Jack Burnette
Homicide Investigator
Interrogating a suspect
I’ll take him by a fast food place and get him a burger and some fries. I like to have the video running before I even go into the room. I don’t tell them that they are being videotaped. We’ll sit and talk for a while about whatever they want: cars, women, hunting, whatever. Then I’ll say, you know you’re under arrest for shooting that guy. Before we start, do you need to go to the bathroom? Do you need some more to drink? I’ll say, well you’ve probably seen this on TV a bunch, but I’ve got to do it. Then I’ll read them their rights one by one and ask them if they understand. They’ll say “yes sir” to every one. What that does, that just kills the Jackson-Denno before it even starts. Their lawyer can’t get up there and say that I coerced them or did anything else if they see their guy sitting their with a mouthful of burger saying that he understands each of his rights. Then I’ll ask them to tell me their side of the story. I’ve never yet had a criminal tell me the whole story. What they’ll do, they’ll shade the truth so it makes them look better. They’ll say that they weren’t the one who pulled the trigger, that it was the other guy. Of course, you’ve already got a statement from the other guy saying that your guy pulled the trigger. They don’t know that in the eyes of the law it doesn’t matter. They think it makes them look better.
Sometimes, a suspect will say, “Basically, I’m gonna tell you the truth.” When you hear that, you know you’re probably going to be lied to. You can’t take any one thing, like not making eye contact and say that they’re lying. Some people just don’t look you in the eye. You’ve got to weigh everything. A fellow that doesn’t make eye contact, slouches in the chair, tells you that he’ll swear on his mama’s grave, that fellow is probably lying.
I don’t usually show them pictures of the victim, or things like that. When they see the picture, it will often shock them back to reality. Right now, they’re removed from it, sitting there, but if you remind them of it, you’ll often get a fellow to stop talking and say, this is serious, I better talk to my lawyer.
Bluffing
I never bluff. The thing with bluffing is that you better know what you’re doing. I won’t tell someone, we know if was you, because we found your fingerprints on the gun. He’s thinking: but I wore gloves. Then he knows that you’re bluffing.
Before an interview, I like to know as much as I can. I like to have a profile done, if possible. Just about any detective who has been in the business since the early 1990’s has been to profiling school. The profile will tell you about their education level, things like that. You can walk in prepared to carry on a conversation. Any detective has to be able to talk to anyone. You might be out at the public projects this afternoon and you need to be able to communicate with the people out there. Later, you may be talking to a bank president. You wouldn’t talk to the bank president the same way that you talk with the people out at the projects.
Body language helps, but I like to have a profile before I go in to talk with the suspect.
You do have some people come in to confess to things that they didn’t do. It doesn’t happen all that often. What the Psych people say is that these people just want attention. In some of the bigger cities, like New York and Los Angeles, they’ve got a whole list of people who walk in and confess every week.
I always videotape interviews. I love video. It goes well with my style, which is pretty laid back. The jury can see the suspect in a natural setting. They can see that he hasn’t been forced to do anything against his will. They’ll see him eating and talking. And, especially now that I’m older, the jury will see a grandfatherly type talking with some young fellow about killing somebody. Defense attorneys hate it. Some of them even ask me on cross “did you tell my client that you were videotaping his statement?” I’ll say “no. I wanted the jury to be able to see him relaxed and talking freely so that they could evaluate him.”
If you’re sitting in a room with two detectives and they’re not writing anything down, you can bet that you’re being recorded. Back in ’76, when I first started, you had to write everything down. The defense attorneys would also question you, “whose words are these, yours or his?” Tape players made it better, but I like videotape. The jury couldn’t see what the suspect was like when they listed to an audiotape.
I just got through teaching a class on death investigations. Some of the topics I covered were basic crime scene establishment. In more advanced courses, I cover dealing with the media. I tell them to set up a media staging area that’s away from your officer staging area (where all of the top officers meet to discuss what happens next). A murder scene is chaos, because all of these people are doing all of these different things. You have to have someone coordinating the whole thing and that’s what the lead investigator is for. Are you going to canvass the area? How big to make the crime scene? One of the things that you have to tell patrol officers is that just because there’s nobody standing by the camera, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t running. Even if the tape isn’t going, the microphone is on. When you hear about situations where the reporters beat the police to a witness, it’s usually because a couple of detectives were standing by the camera talking about how they need to go and find Joe Blow and ask him this and that, and there’s some guy in the van, listening in.
If you want the truth, you’ve got to pay more than a quarter for it. That’s why it’s nice to have a public relations officer. You can have him handle the media, keeping them in a central location which is away from your staging area. You can feed him what you want the media to know and hold back things you don’t want them to know. Of course, they hate it, but that’s what you have to do. They’re always looking for a leak, some “source close to the investigation.” Most of them are irresponsible.