Interview Until You Understand
Then review
An interview is complete when you have gathered all of the information that the interviewee is willing to share with you about the topics under discussion. Truthful people don’t provide important information because they don’t realize it’s important. If you ask more, they will tell you more. Deceptive people don’t provide important information because they don’t want you to know the truth. If you ask more, their answers will continue to create confusion. Every time that we don’t get the truth that the interviewee was willing to share, the fault is ours.
Principle: If at first you don’t understand, assume the fault is yours. If at the end you don’t understand, assume they don’t want you to understand (and are probably lying).
I interviewed a mom a few weeks ago that is accused of smoking meth in front of her small child. When I asked her to tell me all about the day in question, she began with vague statements. “I was at the hotel that day. We were just passing through. I hardly saw the other lady.” This is a story that I don’t understand huge swaths of. “Ok, so please tell me all about being at the hotel from beginning to end without leaving anything out.” She immediately raised her voice and went on the attack, “Why are you asking me these questions? I told you what happened! Who cares what happened next?” This went on for hours, and, at the end of that time, I still had very little idea of what happened during that time period. This is a person that did not want me to know what happened. I didn’t understand so I sought to understand, but the interviewee didn’t want me to understand. At the end of the interview, I knew everything that she was willing to tell me even though I still didn’t know what happened.
This contrasts with the witness - the “other lady” - that was there. I spent hours talking to her as well. At the end of my interview with the witness I knew almost everything that happened and when it happened. I say almost everything because the witness was omitting important information too. She was vague about other people that she met with at the hotel. When I asked about those other people, she reluctantly provided some first names and general descriptions that are probably dead ends. Yes, we have deception (lying by omission), but the deception is peripheral to the main issue under investigation. I was not investigating who else the witness met with, so, after I asked questions to verify that I didn’t know because she didn’t want me to know, I was willing to let those topics go.
Many times it will be the case that the interviewee would have told you more information, but you didn’t ask, they didn’t like you, or something else went wrong. The easiest of these to control is whether or not you ask the questions. Remember that a liar prefers to lie by omission (leaving things out) instead of direct fabrication (an invented story). During the interview, a liar will avoid direct lies if they can. They will hedge their statements in a way that leaves them an out. Then, if you choose to confront them, they have wiggle room to say, “I didn’t say that!”
New interviewers want to be superhuman in a way. They want to employ all the advanced trickery of interview and interrogation to understand immediately if the suspect is lying or not. They look for eye movements, vocal inflections, and nonverbal clusters when they should be listening to the story. If you aren’t hearing what the suspect is saying, it doesn’t matter which way their eyes look when they answer you. All of the trickery is a percentage boosting extra. You don’t have to be superhuman. You can be better than most if you simply ask questions until you understand.
I was speaking to a co-worker yesterday about a pair of lengthy interviews I did with a rape suspect. My co-worker told me that he would have been so confused and he isn’t sure how I kept track of what the suspect was telling me. I told him something that would be helpful for anyone: if you don’t understand, keep asking questions until you do. Select the main strands of the story related to the criminal offense, and review them until you know exactly what the suspect is saying, even if that thing they are saying is totally uninformative.
You understand the story when you can identify, among other things, all the actions taken, all the people involved, and when everything happened based on what the suspect has explicitly told you. Let’s say you are investigating a robbery. You have a witness that told you the suspect went to downtown Seattle with Ricky and Susan, and that is where they robbed a rival drug dealer. In the interview room, the suspect told you, “I went downtown with some people.” It is common for investigators to fill in the gaps for that person. “I know from the witness that they went to downtown Seattle with Ricky and Susan, so that’s obviously what they are talking about.” But is it? You have to ask! If you fill in the gaps with what you think you know, you are sure to miss details. Where downtown did they go ? When did they go downtown? Which downtown did they go to? How did they get there? Who are, “some people”? There’s a lot more questions, but that gives you a starting place. As you interview your suspect, ask yourself, “Do I really understand what they are telling me?”
Tip: As much as possible, elicit more information with phrases like, “Go on…” “Tell me more…” “Help me understand that…” instead of full questions. Use silence after the answer to see if they will add more before you speak more.
Analogy: Interviewing is like sword making. When you make a sword, you take your material, heat it up, bang on it with hammers, cool it down (quench it), heat it up again, and bang on it with hammers some more. The material in this analogy is the information that the interviewee provides to you. The banging with hammers is the interview technique you use to elicit and understand the information. If the person is telling you the truth, they are providing you good steel to work over. Even with just okay technique, it should come out looking like a sword. But liars are providing you with a giant hunk of crap. No matter how you bang on the story it’s not going to make you a sword; it’s just going to make a mess.
Truth tellers and good technique will make you a sword that looks like this:
Even with good technique, liars will give you material for a sword that looks like this:
Principle: First, understand the story. Then poke at the weak spots.
Once you understand the story, go back over it. Look for weak spots. Look for things that were not well defined or that don’t make sense. Ask for details that the interviewee wouldn’t expect you to ask about. “You said you went downtown, where did you start from?” “Did you make any stops along the way?” “What was the mood in the car?” “Were there any interruptions?” “Whose idea was it to go downtown?” In general, liars struggle to provide information beyond the basic story. They will be quick to say that they don’t remember or don’t have anything else to add. Truth tellers are more likely to think about an unusual question whether or not they are able to provide any substantive additional information. This in depth examination of the story should not start until you understand the basic story.
When you get to the end of this more in depth examination of their story, you should (gently) challenge them on discrepancies. “You said that you went downtown with Ricky and Susan, but you also said that Ricky was sick and couldn’t go. Help me understand that.” Challenge all of the major discrepancies. In general, truthful people will be able to clear things up, but deceptive people will be unable to do so. Understand that clarifying discrepancies is not accusatory. This is still a part of the interview.
At this point in the interview, you will have all of the information that the interviewee is willing to provide you. If you choose to interrogate, you will be doing so from a position of strength. If you move into an accusatorial interrogation with a deceptive suspect with only part of the information, the information you failed to gather will come back to haunt you in the form of alibis or plausible objections. Your interrogations will be much more successful if you provided them opportunities to give their alibi in the interview. If they had the opportunity - or ideally opportunities - to provide an alibi or exculpatory information in the interview and they didn’t, then they are almost certainly lying when they come up with an alibi when you accuse them. On the other hand, if you don’t get all of the information from an innocent suspect, you will miss out on chances to exonerate them.
In conclusion, don’t try to be a superhuman. Just try to understand. If you don’t understand, keep asking questions until you do. If you still don’t understand, it is probably because they don’t want you to understand, which is, as they say, a clue.
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