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“911 What’s Your Emergency?”: Deception in 911 Homicide and Suicide Staged as Homicide Calls
Abstract
Emergency 911 calls are often the first indication a homicide occurred and serve as initial witness statements in an investigation. The current study explores deception among homicide and homicide staged as suicide 911 calls. One hundred suicides, 18 homicide staged as suicide calls, 31 homicides with uninvolved callers, and 26 homicide offender calls were compared. Little overlap was found in deception indicators between the current findings and previous studies. Caution is warranted when extrapolating from studies using only 911 homicide calls to equivocal death cases, where investigators consider if the manner of death is a suicide or a staged homicide.
... This information can influence first responder decisions or interpretations of other evidence discovered by investigators. Offenders seeking to avoid detection may deliberately initiate contact with law enforcement and provide false or incomplete information to misdirect the subsequent investigation (Miller et al., 2021). Thus, the examination of 911 calls may provide insight to investigators when evaluating the circumstances of a reported death. ...
... Subsequent to Cromer et al. (2019), Miller et al. (2021) analyzed 175 homicide and suicide calls using indicators from Harpster et al. (2009). Three of the indicators examined (use of the word "just" as a minimizer, urgency to the plea for help, and voice modulation) differentiated between innocent and guilty callers. ...
... The above studies were limited in that they only tested a portion of the COPS Scale indicators identified by Harpster and Adams (2017) and Harpster et al. (2009)or tested call types that differed from the homicide calls explored by Harpster et al. (2009;Cromer et al., 2019;Miller et al., 2021;O'Donnell et al., 2022). Other studies have examined alternative methods of distinguishing between truthful and deceptive 911 calls with varying success, but none have tested the ability of the COPS Scale in its entirety to discriminate between innocent and guilty callers (Markey et al., 2022(Markey et al., , 2023O'Donnell et al., 2023). ...
911 calls are often the catalyst for initiating a medical or law enforcement response to critically injured or deceased persons and may contain important details to assist first responders in quickly prioritizing resources. Callers providing deceptive information may impede these efforts. The current study examined the efficacy of the Considering Offender Probability in Statements (COPS) Scale in judging whether a 911 caller was or was not involved in the death or serious physical injury of the individual whom they were reporting. Specifically, the current study examined whether sworn law enforcement officers using the COPS Scale could correctly distinguish 911 callers who did not cause the person’s death from 911 callers who did cause the person’s death. Agreement among participants on the presence of COPS Scale indicators in calls was generally poor. All guilty and innocent indicators were predictive of participant judgments of callers’ guilt or innocence. However, most indicators were not predictive of guilty or innocent calls, and several were more common in the opposite type of call. The innocence or guilt of 911 callers was mischaracterized in approximately four out of every 10 calls and also influenced questions the law enforcement officers would ask of the caller. Our findings do not support the use of the COPS Scale as a measure of innocence or guilt among 911 callers and suggest its use could detrimentally influence investigative strategies.
... Several recent studies have endeavored to verify the validity of the COPS scale by focusing on its items. Researchers from academic backgrounds, such as Cromer et al. (2019), as well as those from law enforcement, including Miller et al. (2021) and O'Donnell et al. (2022), led these replication efforts. In these studies, multiple coders, unaware of whether the callers were FAC or TRC, rated 911 calls using various items from the COPS scale. ...
... However, these replication studies have certain limitations. First, the research by Miller et al. (2021) and Cromer et al. (2019) only investigated a fraction of the COPS scale items-45% and 24%, respectively. Second, the most exhaustive study, which employed almost the entire COPS scale, was centered on deception in missing person calls, not homicide calls (O'Donnell et al., 2022). ...
... M. Markey, Feeney, Berry, Hopkins, & Creedon, 2022). Aligning with previous 911 research by the FBI, the Army Criminal Investigation Command, and academic researchers (Cromer et al., 2019;Miller et al., 2021;O'Donnell et al., 2022), the Interpersonal Research Lab database primarily collected its calls from open-source public data, such as news outlets, police department releases, and archives. The selection of 911 calls for this database adhered to the standards set by prior researchers (Cromer et al., 2019;P. ...
