09 - MAI 29 - Tears, Lies and Videotape (1)

Tears, Lies and Videotape - 1

29 May 2009

transcrit par Constant_Dieter

La vérité sur l'affaire Harry Quebert de Joël Dicker

Début 2008, Karen Matthews versa des larmes devant les caméras TV pour le retour de sa fille disparue, Shannon, alors qu'elle savait où celle-ci se trouvait. Gordon Wardell et Tracie Andrews ont tenu des conférences de presse après avoir tué leurs conjoints. Les psychologues David Canter et Paul Ekman examinent les spots vidéos d'hommes et de femmes qui se sont proclamés innocents et ont été trouvés coupables.
Il est intéressant de comparer le discours de David Canter sur ces affaires, en particulier sur l'affaire Matthews, avec ce qu'il a dit de l'affaire MC. 

Karen Matthews (standing outside her home, tearful, puffy-eyed) If anybody’s got my daughter, my beautiful princess daughter, please bring her home safe.  
Voice Over : (General scenes of police activity) High-profile crimes – played out on the TV. A person goes missing. A body is found. The cameras arrive and the police make full use of the publicity.

Gordon Wardell (in front of the camera, sunglasses on, shaky voice) : I would urge anybody who knows anything about the death of my wife to come forward.
VO :  (showing clips of people later featured in the programme) Desperate relatives appear to make appeals for information. It’s emotional. It’s raw. But sometimes it’s fake.

Michael Gifford-Hull (at press conference) If anyone has seen her, please let us know where she is.

Pictures of Professor David Canter (DC) and Professor Paul Ekman (DC) : Tonight, the UK’s leading forensic psychologist and the foremost criminal body language expert in the world examine the tears, the lies and the videotape.

DC : The big challenge when lying is to keep the whole fiction unfolding and developing.

PE : The best way to mask a lie is with a strong emotional display.

VO : (Karen Matthews crying) Could we have known they were lying?
Journalist : I was absolutely taken in by her. 
Neighbour : I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach by someone I trusted.  
VO : (Karen Matthews smirking) Were the signs there all along? 999 call made by Karen Matthews is played. 
Operator : Police emergency?

KM : “Hiya. I want to report my daughter is missing please.”

Operator : “Right. How old is she?”

KM : “Nine.”

Operator : “Nine?”

VO : “February 19th, 2008. A distraught mother calls 999 to report her daughter missing. It’s 6.48 in the evening and the temperature is near freezing.”

Operator : “What do you call her?”

KM : “Shannon Matthews.” Picture of Shannon Matthews.

VO : (police activity) “With that phone call, Karen Matthews triggers the biggest police action in West Yorkshire for 27 years. But is it a smokescreen for the real story? Local reporter, Richard Edwards, is one of the first to cover the story.

Richard Edwards : (Yorkshire Evening Post) You think, a nine-year-old girl, that is instantly of interest. But never in a million years did I think the story would unfold the way it did.

Shannon showing the CCTV footage of her leaving school the day she disappeared: CCTV photos shown across the world. The last sighting of missing schoolgirl Shannon Matthews.

VO : (scenes of Dewsbury Moor, people in Shannon t-shirts, putting up posters, etc) Karen Matthews and her extended family live in Dewsbury Moor, an estate on the outskirts of Leeds. The strong sense of community here meant that word soon spreads that Shannon Matthews is missing. Neighbours are quick to start helping the police search. 
Julie Bushby : (Community Organiser) Everybody turned up. People that you don’t normally see. You know that they live on the estate but you’ve never spoken to them. But everybody was there, just trying to do their bit.

VO : (Karen Matthews in slow motion) 24 hours after she made the 999 call, the distraught mother, Karen Matthews, comes out of the house to make an appeal before the TV cameras.

KM : Shannon, if you’re out there, please darling, come home. We love you so much. Me and your Dad. Your brothers. Your sisters. Everybody loves you. Your Dad’s missing you so much, Shannon. He’s even out looking for you. Please come home, Shannon. If you’re out there, come home. If anybody’s got my daughter, my beautiful princess daughter, please bring her home safe. I need her home.

RE : (Karen Matthews in slow motion again) Not only were, erm, were the words that she was using all absolutely spot on, as though she had scripted those, full of emotion, it was her physical appearance as well that was absolutely striking. She was every inch the mother who didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to turn. I mean, you look at her eyes. They are the eyes of a woman in utter despair.

