S05 Episode 16 Extra: Through a Glass Darkly

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Let us help you succeed. Here's al Go to beachbody dot com to claim your free membership and start feeling great. 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. In the last episode, built on Shifting Sands, we covered the disappearance of Pat Blow, Anne Miller, and Renee Brule, last seen at the Indiana June State Park on Saturday, July second, nineteen sixty six, and trowd the murky history of infamous stable owner Silas Jane for clues about his possible involvement in the case.

One theory I didn't mention in the episode due to the lack of any verifiable information was the possibility that Anne Miller had gone to the beach that day as part of a plan to terminate her pregnancy, with Renee and Pat there to support her, with Pat also post there for the same reason. The theory was put forward in twenty twelve by Dick Wiley, a photographer working for

a number of local newspapers at the time. After years looking into the case, Wiley made a promise to Pat's father, Harold, that he would keep looking until he found an answer. Over the years, Wiley compiled reams of notes and testimonies from all manner of witnesses and people linked to the case, but there was always one piece of information that jumped out at him more than any other, the sighting of a man named Roy Largo Junior at the beach the

day the women went missing. Firstly, Largo fitted the tanned and dark haired description given of the man seen welcoming the women onto his boat at some time around noon that day. But more pertinently, Roy's aunt and uncle, Helen and Frank, according to Wiley, just so happened to be doctors that secretly performed abortions, a criminal offense in Illinois and Indiana at the time. Wiley alleged that the Largos carried out their operations on a houseboat anchored somewhere offshore

on Lake Michigan. Wiley believes Roy Largo Junior, who lived with Helen and Frank, may well have picked them up in his boat and then taken them to his aunt and uncle's clinic. Then at some point, as his theory goes, something went wrong and all three of the women were murdered to cover it up. As others have already said, it seems hugely unlikely that a woman would head out to undergo such a traumatic and uncomfortable procedure in nothing

but a swimsuit. It also seems a little far fetched that two individuals who were likely performing abortions as a charitable act for women unable to seek them at the time, would turn so quickly to murder if something had gone wrong either way, the intriguing link with the Largos remains. One thing that would help to corroborate the Largo link is the film footage that was taken at the beach

the day the women went missing. At the time, the footage was instrumental in refocusing an investigation that had been floundering on the back of numerous conflicting eyewitness reports regarding

the movements of the women on that faithful day. The problem of relying on the memory of individuals to recall events in criminal matters, particularly eyewitnesses to a crime, is one that continues to plague the criminal justice system, and there is one person, perhaps more than anyone, whose tireless work over the last fifty years, has helped us to understand why. Elizabeth Fishman was born in October nineteen forty

four and raised in bel Air, California. By the age of sixteen, Fishman had experienced a number of deeply traumatic events, from surviving the sexual abuse of a babysitter at the age of six to the death of her mother when Elizabeth was only fourteen and the burning down of her family home two years later. Undeterred by all of it, Fishman went on to earn a place at the University

of California, Los Angeles to study mats. While there, she became fascinated with psychology, in particular the work of BF Skinner, perhaps best known for his pioneering studies on behavior and conditioning through the use of the Skinner box. The box, otherwise known as an operant conditioning chamber, was a device designed to test how animals behave in response to punishment and reward. In Skinner's most famous experiment, rats were placed

inside a Skinner's box containing a lever. Whenever the rats knocked into the lever, a pellete of food would drop into the box. The rats soon learned the link between the lever the food, so much so that after a few times being placed in the box, they would go instantly to the lever to push it in return for food. Skinner coined the term positive reinforcement to describe the phenomena

inspired by these experiments. But not quite ready to jettison her years of studying maths, Fishman opted to pursue a masters in maths and psychology at Stamford University and was admitted in nineteen sixty six as the only woman on

her course. It wasn't long, however, before she realized there was something about the sterility and clinical nature of mathematics that failed to accommodate the full, messy picture of the human experience, and after a few years studying rats, she decided to turn her attention to people, in particular the

murky world of memory. It was a subject close to her heart, being someone who knew all too well about those memories such as the abuse she suffered as a child, that people don't want, and the memories such as those of her mother before she died, that people fiercely want to keep. In nineteen sixty eight, after getting married, Elizabeth Fishman became Elizabeth Loftus, and a few years later began work on a series of experiments that would change the

way we understand memory forever. Loftus began first with studying semantic memory, the mechanism through which our brains retrieved the various bits of knowledge that we accumulate about the world around us, such as names, dates, and various other descriptive terms. By asking people questions like name a yellow fruit as opposed to name a fruit that is yellow, Loftus discovered a clear link between the grammar of a question and

the speed with which our brains retrieve a response. Loftus found the work fascinating, but after having lunch with a less than impressed cousin a busy, high flying lawyer, Loftus realized she wanted to do something with a far more tangible impact on the world. It was then that she turned her attention to crime, or more precisely, witness testimony, and the question of just how reliable it was. Like all academics, Loftus needed financial support to conduct her studies.

