The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - Just Say You’re Sorry | 3. The Grand Canyon

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

It's Day 2 of Holland’s interrogation of Driskill. Over the course of several hours Holland uses a variety of extreme but legal tactics as he chases a confession. He lies to Driskill about the evidence they have against him and feeds the veteran a story to explain how he might have come to murder Bobbie Sue Hill. Holland is relentless and the interrogation stretches on, with no lawyer present. How long can Driskill resist? Subscribe to The Binge to get all episodes of Smoke Screen: Just Say You’re Sorry ad-free right now. Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Smoke Screen show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. A Somethin’ Else, The Marshall Project & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. The Bench.

Before we start, a warning that this episode contains descriptions of violence. Please listen with care. This time on Just Say You're Sorry. We got two people that pick you out. We got the van down there. We got everything, man. I mean, everything. I like what you got, circumstance or evidence, and I'm not it. Dude, you didn't just, like, barely miss out? You bombed that polygraph. What I'm telling you is, I don't know anything about any of this situation. Do I need to call an attorney or what?

In 2012, ads start appearing on the campus of the University of British Columbia, seeking students for a study about memory. People apply. Then the researchers actually contact their parents. They ask them for details about the students' childhoods. Things like, where did they live? What was the name of their best friend? Then it's the students' turn to be interviewed.

The researchers talk them through the details described by their parents. Sometimes it all sounds familiar, but sometimes the students don't remember the events they're being told about, in which case the researcher assures them, don't worry. Sometimes we don't like to remember things that are negative. Sometimes we push things aside or repress them. This is Dr. Julia Shaw, who is running the study. She tells the students they're going to work together with the researchers to recover these memories using techniques that have worked for other people. And the main way to do that was to get people to close their eyes and go through an imagination exercise.

Where were you when this happened? What was the weather like? Who was with you? The events they're trying to recall can be quite intense. Shaw says to his student, your parents say you were attacked by a dog, or do you remember that time you lost a lot of money? And some of these events are serious crimes,

like stealing or assaulting someone with a weapon. Shaw works with the students to get the pictures back into their heads. She keeps repeating details she'd gotten from their parents, like where they were, who they were with. And basically it was up to participants to then fill in the rest of the details. Bit by bit, the memories arrive, often with startling clarity. And after just three interviews together, they were telling me exactly how they felt, step by step what happened,

what the consequences were, what the police officers looked like later on, how their parents reacted, how they felt, how they felt guilty about it. Some of the participants had 60, 70, 80 details. Maybe you've already figured out what's happening here. These events never actually happened. Shaw made them up to test how susceptible the students would be to forming false memories. She found that 70% of the people told they'd committed a crime ended up having some memory of it, even though it never actually happened. It totally surprised me how many people responded to this formula for creating false memories.

And some of my participants were psychology students. So thinking you can outsmart someone, basically, or you can tell when someone's manipulating you. No, you can't, not necessarily. Even months later, well after these students were told it was definitely a false memory, the experience of taking part in the study left some with a strange mental residue. Some of them would say, I'm still sometimes not totally sure it didn't happen. Shaw's study is one of many that have shown how our memories can be manipulated. Her findings got a lot of attention. Previous studies had found much smaller effects. But I'm left with the unsettling feeling that we can't always trust what's in our heads.

When I close my eyes and try to conjure images from the past, it all feels real. But for some memories, maybe I just saw a picture in a scrapbook and let my imagination run. I can't necessarily tell the difference. For most of us, most of the time, that's no big deal. But the stakes can be very high, especially in the legal system. This week, the U.S. Supreme Court began to review just how accurate eyewitness testimony is. Now, science shows our memories and our powers of perception are far less reliable than we believe.

More than three-quarters of them were sent to prison, at least in part, because an eyewitness pointed a finger. An eyewitness who who we now know, was wrong. Shaw's study is most relevant when you're looking at the work of detectives. They have the power to manipulate both witnesses' and suspects' memories. But unlike Shaw, they might not mean to do it. There's definitely a recipe for creating false memories, the perfect storm of what not to do in interviewing. And the reason that I did it in my research was to show that and to test it, to say, hey, if we do all the bad practice things that we've been going on about for

decades, saying don't do this to police, and we do it all at once, what happens? I found Shaw's study while trying to make sense of the case of Larry Driscoll. And in this episode, with her findings in mind, we're going to go back to the interrogation room to pick apart the techniques that took Larry Driscoll from flat denials... I'm not admitting to nothing because I didn't do nothing. ...to a confession to the murder of Bobby Sue Hill. You sorry about what happened?

