Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer.
And I'm Steve Drissen.
So far, we've told you the story of Robert Davis in Virginia and the Dixmore five in Chicago, two cases that show how the interrogation room works and how racial biases can script false confessions. Today's episode is about how interrogation tactics designed for seasoned adult criminals are often used on the most vulnerable among us. We're going to take you to Camden, Arkansas, where a twelve year old boy is left to fend for himself against grown ups who
suspect him of murder. The interrogation tape is bad enough, but the worst parts happened off camera. This is the story of Thomas.
Cogdal I do a lot of searches online to try to keep up to date about cases involving false confessions and juveniles, and this case came on my radar screen. When I saw these interrogation tapes, I was absolutely floored. You know, Robert Davis was eighteen, he was well over six feet tall. But Thomas Cogdell, he was a boy. He hadn't started shaving yet.
This is the first video I had seen where adult tactics were being used on someone as young as Thomas twelve years old. I'm a mom. I've got kids not much younger than Thomas, and the way the cops railroaded this child, it brings me to tears when I hear this.
You have two boys, I have three boys. I remember what my boys were like when they were twelve years old, and they reminded me very much of Thomas.
Cogdele and that the climax of this interrogation they turn off the camera, that's when the heat really gets turned up.
What happened off camera? I wanted to know what happened.
Thomas's story starts in Camden, Arkansas, a small town about twelve thousand people one hundred miles south of Little Rock. Now Camden's a beautiful place, but like too many smaller towns,
modernity has been hard for Camden. Once upon a time, it was home to a naval ammunition depot that employed a lot of people, and it was even known for being the home of the man who invented gray Pet soft drinks, which were really popular in the fifties and sixties, but gray Pet fizzled out and the ammunition depot closed at the end of the Cold War, and ever since the late eighties early nineties, Camden's been losing jobs, residents,
and morale. Now, at the beginning of the summer in two thousand and six, Thomas and his family had moved into a tidy, little gray house on Waco Street. They live there, just the three of them. It's Thomas who's twelve, his eleven year old sister Kayley, and their mom, Melody Jones. Let me tell you a little about Thomas. He's one of those whiz kids. It's the kind of kid who racks up all a's in school and then comes home
and dives straight into a book. He's well mannered, polite, quiet, small for his age, with these chubby cheeks that made him look even younger than his age. And at twelve, he still spoke with a lisp, this really childlike lisp that was incredibly endearing. Now, in many ways, Thomas shouldered a lot of the responsibility around the house. Melody was on Social Security disability because of mental illness, and the family got by on her monthly check and food stamps.
Thomas had a sister who was eleven, Kaylee. She was as immature in some ways as Thomas was mature. She wasn't as good as he was at reading, so he'd spend a lot of time helping her learn her words and remembered. They were new on the block, which unfortunately meant that Kaylee was in for some bullying. But when other kids would pick on her, Thomas would literally launch himself at them, chubby cheeks and all. He was the big brother, it was his responsibility he felt to defend.
The two of them got along well for the most part, but like all children, they had their spats, and it usually occurred when Kaylee would interrupt something that Thomas was working on or listening to, or video game he was playing, and that would frustrate him. But that happens in every family.
So let's fast forward to the morning of August seventh, two thousand and six. It was Monday morning, but school was out, so the kids had stayed up really late the night before. Kayley had gone to bed at about two point thirty in the morning, and Thomas had stayed up even later than her until about five am, eating em and m's and reading a spooky children's book in his room.
He fell asleep with the book still open to the page that he had left it at.
And then the morning comes at about eleven forty five or so, both Melody and Thomas are awake. Melody later said she went to check the mail that morning found a letter for Kaylee, who was still in her bedroom. Melody asks Thomas to come with her to surprise Kaylee with her letter, but they're met with a horrible Kaylee's in the bedroom. Her hands are tightly bound with a red dog leash, and her feet are loosely bound with a cloth measuring tape, the kind of thing you'd use
to measure out and cut fabric. And there's a plastic bag over her head. Melody removed the bag and it was immediately clear Kayley was dead. Melody's screamed. She screams so loudly that the neighbors hear her. She becomes hysterical. Thomas has the presence of mind to call nine one one. An ambulance arrives. The neighbors are gathering outside everybody's concern,
but no one's being brought out to that ambulance for treatment. Slowly, word is beginning to spread among the neighbors that kayleie Cogdal had been found dead.
