Hi Reader,

Most people would expect that two witnesses seeing the same thing happen in front of them would describe it in the same way. That would be nice, but, well, generally that’s not what happens.

I can remember standing on Springbank Road in the south of Adelaide one day, talking to a couple of people who had both witnessed the same car speeding along the road just before it was involved in a crash. They both described it in great detail, right down to the ‘valve bounce’ sound they could hear coming from the engine as it roared past them travelling well above the posted speed limit. One person had the car travelling east and the other had it travelling west.

Not ideal.

It’s not unusual for people to see or hear things differently. One hears the screeching tyres before the impact, another after the crash. The traffic lights were definitely red, and amber. Two different people. Two different perspectives.

As an investigator, it’s easy to shake your head and mutter under your breath about the incompetence of witnesses. But the reality is that people experience things differently. It doesn’t mean they’re lying to you when they tell you about it. In fact, I believe most people are doing their best to be helpful.

One of the first lessons I learned as an investigator was to get a witness’s version of events down as soon as possible. Take their statement quickly, while it’s all fresh in their mind, preferably straight after the event they’ve witnessed. The problem with taking statements later is that the human brain is great at filling in gaps. Let a witness sleep on their story and their brain goes to work, tidying things up, filling in the little blanks, making everything make sense.

That’s great for storytelling, but not so great for relaying only the facts, the things you actually experienced with your own five senses. The biggest problem is that the witness no longer knows which bits are fact and which bits are fiction. It all seems very real to them.

A person’s memory is not a dashcam. It doesn’t record everything in sequence, every tiny detail. Every time a witness is asked to tell their story, their brain rebuilds it out of the tiny fragments it actually has. That split second experience with all the missing pieces, becomes a ten second action sequence a Hollywood director would be proud of.

There are many things that can affect memory, including the language used to question a witness. Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer conducted experiments as far back as 1974 that showed people reconstructed their memories based on what they had experienced after the event. In their case, they introduced specific words like “smashed into”, “collided with”, or “contacted” when asking people to estimate the speed of cars involved in a crash. Each person had been shown the same film footage of the same crashes, but speed estimates were significantly higher for the more emotive words like “smashed into” than for the gentler “contact”. Those asked about the speeds of vehicles “smashing into” each other even remembered seeing shattered glass on the road after the crash. There wasn’t any. Their brains made it up.

All the witnesses were confident in their estimates and in the fact they’d seen the broken glass. Confidence does not necessarily equate to accuracy when you’re talking to a witness. How do you know if the witness is right? Sometimes that confident witness does get it right. But sometimes they’re just the most convincing person in the room, even though they’re wrong.

That’s why physical evidence is so important in any investigation. It doesn’t matter if it’s a car crash or a murder scene, the things you find there often outweigh what people think they have seen, or heard. A witness might tell you the car was ‘doing at least a 140 km/h’ in the 60 zone, but break out the tape measure and calculator, and the skid marks tell you it was doing 80. Very different. Physical evidence wins, but the witness’s perception is still important.

Cops are trained to see, not just look. You see the skid marks, the blood splatter, or paint transfer. You see how they fit together, sometimes contradicting what the witness has told you. That’s also why they never ask the question ‘Did you see X?’ It’s always an open ended ‘Can you tell me what you saw?’ If you ask the wrong way, you end up filling in the blanks for the witness and they tell you what they think you want to hear.

How often do we hear about historical cases where people were convicted on the testimony of a confident eye witness, only to have the matter overturned and dismissed based on new physical evidence? DNA anyone?

The witnesses weren’t lying. Or at least probably not, because there’s always the possibility that someone deliberately lies for some reason, but for the most part, the witnesses were sincere. They believed what they were telling the investigators and the court. They knew what they had seen and were honest, forthright, confident in their retelling. Except they were wrong. And their testimony can be just as damaging as someone who lies.

Knowing these things also has an impact on me as a reader. I know how real life witnesses can be very wrong, while all the time believing they are correct. They can be genuinely convinced about what they saw. It changes the way I read crime fiction.

I read Sarah Bailey’s The Housemate recently. This is a great book by the way. I think you should read it! Anyway, memory plays a significant role in the story. I’m not going to give too much away, but it tells the story of a woman convicted of murdering her housemate. The case is reopened years later, and she barely remembers what happened. She had a knife in her hand and was covered in the victim’s blood. Did she do it? You’ll have to read the book to find out, but let me tell you, sometimes memories are not what they seem.

Memory tricks are not new in fiction. I’m rather embarrassed to admit that it took me some time while pondering this newsletter, to remember Agatha Christie. What crime or mystery reader hasn’t read at least some of her works? Remember Murder on the Orient Express? Every passenger on the train has their own version of what happened. Their own memories. They each tell Poirot, with genuine sincerity, what happened and yet they can’t all be correct.

In real investigations, we treat the certainty of witnesses as another piece of information. It’s not proof, or fact. It’s simply one more piece of the jigsaw. A person who is absolutely confident in what they saw is no more reliable than the person who says ‘I think so, but I’m not sure.’ Sometimes the less confident witness is being more honest, with themselves and with the investigator. We humans often find it hard to admit when we don’t know something.

Physical evidence doesn’t lie. Sometimes it takes some interpretation, but it doesn’t lie. People, on the other hand, do get things wrong.

I think that good crime fiction takes all this into account. The story doesn’t deliver the truth out of every witness’s mouth. Sometimes those fictional witnesses are wrong, or lying. Sometimes they’re not. But their accounts are all told in a way that makes us as readers, think about what they’re saying. Do we trust them? Does their story match the physical evidence we’ve been made privy to? Is there an alternative that could be just as true?

None of this precludes me from wanting a rock solid eye witness, in real life or in fiction. Someone that can deliver their story, their version of events, with clarity and confidence. Just don’t believe every word they say. I know I don’t.

P.S. – Have you ever been completely certain about something, and found out later you'd got it wrong? Hit reply and tell me about it. I have a feeling I'm not the only one.

KEN LYONS Author ​kenlyonsauthor.com​ ​​

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