More than 60 years ago, over 200 people confessed to the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby (Macdonald & Michaud, 1987; Rogge, 1959). Then in the late 1940s, more than 30 people falsely confessed to the murder and mutilation of Elizabeth Short, an aspiring Hollywood actress whose severed remains were found in a vacant Los Angles lot. The Short case received nationwide attention and became known as the “Black Dahlia” murder, due to descriptions of Ms. Short having always dressed in black. The Short case is still unresolved (Macdonald & Michaud, 1987; Nash, 1983; Rogge, 1959). Still another instance of a false confession is the story of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who lost his pipe while visiting a concentration camp. A search followed, but upon returning to his car the pipe was discovered on his seat. The camp commandant protested that six prisoners have already confessed to stealing it (Macdonald & Michaud, 1987).
The above high profile cases are included to illustrate two general points to the reader. First, false confessions can and do occur, and they are not a new phenomenon. In fact, Munsterberg (1908) was the first psychologist to write on the subject nearly a century ago. In his classic book, On the Witness Stand, Munsterberg devotes an entire chapter to untrue confessions. Many of Munsterberg’s observations on false confessions (e.g., “in some instances the confessing persons really believed themselves guilty” [p.146]; “pseudo-confessions may thus arise in men who are distinctly not ill” [p. 150]) are strikingly similar to what modern research has revealed on the subject. Second, false confessions occur in widely publicized types of cases in alarming numbers without any type of influence or pressure from the criminal justice system. When one takes this fact into account and further considers the influence of situational features (e.g., interpersonal pressure) during an interrogation, a better understanding of false confessions is fostered.
There are several possible reasons for why people give voluntary false confessions. A pathological need for fame and recognition (Radelet, Bedau, & Putnam, 1992) or as Note (1953) phrased a “morbid desire for notoriety” (p.382) could account for the false confessions in cases which receive widespread public attention such as the Lindbergh kidnapping case and the “Black Dahlia” murder. Radelet et al. (1992) reported a case in which a man falsely confessed to a murder to impress his girlfriend. Gudjonsson (1999) conducted an extensive psychological evaluation of Henry Lee Lucas who is estimated to have confessed to over 600 murders. Gudjonsson concluded that Lucas “would say and do things for immediate gain, attention and reaction.....he was eager to please and impress people....the notoriety aspect of the confessions was appealing to him and fed into his psychopathology” (p.423).
This is where I found the text: http://tinyurl.com/6egtz Which is an HTML version of a PDF (I had to copy and paste each line individually!), found through searching "voluntary false confession".