When police arrived at a crime scene, they look for evidence of forced entry, and they didn't see any evidence of forced entry. That means that either somebody in the home had let the murderer in, or that the murder had been committed by somebody who was in the home at the time of the crime.
Kayley had not been sexually assaulted. Instead, she'd been smothered to death. The absence of any sexual attack meant that both Thomas and his mother, Melody were suspects. Now. At this point in the investigation, police had thought the time of death was about six to eight hours before the body had been discovered. Working back from eleven forty five, that would have placed the murder around three forty five to five forty five in the.
Morning, and because Thomas had said that he was awake, still reading a book at the time, suspicion began to focus on him.
The police bring both Melody and Thomas in for questioning later in the day, and it's melodies turn to go first. The mom Now, she's questioned at about four thirty pm for about an hour, and long story short, she denies doing anything to Kayley, and in fact spends most of that interview answering questions about Thomas. At the end of that interview, the end of the hour, she gives the
police permier to question Thomas. Now, this is interesting and problematic, right, I mean, Melody's a suspect as well as Thomas, and she's the one who is giving the police consent to question her son, the other suspect.
It's totally inappropriate.
But the police relied on that consent that they'd gotten from Melody, from Thomas's mom, plowed ahead with questioning Thomas all by himself, no lawyer, no parent, no nothing, starting at about five thirty PM.
So Thomas, a twelve year old boy who had never had any contact with law enforcement, is left to fend for himself against seasoned homicide detectives.
All of the beginning of Thomas's interrogation is captured on videotape, And when you watch this tape, you see a small boy sitting in a chair at a table in a small room with no windows, no clock. Thomas is about to undergo about five hours of questioning at age twelve, by himself. Now, the first segment of this tape runs from about five thirty in the afternoon to sixty five, and it's hard to watch.
It's brutal. It literally gutted me and caused me to cry.
Exactly I mean. At first, Thomas keeps his cool. You can see the honor Roll student in him, trying to be the big man who helps the police. He calls his interrogators sir. He answers them quickly and politely. The only way you can tell he's nervous is by the way he's wringing his hands over and over again, almost non stop. But it gets awful, and it gets awful quickly. The police start out by telling Thomas that he has to choose between incriminating himself and incriminating his own mother.
In the bottom line on me is nobody broke in that house last night. There's no indication of any break here. So your sister died and there was only two people in the house that could have killed him. Okay, that's the only way he can.
Make boy, understand you or your mother. That's the only way it can be, boy, There ain't no other way. And again, did your mother kill her? Not that I know of. They say, why would you kill your sister? And he says, I wouldn't, but they've continued to press you had to have killed her, because if your mother didn't, that just leaves you that she had.
If your mother didn't, I just leave she. Thomas begins to cry, actually wail, and the sound of his high pitch wailing is what caused me the greatest distressed because it sounded almost like the way an animal would sound, a baby animal if their foot were caught in a bear trap or an animal trot. One of the detectives says to him, why are you crying, Thomas, And Thomas says, because you're accusing me of something I didn't do. He had the presence of mind to articulate exactly what he was feeling.
Is unbelievable from a twelve year old little and a twelve year old who had just gone through this this level of trauma. I mean to be that self aware. I'm crying because you're accusing me of something I didn't do.
And the detective he's not yelling, he's not screaming, but he's pressing the point it had to be you, boy.
So Thomas right is a smart kid. He's an Honoraal student, and you can see his mind starts spinning. He's trying to figure a way out of this horrific situation, and he asks the officers, is there any way I can prove to you that I didn't do this?
