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Justice isn't always served... Join us as we count down some of the most infamous cases where law enforcement's critical errors led to devastating consequences. From botched crime scenes to misdirected manhunts, these investigations remind us how badly things can go when the pursuit of justice goes off the rails.
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00:00We have a black male. We do not know any more about that, including the cause of death.
00:04Welcome to WatchMojo.
00:06And today we're looking at infamous cases of investigative errors made by law enforcement that yielded serious consequences.
00:13That information was under wraps until San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein held a news conference and revealed every detail.
00:23Centennial Olympic Park incident.
00:25Security guard Richard Jewell was initially praised for discovering a bag full of pipe bombs and helping to evacuate Atlanta's
00:33Centennial Olympic Park in 1996.
00:35Jewell, a former sheriff's deputy, had discovered the bomb in a backpack and helped clear the area before the explosion.
00:42He was hailed a hero.
00:44His presence and profile nonetheless made him a person of interest in the bomb's planting.
00:49After pressure on the FBI led to this information being leaked to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the public turned on
00:57Jewell.
00:57I remember saying to my editor, this man's life will never be the same, simply because he suddenly was in
01:05the eye of this media storm.
01:08He was eventually cleared, with no other suspects, until anti-government terrorist Eric Rudolph was captured after two more bombings
01:16in 1998.
01:17This trial by media would become a cautionary tale in the potential human cost of law enforcement and the public
01:24rushing to judgment.
01:25For 88 days, I lived a nightmare.
01:28For 88 days, my mother lived a nightmare too.
01:33In its rush for the headline that the hero was the bomber.
01:38The media cared nothing for my feelings as a human being.
01:41Ten years after the bombing, the state of Georgia formally declared Jewell a hero.
01:47The West Memphis Three.
01:48Cases like the Central Park Five show the tragedy of bringing prejudice into an investigation.
01:54When I first saw those tapes, I didn't disbelieve them.
01:58Like anybody else, when I watch a confession tape, my first impulse is, whoa, an innocent person really wouldn't do
02:06that.
02:06But at least Matias Reyes eventually confessed to the assault pinned on those teenagers.
02:11There would be no justice for three children who were gruesomely murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas in 1993.
02:18The investigation suffered from poor crime scene handling, cursory examinations, and information leaks.
02:24Speculation of a satanic ritual caused authorities to lean on teenage outsiders Jason Baldwin, Damien Echols, and Jesse Miskelley Jr.
02:33They argue that the boys' predilections, along with the strange and brutal nature of the crime scene, are proof that
02:39the murders were committed as a satanic ritual.
02:42A coerced confession sealed their fate.
02:45But overwhelming evidence suggested that the public was desperate for closure, and that the police were unwilling to face their
02:51mistakes.
02:52Baldwin, Echols, and Miss Kelly were released from prison in 2011, but the real killers were never caught.
02:58Today, the West Memphis Three walked free.
03:01It's been an absolute living hell.
03:04Disappearance of Madeleine McCann.
03:06A 2007 holiday in Lagos turned tragic for British couple Kate and Jerry McCann, who reported their three-year-old
03:12daughter Madeleine's disappearance on May 3rd.
03:15Three years ago, in a small town on the Algarve coast in Portugal, an extraordinary chain of events was triggered.
03:22But Portuguese authorities failed to immediately secure the scene and notify Interpol.
03:27The McCann's would later learn that police suspected them of staging the abduction themselves.
03:32Please, if you have Madeleine, let her come home to her mummy, daddy, brother and sister.
03:40In the years following their exoneration, leads, based on limited evidence and mistaken witness statements, have consistently fallen through.
03:48In 2023, Portuguese police finally apologized to the McCann's for their poor initial response and communication with tourists in a
03:56particularly high-pressure situation.
03:58Law enforcement in multiple countries are still trying to find out what happened to Madeleine.
04:03I think we will always wonder what happened to her.
04:07Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
04:10The 1994 killings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman set up one of the most shocking trials in modern
04:17American history.
