The McQueary Evolution

by Barry Bozeman

 In the wake of ESPN's Outside the Lines and ESPN the magazines article "THE WHISTLEBLOWER'S LAST STAND", I am revisiting my thoughts about Mike McQueary and his pivotal role in what became the Penn State Sex Scandal. 

The first comment I ever made on the Penn State/ Second Mile/ Sandusky revelations came the day of Linda Kelly’s Press Conference on Nov. 4 2011. As an active participant on the Tennessee Scout sports forums I injected a comment in a long thread of people literally calling for McQueary’s head on a pike. The anger and hatred of McQueary was visceral. “How could a big strong football coach in good shape fail to step in and kick the crap out of an old man who was raping a 10 year old boy”?

Well I could not wrap my head around it either so I felt there must be something else going on and I knew the true nature of a Grand Jury Presentment. Knowing that presentment was not an unassailable statement of fact I tried to caution my fellow Volunteer fans to reserve judgment until all the facts were in. That seemed to be a big mistake. People were angry. Angry at Penn State, at Joe Paterno, at Tim Curley and Gary Schultz and very angry with Mike McQueary.

If Linda Kelly’s goal was to destroy Penn State and Joe Paterno in the court of public opinion, she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. If this was the reaction on sports forums for the Tennessee Volunteers it had to be the reaction across the country on similar forums. I’m not sure why I thought there was far more to this story than seemed evident in the PA Attorney Generals presentation but I became intent on finding out. That led to the creation of this weblog and a long history of exploring the case. 

I actually felt sorry for Mike McQueary. I thought he must have been an abused child – possibly abused by Jerry Sandusky. I tried to imagine how shocked I might have been if I had seen what the Presentment claims he saw. But over time I came to a much different conclusion concerning McQueary and his role in this entire affair. There is no question that Mike McQueary was used by the Office of the Attorney General to make The Second Mile Sandusky Scandal into the Penn State Scandal. The only question I want to consider now is whether he was a willing participant, a coerced participant, or and unwitting dupe.

Over time much thought and effort has been focused on attempting to understand what McQueary actually saw. Linda Kelly’s presentment stated this “most credible” witness “SAW a boy being subjected to anal rape” by Jerry Sandusky. McQueary has made it clear that this overstates his observation. This website was the first to obtain and publish pictures of the locker room where this took place. 

What we do know about that night is that McQueary phoned home and then left the Lasch building to meet with his father and family friend Dr. Dranov that night. The following morning he had a 10 minute conversation with Joe Paterno. And several days later he met with Tim Curley and Gary Schultz to tell them what he had observed.

Even if we can accept that McQueary was so freaked out by what he saw or thought he saw at the Lasch building that he could not react in a manner to protect the child that Kelly says he observed being raped, can we accept that condition made it impossible for him to convey the nature of the heinous crime to his own father and long time family friend Dr. Dranov?

McQeary says the child's height in comparison to Sandusky placed his head at the pectoral muscles of Sandusky's chest.

Here is the point where McQueary's description of the end of his observation becomes important. McQueary says he faced the boy and Sandusky standing a couple of feet apart both observing him. He does not say the child showed any discomfort or surprise much less any fear, pain, embarrassment, or horror over whatever had happened. How is it possible that a small child of that size would not be in pain or greatly distressed if those slapping sounds were a big man driving himself into the child? And perhaps more importantly, how could a grown man desert a small child who was fearful or in pain to the person who was responsible for that situation? 

Framing Paterno: Why the preliminary hearing exposed case against PSU as a fraud

By John Ziegler

Wed, 07/31/2013 - 15:31

In just the last couple of weeks here is just some of what we have learned:It is rather amazing and illuminating that so much new has happened in the last couple of weeks of the so-called “Penn State Scandal.” After all, since most of the possible punishments have already been decided and enforced (possibly permanently), you would think that we would already know the vast majority of knowledge available regarding what actually did, and did not, happen. Obviously, the fact that this is clearly not the case, proves, if nothing else, that there has been a massive and irrational rush to judgment in this story. 

• That Joe Paterno gave an interview to the attorney general’s office just two weeks before he was fired in which he directly contradicts the key “cover up” email in the Freeh Report and raises the likelihood that Freeh purposely withheld exculpatory evidence from the report.
• That the date of the so-called “janitor” episode, which Freeh used to condemn the “Penn State Football Culture,” which was supposedly late November of 2000, could apparently not have been witnessed by the now-demented janitor at that time because he did not seemingly start working there until late December of that year.
• That Mike McQueary now has yet another, at times very contradictory, version of his story and has now augmented it to include seemingly important comments from a now-deceased Joe Paterno (which he never mentioned in previous testimonies after the conversations, but before Paterno passed away).
• That the prosecution is so concerned about the real story of Victim 2 that they vigorously prevented their witness Agent Anthony Sassano from even answering whether he knew the identity of that person on two different occasions.

