Hey there, it's Laura and I writer. I'm here with an update on a case we shared with you back in season one of False Confessions. The subject is Peter Riley, whose really unusual case marks the starting point of the modern movement to expose false confessions. It's a case that's had a profound impact on my own work and the work of my co host, Steve Drissen. Now, the case of Peter Riley is in some ways a classic false confession story. It involves a young and vulnerable suspect, questionable
police tactics, and a series of investigative errors. But in other ways this case stands out is pretty odd. Perhaps most noticeably, the famous playwright Arthur Miller became Peter's champion. He raised the profile of the case and raised the funds for Peter's bail and defense. Arthur Miller wrote powerfully about the phenomenon of false confessions, invoking Galileo and even the subject of his famous play The Crucible, bring national attention.
To the issue.
It's in that spirit that Steve and I continue our work today, both in the course of justice and the courts of public opinion. Welcome to wrongful conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer, and I'm Steve Drisen. Today we're going to tell you our last story of season one. It's about Peter Riley, one of the first modern day false confessors. In nineteen seventy three, police interrogated eighteen year old Peter until he started to believe he was guilty
of murdering his own mother. But Peter's friends and neighbors believed in his innocence. Their small town campaign for Peter's freedom was eventually joined by a host of big name celebrities. Peter's story helped launch the movement against wrongful convictions and false confessions. It inspires the work that Steve and I do to this day.
You know, the Peter Riley case was my baptism in the world of false confessions. When I learned about Peter's case, it was really the first time that I even knew that it was possible for police officers, through their tactics, to get an innocent person to confess to a crime they didn't commit. And I was fascinated by it.
I know the feeling for me. It was thirty years later when I watched those takes of Brendan Dacy's false confession. It's so easy to get hooked by these stories, these people, and you can't walk away.
Peter Riley was about five or six years older than me, but we grew up in the same era in terms of the kind of music that we liked. Peter was very into classic rock, Pink Floyd, Jethro Toll and Peter wore his hair long, very much in the same way that I wore my hair, so I felt a connection to Peter. I lived in a community not unlike Peter's, where people knew each other through Little League or the boy Scouts, where mothers watched out for each other's kids.
And the more I learned about Peter's story, the more I began to understand that what happened to Peter very easily could have happened to me. In addition to these connections that I found with Peter, this was a case in a part of the country which was the birthplace of false confessions in the United States, the Salem witch Trials. It sent me on an exploration, a lifelong exploration, to try to figure out why it is that people would confess to crimes they didn't commit.
Peter's story begins in Falls Village, Connecticut, a tiny community of five hundred people that's part of a larger town called Canaan. If you've been to New England, Falls Village is pretty classic, complete with rivers, horse farms, and covered bridges. It's the kind of place where no one locks their doors, where everyone looks out for each other. In September nineteen seventy three, leaves were turning color across Connecticut, and eighteen year old Peter Riley had just begun his senior year
of high school. Peter was a skinny kid, just over one hundred pounds and an uninspired student whose real love was his rock band. He lived in Falls Village in a small cottage, just him and his mom, Barbara Gibbons. Now, for lack of a better phrase, Barbara was the town eccentric. She was highly educated, well read, and well traveled. But she was also a single mother, which was a big deal in nineteen seventy three, and she was a heavy drinker.
She had a reputation as someone who always spoke her mind, even if it rubbed some people the wrong way. But in Peter's eyes, his mother was someone brilliant who loved and protected him, just like he loved and stood up for her. It was the two of them against the world. On the evening of Friday, September twenty eighth, Peter attends a youth group meeting at the local church. He leaves at about nine thirty pm and drives home, but when he walks in the door, his world is turned upside down.
