The Reid Technique has influenced nearly every aspect of modern police interrogations. Illustration by Leo Espinosa

On December 14, 1955, Darrel Parker came home for lunch from his job as a forester in Lincoln, Nebraska. A recent graduate of Iowa State, he had moved to Lincoln with his wife, Nancy, who worked as a dietician for a flour-and-noodle company and had a cooking show on the local television station. He found her dead in their bedroom. Her face was battered, her hands and feet were bound, and a cord had been knotted around her neck. The medical examiner later determined that she had been raped before the murder.

Parker called the police and spent the next several days in a fog of grief and sedation. After the officers questioned him, he took his wife’s body home to Iowa for burial. Several days later, while mourning with her family, he got a call from the attorney for Lancaster County, Nebraska. There was some new information, the attorney said, and he asked if Parker could come in and help with the investigation. When Parker arrived, he was led into a windowless room and introduced to a large, well-dressed man named John Reid.

Reid was a former Chicago street cop who had become a consultant and polygraph expert. He had developed a reputation as someone who could get criminals to confess. Rather than brutalize suspects, as police often did in those days, he used modern science, combining his polygraphic skills with an understanding of human psychology.

Reid hooked Parker up to the polygraph and started asking questions. Parker couldn’t see the movement of the needles, but each time he answered a question about the murder Reid told him that he was lying. As the hours wore on, Reid began to introduce a story. Contrary to appearances, he said, the Parkers’ marriage was not a happy one. Nancy refused to give Parker the sex that he required, and she flirted with other men. One day, in a rage, Parker took what was rightfully his. After nine hours of interrogation, Parker broke down and confessed. He recanted the next day, but a jury found him guilty of murder and sentenced him to life in prison.

The case helped burnish Reid’s reputation. He hired new employees, took on more clients, and developed more sophisticated methods of questioning. Today, John E. Reid & Associates, Inc., trains more interrogators than any other company in the world. Reid’s clients include police forces, private security companies, the military, the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the Secret Service—almost anyone whose job involves extracting the truth from those who are often unwilling to provide it. The company’s interview method, called the Reid Technique, has influenced nearly every aspect of modern police interrogations, from the setup of the interview room to the behavior of detectives. The company says that the people it trains get suspects to confess eighty per cent of the time.

A growing number of scientists and legal scholars, though, have raised concerns about Reid-style interrogation. Of the three hundred and eleven people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—including those convicted in such notorious cases as the Central Park Five. The extent of the problem is unknowable, because there’s no national database on wrongful convictions. But false confessions, which often lead to these convictions, are not rare, and experts say that Reid-style interrogations can produce them.

Last winter, I signed up for a basic Reid & Associates training course, in Boston. It lasted three days and cost five hundred and eighty dollars. There were about forty people in the class—mostly police officers, federal agents, and private security workers. The instructor, Lou Senese, joined the firm in 1972, shortly after he graduated from college, and is now a vice-president. A middle-aged Chicagoan who resembles a less edgy Dan Ackroyd with glasses, he has the manner of an affable salesman. He mixed lessons in interrogation with homespun stories about how he used his training to outwit a car dealer, and how his daughters used it to manipulate him. The hallmark of lying is anxiety, he said, and interviewing therefore involves watching for signs of anxiety and occasionally causing it.

The Reid Technique begins with the Behavior Analysis Interview, in which you determine whether the suspect is lying. The interview has its roots in polygraph testing, and involves asking a series of nonthreatening questions to get a sense of the suspect’s baseline behavior, and then following up with more loaded questions. Such “behavior-provoking questions” might include “What kind of punishment should they give to the person who committed this crime?” You can also imply that you have evidence, a technique called “baiting.” You might say, “We’re in the process of analyzing evidence from the crime scene. Is there any reason that your DNA would turn up there?”

Senese asked the class, “What do you think is more important, verbal or nonverbal behavior?” Intuitively, we responded, “Nonverbal.” “Yeah,” he said. “That’s the whole ballgame right there.” He told us that a video of an interview without sound would be more likely to reveal lying than one that included the audio. He showed us footage of a dark-haired woman being questioned about having changed her prescription for oxycodone from ten pills to forty. She gave equivocal answers, touched her face, and cast her eyes down and to the left. “I say that’s deceptive,” Senese pronounced. In another video, a bearded bank-robbery suspect sighed and shrugged while giving meandering answers. A teen-ager accused of setting fire to his family’s house responded with details that were oddly specific—such as arriving at school at 7:49 A.M.—while picking at his sock, jiggling his foot, and touching his cheek. When the kid paused to rub his eye, Senese turned and shot us a look.

If you decide that the suspect is lying, you leave the room and wait for five minutes. Then you return with an official-looking folder. “I have in this folder the results of our investigation,” you say. You remain standing to establish your dominance. “After reviewing our results, we have no doubt that you committed the crime. Now, let’s sit down and see what we can do to work this out.”

The next phase—Interrogation—involves prodding the suspect toward confession. Whereas before you listened, now you do all the talking. If the suspect denies the accusation, you bat it away. “There’s absolutely no doubt that this happened,” you say. “Now let’s move forward and see what we can do.” If he asks to see the folder, you say no. “There’ll be time for that later. Now let’s focus on clearing this whole thing up.”

“Never allow them to give you denials,” Senese told us. “The key is to shut them up.”

“That’ll be twenty even—ten for the wine and a ten-dollar tax on the hapless sweater.” Facebook

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Having headed off denials, you steer the subject toward a confession by offering a face-saving alternative. The process is called “minimization”—downplaying the moral consequences of the crime without mentioning the legal ones. In the case of the woman who tampered with her oxycodone prescription, you can suggest that the dentist did not give her enough pain pills and that she only wanted to save a trip to the pharmacy. “If you were a drug addict, you wouldn’t have changed the prescription to forty—you would have changed it to a hundred!” Senese’s 2005 book “Anatomy of Interrogation Themes” lists more than two thousand such excuses, in cases ranging from identity theft to murder. No matter how repugnant the crime, he told us, you can come up with a rationalization that makes it easier for the suspect to admit it. The standard Reid Technique manual, first published in 1962 and now in its fifth edition, suggests a way an interviewer can minimize rape: