They called 911 for help. Police and prosecutors used a new junk science championed by an Ohio cop to decide they were liars
That’s because the FBI sent a version of the study directly to them, which was not labeled exploratory. It included contact information for Harpster and Adams. The publication, which the bureau says typically has a readership of 200,000 but is not supposed to be an endorsement, had immediate impact. “It was required reading by our detective and communications personnel,” a police chief in Illinois told Harpster.
Instead, they ended up warning against using that research to bring actual cases. The indicators were so inconsistent, the experts said, that some went “in the opposite direction of what was previously found." Jarvis, one of the original co-authors from the FBI, told me he hasn’t spoken to Harpster since they published their study. He said he advised Harpster and Adams at the time that more research needed to back up what they’d found.
This spring, U.S. marshals followed Jade Benning, a 48-year-old mother of three with jet-black hair, as she picked up her youngest son from school in Austin, Texas. Benning sold vintage clothing in town, drove a red 1969 Camaro and owned a menagerie of rescue pets. After she left the school’s parking lot, the marshals pulled her over and told her she was under arrest for a murder that happened 26 years ago.
In 2009, Harpster learned about a double homicide in Woodbury County, Iowa, from a television documentary. He offered his services to the lead detective, saying he knew the defendant was guilty “solely upon his analysis of the defendant’s 911 call,” an assistant prosecutor for the county, Jill Esteves, noted later in an email.
When I asked Esteves about this, she didn’t respond. But a colleague in her office, Mark Campbell, defended 911 call analysis. “Tracy Harpster’s work in analyzing 911 calls is new,” he wrote in an email, “but the need for attorneys, judges and juries to evaluate what witnesses say to determine their credibility is as old as the trial court system.
But Harpster does. Former students send him endorsements describing how they’ve used 911 call analysis in real cases. Then he repurposes those as marketing material when emailing law enforcement in other cities and states. It’s a feedback loop. Police often email him 911 tapes for consultations — men and women wailing on the phone as they plead with the dispatcher to save a loved one. Sometimes it’s a parent holding a dead child. In one case, Harpster listened to an Ohio mother’s desperate call for help and then wrote back, simply, “Call me. … DIRTY!!!!” The mother was not charged.
A detective in Washington state, Marty Garland, told Harpster that a young mother had called 911 in November 2018 after her infant stopped breathing in his sleep. There was nothing suspicious at the scene and no detectives were dispatched, Garland wrote.were unable to rule the death a homicide based on the physical evidence.
His original study was based on just 100 emergency calls. Almost two-thirds of the calls came from Ohio and two-thirds of the callers were white. Experts told me that’s nowhere near enough data to draw conclusions from because that sample fails to account for who a 911 caller is and how that might affect the way they speak: their race, upbringing, geography, dialect, education.
Like most of the experts I talked to, Salerno didn’t know that Harpster’s model had already been adopted by police and prosecutors across the country. She didn’t know people were being arrested and charged because of it.Harpster’s supporters say it’s easy to cast shade from the ivory tower. He now considers Harpster a mentor and says 911 call analysis is a good tool to reveal clues. “I don’t weigh my case on that,” Kiddey said. “It’s a building block.”
There’s also the book he and Adams co-wrote, currently listed on Amazon. “It’s really a textbook for law enforcement,” he said. “But it doesn’t help law enforcement if everybody out there uses it to defeat law enforcement.”IX. Lewis didn’t respond to questions or interview requests and CBI declined to comment. His email correspondence and resume suggest he’s a true believer in 911 call analysis, part of a cohort of former students who have become boosters of the program.
One night in early December 2014, Riley Spitler, a scrawny 16-year-old from the suburbs, was playing with a gun when he accidentally shot his older brother, Patrick. Riley’s call for help was nearly incoherent. Two dispatchers tried to calm him down. “I think I killed him,” he screamed. “Oh my God my life is over.” In shock, he couldn’t figure out how to open the glass front door from the inside so he shattered it with his hand.