The Caller

In 2008, an article in the monthly FBI bulletin argued that 911 calls could contain clues for homicide investigations. “The caller, in fact, may be the killer.” Brett Murphy investigated 911 call analysis for ProPublica. You can find their new show, Paper Trail, wherever you listen to podcasts. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  This episode contains recordings of 911 calls and references to suicide. Please use discretion.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  How did you and Betsy meet?

• 1:20Speaker 05

  How did we meet? Well, we actually met at a local gas station where she was working. And I was a regular customer there and we just started making friends, I guess, and eventually went out on a date.

• 1:33Speaker 04

  What did you like about her?

• 1:36Speaker 05

  Well, her bubbly personality and she was just so outgoing and friendly with everyone she ever met. We would always chat and, you know, kind of flirt around and whatnot.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  Russ Feria met Betsy Meyer in 1995. On top of working at the gas station, Betsy ran a business DJing parties. She called it Party Starters. Russ helped her out. He was good with computers. In 2000, Russ and Betsy got married.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  She was just always a positive person, even when she felt bad. So, other than when we were alone in private, most people wouldn't know, you know, if she was feeling bad or sad at all.

• 2:20Speaker 04

  When did you find out about her cancer?

• 2:23Speaker 05

  That was in 2010, early 2010. We didn't know how bad it was or any of the prognosis as far as what needed to be done and how it was going to be treated. She had to have a full mastectomy and chemo and radiation treatment, and that was quite intensive.

• 2:43Speaker 04

  After about a year of going in for treatments, once a week, sometimes twice, Betsy and Russ planned to go on a cruise. It looked like Betsy's cancer was gone, and they were calling it a celebration of life. They bought the tickets for November of 2011, but in October, they got news.

• 3:05Speaker 05

  That's when we found out that the cancer had returned and it was actually in her liver. And the doctor kind of told us at that time that she had about, if we were lucky, maybe three years.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  They decided to go on the cruise anyway. How was she, how was she doing on the cruise and right after?

• 3:27Speaker 05

  Oh, she was doing quite well, actually. She got to do one of her dreams, which was swim with the dolphins. And when we came home, you know, we were looking forward to Christmas.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  They spent Christmas with Russ's family and Betsy's father. Betsy stayed at her mother's apartment outside St. Louis the next night. It was closer to the cancer center, and she had an appointment for chemo on Tuesday, December 27.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  So I was at home by myself and got up and started work like any normal day. I worked from home on the computer, and we texted back and forth throughout the day because I had a standing appointment with some friends of mine, and we like to get together and play games on Tuesday nights. I was trying to ascertain whether or not she needed a ride home afterwards, and at some point or another, she let me know that her friend Pam was going to bring her home, which I struck me as kind of odd, but I said, okay, well, if she wants to bring you home, I guess that's fine, and I'll see you there when I get done with my friends.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  What is your usual Tuesday night with your friends? What do you, what do you do?

• 4:39Speaker 05

  Well, we used to play some role-playing games, similar to D and D. However, those type of games, if you have a group of, say, four or five people that play, everybody has to be present. And that particular night, we had one friend that had to work. And so we sat around and watched a couple of movies. Actually, the second movie was kind of boring. And so everybody decided to, to split.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Ross and Betsy had talked on the phone around 5:00 PM. Ross got to his friend's house around 6:00 and left around 9:00. On the way home, he remembers he was hungry and stopped at Arby's. He says when he got to the house, he called Betsy's name, but didn't hear anything.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  I came around the corner and that's when I saw her on the floor.

• 5:25Speaker 04

  What, tell me what you saw.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  Well, I saw her laying in a pool of blood initially. And when I went down to the floor, I realized that there was a knife in her neck.

• 5:39Speaker 04

  Ross called 911 and told the dispatcher, "My wife killed herself. She's on the floor."

• 5:45Speaker 05

  I jumped to conclusions because she had gone through depression before and actually was on medication for depression and whatnot.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  The 911 dispatcher told Ross someone would be on the way and started asking questions.

• 6:00Speaker 05

  She wanted to know what kind of medications she had and was directing me to try and find those and read the labels off to her so she could get a list of those things.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  What were you thinking about? I mean, do, do you remember?

• 6:14Speaker 05

  I think I was in one state or another of mental shock for quite a while. And so I was just kind of on automatic mode, trying to follow instructions and help until somebody actually physically showed up.

