SUICIDE HOTLINE
SHIFT THE PERSPECTIVE
When Chris Neame's phone rings, he's prepared for tears and tragedy -- and his negotiating skills kick into gear right away. After all, people's lives depend on it.
Neame is a volunteer crisis counselor at the Suicide Prevention Center of the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center in Los Angeles. It's one of about 300 such centers that take calls through the nationwide 24-hour hotline, 1-800-SUICIDE. A massage therapist and stage actor who speaks in a soothing British-accented baritone, Neame got his crisis-counseler training from the Samaritans in London, where he volunteered for eight years before joining the L.A. center five years ago.
He says some callers just need comfort, advice, and referrals for therapy. Others, however, are in imminent danger -- such as Jim, who says he's calling from a hotel room in a Mojave desert town. Jim's got a gun and a death wish, and it's up to Neame to talk him out of his plan. If Neame says the wrong thing, or fails to say the right thing, Jim may put down the phone and pick up the gun.
"What I've always tried to do with my clients is find something to latch onto, one little ray of light, and really expand on it," Neame explains later. "Keep after that thing, keep talking about it."
It's a proven strategy (but not a fail-safe one). Just listening helps, too -- letting people spill their despair into the receiver. Like other callers, Jim is somehow able to confide in a stranger about things he couldn't tell those close to him. His wife, he says, can't have sex anymore after a botched surgery. Frustrated, Jim started going to prostitutes. He got caught in a police sting and will have to go to court. Now he's terrified that his wife and children will find out and he'll lose them all.
The reason Jim gives for wanting to kill himself is also the clue to saving him. Neame starts asking about Jim's family, encouraging him to share anecdotes about happy moments. As Jim talks about his daughters, Neame notices a gradual change. "He started to get softer . . . He started crying," the counselor recalls.
Tears don't alarm Neame, who has learned they're a sign of release. "I could finally say, because he was very vulnerable then, 'Jim, please, would you just take the gun and put it in the drawer by the bedside table? Think of your children.'" Jim agrees. But Neame can't assume his caller is out of danger. He has to get Jim to tell him his location so the police can be notified and, if necessary, take him to a hospital.
The conversation grows tense again; Jim balks. The notion of cops descending on this hotel room probably brings back the shame and fear of being caught in the prostitution sting. Rather than directly countering Jim's objections, Neame sticks with his strategy, refocusing his caller on the ray of light in what Jim sees as otherwise bleak terrain. Neame suggests that Jim try going to therapy with his wife, and points out that getting help for himself will help his family, too.
He tries again for an address, reassuring the distressed man that the cops aren't going to arrest him or embarrass him. "They're just going to assess you. If they feel you should go to the hospital for treatment, they'll take you," Neame says. This time, Jim says OK and gives his location. Neame stays on the line with him until help arrives.
When trying to get suicidal people to reconsider, Neame says he avoids getting all "Mary Poppins about it." He guides callers to solutions that promise continuing improvement -- such as therapy and twelve-step programs. Neame's motto: Focus on the positive but keep it real. In most cases, that paves the way to an agreement to accept help.
INNOCENT ON DEATH ROW
DON'T EXPECT A SQUARE DEAL FROM A STACKED DECK
Defense attorney Bret Strand had just one more chance to save his client's life. Frank Lee Smith was on Florida's death row for the 1985 rape and murder of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead, and Strand believed that Smith was innocent. A relatively new test that could match DNA from a very small sample had the potential to reveal the truth, but convicts don't automatically get the right to prove their innocence. Strand would have to negotiate with the judge to get the test done and admitted into evidence. Failing that, the next step would be Frank Lee Smith's execution.
The case against Smith had been entirely circumstantial. A teenage witness, Chiquita Lowe, had testified that she'd seen a man with a "droopy eye" nearby on the night Shandra was killed. Though Smith's eyes didn't droop, she identified him in court as the person she'd seen. Meanwhile, the defense team's investigator, Jeffrey Walsh, had amassed a mountain of evidence showing that another man, Eddie Mosely, had committed the crime. Mosely had been identified as a rapist in dozens of cases. Judged criminally insane, he had been in and out of mental institutions since 1973. One of his distinguishing features was a droopy eye. Walsh tracked down Lowe, the state's star witness, and showed her Mosely's photograph. She recognized him as the man she'd seen the night of Shandra's murder -- and recanted her earlier testimony against Smith.
