IN AUGUST 1988, needing steadier work than passing out flyers, Walter enrolled in truck-driving school. It ran five days a week, 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM, for eight weeks, and in mid-November he passed his driving test. That night he got home at about 9:00 PM and found his front door locked. He banged on it and yelled. Walter’s uneasy summer truce with the Greens was long over. He’d had two serious fights with Sarge in the previous couple months, and that night Sarge was still angry about a fight they’d had two days earlier. Sarge opened the door, they got into it again, and Sarge beat Walter out of the house and down the street. This was the fight John Fahy heard from his living room and came out to break up, after which Sarge was arrested and Walter was taken to the hospital with fractures and bite wounds.
Sarge spent a couple weeks in jail, and with a restraining order forbidding him from returning to Walter’s, went to stay with a friend. He would eventually plead guilty to simple assault but skip his April 1990 sentencing hearing, so a warrant was issued for his arrest—the warrant that was still outstanding when Devlin and Worrell interviewed him in 1992.
In October 1989, Walter’s aunt evicted him and the Greens from 7244 Rutland, and he moved in with two friends in an apartment in Glenside, just outside of Philadelphia, ten or fifteen minutes away. After earning his tractor-trailer license, he’d driven part time for UPS for a while before getting a full-time driving job, which he lost when he scraped his truck against a low archway in the road. After that he picked up work where he could. His landlord in Glenside had a chandelier company and gave Walter the overnight shift cleaning chandeliers at the Four Seasons hotel downtown.
Walter’s roommates moved out in 1990, and in September of that year he got a job driving a delivery truck for Bake Rite Rolls; it was, as Father John Bonavitacola, a priest in the Philadelphia prison system who got to know him later, put it, a “big deal” for him.1 He paid off his driving school loans and paid back some money to his brother, Greg. By 1992 things were going well; he was still with Bake Rite, getting twenty-five cents a mile. He could afford the apartment by himself and had upgraded from an old hatchback Greg had given him that was missing a floorboard—it was like driving the Flintstones’ car—to a ’78 Chrysler Newport. He worked a lot and was often too tired after work to go out, but he had a few friends.
After all his childhood and adolescent difficulties, compounded by his ASD,2 Walter had managed to stabilize his life again with a good job and a good routine.
In late March 1992, about a month after reinterrogating the Fahys, Detectives Devlin and Worrell located the Greens living in Coatesville, an hour or so outside Philadelphia. They went to speak to the couple on March 30. Sarge was in bed when they arrived; his health had been deteriorating, and he was still sick following his most recent stay in the hospital. Devlin and Worrell had done a background check on Sarge Green, so they would have known he had an outstanding warrant for skipping the sentencing hearing.
Alice Green answered the door and the detectives barged in, but they saw right away that Sarge, six feet tall and heavy, with the tattoos and wild hair, didn’t fit any of the developed descriptions in the case.3 He told them he’d been friends with John Fahy, they’d hung out drinking beer sometimes, and he thought John was a good father. He said he’d been home all day the day of the murder, sitting on his couch, zoned out on painkillers. That wasn’t much of an alibi, but he was definitely not the guy who’d carried the TV box around the neighborhood.
Alice, seventeen now, said she’d babysat for Barbara Jean occasionally and had seen John Fahy use crank and sometimes hit Barbara Jean to discipline her. She said when she got home at about 2:00 PM on the day of the murder, her parents were there and Walter Ogrod came in a little later. He went out again at 2:30 or 3:00 PM for about half an hour and was in the living room later when John Fahy knocked on the door asking if they’d seen his daughter; both of her parents said the same thing about Walter’s whereabouts that afternoon.4 (In subsequent interviews, however, Alice would remember being at the rec center until later in the afternoon.)
