Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Murder in Norway 601
not want to ‘look like a clown in court’ (i.e. make a fool of himself). Secondly, he
did not want to risk being kept in solitary confinement as he had been before
he began to confess to the police (once he had given his confession he was no
longer kept in solitary confinement).
After Mr A was transferred to Bergen Central Prison he began to see the
prison psychologist, and gradually he became increasingly convinced that he
had not committed the murder. By the end of August he was more or less
convinced he was totally innocent. This belief was confirmed and strengthened
after Mr A passed a polygraph test in September 1997. Since that time he has
not at any time believed that he committed the murder (this was confirmed in
his account to others, including his solicitor and family).
I asked Mr A what he considered to be the most salient factors in making
him confess to the murder. He identified the following, but they are not in order
of significance (Mr A had problems with identifying which of the factors below
were most important, and pointed out that it was ‘no one thing’, rather the
combination of factors).
1. Total trust and confidence in the interviewing officer. After the indecent
exposure incident in 1995, Mr A became extremely sensitive about people
talking about him behind his back, and this appears to have reached paranoid
proportions. He felt very ashamed and embarrassed about the incident
but had nobody to talk to about it. He tried on several occasions to tell his
girlfriend, but was never able to. The officer seemed interested in the incident
and began to talk to him about it and Mr A found this very helpful,
even therapeutic. This made him feel very close to the officer and he preferred
talking to him rather than being locked up in a bare police cell. At
the time he thought the officer was a ‘good listener’. Mr A said that after
the indecent exposure incident he ‘dreamed of being a normal guy again’.
At the time of the assessment he viewed his indecent behaviours as being
a form of juvenile experimentation.
2. His determination to cooperate with the police. Mr A said he was determined
to cooperate with the police and clear the ‘misunderstanding’. Once he came
to believe that he had committed the murder he tried very hard to ‘force
the memories out’. Indeed, he appeared to have made a very determined
effort to do so. He claims that the officer went into immense detail about
everything and kept telling him that he had to prove his innocence. Mr A
thought of different ways of achieving this, including asking for the use of
hypnosis, requesting to see a psychologist and taking a lie detector test.
3. Academic curiosity about memory. Mr A said that in some respects he found
the idea of ‘repressed’ memories exciting. He has a general curiosity about
learning new things and was fascinated about the officer’s theories of memory
loss. He liked to develop theories and speculate about what might have
happened to the victim, his cousin. He said that when he was at school his
teachers praised him on his ability to tell stories and make them realistic.
He claims to have a capacity to ‘merge’ himself into things and use his imagination
very effectively. When making up the scenarios of what might have
happened to his cousin it always felt like a theory and not like a reality, but