Episode 035 - Mistakes Writers Make about Police Procedure … and How to Avoid Them with Bruce Robert Coffin
July 14, 2020
Bruce Robert Coffin, the award-winning author of the bestselling Detective Byron mystery series and a former detective sergeant with more than twenty-seven years in law enforcement, talks about how to avoid the inaccuracies regarding the portrayal of police procedures that can take the reader out of your story. We talk about whether an author must have their story comply in every detail with actual police procedure (the answer is no), our own pet peeves about depictions of police procedure in books, TV, and movies, and the freedom provided by fictionalized settings.
Bruce Robert Coffin supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine's largest city. Following the terror attacks of September 11, Bruce spent four years investigating counter-terrorism cases for the FBI, earning the Director's Award, the highest award a non-agent can receive.
Bruce's novel, Beyond the Truth, winner of Killer Nashville's Silver Falchion Award for Best Procedural, was a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel and a finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Best Crime Fiction. His short fiction appears in several anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2016. In the June 2020 issue of Down East Magazine, his novel Within Plain Sight was named one of 100 Books Every Lover of Maine Should Read. Bruce is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and he lives and writes in Maine.
Bruce's novel, Beyond the Truth, winner of Killer Nashville's Silver Falchion Award for Best Procedural, was a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel and a finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Best Crime Fiction. His short fiction appears in several anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2016. In the June 2020 issue of Down East Magazine, his novel Within Plain Sight was named one of 100 Books Every Lover of Maine Should Read. Bruce is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and he lives and writes in Maine.
"One of the things that we all try to do as writers, whether it's by our grammar or the way we tell the story, the speed at which we tell the story, is to pull the reader in and not to do anything that will distract them from the illusion that we've created." -Bruce Coffin
Are you getting value from the podcast? Consider supporting me on Patreon!
Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast! Today my guest is Bruce Coffin. Bruce, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Bruce: I'm doing well, Matty. Thank you for having me on.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Bruce Robert Coffin is the award-winning author of the bestselling Detective Byron Mystery Series. A former Detective Sergeant with more than 27 years in law enforcement, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine's largest city.
[00:00:27] Following the terror attacks of September 11th, Bruce spent four years investigating counterterrorism cases for the FBI, earning the Director's Award, the highest award a non-agent can receive. His novel Beyond the Truth, winner of Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Procedural was a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel, and a finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Best Crime Fiction.
[00:00:51] His short fiction appears in several anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories of 2016. He is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime--I always like that because I like an opportunity to point out it's "sisters and misters"--and the Maine Publishers and Writers Alliance. And in June 2020, Down East Magazine named his novel Within Plain Sight one of the 100 books every lover of Maine should read, alongside books by the likes of Stephen King, of course, E.B. White, Eliot Porter, and Robert McCloskey. That was quite an exciting recognition for you to receive, I imagine.
[00:01:34] Bruce: Indeed. That's quite a lofty crew to be hanging out with. Stephen King got the most mentions there. He wrote a lot of books.
[00:01:41] Matty: He was in there like 90 times. But, yeah, very happy to be part of that with some of my fellow Maine mystery authors as well--Paul Doiron, Barbara Ross, Gerry Boyle. I know I'm forgetting another one, but that's really cool.
[00:01:55] And, not surprisingly, Bruce lives and writes in Maine.
[00:01:58] We're going to today be continuing what's going to become sort of a theme on mistakes writers make about various things and how to avoid them. And you won't be surprised probably, after you've heard Bruce's bio, to know that what we're going to be talking about today is mistakes writers make about police detectives and how to avoid them. In advance of our conversation, I solicited ideas from Bruce about a couple of the things that he sees in books and movies that are particular faux pas. And we're just going to talk about how they should be represented a little more realistically.
Bruce: I just want to preface by saying that, I get that as fiction writers, the first thing we're trying to do is tell a good story, and sometimes that means bending reality. We all do it in the books. We make up fictional places for the stories to occur and characters do things that might be something that a lot of people would be part of simply for the aspect of time, you know? Some of our cases would take a year or more, and you don't have that as a reader to read one of our books. You'd never finish the book.
[00:02:58] I get that we do take some liberties, but I also find that I think one of the things that we all try to do as writers, whether it's by our grammar or the way we tell the story, the speed at which we tell the story, is to pull the reader in and not to do anything that will distract them from the illusion that we've created. And to my way of thinking, a clunky phrase is just as likely as inaccurate information to pull the reader out of the story.
Matty: Talk a little bit about what made you get into fiction writing to begin with, and then in general, what were some of those things that you learned you had to approach a little bit differently as a writer as opposed to as a police officer.
[00:00:06] Bruce: I'm doing well, Matty. Thank you for having me on.
[00:00:09] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Bruce Robert Coffin is the award-winning author of the bestselling Detective Byron Mystery Series. A former Detective Sergeant with more than 27 years in law enforcement, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine's largest city.
[00:00:27] Following the terror attacks of September 11th, Bruce spent four years investigating counterterrorism cases for the FBI, earning the Director's Award, the highest award a non-agent can receive. His novel Beyond the Truth, winner of Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Procedural was a finalist for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel, and a finalist for the Maine Literary Award for Best Crime Fiction.
[00:00:51] His short fiction appears in several anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories of 2016. He is a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime--I always like that because I like an opportunity to point out it's "sisters and misters"--and the Maine Publishers and Writers Alliance. And in June 2020, Down East Magazine named his novel Within Plain Sight one of the 100 books every lover of Maine should read, alongside books by the likes of Stephen King, of course, E.B. White, Eliot Porter, and Robert McCloskey. That was quite an exciting recognition for you to receive, I imagine.
[00:01:34] Bruce: Indeed. That's quite a lofty crew to be hanging out with. Stephen King got the most mentions there. He wrote a lot of books.
[00:01:41] Matty: He was in there like 90 times. But, yeah, very happy to be part of that with some of my fellow Maine mystery authors as well--Paul Doiron, Barbara Ross, Gerry Boyle. I know I'm forgetting another one, but that's really cool.
[00:01:55] And, not surprisingly, Bruce lives and writes in Maine.
[00:01:58] We're going to today be continuing what's going to become sort of a theme on mistakes writers make about various things and how to avoid them. And you won't be surprised probably, after you've heard Bruce's bio, to know that what we're going to be talking about today is mistakes writers make about police detectives and how to avoid them. In advance of our conversation, I solicited ideas from Bruce about a couple of the things that he sees in books and movies that are particular faux pas. And we're just going to talk about how they should be represented a little more realistically.
Bruce: I just want to preface by saying that, I get that as fiction writers, the first thing we're trying to do is tell a good story, and sometimes that means bending reality. We all do it in the books. We make up fictional places for the stories to occur and characters do things that might be something that a lot of people would be part of simply for the aspect of time, you know? Some of our cases would take a year or more, and you don't have that as a reader to read one of our books. You'd never finish the book.
[00:02:58] I get that we do take some liberties, but I also find that I think one of the things that we all try to do as writers, whether it's by our grammar or the way we tell the story, the speed at which we tell the story, is to pull the reader in and not to do anything that will distract them from the illusion that we've created. And to my way of thinking, a clunky phrase is just as likely as inaccurate information to pull the reader out of the story.
Matty: Talk a little bit about what made you get into fiction writing to begin with, and then in general, what were some of those things that you learned you had to approach a little bit differently as a writer as opposed to as a police officer.
read more ...
[00:03:38] Bruce: Well, you know, it's funny. It was almost learning and unlearning at the same time. When I first began writing, one of the things that I would do is, I think it was just because I knew the information, police procedure, already. So I assumed that the reader would know it, I guess is what I thought. And so I wrote a lot of things without all of that in depth information in it, as if I was writing the story for a police officer, and my agent reminded me that that's not who I was writing these for, that the majority of the readers really had no police experience.
[00:04:09] I then had to walk that fine line between writing and giving you enough information that you could follow along with the story and see what it was that the characters were up to without overloading you with detail. I had to keep figuring it out and really trying to change my viewpoint as a writer. So it would be like I was writing for somebody who wasn't me and I needed to remember that. You give them what they need.
[00:04:35] I think it's really getting police procedure is getting the story. You want to give the reader enough that they can follow along with what's going on and stay interested, but not overload them with detail. And that can be anything. I mean, we all get carried away with things that we enjoy talking about or the scenery or whatever it is, and police procedures no different. I really had to learn to give enough, but not too much. And I feel I've found that perfect balance and I walked that line fairly well. And my readers will tell me if I don’t, I'm sure.
[00:05:07] Matty: I imagine your early readers were a lot of your professional colleagues who might have actually loved to hear the kind of detail you were talking about. Did you see a difference in how they responded when your first book came out versus how the non-law enforcement reader responded?