VO : (expert at a computer) But to a body language expert, like Professor Paul Ekman, there’s more to Karen’s behaviour than is immediately obvious.

DC : It’s very small. That shoulder (points to an image of KM on the screen in front of him) goes up a little bit. Twice in a row (he demonstrates with his own shoulder). Behaviour doesn’t occur randomly. It’s like a slip of the tongue. This is a gestural slip. She doesn’t know she’s doing it. Every time we have seen it – and we have seen it in many situations – the person has always been lying.

News reports of the Shannon case : Once again the police helicopter hovered over Dewsbury Moor… determined to leave no patch of ground within sight of Shannon’s front door unchecked.
VO : (Karen and Craig outside the house at night in ‘Find Shannon’ t-shirts, looking concerned) For the media, now encamped in Dewsbury Moor, Karen Matthews and her partner, Craig Meehan, sound and look like anxious parents. News interview with them outside one night.

Reporter : Are you hoping that this time next week you haven’t got to have something like this (meaning a big search event)?

KM : (nodding) Yes. I’m hoping she’s home by then.

VO : But away from the camera lens, people are beginning to notice a different Karen.

VO : (news reporter and camera in the street) Now a live broadcast came on that was actually taking place in the street outside the house. So one of the people in the house decided to test just how live it was by waving to the camera outside and rustling the curtains around. Then when this appears on screen about a second later, there was a big cheer in the room and Karen was one of those cheering. Now that seemed… That jarred. 
KM : (inside the house putting clothes into cupboards. Voice of neighbour) Well, looking back now, yes, she was shy and tearful in front of the cameras and really outgoing, laughed a lot and joked when there were no cameras around.

JB ??: She saw the cameras walking down the street and she was jumping up and down and laughing in the community house. But I just put that down to nerves.” KM walking around the neighbourhood, child gives her a card for Shannon.

RE : Karen just didn’t quite seem concerned enough. When she saw Shannon’s face on the screen she said ‘Here’s Shannon. She’s famous’. And I remember thinking: She’s not famous. She’s missing.

Police divers dredging an icy river: Police have left no stone unturned in their search for the nine-year-old. Every possible hiding place is being examined.

VO : Shannon Matthews has been missing for seven days. Still the search produces no clues. The police are under pressure. The Madeleine McCann case is in the forefront of people’s minds and police in West Yorkshire want to avoid the criticisms of the Portuguese investigation.

Policeman : This is the biggest operation in my 28 years of service that I’ve been involved in. But it is important that we do this work in order to find Shannon.

VO : Thirteen days after Shannon is first reported missing, the police set up a press conference to appeal for help. But it’s a changed Karen Matthews who appears on stage. KM taking her seat at the press conference.

RE : Now at this one, Karen’s face is enormously different. The red rings from her eyes have eased a lot. She still looks pale but she looks almost serene. She’s so calm.

KM : (at press conference) Well, it’s hard to sleep really. It’s just… House doesn’t feel the same without… with her not being there, really. It just…feels empty.

DC : There’s a certain distance in what she’s saying. She’s not really expressing how she feels. She’s actually saying what she wants people to know.

KM : (at press conference) Whoever’s got Shannon, just please let her go. Her family’s missing her. All her friends are missing her at school.

DC : We see very little signs of anguish, of anxiety, of fear. That was rather flat, emotionally. But why should it be there? She knows her daughter is just fine.

KM : (at press conference) Well I think that somebody out there who knows Shannon…they probably know me as well…and it’s…I just want her home safe, really.

DC : Pretty well everything she says is actually the truth. She says that Shannon is probably with someone who knows her.

KM : (at press conference) It makes me think now that I can’t trust people who are really close to me anymore. I just can’t trust them.

DC : She actually draws on what she knows to be the truth in order to keep the whole fiction alive.

RE : She doesn’t cry at all until towards the end when she is asked by the reporter if she could remember the last words that she and Shannon exchanged.

KM : (at press conference, nodding and starting to cry) I’ll see you at tea time, Mum. Love you. Wipes tears from her eyes.

RE : Then the tears come. So was that Karen again the actress turning the tears on or were those words genuinely said and they did pluck at Karen’s heartstrings?

