Pulling one knee toward his chest, cupping his hands around it, he cuts to the chase. “Do you know who shot those girls?” he asks, and then, realizing he’d mistakenly given Mike information, quickly corrects himself: “Do you know who killed them?” When Mike emphatically says no, Lara reminds him that when they sat down together that morning, the first statement he’d made was, “I remember the night of December 6, 1991, the night the four girls were murdered.”
Mike didn’t ever say that, of course, and Lara knows it; but Mike himself isn’t sure, so the statement stands.
Soon afterward, the detectives create a scenario in which confession would work to his advantage. The police have talked to the other people involved and this thing is snowballing; there are going to be arrests. They don’t think he killed any of the girls (right out of the Reid playbook), but they do believe he has knowledge of who did, and that the other guys are the assholes, while he’s the scapegoat, the one the others are dropping the dime on, who was forced to do things he didn’t want to. If he tells them everything he knows, he’ll be in a better position vis-à-vis the grand jury.
Mike stiffens, frowns.
Does he know what a grand jury is?
Voice trembling, Mike says he has a pretty good idea.
I asked John Jones why suspects turn to jelly whenever the grand jury is invoked. “TV,” he said. “Law and Order uses it as a scare tactic. Against the law to lie to the grand jury and all.”
Garcia has a different take. “Mike had no idea what the grand jury was,” he states. “For him it was like threatening the Spanish Inquisition.”
—
Hardesty: “Let’s go back to the trip to San Antonio. Think real hard. You’re getting real close….Those others, they’re covering their ass, how do you think they’re doing that?”
Mike comes up with what he seems to think is a smart conclusion: “Either lying or pinning it on somebody else.”
“There you go. There you go.”
Mike: “And let me guess. I’m it.”
“There you go.”
He’s starting to get it.
They tell him he’s in a hole. Inconsistencies are digging it even deeper, putting him on the top of the “get-fucked list.” They’ve talked to Rob, who’s done the right thing and told them everything, and Mike has to realize they now have all the answers and this thing’s going to end really soon. Whatever he’s holding back, they already know what it is. He’s in this up to his ass, but if he’ll just tell them what happened, they’ll type it up and that will be that. Then they can all go home.
Without realizing it, Mike begins using their language. “I think,” he says, “I’ve dug myself a hole and don’t know how to get out.”
—
By this time, news has spread throughout the APD that Lara and Hardesty might have cracked Yogurt Shop. Many task-force members, including Paul Johnson, are watching from the monitor room. En route to a call from North Austin, Chuck Meyer made a U-turn toward downtown and will take part in the interrogation later today. Manuel Fuentes will soon escort Mike on smoke breaks while the others confer. In the monitor room, the men crowd around the television screen and occasionally page Hardesty to offer suggestions.
As if on cue, Lara jumps in: “Did Robert kill those girls?”
Mike doesn’t think so.
Well, then, was he the one who killed them?
No.
Ten minutes later, just after noon, Hardesty asks Mike what he’s scared of.
Mike: “I’m not scared.”
Hardesty: “You’re scared. Michael, look at me. You’re scared because you’ve had this information all these years.”
At that, Mike’s thinking turns creepy. “I’m scared I have information and don’t know I have information.”
One more step and he’s entering the zone of no return, where fear feeds imagination and changes to speculations that seem like memories and even belief. I did it. If I have this memory of it, then I must’ve done it. Once he acknowledges that what they’re telling him might have happened, he opens himself to the possibility that maybe he did tie up a girl, rape, smack, strangle and shoot her, then burn her up.
The full confession won’t be made for many hours, but the detectives are scoring points fast now, and they know it’s coming. They just have to keep pushing to get him to directly involve Maurice Pierce and the others. They need him to “visualize” himself inside the yogurt shop, not as witness, but as participant, and they especially need his version of events to match the evidence John Jones and the others found at the crime scene. Later this afternoon, they’ll ask him to stand in his chair and imagine he’s on the ceiling of the yogurt shop, looking down on himself and the other guys doing unspeakable things to the girls, just as the hidden video camera’s watching him now.
When the ceiling trick doesn’t give them what they want, Hardesty comes at him fast and furious. That “information he doesn’t know he has” line is bullshit. He shouldn’t fog things up by saying he doesn’t remember, because, he says, “You remember that night. You remembered the date. You understand that when you first sat down here you volunteered the date. We didn’t bring it up. You brought it up.”
This time, Mike’s thrown. “I did?”
The detective says yes.
“Okay,” Mike says. “If you say so.”
Cashing in on his growing uncertainty, Hardesty orders him to stop playing games and tell them what happened and what he knows, and to haul himself “out of this fuckin’ hole.” Why is he covering for these assholes?
He says he isn’t.
But Hardesty persists: Knowing what he’s known all these years without ever volunteering anything, now he’s scared that knowledge is going to jam him up? And if he doesn’t clear this up and tell them what he knows, isn’t that going to jam his ass up? Lara chimes in: “No doubt.” Hardesty echoes him: “No doubt.” They sincerely do not want that to happen. They like him and respect the fact that he has a family now, a wife with a good job, plus the desire to earn a high school diploma. He’s the one in the whole bunch they’d like to see get out of this.
