Freely available video footage of people making public appeals for help with missing or murdered relatives was collected from various online news and media sites from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Appeals were considered for inclusion only if they satisfied the stringent criteria for establishing ground truth, discussed below. Further, appeals were not considered for inclusion if they were recent and high profile in the UK, or if they were made many months or years after the event; all appeals included were made within one month of the relative going missing or being murdered. See Appendix 3 for case summaries of all appeals used as stimulus materials.
Ten appeals (five deceptive and five honest) had been previously collected for the author’s Masters dissertation (Wright Whelan, 2009), from which the two
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accurate participants who took part in Study 1 of the present thesis had been identified. Hence, nine of those original ten appeals were used in studies 1, 2 and 3 (the outcome of one of the ten appeals was known to both participants in Study1, and so was not included). There were five honest appeals, two of which involved missing relatives and three of which involved dead relatives, and four deceptive appeals, two of which involved missing relatives and two of which involved dead relatives. A summary of the properties of the appeals is presented in Table 5.1 below.
Table 5.1: Properties of appeals used as stimulus materials in studies 1, 2 and 3 Relative
missing
Relative dead Gender Length in
seconds M (SD) Deceptive appeals (n = 4) 2 2 2 male 2 female 53.00 (22.96) Honest appeals (n = 5) 2 3 2 male 3 female 48.80 (21.50)
An example of a deceptive appeal in this sample was a man who made a televised appeal for help in finding his wife, after she failed to arrive at work and her car was found abandoned. Her body was found shortly afterwards, and the husband was arrested after eyewitnesses reported seeing him at his wife’s apparently abandoned car, the morning she disappeared. After inconsistencies were identified in the man’s account, and items missing from his wife’s purse were found in his shoe, he admitted to strangling his wife during a row, and dumping her body. At his trial, he pleaded guilty to second degree murder, and apologised for his actions, explaining that he had been in a rage. An example of an honest appeal in this sample, was a man who made an appeal for help in finding who had killed his daughter, who had been found raped and strangled in the driveway of her home. DNA evidence on her body
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did not match any on the police database, but a year later, it was matched to DNA taken from a man arrested for a minor, unrelated offence. Dental records and fingerprints also linked the man to the murder, and he was subsequently convicted.
For studies 4, 5 and 6, a larger and different sample of stimulus materials was required, and so new appeals were collected. Internet searches were conducted with search engines looking for video content, using the following search terms: husband + plea, wife + plea, parent + plea, family + plea, husband + appeal, wife + appeal, parent + appeal, family + appeal, husband + missing, wife + missing, child + missing, missing + press conference, murder + press conference, family + press conference, appeal + press conference, plea + press conference, missing + plea, missing + appeal, murder + appeal, murder + plea.
All deceptive appeals that satisfied the criteria outlined above (ground truth established, not recent and high profile in the UK, and made recently after the event) were included in the sample; deceptive appeals were less numerous than honest appeals, and it was desirable to have as large a sample size as possible. The author became aware of the existence of several deceptive appeals that were not available online, unfortunately funds were unavailable to purchase the footage from news archives.
Thus 16 deceptive appeals were included in this sample, and honest appeals included were matched as closely as possible to the deceptive appeals in terms of: relative missing or publicly known to be dead (i.e. body found), and gender of the appealer. Thus the final selection included 16 deceptive appeals, of which 10 appeals involved missing relatives, and six appeals involved dead relatives. Sixteen honest appeals were included, of which 10 appeals involved missing relatives, and six
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appeals involved dead relatives. A summary of the properties of the appeals is presented in Table 5.2 below
Table 5.2: Properties of appeals used as stimulus materials in studies 4, 5 and 6 Relative
missing
Relative dead Gender Length in
seconds M (SD) Deceptive appeals (n = 16) 10 6 11 male 5 female 48.22 (34.57) Honest appeals (n = 16) 10 6 10 male 6 female 52.13 (36.08)
An example of a deceptive appeal in this sample was a woman who reported that she had been car-jacked and the perpetrator had driven away with her children in the car. The woman made a televised appeal for help to find her missing children, however inconsistencies in her account placed suspicion on her, and nine days after reporting her children missing, she confessed that she had rolled her car in to a lake with her children inside. The woman was able to tell police exactly where in the lake to find her car, in which the bodies of her drowned children were found. An example of an honest appeal in this sample, was a woman who appealed for help in finding the murderer of her husband, who had been stabbed 18 times. Two weeks later, a man handed himself in to police, admitting to the killing; the man he had murdered had been due to testify against him, and extensive eyewitness and forensic evidence linked him to the crime, as well as his confession.
Study 7 utilised the same 32 appeals as studies 4, 5 and 6, plus four ‘filler’ appeals. These ‘filler’ appeals, two honest and two deceptive, were selected at random from the available pool of appeals; three appeals used in studies 1, 2 and 3,
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and one appeal not previously used, were included. A summary of the properties of the appeals is presented in Table 5.3 below.