In no way want to okay, personally okay, A moment he woke me up.
Ahead my lap, and his idea for proving his own innocence is this heartbreakingly childlike idea. He fell asleep that night at five am with a book in his lap, and he tells the officers that if he had woken up and killed his sister, the book would have fallen off his lap and be on the floor of his bedroom. And he says, go back and look in my bedroom. You'll see that there's no book on the floor, which
proves I didn't do this. The officers reject this theory, right, and instead they tell Thomas he had no choice but to confess. You're going to have to tell us everything. Thomas keeps denying his guilt as the pressure is turned up dozens of times over and over. He tells him he didn't kill his sister, and of course it's the officer's job to cut through those denials to make him believe the case against him is rock solid to bring him down to that point of hopelessness. So they lie
to twelve year old Thomas. They lie, They say to him, their investigation is going to find his fingerprints on the plastic bag that was over Kaylee's head, and his fingerprints are going to be at a certain angle that somehow indicates that he had held the bag over his sister's head.
And then they offer inducements to get him to confess. Thomas, you're twelve years old. If you confess, we're here to help you and your mother, You've got to be flat honest with us so that we can help you. You're going to need some help to get rid of this guilt.
We're here to help you and your.
Mother, Okay, But you've got to be flat honest with us so we can help you. Okay. Return.
Oh, it's the help theme again versus punishment. We're here to help you, that's what we want to do, Temas.
And it's at this point during the interrogation that the officers introduce their theory of the crime. In other words, they start telling Thomas what it is they want him to say. Could it have been an accident? They asked Thomas, even though the crime is scene obviously indicates that what happened to Kayley was was clearly no accident, and Thomas, who's crying and scared out of his mind, says, this possibility and I don't, well, it's a possibility. It could
have been an accident. And I don't remember it.
Do you remember tomorrow?
You knows.
This goes on, Okay, it goes on for more than an hour, and by the end it culminates in this horrible ten minute segment where Thomas is left alone. The officers step out of the room, but the camera is still running, and he starts rocking back and forth in his seat and muttering to himself. It's like halfway distinguishable gibberish.
Nobody came, so I didn't do it?
Why she wanted to do it? Why mom wouldn't do this. She loves her daughter, doesn't she? She loves me. I didn't do it, that's the bottom line. But they don't believe me. Help. I'm scared.
We've seen cases where people are reduced to a place where they're crawled up in a fetal position on the floor from these tactics, and they're working their magic on Thomas.
I mean it's so hard to watch. This is psychological torture, and this moment, the emotional breakdown of Thomas, this is the moment when police decide to turn off the video camera.
There's no excuse for that. I think what they began to realize was that this was awful what they were recording on tape, and Thomas had reached a place where he was having a breakdown and he still would not confess to this crime. So they needed some time to try to work on him outside of the interrogation room with the.
Camera off exactly, and outside of this camera which was recording this trail of emotional destruction that would turn off any judge, any jury, any listener in America. So they turned off the camera for what they later called a break questioning r a break that ended up lasting about three and a half hours. Now, it's perfectly legal for them to turn off the camera, right That's the thing there was, and in fact, there still is no law in Arkansas requiring interrogations to be recorded in full.
We need to have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth of what happens in the interrogation room. We can't allow law enforcement officers to have the discretion on when depressed the stop button.
Later, when the state was prosecuting this case, it said that all that happened during this break was that the deputy prosecutor sat with Thomas while he had something to eat, right, And during that break, while he was eating, the prosecutor said that Thomas just spontaneously decided to blurt out a confession to killing his sister. Right, not being questioned, not being pressured, not being manipulated, not being lied to. He just blurts it out in the middle of eating this hamburger.
And this is a common refrain that we hear from law enforcement officers, the spontaneous confession. And why is it common? Well, if someone blurts out at confession without any prompting or persuasion by the police, police officers don't need to read them their miranda rights.