[00:05:25] Bruce: I really expected a big difference there. I think I was most nervous about what my former colleagues would think. We're tough on each other, there's no question, so you expect that they would call you out on anything that was different than the norm or something that I messed up and I think I was most excited by the fact that they actually got enthralled in the stories and weren't sitting there looking to nitpick, were actually enjoying the story and seeing where things went.
[00:05:50] And then the natural reaction is trying to figure it out if I had a character, if I modeled them after someone they knew, or if it was after them themselves. But yeah, that was almost a litmus test for me. I wanted to know whether or not what I had done and for the entertaining quality would still pass muster with the people that actually did the job.
[00:06:10] I was very excited to see that they were embracing my writing as well. So it's good, it seems to cross all age groups and occupational groups and I'm hitting apparently on all the cylinders. There are very few naysayers and that's what every writer wants, I think.
[00:06:26] Matty: That's great. And plus, they don't want to read about the one-year investigation any more than the non-law enforcement reader does. They would be as bored by a documentary-like reliance on strict reality is any other reader would be.
[00:06:41] Bruce: It's true. I think that's definitely true.
[00:06:44] Matty: Now that I've given you a chance to give a little bit more general background ... Miranda miscues, what are you seeing there? I see it in literary work. I see it in script work when they're doing it for television or movies. There seems to be almost a frantic need to get Miranda out of the way immediately. Miranda is being read as the cuffs are going on and it makes for a cool television. It makes for cool novel reading and whatever, but it's not realistic. I think some of it is just the knowledge of what Miranda is all about. And really, it's a two-prong test where Miranda is required if someone is in custody. That's not someone that's coming to give a statement or voluntarily submitting a statement. They have to be in custody and they also have to be being questioned. Because of being in custody now they're subject to all of the rights that would be afforded anybody in custody, whether they were in jail or had just been arrested. And, really, questioning somebody, that is very similar to searching a property that belongs to them, like their car or their home or their business, in that they are afforded those protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
[00:07:51] Bruce: If you look at an interview, in the same vein, one of the things that would get you by a warrant in a search, it would be voluntarily having the person who owned or responsible for the property, allowing you to do a search. And so really an interview is the same thing, that it has to pass the voluntariness test. The person being questioned has to be given their rights and be afforded the opportunity to either not answer the questions or to seek advice of counsel or to answer the questions if that's what they choose to do. Miranda doesn't start right away. I mean, it doesn't work that way. Taking somebody into custody is not a reason to read Miranda.
[00:08:28] I can't speak for other police departments, maybe it's done differently in the UK or whatever, but I know about my own experience and quite often what will happen during an arrest, the uniformed officers would be tasked with the actual physical arrest of somebody. And then when they were met by the detectives, the detective at that point might be the person who's actually conducting the interview. And so let's say you are the uniformed officer. I don't want you reading Miranda to somebody who's upset with you because you just placed him in custody. They're probably not going to be very cooperative, even if it's in their best interest at that point.
[00:09:01] But later on in a calm environment where we get a chance to talk back and forth as adults and equals, and maybe the detective gets a chance to explain some of what's happening, they may be more apt to go along with that and actually want to explain their side of what happened, which would mean answering questions. But once they have invoked their Miranda rights and shut down, you can't go back to that.
[00:09:25] The only person that can undo that then is the person themselves who has invoked their Miranda rights and refused to talk. You can't go back at them again and try to give them something else or say something else to entice them to talk to you. You really have to be careful with that. And I think in a lot of writing, sometimes I'll see people rush to that as if that was the next step as the cuffs are going on, and we've all seen it, Law & Order and all those shows, "You're under arrest," and, "You have the right to remain silent."
[00:09:54] We don't do that. The likelihood is that people would never want to talk to us. They'd just clam up.
[00:09:59] Matty: How much time would normally go by between the time they were taken into custody and the interview scenario where they are read their Miranda rights.
[00:10:10] Bruce: It really would depend greatly on the procedure itself. If the detective makes the arrest, let's say, the arrest is actually after a big, long investigation, and let's say it's a murder case. Unless the police were actually witnessing the event and then the arrest obviously had to be right away, generally speaking, the arrest might come after a long, protracted investigation. In which case it would almost be the last thing that was done, because a case would be built all along. And at that point, the detective might be involved in the physical arrest. If that was the case, it might only be a matter of transporting that person to the police station or wherever the interview was going to be conducted. And then Miranda might be read. It could be a very short period of time.
[00:10:51] In other cases, maybe the uniformed officers were first on the scene and maybe the murder had just happened, and the suspect is standing there holding the weapon above the victim. And then the detectives, let's say it's a nighttime event, would not necessarily be working, might be called in. Then after the custody has happened, that person's transported to the jail or to the police station, to a holding area or whatever it is.
[00:11:14] It may be hours before a detective actually gets to sit down with the suspect at that point, and then go over the rights and attempt to do an interview where they garner additional information or clarifying information, whatever it is. Because there's always the chance that if the actual incident wasn't witnessed by the police, maybe that person just happened to come across it and out of human stupidity picked up the murder weapon and the officer comes around the corner and there they are standing there and had nothing to do with it.
[00:11:42] It varies widely. And sometimes the people do, in fact, invoke their right to remain silent and as they think about it a little bit more, or they get a chance to talk to somebody for advice, that changes. Sometimes the attorney will contact us and bring the person in or say, "Hey, they want to talk to you down at the jail. And we've arranged a meeting, can you have a detective come down and talk to us?" It really depends.
[00:12:04] Matty: And when you're at the point where you feel it's the time to read them their Miranda rights, are there tips that you ever offered more junior law enforcement officers about how to pose that, so that just hearing that didn't automatically have them invoke their rights to remain silent?
[00:12:23] Bruce: I think it's really just learning to deal with people. There's a little bit of salesmanship that goes into any of that. I did this for a living for almost 30 years, and still driving home at night in the dark, all of a sudden, if I recognize there's a police car directly behind me, I get that reaction. I get the same reaction you would get. And I did that for a living and I'm thinking, "Oh my God, don't they have anything better to do?" or "What have I done?"
[00:12:45] I think the detective who's seasoned recognizes that the uniformed officer really becomes somewhat of a threat to the person and they're not going to respond well to that. And there's a difference, I think, between having to take an authoritative role on the street to get control of a situation and being the detective in the nice suit and tie and the environment with everything is nice. There's no mosquitoes biting. There's nobody screaming from across the street. There's none of that going on. It's a controlled environment. And now this is a chance to sit down and try to reach this person on a personal level and so it really doesn't need to be, and it shouldn't be, an adversarial interaction.
[00:13:26] It should be two people having a discussion. And the detective wants to get home the point that what they are after is the truth. No one worth their salt as a police officer should be looking to hang a crime on somebody. They should be about trying to find the truth. And so, I always would say, “I wasn't at the event, I wasn't at the scene that you were at. You know what happened. You were there, or you at least know your version of it. I wasn't there. What I'm trying to get at is the truth and this is your opportunity to give me that, to tell me your side of the story," and then you proceed to read Miranda and make sure they understand what they've been read. And then you go from there.
[00:14:05] It's really a matter of trying to get a connection with them one-on-one. And I think the likelihood of success in some of those cases really depends upon the longevity of the detective, the police officer who's handling the interview, and also the experiences of the person across the table. If this is somebody who's been in trouble repeatedly with the law, they're probably going to be pretty well versed in what their rights are and know what happens if they have done something wrong and less likely to talk to you. So sometimes it's really a question of how bad a person that might be across the table.
[00:14:38] Matty: It seems as if the whole interview process is another one that is probably not accurately represented in books and TV and movies, because it's always confrontational, it's always butting of heads, because a friendly chat wouldn't make very good drama.
[00:14:55] Bruce: Right. Exactly. I think those usually are depicted as poorly as the courtroom scenes are depicted. Generally, I'm used to seeing the judge sleeping on the bench and people are objecting and the judge hasn't ruled on the previous objection, and now someone on the other side is barking at the other attorney and that stuff doesn't happen. I mean, it wouldn't work. It does make for great drama, but it doesn't work that way in real life.
[00:15:18] Some people do a nice job with the courtroom procedure. I know Michael Connelly really hits that well, but it's a fine line. You can't be boring to the point of what it would really be like sitting in court. There's a lot of sidebars that nobody is ever privy to, the jury's not privy to, the people in the courtroom are not privy to. A lot of legal issues get discussed with the jury out of the room. So, yes, it's a lot different in real life.
[00:15:41] My wife won't let me watch Law & Order or any of those shows with her because I'm constantly going, "Come on, that would never really happen."
[00:15:48] Matty: You can't suspend your disbelief that much?
[00:15:49] Bruce: I can't, I can't do it.
[00:15:53] Matty: Let's move on to jurisdictional issues. In other words, who can investigate homicides specifically?
