Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

The Psychology of False Confession: Case Examples 221
confess to murders. One part of my evidence involved describing how I had
subtly implanted in Mr M’s mind a completely fictitious murder to which he
subsequently confessed. I interviewed Mr M twice in prison after his conviction
for the two murders where I gained further insight into his apparent compulsion
to confess and the gratification he gained from it.
Mr M had a disturbed and turbulent childhood. He reported his family life
as having been very unhappy, he truanted a great deal from school and before
long he had long list of criminal convictions. The offences for which he was
convicted dated back to the age of 14 years. These include burglaries, road
traffic violations, acts of violence and sexual offences. Mr M performed poorly
at school and was transferred to a special school. He appears to have been
sexually disinhibited from early adolescence (i.e. there were frequent reports of
indecent exposure) and continued to expose himself to women until his latest
arrest. He had been drinking excessively since adolescence and there were
several reported instances of suicide attempts as an adult. He appeared to
have had some history in childhood of falsely confessing to the police. On one
occasion his mother intervened as Mr M had been with her at the time of the
alleged offence. Mr M reported having falsely confessed in childhood for the
excitement of it and in order to raise his status in the eyes of his peers.
In various psychiatric reports Mr M was consistently diagnosed as ‘severely
personality disordered’. This diagnosis was consistent with the psychological
findings which were obtained from extensive testing, conducted in 1987 by
myself and repeated in 1990. Mr M proved to be of borderline intelligence
(IQ = 76), and reported a severe degree of depressive symptomatology. He
showed marked symptoms of anxiety and intrusive thoughts about the various
murders he reported having committed. Mr M proved to be highly suggestible
on the GSS 1 and GSS 2. The results from the various tests administered in 1990
were entirely consistent with the 1987 results, except that Mr M’s free recall
on the GSS narrative was considerably better in 1990 than it had been in 1987.
This was strikingly so for the GSS 1 story and was undoubtedly related to one
important experimental manipulation that was incorporated into the 1990 assessment.
That is, I added one sentence to the end of the GSS 1 narrative. The
story describes a woman being robbed whilst being on holiday in Spain. The
added sentence read, ‘A few months later the woman was sexually assaulted
and stabbed to death whilst visiting a friend in South West London’. The reason
for adding this sentence to the story, which was presented to Mr M as a
memory task, was to see whether Mr M’s tendency to confess to murders could
be produced by experimental means about a completely fictitious murder. The
big question was would Mr M take the bait?
I presented the GSS 1 story to Mr M as a memory task, as I did for the
GSS 2 story, which was also administered during the same session, but unlike
the GSS 1 it contained no added sentence to the standardized narrative. As
both stories had previously been administered to Mr M three years previously,
I asked him if he had ever heard of either story before. He said he did not think
so. After reading out both the stories I made no further mention of the sentence
added. I knew that within a few days Mr M was to be seen by a psychiatrist.
I telephoned the psychiatrist and told him about what I had done and requested