Note: episode transcripts are radio scripts - please keep that in mind as you come across notations and errors in the text.
Previously on Bear Brook, Season 2: A True Crime Story:
[Cynthia Mousseau] I could point out how Jason’s statements were so inconsistent with the undisputed forensic evidence in this case, that it was more probable that he was guessing in response to interrogation questions, than he had any actual knowledge. In fact, looking at these inconsistencies, it is shocking that Jason was ever even a credible suspect, let alone convicted.
[Jason Carroll] I do remember being yelled and screamed at. // and any time I answered the wrong way, he’d be like, “Nope. Nope, nope, nope, nope.” // I remember being so wiped out, I tried to go to sleep under the table, they wouldn’t let me.
[Jason Moon] But, ultimately, // were you convinced that Jason was guilty of the crime?
[Tom Dufresne] Oh yeah. He admitted to… // If I recall correctly, he admitted to stabbing her at least once. This was a horrible crime. // I mean, that's… why would you say that if you didn’t do it?
…
The first known wrongful conviction in the United States was based on a false confession. Actually, two false confessions – one from each of the two co-defendants.
They were farmers in Vermont in 1812. Jesse and Stephen Boorn. They didn’t like their brother-in-law. They thought he was lazy, freeloading off of their family.
When the brother-in-law disappeared, the Boorn brothers were easy suspects. Witnesses said they heard the Boorns threaten to kill the brother-in-law. The brother-in-law’s personal items were found in the Boorns’ cellar. Bones were found buried in their field.
The Boorn brothers were arrested. A jailhouse informant said one of the brothers confessed to him. Then, Jesse and Stephen Boorn themselves both confessed. In detail, they described murdering their brother-in-law with a club, burying his body, then excavating and moving the remains – twice.
Stephen Boorn was scheduled to be executed on January 28, 1820. Then, the brother-in-law arrived in town – alive.
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The signs were all there. The bones found in the field were dog bones, the jailhouse informant had every incentive to lie about his cellmate, and the confessions from the Boorn brothers didn’t match with known facts.
But confessions are uniquely powerful as evidence goes. And so for a very long time, it took something like this to exonerate someone who had falsely confessed to murder. A miracle. The victim come back to life.
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Because of this, for a long time, the known examples of false confessions were very few. From 1820, when the Boorn brothers were set free, to 1989 when Jason Caroll was arrested, just 61 people in the U.S. had been exonerated after falsely confessing. That’s 61 known false confessions in 169 years.
Then, another miracle: DNA testing. In 1989, for the first time, a DNA test proved someone’s innocence after they were convicted and freed them from prison. Three years later, a group of lawyers founded the Innocence Project – a group devoted to doing more of the same. A flood of exonerations followed.
Over the last three decades, that flood has helped expose all kinds of problems in the criminal justice system. Like the unreliability of eye-witness testimony, police using junk forensic science like bitemark or hair analysis, prosecutorial misconduct, and false confessions.
Since 1989 – nearly 400 people have been exonerated after they falsely confessed to crimes they didn’t commit. That’s almost 400 known false confessions in just 34 years. Some of those people had been sentenced to death. More than half of all of them were Black.
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The same year all that began, 1989, Jason Carroll was confessing to murder.
Jason’s case sits on a bright red line separating what we used to believe, from what we now know about false confessions.
And from today’s side of that line, the story sounds different.
This is Bear Brook, Season 2: A True Crime Story. I’m Jason Moon.
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…
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] People really have a hard time understanding, why would you confess to something that you didn’t commit? Why would you confess to something as horrible as a rape // or a murder, if you didn’t actually do that?
Dr. Fabiana Alceste has devoted her career to researching and understanding the answers to that question. She’s a professor of psychology at Butler University.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] Being wrongfully accused and convicted of a crime that you did not commit on the basis of your own false confession is just about the worst thing that can happen to someone.
I called Fabiana to see what she makes of Jason Carroll’s case. I wanted to know what she hears when she listens to the confession tapes.
I’ll spare you the suspense: There are no simple answers here.
But there is so much we’ve learned. What was once just a rhetorical question – “why would you confess to a murder you didn’t commit?” – today, it’s actually been answered, thanks to decades of scientific research and the lived experiences of hundreds of exonerees who falsely confessed.