Yeah, I'm sorry that it all happened. From Something Else, The Marshall Project, and Sony Music Entertainment, I'm Maurice Shama. And this is Smokescreen. Just say you're sorry. Episode 3, The Grand Canyon. In the last episode, we got to know Texas Ranger James Holland as he tried to solve the murder of Bobby Sue Hill

and retraced the steps that led him to Larry Driscoll. Holland picked up Driscoll at his workplace and told him he was possibly a witness to this crime. On that first day, they spent several hours together talking. Recall that Driscoll admitted he did remember being on East Lancaster Street in 2005, placing himself around the location where Bobby Sue Hill was abducted and around the same time. The next morning, he returns to the sheriff's office for a polygraph exam.

That's a lie detector test. Driscoll is seated and hooked up to wires and sensors. We don't have a recording. It's actually unclear if the test was recorded, but we do have a report from the guy who ran the test, which indicates it was pretty quick. Driscoll is asked the same question twice. Did you cause the death of that woman?

And then, did you cause the death of that woman in any way? Both times he says no. This is a turning point. The report says deception indicated. Driscoll is told that he failed, that he's lying. For James Holland, the Texas Ranger, this result indicates that he's on the right track, but it's not enough on its own. Now Holland's mission is simple. He needs to get a confession. We're going to spend the rest of this episode going through his interrogation, step by step, finding out how Holland does it.

The recording starts with Driscoll's reaction to the polygraph. He responds like anyone might. Relax. Take a deep breath. I'm tired of being accused of something I didn't damn well do. Relax. Driscoll's frustration I'm tired of being accused of something I didn't damn well do. Relax. Driscoll's frustration changes the mood of the room. Now he's realizing, once and for all, that he's not just a witness. That he's being accused of murder.

The polygraph operator also sticks around. His name, by the way, is Lonnie Falgu. We asked him for an interview, and he didn't respond. Maybe that's not surprising, given that he was actually working for, get this, the U.S. Secret Service. You know, the federal agency that's mostly known for protecting the president. I was never able to get to the bottom of why he's involved in this case, but it seems the Secret Service shows up in surprising places. Not unlike the Texas

Rangers. Anyway, Falgu remains with Holland as he tries to calm Driscoll down in the wake of this accusation. You weren't in my life is what you're trying to do, and I didn't do a damn thing. You know what? I'm trying to save your life. If you don't paint this picture, Larry, then you're going to force us to paint. I don't know of a picture to paint. If you don't help us, then we're going to fill in the blanks ourselves. There are a lot of times, listening to this, where I almost want to shout into my headphones, Larry, call a lawyer. But he doesn't. Holland is saying they already have enough information to nail him.

We got two people that pick you out. We got the van down there. We got everything, man. I mean, everything. I think what you got is circumstantial evidence, and I'm not it. Listen, you got eyewitnesses, all right? You've got computer stuff. You got the Fort Worth PD logs. You got all that stuff, and you got the body dumped a half mile. We got the DNA, and you bombed the polygraph. What Driscoll doesn't know is that Holland is lying to him about key parts of the evidence. It's legal for him to do that. And it's also condoned, to some extent, by perhaps the most influential interrogation style of the last century. We're going to tell you about it

because it's really helpful for making sense of what Holland does with Driscoll. It's called the Reed technique. The Reed method is the predominant method of interrogation in the United States. Their book is really the Bible of interrogation for police. This is Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco. He studies how police get confessions. What happens when you pull the curtain back? How is the sausage made? A century ago, interrogations in America looked very different than they do today.

