The nation and much of the world was misled last week by a single person when those tracking the D.C. sniper were given the false hope that they finally had a witness to a shooting-and thus their first substantial lead. However, after further questioning the witness admitted fabricating the whole story. Experts are now back at square one in their search for the sniper, and many are left asking why this supposed witness lied in the first place.
"It's not an uncommon occurrence, unfortunately," says Jeffery Smalldon, Ph.D., a forensic psychologist in Columbus, Ohio. "In high publicity cases, there are often people who insert themselves into the case with false information." This leaves authorities stuck in a situation in which they need all of the information they can find to solve a crime but are nearly incapable of preventing false leads from being reported.
Smalldon speculates that this informant deliberately misled the police, pointing out that the information given was too specific to be a distortion of memory. "The false information was an act of aggression against the authorities, and it was obviously highly maladaptive attention-seeking," says Smalldon.
