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The Signal Mountain murders refers to a widely publicized case in 1988 involving the shootings of Richard Mason, Kenneth Griffith, and Earl Smock near Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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The Signal Mountain murders refers to a widely publicized case in 1988 involving the shootings of Richard Mason, Kenneth Griffith, and Earl Smock near Chattanooga, Tennessee.
The three men had been riding the backwoods of Signal Mountain. The men were missing and being searched for by their relatives when they did not return home. The bodies were found off Big Fork Road near the community of Suck Creek by a resident while their all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) were found down an embankment on the side of Roberts Mill Road.
The owners of the land were Frank Casteel and his wife, Susie. When Frank noticed more and more people intruding on his land he consulted a police officer who advised him to keep a logbook of everyone he witnessed. The men were later found dead and Casteel was a prime suspect. Larry Sneed had taken possession of the logbook in 1988.
Although no physical evidence to support Casteel’s conviction, he was sentenced to life in prison. An appeal was made and eventually given an opportunity to overturn Casteel’s conviction in 2001. [1] The attorneys said there was no hard evidence that clearly identifies Casteel as the murderer. [2] In 2003 Frank Casteel was found guilty again for the triple homicide and returned to prison. [3]
Casteel died in prison in May 2019 at the age of 71. [4]
In 2020, Casteel's son Franklin Trever Casteel authored a book on the subject. [5]
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and other forms of post-conviction relief, as well as advocate for criminal justice reform to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 1% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
The murder of Scott Amedure occurred on March 9, 1995, at his mobile home in Lake Orion, Michigan. The 32-year-old was killed by 24-year-old Jonathan Schmitz, three days after the men appeared as guests for the taping of an episode of the tabloid talk show The Jenny Jones Show. Amedure had publicly revealed in the episode that he had a crush on Schmitz, who claimed that he was straight but flattered by the revelation. On the morning of March 9, Amedure left a sexually suggestive note on Schmitz's apartment doorstep. In response, Schmitz purchased a 12-gauge shotgun, confronted Amedure at his home, and fired two shots into Amedure's chest. Schmitz called 911 to report the killing and he was subsequently arrested.
Steven Allan Avery is an American convicted murderer from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who had previously been wrongfully convicted in 1985 of sexual assault and attempted murder. After serving 18 years of a 32-year sentence, Avery was exonerated by DNA testing and released in 2003, only to be charged in another murder case two years later.
The Angola Three are three African American former prison inmates who were held for decades in solitary confinement while imprisoned at Louisiana State Penitentiary. The latter two were indicted in April 1972 for the killing of a prison corrections officer; they were convicted in January 1974. Wallace and Woodfox served more than 40 years each in solitary, the "longest period of solitary confinement in American prison history".
Richard Alexander is an Indiana man who was wrongfully convicted of rape and later exonerated by DNA evidence. Years later, on September 17, 2020, Alexander was charged with the murder of Catherine Minix, who was found stabbed to death. Minix had previously filed a protective order against Alexander for domestic violence.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
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.
Kent Leppink was a fisherman who was killed in Hope, Alaska, in May 1996. His former fiancée, Mechele Linehan, and former roommate, John Carlin, were convicted of murdering him in 2007, but the judgments were reversed on appeal. Carlin died in prison in 2008 and Alaska prosecutors ultimately decided against indicting Linehan a second time.
Christa Gail Pike is an American convicted murderer, and the youngest woman to be sentenced to death in the United States during the post-Furman period. She was 20 when convicted of the torture murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer, which she committed at age 18.
Rolando Cruz is an American man known for having been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, along with co-defendant Alejandro Hernandez, for the 1983 kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in DuPage County, Illinois. The police had no substantive physical evidence linking the two men to the crime. Their first trial was jointly in 1987, and their statements were used against each other and a third defendant.
Meredith Susanna Cara Kercher was a British student on exchange from the University of Leeds who was murdered at the age of 21 in Perugia, Italy. Kercher was found dead on the floor of her room. By the time the bloodstained fingerprints at the scene were identified as belonging to Rudy Guede, an Ivorian migrant, police had charged Kercher's American roommate, Amanda Knox, and Knox's Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. The subsequent prosecutions of Knox and Sollecito received international publicity, with forensic experts and jurists taking a critical view of the evidence supporting the initial guilty verdicts.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in Canada.
The 1982 Lake Waco Murders refers to the deaths of three teenagers near Lake Waco in Waco, Texas, in July 1982. The police investigation and criminal trials that followed the murders lasted for more than a decade and resulted in the execution of one man, David Wayne Spence, and life prison sentences for two other men allegedly involved in the crime, Anthony and Gilbert Melendez. A fourth suspect, Muneer Mohammad Deeb, was eventually released after spending several years in prison.
Laurie Show was a 16-year-old sophomore at Conestoga Valley High School who was stalked by her classmates and murdered on December 20, 1991, in the United States. Her body was discovered by her mother, Hazel Show, in their Lancaster, Pennsylvania home, with her throat slit. Her classmates Lisa Michelle Lambert, Tabitha Buck, and Lawrence "Butch" Yunkin were subsequently charged with her murder.
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.
Hae Min Lee was a Korean-American high school student who went missing on January 13, 1999, in Baltimore County, Maryland, before turning up dead on February 9, 1999, when her corpse was discovered in Leakin Park, Baltimore. Her autopsy revealed that she had been killed by way of manual strangulation.
In the early hours of August 10, 1991, a mass shooting occurred at Thai Buddhist temple Wat Promkunaram in Waddell, Arizona, killing nine people. At the time, this was the deadliest mass shooting at a place of worship in U.S. history, until it was paralleled by the Charleston church shooting in 2015, which also killed nine people, and then superseded by the Sutherland Springs church shooting in Texas in 2017. As of 2024, it is the deadliest mass shooting in Arizona history.
Making a Murderer is an American true crime documentary television series written and directed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos. The show tells the story of Steven Avery, a man from Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, who served 18 years in prison (1985–2003) after his wrongful conviction for the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beerntsen. He was later charged with and convicted of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach. The connected story is that of Avery's nephew Brendan Dassey, who was accused and convicted as an accessory in the murder of Halbach.
The Skid Row Stabber is an American serial killer, responsible for the murders of 11 people in the Los Angeles neighborhood known as Skid Row, which is notorious for housing a huge number of homeless people, who are regularly subjected to victimization. The criminal's signature weapon was a knife. While a suspect named Bobby Joe Maxwell was arrested, charged, and sentenced for the murders, his conviction was overturned in 2010.