How to Detect Deception with Susan Constantine

out over this thing. It was all the buzz. So she was standing in her front yard showing everybody. Now, she wouldn't let anybody touch it, but she would let us look at it, and you know, we were just captivated by it. A little while later, you know, we all went on our separate ways and I'm standing in my driveway just shooting baskets at the basketball goal, and she walks up and she says, hey, do you want him?

And she had the pet rock in the little crate and I was like what, and she said, yeah, you can have him, and I went yes, And then she cracked up laughing and said, hey, it's not a lie. I had my fingers crossed behind my back and then she's scurried off like the rat she was. And I'm telling you, that's the first time in my life I

had really felt just boon swaggled. I was like, how in the world would you just walk up to somebody who was minding their own business light of them, and then what is this thing about fingers crossed behind your back? It's somehow not a lie. So I went in the house and of course told my sister Shelley, who said, what now, Like she was so mad. She always had my back, still does, and she said, don't you worry about that pet rock. We got pets of our own

and they fly. Well, I didn't know what she was talking about, but she wanted to take some tomatoes and get them back by throwing tomatoes at their house. That's a whole nother podcast, But I'm just telling you, people will lie, and people will have excuses for lying, and people will have these little ways of getting out of it really being a lie. There is nobody better to help us navigate this than the human light detector. Susan Constantine.

She literally wrote the book The Complete Idiot's Guide to

Reading Body Language. You've seen her on Doctor Phil, CNN, Nancy Grace, Good Morning America. She is renowned. She is revered with her expertise in body language. She even developed a unique way that she detects deception. She uses a combination of human behavior analysis, statement analysis, and voice stress analysis to identify deception, and she does it using three separate experts at the same time, so she knows if all three of them agree that there is deception, she

would stake her reputation on it. She has worked with government officials, politicians, law firms, corporations, and celebrities. She has over a thousand hits on TV, print media, and radio. Susan Welcome, Welcome, design Saven.

So he goes over to introduce hisself while I'm finishing up, and as y'all are talking, I walk up and I said, yeah, isn't this unbelievable. She can tell whether you're telling the truth in seven seconds. Well, Huck turns to me and goes, what, And I said, yeah, she's a line expert deception. He went, I thought you meant she was a line like the King of the Jungle expert. I said, baby, why would a line expert the King of the Jungle line be here? He goes, I didn't know. I figured Tiger King. Maybe

they had broadened it. He goes, but listen, you need to make somebody aware that. You can't just have me walk up to somebody and start talking and she's gonna know if I'm lying within seven seconds. And I said, you're at crime con and these are all experts. Why would you lie to any of them? And he said, I don't know. I'm a man, she's a beautiful woman. A lie I could come up.

It's just adorable. And you know, again, I appreciate you taking time with both of my children, Carolina and Huck and giving them some of the you know, skills and understanding. Hey, y'all go read this book. Y'all take this online class, because if you can read body language and understand statement analysis in this business, it will serve you. Well.

these prejudgments. In fact, when I'm doing training classes, Cheryl, I raise I have people raise their hands as how many of you think you're really good at detecting deception? And all these people will raise their hands and it's really interesting because really fifty people at most people at fifty percent are best are able to really read people. But what they're really doing is they're their fault. They're

making some judgments about people and reading body language. And at the level that I do it, and I know you do too as well, Cheryl, it's a learned skill. It's not a gut feeling. It's you have to really do your your work and then test it down in

the field to make sure that you're accurate. And one of the things that you pointed out was that the methodology that I use, which is a three prong test, and it just made perfect sense to me that if a person was being deceptive and you can pick it up in their nonverbals or their behavioral behavioral analysis, you should be able to hear it in the vocal tremors through voice stress analysis, and it should show up in

the language. So that's where I pulled that together, because we are we have multiple channels of communication, both verbal and nonverbal. When you're lying nonverbally, are lying, and you'll see it in the nonverbals, and you also see it in the verbals and in the language and bingo. It really works and it increases the level of validity therefore gives you a little bit more positivity that the person could be lying to at a higher level of accuracy.

you're doing it is just brilliant. But before we go any further, I want people to hear how you got

into this business, because honey, it's not only unique, it is unbelievable.

