Memories… and Misidentifications

I said Bill? Could it happened? I was a little kid misheard or this was the name I knew the man by. I don't know how it got to be from one person to the other. I can't explain the moment it happened, but I think it was an evolution. Maybe my recollections and memories were not as good as theirs. I didn't trust myself anymore because Melissa's memory is really the lynchpin of the whole case. I want to understand more about it. Where did her early memories of the

perpetrator come from? And why did those memories change? Somewhere along the way things pivoted away from Bill and to Rodney. Why and how? And what part the detectives play in all of it. I started with reaching out to Gary Wells. He's a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University. He's a giant in the field of social psychology, cognitive psychology,

and its intersection with the law. He's also done extensive research on lineup procedures and the accuracy of eyewitness identification, dating back to n He's authored over three hundred articles. His findings have been included into psychology and law textbooks, and he's worked with the Justice Department to write the training manual on eyewitness identification evidence. We've got a reliability problem in eyewitnessification because most of the DNA generations about

involved cases of mistaken identification in the Midwest. Innocence Project reached out to Gary Wells asking him to review and advise them on Rodney's case. This was before Melissa's recantation. If it's okay, let's first talk about Melissa. The first thing she says is Bill did it. From there in the hospital she starts from and bring other things about Bill. She remembers that Bill drove a yellow car, then it turns into a taxi, and then a white Volkswagon. She

remembers spending the night at his house. There was a park across from the house. What do you make of the first responses that come from her, Well, I think the first responses are you know. She could say I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but she didn't. In general, the spontaneous mentioning of this person Bill is big lead. I mean, it should be followed up on. That's a meaningful statement, and especially if you have nothing

else to to really contradict that. I don't want to attribute bad motives to the to the case investigator here, but throughout this process it just looks very chaotic. I mean, early in this process, she's been being shown people who don't fit their description. They don't look at all like each other. The only thing they seem to have in common is most of them were named Bill or William or Billy or Willie. And so that whole strategy was to put a bunch of bills in front of her. Right,

that was a bad idea. That's a fishing expedition with Melissa unable to ide any of those men in time. The composite sketches drawn, Remember they start with a photo of a family friend named Dennis Smith. Allegedly, Melissa had said he kind of looked like the killer. For the sketch artists to have a picture of the person, she says, he looks like as another like, what is the what is the point of that? Did he even need her at that point? Is she adding anything? I doubt it.

We We have done experiments to produce composites. What we find is that in general, they tend not to look very much like the perpetrator, like the person they saw, because it's just so difficult. We can't pick out the nose and the eyes, and then you know, we don't have those things separately, uh, in memory. So here's the big problem though, When you produce a composite and the composite may or may not resemble the real perp or very much, but you use that to find a suspect.

Guess what, You put the composite out to lots of people, right, Well, yeah, of course it always looks like somebody, which is exactly what happened in this case. The sketch is released to the public. Joanne's family sees it and says the man looks familiar and after going through Joanne's diary with police, they land on raw me. So then they decide that Rodney is their suspect, and they go to Melissa with

two photos. One is of a family, remember, a cousin, of her half sister, her older half sister, and the other and that's a color polaroid and the other is a black and white mug shot of Rodney Lincoln. Sort of just talk me through that, okay, So if you if you just come in at that point where they decide that they're going to try to do an identification with Rodney Lincoln, they would have needed to understand and appreciate the fact that, well, we suspected Lincoln only because

he was the closest match to the composite. Right. What they needed to do then was create a proper identification procedure, which would be at least six photos. And in those six photos, they need to pick other people who also have some similarities to the composite and use those. It can't just be too So she picks Rodney. Burgoon said his name is not Bill, and Burgoon said, Melissa replied, it's that's him, that's him, and he's like, but his

name is not Bill, and she said that's him. She had seen Rodney before, and so when she says that's him, is that what she's what she's doing, is she's recognizing someone that her mother did have a relationship with at some point, and that this is what we call a source monitoring error, which is a particular problem that flicks everyone, but it's stronger with children and stronger with the elderly. And that is you remember, in this case, the face,

but you've confused the context. So yeah, it's a familiar it's a it is a familiar face. You have been in the same room with that person. Right by that point, that memory maybe of the perpetrator may start to almost be blending with this person. And I say that because she was right about some things about it turned out about Rodney, not about Bill, right, that he lived with his mom, and that there was a park right park

across the street. So so it's quite possible that what is augmenting this identification is the fact that now you're showing her someone she has seen before and and and and seen in the context of an interaction with her mother. She picks Rodney right, and then within two hours she is viewing a live lineup right so the live lineup.

