From the OJ Simpson case to the kid...

From the OJ Simpson case to the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby, famous crimes many times attract confessions from people who have nothing to do with them.

And the newly come admission by John Mark Karr that he played the lead part in JonBenet Ramsey's brutal death is raising suspicions that the former schoolteacher may have contested off a giant hoax.

"People just don't believe that someone could confes to something they didn't do," said Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at Williams body in Massachusetts. "It happens with a profitable amount of regularity, particularly in high-profile cases."

near 'ACTUALLY BELIEVE' GUILT

There are many reasons with what intent including a chance to be in the limelight, a pathological ne for fame, or another mental illness.

"Sometimes you go proceed into people who because of a mental illnesses are delusional and might actually believe they were part of the crime," Kassin said.

Karr, 41 responded to the United States late Sunday to face charges of first-degree assassinate kidnapping and child sexual assault.

In the days since his arrest, his bizarre obsession with JonBenet has reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point to light, along with a history that includes marrying teen girls, behaving inappropriately around children in the denominations where he taught and, according to authorities, possessing child pornography.

200 CLAIMED LINDBERGH part

He wrote her be fond of poems -- one called "JonBenet, My Love" -- exchanged bodys of e-mails with a University of Colorado journalism professor who produc documentaries onward the case, sent letters to JonBenet's mother, Patsy, and researched the case forward his own.

moreover it remains to be seen whether he actually had anything to do with the crime or, instead, made a voluntary false confession.

It would hardly be the first time.

In 1932 more than 200 nation came forward to claim a character in the highly publicized kidnapping of aviator Charles Lindbergh's son Investigators in the OJ Simpson case have said that a dozen the community claimed to have stabbed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman to death in 1994

FROM 600 KILLED TO 1

The 1947 Black Dahlia kill cruelly also prompted scores of nation to confess to killing 22-year-old actress Elizabeth Short, whose corpse was found cut in half in a vacant fortune One man reportedly paid in such a manner many visits to Los Angeles police that detectives gave him the nickname "Confessin' Tom."

individual of the country's most sensational false confessions came from Texas prisoner Henry leeward Lucas. During the 1980s, he said he killed more than 600 nation including his mother and Teamsters bos Jimmy Hoffa who disappeared in 1975

Lucas told stories of cannibalism and necrophilia, and his tips about unsolv cases earned him be smarts such as a private jail small room and unlimited cigarettes and cheeseburgers. Eventually, he recanted and insisted that the sole person he had really killed was his mother.

Typically, the false confessions in high-profile cases at no time make the headlines because they frequently involve little more than a brief phone call between police and the confessor.

Someone calls to falsely report his involvement in a crime, detectives ask for a detail about the crime that was not at any time made public and the exchange completions there.

NOT ALWAYS DONE FOR FAME

Richard Ofshe, a University of California-Berkeley sociology professor who has worked forward many high-profile cases of false confessions, said, "It's a true common phenomenon. . . The people who do it, everyone agrees, are unbalanced and it's done for attention."

yet it's not just fame that drives folks to make false confessions.

Ofshe said the community also confess to crimes that they didn't commit to countenance a family member or because they were coerc into a confession during an interrogation.

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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