But they were the strong little Baptist family, and so I felt safe going over there. And they had a nice house and his parents, her parents were great. But

my mom said, I don't know, I don't like you going over there. It seems like a bad part of town. And I'm going, oh, Mom, you know it's VICKI. They're a nice family, et cetera, et cetera. So she says, well, I'm going to tell you I don't like it, but you know, just be careful and you know, look out. So I did. So we went over there. I went over there, and we went over to a babysit at a girl's house around the corner. She had a four

year old son, and you know, nothing unusual. And my girlfriend, out of nowhere, literally Eryl out of nowhere, looks at me. She goes, if you were if somebody were to come in here and kill us, do you know, if you'd go to heaven? And I was like, oh, dear God, all I could think about was going back home.

invited to go babysit again. And when we went over to go babysit again, we got a phone call right before we're supposed to go over there and the lady says, don't bother coming over, and my date stood me up, and so we didn't go. We were all bummed out. And of course, you know, making fifty cents an hour babysitting was our roller skating money, right, so that was like big bucks for us. And we were really disappointed.

And it was in the summertime, so we're sitting on the porch and then up come drives up at dusk, this white man and it had carpet acres written on the side of it. And this guy gets out of the van after he parks right in front of my friend's house, peels off down the street and he's looking inside these cars and he's kind of jiggling in the door knobs and everything, and I'm like, just something on my hair. Stood, I'm going a danger, danger, danger, you know. So I got up and I went in the house

and peering outside the windows, and then he kind of disappears. Well, to top it all off, at the end of the street ends up being a graveyard. So I'm just trying to set the scene for you in Zone seven. So anyway disappears and then out of nowhere, I mean it must have been a half hour or so, maybe forty five minutes, this guy comes running out between the house, my house, a friend's house, in the house next door, and it's that guy. So he stops at the back

of the van. He looks right over at me because we're literally only feet apart. See this guy, He sees me, and then he opens up the back of the van, throws something in it, and then peers off down the street. Well, it didn't take very long after that that we ended up seeing helicopters flying overhead, and remember the graveyard iss just houses away, taking these big, huge spotlights and going through the neighborhood, and then policemen were walking police dogs,

and he said, hey, have you kids seen anything? And I said, well, guy, I saw this guy. He had you know, described him totally. His hair is what was written on the van. You know what he was doing, his body language, you know how he was acting very suspicious, and we said, what happened? She says, He says, a woman was just murdered around the corner. It was the house we were babysitting for. So anyway, it was the lady were babysitting for. So the story is that she

was a bookkeeper for carpet acres. The boyfriend was trying to get her to embezzle money from this company because it was a parent owned company and he was one of the sons, and she wouldn't do it, and so he got ticked off and he came on to her, strangled her, and then decided to kill her. And he killed her with twenty one times with a pairing knife. So even to this day, Cheryl, I will not leave a knife out on my counter. So I had to testify court. I was one of the primary witnesses and

had to testify. And you can imagine how that was at fifteen years old.

And here's how it began, Cheryl is that I I started off as doing image consulting for attorneys, and I got a certificate for executive image consulting and I ended up reading a after I graduated, reading an article about a public defender that were ward warping their clients for trial, and I thought, wow, this is kind of cool. I

don't think anybody ever thought about this before. And it just so happened that my mother had a nonprofit organization for people that have gone through personal tragedy, and we had an entire clothing center. So I pitched an idea to the public Defender's office and then loaded up the truck and went down there, and I said, I pitched the idea to the public Defender's office the very same courthouse where George Zimmerman was tried and convicted, I mean

not convicted, but was where the trial was. So anyway, I had a clothing center in there, and then the attorneys would reach out to me and have me wardrobe and start to coach some of their clients based on what I learned in that course. But that was only the beginning. And then the public defender, one of them took interested in meet Jeffrey Leichel and said, Hey, I would love for you to come and watch me pick a jury. Maybe you can just watch and analyze the

people or the potential jurors. So I said, you think I would be good at that? Because I don't think

you'd be good at I think you'd be fabulous at it.

