Serial Killers, Serial Liars | The Psychology of False Confessions | 5

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It's September 1984, in El Paso, Texas.

A small group of police officers stand beside two unmarked cars.

They're chatting about their plans for the weekend, what they're each going to do before the summer ends.

It's light talk, but it feels a little forced.

Beneath their laughter, the mood is tense.

The reason for their tension arrives with one of the cop's colleagues.

Hands cuffed in front of him, his one good eye swiveling around to take in the bright sky, Henry Lee Lucas isn't an impressive figure, but his chilling reputation precedes him.

One of the cops, Detective Benny Perez, waves Henry forward, then takes him by the arm.

Henry's going to ride up front with Benny.

Two of the other cops are going to ride him back.

The remaining officers slide into the second car.

Recently, Henry confessed to using an ax to murder 72-year-old Labrada Apodaca in May 1983.

The admission hasn't shocked investigators.

By this stage, Henry's already admitted to killing over 150 people.

Today, Henry said he'll lead the investigators to Labrada's house to prove he's the killer.

So while Henry gives directions, Benny heads east on I-10 for a while.

It's quiet in the car, at least until they pass a pair of hitchhikers, a man and a woman.

That's what Henry perks up.

He points to the woman and tells the cops that she would have been one of his.

Luckily for her, he's not on the loose anymore.

Eventually, Henry's instructions bring them to the community of Isleta and to within a block of Labrada's house.

He holds up his cuffed hands and tells Benny to stop.

This is the place.

The men get out of the car and all eyes turn to Henry, who scratches his head while he gets his bearings.

After a few seconds, he makes up his mind and points the way to 144 Irma Road.

Detective Benny Perez doesn't say anything to his colleagues, but behind Henry's back, he exchanges looks with a few of the guys.

This is exactly where Labrada Apodaca lived.

This is where she was murdered.

But it's not all that Henry Lee Lucas seems to know.

Stopping on the driveway, Henry pulls up short.

This is the place, he says, but something's different.

He just can't work out what.

The cops know, though.

When Labrada was murdered, the house was ringed by a picket fence.

Now, there's a chain link one in its place.

Before they can get too close, Benny calls out to Henry to stop and hands him a notepad and a pencil.

He tells Henry to draw a map of the inside of the house.

Henry shrugs like it's no big deal, then scribbles a rough shape of the house.

Inside, he gets most of the rooms dead on, including some of the furniture.

It's eerie.

Some people have expressed doubt about Henry's multiple murder confessions, but from everything Benny can see, this seems legit.

He's brought them right here.

How could this possibly be a hoax?

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal.

In 1986, Henry Lee Lucas' confession to the murder of Labrada Abedaka was thrown out of court.

The reason?

The judge in the case ruled that Henry wasn't properly informed of his rights before the interview began, which made the confession inadmissible.

After that, the prosecutors had no choice but to move for a dismissal.

Because there was no other evidence in the case, Henry's confession was all they had.

But by that stage, it was a familiar story.

Although Henry had garnered national attention for confessing to hundreds of murders around the country, he'd eventually recanted, saying the whole thing was a lie, that he'd only said those things to make the police happy.

Some of the specific crimes he confessed to were blatantly not Henry's.

Murders that happened when he was hundreds of miles away, for instance.

And many of Henry's statements to police should have run alarms, signaled that he was lying through his teeth, like when he told a Japanese film crew that he'd killed in their country.

When asked how he got to Japan to commit the murder, Henry smirked and said he drove.

Still, some of the convictions against Henry stuck, including three of the murders he was tied to through physical evidence.

So, he remained behind bars until the end of his life, with some people still convinced that Henry Lee Lucas was the worst serial killer who'd ever lived.

And then there was Henry's lover and alleged partner in crime, Otis Tool.

Like Henry, he'd confessed to taking part in a murder spree across the United States, which plenty of people laid up.

But then, when he confessed to killing little Adam Walsh, the one murder he actually committed, he wasn't believed.

So, how did all of this happen?

How could so many people train to seek out and catch the liars and cheats be so easily hoodwinked?

Here to talk about the psychology of false confessions and their impact on the criminal justice system is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, Dr.

Allison Redlich.

Doctor, thank you so much for sitting down with me.

I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Absolutely, it's my pleasure.

Well, let's dive right in here.

So I think it's safe to say that this is a fairly niche area of study.

So what drew you to focus on the subject of false confessions?

Yeah, I mean, actually, so I'm in a subfield of psychology.

My degree is in developmental psychology, and the subfield is called psychology and the law.

And within psychology and the law, there's actually a lot of people, I would say, who study false confessions.

