Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

242 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
of England, so he finds foreign women to get citizenship abroad. He said he
invited the women to come to England, where he murdered them and buried
them in shallow graves in Lancaster.
On 21 July 1998, within a week of Mr Key arriving in Arizona, Mr Key
was shot dead by his wife. On the day of the murder she had purchased a
powerful handgun, having shortly before had her and her husband’s story of
him being a British serial killer being turned down by a newspaper. Mrs Keys
was charged with the murder of her husband. Her defence was that she had
acted in self-defence. She alleged that she had shot her husband after he tried
to strangle her. She viewed him as a serial killer and was convinced he was
going to kill her. The police found no evidence of attempted strangulation and
were of the view that Mrs Key had planned to murder her husband in order to
sell her story to the media (Cutting Edge, 2001). She told the police that her
case would be supported by tape-recorded conversations between them where
her husband had confessed to being a serial killer. The police initially found
the tapes supporting her case, but soon discovered that they were only “practice
tapes” of Mr Key’s confession to five murders. Left behind in England were tapes
that showed how Mrs Keys had bullied her husband into confessing to the
murders. These tapes were used at her trial in Phoenix to convict her. She was
convicted of first degree, premeditated murder, and is serving a life sentence.
Was Mr Key a serial killer? The English police investigated the case and
found no evidence that he was. They found no bodies in shallow graves as
described by Mr Key. The Phoenix police did not believe the confessions either
(Cutting Edge, 2001). The language of the confession had all the hallmarks
of a pressured–internalized false confession, although I think it is likely that
Mr Key was also going along with his wife in order to please her (i.e. a compliant
type of a false confession), never being fully convinced that he was a serial
killer. Mr Key’s history of mental illness, and the apparent deterioration in his
mental state during his marriage to Mrs Key, probably made him vulnerable
to breakdowns in reality monitoring. He also appears to have been emotionally
dependent upon his wife and was eager to please her. She seemed certain that
he was a serial killer and tried hard to persuade him to provide her with a
detailed confession, which she would then tape-record, for whatever motive.
CONCLUSIONS
In this chapter case examples have been provided to illustrate some of the critical
components of the different psychological types of false confession that were
discussed in Chapter 8. The cases demonstrate the importance of having a good
conceptual framework for understanding the process and mechanisms of false
confession. The different types of false confession should not be viewed as exclusive
categories, because there may be an overlap between the different groups.
For example, suspects may be partly persuaded by the police that they were
involved in the alleged crime, but nevertheless confess mainly for instrumental
gain (i.e. in spite of partly believing the police’s account of events, they confess
in order to escape from an intolerable situation).