The evil twin is a staple of horror/mystery/crime fiction: someone that looks exactly like you, and commits atrocities in your name and image.
Has this ever occurred in real life, i.e. are there cases of people either framed or mistakenly accused of crimes committed by someone acting as a sort of evil twin?
I’m not really looking for cases of mistaken identification, i.e. someone being merely convicted of a crime perpetrated by someone else, or common cases of identity theft, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be a biological twin, either (though if there’s such a case, all the better), someone acting as a sort of imposter would do just as well.
Don’t recall any famous cases off-hand, but there is the case of the Han twins where one twin tried to kill the other.
Is this more like what you are looking for?
My husband was involved in a case where a man had exposed himself to some children. An adult eyewitness who saw the man drive off, identified him from a mugbook, but the man had absolute proof of being else where at the time of the crime. This first suspect finally said it might have been his brother, who strongly resembled him. The brother was picked up and turned out to be the perp. The two men could have passed for twins.
There was a case in Grand Rapids a few years back of an identical twin being accused of rape. Both men had criminal records, but the prosecution couldn’t prove which one actually did the crime.
I used to hang out in a bar in college where I came to know a pair of mirror twins as aquantainces. It took me a long time to see that they weren’t the same person because they didn’t usually come in together. They had mirror image features but that wasn’t obvious to me until I learned the situation. One was left-handed, the other right. One was gay, the other straight. One did drugs and committed petty crimes, the other did not. Not to inflame a stereotype but, the left-handed, gay, petty criminal one did seem a little evil to me. It was freaky to have the truth revealed to me when they walked in together one night.