It's not until ten twenty pm that officers turn the video camera back on. We're back now in the same interrogation room with Thomas sitting in the same seat as in the earlier session. But what we now see and hear is a very different Thomas Coddle.
Right, Cole H, I am to actually feel good and good and you know, it's like a completely different person in that interrogation room. He is calm, he is cool, he is collected. He seems to be eager to want to help police officers. And it's as if someone presses the play button and he starts telling a story that involves and implicates him in his sister's death.
Exactly. He's almost cheerful while he's reciting the story, one that sounds really rehearsed and practiced. He tells a story in which Kaylee had been in her bed, apparently sleeping, and Thomas had tied her hands and feet to slower down. He says when she got out of bed, he didn't mean to hurt her, and then he described putting a plastic bag over her head, leaving the room, then going back and loosening it so that air could get in there.
But even this story, right, this confession to being involved in the death of his sister, it develops inconsistencies. The police have him go through it a second time, and this time they have him take out the part where it was an accident. On the second go round, Thomas said he put two bags on Kaylee's head because the first one had a hole in it, and he said he held the bags there until she started twitching. In this account, he says he tied her up after she was smothered.
You shit bags and one more bags?
Why did you used to because the other one had a hole in it? Okay, so she's charged.
You've gone. You've got these things to tie.
Her wrists and to tie her legs, and you.
Do that for fear that she's gonna wake up and come hurt you.
That's what you're telling us. Then what do you do?
And I turn onto TV as I said, leave home and go back to me, and then I false lea.
And it's this story, this concession, that leads to Thomas's arrest and being charged in juvenile court with his own sister's murder.
But it's still not quite the end of the story, because as soon as Thomas gives this strangely calm confession, the police bring in his mother, Melody.
They're probably hoping that Thomas is gonna confess to his mom and then they'll have another piece of evidence that they can use against Tom. But what does Thomas say, Well, he leans over and he whispers to his mother something that he's obviously trying to say without the camera picking it up. Thomas whispers to his mom not to worry, just go along with it. He didn't really do it
and they won't find his fingerprints on the bag. The interrogators want to know what he whispered to his mother, so they ask her when they have her alone again, what did he whisper to you?
Did he go along with what he said because he said.
He didn't do it and that y'all wouldn't find his fingerprints?
What does he mean? Thomas knows his fingerprints aren't on the bags that were found over his sister's head because he never touched those bags. He believes that the absence of his fingerprints will prove his confession false and set him free. And then he appears to think that, having done as he was told, after having confessed to the murder of his own sister, he's going to walk out
of that room and go to his cousin's house. Instead, police come back in place Thomas under arrest and charge him with the murder of his own sister.
So let's talk a little bit about Thomas's confession. One of the best ways to measure the reliability of a confession is to look at the evidence that corroborates it, and in Thomas's case, there was no corroboration linking Thomas to this crime. They took that cloth measuring tape and they sent it to the lab for DNA testing. Thomas's DNA wasn't on that cloth measuring tape. Instead, another male's DNA was on that tape. And the story didn't account
for other findings that the medical examiner had made. Caylee had bruising on her forehead, suggesting that there was some beating or some kind of a struggle before she had been killed, and Thomas's confession said nothing about a beating or a struggle.
There's such a lack of corroboration of Thomas's story and the psychological tactics that were used to extract this story, including fact feeding, including threats and promises. This confession bears so many red flags. But let's talk for a minute though, about that three and a half hour period when the
video camera was turned off. I mean, you look at this and it just stinks to high heaven when they press that stop button and then somehow Lo and Behold come back with a confession and a completely different child. What happened during that time. How did Thomas turn from this panicked child having an emotional breakdown to a cool, calm, confident, confessed murderer.
To hear it from Thomas, this was no spontaneous outburst suggesting that he was guilty the whole time. This was part of an interrogation process that actually was ramped up during that three and a half hour period.
