A suspect is a status that police can confer in an afternoon and take back only slowly, sometimes after decades. The people in these files were arrested, charged, sentenced, questioned or simply named, and then a laboratory result or a second offender’s admission changed what the record could say about them. In one case the correction came late enough that the man did not live to hear it. In one the laboratory gave no answer at all. For each, the question is who was cleared, by what, and who the case later pointed to.
Brian Dugan pleaded guilty in November 1985 to two murders in northern Illinois: Donna Schnorr, 27, killed in July 1984, and Melissa Ackerman, 7, killed in June 1985. He received two life sentences. During the plea discussions his public defender told prosecutors that Dugan might be connected to the killing of Jeanine Nicarico, a 10-year-old girl killed in DuPage County in February 1983, and that he would confess to it only if his life was spared. Prosecutors refused. By then three young men from Aurora had already been charged with the Nicarico murder.
The case against them began with a $10,000 reward. Rolando Cruz 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 account drew in two other Aurora men, Alejandro Hernandez, who was 19 at the time of the crime, and Stephen Buckley. On March 8, 1984, the three were arrested, and the next day DuPage County State’s Attorney J. Michael Fitzsimmons obtained indictments for the murder.
The lead detective on the case, John Sam, resigned because he believed the men were innocent, the registry records. The prosecution 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 Buckley. Cruz and Hernandez were sentenced to death. Prosecutors later dropped the case against Buckley.
### Years of retrials
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 National Registry of Exonerations gives the date of the reversal as January 19, 1989. Each man was tried again. At the retrials, the registry says, much of the evidence pointing to Dugan was kept from the juries. Cruz was convicted a second time on February 1, 1990, and again sentenced to death. Hernandez’s second trial, held in Bloomington three months later, ended with a hung jury. He was convicted at a third trial on May 17, 1991, and sentenced to 80 years in prison.
In 1992 DNA testing excluded Hernandez and Buckley as the source of biological evidence in the case. Prosecutors went on opposing the men’s appeals. Mary Brigid Kenney, an assistant attorney general assigned to the Cruz appeal, wrote a memo raising concerns about the case and resigned in protest, the registry records. On December 4, 1992, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed Cruz’s second conviction and death sentence by a vote of 4 to 3. Weeks later three justices retired, and on May 28, 1993, the reconstituted court granted a rehearing.
At Cruz’s third trial, in November 1995, the registry records, a sheriff’s lieutenant had testified about a telephone call supposedly showing that Cruz had made admissions, but the lieutenant was on vacation in Florida at the time of the supposed call. On November 3, 1995, after two weeks of prosecution testimony, Judge Ronald Mehling acquitted Cruz, and he walked free. On December 8, 1995, the charges against Hernandez were dropped, and he too was released. A 1995 DNA test had matched biological evidence from the crime to Dugan, according to a case summary by the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s law school.
### The settlement and the pardon
A sheriff’s internal investigation found no wrongdoing by police or prosecutors, but a grand jury began examining the prosecution of Cruz. On December 12, 1996, it indicted seven law enforcement officials, three former prosecutors and four sheriff’s officers, who became known as the DuPage Seven, on charges that included official misconduct, obstruction of justice and perjury. A judge freed two of them on May 13, 1999, for lack of evidence, and the remaining defendants were acquitted on June 4, 1999. On September 26, 2000, the DuPage County Board voted 14 to 9 to settle the civil rights suits brought by Cruz, Hernandez and Buckley for $3.5 million. Before the end of 2002, DuPage State’s Attorney Joseph Birkett released new DNA results that, the Daily Herald reported, pointed to Dugan, not Cruz. On December 19, 2002, Governor George Ryan granted Cruz a full pardon based on innocence. Hernandez later received $170,000 in state compensation and Cruz $120,300, the registry records.
### Dugan in court
On November 29, 2005, a DuPage County grand jury indicted Dugan for Jeanine Nicarico’s murder, citing DNA evidence and improved DNA technology. At his first court appearance, on January 18, 2006, he pleaded not guilty. He pleaded guilty on July 28, 2009, with no deal, and told the court that no one had aided, abetted or helped him. A jury sentenced him to death that November, and the sentence was imposed on December 16, 2009. In March 2011 Illinois abolished the death penalty and Governor Pat Quinn commuted his sentence to life. He was still serving life as of August 2020, according to the registry.