They beat people up. They hung them out of windows. They put cigarettes in their arm. They kick them. They punch them. They hit them with rubber hoses. The U.S. Supreme Court effectively banned this sort of thing in the 1930s, so police looked for new ways to get confessions, using the suspect's mind rather than his body. Enter John Reed. He was a polygraph operator in the 1950s who developed a more psychological approach

and began teaching it to other detectives. Reed and Associates has trained hundreds of thousands of police over the years on how to interview and interrogate. Everything about the process is designed to break down the suspect's denials, overcome their objections, and move them from denial to admission and ultimately get the confession.

Reid and associates, by the way, vigorously dispute Leo's characterization. They say they teach police to get to the truth. It's not just about getting a confession. If you've ever seen an interrogation in a movie, chances are the tactics owe something to this technique, which is so pervasive, so baked into police culture, that individual detectives might not even know they're using elements of it. There are many moments in Holland's interrogation of Driscoll that feel to me like classic Reed.

But I need to be really clear about this. When you listen to an interrogation like this one, you can't always say exactly when the detective is or isn't using the Reed technique. Let's start with something that is classic Reed, watching the suspect. Are they giving off signals that they're lying? They look at your body language, your demeanor, your vocal pitch, how you're seated in a chair,

and they say you can tell whether somebody is likely lying or not based on their clusters of their behavior. As Holland says himself, he's been doing this from the moment he met Driscoll. You can't hide those indications, and that's why yesterday, as soon as we sat down, I knew that you did it. Academic studies, by the way, show police are no better than people off the street in detecting lies. They are, however,

much more confident about it. Once you've decided that you believe a suspect was involved in the crime, according to the Reed technique, now you need to tell them why you believe they're guilty. In many cases, this would involve laying out all of the persuasive, direct evidence you have against them. But Haaland doesn't have this evidence.

So he lies. He tells Driscoll that the local police department has records of his license plate showing he was near the scene of the abduction. Not true. And his claim about eyewitnesses seeing Driscoll is mostly a lie, too, since there was only a sketch. Driscoll also learns he's on a list of people

who seek out sex workers. There is no such list in the case files. Plus, Holland repeatedly suggests that the DNA is going to come back and match him. But the Ranger has no basis at all to make that claim. Most people don't know that police can lie, that police can just make it up wholesale, pretend to have evidence that doesn't exist.

The purpose of the false evidence ploy is to get the suspect to think you're caught, so stop denying and start admitting. Lying about evidence is legal in the U.S., apart from a couple of states who have banned it when interviewing minors. But it's known to be a risk factor for eliciting false confessions. The National Registry of Exonerations

has recorded more than 350 false confession cases. Deception by police showed up in roughly 90 of them. As for Reid, we reached out to Joseph Buckley, the longtime president of Reid & Associates, for comment, but didn't hear back. He's previously said to me that lying should be a last resort, and that miscarriages of justice happen when detectives depart from their training. Next comes something that, while not exactly a lie, is misleading. Holland leans on Driscoll with the fact that he failed the polygraph. Dude, you didn't just, like, barely miss that? You bombed that polygraph. It's misleading because polygraph tests are notoriously

unreliable. The results are mostly barred from courtrooms in the U.S. They're really not much better than a Ouija board. But police do still use them to guide the direction of their investigations and also to ratchet up the pressure on suspects.

Once the suspect is feeling the heat, the read technique suggests that the detectives offer them a lifeline. The term psychologists use is minimization. I've also heard of detectives calling it the out. Here's how Holland does it. The ranger uses a metaphor, comparing Driscoll's situation to jumping off the Grand Canyon. You're on the edge of the Grand Canyon, right? I'm asking you to take a jump off the edge and do something that's very uncomfortable to you. It's very obvious, all right?

When you do that, I'm going to reach out and I'm going to hand you a parachute. You got to start with that leap of faith. In Driscoll's case, the parachute is a story that paints him in the best possible light. I told you that this girl was on crack. She was messed up on dope and she was robbing people. Okay, this could be shit that just went wrong. It could be a lot of different things, Larry.