I think we find it as fascinating as you do and many of your viewers.

And the way that I got back into it some many, many years ago was in graduate school.

While I was getting my degree, I was studying how to effectively interview children who had been suspected of sexual abuse.

And so right around that time, a little bit after, there were a wave of these child sexual abuse hysteria cases, often taking place in daycares, in which scores of children were being interviewed in such a way that they were alleging sexual abuse that never happened to them.

And at some point, I just became very interested in, well, what happens when children or adolescents are interrogated and they're the suspect?

And are the problems that we're seeing with the questions of children as victims, are we also seeing those problems when youth are interrogated?

And long story short, we absolutely are.

Youth are at risk for false confessions, largely because of the way that they are questioned by police.

You talked about the public's fascination with people who falsely confess to crimes.

But how common are false confessions?

So the question that we can answer is about people who have been wrongly convicted and exonerated.

So there's a great repository.

It's called the National Registry of Exonerations.

It's been around for, gosh, I'm not sure, a decade and a half or something.

But they catalog known wrongful convictions.

So among known wrongful convictions, false confessions are much more common than I think people would expect.

So the Innocence Project, which many of your viewers may be familiar with, is probably the most famous project that exonerates people.

They rely on DNA to exonerate people.

So among DNA exonerations, nearly 30 percent of people who've been exonerated through DNA, are people who had given false confessions.

When we look at the larger subset of exonerations, which is over 3,500 right now in the National Registry, about 12 to 13 percent of those DNA, non-DNA exonerations are people who gave false confessions.

What's even more surprising is that when we look at exonerations for people who were wrongly convicted of murder, it's much larger percent of false confessions.

So in the Innocence Project data set, about 61 percent of those exonerated of murder had given a false confession.

And it also rises in the non-DNA cases as well.

Do you find there to be a racial disparity in terms of the balance in the number of wrongful convictions, coerced confessions, exonerations, imprisonment?

So that's an excellent question.

And there needs to be a lot more research on this topic, given what we know about all of the disparities, racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

What I can tell you is that certainly people of color are overrepresented in the National Registry of Exonerations.

However, my understanding is that they look somewhat similar to their rates of people in prison.

So, they're both overrepresented among prisoners and overrepresented among people who have been wrongly convicted and exonerated for those crimes.

Again, it's that subset of cases that we know about.

And then we don't know about all of the cases of many, many people, I'm sure, who have been wrongly convicted, but not yet or maybe never exonerated.

Among people who have given false confessions, again, there's just not enough research to say that race plays a role in this.

There is a little bit of research, but not nearly enough.

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Well, let's talk about the psychology behind it then.

Why would a person admit to committing a crime that they had nothing to do with?

So, when I, myself and others like me go into a court of law and serve as expert witnesses, where we're trying to explain to juries and judges why people would give a false confession and oftentimes give a confess to a heinous crime like murder that they didn't commit.

We talk about two different types of factors.

There's situational risk factors and dispositional risk factors.

I'll start with dispositional only because you asked about the psychology of it.

The dispositional factors are just factors that are about the person, him or herself.

So as I mentioned, juveniles are at a higher risk of giving a false confession than adults, people with intellectual disabilities, people with mental health problems, anything that really makes a person vulnerable to the interrogation techniques.

That's where I want to turn to next because a lot of what we study and what we know about these proven false confession cases, the ones that have resulted in exonerations, comes down to the police interrogation tactics.

I think that none of us are immune.

I always say that I don't think I'm immune, given the right circumstances to giving a false confession.

Even though I am an expert on false confessions, certainly as an aside, I would encourage all of your listeners to always invoke their Miranda rights and not talk to the police.

But even I've seen cases sometimes where suspects are trying to invoke their right but the police keep questioning them.

So even that is not a guarantee.

So the situational risk factors have to do typically with the interrogation techniques themselves or the interrogation itself.

I think it's important for your listeners to understand the interrogation process.

So if I may, let me try and briefly explain what it is in the United States at least.

In the US, we have what's called an accusatorial or a confrontational model of interrogation.

Usually, it's divided or primarily divided into two different phases.

There's the interview and the interrogation.

I know that sounds a lot like semantics, but there's a pretty big difference between the interview phase and the interrogation phase.

During the interview phase, police are trying to establish whether this person of interest is either telling the truth or lying.

It's called deception detection.

In the US, most law enforcement are using deception detection techniques that are not effective.

They're inaccurate.

It's like flipping a coin.

They think that they're able to discern when somebody's telling the truth, and when somebody's lying, but they're not very good at it.

