One moment your mother, your father, sister, brother, girlfriend or boyfriend is a happy, healthy person. The next minute they're gone. You don't know who killed them or why. All you have is a body and a bunch of questions. In either situation, you'll be dealing with devastating emotions for years.
Some people never recover.
That's why we spend the resources to verify these claims. And, as you should know from last week's reading assignments, boastful behavior is quite common among criminals. Many of these people were raised in severely dysfunctional families, and suffered years of neglect. They like the attention and often confess to crimes they didn't commit. Outside the lecture hall, a bell rang.