Mike comes up with something. Okay, he did see the fire trucks and whatnot, and he lied to the officer about seeing the red Jeep in the Northcross parking lot when he didn’t, though he doesn’t know why. Hardesty supplies the reason: He was covering up something he’s afraid to reveal because it might jam him up.
When he tries to deny that, they roll right over him. They know he was involved, they listen to people day and night and recognize deception when they see it, they know he was there, so now he needs to clear out the crap he’s been living with for eight years, and once he does that, they’ll work with him. They’ve told him what the consequences will be if he lies to them, but they’re giving him this opportunity to tell them what he knows and go on with his life. And when Mike says he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to tell them, they go at him harder.
When asked if he might be willing to take a lie-detector test, Mike’s all for it. Maybe he thinks the machine will help him remember. The detectives take a break, as if to go find the polygrapher, but when they come back, they don’t mention him. Minutes later, Hardesty switches directions and out of left field asks Mike how old he was that December. Startled, he doesn’t answer. After the officers have left him alone again, he gets a pen and writes on his palm, perhaps figuring out his age in 1991. Then, still loose as rubber, he leans back and stretches, folds his arms and hands together like a pillow, rests them on the table and puts his head down for a moment before, as if having had a sudden thought, he sits up and reaches across the table for some papers Lara had been consulting. He flips through them, returns them to their proper place, sits there with his arms across his chest and sips his Dr Pepper, as blank as a white page.
—
What I’m looking for here is a clear turning point, the moment after which nothing will be the same, but there are several. Certainly 12:40 isn’t the turning po
int, though it is one of them. That’s when the first DVD ends. Making notes in the margin of the transcript, I wrote, He’s theirs. Whether he did it or not, he belongs to the APD.
Was Mike Scott’s will overborne? Yes. Did Lara and Hardesty use illegal methods of coercion, promises and threats? Almost certainly. Can we trust Scott’s confession to be honest and true? Not under the circumstances, even if he did participate in the crime. And if he didn’t? We hit a snag on that one. The idea of a false confession simply won’t compute; it confounds our sensibilities. We’d never confess to something we didn’t do, so why would he? After all, they didn’t beat him with a rubber hose or rip out his fingernails.
APD polygrapher Bruce Stevenson—a big guy with breathing problems and a heavy Texas accent—comes in, sits down, looks Mike in the eye and explains how a polygraph test works. He also declares that not only is he a polygraph expert; he is the APD’s forensic hypnotist. Does Mike know what that means? “It means I know how the mind works.”
Mike nods.
Stevenson then explains what he calls the VCR theory of memory. In our minds, there’s something called “revivification,” which means Mike has a VCR in his head that records everything that ever happened to him. He didn’t know that? Well, it’s there. All he has to do is insert the tape and push PLAY. The memory will be there like a movie inside his eyes. Revivification’s real; everything else is bullshit. Mike nods again. Stevenson says his claims of not remembering are also bullshit because the information’s already there. Mike repeatedly protests that he’s being honest and doesn’t recall being there and doesn’t think he was, but Stevenson and Lara ignore him and ask if what’s causing his memory lapse is his own involvement. When Mike says, “No, sir,” Lara cocks his head. Is he positive? “Yes, sir.” Well, the detective points out, he doesn’t look positive.
Mike yields. “I’m not sure about everything now.”
Stevenson’s ready to go forward with the lie-detector test, but Lara and his colleagues in the monitor room have decided not to run it after all. Their guy’s on a roll that they don’t want to interrupt. For Mike, this is a sharp disappointment; he’d been hoping that once he’d either passed or failed the test, he’d know what had really happened. And then he could go home.
It’s about now that he starts rocking in his chair and holding his head in his hands, as if trying to swirl up memories they insist are inside. He tells them he doesn’t want to hinder this investigation or be the patsy while the other guys cover their asses; he wants to cut through and push PLAY on his VCR memory so he can visualize the event and watch the pictures roll by. He wants to do what they’re asking him to, and they say they understand, that they simply want him to realize how important this is for him, his future, his family, his life.
A little more than four hours into the questioning, Lara points to the pictures of the dead girls again and asks Mike to look at them. “That’s it for them,” he says, “and for what?”
“For twelve or fourteen bucks,” Mike says. “Something like that.”
Lara: Was it worth it?
Mike: Not for four lives.
Lara: No. It wasn’t worth it. Whose idea was it to go there?
Mike: Huh?
Lara: Here we go again, getting into that nonresponsive mode of yours. How long do you think you can keep this up?
Mike: Wait a minute.
Lara: You need some time to think real hard, buddy. Because the next phase—
Mike, head down, as if defeated: Yeah.
Lara: —is coming really quick. Real quick. And your opportunities are slowly diminishing. But you realize that, don’t you?
Lara moves in closer, hands wide on the table.
Mike rocks back and thinks, mumbles, seems to generate a thought, then shakes his head, still rocking.
Hardesty: Whose idea was it?
Mike, point-blank: Maurice’s.
Hardesty: Right.
