Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Why do Suspects Confess? Theories 117
body with a bread knife. At first sight the murder had many of the signs of a
sexually motivated killing, which meant that the police would have been looking
for a male suspect. As things turned out, the case was even more bizarre than
it initially appeared.
Shortly after the discovery of the murdered woman’s body, fingerprinting was
carried out on friends and neighbours so that they could be excluded from the enquiry.
Mrs R, who was the victim’s closest friend, was discovered during fingerprinting
to have lacerations on her hands. The police also noticed what looked
like blood on her handbag. A search in her handbag revealed an even more
surprising discovery, a piece of the established murder weapon! A conventional
blood group analysis was carried out on the cross-matching of blood among the
two women. The evidence suggested, but was not conclusive, that the victim’s
blood was on Mrs R’s handbag and the rims of her glasses. Conversely, Mrs R’s
blood grouping was found on the dead woman’s clothing and mixer taps within
the victim’s flat. Mrs R strongly denied any involvement in the murder and
instructed her solicitor to have various blood specimens analysed by the newly
developed DNA profiling technique so that she could once and for all prove her
innocence. This was done and the results were conclusive. The blood on Mrs R’s
handbag and glasses did belong to the deceased woman and the blood found on
the victim was that of Mrs R, who continued to insist that she had no recollection
whatsoever of having killed her best friend. In fact, in spite of all the forensic
evidence, which was clearly overwhelming, Mrs R could not contemplate the
thought that she had murdered her friend in a most horrific way. In view of
the forensic evidence, Mrs R pleaded guilty to manslaughter on the grounds of
diminished responsibility, but she never ‘admitted’ that she could possibly have
been responsible for the murder. In her own words, ‘I could never have killed
my closest and dearest friend no matter what the forensic evidence says’.
It is probable that the inability of Mrs R to ‘admit’ to the murder was primarily
caused by the difficulties she had in accepting that she had committed
a brutal and horrific act of violence against her best friend.
Psychological assessment showed Mrs R to be of average intelligence, but she
had a strong tendency to deny painful and undesirable emotional experiences,
particularly those relating to anger and hostility. She was a proud and strongly
willed woman who found self-confrontation difficult.
Her psychological profile was that of an ‘overcontrolled personality’
(Megargee, 1966), that is, the type of person who has rigid inhibitions about the
appropriate self-expressions of anger and frustration, and may suddenly lose
control and act extremely explosively when provoked.
THEORETICAL MODELS OF CONFESSION
There are a number of theoretical models that have attempted to explain the
mechanisms and processes that facilitate a confession during custodial interrogation.
Five different models or theoretical orientations are reviewed in this
chapter. Each model looks at confessions from a different perspective, and taken
together the models provide an important insight into the reasons why suspects
tend to confess during custodial interrogation.