 The following story contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. At what location was this? 8th and H on the left-hand side. He was all talking like that. This is The Alley, DC's 8th and H case. My name is Shannon Lynch. Episode 3, The False Confession Trap. In the last episode, we talked about how detectives Sanchez and McGinnis began pursuing their theory that a gang called the 8th and H crew was responsible for Catherine Fuller's death. They made their first arrest in the case, Alfonso Moncaris, just days after the murder. Monk denied any involvement in the crime, but based on an anonymous tip and a questionable statement given by Clifton Yarbrough, the police were able to arrest Monk and keep him in custody. Police continued to express frustration over what they perceived as uncooperative members of the community. However, several members of the neighborhood had come forward with information, but their tips didn't fit into the detective's gang theory narrative so they were written off. During this time, other violent crimes against women were happening around 8th and H. A newcomer named James McMillan had been charged with two separate assaults and robberies on middle-aged women in the same area where Mrs. Fuller was killed. Second, a woman named Amy Davis gave a statement to police claiming she saw a man named James Blue beating Mrs. Fuller up in the alley the day of the murder. Neither one of these leads was pursued extensively because these individuals did not fit into the detective's gang theory. Part one, building the team. By November of 1984, detectives Sanchez and McGinnis had run into a dead end. There was little evidence to support their chosen theory that the 8th and H crew was responsible for Catherine Fuller's brutal murder. The community was growing frustrated with the lack of answers. It was time to shake things up. In late October, Sanchez and McGinnis asked higher-ups to add Detective Donald Gossage to their team. Unlike McGinnis and Sanchez, Detective Gossage was familiar with the 8th and H area from patrolling in that neighborhood. He was known to drive around with teens and pre-teens in his cruiser, buying them food and pressing them for information. Detective Gossage is the same detective that harassed Alfonso Moncares for years, as mentioned in episode 2. Patrice Gaines explained what she'd learned about Detective Gossage while working as a reporter for the Washington Post. When I began to question people in the community and elsewhere, even on the police force, I found him to be a much more troubled, shady, certainly questionable character. There were other officers who would talk about him negatively, but no one wanted to speak on the record. Gossage was officially added to the investigative team in early November. Around the same time, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerry Goren was assigned to prosecute the case. It would be his sole focus for the next year. Goren was a young, promising lawyer and a graduate of Harvard Law. In 1984, he'd been with the U.S. Attorney's Office for five years, and he was generally liked by his colleagues. He'd just started trying murder cases earlier that year. This was definitely Goren's most substantial case thus far in his career. He was in it to win it. It didn't take long for attention surrounding the 8th and 8th case to explode. It quickly became a regular element of local TV and newspaper stories. News outlets as far away as Los Angeles published stories on it. The pressure was on, and it wasn't long before Detective Gossage proved to be an asset to the investigative team. Part 2 Cracked On a night in late November, Gossage was patrolling near the Washington Coliseum, where a go-go concert was taking place. A fight broke out among attendees. Gossage stopped several of the concert goers to get information, one of which was a 16-year-old girl named Carrie Ellaby. Unprompted, according to Gossage, Carrie claimed she had information to share about the 8th and 8th case. Several days later, at the homicide office, she told Detective Gossage that a young man named Calvin Alston had confessed to her, saying he had snatched Mrs. Fuller's pocketbook during the assault. This was the crack in the case the detectives had desperately wanted. They were excited to finally have some fresh information. Even if their witness wasn't the most reliable, Carrie would later change her story several times over the following months. She was also a frequent PCP user. As Detective Gossage himself would later admit, their case was weak without the tip from Carrie. He told a Washington Post reporter, quote, without Carrie, there would have been no case. There were no leads. On the evening of November 29th, Calvin's mother answered the front door of her house that stood less than a mile from 8th and H. A wave of cops flooded her home, guns drawn. The helicopter was circling above. 