Done deal, then. At 1:30, two men get what they wanted; another has no idea what he just got himself into.
—
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals does not like overturning convictions or granting appeals. This, after all, is the court whose presiding judge, Sharon Keller, will—on September 25, 2007—refuse to answer a lawyer’s call on the afternoon of his client’s execution because the phone rang a few minutes past the five o’clock deadline: So, guilty or not, the man was put to death. But on June 6 of that same year, having already reversed Robert Springsteen’s conviction and ordered a new trial, the TCCA will vote five to four to overturn Mike Scott’s conviction.
Both appeals were based on the abrogation of the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, guaranteeing the right of every citizen to confront his or her accuser. Although the justices weren’t asked to rule on possible investigative misconduct, the court’s majority opinion in Scott—written by Judge Tom Price, a moderate Republican from Dallas—cited many instances of improper questioning, in which the accused was fed implications and suggestions that led him to make self-incriminating statements and to supply accurate crime-scene details he’d previously either misstated or denied knowing. Judge Price refers to the moment when Mike said the idea was Maurice’s and then writes:
At first he [Scott] insisted he had not gone into the yogurt shop himself and that Pierce and Springsteen had gone in through the front door. Asked whether they had carried guns, the appellant initially asserted that he could not remember but that Pierce might have. He eventually described Pierce’s gun as a .38 caliber revolver. When the detectives asked him if a second gun had been used, the appellant first could not remember whether Springsteen had a gun. Later he said he had seen the handle of a pistol in Springsteen’s waistband. He volunteered that it had had a wood or “wood facsimile” handle but when they inquired whether he knew what an automatic looked like, he suddenly changed his story and claimed it had been, in fact, an automatic. He could not tell them the caliber of the second gun, and soon after stated that he was not really positive Springsteen had had a gun at all.
And when one of the detectives asked whether they had “cased” the yogurt shop, the appellant acknowledged that they had. First he said they had noticed that the back door of the yogurt shop had been “propped open” but he later abandoned this assertion. The appellant continued to insist he had not gone in, even though the detectives accused him of “minimizing” his involvement, to his eventual detriment. He even alluded at one point to the fact that “we” came back out of the shop and drove off but immediately insisted he had misspoken.
The videotape shows Lara, at this point, bolting out of his chair and heading toward the door and saying Scott didn’t want to talk anymore. It was time to “just take him to the grand jury.”
Mike’s reaction is immediate. Covering his face with his hands, he breaks down into tears. “I don’t remember going inside the…”
They tell him yes, he does, and should be a man and tell the truth; all he has to do is open the doors in his mind. And he says he’s trying to be a man and to tell the truth, but honestly, he doesn’t think he went inside that store and—
Hardesty: Michael, Michael.
Mike: Are you telling me I went inside?
Hardesty: I know you went inside. You know you went inside.
Mike: I don’t remember going inside.
Hardesty: Come on, Michael, you went inside. Earlier you said, “We ran back out to the car,” meaning you, Maurice and Robert. You said “we.” Well, “we” did. Michael, you went with them inside that store.
Mike: Okay.
“Okay” isn’t perfect, but it’s a start.
—
The TCCA opinion continues:
The detectives falsely assured the appellant that they knew “all about those two guns,” even before the use of a second gun had been acknowledged, thereby feeding him important information. They told him that they did not believe he had shot the girls. The appellant asked, “Look, can I tell you all what I keep see
ing in my head? I keep seeing these girls get shot.” He followed this almost immediately with the disclaimer, “I don’t know if this is real or not or if this is—” at which point one of the detectives interrupted him to assure him, “Michael, it’s real.” Even as the appellant began to describe events inside the yogurt shop, he continued periodically to claim, e.g., “I don’t honestly remember going in the building….”
After a break, the appellant returned with fresh memories. He remembered the girls had been tied up, but could not remember with what. He thought they were wearing their uniforms when it happened. The detectives accused him of “starting to go off in this other tangent and bullshit with us again.” The appellant replied, “I can’t even remember going inside the place, guys. I don’t remember walking through the doors.”
It’s 4:30 when Hardesty asks Mike what the girls were tied up with.
Mike, hopeful, looks up: I want to say [long pause] extension cords?
Hardesty, slightly sarcastic: Really. Why do you want to say that?
Mike, getting the implication: I remember it being white. Napkins?
Hardesty, in utter, if feigned, disbelief: Not napkins. You can’t tie her up in napkins. Give me a break. Something white. Tell us what it was.
Mike is thinking hard, just like they’re always telling him to. He wonders aloud if they might have used a T-shirt and an electrical cord? Hardesty says no and tells him to think harder about a T-shirt and something else and that he’s not going to tell Mike what that is, because he knows. Struggling, Mike says he’s trying to remember; Hardesty repeats “something else,” then asks if he helped Rob tie the girls up, and Mike says he thinks—no, he guesses—he did. But Hardesty answers the question more definitively: “Yeah, you did,” and he also wants to know what the girls were wearing by the time they were tied up. When Mike doesn’t answer, Hardesty repeats the question then says, “Michael, that’s a gimme. That’s an easy one.”
Who Killed These Girls? Page 19