Thomas has said that the interrogation continued after he had that emotional breakdown and was taken out of the room that off camera, the police had continued telling him that it was either going to be you or your mother, and that he needed to stand up and be a man and admit what he did and if he did then he'd be able to go home. Right That's why he later thought he was going to be able to go back to his cousin's house after confessing to the
murder of his own sister. And Thomas also told his court appointed psychologist that they told him that if he didn't confess, he a twelve year old, would be charged as an adult and could get the death penalty.
Or his mother could get the death penalty if he didn't confess, because there are only two people who could have been guilty of this crime, Thomas or his mother.
So we have these two different stories of what happened during this three and a half hour period. Off camera, the prosecutor says Thomas is eating and he spontaneously confesses. But to Thomas has a story of continuing pressure, continuing manipulation, all occurring off camera. So how do we weigh those
two accounts well. During Thomas's break in questioning Melody, the mom is reinterviewed a second time on video camera, and during that second interview of Melody, you can hear a loud, deep male voice yell Thomas, I'm not going to ask you again. Thomas is being questioned. That much is really clear, and he's being yelled at. That horrible process that we saw earlier is still happening just off camera.
Thomas is convicted despite the heroic efforts of a very good attorney who Laura and I met for the first time in this case. Thomas's attorney was a public defender named Dorsey Corbin.
My name is Dorsey Corbin, and I represented Thomas Cogdaal from seven months after he was charged with murder until the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on May six, twenty ten.
She had challenged the confession aggressively before trial and lost, and she had tried this case very effectively.
Confessions are one of the most powerful forms of evidence, and it can be incredibly hard to unwind these cases. After the fact, eighty one percent of false confessors who took their case to trial were convicted even though they were factually innocence of these crimes.
Okay, can I talk about things that don't make sense in this whole case. The police, they originally thought that Kaylee must have died somewhere between two thirty or three thirty, and that was the time frame that Thomas used in his confession. Lividity is the process which after death, your blood settles because of basically gravity. So if you're laying on your back, you're going to have red marks on the back where the blood settles. The medical exammeinter tests
that lividity stops after six to eight hours. However, the pictures taken at the crime scene at twelve oh two pm in the afternoon and at one fifty in the afternoon showed continuing lividity, the time of death being six to eight hours before two pm. In the afternoon, is well after the time Thomas had gone to sleep, and the police never made him change that part of his story. He didn't do this in his sleep and somehow managed to leave no fingerprints, no DNA. It just didn't happen
at the hands of Thomas. The judge had heard all of the evidence from the very beginning, but the.
Power of the confession again was so strong that the juvenile court judge believed the confession.
Very few people can understand how or why anyone would admit to a crime they didn't commit.
So Thomas has sent off to a juvenile detention facility in Texarkana, where he was sentenced to stay there until his eighteenth birthday. Dorsey Corbin, meanwhile, his public defender, continued fighting his case. She took Thomas's case to the Arkansas Court of Appeals and argued about the confession there lost, and then she decided to take the case to the
Arkansas Supreme Court. And that's when we got involved. When we first heard about Thomas's case, it was right when we were getting ready for Brendan Dassi's post conviction hearing in Manitoba, Wisconsin, and we reached out to Dorsey Corbin, and when she learned that the Arkansas Supreme Court had agreed to hear Thomas's case, she asked us to file
an amicus brief. Write a brief from experts explaining the problem of false confessions and explaining how kids like Thomas are more likely to falsely confess than adults, believe it or not. When you're in the part of the appeals process called a direct appeal, you can't file it based
on whether the confession is true or false. Instead, the only argument that you can make is whether the confession was coerced or forced, and whether there were any problems with the way in which police read the defendant his Miranda rights. These are the right to remain silent, the right to have a lawyer with you during questioning.
The defendant has to knowingly and intelligently waive his Miranda rights. So if the suspect, because of his or her vulnerabilities, doesn't understand those rights, that's another way to attack the confession.
What was Dorsey doing in this case? For Thomas? Here we have a twelve year old in the interrogation room who's being told that he has a constitutional right to silence and a lawyer, all these difficult concepts. They tell him he has these rights and then they ask him, do you agree to waive these rights?