Table 5.3: Properties of appeals used as stimulus materials in Study 7 Relative
missing
Relative dead Gender Length in
seconds M (SD) Deceptive appeals (n = 18) 10 8 12 male 6 female 48.92 (32.86) Honest appeals (n = 18) 11 7 11 male 7 female 52.22 (34.14) 5.1.1. Ground truth
As noted, to be acceptable for inclusion in the present studies, all appeals had to satisfy the criterion of adequate ground truth; i.e. the evidence was strong enough to support the conclusion that the appeals were actually truthful or deceptive. According to other published research in this area, a number of criteria can be used to determine whether ground truth has been established; those used by ten Brinke and Porter (2012), and Vrij and Mann (2001b), were used here.
Consequently, in the present research, appealers were classified as honest or deceptive only if there was overwhelming evidence indicating the extent of their involvement in the death or disappearance of their relative using these criteria. Such evidence included: forensic evidence (for example, soil traces, pollen traces, fibres linking the accused to the crime scene, blood spatter patterns, bite marks); presence of the victim’s blood (for example, in the clothing, car, or home of the accused); other DNA linking the accused to the crime (for example, skin, hair, body fluids);
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footage from security cameras, CCTV, police surveillance videos, and speed cameras (for example, CCTV of the accused dumping the body of the victim); knowledge of the location of the missing person’s body; knowledge of unreleased or undiscovered details of the crime (for example, knowledge of the cause of death before the body was found by police); confessions which included intimate knowledge of the crime and were not recanted; admission at trial (for example, admitting guilt and apologizing to family members); post mortem evidence ( for example, evidence that the victim could not have been alive at a time when the accused claimed that he or she was alive); medical evidence (for example, expert testimony that it was impossible for a person to be rendered unconscious for 10 hours by a drug administered in a way that the accused claimed); computer search history of the location of the crime or the body, prior to the crime occurring (for example, zoomed- in satellite images before the relative was reported missing, of the exact, remote location where the body was later found); eyewitness testimony (for example, a family member who survived an attack in which other family members were killed, or identification of the accused at the crime scene); possession of the murder weapon; possession of items from the crime scene; phone records; incriminating financial transactions; and an account of events, or an alibi, inconsistent with the evidence (for example, a man claiming to have spent the morning searching for his wife, when CCTV footage shows him taking a mattress to a dumpster, and till receipts show that he then purchased a new mattress. His wife’s body was later found wrapped in a bloody part of a mattress). The large majority of cases involved multiple pieces of evidence as described above. Following the protocol established by ten Brinke and Porte (2012), Table 5.4 provides a summary of the types of evidence used to classify cases as deceptive or honest.
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Table 5.4: Frequency of case evidence used to establish ground truth
Evidence type
Honest appeals (n = 22)
Deceptive appeals (n = 20)
Forensic evidence (soil, pollen, fibre, fingerprints, dental records, blood spatter patterns etc)
20 9
DNA evidence (body fluids, hair, skin etc.) 9 5
Victim’s blood 4 5
CCTV/video/speed camera evidence 8 3
Knowledge of location of victim’s body 3 3
Knowledge of unreleased/undiscovered details of crime
3 3
Confession 8 9
Admission at trial 7 9
Post mortem evidence 1 5
Medical evidence 0 1
Computer search history of location of crime/body 2 0
Eyewitness testimony 7 9
Possession of murder weapon (appealer/accomplice) 0 2
Possession of items from crime scene 2 1
Phone records 0 2
Wiretap evidence 0 1
Incriminating financial transactions 1 3
Account/alibi inconsistent with evidence 5 14
Note: totals exceed sample size as cases were classified based on several pieces of evidence
In total, 42 appeals were included in the final selection of cases, approximately half of which were classified as deceptive, and half as honest. As previously mentioned, not all appeals were used in all the studies.
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In the group of appeals classified as deceptive, in all cases except one, the appealer has also been convicted in a criminal court of involvement in the death (or kidnapping, in one case) of their relative. The exception concerned a mother suspected of killing her missing child who led police to the child’s body, buried in a remote location, whilst she was under surveillance. She has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of her child, and to interfering with her remains. However, at the time of writing, her plea was not accepted by the court and she is awaiting trial charged with murder.
In the group of appeals classified as honest, another person has been convicted of the death of the appealers’ relative, or the relative was found with no evidence of foul play, except in two cases. One of those two cases was that of a father who made an appeal for help when his daughter disappeared whilst in the care of her mother, from whom he was separated. CCTV footage from the day the girl was reported missing clearly shows a man, an acquaintance of the girl’s mother, carrying the girl down a hotel corridor. The girl’s body was found shortly afterwards. The man was charged with first degree murder, rape of a child and kidnapping, the mother was charged with murder, human trafficking, child abuse involving prostitution, and filing a false police report. From initial investigation to trial, the man has not disputed that he took the child, and information provided by the man’s lawyer helped police find the child’s body. At the time of writing, the trial continues. The father who made the appeal lived in a different state to his daughter, was never named as a person of interest or a suspect in the case, and the CCTV footage from the hotel clearly shows with whom his daughter was just before she died.
The second of those two cases (used only in Study 7) was that of a mother who appealed for the return of her teenage daughter, who had disappeared when
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attempting to hitch-hike home from a rock concert. The daughter’s body was found buried in a remote location three months later; she had been raped and violently murdered. DNA evidence linked the murder to a male suspect in a previous sexual assault in the same area some years previously. The victim in this case was able to get a good look at the man, enabling police to produce a sketch of the attacker, although his identity remains unknown.