The words "Don't you die on me" came back to haunt me recently, as I got a message to say John Spirko may have had a suspected heart attack just minutes after we hung up the phone and I uttered those words. It would turn out it wasn't a heart attack and after some time in hospital John was returned to prison in time to get some better news.

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In 1982, postmistress Betty Jane Mottinger was abducted from her one-room post office in Elgin, Ohio — a town of fifty people and murdered.

Six weeks later, John Spirko, a career criminal with a talent for spinning stories, decided to trade invented information about her death for a deal that would keep his girlfriend out of prison. It didn't work. Instead, his web of lies contradictory, provably wrong, and completely fabricated, somehow became the centrepiece of a capital murder prosecution. No physical evidence. No connection to the victim. No connection to the crime scene. Just the words of a man who admitted he made it all up.

John Spirko has been on Ohio's death row, and now serves life without parole, for over forty years. A federal judge called his conviction a foundation of sand. A governor said there was enough doubt to spare his life but not enough to free him.

This is his story as told by him from his prison cell in Ohio.

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