In 2003, three people were shot in an open street in Chicago by a man dressed in black. One lost his life. Police immediately suspected gang clashes between rival gangs.
One of those who was shot later identified the gunman as someone who went by the nickname “twin”. It was a nickname two twins who figured in Chicago’s underworld used at the time.
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Criminal twins
The identical twins Kevin Dugar and Karl Smith, were both involved in a lot of crime, and engaged in, among other things, buying and selling drugs.
(Smith and Dugar have different surnames since one twin chose to take the surname after the father, while the other took the name after the mother.)
But when the person who was shot was to pick out who was behind the shooting by pointing to the perpetrator in a photo series, both twins were not included, only Dugar.
Dugar was naturally picked out and identified as the man who had fired the shots. He was arrested later that year, without being able to understand why.
Dugar asked his brother in confidence if he knew anything about the shooting, but Smith refused to know anything about it.
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Sentenced to 54 years in prison
In 2005, Dugar was convicted of the murder, to 54 years behind bars. He spent the next 11 years inside the prison walls, and the case did not appear to remain untouched. A verdict was handed down and Dugar was found guilty.
For the first few years after his sentencing, Dugar’s twin brother, Smith, spent time outside the prison walls.
He was not even mentioned in the criminal case, but still had close ties to Chicago’s criminal gangs. And in 2008 he was the one who put in the glue.
Both were jailed for murder
He then took part in a bloody armed robbery, in which, among other things, an eight-year-old boy was shot and killed.
Dugar was convicted of participating in the aggravated robbery, and received a sentence of 99 years in prison.
Thus, both twins were in prison – with their own murder convictions.
But was it so simple that both were ice-cold killers? In 2013, things should make people doubt just this.
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– I’m here to confess
In a letter to his brother, Smith laid the cards on the table. It was he who had fired the shots that had gotten Dugar imprisoned.
One September day in 2016, the brothers finally got their case back in court, and Karl Smith took the witness stand and said:
– I’m here to confess to a crime I committed, like him [Dugar] was wrongly accused of, Smith said.
Dugar himself sat in the hall, and shed tears as Smith admitted everything in his testimony.
Was not believed
But the judge did not buy the explanation. He found it suspicious that Smith would only clear his conscience after he had already been convicted of a murder that would keep him in prison for life.
In the end, Smith was not believed, and the twin brothers had to be forced to remain in prison.
But the incident had not gone unnoticed. In the local as well as national and international media, the case was caught and received a lot of attention.
An organization working on potential homicides, the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, took an interest in the case.
In 2021, they got the case resumed before an Illonois Court of Appeals. They looked at the case and overturned the verdict.
Free man after 19 years
On Tuesday 25 January 2022, Dugar was a free man for the first time in 19 years.
