They were under duress, they confessed as part of a plea bargain to reduce their sentences, they were insane, they were under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or they were tortured, or they want the notoriety that goes with the crimes of murder.
Whatever their reasons, many innocent persons were executed or sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit
I am going to give you examples of serial killers who confessed to crimes in which on some occasions, they committed some of the murders they were convicted of but confessed to some they probably didn’t commit.
This killer committed eleven murders of both boys and girls who were of various ages. He pleaded guilty of their murders because of a plea bargain. He agreed to the plea providing that ten thousand dollars for each of the ten murders he admitted to, was put into trust for his wife and small son. After the agreement was signed, he gave the police the locations where his victim’s bodies were buried. He also pleaded guilty to an 11th murder and that victim’s body was found.
He later stated that he had committed anywhere from 80 to 200 murders. It is considered highly unlikely that he committed that many murders. Officials concluded that he was making those admissions so that he could be taken from his prison and be on the outside (in the company of the police) for a while. By his own admission, he later said at a parole hearing that he was likely to kill again. He made that statement as a means of bragging that he was a real dangerous individual. He knew that even before he made that statement, he would never be released from prison so he had nothing to lose by making that statement. In actual fact however, he really was a dangerous man. He died in prison from cancer in 2011.
This serial killer murdered thirteen women in the Boston area. He was referred to by the press as the Boston Strangler. He confessed to those murders.
There have been lingering doubts remaining as to whether DeSalvo really was the ‘Boston Strangler’. At the time he confessed to the murders, people who knew him personally did not believe him capable of the crimes. That alone is not evidence that he didn’t commit the crimes. It was however also noted the women allegedly killed by ‘The Strangler’ were of widely varying ages, social strata and ethnicities, and that there were different methods of strangling them. That may hint that he didn’t strangle the women but not all serial killers murder the same kind of women the same ways. There was one such killer who only chose one kind of victim and I will get to him later in this article. Former FBIprofiler Robert Ressler, said "You're putting together so many different patterns (regarding the Boston Strangler murders) that it's inconceivable behaviorally that all these could fit one individual.”
Elaine Whitfield Sharp, an attorney specializing in forensiccases, observed, that contrary to DeSalvo's confession to Mary A. Sullivan's murder, there was no semen in her vagina and she was not strangled manually, but rather by ligature. DeSalvo nevertheless confessed to sexually penetrating Sullivan and yet despite that admission on his part, the forensic investigation revealed no evidence of any sexual activity at all. In fact, the investigation revealed that the DNA evidence found on Sullivan’s body did not match DeSalvo’s DNA.
Ames Robey, a former prison psychologist who analyzed both DeSalvo and George Nassar, the inmate DeSalvo reportedly confessed to, has said that Nassar was a misogynistic,psychopathickiller, and was a far more likely suspect of the 11 murders than DeSalvo was. Some followers of the case believe that Nassar fed DeSalvo details of the murders he himself had committed so that DeSalvo could confess to the crimes and be blamed for them.
Nassar had previously been convicted of the May 1948 murder of a shop owner and was sentenced to life in prison in that case, but through his friendship with a Unitarian minister he was paroled in early 1961, less than a year before the Boston Strangler murders were believed to have begun. He is currently serving a life sentence for the 1967 shooting death of an Andover, Massachusetts gas station attendant. He denies that he killed those eleven women. We will never know since DeSalvo died after being stabbed to death by a fellow prisoner on November 25, 1973.
Ottis Elwood Toole (United States)
This serial killer and self-admitted cannibal was convicted of murdering six persons and sentenced to life in prison. He also murdered Adam Walsh, the six-year-old son of John Walsh, the host of America`s Most Wanted.
There is some confusion as to how many people he really murdered. He recanted and then later admitted that his confessions were true. He later confessed to four more murder charges and was sentenced to another four life sentences before dying in prison.
