Lawyers at Northwestern University say they have evidence the wrong man was convicted in 1981 of killing a security guard at a Chicago-area Masonic Temple.

Anthony McKinney was sentenced to life in prison with no parole for the robbery and murder of Donald Lundahl outside the temple in Harvey, a small community south of Chicago. Lundahl's body was found in his car on the night of the Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks title match in 1978.

Karin Daniel and Steven Drizin of the Northwestern Law School's Center for Wrongful Convictions say Harvey police beat a confession out of the 18-year-old McKinney and statements implicating him in the killing out of two witnesses, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

"Anthony's plight is about the most tragic I've ever seen," said David Protess of the Innocence Project at the Medill School of Journalism. "He not only has been locked up for almost two-thirds of his life for a crime he did not commit, but the actual perpetrators were known right from the start."

One of the witnesses told a grand jury he left his house after the 10th round of the Ali-Spinks fight. If that was true, he could not have been at the scene when Lundahl was killed or seen McKinney commit the crime, the Northwestern investigators found.