[00:15:59] Bruce: That comes up a lot. And I think really my advice to any writer trying to work on police procedurals, or any mystery involving a murder of that sort, is to know the area that you're writing about. Even if you've made up a town, you want to try to get the area right for the state that you're in, or the county. This comes up a lot when I'm privately advising other writers who are working on a novel and trying to get something right that's set in Maine. And like I say, really, they need to do their homework for their area that they're in because they're not all writing stories set in Maine--thank God, or I wouldn't have made the top 100 for Down East Magazine.
[00:16:35] But for example, in Maine, sometimes I'll read a book where the county sheriff is investigating the homicide or the local police department chief is investigating the homicide or whatever, they'll have a small little PD. You can do whatever you want as a fiction writer, obviously, but to try and stick as close as possible to reality so you don't lose the reader. In Maine, there are only three agencies by decree of the Attorney General's office that are allowed the ability to investigate and work homicide cases. And that is for the entire state. The state police have jurisdiction over that for the entire border of the state of Maine. The only two exceptions to that are the city of Bangor and the city of Portland, Maine, and both of them, have their own homicide units that investigate murders that occur within their cities.
[00:17:25] So the state police wouldn't work a case, although I say that. We've worked them jointly before when it's unclear where the victim actually succumbed to the murder. Were they taken in one of our cities and then maybe the body was found someplace else? When that happens, it is not unheard of for the agencies to work in tandem and have two primary investigators, one from each agency, working the case, but generally speaking, it's just those three agencies. So if you're writing a story, that's set in, I don’t know, just pick any small town-- Dexter, Maine, say, and I don't even know if Dexter has a police department anymore--but he's away, they wouldn't be investigating the murder. They may well be the first responders to something that happened is they have a police department or the county that covers that town, but they would not be the primary agency investigating that murder. It would have to be the state police in that case. And you definitely want to try to get that right.
[00:18:18] And then obviously once you've homed in on what police department would be responsible for this, then you also have to try to figure out how they operate. What their command structure is, the pecking order, who would investigate, that kind of thing. So it pays to do a little bit of homework.
[00:18:31] Matty: It's an advantage of making up a location because I was facing this. I should have interviewed you a year ago because last year in 2019, I wrote a standalone that is now making the rounds of agents. And it's set near Lamoine, Maine, on the mainland right off Mount Desert Island. And I wanted a Sheriff's deputy to be one of the main characters and that he was investigating, at this point not a murder, just some odd things that were going on. And so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the rules were. And I finally decided that they were so confusing that even people in Lamoine, Maine, wouldn't know whether I was portraying it accurately or not. And plus I wasn't calling it Lamoine, Maine, anyway. It was Elias, Maine, in my book.
[00:19:13] So I thought, okay, I think that's close enough for the purposes of my book. Someone can read the description of the geography and I'm sure they can guess that it's Lamoine, Maine, but I can always just fall back on the fact that no, it's not, it's Elias, so I get to figure out who investigates what.
[00:19:29] Bruce: And if you made up the town, you can make up anything else you want to. I always love to give that caveat because I don't want to feel like I'm preaching to people about how it should work, but I think it's like the rules of writing themselves. We should know what they are before we try and break them. It's that same idea. And really for me, it's about trying to do the minimal amount of damage to your own story. And that is not doing things that will be off-putting for the reader. If something's done either inappropriately or inaccurately or way beyond belief, it's the equivalent of the telephone ringing as I'm trying to read a book that I'm absolutely in love with, and you don't want to do anything that's going to pull the reader out of the illusion.
[00:20:07] To me, that's the best. If you can sit down and read a book at one sitting, you're hooked. And you're hooked because of all the things the writer did correctly. As a writer yourself, you don't want to be doing things that will pull you out or let the reader be pulled out of the story, and getting police procedure wrong, way wrong, I think it's one of those things.
[00:20:26] Matty: And there might be cases, too, where the reality would be so distracting that the fictionalized version is a smoother experience for the reader.
[00:20:38] Bruce: I think you give them enough; you try to give them what they need. You know, if DNA results in my stories came back the way they really come back in real life, again, they'd be long books. They would all be the equivalent of Stephen King's The Stand. You have to take some liberties, but I try to follow, in an area that's somewhere between entertainment and reality, as close as I can.
[00:20:58] Matty: Yup. So let's hit another of these mistakes that writers make: cops committing burglaries for evidence. Talk about that a little bit.
[00:21:07] Bruce: I love that one, and even Michael Connelly delves into that a little bit. And I'm certainly not the one to tell you that that's never happened. Rules do get broken in probably every profession, but really one of the things that I was very cognizant of, and I learned early on in the job, is that there are no shortcuts. There's a reason cases don't always get solved. Even if we actually know who did it, there's a big difference between you or I knowing who committed a murder and being able to prove it and successfully prosecute the case. Huge difference. We're talking probable cause all the way up to and beyond a reasonable doubt, and those aren't even close to each other.
[00:21:45] I think in any profession, if you're at point A and you're trying to get to point B, what's the shortest way for me to get there? And they love to do that, and in a lot of the books there'll be a cool burglary, or the detective knows how to pick locks or they'll send somebody in on their behalf to look around first.
[00:22:03] I mean, you can definitely do it and, like I say, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that that is never done. The problem becomes once you have done that as a writer in your story, and one of your characters has now gone there, what you're running the risk of is the fruit of the poisonous tree.
[00:22:21] Now, just because there's a bloody knife in the suspect's trunk doesn't mean that if you don't have probable cause to search that trunk, or some other legal exception ... let's say you're the bad guy in my scenario. I'll make you the bad guy--sorry but so you're the bad guy and I know that you have just committed this crime and you're driving from the scene and I get you a couple of miles away. And for whatever reason, I believe the murder weapon that you used is in the trunk or that you're going to dispose of that.
[00:22:51] If I have probable cause to arrest you for anything, honestly, let's say you're drunk too. Okay. We're going to add that to your resume. You've got it going on. You're intoxicated and I know that as soon as I pull you out of the car. Now I've got an OUI, I have a reason to actually physically arrest you. Now, when I'm done arresting you, that also now legally gives me the right to search that vehicle because I'm going to have it towed off the side of the road, and I've got to do an inventory search. That is legal. In the course of that inventory search, I'm hoping that I'm going to find a murder weapon and I do in the trunk of the car. Now that's a legal definition that I'm allowed to follow. Let's say I pulled you over for something else and found out you were drunk and then that leads to me finding out you just committed the murder. If you twist that and now you're using that as a way to try to get a look in the trunk, that's problematic. If I have somebody or the detective goes and sneaks into your trunk in the parking lot and picks the lock and gets the trunk open, sees the knife there, we can't then go and get a search warrant and say, "Hey, we broke into the trunk and the knife was there, Your Honor." It doesn't work like that. So you have to follow the rules. You have to play by the rules.
[00:23:56] If you don't, you're running the risk ... really there's only two options here. One is when the detective or whoever it is that has committed this infraction gets on the stand, that question ultimately might be posed. And so you have two choices. You can either let your case fall apart because you have now poisoned the tree, the evidence tree, because anything you found, anything that's happened after that, as a result of that illegal search is now gone, which might be your whole case, or you can perjure yourself on the stand.
[00:24:27] And there's a slippery slope that nobody wants to get in. Once you've lost your credibility, it doesn't come back. It doesn't grow back. So that might make for fun and exciting stuff in fiction, it's not very realistic, and I, as a writer, I would really work to try and keep that at a minimum.
[00:24:44] If the goal is to try and show the possibility that your main character might be frustrated enough to bend the rules, just know as the writer that there might be fallout as a result of that. And that might be something that you want to revisit.
[00:24:55] My wife and I love to watch the British crime mysteries and Midsomer Murders is one of our favorites. The stories aren't always the best, but we love the characters, and so it's sort of a relaxing thing to come home to. But they do two or three burglaries an episode sometimes. And I look at this character--they're breaking into everything. I should imagine if the police work was that easy, we'd never not solved the case.
[00:25:17] Matty: The number of murders that happen in tiny British towns ...
[00:25:21] Bruce: Who would want to live in Midsomer? But the same thing goes for having somebody else do it instead of the detective. Now they're acting as an agent of the government and it's really the same as if the detective went and did the break-in to take a look. So, you definitely see it in crime fiction, but it's probably not one of those things that you want there, unless you're writing a story about a bad police officer. And then I guess anything goes. If you're writing mysteries or suspense or thrillers, the cell phone really threw a wrench in the works because it's harder and harder to put your character in a space where they're out of touch, they can't get help, all those details.
[00:26:01] Right? Yeah, technology has definitely changed it. it definitely, like you say, becomes much harder for the writer trying to find a way to plot the story that's believable. There's always the joke about the cell phone coverage. You go into a dead zone at a point where it helps your story. You can only do that once per book, is what somebody was saying one time that I read.
