Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

The Psychology of False Confession: Case Examples 241
Dominique arrived in England about the end of January 1998. They married
on 14 February 1998 and lived in London until May when they moved to Stroud,
where Mrs Key’s grown-up daughter from a previous relationship lived.
After their honeymoon the relationship between the couple deteriorated.
Mrs Key was to claim that her husband had talked in his sleep about murders
he had committed. She began to question him and bully him into admitting that
he had murdered several women. On 18 June 2001 Mrs Key had a tape-recorded
telephone conversation with her husband. Mrs Key dominated the conversation
and tried to browbeat her husband into accepting that he had killed several
women. He explains that he is not sure if he had murdered anybody and claimed
to have ‘no conscious memories of it’. Mrs Key became angry and kept shouting
at him things like ‘You are a liar’, ‘You are a fucking murderer’. Mr Key said
he could not confess to something he did not know for sure he had done. She
told him she knew for certain he had killed these women and kept bullying
him into accepting her scenarios. She pushed her husband for memories of
the murders. Mr Key began to admit to the murders and gave very vague and
tentative descriptions. He thought it had happened before 1989 in the north of
England, possibly Blackpool. She suggested he strangled the women; he then
agreed with this. She then took him through each of the killings. That same
evening Mr Key gave himself up to the police and was admitted to hospital for
a psychiatric assessment.
On 25 June Mr Key was arrested and interviewed by the Lancashire police.
I have listened to the tape-recorded interview and the tapes of conversations
between Mr Key and his wife in June and July 2001. In his interview with
the Lancashire police on 26 June 2001, Mr Key sounds like an articulate and
intelligent man. He was carefully and properly interviewed by the police in the
presence of a solicitor. He explained that in 1989 he had been in hospital for
two weeks and treated for paranoid delusions. He was suffering from paranoid
schizophrenia and had been on medication since that time. He told the police
how his wife says he has been talking in his sleep about having murdered five
women and was allegedly threatening her. He had no recollection of having
committed any murders, but tried hard to imagine how he might have done it.
Mr Key wanted to know from the police if he had killed anybody. He expressed
doubts about whether he had murdered anybody. The police investigated the
case and found no evidence that Mr Key had murdered anybody. He was released
from police custody. There was evidence that he had a history of making
a false confession. Several years previously he had persuaded himself that he
had murdered nine people on a motorway and confessed to it. This proved to be
a false confession (Cutting Edge, 2001).
At the end of June Mrs Key left England and went to Phoenix, Arizona.
Two weeks later Mr Key followed his wife to the USA. They both stayed with
an old friend of Mrs Key. Mrs Key interviewed her husband further on tape
about the murders in England, apparently in order to sell their story to the
national press. Now, for the first time, Mr Key described his murder victims as
having been foreign women (two Russian, a New Zealander, a French woman,
and a Portuguese). The motive for the murders is that he wanted to get out