19-year-old Calvin was cuffed and brought into the homicide unit office. The detectives immediately pegged him as a weak link. Detective Sanchez said in an interview later that Calvin, quote, acted feminine. They felt confident they could crack him. As soon as Calvin waved his Miranda rights, detectives dug right in. They told him they knew he had confessed to taking part in Mrs. Fuller's murder. Calvin insisted that that was impossible. He had been painting a house the day of the crime, he told them. He felt confident he could prove his alibi if he just got the chance to talk to his co-workers. The detectives weren't buying it. They repeatedly called him a liar. They said they knew for a fact that he was involved and that his alibi was bogus. This, of course, was a lie. What happened next would become a routine practice in interrogations throughout the course of the 8th and H investigation. Detective McGinnis pulled out a piece of paper and put it on the table in front of Calvin. He drew a circle with lines through it, like slices of a pie. He then shaded in one of the slices of the pie with his pen. McGinnis told Calvin the pie represented the crime. According to them, Calvin only had two options. Either take a small slice of the pie or claim the entire pie. Taking a slice would mean he'd have to confess his involvement, which would result in a short prison sentence. The detective said they assured him they'd be able to quote-unquote help him if he just chose this option. The second option was to take the whole pie by continuing to deny his involvement. The detectives told Calvin he'd spend the rest of his life in prison if he picked this option. Calvin was scared. He was alone in an interrogation room with two authoritative detectives. At this point, he could have stopped talking. He could have called a parent to come sit with him during the interrogation. He could have demanded a lawyer. But Calvin was young and unfamiliar with the legal rights he had. He wasn't aware that he had options outside of the two detectives had presented to him, no matter what he thought he was going to prison. In a last-ditch effort to save himself, Calvin cracked. It was a struggle. They were punching a lady. She swung and the lady hit the ground. Their mom, Levi, and Kevin, Chrissy, and all of them, they were kicking and punching our lady. Part three, how false confessions happen. A false confession is a statement given by a person that incriminates themselves in a crime they did not commit. This might happen for several reasons, including threats from police, physical violence, deceptive tactics, or a lack of understanding of the law. Oftentimes, it involves police lying to the suspect about what evidence they have, which is totally legal in the U.S. It's hard to understand why someone would confess to a crime they didn't commit. But this is a surprisingly common occurrence. A study published in the Journal for Criminal Law and Criminology looked at hundreds of exonerations that occurred between 1989 and 2003, a staggering 42% of the exonerations involving young people had a false confession. One of the most well-known instances of this phenomenon was seen in the Central Park Five case, also known as the Exonerated Five. In 1989, five years after the murder of Catherine Fuller, five young Black and Latino men were arrested for allegedly raping a woman in New York City's Central Park. Four of the five gave videotaped, quote, unquote, confessions. In every instance, only the confessions were recorded on video, but the hours of intense interrogation that led up to them were not. All five young men were convicted and sent to prison. In 2001, convicted rapist and murderer, Mattias Reyes, confessed to the crime. After Reyes' DNA was tested against the semen that was left at the crime scene, it was confirmed he was the actual perpetrator. The Central Park Five had their convictions vacated in 2002. The phenomenon of false confessions isn't limited to just civilians. An attorney named Don Salisman, who was involved in the 8th and H case in more recent years, told me about a case he worked on, known as the Norfolk Four. In an interview, Salisman explained the case to me. Four innocent Navy sailors, falsely confessed to a crime that they did not commit, a brutal crime in Norfolk, Virginia, that occurred just off of the Naval base. So it was being investigated and prosecuted by civilian police and the regular state justice system in Norfolk. The crazy thing about the Norfolk Four case is that the police knew that these four Navy sailors did not match the DNA, because after my client, Daniel Williams, confessed to this rape and murder after a highly coercive interrogation, where the police told him that he failed a polygraph when he actually passed the polygraph. And when the police told Daniel that they had a witness who saw him coming out of the victim's apartment after she had last been alive, which was not true, Daniel confessed. And then a couple months later, DNA came back and proved that he was not the person who had raped the victim and left his semen. Rather than acknowledging they'd made a mistake, the detectives reasoned Daniel must have had an accomplice that was responsible for the DNA left at the scene. And they arrested his roommate and interrogated him and he confessed and then they arrested another person when his roommate's DNA didn't match and it just kept going on and on. And the confessions changed from Daniel Williams confessing wrongly, falsely, that he committed this crime by himself to the next person saying that the two of them had done it together, to the next person saying that there were three people, to the next person saying that there were four people, and eventually they got a confession from one of these men that seven people were involved. All of those people, the DNA did not match them. Eventually, in their eighth arrest, the police identified the person that had actually left the semen sample at the crime scene. But again, rather than admitting they'd gotten it wrong with the first seven arrests, they prosecuted all eight of them. And it took 15 years from the time we got involved in that case before our clients were fully exonerated and their names were cleared and they were compensated for the wrong that was inflicted on them. The Norfolk Four, like the eighth and age crew, were victims of investigators holding on to a theory and refusing to let go, even when they gathered evidence that contradicted said theory. So how do false confessions happen? Jim Tranum is a former DC homicide detective and expert in the area of false confessions. In