliary, RIA Novosti and Lenta.ru reported. He was arrested in Novocherkassk on November 20, 1990.
Serhiy Tkach was arrested in the small town of Polohy, in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, on August 5, 2005, according to Gazeta po-ukrainsky. He had once been trained as a police forensic expert. Within weeks he was confessing to killings of girls and young women that he said went back to 1980. His first count was about 80; later he said it was more than 100. In December 2007 his case went to trial in closed session before the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Court of Appeal, and on December 23, 2008, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Reports of how many killings the court held proven differ, from 29 to 37. What is not in dispute is that, while he was free, police in at least three regions arrested other men for crimes he later admitted. Tkach died in a prison colony in Zhytomyr on November 4, 2018.
The counts of the wrongly punished differ. Radio Svoboda reported at the verdict in 2008 that nine innocent people had been punished. Moskovsky Komsomolets and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group put the number of men charged or imprisoned at no fewer than ten. In 2012 Radio Svoboda reported that twelve other people had been arrested for his crimes. Most of those convicted served up to ten years, the Kharkiv group said.
One of the girls who died in the Pavlohrad years was Olenka Svetlichnaya. She was 9. Her father was arrested and accused of killing her. He was held in the Dnipropetrovsk pretrial detention center, where, according to Moskovsky Komsomolets, he was allegedly ill-treated, and in 2000 he died by suicide in his cell. Radio Svoboda reported in 2008 that one of the innocent men punished for Tkach’s crimes had taken his own life. The Kharkiv group, in a 2018 review of the men wrongly held in the case, named him as the father of one of Tkach’s victims.
The youngest was Ya. P., an eighth-grader from Rody. He was taken from an English lesson, Moskovsky Komsomolets reported, and accused of killing his 10-year-old cousin, Yana. His mother told the paper he had been forced into confessing. He was sentenced to 15 years and was still in prison in December 2007. The Kharkiv group reported that he was freed in 2008.
I. R. was sentenced to 10 years in 1997 for a crime that Moskovsky Komsomolets said Tkach had committed. The Kharkiv group, citing the journalist and lawyer Serhiy Dovhal, said he had at one stage been sentenced to death; the sentence was reduced after some charges were withdrawn, and he served a ten-year term in full for two assaults on women who survived. He had been released shortly before the trial began.
Olha Prystepa was 13 and lived in Polohy. She was killed on March 26, 2003. A young man from the town, V. K., was detained on March 28, 2003, two days later, after two schoolgirls said they had seen him nearby. DNA later linked the killing to Tkach, Gazeta po-ukrainsky reported in 2012, and Tkach confessed to it. V. K. told the paper in 2012 that he confessed after police threatened him and his family; the Kharkiv group said the threats were made against his wife and infant daughter. The case against him rested on his confession, a filmed reconstruction and the two schoolgirls' account, and no forensic examination showed his guilt, the paper reported. On April 24, 2004, the court of appeal sentenced him to 15 years, and the Supreme Court left the verdict in place. By his own count he spent 4 years, 8 months and 13 days in custody. Afterward his wife left him, and in 2012 he was suing for 2.5 million hryvnias in damages in a court in Marhanets. "What life taught me," he said, "is never to talk to the cops."
M. D. was detained on October 1, 2004, and charged with crimes that Tkach later confessed to. He told Radio Svoboda in 2012 that he had been held for 37 days in the temporary detention facility of the Polohy district police, then in the pretrial detention center in Zaporizhzhia, and that he was beaten during interrogation and confessed under pressure. He later withdrew the confession. A television report prompted a review in 2011, the Kharkiv group said. The Higher Specialized Court acquitted him in March 2012, and he was released on March 22, 2012, after nearly eight years. He told Radio Svoboda that he had received no compensation and did not expect justice in Ukraine. He died in early 2015, at 39, the Kharkiv group reported. Another man served 4 years and 6 months for an assault on an 8-year-old girl, who survived, in August 2003, and was released on February 25, 2008, Gazeta po-ukrainsky reported. He said his leg had been broken during his interrogation, and he was seeking compensation and the punishment of the officers involved.
The Prosecutor General’s Office told Moskovsky Komsomolets in 2007 that the wrongly convicted would not be released until a verdict had been reached against the real offender. Edward Bagirov, head of the International League for the Protection of Citizens' Rights in Ukraine, told the paper that after the verdict they could be freed and sue for compensation.
