When killers confess: solving homicide the easy way

Jeremiah Lloyd Thomas took nine years to confess to
killing his friend Jeffrey Babb on Walkley in 1993.

  A criminal's mind is a highly-flawed thing and strange impulses that compel a such people to violent activity can also turn inwards and inflict a sort of self-torture, in the form of relentless and profound remorse. (Wow, did you just make that up? - Chimples).
   Take the case of Jeremiah Lloyd Thomas who walked into a Jamaican police station in 2000 to confess to killing his friend Jeffrey Babb, 22, at 4830 Walkley apt. 1 nine years earlier.
   Thomas had been feeling depressed and burdened with remorse by what he had done.
   Babb had been tied and gagged and was found dead by his ex-girlfriend who had popped in to pick up mail.
   Cops couldn't get a bead on the killer and were grateful when a call came in from the Jamaican police with Thomas' confession.
   Thomas made his case before a judge, explaining that a third man named Paul did most of the dirty work but that story didn't fly too high and Thomas, who would have been 20 at the time of the murder, was sentenced to a life sentence of 25 years without parole.

John Matthew Mason killed Gerald Lambert in 1977
and confessed to the deed 18 years later.

   He was to kill again, according to reports. In April 2004 Thomas stabbed a fellow inmate to death at the Donnacona prison near Quebec City. Prison guards doused Thomas with pepper spray but it did not slow him down as he stabbed Saalim Speede as the guards watched on.
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   In a similar case, the American John Mathew Mason owned up to murdering Gerald Lambert after meeting him in a Montreal bar in 1977. Mason, who was 18 at the time, confessed that he had planned the killing after Lambert, 25, had picked him up in a bar and brought him to his home at 9895 Bruchesi. Mason stabbed Lambert 46 times, explaining that he was trying to get revenge against his mother, who left him to be raised in foster homes as a child, an upbringing which resulted in him later becoming a rent boy male prostitute.
   Mason subsequently became a Scientologist, which led him to confess to his misdeed as a way to clear his conscience.
   The judge ordered him to serve a sentence of not less than 10 years, but I don't know what the exact punishment was.