The False Confessors

On Independence day, 1954, Marilyn Sheppard, 31, was bludgeoned to death in a second-floor bedroom of her pleasant home in Bay Village, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. When the police arrived, her husband, Samuel A. Sheppard, an osteopathic surgeon, was in the living room, naked to the waist, one eye puffed shut, his neck, he believed, broken. He said he'd fallen asleep on the couch, was awakened when his wife screamed. He ran up the stairs and was knocked out by someone he never saw. "I was clobbered," he said. He came to, heard someone below. He ran down, spotted "a bushy-haired man," chased him through the house and out to the observation deck overlooking Lake Erie. He made a flying tackle, took a right to the eye, a left to the jaw and passed out again.

Simple at first glance, the case had puzzling aspects. Earlier that same day, a neighbor, leaving Mrs. Sheppard after a visit while Dr. Sheppard was asleep, said that Marilyn had bolted the door. Yet there was no sign of forced entry. The dead woman's pajamas had been torn off, but she hadn't been sexually assaulted. Had a burglar been surprised, he might have struck once or twice in panic, but Mrs. Sheppard had been hit at least 35 times; her face and skull were pulp. Dr. Sheppard pointed out that his medical bag was open, suggesting that the killer was an addict, desperate for a "fix." But no drugs were missing.

A week later a woman telephoned police to confess that she had killed Mrs. Sheppard in order to revenge herself on Dr. Sheppard for poor medical treatment. A routine investigation established that she had been drunk when she made the call, and that she knew no more about the case than she had read in the newspapers.

Four days later a man called from Baltimore to admit that he had done the job. He had done it for a fee -- $1000. This one turned out to be an ex-convict, also drunk, who wanted "to impress a girl."

Thereafter, the police had to listen to a long line of confessors, each insisting that he or she had wielded the fatal bludgeon, each furious at the skepticism of the gendarmery.

One reason for the calm the police maintained in the face of all this was that they had decided to arrest Dr. Sheppard. There were fatal implausibilities in his story. When the visiting neighbor left that night, Sheppard was wearing slacks and a T-shirt; when police arrived he was bare-chested and the T-shirt was nowhere to be found. All fingerprints, even those that would normally have been about the house, had been carefully wiped away. A pair of bloody gloves belonging to Sheppard were found in the garage. He refused a lie-detector test. He conceded intimacies with various women, and he admitted that he and Mrs. Sheppard had pondered the desirability of a divorce. After a trial notable even by American standards for the amount of slushy sentimentality that went into the newspaper coverage, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in the second degree, still protesting his absolute innocence. The case was closed.

It would not stay closed. The shrill cries of new "confessors" rang in the land. One Billy O'Williams confessed in Trenton. It was established that he hadn't been within a thousand miles of Cleveland when Mrs. Sheppard died. A Henry Fuehrer proclaimed in Cincinnati that it was he who had entered the premises, intent upon burglary, and killed the woman when she awoke. Since he had been in the workhouse in Knoxville, Tennessee, that night, his tale was viewed as rather unlikely by legal authorities. Altogether 25 men and women pleaded guilty and were proved innocent.

The Court of Last Resort, an Argosy magazine feature that had proved convicted men innocent in several cases, became interested in the Sheppard matter. Erle Stanley Gardner, chief investigator and presiding justice of the "court," pointed to unexplained aspects of the case, wondered whether Dr. Sheppard's cheating on his wife had unduly influenced the jury. But he was unable to produce any new evidence that might overturn the conviction.

Then, on July 16th, 1957, confessor number 26 came to the front. Donald J. Wedler, 22, resident in a Florida prison for robbery, told Sheriff Rodney Thursday that he had come reluctantly to the conclusion that it was really he who had killed Mrs. Sheppard. Reading old newspaper accounts of the murder had, he said, convinced him. He said he had been in Cleveland at the time, on heroin, and badly in need of money for a fix. He had selected a house at random, ransacked a bedroom, was caught in the act, struck "a woman" with a length of lead pipe. He ran out of the bedroom, encountered "a man," struck him, raced outside and away.

