Every one of the cases below is known by a number, and in every one of them the number came from the killer.
That is not the same as the number he was convicted of, and it is usually not close to it. It survives anyway, because a confession total is useful to somebody. It sells a newspaper, closes a file, buys a plea, or makes a nurse the most notorious woman in Massachusetts. The conviction figure does none of those things, and it is the one this archive records.
Henry Lee Lucas confessed to about six hundred murders and cleared two hundred and thirteen cases for the Texas Rangers. He was demonstrably somewhere else for a great many of them. He was convicted of eleven and is probably responsible for three.
Pedro Alonso Lopez claimed more than three hundred girls across Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Ecuador convicted him of one hundred and ten, fifty-three bodies were recovered, and he served fourteen years because sixteen was the maximum the law then allowed. He was released in 1994, deported, released again, and nobody knows where he is.
Donald Gaskins claimed more than a hundred. Fourteen were established. He killed a fellow prisoner on death row with a rigged radio, which is what put him back under sentence, and he was executed in 1991.
Richard Kuklinski told interviewers for twenty years that he had killed between one hundred and two hundred and fifty people as a contract killer. Six were proved. Almost none of the rest has ever been corroborated by anyone.
Glen Rogers claimed seventy. Five are established, and no investigator has ever supported the larger figure. He was executed in Florida in May 2025.
Donald Leroy Evans claimed sixty across the United States. He was convicted of two, three were established, and he was stabbed to death on death row in 1999 before any of the rest could be tested.
Manuel Delgado Villegas, El Arropiero, confessed to forty-eight killings in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal. Several of them were shown to be impossible. Seven were corroborated. He was never tried at all, having been found unfit, and he died in Madrid in 1998.
Efren Saldivar confessed in 1998 to forty or fifty deaths on the night shift at a Glendale hospital, then retracted, and in later years put his own estimate above two hundred. He pleaded guilty to six.
Jane Toppan confessed to thirty-one murders and said she wanted to have killed more people than anyone who ever lived. That is the clearest statement of motive any of these cases produced. She was charged with three, found not guilty by reason of insanity in 1902, and has no conviction at all.
Kieran Kelly is said to have pushed as many as thirty-one people under Underground trains. He was convicted of two. The thirty-one comes almost entirely from one retired officer's book published in 2015, and both the British Transport Police and the Metropolitan Police have said there is no record supporting it.
H. H. Holmes, born Herman Webster Mudgett, confessed to twenty-seven murders and sold the confession to a newspaper for a reported seven thousand five hundred dollars. Some of the people in it turned out to be alive. He was tried for one killing, that of his accomplice Benjamin Pitezel, and hanged for it in 1896. Around nine can be reliably attributed to him, and the castle full of vanished women that the confession bought exists mostly inside the confession.
Miranda Barbour told a newspaper she had killed at least twenty-two people, and in some tellings a hundred. Investigators in several states found no support for any of it. She was convicted of one murder, committed with her husband three weeks after their wedding, and is serving life without parole.
A reader may feel this is a complaint about vanity, and that a lie told by a man already serving life costs nothing. It costs a great deal, and the cases record what.
Lucas's six hundred were not just believed, they were used. Two hundred and thirteen files were closed on the strength of them, in jurisdictions that wanted them closed, which means two hundred and thirteen investigations stopped. Whoever committed those killings was never looked for again.
Holmes's number was a transaction in the plainest sense. He was paid for it, and what he sold has outlived every fact about him; he is remembered for a building and a body count, and convicted of one murder.
Coral Eugene Watts was given immunity in Texas in 1982 for any murder he confessed to, in exchange for pleading guilty to burglary with intent. He confessed to thirteen under that deal and investigators credited him with as many as eighty. The immunity nearly released him in 2006, and what stopped it was Michigan convicting him of a killing he had already confessed to under the agreement that was supposed to protect him.
And a confession can be the only thing standing between an innocent person and a life sentence, which is the other half of this and the reason the reliability matters in both directions. Keith Hunter Jesperson began writing anonymous confessions signed with a smiley face because Laverne Pavlinac and John Sosnovske had been convicted of his first murder and had served four years for it. Tommy Lynn Sells, who claimed seventy and is confirmed at twenty-two, made a confession that exonerated a woman convicted of murdering her own son. Serhiy Tkach, who claimed around a hundred and was convicted of thirty-seven, had at least nine innocent men convicted of his killings before he was caught.
The hardest version is Wang Shujin. In 2005 he confessed to a rape and murder in Hebei for which Nie Shubin had been executed ten years earlier. The Chinese courts twice refused to accept the confession. Wang was executed in 2013 for three other killings, with that one excluded, and Nie Shubin was exonerated posthumously in 2016.
A confession is not evidence of anything except that somebody said it. Where it is checkable it gets checked, and the number falls; where it is not checkable, it stands, and it is the number everyone remembers. Twelve of the cases above are famous for a figure that no court accepted. In several more, the same instrument, used honestly, was the only thing that got an innocent person out.