Why Do Some People Confess to Crimes They Didn’t Commit?
Then the bombshell dropped. The DNA test came back negative. Whoever killed JonBenet Ramsey, it wasn’t John Mark Karr.
So why did he confess?
Among the most twisted things in nature is the human psyche. It is possible to convince oneself that one has committed the most terrible crimes, and then convince others as well. The true self-belief is a powerful thing when it comes to convincing someone else that you are telling the truth. And some people can become so obsessed with a case, a person, an ideal, that they can pass lie detector tests, create believable fantasies that no one can shake with any amount of fact.
No psychologist has ever fully defined the symptoms that will lead to this sort of self-delusion, nor can the medical community agree on a definition or even a common term for the illness. But historians have one: they call it the “Aquinas Effect” or, more recently, the “Aquinas Syndrome.” The original term was coined by historian Mark Campbell in 1892, when he was struggling for a phrase to explain some of the confessions of “heretics” during the time of the Inquisition. Eventually he decided that the extremely logical theory of law put forward by St. Thomas Aquinas had created a church judiciary so rigid that guilt was presupposed. When the defendant faced that rigid conviction, eventually even the strongest will begin to question him- or herself, and may, if sufficient evidence is available, convince him- or herself of guilt.
The term has continued to be used in texts as varied as academic treatises on convicted killers, to written recantations of confessions, to several notable court cases. And although Aquinas Syndrome (or AQS for short) has no set or standard definition, and is not recognized by the medical community as a stand-alone syndrome with verifiable symptoms, several trends have been noted in self-confessed non-killers.
1. AQS confessors are usually clinically depressed and are generally unmedicated.
2. They may have trouble forming normal attachments to people and in many cases show signs of sexual digression. The majority have unusual desires (often classed as perversions) including bestiality, pedophilia and necrophilia. Most are divorced (generally multiple times) and are unattached at the time of confession.
3. AQS confessors are generally obsessed with one crime or set of crimes with similar characteristics. Sensational murders, long-unsolved cases, cases involving children: these are the most common cases to be confessed to.
4. AQS confessors generally seek out an individual that they consider an expert on the crime, but deliberately choose someone that is not bound by a vow of silence. They may correspond anonymously with the expert for some time before confessing to the crime.
5. Quite often the confession will include elements which the police have withheld from public release, but which can be deduced from existing material. Alternatively, the details may have been “fed” to the AQS confessor, either purposefully or by accident, by police or the expert.
6. The confession is usually at once detailed and vague. While the AQS confessor may be able to describe many of the aspects of the crime, including relative location, time and method, other details will be missing, inaccurate or vague.
So why do they confess? AQS is a disease without a known cause. It could perhaps be linked to offshoot forms of paranoid schizophrenia, delusional disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders, or simply depression. But there are many with these disorders, and they do not confess to crimes so sensationally. Perhaps there is a biological link, a chemical imbalance, or perhaps it is a peculiar fascination with death and a desperate cry for attention.
John Karr fits many of the trends of an AQS confessor, including the key one: he confessed to a murder he was physically incapable of having performed (he was apparently half a continent away). Whatever else he may be, and there is circumstantial evidence that he may be many things and not all of them good, he is not the killer of JonBenet. However, if his confession will lead to the determination of symptomology and terminology of Aquinas Syndrome, perhaps the money spent like water by DA Lacy will be well-spent after all�
