Murdered Innocents (31 page)

 

Michael Scott’s defense team was prepared not to let their client be the second suspect in the yogurt shop murders to collapse. Again, as with the Springsteen defense team, Scott’s lawyers tried to disprove the theory that the fire started on top of the girls. Several firefighters who were at the scene were brought in to testify.

Carlos Garcia also attempted to show that the door in the back of the yogurt shop was a key-lock door and not a swing-latch door as Scott had confessed to. Garcia argued how that would mean the killer had taken the key prior to the crime. Judge Lynch, however, did not believe Garcia ever proved this argument.

 

 

Another huge confrontation loomed on the horizon for Carlos Garcia. He was ready to take on Detective John Hardesty, the key interrogator of Michael Scott. Garcia informed the detective that they would read through the interview of Scott.

“The transcript you’ve got in front of you has page numbers and line numbers and a lot of times we’ll just refer to each as we go along. Okay?”

Hardesty would be difficult. “Well, I’d prefer we use the state’s.”

“We’re going to use mine.”

“I don’t trust yours, Mr. Garcia.”

“That’s your opinion, sir. We’re going to use mine.”

“Well, the answers I give you I can’t say are going to be one hundred percent correct.”

Garcia took offense to the detective’s attitude and asked Judge Lynch if he could be deemed an adverse witness. It was a rocky start.

“Would you try to change his memory,” asked Garcia about Scott, “if he tells you one thing that’s not quite accurate?”

“I guess in a general sense we might.”

“So, you would try to change peoples’ minds as to what they remember?”

“No. If Mr. Scott says he remembers something that we feel or I feel is—just totally contradicts what we know or is completely the opposite from the facts that we know, I’m not saying I would try to change his mind. But I would tell him he’s on the wrong track and I think he knows more than what he’s saying.”

Later in the cross-examination, Garcia asked Hardesty, “Did you ever consider the fact that perhaps just he either doesn’t have a good memory or he doesn’t really remember?”

“Never,” replied the officer. “He’s extremely intelligent. He has an extremely good memory.”

“But you never considered whether or not the fact that when he tells you earlier on, ‘Look, I don’t have a good memory,’ that that could be the truth? You didn’t consider that?”

“No. I don’t believe that. Didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.”

 

 

Scott’s lawyers brought in their own expert witness on false confessions. Dr. Richard Leo, an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, and a student of Dr. Richard Ofshe, the expert witness who testified in Robert Springsteen’s trial, broke down the parameters of false confessions for the court, outside of the presence of the jury.

“I think to understand the interrogation confession,” began Dr. Leo, “one has to understand the process, how the techniques are designed, what they are meant to communicate and how they affect the decision-making and perceptions of both the guilty and the innocent.”

Dexter Gilford asked Dr. Leo, “What is the basic underlying psychological principle of modern interrogation tactics?”

“Modern interrogation is premised on the notion that the person is guilty, that they will deny their guilt, and that you need to use psychological techniques to break down their denials and change their perceptions so that they come to see it as in their self-interest to make an admission.”

“Are the interrogation tactics effective in eliciting confessions?”

“Yes. They are meant to affect a guilty suspect a particular way. They are not intended to be used on the innocent, but sometimes, inadvertently, they are.”

“Can you go through the main techniques that are used to achieve this purpose?”

“Typically in an interrogation there is some type of isolation of the suspect. There is an attempt to remove the suspect from an environment that would support resistance. There’s an attempt to build rapport to get the suspect to trust, maybe even like, the interrogator.

“And then at some point, there is the accusation, which serves as a kind of an ambush . . . where the interrogator will accuse the suspect. The suspect will deny. The interrogator, anticipating the denials, will attack the denials in multiple ways.

“The interrogator is trained to escalate pressure, to repeat the attacks, to generate a sense of hopelessness or powerlessness in the individual.”

Leo spoke of a different method. “A separate set of tactics are meant to motivate the suspect to think that it’s in his or her best self-interest to confess. A theme is inventing a scenario in which somebody could have committed the crime, but trying to minimize the seriousness of the crime.”

“Basically, what you have described is two general parts of these interrogations,” stated Gilford. “The first part is meant to break down the person’s confidence and their ability to deny, correct?”

“Correct. And convince them that they are caught and there is no way out of this.”

“And the second part [is] to build them back up as to, given that situation, here is the best course of action?”

“Correct. Given that your situation is hopeless—there is no way out, you are caught, no one is going to believe your denial—here are the reasons why you’re better off by making an admission.”

“And these techniques are effective in eliciting true confessions from guilty suspects, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Are there times where a typical interrogation characterized by those techniques we’ve just talked about can result in an innocent person giving a false confession?”

“Yes. It typically takes a fair amount of pressure to get a false confession.”

“Is it your opinion that it’s the intended effect of these techniques and the interrogator to elicit a false confession from an innocent person?”

“No, absolutely not. There’s numerous indisputable proven false confessions out there, but typically they result through an erroneous belief in the suspect’s guilt and through a misuse or overuse of interrogation tactics. But it’s not intended. The police intend to get the guilty, not the innocent.”

“Is there a common myth that you are aware of concerning the notion of false confessions?”

“Yes. The common myth is that most people will not confess—well, people won’t confess falsely unless they are tortured or they are mentally ill.”

“Now, you have studied interrogations and confessions, and particularly you have focused on the phenomenon of false confessions, correct?”

Leo acknowledged that he had. He also mentioned three types of false confessions: voluntary, compliant, and persuaded, or internalized.

