The Truth About False Confessions

Sometimes people end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this episode, Prof. Hirsch recounts a harrowing case involving a late night assault on a police officer in New York City. The police apprehended a young man on a nearby street who later confessed to beating the cop with a baseball bat. But numerous inconsistencies in the testimony of various officers and questionable aspects of the man's confession cast doubt on his guilt.  

In this episode of The Truth About False Confessions podcast, Prof. Hirsch describes his introduction to the field of false confessions. It dates back to his time as a law clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals in the 1980s where he encountered a homicide case that went up to the Supreme Court.

Prof. Alan Hirsch describes his experience traveling to testify in an alarming case with a dubious confession and several strange developments. When is a guilty plea not a guilty plea? How did this bizarre case end? 

Should an expert resist testifying in cases where he thinks the defendant is guilty?  In this episode of The Truth About False Confessions, Prof. Alan Hirsch discusses the case of a man who was probably guilty but was also broken down by extreme and unusual interrogation tactics. 

Serial killer or serial false confessor? That's the question that had to be answered in this strange case. The man in question confessed to 18 murders, most of which he clearly did not commit. Why did he keep confessing? And was he innocent or guilty of the homicide that could determine whether he is executed?

There was little doubt that Jeremy Conover, who took his own life shortly thereafter, was involved in sexual assault, arson, and murder – what the Sheriff of this small county called “the most heinous crime I've seen or even heard of” in tiny Butler County, Missouri. Conover raped a ten-year-old girl, killed her and her father, then burned down their house. But did Conover have an accomplice? There was no evidence against the alleged accomplice, except his shaky confession, and he had a solid alibi. But he faced a sheriff convinced of his guilt.

This triple homicide attracted national attention in part because of an HBO three-part documentary and in part because of the community’s fear of a Satanic cult in their midst. As if the brutal murders of three young boys were not enough to shake up this Bible Belt city, imagine what happened when the killers were revealed to be teenage boys who worshipped Satan. But did they really worship Satan? And were they really killers?

When a gang-related shootout in Memphis left one bystander dead and another seriously injured, police had few leads until an anonymous tip led them to the doorstep of teenager Torry Anderson. Anderson’s subsequent confession had serious problems and was the only evidence against him. In his description of the case, Professor Alan Hirsch emphasizes the defense attorney’s clever closing argument. But was it enough?

After secretly giving birth, high school cheerleader Skylar Richardson buried the baby in her backyard. But was the child born alive and killed by Skylar, or stillborn? In the face of a problematic interrogation, Skylar confessed not only to killing the baby but also to burning it in an effort to destroy the evidence. A gruesome crime? Or overzealous police tricking an innocent teenager? In the pilot episode of The Truth About False Confessions, Professor Alan Hirsch, who was an expert witness at Skylar’s trial and interviewed her post-trial, recounts this riveting case.