The Considering Offender Probability Statements (COPS) scale is a checklist designed to discern caller deception in 911 homicide calls. The current study evaluated the scale’s ability to distinguish between false allegation callers and true report callers using a data set of one hundred 911 homicide calls. Results indicated an inability of the COPS scale to differentiate false allegation callers from true report callers, casting doubt on its discriminative ability. Further scrutiny of the individual items of the COPS scale revealed discrepancies, with certain items contradicting the scale’s expected outcomes. Moreover, a review of effect sizes from past studies, including those by the scale’s creators and independent researchers, indicated potential issues in the initial research by the COPS scale’s creators. This was evidenced by the consistently lower effect sizes reported in independent studies and by effect sizes that seemed improbable by the COPS scale creators. These results underscore the need for more comprehensive, empirically backed methods in the development of deception detection tools. They also emphasize the critical need for collaborative endeavors in enhancing and substantiating these tools before law enforcement agencies use them in criminal investigations.
... Other studies that have been used to review the COPS scale have focused on assessing the validity of the individual indicators in COPS (Cromer et al. 2019;Miller et al. 2021). These studies selected a handful of indicators from the COPS scale, with the inclusion of indicators from their own development, and then compared their presence or absence in guilty and innocent calls. ...
... These studies selected a handful of indicators from the COPS scale, with the inclusion of indicators from their own development, and then compared their presence or absence in guilty and innocent calls. Several studies reported no significant differences between several of the individual indicators in the COPS scale (Cromer et al. 2019;Miller et al. 2021). The reason as to why these studies report findings that are at odds with Harpster et al. (2009) may be attributed to their analytical approach. ...
... Research on emergency calls typically looks at individual indicators and develops sum or average scores (Cromer et al. 2019;Miller et al. 2021;O'Donnell et al. 2022). The shift of focus from 'how many' to 'when' has been supported in other forensic linguistic research (Elms & Keatley, 2023;Elms et al. 2024;. ...
The utilisation of emergency calls to stage false and misleading narratives can assist offenders in concealing their criminal activity. The majority of emergency call analyses focus on detecting deception; however, investigating the complex temporal ordering of verbal indicators with a measure of proximity may offer new inductive investigative insights. The current research took a novel approach to analysing emergency calls by focusing on the temporal placement of verbal indicators with a measure of proximity coefficients. Results showed that several important differences existed in the temporal ordering of indicators that occur at the start and end of staged and authentic calls. These findings offer an insight as to influence of saliency and the competing priorities that exist between staged and authentic emergency calls. This is the first research to explore the temporal ordering of indicators in emergency calls and to provide a basis for its tentative application to interview strategies.
... Research into indicators of veracity and deception has expanded in recent years (Markey et al., 2022;Miller et al., 2020). Several of these studies have attempted to replicate findings of a study conducted by Harpster et al. (2009), in which the authors examined one hundred emergency calls made in the United States by persons reporting a homicide. ...
... A larger 2020 study examined 175 emergency calls of reported homicides and suicides and found only four of 28 indicators based on Harpster et al. (2009) discriminated between truthful and deceptive callers. Consistent with Harpster et al. (2009), deceptive callers repeated the word "just" more times throughout the call than did truthful callers (Miller et al., 2020). However, other effects were not in the expected direction. ...
... These calls included caregivers who were unaware of the circumstances of the child's disappearance, as well as those who were responsible for the disappearance but concealed their involvement from dispatchers. The authors' findings were largely consistent with that of Miller et al. (2020). Of the forty-three 911 COPS Scale© variables tested, only six were supported. ...
... In an attempt to overcome the limitations of laboratory studies, some researchers have focused on lies produced in the context of high-stakes, real-world cases where the consequences for the (alleged) deceiver can be severe: emergency calls (Harpster et al., 2009;Laforest, 2012;Laforest et al., 2020;Miller et al., 2021), investigative interviews with suspects (Mann et al., 2002;Shuy, 1998), criminal trials (Fornaciari and Poesio, 2013), or plea appeals in the media for the return of a missing loved one (Brinke and Porter, 2012;Wright Whelan et al., 2014). The methodologies used in these studies are similar: the discourse of individuals who have provided accurate information is compared to that of individuals who, post-investigation, were found guilty of the alleged crime or of being an accomplice to it. ...
The objective of this study is to investigate how individuals convicted of online sexual crimes use language to deceive police investigators during investigative interviews. Discursive and interactional cues that may indicate deception were identified based on the suspects’ responses to questions asked by the police investigator, that is, whether the questions had a high or low potential to elicit deceit. To refine the selection of deceptive answers to be analyzed, the information that was contradicted or questioned during the interview was then targeted for each suspect. The results show that seven elements – grammatical negations, argumentative markers, uncertainty markers, use of the conditional, ignorance markers, sincerity markers, and volubility – distinguish between truthful and deceptive responses. Findings suggest that these elements are used as strategies to convince the investigator of the truthfulness of the (deceptive) statements being made and to avoid providing information that could be refuted during the interview.
Previous research has examined how callers and call-takers use linguistic resources to negotiate requests in emergency calls and has identified differences in calls where callers are being deceptive. However, no scholars have yet examined the discourse of swatting calls or emergency calls wherein an individual fabricates an emergency to inspire an armed police response in the form of a ‘Special Weapons and Tactics’ (SWAT) team. The current study addresses these gaps in a genre-based discourse analysis of caller moves and steps in a sample of 15 calls. We show how swatting callers use specific rhetorical moves (e.g. mentioning vulnerable victims, threatening future violence) that take advantage of police deployment prioritization protocols to escalate the urgency of their fictitious emergencies. Consequently, this study improves scholarly understanding of linguistic features used to request help in dangerous situations and introduces potential avenues for law enforcement to better identify ‘swatting’ calls in the future.
This study examined the use of machine learning in detecting deception among 210 individuals reporting homicides or missing persons to 911. The sample included an equal number of false allegation callers (FAC) and true report callers (TRC) identified through case adjudication. Independent coders, unaware of callers’ deception, analyzed each 911 call using 86 behavioral cues. Using the random forest model with k-fold cross-validation and repeated sampling, the study achieved an accuracy rate of 68.2% for all 911 calls, with sensitivity and specificity at 68.7% and 67.7%, respectively. For homicide reports, accuracy was higher at 71.2%, with a sensitivity of 77.3% but slightly lower specificity at 65.0%. In contrast, accuracy decreased to 61.4% for missing person reports, with a sensitivity of 49.1% and notably higher specificity at 73.6%. Beyond accuracy, key cues distinguishing FACs from TRCs were identified and included cues like “Blames others,” “Is self-dramatizing,” and “Is uncertain and insecure.”
The current study examined verbal cues of veracity and deception in 911 calls reporting homicides or suicides of another person. Specifically, the current study compared differences in the presence/absence and number of potential verbal indicators between a sample of deceptive callers who concealed their role in causing the person's death and truthful callers who did not cause the person's death. Results demonstrate consistency with previously proposed indicators of veracity and deception in 911 calls. More precisely, a greater number of self-handicapping statements and descriptions of physical sensations were made by deceptive individuals, whereas truthtellers were more likely to spontaneously self-correct inaccurate statements. Practical implications and limitations are discussed.
The question of whether discernible differences exist between liars and truth tellers has interested professional lie detectors and laypersons for centuries. In this article we discuss whether people can detect lies when observing someone's nonverbal behavior or analyzing someone's speech. An article about detecting lies by observing nonverbal and verbal cues is overdue. Scientific journals regularly publish overviews of research articles regarding nonverbal and verbal cues to deception, but they offer no explicit guidance about what lie detectors should do and should avoid doing to catch liars. We will present such guidance in the present article. The article consists of two parts. The first section focuses on pitfalls to avoid and outlines the major factors that lead to failures in catching liars. Sixteen reasons are clustered into three categories: (a) a lack of motivation to detect lies (because accepting a fabrication might sometimes be more tolerable or pleasant than understanding the truth), (b) difficulties associated with lie detection, and (c) common errors made by lie detectors. We will argue that the absence of nonverbal and verbal cues uniquely related to deceit (akin Pinocchio's growing nose), the existence of typically small differences between truth tellers and liars, and the fact that liars actively try to appear credible contribute to making lie detection a difficult task. Other factors that add to difficulty is that lies are often embedded in truths, that lie detectors often do not receive adequate feedback about their judgments and therefore cannot learn from their mistakes, and that some methods to detect lies violate conversation rules and are therefore difficult to apply in real life. The final factor to be discussed in this category