What Happens After People Give Deathbed Confessions?

After years of almost no contact, Joseph Cibelli sent his father one final goodbye text message on September 19, 2023. By then, Daniel Raymond Drozd was dying of late-stage pancreatic cancer after a lifetime of bringing what Cibelli describes as “constant chaos” and violence to his family. Cibelli texted, “The poison that spilled from your spirit spread through everything it touched…Yet from that same poison, I have drawn strength. I have drawn hope.”

The response from Drozd 10 days later was unexpected, Cibelli says, but even more shocking was that it came in the form of an emotional confession to his two sons, tears streaming down his face. “Cyanide pills…I did it,” Drozd said, according to Cibelli in The Tylenol Murders: A Father’s Confession to His Son. Drozd allegedly made several more statements that implied what Cibelli says he had long suspected: His father was responsible for a series of killings that stoked national fear more than four decades earlier. 

In fall 1982, seven residents of the Chicago metropolitan area, including a 12-year-old girl, died after consuming Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with poisonous cyanide. The so-called Tylenol murders led to a recall of more than 31 million Tylenol bottles across the United States and paved the way to tamper-proof over-the-counter medication as the industry standard. The case is still officially unsolved.

“This was not something I was going to just file away,” Cibelli, a salon entrepreneur turned author and forensic psychologist, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “It was something I needed to deal with, though, after he was gone.”

Accounts of deathbed confessions like these have been documented in the United States and countries worldwide for decades, even centuries. But what drives people to admit to crimes in their final moments—and what happens next?

Though not a recognized legal term, a “deathbed confession” is generally a statement somebody makes in their final days in which they share a long concealed secret.

“Maybe people didn’t know that you committed [a] crime, or they suspected but weren’t sure,” Peter Nicolas, professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “It could be conduct that is non-criminal in nature. It could be confessing to an affair during your marriage [or] that you’re the biological parent of someone.”

In early forms of deathbed confessions in colonial America, especially Puritan New England, condemned individuals were urged to issue “dying warnings” shortly before execution as evidence of repentance.

In the modern U.S. criminal justice system, some widely reported deathbed confessions have helped close cases decades later. Others have proven difficult to verify. In 2000, Jo Weber told media outlets that her late husband, World War II veteran Duane L. Weber, confessed shortly before his 1995 death to being D.B. Cooper, the infamous airline hijacker who parachuted out of a passenger plane in November 1971 after demanding (and receiving) $200,000 in cash. But the FBI, which has investigated hundreds of suspects identified as Cooper, found no DNA evidence to support Weber’s claim. The case remains unsolved.

Deathbed confessions differ from what the law defines as dying declarations, or out-of-court statements made by a person about the causes or circumstances surrounding their imminent death. These declarations are usually given by victims of crimes rather than perpetrators. They’re recognized in many state and federal courts as exceptions to the hearsay rule and are considered highly reliable statements made by a person who has no reason to lie. 

What drives people to admit to crimes in their final moments? Every situation is different, but Cibelli says his father may have “wanted to just get it off of his chest.” According to The Tylenol Murders, his father said, “I’m going to be blamed for something terrible, so I will just admit it now.” He also warned Cibelli that if he knew the truth and didn’t do anything about it, “You would be the monster.” 

Cibelli had long suspected his father’s involvement in the killings and says he purposely used the word “poison” in his final message to his father. “I felt like I kind of poked it out of him. That was intentional, because I’ve carried this,” Cibelli says.

According to Nicolas, an expert on dying declarations, “When you believe your death is about to be imminent, you’re more likely to speak truthfully. That’s the part that I think overlaps with the deathbed confessions.”

The prospect of meeting one’s maker with unresolved sins carries real weight in certain religious teachings, and admitting to wrongdoings is often seen as a way to secure salvation or seek forgiveness. Even for non-religious people, there may be a “psychological urge to come clean,” Nicolas says.

Pete Elliott, a U.S. Marshal for the Northern District of Ohio, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that remorse or guilt can also play a role: “I’ve interviewed serial killers before; sometimes it’s about taking credit, having a trophy at the end. Sometimes it’s about ego, or God, or worrying what’s on the other side.”

The people at the receiving end of a deathbed confession can be left blindsided. In February 2024, Ashley Randele wrote in Newsweek that her late father, Thomas Randele, reportedly told her and her mother that he was a fugitive. He died of lung cancer in May 2021. “Thing is, I'd always been the one he told his secrets to, so it was particularly shocking to me,” Ashley wrote.

As it turned out, her father was actually Ted Conrad, who was once a vault teller at the National Society Bank in Cleveland. In July 1969, Conrad simply left the bank with a bag of $215,000 in cash (equivalent to nearly $1.9 million today), never to return. He changed his name to Thomas Randele and had evaded authorities ever since.

“That weighs on people in more ways than one, especially if you’re looking over your shoulder every single day,” says Elliott, who inherited the search for Conrad from his father, former Deputy U.S. Marshal John K. Elliott. 

Though a dead person can’t be criminally prosecuted in the United States, the information provided in a deathbed confession can help police uncover additional evidence to substantiate the claims. Ashley and her mother planned to wait a year before alerting law enforcement. But several months after Randele’s death, federal authorities had already conducted a handwriting analysis and came across other details linking Randele to Ted Conrad. The case was closed shortly thereafter.

“We have a lot of [these cases] that involve people we’ve been looking for since the 1970s and ’80s,” Elliott says. “I believe some of those people are probably deceased, and they’re probably deceased under a fictitious name. I believe in some of those cases families did know, and in some of those cases, families didn’t know. It’s different in every single case.”

After receiving his father’s deathbed confession, Cibelli, who’s currently pursuing a law degree, says he “had to start putting all the pieces together of how he did what.” Among the items he discovered was a sample bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol from the 1980s, stored in the attic of his childhood home. He has since reported his findings to local authorities.

For both a victim or perpetrator’s loved ones, getting true closure in such cases is often easier said than done. Ashley Randele, who went on to co-host the My Fugitive Dad podcast, wrote in Newsweek, “I'll never stop missing [my father]. But at least now, I know the Ted he was and the Tom he became.”