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For the last six episodes, I’ve told you about the ways Jason’s case was argued over as it happened – with the knowledge and ideas people had at the time. Call it another true-crime storytelling choice. I wanted you to hear the arguments the way Tony and Jason’s juries heard them.
Now, let’s run the clock forward 30 years. Let’s take a journey into a modern understanding of confession evidence.
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Fabiana’s first lesson for this journey: This is not the land of intuition. Hunches and gut feelings about the way people act or how they sound during a confession, it will not help us here.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] It’s very, very difficult for anyone to distinguish between true and false confessions.
There’s one study that illustrates this so powerfully, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
It’s from 2005. Psychologists videotaped a group of incarcerated men confessing to the crimes they actually committed. Then, they videotaped them confessing to crimes they did not commit.
They wondered: Could anyone tell the difference?
They played the tapes for a group of about 60 police officers and another group of about 60 college students.
Both groups felt confident they could tell the difference. Both groups were wrong. Overall, their accuracy rate was no better than if they had guessed at random.
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The police officers in the study had an average of 11 years of experience. Many of them had been trained in so-called deception detection.
But it didn't matter. Laypeople, trained detectives, you and me – as much as we might think we’d know a false confession if we heard one, we’re probably wrong.
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[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] It’s very hard to reliably tell when people are telling the truth versus when people are lying, using the kinds of behavioral cues that are kind of in the general zeitgeist. So, if I asked you, “How do you know when someone is lying?” What kinds of things would you tell me to look for?
Shifting in your seat, looking away, mumbling, making too much eye contact, touching your face. These might be signs of anxiety, but none of these behaviors are reliable ways to tell if someone is lying.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] But unfortunately, these are the kinds of signs that police officers have been trained to look for for a very long time. And they are often told in these trainings that these are scientifically proven ways to identify liars when they are just unequivocally not. And in fact, a lot of scientific evidence shows that this is not the way to identify liars and truth tellers.
By the way, Fabiana says there is a better way to catch liars: Have them tell the story backwards. People have trouble with the mental effort required to build a false story in reverse.
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So false confessions are really hard to spot. We can’t rely on our senses or intuition to hear them. But why do they happen in the first place?
Well, Fabiana says the answer is not in the confession – it’s in the interrogation.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] Interrogations are not conversations, right? The interrogation is basically a monologue by the interrogator, uh, until the very end where you finally have the suspect verbalize and write their confession.
Here, Fabiana is describing a particular method of interrogation common in the United States – something called the Reid technique.
The roots of the Reid technique go back to the 1950s. It’s named after the police officer who originally developed it: John Reid. He has since died, but today, the Reid Company continues to hone the technique – and to teach it to all kinds of law enforcement agencies around the world.
The Reid technique uses a two-pronged approach: Make it hard for the suspect to deny guilt and make it easy for them to confess it.
False confession researchers like Dr. Fabiana Alceste call this maximization and minimization. You might think of it like the carrot and the stick.
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In Reid, the interrogator tells the suspect up front that the evidence already points to them. The interrogator might do this – even if it’s not true.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] What’s called the “false evidence ploy.” This is an interrogation tactic in which an interrogator will tell the suspect that there is irrefutable, ironclad evidence of their guilt, like DNA, fingerprints, an eyewitness, CCTV footage, you name it – even though this is actually false.
That’s totally legal in the U.S., by the way. And that’s the first stick: “We already know you’re guilty.”
Then the interrogator cuts off any denials. Another stick.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] You kind of put your hand up and you say, “Well, hold on a second. Let me finish, because this is really important.” And you don’t actually let them verbalize their denial.
The sticks, or maximization, are meant to make the suspect feel hopeless. Like denying their involvement is a total dead end. “They already know it’s me, they won’t even let me say I didn’t do it, and they’ve got proof.”
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Now come the carrots – minimization.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] So these could be things like blaming the victim, saying that anyone in the suspect’s shoes would’ve done the exact same thing, saying that the crime was committed on the spur of the moment rather than being planned. // The interrogator might be using a kinder tone. Maybe sometimes they’re even whispering all of these excuses to the suspect, telling them, “Hey, I understand. I would’ve done the same thing. You were just trying to protect your family.”
Carrots can also be implied. Like, “Hey, if you tell the truth, it’ll be better for everyone.” Which to a suspect might sound like they’ll get a lighter sentence, even if that’s not true.