The problem with that is based on this diagnosis that they're making of somebody's telling the truth or somebody's lying, they then make the decision to interrogate somebody.

Of course, it's when they think the person is lying and they think the person is guilty.

The interrogation phase is what we call guilt presumptive, where the police are now presuming that the person is guilty, that they are now employing interrogation tactics on.

There's a very famous, well-known method of interrogation in the US.

It's called the read technique.

There's nine steps to the read technique.

The first step is what's called direct positive confrontation.

After the police have misidentified an innocent person as guilty, they go into the interrogation with this direct positive confrontation saying, I know you're guilty and you just need to tell me about it.

The interrogation follows from there.

They use a lot of different, what are called minimization themes, and this is the problem.

Once an innocent person has been presumed guilty, they're then interrogated in that way.

And I think all of us have this idea of confirmation bias or tunnel vision and the police with their hypothesis or theory that this person is guilty, that's all they can see and they ignore and they discount and they reject any evidence that's contrary to their hypothesis that this person is guilty.

I know I said that very quickly, but that's how false confessions in a nutshell are produced.

So it seems to me like there's a pretty clear line of demarcation between a coerced confession and a false confession.

Again, to go back and touch on the psychology of it, for example, it seems to me that when it comes to false confession, someone is more likely to confess to an extreme crime.

Someone is going to confess to a murder that they didn't commit, rather than confessing to stealing a tube of lipstick.

If you're going to confess to something that you didn't do, why slow pitch it when you can swing for the fences with murder?

The problem is that the cases that we're most likely to know about are these serious cases.

If somebody gives a false confession to stealing a tube of lipstick or shoplifting, it's very likely we may never know about it, because the crime is so minor, it takes a lot of time and resources and money to exonerate somebody.

I always call people who have been exonerated as like innocent and sisters.

I feel like they have to go to the rooftop and shout their innocence.

And so when I say that 61% of DNA exonerations of murder cases are people who have given false confessions, but what we don't know again are all of these people who have been wrongly convicted, who were innocent, gave false confessions, and were never exonerated.

And there are reasons for people to increase that likelihood of being exonerated, because that murderer is sitting in prison, whereas the shoplifter is very unlikely to be sitting in jail.

Let me back up a step because you mentioned the word coerced, and there is what's called a taxonomy of false confessions, and there's three different types.

There are voluntary false confessions.

So there are cases in which we know about that the person on their own accord decides to falsely confess to crimes.

And typically, we see this in cases where the person is trying to gain infamy.

So somewhat similar, I think, to Henry Lee Lucas, to the crimes he may have falsely confessed to, although I think that was also induced through police interrogation.

Another main reason for a voluntary false confession is to protect the true perpetrator.

So we might see that with family members, where a father is trying to protect his son, or maybe with gang members, where one is trying to protect another gang member and take responsibility for the crime they didn't commit.

But the other two types of false confessions in the taxonomy are called coerced compliant and coerced internalized.

And so coerced compliant are confessions that were induced through the police interrogation process, but the suspect knowingly gives a false confession, usually just to get out of that interrogation room.

They realize that they've been in there for hours and the police are not gonna give up, and that they just finally have to give in to extract themselves from that situation.

In contrast, coerced internalized are also coerced through the police interrogation process, but the person, the suspect comes to temporarily believe that they committed the crime, and they don't realize they're innocent.

So the police are able to convince them that it must have been you.

There's no other explanation.

And oftentimes, one of the techniques that are used and that are common among false confession cases that we know about is a legal and permissible interrogation tactic of using trickery and deception or, in other words, lying to suspects.

So police are allowed to lie to suspects.

They're allowed to claim that they have evidence against you that doesn't exist.

And what this does is causes a lot of confusion and can lead to these internalized false confessions where the person comes to temporarily believe that they committed the crime when they didn't.

So one good example is the case of Marty Tankliff, who was wrongly convicted for about 18 years before being exonerated.

And he was convicted of murdering his parents.

And during the interrogation, he was told that his father woke up from the coma and said that it was him.

And eventually Marty, who was 17 years old at the time, falsely confessed.

And that was never true.

His father never woke up.

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It's interesting because you said that some people just want to get out of the interrogation room, where it seems like Henry Lee Lucas, the interrogation room was like having a day pass.

Every time he confessed to something, they gave him a cheeseburger.

They drove him all over the place.

Now, we have DNA evidence that we can put in place, and it's a lot easier to weed out the guilty from the non-guilty.

So do you feel that there has been a shift in law enforcement from, say, 30 years ago to now because of the technology that exists to prove someone's innocence, that it's more difficult to falsely accuse somebody of something?