• 6:29Speaker 04

  It took police about 10 minutes to arrive.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  They took me outside and I guess they were performing their initial investigation inside. And eventually, they came out and asked me if I could come down to the station, which I did. And then they started questioning me about all the events of the day, who she was with, who brought her home, if she had any enemies, or I guess it lasted overnight, the questioning. And sometime the next day, they decided and asked me if I could go take a lie detector test.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  After the test, an officer told him that he'd failed it.

• 7:08Speaker 04

  What were they saying exactly that you had done to Betsy?

• 7:11Speaker 05

  They said that I stabbed her over 50 times.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  And did they say why you had done that?

• 7:18Speaker 05

  They said that evidently I had found a change of beneficiary on some insurance, and so I had gotten angry and emotional and killed her for the money.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Four days before she died, Betsy had removed Russ as the beneficiary on her life insurance policy.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  On January 4th, Russ was charged with first degree murder. He was put in jail, and his trial began almost two years later, in November 2013.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  The prosecutor, Leah Chaney, argued that Russ had killed Betsy soon after he got home, then showered, then called 911.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Leah Chaney played the recording of Russ's call for the jury. It was the first time he'd heard it. What was it like hearing it played back?

• 8:12Speaker 05

  It was quite emotional.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  Brought back all of the feelings and everything that I was going through at the time.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  ...one supervisor to testify. And what did the nine one one supervisor say in their testimony?

• 8:32Speaker 05

  Uh, she tried to say that it sounded like I was acting it out.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  She hadn't answered Russ's call, but she listened to the recording. She said that Russ seemed hysterical until he was answering a question, quote, "And then it would go back to hysteria again."

• 8:55Speaker 06

  Lincoln County nine one one, what is the location of your emergency?

• 9:00Speaker 07

  (coughing)

• 9:03Speaker 06

  Okay, ma'am. Hello?

• 9:05Speaker 07

  Hello?

• 9:06Speaker 06

  Yes, I need you to take a couple of deep breaths so I can see what's going on. What is the address where you need us to come?

• 9:12Speaker 07

  One, one, one, one thirty C-Mac.

• 9:16Speaker 06

  Okay, what, um, what is the telephone number you're calling from?

• 9:19Speaker 07

  Zero, seven.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  Okay, who am I speaking with?

• 9:21Speaker 07

  My name is Russell Faria.

• 9:23Speaker 06

  Russell, what's going on there?

• 9:25Speaker 07

  (coughing) I just got home from a friend's house, and, and my wife, my wife killed herself. She's, she's, she's on the phone.

• 9:36Speaker 06

  Okay, Russell, I need you to calm down, honey, okay? I need you to calm down, take a couple of deep breaths, we're gonna get somebody on the way there, okay? Russell, how long were you gone today?

• 9:48Speaker 07

  Uh, uh, I was around five. I just got back, but she was at her mom's, and her friend was bringing her home, so I don't know what time she got home.

• 9:59Speaker 06

  Has she been depressed lately?

• 10:03Speaker 07

  (coughing) She's got, she's got, she's got, she's got cancer.

• 10:09Speaker 06

  She is, but she does have cancer. Russell, she, do you think that she's beyond help right now?

• 10:15Speaker 07

  (coughing) I think she is dead.

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Okay. Russell, I have a couple officers that are out there right now, can you do me a favor and open your front door?

• 10:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 06

  Okay, okay, well, good luck to you, honey. I'm gonna go ahead and hang up, and we're gonna try to call your mom, okay?

• 10:30Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 10:31Speaker 06

  All right.

• 10:32Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 10:33Speaker 06

  Bye-bye.

• 10:37Speaker 04

  One of the first officers to get to Russ and Betsy's house said it seemed like Russ was panicking, having difficulty talking and breathing. But when the officer tried to distract him, talking about where they grew up in the same neighborhood, Russ spoke normally and sometimes laughed. Police noted that when they left Russ alone, his emotions seemed, quote, "over the top." The trial lasted four days, and Russ Faria was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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• 14:03Speaker 01

  It's sort of this newsletter that's sent directly to police departments. I think it has something like a readership of 200,000.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  Journalist Brett Murphy. The bulletin featured an article with the title "911 Homicide Calls and Statement Analysis: Is the Caller the Killer?" The article said that 911 calls to report a death contain, quote, "uncontaminated clues", and that specific features of a call can help identify whether a caller is innocent or guilty.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Certain turns of phrase, different omissions, verbal

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Cues became indicators of guilt, guilty indicators. If someone calls 911 and they say one of these things or they don't say one of these things, then it means that it's more likely that they are guilty of the crime that they are calling to report.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Today, Brad is a reporter for ProPublica. But in 2021, he was working for USA Today on a series of stories about whistleblowers in police departments.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  I was on the road somewhere outside Shreveport, Louisiana, and I met with a woman who was telling me all about this really upsetting case.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  The woman's mother had died. Police said it looked like suicide, but the woman believed it was a murder by her stepfather.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And she kept mentioning this new thing called 911 call analysis and saying her stepfather had called police and he had failed this analysis that is called a COP scale.

