Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

508 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
confession that would reduce the charge to manslaughter, but after having
time to think about the confession in the police cell, decided to retract it. The
content of the confession had all the hallmarks of a person who is trying to
appear mentally disarranged, including claiming that he could hear the trees
on the common talking to him and that one of the women had reminded him
of his mother whom he hated. His post-admission statement to the police was
also unconvincing in that some of the details he gave did not coincide with the
known facts (e.g. he claimed to have hit the women, whereas they were stabbed
to death). Within half an hour of the retraction interview terminating Fell was
able to eat properly for the first time since his arrest.
Interestingly, in spite of Fell making a confession to the murders, he was
able to resist repeated pressure from the police to get him to admit that he had
had owned a double-edged knife and a green jacket as claimed by witnesses. He
never admitted to these matters and has always claimed that he did not own
double-edged knife or a green jacket. This suggests that when Fell broke down
and confessed in the sixth interview he was not just agreeing with everything
the police had suggested to him. In other words, his mind was not completely
overborne by the pressure of the interrogation. This is something I have noted
in other cases of false confession and it was discussed in Chapter 9.
The police interviews were conducted 14 months after the murders. The questioning
during the interviews was persistent, determined and relentless. This
included the officers repeatedly presenting their view that Fell was the man
who had been seen at the material time on the common where the murders had
taken place and that they had a large number of witnesses who had allegedly
identified him from a photofit. He repeatedly requested to see a solicitor, but the
officers completely ignored his requests and continued to interview him. A careful
analysis of the interviews indicated that the techniques used to break down
Fell’s resistance were similar to the Inbau, Reid and Buckely (1986) type techniques
found by Pearse and Gudjonsson (1999). They comprised ‘Intimidation’
(i.e. maximization of anxiety associated with denial, multiple assertions, gross
exaggeration of the evidence, including false claims that Fell had been identified
on the common, the use of his girlfriend to incriminate him and at times raised
voices by the officers and rapid questioning), ‘Robust Challenge’ (i.e. repeatedly
challenging Fell’s denials) and ‘Psychological Manipulation’ (i.e. minimizing
the seriousness of admitting to being on the common and then exaggerating its
importance once he had admitted that he ‘might’ have been there, suggesting
that he had committed the offence whilst drunk and had forgotten about it,
inducements to admit to manslaughter). It is also evident that there were a
number of unrecorded conversations with Fell in the police cell.
In September 1999, the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the
case to the Court of Appeal mainly on the grounds of new evidence concerning
material non-disclosure and fresh psychological evidence concerning Fell’s vulnerabilities
during the interrogation and the effects of these on the reliability
of the admissions he had made to the police in 1984. The defence sought to add
further grounds for appeal, including the absence of a solicitor during the police
interviews.
I had first become involved in this case in 1988 after being commissioned by
Fell’s solicitors. I interviewed Fell and on testing found him to be of low average