[00:26:21] And I always joke about that. I'm like, well, that depends on where you live. I'm in Maine and we are very rural, and I can tell you this, I can drive right out of my house right now and in 20 minutes I can get to a place where I have no cell coverage for like 11 miles. And that's legit, I mean, zero service at all. Maybe I'll get to use that stretch of roadway someday. That'll be great. I'll argue with that about with other writers.
[00:26:41] But, yeah, it definitely changes the game because you could have entire things happening, as a writer, with one character going on on the other side of town and, back in the seventies, the other character wouldn't even know that any of that had happened. And you could have that comedy of errors where they were tripping over each other. Much harder to do with cell phones. As a matter of fact, you really can't stay out of touch. It's hard to do that. I loved retiring from police work and being able to shut the ringer off on my cell phone when I went to bed at night. I can't even tell you how weird that was, because it always had to be right there and on and loud, because I was always called in.
[00:27:16] So, yeah, it definitely changes. Sometimes I wonder if the historical writers might have it better because all of those things that we have to contend with, they're not there. If you're walking the foot beat down on the waterfront in our rainy cobblestone type evening in Portland, Maine in 1910, you're not going to have the same issues that Detective Byron might have today.
[00:27:37] Matty: Exactly. You would be slipping in the horse manure.
[00:27:41] Bruce: That's true. You might get run over by a wagon. That's very true.
[00:27:44] Matty: Exactly. There'll be some other set of issues to deal with.
[00:27:47] Bruce: That's true.
[00:27:48] Matty: The final category we're going to talk about is crime scene do's and don'ts. What are some things that you see in terms of how a crime scene is treated that are not realistic?
[00:27:58] Bruce: Some of those are really probably better served visually as failures. I'd say a lot of the Hollywood script writing or TV script writing, you can really see it there, but I also see it in the novels. Crime scene should be very, very limited. I know it's great to be able to have all your main characters involved in every aspect of a case. If you've got multiple people, so you want to put them here and you want to put them there. But the reality is, the minimum amount of contamination to a crime scene that occurs is the best, because this is another one of those things that will be examined and torn apart later on and in court.
[00:28:35] There are two things you don't ever want to see happen to a crime scene. One is you don't want them corrupted by people adding things to the scene, you know what I mean? Let's say footprints come into play in a murder scene. The last thing you want to do then is as having five or six people traipsing through there and bringing their own footprints. At a minimum, what that's going to do now is that everybody who did that is now going to have to give an impression of their footwear for comparison purposes, to try to eliminate them as suspects in the murder scene.
[00:29:06] Same goes with fingerprints. You've got people that are picking up things without gloves, without latex gloves on, well, they're now adding fingerprints. They're adding DNA, and that's another one that is a really pet peeve of mine, especially now that we're in the age of DNA and everyone understands the importance of that particular science, is the prospect of going in and bagging and tagging multiple items from the crime scene, the murder weapon, whatever it is, or something that's left behind by the suspect. And as the evidence collecting is going on, they've got their rubber gloves on, they've got that right, but then they're picking up evidence, then they're bagging it and tagging it, and then they go over and they pick up another piece of evidence. Well, if I've done that and I didn't change my gloves, I'm the investigator, what have I done? I may now have transferred somebody's DNA from one thing to another thing. And now something that maybe the person you want to charge has never touched is going to have their DNA on it.
[00:30:04] You have to be cognizant of those types of things. I think as a writer, even if you haven't done that, it's better to try and visualize what could go wrong with what you're doing. And maybe that's part of your plot, maybe you want that in there, but to try to be aware of those things. I hate to keep beating up the television series, but usually when there's a crime scene, that's always one of the cool moments to get that shot of all eight detectives. And they're dressed to the nines. They're all made up, even if it's three in the morning. Everybody looks great and they're all posing, they're all standing there trying to look bad, and that would never happen. You would never want people like that. And they're really at a bare minimum.
[00:30:42] So, yeah, you just have to be aware of all those things. What it would be that you'd be looking for: what's out of place. One route in one route out, we always used to preach that. you pick a route that will do the minimum amount of damage. I mean, anybody other than on a hovercraft that enters the crime scene is now doing something to the scene to change it, whether they mean to or not.
[00:31:01] The minimum amount of personnel really matters and the minimal disturbance and picking one place and everybody follows that path is very important. The other thing to bring this up and again, I want to qualify in case there are agencies out there that are actually doing this. We almost always bagged and tagged our evidence in paper. Not the plastic bags that you see in every single TV show. In court that's one thing to hold up something that's now been processed and everything else a year later, and you want the jury to be able to see it without touching it, so they're in a clear plastic bag. That's a different animal all together. But the initial seizing of evidence ... here's a good example. Here's an easy example. Anyone who's ever gone family camping, right? The bug dope and the bug bites and the good time that went from that fantasy weekend.
[00:31:50] And then you go, "Oh my God, I'm never going again." Right? Came back and it rained all weekend and ruined your trip. And what's the first thing you do with all your stuff when you get home, because you don't want to deal with it anymore, right? You throw it into a bag, you throw it in the garage and you're like, I'll get to that next week.
[00:32:06] Next week becomes next year and now you're thinking, "Hey, let's go camping. That'll be fun." And when you go to take the stuff out of the bag, what's it look like? It's got fauna on it you can't identify. Usually that's what happens.
[00:32:18] Matty: From your own life.
[00:32:20] Bruce: I've been there. We've all done that. And, so, yeah, you don't do that. The last thing we would ever do is put evidence in something that may either mess up or let's say smear fingerprints, cause things to degrade because they're in plastic. And let's say I've got something that's blood soaked. If I put that in plastic, that's exactly what's going to happen. It's going to mold, it's going to degrade. There'll be heat as things are happening. And you don't want to do that. For us, when we grab things that were, let's say bloodied or had any other fluids on them, we would take those back to the police station and air-dry them in a controlled room, and maybe on a big, long table with the fresh wrapping paper, like the meat packers would use, a fresh roll of that, and then you let them air dry. Then you do your testing. You can take your samples for the DNA, take your samples for testing for blood type, fingerprints, looking for hair and fibers with alternate light sources.
[00:33:13] Things that wouldn't show up any other way. That's when all of that happens, but we air dry all those things first, because you want to be able to preserve them for later retesting, for court purposes, that kind of thing. Man, they love the plastic. They just love to use the plastic. And I tell you that's not.
[00:33:30] Yeah, it's just not ... we had boxes for sharp things. We had paper bags, like the ones you used to get at the grocery store, which I guess we're back to doing again now. My wife keeps bringing them home by the truckload. I'm like, why did we ever do away with that? I don't understand. But yeah, plastic, it's really a no, no. We did paper bags and cardboard boxes. It would be a real rarity that we would use plastic.
[00:33:50] Matty: It introduces another interesting time consideration. We were talking earlier about watching the British crime shows and my husband and I really got into Endeavour, and I think that took place in the sixties, if I remember correctly--sixties or maybe early seventies--and it was always very distracting because there were always, as you were saying, a bunch of people in the crime scene and they were always touching everything. And I thought, are they doing that because that's truly what would have happened in 1965 or whenever the story was supposed to take place.
[00:34:23] And then let's just say, that's true, that the glove concept didn't come along until later, did they have to weigh the distraction of showing something that might've been realistic but that would have struck people who are now used to CSI and I think are more savvy, more knowledgeable about those things, to watch them touch everything without gloves on.
[00:34:46] Bruce: That's interesting. I wonder whether or not that even occurred to them. It definitely pulls me out of it when I see it. "Look, there they go again. They're touching everything with their bare hands," and I've got my wife doing it now, so that's good. She's discriminating. But yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. I'd like to think, because fingerprinting had been going for quite a while at that point, that they would have been aware of that. But the other thing I noticed is that, especially in those older ones, the historical ones, everybody's smoking a cigarette. It's like going to a Rat Pack concert. You see Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. doing their thing. Everybody's got a cigarette going. Well, you're bringing that cigarette into the crime scene. I don't know. You have to suspend disbelief, I think, in a lot of that type of stuff.
[00:35:27] That is interesting. I think if you, as the writer, were trying to establish that things might've been a little sloppier back then, or that there is a way for a hole to develop in a case, that that might be leading a reader down one way and then all of a sudden you flip it on its head because somebody did something at the scene. That really could spin the reader for a loop and think, "Oh my God, I never saw that coming." Yet they read the scene where it happened, where the thing happened, and it was sort of minimized by the writer at the time, but then it becomes a big deal later on. That's a great plot device, I think, if you were going to do that.
[00:36:00] But, it definitely puts me off when I read that or when I see that, so not something that we do. Another great analogy is if you've ever played billiards, try picking up a ball to make a point, and then talking to the person who was getting ready to take a shot and then putting it back where it was, roughly. You can't put it back where it was--once you've moved it, it's moved. Evidence is the same way. Once it's been messed with, you can't testify to its quality, that it was unsullied, that nobody went and touched it no one did anything else, no one moved it before you got there.
