DETECTING DECEPTION 221amount of information and detail about an event or situation
may appear to be telling the truth; however, they may be pre-
senting a fabricated smoke screen they hope will obfuscate the
facts or lead the conversation in another direction. The truth
is revealed not in the volume of material spoken but through the
verification of facts provided by the speaker. Until the infor-
mation is verified, it is self-reported and perhaps meaningless
data (see box 58).
(10) Stress coming in and going out. Based on years of studying in-
terviewee behavior, I have concluded that a person with guilty
knowledge will present two distinct behavior patterns, in se-
quence, when asked a difficult question such as, “Did you ever
go inside the home of Mr. Jones?” The first behavior will re-
BOX 58: IT’S ALL A LIEI remember one case in which I interviewed a woman in Macon, Georgia.
For three days she voluntarily provided us with page after page of infor-
mation. I really felt we were on to something when the interview was fi-
nally over, until it came time to corroborate what this woman had said. For
over a year we investigated her claims (both in the United States and in
Europe), but in the end, after expending significant effort and resources,
we discovered that everything she had told us was a lie. She had provided
us pages and pages of plausible lies, even implicating her innocent hus-
band. Had I remembered that cooperation does not always equal truth,
and had I scrutinized her more carefully, we would have been spared
wasting a great deal of time and money. The information this woman had
given sounded good and seemed plausible, but it was all trash. I wish I
could say this incident happened to me early in my career, but it did not.
I am neither the first—nor will I be the last—interviewer to be bamboozled
this way. Though some people naturally talk more than others, you should
always be on the lookout for this kind of chatty ploy.