On November 17, 2008, while the trial was under way, the Prosecutor General’s Office opened a criminal case against three former officers of the Polohy district police: a first deputy chief and two operatives of the criminal investigation unit, UNIAN reported. A preliminary inquiry had determined that they used physical and psychological pressure to make a man identified as D. confess to an assault on a girl. Citing Tkach’s confession and other evidence, the prosecutors asked the Zaporizhzhia Regional Court of Appeal to set aside D.'s conviction under an exceptional procedure. The court agreed, and D. was released. The three officers were charged with abuse of office causing grave consequences, and a district court in Kyiv ordered them held in custody. In December 2013, UNIAN’s headline reported that a prosecutor and police officers who had pinned the crimes on innocent men were given sentences of 5 to 7 years.
Brian Dugan pleaded guilty in November 1985 to two murders in northern Illinois: Donna Schnorr, 27, of Geneva, killed in July 1984, and Melissa Ackerman, a 7-year-old girl from Somonauk, killed in June 1985. He received two life sentences. During the plea talks he told prosecutors that he had also killed Jeanine Nicarico, a 10-year-old girl taken in Naperville in February 1983, and that he had acted alone. He would confess formally, he said, only if he was promised that he would not be executed.
No promise was made. By then three young men from Aurora had already been charged with the Nicarico murder, and two of them, Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez, had been sentenced to death. A $10,000 reward had been offered, and Cruz, then a young man from Aurora, came to the police with a story about the crime that, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, he made up in the hope of collecting it. His story drew in Hernandez, who was 19 at the time of the crime, and a third man. On March 8, 1984, the three were arrested, and on March 9 DuPage County State’s Attorney J. Michael Fitzsimmons obtained indictments against them for the murder.
The lead detective on the case, John Sam, resigned because he believed the men were innocent, the registry records. The prosecution’s case at the first trial rested on informants, police testimony that Cruz had shown knowledge of the crime, statements attributed to Hernandez, two eyewitness identifications and forensic testimony. On February 22, 1985, the jury convicted Cruz and Hernandez and deadlocked on the third man. Cruz and Hernandez were sentenced to death. Prosecutors later dropped the case against the third man.
On November 1, 1985, Dugan wrote and signed a confession to the Nicarico murder. George Mueller, a LaSalle County assistant public defender who represented him, testified in 2009 that the statement said Dugan was confessing "to ensure that innocent people are not murdered by the state for a crime they had no part of." On November 8 his public defender told LaSalle County prosecutors that Dugan might be connected to the Schnorr and Nicarico murders and would confess to Jeanine’s killing only if his life was spared. Prosecutors, doubting parts of what he said, refused to bargain. Because no deal was struck, he never gave a formal statement that could be used against him.
DuPage prosecutors did not accept his account. At Cruz’s second trial, the state argued that Dugan might have been involved with Cruz and Hernandez but that Cruz was the principal, according to the Center on Wrongful Convictions. A police dog trainer testified that a bloodhound had shown that more than one person was involved, which the prosecution used to suggest that Dugan was lying about acting alone. On January 19, 1988, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned the convictions of Cruz and Hernandez, ruling that they should have been tried separately, according to the Daily Herald’s timeline; the registry gives the date of the reversal as January 19, 1989. Each man was tried again. At the retrials, much of the evidence pointing to Dugan was kept from the juries, the registry says, and the bloodhound testimony was used against his account. Cruz was acquitted in November 1995, and the charges against Hernandez were dropped weeks later.
In November 2005 a DuPage County grand jury indicted Dugan for the murder, citing DNA evidence. He pleaded guilty on July 28, 2009, with no deal, and a jury sentenced him to death that November. Judge George Bakalis imposed the sentence on December 16, 2009. In March 2011 Illinois abolished the death penalty and Governor Pat Quinn commuted the sentence to life in prison on March 9. In all, the case ran twenty-six years from the Nicarico murder to a guilty plea by the man who first offered to confess.