On the other side of the state, a man named Grover Thompson was convicted of a crime he did not commit, and the proof came from someone else’s confession. Timothy Krajcir had spent most of his adult life in Illinois prisons. He was paroled in 1977, and the Daily Egyptian reported that enrolling at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale was a condition of his parole. By his own later account he killed women in southern Illinois, southeast Missouri, western Kentucky and Pennsylvania between 1977 and 1982.
In September 1981, in Mount Vernon, Illinois, an elderly woman survived a crime for which Thompson was arrested. He was 46, a Black man with a history of mental illness who was traveling by bus from Milwaukee to visit family in Mississippi, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. A neighbor identified him after being shown only him. Thompson was tried in Jefferson County Circuit Court in December 1981. The trial lasted two days. He testified and denied the crime, and on December 9, 1981, the jury convicted him of attempted murder. He was sentenced to 40 years. He died at Menard Correctional Center on June 28, 1996, still maintaining his innocence.
### The Carbondale lab
In Carbondale, Paul Echols had been a rookie patrol officer with the city police in April 1982, when Deborah Sheppard, 23, was killed. The case was not solved, and he kept returning to it as he rose through the department, the Daily Egyptian reported. In the summer of 2007, by then a lieutenant, he submitted the evidence to the Illinois State Police crime lab and worked with forensic scientists on newer DNA techniques. The profile matched Krajcir, who was already in the Illinois offender database; the match came in August 2007. Echols went to the prison to interview him. Krajcir first denied any involvement. The next day he called Echols and confessed. Carbondale police announced on August 31, 2007, that they had made an arrest in the 25-year-old case.
Krajcir pleaded guilty to Sheppard’s murder on December 10, 2007, and was sentenced to 40 years. A Cape Girardeau detective, Jimmy Smith, went back through his city’s files and connected Krajcir to five unsolved killings there. After prosecutors and the victims' families agreed not to seek the death penalty, he confessed, KFVS12 reported on December 11, 2007, to nine killings. On April 4, 2008, he pleaded guilty in Missouri to five counts of first-degree murder, with other charges, and received 13 consecutive life sentences across the cases in the state. He later pleaded guilty in Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
His confessions also reached back to Mount Vernon. He admitted the 1981 crime for which Thompson had been convicted. He was never charged with it. In January 2019, days before leaving office, Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner granted Thompson posthumous executive clemency based on innocence. It was the first posthumous exoneration in Illinois. Thompson had been dead for more than 22 years.
Between October 1986 and September 1989, eight young people from southeastern Virginia were the victims of four separate cases. Because each case involved a young couple and a vehicle, the press and many investigators came to treat the four as one series, the Colonial Parkway murders. The grouping has always been a working view, not a finding. For decades the FBI and the Virginia State Police said they had no physical evidence tying all four cases together. No one was ever charged.
On January 8, 2024, the Virginia State Police, the FBI and the Hampton Police Division announced in Suffolk that DNA linked Alan W. Wilmer Sr., a fisherman from Lancaster County who died in 2017 at 63, to three killings: those of a young couple in Isle of Wight County in 1987 and of Teresa Lynn Spaw Howell, 29, in Hampton in 1989. A man had been arrested in Howell’s case earlier, but a judge set the charges aside after DNA excluded him. Police said her death was not part of the parkway series.
Wilmer had never been convicted of a felony, so his DNA had never been taken while he was alive and was in no law enforcement database. Investigators obtained it legally after his death, and in 2023 the Virginia Department of Forensic Science issued a certificate of analysis confirming a match to him from evidence in the Isle of Wight and Hampton cases. The State Police said that, had he lived, the Commonwealth’s Attorneys of Isle of Wight County and Hampton would have charged him. He was never arrested, charged or tried, and no court has held him responsible for anything.
