Whether or not he participated in a murder, this statement seems altogether credible. Mike Scott—it’s fair to say—didn’t know what day it was most of the time.
The detectives have undoubtedly been in the monitor room, watching him, taking in his body language and gauging his temperament. After about ten minutes, Lara returns with Hardesty, who shakes Mike’s hand and sits at the computer. When Mike asks him about the age and make of the laptop, Hardesty says it’s new. While they chat about lithium ion batteries, Lara waits, tilts his chair back and, once more assuming the position, joins his hands in a basket on top of his head, elbows splayed out.
It is 9:15 a.m. on Thursday, September 9. Mike Scott will not speak to his wife for ten hours, when the detectives finally come up with a mobile phone they previously claimed couldn’t be found anywhere in the unit. By then he will have become convinced that he more than likely had some involvement in the ICBY murders, if only as a witness, despite the fact that he still has no memory of anything happening that night.
“Dear,” he’ll say to Jeannine at 7:04 p.m., “I know more about this case than I thought I knew.” When she presses him for details, he’ll change the subject, and when she complains about a migraine, he’ll tell her where the Vicodin is and then mention the big can of “raviolis” in the cupboard that she and the little girl could have for dinner. After that he’ll hang up and turn back to the detectives.
You have to wonder how in a day’s time this man came to believe he knew more about an incident than he thought he did. Was he led to believe this supposition, or did he suddenly remember something? Who persuaded whom and of what?
—
In the 1930s, after the Wickersham Commission, appointed by President Herbert Hoover, reported that police in more than half the states in the nation habitually used “physical brutality or other forms of cruelty” to extort confessions from people under suspicion or arrest, physical torture—“the third degree” of brass knuckles, rubber hoses, telephone books to the kidneys—was gradually outlawed throughout the country. Anxious police departments searched for other methods of inducement. In the mid-1940s, former Chicago cop and polygrapher John E. Reid came up with an alternative. Having had enough experience with the earlier methods to know that a physically tormented person could hold out only so long before confessing to whatever he’d been accused of, Reid developed a highly structured psychological approach to persuasion and confession. His five-hundred-page Criminal Interrogation and Confessions was published in 1962 and is still in print. He died in 1982, but the Reid Technique is registered and copyrighted, and his company offers weeklong seminars all over the nation, mostly for cops and prosecutors.
To identify a criminal and establish his potential participation in a crime, the technique broadly divides the investigative process into two stages: the interview and the interrogation. Nonaccusatory, friendly and conversational, an interview can take place anywhere—in a home, the backseat of a squad car, a restaurant—and its stated purpose is to search for the truth—what really happened?—and, most important, to determine whether or not there is reason to believe someone’s guilty. To comfort the interviewee and make him feel important and smart, investigators are encouraged to take notes.
The process should move on to the next stage only if the investigator—through close observation of behavior, a pattern of inconsistencies in testimony and physical or circumstantial evidence—has become “reasonably certain of the suspect’s guilt.” At which point, interview becomes interrogation. Those of us who watch cop shows on TV are familiar with this switch and can readily pinpoint the exact moment when it occurs—for instance, when Kyra Sedgwick (as Brenda Leigh Johnson in The Closer) changes from sweet southern nice girl to a lying, devilish, two-faced cop.
Interrogations are accusatory and should be conducted in a controlled environment, free from distraction. No more note-taking. By then you want your suspect to feel trapped and edgy. Recording his comments might alert him to the incriminating consequences of his words and thus inhibit further admissions.
“Be sure you have the right person,” the reader is warned in the preface to Reid’s book. Because you will get a confession.