“The first category,” Leo began to explain, “is known as voluntary false confessions. This is the typical example where somebody calls the police department after a high-profile crime and says, ‘I did it.’

“The second category is called compliant false confession. This is where after an interrogation, the suspect is worn down and perhaps they are promised some kind of reward or suggested that they will be threatened with something harsh if they don’t confess, and they knowingly confess falsely to escape the pressures of the environment, to terminate the interrogation, or to receive whatever benefit or promise that’s been suggested.

“The third type is called the persuaded false confession. It’s the most counterintuitive and most rare. Through the course of the interrogation, the suspect comes to doubt their memory. They come to believe, or are persuaded, that they have committed the crime, despite having no memory.”

“We talked earlier about the techniques of interrogation,” stated Gilford. “How would those tactics have some role in eliciting a false confession from an innocent person?”

“Well, an innocent person being accused is obviously going to deny,” Leo replied, starting his explanation. “The police will not believe the denials. So when the innocent person is interrogated, typically the police will make up evidence of their guilt.

“An innocent person, who is naive or has no experience with the police, or is trusting of authority, may have no idea that police can lie and make up evidence.

“The suspect may come to doubt themselves. They may come to perceive that their denials are pointless; that they are not going to be accepted, that there is no way out of the situation. The suspect may start to think, ‘Well, I am being railroaded, or maybe I did it and I just don’t remember it.’”

“How does one go about developing a narrative description of the crime scene?” wondered Gilford.

“The suspect desperately tries to remember, even though they have no memory of doing this. And so they sometimes look to the interrogator and try to infer what are the correct answers. They sometimes incorporate knowledge that is publicly known. And sometimes they guess. They speculate. They try to reason from inference. It’s a desperate process to search for or excavate or find memories that don’t exist. The pressures of the interrogation environment and the interrogator are what caused the person to create a narrative.

“It’s only the sustained pressures of the interrogator and the interrogation environment that caused this phenomenon in the first place.”

“Can you tell the court briefly, what are your criteria for qualifying a confession as false in the studies specifically related to false confessions?” asked Gilford.

“There are only four ways you can absolutely prove a confession is false. One is if you can show that it was physically impossible for the person to have committed a crime. Say, they were in another state at the time.

“A second is if you can show that the crime never occurred; murder victim shows up live after a person falsely confesses.

“A third is that scientific evidence exonerates the person. DNA—you hear a lot of cases about DNA.

“And then a fourth is where the true perpetrator comes forward, as in the Christopher Ochoa case, here in Austin, Texas.”

The jury, however, would never hear Leo’s testimony. Judge Lynch limited the parameters of what the doctor could discuss. The result was Leo would be limited to discussing that guilty people confess and why they confess. The doctor would not be allowed to talk about the fact that innocent people confess and why they do it. The judge cited Leo’s lack of empirical scientific evidence that proved that the methods of interrogation used would lead to a persuaded false confession. As a result, the defense chose not to include Leo as a witness because he would have, in effect, become a witness for the prosecution.

 

In addition to Dr. Richard Leo, the defense for Michael Scott had another key witness, an expert on crime scene reconstruction, Ross Gardner. Gardner was a twenty-nine-year law enforcement officer and a twenty-year military veteran. He also coauthored
Bloodstain Pattern Analysis: With an Introduction to Crime Scene Reconstruction,
with Tom Bevel.

Gardner explained the purpose of crime scene reconstruction. And he was allowed to do so before the jury.

“Crime scene reconstruction is really simple logic, deduction, scientific method. That’s all it is. In a criminal investigation, we have a variety of information that comes to us. Much of it is testimonial evidence, but the more significant evidence is the physical evidence, because the physical evidence never lies. It is what it is.

“Crime scene analysis is designed to look at the information in the crime scene, specifically every item of evidence, its relationship to other items of evidence, and from that define specific events that occurred.”

Gardner gave an analogy to explain what he does. “Imagine it this way. Somebody walk(s) up to you with a jigsaw puzzle, five hundred pieces, reaching in the box and grabbing a couple of handfuls, throwing them down in front of your face, and then walking off with the box. They then turn to you and say, ‘Okay, tell me what happened based on the pieces you have.’

“So what we do is take those pieces of physical evidence, we put them in as much order as is possible. When we’re done, what we have is a skeleton, a lattice, and those pieces fit in certain orders, and then that tells us these things occurred within that scene.”

In regard to the yogurt shop murders, Gardner was given the autopsy reports of all four girls, the original incident report, all scientific reports, and the fire reports from Melvin Stahl and Marshall Littleton. Gardner did not receive a copy of Michael Scott’s confession.

Based on his research of the materials, Gardner came up with several conclusions that differed from the scenario divulged by the prosecution. He believed the girls died in the positions where they were discovered. He believed Eliza Thomas was raped. He also believed Sarah Harbison was anally raped. He believed the girls were lying on the floor, facedown, when they were executed.

Gardner believed Amy Ayers was next to Jennifer Harbison when the older girl was killed. He believed Amy was dragged across the floor approximately seven to nine feet with the ligature around her neck. She was repositioned on her knees and shot with the .22. She fell to the ground on her left side. She either rolled or was pulled even farther away. She was shot a second time, this time with the .380. Someone grabbed her arm and dragged her several feet away to the middle of the back room.

Gardner further testified that the evidence showed him the fire did not start on top of the girls’ dead bodies. He concurred with Stahl’s initial fire analysis.

“This arson investigator certainly did know his job.”

Gardner stated there was no evidentiary support for the claim the fire started on top of the girls.

The defense rested its case later that afternoon.