Henry Lee Lucas
This serial killer was convicted of murdering eleven people however what makes this murderer stand out is that he has claimed that he actually murdered as many as 600 victims. These confessions were later deemed believableby a Texas-basedLucas Task Force, a group which was later criticized by then-Attorney General of Texas, Jim Mattox, and others for sloppy police work and for them and the police taking part in an extended hoax perpetrated by Lucas.
This serial killer was convicted of murdering eleven people however what makes this murderer stand out is that he has claimed that he actually murdered as many as 600 victims. These confessions were later deemed believableby a Texas-basedLucas Task Force, a group which was later criticized by then-Attorney General of Texas, Jim Mattox, and others for sloppy police work and for them and the police taking part in an extended hoax perpetrated by Lucas.
Despite his recantation, some of Lucas' confessions had been challenged as inaccurate by a number of critics, including law enforcement and court officials. His reason for the confessions was that Lucas claimed to have been initially subjected to poor treatment in jail and that coercive interrogation tactics were used against him while he was in police custody, so he confessed the murders in an effort to improve his living conditions and stop the police abuse. These claims were quickly seized upon by the press, and Lucas, accompanied by Texas Rangers, was soon flown from state to state, to meet with various police agencies in an effort to resolve a number of unsolved murders.
Here is where the stupidity of the police took form. Instead of asking Lucas where the bodies were, they would tell him who was killed and when they were killed or at least went missing and after feeding him with more information on each case, he created scenarios which they believed even though they never found his so-called victim`s bodies.
He certainly murdered his mother on January 11, 1960 and was sentenenced to prison for 20 to 40 years for that crime. Ten years later he was released from prison because of overcrowding. And it was from then that he began murdering his eleven victims, sometimes in the company of Ottis Elwood Toole.
Lucas died in prison from heart failure at age 64. We will never really learn how many victims this freak actually murdered.
Now I am going to tell you about a really botched police investigation of a so-called serial killer.
Sture Bergwall (Sweden)
There is real doubt whether or not this man ever killed anyone and yet he was convicted of murdering as many as eight and confessed to killing 30 victims. He could rightly be called the serial killer who never was. Why this anomaly, you rightly ask yourself? (This man also went by the name of Thomas Quick but for the purpose of this article, I will use his real name)
During the 1990s, Bergwell confessed to one unsolved murder after another during a succession of therapy sessions at the Säter psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. During those years, he said that he had maimed, raped and eaten the remains of his victims; the youngest of whom was a nine-year-old girl whose body has never been found.
In 2008, Hannes Råstam, one of Sweden's most respected documentary-makers, visited the former Bergwall, at Säter, real all of the 50,000 pages of court documents, therapy notes and police interrogations and came to the startling conclusion that there was not a single shred of technical evidence for any of Bergwall's convictions. Råstam was able to gain key information surrounding each case of supposed murders from psychiatrists, police officers and his lawyers, before stitching together the rambling and confused testimonies into a coherent narrative that could stand up in court. The conclusion he reached was that the man never committed any of the crimes he was convicted or admitted to have committed.
Bergwall has subsequently been acquitted of five of the eight murders and two outstanding cases—one for the murder of 15-year-old Charles Zelmanovits and the other for the double killing of a Dutch couple on a camping trip have been submitted to the authorities for review.
How did this ridiculous absurdity come about? More importantly, why would a man confess to such sadistic and violent crimes if he was truly innocent?
Bergwall explains it rather well when he said; “I was a very lonely person when it all started. I was in a place with violent criminals and I noticed that the worse or more violent or serious the crime, the more interest someone got from the psychiatric personnel. I also wanted to belong to that group, to be an interesting person in here.”
1990, he robbed a local bank dressed in a Santa Claus outfit to feed his drug addiction. The clerk recognized him. That was the beginning of his incarceration in Säter hospital for psychiatric treatment.
