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In Conversation: Did a Texas man confess to a murder he didn’t commit? · Apple News Today

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  Duarte Geraldino, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from "Apple News Today." I'm Duarte Geraldino. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
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  In early 2015, Larry Driskill was working at a barn in Parker County, Texas when a Texas Ranger named James Holland approached him. Driskill asks Ranger Holland …
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  Larry Driskill: Am I in trouble or what?
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  And Holland says …
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  James Holland: No, we … we think you might be able to help us.
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  Driskill agrees to help. He gets into Holland's car and the two drive to the sheriff's office. They sit down in a small room. Holland pulls out a photo of a woman, and then he asks Driskill if he recognizes her.
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  Larry Driskill: She don't look familiar to me, period. I ain't ever seen her.
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  The woman in that photo is Bobbie Sue Hill. In 2005, she disappeared in Fort Worth, Texas. Her body was found in a creek less than a mile from Driskill's home. At the time, every lead went nowhere. The case went cold, that is until nearly a decade later when Driskill became a suspect. Within 24 hours of talking with Ranger Holland, Driskill said something that, to this day, he can't believe came out of his mouth.
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  Larry Driskill: I'm sorry if I took somebody's life, but I don't think I did.
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  What he's saying there is, "I'm sorry if I took somebody's life, but I don't think I did.” He eventually confesses to a crime he says he did not remember committing.
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  Maurice Chammah: Almost immediately, he told me, he said, wait a minute, I don't think I really did this. I was exhausted. I had been interrogated for hours. I was desperate to get out of that room. But I think I'm innocent, and surely the court system will figure this out and sort out the truth, and surely I'll be freed. But of course, that didn't happen for him.
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  That's Maurice Chammah. He's a staff writer for "The Marshall Project." He spent a year writing about how James Holland managed to get people to confess to crimes. Holland is the Texas Ranger at the center of this case. Holland has gotten lots of murder confessions. Many are not in doubt, but there are growing questions about his techniques and whether they led some innocent people falsely confess too.
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  Chammah: So, James Holland is a very kind of charming, charismatic guy. He wears a big cowboy hat, like all the rest of the Texas Rangers. He's got this sort of soft drawl. And he is a star of the Texas Rangers, who are themselves stars of the Texas Department of Public Safety. And the Texas Rangers have a lot of different roles, but one of them is that they solve cold cases. James Holland quickly rose to the top of his profession by being really, really good at solving cold cases and doing it in particular by getting people to confess to murders. If listeners have heard of him before, it is because he is famous for getting more than 90 murder confessions from a California prisoner named Samuel Little.
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  Geraldino: You write that he was described as "gifted." What does it mean to be gifted in this sense?
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  Chammah: Well, I think it means having a real ability to understand psychology and an ability to get in the room with somebody who has no reason really to tell you that they committed a murder and to figure out, piece by piece, moment by moment, how to pull them towards telling you the truth or telling you that they committed this murder. And Holland uses a series of different tactics to do this. He uses a style of interviewing called cognitive interviewing, where you really get the person to relax and close their eyes and sort of revisit the scene in their mind and maybe give you details that they didn't know that they had in there that further implicate them in a murder. He also is very adept, like many detectives, at using deception. Or he won't even need to necessarily deceive you. He'll say, there's DNA testing being done, and we think maybe you'll match the DNA, and it can have the same effect of sort of getting your mind spinning. And then you can end up sort of implicating yourself further as you try to sort of climb your way out of what seems increasingly like sort of the walls closing in around you.
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  Geraldino: These tactics that Holland is using, they would not be considered illegal. Correct?
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  Chammah: That's correct. I mean, I think the most surprising thing about the story to me was that all of the things Holland does are totally legal. Now, some states are starting to consider banning deception in the interrogation room, especially with really vulnerable suspects like teenagers. You know, now two states have banned lying to teenagers in the interrogation room. But overall, all of these tactics remain legal, even as a series of psychologists, researchers over now the last 20 years have done a series of studies that show that these tactics increase the risk of a false confession because the very same things that make a guilty person more likely to confess can also lead an innocent person to feel sort of hopeless and like their only way out is to confess to this crime, even if they didn't commit it.
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  Which brings us back to the case of Larry Driskill. To understand how Driskill wound up confessing to a crime he says he didn't commit, you have to go back to the beginning. When Bobbie Sue Hill went missing in 2005, police initially spoke with her boyfriend, Michael Harden.
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  Chammah: What the boyfriend told the investigators early on was, I saw a man abduct her in a white van. Basically, she was doing sex work. The man came up and was going to hire her, essentially. And at one point, he looked at me through the window of the of the van, and then the van sped off and I never saw her again. And then her body was found.
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  Geraldino: What did he describe as the man in that van? What did that man look like?
