Why do people confess to crimes they haven’t committed? What about the psychology of an innocent suspect allows them to falsely claim criminal wrongdoing?
Using recorded police interviews and trial transcripts, She’s So Cold, a new book by Donald E. McInnis shows us the process by which the innocent come to claim guilt. It also suggests a related – and perhaps more important – question: what mental gymnastics allow the police to target a plainly innocent suspect while allowing a guilty one to walk free?
McInnis is an attorney in California. He represented one of three boys charged by the Escondido, CA District Attorney’s Office in the 1998 murder of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe. Late one night, Stephanie was stabbed nine times in her bedroom in suburban Escondido.
Murder there is a rare event and the police immediately demonstrated their inexperience in their investigation of Stephanie’s. Most importantly, a mentally ill drifter named Richard Raymond Tuite had been seen in the neighborhood on the day of the crime frightening residents. Tuite had a long history of minor sex offenses against young girls and had once stabbed a person – facts well known to authorities. Police interviewed him briefly but let him go, without checking his clothing for Stephanie’s blood that surely would have spattered the killer.
That left Stephanie’s father and her brother Michael, 14, as suspects, but the police had no evidence – no fingerprints, no bloody clothing, no murder weapon, nothing. Despite scouring the neighborhood and the house – including ripping up carpets and tearing out wall board – they had nothing linking anyone to the murder.
So they set out to obtain a confession from the most vulnerable male available – Michael.
That required a lengthy process of lying, threats and intimidation by several detectives against a boy who’d just undergone the trauma of seeing his sister’s maimed and bloody body and his family’s horror. Michael and his remaining sister were placed in foster care and denied contact with their parents. Interrogation was conducted in a small, windowless, white room at police headquarters in which four detectives took turns on Michael with neither his parents nor an attorney present. They good-cop/bad-copped him, threatened, cajoled and promised. Over nine hours of questioning and intimidation, first the boy’s defenses broke down and finally his grasp on reality.
What “broke” Michael were the detectives’ numerous lies. For hours, he protested his innocence, but when they told him they had discovered Stephanie’s blood in his room (a lie), had stacks of forensic analyses demonstrating his guilt (a lie) and that a machine called a Computer Voice Stress Analyzer never erred (a lie) and showed that his claim of innocence was false (a lie), Michael began to imagine –at their urging – that he had two personalities, a good Michael and, previously unknown to anyone, an evil one.
Eventually, Michael confessed to a terrible crime in which he’d played no part.
But the police weren’t finished. Michael and his friends Joshua and Aaron had played video games together that involved “killing people.” That, plus the mysterious lack of evidence (how could one boy dispose of the bloody clothing and the knife?), were enough for the police to decide that the three had devised and carried out a highly complex and vicious plot.
Using the same tactics against Joshua, first over a nine-hour period and later for 13 hours, he too confessed to a crime he hadn’t committed. Joshua was emotionally the weakest of the three, a fact understood by police. By the end of his sessions in the tiny white room, he’d not only admitted his own guilt, but supplied police with wholly unlikely descriptions of how, for months, the three had planned and carried out the crime. Down to the minutest detail, the boy gave the police what they wanted. Indeed, they all but dictated his version of the crime to him.
With Aaron, they weren’t as successful, but they didn’t need to be. After all, they had two confessions, one of which described his guilt and that was enough to get all three indicted.
With indictments in hand, the District Attorney’s Office took up where the police had left off. At the preliminary hearing to determine whether the boys would be tried as juveniles or adults, ADA Summer Stephan announced that the three boys – none of whom had ever been in trouble with the police or even with school authorities, who were smart, made good grades and bothered no one – were in her words “pure evil,” “diabolical.” Encouraged by video games, they concocted their fiendish scheme and so meticulously carried it out as to leave no evidence for the police to find. Such was Stephan’s pitch to Judge Laura Hammes.
It failed. Judge Hammes had watched the videotapes of the police interviews and, in open court, announced her conclusion that, if they were brought to trial “these boys would be not guilty.” Others condemned the police outright. Two experts quoted by McInnis – one a former police officer, the other an academic expert in false confessions – separately used the same words to describe detectives’ actions – they “should not be police officers.”
Eventually, Michael Crowe, Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser saw the charges against them dismissed and were declared factually innocent by a federal judge. But that was long after they and their families had paid a terrible price in fear and disillusionment.
The criminal justice system too paid a price. That system depends for its legitimacy on the public’s perception of its integrity. That perception took a pounding in this case.
The cities of Escondido and Oceanside (that contributed one detective to the proceedings) paid a steep price too. They paid the Crowe family $7.2 million and the Houser family $4 million for a variety of civil wrongs committed against them and their children.
She’s So Cold shows in excruciating detail how fragile the human psyche is and the power law enforcement wields to manipulate us. It’s an excellent case study in how, under the wrong circumstances, fact can become fiction and fiction fact.
That explains the boys’ capitulation to police pressure. But, like the boys, the police too substituted fiction for fact. Early on, investigators abandoned what most of us possess – an adult sense of skepticism about their own ideas. They had nothing to indicate that the boys had murdered Stephanie and much pointing to their innocence. They ignored all that and instead embraced a highly unlikely fictional narrative of their own making. In their eagerness to believe a lurid tale of children murdering children, the police came to resemble boys themselves excited beyond control by their own fevered imaginations. What allowed them to do so?
The answer is not that what they did was simply easier than locating the real killer. In the end, that proved to be simplicity itself. At the insistence of defense lawyers, Richard Raymond Tuite’s clothing was finally analyzed and, sure enough, spatters of Stephanie’s blood were revealed. Only he could have been the killer.
Had detectives done the obvious, they’d have solved the murder in a matter of days. Instead they embarked on a long, harrowing journey through the unreal.
To the question “why?” there is no clear answer. We know that police are under pressure to solve crimes, a fact that encourages the use of extra-legal means to obtain confessions, even from the innocent. Plus, a “win-at-any-cost” mindset goads prosecutors at all levels. But the solution to this crime was all along obvious and easily obtained.
True, the officers involved paid no price for their wrongful actions. The cities that employed them paid large sums of money in damages to their victims, but the investigators were never punished and one was even given an award for his part in perverting justice. But the simple absence of consequences for wrongdoing doesn’t explain wrongdoing, particularly by those sworn to uphold the law.
We know why the innocent sometimes confess to crime. We don’t know why the police sometimes initiate and doggedly pursue the fantasies that constitute false confessions. Until we answer that core question and address the cause of that behavior, we can expect it to continue and for the innocent to go to prison as Michael, Joshua and Aaron almost did.
Thanks to Donald McInnis for an unsettling but necessary look at the dark and sometimes obscure motivations that produce misbehavior by the police and false confessions to crime.