Eddie Lee Mosley was never convicted of killing anyone. He was charged with murder in 1987, ruled incompetent to stand trial and committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where he remained until his death in 2020, aged 73. Yet his name sits at the center of two of Florida’s best-known wrongful convictions. DNA testing in 2000 and 2001 linked him to killings of Black women and girls in northwest Fort Lauderdale for which two other men had been sent to prison. One of them, Jerry Frank Townsend, served about 22 years before he was freed. The other, Frank Lee Smith, died of cancer on death row eleven months before the test that cleared him.
Police and the lawyers who sued on Townsend’s behalf came to attribute 17 murders and other assaults to Mosley between 1973 and 1987, according to Florida Bulldog. None of those killings was ever tried against him. According to the FRONTLINE documentary "Requiem for Frank Lee Smith" (PBS, 2002), Mosley was charged in two cases in 1973, with other charges. He was declared incompetent and sent to the state hospital for the criminally insane at Chattahoochee, Florida. Doug Evans, a Fort Lauderdale detective who then headed a squad investigating crimes against women, told FRONTLINE that the squad had close to 300 cases at the time and that Mosley was identified in 41 of them. "He never confessed, not one time, to any case," Evans said.
About three weeks before September 5, 1979, Evans named Mosley as the prime suspect in the killings within Fort Lauderdale’s jurisdiction, Florida Bulldog reported. His case rested on eyewitness accounts from women who had survived assaults. Broward Sheriff’s Office detectives did not follow his lead. Detective Anthony Fantigrassi later testified that he had checked Mosley during the 1979 investigations and discarded him as a suspect.
On September 5, 1979, Miami police arrested Jerry Frank Townsend, then 27, after a woman reported an assault, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Townsend had an IQ the registry gives as 58; the Innocence Project describes him as having the mental capacity of an eight-year-old. From September 6 to 10, Miami officers and two Broward Sheriff’s detectives, Fantigrassi and Mark Schlein, questioned him. The registry says officers stopped the tape at times and showed him photographs. He implicated himself in about 20 killings, many of which prosecutors never pursued because the evidence showed he could not have committed them. No physical evidence linked him to any of the crimes. Townsend’s arrest, Florida Bulldog wrote in 2012, ended the public search for the person responsible, who had frightened a mostly Black neighborhood in northwest Fort Lauderdale. Mosley stayed free.
In July 1980 a Broward jury convicted Townsend of first-degree murder in the 1973 deaths of Naomi Gamble, 15, and Barbara Ann Brown, 21, and acquitted him in the death of Thelma Jean Bell, 20. He received two consecutive life sentences. In October 1982 he pleaded no contest to the murders of Cathy Moore and Terry Jean Cummings, and prosecutors dropped the charges in the deaths of Ernestine German and Sonja Marion. The Marion case had been dropped after an alibi showed Townsend clocked in at work that morning, Florida Bulldog and the Innocence Project reported. In December 1982 he pleaded guilty in Miami-Dade County to two more murders and a further offense. In all, he stood convicted of six murders and a further offense. At Townsend’s trial, Evans testified for the defense, and the 2009 Bulldog profile reported that the prosecutor and judge cut his testimony short. Fantigrassi told the court that Evans had an "irrational vengeance" against Mosley.
Police arrested Frank Lee Smith on April 29, 1985. He was 37, and he was charged in the death of an 8-year-old girl, Shandra Whitehead. Mosley was a cousin of the child’s mother, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, the Innocence Project and FRONTLINE. Smith’s interrogation was not recorded and the detectives took no notes. No physical or forensic evidence linked him to the crime, and he offered no alibi. Two witnesses identified him from photographs and a third from a lineup, the registry says. On January 31, 1986, a Broward jury convicted Smith of first-degree murder, with other charges. The jury recommended death, and Judge Robert Tyson imposed the sentence on May 6, 1986. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence on direct appeal in 1987 (Smith v. State, 515 So. 2d 182).
What changed afterward was uneven. In 2001 a bill was filed in the Florida House, HB 1483, titled "An act for the relief of the estate of Frank Lee Smith." FRONTLINE broadcast its documentary on Smith’s case in 2002. In 2012 relatives of women whom police had attributed to Mosley called on the Broward state attorney to investigate the police conduct that led to the arrest of the wrong men, Florida Bulldog reported, and its headline in 2015 said the state attorney would not investigate. Arnette Tukes was 20 and had a son who was three when she died; years later he named his own daughter Arnette in her honor, the Bulldog reported in 2012. Her mother was a cousin of Doug Evans. "My daughter would still be alive if they hadn’t arrested the wrong man," her mother told the Bulldog.