So DNA is only available in about 10% of crimes, unfortunately.

So it is a very good way to sort between people who are guilty and innocent, for the most part.

But even there are problems still within DNA analysis, and it's not always as clean and perfect as we'd want it to be.

So that is an excellent question.

I think a part of the problem with the United States Criminal Justice System and police agencies in particular is that there's over 18,000 police agencies, and there's not a lot of oversight, and they just pretty much follow their own models.

And so trying to implement national reform, certainly, is very difficult.

There have been some statewide reforms.

There's no kind of commonality, if you will, between the police interrogation.

So I think that for the most part, most police agencies in the United States are using the accusatorial model, this very controversial model.

They're not very up on all of the research.

They may have never experienced a wrongful conviction due to a false confession.

I think they're about 94% of police agencies are considered small.

So we often talk about large police agencies like the LAPD or the NYPD, but most are like less than 100 police officers.

Ninety-four percent.

So I'm not sure how much progress we have made in the past 30 years, when I consider those kinds of factors.

On the other hand, we are starting to see reform.

Based on all of these wrongful convictions, false confessions that we know about, and the Innocence Project has been an absolute leader in pushing these policies and reforms.

So now, for example, about at least nine states, with some others considering it, have banned the use of trickery and deception, lying to suspects with minors.

There's about 27 states that now mandate the recording of certain interrogations.

It's usually not all interrogations.

It might be interrogations of murders, or interrogations that involve youth, or something along those lines.

But we are starting to see some reforms.

What we haven't really seen wholesale is what many other westernized countries have done like many countries in Europe and New Zealand and Australia, is that they've changed their entire model of interrogation.

So, they no longer use that accusatorial model.

They do something called the information gathering model.

And I'll try to just be brief about it, but instead of making confession the goal of the questioning, they're making information gathering the goal.

And they're not relying on those cues to deception that have been shown through decades of science, to not be diagnostic indicators of whether somebody's telling the truth or lying.

Yeah, it's beginning to sound a little like Guilty Until Proven Innocent, which I'm pretty sure is backwards.

Yes.

I have to give a shout out to my friends, Eric Jensen and Jessica Blank, who wrote the play The Exonerated.

They worked with the Innocents Project on that, and I know that they are very proud of that work.

And I know it did a tremendous amount of good.

It shed a lot of light on the subject.

And it sounds to me that you are doing the exact same thing.

So in light of that, I'm going to ask you one last question.

So in the strange event that somebody listening here ends up on a jury and the defendant has confessed, but they didn't plead guilty after being offered a plea deal by the prosecutor, what advice would you give that juror?

Okay.

Well, I think jurors, my advice to all the potential jurors out there is absolutely pay attention to all of the evidence.

I mean, that's your role as a juror, and that's the way you're going to come to a fair and judicious verdict.

But I would see this as a red flag.

I should also note, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm not sure that the jury would even know about if the defendant rejected a plea offer.

This might be something that the judge may or may not allow the jury to hear.

But if they do hear about it and the defendant rejects the plea offer, I would hope that the jurors are questioning, why is the defendant recanting their confession?

Why did the defendant reject the plea offer, particularly if it was a bargain?

Because one of the clear things that comes out from research is that it's very difficult for jurors and even judges to ignore confession evidence.

So it is extremely weighty in the courtroom, and it very often leads to convictions either at the trial by from jurors or judges or through plea bargains, through guilty pleas.

Right.

Well, you can't unring a bell.

Yes.

Once it's out, it's out.

Dr.

Redlich, thank you so much for sitting down with us today on American Criminal.

This was a very cool conversation and I am a fan.

So thank you for being here.

I am a fan as well.

Thank you so much for having me.

And I hope it was educational for your audience.

That was my conversation with Dr.

Allison Redlich from George Mason University.

If you'd like to find out more about Dr.

Redlich, you can Google her work with the Models Library.

That's M-O-D-I-L-S.

From Airship, this is the final episode in our series on Henry Lee Lucas and Audis Tool.

On the next series, the disappearance of a wealthy Manhattan socialite leads investigators to Sante Cimes, a woman whose previous crimes have included fraud, human trafficking, slavery and murder.

And that's just the beginning.

We use many different sources while preparing this episode.

A few we can recommend are Bringing Adam Home by Les Standiford and Joe Matthews, The Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas by Mike Cox, and the documentary series The Confession Killer.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details, and while in some cases, we can't know exactly what happened, all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing by Mohamed Shazi.

Sound design by Matthew Filler.

Music by Thrum.

This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan, managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham for Airship.