His mother is lying mostly unclothed on the bedroom floor. Her throat's been cut so deeply she's nearly decapitated, and she's been stabbed and beaten so badly that both of her thigh bones are broken. Peter freezes, His instinct warns him not to disturb the scene by touching the body. Instead, he grabs the phone and makes a series of calls to paramedics, hospitals, and doctors. A hospital worker calls the police, and the cops show up within minutes. When the police arrive,
Peter's in shock. He's just discovered his mother dead. But the officers think Peter's being too calm, and they begin to suspect him. They take him into a neighbor's home and strip searcheim. They're looking for scratches, cuts, bruises, any indication that Peter had taken part in a brutal struggle, but they find nothing. Peter's wearing jeans, a brown T shirt, and gold sneakers, and a witness from the church confirms
that Peter's been wearing the same clothes all night. The police examination finds no blood anywhere on his body, clothing, or shoes, but the cops are still suspicious. They question Peter in the back seat of a squad car. Then they take him down to the station and hold him over an Peter doesn't sleep at all, but the next morning he has the presence of mind to ask for
a polygraph. The police give him one, but they tell him that he failed the test, and when Peter's told that he failed, he begins to doubt his own memory because he believes polygraphs are infallible. Before too long, Peter begins to wonder whether he might have killed his mother but somehow doesn't remember it now, believe it or not, police record the interrogation on an old reel to reel machine, even though they weren't legally required to do so in
nineteen seventy three. On tape, they egg Peter on and suggest that he might have amnesia they tell him sometimes when people commit these crimes, the memories are so traumatic that people repress them, and Peter Riley starts believing that he might be a murderer. I believe I did it now, he tells the police. But I don't remember.
Peter says, over and over again, we got to keep digging, digging, digging to get this information out of me. Because he wants to know what this information.
Is, he asks the police for truth serum, and at another point he even says, can you pound this out of me? The police praise Peter for being willing to admit he might be guilty. They tell him, we're not here to punish you. Maybe you'll go to a mental hospital for three months. Peter begins to feel like he's bonding with his interrogators, like they're all working together to fill in the blanks in his memory, and eventually their teamwork succeeds. Peter had a straight razor at home, a
small blade that he used to make model airplanes. After hours of questioning, he eventually says that he could have used that razor to attack his mom. He adds that he could have broken her legs by jumping on them. In other words, he gives what we now call a persuaded false confession.
These are a special subspecies of false confessions that are relatively rare, And what happens in these cases is the police interrogation tactics themselves cause a suspect to begin to doubt their own memory, and the suspect is persuaded that he or she must have committed the crime but can't remember it, and the interrogation becomes an exercise in reconstructing the suspect's memories of the crime. But the memories aren't real, they're confabulations.
Peter's confabulated story isn't realistic. A small razor wasn't capable of inflicting deep wounds like those on Barbara's neck, and Peter was one hundred and ten pound weekly there's no way he could have broken his mother's thigh bones just by jumping on them. But police ignore those problems. After all, they've got a confession. By the end of the interrogation, Peter starts realizing that he has no family left.
You're talking about someone who has just lost the only family member in his life. Peter never knew his father. His mother has now been murdered, they live alone in this small cottage, and he's thinking that he's gotten nowhere to go, and.
So Peter asks his interrogator, is there any chance that you might take me in? I wouldn't want to impose, he adds, I'll do work around the house. I really would love to live with a family.
I've never seen that before. Just a complete dependence on one's interrogator and a complete sort of loss of understanding of the fact that this person is his adversary.
It's hard to imagine anything more purely fucked up.
It's the most disturbing thing about this interrogation.
But Peter doesn't get to go live with the cops, even though he's done everything they asked. Instead, he's arrested and booked into jail. Once Peter is away from his interrogator's influence, he immediately realizes he didn't actually kill anyone, and he recants his confession, but it's too late. On September twenty ninth, nineteen seventy three, Peter Riley is charged with the murder of his own mother. Barbara's murder and
Peter's arrest shook falls village to its core. Everyone was following this track, including one residence who would go on to become an important figure in Peter's story.
My name is Donald Connery. Well, one thing I can claim for some distinction is that I probably am the only foreign correspondent who ever made a complete career shift overnight from reporting international affairs to investigating the criminal justice system.
Don Connery was an esteemed journalist, and the last thing on his mind was the subject of false confessions. But this murder was big news in this small town, and you couldn't help but be drawn into it. He began to start looking into the case himself and later wrote a book about the case that was an absolutely essential text about what happened to Peter Riley.
Don Connery's in his nineties. But in nineteen seventy three, he had just moved to Falls village with his wife and kids, and.