jury selection. So anyway, I told him what I was doing, and they thought that was pretty cool, and I said, well, I think what you guys are doing pretty cool, And before you know it, I'm hired now as the Florida area manager as a trial consultant. And the trainer who trained me did the I did the retrial for the Andrea Yates case, the retrial for where she was found guilty by reason of insanity. So anyway, that's what I

did for quite a long time. And then during that time I went back to college and both of my two kids and I were all going to school at the same time. I was in my early forties and I went to you know, went back to college. I got my master's degree in psychology, all the while getting multiple certifications and everything you can imagine from investigative interview into statement analysis, to micro expression training to criminal intelligence training, you name it, and I still continue. I mean it

is an ongoing process. So I got pretty well known for what I was doing, and then out of nowhere, I got a phone call from a reporter in Orlando and said, hey, listen, there's a big trial that's coming up.

You might want to sit in on it. I think it's going to be very interesting. I said, really, He says, well, it was about a young girl who allegedly had killed her daughter, young daughter. It was Casey Anthony.

in this business and true crime were there. So I was able to connect with all of them. Before you knew it, I was did over four hundred and some odd hits during that trial so you can imagine I was being flown from Good Morning America to the Today showed an inside edition and you name it, and that's what springboarded it.

almost cartoon like at times, like she would laugh inappropriately, she would have that smile. She would have her hair in a ponytail, she would take it down, she would have long hair. Some days. She would almost flirt with her attorneys. She would do her hands in an unusual manner. It was almost like sometimes she was aware the jury was there, and sometimes she almost acted like she didn't know they were even important to her.

do you do your nose crunches up, your eyes narrow. Well, that is a sensory part of the sensory of the human body. Right, she recalled that odor. She recalled it, So that's why she showed that micro expression and discussed other than fear, horror, sadness, none of that. It was disgusted. I was like, oh my god. In fact, I think I was on Nancy's show and I think that's when I stated what I saw that day. But that will

never leave me. But she was different on the camera versus off the camera, and she did flirt a lot. She had those big, huge fanby eyes. She was very attractive. So the interesting thing was they seated her directly across from the jury, which is usually very unusual. She just be on the side, but the jurors were able to just watch her all day long, so it created a sense of familiarity, likability.

the same thing, it's a whole different picture. You see a lot of things that people don't see even if they're on watching it on court a court TV or in session.

to look for hone in on depending on who you're working for.

And I'm watching the demeanor morph right. That can be either an expert witness, It could be, you know, someone in the jury box. It could be the defendant. So

I'm looking at what are they exhibiting when they hear something that would have created what we call cognitive load, meaning that they know they're they're percolating different thoughts, different ideas, or they're trying to if it was a person and they were talking to one on one, they're trying to tell a story differently from what they know and they deviate from the truth. And when they do that, you're going to see a shift in their demeanor. So that

can be in any way. It could be an eye rolling, It could be in a side smirk in their mouth, which is contempt. It can be a shift in their body language where they shift their body language and they point it towards the exit side. They could show pacifiers where they're you know, rubbing their clothing or adjusting their clothing. Could be a smirk, it could be a gulp or a yawn, there's so many a micro shoulder shrug. But it's tied to a stimulus. Everything is tied to stimulus

and it has to start within seven seconds. And the reason why that is is that the rate of speed in which we talk, and we the words that we use in the rate of we talk f one hundred and twenty five to one hundred fifty words per minute. We know that from stenographer research. So when you get beyond that one hundred and fifty words, your mind is going to go on to something else, right, So it's tied to the original stimulus. Let's say, you know, we

ask murdoch, Did you kill your wife? You might say no. Then you ask a question, do you know who killed his wife? No? Did you have anything to do with a disappear or the you know or the murder? Or know who may have murdered your wife? And then he shifts, he moves, and then he tries to over explain. He licks his lips. You see him rolling his tongue around the inside of his mouth a lot. He might show some crocodile tears. So now see now how you see

how it's tied to that stimulus. Everything has to be tied to that stimulus. So that's how you know that that person's either lying to you or they're being deceptive, and it usually happens within seven seconds. Then they happen in clusters. If it's just one thing, they rub their nose, they stroke their clothing, they wring their hands, they tap their feet. It's really not an indicator of anything other

than maybe anxiety. But if it's tied to a stimulus, a probative questions whether they're trying to derail or try to move you off from the truth and tell you something that's different from what actually occurred, you're going to see them in clusters. You'll see it and hear it in their voice inflection. You'll pause and hesitation, stammers, stops and starts, yawning, gulping, drinking water, or it could be

in their language. Their language will show the same thing that pauses the hesitations, that stops the stammers, and then you'll see it in their body language. You'll see it happen in a cluster. So there's not one indicator of deception. It has to be a multiple things, a minimum of two to three that happened within the first seven seconds after the stimulus has been delivered.

