Police Convinced Six Innocent People They'd Committed Murder | NEBRASKA 1985 Cold Case SOLVED

In February 1985, a beloved 68-year-old grandmother named Helen Wilson was raped and suffocated in her apartment in the small town of Beatrice, Nebraska. Police found a strong first suspect almost immediately a local man with a rape arrest on his record, whose own grandmother lived in Helen's building. He gave a blood sample. And a botched lab test cleared him. So investigators let the real killer walk out the door. What happened next is one of the most disturbing wrongful-conviction cases in American history. Acting on a teenager's tip, police built a case against six local people who had nothing to do with the murder. Five of the six confessed not because they were guilty, but because they were threatened with the death penalty and worked on by a police psychologist who convinced them they had "repressed" memories of a crime they'd never committed. Some of them came to genuinely believe they were murderers. They were convicted in 1989 and, together, they lost 77 years of their lives to prison. Only one of them never confessed, and never stopped fighting. He demanded DNA testing of the evidence that had been preserved since 1985. And when the results came back, they cleared all six of them completely and pointed, every single profile, at one man acting alone: the original suspect the police had cleared at the very beginning, who by then had been dead for sixteen years. This is the story of Helen Wilson, the six innocent people convicted of killing her, and the science that finally told the truth everyone had gotten wrong. Every case on Decades Cold is real and carefully researched from public records and reporting, told with respect for the victims and families involved. Tell us where you're watching from and subscribe so the next case finds you. #truecrime #coldcase #DNA #coldcasesolved #forensics #nebraska #beatricesix #wrongfulconviction #falseconfession #unsolved