—
If Mike Scott can be called a weak link, it’s not because he’s willing to rat out his friends, but simply because his capacity for submission—his compliance and uncertainty and, most of all, his eagerness to be liked and believed—sabotage his own best interests and perhaps even his ability to separate truth from suggestion. He doesn’t say that if he knew what happened he’d tell them, but that “if I knew what I needed to tell you…” These small slipups and the gradual accretion of doubt in the suspect’s own mind enable an interrogating officer to bore in more deeply, to fill an untethered mind with dreamlike possibilities until doubt becomes certainty and a person can start to believe he committed the crime they’re asking him about and that he’d better confess to it.
When police use the Reid Technique, they’re usually seeking confirmation, not truth. Having decided in advance he’s their man, they need to persuade him to agree with their version of what happened. The question of Why? doesn’t even come into it. That’s for the punishment stage of a trial, which will determine whether a convicted party acted with intent, is a continuing threat to society, feels remorse and so on. After creating a possible narrative, cops don’t mess with motivation; they just need to find somebody who either committed the crime or fits the bill.
“Confession,” John Jones insists, “is a beginning. We had fifty.” When he was the ICBY case agent, he searched for solid physical evidence, hoping to build toward a confession. Paul Johnson’s task force, on the other hand, relied on what Jones calls “the pyramid theory of investigation”: get the confession, secure it at the top and then build a case to support it. And if the evidence doesn’t agree, figure out how to make it match up.
This might well be true, but in terms of support and approval from the APD, the Travis County DA’s office, the mayor, the families of the murdered girls and most Austin citizens, there’s a big problem: Johnson got arrests and Jones didn’t.
The way Jones sees it, Johnson then took advantage of his success and turned the families against him. That was the worst part. “I could’ve handled everything else,” he says now.
—
Once again, Hardesty asks basic questions about Scott’s personal life and painstakingly records his answers. In response, Mike is expansive. He and Jeannine have been back in Austin for less than a month, since UniSys offered her a ten-thousand-dollar raise to move from their San Antonio office to the one here. Not a bad deal, and this is a cool city. It’s where they met, at a party around 1990. Although she wasn’t born or raised here, Jeannine considers Austin home. Mike’s father still lives here, and the extra money will help fund Mike’s pursuit of a GED, and when that enables him to find a better-paying job, he can repay Jeannine. They don’t particularly like living in somebody’s trailer but figure they can manage until they find their own place.
After Hardesty completes his debriefing, Lara leans forward and identifies the case they’re investigating, as per Reid protocol: Let the suspect know what he’s there for. And even though the detectives don’t necessarily consider Scott a suspect, they want him to know how much they appreciate his cooperation.
“No problem,” Mike says.
What they’re going to be doing, Lara says, is taking Mike back nearly eight years, to 1991. A long time ago, he acknowledges, but “it’s an incident that sticks in people’s minds,” which makes it easier to remember.
Mike pulls back a little. “I’ll be honest with you guys,” he says. “I have a piss-poor memory.”
That’s what they’re there for, Lara counters, to help him remember.
—
Neuroscience claims that memory might be a matter of chemistry and that someday we’ll be able to pluck a particular recollection from the mind like a grapefruit seed. What’s clear in the case of
Mike Scott is that if he has a piss-poor memory (or even thinks he does), his interrogators can make use of this. They can suggest and assert and imply things he doesn’t remember but cannot firmly contradict or deny. After a while, he may come to think he remembers things they have persuaded him to accept as true. Okay, he’ll say. I guess you’re right. I don’t remember, but maybe you know. And then, once he’s settled into being a compliant confessor, he might even begin to internalize his accusers’ version of what happened.
What we know can be evasive and become, over time, what we think we know or thought we did, which, in turn, might be contradicted by data that documents what really did happen. What we know. How memory connects to facts and the truth, or fails to. How memory actually works. Lara explains to Mike that they’re planning to “plug away” at him to get a better feel for where he was that afternoon and evening, who he was with and what happened on the following days. They want to narrow down some time periods, hoping that something they ask or he says might act as a trigger to something else he thought he didn’t remember.
Mike says he’s okay with that.
