February 10, 2022 • 32 mins
How did the focus shift from Melissa’s initial statement that, “Bill did it,” to Rodney becoming the prime suspect? Experts break down the police procedures which may have altered the course of the investigation, as well as the science behind how memories work and change over time.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I battle between what I remember and this narrative that
I developed over the time with the police. How did
it go from Melissa saying Bill was a perpetrator to
Rodney Lincoln being arrested and eventually convicted. And I know
on some level how it happened, and that I wasn't
(00:22):
solely responsible. The city was out for blood. I'm Leah Rothman.
This is the Real Killer Episode ten. Memories and misidentifications.
(00:49):
You know what I did ask myself many times? Why
I said Bill? Could it happened? I was a little
kid misheard or this was the name I knew the
man by. I don't know how it got to be
from one person to the other. I can't explain the
moment it happened, but I think it was an evolution.
(01:11):
Maybe my recollections and memories were not as good as theirs.
I didn't trust myself anymore because Melissa's memory is really
the lynchpin of the whole case. I want to understand
more about it. Where did her early memories of the
perpetrator come from? And why did those memories change? Somewhere
(01:34):
along the way things pivoted away from Bill and to Rodney.
Why and how? And what part the detectives play in
all of it. I started with reaching out to Gary Wells.
He's a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University.
He's a giant in the field of social psychology, cognitive psychology,
(01:57):
and its intersection with the law. He's also done extensive
research on lineup procedures and the accuracy of eyewitness identification,
dating back to n He's authored over three hundred articles.
His findings have been included into psychology and law textbooks,
and he's worked with the Justice Department to write the
(02:19):
training manual on eyewitness identification evidence. We've got a reliability
problem in eyewitnessification because most of the DNA generations about
involved cases of mistaken identification in the Midwest. Innocence Project
(02:41):
reached out to Gary Wells asking him to review and
advise them on Rodney's case. This was before Melissa's recantation.
If it's okay, let's first talk about Melissa. The first
thing she says is Bill did it. From there in
the hospital she starts from and bring other things about Bill.
(03:02):
She remembers that Bill drove a yellow car, then it
turns into a taxi, and then a white Volkswagon. She
remembers spending the night at his house. There was a
park across from the house. What do you make of
the first responses that come from her, Well, I think
the first responses are you know. She could say I
(03:24):
don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but she didn't.
In general, the spontaneous mentioning of this person Bill is
big lead. I mean, it should be followed up on.
That's a meaningful statement, and especially if you have nothing
else to to really contradict that. I don't want to
attribute bad motives to the to the case investigator here,
(03:48):
but throughout this process it just looks very chaotic. I mean,
early in this process, she's been being shown people who
don't fit their description. They don't look at all like
each other. The only thing they seem to have in
common is most of them were named Bill or William
(04:09):
or Billy or Willie. And so that whole strategy was
to put a bunch of bills in front of her. Right,
that was a bad idea. That's a fishing expedition with
Melissa unable to ide any of those men in time.
(04:31):
The composite sketches drawn, Remember they start with a photo
of a family friend named Dennis Smith. Allegedly, Melissa had
said he kind of looked like the killer. For the
sketch artists to have a picture of the person, she says,
he looks like as another like, what is the what
is the point of that? Did he even need her
(04:54):
at that point? Is she adding anything? I doubt it.
We We have done experiments to produce composites. What we
find is that in general, they tend not to look
very much like the perpetrator, like the person they saw,
because it's just so difficult. We can't pick out the
(05:16):
nose and the eyes, and then you know, we don't
have those things separately, uh, in memory. So here's the
big problem though, When you produce a composite and the
composite may or may not resemble the real perp or
very much, but you use that to find a suspect.
(05:36):
Guess what, You put the composite out to lots of people, right, Well, yeah,
of course it always looks like somebody, which is exactly
what happened in this case. The sketch is released to
the public. Joanne's family sees it and says the man
looks familiar and after going through Joanne's diary with police,
(05:59):
they land on raw me. So then they decide that
Rodney is their suspect, and they go to Melissa with
two photos. One is of a family, remember, a cousin,
of her half sister, her older half sister, and the
other and that's a color polaroid and the other is
(06:22):
a black and white mug shot of Rodney Lincoln. Sort
of just talk me through that, okay, So if you
if you just come in at that point where they
decide that they're going to try to do an identification
with Rodney Lincoln, they would have needed to understand and
(06:44):
appreciate the fact that, well, we suspected Lincoln only because
he was the closest match to the composite. Right. What
they needed to do then was create a proper identification procedure,
which would be at least six photos. And in those
six photos, they need to pick other people who also
(07:08):
have some similarities to the composite and use those. It
can't just be too So she picks Rodney. Burgoon said
his name is not Bill, and Burgoon said, Melissa replied,
it's that's him, that's him, and he's like, but his
name is not Bill, and she said that's him. She
(07:29):
had seen Rodney before, and so when she says that's him,
is that what she's what she's doing, is she's recognizing
someone that her mother did have a relationship with at
some point, and that this is what we call a
source monitoring error, which is a particular problem that flicks everyone,
(07:53):
but it's stronger with children and stronger with the elderly.