Bergwall had always wanted to meld in with his peers. Even when he was a teenager, he was a misfit. As a young man, Bergwall had further craved to be taken seriously and treated as an intelligent person. For a while, he wanted to be a doctor and subsequently read up on psychoanalysis. While in Säter, he began to realize he could use this knowledge to get the attention and acceptance he craved. Then one day in 1992, when he was in his therapist’s office, he asked him, “What would you say, if I had done something really bad?”That question was the spark that ignited the fervor that followed. He told the therapist that he had murdered someone and then later said, “Once I'd said that, there was no going back.”
He began confessing to murders he hadn’t committed. He was convicted of eight of them. Strangely enough, if he was a serial killer as the police, psychiatrists and the courts believed that he was, then why was there was no obvious modus operandi? He supposedly killed children and adults, he raped men and women, he used an array of weapons and he committed murders in various parts of Sweden and Norway. That is most unusual for serial killers. But that doesn’t necessary mean that he didn’t kill those people.
In 1996, he confessed to the murder of nine-year-old Therese Johannessen in Norway eight years previously. He initially said the girl was blonde and lived in a rural village. Actually she had dark brown hair and lived in a tower block in a heavily urbanized area. After he confessed to the murder of Therese Johannessen, Bergwall was driven to Norway. When Bergwall claimed that he had thrown Therese's body parts in a nearby lake, the Norwegian authorities spent seven weeks' draining it. They found nothing. When a 0.5mm bone fragment was discovered in adjoining woodland, it later turned out to be a charred piece of wood. The TV cameras followed his every move. He was rapidly becoming one of the most famous men in Scandinavia and he obviously reveled in the attention he received. Now he was no longer a nobody. Now he was a somebody. Are you ready for this? Despite the obvious fiction he had created for himself, he was convicted of murdering the girl.
In another case, one of Bergwall’s victims had a distinguishing birthmark on his right buttock that only his parents knew about. In early interviews, Bergwall only said that the boy had some vague marks or scars on the front of his stomach, possibly from surgery. The police asked the parents of the boy if he had any such scars. For a while, they refused to be specific because of their suspicions that the information would make its way back to Bergwall. When the police threatened to take the boy’s mother to court for protecting a murderer by not giving the police all the information she had about her son; she drew a picture of the birthmark. Shortly afterwards, Bergwall remembered that specific birthmark in his therapy session. Wow. How did he suddenly know about that birthmark?
During the course of the investigation, Bergwall referred to at least 24 different places in Sweden and Norway where he had committed murders, handled dead bodies or left body parts. Zampo (a police dog trained to find human remains) was used 45 times at those 24 locations. Not a single trace of blood or body parts was ever found. The dog was obviously smarter than the rest of them. He wasn’t going to dig up bodies that were never there.
What is even weirder is that he appeared to have a cast-iron alibi for some of his crimes he was accused of having committed. For example, he confessed to killing a teenage boy in 1964 at the age of 14 but it turned out that several witnesses could remember seeing him at holy communion with his non-identical twin sister, some 250 miles away. In fact, there was a photograph showing him there. He was convicted of the crime anyway. When he claimed responsibility for the killing of a 23-year-old woman in Norway in 1985, he said he had sex with her despite his stated sexual preference for men. The police had found traces of sperm in the woman but a subsequent DNA analysis ruled out the possibility that it belonged to Bergwall. And yet once again, a court found him guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.
Defenders of the verdicts pointed out that Bergwall had revealed significant pieces of information from each of the crimes that only the killer would know. Still today, there are those who robustly defend the police investigations, including Supreme Court judge. Göran Lambertz, who conducted a week-long review of the Bergwall cases in 2006 in his previous role as attorney general and found them all to be above board. Ohhh. Give me a break.
Lambertz said that Bergwall gave a lot of facts about two murders, in particular; the Johannessen and Zelmanovits murders that fit so well with what actually happened and what kind of children these two victims were. But according to Bergwall, a lot of the information was already in the public domain: and that is where he got the information from so that he could include that information into his involvement in their deaths.