This is classic interrogation technique: start slow, ask broad questions, make vague, nonthreatening inquiries, adopt a convincingly honest demeanor. Insist you’re there to help. Mike nods, answering with “Yeah” or “Okay.” In a quick reversal, once Lara has provided the setup, Hardesty switches back to basic questions, some of which Mike can’t answer—for instance, his address, zip code and phone number. But he’s lived in Buda for only a month and they’re house-sitting, so why should he know the zip code? In addition to which, Jeannine says his memory’s like Swiss cheese. What the detectives realize immediately is that they’ve made the right choice; he is definitely the weak link if he doesn’t even know his own phone number.
From a file box, Lara removes photocopied portraits of the dead girls and places them faceup on the table. These, he says, are the people they’ll be talking about. Does Mike remember those girls? He straightens the photographs one by one, watching for a reaction with, as instructed, his powers of “behavioral observation.” Of course Mike remembers. He didn’t know the girls personally but knew them “by face” from newspapers and TV—and, boy, they “flogged the crap out of that one, didn’t they?”
Bad start. Sometimes a person who’s overly trusting or not clever enough to dope out what’s really going on will assume a casual, knowing attitude. In the interest of appearing knowledgeable, he might make comments—a wisecrack—he’ll come to regret. Sometimes, perhaps even often, it’s hard to tell whether or not Mike recognizes a mistake when he’s made one. I’m with you is what he means to imply. We’re the kind of guys who can make sharp comments about dark and terrible events. We can laugh at what others call tragedy. We have the wit to do that. Flog the crap…Joke’s on the media clowns, right?
The detectives ignore this and once again take Mike back to December 6. Where did he live then and with whom? How long had he known Rob Springsteen? “About three years,” Mike says. Three years? Yes, he says, even though when Mike moved in with Springsteen and his father, Rob had been in Austin a total of three months.
They take it minute by minute. Who was with him that day? Did they smoke dope, take acid or drink beer? How did they get to McCallum and whom did they see there? When did they meet up with Maurice Pierce, and did Mike say Maurice had purchased a gun only the day before the murders? If so, what kind? Mike is almost positive it was a blue-black .38, because they’d all gone out to the woods around the lake to shoot it. Yes, he was pretty positive it was a .38 with a black handle, and maybe Forrest was with them and maybe not—he didn’t know Forrest that well—he wasn’t even sure if Forrest was his first name or last. And there was another guy—he can’t remember his name—kind of preppy, short blond hair, with a stud earring in one ear, drove a red truck, didn’t drink or smoke, a kind of my-body-is-a-temple guy. Bowling alley, beer, maybe smoked a bowl, went to Northcross, maybe Maurice drove them, maybe they took the bus….
Which bus, what route?
He reminds them of the piss-poor memory.
No, he is told, he has a good memory; he’s remembering very specific things.
Okay. He’s pretty sure Maurice drove them.
In what kind of car? A light blue Ford LTD, a former police cruiser belonging to his dad. Maurice cared about that car more than girls or friends or anything. Mike’s pretty sure now that, yes, Maurice drove Rob and him to get more beer, then to the mall; by then they were buzzing pretty good. Then Maurice left to go run errands for his sister or baby-sit her kids; Forrest went back to school. And he and Rob sat in the food court or where the video games were and they did the usual. Hang out. Let the buzz settle. Walk around looking at T and A. T and A? Tits and Ass. Hooters? Right.
He’d broken off with Rob a couple weeks after the murders, when he stole four free Metallica tickets Mike had gotten from his father, who worked at the Erwin Center. What a prick to do that to his closest friend, right? And the cops agree with him, because their sympathy adds to the narrative context they are creating, of a nice guy like Mike being railroaded by punks like Rob, Maurice and perhaps Forrest.