Keith Hunter Jesperson drove long-haul trucks across the western and southern United States between January 1990 and March 1995. Between killings he wrote anonymous letters to The Oregonian and to prosecutors in Portland, signing them with a drawn smiling face, and the newspaper’s coverage gave him the name the Happy Face Killer. His first killing, of Taunja Bennett near Portland in January 1990, had already been solved, wrongly.
L.P., a 57-year-old Portland woman, had been in a relationship for about ten years with J.S., a 39-year-old farmhand 18 years younger than she was. 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 first made anonymous tips that J.S. had bragged about the crime. When the police did not act on them, she called the detectives, told them about the abuse, and named him as responsible. Her account then changed. She said the two of them had met Bennett at a Portland 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 the list in the search warrant; police concluded the items had been planted.
Both were arrested in February 1990, and both said they were innocent. The case against them rested mainly on her recorded statements. L.P. was tried first. At trial she recanted and told the jury she had made up the story to get away from J.S. Prosecutors played the tape of her confession, and in January 1991 a Multnomah County Circuit Court jury convicted her of felony murder. She was sentenced to life with 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.
In 1994, newspapers and authorities in Oregon received anonymous letters from a man who said he had killed Bennett, the registry records. The letters went to the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office and to The Oregonian, which said in 2022 that in them he confessed to five murders and used a happy face as a signature. The paper published a five-part series on the letter writer and his confessions in 1994. No one connected the letters to a name, and the two people convicted of Bennett’s death stayed in prison.
Jesperson was arrested in Cochise County, Arizona, in March 1995, the Associated Press reported, after he called a Clark County, Washington, sheriff’s detective on March 24, 1995, and confessed to the killing of Julie Winningham. "I had been worried about this for a long time. I wanted to get those two people out of prison," he said in 1995, ABC News reported. He said he had come forward partly to get credit for the Bennett killing and partly to free the two people convicted of it. In November 1995 he pleaded no contest to murdering Taunja Bennett, according to the registry.
Schrunk told Circuit Judge Paul Lipscomb in late October 1995 that considerable evidence showed the two had been wrongly convicted, while saying that the lawyers, the judge and the jury in the 1991 cases had done nothing wrong. L.P., then 62 and waiting at the Oregon Women’s Correctional Center, told the Associated Press she had expected the police to arrest J.S. and discover her lie, and that the matter had "snowballed" from there. On November 27, 1995, at the prosecutors' insistence and on the strength of Jesperson’s confession, Judge Lipscomb ordered L.P. and J.S. released. "There’s no longer any doubt that these two individuals are innocent," he said. "The evidence is compelling." He set aside J.S.'s conviction, ruling that his civil rights had been violated; ABC News reported that the judge ruled J.S.'s plea had not been voluntary. He refused to set aside L.P.'s conviction. "Her persistence in this manipulation resulted in her own conviction," he wrote. He criticized her for abusing the judicial system but ordered her freed, because keeping an innocent person in prison would be cruel and unusual punishment. L.P. died in 2003, the registry records. J.S. has also died, ABC News reported in 2021. The two cases are listed in the National Registry of Exonerations, his with the contributing factor of perjury or false accusation and hers with the contributing factor of false confession.
Zhao Zhihong was arrested in Inner Mongolia, in northern China, in October 2005, and he confessed to more than 20 crimes, among them robberies and killings, committed over almost a decade. One of them was a killing that, as far as the courts were concerned, had been solved long before. On April 9, 1996, a woman surnamed Yang was killed in Hohhot, the regional capital. Hugjiltu, an 18-year-old ethnic Mongolian who worked at a cigarette factory, was the person who reported the crime. AFP reported in December 2014 that he had been questioned for 48 hours before he confessed. On May 17, 1996, the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to death for intentional homicide, with lifelong deprivation of political rights, and to five years for hooliganism, with the death sentence to be carried out at once. On June 5, 1996, the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court rejected his appeal. He was executed on June 10, 1996.
