Should You Believe a Deathbed Confession?

A dying man told his sister there is a thirteen-year-old child at the bottom of an Arkansas pond. Here's why deathbed confessions are so disturbing to hear and hard to verify.

Somewhere beneath the surface of a pond near Chester, Arkansas, investigators are looking for a boy who may not be there.

It is the kind of place you could drive past without noticing. Private land, rural road, a pond holding whatever ponds hold after forty years: mud, weeds, animal bones, rusted debris, silt over silt, and probably nothing worse than time.

In May 2026, searchers came to that water because of a story.

Cadaver dogs worked the banks. Divers went in. Crawford County Sheriff Daniel Perry told 40/29 News he was “pretty confident” a body was in the pond after the dogs alerted, while also being clear about the obvious problem: if the story is true, the remains have been underwater for three or four decades, covered in silt, with very little left to find.

Chester Pond search on May 15, 2026

The tip didn’t come from a newly discovered police report or a grieving family who had spent decades searching for a missing child. It came from a sister, reporting what her brother told her while he was dying.

According to Perry, the dying man said he killed a 13-year-old boy sometime in the 1980s and left him in the pond. The two boys had been camping. Perry described the account only in fragments: “some things happened,” then a rock, a blow to the head, a body pushed into the water. Investigators have not identified the child. They have not found a missing-person report that clearly matches the story. The man who allegedly confessed has not been publicly named. So far, the pond hasn’t given up a body.

Even with that little, the story is hard to shake.

One detail makes it harder. The dying man reportedly told his sister he was eight years old when it happened.

Eight.

If true, this isn’t an adult’s confession to an adult crime. It’s an adult, at the end of his life, trying to explain something a child remembers.

What happened at that pond? Murder? Accident? A fight between two kids that went too far? A drowning the survivor never told anyone about? A secret adults helped bury? A memory that warped over forty years? Or is there no boy in the pond at all?

The uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve. It’s the whole problem.

Deathbed confessions hold us because they seem to deliver what cold cases rarely do: a final answer. The killer speaks. The secret breaks open. The truth comes out because the person carrying it has run out of time.

The trouble is that dying words and verified facts are not the same thing. A person can be sincere and wrong, remorseful and self-serving, lucid one minute and confused the next. A deathbed confession may reveal something true. It also reveals what the dying person needs to say.

That need is where the work starts.

Why Dying Words Hold Us

We want to believe that conscience eventually catches up with people who got away with terrible things. The deathbed confession is the form that fantasy takes.

Someone has lived for years with a secret. Sometimes for decades. Sometimes a whole life. They’ve lied to police, to family, to themselves. They’ve watched investigators chase the wrong leads or give up. They’ve built a life around silence.

Then, at the end, when there is nothing left to protect, they speak.

The pull of that moment is real, and I feel it too. The same thing that makes it satisfying is what makes me skeptical of it.

Death does change some people. It can lower defenses, awaken old guilt, reawaken religious fear, or produce a sudden urge to apologize.

What death doesn’t do is make people reliable. Dying doesn’t repair memory. It doesn’t dissolve narcissism, reverse a lifetime of manipulation, or override the effects of delirium, dementia, medication, infection, or pain. And it doesn’t take away the wish to control a story or to turn a messy life into a single clean final scene.

A dying person may have nothing left to lose. They can still have plenty left to control.

The alleged confession in Crawford County is specific enough to justify a search and too thin to prove anything. It has a location, a victim description, and a rough mechanism: a rock, a pond, a boy. It also arrives secondhand, decades late, without a name, without remains, with the most psychologically complicated detail possible at its center. The confessor was a child himself.

The public wants to know whether the confession is true. Investigators have to ask a harder question. What can be tested?

A “dying declaration” is not the same as a deathbed confession. A dying declaration usually involves the victim, not the offender. It’s the person bleeding out who names her shooter. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, that kind of statement can fall under a hearsay exception if the speaker believed death was near and was speaking about the cause of that impending death.

That isn’t what’s happening in Crawford County. This is an alleged wrongdoer, decades later, describing something he says he did as a child. As Peter Nicolas explained in an A&E Crime + Investigation piece on deathbed confessions, the term can cover a crime or something deeply personal that isn’t criminal at all, like biological parentage or an affair.