[00:36:31] One of the reasons that all of the scenes are photographed before things are moved from them. The evidence tech will usually do at least a rough diagram, a drawing kind of a thing, to show the placement of where things are in the room, let's say here's the body over here, and so you do a rough drawing of the size of the room, you show where the body is. Maybe you put in where the murder weapon was, and then later on you could actually, by measuring, you can go and do that to scale. And then you could conceivably, and sometimes this is done like they do with a plane crash, you recreate that entire scene, maybe in a gymnasium, maybe it's something you put together for the court. The jury is sometimes taken on field trips and they might actually then get to see a mockup of the scene or go to the scene itself. Sometimes that happens too, depending on whether or not it's relevant to a case. But all of those things have to be done before anything is moved.
[00:37:27] And actually I want to make one last point on that. The most important, obviously, in a murder scene is the body. That may be your most important piece of evidence. And I notice there's a lot of that where they're checking pockets, they're moving them, they're rolling them over, looking for whatever. And at least in Maine, the medical examiner is the person who's actually responsible for that body. And until the medical examiner either gets there and says, "Okay, it's okay to move them at this point, and then we're going to take them up to the autopsy," or the medical examiner has questioned the detective and has gotten enough information, and maybe they've worked together repeatedly so they know, sometimes they'll give you the verbal OK based on what you're telling them, or maybe you send them some photos or whatever. But the medical examiner is the only person that actually can give the blessing to move that body.
[00:38:13] That's their evidence, that's their bailiwick. And I notice there's a lot of that where the detectives just start poking around or the uniformed officer might start poking around and it's not a good idea. That's a good way to mess up a murder case as well. Just something for the writers to be thinking about.
[00:38:27] Matty: Yeah. I think that resources like the information you're providing are great because then people know what the reality of the situation is. And I think it also gives some interesting ways and more unusual ways of making a scene interesting. So you could have all eight of the detectives there in the room, treading all over the floor, or you could make the fact that that's not possible in reality part of the drama. You could have one detective that was in the room and there's another three that want to come in, but they're being prevented by the officer stationed at the door or whatever. Rather than falling back on the tropes, which now are losing their impact because everybody's seen them so many times, and instead you find out what the truth is, but you find a way to find drama in the true situation that's more interesting than the easy drama of the incorrect situation.
[00:39:24] Bruce: Right. And I think that's like what we were discussing earlier with the advent of the cell phone. That now puts a limitation on us as writers, where we could spin these crazy yarns before, where characters weren't aware of what the other characters were doing, but we were able to use those limitations to our advantage. I think as a writer, if you consider those things that we just talked about for crime scene management as limitations, it might be fun and that absolutely could affect you plotting. I mean, you should use that as something that it's not a limiter, it opens up another avenue or creates more drama because somebody violates the protocol or whatever it is. Especially if you're going to have a court room drama part of this in your story, if that ends up getting to that point, those are moments that can come back to haunt. Maybe things go sideways at the end of the book and it becomes a sequel to try and fix what happened.
[00:40:13] Matty: I love that. That and all the information you've shared today has been great fodder for the listeners. So Bruce, let people know where they can go to find out more about you and your books online.
[00:40:25] Bruce: You can go to my website, which is BruceRobertcoffin.com. You can also find me on pretty much all of social media, and at HarperCollins, their website as well. My John Byron series, which is now four books long, and I would recommend if they check them out that they read them in order, always fun to read them. And I love the character arc that I've built in for John and the team. And you'll also get a lot of good ideas probably and procedural ideas, because I try to follow my own rules as I'm writing the books.
[00:40:55] Matty: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for this. This has been so helpful.
[00:40:59] Bruce: Thank you. This has been fun.
[00:04:09] I then had to walk that fine line between writing and giving you enough information that you could follow along with the story and see what it was that the characters were up to without overloading you with detail. I had to keep figuring it out and really trying to change my viewpoint as a writer. So it would be like I was writing for somebody who wasn't me and I needed to remember that. You give them what they need.
[00:04:35] I think it's really getting police procedure is getting the story. You want to give the reader enough that they can follow along with what's going on and stay interested, but not overload them with detail. And that can be anything. I mean, we all get carried away with things that we enjoy talking about or the scenery or whatever it is, and police procedures no different. I really had to learn to give enough, but not too much. And I feel I've found that perfect balance and I walked that line fairly well. And my readers will tell me if I don’t, I'm sure.
[00:05:07] Matty: I imagine your early readers were a lot of your professional colleagues who might have actually loved to hear the kind of detail you were talking about. Did you see a difference in how they responded when your first book came out versus how the non-law enforcement reader responded?
[00:05:25] Bruce: I really expected a big difference there. I think I was most nervous about what my former colleagues would think. We're tough on each other, there's no question, so you expect that they would call you out on anything that was different than the norm or something that I messed up and I think I was most excited by the fact that they actually got enthralled in the stories and weren't sitting there looking to nitpick, were actually enjoying the story and seeing where things went.
[00:05:50] And then the natural reaction is trying to figure it out if I had a character, if I modeled them after someone they knew, or if it was after them themselves. But yeah, that was almost a litmus test for me. I wanted to know whether or not what I had done and for the entertaining quality would still pass muster with the people that actually did the job.
[00:06:10] I was very excited to see that they were embracing my writing as well. So it's good, it seems to cross all age groups and occupational groups and I'm hitting apparently on all the cylinders. There are very few naysayers and that's what every writer wants, I think.
[00:06:26] Matty: That's great. And plus, they don't want to read about the one-year investigation any more than the non-law enforcement reader does. They would be as bored by a documentary-like reliance on strict reality is any other reader would be.
[00:06:41] Bruce: It's true. I think that's definitely true.
[00:06:44] Matty: Now that I've given you a chance to give a little bit more general background ... Miranda miscues, what are you seeing there? I see it in literary work. I see it in script work when they're doing it for television or movies. There seems to be almost a frantic need to get Miranda out of the way immediately. Miranda is being read as the cuffs are going on and it makes for a cool television. It makes for cool novel reading and whatever, but it's not realistic. I think some of it is just the knowledge of what Miranda is all about. And really, it's a two-prong test where Miranda is required if someone is in custody. That's not someone that's coming to give a statement or voluntarily submitting a statement. They have to be in custody and they also have to be being questioned. Because of being in custody now they're subject to all of the rights that would be afforded anybody in custody, whether they were in jail or had just been arrested. And, really, questioning somebody, that is very similar to searching a property that belongs to them, like their car or their home or their business, in that they are afforded those protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
[00:07:51] Bruce: If you look at an interview, in the same vein, one of the things that would get you by a warrant in a search, it would be voluntarily having the person who owned or responsible for the property, allowing you to do a search. And so really an interview is the same thing, that it has to pass the voluntariness test. The person being questioned has to be given their rights and be afforded the opportunity to either not answer the questions or to seek advice of counsel or to answer the questions if that's what they choose to do. Miranda doesn't start right away. I mean, it doesn't work that way. Taking somebody into custody is not a reason to read Miranda.
[00:08:28] I can't speak for other police departments, maybe it's done differently in the UK or whatever, but I know about my own experience and quite often what will happen during an arrest, the uniformed officers would be tasked with the actual physical arrest of somebody. And then when they were met by the detectives, the detective at that point might be the person who's actually conducting the interview. And so let's say you are the uniformed officer. I don't want you reading Miranda to somebody who's upset with you because you just placed him in custody. They're probably not going to be very cooperative, even if it's in their best interest at that point.
[00:09:01] But later on in a calm environment where we get a chance to talk back and forth as adults and equals, and maybe the detective gets a chance to explain some of what's happening, they may be more apt to go along with that and actually want to explain their side of what happened, which would mean answering questions. But once they have invoked their Miranda rights and shut down, you can't go back to that.
[00:09:25] The only person that can undo that then is the person themselves who has invoked their Miranda rights and refused to talk. You can't go back at them again and try to give them something else or say something else to entice them to talk to you. You really have to be careful with that. And I think in a lot of writing, sometimes I'll see people rush to that as if that was the next step as the cuffs are going on, and we've all seen it, Law & Order and all those shows, "You're under arrest," and, "You have the right to remain silent."
[00:09:54] We don't do that. The likelihood is that people would never want to talk to us. They'd just clam up.
[00:09:59] Matty: How much time would normally go by between the time they were taken into custody and the interview scenario where they are read their Miranda rights.
