Why People Who Have Committed Crimes Turn Themselves In

Long-distance trucker Wayne Adam Ford walked into a sheriff’s office in Northern California on an early November morning in 1998 with a severed human breast in his coat pocket. He had spent the night in a hotel room, drinking with his brother before he woke up and confessed to the brutal murder of four women. 

As Ford detailed his crimes to investigators, he seemed distraught and emotional. He told them he wanted to stop killing and let the families of his victims know what happened, and he wanted to die. 

There are many reasons people like Ford come forward, including a fear he would kill his ex-wife. 

Some feel the police are onto them and know they’re going to get caught, Dr. Louis Schlesinger, a professor of Psychology at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice tells A&E Crime + Investigation. 

Others say they’re remorseful.

“It is very, very difficult to determine true remorse,” Schlesinger says. "Where was the remorse when when the individual killed these people?” 

And some seem to have found that being on the run came with unexpected challenges.

After almost 40 years as a fugitive, Clarence David Moore surrendered to authorities in 2015 for healthcare, according to Kentucky Sheriff Pat Melton. The 66-year-old, who had been convicted of larceny in North Carolina and faced up to seven years in prison, fled custody thrice before settling into a quiet life in Kentucky with a woman who had no knowledge of his past. 

Moore used multiple aliases, going by Ronnie T. Dickinson when he was pulled up for not having a valid driver’s license in a 2009 collision. 

Five years later, he had a stroke and was left in poor health. It was then that he called to turn himself in; the Sheriff’s deputy who answered his call thought it was a prank. When Melton arrived to make an arrest, he noted that Moore looked 30 years older than he was and struggled to speak. Being on the lam meant the man didn’t have a Social Security number under his aliases and could not get help.

If a person on the run tries to enroll in Medicare or Medicaid, they run the risk of getting caught.

“Medicare was originally, very closely tied to Social Security,” Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler, a professor of public health at CUNY’s Hunter College, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “I think that those databases are actually integrated.”

Private insurance gets very expensive and can be hard to enroll in.

In 1970, 51-year-old Mack Ray Edwards confessed to committing six murders over 17 years. He told detectives he had a “guilt complex” that prevented him from eating, sleeping and doing his work as a contractor and heavy equipment operator. 

Edwards previously confided in a jail guard that he had murdered between 18 and 22 children, but when he pled guilty, it was to three counts of kidnapping and three counts of murder. He died by suicide in prison after being sentenced to death.

Serial killers, at times, over- or under-state their crimes.

“Sometimes the numbers they give can't be trusted,” Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a professor emerita of forensic psychology at DeSales University, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “Some have been known to exaggerate, perhaps to create an impression of being tough or merciless or imposing. Others just play games, depending on who’s asking.”

Richard Kuklinski, better known as “The Iceman,” claimed to have killed over 100 people—an admission he made after he had already been incarcerated for four murders. 

“I never believed that,” Schlesinger says. “He killed a lot of people, but I doubt very much it was over a hundred.”

The incarcerated may claim more bodies than they are responsible for because it gives them status in prison, he explains. 

“[The confessor] is going to get a lot of attention,” Schlesinger continues. “He may get out of the institution to show where he buried [the body]. And it becomes a whole big thing on the news.”

Some people voluntarily confess to crimes they never committed. After the 20-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, 200 people came forward to confess, none of whom was carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man ultimately sentenced to death for the crime. The “most prolific serial confessor in recent history,” Henry Lee Lucas, confessed to around 600 murders in the early 1980s, per a 1999 report in The Journal of Forensic Psychiatry. Only three of Lucas’s murders were ever confirmed. 

In Lucas’s case, a psychological evaluation revealed reasons including a personality disorder, poor self-esteem and an eagerness to please. Others may confess out of a desire for notoriety, self-punishment or to protect the actual perpetrator, per a 2025 Law and Human Behavior article.

The list of possible reasons for self-confession is long: family members can coax the offender into turning themselves in, or the offender can hope the law may be kinder to those who admits guilt.

The latter was not the case for long-distance trucker Ford, who was ultimately convicted on four counts of first-degree murder and given the death sentence. He has been awaiting his fate in San Quentin State Prison in California for 19 years.