His parents spent years petitioning for the case to be reopened. AFP wrote in December 2014 that the family had spent nearly a decade trying to prove his innocence. Zhao told investigators that the first killing of this kind he had committed was the one in Hohhot on April 9, 1996, known in Chinese reporting as the "4·9" case. The Supreme People’s Court noted in 2019 that he had confessed to the Yang killing on his own initiative and had consistently maintained it. Yet his confession did not lead quickly to a reckoning. His trial was adjourned in 2006 and not resumed until 2015, and only in December 2014 did the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court declare Hugjiltu not guilty.
The court gave three main reasons. The way of killing Zhao had described in his confession did not match the post-mortem findings. The blood-type evidence used against Hugjiltu identified only a type, not a person, and so could not show that he alone was responsible. His statements were unstable and conflicted with other evidence; Xinhua reported that his description of the victim did not match her height or hairstyle. The hooliganism conviction, the court said, had rested on nothing but his own confession. AFP added that the court said the DNA evidence did not definitively link him to the crime. The court said that the case met the conditions for state compensation and that work on holding those responsible to account had begun. AFP, citing Xinhua, reported that a deputy president of the court gave the parents 30,000 yuan, a personal gift rather than an official payment. On social media, AFP wrote, many people said the sum was not enough and called for the officials involved to answer for the case.
On December 25, 2014, Hugjiltu’s parents applied for state compensation of 3,723,335.50 yuan. On December 30, the Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court decided to pay them 2,059,621.40 yuan, and the decision was delivered on the morning of December 31, Xinhua reported. The award was made up of 1,047,580 yuan for his death and funeral costs, 12,041.40 yuan for the 60 days he had been held, and 1,000,000 yuan for emotional harm. His father said the question was not whether they were satisfied with the amount: it was a kind of comfort for the spirit, and no more. Inquirer.net reported in February 2016 that China had punished 27 officials over the wrongful execution, and in March 2015 that the country’s chief justice regretted wrongful convictions.
Zhao was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. On February 9, 2015, the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court announced a judgment that the People’s Daily’s later report dates to January 26, 2015. When the Supreme People’s Court reviewed the sentence, it confirmed 17 crimes, including the killing of six people, but declined to confirm four others. One of the four was the killing of Yang in 1996. Zhao was executed at Hohhot on July 30, 2019. He had maintained throughout that he committed the crime that cost Hugjiltu his life, and the highest court held that claim unproved.
Francis Heaulme was arrested in Bischwiller, in Alsace, on January 7, 1992, and has been held ever since. By June 2026 he was serving sentences for 11 murders committed between 1984 and 1992, according to reports by Sud Radio and by AFP as printed by the Swiss outlet blue News. The French press called him the "routard du crime," the drifter of crime, because the killings followed his wanderings: from 1984 he moved through 37 French departments. The last two murders on his record are the ones he has always denied: the killings of two eight-year-old boys, Cyril Beining and Alexandre Beckrich, in Montigny-lès-Metz, near Metz, on September 28, 1986. Heaulme was convicted of them in 2017, the conviction was upheld on appeal in 2018, and it became final in June 2020.
The police investigation that followed the children’s deaths was later heavily criticized, and more than one person confessed to the killings. A warehouse worker, H. L., who worked nearby, confessed twice in 1986 and retracted; investigators judged the confessions not credible, Lyon Capitale reported. A 19-year-old’s confession was dismissed as fanciful. In 1987 a 16-year-old apprentice cook, Patrick Dils, confessed in police custody, Sud Radio reported, repeated the confession several times and then retracted it for good. He was convicted twice. A review procedure led to a third trial, and in 2002 the Rhône assize court in Lyon acquitted him. He had spent 15 years in prison. What weighed most in his acquittal was evidence that Heaulme had been in Montigny-lès-Metz, nearby, on the day of the killings, Lyon Capitale reported.
Heaulme was placed under formal investigation for the Montigny killings in 2006, Lyon Capitale reported. In 2007 the case against him was dismissed. Cyril’s mother appealed that dismissal, and her appeal led in time to the trial, Europe 1 reported in 2020. In 2013 he was sent to the Moselle assize court, and in June 2013 the Cour de cassation upheld that referral. The second trial opened before the Moselle assize court in Metz on April 25, 2017. Glock, for the defense, told the court the trial could no longer be fair, pointing to the evidence destroyed in 1995, and asked for his immediate acquittal; the request was refused. As the presiding judge read out the summary of the case, Heaulme stood up. "J’ai commis des meurtres, mais Montigny, ce n’est pas moi," he said: I have committed murders, but Montigny wasn’t me.