DC : So now we see some genuine emotion. Why it occurs at this point, I have no idea. But the fact that she is capable of it tells us that its absence right from the start in the earliest points when you really expect to see it most severely is suspicious.

KM : (at the press conference) with a little teddy bear.

RE : Then Karen picks up Shannon’s favourite teddy bear and holds it very close to her face and poses for pictures that way. And it’s a scene that is heavily defined – as was much of the Shannon case – by the McCanns’ trauma. KM holding the teddy bear up. 
DC : She doesn’t quite know what to do with it. It’s totally different from the way Kate McCann carried the teddy everywhere with her as some sort of reassurance of her daughter.

RE : I think that is one of the most striking images of the whole Shannon situation. KM in her house with piles of posters on a table.

VO : Press conference over and Karen Matthews’ behaviour away from the cameras is getting harder to ignore.

PJ ??: I can remember going into the chip shop and Karen ordered fish and chips and some other stuff and I ordered my dinner and the guy in the fish shop said 'That’s all right, Karen. These are on us.’ And she turned round, started giggling, bold as brass and said ‘Oh I should get rid of one of my kids more often'.

RE : We’d arranged to go and see them to discuss the story I did for the following day. So I turned up, knocked on the door and walked in. And the house was empty. And then the next thing I heard was someone shouting ‘Boo!’ And then it was Karen, she’d been hiding behind the living room door, leaped out and tickled me on my sides. And I was absolutely flabbergasted by that. I mean, what do you make of that?

KM, Craig and an obscured child in the front room being interviewed for GMTV.

VO : On the 6th of March, Karen gives an interview to GMTV.

KM : Wherever she is, she’s going to be frightened. And it’s just breaking everybody’s heart on the street.

GMTV : And what would you say to anyone holding Shannon?

KM : (shaking head) Just let her go.

DC : Just let her go? (shakes his head) This is a NO (nods) This is a YES

Repeat of KM on GMTV saying 'Just let her go' while shaking her head.

DC : So she’s caught in a conflict between ‘Please let her go’ and ‘Don’t let her go – you’ve got to keep her.’ So I get something from this. It’s another gestural slip.

VO : The more Karen Matthews appears on camera, the more her behaviour is starting to raise eyebrows. KM and Craig in their house looking at cards and letters received from the public.

VO : Even to the untrained eye.

RE : She almost at times gives a strange half-smile. KM turning away and half-smiling at the camera.

 DC : If you’re an anguished mother, we wouldn’t expect that you would be smiling.

KM on the sofa at home, smirking.

DC : She’s getting a kick out of being able to pull the wool over the eyes of the community and the police. She thinks this whole plot is going to succeed. And so far it is succeeding. She’s on television. The community’s supporting her. Everyone believes her.

KM, Craig and some other adults outside the front door with a poster. Singing hymns with a vicar.

DC : On a number of occasions, she seems to have a slight sort of, some people might call it a smirk, a slight upturn of the lips. And I think that’s actually an indication of embarrassment of what’s going on...

KM looking embarrassed, smirking.

DC : which a person emotionally engaged with the whole process of telling the truth wouldn’t express. For a few occasions where she looks to Craig and you wonder ‘Is she thinking to herself, I wonder if he knows the truth?’ It sort of implies she’s checking him out.

KM turning to Craig and studying his face.

DC : But then she will turn her head into his shoulder, which is a way of getting her face away from the crowd and just hiding any sort of emotional expression.

KM burying her head in his shoulder so her face cannot be seen.

VO : And there’s a new tactic. KM with Megan Aldridge, Shannon’s best friend.

VO : Deflecting attention from herself by shifting the focus to Shannon’s best friend, 8-year-old Megan Aldridge.

Megan’s father : She definitely used Megan. ‘Let Megan stand here with me and Craig. Let Megan do this. Let Megan do that.

KM : (at press conference) Her bestest friend, Megan Aldridge, is missing her, because she’s the only friend she’s got is Shannon. Megan holding some balloons.

Megan's father : One time, when they were releasing balloons, Megan didn’t want to write a message for Shannon. And Karen said to Megan ‘You write this message and Shannon’ll get it and come home.’ I thought Karen was taking comfort in Megan but looking at it now it was just another piece of her plan. That’s all it was. It was a bit of extra leverage. Definitely.

Flat where Shannon was found.

VO : After 24 days of searching, there is astounding news.

