Daily Mail UK has reported that a man who made a deathbed confession that linked him to a cold case murder from 1995 now faces jail because of what he thought was a last-ditch effort for a clean conscience. James Washington was having a heart attack when he called a police officer over to his hospital bed in 2009. Washington had long been linked to the murder of Joyce Goodener, who was found stabbed in the neck, beaten to death with a cinderblock and set on fire in an abandoned Nashville, Tennessee house.
A lack of sufficient evidence- most significantly there were no DNA samples- kept the police from arresting anyone over the past 17 years. At the time of his 2009 heart attack, Washington was in jail for a different crime, so when he was escorted to the hospital with the severe chest pains, there was a police officer nearby.
'He kind of got as best as he could, motioned, and said "I have something to tell you. I have to get something off my conscience and you need to hear this,"' said transport guard James Tomlinson.
'He said "I killed somebody. I beat her to death,"' Mr Tomlinson added. With that weight lifted off his conscience but added on to his rap sheet, Washington proceeded to live through the heart attack and was sentenced to life in prison. Even though he tried to talk back the confession in the wake of the hospital stay, he was found guilty in court and now faces up to 51 years behind bars.
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