If you imagine the suspect is truly guilty, it’s not hard to see how this might work. The suspect feels the jig is up. “And anyways, even the cops are saying it’s not that bad what I did. I’ll confess and make things easier on myself.”
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The carrots and sticks of the Reid technique do work. The Reid Company once reportedly claimed that their technique yields a confession 80% of the time.
The problem, according to the research, is that it can work on guilty people and innocent ones.
In research settings, when these tactics are used during an interrogation, the rate of true confessions goes up – but so does the rate of false confessions.
The Reid Company responds to these critiques by saying that when false confessions happen, it’s usually because an interrogator has strayed QUOTE “outside of the parameters of the Reid technique.”
But Fabiana and other experts on false confession say the Reid technique puts innocent people at risk. Especially when you combine it with other risk factors.
Like younger suspects. Children and adolescents are hugely overrepresented in the pool of proven false confessions. Same goes for people with intellectual disabilities.
The length of interrogations is another risk factor. According to one study, most interrogations last between 30 minutes and 2 hours. The Reid technique cautions against going for more than 4 hours. One study of 125 proven false confessions found the average length of those interrogations was over 16 hours.
So – the Reid technique, young or mentally disabled suspects, long interrogations. The research shows these things all make false confessions more likely.
But it can still be hard to wrap your mind around. Surveys show most of us still think we would never falsely confess.
Maybe the research isn’t enough to convince us. Maybe we need to hear from someone who lived it… like Huwe Burton.
[Jason Moon] Have you ever gone back and watched the taped confession you gave?
[Huwe Burton] Absolutely. // It’s still hard to watch it without breaking down. You’re looking, I can hear the officer’s voice in the back and it takes me right back to that room, 1989. And it takes me right back to the – how terrified I was and I can see the fear in my eyes as I’m looking at my 16-year-old self.
1989. The same year Jason Carroll confessed.
One evening, a 16-year-old Huwe came home to his family’s apartment in the Bronx and noticed his mom’s car wasn’t in their driveway. Then, he went inside.
[Huwe Burton] And (clears throat) I came in, now I’m taking my things off, I’m walking towards the back of the apartment, toward the bedrooms. I noticed that my parents’ bedroom was open, the door was open. I went into the room, I looked in there, and that’s where I made the discovery. I’d found my mom.
His mom, Keziah Burton, was lying dead in her bed. She had been stabbed in the neck.
[Huwe Burton] Immediately called the police. I’m screaming, crying. I couldn’t stay in the house any longer so I ran outside.
The police arrived. Huwe answered some questions about what he saw and where he was that day.
Huwe’s father was away in Jamaica, visiting Huwe’s grandmother. So Huwe went to stay with his godmother.
A few days later, police called Huwe’s godmother. They wanted Huwe to come take a polygraph test.
[Huwe Burton] I was only able to sleep 10, 15 minutes at a time. And I’m, you know, I’m just waking up, staring at the ceiling. If I try to eat something, as I eat it, it's coming back up. // I’m drained. I didn’t even want to get out of the bed. My godmother said, “Well, they just want to do this– same questions they asked you that day, they just want to ask you the same thing again. They just want a polygraph test.” And you know, I’d never heard of it before. I don’t know what a polygraph test is. “Alright so, let’s go, if it’ll help you find out who did this to my mom, then alright.” So by the time I get to the precinct, I’m already a mess. I’m already drained.
Huwe went into a room alone with the police. No lawyer. No parents.
[Huwe Burton] What started as a simple interview, maybe about an hour-and-a-half, two hours into that, it turned accusatory. They told me they had evidence that led them to believe that I was the one who had committed this crime.
Huwe was 16, he’d just found his own mother murdered in their home, and now the police were telling him they knew he did it.
Stick.
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[Huwe Burton] I started crying immediately, because I still couldn’t process that I just left my mom sitting on the couch and went to school, only to come back and find her murdered in my parents’ bedroom. // I don’t know, I don’t know up from down. And in the middle of that, you tell me that, “We know that you’re the one responsible for it. You did this.”
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[Huwe Burton] The more I told them I didn’t, the more they told me, “You did and this is the only way this is going to work for you. We know that you didn’t mean to do this, we know that this was an accident. But you need to tell us the truth.” I’m still telling them, “No, I didn’t commit this crime, I didn’t commit this crime, I do not– I didn’t do anything to my mom.”