I mean, once you get an identification of somebody from photos, turning around and doing a live lineup in which he's the only person in common between um, the photos and the live lineup, it's pretty much guaranteed the witness is just gonna turn around and pick the same person. And it doesn't matter if the child are an adult, Right, they're gonna pick the same person out of the live lineup that they that you just led them to pick out of photos. Besides this, there are other issues with

lineups that need to be considered. So the big problem with I win a cientification is that witnesses tend to pick the person from the lineup who looks most like the perpetrator relative to the other members of the lineup. Right, That makes sense, comes very natural, two people. It's just kind of baked into our psychology is to make relative judgments. I mean, I don't know the actual size of this,

whatever it might be. I can't tell you in in millimeters or whatever, but I can see that this is bigger than that, right, So this is how we make most of our judgments, right, in terms of them being relative to something else. And so it is the case with a line up to the natural tendency. The natural propensity is to look at a lineup quickly home in on who best matches my memory relative to the others. This is the best person, and then there's a tendency

to run with that and pick that person. The problem with that is that what if the perpetrator is not in the line up, there still is somebody who better matches your memory than somebody else. So an absolutely critical and essential type of instruction is keeping mind the person who committed this crime, person you saw might not be in here, and so maybe maybe the correct answer is none of these. That's a very important instruction. It takes

pressure off the witness. So then they're at this live lineup. I know you've seen it, and these gentlemen are and eighteen years old, shaggier, longer hair, inches taller than Rodney Rodney's thirty seven, shorter dark hair um and also just shorter. And in terms of fillers, how did metro p D do with the fillers in this live lineup? On the

live lineup? I mean, not only is Melissa coming into it having already only two hours earlier picked Rodney Lincoln from two choice alternative but in addition, for three other people in the live lineup are very poorly selected fillers. They don't fit the description. Rodney is the only one who who fits the description. If by that point we consider the description to be this uh composite. When you select good fillers, they should all have that same characteristic,

so that if he's innocent, he shouldn't stand out. So I I interviewed Detective Burgoon recently and I asked him about the live lineup, and he basically said that it was a Saturday, and there weren't too many people there, and they only had twenty hours in Missouri at the time. They only had twenty hours to apply for a warrant. You know, we basically had twenty hours to put together this live lineup. I would think that twenty would be enough time to round up people. You don't have to

get them from jail cells. I mean you can, you can get them off the street. Personally, I don't think that's a good excuse. And the fact that Lead Detective Joe Burgoon, a man that Melissa came to love, is part of the lineup at all, is a problem. Talk

to me about double blind lineups. The idea of the double blind lineup, which I came up with in the late eighties and started pressing pretty hard on into the ninety nineties, was that began discovering oftentimes, Um, the person doing the line up, the detective who knows that his suspect is in position three, is inadvertently unintentionally We're not saying it's intentional queuing the witness towards number three. Consider what you would do, I mean, perfectly natural. Nobody thinks

they're they're doing something inappropriate. So let's say your case, detective, you think that you know, you put together a lineup. You think that number three, You know number three is your suspect. You know that numbers one to four or five, six, those are just fillers. Right. You show it to the witness, and the witness says, um, number two. Now take your time. Are you sure you look at all of them? Right? But if the witness says, um, number three, yeah, yeah,

tell me about number three. So it's just human nature on the part of in this case, the lineup administrator to sort of leak or inadvertently steer. And so the double blind lineup is a pretty simple idea. I mean, I just borrowed it from what we already know in scientific testing, namely that well, the person who administers this photo lineup and any buddy who's in that room should not know which person is the person who is the

suspect and which ones are fillers. Then they cannot inadvertently, unintentionally or whatever, steer the witness around or influence how the witness feels about their choice. So you know how the rest goes. Melissa picks Rodney. Then two trials later, he's convicted. Fast forward three decades. So Melissa in two thousand and fifteen says Rodney didn't do it, he was never there that day. And then she also says, I believe tommylind Cells did it. So what do you make

of that new memory? Well, I think that Melissa's showing great bravery here and saying that she now believes that it was not Rodney Lincoln because that requires her to like sort of rewrite a significant part of her life history. That's that's huge. Now. I do think that what she's doing is she's weighing. Maybe she's weighing the evidence a little bit better. I mean, she's coming to grips with things that she didn't know at the time. I mean

as an adult, she's now processing his name. Isn't Bill right? He does have an ali by in the words, she's taking into consideration, Uh, this other evidence at the same time, why is she saying that it's this other person? It seems very unlikely that she's able to recover that original memory and based it on that. Because too much time is passed. It seems unlikely she would be able to cast her mind back and recover that original memory. I