04:18This was the perfect soap opera.
04:21The O.J. Simpson murder case was the first true reality show for the country.
04:28Okay, let's go, here we go.
04:30This was the first wall-to-wall televised trial.
04:35The investigation was immediately hampered by first responders' disoriented handling of an unsecured crime scene.
04:42Public pressure certainly became overwhelming, as police charged Brown's superstar ex-husband O.J. Simpson.
04:48The battle lines are drawn, and race will now determine this trial's outcome.
04:54The evidence was essentially conclusive, but the defendant's team effectively argued that sloppy police work and Detective Mark Furman's conduct
05:02opened the possibility of corruption.
05:05Simpson's acquittal is widely believed to be a miscarriage of justice,
05:09influenced by L.A.'s contemporary racial tensions.
05:12But the argument for jury bias would have been stronger,
05:15if not for the failings of a seemingly open-shut investigation.
05:19Was that verdict about murder, or was it about race?
05:23The verdict was undeniably about race.
05:27Murder of Jeanne-Benet Ramsey.
05:29The day after Christmas, 1996, child model Jeanne-Benet Ramsey was found dead in the basement of her affluent family's
05:36Colorado home.
05:37A story that is gripping the nation.
05:39It is the investigation of the murder of little JonBenet Ramsey.
05:43Media attention on this shocking tragedy escalated,
05:46as Boulder PD focused their investigation on a cover-up by the family.
05:51But the case was found to be compromised,
05:52by a failure to immediately interview them,
05:55and to secure the scene from visitors who contaminated the scene.
05:58Boulder police believe Jon and Patsy killed their daughter,
06:01and then staged a kidnapping,
06:04complete with a rambling two-and-a-half-page ransom note to cover it up.
06:09Crucial evidence was either lost or shared with the suspected family,
06:12and the investigator's tunnel vision was ultimately undermined by false confessions
06:17and clashes with the district attorney's office.
06:19With the Ramseys cleared by ambiguous DNA evidence in 2008,
06:23the circumstances of Jeanne-Benet's death may be too muddied for the case to ever be reliably closed.
06:29Finding the killer isn't going to change my life at this point,
06:33but it will change the lives of my children and my grandchildren.
06:38This cloud needs to be removed from our family's head,
06:43and this chapter closed for their benefit, so there is an answer.
06:47Evans' family tragedy.
06:49London police knew that there was no time to waste
06:52after Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine were murdered in 1949.
06:56The murder of Beryl was just the beginning of the tragic tale of Timothy Evans.
07:00They observed the violent history of the victim's patriarch, Timothy,
07:04and got him to confess to possibly poisoning his wife to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
07:09Stricken with guilt,
07:11on November the 30th,
07:13he went to the police station in Merthyr Tydville,
07:16and confessed that he had disposed of his wife.
07:21But he changed his story even before learning that the victims were strangled.
07:25Evans was nonetheless convicted and later executed on the eyewitness testimony of neighbor John Christie.
07:31Three years later, Christie confessed to murdering Beryl, as well as four women after them.
07:37This miscarriage of justice was a key factor in the abolition of the death penalty in the UK,
07:42but could have been avoided if the police were less prejudiced and more scrupulous.
07:47But on the 9th of March, 1950,
07:50not only had one man been wrongfully executed,
07:54the real killer had got away scot-free.
07:58His terrible crimes were yet to be discovered.
08:02The Night Stalker
08:03In 1985, Los Angeles was gripped in fear of the serial killer known as the Night Stalker.
08:09The Night Stalker killed at least 13 times 13 people who were awakened in the night to face death.
08:15At least 15 others survived his brutal attacks.
08:18San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein was hoping to comfort the public with a press conference
08:23to address him striking in their city.
08:25But the broadcast inadvertently notified the killer that police were aware of his gun and rare avia sneakers.
08:31As a result, Richard got rid of the shoes and got rid of a gun over the Golden Gate Bridge.
08:38This information was meant to be held from the public,
08:40but the scope of the manhunt stained communication among law enforcement agencies.