You got a chance. This doesn't have to ruin your whole life. You can define this thing. And Holland goes further. Not only was this an accident, he says, it could have started as self-defense. In any case, it's not working. Driscoll still strongly denies having anything to do with the murder. Holland keeps trying to be nice. I'm still thinking, get a

lawyer. No one in this room is trying to screw you over. No one is trying to fuck with you. But I told you yesterday, I thought you did it. I know today that you did. All right. The DNA is gone. All right. We can't take that back. All right? But it's going to come back. It's going to come back negative. No, it's not. What I'm telling you is,

I don't know anything about any of this situation. Do I need to call an attorney or what? Ding, ding, ding. Finally. But it's not enough. Driscoll phrases it as a question. Do I need to call an attorney? The law says you have to directly ask for an attorney,

which gives Holland just enough wiggle room to justify continuing the interview. He moves on to a new tactic. Can you do something for me? What's that? Say I'm sorry. For what? Just say it. Sorry for what? I didn't do nothing. Just say it. Just say I'm sorry. I'm sorry Just say it. Sorry for what? I didn't do nothing.

Just say it. Just say I'm sorry. I'm sorry, but I still didn't do nothing. Say it like you mean it. I'm sorry, but I didn't do anything. I don't remember anything. Nothing after that. Just those two words, I'm sorry. This is not classic Reed technique. As far as I can tell, this is a James Holland original. Ask the suspect to say,

I'm sorry, in isolation, as if those two words are magical, a spell that will break down the dam and unleash a wave of guilt. But Driscoll refuses. So now Holland goes quiet, and we hear from the other man in the room, Lonnie Falgu. Remember, he's the Secret Service agent who ran the polygraph test. We get what feels like a classic routine. Good cop, bad cop. And if you thought Holland was being the bad cop, well, listen to the other guy.

There's a lot of other unsolved problems in and around here, okay? Maybe Larry's involved in them. How can he not be at this point? Or we can narrow that focus a little bit and put it on what we're talking about specifically right here, which is what I think it is and only is,

and that this girl disappeared, okay, at your hand. The not-so-subtle implication here is that if Driscoll doesn't admit to this crime, then they may start looking into him for other crimes. Remember, I mentioned minimization, pushing the suspect to say it was an accident or self-defense. Well, there's also maximization. The interrogators maximize the cost of staying silent. It's illegal, of course, to threaten a suspect directly, and Reed forbids it too,

but Falgu is walking pretty close to the line. Still, Driscoll doesn't take the bait, so Holland comes back with the good cop routine. This is self-defense. This is something. I know it from watching you yesterday, but I also know from watching you yesterday, and listening to you talk about your son, about your wife, about your grandkids.

I know all those things, that you're a good person. The day before, during the interview, Holland had asked Driscoll if he was religious. It was just small talk, but Holland was paying attention, and he uses it now. Let me tell you something, all right? Because I'm a good Christian person. And you are too. You go to church every Sunday.

All right? If they would have tried to take my wallet or they would have attacked me and they were screwed up on dope, I would have defended myself. I would have did probably what you did. Holland's parachute must look very tempting right now. If you help me, if you let me help you work through

this story, I can take that to the district of Sterney and it can be very understandable. And you know something else? Hey, you're not some shit bird that we're dealing with off the street. You're a good family person. You haven't done anything. You're not a bad person. Years later, I asked Driscoll, what was it like to be in that room under that pressure? First, I felt like he's a good old boy, just trying to get some answers and trying to help him. Then in the middle of it, it just seemed like he turned on me like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It's kind of like no matter what I say, it's not right. What do you mean? It just felt like I'm matter what I say, it's not right.

What do you mean? It just felt like I'm fighting a losing battle. You're not listening to me. You're not trying to understand that I didn't do this. And as the interrogation goes on, you can hear some of that exasperation. People's pissing, accusing me of shit that I ain't never done. I told you yesterday, all right? And I'm wondering, do I need to call my attorney or what? Again, Holland swats away the talk of calling a defense lawyer. At this point, it's pretty much a stalemate. Neither man is getting what they want.

But Holland has another tactic ready to go. This one will be familiar to anyone who remembers the case of O.J. Simpson. Do you remember how, after Simpson was acquitted of murder, he wrote a book? It was called If I Did It. It's been around 40 minutes since James Holland told Larry Driscoll he failed a polygraph and that evidence shows he's guilty of killing Bobby Sue Hill. Holland is lying about key evidence, but Driscoll doesn't know that. Still, he's not really budging.

