Evy Pompouras helps police identify suspects through their written statements. Truthful accounts are messy, with hesitations and self-corrections. Liars tell polished stories with a clear beginning, middle, and end, like they rehearsed it.
I did interviews and interrogations and I would be asked to help local police departments. And they'd say, look, we have this case, we've got three suspects, but we can't figure out who it is. I'd always want to interview the person I thought it was. And I'd say, send me the statements that they wrote. Written statements. Written statements. And so I'd look at their statements and based on their statements, I would be able sometimes, most of the time, to tell who likely did it. When you ask somebody, what did you do yesterday? Will they deliver a beautiful story to you that has a beginning, middle, and an end? Every two minutes, yeah. And when it's a story, it's an arc, it's typically manufactured. That's a lie. The liar is like, oh, I gotta write a story. I gotta tell them what I did here. They're manufacturing it. A truthful person is gonna write how their day went. And a truthful person also makes spontaneous corrections.
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