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Speaker 1: Welcome to Unexplained extra with Me Richard McClane Smith, where
Speaker 1: for the weeks in between episodes we look at stories
Speaker 1: and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make
Speaker 1: it into the previous show. In the last episode, built
Speaker 1: on Shifting Sands, we covered the disappearance of Pat Blow,
Speaker 1: Anne Miller, and Renee Brule, last seen at the Indiana
Speaker 1: June State Park on Saturday, July second, nineteen sixty six,
Speaker 1: and trowd the murky history of infamous stable owner Silas
Speaker 1: Jane for clues about his possible involvement in the case.
Speaker 1: One theory I didn't mention in the episode due to
Speaker 1: the lack of any verifiable information was the possibility that
Speaker 1: Anne Miller had gone to the beach that day as
Speaker 1: part of a plan to terminate her pregnancy, with Renee
Speaker 1: and Pat there to support her, with Pat also post
Speaker 1: there for the same reason. The theory was put forward
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve by Dick Wiley, a photographer working for
Speaker 1: a number of local newspapers at the time. After years
Speaker 1: looking into the case, Wiley made a promise to Pat's father, Harold,
Speaker 1: that he would keep looking until he found an answer.
Speaker 1: Over the years, Wiley compiled reams of notes and testimonies
Speaker 1: from all manner of witnesses and people linked to the case,
Speaker 1: but there was always one piece of information that jumped
Speaker 1: out at him more than any other, the sighting of
Speaker 1: a man named Roy Largo Junior at the beach the
Speaker 1: day the women went missing. Firstly, Largo fitted the tanned
Speaker 1: and dark haired description given of the man seen welcoming
Speaker 1: the women onto his boat at some time around noon
Speaker 1: that day. But more pertinently, Roy's aunt and uncle, Helen
Speaker 1: and Frank, according to Wiley, just so happened to be
Speaker 1: doctors that secretly performed abortions, a criminal offense in Illinois
Speaker 1: and Indiana at the time. Wiley alleged that the Largos
Speaker 1: carried out their operations on a houseboat anchored somewhere offshore
Speaker 1: on Lake Michigan. Wiley believes Roy Largo Junior, who lived
Speaker 1: with Helen and Frank, may well have picked them up
Speaker 1: in his boat and then taken them to his aunt
Speaker 1: and uncle's clinic. Then at some point, as his theory goes,
Speaker 1: something went wrong and all three of the women were
Speaker 1: murdered to cover it up. As others have already said,
Speaker 1: it seems hugely unlikely that a woman would head out
Speaker 1: to undergo such a traumatic and uncomfortable procedure in nothing
Speaker 1: but a swimsuit. It also seems a little far fetched
Speaker 1: that two individuals who were likely performing abortions as a
Speaker 1: charitable act for women unable to seek them at the time,
Speaker 1: would turn so quickly to murder if something had gone
Speaker 1: wrong either way, the intriguing link with the Largos remains.
Speaker 1: One thing that would help to corroborate the Largo link
Speaker 1: is the film footage that was taken at the beach
Speaker 1: the day the women went missing. At the time, the
Speaker 1: footage was instrumental in refocusing an investigation that had been
Speaker 1: floundering on the back of numerous conflicting eyewitness reports regarding
Speaker 1: the movements of the women on that faithful day. The
Speaker 1: problem of relying on the memory of individuals to recall
Speaker 1: events in criminal matters, particularly eyewitnesses to a crime, is
Speaker 1: one that continues to plague the criminal justice system, and
Speaker 1: there is one person, perhaps more than anyone, whose tireless
Speaker 1: work over the last fifty years, has helped us to
Speaker 1: understand why. Elizabeth Fishman was born in October nineteen forty
Speaker 1: four and raised in bel Air, California. By the age
Speaker 1: of sixteen, Fishman had experienced a number of deeply traumatic events,
Speaker 1: from surviving the sexual abuse of a babysitter at the
Speaker 1: age of six to the death of her mother when
Speaker 1: Elizabeth was only fourteen and the burning down of her
Speaker 1: family home two years later. Undeterred by all of it,
Speaker 1: Fishman went on to earn a place at the University
Speaker 1: of California, Los Angeles to study mats. While there, she
Speaker 1: became fascinated with psychology, in particular the work of BF Skinner,
Speaker 1: perhaps best known for his pioneering studies on behavior and
Speaker 1: conditioning through the use of the Skinner box. The box,
Speaker 1: otherwise known as an operant conditioning chamber, was a device
Speaker 1: designed to test how animals behave in response to punishment
Speaker 1: and reward. In Skinner's most famous experiment, rats were placed
Speaker 1: inside a Skinner's box containing a lever. Whenever the rats
Speaker 1: knocked into the lever, a pellete of food would drop
Speaker 1: into the box. The rats soon learned the link between
Speaker 1: the lever the food, so much so that after a
Speaker 1: few times being placed in the box, they would go
Speaker 1: instantly to the lever to push it in return for food.