I don't remember anything to tell you. I don't ever remember being over there. I can't remember it in my head. I'm not recalling any of it, hardly. I don't remember any bit of it. But Holland won't take no for an answer. The polygraph proves that you remember. It's a standoff.

Before getting to how that tension breaks, and to give you the tools to understand why it breaks, we're going to take a short detour into the way memory works. Or, let's say, down memory lane. Not all memories are sort of catastrophically false, but almost all memories are at least a bit false. This is Dr. Julia Shaw again, who created those false memories in her students. She also testifies as an expert on memory in criminal cases. So we engaged her to give us her thoughts. In the justice system, most false memories, as far as I'm concerned,

happen accidentally. They happen because people don't understand how memory works. Witnesses and suspects, especially if interviewed incorrectly, can fabricate realities that never happened through the police process. So not only do we regularly forget things, which seems obvious enough, we also remember things that just didn't happen. Often we're not talking about pure truth or fiction, but a hazy space between the two. So autobiographical memories are networks within the brain, almost like a big spider web. This network, the spider web, is constantly evolving. You can add details to that network by, for example, thinking about what could have been, or someone else telling their version of the events,

and then you taking those details and being what's called a memory thief. That sounds abstract, but we've all had this happen. Think about arguments over dinner with your parents about how something went down years ago, or I don't know, the high school reunion where nobody quite agrees which kid got caught cheating on that test. And once you enter the criminal justice system, any room for doubt can be catastrophic. Listen to this moment from day one of the interrogation. The only time I ever remember is at a Dollar General or Family General store on Lancaster Street way the hell down. Right, yeah, I know where that is. Driscoll comes up with a hazy memory of being at this Dollar General store on East Lancaster Street. This is after being told

he was on the street and being asked to remember it repeatedly. Now we're getting somewhere. And it just popped into my head. So you are more likely, if you go back to a scene or if you think back to, you know, close your eyes and picture yourself at the scene, you're more likely to remember more details. Close your eyes for a second, all right? Take a minute and remember that person. Try to get a clear in your mind of all your thoughts, all right? But if it's of something that didn't happen at all, you're also quite likely to create some. So it can go both ways.

If you are listening to this and can safely close your eyes, go ahead and shut them. Try to picture the table where your dinner was sitting last night. Where is your cup? What food is closest to you on your plate? What are you sure about, and what would just be an educated guess? If you kept picturing the cup on the left, would that picture overtake any real memory? the line between truth and fiction can blur quickly. Now, back to the interrogation.

Listen to Holland use what I've taken to calling the H-word. Let's talk in hypotheticals for a second. All right? You know what hypothetical means? It doesn't mean that it happened. It means that possibility, it could have, it might not have,

it's just like bullshit and just kind of talking through things. Let's talk through this thing. Say the word hypothetically. Hypothetical. Holland says that they don't need to talk about Driscoll's actual memories, just how it might have happened. You're not admitting anything, you're saying hypothetically. So hypothetically, if this thing went down, hypothetically, how would it have gone down? I don't know how it would have went down. You want to cut it? I wasn't there. Driscoll isn't providing the details Holland needs, so the Ranger begins the story himself. Well, hypothetically,

if some chick had gotten in your van and was trying to rob you, and hypothetically, if this, say, 240-pound black guy is coming up to your vehicle surprising you, and this girl's just jumped in, hypothetically, I would think that you'd know

you're fixing to get robbed. This black man that Holland brings up is actually not a fabrication. His name is Michael Harden, the boyfriend we met last episode, who witnessed Bobby Sue Hill enter a van and says he saw a man's face. What's important to note here is that Holland is suggesting that Driscoll, a white man, attacked Bobby Sue Hill, a white woman, because there was a black man nearby and he was afraid of him. One of Driscoll's lawyers thinks Holland is playing to a racist stereotype here, basically saying, white man to white man, look, I get it. You were scared of a black man, and you snapped. He then uses what he knows about Driscoll's history to help explain his actions, even excuse them.

