Innocents often confess falsely to big crimes
Innocents often confess falsely to big crimes
Experts say they do it for attention or may be mentally ill
Cecilia M. Vega, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, August 20, 2006
From the O.J. Simpson case to the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby, famous crimes often attract confessions from people who have nothing to do with them.
And this week's admission by John Mark Karr that he played the lead role in JonBenet Ramsey's brutal death is raising suspicions that the former Petaluma schoolteacher may have pulled off a giant hoax.
"People just don't believe that someone could confess to something they didn't do," said Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at Williams College in Massachusetts and an expert in confessions. "It happens with a good amount of regularity, particularly in high-profile cases."
There are many reasons why, including a chance to be in the limelight or a pathological need for fame.
But experts agree it usually boils down to one thing: The person is deeply disturbed.
"Sometimes you run into people who because of some mental illnesses are delusional and might actually believe they were part of the crime," Kassin said.
Following his arrest Wednesday in Bangkok, Karr allegedly told authorities that he had sex with the child beauty queen. He also told reporters that he was with her when she died and that her death was an accident.
There are aspects to his story, however, that just don't seem to add up. Investigators concluded there was no semen on JonBenet's body when she was found dead in the basement of her Colorado home the day after Christmas in 1996. An autopsy also showed that she died from strangulation after being beaten so badly that she suffered a fractured skull -- hardly an accident.
And Karr's ex-wife has said she doubts he committed the crime because the couple spent that holiday season together in Alabama where they were living at the time.
Karr, 41, is awaiting deportation from Thailand to face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault. Authorities in Thailand said he would be returned from Bangkok today.
In the days since his arrest, his bizarre obsession with JonBenet has come to light, along with a history that includes marrying teenage girls, behaving inappropriately around children in the schools where he taught and, according to authorities, possessing child pornography.
He wrote her love poems -- one called "JonBenet, My Love" -- exchanged volumes of e-mails with a University of Colorado journalism professor who produced documentaries on the case, sent letters to JonBenet's mother, Patsy, and researched the case on his own.
But it remains to be seen whether he actually had anything to do with the crime or, instead, made a voluntary false confession.
It would hardly be the first time.
In 1932, more than 200 people came forward to claim a role in the highly publicized kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's son. Investigators in the O.J. Simpson case have said that a dozen people claimed to have stabbed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman to death in 1994.
The 1947 Black Dahlia murder also prompted scores of people to confess to killing 22-year-old actress Elizabeth Short, whose body was found cut in half in a vacant lot. One man reportedly paid so many visits to Los Angeles police that detectives gave him the nickname "Confessin' Tom."
One of the country's most sensational false confessions came from Texas prisoner Henry Lee Lucas. During the 1980s, he said he killed more than 600 people, including his mother and Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa who disappeared in 1975.
Lucas told stories of cannibalism and necrophilia, and his tips about unsolved cases earned him perks such as a private jail cell and unlimited cigarettes and cheeseburgers. Eventually, he recanted and insisted that the only person he had really killed was his mom.
Typically, the false confessions in high-profile cases never make the headlines because they often involve little more than a brief phone call between police and the confessor. Someone calls to falsely report his involvement in a crime, detectives ask for a detail about the crime that was never made public and the exchange ends there.
Modesto police Sgt. Al Brocchini, who worked as a detective on the Laci Peterson case, said that in his six years working homicide cases, he has never known anyone to come forward to take responsibility for a crime they didn't commit hoping to achieve 15 minutes of fame.
"If that happened and somebody called and said, 'I did that crime, I committed that murder,' a police department isn't going to go over there and handcuff the guy and place him under arrest," Brocchini said. "We're going to see if he was in the place at the time of the murder. Get the details first."
Still, Richard Ofshe, a UC Berkeley sociology professor who has worked on many high-profile cases of false confessions, said, "It's a very common phenomenon.
"The people who confess to crimes they didn't commit are not thinking clearly," he said. "The people who do it, everyone agrees, are unbalanced and it's done for attention."
Such people often don't consider the long-term consequences of giving a false confession, including the possibility of being convicted for a crime you didn't commit, Ofshe said.
"They're obviously disturbed," he said. "Their reasoning is not working."
But it's not just fame that drives people to make false confessions.
He said people also confess to crimes they didn't commit to protect a family member or because they were coerced into a confession during an interrogation.
Ofshe is currently involved in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, in which five black and Latino teenagers confessed to raping a white woman, an investment banker. DNA later linked an imprisoned murderer to the attack in Manhattan.
In the case of Karr, Ofshe believes his reported admission of guilt may be the result of an interrogation, rather than one driven by a desire for notoriety.
"This may be, and in all likelihood is, an interrogation-driven confession," he said, adding that confessors typically are able to provide significant details about the crime, whereas Karr has publicly, at least, remained tight-lipped.
When asked what happened when JonBenet died, Karr told reporters, "It would take several hours to describe that. ... It's very painful for me to talk about it."
But when asked if he was an innocent man, Karr flatly responded, "No."
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News researcher Johnny Miller contributed to this story. E-mail Cecilia M. Vega at
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