Cross-Examination Blog: COLD READING TECHNIQUE FOR CROSS-EXAMINATION

Cross-Examination Blog: COLD READING TECHNIQUE FOR CROSS-EXAMINATION: Years ago a friend of mine asked me (Bob Dekle) to watch a late night television show with him. In the show, a psychic summoned dead rela...

AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULTS

My father served in the Third Marine Division during WWII, seeing action at Bougainville, Guam, and Iwo Jima. He almost never talked about his combat experiences, although he would occasionally tell funny stories about non-combat related incidents.

Over the years I have had many people tell me that they thought my father was utterly fearless, how he was able to "keep [his] head when all about him were losing theirs." As for myself, I had never seen him display fear, even in situations where I was scared to death, until an incident which occurred shortly after I graduated from college.

I was visiting my parents and we were watching a documentary on D-Day. As the narrator described the preparations for the landing, Dad became more and more agitated. Dad was upset because they weren't going in at high tide, and more men would be killed because there would be more exposed beach to cross before getting to cover inland. It was obvious that he was distressed by the prospect of soldiers dying on the beaches of Normandy. I wanted to watch the documentary, but I was afraid that the next scenes would be scenes of soldiers being killed as they waded ashore. I suggested that we change the channel.

Later, in the lead up to the ground combat phase of Desert Storm, there were news reports that the Marine Corps was lobbying for an amphibious landing as a part of the invasion. The mere thought of making such a landing appalled my father. He said that if they could find any way to invade Kuwait without making such a landing, they should do so. He was certain that an amphibious assault would result in needless casualties. I tried to reassured him that the technology for such assaults was probably far better than what they had during WWII, but he was adamant. I won't use his exact words, but I got the impression that he thought the Marine Corps brass was "intellectually challenged" for insisting on an amphibious assault.

I only heard my father describe his involvement in an amphibious assault on one occasion. It was his first assault at Bougainville. He said the landing craft operator was too frightened to go all the way up to the beach and dropped the gangplank when they were in about six feet of water. Dad, who was in the front of the landing craft, stepped out and went straight to the bottom, losing his helmet and rifle, and getting trampled by the Marines behind him. When he got to shore, he was helmetless and unarmed. I asked him what he did about losing his helmet and rifle, and he said he had no trouble getting replacements onshore. He didn't elaborate, and I didn't ask.

I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like to be involved in an amphibious assault. Judging from Dad's attitude toward them I'm certain that I never want to find out.

BODY LANGUAGE AS A SIGN OF DECEPTION

A few months ago I channel-surfed through a trailer for The Mentalist which showed the hero telling a suspect “I know you’re lying because you [winked, looked away, gave some other body language indication of lying].” My immediate reaction was to say “Baloney!” and keep on channel surfing. I don’t remember the specific tell that the mentalist described, but I do remember thinking that there were hundreds of innocent explanations for why a witness would do that during an interrogation.

Here’s my take on body language. We are all experts at interpreting body language if we leave the interpretation at the subconscious level. Have you ever had this happen? You see someone reacting in a way that makes you mistrust him, you can’t really put your finger on what it is, but you are uncomfortable. Trust that feeling. Your subconscious interpreted the person’s body language as that of an untruthful witness based on thousands of generations of heredity. Our remote ancestors’ survival depended on reading body language, and they passed their talent on to their offspring, who passed it on to their offspring, who eventually passed it on to us. This type of interpretation happens in the more primitive parts of our brains. If we try to overthink it, we wind up in "analysis paralysis" like Aesop's centipede. When asked how he could operate so many legs in unison without getting them tangled up, the centipede admitted that he didn't know, but he'd concentrate on it and figure out how he did it. The more he thought about it, the more tangled his legs became, until he was completely immobile with his legs tied in knots.

I think we're better off leaving body language interpretation on the subconscious level. I’ve read several articles on body language which says if someone does this or that, it’s a sure sign of lying, and I’m not convinced. I agree with Phillip Houston and Michael Floyd (authors of Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception), who rightly say that no one body language quirk is a sure sign of lying, it’s simply an indicator that you might want to take a critical look at what the witness is telling you. If the witness displays enough body language tells, your subconscious is going to decide they're lying before your conscious can apply the principles you learned in body language class.

One of my favorite bogus signs of lying is the crossed-arm stance. “Whenever someone crosses their arms in front of you,” so the pundits say, “they’re getting defensive, and they’re getting defensive because they’re lying.” Once again, I say “Baloney!” Obviously the people who peddle this brand of baloney have never encountered a bodybuilder or a teenage boy. Take a look at these two bodybuilders and try to decide if they’re (a) lying, (b) acting defensive, or (c) showing off their muscles.

 

 

I struck that pose several times when I was a teenage weightlifter, usually in front of a pretty girl.

There are any number of reasons unrelated to lying why people fold their arms across their chests. Sometimes they even do it because they’re cold.

