The four-man posse flew commercial. By the time they checked into a Charleston motel that evening, Mike Scott had signed his statement in Austin and gone home. Springsteen was at work, filling in as a short-order cook for the local Fraternal Order of the Eagles.
Though still working mindless jobs for minimum wage, Rob hadn’t done badly since leaving Austin. There had been a couple of scrapes with the law, but he’d gotten his GED, after a drunk-driving arrest, when the judge offered him the option of finishing his degree instead of doing time. He’d married a woman twenty-two years his senior who had two nearly grown children and a grandchild, was restoring an 1890 log cabin she’d inherited and held a regular job as a graveyard-shift stock boy at Kroger. He’d also worked at chemical plants and been assistant manager of a burger joint. He was looking for more meaningful work but thus far hadn’t been offered anything close to what he thought he deserved. His wife, Robin Moss, was a banker, which helped. As for Austin, once his father moved away, he’d lost all connection to it.
Because the Charleston PD interview rooms weren’t equipped with recording devices, the APD audiovisual lab had provided the detectives with a clock containing a hidden video camera that could wirelessly transmit a signal to a television set with a VCR. Before leaving town, Merrill had tested the clock-camera, which worked as promised; nonetheless, Meyer suggested that for backup they use a hidden Nagra reel-to-reel audiotape recorder.
When I asked an audio specialist what he thought of Nagras, he laughed. “Remember those?” he said to a colleague. “Tape maxed out at three hours?”
On the morning of September 15, with the help of Charleston police officer Eric Hodges, Merrill hung the clock-camera at about eye level on the wall of a windowless seven-by-nine interview room. Then, testing the device, they discovered that a persistent hum was fuzzing up the audio, often rendering speech indecipherable. There were also inexplicable bursts of static and “explosions on the screen of some sort,” perhaps from interfering radio traffic. The screen would distort before coming back into focus, then go bonkers again. They fiddled with the wires, but nothing worked. The room was furnished with a large desk and three chairs. After loading the Nagra and hiding it in a drawer, they taped a microphone underneath the desk and pointed it toward the chair Springsteen would sit in. By the time they finished the setup, it was close to noon. As for the hum and the static, they’d done the best they could.
—
When Merrill and Hodges knocked on his door sometime after twelve-thirty, Rob had been asleep for maybe an hour, having worked from five until ten the night before cooking for the Eagles, and then from midnight until eight at Kroger. Before that, he’d worked all afternoon on the cabin. After arriving home that morning, he’d spent a couple hours on his PlayStation before going to bed. He figured he’d slept maybe six hours in the past three days.
When the policemen knocked, Rob staggered to the door. Two men stood there in regular clothes, wearing sidearms. Cops, he thought, and opened the door. After Hodges introduced himself and Detective Merrill, he said they’d like to ask him a few questions. Rob invited them in, but they declined to engage in conversation. There were others, Hodges explained, who wanted to talk to him; they’d all come in from Austin. Would he mind going downtown with them?
Rob offered them chairs while he went upstairs to dress, but the policemen chose to stand, and then heard him phoning someone from the kitchen—his wife, they assumed—to explain where he was going. After a few minutes, he returned wearing black jeans, a dark knit shirt and a ball cap pulled low. He grabbed a pack of his wife’s cigarettes—a brand, Eve, made especially for women—and a lighter. On the drive to the police station, he told the cops about the cabin he’d been working on, and they feigned interest.
By the time Robert Burns Springsteen IV was escorted into a Charleston PD interview room at about two o’clock, his wife had called his stepfather, Brett Thompson, to tell him that Rob had gone downtown with two policemen to answer questions about something that had happened in Austin. More than slightly alarmed, Thompson set off for the station himself.
