Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

CHAPTER 21
Four High Profile American Cases
In this chapter I discuss four high profile American murder cases involving
disputed confessions. In all four cases I had been commissioned by defence
attorneys to assess their clients and study the relevant papers in the case.
The first case concerns the confessions of Waneta Hoyt to the murder of her
five children. My findings were on balance unfavourable to the defence and
I was not required to testify. Nevertheless, the case is of great psychological,
medical and legal interest. The second case discussed is that of Joe Giarratano.
Dr James MacKeith and I assessed Giarratano in 1990 and considered his 1979
confession to double murder to be unreliable. Giarratano’s death sentence was
commuted to life imprisonment two days before his execution date in February
1991. The third case involves Henry Lee Lucas, who was estimated to have made
over 600 confessions to murder in the 1980s. My assessment was important in
understanding his psychopathology. In June 1998, four days before Mr Lucas’s
execution date, the Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, granted clemency and
commuted Mr Lucas’s death sentence to life imprisonment. The third case is
that of John Wille and his partner Judith Walters, who confessed to several
murders during custodial interrogation in 1985. Wille received a death penalty
sentence and Walters life imprisonment. Both are still fighting to prove their
innocence.
WANETA HOYT
Much has been written about this case in the national newspapers in the USA
and two books have been devoted to the case (Firstman & Talan, 1997; Hickey,
Lighty & O’Brien, 1996). In England, the case featured on a BBC 2 Horizon
programme on 25 February 1999. The case involved a 48-year-old woman who
in 1995 was convicted of murdering five of her infant children between 24 and
30 years previously. An influential publication in a medical journal in 1972
about the case eventually led to Waneta Hoyt’s arrest. The article proposed a
controversial theory of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), which according
to the Horizon programme had set back cot-death research for a generation.
I became involved in the case shortly before the trial in 1995 and carried out
a psychological evaluation at the request of the defence attorneys. There has
been much speculation about what my findings had been in the light of my not