The detectives eased up and said they were just reinterviewing everyone in the neighborhood. Alice asked them why didn’t they go talk to Walter Ogrod—he’d lived there too. She got Ogrod’s address from a friend who still knew him and called them with it. On April 1 Devlin and Worrell drove out to Glenside with their supervisor, Sergeant Larry Nodiff, to talk to him. They would later claim it hadn’t occurred to them yet that Walter could be a suspect, though detectives don’t usually take supervisors with them to speak to informational witnesses.5
They got to Walter’s apartment above the chandelier shop next to the railroad in Glenside at about five in the afternoon and knocked. No one answered, so they approached the shop owner, Walter’s landlord, Howard Serotta. Worrell knew the arrival of a homicide detective could be startling, something that never happened to most people. He reassured Serotta that Walter wasn’t in any kind of trouble, they just wanted to talk to him.6
The detectives asked Serotta what Walter was like, what his routines were. Then, oddly, according to Serotta, one of them asked if Walter had a weight set. The question stuck out in Serotta’s memory because he was, as Worrell had thought he might be, surprised to be talking to a homicide detective—especially about Walter, who seemed like a nice, quiet guy. And since the detectives never followed up with Serotta, it was the only time he ever talked to them.7
The detectives, on the other hand, would swear they never asked Serotta about a weight set, that they couldn’t have because they didn’t know about the weight set in Walter’s basement until he told them about it a few days later. This would become a key issue in the case for two reasons: 1) if detectives asked Serotta about the weight set, they were asking him about what they would later allege was the murder weapon, something supposedly only the killer knew, two days before they claim Walter told them about it; and 2) this would also prove that the detectives had thought of Walter as a suspect several days before they interviewed him, which, for technical reasons, would make Walter’s entire interview with detectives a few days later inadmissible.
Serotta told the detectives Walter’s car was in the parking lot, so he didn’t think he’d be gone long, and they were welcome to wait. The detectives decided not to; clearly they were in no particular rush to speak to Walter. Devlin and Worrell had the next couple of days off, so Worrell wrote, “Call Sunday after noon re: John Fahy” on the back of a business card and left it for Walter. He felt sure Ogrod would know who John Fahy was.8
On the afternoon of April 1, the day the detectives came by, Walter had returned from work, taken his dog for a two-hour walk, and then gone out again, this time for one of his twice-monthly trips to the comic store. He’d been collecting since he was a kid—Batman vs. Predator, Superman, X-Men, Star Wars. On his way home he’d picked up his weekly Chinese food supper, wontons, and when he got home Mr. Serotta gave him Detective Worrell’s card. Walter didn’t recognize John Fahy’s name and thought it must have something to do with Maureen Dunne’s case. He called the homicide office but was told Worrell was gone for the day. The card said to call on Sunday, so he put it aside.
On Saturday, April 4, Walter got up at 8:00 AM, walked his dog, watched TV for a while, and showered. He got to his Bake Rite job at about 1:00 PM and had to wait three hours for sourdough rolls to come in from another bakery. He got on the road at about 4:00 PM and drove his regular route, twenty-five stops dropping off rolls and picking up empty pallets at fast-food restaurants stretched over 303 miles in and around the Philadelphia suburbs. He got back to Bake Rite at 4:30 AM on Sunday, April 5, put in his paperwork, and was asked to drive another route, a short one of eighteen miles. He returned to Bake Rite from that route at 10:30 AM, put in his paperwork, and went home, stopping on his way for groceries.
He got home a little before noon, exhausted but glad to have put in more overtime; he was saving money to buy himself an actual new car to replace the Newport. He made himself something to eat, took a shower, and dialed Detective Worrell. When he got Worrell on the phone, he asked who John Fahy was. Worrell explained that John Fahy was Barbara Jean Horn’s stepfather and that the detectives were speaking to everyone from the neighborhood who might know anything about the case. Walter asked if they could talk on the phone, but Worrell said no, he had to come in. Walter said he was tired and asked if he could come in another time.
“We want to solve the case,” Worrell said. “A little girl was killed. We just want to ask you some questions. We will be in and out quick.”
Walter relented and drove to the Roundhouse, arriving, he has maintained, at around 1:30 PM. By this point he’d been awake for almost thirty hours. He went to the front desk and asked for Detective Worrell. The officer said Worrell was expecting him and would be down shortly.
Worrell came down, introduced himself, and took Walter inside. Walter asked if Worrell knew Detective Clark, one of the detectives who had interviewed him about Maureen Dunne’s murder. Worrell said that he remembered the case and that Clark was doing all right. Walter claims he went to the logbook and asked for a pen to sign in, but Worrell told him he didn’t have to.
“I signed it every time I came here before when I talked to Clark,” Walter said.
“You don’t need to. You’ll only be here a few minutes,” Worrell said.
Worrell led Walter to the elevator. The elevator doors closed. Walter didn’t see sunlight again until the next morning.