And that is you remember, in this case, the face,
but you've confused the context. So yeah, it's a familiar
it's a it is a familiar face. You have been
in the same room with that person. Right by that point,
(08:14):
that memory maybe of the perpetrator may start to almost
be blending with this person. And I say that because
she was right about some things about it turned out
about Rodney, not about Bill, right, that he lived with
his mom, and that there was a park right park
(08:35):
across the street. So so it's quite possible that what
is augmenting this identification is the fact that now you're
showing her someone she has seen before and and and
and seen in the context of an interaction with her mother.
She picks Rodney right, and then within two hours she
(08:59):
is viewing a live lineup right so the live lineup.
I mean, once you get an identification of somebody from photos,
turning around and doing a live lineup in which he's
the only person in common between um, the photos and
the live lineup, it's pretty much guaranteed the witness is
just gonna turn around and pick the same person. And
(09:21):
it doesn't matter if the child are an adult, Right,
they're gonna pick the same person out of the live
lineup that they that you just led them to pick
out of photos. Besides this, there are other issues with
lineups that need to be considered. So the big problem
with I win a cientification is that witnesses tend to
(09:45):
pick the person from the lineup who looks most like
the perpetrator relative to the other members of the lineup. Right,
That makes sense, comes very natural, two people. It's just
kind of baked into our psychology is to make relative judgments.
I mean, I don't know the actual size of this,
(10:07):
whatever it might be. I can't tell you in in
millimeters or whatever, but I can see that this is
bigger than that, right, So this is how we make
most of our judgments, right, in terms of them being
relative to something else. And so it is the case
with a line up to the natural tendency. The natural
(10:30):
propensity is to look at a lineup quickly home in
on who best matches my memory relative to the others.
This is the best person, and then there's a tendency
to run with that and pick that person. The problem
with that is that what if the perpetrator is not
in the line up, there still is somebody who better
(10:51):
matches your memory than somebody else. So an absolutely critical
and essential type of instruction is keeping mind the person
who committed this crime, person you saw might not be
in here, and so maybe maybe the correct answer is
none of these. That's a very important instruction. It takes
(11:12):
pressure off the witness. So then they're at this live lineup.
I know you've seen it, and these gentlemen are and
eighteen years old, shaggier, longer hair, inches taller than Rodney
(11:32):
Rodney's thirty seven, shorter dark hair um and also just shorter.
And in terms of fillers, how did metro p D
do with the fillers in this live lineup? On the
live lineup? I mean, not only is Melissa coming into
it having already only two hours earlier picked Rodney Lincoln
(11:59):
from two choice alternative but in addition, for three other
people in the live lineup are very poorly selected fillers.
They don't fit the description. Rodney is the only one
who who fits the description. If by that point we
consider the description to be this uh composite. When you
(12:20):
select good fillers, they should all have that same characteristic,
so that if he's innocent, he shouldn't stand out. So
I I interviewed Detective Burgoon recently and I asked him
about the live lineup, and he basically said that it
(12:40):
was a Saturday, and there weren't too many people there,
and they only had twenty hours in Missouri at the time.
They only had twenty hours to apply for a warrant.
You know, we basically had twenty hours to put together
this live lineup. I would think that twenty would be
(13:01):
enough time to round up people. You don't have to
get them from jail cells. I mean you can, you
can get them off the street. Personally, I don't think
that's a good excuse. And the fact that Lead Detective
Joe Burgoon, a man that Melissa came to love, is
part of the lineup at all, is a problem. Talk
(13:22):
to me about double blind lineups. The idea of the
double blind lineup, which I came up with in the
late eighties and started pressing pretty hard on into the
ninety nineties, was that began discovering oftentimes, Um, the person
doing the line up, the detective who knows that his
(13:46):
suspect is in position three, is inadvertently unintentionally We're not
saying it's intentional queuing the witness towards number three. Consider
what you would do, I mean, perfectly natural. Nobody thinks
they're they're doing something inappropriate. So let's say your case, detective,
(14:07):
you think that you know, you put together a lineup.
You think that number three, You know number three is
your suspect. You know that numbers one to four or five, six,
those are just fillers. Right. You show it to the witness,
and the witness says, um, number two. Now take your time.
(14:28):
Are you sure you look at all of them? Right?
But if the witness says, um, number three, yeah, yeah,
tell me about number three. So it's just human nature
on the part of in this case, the lineup administrator
to sort of leak or inadvertently steer. And so the
(14:49):
double blind lineup is a pretty simple idea. I mean,
I just borrowed it from what we already know in
scientific testing, namely that well, the person who administers this
photo lineup and any buddy who's in that room should
not know which person is the person who is the
suspect and which ones are fillers. Then they cannot inadvertently,
(15:11):
unintentionally or whatever, steer the witness around or influence how
the witness feels about their choice. So you know how
the rest goes. Melissa picks Rodney. Then two trials later,
he's convicted. Fast forward three decades. So Melissa in two
(15:34):
thousand and fifteen says Rodney didn't do it, he was
never there that day. And then she also says, I
believe tommylind Cells did it. So what do you make
of that new memory? Well, I think that Melissa's showing
great bravery here and saying that she now believes that
(16:00):
it was not Rodney Lincoln because that requires her to
like sort of rewrite a significant part of her life history.
That's that's huge. Now. I do think that what she's
doing is she's weighing. Maybe she's weighing the evidence a
little bit better. I mean, she's coming to grips with
(16:23):
things that she didn't know at the time. I mean
as an adult, she's now processing his name. Isn't Bill right?