The dead can’t be cross-examined. They can’t clarify whether “I killed him” meant murder, accident, panic, or failure to help. They can’t supply a name they forgot to mention, or a year, or who else was present. They can’t tell you whether they were lucid, medicated, hallucinating, speaking symbolically, or trying to leave one last emotional bomb behind.

When the confession is secondhand, the problem doubles. In Crawford County, the public version comes through the sister. That doesn’t make her unreliable. It means her memory is now part of the evidence, and investigators are dealing with two minds instead of one: her brother’s memory of what happened, and her memory of what he said.

Did he say “I killed him” or “I think I killed him”? Did he say the boy was thirteen, or did that detail get attached later? Did he describe a real camping trip or a childhood scene reconstructed from fragments? Did he repeat a story he had told before, or say something brand new at the very end?

In old cases, one word can change the meaning of everything.

Three Confessions That Led Somewhere

The reason investigators can’t ignore these confessions is that some of them prove to be true. They lead to bodies. They expose fugitives. They close cases that have hurt families for decades.

The strongest recent example is the case of Susan Carter and her ten-year-old daughter Natasha “Alex” Carter, who vanished from Beckley, West Virginia, on August 8, 2000. Susan had been in a custody dispute. Alex was a little girl who should have grown up. For more than twenty years, they were gone.

Susan Carter and her ten-year-old daughter, Natasha “Alex” Carter

Larry Webb had been a suspect almost from the beginning. In 2024, his health failing, he confessed. According to the Associated Press, Webb’s confession led authorities to remains believed to be Susan and Alex in the backyard of his home. He died about six hours before the remains were recovered. He had been arrested earlier that month after investigators reportedly found a bullet with Alex’s blood in his bedroom.

The confession didn’t erase the horror of what happened. It didn’t give Alex back her childhood or return Susan to anyone who loved her. What it did was move the truth from suspicion into the physical world. The remains weren’t a theory. They were evidence.

That is what a strong deathbed confession does. Not because it sounds dramatic, but because it connects to something physical. It gives investigators a place to dig, a body to recover, a forensic fact to check the story against. It doesn’t ask to be believed because the speaker is dying. It proves itself by leading to evidence.

That is the question hanging over the pond in Crawford County. Does this confession connect to the physical world the way Webb’s did? Or does it stay locked in memory, impossible to confirm and impossible to dismiss?

Theodore Conrad’s case shows a different kind of deathbed confession. No murder, no body, just identity.

In July 1969, Conrad was a young bank teller in Cleveland. He walked out of Society National Bank with $215,000 and disappeared. For more than fifty years, he lived as Thomas Randele. He married, had a daughter, and built a life. The people who loved him thought they knew who he was, the way families usually believe they do.

Shortly before he died of lung cancer in 2021, he told his wife and daughter the truth. He was Ted Conrad, the fugitive bank robber. Authorities later confirmed the identification through handwriting comparison and other evidence, and the case was closed.

The Conrad case fascinates me because it shows how a deathbed confession can solve something for law enforcement while shattering something for a family. His daughter didn’t just learn that her father had stolen money. She learned that the man she knew had been living under a false name her whole life. Every ordinary memory had a hidden layer underneath it. The dad, the husband, the suburban guy with familiar habits and funny stories now seemed like costume dressing up a person she didn’t know.

A deathbed confession can close a case. It can also blow up a family.

James Washington adds another wrinkle. Washington was already in prison when he had seizures in 2009 and apparently believed he was dying. In the hospital, he confessed to prison guard James Tomlinson that he had been involved in the 1995 murder of Joyce Goodner in Nashville. He was already serving time for attempted second-degree murder, but the Goodner case was unsolved, and a man who thought he might be dead in a day pulled it back into motion. Prison officials passed the confession to prosecutors, who moved to indict.

In 2009, James Washington confessed to his involvement in the 1995 murder of 35-year-old Joyce Goodner.

Then Washington recovered.

Once he was no longer dying, he tried to take it back. It was too late. The confession had already left the hospital room. He was convicted.

The Washington case is almost too clean a demonstration of the psychology at work. When he thought he was dying, he needed to speak. When he survived, he wished he’d never had. Death changes the math, but only while death feels certain. The minute survival comes back into play, consequences come back with it.