But Wedler said the front door had been unlocked, whereas other testimony indicated it had been bolted. He claimed he had left dresser drawers open, but police had found them closed. He said he had hit Mrs. Sheppard "a couple of times"; but she had been struck very many times more than that. He claimed only one tussle with the man; Dr. Sheppard claimed two.

Still, Dr. Sheppard, shown Wedler's picture, said he had a vague feeling that this was indeed the man. He announced suddenly that he was now willing to take a lie-detector test -- Wedler had already had one, given by the Court of Last Resort, that proved favorable to his story, according to the operator -- providing no police officials be present. This condition was naturally unacceptable to the authorities. And Cleveland was not sufficiently impressed with Wedler even to extradite him, a circumstance that annoyed the Florida robber. "That's my story," he said. "It's up to you to prove it isn't so."

The Cleveland prosecutor's office has filed Mr. Wedler's name away with the other hag-ridden neurotics who pop up in the backwash of every well-publicized crime, murders in particular. The New York City police know that they will have to bar the gates every year to at least 2000 eager citizens fighting to tell all, and in Los Angeles, naturally, twice that many petition to be locked up for something they didn't do -- didn't do and, usually, couldn't have done. How does this strange plague run nationally? A noted crime statistician has said, "If every person in the United States who confesses to a crime he hasn't committed were recorded on an IBM punch card, I venture we'd have at least 400,000 a year showing up in the Uniform Crime Reports."

Because they clutter up a case, cost money and man-hours, and because of the danger that they may cause a false conviction, policemen take a dim view of the compulsive confessors. Viewed more objectively, some of them are weird and wonderful indeed. Consider, for instance, the Case of the Two Bangors.

Several years ago the police of Bangor, Maine, found this in the morning mail: "Exposing who killed Edith Ford. It was Frederick Harder of Spokane, Washington. Edith deserved to die, but only God has the right to that irrevocable decision. Knowing about it has been on my conscience a long time but I would not speak out. A murderer may strike twice. I will not sign my name. Let justice be done!"

Bangor, Maine, had no record of such a homicide, but Bangor, Pennsylvania did. Edith Ford's body, well wrapped in baling wire, had been found at the bottom of a well, and the case had lain unsolved for two years. The Spokane police were asked to chat with Mr. Harder. They found him to be a high school teacher of 51 years and excellent reputation. He was furious. He had never known an Edith Ford. He hadn't set foot out of Spokane for 11 years, and who the devil had written the letter? The answer came soon enough. Shown a photostat of the letter, he recognized the script instantly. It was his own.

Shaken to his shoes, Harder sought a psychiatrist and, a good many 50-minute hours later, remembered that about the time the letter had been written he was confined to bed, recuperating from pneumonia. He had read a précis of the Ford case in a magazine. That was all he remembered. But beyond doubt he had written the anonymous letter, after which his unconscious mind had blacked out the entire episode. A crossed wire in his unconscious recollection had brought him to address the letter to the Maine Bangor instead of the Pennsylvania one.

Harder's dreamworld approach to self-incrimination sets him apart from the run of punishment-seekers, most of whom go about their strange business in a more direct fashion. Jim McGill comes closer to fitting the pattern. McGill began his career by confessing to a murder in Washington, D.C. He didn't make the sale. In the next 15 years he tried in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. One would expect such persistence ultimately to be rewarded, and McGill finally found success. His was a set routine: in metropolitan centers he claimed the rights and (continued on page 54)False Confessors(continued from page 44) prerogatives of a murderer; in rural territory, aware that barn-burning in the boondocks equates with murder in Manhattan, he plumped for arson. If McGill were within 20 miles of a farm fire, he could be counted on to buttonhole the sheriff before the ashes were cold. Usually a few questions showed him up and after a night or two in the local jail he'd be pointed toward open country and told to scat. But one day in Lodi, California, he heard of a barn-burning and instead of merely making the claim, he set his limited imagination to work. He was, he told the law, not only an arsonist, he was a labor organizer, intent on gathering the farm hands of America into one big union. When a farmer proved dubious of the benefits of organization, McGill burned his barn, he said -- just as a warning.

