Born Liars (8 page)

No-one can earn a million dollars honestly.
William Jennings Bryan

On 10 September 2001, Major Charles Ingram faced this question:

A NUMBER ONE FOLLOWED BY ONE HUNDRED ZEROS IS KNOWN BY WHAT NAME?

It was the last in a sequence of twelve questions asked of Ingram on Britain's (and the world's) most popular game show,
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
? With the help of all three lifelines, Ingram had got the first eleven answers right. Now he stood on the verge of becoming only the third contestant in the show's history to win a million pounds.

For the best part of two evenings the studio audience had been amazed and bemused by Ingram's progress. His idiosyncratic manner offered a vivid contrast with the previous two winners of the top prize. Judith Keppel, who became the first Millionaire in 2000, possessed all the poise and self-assurance of England's upper middle-class: even when unsure of her answers, she was never unsure of herself. David Edwards, who had won the jackpot only five months before Ingram's appearance, exuded a different kind of confidence: that of a man who lives and breathes general knowledge quiz shows, and collects facts the way books collect dust.

Ingram, by contrast, twitched with self-doubt. He took an age to answer every question, circling around each option in turn, contradicting himself, lurching towards one before looping back and landing, as if by accident, on an answer he might have dismissed as impossible just a few seconds previously. He showed none of the strong instincts that can help pressured contestants override their doubts on crucial questions. Yet somehow he had stumbled towards the right answer eleven times. Now he was groping his way towards an answer that would either win him a million pounds or lose him nearly half that amount.

Faced with his four choices and bereft of lifelines, Ingram admitted he was unsure. ‘You haven't been sure since question number two,' groaned the show's host, Chris Tarrant. ‘I
think
it's a nanomole,' said Ingram, his hands clambering all over his face. ‘But it could be a gigabit.' Tarrant hinted heavily that Ingram ought to take the money and run. For a moment, Ingram seemed to agree. ‘I just don't think I can do this one.' But he persisted. ‘I don't think it's a megatron. And I don't think I've heard of a googol.' Ingram murmured the latter word three more times to himself, before announcing that ‘By a process of elimination, I actually think it's googol, but I don't know what a googol is.' The cameras focused on Ingram's wife, Diana, in the audience. She looked nauseous. ‘You've got half a million – and you're going for the one you've never heard of?' asked an incredulous Tarrant. After more mulling, Ingram announced, with something approaching resolution, ‘I'm going to play.' The audience let out a gasp of dismay. Ingram flinched. ‘No, I'm not!' But he did, declaring googol his final answer. After the excruciating delay of a break in recording, Tarrant asked for Ingram's half a million-pound cheque back. ‘You no longer have that,' he said, ripping it up. A pause. ‘You've just won
one million pounds
!' The audience exploded with excitement and relief.

The episode was never broadcast. A week later, while the rest of the world reeled from the attacks of September 11th, Ingram received a phone call at his home in Wiltshire from Paul Smith, managing director of the show's maker, Celador Productions. Smith informed Ingram that the cheque Tarrant had handed him, post-dated for 18 September – the next day – had been cancelled. So had the episode itself, due to broadcast the same day. Smith referred vaguely to ‘irregularities', without suggesting they were connected to Ingram, who sounded surprised but not upset. Five days later, at seven a.m., Ingram answered a knock at the door. It was the police, there to arrest him and his wife. At the same time, eighty miles away in Cardiff, a third man was being arrested: Tecwen Whittock, who had been sitting in the Fastest Finger First row of contestants during Ingram's time in the hot seat.

A year and a half later, on 7 April 2003, a jury at Southwark Crown Court in London found Charles and Diana Ingram and Whittock guilty of conspiring to cheat their way to a million pounds. Charles Ingram resigned his commission from the army. Eighteen months later he was declared bankrupt.

