"They were ideal inmates."
June 25, 2017 7:32 AM   Subscribe

Remembering the Murder You Didn't Commit Relating a horrifying tale of psychological manipulation and miscarriage of justice, writer Rachel Aviv recounts the manipulation of suspects and creation of false memories in the case of the Beatrice Six, all convicted for the murder of an older woman, prior to their exoneration on DNA evidence in 2008.

Beatrice Six materials at the Innocence Project.

Rachel Aviv's work on the intersections of criminal justice, psychology, and vulnerable populations has appeared on MetaFilter many times. Just a sampler:
Resignation Syndrome in refugees
The early treatment of schizophrenia
Euthanasia for the mentally ill in Belgium
Martha Nussbaum and the philosophy of emotions
Child abuse in the Hasidic community
posted by Miko (12 comments total) 26 users marked this as a favorite
 
I read that a week ago and was completely unnerved. Imagine how many similar cases there might be.
posted by acrasis at 8:00 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


"From there on everyone else is implicated through dreams."
posted by doctornemo at 9:56 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


What a horrific story. So much damage.
posted by doctornemo at 10:45 AM on June 25, 2017


So now we can add the Beatrice Six to the Central Park Five and the Norfolk Four. How many other innocent prisoners are out there languishing in our penal system based on false confessions? Although a lot of people put in hard work to get these convictions reversed, chance plays too large a role for my comfort.

The attorneys for the county argued that the six should get no more than three hundred thousand dollars each in damages, and suggested that it was Winslow’s fault that he had been repeatedly raped while he was serving his sentence. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anybody should be abused like that in prison,” one of the attorneys said. “But you saw him testify here. You saw his video. Mr. Winslow is effeminate in nature.”

I am speechless.

Helen Wilson’s grandson, Bob Housman, runs Jan’s Cleaners, in downtown Beatrice, where Searcey used to have his uniform dry-cleaned. Housman, a sixty-three-year-old with a reddish beard, said that he would consider leaving town if the judgment caused him to pay higher taxes. He dismissed Bruce Allen Smith’s role in his grandmother’s death. “I don’t feel the connection,” he told me. “I never did, though he probably was there at one point or another.”

“Do you feel that there were seven people there?” I asked him.

“I don’t feel,” he said. “I know.”

His theory was that the six broke into the apartment and murdered Wilson around midnight. “I still have nightmares about it,” he said. They could have left the door open, allowing Smith to walk into the apartment in the early morning and rape her dead body, leaving his DNA. Housman and his wife clean the uniforms and suits of many people who hold public office in the county, and he said that nearly all of them still think the six are guilty.


One of the most troubling things about these cases is that the police and prosecutors have so thoroughly convinced the victim's friends and family that innocent people are actually guilty, that it seems common for them to be unable to accept that another party was actually responsible. And so they will go to their graves not only grieving the victim, but convinced justice has been denied them. Wrongful convictions lead to suffering on so many levels.
posted by TedW at 10:50 AM on June 25, 2017 [12 favorites]


The attorneys for the county argued that the six should get no more than three hundred thousand dollars each in damages, and suggested that it was Winslow’s fault that he had been repeatedly raped while he was serving his sentence. “Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anybody should be abused like that in prison,” one of the attorneys said. “But you saw him testify here. You saw his video. Mr. Winslow is effeminate in nature.”
posted by FiveSecondRule at 10:59 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I, for once, really have nothing to say.
posted by Samizdata at 11:25 AM on June 25, 2017


How many other innocent prisoners are out there languishing in our penal system based on false confessions?

Well, I mean, if you assume the burden of proof for death row convictions is at least as high or higher than it is for other crimes, and you allow for wrongful conviction for reasons other than false confession, the answer to that question is at least one in ten.
posted by penduluum at 11:27 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


Apparently that quote was glaring to other people as well.

That was an insane read. I'm so glad there's starting to be increased publicity to miscarriages of justice. I hope that pressure resulting from exposing these cases combines with pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement to improve the justice system. It's interesting to me that the forces at play in police work seem to be, on one side, a constant pressure to solve cases and find guilty parties, and on the other side, the small risk of a huge settlement against the state/police if they go too far. It's just like the oil industry with its constant pressure to produce more oil with the small risk of a huge spill. I'm curious if there are game theory models that could be used to improve this type of system.

