Patrick Dils: 15 Years for a Crime He Didn’t Commit
Sixteen years old. An apprentice cook. Quiet. One afternoon the police take him in over the brutal murders of two eight-year-old boys. After 36 hours of interrogation he confesses. He describes the sound of their skulls being crushed “like a melon.”
He recants almost immediately. It doesn’t matter.
In 1989 a French court sentences him to life in prison — the first minor in modern French history to receive that sentence for murder. He will spend the next fifteen years behind bars for a crime he did not commit.
This is the story of Patrick Dils, one of France’s most devastating miscarriages of…
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