In June 2026 an investigating judge sent him to trial for one more killing, that of Jean-Joseph Clément, 60, at Bédarrides in the Vaucluse in August 1989. In that case he is accused only. He confessed to it in 1992 and retracted, and a judge in Reims dismissed the case in 2002; the investigation was reopened in July 2023 on new evidence, according to Sud Radio and blue News.
The people wrongly held in these series were arrested for the same reasons that make the arrests understandable and, afterward, hard to defend. Police had a crime that frightened a community and a need to close it. In Vitebsk the confessions were obtained by force. In the Rostov region investigators arrested mentally ill men, and a prosecutor later counted twelve held on false charges. In Polohy a young man confessed after threats against his wife and infant daughter. In Fort Lauderdale a man with an IQ the registry gives as 58 implicated himself in about 20 killings. In Portland a woman gave detectives a false account in order to end a relationship. In Hohhot an 18-year-old confessed after 48 hours of questioning. In Montigny a 16-year-old confessed in custody and then retracted. In DuPage County a young man made up a story in the hope of a $10,000 reward.
What cleared them was, in most of the cases, the right offender: Mikhasevich’s arrest in 1985, Tkach’s in 2005, Jesperson’s telephone call in 1995, Zhao’s confession in 2005, DNA testing in the Dugan and Mosley cases, evidence placing Heaulme in Montigny. In Fort Lauderdale it came too late for Smith, who died before the test. In Ukraine, the Prosecutor General’s Office said in 2007 that the wrongly convicted would not be released until a verdict had been reached against the real offender.
What changed afterward differs by place. In Belarus about 200 officials were prosecuted or disciplined, most of them only reprimanded or expelled from the party. In Ukraine a prosecutor and police officers were sentenced to 5 to 7 years. In China 27 officials were punished and the family of the executed man was awarded 2,059,621.40 yuan. In Florida a relief bill was filed for Smith’s estate, and families of women whom police attributed to Mosley called for an inquiry that was not held. In Illinois the state abolished capital punishment in 2011, and Dugan’s death sentence was commuted to life.
• 1971: In Vitebsk, O. G. is convicted of the murder of Lyudmila Andaralova, one of the earlier convictions later undone by Mikhasevich’s confessions.
• 1978: Yelena Zakotnova, 9, is killed in the Rostov region; Aleksandr Kravchenko is later executed for it, in 1983.
• September 8, 1983: Rostov police arrest a 19-year-old on a psychiatric register; further detainees follow.
• March 8, 1984: Three men are arrested in Illinois for the Nicarico murder; they are indicted the next day.
• September 1984: Chikatilo is detained in Rostov and released as a suspect in early 1985.
• April 29, 1985: Frank Lee Smith is arrested in Florida; he is convicted on January 31, 1986.
• Late 1985: Mikhasevich is arrested in Belarus.
• May 1987: Mikhasevich is sentenced to death.
• November 20, 1990: Chikatilo is arrested in Novocherkassk.
• January 7, 1992: Heaulme is arrested in Bischwiller.
• February 14, 1994: Chikatilo is executed.
• November 1995: Rolando Cruz is acquitted in Illinois; on November 27, L.P. and J.S. are released in Oregon.
• 2002: The Rhône assize court in Lyon acquits the teenager convicted twice of the Montigny killings.
• August 5, 2005: Serhiy Tkach is arrested in Polohy.
• October 2005: Zhao Zhihong is arrested in Inner Mongolia.
• November 2005: Brian Dugan is indicted for the Nicarico murder.
• December 23, 2008: Tkach is sentenced to life imprisonment.
• July 28, 2009: Dugan pleads guilty to the Nicarico murder.
• March 2012: M. D. is acquitted in Ukraine and released on March 22.
• December 2014: The Inner Mongolia Higher People’s Court declares Hugjiltu not guilty; his parents are awarded 2,059,621.40 yuan.
• May 17, 2017: Heaulme is convicted of the Montigny killings.
• July 30, 2019: Zhao Zhihong is executed.