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Acquitted after confession, how the prime suspect in a 1993 murder walked free

On June 18, 2011, a jury acquitted Clarence Michael Burcham after a seven-day trial in Moorhead despite his 2009 confession to strangling Sharon Stafford, a 26-year-old victim.
Renewed focus on cold cases in 2008 placed Stafford among 52 cases featured in a Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension playing-card deck distributed to prisons and jails, prompting Detective Nelson's exhaustive review.
Burcham, then 44, gave varying accounts of the night Stafford was killed, including that he found her dead. Defense lawyer Tracy Eichhorn-Hicks argued Burcham had the intelligence of a 7-year-old and often told police what they wanted to hear.
Clay County Prosecutor Brian Melton said in 2009 he was confident the evidence would prove Burcham guilty, yet Moorhead Police Chief David Ebinger later stated the department did not let the case sit.
The trial drew parallels to Brendan Dassey's case featured in the 2015 Netflix documentary "Making a Murderer". False-confession expert Lawrence White worked both cases and found both suspects had low IQs of about 70.

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