The videotape of Rob’s questioning begins with the usual glitchy lines, though this time they’re accompanied by the background hum, as persistently annoying as a leaf blower in the distance. Lara comes in—wearing a lighter-colored shirt this time—and lays some papers on the desk, then leaves. Rob enters with the husky, frowning Merrill, who quickly vanishes from view when he sits with his back to the camera. Rob’s attitude, like Mike Scott’s, is one of unworried ease, but he lacks his former friend’s affability. He sits where he’s been directed to, in an old-fashioned wooden office chair with arms. When Lara returns, Rob stands and politely extends his hand. They shake and exchange names. When Lara suggests they sit down, Rob reaches in his belt pouch and says, “I’m just going to get me a cigarette,” and when Lara says there’s no smoking, he points toward the desk and says that, well, he saw the ashtray and figured it was all right.
Lara stands firm. They can go out for a smoke later. Rob takes his chair and says, “No problem.” And he waits. He’s even chewing gum.
Four girls, I remind myself. Stripped, bound, molested, shot dead, burned to the bone. This is how cops get the bad guys. Do not automatically sympathize with this man. He might have been there, might’ve done what Mike Scott said he did and “raped the shit out of” one of those girls. But what I see on my computer screen is a tall, thin young man answering questions with “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” happily engaging in what he thinks is a consensual conversation about a crime that happened in another city almost eight years ago, when he was seventeen and had pretty much dropped out of high school. But as with the other two who sat in a similar hot seat—Kelly, then Mike—it’s hard not to have feelings for someone who’s trapped and doesn’t know it yet. In a narrative sense, blind ignorance turns him into a protagonist.
—
Again, following Reid protocol, Lara establishes the reason for their presence, citing issues that need clearing up from interviews that weren’t done all that well the first time around, and then he yields to Merrill, who asks for the usual personal information: date of birth, address and the rest. The interrogation will last only five hours, but because Springsteen doesn’t request bathroom or food breaks and Lara changes his mind and lets him smoke in the room, the three-hour Nagra tape will run out with two hours to go. By then the police are too close to getting what they came for to risk interrupting the proceedings; and since they don’t want Springsteen to know he’s being recorded, they can’t replace the tape and thus have to depend on the faulty clock-camera for sound.
It’s an odd mistake, especially given Lara’s repeated suggestions to Mike Scott that he get a soft drink, use the restroom, have a smoke…not because he thought Mike needed time to think but because they did. Maybe the detectives have become overconfident and impatient and simply don’t realize how bad the clock-camera’s reception really is. This will prove to be an extremely costly error.
Rob’s voice is pinched but unwavering. When Lara inquires how he’s feeling this morning, he answers with a flat-out “Tired,” then relates the story of his jobs and lack of sleep and how he’d been in bed for only an hour when—boom boom boom, he hammers at the air with his fist—somebody knocked and he wondered, Who in the world?
Lara nods as if to say, I’m with you, brother; I know how that is. And he asks Rob to tell them a little about himself, what he’s up to, how he likes living “out over here.” Talking with his hands, waving toward some lake or town he’s describing, Rob complies. His family history elicits a “Wow” from Lara when he lists the professional positions his father, grandfather and an uncle have held. His accent is softly southern. When he asks Lara how long they think this will take, since he has a job to get to, the detective says they just need to clarify a few things and they’ll get him out of there as quickly as possible.
This seems positive to Rob. But in about half an hour, Lara makes a
sharp turn toward the night in question, in response to which Rob recites a list of his activities that afternoon and evening, at the school and the mall, including the midnight Rocky Show and the cast party he didn’t get to. He shakes his head when Lara asks him about casing the yogurt shop that afternoon and swears he’s never been in the store in his life, and no matter what they’ve heard, he had nothing to do with killing those girls. Foolishly cocksure, he remains unconcerned. By this time he’s smoking—Eves are thinner and longer than a regular cigarette—and sitting with his chin defiantly high, awaiting the next question.
The inquiry continues, pointed but not aggressive, for two hours or so, until Lara abruptly launches into a series of “Would you be surprised to know” questions, the first of which he backs up with statements from “five or six different people” who have sworn that Rob was with Maurice, Mike and Forrest not just for a few hours, as he’d claimed, but for the entire night.