To attempt to steal a million pounds is one thing; to attempt it under the noses of fifteen million people is quite another. But it wasn't just the audacity of the Millionaire Three's scheme that struck the public – it was the absurdity. The story that emerged from the trial read like the script of a very British drama, mixing tragedy with comedy, low cunning and risible self-delusion. The popular version went something like this: a dim Major from a minor public school is persuaded by his ambitious wife to co-operate in a get-rich-quick scheme that involves getting on to the country's most watched game show and then using the coughs of an accomplice in the studio – a quiz show veteran – to direct him to the correct answers. Against all odds, the unlikely threesome pull it off. Until, one morning, the phone rings.

All three defendants pleaded not guilty, and later continued fiercely to protest their innocence, despite being offered large sums of money to ‘tell their story'. After the trial, ITV broadcast a documentary about the aborted show and its aftermath. The programme was viewed by an extraordinary seventeen million people – more than the series itself. It presented an edited version of Ingram's run, drawing attention to the heavy coughs that seemed to occur every time the Major mentioned a correct answer. To the public, the documentary offered the peculiarly satisfying spectacle of watching a man engaged in an elaborate deception for which he had already been caught. Ingram's reactions to his coughing cues were so obvious, it was funny. ‘I don't think I've heard of a googol.'
Cough
. ‘I actually think it's googol.'

An odd lacuna lay at the heart of the prosecution case, however: there was no evidence of Major Ingram and Tecwen Whittock ever meeting, speaking, or emailing each other. Whittock had had brief conversations with Diana on the phone, but in the world of quiz show obsessives this was unremarkable. Diana had been a contestant herself (she won £32,000) and was co-authoring a book about the show; prospective contestants frequently seek out the advice of those who have been there before them. Neither did police discover any calls or meetings between the three after the show's recording. (You might have imagined that in the period after Ingram's win and before he knew of the investigation the three would have talked, if only to discuss the distribution of spoils). After a team of Scotland Yard's top detectives had taken eighteen months to carry out their enquiries, the Crown's case rested entirely on the tape of Ingram's appearance and the suspicions of Celador staff.

These suspicions seem, on closer examination, to have been surprisingly flimsy. For instance, the court was told that the production staff became wary when the Major used up his lifelines early in the show. But a look back at previous contestants who had made long winning runs indicated that there was nothing unusual about this. It was argued that Whittock's guilt was indicated by the fact that he leaned over to ask his fellow panellist about one of the questions. But at least one former contestant testified that this was normal too. A production assistant thought it odd that the Major said he would be going to work in the morning, despite having just won a million pounds. But the previous million-pound winner, David Edwards, a teacher, had done precisely that just twenty weeks before. Celador's testimony bore a touch of what psychologists call ‘hindsight bias' – the tendency to recall one's own thoughts and feelings in a manner consonant with what you now know, or think you know.

There is no doubt, however, that the tape is compelling evidence. There are 192 coughs on it, and the prosecution deemed nineteen of the loudest ones to have come from Ingram's accomplice – although they conceded it was impossible to prove. Tecwen Whittock didn't deny coughing a lot. He suffered from hay fever and rhinitus, an allergy to dust. Independent experts testified to the authenticity of his condition and agreed that it would have been exacerbated by sitting for hours in the dry heat of the studio. As the prosecuting barrister scornfully pointed out, however, ‘There is no condition causing you to cough after someone has given the right answer to a question.' Except – perhaps there is.

During the twenty-two days of the trial at London's Southwark Crown Court, there was a lot of coughing in the courtroom. The tape of Ingram's appearance was played in full at least a dozen times, and the key segments were replayed over and over, with the coughs helpfully amplified by Celador production engineers. But the coughs weren't coming just from the tape. A journalist sitting in the public gallery noticed that every time one of the barristers mentioned the word ‘cough' – which is to say, frequently – people in the public gallery broke out into coughing fits. When a leading expert in respiratory conditions was giving evidence, proceedings were halted because a female juror couldn't stop coughing. During the defence barrister's summing up, two more jurors seized up and the judge adjourned proceedings until they could recover.