• 15:46Speaker 04

  The 911 COP scale, an abbreviation for considering offender probability in statements, appeared on page 27 of the FBI bulletin. It was the title of a one-page worksheet with a list of checkboxes organized in two columns, labeled innocent callers and guilty callers.

• 16:09Speaker 04

  The article was written by an FBI agent named Susan Adams and an Ohio deputy police chief, a man named Tracy Harpster.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  Susan and Tracy met in 2004 at the FBI Academy in Virginia. Tracy was there for a 10-week training and Susan was there to lecture.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  She had written a dissertation a few years earlier on studying, quote, "linguistic and structural features of written statements to predict whether someone was telling the truth."

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Soon after the training, Tracy Harpster started a master's program in criminal justice. He asked Susan Adams to help with his thesis.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  They collected these 911 calls that included 50 people who were later convicted of some sort of crime and 50 people who were not.

• 17:04Speaker 04

  Together, they analyzed the 100 calls, looking for patterns. In the summary of their findings in the FBI bulletin, they wrote that guilty callers tended to give, quote, "rambling information." Another indicator was insulting or blaming the victim, or asking for help for themselves and not the person who died. Did police and prosecutors immediately seem interested in this research?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. People really loved it. It was originally just what researchers call an exploratory analysis, meaning there's a lot more research needed to see if it's valid and sound and should be applied in real-world situations. But this kind of just took off right from that exploratory analysis.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  After the bulletin came out, a sheriff sergeant in Colorado asked Tracy and Susan to help with a case she was working on. She sent a recording of a woman calling 911, saying her husband had died. They replied with a report. They'd found one indicator of innocence and 12 indicators of guilt.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Things like saying the word "blood" instead of saying "bleeding."

• 18:20Speaker 04

  They wrote, quote, "callers who chose to comment on the presence of blood at the scene, rather than on the condition of the victim, were more likely to be guilty. The focus appears to be on the bloody scene, rather than on her bleeding husband."

• 18:36Speaker 04

  They also wrote that the woman had, quote, "no sense of urgency and was too patient."

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Saying things like, "I'm sorry" and "thank you," that's what they would call being inappropriately polite. If you interrupt yourself, if your answers are too short, too long, saying "somebody," you know, that means there's a lack of commitment. Harpster and Adams said that witnesses to a crime should be able to report their observations clearly.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  They wrote that the woman, quote, "hesitated to commit to her narrative." They noted that she said, "God who would do this," which they found to be, quote, "a curious and unexpected question."

• 19:18Speaker 04

  Investigators kept asking Tracy Harpster for help, and he started teaching classes.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  He kept listening to more calls. He wrote a book about it and hit the road, training police departments, prosecutors, coroners, 911 dispatchers on this system that he developed.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  In 2014, police in Aspen, Colorado, were investigating the death of a woman named Nancy Fister. Nancy's friend Kathy Carpenter had called 911. She said she hadn't heard from Nancy for a few days, and she'd gone looking for her. She told the dispatcher she found Nancy dead in her closet.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  And the local police asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to help find who did it. And then there was an agent at CBI, who was one of Harpster's students. He stepped in to help analyze the phone call.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. 911, what is the address of the emergency? Help me. Oh, my God. Oh. What is the address of the emergency? He came into me. I was fucking no clothes.

• 20:31Speaker 06

  Is that a house business or apartment? It's a house. It's Nancy Fister's house. My, my friend. Ma'am, tell me exactly what happened. Okay. My, my friend had a...

• 20:46Speaker 07

  I got my friend in the closet.

• 20:51Speaker 06

  Ma'am, tell me exactly what happened.

• 20:54Speaker 07

  My, my friend came back from Australia, sent to sister and she had some people living there and she really pissed them off and um she made threats to them about owing money and I don't know but she, I couldn't find her, she didn't call and these people said the dog had been in the house and she hasn't been around so I went up there to get the dog and I was looking for her.

