Eddie Joe Lloyd's confession had his signature, but the DNA did not. He is about to be released from prison after serving 18 years for a murder he did not commit.

Here's what happened:

After a series of fatal child abductions in Detroit, including the brutal rape and murder of 16 year old Michelle Jackson, the city was on edge.

Eddie Joe Lloyd was an involuntarily-committed patient at a mental hospital. He wrote the police letters about the crime. They came to the mental hospital to question him. He confessed. His detailed account, contained in a six page statement and on tape, was described as "chillingly accurate."

But...the confession was false.

"At a hearing on Monday, prosecutors and defense attorneys will appear together before the judge who sentenced Mr. Lloyd to life in prison in 1985, lamenting as he did so Michigan's lack of the death penalty. They plan to present DNA evidence to show that Mr. Lloyd is the wrong man and request his release."

What went wrong?

Barry C. Scheck, the co-director of the Innocence Project and Mr. Lloyd's lawyer, says "This cop had to know, he had to know, that he was feeding a paranoid schizophrenic guy, a guy with a mental disorder, in a mental institution, facts in order to clear a major homicide so everybody could look good," Mr. Scheck said. "If you permit this kind of questioning, you're going to end up not just with innocent people in jail but the real perpetrators still out there."

Scheck is calling for the criminal prosecution of case detective Thomas De Galan. He also has called for misconduct investigations into William Rice, the sergeant who oversaw the case, and the prosecutor, Timothy Kenny, because biological evidence available at the time that could have cleared Mr. Lloyd was never pursued.

Eddie Joe Lloyd will be the 110th person freed from jail after DNA evidence has proven their factual innocence. About 20% of these wrongful conviction cases involve false confessions.

A fairly simple remedy exists: Require the police to videotape all confessions. Currently only two states, Minnesota and Alaska, require this.

Michelle Jackson's case has been reopened. The DNA doesn't match anyone in the DNA databases. As with most of the 110 cases of wrongful convictions, this means that the real killer is still out there.

Now that's chilling.