Hypothetically, a man with your military experience is going to go into self-defense mode like that. And hypothetically, a man like you who's been trained by the U.S. military for 23 years doesn't even have to think about what he's doing because he's been trained what to do in situations like that. You've been trained. As the interrogation wears on, Holland is relentlessly pushing Driscoll towards the hypotheticals. In fact, we counted. The word is said at least 65 times. Hypothetically, she gets into the vehicle. Okay.

Hypothetically, what occurs after she gets in the vehicle? That's the part I don't know. I don't even know if she got in the vehicle. She got in the vehicle. OK. But I don't think I've ever killed anybody. Because I couldn't remember if I did or not anyway. Switched into that mode,

it would have been automatic. Something to flag here is that there are some gaps in the tape, so we don't know everything that's said. The audio also gets a little wonky. We're going to let this next bit of tape play for a while so you can hear Driscoll take his first step off the ledge. How would you do that? I don't know, except for just trying to block her out, push her out of the vehicle or something.

Like this? Probably more of the chest. All right. If I did that. All right. So you're doing this and the struggle starts. Then you see this black dude coming up on the vehicle. All right.

So if you've got two threats now, what do you have to do with them immediately? I guess my military mind, I guess, would tell me to take one out. Take one out. You got this chick, you're going into military mode. Now she's laying there and she's not moving. You're in military mode. What do you do? Do you go down to the Fort Worth Police Department and tell them, hey, I've got this cracked-down girl that's probably a prostitute dead in my vehicle? Do you do that? Hell no, you don't do that.

Does that sound like what happened? Hypothetically? Hypothetically, I guess it could have, but I just don't know. Was it self-defense or did it just get out of hand? If anything, it would have had to have been self-defense. I can't remember that. All right. Well, it's self-defense. Listen as the hypothetical language here and there begins to dissolve,

leaving behind a confession. The only thing I can think of is, he guesses she was trying to rob him. He was trying to throw her out of the vehicle, and his hand slipped and got her throat. At one point, he does make a last-ditch attempt to get a lawyer. But again, it's not a direct enough question, and so Holland can bat it away. Can I ask you a quick question?

How come you won't let me put up a phone and call Charlie? Your friend? Yeah. Because Charlie's not going to help you right now, but we are. Because Charlie's an attorney. Well, if you want to talk to an attorney, you can talk to an attorney. Do me a favor, all right? I'm going to be right here with you. Holland leads Driscoll back to those two magic words. And this time, it breaks him. Now let's try this. I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I took somebody's life.

But I don't think I did. You feel better. You feel better, and I can see see it and it's rolling off your shoulders because it's been tearing you up for 10 years. It's okay. Accidents happen. It's okay. It's okay. You feel better, don't you? It's okay. Let us help you. You need me up for ten years. Ten years.

I didn't understand what? I find this hard to listen to. Let's say for a moment that Driscoll did kill Bobby Sue Hill, that he strangled her in his van. And I realize I now am using a hypothetical myself, but I think I need to in order to make sense of the possibilities in this moment. If he's guilty, then scenario number one,

he's lying about not remembering it and putting on an incredible performance. Or scenario number two, he did it, but he doesn't really understand why or how he suppressed the memory. This may explain why Driscoll is about to take the leap of faith. On TV, when the killer confesses, it's usually framed as a single dramatic moment with lots of build-up. In real life, there is still the build-up, but the actual confession is more diffuse,

a series of sentences, some direct and specific, some not so much, scattered across the transcript. By this point, Driscoll has stopped crying, and you can hear a sense of hopelessness. I'm just trying to figure out why I can't picture everything. Picture it. When you're sitting there crying, you're picturing it. Just as there's no one moment he confesses, in terms of his words, there is no one moment where his body language shows he's giving in.

It's gradual. Is it the truth, yes or no? Yes, it is. All right, boom. Get done with it. Well, let's do what we need to do and let's get this over with. Go through it. Just All right, boom. Get done with it. Well, let's do what we need to do and let's get this over with. Go through it. Just tell us. Boom.

Now listen to how the hypothetical language begins dissolving at a faster rate. But also listen for the residue. Even after Driscoll has abandoned the word hypothetically, he still uses the phrase, I guess. Holland is coaching Driscoll to drop the conditional language. And eventually, Driscoll starts doing it on his own. I guess I was giving her a ride. No, I was giving her a ride to the house.

