Beatrice Six
Beatrice Six were six people—Joseph White, Thomas Winslow, Ada JoAnn Taylor, Debra Shelden, James Dean, and Kathy Gonzalez—falsely convicted in 1989 of a 1985 rape and murder in Beatrice, Nebraska. They were exonerated in 2009.
Their convictions came mainly from five confessions obtained after threats of the death penalty. A Nebraska forensic scientist, Dr. Reena Roy, did the blood and semen tests but was not called to testify, even though her tests showed none of the six matched the evidence at the scene.
In 2008 DNA evidence pointed to Bruce Allen Smith, the original prime suspect who had died in 1992. Most of the six were told by a police psychologist that they had repressed memories of the crime. White, who insisted on DNA testing, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of all six in 2014; White had died in 2011.
In 2016 a jury awarded them $28 million. The county appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in 2019. To pay the award, Gage County had to raise property taxes to the maximum allowed. Payments began in June 2019 and finished in March 2023; the tax increases expired in January 2023.
A six-part HBO documentary, Mind Over Murder, about the Beatrice Six, the case, and its aftermath, was released in 2022, with the first episode airing on June 20.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 08:58 (CET).