I thought, this was a terrible event which will play out and will have nothing to do with me, except that the accused eighteen year old was a friend and classmate of my children who went to the regional high school, and Peter was someone they talked about or knew about.
Now, something extraordinary happens after Peter's arrest is announced. Remember, people in this tiny town know Peter Riley and they like him.
This was in the age before social media, where communities were much more connected in a sense. They met each other through clubs, extracurricular activities at schools, church groups, boy Scouts, and the entire community knew who Peter was. From these various essential parts of the social fabric of Falls village.
Peter's arrest leads to a groundswell of support. Everyone starts defending his innocence.
After reading the initial stories. My younger children, Carol and Julie kept saying Peter couldn't possibly have done this.
The mothers of his high school classmates form a group called Canaan Mothers, and they hold bake sales to raise money so that Peter can get released on bond before his trial. Some families even put their houses up as security. It was incredible mothers supporting the accused mother killer.
They wanted to do everything in their power to help him.
My kids said, and other neighbors said, you know, we don't think this is possible. There's no reason to think that he had any cause to harm his mother. And the word was in the community that yes, Peter. It confessed that nobody could under then why he would admit to something he didn't do, but their protests caught the attention of the media.
A reporter named Joan Bartel hears about how the town of Falls Village is rallying behind an accused murderer. She listens to Peter's interrogation tapes and writes an explosive article in a magazine called New Times. The article questions Peter's guilt and includes many excerpts from his interrogation, exposing the CoP's manipulation of Peter. People around the state are horrified to read about a teenage boy made to believe that
he killed his own mother. Donations flow in to the Canaan mothers, and soon enough money is raised for Peter to post bond fifty thousand dollars. He's released and moves in with one of his friend's families. Peter Riley is welcomed back into the Falls Village community.
This so called killer went straight back to high school to complete his senior year, and it didn't seem to worry parents or teachers of the principal, who in fact supported him.
One of the things that attracted reporters to this case, including Don Connery was the idea that in order for these people to embrace Peter, they had to understand or at least believe that this confession was false. And here they are taking this suspected, confessed murderer into their own homes or being willing to do so, and to raise money for him, and to advocate for him and to fight for him. That's remarkable.
Peter Riley was free on bond, but prosecutors were moving forward with his trial anyway.
The community was confident that the trial in nineteen seventy four would quickly lead to an acquittal. He would be found innocent.
But on April twelfth, nineteen seventy four, Good Friday, Peter Riley was convicted of killing his own mother.
It was a bombshell when the jury decided almost entirely in the basis of the confession, so called confession, that he was guilty, and he was sentenced to six to sixteen years from manslaughter and driven off at high speed to the high security penitentiary.
Even though he'd just been convicted of murder, Peter only spent a few hours in prison. Amazingly, a court ruled that he could stay free during his appeal. As long as he posted an additional bond ten thousand more dollars. His village raised the extra money and Peter was freed.
But now Peter needed to pay for an appeal, and that would cost more than the Canaan mothers could raise, so that reporter from New Times, Joan Bartel, sent the article she wrote about Peter's case to another Connecticut resident, the famous playwright Arthur Miller.
Arthur Miller was my favorite playwright. I remember reading all of his plays in high school in the nineteen seventies Death of the Salesman all my sons. I liked him not only because his plays moved me. I liked him because he was a public figure that cared deeply about justice. He was a playwright with a conscience.
The Crucible, probably Miller's greatest play, had been motivated in part by the false accusations that went on in Salem and Massachusetts three hundred years ago, when twenty one people were falsely accused of satanic activities and either hung or in one case of being crushed to death executed. And Miller also personally had faced the House of American Activities
Committee accused of being a communist or worse. So he had every reason to that this is something that he should put right, and he invested a great deal of his time to do that.
Arthur Miller read Jones article. He was appalled by the tragedy of Peter's confession, and he began to take a leading role in Peter's fight for vindication. Miller recruited other a list celebrities to donate money to Peter's defense, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Art Garfunkel, Candice Bergen, William Steyren, Mike Nichols, even Elizabeth Taylor. Pretty Soon a powerful coalition of voices was gathering steam.
