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The investigators say they were reluctant to believe McGraw at first, but at the time he was the best lead they had. McGraw listed an impressive array of hardware allegedly used by the killers, including such glamorous weapons as a plastic Glock pistol and a 9-millimeter Beretta, but none of it matched the ballistics information the police had. One detective noted that McGraw gave investigators nothing of consequence, but at least he was giving up names. And in a case that had come under international scrutiny, it was impossible for the investigators to ignore any leads.
So the other Tucson suspects were picked up. And some of the things they told police were extremely troubling.
The statements of both McGraw and Dante Parker, for instance, mention the loot from the temple being carried out in a black bag. And detectives say Parker accurately described a piece of jewelry they didn’t even know was missing until they checked with the victim’s family after Parker was arrested and charged with the murders.
There were problems, but there are always problems with confessions, investigators say. As Agnos points out, the hours of denial, the spotty details, the sloughing off of blame and the confusion are all part of the classic matrix of detective-criminal interaction.
There’s a classic interviewing process that one goes through in dealing with a criminal,” Sheriff Agnos says. I will tell you, to be a good police officer you have to be a very good poker player. You have to know when to bet, when to raise, when to check, when to pass, and, as the song by Kenny Rogers says, you gotta know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em, because these criminal suspects are experienced individuals and they will take you around in circles. You have to go kind of where they take you.”
And now Leo Bruce, Mark Nunez and Victor Zarate are taking him to court.
PEOPLE HAVE BEEN aware of the phenomenon of false confession for hundreds of years.
In England in 1660, William Harrison disappeared, and his servant, John Perry, was sent to look for him. When Perry failed to return to his own home that evening, the authorities became suspicious. Perry was confronted with a bloody hat allegedly belonging to his master. After several days of intensive questioning, Perry broke down and confessed to murdering Harrison. His statement also implicated his brother and mother in the crime, and, on the basis of that statement alone, all three were convicted and executed.
Two years later, William Harrison reappeared. He said he had been ambushed, kidnaped and sold into slavery in Turkey. Eventually, he escaped and returned home. Perry’s Case,” as the incident has come to be known, is the seminal case from which the body of British and American law surrounding confessions proceeds. Soon after Harrison’s reappearance, some English courts began to require proof of the victim’s death-the corpus delicti requisite familiar to readers of Erle Stanley Gardner-as corroboration of a murder confession. Though the rule was never applied universally in Great Britain, it has been adopted by all American jurisdictions save Massachusetts.
Gisli Gudjonsson was a police detective with the Reykjavik Criminal Investigation Unit in his homeland when he had his first experiences with false confessions. One case involved the murder of an elderly woman who was killed when she apparently surprised a burglar in a house she was watching for friends who were traveling abroad.
Because murder is relatively rare in Iceland,” Gudjonsson says, it was well-publicized in the papers, and soon a man came to the police station and said he had committed the killing. He was interviewed and gave an account that did not coincide with the facts of the matter, so we decided his confession was undoubtedly not genuine.”
Later, a well-known television personality was arrested and convicted of the woman’s murder-he presumably killed the woman because she, and anyone else in Iceland, could have identified him.
A second case involved a man Gudjonsson describes as a well-known thief.” After the man left the home of a woman he had been drinking with, she noticed her purse was missing and called the police. When Gudjonsson apprehended him, the man eventually said, All right, I must have done it.” Gudjonsson says the thief said he could not remember taking the purse, but that he had a history of blackouts and he thought he must have taken it. Later, the woman found the purse, which had slipped behind a settee.
Nevertheless, he confessed to the crime because he thought he must have done it, not because he had any memory of doing it,” Gudjonsson said.
IN ADDITION TO ITS guarantees of due process and against double jeopardy, the Fifth Amendment provides that no person can be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” But the concept of compulsion is a slippery one, and surely an innocent person would not confess unless he or she was somehow compelled to do so. Gudjonsson’s research, however, indicates that normal, accepted police procedure can sometimes result in normal” people-that is, people who are not mentally debilitated-confessing to crimes they did not commit.
When police officers believe they are interviewing a criminal suspect, they may use persuasive interviewing techniques,” Gudjonsson said in a speech, The Psychology of False Confessions,” he delivered in 1989 in Great Britain to the Royal Society of Medicine. That means they have certain hypotheses. They believe that person that they have in custody has something to do with the offense and they may be determined to prove their case. They may be persistent. They may not use obvious pressure, but they may be determined in their questioning.”
And Gudjonsson believes some people may be prone to caving in to interrogators even if they are certain they did not commit the crime they are being questioned about.
