by Ian Leslie
The case remains somewhat mysterious even to those closely involved with it. Chris Tarrant later remarked that ‘Scotland Yard and the Fraud Squad have never worked out what happened.’ A police source told the Daily Telegraph, ‘We’ve never been able to find every piece of the jigsaw.’ It’s not within the purview of this book to discuss whether the verdict was just. The relevant question is this: why was everyone so ready to believe in Ingram’s guilt?
When somebody pulls off the rare feat of winning a million pounds in a show with a studio audience, it’s natural that questions should arise over their probity. Something about Ingram’s manner, however, kindled these questions into suspicions; Celador’s staff felt, instinctively, that something was not right. Of course, their instincts, like those of the detectives asked to judge the authenticity of rape claims, may not have been distilled wisdom so much as distilled prejudice. Ingram, a mid-ranking army officer with a posh voice and a bumbling manner, came with his own cultural baggage. ‘Tim Nice-But-Dim’ was how Tarrant described his first impression of the Major. Not the sort of man who could win one million pounds on a general knowledge quiz show.
But perhaps what really convinced ten jurors, the press and the British public of Ingram’s guilt was his demeanour in the hot seat: awkward, a little odd-looking, not terribly confident, short on charm. During his time under the studio lights he seemed shifty, he fidgeted, he was inarticulate. In other words, Ingram exhibited all the cues we intuitively associate with a liar.
Trusters and Cynics
Jake Gittes, the private detective played by Jack Nicholson in Roman Polanski’s film Chinatown, is primed to look for deceit in every conversation and is wary of everyone he meets. In his small world of crooks and divorcees, he is very difficult to fool, but when he gets drawn into the machinations of Los Angeles politics his instincts become useless to him. By the end of the film he has been duped by everyone, overwhelmed by the unsuspected complexity of human behaviour.
Some people are better than others at detecting deceit. But they’re not necessarily the kind of people you’d think. Nancy Carter and Mark Weber, psychologists from the University of Toronto, gave forty-six MBA (Masters in Business Administration) students, each of whom had already had several years of work experience, a work-based scenario to read. It described a recent spate of dishonesty in their university’s recruitment and interview process, involving potential employees lying about their qualifications. These lies, they were told, had cost the organisation dearly in terms of time, productivity and morale.
The participants were asked to choose one of two managers to interview new applicants. The managers had similar experience and skill-sets; the only difference between them was attitudinal. Colleen was disposed to view people very positively and to assume that they were trustworthy until proven otherwise. Sue was more suspicious by nature. She was inclined to believe that people will get away with anything they can; her default attitude was one of distrust. A clear majority of the students chose Sue to run the recruitment process. They feared that Colleen would be gullible and easily duped. They even suspected her to be of inferior intelligence.
Most of us would probably make the same choice, even if we’d rather be friends with Colleen than Sue. Given the situation, it would surely be better to have an interviewer who is always on the lookout for liars than one who assumes that people generally tell the truth. It’s commonly believed that those with a pronounced tendency to trust others are easy prey for predators in the social jungle. High trust is associated with credulity – with people who will believe anything they hear from an interviewee, or a vendor, or an internet date. Indeed, most economic models of decision-making suggest that in any social interaction we should all be more like Sue and less like Colleen: low trusters, who rightly assume that others are out to behave in their own self-interest, and so act to defend ourselves from exploitation. But is being a high truster synonymous with being an easy gull?
Carter and Weber followed their initial experiment with one intended to address that question. They made videos of students in simulated job interviews in which half of the interviewees were asked to tell the truth throughout the interview, while the other half were asked to lie about three significant things that might help them ‘get the job’. The researchers then played these tapes to participants who had previously filled out a standard psychological test designed to ascertain whether or not they were high trusters or low trusters – for our purposes, let’s call them Trusters and Cynics. The participants were asked to judge which students were telling the truth and which were lying. As it turned out, the Trusters were significantly more likely than the Cynics to spot the liars.
This finding tallies with previous experimental evidence from other social scientists suggesting that, counter-intuitively, Trusters are less gullible than Cynics. The reason for this seems to be that people who are naturally suspicious of their fellow human beings tend to keep their social interactions to a minimum, outside of a small circle of known and trusted acquaintances. In the words of the sociologist Toshio Yamagishi, they take fewer ‘social risks’. This means they are less experienced at dealing with other people – at least, people they don’t already know well – and therefore at reading intentions and motivations.