The detectives’ version of that Sunday, April 5, is that when they got to work on that day they already had two phone messages from Walter, who then called again before Worrell could call him back. Walter made an appointment to come in around 6:00 PM but unaccountably showed up at 3:45. Worrell signed Walter in (Walter’s name appears on the Roundhouse log sheet, signed in at 3:45 PM in Worrell’s handwriting), took him upstairs, sat him on a bench outside the homicide offices, and told him to wait because Detective Devlin was out running errands and they were required to have two detectives present for the questioning.
Whatever errands Devlin may have been on, making a suspect wait is the first step in an interrogation, establishing that he is under your control and letting his nerves about the interview build.9 Walter spent close to two hours in the waiting area outside the homicide offices; there was a bench, some empty magazine racks, wanted posters on the wall. After about forty-five minutes of reading posters, Walter walked down the hall, found a detective, and asked him to tell Worrell that he’d been waiting a while, was really tired, and would come back another time. He headed for the elevator but just before reaching it felt Worrell’s hand on his arm, steering him back to a bench. He said he was tired and wanted to go home. He waited again, bored and dozing on the bench, for another hour. Then he found Worrell again and told him he was going home. Worrell said they were ready for him and led him to Interview Room D. By Walter’s timeline, it was about 3:45 PM; according to Devlin and Worrell, around 5:30.
The interview room was small with a grayish interior, a one-way mirror in one wall, and just enough space for a table with a chair on either side. To one side was another chair, a metal Windsor chair that was bolted to the floor, with handcuffs dangling from one of the arms.10 Walter sat in one of the regular chairs.11
Devlin and Worrell asked basic questions at first, writing down his information: height, weight, address. They then started what they would call the “oral” part of the interview, meaning the part they didn’t transcribe. These questions were general—how long he’d lived on Rutland Street, who’d been living there at the time of Barbara Jean’s murder, how long he’d been living in Glenside.
They explained that they had asked him down to talk about Barbara Jean Horn. They were talking to all the witnesses again and wanted to know what he knew. Walter said all he knew was she was found in a box on St. Vincent Street. Neighbors supposedly saw the man walking down the street with the box; he’d heard something about someone seeing the man with the box from a church across the street and something about a man trying to dump the box in the Dumpster behind the car dealership. And a sketch of the man had been put up all over the neighborhood.
Walter hadn’t recognized John Fahy’s name, but the detectives asked if Walter knew the little girl’s stepfather. What he was like? How did he get along with Barbara Jean, with his wife? What did Walter know about his drinking, drugs, his family? Had he done anything that made him seem like he might harm someone?
Walter said he’d never seen Fahy treat Barbara Jean any way other than a good father would. He hadn’t known John was the child’s stepfather until after the murder; he thought her parents were husband and wife and she was their child. He said that John was a nice guy as far as he knew, that he would come over and have a couple of drinks with Mr. Green every once in a while.
These general questions took about half an hour, until about 6:00 PM according to the detectives, 4:15 according to Walter.
From this point on, the two versions of what happened in that interrogation room split, but not entirely, shadowing each other, twisting around each other at key moments.
According to Walter, when the detectives finished the general questions he told them to call him if they thought of anything else. He stood up to go but Worrell closed the door.
“We think you might know something,” Devlin said in a helpful tone, pulling his chair up very close to Walter. “We think you might have done it, and you’re blocking it.”
Walter says he asked for his phone call, but Devlin said they would get to that later.
For the detectives, the interrogation moved to the next level of control. A Philadelphia homicide detective who worked with Devlin and Worrell in the early ’90s (or may have been Devlin himself, since he was among the detectives interviewed) explained these control techniques to author Arthur Magida:
[The suspect] wants coffee? Fuck it, you get it for him. He needs to go to the bathroom? Fuck it, you go with him. You go right to him and bluff: “We know you did it. And we know how you did it. You either come clean now or we get you anyway. It’s that simple. We know what happened, and we’re your worst nightmare.” You might even say a neighbor saw what happened. You go right up to the point of not being believable—and you try not to cross it.12
This vivid description of how to establish control, given by a detective years later, matches Walter’s version of his interrogation exactly.
According to Walter, Devlin then put a photograph of the TV box in front of him.
