I found this article
Homicide Studies 2009; 13; 69-93
originally published online Dec 5, 2008;
Tracy Harpster, Susan H. Adams and John P. Jarvis
Analyzing 911 Homicide Calls for Indicators of Guilt or Innocence: An Exploratory Analysis
It's about homicide and not missing children cases but looks interesting. I'll let you know if there's anything applicable but here's the citation in case anyone else wants to read.
It's readable online at Sage Complete. It requires a subscription; I got it through my library.
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Here is an earlier article from some of the same authors:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2194/is_6_77/ai_n27504386/
The link may have been here before.
Sorry to be quoting myself, I just want to include the citation. This is a very short post and I have to make it bigger somehow... :crazy:
I’ve read the above article now and I think it’s based on the same research as the 2008 one we've discussed here, only it’s written for a more scientific publication, with more statistics and more scientific background than the FBI bulletin article which is more practical in its scope.
Based on their research, Harpster, Adams and Jarvis list the following as indicators of potential innocence in their study of callers reporting homicide:
-Immediacy, including early pleas for help, pleas for help for the victim only, urgency of plea, demanding plea, voice modulation, verbal reaction of caller before the 911 dispatcher’s first cue
-Accuracy, including self-correction
-Validity, meaning plea for help
Indicators of potential guilt include:
-Evasion, including resistance in answering, huh factor, repetition, conflicting facts
-Extraneous information
-Distancing, including acceptance of death (dependent on whether there is a relationship between the caller and a victim), possession of a problem, inappropriate politeness, insulting or blaming victim, plea for caller only and minimizing their own involvement before, after or during the event. (I just seen him in his car-type of responses).
The possession of problem is a bit hard to explain so I’ll quote:
This variable occurs when an individual calls the 911 emergency line and reports a problem but does not ask for assistance from the dispatcher. This category is applicable only when the caller uses the word “I,” indicating personal possession of the problem. For example, the following dialogue occurred when a father called 911 to report that his son was having a medical event:
Dispatcher: 911, what is your emergency?
Caller: I have an unconscious child who is breathing very shallowly.
In this case, the father comments that he is in possession of a problem and refers to his problem (his dying son) as an unconscious child. When the paramedics arrived at the residence, the child had already died. The subsequent criminal investigation revealed that the father assaulted his son causing cerebral hemorrhaging.
The most statistically significant factor was extraneous information (in regard to the outcome, guilt or innocent) but most of the others ended up significant as well, with the exception of minimizing. I figure that’s because both genuine innocent bystanders who just happened upon a body by chance and killers who want to keep out of jail may say they just happened upon a body by chance. Self-correction wasn’t significant in a multivariate analysis, possibly because it came up in such a small number of calls. They note that there might be other important factors, such as self-interruptions, contractions and usage they didn’t study.
The authors also discuss that one limitation of their study is that they didn’t study calls made by people under 19 nor anyone who was severely under influence while calling. It is not known if Misty had taken anything that night. If she had it might account for some of the huh factor and the trouble she had answering simple questions. I think it would sound more in her voice if she was really seriously impaired, though. She was 17, I don’t think that two years would make very much of a difference but youth and lack of experience might account for some uncertainty and awkwardness with the procedure. Presumably the emotional reaction a loving and responsible teen stepmom has when a child is missing is pretty much as big as an older caretaker, though, and if one is mature enough to take the responsibility for two children 24/7 one has to be able to report them missing if need be. The biggest age group of callers in the study was those 19-28, so it's not like the people studied were all elderly seniors.
