Expert: Stepfather falsely confessed in Rowan Ford murder
21 June 2010 / Joplin Globe
by Jeff Lehr
WAYNESVILLE, Mo. — Detective Brian Martin interviewed David W. Spears a day after Spears reportedly confessed to another investigator that he had participated in the rape and murder of Rowan Ford.
Martin, a Barry County sheriff’s investigator, wanted to know firsthand from the 9-year-old girl’s stepfather: Did he kill her?
“I can’t say that I didn’t,” Spears told Martin, according to a transcript of the interview that was presented at a hearing Monday in Pulaski County Circuit Court in Waynesville.
Martin pressed him to be more clear.
“Any way that you look at it, I didn’t save her,” Spears told him. “I might as well have (killed her).”
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Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco and an expert on police interrogations and the obtaining of false confessions, told the court that he interviewed Spears one year ago and reviewed case documents. He said he believes that Spears falsely confessed to [Chief Deputy Chris] Jennings after about a week of accusatory interrogations during which investigators used a number of coercive techniques that various studies associate with the obtaining of false confessions.
Leo said he thinks Spears gradually came to internalize a belief that he must have committed the crime even though he had no memory of it, and this produced a false confession. Leo told the court that the interview with Martin one day later shows that Spears still had no memory of committing the rape and murder of the girl, just as he had maintained all along under questioning before the reported confession.
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There is no trace evidence of the girl’s body having been inside the Chevrolet Suburban that Spears purportedly drove to [co-defendant Chris L.] Collings’ home, she said. That is significant because in his confession, Spears reportedly told Jennings that the men hauled the girl’s body in the Suburban to dispose of her down a sinkhole in McDonald County. On the other hand, [Spears' attorney Cynthia] Dryden said, there is trace evidence of Rowan having been in Collings’ pickup truck.
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Dryden told the court that only a small concluding portion of Jennings’ interrogation of Spears on Nov. 9, 2007, was taped. She said the portion during which he purportedly confessed to certain details of the crime was not recorded. Nor were several other interrogations of him by investigators in the days leading up to his confession, she said.
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and more, at
http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x1...father-falsely-confessed-in-Rowan-Ford-murder