“Here, take another look at the box with Barbara Jean in it,” Walter remembers Devlin telling him, sitting close in the small interview room, sliding a picture at him on the table. “Here’s what she looked like. Do you remember putting her under the sink and washing her off? Do you remember the trash bag you put over her? Do you remember putting her in the box? Does this help you remember?” Devlin asked. “Does it bring back any memories?”
“No, man, I didn’t do it,” Walter said. He told them he wanted the phone.
Devlin said, “Look, we’ll get to that later on. We just want to help you remember.”
They brought out two more photos, one with Barbara Jean in the box, a garbage bag over her body, her head showing, and the other with the bag removed.
“You killed this girl, man, and we want to help you,” Devlin said. “You killed her. We want to help you remember it. We want to see you get some help, and we want to put this to rest. You seen Barbara Jean that day. Mrs. Green wasn’t in the house. Barbara Jean came over for Charlie. You let her in.”
“No,” Walter said.
“You must have because nobody was around. Mrs. Green wasn’t there,” Devlin said.
“She was. She was home that day,” Walter said.
The detectives knew this was true—Sarge, Linda, and Alice had all told them they were home that afternoon.
“We have neighbors say they saw you let Barbara Jean in the house,” Devlin said.
This was a bluff; no one saw Barbara Jean go into Walter’s house that day.
They showed Walter picture after picture, again and again, Barbara Jean, the box with the cover on, without the cover.
“Why’d you hit her, man?” Devlin asked. “Why’d you kill her? What happened? Did you do anything to her? Did you have fun with her?”
“No, I didn’t,” Walter said.
“Well, why’d you bring her in the house?” Devlin pressed. “What did you do with her clothes? She was a child—why’d you do it? You took her downstairs because if somebody walked in you didn’t want them to see you.”
“No, I didn’t take her downstairs,” Walter said.
“Yes, you did, man. You took her downstairs to have a little fun.”
“No, I did not.”
“No clothes,” Devlin pressed. “She was raped.”
“No, I did not rape her.”
“You took her downstairs. You had fun. Something happened and you killed her.”
“No, I did not,” Walter said.
Devlin pressed harder.
“You know, you need to go to a place where they can give you a little help. You know what I mean? You seem like you’re a little off. Did you ever see a doctor?’
“Yes,” Walter said.
“Is there a reason you seen him?”
“Things and all.”
“Well, what is wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Walter said. “I need help now and then, but that’s it. I’m not gonna deny it.”
Devlin and Worrell pushed: Here she is. Look at her. She was raped! You went nuts and beat her up. How the hell else did she get beat? It makes sense. What did you hit her with?
“I wouldn’t do that,” Walter told them. “If I did, I would’ve killed myself.”
Walter’s statement, written by Devlin, says, “I feel like killing myself over this.”
Devlin threatened him: if he didn’t confess they’d put him in a cell with “a bunch of niggers” and tell them he’d raped and killed a black girl. When he dozed they prodded him awake. They gave him coffee, five, six cups. They told him they were going to be all night so he might as well eat and gave him a cheesesteak. Walter was terrified and now hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, and as the interrogation dragged on, deepening panic and exhaustion clouded his mind; eventually, the detectives’ insistence that someone had seen Barbara Jean go into his house that day had him wondering if he could have done something so horrible and blocked it out. He didn’t remember it, but someone saw him let Barbara Jean in and she’d been killed; he stared at the pictures of the dead little girl and started crying. As he described it to me later, his thoughts began to cascade: Someone raped that little girl. It was horrible. Someone killed her, look at the pictures, someone seen me let her in and then she was killed. I must have done it. But how could I do that? How could I—but she was killed in my house, I let her in—she was raped. . . . How could I do that? How could I do that?
The detectives pushed him through a description of the murder and its aftermath. They drew a map of the neighborhood and told him to trace his route with the box. He got it wrong.
“No,” a detective told him, “people saw you here. You must have gone this way.”
They asked leading questions and gave him the answers when he didn’t know or answered incorrectly: “Imagine in your mind what she was probably wearing. . . . Her hair was wet. Did you wash her? . . . You needed to hide her; you needed something to put her in. Where did you get the box? Well, it came from down on the corner, you went down there to get it . . .”
