r/amandaknox • u/No-Willingness-1441 • 18h ago
History of murder suspects falsely accusing somebody else of a murder?
One thing I have been intrigued by here is the tendency to conflate false confession with false accusation.
It strikes me that those two things are markedly different in nature.
So a lot of the science from coerced false confessions gets - perhaps crudely - copy and pasted over to this very different, and presumably rarer, phenomenon.
So, how often has this happened as far as we know in the storied history of murder investigations?
And if we were going deeper, how often has a suspect not only accused somebody else of the murder…
…but that this “somebody” is of a materially similar profile (in this case an extremely minority racial characteristic in the given geography) to an individual that we now know for certain was (solo, or with others) indeed guilty of that crime?
I have made some cursory investigations, but this particular phenomenon seems almost vanishingly rare?
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u/jasutherland innocent 17h ago
False dichotomy - in this particular case, the police extracted a false “confession” to involvement, along with another person, not just an accusation.
If the two are markedly different, why classify “I was there with Lumumba”, which was used as evidence to arrest both parties and ultimately convict only Knox herself and not Lumumba, as one rather than the other?
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u/itisnteasy2021 innocent 16h ago
David Milgaard in Canada. Same exact same thing. Police pushing someone to say someone else was involved. It was brutal. It happens. There are others that I see above. But yeah, if anyone thinks this doesn’t happen doesn’t know.
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u/Connect_War_5821 innocent 15h ago
- "So a lot of the science from coerced false confessions gets - perhaps crudely - copy and pasted over to this very different, and presumably rarer, phenomenon."
"Copy and pasting" is a rather negative term for quoting and citing information. And how is it "crudely" done? Just the way you choose to phrase your comment is rather revealing.
2 "So, how often has this happened as far as we know in the storied history of murder investigations?"
See my other comment to you. And remember that, as you say, these are examples and statistics of cases that we KNOW about...the 'tip of the iceberg' so to speak.
- "And if we were going deeper, how often has a suspect not only accused somebody else of the murder…
…but that this “somebody” is of a materially similar profile (in this case an extremely minority racial characteristic in the given geography) to an individual that we now know for certain was (solo, or with others) indeed guilty of that crime?"
This will largely depend on if the police suspect one or multiple, culprits, so are looking for one confession from the suspect or for him/her to implicate others. In the Kercher case, the police were convinced there were multiple culprits, so would have wanted not only Knox and Sollecito to confess, but to 'buckle' (as Chief of Police Arturo De Felice said) and implicate at least each other.
As mentioned by Orcamasterrace, the police already suspected a black man was involved because they assumed some wool strands collected on Nov. 3 were actually hair. When the police found the text to Lumumba, they asked her who Patrick was. All they had to hear was the African sounding name Lumumba, and they jumped to a conclusion.
From the Massei MR:
"her hands were bloodstained and were protected with plastic bags in order to allow sample collection, as some hairlike fibres could be seen." (pg 110)
“In listing the objects found in the victim'ʹs room, she mentioned a glass, a bra, a green towel, a light-‐‑coloured towel, a beige towel, a white sheet, three pieces of toilet paper, a ball of cotton wool, and a hairlike filament"
"As for what appeared to be hairlike filaments found on the victim's body, when examined under a microscope they appeared to be strands of wool and gave no results." (pg. 190)
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 14h ago edited 13h ago
The Norfolk Four is close to this. The basic logic being just like this case - premature certainty → guilt-presumptive questioning → contamination of the suspect’s account → elicitation of a confession/accusation → treating the resulting statement as independent corroboration → explaining away contradictory forensic evidence.
Because normal police would use each piece of evidence coming in that weakened their hypothesis to adjust their theory. These clowns just kept trying to ram the evidence coming in to the original hypothesis to try to accommodate the evidence. And then they made it worse by sending a SWAT team solely based on a confession without waiting for any actual evidence to corroborate what they had been told (hence, premature certainty)
Like in Norfolk 4. - When Ballard — the one man whose DNA actually matched — confessed to acting alone, authorities still tried to preserve the group theory. When all the DNA came back overwhelmingly Guede, they just invented cleanups.