an interview with me, he described the method of interrogation detectives widely used in the U.S., which is called the read technique or the read method. He argues this technique is what makes false confessions more common in the states than in other countries that don't use these tactics. Here in the U.S., law enforcement uses what I refer to as the accusatory approach when they interrogate suspects. And it's taught all over the country. It basically all boils down to what is commonly known as the read technique. Even though detectives say that, oh, I was never trained in read, if you look at what they're doing, it's basically the read technique. Jim really broke down how the read technique works. The read technique is a two-part process. The first part is what they call a behavioral analysis interview. They teach you that with like a 30-minute interview of the subject and by using behavioral analysis by listening to the way that the person responds to a question, you have a series of like 17 questions that you ask them and based on their response, you're supposed to be able to tell whether or not they're being deceptive or even if they're guilty with over 80% accuracy. That's what we teach is. The problem is, though, that's all junk science. The research that is out there, the real scientific research shows that a lot of the things that read says are signs of deception or actually signs of truth-telling. And, you know, people like juveniles, people with intellectual or developmental disabilities often exhibit these signs as manifestations of their youth or of their disability. For example, fidgeting problems with eye contact are closing their eyes to think. And so we're making judgment calls as to whether or not somebody's lying to us based on junk science. But it's on that basis that we then decide whether or not we're going to go to the next stage, which is interrogation. I asked Jim to give me an example of what this would look like in real life. Let's say I'm investigating the theft from a cash register. All I know is that five different people had access to that cash register. I don't have any other evidence that they took it or they didn't. But I interviewed them using my pseudoscience and I determined that, you know, this person is the one who did it. So I leave them alone in the interrogation room and I let them sit for 10 or 15 minutes, increase their anxiety, and then I'll come back in and I'll have a big folder with me with all kind of papers and it's all blank, you know, because I'm just making all this up. Here's where confirmation bias really sets in. What I do is I stand over top of you and I tell you, our investigation has proven that you are the one who stole the money. There is no doubt about it whatsoever. The evidence is there. You cannot say anything that will convince me otherwise. All I want to know is why. And then I'll start throwing out potential excuses as to why. It may be something like, did you take the money because the cash register drawer was open and anybody would be tempted. Did you take the money because you were in debt and under a lot of stress? But it's a monologue. I'm doing the talking. Now you may try to say, well, wait a minute, I didn't do it or try to explain something. I block you. I don't want to hear it. Look, we know you did it. Dad, did you do it because? I can lie to you and tell you we have five witnesses who saw you do it. And the thing is, I'm doing this over and over and over. I'm blocking your denials. That's where this confirmation bias sets in because I am not looking for information. I'm looking for you to confirm. If the interviewee doesn't break, at this point, the interrogator gives what Jim called a false choice. I tell you, look, we've been at this for three hours. We know you did it. No doubt in our mind. Now you either did it because you're an adult female who doesn't care about anybody or you took the money because you were under a lot of stress and you were going to pay it back anyway. So it's one or the other. If it's the first one, out of here, let your judge do what they will. But if it's the second one, let's work with that. Often, either real or implied threats come in. The investigator will say things like what do you think the judge is going to do with somebody who lies versus somebody who tells the truth? Do you think the jury is going to think kindly of you sitting up there and lying when we have all this evidence? Lineancy could be, look, if you cooperate, you know, things could go better for you, you know, that sort of stuff. And a lot of times it's not direct, but it's just implied. But like I had mentioned before, it's over and over and over and over again. Marissa Boyer's Bluestine is an assistant director of the Quadrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Kerry Law School. Previously, she worked with the Pennsylvania Innocence Project to reverse 14 wrongful convictions. Marissa explained how the read method easily allows detectives to feed information to suspects. When I was trained, I was told, you come into the room with a folder filled with documents. Doesn't matter what it is, it's a big folder meant to imply that we have all this evidence against you in the process of that conversation. So nope, nope, nope, I didn't do it, I didn't do it, I didn't do it. Then the police very often will use evidence from the case to try to convince the person that they did, right? Well, then explain to us why we have you on surveillance coming out the back door. Tell us why we've got your DNA on the ligature around her neck. Explain the broken window. And what did I just do with all that? I told the person in front of me details about the case, about how the person got in, about how the victim was killed. A