Overnight. There was a remarkable amount of energy behind the effort to free Peter as soon as possible from what everyone, at least in Litchfield County saw as a wrongful conviction.
The first thing Peter needed was a lawyer to handle his appeal. Arthur Miller recruited Roy Daily, a former federal prosecutor, and as Roy started preparing Peter's appeal, Miller worked to raise the public profile of the case. The New York Times featured a two part series about Peter on the front page. Not long afterwards, sixty Minutes covered the story too. Meanwhile, Peter's legal team pressed his case in court. Eventually a hearing was held to determine whether to grant him a
new trial. Arthur Miller personally recruited some world renowned experts to testify. At that hearing, a forensic pathologist testified that if Peter had actually killed his mom, it would have been impossible for him to clean all the blood off his body and clothing before the police arrived. The pathologist also testified that there's no way one hundred and ten pound kid could break a woman's thigh bones by jumping on them, and a psychologist testified that Peter was suggestible
and easily manipulated by authority figures. In other words, he was highly vulnerable to giving a false confession. This hearing took down both the medical evidence against Peter and his confession, and.
It led to a verdict by George Speziale that a bus carriage of justice had happened in his own courtroom, and he said that Peter deserved a new trial.
It was March twenty fifth, nineteen seventy six, a little more than two and a half years after Peter lost his mom. Peter was granted a new trial, but the prosecutor who'd convicted him was up in arms. He believed Peter was guilty and vowed to take him to trial again, but that didn't end up happening.
He delayed to a point where he dropped dead on a golf course.
The prosecutor passed away of a heart attack at age fifty four, so a new prosecutor, a young man named Dennis Santour, takes over, and as he digs into the case files, he finds a piece of evidence that had never been disclosed to Peter's defense team. A police officer and his wife had reported seeing Peter in downtown Canaan the night of the murder as he was driving home from his church youth group. They'd seen him only a few minutes before Peter arrived home, found his mother's body,
and started calling for help. It was an air tight alibi. Those few minutes didn't give Peter enough time to drive home and kill his mother before making those phone calls.
Well, this was a so called exculpatory evidence which should have been turned over to the state and then to the courts, and once it was revealed, it took only weeks before Peter Riley was fully exonerated.
The state of Connecticut formally dropped all charges on November twenty fourth, nineteen seventy six. Peter Riley's name was officially cleared. After Peter's exoneration, the state police never found Barbara's real killer and continued to insist that Peter was guilty.
The case went into the legal annals as a classic false confession tragedy, and it was a prime example of these systems on willingness to admit error in most of these controversial cases.
Don Connery eventually wrote a book about the case, Guilty until Proven Innocent, and he continued writing about cases of wrongful conviction.
After the Peter Riley case, don Conry became his own one man journalistic innocence project. He began taking cases in Connecticut and investigating them and writing about them, and he also began taking false confession cases from outside of Connecticut as well.
Meanwhile, to add insult to injury, Connecticut police actually stopped recording interrogation after Peter's case. Peter's interrogation tapes had made them look bad, and they didn't want to look bad again. It wasn't until twenty thirteen that Connecticut adopted a law requiring interrogations to be recorded, and who testified before the state legislature in support of that bill Peter Riley.
Peter said, Look, we shouldn't let law enforcement officers get away with not recording interrogations, because what it does is it makes it impossible for people like me to explain to a jury or to the general public how it is that I was made to confess to killing my own mother. Peter was a powerful advocate for recording, and his testimony was critical on getting the bill passed in twenty thirteen.
Most importantly, Peter Riley's case woke the world up to the problem of false confessions. This injustice was a rallying cry for so many people, including Steve and me. Peter's story epitomizes the profound humanity in so many wrongful conviction cases, from the tragedy of the crime, to the ugliness of false accusation, to the defendant's struggle and perseverance, to the good people like Arthur Miller and the Canaan mothers who
fight for the truth no matter what. In nineteen ninety five, the very first conference about False Confessions took place in Hartford, Connecticut. Don Connery organized it, and the people who'd helped exonerate Peter Riley spoke. Since then, hundreds of confessions had been proven false around the country and were just getting started.