Those responsible didn't consciously decide to cough on this cue – they were reacting unconsciously and involuntarily. If the correlation between their coughs and the word cough had been pointed out to them they would have been startled. James Plaskett, a former winning contestant on the show, who published an exhaustive analysis of the Ingram trial, wondered if a similar effect explained Whittock's coughing. Once you accept that people cough in unconscious response to external stimuli it seems plausible that Whittock was at least some of the time, because we don't know that all the coughs were his – reacting involuntarily to the answers he knew to be right. Plaskett reviewed a DVD of Judith Keppel's winning performance. Audible audience coughs occurred after her first enunciation of the correct answer but before definitely committing to her answer at the £2,000, £4,000, £8,000, £64,000, £500,000 and £1,000,000 points. That's to say, at six of the last ten questions – just as with Ingram.

The case remains somewhat mysterious even to those closely involved with it. Chris Tarrant later remarked that ‘Scotland Yard and the Fraud Squad have never worked out what happened.' A police source told the
Daily Telegraph
, ‘We've never been able to find every piece of the jigsaw.' It's not within the purview of this book to discuss whether the verdict was just. The relevant question is this: why was everyone so ready to believe in Ingram's guilt?

When somebody pulls off the rare feat of winning a million pounds in a show with a studio audience, it's natural that questions should arise over their probity. Something about Ingram's manner, however, kindled these questions into suspicions; Celador's staff felt, instinctively, that something was not right. Of course, their instincts, like those of the detectives asked to judge the authenticity of rape claims, may not have been distilled wisdom so much as distilled prejudice. Ingram, a mid-ranking army officer with a posh voice and a bumbling manner, came with his own cultural baggage. ‘Tim Nice-But-Dim' was how Tarrant described his first impression of the Major. Not the sort of man who could win one million pounds on a general knowledge quiz show.

But perhaps what really convinced ten jurors, the press and the British public of Ingram's guilt was his demeanour in the hot seat: awkward, a little odd-looking, not terribly confident, short on charm. During his time under the studio lights he seemed shifty, he fidgeted, he was inarticulate. In other words, Ingram exhibited all the cues we intuitively associate with a liar.

Jake Gittes, the private detective played by Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski's film
Chinatown
, is primed to look for deceit in every conversation and is wary of everyone he meets. In his small world of crooks and divorcees, he is very difficult to fool, but when he gets drawn into the machinations of Los Angeles politics his instincts become useless to him. By the end of the film he has been duped by everyone, overwhelmed by the unsuspected complexity of human behaviour.

Some people are better than others at detecting deceit. But they're not necessarily the kind of people you'd think. Nancy Carter and Mark Weber, psychologists from the University of Toronto, gave forty-six MBA (Masters in Business Administration) students, each of whom had already had several years of work experience, a work-based scenario to read. It described a recent spate of dishonesty in their university's recruitment and interview process, involving potential employees lying about their qualifications. These lies, they were told, had cost the organisation dearly in terms of time, productivity and morale.

The participants were asked to choose one of two managers to interview new applicants. The managers had similar experience and skill-sets; the only difference between them was attitudinal. Colleen was disposed to view people very positively and to assume that they were trustworthy until proven otherwise. Sue was more suspicious by nature. She was inclined to believe that people will get away with anything they can; her default attitude was one of distrust. A clear majority of the students chose Sue to run the recruitment process. They feared that Colleen would be gullible and easily duped. They even suspected her to be of inferior intelligence.

Most of us would probably make the same choice, even if we'd rather be friends with Colleen than Sue. Given the situation, it would surely be better to have an interviewer who is always on the lookout for liars than one who assumes that people generally tell the truth. It's commonly believed that those with a pronounced tendency to trust others are easy prey for predators in the social jungle. High trust is associated with credulity – with people who will believe anything they hear from an interviewee, or a vendor, or an internet date. Indeed, most economic models of decision-making suggest that in any social interaction we should all be more like Sue and less like Colleen: low trusters, who rightly assume that others are out to behave in their own self-interest, and so act to defend ourselves from exploitation. But is being a high truster synonymous with being an easy gull?