think that's long gone. It wasn't that good in the beginning. There's too much water under the bridge. She's already made this mistaken identification and believe that it was somebody else All along. These things make that original memory largely untraceable. The legal system tend not to buy recantations, sort of like, well then you must have if you were wrong before, why wouldn't you be wrong now? You know? Does memory get better? With your memories better now? I have a

lot of questions about memories. I mean, how exactly do memories even work and what causes them not to I asked three memory experts to share their years of knowledge and research with me. They agreed to talk about the case as a high pathetical. I've heard people compare memory to a video recorder. Is that reasonable? I mean, the fast answer is straightforward yes and no. That's Daniel Reiesberg.

He's an emeritus professor and a cognitive psychologist whose research focuses on how people remember emotional events in their lives. For the last twenty years, he's been called to testify as an expert witness in i D cases, confession cases, and cases involving children's and adults memories. Like a video recorder, memory has an input side, akin to what happens when you hit the record button on your phone or a player.

Memory has a storage time when the information is just sitting there waiting for some eventual playback, and memory also has a playback function. But the moment you start looking at the comparison in any sort of serious way, the comparison just collapses. And I would put at the top of the list two crucial points. One of them is

that the input to memory is selective. And there is, in many occasions a lot of information arriving at your ears, or a lot of information out in front of your eyes, and if you're not paying attention to it, it does not get recorded. Into memory. But the other I think even more important distinction is that one's information is recorded

on your phone. It's it's their dormant and in that way, what you eventually get in playback really is a high quality rendition of exactly what went in in the first place. And memory is massively different because our memories are dynamic and information that's in storage is constantly getting updated and elaborated and merged together with other sources of information. I agree with you, that's the way memory works. It's a wonder for wonderful system, UM, but it's um. It's a

system that was not not developed for the courtroom. That's Iris blend On Gitlin. She's a professor of psychology at California State University, Fullerton. Her research focuses on memory in the forensic context, memory as it relates to identification of people and events, and detecting deception as it relates to interviewing and interrogation. She also works as an expert witness, primarily in criminal cases. Within the courtroom, a lot of time needs to be accurate and complete. That's not what

it evolves to be. So it's there's a conflict between what the legal system meets, you know, in order to self crimes um and what human humans can give from their memory, which is it's wonderful for every day, for all of our experiences, but not for the courtroom. The only other piece that I would add to that is people don't necessarily have a good sense of when their memory fails, and that's how they're Clydeer off it. She's a research professor at Georgia State University. Her work focuses

on memory errors, with an emphasis on courtroom applications. Her work also looks at face recognition and eyewitness identification. Most recently, she's been looking at how people remember information that's been imagined versus actually experienced and the confusion that comes with it. Like Dan and Iris, for the last ten years, how There has also been working as an expert witness. People can feel um because they remember something with a lot

of vividness or a lot of detail. Then they can come to believe that it's highly accurate and become very confident in that. And again, to add to what Irish said, that isn't necessarily the case that works in the courtroom because memory fades over time, over time, and right off the bat, here's Dan again, memories fade, All memories fade. The fade begins immediately. Um, you know, there's no honeymoon period in which the memory is, you know, resting before

the fade starts. That's just not the way it works. One of the claims of that memory I commonly encounter is that some events are immune to forgetting, and people say, I will remember that till the day I die. I'll never forget it. I remember it as though it were yesterday. And you know, there's a kernel of reality there because some events are memorable. But at the same time, no

event is immune to forgetting. To what Dance saying, it's not that you're necessarily going to forget that the thing happened. I'm not going to forget I was in a car accident, but the details surrounding that event are going to update and change. So you know, it's not that people completely forget something happened. I can remember all the details of it. And it turns out event memories are very different than facial ones. Here's iris again, the event is likely to

be replay rehearsed. Right as people give the account of an event and they talk about it and trying to reconcile, they think about it, and so potentially there's a stronger memory for the details of the event, of parts of that event, and there is not the image of a perpetrator because that doesn't get rehearsed. And trauma has a surprising effect on memory, actually a contradictory one. Here's Dan.

One of the things that trauma does, you know, in you know, lots of field studies, lots of laboratory studies, is sharpen your focus. The things that they do focus on during the trauma tend to be longer lasting compared to memory for some you know, mundane, everyday occurrence. And part of the complication here is that it's often difficult from the outside to figure out exactly what the person

is going to focus on. And so, you know, two people going through what seemed to be similar events may end up focusing on different things, and therefore they're going to have very different memories. And the opposite can also be true, like when someone experiences a lot of stress and arousal, something called catastrophic memory loss can occur. So in regards to Melissa, we don't know which one happened.