### The attributions since 2024
Within days the families of other victims pressed for more. Cathy Thomas’s brother told WTVR that the families were "absolutely furious" about what he called a go-slow approach, and asked why Wilmer’s DNA had not been taken earlier if his name had been in the files for decades. On November 14, 2025, the Virginia State Police and the Isle of Wight Commonwealth’s Attorney announced that DNA had identified Wilmer as the suspect in the 1988 killing of Laurie Ann Powell, 18, of Gloucester County. The testing was done by DNA Labs International in Florida and paid for by the Virginia Attorney General’s Office through its Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. The State Police said that had he been alive, he would have been charged.
On January 20, 2026, the FBI’s Norfolk Field Office announced that it had resolved the 1986 killings of Cathleen Thomas and Rebecca Dowski and had determined that Wilmer killed them. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said the evidence would have supported a federal prosecution had Wilmer been alive. In September 2026 the FBI attributed the 1988 case of Keith Call and Cassandra Hailey to Wilmer on the totality of circumstances, with no direct forensic evidence, and families of several victims publicly disputed that finding as circumstantial, WTVR reported. The 1989 deaths of Annamaria Phelps and Daniel Lauer have no named suspect and remain listed as active by the State Police.
Between February 1976 and March 1977, four children were taken from suburbs north of Detroit and killed: Mark Stebbins, 12, of Ferndale; Jill Robinson, 12, of Royal Oak; Kristine Mihelich, 10, of Berkley; and Timothy King, 11, of Birmingham. No one has been charged in any of the four deaths. In February 2026, fifty years on, the Michigan State Police said the case is still open and that evidence is being evaluated as new technology develops. By the accounts of WDIV and WXYZ, the search became the largest investigation of its kind in the United States at that time, and the task force received more than 11,000 tips. No one has been proved responsible, and no name is offered as the answer.
The record is a long list of men who came under suspicion and were not charged. In August 1999, L. Brooks Patterson, who had been the county’s prosecutor at the time of the killings, organized a trip to Wyoming to obtain DNA from a man, D.N., who had died and who was at that point regarded as the prime suspect. Patterson called it a gamble worth taking. The DNA was compared with a hair recovered in the case. It did not match; the Associated Press reported in 2006 that this lead collapsed in November 2000.
A second name followed. Christopher Busch was long a person of interest, and WDIV reported in 2011 that the families said they had never been told at the time that he had been a suspect. In 2008 police obtained search warrants connected to him. By 2010 the Oakland County prosecutor’s office no longer regarded Busch as a suspect. In June 2012 the office said new evidence pointed away from him, and that families and media had misread public documents without seeing the actual evidence. Paul Walton, the chief assistant prosecutor, said there was not a piece of evidence that pointed to Busch and that Busch’s DNA did not match the physical evidence. In 2020 Walton told WXYZ that his office had explored the lead. Busch died without being charged in any of the four deaths.
The case shows what a clearing can and cannot do. It removed two names from the list of the people most likely to be responsible. It did not supply another.
Six women died in Englewood, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, between December 1994 and June 1995. In June 1995 police arrested Hubert Geralds Jr., whose own sister had called them, and under questioning, the National Registry of Exonerations says, he confessed to all six killings. A Cook County jury convicted him on November 14, 1997, and Judge Michael P. Toomin sentenced him to death on January 9, 1998.
His case stands apart from the others because the clearing was partial. On June 19, 1995, while he was in custody on six murder charges, Assistant State’s Attorney Kevin Byrne interviewed him about Rhonda King, 18. Geralds chose to write a statement himself rather than give a recorded one. In that written statement, as the appellate court summarized it in 2013, he said he had met King sometime before Christmas in December 1994 and that he had killed her. The court later observed that the statement lacked substantial detail. The Cook County medical examiner recorded the cause of her death as undetermined.
In September 1999 Newsweek reported that Chicago police had linked 12 unsolved murders in the neighborhood over four years, and that DNA testing at the Illinois State Police crime laboratory had sorted them among four different offenders, called Patterns A, B, C and D. The magazine quoted the criminologist James Alan Fox, who warned that once a killer is identified, police may be tempted to attribute unsolved murders to that person in order to close them.
