The Innocents (1964)
by Edward D. Radin

Excerpt from Chapter 6 on

Franklin Hamlin

Two photographs and a newspaper clipping are on my desk. One photograph is labeled Franklin Hamlin and shows a man of medium build, on the slender side, a thin-faced man with sharp features. The other picture bears the name Harry Kistler and shows a burly man with a very large, round face, the kind frequently described as moon­faced, where there are heavy jowls that are almost a continuous second chin circling the face and obscuring the features. One sentence in the news clipping reads: "Police said the men were 'dead ringers' for each other." The thin-faced, sharp-featured Hamlin had been mistakenly identified as Kistler by three witnesses in the robbery of a San Francisco jewelry shop. Hamlin had spent ten months in prison when, in 1954, Kistler was arrested and confessed to the robbery. The storekeeper later was puzzled as to how he could have mistaken one man for the other. California paid Hamlin $5,000 for his false imprisonment.