Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClane Smith, where for the weeks in between episodes we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. Last week's episode, appearing as being recounted the complex story of five young men and one young woman from Iceland who in the nineteen seventies were convicted for their involvement in the apparent murder of
two men, Gudmunder and Geffner Inesen. All six individuals confessed to being responsible for the killings to one degree or another, but were later exonerated in two thousand and eighteen when it was ruled that their confessions were likely to have been false. It has long been one of the most misleading arguments in the history of criminology that no innocent person would admit to being responsible for a crime that
they didn't commit. It's an idea that many of us still cling to that wouldn't be so bad, perhaps if it wasn't an idea that law enforcement professionals and in many cases judges and juries have historically believed. Also, though there are undoubtedly cases of criminal investigators forcing confessions out of suspects, or even deliberately pinning crimes on innocent individuals.
What is perhaps most alarming about many cases of false confession is that the interrogators are completely unaware that it is their actions that have helped to manufacture them. In sixteen ninety two, in the village of Salem in Massachusetts, seventy six year old Anne Foster, a widow from the nearby town of Andover, confessed that the devil appeared to her in the shape of a bird, and that she had the gift of striking people down with mere thoughts alone.
Despite being interrogated and tortured continuously for days, Foster had steadfastly denied the accusation that she was a witch. However, when it was put to her that her own daughter, Mary Lacey Senior, who was also under investigation for witchcraft, had accused her own mother of the crimes, Foster finally confessed to being in league with the devil. Over two hundred people were arrested and wrongfully accused of witchcraft during the Salem witch Trials, perhaps one of the better known
cases of false confession in relatively recent history. However, it wasn't until nineteen o six that a label was given to the phenomenon. It was in January that year in Chicago when a young man attending to his father's horse in a barn the dead body of a young woman lying face down in the muck with a copper wire twisted hard around her neck. Police quickly became suspicious of the young man who'd found the body, due simply to the fact that he looked as though he hadn't had
any sleep from the previous night. After taking him to the police station for further questioning, it was put to him immediately that he had committed the murder, having first denied the accusation. As the police pressed him harder, telling him how they knew he was guilty and the way in which he'd done it, the young man eventually changed
his mind and confessed to the murder. As he went on to explain it was roughly six thirty pm when he'd taken the woman into the alley and murdered her when she tried to escape, and on, he continued retelling his story numerous times, with each version becoming more detailed than the last. Believing they had their man, the police formerly charged the suspect, who was later convicted and sentenced
to death for the crime. No sooner had he been convicted, the young man retracted his confession, insisting that he had no recollection of having made it in the first place. Intrigued by the case, a local doctor contacted esteemed Harvard University psychologist Hugo. Munster Burg for his opinion on the matter.
Munster Burg replied that for a number of reasons, he believed the man was innocent of the crime, and that his absurd and contradictory, untrue confession, as he called it, sounded exactly like the involuntary elaboration of a suggestion put into the man's mind. When the letter made its way into the local press, Munsterburg was derided for his so called expert opinion, with his interpretation being criticized as harve it's contempt of court and nothing more than science gone crazy.
A week later, despite having a cast iron alibi for the night of the murder, the young man, who many would later come to believe was entirely innocent, was executed by hanging. Are you always taking care of your family? Do you often take care of others and not yourself? Now it's time to take care of yourself. To make time for you you deserve it. Teledoc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to
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if needed. For free. Teledoc therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download the app or visit teledoc dot com forward slash Unexplained podcast today to get started. That's t e LA DC dot com Slash Unexplained Podcast. Despite Munsterberg's recognition of untrue confessions, it would be another ninety
years before legal institutions began to take the idea seriously. Today, psychologists such as Saul Cassin from the John J. College of Criminal Justice in New York are working hard to put an end to this extraordinary phenomenon, with many believing cases such as the Ineson confessions in Iceland to be
just the tip of the iceberg. In the US alone, the nonprofit organization Innocence Project, with whom Cassin works closely, has helped overturn three hundred and sixty five wrongful convictions in the last two decades, twenty five percent of which involved individuals who'd confessed to committing the crime. Much of the problem, Cassin believes stems from the Read interrogation technique, pioneered in the nineteen sixties in the United States by
psychologist and apparent lie detection expert John Reid. Read's technique, variations of which have been employed by police forces throughout the world, involves first surreptitiously conducting a behavior assessment by asking various questions, often irrelevant to the case, while watching for evidence that the suspect might be lying. For years, criminal investigators have been taught that anything from slouching, crossing arms,
or avoiding eye contact as wrong indicators of deception. Once interrogators have been convinced the suspect as being duplicitous, they begin to assert more pressure, continually accusing the suspect of the crime, while attempting to hone in on specific details, Any details or denials that contradict their suspicions are frequently ignored. What makes things complicated is that often this technique seems to work. However, as Cassin argues, it also leads to
an unacceptably high rate of false confessions. Furthermore, having been schooled in the read technique, criminal investigators understandably believe they have become skilled in the art of determining whether a suspect is lying or not, which can have particularly disastrous consequences. To test whether this was true, Cassin enlisted the help of prisoners from Stachusetts Penitentiary to give video recorded accounts
of crimes they had and hadn't committed. Cassin then showed the video to a mixture of college students and police officers. What he found was not only did the students perform better, albeit only marginally so, the police officers were far more certain of their conclusions. In effect, as Cassin put it, their training had made them less accurate and more confident.
At the same time, we might think that as forensic techniques and DNA analysis become increasingly more precise at identifying a suspect that the inconvenience of false confessions will eventually
become a thing of the past. Conversely, however, it seems in some cases that the perceived accuracy of modern day forensics has actually contributed to the making of a false confession, with recent evidence suggesting that suspects may confess to a crime just to escape a harrowing interrogation, hoping that material evidence will exonerate them later. In reality, it's been proven that a confession will often supersede any evidence to the contrary.
More worryingly, it appears that exonerating evidence can also be corrupted when the prevailing narrative that the suspect is guilty is considered strong enough. In nineteen eighty seven, twenty four year old Barry Laffman was arrested by Pennsylvania State police and accused of raping and murdering an elderly neighbor. Lachmann, who was considered to have the intellectual capacity of a ten year old, was told the lie by police that
they'd found his fingerprints at the scene. Faced with this supposedly insurmountable but entirely fabricated truth, Lachmann felt he had no other choice but to confess. When evidence was found to the contrary, such as the blood found at the scene being type A when his was type B, outlandish
theories were concocted to suit the narrative. In this case, a forensic expert suggested that bacterial degradation had somehow changed the blood type from B to A. Lochman would spend sixteen years in prison until DNA evidence finally cleared him. In fact, in a study published in two thousand and sixteen, Seawan Cassin demonstrated that if juries were presented with a simple choice between DNA evidence and a confession, they would
judge the case under DNA evidence. However, if a prosecutor were to offer a theory as to why the evidence might contradict the confession, the jury overwhelmingly sided with the confession. Unexplained. The book and audiobook, featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements have unexplained, including the show's music, are produced by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at
Facebook dot com orward slash Unexplained. Now. It's time to take care of yourself. To make time for you, Tell a doc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download the app or visit teledoc dot com Forward slash Unexplained
Podcast today to get started. That's teladoc dot com slash Unexplained Podcast