He does have an ali by in the words, she's
taking into consideration, Uh, this other evidence at the same time,
why is she saying that it's this other person? It
seems very unlikely that she's able to recover that original
(16:49):
memory and based it on that. Because too much time
is passed. It seems unlikely she would be able to
cast her mind back and recover that original memory. I
think that's long gone. It wasn't that good in the beginning.
There's too much water under the bridge. She's already made
(17:10):
this mistaken identification and believe that it was somebody else
All along. These things make that original memory largely untraceable.
The legal system tend not to buy recantations, sort of like,
well then you must have if you were wrong before,
why wouldn't you be wrong now? You know? Does memory
(17:32):
get better? With your memories better now? I have a
lot of questions about memories. I mean, how exactly do
memories even work and what causes them not to I
(17:52):
asked three memory experts to share their years of knowledge
and research with me. They agreed to talk about the
case as a high pathetical. I've heard people compare memory
to a video recorder. Is that reasonable? I mean, the
fast answer is straightforward yes and no. That's Daniel Reiesberg.
(18:15):
He's an emeritus professor and a cognitive psychologist whose research
focuses on how people remember emotional events in their lives.
For the last twenty years, he's been called to testify
as an expert witness in i D cases, confession cases,
and cases involving children's and adults memories. Like a video recorder,
(18:36):
memory has an input side, akin to what happens when
you hit the record button on your phone or a player.
Memory has a storage time when the information is just
sitting there waiting for some eventual playback, and memory also
has a playback function. But the moment you start looking
at the comparison in any sort of serious way, the
(18:57):
comparison just collapses. And I would put at the top
of the list two crucial points. One of them is
that the input to memory is selective. And there is,
in many occasions a lot of information arriving at your ears,
or a lot of information out in front of your eyes,
and if you're not paying attention to it, it does
(19:19):
not get recorded. Into memory. But the other I think
even more important distinction is that one's information is recorded
on your phone. It's it's their dormant and in that way,
what you eventually get in playback really is a high
quality rendition of exactly what went in in the first place.
(19:40):
And memory is massively different because our memories are dynamic
and information that's in storage is constantly getting updated and
elaborated and merged together with other sources of information. I
agree with you, that's the way memory works. It's a
wonder for wonderful system, UM, but it's um. It's a
(20:04):
system that was not not developed for the courtroom. That's
Iris blend On Gitlin. She's a professor of psychology at
California State University, Fullerton. Her research focuses on memory in
the forensic context, memory as it relates to identification of
people and events, and detecting deception as it relates to
(20:26):
interviewing and interrogation. She also works as an expert witness,
primarily in criminal cases. Within the courtroom, a lot of
time needs to be accurate and complete. That's not what
it evolves to be. So it's there's a conflict between
what the legal system meets, you know, in order to
(20:48):
self crimes um and what human humans can give from
their memory, which is it's wonderful for every day, for
all of our experiences, but not for the courtroom. The
only other piece that I would add to that is
people don't necessarily have a good sense of when their
memory fails, and that's how they're Clydeer off it. She's
(21:11):
a research professor at Georgia State University. Her work focuses
on memory errors, with an emphasis on courtroom applications. Her
work also looks at face recognition and eyewitness identification. Most recently,
she's been looking at how people remember information that's been
imagined versus actually experienced and the confusion that comes with it.
(21:33):
Like Dan and Iris, for the last ten years, how
There has also been working as an expert witness. People
can feel um because they remember something with a lot
of vividness or a lot of detail. Then they can
come to believe that it's highly accurate and become very
confident in that. And again, to add to what Irish said,
that isn't necessarily the case that works in the courtroom
(21:55):
because memory fades over time, over time, and right off
the bat, here's Dan again, memories fade, All memories fade.
The fade begins immediately. Um, you know, there's no honeymoon
period in which the memory is, you know, resting before
the fade starts. That's just not the way it works.
(22:16):
One of the claims of that memory I commonly encounter
is that some events are immune to forgetting, and people say,
I will remember that till the day I die. I'll
never forget it. I remember it as though it were yesterday.
And you know, there's a kernel of reality there because
some events are memorable. But at the same time, no
(22:38):
event is immune to forgetting. To what Dance saying, it's
not that you're necessarily going to forget that the thing happened.
I'm not going to forget I was in a car accident,
but the details surrounding that event are going to update
and change. So you know, it's not that people completely
forget something happened. I can remember all the details of it.
(23:02):
And it turns out event memories are very different than
facial ones. Here's iris again, the event is likely to
be replay rehearsed. Right as people give the account of
an event and they talk about it and trying to reconcile,
they think about it, and so potentially there's a stronger
(23:23):
memory for the details of the event, of parts of
that event, and there is not the image of a
perpetrator because that doesn't get rehearsed. And trauma has a
surprising effect on memory, actually a contradictory one. Here's Dan.
(23:43):
One of the things that trauma does, you know, in
you know, lots of field studies, lots of laboratory studies,
is sharpen your focus. The things that they do focus
on during the trauma tend to be longer lasting compared
to memory for some you know, mundane, everyday occurrence. And
part of the complication here is that it's often difficult
(24:06):
from the outside to figure out exactly what the person
is going to focus on. And so, you know, two
people going through what seemed to be similar events may
end up focusing on different things, and therefore they're going
to have very different memories. And the opposite can also
be true, like when someone experiences a lot of stress
and arousal, something called catastrophic memory loss can occur. So
(24:31):
in regards to Melissa, we don't know which one happened.