As he sat in Interview Room D that night, Walter Ogrod was a case study in risk factors for giving a false confession: he was immature, twenty-seven but with the maturity of a teenager; he had ASD, so couldn’t read social cues and information from the detectives’ faces; he suffered from excessive social anxiety, always wanting to please others so they’d like him; he was more suggestible, more easily manipulated, than 95 percent of the population (as he would score later on the Gudjonnson Suggestibility Scales, a test designed in the 1970s to determine how likely a person is to change a story under pressure).13 And his life experiences had reinforced these issues—his schizophrenic mother convincing him a lamp didn’t exist, the years of being teased and beaten, of “friends” relentlessly manipulating and using him. In the words of a doctor who examined him years later, Walter was a “ripe apple” who had been “primed his entire life to be easily misled and manipulated.”14
In addition, he hadn’t slept in a day and a half, which meant that his ability to make decisions—especially those that required integrating his understanding of what was going on and his emotions, something he had very little ability to do in the first place—was even more severely impaired.15
And he was sitting across from Marty Devlin, a detective famous for getting “tough” confessions, whose only real chance to clear the Barbara Jean Horn murder was to get a confession. Devlin had gone after the Fahys hard and would use his skill on Walter, too; as he’d told John and Sharon, putting pressure on people who might know something was part of the process.
Devlin and Worrell’s interrogation of Walter, as described by Walter, followed an interrogation technique known as the Reid Technique. Invented in the 1940s by John Reid, a private polygraph expert, to replace the then-popular Third Degree, which called for suspects to be threatened, or beaten, into telling the truth (or at least whatever would make the beatings stop), Reid’s idea was to use psychology instead of violence or intimidation to get suspects to confess.
The Reid Technique eventually became standard practice in homicide divisions across the country, and anyone who’s watched a TV show about homicide detectives has seen it in action: at its most basic, it consists of the detectives convincing the suspect that they’re his only hope, that if he tells them the truth—or what they want to hear—they can help him, but if he insists on denying it they can’t. They tell him he wasn’t a bad person, didn’t mean it, maybe there was a reason for what happened; this is called the “out,” the aspect of the story that will show that the suspect wasn’t as bad as he seemed. Detectives are trained to use threats, lies, friendship, whatever it takes to get the suspect to talk.
The Reid Technique breaks interviews into two parts: the Behavioral Analysis Interview (BAI) and the interrogation. The BAI is the informational conversation meant to gather basic facts from the subject—where he lives, his background, and so on. Walter and the detectives both describe this happening in their interview; the detectives called it the “oral” part of the interview. The BAI also allows the detectives to assess how the suspect talks and acts to see if he’s being truthful. During the BAI interrogators can also use “behavior provoking questions” like, “What do you think should happen to the person who did this?” These are designed to anger the subject or throw him off balance while the detective assesses his honesty.
The next stage of a Reid Technique interrogation comes if the detective thinks the subject is a suspect in the crime. If that happens, the Reid Technique teaches detectives to assert intense pressure on the suspect. First, the detectives confront the suspect with how serious the crime is and how confident they are that the suspect did it (maximization); then they offer the suspect “themes” or “alternate questions” designed to let him save face and soften the consequences of what he’s done (minimization). We’ve all seen this on TV, a confident, aggressive detective convincing a murderer to explain what he did in the best possible light so he won’t seem like such a monster in front of a jury.16
Under the Reid Technique, then, much depends on a detective’s ability to tell if his subject is telling the truth, because a truthful subject’s insistent denials of guilt can be indications of innocence, while a guilty suspect’s denials should be ignored. And good homicide detectives rely on their ability to know when someone is lying. As David Simon memorably explained in his 1991 book Homicide, “to homicide detectives the earth spins on an axis of denial in an orbit of deceit. . . . It is a God-given truth: Everyone lies.”17 Detectives learn to trust instincts and experience to know when a suspect is lying, and, since people lie for all kinds of reasons, to know when that suspect is lying about the murder and not about something else like drugs or infidelity that, unless it’s directly related to the murder, doesn’t interest him.18
This means, Simon went on, that a homicide detective’s thinking during an interview usually runs something like this: “Are they lying? Of course they’re lying. Everyone lies. Are they lying more than they ordinarily would? Probably. Why are they lying? Do their half-truths conform to what you know from the crime scene or is it complete and unequivocal bullshit? Who should you yell at first? Who should you scream at loudest? . . . Who gets the speech about leaving the interrogation room as either a witness or a suspect?”19
Detectives therefore take a great deal of pride in their ability to tell when someone is lying. This was the psychology at which Devlin was considered a genius; he or one of his colleagues in the homicide division later explained to author Arthur Magida that detectives know more about psychology than a psychologist and can tell from a suspect’s body language, eye contact, or turn of phrase whether he is guilty or not.20
A problem can arise, though, when a detective with a big ego, convinced he can read minds, fixates on the wrong person, trusting his instinct even if the evidence doesn’t point to that suspect. Marty Devlin had no training in interrogating people with ASD, so maybe he took Walter’s odd mannerisms and inability to express emotions in a typical manner as indications of guilt. Maybe Walter wasn’t showing the emotions Devlin and Worrell thought he should be showing. Whatever it was, Devlin decided Walter was lying and began to apply pressure, the kind of pressure that can cause false confessions.
This is how false confessions happen. Once a detective fixes on an innocent person as a suspect, the fixation leads to “anchoring heuristics,” the trait that makes all of us, once we’re convinced of something, more likely to see evidence that supports our claim,21 and as a detective’s suspicions harden into belief of a suspect’s guilt, he can develop tunnel vision and “confirmation bias.”
Once a detective thinks a suspect is guilty, the Reid Technique offers a wide array of coercive techniques to pressure him to confess: promising leniency or threatening harm; lying about evidence; presenting the “out” so suspects feel that their only chance for survival, particularly in a case that might carry the death penalty, is to admit to the crime.
One problem that arises in false confessions is that in the course of the interrogation a detective eager to get the truth—the confession he wants—can “contaminate” the statement by discussing details of the crime that were never made public. These kinds of details are the best proof that a confession is true, so crucial to investigations that in the early 1930s, after more than two hundred people came forward to confess to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby, police started intentionally withholding information about crime scenes from the press so they could judge confessions on this basis. Contamination can happen intentionally, the detectives feeding information to the suspect, or by accident: for example, a suspect seeing crime scene photos during a long interrogation can pick up details that, repeated back to the detectives an hour or more later, seem like things only the killer would know. Detectives can also accidentally provide this kind of information to suspects by asking leading questions or posing “alternate theories” as to how the crime happened.
One basic tactic of the Reid Technique is to lie to the suspect. Detectives will say that a friend or accomplice gave the suspect up, that there’s physical evidence connecting him to the crime—anything. The courts have ruled this kind of lying acceptable. With John Fahy, Devlin bluffed by telling John his statement didn’t match his version from 1988; with Walter, the lie was that a witness saw Barbara Jean go in his house.
These kind of lies can lead to false confessions. Even John E. Reid and Associates, the modern-day company that provides training in the Reid Technique, warns that lying to suspects can lead to false confessions. And innocent suspects who are immature, malleable, or sleep deprived, have a low IQ, or are too intellectually limited to stand up to pressure are even more likely to confess falsely.22
When false confessions do happen, they happen in one of two ways: some people confess falsely under police interrogation just to get the interrogation to end, thinking that since they’re innocent they’ll be able to clear the situation up later. Other people become convinced under the detectives’ pressure that that they must have committed the crime but can’t remember it. The latter is what Walter says happened to him: after hours in Interview Room D he began to believe, as the detectives were telling him, that he’d murdered Barbara Jean and was blocking it out.
I asked him what it felt like to believe that.
“When I started believing it I was, like, ‘How could I do that? How could I do that?’” he told me. “They’re saying, ‘You enjoyed it, you liked raping that girl.’ It felt horrible.”
Was that when he started crying?
“I started crying before,” he said.
One phrase that Walter said Devlin used—he wanted Walter to “imagine in his mind” what happened during the murder—was familiar to me from Robert Mayer’s book The Dreams of Ada, about a false confession case out of Ada, Oklahoma. In that 1984 case, detectives, trying to solve a months-old disappearance for which they had no clues and no leads, subjected an intellectually disabled man named Tommy Ward to a full Reid Technique interrogation. The detectives made Ward wait for an hour and a half prior to questioning, as Walter had—“common police procedure prior to the questioning of a suspect,” Mayer points out, to “let him get nervous.” When the interrogation started, Ward, like Walter, insisted on his innocence; like Walter, he was confronted with pictures of the missing woman (though not, in Ward’s case, pictures of her body, which hadn’t been found yet) and with evidence invented by detectives; like Walter, Ward told them, “If I thought I did something like that, I’d kill myself”; like Walter, the detectives asked him if he had mental problems; like Walter, he was threatened, told that if he didn’t come up with a good explanation for the crime he’d face the death penalty.