• 21:23Speaker 06

  I need you to tell me exactly what happened.

• 21:26Speaker 07

  I, I can't, my friend is in her closet, yes.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  In her closet?

• 21:31Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  Okay, stay on the line with me, we're gonna send help that way.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  A Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent wrote a report analyzing Kathy Carpenter's call.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  He noted that Carpenter had said, "Help me." She repeatedly interrupted herself, she didn't immediately answer when the dispatcher asked for the address, she provided extraneous information about Feister's dog.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  While the phone was ringing, Kathy repeated, "Oh my god, oh my god," which the agent found suspicious, writing, quote, "The caller gives repetitive phrases even before the dispatcher answers the call." He wrote, "The caller's very first statement is to request help for herself," and that, quote, "The caller repeated her friend was dead and full of blood." He also wrote, quote, "Innocent callers typically minimize the injury and rarely comment about the amount of blood unless the victim is currently bleeding."

• 22:42Speaker 04

  In total, the agent found 39 guilty indicators and zero indicators of innocence.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Eight days after he sent the report, police arrested Kathy Carpenter. She was in jail for three months before someone else confessed to the murder. It was one of Nancy's tenants, the ones Kathy talked about when she called 911.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  This totally upended her life, she told me. She lost her job, lost her home, her car was repo'd, diagnosed with PTSD, had to move in with her mother across the state. People still called her a murderer. And she was just trying to live the rest of her life in solitude.

• 23:31Speaker 04

  We'll be right back.

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  Head to talkiatory.com/criminal to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's T-A-L-K-I-A-T-R-Y.com/criminal to get matched in minutes. Talkiatory.com/criminal. The year after police dropped charges against Kathy Carpenter, Russ Furia was granted a new trial in Missouri. He'd been in prison for two years after a jury ruled he murdered his wife, Betsy. His lawyer had presented new evidence about another potential suspect, Betsy's friend,

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Pam Hop, the woman who had given her a ride that day. In the new trial, Russ's lawyer called the 911 operator who answered his call to testify.

• 26:15Speaker 05

  And in her opinion, you know, I wasn't play-acting at all.

• 26:21Speaker 04

  A TV station in St. Louis broadcast an interview with the operator, Tammy Vaughn.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  You can't fake that. You can't fake that emotion. In my, in my personal opinion, you can't.

• 26:33Speaker 07

  Vaughn says 911 operators are expected to get hysterical callers to answer questions.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  It's a redirection. It's a technique that communicators use to try to redirect, calm them down, ask them the question, and then whenever they have to focus back on the victim or the patient, then they do what's called a re-freak.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  The prosecutor, Leah Cheney, called the 911 supervisor from the first trial to testify again. This time, the supervisor said that she'd learned to evaluate calls like Russ's from Tracy Harpster's class.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  And she was saying all the reasons that she thought Fario was guilty based on his word choice and demeanor during the 911 call.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Brett Murphy. But the judge in the second trial wouldn't let the supervisor's testimony in his evidence. The new verdict was announced on a Friday.

• 27:32Speaker 05

  I was completely free, found not guilty on all counts and completely exonerated.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Leah Cheney didn't charge anyone else with Betsy's murder. But Russ's lawyer asked the US Attorney's Office to review the case. He wanted someone to look more closely at Pam Hupp. When Betsy removed Russ as the beneficiary on her life insurance, she had replaced him with Pam. Pam and Betsy had met as coworkers at State Farm. Betsy's sister said Pam was instructed to use the life insurance to support Betsy's daughters from a previous relationship, which she had not been doing. What did you think of her?

• 28:23Speaker 05

  Well, I thought she was a little weird. But, you know, there's a lot of people like that in this world. And I really certainly didn't suspect her of being somebody that was malicious at all.

• 28:36Speaker 04

  In 2016, Pam Hupp was arrested and charged with killing a man named Louis Gumpenberger. She was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Then, in 2021, she was charged with Betsy's murder. There hasn't been a trial yet.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  It is suspected and Pam is alleged to have done that. She will be facing trial in January of 2028 for said murder.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Since Russ was released, he's opened a motorcycle shop and gotten married. He says it's strange how many people have heard his 911 call.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  It's been played on Dateline six times now, and I don't know how many times on local news. And that's one of the things that people that I meet and that recognize me come up, and they're just very emotional about having had listened to that call.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  While reporter Brett Murphy was looking into 911 call analysis, he found emails Leah Chaney and Tracy Harpster had written each other after Russ was exonerated.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Harpster was looking for marketing material and a chapter in his upcoming book. And he wrote to the prosecutor saying, can you give me an endorsement, cite this case where you used it? And he says in his email, we don't have to say it was overturned. Just hook me up and make it sing. As I was working on this story, the months I was working on this, I listened to, you know, I must have listened to dozens, if not hundreds, of 911 calls.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Can you tell any difference? Could, you know, from someone who's ultimately guilty as opposed to someone who, who someone claimed was guilty?

