Cases solved by confession
A confession years after the crime — to police, to a fellow inmate, or on a deathbed — resolved these cases.
10 documented cases.
Bobby Joe Durham
Bobby Joe Durham, an 18-year-old Appalachian State University student, was murdered alongside his parents, Bryce Durham, 51, and Virginia Durham, 44, in their Boone, North Carolina home during a snowstorm on February 3, 1972. All three were found bound with their heads submerged in a running bathtub. The triple killing of the prominent local Buick dealer and his family went unsolved for 50 years until, in February 2022, the Watauga County Sheriff's Office announced that four members of a Georgia-based criminal network known as the Dixie Mafia had carried out the murders as a paid contract killing.
Christopher Alvin Dailey
Christopher Alvin Dailey, a 26-year-old server at the Huntsville Hilton, was last seen on April 25, 1995, after an employee meeting and was reported missing the next day. His body, with a single gunshot wound to the head, was found in a wooded area of southwest Decatur, Alabama, and his tan 1983 Toyota Tercel was discovered half-submerged in the Tennessee River with a rock tied to the accelerator. The case went cold for 25 years. In November 2020, Johnny Dwight Whited, a Trinity, Alabama, man dying of stage-four lung cancer, telephoned the Decatur Police Department and confessed to the killing, providing details about the crime scene that detectives said only the killer or crime-scene technicians could have known. Whited was charged with murder and indicted in March 2022, but he died of his cancer in June 2022 before the case could go to trial, and the charge was dismissed.
Jacob Erwin Wetterling
Jacob Wetterling, 11, was abducted at gunpoint near St. Joseph, Minnesota on the night of October 22, 1989, while biking home from a convenience store with his brother and a friend. The case haunted Minnesota for 27 years until 2016, when Danny Heinrich, who had been linked by DNA to a 1989 assault on another boy, admitted in federal court that he had abducted, assaulted and killed Jacob, and led authorities to the remains near Paynesville.
James Ricks
James Ricks, a 27-year-old African-American father from North Little Rock, Arkansas, was abducted in 1967 by two brothers fleeing a robbery whose own car had broken down. They took Ricks and his 1964 Oldsmobile, shot and wounded him, handcuffed him, and drove roughly 90 miles to a farm near Newport in rural Jackson County, where James Leon Clay shot him in the back of the head. His skeletal remains were found by a man and his son on August 27, 1967. The Clay brothers were convicted in the 1960s only of stealing the car and crossing state lines with it, never of the murder. Nearly half a century later, a fellow inmate's tip and a recorded jailhouse confession reopened the case, and in 2016 James Leon Clay pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years in the Arkansas Department of Correction.
Michelle Busha
Michelle Yvette Busha, an 18-year-old from Bay City, Texas, was hitchhiking along Interstate 90 in southern Minnesota on May 26, 1980, when she was picked up, sexually assaulted, and strangled; her body was found four days later in a drainage ditch near Blue Earth in Faribault County. For years she was an unidentified Jane Doe and the killing went unsolved. The case broke not through forensics but through a confession: in 1988, Robert Leroy Nelson, an on-duty Minnesota State Patrol trooper at the time of the murder who was by then imprisoned in Texas, admitted to the killing. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in 1989. The victim herself was not positively identified until 2015, when DNA from her exhumed remains matched a family sample, prompting the local sheriff to call it not a question of who done it, but who she was.
Miranda Fenner
Miranda Fenner, an 18-year-old clerk, was stabbed and had her throat slashed during a robbery of The Movie Store, a video rental shop in Laurel, Montana, on November 15, 1998. A passing motorist found her crawling from the doorway; she died within hours at a Billings hospital. Despite more than 700 interviews, the case went cold for nearly two decades. It was broken not by physical evidence at the scene but by the killer himself: Zachary David O'Neill voluntarily walked into the Yellowstone County Sheriff's Office in 2017 and confessed. He pleaded guilty in 2019 and was sentenced to three concurrent life terms.