Huwe was telling the truth. He did not murder his own mother.
But at the time, the detectives were following a hunch – a theory of the case, that later turned out to be based on a mistake.
When police first spoke to Huwe the day of the murder, he told them he went to school as normal. But when the police checked with his teacher, she incorrectly said her attendance records showed Huwe was absent that day. So it looked like Huwe was lying.
[Huwe Burton] The theory was that I owed a local drug dealer money. // And I tried to pay with my mom’s car. And I left the keys for this drug dealer and he’s the one who took the car.
The interrogators believed Huwe’s mother confronted him about the car. They figured Huwe was high on cocaine, the argument escalated, and in a rage, Huwe accidentally killed his mother.
After hours of telling 16-year-old Huwe Burton they know he’s guilty and cutting him off when he denies it, the interrogators have succeeded in pushing him to the point of despair. The sticks, the maximization – it’s worked.
[Huwe Burton] They continued with this over and over and over again and in my 16-year-old mind it seemed like an eternity. I felt that I could not leave, although no one told me “you can’t leave,” I was made to feel as if I could not get up and walk out of the, the interrogation room.
Now the carrot – minimization.
[Huwe Burton] They then began to tell me that, “Look, just tell us that you committed this crime, because, again, we know this was an accident. And if you do, we’ll take you to family court where your dad can come and pick you up and you can put all of this behind you.” // So when they started to suggest that this is the only way that this is going to work, because you’re going to go to jail for this one way or not, when they started talking that language, and now your mind says, “Well, OK, you have to trust them.” // It’s interesting, the people that you look at as authority figures… You know, you’re taught to respect them and you get to a point where you’re almost trying to do the best that you can to make sure that you appease them and that it’s done right. Even with my confession, after we’re going over and over and over it, // in my mind I’m saying, “I have to do it right if I want to just go to family court and see my dad. That’s the only way that I’m going to be released is by doing this thing that they’re asking me to do properly.” // You believe that you’re helping your accusers help you.
Huwe started to play along with the detectives’ questions.
And remember, the police already had a theory of what happened here. And so they asked Huwe questions based on that theory.
This is really important, because it helps explain one of the most puzzling parts of false confessions.
Here’s Fabiana again.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] False confessions aren’t just someone breaking down and saying, “I did it.” They’re actually pretty often rich, detailed narratives. // They have statements of motive, they have apologies, they have timelines, they make references to the thoughts and feelings of the confessor, of the victim, of the things going on around them when they’re committing the crime. They sound like stories that come from a person’s memory.
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[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] And so, if we know for an absolute fact that someone is innocent, how is it possible that they could give such a detailed confession with real facts about the crime? // And the answer to that question is contamination.
Contamination. Basically, when ideas or facts are leaked from the interrogator to the suspect. It’s usually unintentional – and even though interrogators are trained to avoid it, that can be hard to do, especially over a long interrogation.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] The more frustrated you get or the more convinced that you might become of the suspect’s guilt, kind of the less careful you might be, ‘cause you’re like, “Well, I know that this person did this, why would I care about leaking information to them? Because they already have all the information, because they did it.”
Embedded in the questions from interrogators are often details about the crime and an implied narrative about how the police think it happened.
[Huwe Burton] And they say, “OK, so, you were on drugs. So then what did you do? Because your mom was stabbed, so what, did you go into the kitchen and then did, did you go get a knife after that?” “Yes, I went into the kitchen.” So, my answers “yes” or “no” to things is them putting the story together and having me remember this.
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[Huwe Burton] They fed me a story and I agreed and I agreed and I agreed. And they kept going over it. “So, let’s – back from the top. So what happened? So you woke up that morning, and you were still high?” “Yeah I was still high.” And after you do it a few times, now it’s– they’re not saying anything, it’s just you. Now the training wheels are off and you can just roll and do this story yourself.
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Contamination in interrogations can be hard to detect. Especially when the interrogation itself is not recorded.
That happens a lot in proven false confessions like Huwe’s. The tape recorder isn’t turned on until the end. The interrogation – the contamination – isn’t captured. But the confession is. And so that’s all the jury hears.
[Jason Moon] What was that like hearing the verdict from these jurors? I mean, you must’ve been in disbelief.