Speaking of group-think, emotional reasoning and jumping to false conclusions with insufficient evidence: in 1989, our Dear President took out full page ads in The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and New York Newsday calling for New York to “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” in response to a case of similar false confessions from a group of five hispanic and black teenagers.

Relevant quote from the above link:
"I have found that lay people have an easier time understanding why someone would kill themselves…than they do why someone would confess to a crime he did not commit."
posted by FiveSecondRule at 11:41 AM on June 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I read this article and was infuriated most of all with the shrink who manipulated these people. What's to become of him?
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 3:18 PM on June 25, 2017


I read this article last week and it has been on my mind since. I agree with the points above about this being a shocking miscarriage of justice, and the psychologist who manipulated the innocent into confessing should burn in hell.

As I've thought about the article, its framing of false memory bothers me more and more. It focuses on the fallibility of memory, and how people can have false memories, and be manipulated into false memories. It talks about the famous cult/satanic abuse cases that were shown to be false memories. Ok, that's fine, that can happen. But overall, the article makes it seem like it's pretty easy (with enough time and power on your side) to convince someone they committed a murder they didn't commit. In the NPR interview, Rachel Aviv takes this kind of detached intellectual interest in the concept of "false memories gone wild" that lead people to mistakenly think they committed murder.

And by doing that, really the article massively buries the lede. At a couple points throughout the article, Aviv discusses that some of the Beatrice Six had previous experiences of physical and sexual abuse, especially JoAnn Taylor. Near the end, she writes about Taylor's statement that her stepfather used to hold a pillow over her head when he raped her - and that was likely the origin of Taylor's false memory of holding a pillow to suffocate Wilson. So this isn't about false memories: it's about the physical and sexual abuse of children and our society's failure to deal with it. The Beatrice Six were easy to manipulate because of their abuse histories. The Beatrice Six had a lifelong lingering sense of guilt because of their abuse histories (thinking the abuse was your fault is classic). The Beatrice Six had memories of rape and violence that could be manipulated by the psychologist because of their abuse histories - and specifically because no one ever fucking helped them or stood up for them or gave them help to integrate and make sense of the abuse they experienced. The article hints at it with things like:
Taylor, who still refers to the theory of repression that Price taught her, told me, “My memory problems began when I was raped.” She said that her confidence in her memory deteriorated further when her mother refused to acknowledge that the abuse had occurred.
Hey, you know what can seriously fuck up people's memories? Having people you trust deny your experience of reality. Why is the history of false abuse allegations discussed fairly extensively in the article, but there's no discussion of the research on how trauma affects brain function and memory - and how the literal mind-fuck of trauma is made much worse when people around the survivor minimize or deny what happened?

The more I think about it, the more furious it makes me that the article and news coverage are all framed by saying "Gee whiz, isn't memory wacky? Look how you could probably be convinced that you committed a murder you didn't even commit! Brains are crap, amirite?" When really it's rape culture all the way down. JoAnn Taylor's memories were real; she was able to be manipulated into thinking they were memories of her committing murder, rather than the abuse she survived, because the people she trusted to protect her as a child told her that the abuse wasn't real.
posted by medusa at 9:01 PM on June 25, 2017 [18 favorites]


That is an excellent point, medusa. I think much of it did come through in the piece, but it wasn't centered in the way you suggest would be valuable (and I agree). Your comment would make a very good letter to the editor in response to the piece:
Letters to the editor: Please send letters to themail@newyorker.com, and include your postal address and daytime phone number. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. All letters become the property of The New Yorker.
posted by Miko at 5:18 AM on June 26, 2017


I read this article and was infuriated most of all with the shrink who manipulated these people. What's to become of him?

The article said that Price was liable, along with Burdette Searcey and the county, so there's that. What gets me is that, unlike Price, who wouldn't talk to the article author, Searcey--who kept using his police lights to pull Price over just to talk to him, who started making arrests even though his department didn't have jurisdiction, who kept collecting "suspects" until he found one with Type B blood, who seemed to pretty deliberately target LGBT people--still stands by his actions, even though he's pretty much destroyed his county financially, along with the lives of the Beatrice Six. He's proud of it. This case reminds me of the West Memphis Three, another situation where murders were pinned on some vulnerable local kids while the real killer or killers escaped justice. The conceit that small-town life is somehow more honest and genuine than big-city life is so much bullshit.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:46 AM on June 26, 2017 [3 favorites]


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