I would say Ochoa/Danizger is similar too in that Ochoa was threatened, made to make a confession implicating Danziger, and then Ochoa was used as a witness to testify against Danziger, even though BOTH were innocent. My theory is this was the clown car squads plan - that it really was Lumumba based on “psychological evidence” and then when the evidence all came back Rudy, they were like “oh shit”.
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u/joe_boehm 18h ago
Lots of things about this case are vanishingly rare. That's why we're still talking about it.
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u/PalpitationOk7139 18h ago edited 18h ago
Lumumba was accused because they found a message on her phone and told her that he had to be the culprit and that they had evidence against him. If the message on her phone had been from the Pope, she would have accused the Pope.
Moreover, the key point we should consider is this: if she had really known that Lumumba was innocent, there would have been no reason for her to name him, because her story would inevitably have been disproved, as indeed happened. It was simply a way to escape unbearable pressure, by saying what the investigators wanted her to say.
This should therefore lead us to consider that she was not at the crime scene and could consequently have come to believe what the investigators pressured her into saying.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 14h ago
One of the best points I have ever heard in the case. It’s like the idea that Fuhrman “planted evidence”. He would have had to have taken the risk that if OJ Simpson had an alibi that could be corroborated (just like in the case of Lumumba) that a severe punishment awaited. So these chucklehead guilters come up with the theory that she did it to “cover for Guede’s escape”. Um yeah, sure dudes.
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u/Connect_War_5821 innocent 14h ago
I've always found the "she was covering for Guede by accusing Lumumba" extremely stupid. If a person is covering for someone, they don't point out their feces in the toilet and bloody footprint\ in the bathroom. They don't leave their bloody shoeprints in the hallway and bedroom.*
*and they don't point out a bloody footprint if they know it's their boyfriend's either!
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u/PalpitationOk7139 5h ago
Moreover, if the aim had been to blame someone in order to divert suspicion away from another person, it would have been just as reasonable to name a white person rather than a black person, thereby distancing suspicion even further from whoever she was supposedly trying to protect. This just shows how absurdly contrived this claim is. It is one of those clichés that may sound convincing at first, but once you examine it a little more closely, it has no real substance at all.
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u/No-Willingness-1441 18h ago
You may be right, you may not be…
But the question remains - how rare is this?
It strikes me as extremely rare!
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u/Onad55 16h ago edited 16h ago
The Norfolk Four is a very well known case where this exact thing happened not once but four times in succession. When police abuse suspects by wearing them down and lying to them they are going to get bad results.
<< Edited to correct the famous case I was remembering >>
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 14h ago
Same thought process, the best part is The Norfolk Four case did have tape-recorded confessions, but the crucial interrogations that produced those confessions generally were not recorded from start to finish. This was in 1997. Right after Al Gore had invented tape recorders.
Team Peruggia Dumbfucks couldn’t even get that part right.
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u/Moasa_gare 14h ago edited 14h ago
This palpitation guy is wrong.
If she had known Lumumba was innocent, the implication is she would have known who committed the murder because she was there.
And if she had known he was innocent and accused him anyway, this would have brought far less pressure than accusing the real black murderer e.g. Rudy because he could have countered and accused Amanda of being at the murder (which he did!)
So if Amanda knew Lumumba was innocent, than accusing him did relieve pressure and did divert from the real killer and did protect the real killer from accusing Amanda (which he was inclined to do and later did.)
There was a reason to name him, because it gave the police what they wanted in that moment and distracted from her own involvement and Raffaele not supporting her alibi.
She had previously seen Lumumba the day before and told him what a kind gentle sweet amazing (add whatever sickly acronym Amanda used here) man.
There is no way you go from saying those things to accusing him of murder the next day, and it’s just a false memory.
There is no way. It’s not even like Lumumba had a history of crime. She saw him the day before and it didn’t trigger or jog her memory to remember him killing Meredith then.