• 30:32Speaker 01

  No, I can't. I mean, I, I can't. It's, to me, it always seemed, like when I first heard about it when I was in Louisiana, I, I thought it seemed far-fetched, but I don't know. So I wanted to look into it, keep an open mind. I thought I might come away with some ability to, like, predict one way or another, but I was never able. I mean, there would, there would be people who have the flattest of affects, other people who seemed absolutely heartbroken and distraught and in shock and trying to divine one way or another was, it was like reading tea leaves.

• 31:18Speaker 04

  If I were to call 911, I think the last thing on my mind would be that someone potentially was going to listen to that call and look at me as a suspect, depending on what words I chose to use.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  This was another concern of law enforcement and prosecutors I talked to, that there would be a chilling effect, right? People, if they were worried that their word choice might implicate them, that they might not want to call 911. And don't, like, don't get me wrong, the 911 calls are crucially important to a homicide investigator. It's kind of like the first record starts the timeline, you can check what someone said versus facts that come up later. It's a critical piece of evidence for, like, you know, for a number of reasons.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  But to use it in this way is deeply concerning to the people I spoke with who live and work in this world. There's one 911 call in Ohio. There was a couple of parents wailing on the phone. They were holding their child who had died. Harpster listened to the call and he wrote back to the police officer who sent it to him. He said, "Call me..." dot, dot, dot, "dirty." Like, the parents were dirty and he didn't like their 911 call. The mother who was on the phone in that case was never charged, right? So there's, like, these cases keep appearing in my research where it was applied, the

• 32:54Speaker 01

  911 call analysis was applied in some way, but it didn't work. The person was acquitted or never charged. And this never seemed to be evidence that maybe there was something wrong with the thing. But on the flip side, anytime 911 call analysis was used and that person was later charged or convicted, that was evidence that it worked.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Did you ever get a chance to interview him?

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I talked to him once on the phone. It was one kind of short conversation. I raised, you know, a couple of questions and concerns from some folks I'd been talking to at that early stage. I could not get back in touch with him.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  Brett says he sent him emails and texts for months. He'd asked Tracy Harpster if he could sit in on one of his classes.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  He said, no, it was only for law enforcement. I asked him, I was like, why can't I sit in? But he was, he's very protective of it. He told me that, you know, other people would use it for nefarious ends. People would start gaming their 911 calls.

• 34:01Speaker 04

  So he interviewed a former student of Tracy's and asked what it was like.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  There's a projector screen up top. It is the caller, the killer, in bold, red font, kind of looks like dripping blood. And he claims that one in three people who call 911 to report a death are actually murderers. I never found any record to support that figure.

• 34:26Speaker 04

  We contacted Tracy Harpster for this story, and he sent a response which includes the following. Quote, "We are not aware of any individual who has been arrested or prosecuted for murder solely based on a 911 call. The 911 call is but one piece of evidence that should be closely examined, just like any other."

• 34:51Speaker 01

  I think it's important to say that, from what I can tell in his, what he tells students and what people have, who have attended the class, told me, is that he really believes in this. He really thinks that he is helping these cases and bringing murderers to justice. And it's a kind of invaluable instrument for police and prosecutors to kind of help them solve otherwise potentially unsolvable cases. So I never got the sense that he was operating in bad faith in any way, or thought he was selling snake oil or anything. Sort of his life's work.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  Brett spoke with an FBI behavioral scientist who had worked with Tracy and Susan on the research.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  He told me, I just don't see that this, the work we did rises to the level of success by the scientific community. There's no definitive answer as to whether this is useful. And everyone that I know of has kind of failed to reproduce most of his findings, which has kind of, in their minds, sort of invalidated the research quite a bit.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Researchers at universities and the FBI have tried and failed to find evidence that the 911 COPPS scale method can reliably identify guilty callers. But in 2022, when Brett was investigating, some police and prosecutors still seem to be using it.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  There's not really like a governing body that's supposed to be vetting science or purported science that's getting adopted in the courtroom and works a lot on precedent. You know, if it makes its way into one case, then an attorney can cite that case, which is sort of the opposite of how science works. Science changes based on new information all the time. But conversely, the court system works on precedent. So what's supposed to be happening is that there's supposed to be something like a standard applied. It's called the Daubert standard or the Frye standard, in which judges are supposed to evaluate whether it stands up to scrutiny.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  The Daubert standard, from a 1993 Supreme Court case involving a pharmaceutical company, says that judges should look at an expert's methods to determine whether to allow them to testify, not just their credentials.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  There's all sorts of benchmarks it's supposed to hit. Has there been other studies that replicate the findings? Pretty much, is it sound?