Would Rob find that to be a surprise?
Springsteen says yes, a complete and total surprise. But it’s the next question that gets him.
“Would you be surprised,” Lara asks, “if I told you that the ‘Rocky Horror Show’ wasn’t even showing at Northcross on Friday, December 6, 1991?”
The effect of this is not reflected in the written transcript. To understand the damage, you have to watch the tape. Of course, Lara didn’t exactly say the movie hadn’t played that night, but the inference hits home. Rob’s head pops up and his voice tightens as, clearly, the worm of doubt begins to uncurl. And within the next quarter of an hour, Lara tells Rob it’s no coincidence they came to West Virginia after all these years. It’s because of a new technology “called DNA” that’s tremendously important, and Rob gets it. The cops are talking science. They’re saying they found his DNA at the scene, aren’t they?
—
At about this same time, the Charleston cop Eric Hodges is refusing to allow Brett Thompson into the station to talk to his stepson, even after Thompson says he doesn’t think Rob’s capable of making a legal decision on his own. Hodges assures him that Rob has been afforded his full rights and issued a Miranda statement, which he has waived. But Thompson’s not convinced and suspects Hodges doesn’t really know what the Austin cops are up to or if what he just said is true. Perhaps Rob’s stepfather sniffs this out, because he goes home and calls David Bungard, a local attorney whose offices are directly across the street from the police station. Bungard strolls over and, right at the moment when Rob’s starting to crack, he’s in the reception area, telling Hodges that he’s been hired by Robert Springsteen’s family to represent him and would like for the interrogation of his client to come to an immediate halt. Hodges tries soothing him with the same lies he told to Thompson, adding what the Austin detectives had instructed him to, that because a third party had arranged for the lawyer, not the suspect himself, they don’t have to let him talk to Robert. Bungard gives Hodges his business card and leaves.
The Charleston Police Department will close for the day at four-thirty: lights off, doors locked, one officer to stand patrol, everybody else gone. Half an hour later, Eric Hodges drives to the mall for dinner. Anyone hoping to enter the CPD offices is out of luck until he returns. But in the interrogation room, the lights burn on. The Nagra tape has run out. The APD is nailing Rob Springsteen to the wall.
—
Pretty much all of us maintain belief in a sense of self that defines us and what we think we might or might not be capable of. Many friends of the four men arrested for the ICBY murders refused to believe they were involved. He’s not that kind of guy, they’d say. At his home in West Virginia in 2010, Springsteen characterized himself to me as a “normal guy” who would never “do anything like kill somebody” because “that’s not me.” As for prosecutors, cops and Austinites, “They don’t know anything about me.” Like a psychiatrist, the interrogator has to figure out how to break through the armor of a suspect’s self-characterization and drive him to the point of thinking he isn’t who he’d always thought, dreamed or hoped he was; that he is—or may be—somebody else altogether, a stranger to himself, perhaps even a killer. At about five o’clock, just after he plants the seed of doubt in Rob’s mind about the Rocky Show, Lara pulls this off.
He’s still hammering at Rob’s time line, employing a repetitive “What happened next?” series of questions focusing on the crucial hours from ten until midnight. “Okay,” he says after Rob describes driving around in Maurice’s car on what he thinks was that night, although he can’t be sure; it might’ve been the weekend before or the one after. They were always driving around in Maurice’s car. “What happened then?”
Rob says he thinks they went to the movie, though given what Lara told him, he guesses they didn’t. And if they didn’t go to the Rocky Show, he doesn’t know what they did. “Or anyway,” he says, “I don’t remember.” But he does know one thing: “I was never in that yogurt shop. Never.”
Lara ignores that, presses on. And so now Rob’s sure there wasn’t a movie, “Now that I’ve told you?”
Rob says no, he’s not sure of that. He said he doesn’t remember one way or the other, but he wants the detectives—“you guys”—to believe him. “I believe that to be the truth.”