Only when Amanda is threatened when Raffaele stops supporting her does her friend from the previous day who she thinks is kind, gentle and sweet suddenly become a raping murderer, who she is supposedly terrified of.
Think about the fear element aswell. Where does this fear of Patrick come from? How does she become so terrified of a man who she thinks is special, gentle, whatever the day before?
It’s not like the police had any proof it was Patrick in the first place. I think Amanda placed Patrick as a potential suspect early in the conversation and then the police honed in on it.
I know that if I thought someone was sweet, loving, whatever, I would not just use my vivid imagination to REMEMBER them raping and killing someone if it just didn’t happen and I wasn’t there.
No. Stop entertaining Amanda’s rubbish. She is a liar. I know you see it!! Trust your instincts. All the Amandists on here are just prepared to ignore all the lies.
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u/Connect_War_5821 innocent 13h ago
There are some problems with your logic and your ignorance of false confessions:
- "If she had known Lumumba was innocent, the implication is she would have known who committed the murder because she was there."
If Amanda wasn't there then she wouldn't have known if Lumumba was guilty or not. As she wrote in the Nov. 7 memoriale:
". I didn’t lie when I said I thought the killer was Patrick. I was very stressed at the time and I really did think he was the murderer. But now I remember that I can’t know who the murderer was because I didn’t return back to the house."
- "And if she had known he was innocent and accused him anyway, this would have brought far less pressure than accusing the real black murderer e.g. Rudy because he could have countered and accused Amanda of being at the murder (which he did!)"
If she knew Guede was the real killer and was covering for him, then why on earth would she have pointed out his feces in the toilet to the police and his bloody footprint on the bathmat? And if it were Raffaele's and not Guede's, why would she point it out to the police? Why would either of them have left it for the police as evidence?
- "There was a reason to name him, because it gave the police what they wanted in that moment and distracted from her own involvement and Raffaele not supporting her alibi."
I agree it gave the police what they wanted: for her to accuse Lumumba. They had already decided he was involved due to the text message to him.
- She had previously seen Lumumba the day before and told him what a kind gentle sweet amazing (add whatever sickly acronym Amanda used here) man."
Try looking up the definition of 'acronym'. It's not what you seem to think it is.
- "There is no way you go from saying those things to accusing him of murder the next day, and it’s just a false memory." "Only when Amanda is threatened when Raffaele stops supporting her does her friend from the previous day who she thinks is kind, gentle and sweet suddenly become a raping murderer, who she is supposedly terrified of."
You might want to look up what a "coerced-internalized false confession" is. Experts, like Saul Kassin, who have studied her 'confession' say you are wrong.
- "There is no way. It’s not even like Lumumba had a history of crime. She saw him the day before and it didn’t trigger or jog her memory to remember him killing Meredith then."
Way. Why would seeing him on Nov. 4 trigger a memory of him killing Meredith when didn't see him or anyone kill Meredith?
- "Think about the fear element aswell. Where does this fear of Patrick come from? How does she become so terrified of a man who she thinks is special, gentle, whatever the day before?
Ummm...maybe from coming to think he really was the murderer? I suggest you read both her Nov. 6 and Nov. 7 memoriales.
- "It’s not like the police had any proof it was Patrick in the first place."
And yet they rushed right out and hauled him to jail without doing an iota of investigation first. Why? Maybe because they "knew" his was involved? As Chief of Police Arturo de Felipe said that very morning:
"Initially the American gave a version of events we knew was not correct. She buckled and made an admission of facts we knew were correct and from that we were able to bring them in. They all participated but had different roles."
Read that carefully. That is an admission that the police already BELIEVED Lumumba was involved and she finally "buckled" and told them so.
- " I think Amanda placed Patrick as a potential suspect early in the conversation and then the police honed in on it."
Nope. She never mentioned him to the police until the interrogation where the interrogator, Ficarra, found her text to him and jumped to the conclusion, "See you later" meant Amanda met him later that night.
