Title: Fall guys
First published: 1996
Description: There was horror enough in the brutal slayings of two western Pennsylvania women, but when a malevolent detective framed two innocent boys in these unrelated cases, the evil compounded. In a compelling story of criminal detection written by the investigator himself, former FBI agent Jim Fisher provides the anatomy of an outrage.

In the first of the cases, eleven-year-old Charlie Zubryd confessed that at the age of eight, he had murdered his widowed mother by shattering her skull with a hatchet. The crime was committed in the basement of the modest Zubryd home in a rural section of Sewickley Township in western Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh. Following intense police questioning, young Zubryd confessed to the crime in March 1959, a full twenty-eight months after the bloody murder of his mother.

Too young to prosecute, Charlie Zubryd was adopted after his confession and a brief stay in a mental ward. A childless couple gave Zubryd a new name and identity. It would be twenty years before Charlie Zubryd - now going by the name Chuck Duffy - would have any contact with his blood family.

When Zubyrd/Duffy made an effort to get his real family back, he was rejected because his relatives still believed he had murdered his mother. Until Fisher began to investigate the case in 1989, Chuck Duffy was not sure he had not killed his mother during some kind of mental blackout.

The second case occurred in 1958, two years after the Zubryd case. Thirteen-year-old Jerry Pacek endured forty-one hours of police grilling before he confessed to raping and killing fifty-year-old Lillian Steveck as she walked home one evening from a bus stop in Breckenridge, Pennsylvania. Pacek told the same Allegheny County homicide detective who had framed Charlie Zubryd that he had killed the woman with a variety of blunt objects, none of which were ever found.

The thirteen-year-old boy was tried and convicted of the murder the following spring. He was sent to Camp Hill Prison, where he remained incarcerated for ten years.

. Fisher's investigation cleared the names of the wrongfully accused boys. Because of his investigation, the Zubryd case was reopened, which led to the identification of a vicious killer. Tragically, Charlie Zubryd (Chuck Duffy) died on October 9, 1993, but he did live to see his name cleared. In 1991, Fisher's investigative efforts convinced the governor of Pennsylvania to grant a full pardon to Jerry Pacek, who as an adolescent had served ten years in an adult prison for a murder he did not commit.
Subjects: Confession (Law), Scapegoat, Murder, Homicide investigation, Investigation, Self-incrimination, Murder, united states
Places: United States
LC classification: HV8079.H6 F57 1996