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  Chammah: So, this is where it gets very interesting. So, in 2005, in the immediate aftermath of the crime, he talks to the investigators, and he describes the man, and he gives so description that they actually bring in a sketch artist and they produce an image of this face. And you look at the face, it's got a mustache, it's got a very specific hairline and forehead. It's a very kind of memorable image of a man's face. Similarly, he says that the van was kind of like a white minivan.
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  Ultimately this information leads police nowhere. The case goes cold. Eight years later, Texas Ranger James Holland enters the case. He goes back to the boyfriend and asks him to revisit his memory. At first, he uses the cognitive interview method that Maurice was talking about earlier, which experts don't consider controversial. But then Ranger Holland tries another technique.
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  Chammah: He brings in a hypnotist. The Texas Rangers were one of the last law enforcement agencies in the country to maintain a branch that carries out what's called "forensic hypnosis," where they actually use hypnotic techniques on witnesses to try to help them remember things. And the hypnotist comes into the room with the boyfriend, and they have a session together where he asks him to, again, close his eyes, imagine himself on a beach, and then once he's sort of in this very relaxed state, revisit the scene of the crime and his memory of this man abducting his girlfriend in a white van. And we don't know exactly why what happens next is what happens, but he describes the man and the van again. And the description is incredibly different from what it had been eight years earlier. So, whereas before I said there was a mustache, now the mustache pretty much disappears. There's just a little tiny bit of five o'clock shadow. And the hairline changes and the forehead changes and the eyes change. And literally, this looks like a completely different person than the man he had described almost a decade earlier. Likewise, the description of the van changes. It's still a white van, but it goes from being a minivan to being more of a full-size work van that doesn't have any windows. So, the windows disappear, the shape of the van changes completely. Some researchers told me … To research the story, I shared a lot of the materials from the case with psychologists, with university researchers. And many of them thought that there was a very high risk that this man's memory had been contaminated by looking at pictures of vans and pictures of faces. One researcher told me, look, this guy over the course of eight years has potentially seen thousands of other faces, and memory doesn't get better with time. So, the only direction this could go is that his memory is getting weaker and degraded. And the man that he thinks he saw isn't really the man he saw. And we should put much more faith in that earlier sketch with the mustache, right?
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  Geraldino: And these were the red flags. These are some of the red flags that the researchers point out.
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  Chammah: Mm-hmm. These are the red flags the researchers point out. The idea that the description of the van and the face are changing eight years later after using forensic hypnosis, which has been widely criticized and condemned by researchers to the point where most law enforcement agencies aren't using it. And even the Texas Rangers themselves said that they were discontinuing their hypnosis program a couple years ago. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily revisiting all the cases that they solved with hypnosis. But they even have acknowledged that this is a potentially problematic tool.
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  So, police put out the new sketch of a man that, at this point, they believed to be their suspect. But they also digitally age the face so that it looks 10 years older. It's this image that leads Ranger Holland to Driskill.
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  Chammah: Someone calls and says, you know, that looks like Larry Driskill. In fact, it was a guy who runs a pawn shop who said, I have a customer named Larry Driskill, and I think this looks like him. And keep in mind that the sketch that led to Larry Driskill is incredibly different from the original sketch that was made within a few weeks of the original crime, based on the memory of the witness, right? Larry Driskill did not have the kind of big, bushy mustache that was in that original sketch. So, this is what leads Larry Driskill into the interrogation room.
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  Remember, when Driskill is first brought in for questioning, he doesn't believe he's a suspect. No, he actually thinks the opposite, that he's being a good citizen just trying to help the police. Then Holland starts asking Driskill questions about where he was nearly a decade earlier.
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  Chammah: For the first hour or two, the way they talk about the case is that Holland says that Driskill may have been a witness to a crime. He says, we have proof that you were in this one area of Fort Worth around the time this woman disappeared, and we think maybe you gave her a ride before she was murdered. And we just need to figure out where you took her, where you dropped her off, what you were driving because that's going to help us solve this case. And initially, Driskill says, I wasn't really ever around that area. I don't know what you're talking about. I certainly wouldn't have been around that area in that timeframe in 2005.
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  Holland tells Driskill police recorded his license plate in the area where Hill was taken. Which is a lie. Holland has no proof Driskill was there. But just by saying this, it makes Driskill believe, well, if the police are saying it's true, it must be true.
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  Chammah: Driskill Starts mining his memory and he says, well, at one point, I was making some car payments around there. My father, I guess, lived not too far from there, so I would maybe visit him. And also, I was a contract worker who would go bid on jobs. So, I think I have a vague memory of bidding on a job over there. Now, to Larry Driskill, this is him mining his memory, trying to be helpful, trying to figure out, wait, maybe I did witness something and maybe I can help this ranger solve this crime. But to the ranger, this is evidence that Driskill was initially lying.