Well, you sign a waiver. And this is where inquisitiveness saved the day for Thomas. The detective asks him to sign a waiver, and Thomas said, what's a waiver? You know, a waiver is a legal term exactly. You know, every time you go bungee jumping, you have to sign a waiver to protect the business from getting sued.
Here's Thomas about to go off the cliff, right, I mean a different kind of cliff.
So the detective freezes and he's never been asked that question.
He says, well, this simply states that what you were doing, you were doing of your own free will. That's not what a waiver means. That that's not what it means
to give up your rights. This is the issue that Dorsey Corbyn, Thomas's lawyer, brought before the Arkansas Supreme Court, and it was the issue that we supported her with by writing an amicus brief that not only talks about how insane it is the twelve year olds like Thomas are allowed to waive their constitutional rights without any adult advising them, but that also highlighted all of the reasons why this confession we thought was not worth the tape it was recorded on, and it worked.
The Arkansas Supreme Court held that the detective's explanation of what a waiver was was wrong, and that as a result, Thomas did not knowingly and intelligently wave his Miranda rights. The confession was out and the conviction was overturned.
It angers me so much that police officers lie to children, isolate children, and do all the terrible things that they did to Thomas in this interrogation, and God only knows what they did to him for the three and a half hours that they didn't bother to put the tape on.
Because he was an honor roll student, he wanted to make sure he understood this new he hadn't heard before waiver. That's what freed him. How many other Thomas Cogdals are there out there, children twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, who were interrogated in just this way, but who didn't have that moment of good fortune in a way to be able to ask what a word means, As.
The captain of the police force said at the time of trial, had we known at the interview. What we know now, we would have conducted the interview differently. That speaks volumes. They focused in on Thomas, they had tunnel vision, and their sole goal was to get a confession out of a scared twelve year old boy. Congratulations, they did it.
No one else has ever been charged with the murder of Kaylee Cogdal.
Thomas deserves closure, and equally importantly, Thomas's sister deserves justice.
Melody never confessed to this crime. And the bottom line is police and prosecutors made a judgment that there wasn't enough evidence pointing to an alternative suspect. We weren't there on the scene. We can't tell you what the evidence on the scene shoulder who had pointed to. But what we do know is that Thomas's confession is false. Two weeks or so after the Arkansas Supreme Court, throughout his conviction, Thomas was free living with his grandparents.
When he was younger, his mother had taken Thomas and his sister to the Department of Human Services and basically said, here, take these kids. I can't deal with them anymore. I suspect that when Thomas came back he felt somewhat of a burden to be more of a caretaker for both his mother and for his sister after the murder.
I think it was very.
Important for Thomas to live with people who would take care of him, nurture him, and love him. He found that with his grandparents, and they were so very happy to have him their home.
Despite the ordeal of trial and conviction, everything that Thomas went through after he was released, he still had dreams. He wants to be an astronomer, and he wants to go where people don't know him. Thomas, wherever you are, we wish you all the best.
My friend and Dorsey, thank you so much for allowing us to play a role in this case.
It's a great honor to be able to work with people like Dorsey to fight for the freedom of kids like Thomas. But there are larger questions here. What can we do to prevent these kinds of cases from happening again?
What kinds of reforms are needed. One of the laws that Steve has been fighting for is a law requiring lawyers in the interrogation room for kids like Thomas, not allowing them to give up their rights to a lawyer, but rather insisting that they have someone there by their side to advise.
Them, and they need help in understanding what the Mirianda warnings are and understanding what the consequence witz are of giving them up. That's why you need lawyers to be an advocate for that child in the interrogation room.
Thanks for listening to Thomas Cogdell's story. Next week, we'll take you to a small farmtown in Nebraska that was racked by a double murder, a false confession, and a surprising twist that sounds like it's right out of a Tarantino movie. Until then, thanks for listening. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is the production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Flamm and the team at Signal Company
number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura Nyrider and you.
Can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction