The Reid Behavior Analysis Interview

Part 1: Do the case facts and evidence support the subject’s story?

The most important element in evaluating a suspect’s potential culpability in committing a crime or an act of wrongdoing is the content of their statement compared to the case facts and evidence. This underlying principle is almost always ignored by social psychologists, defense attorneys, or academicians who are critical of interrogation techniques in general and the Reid Technique specifically.

When they discuss and describe the Reid Technique investigative interview process, called the Behavior Analysis Interview (BAI), it is usually along the following lines as illustrated in the testimony of Richard Leo:

“A. …… And this is a pre-interrogation investigative method that Reid & Associates calls behavior analysis, where you, if you follow the Reid method, you ask somebody fifteen to twenty hypothetical questions; and in the Reid training, you're supposed to look at the person's body language and make a decision about whether or not, based on their body language in response to the questions, as well as the content of their answers, whether they're telling the truth or lying.· And that can become the basis for interrogating somebody……..Essentially it is training the person to be a human lie detector.· And that has been discredited, the behavior analysis interview method, pre-interrogation.”

Social psychologists, defense attorneys, or academicians who are critical of the Reid Technique never reference the underlying principle that all investigators follow: Do the case facts and evidence support the subject’s story?

Here are three examples of this principle.

A bank teller (we will call her Susan) incurred a $1,500 shortage in her cash drawer. In describing the sequence of events Susan stated that on the day in question, she was working as the drive-up window teller. She said that “the way things were going I was obtaining more large bills than I was passing out (referring to her transactions). So not to keep an overabundance of large bills in my drawer I took $1,500 – 11 $100 bills and 8 $50 bills – and went over to sell them back to the vault but Mary was on the phone, so while I was waiting for her to finish the call I saw that two customers had driven up to the window and I did not want to keep them waiting so I went back to the window and put the $1,500 in a side drawer in my work area. We got very busy at that point so it was a few hours before I went to get the $1,500 out of the drawer and when I opened the drawer it was empty, so I assumed that Mary had come over to get it, so I went over to her to get a credit slip for the $1,500 and Mary said that she never got a chance to come over to get the money.”

One of our basic principles for conducting the investigative interview is to not tell the subject what information we have, but rather, to ask them what happened and see if the information that they provide is consistent with the information that we already have or know. In the above case, the investigator had in his possession the teller tape, which he brought to Susan’s attention later in the interview:

Investigator: “And at 7:29 you entered the $1,500 transaction to sell.”

Susan: “To sell out, yes.”

I: “Why was it that at the time you bought the $2,000 you just didn’t give her the $1,500 at that time?”

S: “I was wrapping it.”

I: “Ok. Now your first transaction of the day doesn’t occur until 11:35, there’s a 6-minute gap there.”

S: “No that’s 7:35.”

I: “Right, I stand corrected.”

The teller tape reflects and is confirmed by Susan in the above dialogue that she decided to sell the $1,500 back to the vault before she had any customer transactions….contrary to what her original story was. If the investigator had brought to her attention the teller tape and the documented sequence of events before asking her what happened that day, it would have been very unlikely that Susan would have adopted the position that she only decided to sell the money back to the vault after a series of customer transactions.

In a second example, on a Saturday night, John was found dead in his basement, shot in the head. John worked in real estate and had a home office, which several of his co-workers also utilized on a regular basis. As part of the investigation, we interviewed a number of John’s colleagues, including a co-worker we will call Dennis. One of the questions that we asked Dennis was when was the last time he had been over to John’s house either on a social occasion or to work out of the office. Dennis replied that it had been quite a while, at least 4 or 5 weeks ago.

Unbeknownst to Dennis, the police had canvassed the neighbors and found a lady who lived caddy corner from John who was filming her kids playing soccer in the yard that Saturday morning and in the background, you could see somebody going up to John’s front door and then entering the home at about 10:00 am that morning. When the film was enhanced it was Dennis going into John’s house the day of the murder. The fact that Dennis lied about the last time he had been to John’s house was incredibly important. If we had done the interview differently, revealing to Dennis early in the interview that we had him on video entering John’s house on the day of the murder, he obviously would not try to claim that he had not been to John’s house for 4 or 5 weeks.

In a third example, a woman was given a prescription by her dentist for Percodan (Oxycodone tablets). When she gave the pharmacist the prescription, he noticed it was written for 40 tablets. Questioning the number of tablets, he called the dentist’s office to confirm the accuracy of the prescription. The office advised him that the prescription was written for 10 tablets, not 40, suggesting that the patient had changed the number on the prescription, which the patient denied.

Several days later, we interviewed the patient, whom we will call Margaret. During the interview, Margaret was adamant that she did not change the prescription and said that the dentist’s office obviously made a mistake when they wrote the prescription. As Margaret related the sequence of events when she went to the pharmacy, she said that when she handed the prescription to the pharmacist, “he noticed that it had been changed.” This statement was not consistent with Margaret's story that the dentist’s office made a mistake when they wrote the prescription – if her statement was accurate, then there was no change made to the prescription at anytime, so her reference to the fact that the pharmacist “noticed the change” was a disclosure of what she had done. Margaret subsequently went on to acknowledge that she did change the prescription from 10 tablets to 40 tablets and acknowledged that this was not the first time that she had altered a prescription.

As these three cases illustrate, the essential element to evaluate during an investigative interview is whether or not the case facts and evidence support the subject’s story….if they do not the investigator should continue the investigation of the subject.

In addition to the above consideration, one of the key elements in any investigation is to attempt to verify the subject’s alibi.