If you assume everyone you meet is out to deceive you, then you’re less likely to be duped, but you’re also less likely to learn how to distinguish liars from truth-tellers. Trusters come to be seen as gullible because they are the ones who most often enter into risky social interactions that occasionally backfire – the ones who go on blind dates or buy antiques from market stalls. But they’re not gullible; they’re trusting. There is a difference.
Remote Deceptions (and Detections)
In January 2007, a retired police inspector called Garry Weddell strangled his wife Sandra, a nurse, at their home in Bedfordshire, a few weeks after she had confessed to an affair and asked him for a divorce. Then he tied a length of cable around her neck and hung her body in the garage to make it look as if she had killed herself. Near the body he placed a single sheet of A4 paper on which he had typed her ‘suicide note’, wearing rubber gloves to avoid leaving any fingerprints. Weddell had spent twenty-five years on the force and had an idea of what his former colleagues would be looking for.
Few people who knew the Weddells could believe that Sandra, a seemingly happy mother of three, would kill herself, and although Garry Weddell was not initially considered a suspect, a few of the more experienced detectives had their suspicions. They checked with police forces across the country and found only three previous deaths involving cable ties – every one a murder. Furthermore, there were bruises on Sandra’s body that suggested she might have been in a fight before she died. The suicide note became a key piece of evidence: was it authentic?
Police handed the note to John Olsson, an expert in the field of forensic linguistics. In 1994 Olsson had been a post-graduate linguist working at the University of Birmingham, where he first became interested in the application of his work to criminal investigations. His colleague Malcom Coulthard had performed an analysis of the written confession of Derek Bentley – hanged in 1953 for the murder of a policeman – which demonstrated that it had almost certainly been written by a policeman, helping to win a posthumous pardon for Bentley. Olsson was hooked, and by the time of the Weddell investigation he had worked with the police on over three hundred cases, from extortion to murder.
In Olsson’s experience, forged suicide notes could be spotted by their overuse of highly charged, self-lacerating words like crazy, cowardly, and selfish, which are rarely found in the genuine article. According to this logic, Sandra’s note looked like it might be authentic because it didn’t use such language, but Weddell was an experienced cop who might have had a strong sense of which sentiments would ring true. So Olsson began looking for other clues. In previous cases, idiosyncrasies of spelling often pointed to the real author of the note, but he
couldn’t find any of those in the note or in letters written by Sandra or her husband. He had to get down to the level of punctuation before he made a breakthrough.
Olsson noticed something about the length of sentences in the note – in particular a quirk in the placing of full stops, the first of which appeared immediately after Sandra had supposedly written her husband’s name:
Garry. I am typing this note, because I know that if I were to hand write it and leave it for you, then I know that you wouldn’t read it. I am so sorry for all the hurt I have caused you Garry. I never meant to hurt you or cause you so much pain.
The note was brief, to the point and peppered with full stops, most notably the first one. It was very unlike the letters known to have been written by Sandra, who favoured long rambling sentences, sprinkled with commas, dashes and semi-colons. One of her past sentences was more than one hundred and thirty words long – compared to the average sentence length of only twelve words in the suicide note. Much closer to the style of what was allegedly her final letter were letters written by her husband, who used full stops liberally and whose sentences averaged only nine words. This, together with other evidence, led the police to charge Weddell with murder.3
The kind of lying I focus on in this book is face-to-face, human-to-human deceit, in which the deceiver is attempting to spin a story that accords with his or her personality and circumstances. The more the lie is identified with the liar, the better. There is, however, another category of deception altogether, one in which the deceiver creates something – a painting, a recording, a document – that they hope will never be traced back to them.
Weddell’s ‘suicide note’ is an example of such ‘remote deception’. My second and final example of it comes from a different field of forensic investigation. The study of ‘election forensics’ took off after the disputed American presidential election of 2000. It applies statistical analysis to election results as a way of detecting fraud.
Faking election results doesn’t sound difficult. You just invent a string of random numbers that are plausible enough and show the result you want, right? But it’s harder than you might imagine. The problem is that we’re surprisingly bad at making up random numbers. When participants in lab experiments are asked to write sequences of random digits, they tend to select some digits, or some patterns of digits, more frequently than others. The job of electoral forensics experts is to analyse the results of elections to see if they’re really as random as they ought to be, or if there are some suspicious consistencies that reveal the hand of a fixer.
Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, political scientists from the University of Columbia, analysed the disputed 2009 Iranian election that led to Iran’s Green movement. They looked at the published vote counts received by different candidates in different provinces, concentrating on the last and second-to-last digits of each number. For example, if a candidate received 14,579 votes in a province, they focused on digits 7 and 9. The last digits in a fair election don’t tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election. They are what statisticians call random noise. But that’s the point: it means they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud. For example, an election in which a majority of the vote counts ended in 5 would be very suspicious.