"In my 14 years doing first degree murder cases, it is the clearest case of innocence I've ever seen," says Strand.
And that was without the DNA evidence.
The hearing that could finally bring Smith justice began on September 16, 1998. Strand requested that the DNA be examined by a confidential outside expert. The prosecutor, Carolyn McCann, preferred turning over the human material to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) instead. The judge suggested a compromise: Let the FBI test it. After deliberations, Strand and Smith agreed.
When the hearing resumed three weeks later, on October 21, the attorney and the prosecutor negotiated for a few moments about whether the prosecution could use the DNA against Smith if it showed him to be the killer. Since Strand knew the test could only help his case, "my next negotiating position was to agree to all terms," he says. "And once I had agreed to all terms, they withdrew their agreement."
McCann reversed herself, now objecting to any DNA testing. She claimed that Strand should have asked for the DNA test years earlier. Now, she said, its admission into evidence was "procedurally barred." The judge, reversing his earlier decision, sustained McCann's objection.
Court documents show McCann's explanation for her reversal: She asked for DNA testing because she called Strand's bluff. She believed -- wrongly, as it turned out -- that unless the sample was tested by a confidential expert "the defense wouldn't do it."
No deal can work if one party doesn't want it to.
In December 2000, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sheriff's detective reopened another case in which he suspected an innocent man had been convicted of a murder actually committed by Eddie Mosely. He sent off the DNA from the case to a lab that scientifically validated his suspicions. Mosely's DNA was a match; he had committed the murder. The innocent man was released from prison.
Under pressure from this revelation, the prosecution sent the DNA from the Shandra Whitehead case to the FBI lab. This sample, too, matched Eddie Mosely. Smith finally was exonerated. But it was too late to set him free: Frank Lee Smith had developed pancreatic cancer while waiting for justice to find him. He had died 10 months earlier.
Strand has since moved to Wyoming, where he represents people trying to collect the child support they're due. Surprisingly, he says he doesn't think it's worthwhile to spend outrage on the raw deal that Frank Lee Smith got. He quotes Mother Jones: "Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living."
HOSTAGE CRISIS
REASONING WITH TERRORISTS
In most life-and-death negotiations, the negotiators themselves are in danger of nothing worse than frayed nerves and restless dreams. But sometimes a negotiator has to place his own life at risk. United Nations undersecretary Giandomenico Picco did exactly that -- nine times.
Late one night in August 1991, as he walked down a deserted street in Beirut, Lebanon, toward the Shi'ite district, the 6'4" Picco, in crisp blazer and tie, looked decidedly out of place. But fitting in was the least of his worries. He'd been told he would be contacted by a group responsible for kidnapping more than a dozen Westerners since 1984. The terrorists belonged to the notorious organization Hezbollah, which still held three British and six American hostages, including Associated Press Bureau Chief Terry Anderson.
Given his mission, the sudden screech of brakes came as little surprise to Picco. He realized the kidnappers had indeed made contact when someone grabbed him, pushed him into the car, and shoved his head onto the floor. After about a half hour, the car stopped, and he was led up some stairs and into a room draped with white sheets, obscuring the details of the space. Two men in ski masks entered.
Unlike Terry Anderson and other Hezbollah hostages, Picco came by choice, hoping to negotiate their freedom. But he knew his mediator status didn't assure his safety -- or freedom. In 1987, British clergyman Terry Waite had arrived in Beirut with the same task -- only to be kidnapped himself.
Terrorists, kidnappers, killers: All those labels applied to the men with the ski masks. But Picco's strategy in dealing with them mirrored, in one vital way, his negotiations with diplomats in business suits. "You try to find out who the person is -- not what he does," he says. "I asked them if they've got children. They were surprised by the question.
I said, 'I don't know you and you don't know me, so I have to find out what we have in common. And if you are a father like I am, we have a beginning.'"