Robert Huntbach
Robert Huntbach, an 85-year-old man, and his 77-year-old wife, Goldie Huntbach, were bound, gagged, tortured and shot to death in their home in Waterloo, Iowa, late on the night of January 12, 1981. The elderly couple's house was ransacked and the robbery netted about $6,000, according to prosecutors. Although Waterloo police interviewed many people in the original investigation, including a former local resident named Jack Wendell Pursel who was believed to have once dated a Huntbach relative, no arrests were made and the case went cold for more than three decades. The case was not broken by DNA, fingerprints or any forensic advance. On May 8, 2012, Pursel, then 66 and living in South Gate, California, walked unprompted into the Waterloo Police Department and confessed to the killings, saying he had become a born-again Christian and was seeking forgiveness. Days earlier he had telephoned an estranged brother to tell him what he had done, and he later disclosed that he had also confided the crime years before to a prison acquaintance who had once been associated with Charles Manson's followers. Prosecutors said Pursel supplied details about the murders that were never made public and that only the killer would have known. He pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder on June 7, 2012, and Black Hawk County District Judge Bradley Harris sentenced him to two consecutive terms of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Susan Carter
Susan Carter, 41, and her 10-year-old daughter Natasha 'Alex' Carter were last seen on August 8, 2000, in Raleigh County, West Virginia, where they had been living in the home of Larry Webb, a man Susan was in a relationship with. The mother and daughter simply vanished, and the case went cold for more than two decades. The breakthrough came not from technology but from the killer himself: in the first week of April 2024, Webb, by then in his 80s and in failing health, gave investigators what the prosecutor called a detailed, undeniable, unconflicted confession, admitting he had shot Susan during an argument over money and then shot Alex to keep the child from exposing him. He described wrapping the bodies in bed linens, hiding them in his basement, and burying them in a grave he dug in his backyard. Acting on his account, searchers excavated the property at 100 Kyle Lane in Mabscott and recovered human remains on April 22, 2024, the same day Webb died in custody after a medical episode. He had been indicted in October 2023 and arrested on April 12, 2024, but he was never tried, dying as the bodies he confessed to burying were finally being unearthed.
Susan Jaeger
Susan Marie Jaeger was 7 years old when she was abducted in the early hours of June 25, 1973, from the family tent at a campground near the Missouri Headwaters by Three Forks, in Gallatin County, Montana, the intruder cutting through the tent fabric while the family slept. The kidnapper made taunting phone calls demanding ransom, and the case stalled for a year despite a wide search. The break came not from forensic science but from a confession that was set up by a remarkable piece of human persistence: on the one-year anniversary of the abduction, the killer called Susan's mother, Marietta Jaeger, and Marietta, instead of breaking down, kept him on the line for about an hour and answered his cruelty with compassion until he wept. The FBI recorded the call, and audiophonoscopic voice analysis tied the caller to a local 23-year-old contractor, David Meirhofer, whom FBI profilers had already flagged. Confronted with the evidence, Meirhofer confessed on September 29, 1974, to four murders, three of them children, committed in Gallatin County between 1967 and 1974: 13-year-old Bernard Poelman, 12-year-old Michael Raney, Susan Jaeger, and 19-year-old Sandra Dykman Smallegan. About four hours after confessing, Meirhofer hanged himself in his jail cell with a towel, so he was never tried. The investigation is widely cited as the first serial-murder case cracked with the FBI's emerging behavioral-profiling technique.
Susan Marcia Rose
Susan Marcia Rose, a 24-year-old woman from Johnstown, Pennsylvania who had moved to Boston and dreamed of becoming a lawyer, was found dead on October 30, 1979 in a Back Bay building under renovation at 285 Beacon Street. She had been struck in the head with a hammer and sexually assaulted. A Brighton man was tried for the killing and acquitted in 1981, and the case went cold for more than four decades. It was broken not by forensic science but by a confession: in August 2023, John Michael Irmer walked into the FBI field office in Portland, Oregon and told agents he had killed Rose in 1979, saying he had gotten sober and found religion. Investigators only afterward matched his DNA to material preserved from the scene, corroborating the account he had volunteered. Irmer pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in April 2026 and received a mandatory life sentence without parole.