Did she have some very sharp memories based on where
she put her focus or was she so stressed that
like the perpetrator's face just became a blur. We'll never know.
But what about exposure time. It seems the man was
in the apartment for a long time. Melissa said she
got a good look at him. At times his face
(24:53):
was a foot away. Here's iris we know of cases
and also from research that even if you have long
exposure time to a phase, I mean the famous case
of the Ronald Cotton a case. You know, the rapist
was in the room for a long period of time
(25:16):
with Jennifer the victim, right, And so she even said
that she studied his face. She wanted to be able
to remember him right, to be able to you know,
make sure that they got to him. And she still
made a mistake. And when she came across the real
real rapists years later in another trial, um, she actually
(25:36):
came in front and saw him and she could not
nothing trigger, nothing trigger in her mind. And that was
a real rapist, proven by d n A right. And
so you know from these cases, but also from the
empirical research, that is possible to also misremember or forget
a face even if you had long exposure time and again,
(25:59):
where was Melissa's focus? Was it on the man's face
or the knife he was stabbing her with? What about age?
Does a child's memory work the same as an adults?
The answer is basically yes, with a few exceptions, one
of the biggest being suggestibility. Here's iris again. I think
(26:23):
in a suggestive environment where you have suggestive kinds of
interviewing and and lots of adults with an interest of
trying to get more information, and also with authority figures,
all of that kind of environment would definitely potentially influence
that person's memory. I would add just quickly, is that
(26:45):
I don't want to leave the feeling that you know,
children's memory cannot be relied upon. You know it can
given the right circumstances. They're right set of protocols, and
we know that from their research is very clear children
can't give reliable, truthful information and complete information in the
right condition. So basically, memories fade almost immediately. They're malleable,
(27:18):
and both adults and children can make errors when I
ding someone. It seems like the burdens on law enforcement
to conduct interviews and lineups in ways that produce good,
reliable information without contaminating the original memory, which brings us
back to Gary Wells and what should have happened in
(27:38):
Rodney's case. I think this whole thing all along needed
to be solved with if at all possible, with harder evidence.
A seven year old You can't be shown her fifty
photos over several days and of all kinds of different
(27:59):
people and then giving her really biased final test of
only two photos. Once you did that, you sort of
trampled on the evidence. You know, I've been pushing this analogy,
um that I think that you know, I witness evidence
should be treated as a form of trace evidence. You know,
(28:21):
trace evidence we usually think of as fingerprints and blood
or semen or hair fibers that a perpetrator left behind
at the scene of the crime that can help establish
the identity of the perpetrator. Well, that's also true of
eye witness evidence. What happened here was the perpetrator left
a trace behind, except that trace was in the head
(28:43):
of Melissa. It's the same as going into a crime
scene and just trampling all over the place. Oh well,
you know, it doesn't matter if I pick up this object,
if I step over here, or I'm gonna I'm gonna
move the gun, you know, like you would never consider
doing those things when investigating a crime. Well, there should
be a lot of things you don't consider tampering with,
(29:06):
like to witnesses memory when invested getting a crime as well.
Should the detectives. Should they have known better back in
It's hard to put ourselves back into you know. I
don't want to be one who says that this was
(29:28):
not good faith at the time. I can't really make
that judgment. What I can do now, though, is say that, UM,
given this path of these events as they were created
and unfolded, the result in the end of Melissa picking
(29:49):
Rodney from that one of two photos and then turning
around and picking him from the lineup is of no
real probitive value. It's not desp positive of guilt. It's
not really something that even can qualify as evidence. If
by evidence we mean that it's that somehow we're at
(30:10):
least getting beyond more likely than not, it's just not there.
Gary's work, like his pre lineup instructions, choosing fillers, double
blind lineups, videotaping, the identification and better interviewing of witnesses
are procedures that have been implemented in almost thirty states,
(30:32):
covering about of the population. There's still a long way
to go, but we're in a much better position today
than we were certainly so, of course I had to ask.
(30:54):
It's Missouri one of the states that has adopted these reforms.
They have not. Next time on The Real Killer, imagine
you take this job and you're told and you don't
have the right to correct monthal conviction, a system seemingly
(31:18):
built to fail, not just Rodney Lincoln, but many others.
Lamar keeps me up at night, Son of a bitch.
I could. I could talk like a sailor for five
minutes talking about how mother fucking pissed I am that
Lamar is still sitting in prison makes me the puke.
(31:49):
The Real Killer is a production of a y R
Media and I Heart Radio, hosted by me Leah Rothman.
Executive producers Leah Rothman and Eliza Rosen for a y
R Media You. Written by me Leah Rothman, Senior Associate
producer Eric Newman, Editing and sound design by Cameron Taggy,
(32:10):
mixed and mastered by Cameron Taggi, Audio engineering by Jesus C.
