Charles Ray Hatcher - Melvin Reynolds

Melvin Reynolds

On May 26, 1978, four-year-old Eric Christgen disappeared in downtown Saint Joseph, Missouri. His body later turned up along the Missouri River; he had been sexually abused and died of suffocation. The police questioned more than 100 possible suspects, including "every known pervert in town," to no avail. One of them was Melvin Reynolds, a 25-year-old man of limited intelligence who had been sexually abused himself as a child and who had some homosexual episodes as an adolescent. Reynolds, although extremely agitated by the investigation, cooperated through several interrogations over a period of months, including two polygraph examinations and one interrogation under hypnosis. In December 1978, he was questioned under sodium amytal ("truth serum") and made an ambiguous remark that intensified police suspicion. Two months later, in February 1979, the police brought the still cooperative Reynolds in for another round of interrogation—14 hours of questions, promises, and threats. Finally, Reynolds gave in and said, "I'll say so if you want me to." In the weeks that followed, Reynolds embellished this confession with details that were fed to him, deliberately or otherwise. That was enough to convince the prosecutor to charge Reynolds, and to convince a jury to convict him of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years later, Reynolds was released when Charles Hatcher confessed to three murders, including that of Eric Christgen.