[Huwe Burton] No, I collapsed. My legs gave. I was 18. We stood up and they read the verdict as guilty, second-degree murder. I dropped. I’m crying and screaming, “I didn’t kill my mom! I didn’t kill my mom!” First time I seen my father crying, you know… // And I can remember the judge dismissing the jury and I’m crying, I’m looking at them. They have all of the bailiffs and stuff in the court around me. And I’m asking the jury – just to show you, I’m still a kid, when I’m 18, I’m asking them, where are they going? “Where are y’all going? Like, what about me? Like, what about – you can’t leave. What about me?” I never forget that.
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[Huwe Burton] I couldn’t believe that someone would actually think that I could harm my mom. I… The shock of that, like, you actually believed that? Um… It was a lot. That day was a lot.
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The jury saw Huwe Burton’s videotaped confession and they believed it. Because why wouldn’t they?
[Huwe Burton] Who in their mind – and go back in a time capsule of 1989 – who says that they killed their mother if they didn’t?
Huwe Burton spent 20 years and 8 months in prison for a crime he did not commit.
He was released on parole and then finally exonerated in 2019 – when he was 46 years old.
Huwe and a team of innocence lawyers uncovered serious misconduct by the police and prosecutors in his case.
The teacher who said Huwe was not at school the day of the murder – she later called police and told them she was wrong. She just looked at the wrong date in her records. Huwe was at school that day. Prosecutors had that information, but never turned it over to Huwe’s defense attorneys. A serious violation of their constitutional duty.
Huwe and his lawyers also uncovered the detectives who interrogated him had extracted false confessions in another investigation just three months before Huwe’s arrest.
But even with what the jury heard at trial, there were plenty of signs:
Huwe recanted his confession and told everyone it was coerced.
Huwe said in his confession he stabbed his mother once. She’d been stabbed twice.
There was no medical or physical evidence that Huwe was high on cocaine or that he’d been involved in a struggle.
There were even signs, obvious in retrospect, that Huwe’s confession was contaminated. Huwe’s story about the murder was littered with police jargon – things most 16-year-olds would never say. Huwe said he was “stimulated” on cocaine, that he was “associating with a friend,” and that he “proceeded” up a road.
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But these warning signs were nothing compared to the power of Huwe’s confession.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] Confessions seem uniquely positioned as the thing that overpowers all the other factors that you could think of, that you could look at and say, these things don’t seem right. The confession overpowers all of those things. There’s some research that shows that confession evidence can be more powerful // than // DNA that exonerates the confessor.
Confessions are so convincing, they can even spill over into influencing other forms of evidence – including forensic evidence.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] You would think that the science is the science and it would be really difficult to bias a scientist who is examining some kind of forensic evidence, like, let’s say a fingerprint. But, actually, what we see in the studies that researchers in this field have conducted is that if a fingerprint examiner knows that there was a confession in the case, they’re more likely to say that that person’s fingerprint is a match to the fingerprint that they found at the scene.
Fabiana says this goes for other forensic experts, too, like medical examiners. If they know a confession exists, it can influence their interpretation of the evidence.
Confessions can also derail good police work. Once there’s a confession, there’s a tendency for the investigation to come to a halt. “We found the guy, he confessed. What’s left to do?”
Six days after Huwe’s confession, police pulled over a man driving Huwe’s mother’s car. This man lived downstairs from Huwe’s family. He had a violent criminal history. He was driving the victim’s car.
But police already had their guy – someone who confessed.
The man who was driving Huwe’s mother car died before Huwe’s trial. No one, besides Huwe, was ever convicted for Keziah Burton’s murder.
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[Huwe Burton] For many years, I would ask myself, sitting inside there, like, very angry with myself, like, how did you allow them to trick you like that? I was very upset, especially in my early 20s. // It’s one of those things that, you know, you can’t put that kind of pain into words.
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[Huwe Burton] You’re screaming at the top of your lungs that you didn’t do something. And it’s almost as if the world can’t hear you.
Once Huwe was exonerated, the world did hear him. He spoke out in interviews like this one. He says it was partly a way to begin healing – partly because he feels a duty to tell all of us: This can happen. This does happen.
Today, Huwe continues to speak out and to move on with his life. In prison, he picked up long-distance running as a way to cope with the pain. In 2019, he ran the New York City marathon as a free man.