08:45Richard Ramirez threw his shoes off the Golden Gate Bridge,
08:48but was thankfully not able to kill again before he was apprehended by civilians who recognized his description.
08:55Law enforcement officials would credit them with resolving one of the largest manhunts in California history.
09:00Days after Romero's tip, police found Romero's car, lifted a print, ID'd him,
09:07and then a few days after that he was arrested in East Los Angeles, nearly killed by an angry mob.
09:13The Unabomber.
09:14The highly intelligent eco-terrorist Ted Kaczynski evaded capture for 17 years.
09:20He was the most wanted man in America, cold-blooded bomber who killed in Maine.
09:25He eluded the FBI for 18 years, a ghost targeting universities and airlines, thus the name, the Unabomber.
09:33In that time, he delivered 16 bombs by various methods, leading police to treat some of the attacks as isolated
09:40incidents.
09:40It was even theorized that there were multiple bombers.
09:43But authorities weren't just actively outwitted by the Unabomber,
09:47named for his initial targeting of universities and airlines.
09:50Local, state, and federal investigators continued to work around the clock, collecting evidence from the blast.
09:55The early morning explosion severely injured Yale University computer scientist David Glertner.
09:59The Unabomber task force thus focused on college-age suspects,
10:04until the materials of the bombs shifted the profile to an older, blue-collar man.
10:09An academic aged somewhere in between, Kaczynski was finally arrested in 1996,
10:14after his brother David recognized the mannerisms in his published manifesto.
10:19Even when the big picture is so far off, the finer points in an investigation are crucial.
10:25The press coverage of Kaczynski's capture was amplified by the fact that the national media was already in this state.
10:32The Yorkshire Ripper.
10:33A year after Peter Sutcliffe's arrest,
10:36Constabulary Inspector Lawrence Byford wrote a report about how the Yorkshire Ripper could have been caught much sooner.
10:42The whole of Britain was terrified by the elusive murderer who seemed to kill for his own enjoyment.
10:48Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times during his five-year spree,
10:52yet police didn't note small descriptions of the suspect that he matched.
10:56They even downplayed his implication in an anonymous letter that a friend quickly took credit for.
11:01And even Peter Sutcliffe himself has said,
11:04I got to the point where I thought I must be invisible.
11:07So he got to a stage where he felt untouchable.
11:11He felt so powerful.
11:12He thought that he was never going to get caught.
11:14But long before the Home Office released the Byford Report in 2006,
11:19everyone knew about Wearside Jack.
11:22John Samuel Humble's false tapes and letters misdirected the investigation for over a year.
11:27Sutcliffe ultimately admitted to being the Ripper during his 1981 interview,
11:32putting an end to one of the most infamously flawed major investigations in UK history.
11:37Sutcliffe's legacy casts a deathly shadow over the lives he took and the lives he left behind.
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11:59Atlanta Murders
12:00The murders of two adults and 28 children were linked to a spree in Atlanta between 1979 and 81.
12:07The city was on fire with fear.
12:09But police didn't seriously investigate the links until a year in.
12:14It's understood that racial bias impeded efforts to solve these crimes within the city's black community.
12:19Even after a task force was formed, it took civilian pressure to spark federal involvement.
12:24Wayne Williams was ultimately convicted of killing the two adults, then linked to most of the child abductions.
12:30It took 11 and a half hours, over two days, for the nine women and three men, eight black and
12:36four white drawers,
12:37to reach a verdict for the murders of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne.
12:42Guilty on both counts.
12:43The sentence, two consecutive life term.
12:47The string ended with his downfall, though many feel he was a scapegoat for a possible conspiracy or social crisis.
12:53Williams himself has tried to appeal his case on the grounds that the police cared more about catching the Atlanta
12:59boogeyman than looking deeper.
13:01To this day, Williams still proclaims his innocence.
13:05I'm just speaking for the harm.
13:07I haven't killed anybody.
13:08What are some other miscarriages of justice brought on by flimsy investigating?
13:13Testify in the comments below.
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