well-known, more recent example of this is seen in the popular Netflix series Making a Murderer. The interrogation of Brandon Dassy is a masterclass in coercion. I think most of us have probably seen that video, of Brandon Dassy being interrogated by the police officers. There's one moment where they say to him, Brandon, we know you guys did something to her head. What'd you do to her head? And he says, we cut her hair. No, that wasn't it. You know, what'd you do to her head? We hit her. No, it wasn't that either. And he takes like several more guesses. And finally, the police just say, all right, we're just going to tell you she was shot, who shot her. Oh, Steve did. Right, so what did they just do? They gave him information about the case. And that's how it happened. Marissa also told me about things that make false confessions more likely. First of all, there's dispositional factors. So the actors about the individual that might make them more susceptible to giving a false confession. Juveniles, for example, people who are elderly, people who are addicted. People who are ADHD has an almost direct causal connection with people who are susceptible to giving false confession. So those are kind of things about the person. Then there are issues about the situation, which are referred to as situational factors. How long did the interrogation go on? What kinds of questions were used? Where did it occur? And there have been a lot of studies that have shown that the longer that interrogation goes on, the more likely the statement that gets resulted is false. One thing I want to make clear here is that many detectives that get false confessions out of people aren't necessarily intending to do so. The read method just makes it very easy for this to happen. Jim Traynam told me about a time he got a false confession and how it really changed his perspective on interrogation techniques. I actually had a suspect that we developed. I'm not a yell or a screamer at all. I'm not one of these guys that bangs my fist on the table and all. But after hours using the interrogation techniques that I was taught, and that would pass muster in any court in the country, we finally did convince her that it was a good idea. And she did. And she gave us those details that as we love to say, only the true perpetrator would have known. So we thought we were in pretty good shape. But things started to go south when they really started to look into her alibi. We ran across her alibi and it was unshakable. She was living in a homeless shelter for families at the time. And so when I went to get the log, to sign in, sign out log, which I was very strict about, I found that she was out some of that night, but there was no way that she could have been out during the critical moments. Jim wanted to understand how he could have mistakenly elicited a false confession from someone. Luckily for him, there were tapes of the entire interrogation. The way that we judge whether or not a confession is true is by the number of true details that the person can tell us about the crime. Well, that doesn't work if we happen to tell them those details beforehand, either in very subtle means or even directly or showing them crime scene photos. And we completely contaminated it. It wasn't blatant, but it was little things that she was able to pick up on as the interrogation went on that allowed her to create the story. A lot of it was outlandish, but it contained enough for us to believe that she had inside knowledge about it. So that's when I began coming up with training programs for my coworkers to try to help them understand that this is the small print that they don't teach you about. Part four, the trap in action. Calvin Alston was definitely a victim of the deceptive tactics of the read method. Police lied to him, saying they had definitive evidence of his involvement, seeing only two options to confess and get a lesser sentence or deny involvement and get life in prison. Calvin chose the former. Initially, he told detectives that he'd only acted as a lookout during the crime, manning the eighth street end of the alley. Next, according to police records, he began to explain his version of events. Calvin said Mrs. Fuller was walking up eighth street when Levi Rouse, Russell Overton, Alfonso Monc Harris, Kelvin Smith, and Clifton Yarbrough pushed her into the alley. Levi hit her on the back of the head with a quote, two by four like stick, and then she fell. They grabbed her arms and feet and carried her up to what he referred to as the little cut in the alley. Then he said Clif picked up her money and ran off towards ninth street. There was no mention of the sexual assault. Detectives Sanchez and McGinnis were excited, but it technically wasn't enough. They needed Calvin to admit to being an active participant in the murder. And they really needed him to drop more names to fit into their theory that a gang upwards of 20 young people committed the crime. They told him they'd need more information in order to quote, unquote, help him. What happened next is something you see often in false confessions. McGinnis gave Calvin an outline of what he thought the version of events were. He was feeding him details. According to Calvin, they went over this version of events again and again for the next hour and a half. It was a rehearsal. Only then did they start videotaping. In the video, Calvin said a group of young men had been hanging out at the park at eighth and H talking about robbing someone. Then they crossed H street, grabbed Mrs. Fuller and pushed her into the alley. They followed Lady Dan's street, told Levi, pushed the lady into the alley. Next, he said the group carried her down the alley. They picked her up and took her in this garage like