Mario Studio engineering by Tom Weir and Kelly McGrew, legal
counsel for a y R Media, Gianni Douglas, executive producer
for I Heart Radio, Chandler Mayze. If you're enjoying The
Real Killer, tell your friends about it and leave us
(32:32):
a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
I battle between what I remember and this narrative that
I developed over the time with the police. How did
it go from Melissa saying Bill was a perpetrator to
Rodney Lincoln being arrested and eventually convicted. And I know
on some level how it happened, and that I wasn't
(00:22):
solely responsible. The city was out for blood. I'm Leah Rothman.
This is the Real Killer Episode ten. Memories and misidentifications.
(00:49):
You know what I did ask myself many times? Why
I said Bill? Could it happened? I was a little
kid misheard or this was the name I knew the
man by. I don't know how it got to be
from one person to the other. I can't explain the
moment it happened, but I think it was an evolution.
(01:11):
Maybe my recollections and memories were not as good as theirs.
I didn't trust myself anymore because Melissa's memory is really
the lynchpin of the whole case. I want to understand
more about it. Where did her early memories of the
perpetrator come from? And why did those memories change? Somewhere
(01:34):
along the way things pivoted away from Bill and to Rodney.
Why and how? And what part the detectives play in
all of it. I started with reaching out to Gary Wells.
He's a distinguished professor of psychology at Iowa State University.
He's a giant in the field of social psychology, cognitive psychology,
(01:57):
and its intersection with the law. He's also done extensive
research on lineup procedures and the accuracy of eyewitness identification,
dating back to n He's authored over three hundred articles.
His findings have been included into psychology and law textbooks,
and he's worked with the Justice Department to write the
(02:19):
training manual on eyewitness identification evidence. We've got a reliability
problem in eyewitnessification because most of the DNA generations about
involved cases of mistaken identification in the Midwest. Innocence Project
(02:41):
reached out to Gary Wells asking him to review and
advise them on Rodney's case. This was before Melissa's recantation.
If it's okay, let's first talk about Melissa. The first
thing she says is Bill did it. From there in
the hospital she starts from and bring other things about Bill.
(03:02):
She remembers that Bill drove a yellow car, then it
turns into a taxi, and then a white Volkswagon. She
remembers spending the night at his house. There was a
park across from the house. What do you make of
the first responses that come from her, Well, I think
the first responses are you know. She could say I
(03:24):
don't know, I don't know, I don't know, but she didn't.
In general, the spontaneous mentioning of this person Bill is
big lead. I mean, it should be followed up on.
That's a meaningful statement, and especially if you have nothing
else to to really contradict that. I don't want to
attribute bad motives to the to the case investigator here,
(03:48):
but throughout this process it just looks very chaotic. I mean,
early in this process, she's been being shown people who
don't fit their description. They don't look at all like
each other. The only thing they seem to have in
common is most of them were named Bill or William
(04:09):
or Billy or Willie. And so that whole strategy was
to put a bunch of bills in front of her. Right,
that was a bad idea. That's a fishing expedition with
Melissa unable to ide any of those men in time.
(04:31):
The composite sketches drawn, Remember they start with a photo
of a family friend named Dennis Smith. Allegedly, Melissa had
said he kind of looked like the killer. For the
sketch artists to have a picture of the person, she says,
he looks like as another like, what is the what
is the point of that? Did he even need her
(04:54):
at that point? Is she adding anything? I doubt it.
We We have done experiments to produce composites. What we
find is that in general, they tend not to look
very much like the perpetrator, like the person they saw,
because it's just so difficult. We can't pick out the
(05:16):
nose and the eyes, and then you know, we don't
have those things separately, uh, in memory. So here's the
big problem though, When you produce a composite and the
composite may or may not resemble the real perp or
very much, but you use that to find a suspect.
(05:36):
Guess what, You put the composite out to lots of people, right, Well, yeah,
of course it always looks like somebody, which is exactly
what happened in this case. The sketch is released to
the public. Joanne's family sees it and says the man
looks familiar and after going through Joanne's diary with police,
(05:59):
they land on raw me. So then they decide that
Rodney is their suspect, and they go to Melissa with
two photos. One is of a family, remember, a cousin,
of her half sister, her older half sister, and the
other and that's a color polaroid and the other is
(06:22):
a black and white mug shot of Rodney Lincoln. Sort
of just talk me through that, okay, So if you
if you just come in at that point where they
decide that they're going to try to do an identification
with Rodney Lincoln, they would have needed to understand and
(06:44):
appreciate the fact that, well, we suspected Lincoln only because
he was the closest match to the composite. Right. What
they needed to do then was create a proper identification procedure,
which would be at least six photos. And in those
six photos, they need to pick other people who also
(07:08):
have some similarities to the composite and use those. It
can't just be too So she picks Rodney. Burgoon said
his name is not Bill, and Burgoon said, Melissa replied,
it's that's him, that's him, and he's like, but his
name is not Bill, and she said that's him. She
(07:29):
had seen Rodney before, and so when she says that's him,
is that what she's what she's doing, is she's recognizing
someone that her mother did have a relationship with at
some point, and that this is what we call a
source monitoring error, which is a particular problem that flicks everyone,
(07:53):
but it's stronger with children and stronger with the elderly.