Washington’s case was an adult confessing to an adult crime. Crawford County may be something stranger: an adult, at the end of his life, trying to make sense of something his eight-year-old self either did or didn’t do.

These cases are a useful reminder that deathbed confessions aren’t just folklore. They produce remains, identify fugitives, and close cases that have stayed open for decades. The ones that hold up have something in common. They generate information that can be checked outside the confession itself: a body, a bullet, a handwriting sample, a location, a name, a timeline.

The confession opens a door. The evidence either walks through it or it doesn’t.

The Tylenol Confession, and D.B. Cooper

Other confessions are harder to evaluate because they attach themselves to famous cases, the kind that already live somewhere between evidence and mythology.

The Chicago Tylenol murders are one of those. In 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. The deaths terrified the country, triggered a national recall, and changed how over-the-counter medications are packaged. Officially, the case is still unsolved.

Joseph Cibelli says his father, Daniel Raymond Drozd, confessed near the end of his life to involvement in the Tylenol killings. Cibelli says Drozd told his sons, “Cyanide pills...I did it,” and made other statements he interpreted as admissions. Cibelli has also said he had long suspected his father and later found items he believes are relevant, including an old sample bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol.

Daniel Raymond Drozd, who allegedly confessed to his son, Joseph Cibelli, to being the Tylenol poisoner

That is an explosive allegation. It’s also unproven. Both can be true.

The allegation deserves investigation. It does not deserve belief without corroboration. A son may be accurately reporting what he heard. A dying father may have said exactly what his son says he said. But the Tylenol murders aren’t solved because someone says his father confessed. They would be solved if investigators could match the confession to physical evidence.

Famous cases pull confessions toward them. They attract theories, suspects, family legends, false memories, and false confessions because they’re unfinished stories. People want a name to attach to the mystery. They want to know who poisoned the Tylenol capsules and who D.B. Cooper was. When a case becomes part of the culture, a confession can feel satisfying before it’s verified.

Duane Weber is a good example. Weber reportedly claimed on his deathbed that he was D.B. Cooper, the hijacker who parachuted from a plane in 1971 with $200,000. The FBI later said Weber was ruled out by DNA testing on Cooper’s tie.

That’s the job of evidence. To interrupt a good story. The story may be emotional. It may fit certain memories. If the forensic record doesn’t support it, the story can’t carry the case.

Crawford County is different from a famous case confession. There is no national mystery to inhabit, no victim whose name already means something to the public, no legend waiting to be filled in. If there is a boy in that pond, he isn’t famous. He’s unknown.

That makes the case less sensational. It also makes it more haunting. If a child died in that pond in the 1980s, he never made the news. He had a name before any of this. He had parents who either looked for him or didn’t, and neither version is easy to think about.

When Emma Smith Was Found Alive

Some deathbed confessions don’t solve cases. They create them.

Emma Alice Smith disappeared from Sussex, England, in 1926. Decades later, an alleged deathbed confession suggested she had been murdered. The claim was serious enough that police reopened the case. It did not end with a body. A later report quoted Detective Chief Inspector Trevor Bowles saying that “as far as is possible,” it had been established Emma Alice Smith was not murdered. She had likely eloped with a married road worker named Thomas Wells and gone to Southern Ireland. Police closed the case.

Emma Alice Smith went missing in 1926

The phrase “as far as is possible” is doing important work there. In a case that old, certainty isn’t really on the table. The confession wasn’t disproven in any clean way. No DNA test was available to test a living Emma. No videotape surfaced. The confession collapsed under the weight of a more plausible explanation.

For investigators, that kind of failure is instructive. A confession can be serious enough to open a file and still not strong enough to survive it.

This is one reason we don’t have good numbers on deathbed crime confessions. Most happen privately, told to a relative, a priest, a nurse, a hospice worker. Some are never reported. Some are dismissed as confusion. Some are kept quiet to protect the family. Some are reported years later, after the listener has replayed the conversation so many times that the exact words are gone.

We don’t know how often these confessions actually happen, and we don’t know how often the ones that get reported are true. What we have are individual cases, some confirmed, some debunked, some unlikely to ever resolve. Crawford County is still in that last category.

The Eight-Year-Old Problem

Eight years old.

