Forensic Psychology For Dummies (163 page)

1. He established the boy’s intellectual ability prior to the accident.
This process wasn’t simple because the boy had suffered severe head injuries from the accident, and so Haward had to consult his school records and other information.

2. He selected two groups of cyclists.
One group had the measured intelligence of the boy before the accident and the other had average intelligence. The boys rode their cycles through a puddle containing fluorescein dye so that their precise wheel tracks showed up on the road. Each set of cyclists then rode, one at a time, into a road from a junction similar to the one where the accident took place.

3. He carefully measured the tyre tracks and evaluated the route taken to determine how dangerous the taking of the curve had been.
The crucial issue was how close the cycles kept to the side of the road or how likely they were to swerve into the middle, which was much more risky.

The results showed that cyclists of low intelligence were no more likely to take the corner in a risky curve than riders of normal intelligence. In addition, the average curve followed by the cyclists was compared with the line the victim had taken to show that his behaviour was normal. This allowed the court to dismiss the claim of contributory negligence.

Haward used the process of setting up specific experiments to test aspects of claims in many cases. In doing this he was following directly in the footsteps of Münsterberg and the Baron that I mention earlier. The same sort of thing is still done today in some cases, as I did in relation to the case described later: ‘Examining the Role of Implicit Influence in the Lockerbie Bomber Case’.

Forcing Drugs to Make a Defendant Fit to Stand Trial

Charles Thomas Sell was a St Louis dentist long known to suffer from delusions. Although he hadn’t been convicted of any crimes, in 1997 he was charged with over 60 cases of fraud. Psychiatric examination determined that his mental state was such that he wasn’t fit to stand trial. The courts sent him to a mental institution with the plan that he’d get enough treatment to become competent enough to face the charges. However, while in hospital Sell refused to accept any medication that would influence his mental state. Prosecutors requested that the law require him to be forced to take the medication so that he’d become fit to stand trial.

This case was a
cause celebre
and a number of professional organisations submitted reports offering opinions on what should happen, including the American Psychological Association. These reports provided detailed guidance on the conditions under which various medical interventions are ethically acceptable.

The resulting guidelines have since found their way into various statutes. They include the recognition that any administered medications that influence a person’s thought processes are matters over which the individual should have an influence. Furthermore, the courts need to be aware that such drugs are liable to influence other aspects of a person’s behaviour that can modify how someone seems in court. Therefore, courts need to be extremely careful before requiring coercive treatment with drugs to make a person competent to appear before a judge and jury. All other less invasive methods should be considered first.

In a protracted set of legal judgements, the parties eventually agreed that it was probably appropriate for Charles Sell to be given medication involuntarily.

By then, however, he’d spent longer incarcerated than he would’ve done if he’d been found guilty of the original charges, and the case was dropped!

Investigating a Honey-Trap Gone Wrong

The young model Rachel Nickell was murdered while walking her dog with her 2-year-old son on Wimbledon Common in South London in July 1992. A couple of months later the police decided that Colin Stagg was the likely culprit. He came to their notice through lonely-hearts correspondence he had carried out with a woman, who thought it was rather odd.

The police set about trying to get Stagg to admit to the murder using what’s often called a
honey-trap.
A woman police officer, ‘Lizzie’, pretended to be part of the lonely-hearts’ circle and opened up correspondence with Stagg. Her activities were guided by a person with some forensic psychology background who’d generated a ‘profile’ of the killer that he thought fitted Colin Stagg.

Over six months, Lizzie corresponded with Stagg and met him a few times. Using pointers provided by the psychologist, she got as close as she could to offering Colin sexual favours if he admitted to the murder of Rachel Nickell. He never did admit that, but seemed to mention some aspects of the case that the police thought indicated knowledge that only the culprit would know. Armed with this and the willingness of the psychologist to give evidence that Stagg fitted the profile of the killer, the police charged Colin and took him to court.

As part of his defence, I and a number of colleagues examined closely the transcripts of all the interactions between Lizzie and Colin. We saw quite clearly that a concerted effort had been made to use various well-known psychological persuasion techniques to get a confession from Stagg, and that any claim that he fitted some sort of ‘profile’ of the killer was speculative in the extreme.