Nine times in ten this tale would have brought him his usual invitation to leave town forthwith. But it happened that there had been efforts at organization of farm hands around Lodi, and there had been several suspicious fires. The Lodi authorities decided McGill was telling the truth. They thanked him and sent him to San Quentin tagged for 15 years. Tucked away in peace and quiet, McGill meditated and made the discovery that comes to so many men: once his heart's desire had been gained, he wanted no part of it. He began to scream his innocence. "Let me out of here," he said with fervor. He succeeded in having an investigation begun, but he died before it was completed. He had really made the grade: a life sentence for a crime he hadn't committed.

California's Black Dahlia case has probably attracted more self-incriminators than any other in our history. The Black Dahlia was one Elizabeth Short, inevitably referred to in newspaper accounts of her demise as "beautiful." She was in fact not actually ugly, a brunette of no steady occupation who had done a good deal of sleeping around. Her body, not very neatly cut in two, was found in a Los Angeles vacant lot in 1947. Veteran police officers, marking the sexual and macabre aspects of the crime, braced themselves for the onslaught. Langley Lewis, 29, of Englewood, N.J., was first under the wire. "I did it," he said. "I killed her with a knife. I bisected her -- do you know what I mean by bisecting?"

One Alvin Turnbow was next. He surrendered in Dallas, and recorded for the police of that municipality a confession studded with torture and perversion. They threw him out. A woman telephoned from Fullerton, California: "I'm the killer of the Black Dahlia. Come and get me." A woman in San Diego, notable only because she was a former WAC, got into line, but her story held up no better. In Chicago a lady of admitted lesbian persuasion confessed killing Beth Short because she'd been cheating: "They think a man killed the Black Dahlia, but I did ..."

Pharmacist's Mate John Andry told Long Beach police that he had killed Beth Short, all right, but that it was up to them to prove it, he wouldn't help them. The task proved beyond their capabilities.

It's a long list, over 200 names, and still growing. Of the total, 38 convinced the police that their stories warranted investigation. Not one proved worth the trouble.

Why do they do it? When normal impulse makes a man twitch nervously when he's pulled up for speeding, how can another man walk calmly up to a police officer and hold him firmly by the arm while he enters a false claim to homicide?

In a few cases the reason is not difficult to find. Some false confessors take the blame out of love for the truly guilty. A father may confess his son's crime, a woman her lover's. There are those who do it for hire. A small businessman who has burned down the store for insurance and finds the insurance company's sleuths on his trail may, if he knows the right people, engage a professional time-server. For perhaps 25 percent of the insurance money this worthy will admit to setting the fire -- an accident, he'll say; he broke in to rob and dropped a cigarette -- and he'll deny to doomsday any connection with the store's owner. Five years, say, with two off for good behavior -- it isn't bad if you like the cozy feeling of a cell, or are a connoisseur of prison cuisine. Some men like to hide in prison. Guilty of a felony, let us say, and sensing the ring closing, they confess a misdemeanor, hoping to draw a sentence just long enough to keep them out of circulation until the heat dies down. This used to be a better dodge than it is today, by the way, because a few men have been caught in the deception, and wardens are currently apt to be curious about even their casual guests.

But these are comparatively normal folk, and there are comparatively few of them. The majority of self-incriminators are mentally out of round. Some of them are psychotic, insane. Most are not. They can earn their own livings, get along with people, are frequently charming, intelligent, sensitive. They are emotionally disturbed, but in a fashion that is not overt. They are hysteroids, compulsive neurotics. Authorities such as Dr. Marcel Frym of the Hacker Foundation for Psychiatric Research reject the off-the-cuff dicta of many police that the false confessor merely wants public notice, or is demonstrating the aberration of drunkenness. Granted that some false confessors are drunk, still not all drunks are false confessors. Some people seek notoriety by eating 480 oysters in an hour (the world record, if you care). Why do others profess to be felons? The answer lies deeper than even the depths of ego -- or the bottom of a fifth of rye.