“What do you think happened to [the victim]?” the detectives asked Ward.
“I don’t know,” Ward told them.
“Use your imagination,” the lead detective urged. “What do you think?”
The detectives offered him his “out”: What if she’d been killed by accident? Could he imagine that? Could he imagine where she might have been buried? Eventually, after hours of interrogating Ward and urging him to use his imagination, detectives had a confession. Like Walter, important information did not check out—the body was not found where Ward supposedly said he’d dumped it, and an accomplice he named was proven innocent. Like Walter, at Ward’s trial the prosecutor admitted some things in the confession weren’t accurate but insisted that it was, nonetheless, true. Ward and a codefendant, Karl Fontenot, who had likewise given a confession that didn’t match any facts of the case (or Ward’s confession), were found guilty and sentenced to death.
The same detectives and prosecutors used the same device—false confessions cultivated from a defendant’s imaginings about the case—to “solve” another Ada murder a year or two later; that second crime was the subject of John Grisham’s book The Innocent Man. The defendants in Grisham’s book, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, were eventually exonerated by DNA testing.
In Tommy Ward’s case, the victim’s body was eventually found—miles away from anywhere Ward or his codefendant had been or had mentioned in their confessions—and she’d been killed not by stabbing or burning, as the defendants had said, but by a single gunshot to the head. There is no DNA to test in the case, and Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot, their sentences reduced to life in prison, are still incarcerated.
While writing his book, Mayer spoke with a potential juror named Barry Anderson:
“You can get anyone to confess to anything,” Anderson told Mayer. “I know. I was in Vietnam. Everyone has a different pressure point. But if you want, you can get anyone to say anything.”
“Were you a prisoner of war in Vietnam?” Mayer asked.
“No,” Anderson said. “I interrogated prisoners of war.”23
It’s is hard to believe someone would admit to a crime he or she didn’t commit, especially one as horrifying as killing a child. No way, we think; I don’t care what you did to me, if I didn’t do it I would never say I did.
But it happens. As of this writing, about 25 percent of the 325 DNA exonerations in the United States involved false confessions or admissions.24
The result of Walter’s interrogation by Devlin and Worrell was a sixteen-page document, written out by Devlin and signed on every page by Walter. It told a story of a spur-of-the moment decision to sexually assault Barbara Jean that went wrong:
The day Barbara Jean died she came over to my house and knocked on the front door looking for Charlie Bird. He was six. He wasn’t in the house but I let Barbara Jean in anyway. Now usually Linda is right there in the Dining Room but she must have stepped out for a short while or was upstairs or something because it was only me and Barbara Jean in the living room. I got the idea to ask Barbara Jean to come down the basement with me and she followed me down the basement.
When we got down the basement I asked her if she wanted to play doctor and she said yes so I started to take her clothes off. I can’t really remember what she was wearing but I think it might have been like a one-piece thing. I’m not real sure about that. I remember she didn’t have nothing on her feet. Anyway after I got her undressed I started stroking her shoulders and her back. Then I started to rub her feet. After that I asked her if she wanted to see between my legs and I pulled my pants down around my ankles and knelt down. I was getting hard by now. I pulled Barbara Jean over to me and I was like holding her real tight and rubbing against her leg. Then I was like trying to force her head down towards my penis. I liked [sic] pushed her face onto my penis and that’s when she started to scream. I don’t know what happened to me then I just went crazy. I remember picking up what felt like a pipe at the time and I just started hitting her in the head. The best I can see it in my mind is that I was holding her head down and hitting her with this pipe. It might have been my small “pull down” bar to my weight set. I hit her at least four times maybe more. She didn’t move after that.
It also described the aftermath:
I got real scared after that. She was bleeding and I didn’t know what to do. I grabbed some kind of cloth that was down there and I held it on her head to [til?] I could get her over the the [sic] basement tub and when I got her by the tub I turned on the cold water and I either put her in the tub or held her under the faucet to clean her off. After that I think I left her in the tub and went out the back door to the garage and I opened the garage door to look in the garage to see if there was something inside to put her in. I found a green or blue trash bag and I went back in the basement and wrapped the bag around her to cover her and then I carried her out the back door to the garage. I didn’t want nobody to find her in the basement. After I got her in the garage I put her down and covered her up some more with clothes in the garage and I left the garage closed the door and went looking for something else to put her in. I walked up my back driveway towards St. Vincent St. and I saw this box in the back of this house near the corner so I grabbed it.