At the Hartford conference, Arthur Miller said at one point that the record of mankind is full of confessions of events that either never happened.
Or to which the accused had little or no connection. After all, even Galileo confessed that the sun and all the stars revolved around the motionless earth. Rather than face the wrath of the Church, which for centuries had taught the opposite. Confronted with great power against which one has only a fragile defense, confession can begin to look like the door to freedom. Confession can very readily turn into a kind of coin with which to buy one's way
out of a frightening and painful situation. How then I will eat to indict the criminal? Is there a good substitute for confession as the mainstay of a prosecution case? For starters, I would suggest evidence.
Wise words. We're not there yet, mister Miller. We're not there yet, but we're getting closer every day.
Hello Peter Howard, and High State do them pretty good.
It's really great to talk to you. What's your life like these days?
While I'm sixty five, so I'm retired at this point, which just means I come up with a whole lot of work for myself that.
Don't get paid for it.
I'm still an avid musician. I play every day. It's been something I've done since I saw the Beatles on that Sullivan, so it's been a long time. I just play a lot of music. I do what's positive for me these days, and that's pretty much it. What's your favorite song to play? I don't know anything by the Alma Brothers.
You know, Steve and I are two lawyers who have the honor of standing up in courts and fighting for people we believe in. But we're also trying to change the world here.
From the very beginning of my study of false confessions, I have gone out into the world and to inform people about what I've learned.
For the first ten years that I did this work, we went around the country trying to convince anybody who would listen that false confessions even existed, that this happened at all. And suddenly there's been this explosion of interest in understanding that false confessions can happen to anyone, that they could happen to you, they could happen to me, and to see the urgency for reform that hearing these stories produces. It's a sea change, and it's a very very welcome sea change.
When I got started in this work in nineteen ninety five, there were only two states that required electronic recording of interrogations, and now they're twenty seven. There should be fifty. We are getting to a point where I think that will happen in my lifetime. So in addition to electronic recording, one of the goals that Laura and I have is to actually change the way in which police officers gate suspects.
I think that when people hear stories of grave injustice, there's a human need to identify the bad guy, and in some cases there are very clear bad guys. Police have physically abused suspects, police have tortured suspects, But in some cases police officers are following training that they don't know is problematic. That's where I see we can make a lot of change. Many other countries have developed new interrogation techniques that you don't have to use lies. You
don't have to use false promises. You certainly don't have to use fact feeding.
One of the most exciting developments recently has been the creation of these conviction integrity units in prosecutors' offices.
When prosecutors are interested in actually doing real justice instead of just closing cases, everything changes.
One of the things that's always excited me about this work is that we get to rewrite history. When we exonerate somebody, we get to change their life narrative. That's part of what we're trying to do with this podcast is not only tell these stories, but change the legacies of the people who falsely confessed.
You're taking this false story that they've told about themselves and you have to change it to a true story, a story of innocence.
In the wake of making a murderer, which certainly put both Laura and I on the map in a way that no other television show or radio show or victory in court had done. I felt like we had an obligation to speak out on these issues that we care so deeply about. I guess I was channeling Arthur Miller. I mean, I could see Donald Connery saying I knew Arthur Miller. You're no Arthur Miller, but we had the opportunity to tell these stories, and I think we as lawyers have an obligation to do that.
You know, you don't have to be a lawyer to see the injustice here. You just have to be someone with a conscience. These are stories of great tragedy. They grip people, these stories unsettle people, and they move people to make change. This is a movement that draws from all walks of life, from ordinary folks who want to channel their outrage into action, to those with a powerful public platform, artists, musicians, writers, actors. We saw this in
the Peter Riley case with Arthur Miller. We saw it in the West Memphis three case with Peter Jackson, Johnny Depp, Eddie Vetter, Natalie Mains, and we see it today with Brendan Dacy's case and all the people who are rallying around him. These kinds of movements built on real people. They're unstoppable, and we're not going to stop until we can bring Brendon Dacy on this podcast as a free man. Conviction False Confessions is a 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. Special thanks to Jogi Hammer for additional script editing and for wrangling and writing like a mad woman. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura.
Nywriter and you can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
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