Ponder the case of a man we'll call Thomas Hardinge, 27 at the time the sad tale begins, strong and heavily built, with a college education. One night, no doubt in the full of the moon, he staggered into a New York City station house and drunkenly mumbled that he had killed one Beulah Limerick. A detective who'd been trying to calm him remembered Beulah Limerick: 19, pretty, made dead in Washington, D.C. by a person or persons unknown. He was interested. But Thomas' story was vague, and in the vital matter of the date of the girl's death, he was a full year out. He was steered to the drunk tank, screaming "I'm gonna run! Shoot me! Finish me off! I don't want to live!"

Next morning, hung over but rational, he expressed disappointment at finding that he was not on Page One of the New York newspapers. "I was drunk," he said, quite unnecessarily. "I just wanted a little publicity." New York police practice being a bit more advanced than the general run, Thomas was given a psychiatric examination. The doctors found him in a state of "emotional panic." His wife, a telephone operator seven years his senior, established the background:

Shortly after their marriage Thomas lost his job. A week later he woke in a sweat and hysterically begged his wife not to leave him alone. Finding irrefutable her argument that their sustenance depended upon her job, he begged her to lock him into a clothes closet. He had, he said, an uncontrollable impulse to steal, and he was afraid. As much to humor him as anything else -- he was suffering from a second-degree hangover -- his wife put him into a closet, stuffed a sandwich and a bloody mary in after him and locked the door. When she came home that afternoon he was seated on the sofa, sobbing hysterically and surrounded by useless articles taken in burglary.

He had gnawed his way through the closet door panel.

Each day Thomas found a new device to prevent his leaving the apartment. Each afternoon his wife found him on the sofa, weeping, pointing helplessly to his loot. His panic mounted in intensity, (concluded overleaf)False Confessors (continued from page 54) in duration. He lived in terror. One afternoon when his wife returned, braced for the daily horror, he was not on the sofa, nor in the apartment. That night he confessed the Limerick murder. He could not have committed it, for on the day Beulah Limerick died he had been in Sing Sing, doing a term for forgery. I established his alibi, incidentally. At the time of his "confession" I was executive director of the New York State Division of Parole, and Thomas was under parole.

The examining psychiatrists believed that the fact of Thomas' inebriation at the time of confession was not significant. He made the false confession while drunk, but not because he was drunk. His stated desire for publicity was subterfuge, whistling in the dark. The real reasons were pried out of the dark corners of his psyche in the course of psychiatric treatment, and the pattern followed the theory of behavior first laid down by the noted psychoanalyst Theodor Reik. Simply stated, it is this: all of us at times do things considered wrong or immoral by the society in which we live. Some of us feel guilty afterward. Recollection of the "sin" may be buried in the unconscious, but the guilty knowledge struggles to work its way back to the conscious level. The unconscious cries, "You have sinned!" and the conscious self answers, "I don't hear you!" With some people, repressed material must be heard.

How does one get rid of the sense of guilt? By following childhood's pattern: when a child sins, he experiences anxiety, fear, apparent withdrawal of love and finally physical punishment. After that, normalcy is restored. The pattern is sin, spanking, serenity. Suffering is a means of regaining love and acceptance. "We derive reassurance from paying the price," Reik says. Repressed material over which we feel guilt nags at us, goads us into seeking expiation, until an individual may be driven to confess something he didn't do as atonement for something long forgotten which he did do. Even false confession may be good for the soul. It was post-confession serenity that Thomas was looking for, the night he screamed that he had killed Beulah Limerick.

The psychiatrist asked if he knew of any secret anxiety. He said, "Absolutely not," but he did, and in time he admitted it: almost immediately after his marriage he had become impotent, psychically impotent. "It was devastating," he said. "I'd think about Irma and that minute, I could do it, no question. But when we got into bed, it was gone. I'd lie there, calling myself every kind of heel."

He tried a prostitute. He was potent. "I was impotent only with my wife," he told me. "Feeling that way, I should never have married her."