in his pitch. And I thought that was kind of funny, and then I thought, you know what, that rings kind of true. And then I know, like in law enforcement. You can always tell if there's a little heightened anxiety because it sounds like they're running even though they're driving the car. You can hear that breath. You know, I'm now on Stonewall Avenue, I'm turning on b Stree Street,

and that you know that breath comes. So you're looking for the facial expressions and the voice, the tone of the pitch, and then you're listening for statements, so you're looking for the number three and left and repeating words and self sentenceoring. You're doing all of that at one time, which again is extraordinary.

like an anxiety attack. That's when they start to hyperventilate. Right. We all that with Murdoch a lot, right, he would you know, or you'd hear somebody calling a nine to one one call. Oh my god, oh my god. You know, it's like, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Now, yes, that's true, someone would would do that. But then if you hear all of this in dead silence and you don't hear the breathing, and then all of a sudden they pick it back up

again and do the same thing. I mean, it is really remarkable the narcissism that these perpetrators are murderers have because they don't realize that we can analyze that stuff. I mean, I'm telling you, you know, go ahead and tell the story, because I'm going to throw you on the voice stressed analysis analyze. I'm going to find out exactly where you're lying. I'm going to see it writing your language, and it's going to show right up in your behavior. Slam dunk, You're busted.

watched me at all. But I read an article one time where people said, that's what Jackie Kennedy would do. She would look at almost a thirty degree angle away from people. She wouldn't look directly almost, And I thought, well, I'm in good company, then I'll take that.

They found that if you moved your eyes up to the right or the left, it would be between constructing a lie or visualizing, and then if you look side to side, that would be audit, which means you would recall a sound or recall a conversation versus fabricating that you recalling a conversation or something that was auditory, and looking down to the right or the left was really more processing. But anyway, to make a long story short, there's twenty two out of twenty three peer reviewed research

articles that debunk that entire science. So it is very improper. In fact, law enforcements still use it. But what I will tell you that it does it is helpful for is it helps you to kind of know how that person processes. So if they tend to look up, they're more visual their auditory, they tend to look side to side. If they look down, they tend to be more processors. And then you can use that as a way to communicate.

So if a person's looking up, you know that they're visualizes, so you use words like ce focus, you know, recall an image, et cetera. So you can kind of speak their language. And you know, all this with investigative interview and they use a lot of this, but the the actual whom John Levall and Ericson and Bandler's stuff is garbage.

analyst whose book I consider a must. Again, when you talk about your team and you talk about three or four y'all working at the same time, it's not just hey, me and some friends are getting together.

So in the Michael Jackson case, the attorney had seen me on or TV and they wanted me to analyze the deposition tapes of Wade Robson and James Safechuck regarding the sexual allegations by Michael Jackson. Now here's is post after his death. They are now suing the estate and so they were weren't They weren't getting anywhere, So they wanted this documentary to come out never Land one and two, and they wanted to show that, you know, if they're lying.

They wanted to present that to Netflix to tell them that, listen, you're putting on a program with to confirm liars or not liars. So then what I do is I don't tell my team. And they keep in mind they have their own businesses. They're trainers and experts on their own, but I collectively pulled them together as people that I use as my experts, who I use and who I've been trained by. So I pulled them together and say, here's here's the case. We got a Michael Jackson case.

