Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

566 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
Psychological and Psychiatric Evaluation
In 1993 my psychiatrist colleague Dr MacKeith and I travelled to Louisiana
to assess Wille, Walters and Sheila Walters. We carried out detailed assessments,
which were tape-recorded and later transcribed. We produced interim
reports, where we requested access to more material, including copies of all
tape-recorded interviews with the three accused. We had serious doubts about
the reliability of the confessions of Wille, Walters and Sheila Walters. We considered
that for different reasons all three individuals had been psychologically
vulnerable to giving unreliable confessions.
During our assessment, all three individuals denied having had anything to
do with the murders, nor did they witness them. Wille claimed to have confessed
to the murders as a way of coping with suggestions and pressure from the police,
and he also wanted to protect his girlfriend, Walters. He told us he pleaded
guilty to the murder of Powe as a deal to prevent Walters being prosecuted for
the offence.
Walters claimed to have been heavily drugged during the interrogation sessions,
and alleges that she was coerced into making false confessions to murders
by intimidation, threats, physical abuse and inducements. She told us that
knowledge and details about the murders came from the police, and she was so
confused and distressed that she began to believe that perhaps she had been
involved in the murders, even though she had no memory of it.
Sheila Waters told us that the details of the murders concerning Lopatta
and Phillips during the tape-recorded interview came from the police when
she had been interviewed in the presence of a large number of officers earlier
that day. At that time she had been deliberately separated by the police from
her grandmother, who remained outside the room. The police officers allegedly
showed her distressing photographs depicting the bodies of the two victims. She
was pressured to confess to having witnessed and participated in the murders.
She said she had been told that if she did not confess her mother would be
electrocuted. She kept making persistent denials, which were disregarded by
the police and the FBI. After a while she began to wonder whether any of these
things had happened, but she had no memory of any of it happening.
With regard to the murders of Lopatta and Phillips, on the basis of what the
three individuals told us, it appeared that Wille had made a coerced–compliant
type of false confession, subsequent to several voluntary false confessions,
whereas the confessions of Walters and Sheila Walters were of the coerced–
internalized type. There is convincing corroborative evidence from medical
records that at the time of her custodial interrogation in August 1985 Walters
began to distrust her own memory and developed a memory distrust syndrome
(see Chapter 8 about the nature of this syndrome).
Extracts from Judith Walters’ Medical Records
It was evident from the Santa Rose County Medical Records that after her arrest
in early August 1985 Walters was in a very disturbed mental state. She was
referred to the Mental Health Clinic in mid-August, because of severe anxiety,