And there was a confrontation in the vehicle. I think she was trying to take my billfold from me. And I went to defend myself, to try to push her out of the car and my hands went from her chest to her neck and I guess I choked her down. You guess or you did? I did choke her down then because an African American gentleman

was coming up to me and I guess my military kicked in when she tried to assault me. Okay. So I think I took off trying to get away from the situation. Alright. Then all I did was take and put her in a trash sack. You're asking questions, but you need to tell us what happened. Well, that's what I'm trying to do, but I keep putting the guesswork in it.

What did you do when she was dead in your vehicle? Left the scene. Driscoll even describes disposing of Bobby Sue Hill's body. I guess I take, no, I take the bag out of the van and throw it off the side of the bridge. All right, then what? Then I get in my vehicle and I leave and go home. You ever think about it afterwards?

No. You sorry about what happened? Yeah, I'm sorry that it all happened. There's another desperate moment where Driscoll tries to take it back. You got to tell the truth. Right. You know, I mean, the truth is more important than anything.

Because I don't think I did any of it, to be honest, is what I'm thinking. Oh, my God. But... But, you what I'm thinking. Oh, my God. But. But, you know, you did. I guess I, yeah, I guess I did. I'm just not totally. I know you're not totally.

Ended. Ended what's going on here. Holland brings Driscoll back around again. People don't bend over and sob and say they're sorry about it. People don't admit and say that they did they're sorry about it. People don't admit and say that they did things that they didn't do. I mean, we're past that. It happened. You did it. Now you gotta make a choice. Do we lay

this whole thing out and let the ranger take it to the DA? And so Driscoll returns to describing the murder, ending on how he left the site where he hid the body. Backed out the driveway and turned around and went back and then went home. Right. At the same time, gathered up the clothes in the bag and another bag and put them out

in the dumpster. Okay. Guess what? What? You just corroborated shit to a T that I've never said to you. You just described everything the way that eyewitnesses described it. From the get-go. And there's certain things that I haven't told you about tire marks and other things, but you just

corroborated it again. I'm just getting pitchy myself doing that. No, no, no. But you know you did it, correct? I had to. If I just corroborated everything. Not I had to, if I just corroborated everything. Not I had to, but you know you did it, right? I haven't found anything in the police report about tire marks that directly back up Driscoll's story. But at some point, Driscoll does draw a picture of how Bobby Sue Hill's body was placed in the trash bags. The district attorney, Jeff Swain, told me that Driscoll's descriptions are accurate,

and he couldn't have known this stuff otherwise. It's one of the reasons prosecutors remain so sure about the confession. Driscoll tells me he was just guessing, and he was also shown a photo of Bobby Sue Hill's body the day before. Perhaps that influenced the drawing. Swain, the prosecutor, didn't give us an interview for this podcast, but we've emailed,

and he's made it clear that his office stands by Driscoll's conviction. He emphasizes that all Holland's interrogation tactics are legal and effective. Back in the room, Driscoll is coming to terms with the weight of his confession. I can't believe I took somebody else's life.

What, did you do it in South Defense? I had to. This is where we leave the interrogation room. We ran a lot of the recordings by psychologists, including Julia Shaw, who sometimes acts as an expert witness in court. It's one of the most troubling interviews I've ever heard because it's so...

It's so coercive. And it's so misleading. I think it's a very overconfident interviewer who thinks they've got the right guy and is just doing absolutely anything they need to do to get this person to say that they did it. We engage Shaw because of her own work on what leads to false memories. But she also hears, in Driscoll's language, something a lot simpler. Desperation to get out of this situation by whatever means necessary. So he's all the way through, increasingly saying what the interviewer is piece by piece telling him to say.

And that is what's so shocking about this interview, is that it's much more transparent, actually, than most of the work that I see. So when I do work as an expert on cases, they're way less obvious than this. This would not be admissible in any courtroom in most parts of the world. Richard Leo has also heard clips from the interview. The false evidence play, the lying about non-existent evidence making it up, the non-existent witnesses,

the van, the minimization and the self-defense technique increased the risk of eliciting false confession. If I was a judge, I would have suppressed this confession as a violation of law. We don't know exactly how long Driscoll was with Holland. We do have about seven hours of tape across the two days, but we know that not everything was recorded.