There is a perception of immediate, desirable consequences,” Gudjonsson said in his speech. These type of confessions are best explained by the subject’s desire to escape from a highly stressful situation. The perceived immediate gain may be much more powerful than the long-term uncertain consequences of the confession, especially if people [think] that once their [attorney] comes he will sort it all out or they think, like some [innocent] people have told me, `Well, no court will convict me, I did not do it and even if I said I did it, clearly they are going to find the real offender and I am going to be let free.'”
Gudjonsson said it often doesn’t make any difference whether the confession is real-because the relief is. They think, `This is good, I don’t have to be questioned by the police anymore.'”
Unfortunately for these conflict-avoiders, once they confess, there is a high probability that their confessions will be accepted, according to Gudjonsson. A confession, he and many police say, more often ends a case than sends detectives scurrying off for corroborating evidence.
In the temple murder interrogations, according to the transcripts and tapes, investigators repeatedly reminded the suspects that they weren’t picked up on a whim.
The cops repeatedly suggested to each suspect that he is simply the last link in the chain, that the suspects’ little pact” had been violated and that all his criminal confederates were spilling their guts out in interrogation rooms just feet away.
Almost from the beginning, Sheriff Agnos says, investigators thought the murders at Wat Promkunaram were the result of a botched robbery by amateur burglars. It is not hard to see how Mike McGraw’s scenario-that a wilding” party from Tucson broke into the temple for the purposes of robbery, killing the residents when the robbers were discovered-seemed plausible to the detectives. McGraw and Dante Parker had criminal records, and Mark Nunez was an unemployed alcoholic likely to go along with his friends.
Maybe the only unlikely suspect was Leo Bruce.
At 28, he was the oldest of the Tucson suspects, and the circumstances of his life were significantly different. While the others were unemployed, he had two jobs. While the others were living at home with relatives, he had his own modest apartment, where he had lived for three years. He had a car and a girlfriend. Bruce said he had not done more than say hello to Mike McGraw for about five years-since before McGraw went to prison for car theft. He says he didn’t know Dante Parker, and that Mark Nunez was only a casual friend. He says he was friends with Victor Zarate, a man whom McGraw implicated but whom detectives released after a few days.
At his press conference, Leo Bruce seemed almost frail, the very picture of compliance. He was polite and soft-spoken, and his eyes rarely drew level; his head bobbed in supplication to the reporters’ questions. He constantly looked to his lawyers before making his tentative answers. There was no reason to disbelieve his lawyers’ central assertion: Leo Bruce was a good citizen.
Except that he had told police he shot nine people in the back of the head with a .22-caliber rifle.
It is possible to imagine that Bruce, who retracted his confession just minutes after concluding it, was just following his natural tendency to avoid conflict when he made the confession.
It may be that police officers have to place people under a certain amount of pressure,” says Gisli Gudjonsson. Certainly when I was a police officer, I put people under pressure because I knew that if I did not put some people under pressure they would not confess. Most people do not confess if you say to them, `I have absolutely nothing on you.'”
But it is also important to remember that some people cope poorly with stress, Gudjonsson says, and are likely to agree with anything a police officer says simply to remove themselves from an immediately unpleasant situation. Though there is no evidence in the publicly released transcripts of the interviews that police did anything improper while questioning Bruce or any other suspect, the pressure was undoubtedly extreme.
There was no coercion,” Sheriff Agnos says. There was no abusiveness. That has been discounted. It has now been downgraded from `abusiveness and coercion’ to `pressure.’ And I can tell you there was not the same amount of pressure put on these suspects as they put on the victims. Can you imagine the pressure on the nine victims as they lay on the floor crying and praying for their lives and being shot one by one in the back of the head? That’s pressure.”
And the sheriff and his investigators say they have other witnesses, witnesses who as yet have not agreed to testify, who say that at least some of the Tucson suspects were involved in the murders. And that not all the statements of the west Valley juveniles have been made public. And that while innocent people apparently confess to crimes more often than intuition would allow us to believe, guilty people also confess.
No one knows the whole story-from the transcripts of the interviews with the Tucson suspects, it is possible to believe that some of the Tucson men are guilty and some are innocent, that none of them were directly involved but that some of them have guilty knowledge, that all of them were involved or that none of them were involved. Agnos, while he says he’s convinced of the Tucson suspects’ guilt, also says he doubts anyone other than those who were there will ever know exactly what happened at Wat Promkunaram in the first hours of August 10, 1991.
The sheriff says he believes the confessions have to matter.
We have taken their admissions and set them aside, and said they don’t mean anything,” Agnos said. Well, they do mean something. If we don’t ever pursue a criminal where there are no witnesses or victims left alive, we’re essentially saying you can get away with murder. Just kill everybody.”
part 3 of 3
BUILDING A BETTER MOUTHTRAP AFTER YEARS … v1-08-92