[00:10:10] Bruce: It really would depend greatly on the procedure itself. If the detective makes the arrest, let's say, the arrest is actually after a big, long investigation, and let's say it's a murder case. Unless the police were actually witnessing the event and then the arrest obviously had to be right away, generally speaking, the arrest might come after a long, protracted investigation. In which case it would almost be the last thing that was done, because a case would be built all along. And at that point, the detective might be involved in the physical arrest. If that was the case, it might only be a matter of transporting that person to the police station or wherever the interview was going to be conducted. And then Miranda might be read. It could be a very short period of time.
[00:10:51] In other cases, maybe the uniformed officers were first on the scene and maybe the murder had just happened, and the suspect is standing there holding the weapon above the victim. And then the detectives, let's say it's a nighttime event, would not necessarily be working, might be called in. Then after the custody has happened, that person's transported to the jail or to the police station, to a holding area or whatever it is.
[00:11:14] It may be hours before a detective actually gets to sit down with the suspect at that point, and then go over the rights and attempt to do an interview where they garner additional information or clarifying information, whatever it is. Because there's always the chance that if the actual incident wasn't witnessed by the police, maybe that person just happened to come across it and out of human stupidity picked up the murder weapon and the officer comes around the corner and there they are standing there and had nothing to do with it.
[00:11:42] It varies widely. And sometimes the people do, in fact, invoke their right to remain silent and as they think about it a little bit more, or they get a chance to talk to somebody for advice, that changes. Sometimes the attorney will contact us and bring the person in or say, "Hey, they want to talk to you down at the jail. And we've arranged a meeting, can you have a detective come down and talk to us?" It really depends.
[00:12:04] Matty: And when you're at the point where you feel it's the time to read them their Miranda rights, are there tips that you ever offered more junior law enforcement officers about how to pose that, so that just hearing that didn't automatically have them invoke their rights to remain silent?
[00:12:23] Bruce: I think it's really just learning to deal with people. There's a little bit of salesmanship that goes into any of that. I did this for a living for almost 30 years, and still driving home at night in the dark, all of a sudden, if I recognize there's a police car directly behind me, I get that reaction. I get the same reaction you would get. And I did that for a living and I'm thinking, "Oh my God, don't they have anything better to do?" or "What have I done?"
[00:12:45] I think the detective who's seasoned recognizes that the uniformed officer really becomes somewhat of a threat to the person and they're not going to respond well to that. And there's a difference, I think, between having to take an authoritative role on the street to get control of a situation and being the detective in the nice suit and tie and the environment with everything is nice. There's no mosquitoes biting. There's nobody screaming from across the street. There's none of that going on. It's a controlled environment. And now this is a chance to sit down and try to reach this person on a personal level and so it really doesn't need to be, and it shouldn't be, an adversarial interaction.
[00:13:26] It should be two people having a discussion. And the detective wants to get home the point that what they are after is the truth. No one worth their salt as a police officer should be looking to hang a crime on somebody. They should be about trying to find the truth. And so, I always would say, “I wasn't at the event, I wasn't at the scene that you were at. You know what happened. You were there, or you at least know your version of it. I wasn't there. What I'm trying to get at is the truth and this is your opportunity to give me that, to tell me your side of the story," and then you proceed to read Miranda and make sure they understand what they've been read. And then you go from there.
[00:14:05] It's really a matter of trying to get a connection with them one-on-one. And I think the likelihood of success in some of those cases really depends upon the longevity of the detective, the police officer who's handling the interview, and also the experiences of the person across the table. If this is somebody who's been in trouble repeatedly with the law, they're probably going to be pretty well versed in what their rights are and know what happens if they have done something wrong and less likely to talk to you. So sometimes it's really a question of how bad a person that might be across the table.
[00:14:38] Matty: It seems as if the whole interview process is another one that is probably not accurately represented in books and TV and movies, because it's always confrontational, it's always butting of heads, because a friendly chat wouldn't make very good drama.
[00:14:55] Bruce: Right. Exactly. I think those usually are depicted as poorly as the courtroom scenes are depicted. Generally, I'm used to seeing the judge sleeping on the bench and people are objecting and the judge hasn't ruled on the previous objection, and now someone on the other side is barking at the other attorney and that stuff doesn't happen. I mean, it wouldn't work. It does make for great drama, but it doesn't work that way in real life.
[00:15:18] Some people do a nice job with the courtroom procedure. I know Michael Connelly really hits that well, but it's a fine line. You can't be boring to the point of what it would really be like sitting in court. There's a lot of sidebars that nobody is ever privy to, the jury's not privy to, the people in the courtroom are not privy to. A lot of legal issues get discussed with the jury out of the room. So, yes, it's a lot different in real life.
[00:15:41] My wife won't let me watch Law & Order or any of those shows with her because I'm constantly going, "Come on, that would never really happen."
[00:15:48] Matty: You can't suspend your disbelief that much?
[00:15:49] Bruce: I can't, I can't do it.
[00:15:53] Matty: Let's move on to jurisdictional issues. In other words, who can investigate homicides specifically?
[00:15:59] Bruce: That comes up a lot. And I think really my advice to any writer trying to work on police procedurals, or any mystery involving a murder of that sort, is to know the area that you're writing about. Even if you've made up a town, you want to try to get the area right for the state that you're in, or the county. This comes up a lot when I'm privately advising other writers who are working on a novel and trying to get something right that's set in Maine. And like I say, really, they need to do their homework for their area that they're in because they're not all writing stories set in Maine--thank God, or I wouldn't have made the top 100 for Down East Magazine.
[00:16:35] But for example, in Maine, sometimes I'll read a book where the county sheriff is investigating the homicide or the local police department chief is investigating the homicide or whatever, they'll have a small little PD. You can do whatever you want as a fiction writer, obviously, but to try and stick as close as possible to reality so you don't lose the reader. In Maine, there are only three agencies by decree of the Attorney General's office that are allowed the ability to investigate and work homicide cases. And that is for the entire state. The state police have jurisdiction over that for the entire border of the state of Maine. The only two exceptions to that are the city of Bangor and the city of Portland, Maine, and both of them, have their own homicide units that investigate murders that occur within their cities.
[00:17:25] So the state police wouldn't work a case, although I say that. We've worked them jointly before when it's unclear where the victim actually succumbed to the murder. Were they taken in one of our cities and then maybe the body was found someplace else? When that happens, it is not unheard of for the agencies to work in tandem and have two primary investigators, one from each agency, working the case, but generally speaking, it's just those three agencies. So if you're writing a story, that's set in, I don’t know, just pick any small town-- Dexter, Maine, say, and I don't even know if Dexter has a police department anymore--but he's away, they wouldn't be investigating the murder. They may well be the first responders to something that happened is they have a police department or the county that covers that town, but they would not be the primary agency investigating that murder. It would have to be the state police in that case. And you definitely want to try to get that right.
[00:18:18] And then obviously once you've homed in on what police department would be responsible for this, then you also have to try to figure out how they operate. What their command structure is, the pecking order, who would investigate, that kind of thing. So it pays to do a little bit of homework.
[00:18:31] Matty: It's an advantage of making up a location because I was facing this. I should have interviewed you a year ago because last year in 2019, I wrote a standalone that is now making the rounds of agents. And it's set near Lamoine, Maine, on the mainland right off Mount Desert Island. And I wanted a Sheriff's deputy to be one of the main characters and that he was investigating, at this point not a murder, just some odd things that were going on. And so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the rules were. And I finally decided that they were so confusing that even people in Lamoine, Maine, wouldn't know whether I was portraying it accurately or not. And plus I wasn't calling it Lamoine, Maine, anyway. It was Elias, Maine, in my book.
[00:19:13] So I thought, okay, I think that's close enough for the purposes of my book. Someone can read the description of the geography and I'm sure they can guess that it's Lamoine, Maine, but I can always just fall back on the fact that no, it's not, it's Elias, so I get to figure out who investigates what.
[00:19:29] Bruce: And if you made up the town, you can make up anything else you want to. I always love to give that caveat because I don't want to feel like I'm preaching to people about how it should work, but I think it's like the rules of writing themselves. We should know what they are before we try and break them. It's that same idea. And really for me, it's about trying to do the minimal amount of damage to your own story. And that is not doing things that will be off-putting for the reader. If something's done either inappropriately or inaccurately or way beyond belief, it's the equivalent of the telephone ringing as I'm trying to read a book that I'm absolutely in love with, and you don't want to do anything that's going to pull the reader out of the illusion.
[00:20:07] To me, that's the best. If you can sit down and read a book at one sitting, you're hooked. And you're hooked because of all the things the writer did correctly. As a writer yourself, you don't want to be doing things that will pull you out or let the reader be pulled out of the story, and getting police procedure wrong, way wrong, I think it's one of those things.
[00:20:26] Matty: And there might be cases, too, where the reality would be so distracting that the fictionalized version is a smoother experience for the reader.
[00:20:38] Bruce: I think you give them enough; you try to give them what they need. You know, if DNA results in my stories came back the way they really come back in real life, again, they'd be long books. They would all be the equivalent of Stephen King's The Stand. You have to take some liberties, but I try to follow, in an area that's somewhere between entertainment and reality, as close as I can.
