Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Psychological Vulnerability 487
to do with her murder. The following morning he told his grandmother
about the nightmare and said he thought he might have done the murder.
She told him not to be silly and later in the day he sneaked out while she
was asleep. He went to the police station in order to see a photograph of
the victim so that he could compare it with the face he had seen in his
nightmare.
� After the police had come to his house on 8 October he in a way wished
that he had witnessed the murder. For the first time in his life he was
somebody, he felt important and wanted, and people were not ignoring him
any more like they always had done in the past. Most importantly perhaps,
he felt for first time in his life that he had something that somebody else
wanted. Prior to having made the confessions to the police he had felt very
low in his mood and a complete failure. Everything he had attempted he
had failed at and the final shock was being medically discharged from the
Army.
� Evans claimed that the police asked him many personal questions which
upset him greatly. These included questions like ‘Do you masturbate?’, ‘Do
you like girls?’, ‘Do you think about girls?’, ‘Do you do things to them?’. Evans
told us he that he was very embarrassed by these questions. He claimed
that some of the answers he gave to the police concerning the murdered girl
were related to memories of his sister (e.g. according to Evans his sister used
to wear a dress with flowers on it).
Evans said that when he entered the police station on 9 October he had no
firm belief or memory that he had committed the murder. While at the police
station his belief that he had committed the murder gradually grew and when
he woke up after the first night in custody he said to himself ‘I’ve done this’
and he wanted people, including the police, to think that he had done it. He
then made up various details to fit in with what he thought might have happened
and what the police wanted to hear. Evans claims that he was never
completely convinced that he had committed the murder but rather thought
that he might have done it and in a way wanted to believe that he had done it.
He claimed to have had various pictures and visions in his mind concerning the
murder but had no clear memory of having committed it. He tried to become
totally absorbed in the case and used his imagination as best he could to create
details. Even though he thought he had committed the murder, it was as
though at another level he knew he had not done it. He claimed that it took
him a long time to become convinced that he had had nothing to do with the
murder.
Evans told us that as a child he often had nightmares and slept badly. He
has suffered from asthma since infancy, which has been a serious physical
handicap to him. He claimed to have been commonly bullied as a child; he was
very fearful of physical aggression and was in the habit of exaggerating things.
He had always had little confidence in his memory.
Prior to his going to the police station he had felt very low in mood since
leaving the Army and had been prescribed Valium by his General Practitioner.