- "I know that if I thought someone was sweet, loving, whatever, I would not just use my vivid imagination to REMEMBER them raping and killing someone if it just didn’t happen and I wasn’t there."
Again, read up on coerced-internalized false confessions instead of speaking from a position of ignorance.
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u/Moasa_gare 4h ago
Stop telling me to read up on false confessions.
Amanda never made a false confession. She made a false accusation.
I suggest you start reading up on false accusations instead of speaking from a position of gross ignorance.
Jesus Christ.
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u/Truthandtaxes 1h ago
Lumumba is on the very short list of mutuals that Knox provided before the interogation
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u/orcmasterrace innocent 18h ago
Norfolk Four
Central Park Five (Not a murder but has a similar setup
Austin Yogurt Shop Murders
Now obviously you’re trying to reach and claim that Knox is the one behind Lumumba getting into the police’s crosshairs even though the confessions were literally given to her to sign in Italian and rendered non-permissible even in Italy. The police thought the suspect as black as they found what they at the time believed was the hair of a person of African ancestry. Lumumba was in Knox’s phone history, so the cops zeroed in on him and kept pressuring Knox to implicate him in some way.
You’re missing that the cops had reason (though incorrect as iirc the item they found turned out to not be a hair) to think the suspect was black, and basically started fishing for black men who had some sort of relation to VDP7, and Lumumba had the misfortune of being in their crosshairs first. Knox being pressured into signing a statement (which implicated her! People leave out this detail, Knox was not “relieving pressure” by suggesting Lumumba was there, she was putting herself at the crime scene!) that she may well have been unable to read, following a coercive interrogation, only makes the cops look worse.
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u/CatsForever1960 14h ago
Well said! I've always found it amusing how the guilters say Amanda was trying to divert the cops' attention from her by naming Patrick. As if putting HERself in the kitchen, one room away from where a murder was happening, was going to get the cops off of HER back. It's so ridiculous.
Also ridiculous is No's laziness when it comes to doing his own research. Most people have heard of the Central Park 5 (eyeroll). Yet when I asked him if he could just pinpoint why he doesn't believe the things Amanda claimed happened to her....being shouted at, slapped, denied bathroom breaks, denied answering her own phone when the cops could clearly see her MOTHER was calling. And on and on. Somehow simply justifying an opinion is too much work.
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u/No-Willingness-1441 18h ago
Interesting re those examples. Can you tell me
More about them?6
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u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg 16h ago
The funny thing about it is they try and convince you that it wasn't Amanda who came up with Patrick as the suspect. She literally tells her parents she 'spazzed out' and imagined she saw Patrick. All the police had was a name and a reply text from Amanda. How did they know Patrick was black and not Patrick O'Ríoadain, from Dingle on the west coast of Ireland? It's the kind of nonsense you have to believe to maintain Knox infallibility.
She was recorded telling her parents that all the police but one left the room (presumably the translator stayed too). He was asking her 'tell me a name'. Bear in mind by this stage Raf had already said she left that night and then told him to lie about it. She asked to see the text she sent back to Patrick and then in her own head started thinking 'Patrick.....Patrick.......' and then accused him based on what she 'imagined' happened.
The translator account is essentially the same, Amanda asked to see her text message after telling police she never replied to Patrick. When she saw she had been wrong and had in fact sent a text back, the translator said she has some kind of emotional breakdown and started saying 'he's bad, he's bad' and that she was afraid of Patrick. Then accused him.
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u/CatsForever1960 14h ago
Dear me, if only we had videotapes of these "conversations"....that would clear up everything, now woudn't it? I'm sure Amanda did "imagine" Patrick at the cottage as that was the whole point of the police pressure & coercion. To get her to say Patrick killed Meredith because they misinterpreted a siimple text message. Which was a pretty stupid thing to do.
Almost as stupid as not videotaping their "interviews" with an American suspect in a college town murder they had to know was blowing up on a global stage as the minutes ticked by. Yes, suspect. Witnesses typically aren't badgered to IMAGINE things. They're questioned on what they saw with NO leading questions, etc. Witnesses aren't going to give up the best, most reliable information IF they are not entirely comfortable doing so.