[00:20:58] Matty: Yup. So let's hit another of these mistakes that writers make: cops committing burglaries for evidence. Talk about that a little bit.
[00:21:07] Bruce: I love that one, and even Michael Connelly delves into that a little bit. And I'm certainly not the one to tell you that that's never happened. Rules do get broken in probably every profession, but really one of the things that I was very cognizant of, and I learned early on in the job, is that there are no shortcuts. There's a reason cases don't always get solved. Even if we actually know who did it, there's a big difference between you or I knowing who committed a murder and being able to prove it and successfully prosecute the case. Huge difference. We're talking probable cause all the way up to and beyond a reasonable doubt, and those aren't even close to each other.
[00:21:45] I think in any profession, if you're at point A and you're trying to get to point B, what's the shortest way for me to get there? And they love to do that, and in a lot of the books there'll be a cool burglary, or the detective knows how to pick locks or they'll send somebody in on their behalf to look around first.
[00:22:03] I mean, you can definitely do it and, like I say, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that that is never done. The problem becomes once you have done that as a writer in your story, and one of your characters has now gone there, what you're running the risk of is the fruit of the poisonous tree.
[00:22:21] Now, just because there's a bloody knife in the suspect's trunk doesn't mean that if you don't have probable cause to search that trunk, or some other legal exception ... let's say you're the bad guy in my scenario. I'll make you the bad guy--sorry but so you're the bad guy and I know that you have just committed this crime and you're driving from the scene and I get you a couple of miles away. And for whatever reason, I believe the murder weapon that you used is in the trunk or that you're going to dispose of that.
[00:22:51] If I have probable cause to arrest you for anything, honestly, let's say you're drunk too. Okay. We're going to add that to your resume. You've got it going on. You're intoxicated and I know that as soon as I pull you out of the car. Now I've got an OUI, I have a reason to actually physically arrest you. Now, when I'm done arresting you, that also now legally gives me the right to search that vehicle because I'm going to have it towed off the side of the road, and I've got to do an inventory search. That is legal. In the course of that inventory search, I'm hoping that I'm going to find a murder weapon and I do in the trunk of the car. Now that's a legal definition that I'm allowed to follow. Let's say I pulled you over for something else and found out you were drunk and then that leads to me finding out you just committed the murder. If you twist that and now you're using that as a way to try to get a look in the trunk, that's problematic. If I have somebody or the detective goes and sneaks into your trunk in the parking lot and picks the lock and gets the trunk open, sees the knife there, we can't then go and get a search warrant and say, "Hey, we broke into the trunk and the knife was there, Your Honor." It doesn't work like that. So you have to follow the rules. You have to play by the rules.
[00:23:56] If you don't, you're running the risk ... really there's only two options here. One is when the detective or whoever it is that has committed this infraction gets on the stand, that question ultimately might be posed. And so you have two choices. You can either let your case fall apart because you have now poisoned the tree, the evidence tree, because anything you found, anything that's happened after that, as a result of that illegal search is now gone, which might be your whole case, or you can perjure yourself on the stand.
[00:24:27] And there's a slippery slope that nobody wants to get in. Once you've lost your credibility, it doesn't come back. It doesn't grow back. So that might make for fun and exciting stuff in fiction, it's not very realistic, and I, as a writer, I would really work to try and keep that at a minimum.
[00:24:44] If the goal is to try and show the possibility that your main character might be frustrated enough to bend the rules, just know as the writer that there might be fallout as a result of that. And that might be something that you want to revisit.
[00:24:55] My wife and I love to watch the British crime mysteries and Midsomer Murders is one of our favorites. The stories aren't always the best, but we love the characters, and so it's sort of a relaxing thing to come home to. But they do two or three burglaries an episode sometimes. And I look at this character--they're breaking into everything. I should imagine if the police work was that easy, we'd never not solved the case.
[00:25:17] Matty: The number of murders that happen in tiny British towns ...
[00:25:21] Bruce: Who would want to live in Midsomer? But the same thing goes for having somebody else do it instead of the detective. Now they're acting as an agent of the government and it's really the same as if the detective went and did the break-in to take a look. So, you definitely see it in crime fiction, but it's probably not one of those things that you want there, unless you're writing a story about a bad police officer. And then I guess anything goes. If you're writing mysteries or suspense or thrillers, the cell phone really threw a wrench in the works because it's harder and harder to put your character in a space where they're out of touch, they can't get help, all those details.
[00:26:01] Right? Yeah, technology has definitely changed it. it definitely, like you say, becomes much harder for the writer trying to find a way to plot the story that's believable. There's always the joke about the cell phone coverage. You go into a dead zone at a point where it helps your story. You can only do that once per book, is what somebody was saying one time that I read.
[00:26:21] And I always joke about that. I'm like, well, that depends on where you live. I'm in Maine and we are very rural, and I can tell you this, I can drive right out of my house right now and in 20 minutes I can get to a place where I have no cell coverage for like 11 miles. And that's legit, I mean, zero service at all. Maybe I'll get to use that stretch of roadway someday. That'll be great. I'll argue with that about with other writers.
[00:26:41] But, yeah, it definitely changes the game because you could have entire things happening, as a writer, with one character going on on the other side of town and, back in the seventies, the other character wouldn't even know that any of that had happened. And you could have that comedy of errors where they were tripping over each other. Much harder to do with cell phones. As a matter of fact, you really can't stay out of touch. It's hard to do that. I loved retiring from police work and being able to shut the ringer off on my cell phone when I went to bed at night. I can't even tell you how weird that was, because it always had to be right there and on and loud, because I was always called in.
[00:27:16] So, yeah, it definitely changes. Sometimes I wonder if the historical writers might have it better because all of those things that we have to contend with, they're not there. If you're walking the foot beat down on the waterfront in our rainy cobblestone type evening in Portland, Maine in 1910, you're not going to have the same issues that Detective Byron might have today.
[00:27:37] Matty: Exactly. You would be slipping in the horse manure.
[00:27:41] Bruce: That's true. You might get run over by a wagon. That's very true.
[00:27:44] Matty: Exactly. There'll be some other set of issues to deal with.
[00:27:47] Bruce: That's true.
[00:27:48] Matty: The final category we're going to talk about is crime scene do's and don'ts. What are some things that you see in terms of how a crime scene is treated that are not realistic?
[00:27:58] Bruce: Some of those are really probably better served visually as failures. I'd say a lot of the Hollywood script writing or TV script writing, you can really see it there, but I also see it in the novels. Crime scene should be very, very limited. I know it's great to be able to have all your main characters involved in every aspect of a case. If you've got multiple people, so you want to put them here and you want to put them there. But the reality is, the minimum amount of contamination to a crime scene that occurs is the best, because this is another one of those things that will be examined and torn apart later on and in court.
[00:28:35] There are two things you don't ever want to see happen to a crime scene. One is you don't want them corrupted by people adding things to the scene, you know what I mean? Let's say footprints come into play in a murder scene. The last thing you want to do then is as having five or six people traipsing through there and bringing their own footprints. At a minimum, what that's going to do now is that everybody who did that is now going to have to give an impression of their footwear for comparison purposes, to try to eliminate them as suspects in the murder scene.
[00:29:06] Same goes with fingerprints. You've got people that are picking up things without gloves, without latex gloves on, well, they're now adding fingerprints. They're adding DNA, and that's another one that is a really pet peeve of mine, especially now that we're in the age of DNA and everyone understands the importance of that particular science, is the prospect of going in and bagging and tagging multiple items from the crime scene, the murder weapon, whatever it is, or something that's left behind by the suspect. And as the evidence collecting is going on, they've got their rubber gloves on, they've got that right, but then they're picking up evidence, then they're bagging it and tagging it, and then they go over and they pick up another piece of evidence. Well, if I've done that and I didn't change my gloves, I'm the investigator, what have I done? I may now have transferred somebody's DNA from one thing to another thing. And now something that maybe the person you want to charge has never touched is going to have their DNA on it.
[00:30:04] You have to be cognizant of those types of things. I think as a writer, even if you haven't done that, it's better to try and visualize what could go wrong with what you're doing. And maybe that's part of your plot, maybe you want that in there, but to try to be aware of those things. I hate to keep beating up the television series, but usually when there's a crime scene, that's always one of the cool moments to get that shot of all eight detectives. And they're dressed to the nines. They're all made up, even if it's three in the morning. Everybody looks great and they're all posing, they're all standing there trying to look bad, and that would never happen. You would never want people like that. And they're really at a bare minimum.
[00:30:42] So, yeah, you just have to be aware of all those things. What it would be that you'd be looking for: what's out of place. One route in one route out, we always used to preach that. you pick a route that will do the minimum amount of damage. I mean, anybody other than on a hovercraft that enters the crime scene is now doing something to the scene to change it, whether they mean to or not.