From reports I've read since, it seems Driscoll was in the station for about 10 hours on the second day. Most people have no idea what it's like to be in the psychological pressure cooker of an interrogation with a skilled interrogator, an authority figure who we've all been socialized to be deferential to and have them just coming at you nonstop. Everyone has a breaking point. We think we don't, but we do. Just from listening to the tape, there is no way to tell, ultimately, whether Driscoll is innocent and this is a false confession. But as you've just heard, the experts I've spoken to see lots of risk factors. When you read the academic literature on false confessions, you tend to see categories. Researchers draw a line around what they call compliant confessions, where the suspect complies with the interrogator for whatever reason. Hunger, exhaustion, a loss of hope after all the lies and gaslighting, or the belief that the truth will eventually come out. Then there's the internalized confession, in which the suspect comes to believe in their own guilt and may even have a false memory.

If Driscoll's confession is false, as he now claims, then it seems to me that a single person can toggle between the two. According to Driscoll himself, at some moments he was thinking, I'm trapped, I need to confess to get out of here. And at other points he was thinking, okay, maybe. I need to confess to get out of here. And at other points, he was thinking, okay, maybe I did commit this murder. He seems to have flashes of memory, images, sounds, what have you, that he imagines as hypotheticals, but then, even just for a moment, feel real. He even had me question to myself, did I do any of this? Could I have really snapped and done this? It sounds almost like your mind is, like, fighting with itself. Was it like you were kind of like the two sides were boxing?

Mm-hmm. And it's kind of like God's helping me over here and Satan's over here trying to fight with me. And I'm stuck in the middle. I'm the dummy in the middle, is what it feels like. This sounds really stressful. It is. And them asking the same thing over and over and over.

And it's like, no matter what you tell them, it ain't good enough. It ain't what they want to hear. After giving the confession, Driscoll actually gets to drive home. He says Holland told him he could explain the situation to his wife before going into custody.

I made a crown and coat drink, maybe took two sips out of it, and next thing I know, they're there with cuffs on me. Did you have time to tell your wife anything? I had about two, two and a half minutes. She took her wedding ring off and threw it in the trash can. Driscoll goes to jail to wait for his trial. Now he'll

definitely get that lawyer. But he also has his own words working against him. When I first picked up this case from Mike Ware and the Innocence Project of Texas, I went into it with an open mind. After listening to this tape, though, and hearing from Leo and Shaw,

I had serious doubts about the validity of Driscoll's confession. Of course, when you report on these kinds of cases, you constantly question yourself. No one wants to be the journalist who naively believes the story spun by a killer. But then I found another one of Holland's cases, which also features a questionable confession and involves some tactics even more shocking

than the Driscoll case. It's a story with eerie similarities to this one. A small town, cold case murder, a military veteran who trusts the police and bitterly regrets it. But his case ended up very differently. How he became a Texas Ranger is beyond me because that just shows me the bar level has been dropped so low

for him to have gotten that far. He was a moron. That's next time on Just Say You're Sorry. The Marshall Project, and Sony Music Entertainment. It's written and hosted by me, Maurice Shema. The senior producer is Tom Fuller. The producer is Georgia Mills. Peggy Sutton is the story editor. Dave Anderson is the executive producer and editor. And Shika Ayers is the development producer.

Akiba Solomon and I are the executive producers for The Marshall Project, where Susan Shira is editor-in-chief. The production manager is Ike Egbetola, and fact-checking is by Natsumi Ajisaka. Graham Reynolds composed the original music, and Charlie Brandon King is the mixer and sound designer. The studio engineers are Josh Gibbs, Gulliver Lawrence Tickle, Jay Beal, and Teddy Riley, with additional recording by Ryan Katz. This series drew in part on my 2022 article for The Marshall Project, Anatomy of a Murder Confession, with thanks to Jez Nelson, Ruth Baldwin, and Susan Shira.