is that some people are just very good liars. The common errors lie detectors make that we have identified are examining the wrong cues (in part, because professionals are taught these wrong cues); placing too great an emphasis on nonverbal cues (in part, because training encourages such emphasis); tending to too-readily interpret certain behaviors, particularly signs of nervousness, as diagnostic of deception; placing too great an emphasis on simplistic rules of thumb; and neglecting inter- and intrapersonal differences. We also discuss two final errors: that many interview strategies advocated by police manuals can impair lie detection, and that professionals tend to overestimate their ability to detect deceit. The second section of this article discusses opportunities for maximizing one's chances of detecting lies and elaborates strategies for improving one's lie-detection skills. Within this section, we first provide five recommendations for avoiding the common errors in detecting lies that we identified earlier in the article. Next, we discuss a relatively recent wave of innovative lie-detection research that goes one step further and introduces novel interview styles aimed at eliciting and enhancing verbal and nonverbal differences between liars and truth tellers by exploiting their different psychological states. In this part of the article, we encourage lie detectors to use an information-gathering approach rather than an accusatory approach and to ask liars questions that they have not anticipated. We also encourage lie detectors to ask temporal questions-questions related to the particular time the interviewee claims to have been at a certain location-when a scripted answer (e.g., "I went to the gym") is expected. For attempts to detect lying about opinions, we introduce the devil's advocate approach, in which investigators first ask interviewees to argue in favor of their personal view and then ask them to argue against their personal view. The technique is based on the principle that it is easier for people to come up with arguments in favor than against their personal view. For situations in which investigators possess potentially incriminating information about a suspect, the "strategic use of evidence" technique is introduced. In this technique, interviewees are encouraged to discuss their activities, including those related to the incriminating information, while being unaware that the interviewer possesses this information. The final technique we discuss is the "imposing cognitive load" approach. Here, the assumption is that lying is often more difficult than truth telling. Investigators could increase the differences in cognitive load that truth tellers and liars experience by introducing mentally taxing interventions that impose additional cognitive demand. If people normally require more cognitive resources to lie than to tell the truth, they will have fewer cognitive resources left over to address these mentally taxing interventions when lying than when truth telling. We discuss two ways to impose cognitive load on interviewees during interviews: asking them to tell their stories in reverse order and asking them to maintain eye contact with the interviewer. We conclude the article by outlining future research directions. We argue that research is needed that examines (a) the differences between truth tellers and liars when they discuss their future activities (intentions) rather than their past activities, (b) lies told by actual suspects in high-stakes situations rather than by university students in laboratory settings, and (c) lies told by a group of suspects (networks) rather than individuals. An additional line of fruitful and important research is to examine the strategies used by truth tellers and liars when they are interviewed. As we will argue in the present article, effective lie-detection interview techniques take advantage of the distinctive psychological processes of truth tellers and liars, and obtaining insight into these processes is thus vital for developing effective lie-detection interview tools.
This study is a successful proof of concept of using automated text analysis to accurately classify transcribed 911 homicide calls according to their veracity. Fifty matched, caller-side transcripts were labeled as truthful or deceptive based on the subsequent adjudication of the cases. We mined the transcripts and analyzed a set of linguistic features supported by deception theories. Our results suggest that truthful callers display more negative emotion and anxiety and provide more details for emergency workers to respond to the call. On the other hand, deceivers attempt to suppress verbal responses by using more negation and assent words. Using these features as input variables, we trained and tested several machine-learning classification algorithms and compared the results with the output from a statistical classification technique, discriminant analysis. The overall performance of the classification techniques was as high as 84% for the cross-validated set. The promising results of this study illustrate the potential of using automated linguistic analyses in crime investigations.
Offender forensic awareness may negatively impact on an investigation. The detection avoidance behaviours of 22 police-trained murderers were examined. Offenders with forensic awareness appear to use many detection avoidance strategies depending on their relationship with the victim and whether they stage the crime scene. Common themes included body disposal; planning and making threats to kill; a history of deception; and interfering with the investigation.