[00:31:01] The minimum amount of personnel really matters and the minimal disturbance and picking one place and everybody follows that path is very important. The other thing to bring this up and again, I want to qualify in case there are agencies out there that are actually doing this. We almost always bagged and tagged our evidence in paper. Not the plastic bags that you see in every single TV show. In court that's one thing to hold up something that's now been processed and everything else a year later, and you want the jury to be able to see it without touching it, so they're in a clear plastic bag. That's a different animal all together. But the initial seizing of evidence ... here's a good example. Here's an easy example. Anyone who's ever gone family camping, right? The bug dope and the bug bites and the good time that went from that fantasy weekend.
[00:31:50] And then you go, "Oh my God, I'm never going again." Right? Came back and it rained all weekend and ruined your trip. And what's the first thing you do with all your stuff when you get home, because you don't want to deal with it anymore, right? You throw it into a bag, you throw it in the garage and you're like, I'll get to that next week.
[00:32:06] Next week becomes next year and now you're thinking, "Hey, let's go camping. That'll be fun." And when you go to take the stuff out of the bag, what's it look like? It's got fauna on it you can't identify. Usually that's what happens.
[00:32:18] Matty: From your own life.
[00:32:20] Bruce: I've been there. We've all done that. And, so, yeah, you don't do that. The last thing we would ever do is put evidence in something that may either mess up or let's say smear fingerprints, cause things to degrade because they're in plastic. And let's say I've got something that's blood soaked. If I put that in plastic, that's exactly what's going to happen. It's going to mold, it's going to degrade. There'll be heat as things are happening. And you don't want to do that. For us, when we grab things that were, let's say bloodied or had any other fluids on them, we would take those back to the police station and air-dry them in a controlled room, and maybe on a big, long table with the fresh wrapping paper, like the meat packers would use, a fresh roll of that, and then you let them air dry. Then you do your testing. You can take your samples for the DNA, take your samples for testing for blood type, fingerprints, looking for hair and fibers with alternate light sources.
[00:33:13] Things that wouldn't show up any other way. That's when all of that happens, but we air dry all those things first, because you want to be able to preserve them for later retesting, for court purposes, that kind of thing. Man, they love the plastic. They just love to use the plastic. And I tell you that's not.
[00:33:30] Yeah, it's just not ... we had boxes for sharp things. We had paper bags, like the ones you used to get at the grocery store, which I guess we're back to doing again now. My wife keeps bringing them home by the truckload. I'm like, why did we ever do away with that? I don't understand. But yeah, plastic, it's really a no, no. We did paper bags and cardboard boxes. It would be a real rarity that we would use plastic.
[00:33:50] Matty: It introduces another interesting time consideration. We were talking earlier about watching the British crime shows and my husband and I really got into Endeavour, and I think that took place in the sixties, if I remember correctly--sixties or maybe early seventies--and it was always very distracting because there were always, as you were saying, a bunch of people in the crime scene and they were always touching everything. And I thought, are they doing that because that's truly what would have happened in 1965 or whenever the story was supposed to take place.
[00:34:23] And then let's just say, that's true, that the glove concept didn't come along until later, did they have to weigh the distraction of showing something that might've been realistic but that would have struck people who are now used to CSI and I think are more savvy, more knowledgeable about those things, to watch them touch everything without gloves on.
[00:34:46] Bruce: That's interesting. I wonder whether or not that even occurred to them. It definitely pulls me out of it when I see it. "Look, there they go again. They're touching everything with their bare hands," and I've got my wife doing it now, so that's good. She's discriminating. But yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. I'd like to think, because fingerprinting had been going for quite a while at that point, that they would have been aware of that. But the other thing I noticed is that, especially in those older ones, the historical ones, everybody's smoking a cigarette. It's like going to a Rat Pack concert. You see Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. doing their thing. Everybody's got a cigarette going. Well, you're bringing that cigarette into the crime scene. I don't know. You have to suspend disbelief, I think, in a lot of that type of stuff.
[00:35:27] That is interesting. I think if you, as the writer, were trying to establish that things might've been a little sloppier back then, or that there is a way for a hole to develop in a case, that that might be leading a reader down one way and then all of a sudden you flip it on its head because somebody did something at the scene. That really could spin the reader for a loop and think, "Oh my God, I never saw that coming." Yet they read the scene where it happened, where the thing happened, and it was sort of minimized by the writer at the time, but then it becomes a big deal later on. That's a great plot device, I think, if you were going to do that.
[00:36:00] But, it definitely puts me off when I read that or when I see that, so not something that we do. Another great analogy is if you've ever played billiards, try picking up a ball to make a point, and then talking to the person who was getting ready to take a shot and then putting it back where it was, roughly. You can't put it back where it was--once you've moved it, it's moved. Evidence is the same way. Once it's been messed with, you can't testify to its quality, that it was unsullied, that nobody went and touched it no one did anything else, no one moved it before you got there.
[00:36:31] One of the reasons that all of the scenes are photographed before things are moved from them. The evidence tech will usually do at least a rough diagram, a drawing kind of a thing, to show the placement of where things are in the room, let's say here's the body over here, and so you do a rough drawing of the size of the room, you show where the body is. Maybe you put in where the murder weapon was, and then later on you could actually, by measuring, you can go and do that to scale. And then you could conceivably, and sometimes this is done like they do with a plane crash, you recreate that entire scene, maybe in a gymnasium, maybe it's something you put together for the court. The jury is sometimes taken on field trips and they might actually then get to see a mockup of the scene or go to the scene itself. Sometimes that happens too, depending on whether or not it's relevant to a case. But all of those things have to be done before anything is moved.
[00:37:27] And actually I want to make one last point on that. The most important, obviously, in a murder scene is the body. That may be your most important piece of evidence. And I notice there's a lot of that where they're checking pockets, they're moving them, they're rolling them over, looking for whatever. And at least in Maine, the medical examiner is the person who's actually responsible for that body. And until the medical examiner either gets there and says, "Okay, it's okay to move them at this point, and then we're going to take them up to the autopsy," or the medical examiner has questioned the detective and has gotten enough information, and maybe they've worked together repeatedly so they know, sometimes they'll give you the verbal OK based on what you're telling them, or maybe you send them some photos or whatever. But the medical examiner is the only person that actually can give the blessing to move that body.
[00:38:13] That's their evidence, that's their bailiwick. And I notice there's a lot of that where the detectives just start poking around or the uniformed officer might start poking around and it's not a good idea. That's a good way to mess up a murder case as well. Just something for the writers to be thinking about.
[00:38:27] Matty: Yeah. I think that resources like the information you're providing are great because then people know what the reality of the situation is. And I think it also gives some interesting ways and more unusual ways of making a scene interesting. So you could have all eight of the detectives there in the room, treading all over the floor, or you could make the fact that that's not possible in reality part of the drama. You could have one detective that was in the room and there's another three that want to come in, but they're being prevented by the officer stationed at the door or whatever. Rather than falling back on the tropes, which now are losing their impact because everybody's seen them so many times, and instead you find out what the truth is, but you find a way to find drama in the true situation that's more interesting than the easy drama of the incorrect situation.
[00:39:24] Bruce: Right. And I think that's like what we were discussing earlier with the advent of the cell phone. That now puts a limitation on us as writers, where we could spin these crazy yarns before, where characters weren't aware of what the other characters were doing, but we were able to use those limitations to our advantage. I think as a writer, if you consider those things that we just talked about for crime scene management as limitations, it might be fun and that absolutely could affect you plotting. I mean, you should use that as something that it's not a limiter, it opens up another avenue or creates more drama because somebody violates the protocol or whatever it is. Especially if you're going to have a court room drama part of this in your story, if that ends up getting to that point, those are moments that can come back to haunt. Maybe things go sideways at the end of the book and it becomes a sequel to try and fix what happened.
[00:40:13] Matty: I love that. That and all the information you've shared today has been great fodder for the listeners. So Bruce, let people know where they can go to find out more about you and your books online.
[00:40:25] Bruce: You can go to my website, which is BruceRobertcoffin.com. You can also find me on pretty much all of social media, and at HarperCollins, their website as well. My John Byron series, which is now four books long, and I would recommend if they check them out that they read them in order, always fun to read them. And I love the character arc that I've built in for John and the team. And you'll also get a lot of good ideas probably and procedural ideas, because I try to follow my own rules as I'm writing the books.
[00:40:55] Matty: Excellent. Well, thank you so much for this. This has been so helpful.
[00:40:59] Bruce: Thank you. This has been fun.
What is your pet peeve related to inaccuracies in the depiction of police procedure in books, movies, or TV? Leave a comment and let us know!
Links
What did you think of this episode? Leave a comment and let us know!