If the dying man really said he was eight when this happened, this is not a standard adult murder confession and shouldn’t be treated like one. It may not be a forty-year cover-up. It may be a man at the end of his life trying to make sense of something a child believed.

That doesn’t mean the story is false. It means the story is complicated.

An eight-year-old does not understand death, intent, responsibility, secrecy, or guilt the way an adult does. Children can be violent. They can cause real harm. They can also misinterpret events, absorb blame that isn’t theirs, confuse sequence, and read adult panic as proof of their own guilt. They remember fragments and build meaning around the fragments later.

A child who saw another boy drown might spend his life convinced he caused it. Freezing instead of running for help can, in memory, feel like a killing. A boy who was present when another child was hurt can grow up carrying survivor’s guilt. A child threatened into silence by an adult may never figure out what he was being silenced about in the first place.

Memory doesn’t stay untouched for forty years. It gets reconstructed, avoided, rehearsed, buried, and retrieved. It’s shaped by shame, fear, dreams, family stories, illness, and whatever moral meaning a person has assigned to his own past.

If there is any truth underneath the Crawford County confession, the range of possibilities is wide. The dying man may have intentionally struck another boy with a rock and watched him die. There may have been a fight, an injury, a fall, a drowning, and panic. He may have witnessed something an adult did and inherited the responsibility in his own head. He may have known a boy died, but misunderstood how. He may remember the location correctly and everything else wrong. Or the confession may not describe a literal homicide at all, but a burden he carried as if it were one.

This is why “Was he lying?” is the least interesting question.

A dying person can be sincere and wrong. He can be emotionally truthful and factually mistaken. He can confess to a moral burden that doesn’t translate into a criminal charge. “I killed him” can mean murder. It can also mean “I was there,” “I didn’t help,” “I was too scared to tell anyone,” “I have blamed myself my whole life.”

None of that makes the confession meaningless. It makes it harder to evaluate.

In forensic work, the question is often less about whether a person is lying and more about what the story does for them. Does it relieve guilt, transfer blame, explain a lifetime of shame, claim importance, or punish someone in the room? A confession isn’t just a statement of fact. It’s an act, and at the end of life, that act happens under serious pressure.

What a Dying Person Gets From Speaking

Different needs produce different confessions.

The simplest kind is remorse. The dying person needs the secret recovered, and the confession comes with details investigators can use: a grave location, a name, a place to dig. Larry Webb’s confession was this kind. It finally let Susan and Alex Carter come home.

A second motivation is fear. Death wakes up religious teachings and childhood beliefs that have been quiet for years. A person who never cared about accountability in this life can be terrified of accountability in the next. The audience changes, and so does the urgency. These confessions tend to be unstructured and emotional, sometimes contradictory, because the dying person isn’t really speaking to the people in the room.

Then there’s control. Some dying people produce partial confessions designed to dominate the room rather than resolve anything. “I did something terrible, and I won’t say more” is a power move dressed as a confession. It leaves the listener stuck with a secret they can’t act on and can’t get rid of.

Occasionally, false deathbed confessors take credit for famous cases. They want credit. They want their name attached to something the public knows: D.B. Cooper, the Zodiac, the Tylenol killings. The bigger the legend, the more attractive the false confession.

The rarest motivation, and the worst, is cruelty. The dying person leaves the living with a secret they can’t prove and can’t forget. The harm continues after the funeral.

Confusion produces a different problem. A fragmented memory or a dreamlike statement under heavy medication, infection, or oxygen deprivation can sound like a confession when the dying person is describing something else entirely. Family members may walk away believing they heard a crime when what they actually heard was confusion.

The function shapes what the confession looks like. A remorseful confession is usually specific. A controlling one is fragmentary by design. An ego-driven one attaches itself to whatever the dying person has been following in the news. A childhood-guilt confession is morally absolute and factually vague.

Investigators can’t just ask whether a confession sounds plausible. They have to ask what the dying person was getting out of saying it.

What the Pond Would Have to Prove

The Crawford County confession has one real strength: a location.

The pond is what makes the story testable. Without it, this would be a dying allegation floating loose from any evidence.