Speaker 1: Skinner coined the term positive reinforcement to describe the phenomena
Speaker 1: inspired by these experiments. But not quite ready to jettison
Speaker 1: her years of studying maths, Fishman opted to pursue a
Speaker 1: masters in maths and psychology at Stamford University and was
Speaker 1: admitted in nineteen sixty six as the only woman on
Speaker 1: her course. It wasn't long, however, before she realized there
Speaker 1: was something about the sterility and clinical nature of mathematics
Speaker 1: that failed to accommodate the full, messy picture of the
Speaker 1: human experience, and after a few years studying rats, she
Speaker 1: decided to turn her attention to people, in particular the
Speaker 1: murky world of memory. It was a subject close to
Speaker 1: her heart, being someone who knew all too well about
Speaker 1: those memories such as the abuse she suffered as a child,
Speaker 1: that people don't want, and the memories such as those
Speaker 1: of her mother before she died, that people fiercely want
Speaker 1: to keep. In nineteen sixty eight, after getting married, Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Fishman became Elizabeth Loftus, and a few years later began
Speaker 1: work on a series of experiments that would change the
Speaker 1: way we understand memory forever. Loftus began first with studying
Speaker 1: semantic memory, the mechanism through which our brains retrieved the
Speaker 1: various bits of knowledge that we accumulate about the world
Speaker 1: around us, such as names, dates, and various other descriptive terms.
Speaker 1: By asking people questions like name a yellow fruit as
Speaker 1: opposed to name a fruit that is yellow, Loftus discovered
Speaker 1: a clear link between the grammar of a question and
Speaker 1: the speed with which our brains retrieve a response. Loftus
Speaker 1: found the work fascinating, but after having lunch with a
Speaker 1: less than impressed cousin a busy, high flying lawyer, Loftus
Speaker 1: realized she wanted to do something with a far more
Speaker 1: tangible impact on the world. It was then that she
Speaker 1: turned her attention to crime, or more precisely, witness testimony,
Speaker 1: and the question of just how reliable it was. Like
Speaker 1: all academics, Loftus needed financial support to conduct her studies.
Speaker 1: After hearing that the US Department of Transportation were offering
Speaker 1: money for relevant studies, she applied successfully for funding and
Speaker 1: promptly began a series of experiments to study the eyewitness
Speaker 1: testimony of car crashes. In one experiment, participants, after watching
Speaker 1: a video compilation of car crashes, were asked a series
Speaker 1: of questions in which the cars were variously described as
Speaker 1: having either contacted, hit, or smashed into each other. It
Speaker 1: wasn't long before Loftus discovered something fascinating. As it turned out,
Speaker 1: the way the question was asked had a fundamental impact
Speaker 1: on the participant's apparent memory of the event. For example,
Speaker 1: those who were asked to guess how fast the cars
Speaker 1: smashed into each other would, on average estimate the speed
Speaker 1: of the collision as being almost ten miles per hour,
Speaker 1: faster than those who were asked at what speed the
Speaker 1: cars contacted each other. A further experiment involved asking participants
Speaker 1: if they'd seen a broken headlight, while others were asked
Speaker 1: if they'd seen THEE broken headlight despite no headlight having
Speaker 1: been broken at all, Those who were asked if they'd
Speaker 1: seen THEE broken tail light were twice as likely to
Speaker 1: claim they'd seen it. The discrepancies appear relatively harmless when
Speaker 1: applied in an academic setting, But what if the person
Speaker 1: asking the question was a police officer and the question
Speaker 1: wasn't if you saw the broken tail light, but rather
Speaker 1: did you see the suspect in question commit the murder?
Speaker 1: And that was exactly what Loftus endeavored to find out.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy three, she was invited to observe a
Speaker 1: complete murder trial. The case ended in the defendant being
Speaker 1: judged not guilty, largely due to the conflicting testimonies of
Speaker 1: the eyewitnesses. Loftus's subsequent write up of the case was
Speaker 1: arguably the first time anyone had addressed so publicly and
Speaker 1: scientifically the questionable nature of eyewitness testimonies. What Loftus would
Speaker 1: later come to understand was that these misleading eyewitness accounts
Speaker 1: weren't necessarily the result of people being unsure about the details,
Speaker 1: but something much more profound. Is there something interfering with
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Speaker 1: This podcast is sponsored by Better Help and Unexplained. Listeners
Speaker 1: get ten percent off their first month at betterhelp dot com.
