Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [65]
The Investigators
On the morning of January 21, 1998, in Escondido, California, twelve-year-old Stephanie Crowe was found in her bedroom, stabbed to death. The night before, neighbors had called 911 to report their fears about a vagrant in the neighborhood who was behaving strangely—a man named Richard Tuite, who suffered from schizophrenia and had a history of stalking young women and breaking into their houses. But Escondido detectives and a team from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit concluded almost immediately that the killing was an inside job. They knew that most murder victims are killed by someone related to them, not by crazy intruders.
Accordingly, the detectives, primarily Ralph Claytor and Chris McDonough, turned their attention to Stephanie’s brother, Michael, then age fourteen. Michael, who was sick with a fever, was interrogated, without his parents’ knowledge, for three hours at one sitting and then for another six hours, without a break. The detectives lied to him: They said they found Stephanie’s blood in his room, that she had strands of his hair in her hand, that someone inside the house had to have killed her because all the doors and windows were locked, that Stephanie’s blood was all over his clothes, and that he had failed the computerized Voice Stress Analyzer. (This is a pseudo-scientific technique that allegedly identifies liars by measuring “microtremors” in their voices. No one has scientifically demonstrated the existence of microtremors or the validity of this method.10) Although Michael repeatedly told them he had no memory of the crime and provided no details, such as where he put the murder weapon, he finally confessed that he had killed her in a jealous rage. Within days, the police also arrested Michael’s friends Joshua Treadway and Aaron Houser, both fifteen. Joshua Treadway, after two interrogations that lasted twenty-two hours, produced an elaborate story of how the three of them had conspired to murder Stephanie.
On the eve of the trial, in a dramatic turn of events, Stephanie’s blood was discovered on the sweatshirt that the vagrant, Richard Tuite, had been wearing the night of her murder. This evidence forced then–District Attorney Paul Pfingst to dismiss the charges against the teenagers, although, he said, he remained convinced of their guilt because of their confessions and would therefore not indict Tuite. The detectives who had pursued the boys, Claytor and McDonough, never gave up their certainty that they had nabbed the real killers. They self-published a book to justify their procedures and beliefs. In it, they claimed that Richard Tuite was just a fall guy, a scapegoat, a drifter who had been used as a pawn by politicians, the press, celebrities, and the criminal and civil lawyers hired by the boys’ families to “shift blame from their clients and transfer it to him instead.”11
The teenagers were released and the case was handed over to another detective in the department, Vic Caloca, to dispose of. Despite opposition by the police and the district attorneys, Caloca reopened the investigation on his own. Other cops stopped talking to him; a judge scolded him for making waves; the prosecutors ignored his requests for assistance. He had to get a court order to get evidence he sought from a crime lab. Caloca persisted, eventually compiling a 300-page report listing the “speculations, misjudgments and inconclusive evidence” used in the case against Michael Crowe and his friends. Because