This Guy Spent 17 Years in Prison for a Crime His Literal Doppelganger Did
Most people have met someone whose resemblance feels almost unreal. It might be a stranger who shows up in your feed or a familiar face you keep getting compared to. It stays lighthearted until that likeness collides with circumstance and a system that confuses one identity for another.
A Kansas man’s life was derailed by the kind of coincidence you’d expect in a movie. He spent nearly two decades behind bars, all because another man existed who could have been his mirror image. What followed exposed the fallibility of human memory, the cracks in eyewitness testimony, and the surreal limits of justice itself.
A Crime, a Name, and the Wrong Man
The story began in 1999 in Roeland Park, Kansas. A woman in a Walmart parking lot was attacked as she got out of her car. The man tried to grab her purse, she fought back, and he ran off with her phone instead. Because she scraped her knees in the struggle, it was classified as aggravated robbery.
Witnesses described the suspect as a “light-skinned Hispanic or African-American man named Rick” with long hair pulled back. Investigators traced the getaway car to a group of men who had been searching for quick money. They said the robber was someone named Rick. When shown booking photos of men named Richard or Rick, one of the men picked out Jones. So did the victim.
Jones actually had an alibi. He was at his girlfriend’s birthday party across the state line in Kansas City, Missouri, surrounded by several people who saw him that night. But the jury didn’t buy it. In 2000, he was convicted of aggravated robbery and sentenced to 19 years in prison.
The Doppelganger Rumor
At Lansing Correctional Facility, where Jones was serving his sentence, other inmates began telling him he looked exactly like another prisoner named Ricky. He brushed it off until the comparisons kept coming. The resemblance wasn’t casual; the two men shared nearly identical faces, builds, hairstyles, and even first names.
Jones was born in 1976, and Ricky Lee Amos, the man everyone said looked like him, was born in 1977. Both were about six feet tall, both wore their hair in cornrows, and both lived near the same Kansas neighborhood. That likeness would later become the key to his freedom.
Finding the Real “Rick”
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With help from the Midwest Innocence Project and the University of Kansas Project for Innocence, attorneys reopened the case. When they finally found a photo of Ricky Amos, everyone was stunned. Side by side, the two men looked like twins. The witnesses who had once pointed at Jones couldn’t distinguish between them.
Amos had lived at the address connected to the robbery and had a criminal record that included robbery and drug possession. When this new evidence reached the court, the judge reviewing the case said no reasonable jury would have convicted Jones if they had seen both men. In June 2017, after 17 years behind bars, Richard Jones walked free.
Freedom and the Price of Time
Jones reunited with his daughters, one of whom barely remembered him, and met his granddaughter for the first time. He began rebuilding his life, still adjusting to freedom after nearly two decades of loss.
In 2018, Kansas approved a $1.1 million settlement for his wrongful conviction, the first under a new mistaken-conviction law. The agreement also cleared his record, issued a certificate of innocence, and gave him access to counseling and healthcare benefits. It was recognition that his imprisonment had been a tragic mistake.
Meanwhile, Amos continued to serve time for unrelated crimes. Because the statute of limitations on the 1999 robbery had expired, prosecutors couldn’t reopen the case.
A Case That Changed More Than One Life
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Richard Jones’ situation shows how fragile justice can be when eyewitness memory stands alone. Misidentification contributes to most wrongful convictions later overturned in the U.S., and this case became one of the most striking examples.
Jones spent nearly half his life locked away because another man looked like him. When he was finally free, he showed no bitterness, saying he didn’t blame Amos for what happened. His focus stayed on rebuilding and finding peace, something the courts could never truly repay.
Two men, one face, and seventeen stolen years. It sounds like fiction, but it’s all real, and it exposes how thin the line between guilt and innocence can be.