And that is you remember, in this case, the face,
but you've confused the context. So yeah, it's a familiar
it's a it is a familiar face. You have been
in the same room with that person. Right by that point,
(08:14):
that memory maybe of the perpetrator may start to almost
be blending with this person. And I say that because
she was right about some things about it turned out
about Rodney, not about Bill, right, that he lived with
his mom, and that there was a park right park
(08:35):
across the street. So so it's quite possible that what
is augmenting this identification is the fact that now you're
showing her someone she has seen before and and and
and seen in the context of an interaction with her mother.
She picks Rodney right, and then within two hours she
(08:59):
is viewing a live lineup right so the live lineup.
I mean, once you get an identification of somebody from photos,
turning around and doing a live lineup in which he's
the only person in common between um, the photos and
the live lineup, it's pretty much guaranteed the witness is
just gonna turn around and pick the same person. And
(09:21):
it doesn't matter if the child are an adult, Right,
they're gonna pick the same person out of the live
lineup that they that you just led them to pick
out of photos. Besides this, there are other issues with
lineups that need to be considered. So the big problem
with I win a cientification is that witnesses tend to
(09:45):
pick the person from the lineup who looks most like
the perpetrator relative to the other members of the lineup. Right,
That makes sense, comes very natural, two people. It's just
kind of baked into our psychology is to make relative judgments.
I mean, I don't know the actual size of this,
(10:07):
whatever it might be. I can't tell you in in
millimeters or whatever, but I can see that this is
bigger than that, right, So this is how we make
most of our judgments, right, in terms of them being
relative to something else. And so it is the case
with a line up to the natural tendency. The natural
(10:30):
propensity is to look at a lineup quickly home in
on who best matches my memory relative to the others.
This is the best person, and then there's a tendency
to run with that and pick that person. The problem
with that is that what if the perpetrator is not
in the line up, there still is somebody who better
(10:51):
matches your memory than somebody else. So an absolutely critical
and essential type of instruction is keeping mind the person
who committed this crime, person you saw might not be
in here, and so maybe maybe the correct answer is
none of these. That's a very important instruction. It takes
(11:12):
pressure off the witness. So then they're at this live lineup.
I know you've seen it, and these gentlemen are and
eighteen years old, shaggier, longer hair, inches taller than Rodney
(11:32):
Rodney's thirty seven, shorter dark hair um and also just shorter.
And in terms of fillers, how did metro p D
do with the fillers in this live lineup? On the
live lineup? I mean, not only is Melissa coming into
it having already only two hours earlier picked Rodney Lincoln
(11:59):
from two choice alternative but in addition, for three other
people in the live lineup are very poorly selected fillers.
They don't fit the description. Rodney is the only one
who who fits the description. If by that point we
consider the description to be this uh composite. When you
(12:20):
select good fillers, they should all have that same characteristic,
so that if he's innocent, he shouldn't stand out. So
I I interviewed Detective Burgoon recently and I asked him
about the live lineup, and he basically said that it
(12:40):
was a Saturday, and there weren't too many people there,
and they only had twenty hours in Missouri at the time.
They only had twenty hours to apply for a warrant.
You know, we basically had twenty hours to put together
this live lineup. I would think that twenty would be
(13:01):
enough time to round up people. You don't have to
get them from jail cells. I mean you can, you
can get them off the street. Personally, I don't think
that's a good excuse. And the fact that Lead Detective
Joe Burgoon, a man that Melissa came to love, is
part of the lineup at all, is a problem. Talk
(13:22):
to me about double blind lineups. The idea of the
double blind lineup, which I came up with in the
late eighties and started pressing pretty hard on into the
ninety nineties, was that began discovering oftentimes, Um, the person
doing the line up, the detective who knows that his
(13:46):
suspect is in position three, is inadvertently unintentionally We're not
saying it's intentional queuing the witness towards number three. Consider
what you would do, I mean, perfectly natural. Nobody thinks
they're they're doing something inappropriate. So let's say your case, detective,
(14:07):
you think that you know, you put together a lineup.
You think that number three, You know number three is
your suspect. You know that numbers one to four or five, six,
those are just fillers. Right. You show it to the witness,
and the witness says, um, number two. Now take your time.
(14:28):
Are you sure you look at all of them? Right?
But if the witness says, um, number three, yeah, yeah,
tell me about number three. So it's just human nature
on the part of in this case, the lineup administrator
to sort of leak or inadvertently steer. And so the
(14:49):
double blind lineup is a pretty simple idea. I mean,
I just borrowed it from what we already know in
scientific testing, namely that well, the person who administers this
photo lineup and any buddy who's in that room should
not know which person is the person who is the
suspect and which ones are fillers. Then they cannot inadvertently,
(15:11):
unintentionally or whatever, steer the witness around or influence how
the witness feels about their choice. So you know how
the rest goes. Melissa picks Rodney. Then two trials later,
he's convicted. Fast forward three decades. So Melissa in two
(15:34):
thousand and fifteen says Rodney didn't do it, he was
never there that day. And then she also says, I
believe tommylind Cells did it. So what do you make
of that new memory? Well, I think that Melissa's showing
great bravery here and saying that she now believes that
(16:00):
it was not Rodney Lincoln because that requires her to
like sort of rewrite a significant part of her life history.
That's that's huge. Now. I do think that what she's
doing is she's weighing. Maybe she's weighing the evidence a
little bit better. I mean, she's coming to grips with
(16:23):
things that she didn't know at the time. I mean
as an adult, she's now processing his name. Isn't Bill right?