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  They break for dinner, and Holland sends Driskill home. Over barbecue, Driskill tells his wife …
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  Chammah: This Texas Ranger thinks I might have witnessed a crime and I'm trying to help him. And it's a little tragic to hear that because it's so clear from the recording that he's starting to get squeezed, and he doesn't even seem to realize it.
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  The next morning, Driskill goes back to the sheriff's office. He agrees to a polygraph, you know, a lie detector test. In most courts, these tests are no longer admissible because they've been found to be unreliable. But police are allowed to use these tests during investigations.
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  Chammah: He fails the polygraph, and to this day he says that, I failed it be because I was nervous and it's not reliable. But his failure further solidifies in the Texas Ranger's mind that he's lying and that he committed this murder and that it's just a matter of getting him to confess to it.
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  So, Ranger Holland tries another tactic. He's hoping to get Driskill to confess. He tells him Michael Harden, the boyfriend, admitted he was trying to rob Driskill that night. This isn't true. But Holland says it is true and asks Driskill to play out the scenario in his mind. This is a technique known as "hypothetical narration," essentially, let's just pretend this happened. Here's Holland in the interrogation room with Driskill.
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  James Holland: Start with that. "Hypothetically, I was down there, and a girl and guy were trying to rob me." Just say, "Hypothetically, I was down there, and they were trying to rob me."
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  Chammah: So, the key question that Holland will ask the suspects is, tell me, hypothetically, how you would've committed this crime. Right? And Driskill, in this case, starts to say, well, I would have been in this area maybe because I was doing a contract work job of some sort, or I was visiting my father who lived around there. And slowly, the scenario plays out where this woman tried to rob him, and he tried to defend himself, and he tried to kill her. And over time, the denials, the "I don't remember, I don't remember" slowly fade away in the transcript, in the audio. And eventually, after hours and hours together, you get a full confession to a crime, even as the suspect says, I don't remember this, but it's plausible enough.
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  Larry Driskill: I was giving her a ride to the house, and there was a confrontation in the vehicle. I think she was trying to take my billfold from me. And I went to defend myself, to try to push her out of the car, and my hands went from her chest to her neck. And I guess I choked her down.
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  Chammah: These hypotheticals, many researchers have found that they increase the risk of a false confession because they start to allow us to imagine things that didn't really happen. And over time, we start to see those things as our actual memories. We know, actually, that memory is a very malleable thing that we may think we remember things that didn't happen. And we certainly don't remember things that really did happen in our lives all the time. There have been studies where undergraduate students can be convinced that they were involved in a fight when they were teenagers, right? And a key way that they come to believe this is that they're told that their parents remember it, which is a deception. And then they're asked to sort of hypothetically narrate what would've happened, using real details. You really went to this mall when you were a teenager, for example, or this was really your friend. And over time, what something could have been like - and this is a quote from some of the researchers - "what something could have been like becomes what it would have been like, and then that becomes in your mind what it was like."
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  Geraldino: At some point in your article, you write that he was just tired. He was just really, really exhausted.
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  Chammah: Yeah. He was hungry. He was desperate to go home, and he felt that a confession was his way out of this room and that it was his only way out of this room. You can see in a video of this interrogation, the way that Ranger Holland is kind of invading his personal space. There's a moment where Larry Driskill kind of crosses his arms and backs up to the wall and kind of leans up against the wall, like he's feeling really overwhelmed and scared. And he also just seems exhausted. And when he confesses with the crime, there's something sort of drowsy and futile about the way that he describes the crime, where he's like, I guess I did it, but I just don't remember. And he breaks down in tears multiple times. You know, there's two ways to look at him crying. I think Holland sees the tears as remorse for finally unburdening himself of having killed this woman. But it's, I think, equally plausible to see him breaking down in tears as just being exhausted and scared and tired and desperate to go home. And not only that, but also starting to question his own memory. I think we can't underplay here, there's two kinds of false confessions, right? There's the false confession where someone says they committed a crime, just because they're desperate to get out of the room. And then there's the false confession where they really come to believe that maybe they committed the crime. And I think, you know, having spent hours and hours looking at this particular interrogation, you can see that Larry Driskill bounces between these two possibilities. On the one hand, he's desperate to get out of the room. But on the other hand, he really is questioning his memory and he's thinking, maybe I did accidentally kill this woman and I blocked it out completely. And if I did that, how awful. How could I have done that? How could that be me? And he's really, it's leading him to really question himself in this really profound way that's very tragic to listen to.
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  Larry Driskill: I'm sorry if took somebody's life, but I don't think I did.
