The behavior of guilty people
In Sebastian Junger’s new book A Death in Belmont, he discusses the 1963 murder of Bessie Goldberg a few streets over from where he lived as a child in Belmont, Mass., a suburb of Boston. Working for Junger’s mother, building an art room addition to his house, was a handyman named Albert DeSalvo. He had been working at their house the day of the Goldberg murder and never admitted to the murder of Bessie when he later confessed to being the Boston Strangler. Roy Smith, a black man who had been hired to clean Mrs. Goldberg’s house that day, was the prime suspect. He was arrested, tried, and convicted of her rape and murder. Junger believes that Smith was falsely convicted and links DeSalvo to the crime.
It is a good read and I highly recommend it.
Also of note is a section near the end of the book where he discusses the interrogation of Smith, which was analyzed in 2004 by a Boston homicide prosecutor named David Meier. This evaluation of Smith’s behavior during the police questioning is very much connected to our study of the Lizzie Borden case. This one part literally jumped off the page at me, and I wanted to share it with you here.
Evaluating Smith’s interrogation is more complicated because there is no way to prove by someone’s behavior that he or she is lying. But you can come close. Interrogations are extremely stressful events, even for the innocent, and almost no one can completely control his or her responses when being questioned about a murder. A classic law enforcement manual called Criminal Interrogation and Confessions describes in detail some typical behaviors of an innocent and a guilty person. The guilty take, on average, three times longer to answer a direct question than the innocent. The guilty tend to touch their hair or their face or pick lint off their clothing when they talk. The guilty tend to repeat a question before they get around to answering it. The guilty tend to offer specific denials that are technically true —“I did not take the $1,200 from the cash register yesterday!” —rather than general denials that are false. The guilty tend to apologize for the misunderstanding. The guilty tend to look for some sign of partial understanding. The guilty tend to use non-specific language about their actions that leaves wiggle room for later questions. The guilty tend ot veer from angry to sullen to ingratiating and then back to angry again. The guilty tend to slouch in their chair, cross their arms, look away, and not move for long periods of time. The guilty, in other words, act guilty. Controlled studies have showed that trained investigators who watch silent videotapes of interrogations can correctly tell if a subject is lying 72 percent of the time. When the sound is turned on, their accuracy rises to 86 percent.
Innocent subjects are an entirely different matter. The innocent tend to get angry and stay angry. They tend to insist on continuing the interrogation until they are cleared as a suspect. They tend to sit straight up, look the questioner in the eye, and answer questions quickly if not eagerly. They tend to describe their actions in excruciating detail. They tend to continue voicing their denials even after they have been told to be quiet. The innocent, in short, see the interrogation not as an ordeal to be survived, but as an opportunity to clear their name. First and foremost the innocent tend to answer questions without having a lawyer by their side.
So let’s go back and analyze the only testimony we have, the only transcription of an interrogation we have, of Lizzie Borden. Read her Inquest Testimony here on my site and see what you think based on the above information of how the guilty and the innocent behave under questioning.
