Fall Guys: False Confessions and the Politics of Murder

It was sheer serendipity that drew criminology professor Jim Fisher into the re-opening of two unrelated, 30-year-old murder cases. When Fisher's book The Lindbergh Case, about the famous 1930s kidnapping and murder, was published in 1987, people assumed that he was an expert on famous crimes. "In fact," he says, "I knew very little about this kind of history. It had therefore been stupid of me to accept an invitation to give a lecture on the history of celebrated crimes in western Pennsylvania." He asked a criminal justice student to help him prepare for the lecture, in the course of which he became intrigued by a 1956 crime in Allegheny County (near Pittsburgh). One thing led to another, and soon he was deep into two cases--the one in '56, and another in '59--in which young boys (ages 10 and 13) were convicted of horrible hatchet murders of women. Both boys had confessed to the crimes after many hours of grilling by the same ambitious homicide detective. Neither case had a shred of evidence to back up the confessions, and yet both boys were convicted--one of them spending 10 years in jail. Both were exonerated by Fisher's investigation. Fall Guys: False Confessions and the Politics of Murder is written in a deliberate, factual style that quietly builds suspense, placing the reader by Fisher's side as he interviews the principals in the cases, pulls out the old newspaper clippings, tracks down the autopsy reports and crime scene photos, becomes convinced of the boys' innocence, and goes in search of the real murderers. It's a mind-boggling story, well told, with two memorable and poignant scenes, when the author assures the "boys" (now men in their 40s), at long last, of their innocence.