All Blog Posts from Crimesider

Columbia, Mo. March 10, 2004 - On Halloween night in 2001, Kent Heitholt, a popular sports editor for the Columbia Daily Tribune was beaten and strangled with his own belt in theTribune parking lot. Not long afterward, Chuck Erickson said he began having dreamlike memories of the killing. When police questioned Erickson, he named an accomplice: his high school buddy Ryan Ferguson.

Read full post…

NEW YORK - Ryan Ferguson is not getting out of prison anytime soon. His latest appeal was turned down by Boone County, Missouri Circuit Judge Jodi Asel, in a decision that was released this week.

If you watch 48 Hours Mystery regularly, it is hard to forget Ryan Ferguson or his 2005 trial in Columbia, Missouri. Ferguson was convicted, along with a high school friend, of the 2001 murder of Kent Heitholt, the Columbia Daily Tribune sports editor. What makes this young man’s case so memorable is that there was so little evidence against him other than a dream of his co-defendant, Chuck Erickson. Really. A dream that Erickson had two and a half years after the murder which led him to confess to the Columbia police.

Read full post…