This book provides police investigators and homicide detectives with a practical method of analyzing 911 homicide calls to uncover the truth. A structured analysis of 911 homicide calls can directly aid in developing investigative leads, planning interviews and solving cases. Case examples present proven, reliable methods as to when a caller is telling the truth or not. This book lays out a framework to analyze the call to determine truth from fiction. Every member of the investigative team, from call-taker to first responder, investigator, coroner's investigators, and prosecutor, can contribute to the success of investigations through their knowledge of 911 call analysis.
Each year, numerous 911 calls reporting a homicide are received by emergency communications centers; a small percentage of the calls are made by the perpetrator. These calls are recorded at times of great stress and are the first versions of what the callers purport to know. A linguistic analysis of the 911 call can lead to the development of hypotheses regarding a caller’s truthfulness, which can help to guide the initial investigative strategy. The present study examined 14 linguistic variables and an additional 4 mitigating variables in an effort to determine whether any of those variables, individually or in combination, were predictive of the guilt or innocence of the caller. A sample of 50 calls to 911 centers was examined. This study identified the presence of a variety of linguistic behaviors that were correlated with an ultimate finding of guilt or innocence.
Staged crime scenes involve an offender deliberately altering evidence to simulate events to mislead investigators. Despite likely occurring more often than reported in the literature due to success in offender deception, the exact frequency of staged crime scenes is unknown. In an attempt to bridge this gap, a legal database was searched for detected staged scenes. A total of 115 cases were examined, and this study reports on 16 staged suicides that were examined through descriptive analysis. Findings indicate the frequent involvement of firearms, hanging, or asphyxia, and that offenders are usually known to victims, although not necessarily intimately.
A staged crime scene involves deliberate alteration of evidence by the offender to simulate events that did not occur for the purpose of misleading authorities (Geberth, 2006; Turvey, 2000). This study examined 115 staged homicides from the USA to determine common elements; victim and perpetrator characteristics; and specific features of different types of staged scenes. General characteristics include: multiple victims and offenders; a previous relationship between parties involved; and victims discovered in their own home, often by the offender. Staged scenes were separated by type with staged burglaries, suicides, accidents, and car accidents examined in more detail. Each type of scene displays differently with separate indicators and common features. Features of staged burglaries were: no points of entry/exit staged; non-valuables taken; scene ransacking; offender self-injury; and offenders bringing weapons to the scene. Features of staged suicides included: weapon arrangement and simulating self-injury to the victim; rearranging the body; and removing valuables. Examples of elements of staged accidents were arranging the implement/weapon and re-positioning the deceased; while staged car accidents involved: transporting the body to the vehicle and arranging both; mutilation after death; attempts to secure an alibi; and clean up at the primary crime scene. The results suggest few staging behaviors are used, despite the credibility they may have offered the façade. This is the first peer-reviewed, published study to examine the specific features of these scenes, and is the largest sample studied to date.
Purpose
The study examines whether the use of forensic awareness strategies increases the chance of avoiding police detection in sexual homicide.
Methods
Logistic and negative binomial regression analyses are used on a sample of 350 cases of sexual homicide – 250 solved and 100 unsolved cases – in order to determine if forensic awareness strategies are related to the status of the case (i.e., solved versus unsolved) and the number of days before body recovery, while controlling for certain victim characteristics.
Results
Although an offender’s use of precautions does not seem to increase the offender’s chance of avoiding police detection, some modus operandi behavior adopted by the offender at the crime scene may help to delay the discovery of the victim, and thus delay the offender’s apprehension. Moreover, the likelihood of whether or not a sexual murderer is apprehended varied significantly across victim characteristics.
Conclusion
Some offenders seem to exhibit rational thinking in targeting certain types of victims and in adopting certain strategies in order to delay body recovery. Number of days until body recovery is a more appropriate measure of detection avoidance than case status, as it is not biased by administrative rules or timing of data entry.
A nonrandom national U.S. sample of 946 homicide crime scenes--supplied by the FBI Behavioral Science Unit for purposes of research--was studied to delineate the prevalence, types, levels, and motives for staging in domestic, nonserial sexual, serial sexual, and general felony homicides. Stagers were found to be a relatively small group who employ a variety of methods to alter the crime scene in an attempt to redirect the investigation away from themselves as logical suspects. Results also suggest that different types of homicides have different staging rates based primarily on the relationship (or connection) between offender and victim. Implications for investigations and understanding this type of crime scene behavior are discussed.