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  Geraldino: People will hear this story, and they'll say if Driskill was innocent, as he now says that he is, why not just firmly say, "I didn't do this. I never knew this woman"?
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  Chammah: Well, that's what he says at first, right? And I think it's really hard for us to wrap our mind around how a denial can slowly get chipped away. But bit by bit, "I didn't do it" becomes, "Well, I guess I was in the area," because you're saying that there's proof that I was in the area. And Holland's like, well, maybe a woman got into your car just to warm up on a cold day and you didn't even see her. And he's like … and he allows that that's possible. And then slowly, as his memory kind of gets chipped away at, he starts imagining some of these scenarios, and "I didn't do it" becomes "Well, I guess it could have happened." Over time, his confidence in his memory just slowly erodes. And he wants to help the ranger, so he stays in the room. And then he starts to think, well, if I leave this room in the middle of this, that I'm going to look more guilty. So, I need to keep talking to this ranger to kind of get myself out of this really bad situation. And his desperation sets in.
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  Driskill has been in prison for about seven years at this point. He's working with the Innocence Project of Texas. They're trying to prove he didn't commit this crime. But even if it turns out his confession was false, Maurice is clear, he doesn't believe Ranger Holland was actively or knowingly trying to elicit a false confession from Driskill.
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  Chammah: I, throughout the reporting, never got sense that Holland was acting in bad faith. There are other detectives who clearly are working in bad faith and just want to get a confession from someone, even if they're innocent. But the problem is not necessarily that detectives are acting in bad faith. It's more that a kind of tunnel vision can set in. You know, that you focus on a suspect, and you believe that that suspect is guilty, and you're trying to get the confession from them, but you're also ignoring things that that would indicate that potentially this person is innocent. You know, in several cases I looked at with James Holland, the suspects said early on, I have no memory of what you're talking about, I have no connection to this. And Holland interprets these as lies, but one could also interpret them as literally this person has no idea what you're talking about and had no connection to the crime.
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  Geraldino: Do these findings force us to rethink how effective these techniques are for law enforcement in general?
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  Chammah: Absolutely. The way that I often thought about the story was not that these techniques don't work to catch guilty people. It's just that because they're risky, because psychologists have found they lead to false confessions, if you use them, it's sort of only a matter of time before you potentially cross from the guilty over to the innocent, regardless of what you think of any particular case. And so, it becomes incumbent upon the police not to do anything that would sort of get into the person's mind and suddenly become part of the memory, even if it wasn't there to begin with. So, it's sort of like potentially really valuable, but it also turns up the risk a little bit. And there are some police departments - the Los Angeles Police Department is one that's been written about a great deal - who are pioneering new and different forms of interrogation that are considered less risky and less likely to coerce innocent people into confessing.
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  Geraldino: You write that officers' tactics are rarely questioned when they're able to get confessions in a cold case. What about the system needs to change in order to make sure false confessions are not happening in these cases?
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  Chammah: Once you confess falsely in a crime, you are really stuck. And actually, a lot of those people plead guilty, even though they believe they're innocent, because they're afraid that a jury would just never believe that they falsely confessed and why that would happen. So, it's proven to be one of the hardest areas of the criminal justice system, of the court process to kind of fix because it goes deep into these issues of psychology and believability. And I think there needs to be more scrutiny of the psychology of why people confess to crimes they didn't commit. There are numerous researchers who are starting to look into what can lead someone to do that. And then there are state legislatures that are considering bans on some of the techniques that are known to be especially risky, like deception, lying to a suspect, minimizing it and saying that it was maybe just an accident. There's also a movement, and many states already require, that interrogations are all audio and video recorded. So honestly, in this case, the fact that I know as much as I do is because this entire interrogation was recorded. Ten years before that, that might not have happened. The Texas legislature is one of the states that requires these recordings. But still, a lot of states don't require that interrogations be recorded at all. So, I think what you're going to see over the next few years is lawmakers, prosecutors, researchers look at these interrogations, look at the techniques, pull out and assess which ones exactly are increasing the risk for false confessions, which ones can be banned or curtailed. How can we increase the likelihood that a suspect feels like they can get a lawyer into the room at an early stage? And then also, police departments - and some police departments are starting to do this - are starting to adopt other forms of interrogation that are considered less coercive, less manipulative, less likely to get a false confession.
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  Geraldino: Thank you so much for being on "Apple News Today," Maurice. Really great work and insightful.
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  Chammah: I appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me here.
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  The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to "The Marshal Project's" request for an interview. And Texas Ranger Holland, he didn't agree to an on-the-record interview. The Parker County district attorney defended Driskill’s conviction. Maurice Chammah is a staff writer for "The Marshall Project" and the author of "Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty." You can read Chammah's article for "The Marshall Project" on Apple News. You can find the link on our show notes page.
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