There was a logical clue and there was an emotional one. Each was apparent on the stoic visage of Anita,* a woman in her early 20s who was being questioned at an ATF field office in Oakland, California.
She’d arrived from nearby Richmond, an industrial port that always finds its way onto the national crime blotter. For years the town was terrorized by drug lords, the most notorious of whom was One-Eyed Marvin. Like all despots, Marvin demanded total fealty and exacted fatal revenge. At the height of his reign, in the early 1990s, he was the chief suspect in the death of Anita’s cousin, machine-gunned outside Johnny’s Diner, a local hamburger joint.
Anita shared her story with two attorneys and two ATF agents: She’d been walking to the back of the burger stand when gunshots rang out—and instantly she dove under a parked car. She’d heard the shots, but her position under the vehicle blocked her view of the assault, she explained.
James (J.J.) Newberry was the street agent on the case, in charge of the ATF task force on gangs in the East Bay. He sat down next to her and asked to hear the story one more time.
“I pulled my convertible into the lot, got out, and headed to the back of the stand,” Anita began.
“Why were you going out back?” Newberry inquired.
“To take a leak,” Anita replied. “I heard the shot, and dove under the car.”
“She didn’t show any facial responses, no emotion,” Newberry recalls today. “She just kept looking ahead.”
“Did you have a sense of impending danger?” he asked.
“No,” she responded.
“Thank you,” said Newberry, and stood up to leave. Then, he recalls, “I banged the table with my fist.”
Anita turned to stare at him.
“What did you just do?” Newberry asked. “You looked to see where the noise came from. You looked that night, too. You saw the man who shot your cousin.”
J.J. Newberry saves the question "why" for last. "I ask where, how, when," says Newberry, whose ability to detect deception sparked psychologists' decades-long quest for so-called truth wizards. "If I ask why, I may get the truth, but it'll be a justification."
Anita began to cry. She confessed that she had, indeed, witnessed the murder. Al Mabanag, the second ATF agent who was present, recalls that the woman’s attorney was thunderstruck by how quickly Anita had confessed the truth to Newberry. Why, the lawyer wondered, had Newberry asked about “impending danger?”
“If she’d sensed a threat, her reaction—and lack of emotion in telling it—would have made sense. But it wasn’t logical to hear gunshots and not look,” Newberry explains. “Only combat veterans do that.”
***
People who read others well have a talent for seeing the invisible. At their best, they instantly glean information about us that we ourselves do not know. They seize on gestures of discomfort, micro-expressions of anger, inconsistencies of language—signals that others routinely miss. And they assemble the data into sometimes instant hunches about the character they’re dealing with. They operate along inductive and deductive channels simultaneously: A shrewd reader is often as quick to typecast personality as he is slow to judge the veracity of the information coming out of a person’s mouth.
No profession has a lock on mind reading. But a few (former) federal agents who have mastered the science and refined their own approach provide a window onto the judgments that most of us make unconsciously and not nearly as successfully. J.J. Newberry’s lie detection abilities earned him the moniker “truth wizard” and sparked psychologists’ two-and-a-half-decade quest for equally capable lie catchers.
Joe Navarro and John (Jack) Schafer each spent years in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Program, an elite task force that investigates “targets of interest to national security,” which in James Bond-speak means spies and suspected double agents.
Schafer is a word maven who has a keen sense of what ordinary locutions cover up; Navarro’s bailiwick is body language. He can “see” unconscious distress in the graze of a hand against the neck. But for all three, success hinges on seeking the answer to one question: What motivates this person in this moment?
One can learn a lot from such a simple approach. Capable detective work may be more Dale Carnegie than Lie to Me—a slow inquiry into another person’s state of mind, not a “gotcha” match that could blow up into a false confession. The process requires that interviewer and target be in rapport; only then can one identify a deviation in a person’s baseline—and that, usually, is the first clue to a problem.
“On an elevator I’ll find out what I can between the first and fifteenth floor,” says Newberry. “I try to make people comfortable and if they’re not, I want to know why.” Newberry is soft-spoken and his physical presence is muted; perhaps the most noticeable characteristic about him is a tic in his right eye. He retired from the ATF in 1998, and lives on a secluded ranch in Northern California. “I pick up a lot of horse shit,” he says when asked to describe his daily schedule. The same might be said of his professional life—he consults on cases that local officials fail to solve.
Newberry likes to recount an incident from the beginning of his career in which a truck bomb killed a woman and child. At the scene was a man, rocking back and forth.
“I got down on my knees and said, ‘This is hard. I know you didn’t mean to do it.’”
“No,” the man responded. “She took the wrong car.”
Why did Newberry approach the man this way?
“Just a gut feeling.”
“J.J. does it intuitively,” observes Gretchen Fretter, a former police detective who has taught interviewing techniques alongside Newberry. “He is better than anyone I know.”