 

 

THE MENACE OF TALCUM POWDER

It appears to me that modern American culture has degenerated into a hog-calling contest with people chanting “Sue! Sue! Sue! Sue!” (When I lived on a farm as a child we called the hogs by yelling “Sooey!”) I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I had gotten an invitation to join a class action lawsuit against New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The heinous crime they were guilty of? They didn’t make it clear enough that the modest fee they solicited from entrants into the museum was a voluntary contribution and that admission was actually free.

Now I’ve gotten another invitation to join a class action lawsuit. It seems that somebody thinks talcum powder causes ovarian cancer. Somehow the lawyers handling the suit arising from this health menace found out I had bought some talcum powder. I applaud their industry in ferreting out this fact. If they had investigated a little further they would have discovered that I don’t have ovaries.

Perhaps I am being unfair. It is possible this law firm contends that talcum powder poses other health risks in addition to ovarian cancer. All I have to do to find out is click on the icon that says "Click here for more information." I clicked on the icon that says "Move to spam folder" instead.

I half expect that someday I will receive an invitation to join a class action lawsuit against God because he kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.

MEMORIES OF MURDER WEAPONS

I was in the gym this morning trying to reduce my waist size when some of the patrons began to ask me questions about the prosecution of Ted Bundy. This doesn’t happen as much as it did 30 years ago, but it does happen from time to time. One of the men asked me if we had ever found the murder weapon. He reminded me that sometime shortly after Bundy’s conviction I had told him about my belief that we may have found the murder weapon. This immediately conjured up a memory of an event which I had not thought of in many years.

It seems that shortly after Bundy’s conviction, we were informed that a law enforcement officer out in the Panhandle had found Bundy camping and taken a huge knife away from him. The knife was supposedly in some agency’s property room. I asked that it be run down and taken into FDLE custody in case of a reversal and a retrial. I do not recall hearing anything more of the incident and don’t know whether the knife was recovered.

If you have read The Last Murder, you will recall that the Medical Examiner had opined that the cause of death was “homicidal violence to the neck area, type undetermined, accompanied by copious bleeding.” Just the day before the abduction Bundy had bought a huge Buck General hunting knife at a Jacksonville sporting goods store. It doesn’t take a great deal of brainpower to infer that the Buck General was what caused the “homicidal violence to the neck area.” We spent a lot of time, energy, and effort trying to find that knife, but were never able to locate it. Then, after the trial was completely over, like belated manna from heaven, we learned about the officer who had relieved Bundy of a gigantic knife just a day or two before his arrest in Pensacola.

Was it the murder weapon? Was the guy really Bundy? I can’t remember enough detail to say. I learned of the incident in 1980 after Bundy’s conviction. It is now 34 years later. At this distance in time from the incident I can’t really say how much of my vivid memory is real and how much is imagined. Our memory does not work like a DVD. We don’t have a video of every incident in our lives, and we can’t simply rewind the video and replay it to get a 100% accurate account of a long-ago event.

Our brains only record the gist of an event, and when we recall it to memory, it is somewhat like looking at a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. Whenever you look at a partially assembled jigsaw puzzle you can usually infer what the missing portion of the picture looks like. That’s what our mind does when the gist of a memory is recalled. Subconsciously our brains fill in the blank spaces with reasonable inferences of what must have happened. As time passes and more pieces of the puzzle go missing, reasonable inference is less able to reconstruct the incident, and imagination takes over. Psychologists call this process confabulation, which is a fancy word for lying. But it’s not really lying, because the process goes on subconsciously and we think we are remembering actual details.

That’s why we have conflicts in testimony, and that’s why the conflicts tend to become more pronounced as time goes by. Nobody’s lying, their subconscious minds are just filling in different details to the gist of a memory that the witnesses all share. For example, some survivors of the Titanic said the ship broke in two before it went down. Others said it went down intact. This conflict in testimony doesn’t mean that the Titanic completed its voyage by docking in New York. We have pictures of the ship resting on the bottom of the ocean. The two groups of survivors agree as to the gist of the event (the Titanic went down), and that memory is accurate. As the saying goes, however, the Devil is in the details of how it went down.

 

So I have this vivid memory with details that may or may not be true. It was at a campground in a State park. The officer was a wildlife officer. Bundy was found chopping on a stump with the knife. All this may be true or it may be confabulation. What isn’t negotiable about my memory is the fact that an officer took a huge knife away from Bundy shortly before Bundy got arrested in Pensacola. That much is corroborated by my friend remembering that I told him the same facts.  

So the next time two people are telling you about an event and they are in hopeless conflict about the details, don’t assume that either one of them is lying. Just take the details that they both agree on as being the gist of a genuine memory and weigh the conflicting details against each other and against reasonable probabilities to separate the genuine memory from the confabulation. In our Titanic example, I think the witnesses who say the ship broke in two are more likely right. Reason: Photographs of the ship on the bottom of the ocean show it is broken in two.

BTW: Back in 1978, the Buck General hunting knife was configured like a Bowie knife. I don’t know what current models of the knife look like. This makes for an interesting parallel between Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling. Rolling committed his murders with a Ka-Bar fighting/utility knife, which is also configured like a Bowie knife.