Woman who confessed to murder to get private room in mental hospital is exonerated decades later
Prosecutors are dropping a murder case against a woman who was twice convicted in a Nevada slaying based on a confession her lawyer says she made in order to get a private room in a psychiatric hospital.
Cathy Woods, who is now 64, won a new trial for the second time last year in the Washoe County case. That happened after DNA tests on a cigarette butt linked a man facing multiple California murder charges, in slayings that occurred around the same time, to the woman Woods was convicted of killing in 1976 near the University of Nevada-Reno, reports the Associated Press.
Woods was convicted in 1980, based on what she said in 1979 while committed to a psychiatric hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana. That conviction was overturned because a trial judge did not allow the defense to present evidence that Woods could have learned everything she said from newspaper accounts. However, at a second trial in 1985 the jury again found the confession persuasive.
Her current lawyer, Maizie Pusich, says Woods doesn’t even remember confessing. However, “I’m told it was a product of wanting to get a private room,” Pusich explained to the Associated Press during an earlier interview. “She was being told she wasn’t sufficiently dangerous to qualify, and within a short period she was claiming she had killed a woman in Reno.”
The man the cigarette butt points to, Rodney Halbower, 66, has previously been convicted of attempted murder and is currently facing murder charges in San Mateo, California, over the so-called “Gypsy Hill” slayings of three other women.
