Les Jones

True Crime > Deathbed Confessions

From Yahoo! News:

A woman dying of cancer confessed to her daughter that she killed her husband years earlier and hid the body, authorities said this week after finding the remains inside a storage unit.

Authorities did not release the names, but a sister identified the woman as Geraldine DiMarzio Kelley, who died Nov. 12 at 54.

I've always been curious why some people confess on their deathbeds and some don't. As someone curious about famous murder cases, it's frustrating that more people don't confess. It's also understandable, I think. Even in death they're trying to protect their reputation or loved ones. And no doubt some of them are in denial about their guilt.

In this case, I think the woman confessed for a prosaic reason. She had hidden the body in a rented storage space, and it doubtless would have been discovered after her death.

Offhand, I can't think of any famous murders that were confessed out of the blue, or at least truthfully confessed. A number of people have confessed to the JFK assassination, but all of their stories had holes, and several of them were inmates who had nothing to lose and everything to gain with a bogus confession.

One confession that does come to mind is that of Christian Spurling. On his deathbed at age 93 he confessed his role in faking the most famous photo of the Loch Ness Monster, the so-called surgeon's photo that shows the monster in profile.