Any "evil twin" mixups in real life?

Factual Questions
1

The trope of the “evil twin” is centuries, probably even millennia, old in literature, with such works as Beowulf, Dick Tracy, Star Trek, and The Order of the Stick providing examples. I seem to vaguely recall a myth I was once told of seven identical brothers, all invulnerable to different things, who stood in for one another when one of them was sentenced to death. Not able to kill him in the first way, they’d try a different way, and one of the brothers would make a “secret switch” and survive the method of execution that he himself was invulnerable to.

Cecil himself has said that identical twins still have different fingerprints. But has there been an example, in real life, of someone being arrested, even punished, for a crime committed by one’s identical twin?

2

There’s the famous case of Will West and William West in 1903, who were noth imprisoned. Not only did they have similar names, but their Bertillon measurements (used before fingerprints) were identical. This wasn’t a case of “all black guys look alike” – these guys really did look alike. They were distinguished by their fingerprints. The case is held to be the pivotal one in dethroning Bertillon’s system in favor of fingerprinting, although that has been disputed.

Interestingly, the case of two memn so closely resembling each other purely by chance has been questioned, and many (including Joe Nickell) have made the case that the two Will Wests were really bothers, and possibly true identical twins.

http://www.forensic.to/forens/forens.Feb.01.txt

3

I realize the question is specific about biological twins, but there is no shortage of cases where a close lookalike was arrested and tried before the real culprit was identified - twins of circumstance, not biology.

4

The Five Chinese Brothers is probably what you’re thinking about.

5

Jose and Ozzie Canseco, identical twin baseball players. Ozzie was a nice guy, but couldn’t play ball as well. Jose was a jerk, but a great ballplayer at his peak. At Jose’s nadir, he was playing outfield and let a fly ball hit him on his head and go into the stands for a home run. Good times. I don’t think they were ever confused like the OP asks.

Also, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen.

6

In the beer world, there are Danish twin brothers Mikkel and Jeppe who compete with each other.

Mikkel (Mikkeller beer) and Jeppe (Evil Twin beer). Personally, I prefer Evil Twin.

7

There is a story about a pair of twins who were well-known scientists - I can’t recall the name and Google insists on informing me about the science of twins; I believe this was late 19th century. One went to a barber and warned him that his beard grew exceptionally fast, so the barber promised that if it grew back in before the next day, he would re-shave him for free. An hour later his brother plopped down in the chair, grinning through his bristle.

May be apocryphal; I’m sure someone has the name on tap.

8

I’m not sure if it’s a mix-up exactly, but Robert E. Oliver tried to frame his twin brother Robert J. Oliver for a murder in Dallas quite recently. But the police didn’t believe him. I was thinking of this because there was just a mistrial in the case, when Oliver’s ex-girlfriend got into the jury room. He may not be a great criminal mastermind, but those are Evil Twin actions, I’d say.

9

Actually, they tried to fool a promoter by having Ozzie stand in for Jose at a celebrity boxing event. Link

And does it count that Gallagher the comedian sold his act to his brother and the brother tried to pass himself off as the original?

10

Wasn’t there a case of identical twin brothers, both of them the “evil twin”, who would commit crimes and get away with them because the prosecution could never prove which of the two committed it?

11

There was novel a few years back, Threat, that turned on exactly that point. One twin committed a huge blackmail operation to raise funds to free his brother from prison in Vietnam, then, when they were finally tracked down, pointed at each other and said, “He did it!”

ETA: Author, Richard Jessup.

12

This is a cross-post from a one I made yesterday in the ATMB forum, to which I have received no response from a mod, so I am assuming it is OK.

I am undergoing raging cognitive dissonance.

In Cecil’s (early?) 2001 masterpiece Do twins have identical DNA? a reader humbly approached the Master and said that $20 hung in the balance on DNA identification of who is who of identical twins. The answer from on-high was “yes.”

The matter was gone over again in Cafe Society, in DNA trickery - has this plot device ever been used in a crime story?, in which His column was cited.

The cause of my distress is this, from February 2013: Twins’ DNA hinders France sexual assault investigation. BBC cites somebody or other who should know that “ordinary” DNA analysis would not help, but some sort of further examination of a huge number of nucleotides may (or will, not clear) sort the two brothers out.

Of course, Cecil, writing in 2001, may have chosen not to use His foreknowledge of all things, in order not to spook His acolytes.

It would be nice to bump the CS thread, but my spirit tells me to lay my soul bare here.

Also I would feel bad if Paul Cunningham was incorrectly relieved of $20.

To that post/this one I would like to add:

The full and correct (“base pairs”) money quote from the recent French case is the following, from “an expert” being quoted by the journalist:

“For a normal analysis, 400 base pairs [of nucleotides] which make up DNA…”[adds the journalist: In the case of identical twins,] “we would be looking at billions.”

The article states that it is merely a matter of money, and that it could be done. Of course, the journalist could be totally wrong, the article is false and that it cannot be done, in which case I withdraw my post from ATMB.

Also, in all events, my faith in the Master, tottering for a moment, is restored: the original column is a Staff report by hawkeye.

Finally, a little more searching has turned up these threads in which the issue is discussed:

Paternity testing of children of identical twins
Can two people be convicted of the same crime?
A criminal, cloned

13

Albert and Ebenezer Fox:

14

Everyone, even twins, will have a few spontaneous mutations. These are what are called single nucleotide polymorphisms or SNPs. So two identical twins will have identical DNA—except for a small number of polymorphisms where they differ. The problem is that you would have to sequence each twin’s genome completely to find the SNPs, and that isn’t cheap. Remember the human genome project, which took a decade of work by multiple labs around the world.

Nowadays sequencing is much faster and cheaper, but it would still be a gigantic undertaking.

15

From the site of Unsolved Mysteries, the show where I saw the case discussed, there is the tale of Frederick and Cedric Young. Although their mother believes Cedric committed a robbery, Frederick (who was stopped for a traffic violation and gave his brother’s name, as Frederick was not a licensed driver) was the twin jailed for the felony.

16

We had the opposite near St. Louis recently. Someone murdered the wrong twin.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/man-gets-years-for-killing-twin-of-intended-target-in/article_81499aea-977b-5de1-9105-a941b117987e.html

17

If the mutation produced a detectable dimorphism and the genes linked to it were known, would it be possible with current technology to look at those genes specifically?

I’m thinking of a pair of twins I know whose eyes are different colors. That’s something which isn’t linked to a single gene pair and which can be affected by non-genetic factors (see: David Bowie’s eyes), but I’m thinking that if we know which genes are linked to eye color, it might be possible to verify the two men’s against the forensic sample(s).

18

Whoops.:smack:

19

Asimov wrote a short story along that line - one of the Union Club mysteries, IIRC.

20

Wow. If my wife gave birth to identical twins, I’d insist upon giving them dramatically different names, anyway. The “Dorione/Darione” thing must have driven every involved party UP A TREE for years.