I want you to analyze. Here's seven hours of deposition. Here's the audio, here's the transcripts. I'll do the behavior analysis I want. Well, Mark didn't do this one, but it was Bob Schaeffer. He's also on my team. He is a trainer in statement analysis. I want you to analyze all the statements. And then Jerry Krotti, who I used as he's an examiner, voice stress analysis examiner and trainer, do your work, and then, you know, put your reports together and then provide them for me. So I don't

put it all in one report. I give them three separate reports. I don't ask them what they found. I don't ask them what they think. I don't encourage them to move one way or the other or slant it one way or another. But interestingly, how we all came up with very similar results. So that's how I do that, you know, and we've done that in a lot of different cases. I found that it's very helpful because it really removes a lot of cognitive buys in your own

personal buyas. Because frankly, I liked Michael Jackson. I saw him in Sweden and so I mean I grew up in you know, Grand Rapids, Michigan, outside of Detroit, so motion was huge. So I had to make sure that I wasn't going to have my own biases interjected into my analysis and slant it. And that's one thing that's that you know, people have to realize that what we're doing is this is subjective analysis, right. It's based on science, and it's been you know, validated science, has been vetted

in the field. But that examiner can switch it anyway they wanted to go. When it comes to behavioral analysis, you can't do it with voice stress analysis, and you can't change it with the language they use. So that's why it's really important to do the three prong tests.

your client's deceptive? And it's like, you know, and that they would take that and go okay, hey, this is what a good a lawyer would do is say, okay, now that I know that, I'm going to steer clear from that and I'm going to redirect it somewhere else. And that's where the trial strategy is very interesting. How you can use that actually is not a negative thing. It could be a positive thing. Knowing what to steer away from because you could, you know, your client could

repeach you. You know, if you didn't provide them with the truth, whether they like to hear it or not, then we're doing them a disservice and their client a disservice.

And that's Sharon. If she is happy or hurt or frustrated, or excited or scared or just anticipating with excitement, you know it immediately. So a lot of times in the family dynamic, if we're in a room and somebody says something that might be controversial or might be yes or no or whatever, I will find myself. I'll look to her immediately. Then I've already read the room. I'm good. I know we we're either going to do it or not do it because she can't hide it, you know.

And so when you work, I know you have worked some major, major cases you mentioned, you know, Jeffery Epstein and Michael Jackson and Casey Anthony, George Zimmerman. But you have also done some things with public defenders and government officials and famous people. And here's one thing I wanted to make a real point about. And you don't have to name anybody, obviously, but if I were like Oprah famous, I know why she only fools with Gail, because you

really can't trust anybody else once you get to her level. Right, Like, you've got all this money, you've got all these famous connections with people, you do these magnificent things in the world. You can travel wherever you want. Of course, people are going to want to gravitate towards you. So to me, your job if you're somebody like j Lo. Okay, you, Susan,

go interview those dancers, you interview the's. You tell me if there's somebody here that shouldn't be here, shouldn't be around me, isn't here for the right reason?

watching the dynamics. When I showed up in a hotel room her assistant, it was like, you know the yes people, right that they're They're these individuals that regardless of what they say, what they do, they're they're just so mesmerized to be in that person's presence and they're really not what I would call that really true friend, right, They're not. They don't. There's not the authenticity that's going on. And I picked it up right away and I thought, oh

my god, that poor girl. She's surrounded around these people that are just giving her what she wants. And we know drugs, alcoholic cause the next morning when I showed up after I worked with it, I went into the room. I couldn't believe what I saw. It was like a frat party, alcohol cigarettes, barf all on the side of her bed. It was the barf that was up in

the and the toilet was overflowing. It was disgusting. So there's people get mesmerized by they they're really not their true friends there they You know, we see this so often, so I understand someone like Oprah. It's got to be a lonely, really place to be because you can't confide and everybody because of who you.

we all get each other, right. So we're here on the sidelines and we're waiving all the you know, the pom poms because we know we respect. We get it. You know, we're the same of ego, strength, different personalities, but we get it. We're on a not a better plane, a different plane, just in a different plane that we're not threatened or intimidated by other people. But people that are insecure, people that are struggling with their own self esteem, they can create havoc in your life, and I have

even in my own business. And the more I've rinked up,

the smaller my circle becomes.

we should approach this person. Just like you saying, if somebody is visual versus you know, so you speak to that a little bit of how you can work in very limited information.

So My job was in the training is to code them. That's why it's called facial action coding system. You're coding the movements and those movements when studied over a massive population.