To avoid charges of misconduct and coercion and yet still manage to redirect the suspect’s ordinary decision-making processes, police must set up a situation in which the subject believes he’s answering a question in the same spirit in which it was asked, which is to say truthfully, honestly, with no underlying implications or intentions. In 1969, the Supreme Court ruled that while investigators shouldn’t threaten possible consequences—grand jury investigation, prison time, execution—or make promises of leniency, they can use tactics of “reasonable deception” and duplicity to solve crimes. Another reason neither to believe what cops say nor to answer their questions.
To keep the suspect off balance, the questioning zigzags. At one point, Lara focuses on the day Maurice bought the .38 from the Mexican boys, when Mike thought maybe he was looking for grass. (Scott begins using TV-cop lingo—“firearm,” “vehicle,” “accelerant”—while the cops adopt street talk, like “the get-fucked list,” “bullshit,” “fuckin’ penitentiary.”) Knowing it’s the wrong-caliber gun, Lara jumps from the .38 to the Pathfinder and the newspaper somebody bought and the question of who read it aloud to the others, then back to Northcross and ahead to the questioning on December 15, after Maurice got picked up with the .22, then back to the sixth, then again to Helotes, the girlfriend….
Mike rubs his face and yawns before staggering through another rambling account of the hours he and Rob spent at Northcross: food court, basket of fries, fat Mexican drinking the ketchup, more beer in the parking lot, saw a red Jeep, dropped off at home by Maurice at ten-thirty, cable movie, asleep by maybe 1:00 a.m. Early night. He remembers things, then doesn’t, then apologizes. The detectives assure him it’s all there, that it’ll come back. If he just keeps thinking real hard—the same instruction Hardesty had doled out to Kelly Hanna.
After an hour and a half, they take a break. Does Mike want a Coke? He prefers Dr Pepper. When the two cops return with the soft drink, Lara begins amiably enough. But when he asks what Mike told Paul Johnson in 1998 about hanging out in the Northcross parking lot at the time of the murders, his voice takes on a slightly sharper edge. It seems that during the break, the detectives decided that the so-called weak link might know more than they’d imagined and so it was time to start grinding.
Moving away from the laptop, Hardesty pushes his chair closer to Mike.
“Do you understand, you have to help us out?” Then, in order to establish “voluntariness” and emphasize that Mike’s will wasn’t “overborne,” he pulls back. Mike should understand he’s not under arrest, not even in trouble; they just want to talk. But, Lara steps in to remind him, he needs to know that “this is going forward” and they want him to help. In the meantime, however, he should remember they’re only talking, he can walk out that door anytime he wants to and…would he like to take a smoke
break?
All three leave. Eight minutes later, the session gets back on track and the detectives sit even closer to him, both leaning forward.
“Mike,” Hardesty says, “you seem real wound up, [like] there’s something you’re not telling us. You’re acting real nervous.” When Mike says it’s because he’s scared, Hardesty wonders what he has to be scared of. Something he hasn’t told them? Well, Mike says, he’s sorry for seeming wound up, but he’s really told them everything he remembers. Hardesty tells him he doesn’t have to apologize, they’re just talking. And Mike relaxes a little, thinking everything’s okay. They like him, after all; they’re on the same team.
By noon the tone has changed again. “Michael,” Hardesty says, “we’ve been working on this a long time; we’ve talked to everybody—Maurice, Robert, Forrest—and we know what happened.” And now it’s time for him to do the right thing, too, and clear up the inconsistencies. “We know more than you think we do, Michael. You’re covering something up.” When Mike says he isn’t, the cop groans in disgust and turns away.
None of this is unusual. Police interrogators always say they know more than the suspect thinks, that other people have confessed and implicated him and they’re 100 percent certain about what happened. And although the routine isn’t necessarily good cop/bad cop, skillful partners will differ in tone and style. In this case, Hardesty’s tense, profane and threatening, a dark cloud that might suddenly turn into a killer storm; Lara’s steadily intense, kind of nonchalant and disinterested…until the moment comes to strike.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 18