Did she have some very sharp memories based on where she put her focus or was she so stressed that like the perpetrator's face just became a blur. We'll never know. But what about exposure time. It seems the man was in the apartment for a long time. Melissa said she got a good look at him. At times his face was a foot away. Here's iris we know of cases and also from research that even if you have long exposure time to a phase, I mean the famous case

of the Ronald Cotton a case. You know, the rapist was in the room for a long period of time with Jennifer the victim, right, And so she even said that she studied his face. She wanted to be able to remember him right, to be able to you know, make sure that they got to him. And she still made a mistake. And when she came across the real real rapists years later in another trial, um, she actually came in front and saw him and she could not nothing trigger, nothing trigger in her mind. And that was

a real rapist, proven by d n A right. And so you know from these cases, but also from the empirical research, that is possible to also misremember or forget a face even if you had long exposure time and again, where was Melissa's focus? Was it on the man's face or the knife he was stabbing her with? What about age? Does a child's memory work the same as an adults? The answer is basically yes, with a few exceptions, one

of the biggest being suggestibility. Here's iris again. I think in a suggestive environment where you have suggestive kinds of interviewing and and lots of adults with an interest of trying to get more information, and also with authority figures, all of that kind of environment would definitely potentially influence that person's memory. I would add just quickly, is that I don't want to leave the feeling that you know, children's memory cannot be relied upon. You know it can

given the right circumstances. They're right set of protocols, and we know that from their research is very clear children can't give reliable, truthful information and complete information in the right condition. So basically, memories fade almost immediately. They're malleable, and both adults and children can make errors when I

ding someone. It seems like the burdens on law enforcement to conduct interviews and lineups in ways that produce good, reliable information without contaminating the original memory, which brings us back to Gary Wells and what should have happened in Rodney's case. I think this whole thing all along needed to be solved with if at all possible, with harder evidence.

A seven year old You can't be shown her fifty photos over several days and of all kinds of different people and then giving her really biased final test of only two photos. Once you did that, you sort of trampled on the evidence. You know, I've been pushing this analogy, um that I think that you know, I witness evidence

should be treated as a form of trace evidence. You know, trace evidence we usually think of as fingerprints and blood or semen or hair fibers that a perpetrator left behind at the scene of the crime that can help establish the identity of the perpetrator. Well, that's also true of eye witness evidence. What happened here was the perpetrator left a trace behind, except that trace was in the head of Melissa. It's the same as going into a crime

scene and just trampling all over the place. Oh well, you know, it doesn't matter if I pick up this object, if I step over here, or I'm gonna I'm gonna move the gun, you know, like you would never consider doing those things when investigating a crime. Well, there should be a lot of things you don't consider tampering with, like to witnesses memory when invested getting a crime as well. Should the detectives. Should they have known better back in

It's hard to put ourselves back into you know. I don't want to be one who says that this was not good faith at the time. I can't really make that judgment. What I can do now, though, is say that, UM, given this path of these events as they were created and unfolded, the result in the end of Melissa picking Rodney from that one of two photos and then turning around and picking him from the lineup is of no real probitive value. It's not desp positive of guilt. It's

not really something that even can qualify as evidence. If by evidence we mean that it's that somehow we're at least getting beyond more likely than not, it's just not there. Gary's work, like his pre lineup instructions, choosing fillers, double blind lineups, videotaping, the identification and better interviewing of witnesses are procedures that have been implemented in almost thirty states,

covering about of the population. There's still a long way to go, but we're in a much better position today than we were certainly so, of course I had to ask. It's Missouri one of the states that has adopted these reforms. They have not. Next time on The Real Killer, imagine you take this job and you're told and you don't have the right to correct monthal conviction, a system seemingly built to fail, not just Rodney Lincoln, but many others. Lamar keeps me up at night, Son of a bitch.

I could. I could talk like a sailor for five minutes talking about how mother fucking pissed I am that Lamar is still sitting in prison makes me the puke. The Real Killer is a production of a y R Media and I Heart Radio, hosted by me Leah Rothman. Executive producers Leah Rothman and Eliza Rosen for a y

R Media You. Written by me Leah Rothman, Senior Associate producer Eric Newman, Editing and sound design by Cameron Taggy, mixed and mastered by Cameron Taggi, Audio engineering by Jesus C. Mario Studio engineering by Tom Weir and Kelly McGrew, legal counsel for a y R Media, Gianni Douglas, executive producer for I Heart Radio, Chandler Mayze. If you're enjoying The Real Killer, tell your friends about it and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.