News reporter : The long search for Shannon Matthews ended just over a mile from her home. The police’s trail of enquiries led them to the upstairs flat of a man who lived alone. The back door kicked in by police who went inside to find nine-year-old Shannon hidden in the base of a divan bed.

RE : I was at home on my day off. The phone rang. And it was my boss. So she said ‘Yep, Shannon’s been found in a flat in Batley Carr.’ We know very little at that point about it other than that she was safe. So I rang Julie. And the first thing Julie was shouting down the phone to me was ‘Is it true?’ Julie Bushby, holding a mobile phone in her hand, shouting to a group of gathered people ‘It’s true! And nodding her head. People start to hug one another.

News reporter : Yesterday ITV news filmed as family and friends realised Shannon was alive.

VO : But Shannon’s reappearance is not the end of the story. KM and Craig outside the house after they were told she had been found. Cameras flashing.

VO : As we’ll see, the biggest drama was yet to come. Zooms in on KM’s face.

Police activity at a roadside.

News reporter : It was just before 9 o’clock this morning that a man, on his way to work, discovered Carol Wardell’s body beside bushes in a lay-by.

VO :  Fourteen years before the Karen Matthews case, the TV cameras recorded another sensational appeal for help. There’d been a murder in Warwickshire.

News reporter : Detectives went to her home and found her husband bound and gagged and in a severely distressed state. Tony Bayliss walking along the road where the body was found.

VO :  Detective Superintendent Tony Bayliss was in charge of the investigation.

TB : I drove here and arrived at the scene and found Carol Wardell’s body lying here (points)

hen staff at the Woolwich building society in Nuneaton called police to say they couldn’t get in because their assistant manageress, Mrs Wardell, hadn’t turned up for work. Footage of building society, police tape across the front, zooms in on a bunch of flowers left by the door.

TB : Our theory was that it was a professional robbery in which Mr Wardell had been held captive at his home. Mrs Wardell had been forcibly taken to the building society and forced to open the safe and that for some reason after that she’d been killed.

Rod Chayter : (Mirror) “This was a huge story. A story like one I hadn’t covered before.” Press conference. Mr Wardell brought in sitting in a wheelchair. Sunglasses on.

VO : The police held a press conference featuring their star witness, the victim’s husband, Gordon Wardell.

TB : I thought it was very important for Gordon Wardell to take part in this press conference because I knew that it would keep the media interest alive and thereby give us more chance of getting information in from members of the public.

GW : (at press conference, shaky voice) I would urge anybody that knows anything about the death of my wife to come forward.

RC : His account was that he had been out to post a letter for Carol, gone for a pint in The Brooklands, driven back to Merridon, walked into his home, smelt cigarette smoke in the home of two non-smokers, walked into the lounge and there was Carol, trussed up at knife point.

GW : (at press conference) As I walked into the lounge, I was grabbed. That was the first time I saw my wife.

VO : But the assembled press corps smelt a rat.

RC : There was no medical need for him to be in a wheelchair whatsoever. There was some token hoarseness of the voice, soft speaking…

GW : (at press conference) The man had got hold of my wife and was threatening her with a knife. I was grabbed from both sides from the back and forced down. He was wearing a clown’s mask, a dark blue boiler-type suit…

RC : Almost from the word go, the story didn’t seem right. The clown’s mask seemed to be an unlikely extra detail…

GW : (at press conference) I lost consciousness and didn’t… The next thing I know I’m on the floor, bound and gagged.

RC : No sense of grief. No sense of loss. No sense of outrage. No real anguish at all. Just cold fish.

TB : Well, obviously following the press conference we were hoping that would stimulate a lot of public interest. Unfortunately it had the effect that a lot of people came to the view that it was Mr Wardell who was responsible for the offence. And I even received a phone call from my mother, who said, more or less ‘What are you messing about at? It’s obviously that husband who did it.’

DC : If you’re listening to him, you don’t feel upset for him. The natural human process of empathy somehow isn’t triggered.

TB : I’ve learnt after many years of police experience not to make snap judgements about people just on the way they happen to behave in a particular set of circumstances. It’s far more complex than that. And when you’re dealing with a serious like this, a murder investigation, you have to keep an open mind and only go where the evidence takes you.”

GW taking part in a police reconstruction.

VO : The police stage a reconstruction of Wardell’s movements on the night his wife died.