I took the box back to the garage and I put Barbara Jean in the box and I put the bag on top of her and closed the box. Then I took the box out of the garage. I was going to just put the box out in the trash maybe a couple of houses away from mine but then I realized that the trash had already been picked up. Then I started looking for a place to dump the box. I walked up to St. Vincent Street turned onto St. Vincent. I was going to put the box in the dumpster that’s located behind Kutner Buick but there was [sic] people by the dumpster so I couldn’t. Thats [sic] located right there by my driveway and I could have tossed the box right over the fence if those people weren’t there. So I had to walk down St Vincent street and across Castor av [sic] to the other side but there was [sic] people waiting for the bus on the corner by the church so I crossed over St Vincent to the other side of St Vincent where Kutner Buick is also located and I walked a couple of steps down Castor and I decided to turn around because it was so busy on Castor Av [sic] and so I turned the corner of St Vincent and Castor walked a little ways and crossed over St Vincent again. By this time the box was really heavy. It wasn’t at first but by this time it was getting heavy I had to put it down. Then I picked it back up and went a little further and put it back down by some trash cans. Then I went back home.25
When the statement was finished, the detectives had Walter sign a waiver of his Miranda rights in the form of a questionnaire that they read to him.
According to Walter, Devlin read the first question to him, offering the answer as well.
“Do you understand you have a right to keep quiet and you don’t have to say anything at all? Put ‘yes,’” Devlin said.
“Yes,” said Walter.
“Do you want to remain silent?” Devlin asked.
“Yes,” Walter said.
“No,” Devlin said. “We got this statement here. We have that signed. You didn’t want to remain silent. Put ‘no’ then.”
When they got to the part about having a lawyer present Walter said again that he wanted his phone call.
“Well, we have the statement,” Devlin said. “You signed it. You didn’t want a lawyer.”
“I want a lawyer,” Walter said.
“No, you didn’t have a lawyer here. You sign this, you get your phone call.”
Devlin and Worrell’s supervisor, Sergeant Larry Nodiff, called Joseph Casey, the assistant district attorney who’d overseen the grand jury investigation into the murder. Casey got out of bed and got to the homicide office at about 2:30 AM.26 It was extremely unusual to get the ADA on a case out of bed in the middle of the night, since the charging DA, whose job was to sign off on charges overnight, had already accepted the charges. But Casey spent the rest of the night in the homicide offices, reviewing Walter’s statement for any “legal issues” that might come up.
Walter was taken downstairs and booked for murder in the early morning of April 6. Passing a window on his way down, he saw outside for the first time since the previous afternoon; it was light out. He’d lost all sense of time. He’d been in homicide at least fourteen hours, most of it in an interrogation room, and hadn’t slept in almost two full days.
Peter Blust’s phone rang at about seven thirty that morning. Blust was a lawyer who’d met Walter a couple years before when Walter was doing some roofing work on Blust’s neighbor’s house. Walter struck him as slow, very earnest, childlike, and had asked his advice a dozen times or so on some student loan issues. Blust felt sorry for him.
Now Walter was on the phone, frantic.
“Pete—Pete—Pete—they’re telling me I killed this little girl and just don’t remember it, I have a mental block about it,” Walter said.
“Whoa, whoa, what are you talking about?” Blust asked.
“I’m in jail! I’m in jail!” Walter said.
Blust got him to slow down and describe his interrogation.
“Walt, why didn’t you call me?” Blust asked.
“I kept telling them I wanted to call you but they wouldn’t let me,” Walter said. “They said, ‘Oh, sure, we’ll make an appointment with your attorney, and in the meantime we’ll arrest you and put you into the general population, but you probably won’t last because when this gets out, they’ll kill you in there.’”
Blust didn’t know about the Reid Technique but didn’t think Walter capable of murder and definitely didn’t think he had the brains to make up a story to explain away a real confession so quickly.27 He told Walter he’d be down as soon as he could.
Walter was put in a cell in the Philadelphia Detention Center and fell asleep.