When the case eventually came to court, after Stagg had been in prison for 11 months, at the earliest stage of the trial the Judge, Mr Justice Ognall, commented on the ‘honey-trap’ activity saying: ‘I am afraid this behaviour betrays not merely an excess of zeal but a substantial attempt to incriminate a suspect by positive and deceptive conduct of the grossest kind’.

He threw the case out and Colin Stagg walked free.

Some years later, a quite different man was convicted of the murder. While the police were focusing on Colin Stagg, the man carried out a very similar murder. In other words, the obsession with honey-trapping Stagg enabled the real killer to go free and kill another young woman.

In January 2007, Colin Stagg was awarded £250,000 in damages. Lizzie also received a substantial sum in payment for the trauma she received from her participation in the fiasco.

Profiling Howard Hughes

When the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes died in 1976, people expressed the concern that he’d been so reclusive and generally odd in his later years that he hadn’t been competent to make an appropriate will. The then president of the American Psychological Association, Raymond Fowler, was called in to review what was known about Howard Hughes and offer an opinion on his mental state and competence towards the end of his life. Dr Fowler was thus asked to perform a
psychological autopsy
(something that I describe in Chapter 11).

Fowler obtained a vast amount of material about Hughes, which he studied over a number of years: material included Hughes’s diary and those of people close to him; business memoranda; articles in newspapers; interviews with Hughes; and letters he’d written or others had written to him or about him.

Dr Fowler’s conclusion was that Howard Hughes was a deeply disturbed man when he died. This mental disturbance had been evident from his earliest days, but developed into a very serious obsessive-compulsive disorder. At no time, however, had he been psychotic and totally out of touch with reality. He always knew what he was doing and had logical, if rather misinformed, reasons for doing what he did.

After extensive legal battles the will was generally accepted and many relatives of Hughes received payouts as well as a number of good causes.

Evaluating a Suicide Note

On 4 June 1992, Paula Gilfoyle, who was eight and a half months pregnant, was found hanging in her garage in the northwest of England. Her husband, Eddie Gilfoyle, found a suicide note in Paula’s handwriting, which he showed to the police. Initially the event was assumed to be a suicide, although Paula had told her friends how she was looking forward to having the baby and had made many arrangements in preparation.

A few days later, friends of Paula told the police that she’d told them that Eddie got her to write the suicide note because, they said, she’d told them her husband claimed to be doing a course for which he required a simulated suicide note!

If you think that this story is all rather odd, I agree with you. Certainly what one person says another person said (called
hearsay evidence
) isn’t usually allowed into court. It wasn’t allowed as evidence in this case, but it did form the background gossip that informed how the police went about the investigation.

Eddie denies any wrongdoing, but was convicted of the murder and after serving many years in prison was released on parole. Along the way, he appealed against the verdict. I was asked to consider the possibility that the crucial suicide note, which Paula had written, had been dictated by Eddie.

I discovered that Eddie and Paula were working different shifts and so had been leaving notes for each other. In addition, two other notes came to light that appeared to be precursors to the suicide note. In total, 11 communications existed from Paula to Eddie in the months leading up to the suicide. By examining the narrative that these notes implied, it was plausible that Paula had been contemplating leaving Eddie and then thinking about ending her life over a long period of time, but hiding this from others. Other studies I subsequently did on genuine and simulated suicide notes also supported the idea that Paula had written the suicide note herself.

Although the solicitors commented on the thoroughness of my report, the appeal judges refused to accept it as evidence. They claimed that my report provided no indication that Paula had been mentally disturbed and amounted to a form of ‘profiling’, which was unacceptable. (This unacceptability of ‘profiling’ was partly a consequence of the disastrous honey-trap case that I describe in the earlier section ‘Investigating a Honey-Trap Gone Wrong’.) The judges made this decision, even though the analysis I carried out hadn’t been done for the original court proceedings when Eddie was tried and convicted. So this was legally ‘new’ evidence which, if it had been available at the original trial, may have swayed the jury. Very recently, a box has been found in which Paula had locked away her private papers. These show she sometimes hid important feelings from those close to her, supporting the view that the happy face she presented to others before her death may not have been an indication of her true state of mind.