News reporter : Mr Wardell had re-traced every step he said he made on the night before the building society robbery. Mr Wardell said he hoped the police would make a breakthrough soon.” GW in the pub where he said he was.

GW : Hopefully, yes. That’s why I’m trying to do anything that I can to help.

RC : The reconstruction was just more of the same, really. Cold. Emotionless. Calculating. Unblinking. Just as he’d been at the press conference.

VO : Wardell’s story starts to unravel.

RC : He claimed to have been bantering with one of the bar staff.

Barman : No, I didn’t serve the man and all the staff have signed police statements to say they didn’t…they don’t recall seeing him.

RC : His story was falling apart in front of his eyes and he would have been blind and stupid not to see that.” Outside of the Wardell home, police tape surrounding it.

VO : It’s the fine detail of his lies that lead to Gordon Wardell’s undoing.

TB : He had said that a cloth was placed over his mouth and he smelt chemicals and the next thing was he came round 8 or 9 hours after he said he was attacked. And an eminent member of the Royal College of Anaesthetists contacted our incident room and said that he knew of no anaesthetic that would have this particular effect. The pub.

RC : I asked the question later, had he wet himself? Two pints. Tied up all night.

TB :: There was no evidence that he had urinated. This was nigh-on impossible. A forensic examination of the house didn’t show any third parties had been in that house on the evening concerned and it was a combination of things and a very complex circumstantial case against Mr Wardell. GW during the reconstruction.

DC : Gordon Wardell is very interesting in contrast to Karen Matthews because he takes a totally different approach. If you watch what he’s doing, he is giving an account that he has carefully thought out, carefully rehearsed, developed and then put this all together. GW in handcuffs.

VO : The jury unanimously declared Wardell guilty. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Picture of his wife’s face.

PE : The elaborate story that he tells the police suggests this was pre-meditated. Because that would take preparation to think through. So it’s likely that this wasn’t momentary loss of impulse, control or an argument that turned violent. It’s likely that he knew what he was going to do, prepared an elaborate story, memorised it so he could give it again and again consistently.

RC : The whole thing was utterly unconvincing. From the word go, really. I mean, it was fairly dreadful acting. I mean, it is very difficult to act. He was determined. But in terms of being convincing, not very good at all.” Other killers featured in this programme.

VO : Most killers try in vain to cover their tracks. But only a few are brazen enough to stand in front of TV cameras and lie to the world. In May 2006 in north-west London, Fadi Nasri paid another man to murder his wife, Nisha. Fadi Nasri and a photo of his wife in her police uniform.

News reporter : “She came out of her house in her night clothes to investigate a disturbance. Her husband had gone out to play snooker. He was called back by the neighbours to find her lying in a pool of blood.

FN : She had a good heart. Always very, very bubbly. Always willing to help everyone. Everyone’s grieving and missing her very much. Still in shock.

DC : One of the challenges of lying is to continue to invent and to give information that you are developing so one of the ways in which people cope with lying is actually by avoiding saying anything that’s not true.  
Police activity.

VO : The fact that Nasri didn’t commit the actual murder himself may have made that easier.

FN : Obviously someone’s got a guilty conscience. They’ll be worrying about what they’ve done or shocked or maybe it was an accident or a mistake or…or…whatever. You know, er… But someone’s got to know something.

VO : Soham, Cambridgeshire. 2002. One of the most infamous killers in recent times, Ian Huntley. Interviewed 11 days after murdering schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, his portrays no hint of emotion.

IH : (News report) It doesn’t help the fact that I was one of the last people to speak to them, if not the last person to speak to them. I keep reliving that conversation, thinking perhaps something different could have been said. Perhaps kept them here a little bit longer. Maybe changed events.

Reporter : Of course at the time it was just a normal chat with two girls that you knew.

Huntley nodding.

IH :  Well that’s just it. I didn’t even know them.

DC : If you listen to what he says, he actually says ‘I was the last person to see them’

Repeated footage of IH claiming to be the last person to speak to them.

DC : “How does he know he is the last person? If they were abducted by somebody else, somebody else would have seen them.”

Other press conferences featured in the programme.

VO : Other killers don’t appear so composed under the spotlight. The ones that look for public sympathy by shedding tears. Paul Dyson, crying.

PD : I love her to bits. I just want her back.

VO : But what lies behind the tears? Are they for real or just for show?

Deuxième partie