And this is where AI really gets exciting, is that we can measure these movements and then we can cross culturally analyze, so we know, like certain cultures with kind of you know, their facial expressions, like in certain Asian population, they don't show necessarily as facial expressions as overt you know, different cultures are taught different things and so they know how to control them. But the bottom line is these movements give us insight and gives me insight to what

emotionally is processing internally. So then you tie that to the stimulus. Maybe it could be even something that with their mind is kind of drifting off or recalling something. You can see these movements, which we know universally there's seven of them, but we've gone so far beyond that, way beyond that to be able to know there's hundreds of emotions that we analyze and it has to be taken into context. So when I look at a video,

I'm watching the movements and I'm coding them. Okay, that's an F three, that's an F four, that's an F five, or whatever. It's facial action. It's they're called units. So I'm looking at them coding it, and then i am I'm also doing a scan analysis, so that's just the face. Scan analysis is a little bit different because it is based on that seven to second theory, right stimulus watching those movements and I'm just watching the facial expressions more

if I'm watching the body movements. And we know that in certain cultures there's different movements based on a specific culture, so there's no universal body language movements that has a specific definition. You have to take it all into context. And that's where it really becomes very tedious process because when I'm analyzing a video, just to kind of give you my I'm going to give you your viewers my what I do when I'm behind the scene. This is

what I do. I take what they're the video, the piece of clip, I upload it into a program called rev dot com. Rev dot com will trans take the verbal and then translate it into text and then you can watch the text highlight as the person is talking, so you know what words are highlighted. And now I'm watching the face right. So I begin by looking at a video I watch I slow it down. Well, the first time I do it, I look at it in real time, and then I start to slow it down.

So I slow the speed down, and I now I'm watching the movement's going like, oh, that weird sound. But we're watching the muscular facial expressions morph and move same time. You can see their body language, and then you tie it into their words, what they're saying that's creating that emotion, and then you start to find patterns and their behavior. And that's what I do. That's how I do it. I sit behind, I turn it all the way down.

I repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, and repeat it at nauseum until I'm certain of what my analysis is. And then I provide the report.

they come back to you that you're going to have something solid to work with. If you don't mind, could you talk a little bit about the Holmes case.

a brilliant idea. And she was an Ivy League student and who actually dropped out in her freshman year because she was considered being like the up and coming female Stephen Jobs. She even dressed in black. She had the deeper, lower voice, she was you know, she just had this aura about her that people were mesmerized. So she not only mesmerized people around her, but also some of the most affluent people of shakers and movers and big MiG money and pharming, you name it. She was able to

she was able to convince them about this blood testing device. Well, my client was being sued by her saying that he stole her copyright on that blood testing device. So he gave me a ton of videos of where she was speaking in front of all of these different groups and conferences and pitching this device and how it worked, et cetera. Well, I gave him my analysis and then I kind of forgot about it. Years passed by and I get an email from it says, hey, did you look at the

front cover of Forbes magazine? I said no. He says, go look at the front cover. It was Elizabeth Holmes and about her device was questionable, whether she was a fraud or not. Well, I go back and I pull the report, and what do I say? She doesn't believe in her own blood testing device. She has low confidence in her own blood testing device. She doesn't think it's going to work. I was like, now, how would I have known that? Well, I'm going to tell you what I noticed when she was so I pulled up all

the old videos. I found this one where she was speaking in front of a various medical team and she was talking about how it worked in all this language, of course, medical language I couldn't even begin to repeat. But then she takes her hand and she says, we have extreme belief that pause hesitate, pausitate hesitate, and then she starts talking about our product. Now here's the problem.

When she said I have extreme belief that when a person uses a bolstering word in front of a statement, always open up your ears, because why did they have to bolster that word? She could get She could have easily said we believe that, or we know that, but we have extreme belief that. But then what followed it was her hand coming up on her neck and rubbing her neck of worry and concern. I was like, are

you kidding me? Busted said she doesn't believe that thing even works, and sure enough is exactly what happened.

being truthful. So I look at that. That's a that's a huge one for me. So I hope everybody will not only just learn the skills that I'm talking about how to detect deception, but also do their own self analyzation about how they handle things and how they communicate to the world. Are they actually being honest with themselves?

I'm an algebra liar. Figure two good lies makes a positive actor, Tim Allen. I'm Cheryl McCollum, and this is Zone seven.