According to Bergwall, a lot of the information he applied to his confessions was already in the public domain and early on in his confessional binge, he still had regular leaves of absence from the hospital. He said, I'd go to the Royal Library in Stockholm on day release and read up on old cases on the newspaper microfiches. Bergwall would then note down the telling details in contemporaneous reports of the murders such as the positioning of the bodies, the specifics of the landscapes, and each victim's clothing which of course he would later reveal in his therapy sessions of his gullible therapist. His therapist (who saw him for a minimum of three 90-minute sessions each week) would praise him for his bravery in digging deep into his so-called remembered past. The police would be thrilled at the emergence of a credible suspect for a previously unsolvable crime. On at least two occasions, Bergwall was flown by private jet to take part in reconstructions at murder sites while all this time, he was basking in the reflected glory, like a small child being patted on his head and praised for his good deeds.
He added, “I didn't need to do much to tell the stories. Usually a single newspaper article would be enough.”
Now here is an important lesson for the police and psychiatrists to follow. He said, “The rest of the information always came during the interrogations from the police, therapists or different people on the investigations team. I knew I just had to listen [and] to pay attention.
It is a common practice among homicide investigators to keep some pertinent information from the public so that wanabee murderers don’t use that information as part of their confessions. Those stupid boobs in the police forces and his therapist in Sweden spoon fed Bergwall all the information he needed to validate his confessions and then he regurgitated that information back at them and they swallowed it all with gusto.
His therapist was no better. In all of Berwall’s therapy sessions and the ensuing police reconstructions, Bergwall was heavily drugged on a full cocktail of benzodiazepines. Medical records show he was being given tablets every couple of hours and often up to 20mg of diazepam, which is enough to knock some people out cold. A high dosage given to those with poor impulse control can lead to a release of inhibitions which explains why Bergwall was able to invent such a grotesque litany of cannibalism, rape and murder that fascinated the therapist and everyone else who swallowed that yucky garbage spewing from his mouth.
When describing the effects on him with respect to the drugs he was given, he said,
“A lot happened inside of me. I'd get high, I'd get a kick and then I'd have lots of fantasies. My imagination would run wild. In one sense, they gave me a lot of creativity. It was like a vicious circle. The more I told, the more attention I got from the therapists and the police and the memory experts and that meant I also got more drugs.”
What I find fascinating about this particular case is that there was a clique of people around Bergwall who were part of a cult. He was a travelling circus comprised of persons who, not unlike like religious twits, do not welcome dissenting beliefs. The same police officer, therapist, prosecuting and defence lawyer who dealt with each of his confessions through the years were the ring masters of this stupid, mindless circus.
In 2001, a new clinical director at Säter reviewed Quick's medical records. He was shocked to discover the dosage and Quick's supply of drugs quickly dwindled. Once he stopped taking them, he stopped confessing. Instead, he announced to journalists that he would no longer co-operate with the police and withdrew from public view. He had already achieved what he wanted all his life—notoriety and he certainly got that.
Should he ever be released from the mental institution? I don’t think so. Anyone with that kind of imagination might conceivably commit such crimes to see what the experience is really like.
In conclusion, let me say that people who confess to crimes they didn’t commit should not be convicted of those crimes. The problem is; how do we really know they didn’t commit those crimes? Well for one thing, we should look into their past as see if they are suffering from insecurity. If they are, then it is conceivable that they are searching for notoriety and if that possibility exists, then we should take great care in searching for the truth. Further, convicting an innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit doesn’t offer solace to the victim’s families. Discovering later that the persons convicted of the murder of their loved ones may not have committed the murders, reinforces their anguish that the real murders are still free.
I suppose these serial killers feel that they have nothing to lose by confessing to murders that they actually didn't commit. After all, if they are going to be hanged as a sheep, they loose nothing by being hanged as a wolf.
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