At the end of January 2000, CBS News reported, Andre Crawford, 37, was arrested after a tip and charged with the murders of 10 women, in a series that began in September 1993. Police Commander Frank Trigg said Crawford had confessed to seven of those killings and to three others police had not linked to the series. Crawford confessed to the King killing in January 2000. On February 10, 2000, the State moved to vacate Geralds’s conviction and death sentence for her murder. Crawford was later convicted of the murder of Rhonda King.
The National Registry of Exonerations lists Geralds’s conviction in the King case as an exoneration, with a false confession as the contributing factor, and says DNA testing identified Crawford and excluded Geralds. The 2013 appellate opinion records the prosecutor’s testimony that no DNA was recovered from King, and the court’s review rested on Crawford’s confession and the physical evidence. The two accounts differ, and the conflict has not been resolved. The Registry also says that, after the King vacatur, the State vacated his other five convictions and he pleaded guilty to those five murders and was sentenced to life without parole; the Department of Corrections record lists five life sentences for murder, and Byrne testified in 2009 that the other convictions were unaffected. He is listed in custody at Hill Correctional Center.
Patrice Alègre was 29 when police caught him in September 1997. In February 2002 the Haute-Garonne assize court in Toulouse convicted him of five murders with rape between 1989 and 1997 and of the rape and attempted murder of a sixth woman, who survived. He was sentenced to life, with a minimum term of 22 years. By 2003 he had become the center of a different kind of case. On May 30, 2003, according to Slate.fr, he backed the accounts of two women who spoke of parties involving prominent Toulouse figures, and made claims about two further killings. The television presenter Karl Zéro read extracts from a letter by Alègre on Canal+ on June 1.
Within weeks Alègre withdrew his statements. Infodujour reported that on June 26, 2003, he retracted, saying his confessions had been coerced and financially negotiated. The rest of the accusations came apart in the same way. One of the women was charged with complicity in false accusation, and the other told the judge in September 2003 that she had never met Dominique Baudis, and had been pressured. Another man placed under investigation in June 2003 was cleared when DNA evidence matched neither him nor Alègre. Baudis’s wife used his 1990 diary to show that on the date of one alleged incident he had been at the National Assembly in Paris, Slate.fr reported. In January 2005 the investigating judge, Judge Perriquet, closed the file, and in March 2005 a dismissal cleared Baudis. He published a book about the affair, "Face à la calomnie," that January. He died of cancer on April 10, 2014. None of the accusations against public figures in Toulouse was proven, and no court held that the parties described by the women took place.
Between November 2019 and June 2020, three older men were killed in robberies in the Burruyacu department, a farming district in the east of Tucumán province, in northwestern Argentina. The last, José "Pepe" Porcel, a retired farmer, died on June 26, 2020; Governor Juan Manzur said on July 1 that the presumed killers appeared to be in custody, and asked that "the full weight of the law" fall on them. In February 2020, before the group arrested for Porcel’s killing was linked to the earlier deaths, a man was arrested with two brothers in the case of Damián Florentino Gómez. All three were released after witnesses failed to identify them and DNA tests came back negative, Contexto Tucumán reported.
From early July 2020 investigators suspected that the group arrested for Porcel’s killing had committed the two earlier killings as well, citing a similar pattern of robberies of older residents. On August 27, 2020, La Gaceta reported a Ministerio Público Fiscal report saying that DNA from the suspects had been compared with traces from the earlier two locations, and that two of the accused could be classed as serial homicide offenders for three cases, while a third was linked to two. On September 28, 2020, the prosecutor, Adriana Giannoni, asked that four defendants be sent to trial; the four other people investigated for complicity were cleared. Antonio Ismael Sánchez, José Ramon Rojas and Juan Alfredo Acosta were sentenced to life imprisonment and a fourth defendant, Marcelo Bernardo Alderete, to 10 years, Contexto Tucumán reported on March 4, 2023.
Three women were killed in Glasgow between February 1968 and October 1969: Patricia Docker, Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock. They were all mothers, and each had spent the evening at the same dance hall in the east end. No one has ever been charged, and Police Scotland has said such cases are never closed.