The masked men, too, were prepared to find common ground with the U.N. undersecretary. One of them told him that, because Picco had proven he was not afraid to die, he was much like themselves.
Commonality established, they got down to business. Israel was holding Lebanese prisoners of war. To improve the odds that Picco would gain release of some of them, the Hezbollah members agreed to free an American hostage, Edward Tracy, within a day. But if Israel did not reciprocate, Picco was warned, the effect on the remaining Western hostages would be "devastating."
At the meeting's end, Picco was again driven back to the area where he had been unceremoniously picked up, and released. Future meetings followed the same protocol: The U.N. undersecretary would be taken from the streets with no guarantee that he'd be released.
Both Hezbollah and Israel kept their parts of the bargain, and over a four-month period, Picco was taken off the Beirut streets, blindfolded, and brought to the militant cell's leader eight more times to work out conditions for each hostage release. One by one, the militants freed their captives, until they let go the last American, Terry Anderson, in December 1991. The extraordinary negotiations brought an end to one of the longest hostage crises of the twentieth century.
Picco believes that in any effort to work out a deal, "to focus on just one definition of what we are is a choice that will lead us to confrontation." Instead, all parties at the table have a "multiplicity" of ways to identify themselves, says Picco -- a fact that smart negotiators do well to exploit.
POLICE STANDOFF
ONLY ONE WAY OUT
The heir to the DuPont fortunes, John E. DuPont, had long run a training camp for professional wrestlers on his 800-acre estate in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. After his mother died in the late 1980s, DuPont began behaving bizarrely. According to a Washington Post account, he complained that the trees on his property were mechanized and moving around. He had razor wire installed inside the attic of his home to protect him from those he suspected were trying to break in and kill him.
One January afternoon in 1996, DuPont, then 56, drove up to the wrestling facility where Olympic champion David Schultz made his home, pulled out a .44 magnum revolver and, without apparent reason, fired it into Schultz. The grey-bearded eccentric then sped off to his mansion, reloaded the gun, and barricaded himself inside.
Police officers tried to reason with DuPont on the phone. "Sometimes he would make comments that he's the Dalai Lama," recalls Robert Ewing, one of a team of negotiators called to the scene. "We had to bring him back to the real world: 'We're here and we're not going away.' That's reality." They pointed out the police cars and floodlights they'd set up to light the area into the night. Ewing delivered the same message over and over again: "There is no other way out. Do what we say and we'll guarantee that you're going to be OK."
Other members of the negotiation team gathered intelligence about DuPont from talking to people who knew him. "It lets you know what kinds of conversations to have with him," Ewing says. Part of effective crisis negotiation is also knowing what not to say, so DuPont wasn't told that his victim had died: "We didn't want him to fear that he was also facing a homicide charge," says Ewing.
The first step in any police standoff, he adds, is to calm the person. Offer to help. Look for small concessions the police can make to gain the person's trust. Let him know there is only one way out. "There has to be a show of force," believes Ewing. "We don't necessarily have to mention that there's a SWAT team, but he has to be able to see it. You let somebody know you're the way out; he has to go through you."
Ewing says trapped desperados rarely make the kinds of demands seen in the movies, such as asking for a helicopter and a million dollars. "For the short term, there might be a lot of bravado. The person might say, 'You're not going to take me,' or, 'I'm not coming out.' And then you just wait him out and eventually, he's going to realize, 'This is stupid.' Then he starts to talk about how he's going to come out safely."
But DuPont, holed up inside, was still raving at police well into the standoff's second day. It was freezing, which gave the negotiators an idea. They disabled DuPont's heating system. When the millionaire murderer left his house to see what had gone wrong with it, cops grabbed him. The standoff, which had lasted some 48 hours, was over.
John DuPont was tried for Schultz's murder, found guilty but mentally ill, and sentenced to up to 30 years in prison or an institution, depending on his mental state.
Ewing, who had been both a patrolman and an attorney at the time of the DuPont case, left the force in 1999 to practice law full time. He says some of what he learned as a police negotiator applies in his practice. "You have to make certain demands, let people know you're willing to back it up. And subtly, calmly, you eventually wear somebody down."
