Kansas City Man Serves 17 Years For Crime Doppelganger Possibly Committed

There will be no new trial for a Kansas City man released from prison after serving 17 years for a crime his doppelganger possibly committed, reported the Kansas City Star on Monday.

While serving his time, Richard Jones repeatedly denied having committed a crime. Attorneys recently discovered Jones had a doppelganger, a man who looked extremely similar to him and had a similar name: Ricky Amos.

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On Thursday, Jones was released from prison after witnesses admitted they could not tell the difference between the two men and could no longer be sure Jones was guilty of the crime. Seeing the photo helped Jones understand what confused him for so many years, he told the Kansas City Star on Friday.

“When I saw that picture, it just made sense to me,” Jones said. “I want people to know that this does happen. It doesn’t get the type of attention that it should get,” he said to WDAF on Saturday.

The case against Jones was dismissed, as announced by Johnson County District Attorney Steven Howe on Monday.

Jones, a Kansas City, Missouri resident, was charged with aggravated robbery in 1999. An attempted purse-snatching in a Walmart parking lot left a woman with a scraped knee while three men ran away with her cell phone. Jones was charged and convicted of the crime, despite his constant claims that he did not commit the crime, which took place in Kansas City, Kansas. Jones said he was at home with his family the day it occurred.

The mandatory sentencing resulted in a 19-year prison sentence, which Jones appealed whenever possible. In 2015, other inmates at Lansing Correctional Facility told Jones there was another inmate who heavily resembled him. The other man had a similar sounding name, Rick.

Jones reached out to attorneys at the Midwest Innocence Project and the Project for Innocence at the University of Kansas Law School. They found Ricky Lee Amos, Jones’s doppelganger who lived in Kansas.

The two men looked similar when their booking photos were placed side-by-side. They have the same facial hair and corn rows, they are both close to 6-feet-tall and weigh roughly 200 pounds and they are about the same age.

Amos has been linked to the address where the crime began. The house was where two men told police they picked up ‘Rick’ and drove to Walmart on the day of the robbery. Amos has denied involvement in the robbery. The statute of limitation for aggravated robbery is five years, so even if he were guilty, he could not be charged.

Amos is currently incarcerated in Sedgwick County, Kansas after being sentenced on April 13 for twice not registering as a sex offender related to a 2003 sexual battery charge. Amos has been in and out of prison throughout the years on robbery charges, drug possession, sexual assault and other offenses, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections' records.

Alice Craig, an attorney with the University of Kansas Innocence Project, has worked for the past two years to help release Jones. Last December, she filed legal action that led to his release on Thursday. The original conviction rested on eyewitness testimony and potential racial bias, she said as reported by NBC News.

“No reasonable juror would have convicted [Jones] in the light of the new evidence,” said Johnson County Judge Kevin Moriarty in his decision on Wednesday. The woman relied on skin tone when she picked out the police photo of Jones, said Moriarty. The other witness, a Walmart security guard, chased the car to identify its license plate number, but he did not see the crime itself. The two other men in the car who said “Rick” was the robber admitted they were high on drugs.

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After Jones asked the lawyers to find his doppelganger, everyone was surprised at the resemblance.

“Either you’re gonna think they’re the same person, or you’re gonna say, ‘these guys look so much alike,’” Jones said. “When I saw that picture, it fell off me. I found that needle in the haystack.”

A GoFundMe page to help Jones “assimilate back into society and allow him to spend time reconnecting with his family and friends” has raised over $17,000 since it was created on Friday.