In the mid-1990s, advances in DNA testing led to a new look at the files by a team led by Jim McEwan, according to the Sunday Post. The team focused on John Irvine McInnes, a former private in the Scots Guards and a furniture salesman who had died by suicide in 1980, according to The Courier. In 1996 DNA was obtained from him after his death in the hope that genetic testing would help. The result was described as inconclusive, and in mid-1996 the Lord Advocate said the forensic evidence was not enough to link McInnes to Helen Puttock’s murder, according to The Courier. The Courier also reports that McInnes had faced four identity parades.
No court has ever found that McInnes, or anyone else, was responsible for any of the three deaths. The laboratory result settled nothing: a name had been put to it and it gave no answer. In 2019 Bob Johnstone, a retired detective superintendent who had headed Glasgow CID, told STV that DNA testing, unavailable in 1969, would have made "a tremendous difference." In October 2023 Police Scotland said it was assessing claims made in a podcast with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service.
In Illinois it took a pardon, a $3.5 million settlement and a death sentence for another man before the story of Jeanine Nicarico’s killing was settled. In Mount Vernon it took another man’s confession 26 years after a jury had convicted an innocent man who had by then been dead for 11 years. In Hampton an arrest ended with a judge setting the charges aside; the man named by DNA 35 years later had never been convicted of a felony and was in no database. In Michigan the lead that DNA ended in 2000 did not point anywhere else, and the second name was left without a charge. In Chicago, a single conviction was vacated after another man confessed, while accounts of the rest of Geralds’s record do not agree.
Cleared is not one condition. Some of these people were exonerated by a court or a governor. Others were released, or never charged, or left unnamed by prosecutors who simply stopped saying their names. What they had in common was the years in between.
• 1981, September: Mount Vernon, Illinois; Grover Thompson is arrested.
• 1981, December 9: Thompson is convicted of attempted murder and later sentenced to 40 years.
• 1982, April: Deborah Sheppard, 23, is killed in Carbondale, Illinois.
• 1983, February: Jeanine Nicarico, 10, is killed in DuPage County, Illinois.
• 1984, March 8: Cruz, Hernandez and Buckley are arrested; indictments follow March 9.
• 1985, February 22: Cruz and Hernandez are convicted of the Nicarico murder and sentenced to death.
• 1985, November: Dugan pleads guilty to two murders and receives two life sentences.
• 1988 or 1989: the Illinois Supreme Court overturns the Cruz and Hernandez convictions; sources differ on the year.
• 1990, February 1: Cruz is convicted a second time.
• 1991, May 17: Hernandez is convicted at a third trial.
• 1992: DNA testing excludes Hernandez and Buckley.
• 1995, November 3: Cruz is acquitted; charges against Hernandez are dropped December 8.
• 1996, June 28: Grover Thompson dies at Menard Correctional Center.
• 1999, August: DNA is obtained in Wyoming from a man regarded as the prime suspect in the Oakland County killings.
• 2000, February 10: Illinois moves to vacate Hubert Geralds Jr.'s conviction in the King case.
• 2002, December 19: Governor George Ryan pardons Cruz on grounds of innocence.
• 2003, June: a man under investigation in the Toulouse affair is cleared by DNA.
• 2005, November 29: Dugan is indicted for the Nicarico murder.
• 2007, August 31: Carbondale police announce the Sheppard arrest.
• 2009, July 28: Dugan pleads guilty to the Nicarico murder.
• 2011, March 9: Dugan’s death sentence is commuted to life.
• 2012, June: Oakland County prosecutors say new evidence points away from Christopher Busch.
• 2017: Alan W. Wilmer Sr. dies.
• 2019, January: Thompson is granted posthumous clemency.
• 2020, February: three people arrested in the Burruyacu case are released after DNA tests come back negative.
• 2023, March 4: the Burruyacu verdict is reported.
• 2024, January 8: Virginia announces the Wilmer DNA attribution.
• 2025, November 14: DNA identifies Wilmer in the 1988 Powell case.
• 2026, January 20: the FBI announces it has resolved the Thomas and Dowski killings.