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The experience of exonerees like Huwe Burton and the research of psychologists like Dr. Fabiana Alceste, have opened a new world of understanding about how and why false confessions happen.
In fact, according to the legal clinic that helped exonerate Huwe, his case marked the first time a court ruled that new understandings about false confessions can constitute newly discovered evidence of actual innocence.
After the break, we bring those new understandings to Jason Carroll’s case.
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[CIVICS 101 PROMO]
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I asked Dr. Fabiana Alceste to review the confessions in Jason’s case. The only real evidence against him.
Here’s what she saw: five red flags in Jason’s interrogations. Five things that the research shows make a false confession more likely.
The first red flag: the length of Jason’s interrogations.
Over four days, police interrogated Jason for a long time. Just how long depends on how you count it.
Police actively questioned Jason for at least 13 and-a-half hours over four days. Five hours the first day, about six hours the second day, and then more sporadically in the following two days.
But if you count up all the time that Jason was with police, as part of the overall psychological burden he was under, the number is 24 hours over four days.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] The longer the interrogation goes on, you see more and more false confessions.
The second red flag: Jason’s age.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] Jason was 19 at this time, so legally he wasn’t a minor, but we still would classify him as an adolescent. He’s still a person at this point in time where his brain has not fully developed.
Of all people in the U.S. who’ve been exonerated after falsely confessing to murder: their median age at the time they were interrogated was 20 years old.
Red flag number three: Jason’s mom, Karen Carroll. Fabiana says Karen’s aggressive involvement in Lamy’s interrogation of Jason supercharged the carrots and sticks. Karen made it even more stressful for Jason to deny and repeatedly communicated that confessing was the only good outcome.
[Karen Carroll] The longer you hold off telling the truth… (fade down)
Karen says, “The longer you hold off telling the truth the harder it’s going to be, and the worse it’s going to be on yourself. You still have a chance to save your ass. My dear, I don’t want to see you go to prison.”
Jason says, “I don’t want to go to prison either, Ma.
Karen says, “then tell us every goddamn thing you know.”
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[Karen Carroll] Then tell us every goddamn thing you know.
Remember, when Jason appealed his conviction to the New Hampshire Supreme Court in 1994, the judges ruled that if Jason’s mom had been acting as a police officer, the confession would’ve been thrown out. But because they said Karen wasn’t a police officer in that room, her conduct wasn’t relevant to them – since the state constitution doesn’t have anything to say about the way relatives question each other. But to a psychologist looking at whether Karen’s involvement made a false confession more likely, it definitely is relevant.
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Red flag number four: maximization tactics – the sticks. Jason’s second interrogation especially is full of them.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] So they say things like, “The jury will tear you apart if you’re not telling the truth here.” They repeatedly tell him that he’s not telling them the whole truth and he’s holding out on them and that they know that for sure.
And the fifth red flag: contamination.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] So, we do see the interrogators revealing key details to Jason. And then sometimes almost immediately after that we see Jason incorporate those details into his story.
We’re going to spend some time on this red flag because Jason’s knowledge of certain details about Sharon Johnson’s murder was a big point of contention at his trials. Remember, the state argued: Jason could only have known so much if he was actually involved.
But Fabiana sees clear evidence that for at least some of those details, Jason likely learned them from the interrogators.
Here’s one example:
During Jason’s second interrogation, detectives ask him, why did Ken Johnson want his wife murdered? Jason says, “I wasn’t briefed on that.” His mother pushes him for an answer. Then Jason says, “Because she knew something that Ken had done.”
And then a detective with the Bedford Police Department, Leo Morency, jumps in – and introduces a new idea.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] So he asks, “What had he done, what had Ken done, raped his daughter?” And after that, Jason goes on to use this detail repeatedly. But he had never mentioned anything about Ken raping Lisa before Morency brought that up.
You might remember, this was an early theory police had, long before they ever talked to Jason – that Ken Johnson had sexually abused his own stepdaughter, Lisa, and that Sharon caught him doing it.
But police later abandoned this theory. Because there’s no evidence for it. Lisa herself denied it. Tony said he was in fact the father of the child. And Tony never mentions it as a motive in his interrogations. By the time of Tony and Jason’s trials, prosecutors say the motive was Ken’s gambling debts – not a rape.
