Terminally ill man admits murder
A terminally ill man has confessed to a murder committed 25 years ago, police have said.
Johnny Whited, 53, is said to have telephoned the police in Decatur, northern Alabama, and announced that he had killed a man in 1995.
He apparently did not know the name of the victim, nor could he be sure of the date. But police said that Whited had described the location and agreed to direct them to it.
‘‘I thought it might be a prank call,’’ Detective Sean Mukaddam told The Birmingham News, a local newspaper, ‘‘but it quickly developed that this was the real deal.’’
He said that the man on the other end of the telephone line had told him that he had advanced lung cancer, that he was ‘‘preparing to meet his maker’’ and wanted ‘‘to lift a weight from his chest’’.
A review of unsolved murders in Decatur pointed to the case of Christopher Dailey, 26, who was shot in the head with a single bullet in 1995 and whose body had been found by two hunters in woodland on the edge of Decatur.
Dailey’s car was found an hour and a half later in the nearby Tennessee River.
Whited was said to have met detectives and directed them to the crime scene, taking them by road and then on foot. He ‘‘reenacted the crime to detectives,’’ police said in a statement.
The information he provided matched evidence from the crime scene, the police added. Whited was charged with murder and is being held at a county jail. He was already awaiting trial on a drugs charge.
Griff Belser, Whited’s lawyer, said he learnt of the murder charge when it was announced by the police. ‘‘He has not mentioned anything about this other matter to me,’’ he said.
Dailey’s relatives have been informed of the arrest, police said.
Detective Mukaddam told The New York Times that officers were trained to distinguish between legitimate tip-offs and publicity seekers.
‘‘We went into some specific questions to see if he was telling the truth or if it was someone trying to get some notoriety,’’ he said.
He added that he was the officer who informed Dailey’s relatives that there had been an arrest. ‘‘I was able to give them closure after 25 years,’’ he said.
While the police sometimes make public appeals for information to help to resolve old cases, that had not happened with Dailey’s killing.
Decatur police do not believe that the two men had known each other and Whited is understood to have declined to say why he committed the murder.
‘‘I thought it might be a prank call, but it quickly developed that this was the real deal.’’ ’’ Detective Sean Mukaddam