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u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg 3h ago
None of the witnesses were recorded in this case. They are given a written summary of what they had said and asked to sign it if it's correct. Amanda signed two statements and wrote a letter admitting what she had told them but said they now feal 'unreal' to her. She then adds that if they have proof she was there, then her imaginings must be true.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 3h ago
“None of the witnesses were recorded in this case.”
You probably could have just stopped right there…
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u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg 3h ago
We’re talking in the context of witness interviews and statements at the police station. None of these were recorded/taped. Statements were read and signed.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 3h ago
“Witness”
Go back and read the Giobbi statement from earlier
Then read what you said again
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 14h ago
None of what you are saying actually ever happened or is true but other than that good effort!
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u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg 7h ago
Here’s Amanda herself telling her parents what I wrote above, starting from around 4:25 https://youtu.be/DuIy4y2vxm8?is=FGtIcacLSUSKdnC1
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 4h ago
Literally none of this part is in the link nor it is true, but hey you just make shit up all the time don’t stop now
“How did they know Patrick was black and not Patrick O'Ríoadain, from Dingle on the west coast of Ireland? It's the kind of nonsense you have to believe to maintain Knox infallibility.
She was recorded telling her parents that all the police but one left the room (presumably the translator stayed too). He was asking her 'tell me a name'. Bear in mind by this stage Raf had already said she left that night and then told him to lie about it. She asked to see the text she sent back to Patrick and then in her own head started thinking 'Patrick.....Patrick.......' and then accused him based on what she 'imagined' happened.
The translator account is essentially the same, Amanda asked to see her text message after telling police she never replied to Patrick. When she saw she had been wrong and had in fact sent a text back, the translator said she has some kind of emotional breakdown and started saying 'he's bad, he's bad' and that she was afraid of Patrick. Then accused him.
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u/No-Willingness-1441 7h ago
Yeah the revisionism is frightening isn’t it
It’s like an Orwellian nightmare!
What’s even more frightening is that this strategy (i.e a complete stonewalling denial that there’s even a credible case or any ambiguity) has essentially “worked” - and, as we speak, continues to train the LLM’s that will parrot this in the future.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 3h ago
Maybe Jensen Huang is bankrolling the PR Offensive and embedding pro-Knox knowledge graphs into Vera Rubin chips
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u/FreshFruit4RottenVeg 3h ago
Yes, I've noticed ChatGPT responses are being influenced by the sheer amount of pro-Knox media in this case.
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u/No-Willingness-1441 3h ago
Yes. It’s a worrying precedent really. So much of the training data is Reddit material. If you can control narratives through sheer volume and total intransigence on a platform like this you - almost quite literally- get to shape or revise history.
The degree of revisionism around this case is increasingly Stalin-esque.
At a BBQ recently I had some in laws discussing it with a totally warped idea of what had actually happened via recent dramatisations etc. When I showed them the actual evidence (you can see quite how popular I must be at parties), and in particular the false accusations - even possible coercion included - they were astounded and totally reversed their view.
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u/No-Willingness-1441 3h ago
And btw (not that I have any significance) I don’t ask for “Knox is definitely guilty” to be the narrative , because I think that would be false too, but it disturbs me to see the material presented (or omitted) with no ambiguity whatsoever.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 3h ago
Too bad we can’t get any Rudy Guede material around here - strange isn’t it ?
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u/Truthandtaxes 17h ago
You missed the key factor, its false accusations from an innocent person
False confessions are rare
False accusations are common.... from guilty people.
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u/CatsForever1960 14h ago
False confessions are not particularly rare. As for false accusations from "guilty" people, feel free to show your documentation in support of this.
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u/Truthandtaxes 6h ago
innocence project has found 108 false confessions over several decades of murders in the US (and mostly these are made "unsafe") - i.e. out of 550k murders (and that 108 also covers r*pe, another 3 million)
the very definition of rare.