But once the idea is introduced to Jason – it sticks. It’s now a part of his story from that point on. Here he is repeating this idea in his third interrogation.
[Officer] Did he give you any explanation as to why she was to be killed?
[Jason Carroll] He had told me that Johnson, she had caught Johnson raping his daughter and doing some other very – or heard about some very other criminal acts.
Fabiana says it’s important to trace the genealogy of each detail in a confession.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] Is it something that the police had already thought in their theory before they even questioned anyone? Is it a new theory that arose out of the questioning of one of the suspects or witnesses? Where does each thought and fact and detail come from? Who states it first? Is it actually true?
The idea that a rape was the motive for the murder was not reported on in the news. So if that idea isn’t true, and it wasn’t in the news – where else did Jason get it from if not the detectives? And if that happened with this detail, couldn’t it have happened with others?
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If you trace the origin of other important details in Jason’s confession, you see a similar trajectory: Detectives introducing ideas, Jason incorporating those ideas into his story.
Like with the murder weapon. Even after Jason has admitted to stabbing Sharon, he gives a handful of different answers about where the murder weapon is. He says he doesn’t know. The detectives say that’s wrong. He says he burned it in a fire. They say that’s wrong. He says he threw it in a river. Wrong again.
And finally, Detective Lamy introduces the idea that the knife is at Jason’s house. QUOTE “It’s at your house or you got it,” he says. Then, Karen introduces the idea of the specific knife. “Is it a small brown pocket knife?” Jason simply agrees with them.
Or how about the amount Jason was paid? According to police, before anything was tape-recorded, Jason said he was paid $500. Then, Lamy says, “I suspect that is not the accurate amount you got.” Jason changes his answer to $2,000. Then, later, to $5,000.
There’s Sharon’s bra – which, remember, was cut open in the front with a knife. One of those supposedly hidden details that only the killer would know. But Jason makes no mention of the bra until his third interrogation, when the idea is first introduced by police.
And then when Jason gets the answer wrong (he says the bra was unsnapped), listen to the detectives give him multiple choice answers to try and help him match up his story to the evidence:
[Neal Scott] How was the bra taken off?
[Jason Carroll] The bra? It was unsnapped.
[Neal Scott] Unsnapped or torn? Do you recall?
[Officer] Cut, torn, unsnapped, pulled over her head?
[Jason Carroll] To me– to me, the way it was going, it seemed like it was unsnapped.
[Officer] Snapped in the front or the back?
[Jason Carroll] In the back. From what– it seemed like he was reaching around her to the back.
So, not only does Jason not mention the bra until police specifically ask him about it – when he does incorporate the idea into his story, he does so in a way that gets the evidence wrong.
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There’s even evidence that detectives were willing to show Jason pictures of the crime scene. It happens during the interrogation with his mother.
Near the end of the tape, after Jason has already said he stabbed Sharon, Lamy asks Jason about Sharon’s rings. You might remember Sharon’s rings were found lying on the ground at the construction site.
Lamy says, “Who took the rings off of her hand, you haven’t told us anything about that. Why didn’t you tell us about that?”
Jason replies, “Because I didn’t know of any rings being on her hands.”
Lamy says, “Well, they were on her hands. Who took them off? You were there. Think clearly, think clearly now. They were found on the ground. Who took them off and why were they off?”
And then Lamy asks, presumably of one of the other detectives, if they have a picture they can show Jason.
And from that moment on, the rings are part of Jason’s story.
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[Jason Moon] So, (sigh) alright, but so a jury could hear this and think, “Well, whatever, he gets some of the details wrong and the details change and they get more incriminating – not because it’s what cops want to hear, but it’s because it’s the things that he doesn’t want to say.” // So why isn’t this evolution of details just a, a kind of slow, like, surrendering to the reality of what he’s done? // Why can’t we say that’s what’s happening here?
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] I think the hard part is that we can’t say that’s what’s not happening… We can’t prove just by analyzing what is going on in the interrogation – we can’t prove that this is a false confession just by anything that he has said or that the interrogators have said.
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[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] All we have are the red flags. All we have are the red flags and what they amount to and how they interact with each other. // They provide a reason to be skeptical of these interrogation practices and the confessions that resulted from them.
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After all this, we’re back to the original problem of false confessions – they’re so hard to detect.
