The Other Guys: Suspects Who Were Considered in Notorious Cases

The annals of crime include many suspects who—perhaps despite evidence against their guilt—have been suspected of crimes they didn’t commit. These injustices can occur for many reasons: Political pressure, sloppy investigations, coincidences or simple mistakes can all play a part in the errors of the criminal justice system.

In 1812, Russell Colvin disappeared from his farm in Vermont. Suspicion immediately fell upon his brothers-in-law, Jesse and Stephen Boorn. Jesse and Stephen’s uncle, Amos Boorn, publicly declared Colvin’s ghost visited him in a dream saying he had been murdered, not unlike the Shakespearian ghost of Hamlet’s father. Shortly thereafter, a dog unearthed some suspicious bones from beneath a stump on the Boorns’ farm.

The two brothers were arrested and faced hanging. But the case against the unlucky siblings collapsed when Colvin—very much alive—arrived back in Vermont after a lengthy stay in New Jersey. The bones found on the Boorns' farm were examined and found to be animal bones, freeing the brothers from incarceration and impending death sentences.

In February 2017, the bodies of teenagers Abby Williams and Libby German were discovered near a hiking trail in Delphi, Ind. Richard Allen was convicted of the murders in November 2024, but a few months later, Allen’s attorneys stated that Ron Logan, who owned the property where the girls’ bodies were found, was also implicated in the murders.

Logan allegedly confessed to the killings to a fellow inmate while he was serving a prison sentence for a probation violation. He added information that wasn’t yet public, such as mentioning box cutters that investigators believed were used to slit the girls’ throats.

Additionally, a man named Kegan Kline admitted he chatted online with Libby and other teenage girls while amassing a collection of sexual images of young girls, but no direct evidence linked Kline with the girls’ deaths. Logan died in 2022 from COVID-19, while Kline was sentenced to 40 years in prison for child sexual abuse material and child exploitation and Allen, who has maintained his innocence, remains incarcerated.

Rex Heuermann, a former New York City architect, has been charged with the murders of seven women whose bodies were found in the Gilgo Beach area of Long Island, N.Y.. But during the lengthy investigation into the murder spree, another suspect emerged: John Bittrolff, a former carpenter from Long Island.

Bittrolff was convicted in 2017 of the murders of two women and was a suspect in a third killing. In 2024, however, Heuermann was charged with that third murder by DNA evidence. Bittrolff is currently serving a sentence of 50 years to life at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N.Y.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Californians lived in dread of the Golden State Killer, who committed at least 13 murders and dozens of rapes and burglaries throughout the state. The killer wasn’t identified until 2018, when DNA evidence linked Joseph DeAngelo to the crimes.

Before his arrest, however, several men were suspects, including Brett Glasby, a small-time criminal who died in Mexico, but the killings continued after his death. Other suspects, including a member of the Aryan Brotherhood named Paul Schneider and Joe Alsip, a business partner of one of the victims, were cleared through DNA evidence.

At the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, a pipe bomb exploded, resulting in two deaths and hundreds of injuries. Security guard Richard Jewell had alerted police to the backpack containing the bomb shortly before it exploded.

Initially hailed as a hero, Jewell was later identified as a suspect, based largely on erroneous media reports and the “lone bomber” criminal profile. Once he was cleared as a suspect by the FBI, Jewell sued many media sources for libel, and in 2005, white supremacist Eric Rudolph was convicted for the Atlanta bombing and other acts of domestic terrorism.

In 1993, nursing student Deborah Meindl was murdered in Upstate New York. Her husband, Donald, was initially considered a suspect; he had a $50,000 life insurance policy on his wife and was having a relationship with a teenage employee at the Taco Bell he managed.

James Pugh was eventually convicted of the murder and served 26 years in prison. But in 2021, two prosecutors concluded the real killer was Richard Matt, a convicted murderer who famously escaped with another inmate from the Clinton Correctional Facility in 2015 before he was fatally shot by a federal agent. The prison escape, which was aided by two prison employees, was the subject of a 2018 miniseries. 

In December 2025, prosecutors dropped all charges against Pugh in a retrial for the murder of Meindl, citing a lack of evidence.

During the 1960s and 1970s, a series of murders attributed to the Zodiac Killer occurred throughout California. Several people have been suspected of being the murderer, but there was never enough evidence to arrest them. Chief among them is Arthur Leigh Allen, the only individual named by police as a suspect. Allen, a convicted sex offender, was identified by a survivor of a Zodiac shooting.

Other evidence obtained from Allen, including DNA samples and fingerprints, didn’t match those of the Zodiac Killer, so he was never formally charged. Additional suspects—including Earl Van Best Jr., a Bay Area resident who was identified by his son as a prime suspect, and Gary Francis Poste, a union painter who was tied to one murder by a team of investigators—died before they could be investigated thoroughly.