“So what then? Do you remember seeing the movie?”
“Not that night, precisely. Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t.”
So what Rob told Lara was a white lie, wasn’t it? Because he wasn’t really there. “We know that,” Lara declares. Can he at least admit he wasn’t there?
“Well,” Rob says, “we were definitely outside the movie.”
Okay. But outside’s a whole lot different than inside, right?
“Maybe we didn’t go in,” Rob concedes.
Lara takes on the tone of a disappointed father: “Rob,” he says. “Rob.” But when he continues to insist he doesn’t remember, the detective becomes streetwise. “I wasn’t born yesterday, brother.” Does Springsteen get that?
Yes.
“Okay. You weren’t actually in the movies as you told us earlier.”
Springsteen says no.
Got him.
Lara pushes for specifics. Was he inside, or outside in the parking lot, or somewhere else? What exactly was he doing? Isn’t it reasonable to think he was next to the theater but not inside it?
Rob agrees that’s a very reasonable thing to say. He doesn’t really remember being outside, but it’s probably reasonable to think he was.
At this point, the overconfident Rob might have convinced himself he was asserting his proficiency as a gamer and quite adept at engaging in hypotheticals. That he has a chance to outsmart this wise guy Latino by seconding the reasonableness of a statement without specifically acknowledging the truth of it.
Lara knots the two strands of conjecture into one: Okay, so he’s down with Rob’s suggestion of a reasonable possibility. Is Rob comfortable with it?
Although Rob hadn’t said “reasonable possibility,” he says he’ll go with it.
No, Lara says, he can’t just go with it. Is he comfortable with it?
Springsteen says yes, he is.
“Is it the truth?”
“It’s possible.”
“It’s possible,” Lara says, echoing him. “Anything’s possible, right?”
Rob’s into the wordplay. “Well,” he says, “yes.”
But Lara’s not. “Is it possible,” he asks calmly and without obvious ill intent, “you killed those girls?” After all, Lara reminds him, that’s what he said, that anything’s possible.
Rob guesses it’s possible.
After another couple of minutes, Lara rolls from possibilities to likelihoods and the logical reason why the others involved in the murders—Maurice, Mike and Forrest—have all included him in the picture, and in no time Rob’s powers of strategic banter fail him. Possible is possible, and what was once flatly denied begins to yield to the realm of imagination, of endlessly evolving conjecture. The g
amer has crashed belly-up in a real-world match.
—
What we have, then, are two confessions obtained by some of the same interrogators relating to the same crime and yet in each case the result of a different process, strategy and breakdown. When Mike Scott was asked to stand on a chair and picture himself at the crime scene, he began to do exactly that: to envision the scene below with himself in it. Then with a little help, he seems to have created a memory of an event that might or might not have occurred, what neuroscientists call a false or illusory memory. Like Shawn “Buddha” Smith, who said while under Polanco’s spell that he actually saw the blood and the raping, in false-confession terms Mike Scott internalized his custodians’ suggestions until they turned into what seemed like memories.
Rob, on the other hand, appears to have tricked himself into playing what he thought was an intellectual match against the big guys, without understanding the enormity of the mistake he’d made about the game itself, which had no rules other than those prescribed by Reid, where possibilities morph into certainties and cops make incriminating statements they assign to the suspect.
That they were the smart ones never occurred to him.
—
The edges of what Robert Springsteen IV considers his self—a normal guy doing normal things—begin to blur. He starts to think like the two men hammering at him, to imagine himself as he’s being told he is. This is the turning point of many interrogations, when the subject accepts the definition of himself that his persecutors have created and labeled authentic and unbiased. Imagination rules. Taking the blame becomes, weirdly, an escape. Rob accepts the detectives’ version of the night, describing what happened as a “total cluster fuck.” He gives details of the rapes, the murders, very little about the fire. He lays his head on his bent arm to re-create the position Amy Ayers was in when they left her. Prosecutors will describe his pose as a perfect replication of Amy’s death posture, even though it isn’t.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 21