Even for the interrogator. Fabiana says they often do not realize they’re planting the details of a false story.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] The majority of police officers and interrogators and detectives out there, when they’re interrogating someone and they are getting a confession and they are contaminating and they are making this person rehearse the confession over and over again, it’s because they really think that the person did it. // And so, that is not always the case. I can point to some very specific people and instances where there have been set-ups by the police and the police knew that they were taking a false confession, and I think that that is rare. I think that is the exception.
Fabiana says the problem here is not about the intentions of individual interrogators. It’s bigger than that.
In 2012, the Attorney General for the state of Nebraska apologized and offered $500,000 in taxpayer money to a man who’d been wrongfully convicted. Darrel Parker had been coerced into a false confession in 1955… by a detective named John Reid. The most commonly used interrogation technique in the U.S. is named after a detective who extracted a false confession.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] The system, the culture that our detectives live in and are made to operate in sets them up for this specific kind of failure of not being able to realize that there’s an innocent person in front of them because it is so guilt-presumptive. It is such an accusatory and confirmatory process. // And so I think that they’re just // doing what they have been trained to do. They are doing what their police departments have done for decades and decades and decades.
This is why recording interrogations from start-to-finish is the number one recommendation from experts like Fabiana to avoid convictions based on false confessions.
In total, about an hour-and-a-half of Jason’s interrogations were tape-recorded. That’s about 11% of the time Jason was questioned by police.
None of this is to say we should never trust any confession. Confessions can have green flags as well as red ones.
[Dr. Fabiana Alceste] One thing that you should be looking for are details that can be independently corroborated that the police did not know about beforehand. So if a confession leads the police to new evidence, that’s a good sign that this might be a true confession.
For instance, if Jason had led police to the location of Sharon’s shirt or her pocketbook, which were never found, it would’ve been strong evidence he was telling the truth.
But Jason didn’t. In fact, there’s not a single verifiable fact that comes from Jason’s confessions that police didn’t already know about in advance.
…
In criminal trials, the standard for convicting someone is “beyond a reasonable doubt.” It’s the highest burden of proof in our court system. It’s also notoriously vague. What makes a doubt reasonable? And what if doubts that seemed unreasonable in the early ‘90s, become reasonable 30 years later with new science? What do we do then?
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In the courts, new doubts are often not enough to undo a conviction. So what does it take?
A new telling of the story?
[Rabia Chaudry] My main goal is to raise the concerns around this conviction to the extent that it would encourage the state to revisit the evidence. // And we have been lucky with other past cases that, almost in every case, we’ve been able to find something. A witness who’s never talked before – just something. And that could happen, that could happen here, too.
Or does it still take a miracle?
[Cynthia Mousseau] What are you? // (Gasp) // I need to stop for a second.
That’s next time, on Bear Brook, Season 2: A True Crime Story.
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Special thanks this episode to all of the scientists and lawyers whose work we relied on: They include Saul Kassin, Steven Drizin, Thomas Grisso, Gisli Gudjonsson, Richard Leo, Allison Redlich, Brandon Garrett, Emily West, Vanessa Meterko, Jennifer Perillo, Christian Meissner, Rebecca Norwick, Katherine Kiechel, William Crozier, Deryn Strange, Sara Appleby, Lisa Hasel, Kristyn Jones, Timothy Luke, Johanna Hellgren, Aria Amrom, the National Registry of Exonerations …and of course, Fabiana Alceste.
In 2022, 30 people in the U.S. were exonerated after convictions based on false confessions. The median amount of time they spent incarcerated was 24 years.
A True Crime Story is reported and produced by me, Jason Moon.
It’s edited by Katie Colaneri.
Additional reporting and research by Paul Cuno-Booth.
Photos and production help on this episode by Sarah Nathan.
Editing help from Lauren Chooljian, Daniela Allee, Sara Plourde, Taylor Quimby, Mara Hoplamazian, and Todd Bookman.
Our News Director is Dan Barrick. Our Director of Podcasts is Rebecca Lavoie.
Fact-checking by Dania Suleman.
Sara Plourde created our original artwork, as well as our website, bearbrookpodcast.com.
Additional photography and videos by Gaby Lozada.
Original music for the series was created by me, Jason Moon.
Bear Brook is a production of the Document team at New Hampshire Public Radio.