in a cut on the hand. According to Calvin, Calvin Smith, Timothy Catlett, Russell Overton and Chris Turner were beating Mrs. Fuller. He said Levi hit her as hard as he could in the back of the head. Then he said the group took her clothes off and sodomized her with a four to five inch hole. Like Levi says, stood this up here like he was pushing and I heard somebody say, shove it some more. Who said shove it some more? Monk said shove it some more. He claimed Calvin Smith took her rings. Clifton Yarbrough took her cash. And then everyone left. There were several issues with Calvin's quote unquote confession. According to police records, the first statement he made before they turned on the video recorder didn't include anything about the sodomy. If he had truly been present, he surely would have included this most horrific detail. Second, some of the facts about Mrs. Fuller's autopsy simply don't line up with Calvin's statement. He said Mrs. Fuller was carried down the alley. But her autopsy showed one side of her back was torn up, consistent with being dragged several yards across concrete, not carried. Calvin said Levi hit her hard in the back of the head. But Mrs. Fuller had no injuries on the back of her head whatsoever. He also said the group took off her clothes and threw her bra. When Mrs. Fuller's body was found, she still had her sweater and bra on, pushed up to her armpits. Calvin described the pole that was used to sodomize her as being four to five inches long. But Mrs. Fuller had injuries that were indicative of a pole that was at least 11 inches. There's a reason for these inconsistencies. Calvin's confession was complete bogus. He simply regurgitated information that was fed to him and filled in the blanks in an attempt to save himself. Many years later, under oath, Calvin explained how he was fed information by the detectives. Here are some quotes directly from court transcripts read by my colleague Joe Wilkes. Attorney, had you said anything about a garage before Detective Sanchez said that? No, sir. Attorney, had you said anything to any of the detectives about a pole being stuck in her when you gave the lookout statement? No, sir. I reached out to Mr. Alston to see if he wanted to participate in this podcast, but I didn't receive a response. Part five, reforms. There are several things that can help prevent false confessions from happening in the first place. One is changing the type of interrogation training police receive, moving away from the read method. In some places, as Marissa Boyer's Blue Stein explains, new interrogation tactics are slowly being implemented. I've been in trainings with law enforcement from Wichita, from departments in Arizona, South Carolina, in my own home state of Pennsylvania, Montgomery County, where law enforcement are learning to do it differently. Learning is a non-coercive, respectful, rapport-building environment of how to interrogate somebody. The key to that is the autonomy and agency of the person who's being interrogated or interviewed, rather than treating them as an object from which to extract a confession. Retreating them as a person who has information or potential information about a crime and learning to speak with them in a way that brings that out more. Second, interrogations should be videotaped from the moment the suspect walks into the interview room. Such videos serve as a fact-checker, as Jim Trainham described in his experience. Most jurisdictions don't record video at all, and for the few that do, they often only video the recap statement after rehearsing beforehand with detectives, as was the case for Calvin Alston. Lastly, we should make it illegal for police to lie to suspects during interrogations. In all 50 states, it is perfectly legal for a police officer to lie about what kind of evidence they have against suspects over the age of 18. When it comes to juveniles, only three states, Oregon, Illinois, and Utah, have made it illegal to lie to underage suspects during an interrogation. There's a reason this practice of deception is illegal in many countries, like Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Norway, and parts of Canada. Lying about having evidence that proves a person's guilt doesn't always lead to the truth, but it can definitely lead to a false confession. Unfortunately, none of these reforms were put in place when Calvin Alston was interrogated by MPD at the end of November 1984. Calvin believed the detectives when they said, either implied or directly, that he could go home soon if he told them what they wanted to hear. But it was too late. He had admitted to being an accomplice in a murder, but he didn't fully understand that at the time. In the coming weeks, police would use Calvin's statement to justify many more arrests of young black men in the area. And Calvin wouldn't go home for a very, very long time. It was a big knock at the door. Boom, boom, boom. So I went to the living room and looked out the window. I seen police cars, seen a whole walkway lined up with police. That's next time on The Alley, DC's 8th and H case. This podcast is dedicated in memory of Catherine Fuller. Our host is Shannon Lynch. Our executive producers are Jason Stewart and Shannon Lynch. This podcast was recorded at New America Studios and Creative Underground. The cover art is by Samantha Webster. Editorial and media support from Jody Nardi, Molly Martin, and Joe Wilkes. Audio editing and mixing by Shannon Lynch. Social media directed by me, Maika Hulit. Script editing and fact checking by Thomas Dibdall and Sharla Freeland. A very special thank you to Patrice Gaines for keeping this story alive for decades and for supporting this project throughout production. 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