"Feeling what way?" I asked him.

"I felt I was committing bigamy when I was in bed with Irma."

"Bigamy?"

"I fought the damned thing for months with the doctor. I wouldn't face it. Then I did. Subconsciously, I'd been feeling that I had no right to be married to Irma, because I was married already. To my mother."

His father had died when Thomas was an infant. His mother never remarried. It was the old story: she devoted herself completely to her son, and when he began to manifest an interest in girls, she threw herself between him and the harpies who would tear him from her. When he dated a girl she didn't like, he returned to find his mother "unconscious" on the floor. She'd had a stroke, she said, but she wouldn't see a doctor. Finding this approach ineffective on too-frequent repetition, she changed her strategy. She announced that she would find a wife for her son. She invited girls to dinner: "Pigs! Gargoyles, they were!" Thomas told me. "After dinner, she'd leave us alone and go to the movies. I'm sure now that she hoped I'd lay these girls. She figured that if I got laid now and then I wouldn't rush into marriage. I'd be satisfied. Of course I met girls she didn't know about. I had no trouble. I got mine. But I always felt guilty. I was cheating, you see. I was mama's boy, her baby, her boyfriend, and by God, in all ways but one, her husband! When I was in bed with some nice girl, I'd be calling myself names: no-good bum, ungrateful son. Even years later, it was still true."

He met Irma, fell in love, told his mother he was going to marry. She announced migraine headaches, fainting spells and heart palpitations. He married, anyway, whereupon her symptoms vanished. She visited the happy couple every day, rendering sage advice on every aspect of married life save one. It took time and a certain amount of brutality, but Thomas eventually told his mother to keep quiet or stay away.

"Right then I became impotent. I hadn't been before. Even before we were married Irma and I had been to bed together and I was all right then. Being impotent scared me and made me do those crazy things, the burglaries ... You see, sleeping with a girlfriend, that was OK. But then I married her, and subconsciously I decided I'd committed a crime against my mother. To make matters worse, I put my mother out of my house. There was this feeling, 'You've got no right to sleep with this girl.' It killed my ability to perform sexually."

Thomas by now was in emotional chaos. He loved his mother and hated her for having kept him a boy. He loved his wife and hated her for having taken the place of his mother. He sought punishment, expiation. The burglaries were unconsciously designed to attain that end. His hidden guilt drove him toward disgrace and retribution, but his wife and his conscious self fought exposure.

"If I couldn't destroy myself by real crimes," he told me, "Then, by God, I was going to invent one. It makes sense, you see. Because I believed I killed that girl."

Thus the broad, general pattern of self-incriminators. There are specific common denominators, too. Homicide with a sex angle attracts most false confessors. Why? Lieutenant Oak Burger, psychologist in the Los Angeles Police Department, answers: "Murder, because it's so positive, so unequivocal, demanding punishment ... murder with sex because in the sex area we find vast submerged feelings of guilt."

Some self-incriminators know they are innocent. Others, like Thomas, are convinced of their guilt. Some believe in their guilt until after confession, when, tension receding, they are able to think more clearly. They will then look for an acceptable rationalization: they were drunk, or they wanted publicity. The relief will probably not be permanent. A renewed buildup of tension will result in another self-incrimination. The offense the confessor chooses usually reflects wishful thinking. He writhes in poorly concealed sexual ecstasy as he talks. During confession, both men and women may come to orgasm.

When the neurotic (as opposed to one who is incurably psychotic) self-accuser cries out, "I can't live with this secret any longer," he doesn't mean the crime to which he is falsely testifying. He means the secret he carries within himself. Psychotherapy can usually discover that secret, and lift the burden of it. Unfortunately, psychiatric service is not uniformly available in American police departments, and so the fate of most self-accusers in the future will be what it has been in the past: they'll be thrown out and they'll go off to present themselves as candidates for imprisonment or death in some other jurisdiction. Some, like Jim McGill, will ultimately succeed -- and rue the day. But most will wander about for the rest of their lives, pleading to be punished for sins they cannot name, nor even remember.