A location isn’t proof. If divers recover remains, the work is only starting. Investigators will need to determine whether the remains are human, whether they’re consistent with a thirteen-year-old, how long they’ve been in the water, whether there’s skull trauma consistent with a blow from a rock, and whether anything identifying is recoverable: clothing, jewelry, dental work. Then comes the DNA question. Can usable DNA be extracted from decades of silt and pond water, and does any of it match a missing child anywhere?

Adult remains would tell a different story. Remains that are too recent or too old wouldn’t fit the timeline. Animal remains would end the search.

If nothing is found, the confession isn’t automatically false. The pond may have shifted over forty years. Silt moves. Remains decay. The body may have been moved at some point. The memory may be real but geographically off. Or there may never have been a body there at all.

This is where Sheriff Perry’s job gets difficult. The absence of a matching missing-person report doesn’t settle anything. Perry has pointed to the obvious problem with old records: handwritten reports, limited resources, missing children classified as runaways, families that moved, and jurisdictions that didn’t talk to each other. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children wasn’t founded until 1984, and the infrastructure for missing children took years to mature after that. (40/29 News; NCMEC) Depending on when this alleged event happened, the systems we now rely on were either brand new or didn’t exist yet.

Old cases don’t fail only because people lie. They fail because reports are lost, names are misspelled, and kids are written off as runaways. Bodies are never identified or recovered.

That is the world Crawford County investigators are working in. A confession can point them toward a pond. It can’t do the work of identification, pathology, and proof.

What the Family Inherits

The first people to deal with a deathbed confession are the ones who heard it.

Imagine sitting next to someone you love, or someone you fear, resent, or have spent your life trying to survive, and hearing them say they killed someone. Or stole a fortune. Or lived under a false name. Or knew what had happened to a child everyone had given up on finding.

What do you do? Call the police that night, or wait until after the funeral? Tell your siblings? Protect your mother? Protect the family name? Decide it was delirium? Wonder if you misunderstood? Go back through every strange comment, every unexplained absence, every locked box, every story that never quite made sense?

A confession like that can rearrange an entire family history. Suddenly, the father’s temper looks like evidence. A trip he took alone looks suspicious. The box in the attic suddenly matters. An old childhood fear of his reads like a clue. The silence around a relative starts looking like complicity.

This is part of what made Joseph Cibelli’s situation so difficult. He wasn’t just passing along a claim. He was describing what it is like to inherit a possible crime from your own father. Ashley Randele, Ted Conrad’s daughter, had to reconcile the dad she loved with the fugitive he had been before she was born. In both cases, the confession didn’t stay with the dying person. It moved into the lives of the people he left behind.

The dying person feels relief. The relatives inherit the investigation.

The sister in Crawford County may have just brought investigators the first real lead on a forgotten child’s death. Or she may have brought them the last confused story of a dying man. Either way, she did what he no longer could. She told someone outside the family.

Now the evidence has to answer what he can’t.

Why Sincerity Isn’t Proof

Deathbed confessions look like the case closing itself: the dying whisper, the stunned relative, the cold case suddenly back in the news, the secret pulled out of the grave at the last minute.

A confession can sound complete before the evidence is. We turn allegations into facts, invent victims who may not exist, and attach confessions to famous cases because the story is too tempting to leave alone. We forget that some people don’t need to lie to be wrong.

A confession can be sincere, emotional, and inaccurate. Memory isn’t a recording. Childhood memory, in particular, is vulnerable to reconstruction. End-of-life cognition can be affected by illness, medication, infection, oxygen deprivation, pain, and fear. Even fully lucid people misremember. Remorse can attach itself to the wrong story and stay there for forty years.

The most misleading true crime stories are the ones that feel complete before the evidence is in.

The right question isn’t how the story feels. It’s what has actually been confirmed. Who heard the confession, what did they hear, was the speaker lucid, was the statement spontaneous, did it include any information not available to the public, did it lead to anything that can be tested? What would prove it? What would disprove it?

Those questions don’t make the story less interesting. They make it more honest.

Back to the Pond

So where does that leave Crawford County? Under investigation, which is where it should be.

The dogs alerted to something humans couldn’t smell and may never be able to explain. The divers worked through dark water, mud, silt, and whatever forty years leave behind. Sheriff Perry took the allegation seriously without pretending it was already proven. And the sister, the only person now alive who heard the words, carried them outside the family.

