“We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin” – André Berthiaume.
With many detectives I have known, I have often wondered what they are like when they take the mask off. How are they around their wives and families? What is the real person?
I had two murder cases come to me at the same time in early 2016, two completely different cases in different counties with different police departments and different detectives. The facts of the two cases were not at all similar yet I kept getting them confused in my mind. When I would think about one I would often have to check myself that aspects of the other were not bleeding into the one I was thinking about. The reason for that, unique in my career, phenomenon was that the methods of each of the two completely different detectives were so similar. The methods were also so different from those of detectives I had dealt with years earlier that I also wondered if this newer generation hadn't gone to the same detective school!
I remember in the one, we'll call it the Jones case, reading the transcripts and listening to the recordings of the interrogation of my client and being so shocked, and also curious, that I looked up the detective's picture. I wanted to see what he looked like. I was more disconcerted to so unremarkable, even avuncular, man. Like Bucket, which accounted for my shock, this detective's methods were completely, unapologetically, right out in the open. And he used every tool in his detective's toolbox to get my client to confess, in which he failed: yelling at him, misleading him, lying to him, being chummy with him. Just as Bucket did he had another detective watching and listening on the other side of the two-way glass. He started the interrogation with the yelling approach. Detectives are legally permitted to do all of these things up to a very distant point (which this detective reached and went beyond), I knew that, but I had never seen all of them used at the same time. It was gaslighting, I could see a truly innocent man thinking "Maybe I did" and confessing. He didn't read my client his Miranda rights--ever! Not on tape, not before they got into the interview room, ever (the judge granted the motion to suppress). I prepared for his deposition (which lasted twelve hours over four sittings) assiduously and started my questioning at the end of his investigation. It was deliberate on my part of course but I did not think that it would so flummox him. The result was the key answer that sunk his case. Anyway, I had watched the tapes as I said and in part one of the deposition asked him about his methods, first generally, "What methods do you use in conducting an interrogation?" "I talk to him just as a normal human being, like you and I are talking today." Just as you and I are talking today... "Now I know Jim that you're going to play this fucking coy little game with me and I'm telling you it's not going to work" he began the interrogation, yelling and pointing across the table at my client. Just as you and I are talking today...? Wow. (He never yelled at or was belligerent toward me.) He seemed to think that that was true, I couldn't be sure but that is what I thought then. That was his reality. "I treat people like I would want to be treated." Is that how he spoke when he quarreled with his wife (I imagined he was married) or disciplined his son (I imagined him having a son.)? In Bleak House Inspector Bucket's wife helps him: personal and professional lives meld into one. The detective in the Jones case wore multiple masks during the interrogation of my client. I don't know if he ever didn't wear a mask, even with his own loved ones. I don't know if there was any skin under all that, maybe it was mask all the way down.