He does have an ali by in the words, she's
taking into consideration, Uh, this other evidence at the same time,
why is she saying that it's this other person? It
seems very unlikely that she's able to recover that original
(16:49):
memory and based it on that. Because too much time
is passed. It seems unlikely she would be able to
cast her mind back and recover that original memory. I
think that's long gone. It wasn't that good in the beginning.
There's too much water under the bridge. She's already made
(17:10):
this mistaken identification and believe that it was somebody else
All along. These things make that original memory largely untraceable.
The legal system tend not to buy recantations, sort of like,
well then you must have if you were wrong before,
why wouldn't you be wrong now? You know? Does memory
(17:32):
get better? With your memories better now? I have a
lot of questions about memories. I mean, how exactly do
memories even work and what causes them not to I
(17:52):
asked three memory experts to share their years of knowledge
and research with me. They agreed to talk about the
case as a high pathetical. I've heard people compare memory
to a video recorder. Is that reasonable? I mean, the
fast answer is straightforward yes and no. That's Daniel Reiesberg.
(18:15):
He's an emeritus professor and a cognitive psychologist whose research
focuses on how people remember emotional events in their lives.
For the last twenty years, he's been called to testify
as an expert witness in i D cases, confession cases,
and cases involving children's and adults memories. Like a video recorder,
(18:36):
memory has an input side, akin to what happens when
you hit the record button on your phone or a player.
Memory has a storage time when the information is just
sitting there waiting for some eventual playback, and memory also
has a playback function. But the moment you start looking
at the comparison in any sort of serious way, the
(18:57):
comparison just collapses. And I would put at the top
of the list two crucial points. One of them is
that the input to memory is selective. And there is,
in many occasions a lot of information arriving at your ears,
or a lot of information out in front of your eyes,
and if you're not paying attention to it, it does
(19:19):
not get recorded. Into memory. But the other I think
even more important distinction is that one's information is recorded
on your phone. It's it's their dormant and in that way,
what you eventually get in playback really is a high
quality rendition of exactly what went in in the first place.
(19:40):
And memory is massively different because our memories are dynamic
and information that's in storage is constantly getting updated and
elaborated and merged together with other sources of information. I
agree with you, that's the way memory works. It's a
wonder for wonderful system, UM, but it's um. It's a
(20:04):
system that was not not developed for the courtroom. That's
Iris blend On Gitlin. She's a professor of psychology at
California State University, Fullerton. Her research focuses on memory in
the forensic context, memory as it relates to identification of
people and events, and detecting deception as it relates to
(20:26):
interviewing and interrogation. She also works as an expert witness,
primarily in criminal cases. Within the courtroom, a lot of
time needs to be accurate and complete. That's not what
it evolves to be. So it's there's a conflict between
what the legal system meets, you know, in order to
(20:48):
self crimes um and what human humans can give from
their memory, which is it's wonderful for every day, for
all of our experiences, but not for the courtroom. The
only other piece that I would add to that is
people don't necessarily have a good sense of when their
memory fails, and that's how they're Clydeer off it. She's
(21:11):
a research professor at Georgia State University. Her work focuses
on memory errors, with an emphasis on courtroom applications. Her
work also looks at face recognition and eyewitness identification. Most recently,
she's been looking at how people remember information that's been
imagined versus actually experienced and the confusion that comes with it.
(21:33):
Like Dan and Iris, for the last ten years, how
There has also been working as an expert witness. People
can feel um because they remember something with a lot
of vividness or a lot of detail. Then they can
come to believe that it's highly accurate and become very
confident in that. And again, to add to what Irish said,
that isn't necessarily the case that works in the courtroom
(21:55):
because memory fades over time, over time, and right off
the bat, here's Dan again, memories fade, All memories fade.
The fade begins immediately. Um, you know, there's no honeymoon
period in which the memory is, you know, resting before
the fade starts. That's just not the way it works.
(22:16):
One of the claims of that memory I commonly encounter
is that some events are immune to forgetting, and people say,
I will remember that till the day I die. I'll
never forget it. I remember it as though it were yesterday.
And you know, there's a kernel of reality there because
some events are memorable. But at the same time, no
(22:38):
event is immune to forgetting. To what Dance saying, it's
not that you're necessarily going to forget that the thing happened.
I'm not going to forget I was in a car accident,
but the details surrounding that event are going to update
and change. So you know, it's not that people completely
forget something happened. I can remember all the details of it.
(23:02):
And it turns out event memories are very different than
facial ones. Here's iris again, the event is likely to
be replay rehearsed. Right as people give the account of
an event and they talk about it and trying to reconcile,
they think about it, and so potentially there's a stronger
(23:23):
memory for the details of the event, of parts of
that event, and there is not the image of a
perpetrator because that doesn't get rehearsed. And trauma has a
surprising effect on memory, actually a contradictory one. Here's Dan.
(23:43):
One of the things that trauma does, you know, in
you know, lots of field studies, lots of laboratory studies,
is sharpen your focus. The things that they do focus
on during the trauma tend to be longer lasting compared
to memory for some you know, mundane, everyday occurrence. And
part of the complication here is that it's often difficult
(24:06):
from the outside to figure out exactly what the person
is going to focus on. And so, you know, two
people going through what seemed to be similar events may
end up focusing on different things, and therefore they're going
to have very different memories. And the opposite can also
be true, like when someone experiences a lot of stress
and arousal, something called catastrophic memory loss can occur. So
(24:31):
in regards to Melissa, we don't know which one happened.
