Police Officer Preparation & Law Enforcement Resource - Archive

I saw this Korean movie called The Chaser about a serial killer who went into the police station and confessed to killing several victims, prostitutes who had not been reported missing, but later clammed up when pressed about the details. He was then released and subsequently killed two more people. The entire time I was in disbelief that the police would release in after less than one night at the station. Is this plausible in the US?

If we couldn't find any other information, like the fact someone wasn't even reported missing, yeah, probably. A confession is no good unless there is something to corroborate it, no matter how small sometimes. Ever so often we have a working murder case and someone will come in to confess to it. There are people that nuts, but they never have any details or give wrong information.

Sometimes people will confess to things that never even happened.

Unless there was some reason to not only believe the event occurred, but also that the person confessing had something to do with it, the two most frequest resolutions would be telling them to have a pleasant evening (in most cases) or taking them to Crisis Intervention if they seemed to be so out of touch that they might harm themselves or someone else.

We had a serial killer here called the "Happy Face Killer" who used to write to us and prosecutors and put a happy face on the bottom.

A woman and her mentally impaired boy friend came into our local S.O. office and confessed to one of his murders before he was caught. I knew both detectives with that agency and they weren't terribly impressive IMO. Anyway, they took the confession and apparently asked enough leading questions to convince the DA too. The couple were sentenced to prison and actually served several years before the real killer (Keith Jesperson) was caught, confessed and gave real details of that killing. The DA immediately went into high gear to get the couple released.

Weird stuff out there in Never Never Land.