Kaufman County is a county in the northeast area of the U.S. state of Texas. As of the 2020 census, its population was 145,310. Its county seat is Kaufman. Both the county, established in 1848, and the city were named for David S. Kaufman, a U.S. Representative and diplomat from Texas. Kaufman County is part of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan statistical area.
Albert Henry DeSalvo was an American rapist and suspected serial killer in Boston, Massachusetts, who purportedly confessed to being the "Boston Strangler," the murderer of thirteen women in the Boston area from 1962 to 1964. In 1967, DeSalvo was imprisoned for life for committing a series of rapes. However, his murder confession has been disputed and debate continues as to which crimes he actually committed.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
Kathryn Casey is an American writer of mystery novels and non-fiction books. She is best known for writing She Wanted It All, which recounts the case of Celeste Beard, who married an Austin multimillionaire only to convince her lesbian lover, Tracey Tarlton, to kill him.
The Norfolk Four are four former United States Navy sailors: Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek Tice, Danial Williams, and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongfully convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko while they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk. They each declared that they had made false confessions, and their convictions are considered highly controversial. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, confessed and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2000, insisting that he had acted alone. He had been in prison since 1998 because of violent attacks on two other women in 1997. He was the only one of the suspects whose DNA matched that collected at the crime scene, and whose confession was consistent with other forensic evidence.
On November 29, 2009, four police officers of Lakewood, Washington were fatally shot at the Forza Coffee shop, located at 11401 Steele Street #108 South in the Parkland unincorporated area of Pierce County, Washington, near Tacoma. A gunman, later identified as Maurice Clemmons, entered the shop, shot the officers while they worked on laptops, and fled the scene with a single gunshot wound in his torso. After a massive two-day manhunt that spanned several nearby cities, an officer recognized Clemmons near a stalled car in south Seattle. When he refused orders to stop, he was shot and killed by a Seattle Police Department officer.
Juan Vallejo Corona was a Mexican serial killer who was convicted of the murders of twenty-five migrant farm workers found buried in peach orchards along the Feather River in Sutter County, California, United States, in 1971. At the time, the crimes were characterized as among the most notorious in U.S. history. Until the discovery of Dean Corll's victims two years after his own conviction, Corona was the deadliest American serial killer by number of proven victims.
Shattered: The True Story of a Mother's Love, a Husband's Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Texas Murder, by author and novelist Kathryn Casey, is a true-crime account of the killing of a pregnant woman whose body was discovered in 1999 in an upstairs closet in her home in Katy, Texas, near Houston. The book was published by HarperCollins in June 2010. Ms. Casey details numerous reasons that prove no one except David Temple had either motive or opportunity.
Michael Morton is an American who was wrongfully convicted in 1987 in a Williamson County, Texas court of the 1986 murder of his wife Christine Morton. He spent nearly 25 years in prison before he was exonerated by DNA evidence which supported his claim of innocence and pointed to the crime being committed by another individual. Morton was released from prison on October 4, 2011, and another man, Mark Alan Norwood, was convicted of the murder in 2013. The prosecutor in the case, Ken Anderson, was convicted of contempt of court for withholding evidence after the judge had ordered its release to the defense.
Deadly Little Secrets: The Minister, His Mistress, and a Heartless Texas Murder is a 2012 true crime book written by the non-fiction author and novelist Kathryn Casey and released by HarperCollins about the 2006 murder by Baptist minister Matt Baker of his 31-year-old wife, Kari Baker, and the staging of her death as a suicide.
The murder of Stuart Anthony Tay occurred in Buena Park, California in Greater Los Angeles on December 31, 1992. The Orange County Register referred to the crime as the "Honor Roll Murder". The victim and most of the perpetrators were Asian American.
The murder of Jennifer Cave occurred in the West Campus area of Austin, Texas. On August 18, 2005, Cave's body was discovered. In 2009, Chuck Lindell of the Austin American-Statesman called it the "most infamous West Campus crime".
211 Crew is a white supremacist prison gang, active both in and out of prison, that was formed in 1995 at Colorado's Denver County Jail. It was linked to several high-profile murders and criminal investigations. Those included the assassination of Colorado Department of Corrections head Tom Clements. Due to a threatening letter sent by a Texas Aryan Brotherhood member, it was suspected to be linked to similar assassinations of Texas district attorney Mike McLelland, and his assistant prosecutor Mark Hasse, but a former Justice of the Peace was eventually indicted for those murders.
In 2013, two prosecutors and a prosecutor's wife were murdered in Kaufman County, Texas. The case gained national attention in the United States due to speculation that the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang was responsible, but this was later found to be untrue. Eric Lyle Williams, a former lawyer and justice of the peace whose theft case was prosecuted by two of the victims, was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death for the three murders. His wife, Kimberly Irene "Kim" Williams, was tried separately, and sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Suzanne Margaret "Sue" Basso was an American woman who was one of six co-defendants convicted in the August 1998 torture and murder of Louis "Buddy" Musso, a mentally disabled man who was killed for his life insurance money. She was sentenced to death in October 1999. Basso was executed by lethal injection on February 5, 2014. Prior to her execution, Basso had been held at the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Texas, where all of the state's female death row inmates are incarcerated. At the time of the crime, Basso lived in Jacinto City, Texas, a Houston suburb.
Ryan W. Ferguson is an American man who spent nearly 10 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the murder, Ferguson was a 17-year-old high-school student.
Investigating Innocence is a nonprofit wrongful conviction advocacy organization that provides criminal defense investigations for inmates in the United States. Investigating Innocence was founded in 2013 by private investigator Bill Clutter to assist nationwide Innocence Project groups in investigating innocence claims. "Once we have a case that meets our criteria, we'll put private investigators to work on it. A lot of these cases need investigators," said Kelly Thompson, executive director of Investigating Innocence. Prior to his work on Investigating Innocence, Clutter was one of the founders of the Illinois Innocence Project. Investigating Innocence also has a board composed of exonerees that reviews incoming cases.
Ali Mahmood Awad Irsan is a Jordanian-American convicted murderer held on Texas death row. He was sentenced for the murders of Iranian-American activist Gelareh Bagherzadeh, a friend of one of his daughters; and his son-in-law, Coty Beavers, in Greater Houston.
Eugene Alvin Broxton is an American murderer and suspected serial killer. Convicted and sentenced to death for the May 1991 murder of a woman in Channelview, Texas, Broxton is also the sole suspect in three other murders for which he has never been convicted but remains the sole suspect.
William Lewis Reece is an American serial killer, rapist and kidnapper. In 2015, he was linked via DNA to the 1997 cold case murder of a girl in Oklahoma, for which he was subsequently convicted and sentenced to death. Not long after, he confessed to three murders associated with the Texas Killing Fields, for which he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2022.