Now the pond has to answer.

If there is a boy in that water, he deserves his name back. Calling him “a 13-year-old” from a dying man’s story is not an identity. He had a family before any of this and a life that came before the pond. Properly recovering him is the least the investigation owes him.

If there is no boy in that water, the question becomes different but no less human. What was the dying man confessing to? An event he buried for decades? Something he saw as a child and then reworked in his own head? A guilt that wasn’t his to carry in the first place? A lie?

If the pond gives up remains, this becomes a case. If it gives up nothing, the mystery doesn’t go away. It moves back into the dying man’s head and into the sister’s memory of him.

Some deathbed confessions lead to a body, a name, a conviction, a fugitive identity, or a long-delayed answer for a family. Others collapse under scrutiny. Some never resolve at all.

Sometimes, as in Crawford County, they lead investigators to a quiet pond, and so far the water hasn’t given anything back. It may not. Or it may, tomorrow.

A deathbed confession feels like the end of the story. But for investigators, it is often only the first lead.

I would not dismiss this confession.

I would not believe it without evidence, either.

As always, thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoy it, please pass it along to a true-crime-following friend. See you next week!

References

5NEWS. (2026, May 15). Crawford County sheriff confirms pond searched after deathbed confession. https://www.5newsonline.com/article/news/crime/true-crime/crawford-county-sheriff-confirms-pond-searched-after-deathbed-confession/527-56b1e14e-87e3-44a6-b737-bdc764b4dba9

Dolak, K. (2012, November 6). Inmate James Washington was convicted after a deathbed murder confession. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/US/inmate-james-washington-convicted-death-bed-murder-confession/story?id=17653264

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2007, December 31). D.B. Cooper redux. FBI Archives. https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2007/december/dbcooper_123107

Friedman, J. (2026, May 14). What happens after people give deathbed confessions? A&E Crime + Investigation. https://www.aetv.com/articles/what-happens-after-deathbed-confessions

Kelly, A. (2011, July 17). “Murder victim” was alive and fled to Ireland with lover, say police. IrishCentral. https://www.irishcentral.com/news/murder-victim-thought-to-have-eloped-in-mystery-case-125712643-237400311

Laville, S. (2009, February 3). Village photograph triggers police murder hunt for missing teenager - 80 years late. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/feb/04/missing-girl-murder-hunt-1920s

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. (n.d.). History. Retrieved May 19, 2026, from https://www.missingkids.org/footer/about/history

Raby, J. (2024, April 23). Dying suspect’s confession leads to remains that are believed to be that of missing woman, daughter. Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/west-virginia-susan-alex-carter-missing-d9b4f9e49b927ed764310f69ec84ba05

Rains, B. (2026, May 15). Deathbed confession prompts search for boy’s remains near Chester. 40/29 News. https://www.4029tv.com/article/deathbed-confession-prompts-search-for-boys-remains-near-chester/71311166

Legal References

Fed. R. Evid. 804(b)(2). https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/rule_804

Lau, T. T. (2018). Reliability of dying declaration hearsay evidence. American Criminal Law Review, 55, 373–407. https://www.law.georgetown.edu/american-criminal-law-review/wp-content/uploads/sites/15/2018/04/55-2-Reliability-of-Dying-Declaration-Hearsay-Evidence.pdf

Orenstein, A. A. (2010). Her last words: Dying declarations and modern confrontation jurisprudence. University of Illinois Law Review, 2010, 1411. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/6

Psychological and Forensic Background

Kassin, S. M. (2012). Confessions that corrupt: Evidence from the DNA exoneration case files. Psychological Science, 23(1), 41–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611422918

Kassin, S. M., Drizin, S. A., Grisso, T., Gudjonsson, G. H., Leo, R. A., & Redlich, A. D. (2010). Police-induced confessions: Risk factors and recommendations. Law and Human Behavior, 34(1), 3–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10979-009-9188-6

Kassin, S. M., & Gudjonsson, G. H. (2004). The psychology of confessions: A review of the literature and issues. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5(2), 33–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00016.x

Nahm, M., Greyson, B., Kelly, E. W., & Haraldsson, E. (2012). Terminal lucidity: A review and a case collection. Archives of Gerontology and Geriatrics, 55(1), 138–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.archger.2011.06.031