Forensic Psychology For Dummies (50 page)

I’ve been involved in several cases of threatening letters and now know the signs to look for in establishing whether the threat is genuine or false. Clearly, making these signs available to the general public is inappropriate, but I can say that the signs draw upon a careful analysis of the credibility of the threat and the benefits and costs to the writer of carrying out the threat. Meticulous study of the form of words in which a threat is expressed can be of great value in understanding the sort of person the writer is, his background and knowledge. For instance, consider what the writer’s really trying to achieve. Is it really money he’s after or to cause havoc? What sort of person the writer’s likely to be can also be gleaned from the way he writes. The crucial question, though, is the probability of the person actually carrying out the threat (check out the later section ‘Examining Documents to Help Solve Crimes’ for more information).

Interviewing Suspects to Sort Truth from Lies

Witnesses are generally in the habit of trying to tell the truth as they understand it when being interviewed. However, you can’t make that assumption when interviewing suspects. Interviewing procedures are established in some places that make it easier to find out if the suspect is telling the truth. However, you need to keep in mind that such interviewing procedures can be fraught with problems.

Dealing with false confessions

A suspect confessing to a crime he didn’t commit is a serious problem for police investigators. You have to get at the truth to avoid the person being wrongly imprisoned (often the person is vulnerable and needing help such as psychiatric treatment rather than custody) and, of course, wrongful imprisonment means letting the guilty person go free.

In 1980, when Sean Hodgson was 30 years old he told a prison chaplain that he’d murdered a barmaid. He withdrew the confession at his trial a year later, saying he was a ‘pathological liar’ who’d falsely confessed to countless crimes. But Hodgson spent nearly 30 years in prison until DNA evidence cleared him.

You may think that a person who’s being tortured or coerced is more than likely to confess to a crime of which he’s innocent. But many examples exist of people confessing without any such pressures. Police investigators have to be on the alert all the time for such possibilities in even fairly common crimes such as burglary. False confessions can happen because the person is:

Craving attention,
believing that he can gain notoriety or glory from admitting to a crime.

Feeling confused about what he did
and/or where he was at the time of the crime, especially if he’s a habitual criminal and was under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Suffering from a serious mental condition
and may not be aware of the real situation as against something he imagined or interpreted wrongly.

Accepting what he’s being told.
Ghisli Gudjonsson, a forensic psychologist who has made a special study of how some people will accept what they’ve been told, calls this tendency
suggestibility.
He has developed a special way of measuring how prone someone is to suggestibility. It consists of asking people questions, then giving them suggestions in relation to their answers and seeing if they accept them. This procedure has been used in court cases to support the innocence of people who initially confess.

Wanting to get out of an awkward situation,
like having been put in a cell and just wanting to get home, possibly not realising the serious consequences of confessing.

In many parts of the world today, and in the past in most places, the main cause of false confessions was physical or mental intimidation or torture. The whole basis of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages was to torture people until they confessed their sins. This is less so now in the UK since the introduction of the PEACE interview process (described in Chaper 4) and the tape-recording of interviews of suspects.

Curiously, in high-profile murder cases or other crimes hitting the headlines, you find people confessing to the crime who couldn’t possibly have done it. For example, in 1932 when the son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped, nearly 200 people confessed to the crime. More recently in 1986 more than 100 people confessed to the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme.

Police investigators are aware of this phenomena, which is why crucial facts about a case are kept secret so that anyone confessing to the crime is required to show his knowledge of these decisive facts.

Encountering the IEE approach in the US

Paul Ekman and his colleagues in the US have drawn up a set of pointers called ‘Improving Interpersonal Evaluations for Law Enforcement and Evaluations’ – better known as the IEE approach – for helping the police interviewer decide the truthfulness of what’s being said. A simple ABC list summarises what’s involved in IEE:

A
wareness: Knowledge of ways in which information can be inaccurate.

B
aselines: Study of the normal mode of behaviour of the respondent.