Did she have some very sharp memories based on where
she put her focus or was she so stressed that
like the perpetrator's face just became a blur. We'll never know.
But what about exposure time. It seems the man was
in the apartment for a long time. Melissa said she
got a good look at him. At times his face
(24:53):
was a foot away. Here's iris we know of cases
and also from research that even if you have long
exposure time to a phase, I mean the famous case
of the Ronald Cotton a case. You know, the rapist
was in the room for a long period of time
(25:16):
with Jennifer the victim, right, And so she even said
that she studied his face. She wanted to be able
to remember him right, to be able to you know,
make sure that they got to him. And she still
made a mistake. And when she came across the real
real rapists years later in another trial, um, she actually
(25:36):
came in front and saw him and she could not
nothing trigger, nothing trigger in her mind. And that was
a real rapist, proven by d n A right. And
so you know from these cases, but also from the
empirical research, that is possible to also misremember or forget
a face even if you had long exposure time and again,
(25:59):
where was Melissa's focus? Was it on the man's face
or the knife he was stabbing her with? What about age?
Does a child's memory work the same as an adults?
The answer is basically yes, with a few exceptions, one
of the biggest being suggestibility. Here's iris again. I think
(26:23):
in a suggestive environment where you have suggestive kinds of
interviewing and and lots of adults with an interest of
trying to get more information, and also with authority figures,
all of that kind of environment would definitely potentially influence
that person's memory. I would add just quickly, is that
(26:45):
I don't want to leave the feeling that you know,
children's memory cannot be relied upon. You know it can
given the right circumstances. They're right set of protocols, and
we know that from their research is very clear children
can't give reliable, truthful information and complete information in the
right condition. So basically, memories fade almost immediately. They're malleable,
(27:18):
and both adults and children can make errors when I
ding someone. It seems like the burdens on law enforcement
to conduct interviews and lineups in ways that produce good,
reliable information without contaminating the original memory, which brings us
back to Gary Wells and what should have happened in
(27:38):
Rodney's case. I think this whole thing all along needed
to be solved with if at all possible, with harder evidence.
A seven year old You can't be shown her fifty
photos over several days and of all kinds of different
(27:59):
people and then giving her really biased final test of
only two photos. Once you did that, you sort of
trampled on the evidence. You know, I've been pushing this analogy,
um that I think that you know, I witness evidence
should be treated as a form of trace evidence. You know,
(28:21):
trace evidence we usually think of as fingerprints and blood
or semen or hair fibers that a perpetrator left behind
at the scene of the crime that can help establish
the identity of the perpetrator. Well, that's also true of
eye witness evidence. What happened here was the perpetrator left
a trace behind, except that trace was in the head
(28:43):
of Melissa. It's the same as going into a crime
scene and just trampling all over the place. Oh well,
you know, it doesn't matter if I pick up this object,
if I step over here, or I'm gonna I'm gonna
move the gun, you know, like you would never consider
doing those things when investigating a crime. Well, there should
be a lot of things you don't consider tampering with,
(29:06):
like to witnesses memory when invested getting a crime as well.
Should the detectives. Should they have known better back in
It's hard to put ourselves back into you know. I
don't want to be one who says that this was
(29:28):
not good faith at the time. I can't really make
that judgment. What I can do now, though, is say that, UM,
given this path of these events as they were created
and unfolded, the result in the end of Melissa picking
(29:49):
Rodney from that one of two photos and then turning
around and picking him from the lineup is of no
real probitive value. It's not desp positive of guilt. It's
not really something that even can qualify as evidence. If
by evidence we mean that it's that somehow we're at
(30:10):
least getting beyond more likely than not, it's just not there.
Gary's work, like his pre lineup instructions, choosing fillers, double
blind lineups, videotaping, the identification and better interviewing of witnesses
are procedures that have been implemented in almost thirty states,
(30:32):
covering about of the population. There's still a long way
to go, but we're in a much better position today
than we were certainly so, of course I had to ask.
(30:54):
It's Missouri one of the states that has adopted these reforms.
They have not. Next time on The Real Killer, imagine
you take this job and you're told and you don't
have the right to correct monthal conviction, a system seemingly
(31:18):
built to fail, not just Rodney Lincoln, but many others.
Lamar keeps me up at night, Son of a bitch.
I could. I could talk like a sailor for five
minutes talking about how mother fucking pissed I am that
Lamar is still sitting in prison makes me the puke.
(31:49):
The Real Killer is a production of a y R
Media and I Heart Radio, hosted by me Leah Rothman.
Executive producers Leah Rothman and Eliza Rosen for a y
R Media You. Written by me Leah Rothman, Senior Associate
producer Eric Newman, Editing and sound design by Cameron Taggy,
(32:10):
mixed and mastered by Cameron Taggi, Audio engineering by Jesus C.
Mario Studio engineering by Tom Weir and Kelly McGrew, legal
counsel for a y R Media, Gianni Douglas, executive producer
for I Heart Radio, Chandler Mayze. If you're enjoying The
Real Killer, tell your friends about it and leave us
(32:32):
a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host
Leah Rothman
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