After hearing that the US Department of Transportation were offering money for relevant studies, she applied successfully for funding and promptly began a series of experiments to study the eyewitness testimony of car crashes. In one experiment, participants, after watching a video compilation of car crashes, were asked a series of questions in which the cars were variously described as having either contacted, hit, or smashed into each other. It

wasn't long before Loftus discovered something fascinating. As it turned out, the way the question was asked had a fundamental impact on the participant's apparent memory of the event. For example, those who were asked to guess how fast the cars smashed into each other would, on average estimate the speed of the collision as being almost ten miles per hour, faster than those who were asked at what speed the

cars contacted each other. A further experiment involved asking participants if they'd seen a broken headlight, while others were asked if they'd seen THEE broken headlight despite no headlight having been broken at all, Those who were asked if they'd seen THEE broken tail light were twice as likely to

claim they'd seen it. The discrepancies appear relatively harmless when applied in an academic setting, But what if the person asking the question was a police officer and the question wasn't if you saw the broken tail light, but rather did you see the suspect in question commit the murder? And that was exactly what Loftus endeavored to find out. In nineteen seventy three, she was invited to observe a

complete murder trial. The case ended in the defendant being judged not guilty, largely due to the conflicting testimonies of the eyewitnesses. Loftus's subsequent write up of the case was arguably the first time anyone had addressed so publicly and scientifically the questionable nature of eyewitness testimonies. What Loftus would later come to understand was that these misleading eyewitness accounts weren't necessarily the result of people being unsure about the details,

but something much more profound. Is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals? Better Help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist. Sign up today and start communicating in less than forty eight hours. You'll get timely and thoughtful responses. Plus, you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions so you won't ever have to sit in an uncomfortable waiting room. You can also log into your account

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Forward slash Unexplained, That's better hlp dot com. Forward slash unexplained Join the over one million people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional to help. Wants you to start living a happier life today. At some point later in life, Elizabeth and her uncle were discussing the horrifying moment her mother was found dead in the family swimming pool. When her uncle reminded Elizabeth

that she was the one who found her. In that moment, a blast of memories she figured she must have suppressed came flooding back to her, from the moment she saw her mother's body in the pool, to the screams and even the paramedics arriving to deal with the situation, only none of it had happened. A few days later, Elizabeth's uncle called her to apologize, having by then correctly remembered that it was in fact Elizabeth's aunt who'd found her

mother's body. This incident not only confirmed Elizabeth's belief that memory was unreliable, but had also demonstrated something much more complicated about false eyewitness testimony and why they were often so compelling. If this had happened to her, it was entirely plausible that false eye witnesses were not just hazy on the details and easily suggestible individuals, They could very well have a perfect memory of something that never actually happened,

indistinguishable from any other genuine memory. In nineteen ninety one, Bloftus invited her undergraduate students to create an experiment to see if it was possible to plant false memories into people's minds. One of her students, Jim Kohane, developed an experiment inviting members of his family to recollect four events from his childhood that he laid out for them, with one of them, unbeknownst to them, involving a story about his brother getting lost in a shopping more that Koane

completely invented. Much to Koane's surprise, his brother not only claimed to remember the event, but even embellished it with apparent memories of his own that happened that day. This became known as the lost in the Mall technique. Working with kne, Loftus adapted the experiment and applied it to a formal study involving twenty four participants, each of whom were told three true stories relating to their past and one completely fabricated story about getting lost in a shopping mall.

When asked to choose which of the stories was made up, twenty five percent of participants failed to identify the false story. Although the lost in the Mall experiment was only a small study, subsequent experiments conducted by Loftus, including convincing people they had once been attacked or even witnessed of bombing,

proved the effect was not a one off. Loftus's work has made her an extremely controversial figure, most pointedly when it's been applied to incidences of apparent recovered memories of sexual abuse. Since the law often requires proof beyond reasonable doubt to convict someone of a crime, the idea that memory is unreliable presents the uncomfortable problem that all memories,

even if true, could become suspect in a court of law. Nonetheless, this does nothing to diminish Elizabeth Loftus's extraordinary work and its contribution to our understanding of memory, a subject that we are still very much grappling with even to this day. Witness testimony can often be the most significant and compelling evidence that sways a jury. Just back in twenty ten, twenty eight year old Aaron Sheelhorn was stabbed to death

outside a nightclub in Houston, Texas. Despite nothing else tying him to the crime and a solid alibi for his whereabouts that night, no less than six eyewitnesses identified a man named Little Grant as the killer. As a result, Grant was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. But Grant didn't do it. In twenty nineteen, DNA samples taken from under Sheerhorn's fingernails implicated another man, j Americo Carter,

who eventually confessed to the crime. According to the Innocence Project, which has overturned three hundred and seventy five wrongful convictions to date thanks to advances in DNA analysis, as many as sixty nine percent of wrongful convictions are made off the back of mistaken eyewitness accounts. If you enjoy unexplained

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the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores. All elements of 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

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