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Brett reported that in 2016, the Missouri prosecutor, Leah Cheney, wrote an email to Tracy Harpster, quote, "Of course, this line of research is not recognized as a science in our state." She said she was finding ways to use 911 call analysis in court anyway. Quote, "Getting creative without calling it science."

• 37:49Speaker 01

  Often prosecutors were, they would have a detective or a dispatcher testify. Harpster himself wouldn't. And unless a defense attorney catches that this is, hey, that's not lay testimony. That actually sounds like scientific or fact testimony. I want to challenge that for a, for a dovert hearing or something like that. If an objection like that isn't raised, then it might slip right through and get right in front of a jury.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  Brett Murphy says sometimes judges would let 911 call analysis in his evidence because a state training board had certified Tracy Harpster's class.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  And I would go to those state training boards and they said, well, we're not actually vetting the curriculum.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  In one case in 2014 in Michigan, a 16-year-old named Riley Spitler had called 911 and said that he'd shot his older brother while playing with a gun.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  The police and prosecutors said he did it on purpose. Spitler always maintained that it was an accident. And the difference, of course, is manslaughter and murder.

• 38:58Speaker 04

  A detective on the case had taken Tracy Harpster's class.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I saw the checklist that he, he filled out, the detective filled out, and I listened to the call. Spitler is, seems to me kind of to be in shock. He's sobbing and hysterical. He told dispatchers that he shot his brother. He said it was an accident, said twice it was an accident. This was extraneous information. By saying the shooting was accidental is an indicator of guilt. Quote, "Because the call should be about help, not about justifying actions." At another point, Riley says, "His life is over. Oh my God, my life is over." Saying something like, "My life is over," shows that Riley was too focused on himself and not his brother. That's what the detective said. It was very me-focused.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  And then finally Riley said, "I think I killed him." And this is before he starts kind of breaking down. He says, "Oh my God, please no." Multiple times in that call Riley said he thought his brother was dead. The detective wrote that this is a guilty indicator because he was accepting his brother's death.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  I mean, I listened to this 911 call also. And I don't understand. I mean, it's confusing to know how you could even look for patterns in anything because Riley is, he's so upset that you can barely understand what he's saying.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was, I mean, just to put into some perspective, Riley was having so much trouble thinking in this moment. He couldn't figure out how to open his own front door to his house from the inside. And he punched his hand through the glass door to open the door. And this is, I think, sort of at, it's at the heart of this 911 call analysis, where there's just not enough known about how people speak during a moment of trauma or shock. A lot of people don't even recognize themselves. They have no memory of saying that thing that they said on a 911 call. They have no memory of doing certain things that they were doing during the 911 call.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  You know, you are, you are kind of outside of yourself. And it's one thing to have a hunch about someone because you think they, and police do this all the time, right? Because you think they're, they're acting odd. But to lend the air of science and apply these indicators of guilt, that takes it to this like other level in which it starts becoming something really dangerous.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Riley Spitler appealed his case on the basis of police prosecutor and judge misconduct and argued that the statement analysis used against him was, quote, junk science. He won, was resentenced for manslaughter and released from prison in 2020. He was 21.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajikko, Lilly Clark, and Lena Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Sederborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. You can find a link to Brett Murphy's reporting about 911 call analysis for ProPublica on our website. This isn't the first time we've had a ProPublica journalist on Criminal to talk about their investigative reporting. Often, their stories stand out to us. And they just started a new podcast last month. The show is called Paper Trail.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  If you're a fan of Criminal, there's a good chance you'll like it. The first episode is a story about generic medications and things going wrong at the factories they come from. And they have other episodes out, and coming up, about health insurance denials, national security, the courts, and more. You can listen to Paper Trail wherever you get your podcasts. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

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