When Beber and Sacco looked at the results issued by Iran’s Ministry of the Interior they found some odd anomalies. The number 7 appeared far more often than it would normally do in a set of randomly generated figures, and the number 5 far less often. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers. That wasn’t all. It’s also been found that people have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to twenty-three) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers. To check for deviations of this type, Berber and Sacco examined the pairs of last and second-to-last digits in Iran’s vote counts. On average, if the results had not been manipulated, seventy per cent of these pairs should have consisted of distinct, non-adjacent digits. In this case, only sixty-two per cent of the pairs contained non-adjacent digits. That may not sound so different from seventy per cent, but the probability that a fair election would produce a difference this large is less than 4.2 per cent.
Each of the two tests provided strong evidence that Iran’s published vote counts had been manipulated. Taken together, they left little room for reasonable doubt. According to this analysis, the chance that the Iranian election was fair is less than one in two hundred.
The Dream of a Truth Machine
The past, present and future of lie detectors
On 19 April 1921, in Berkeley, California, a young policeman invited an eighteen-year-old woman called Margaret Taylor into a small room. A strange-looking contraption sat on the table. Taylor, a blue-eyed, golden-haired native of the state, wasn’t sure what to expect. A few weeks previously she had reported the theft of a four hundred-dollar ring from her room in College Hall, the female boarding house of her university campus. Now she was being asked to recount her story whilst attached to this bizarre device which – it was rumoured – could read her mind. Taylor wasn’t the only girl in College Hall to find something had gone missing recently. For several months now its inhabitants – most of them young ladies from well-to-do families – had been returning to their rooms to find their evening gowns spread out on their beds, as if someone had been sizing them up. A sophomore from Bakersfield had been robbed of forty-five dollars she had placed inside a textbook; other students had lost letters, jewellery, items of silk underwear. Unable to extract a confession from any of her boarders, College Hall’s housemother turned to the police. After an initial inconclusive investigation, the case was handed over to John Larson, the man who now greeted Margaret Taylor.
Miss Taylor was not under suspicion, but Larson needed a ‘control’ to measure against his suspects. As several other students waited their turn outside, Larson strapped a blood-pressure gauge to one of Miss Taylor’s bare arms until it gripped firmly, and wound a rubber hose tightly around her chest to measure the depth of her breathing. He told her to hold as still as she could – the least muscular movement might be mistaken for a guilty reaction. Then he turned on the instruments. Drums revolved, black recording paper turned, and the long rubber hoses swelled and subsided to the rhythms of Taylor’s body. A pair of needles began to scratch out patterns on the paper. After a short preamble, Larson began his questions, speaking in a monotone:
1. Do you like college?
2. Are you interested in this test?
3. How much is 30 x 40?
4. Are you frightened?
5. Will you graduate this year?
6. Do you dance?
7. Are you interested in math?
8. Did you steal the money?
9. The test shows you stole it. Did you spend it?
The interview took six minutes. After Larson had finished with Taylor, he worked his way through the list of suspects. One of them, a student nurse called Helen Graham, entered the room already under suspicion. A few years older than the other students, Graham was a tall, striking woman with deep-set eyes and an intense manner. She was unpopular with her dorm sisters, who disdained her modest Kansas background; it had been suggested to police that she seemed to spend beyond her means. Sure enough, no sooner had Larson reached the questions about theft – ‘The tests show you stole it. Did you spend it?’ – than the machine showed a steep drop in Graham’s blood pressure followed by an alarming rise. In a fit of rage, Graham ripped off the machine’s cuffs, leapt to her feet and ran from the room. Called back for questioning the next day, she broke down and confessed to the crime. Berkeley’s newspapers hailed the first success of the police’s new ‘lie detector’.
In 1858 the French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey built a device that simultaneously recorded changes in blood pressure, respiration and pulse rates whilst his subjects were subjec
ted to nausea, sharp noises and stress. In 1895 the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso invented an early lie detector, based on a similar physiology of emotion. A suspect was told to put his hand into a tank filled with water; his pulse would cause the level of liquid to rise and fall slightly; the greater the fluctuation, the more dishonest he was judged to be. The work of Marey and Lombroso was part of a new strain of scientific thinking about the relationship between the emotions and the nervous system. William James argued that feelings derive from physiological responses rather than vice versa; a man runs from a bear not because he feels afraid, but feels afraid because he’s running from a bear. In 1901, Freud wrote that ‘No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.’ Of course, when a person’s emotions are manifested in the body’s starts and shivers, they become available for measurement.