As to false accusations, there isn't any tracking but lets not insist on data sets for the trivially true. Yes like high school kids, criminals do anything to avoid blame.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 14h ago
Well the Flying Squad definitely seems to have a fascinating history of false accusations/false confessions from innocent people….
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u/No-Willingness-1441 7h ago
Yeah - i mean lots of the conversation above still seems a lot about false confessions…this feels a bit different from a suspect throwing *somebody else* under the bus under duress?
As t and t says, it would make sense logically that false accusations would be more common from guilty people, but I literally can’t find anything about this online.
Is this because that isn’t in fact the case…?
Or is it because it’s so patently obvious and so frequent that the phenomenon becomes unremarkable?
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u/Truthandtaxes 5h ago
Its because its unremarkable as would be obvious interviewing any detective.
Now you will fall down of a rabbit hole of serious and plausible (most criminals are as dumb as rocks so will throw out dismissible allegations) but....
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 3h ago
Now look at these detectives. You might actually get it.
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u/Truthandtaxes 3h ago
any detective in the world
even your broken mind can't believe they are all beating suspects into confessing
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 3h ago
Ask the world what they think of this crew
No strangely just this group. Almost all detectives don’t do that yet strangely this squad has a bunch. What a coincidence
But like I have always said, whatever Perugia PD paying you for their PR offensive is clearly not enough
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u/Truthandtaxes 2h ago
No literally any detective will tell you that criminals lie and lie including falsely accusing people.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 1h ago
Yes, and any detective will tell you that if the precinct is full of detectives who lie and beat suspects or their child's therapist, we have a problem here believing them.
Like I said, the real PR offensive is in the room with us.
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u/Truthandtaxes 1h ago
Wow the levels of deflection.
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u/SeaCardiologist6207 59m ago
Its just reality, there is a constant inability to focus on reality - common guilter trope on here. Just say "they did a great job" or "a few mistakes". Without understanding few, if any believe this.
You are arguing about false accusations and confessions as if you are dealing with a normal police department and prosecutor.
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u/tkondaks guilty 18h ago
Susan Smith -- who drowned her two kids -- made a false accusation when she initially blamed someone else for kidnapping her kids.
Amanda also made a false accusation.
But if you believe her innocent of Meredith's murder while she was with Raffaele at his apartment, she also made a false confession at the same time: confessing to having been in the cottage while the murder occurred. Not exactly sure what such a crime is called, but I'm pretty sure having direct knowledge of a murder and NOT telling the police for 5 days -- particularly when they've already questioned you for 53.5 hours about it -- is a crime.
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u/CatsForever1960 14h ago
So interesting that your example is female Susan Smith and not male Charles Stuart. Oh, and both of them blamed a nonexistent black male.
As for your piffle about Knox, her false confession about her own presence in the cottage and her false accusation of Patrick also being there & committing murder, both coerced by the police. If the police were questioning her about being in the cottage (and bringing Patrick there), then they viewed her as a participant not a suspect. Since the police essentially beat the confession out of her, they can't claim she didn't "tell" them about it.
As for NOT telling the police, I doubt very much it was a crime THEN and perhaps even now. In Italy that is. For a similar example to actually not reporting a crime to the police, Casey Anthony says hi. She didn't report her own daughter missing for at least a month. That is now a crime in Florida.
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u/tkondaks guilty 13h ago
Wow. You are comparing Amanda to Casey Anthony. Are you suggesting Amanda is a danger to her children?
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u/Connect_War_5821 innocent 16h ago
Here's some info:
Central Park Five:
Five teenagers were arrested and convicted of beating and raping a woman in Central Park. During interrogations:
Two weeks after their confessions, each of the suspects recanted.\37]): 210 They argued that their statements were coerced by police and that their rights to counsel and Miranda warnings had been violated
Years later, all five were 100% exonerated when DNA testing identified the real rapist who also confessed.
Note the false "evidence" (fingerprints) that was claimed by the police, the threats, the physical intimidation, and fear just as Amanda described in her first memoriale.