Speaker 1: Forward slash Unexplained, That's better hlp dot com. Forward slash
Speaker 1: unexplained Join the over one million people taking charge of
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Speaker 1: At some point later in life, Elizabeth and her uncle
Speaker 1: were discussing the horrifying moment her mother was found dead
Speaker 1: in the family swimming pool. When her uncle reminded Elizabeth
Speaker 1: that she was the one who found her. In that moment,
Speaker 1: a blast of memories she figured she must have suppressed
Speaker 1: came flooding back to her, from the moment she saw
Speaker 1: her mother's body in the pool, to the screams and
Speaker 1: even the paramedics arriving to deal with the situation, only
Speaker 1: none of it had happened. A few days later, Elizabeth's
Speaker 1: uncle called her to apologize, having by then correctly remembered
Speaker 1: that it was in fact Elizabeth's aunt who'd found her
Speaker 1: mother's body. This incident not only confirmed Elizabeth's belief that
Speaker 1: memory was unreliable, but had also demonstrated something much more
Speaker 1: complicated about false eyewitness testimony and why they were often
Speaker 1: so compelling. If this had happened to her, it was
Speaker 1: entirely plausible that false eye witnesses were not just hazy
Speaker 1: on the details and easily suggestible individuals, They could very
Speaker 1: well have a perfect memory of something that never actually happened,
Speaker 1: indistinguishable from any other genuine memory. In nineteen ninety one,
Speaker 1: Bloftus invited her undergraduate students to create an experiment to
Speaker 1: see if it was possible to plant false memories into
Speaker 1: people's minds. One of her students, Jim Kohane, developed an
Speaker 1: experiment inviting members of his family to recollect four events
Speaker 1: from his childhood that he laid out for them, with
Speaker 1: one of them, unbeknownst to them, involving a story about
Speaker 1: his brother getting lost in a shopping more that Koane
Speaker 1: completely invented. Much to Koane's surprise, his brother not only
Speaker 1: claimed to remember the event, but even embellished it with
Speaker 1: apparent memories of his own that happened that day. This
Speaker 1: became known as the lost in the Mall technique. Working
Speaker 1: with kne, Loftus adapted the experiment and applied it to
Speaker 1: a formal study involving twenty four participants, each of whom
Speaker 1: were told three true stories relating to their past and
Speaker 1: one completely fabricated story about getting lost in a shopping mall.
Speaker 1: When asked to choose which of the stories was made up,
Speaker 1: twenty five percent of participants failed to identify the false story.
Speaker 1: Although the lost in the Mall experiment was only a
Speaker 1: small study, subsequent experiments conducted by Loftus, including convincing people
Speaker 1: they had once been attacked or even witnessed of bombing,
Speaker 1: proved the effect was not a one off. Loftus's work
Speaker 1: has made her an extremely controversial figure, most pointedly when
Speaker 1: it's been applied to incidences of apparent recovered memories of
Speaker 1: sexual abuse. Since the law often requires proof beyond reasonable
Speaker 1: doubt to convict someone of a crime, the idea that
Speaker 1: memory is unreliable presents the uncomfortable problem that all memories,
Speaker 1: even if true, could become suspect in a court of law. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: this does nothing to diminish Elizabeth Loftus's extraordinary work and
Speaker 1: its contribution to our understanding of memory, a subject that
Speaker 1: we are still very much grappling with even to this day.
Speaker 1: Witness testimony can often be the most significant and compelling
Speaker 1: evidence that sways a jury. Just back in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: twenty eight year old Aaron Sheelhorn was stabbed to death
Speaker 1: outside a nightclub in Houston, Texas. Despite nothing else tying
Speaker 1: him to the crime and a solid alibi for his
Speaker 1: whereabouts that night, no less than six eyewitnesses identified a
Speaker 1: man named Little Grant as the killer. As a result,
Speaker 1: Grant was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
Speaker 1: But Grant didn't do it. In twenty nineteen, DNA samples
Speaker 1: taken from under Sheerhorn's fingernails implicated another man, j Americo Carter,
Speaker 1: who eventually confessed to the crime. According to the Innocence Project,
Speaker 1: which has overturned three hundred and seventy five wrongful convictions
Speaker 1: to date thanks to advances in DNA analysis, as many
Speaker 1: as sixty nine percent of wrongful convictions are made off
Speaker 1: the back of mistaken eyewitness accounts. If you enjoy unexplained
Speaker 1: and would like to help supporters. You can now do
Speaker 1: so via Patreon to receive access to add three episodes,
Speaker 1: just go to Patreon dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Pod
Speaker 1: to sign up, or if you'd like to make a
Speaker 1: one time donation, you can go to Unexplained podcast dot
Speaker 1: com Forward Slash Support. All donations, no matter how large
Speaker 1: or small, are greatly appreciated. Unexplained, the book and audiobook,
Speaker 1: featuring ten stories that have never before been covered on
Speaker 1: the show, is now available to buy worldwide. You can
Speaker 1: purchase through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Waterstones, among other bookstores.
Speaker 1: All elements of Unexplained, including the show's music, are produced
Speaker 1: by me Richard McClain smith. Please subscribe and rate the
Speaker 1: show wherever you listen to podcasts, and feel free to
Speaker 1: get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the
Speaker 1: stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an
Speaker 1: explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can
Speaker 1: reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com, or Twitter
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