And yet, in the media’s closed mind, this case is already closed and, except for a couple of cherry-picked/out-of-context/alleged statements from Paterno, nothing particularly new or interesting has recently occurred.

As for the preliminary hearing in particular, contrary to highly-predictable media reaction, I actually think that it went about as well as could have been expected for the defense.

Read more

The Limits of Memory and Suggestive Memory

The limits of memory and suggestive memory are factors that should not be overlooked in the Sandusky case. 

by
Ray Blehar

After the Ziegler release of the interview of "Victim 2," I got a phone call regarding the statement he made that "incriminated" Curley and Schultz because "V2" said Sandusky told him he'd be getting a call from Tim Curley because McQuery saw them engaged in a sex act. 

In an earlier blog post, I quoted Jim Clemente, who said:  "after ten years or twelve years or thirteen years, you can't remember specific words that you used in a conversation.  And it's irresponsible for somebody to quote somebody ten years or twelve years after the event and say those are the specific words they used in a specific conversation.  That is absolutely not done it's - it's not proper in a criminal investigation at all."

I reminded the caller of Clemente's statement and added that any "quotes" from 2001 can't be considered as an accurate account of what was said based on two things: the ability of memory and suggestive memory. 

Long Term Memory

First, what is retrieved from long term memory is typically part of a schema that your mind has established for retrieving information. For example, I can recall things that I learned from many years ago because my mind has built a system for retrieving it that relies on relationships between the information. New information is added to the schema.  I don't memorize it, rather, I understand how one piece of information relates to the next and my brain has established a schema.  The depth of processing builds the network for recalling it as needed.  

Certainly, there are things retrieved from memory as a matter of rote or repetition.  I like to use the Bill Clinton quote, "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,' as an example.  This was a quote played over and over again in the news cycle, thus I remember it quite well.  It is doubtful that anything said in 2001 was repeated over and over again by any of the parties involved during that timeframe, thus was not committed to memory by rote.

In listening to Ziegler's interview of Sandusky. it appeared as if he could recall the events of that night in the shower with amazing clarity. He may have been able to do this because he was not recalling that particular incident, but the repeated pattern of horseplay he had with all the victims. Victim 4 reported very similar activities. Ziegler's "V2" and Sandusky worked out and showered on several occasions. It is likely the same activities occurred each time, thus March 1, 2002 or the correct date of Feb 9, 2001 are essentially the same occurrence as retrieved from the schema of memory.  

Ziegler's "Victim 2" recalled what happened that night as well, but it was essentially the schema he had built regarding the multiple times that he had horsed around in the shower with Sandusky.  Obviously, not exactly the same events transpired each time, but the mind had formed a lasting impression of the shower activity that was recalled from long term memory.

However, I highly doubt that he had built a schema for remembering the exact words of a phone call from 12 years ago.   The interjection of new information very likely made its way into the recollection of what was said in that phone call.  That was likely a result of suggestive memory.

Suggestive Memory
On November 9, 2011 (the date of the interview), the person claiming to be Victim 2, just like the rest of us were subject to an unrelenting news cycle that repeated the WRONG DATE of the incident (which he repeated) and that McQueary witnessed a sex act/rape in the shower. This information was interjected into his memory of events, so that when he recalled the phone call from Sandusky he added the information that he had been hearing over the days leading up to his interview.(i.e., McQueary was the reporter - unknown to Sandusky until November 2011- and that McQueary believed he witnessed a sex act) 


This article from LiveScience explains it quite well.

Some of this failure of reliability happens at the scene of the crime, said Maria Zaragoza, a psychologist at Kent State University in Ohio. Things happen quickly; the emotional charge of witnessing a crime may keep people from cuing into important details. If there's a weapon, Zaragoza said, people tend to become hyper-focused on it. They pay more attention to a gun than to the face of the person holding it.

Often, "the information getting into the memory system is very limited," Zaragoza told LiveScience.

The next source of memory uncertainty happens during the investigation. Suggestive questioning can distort memories, Zaragoza said. Each time you relive the crime, either out loud to an investigator or in your own head, that distorted memory is strengthened.

In one famous case, 22-year-old college student Jennifer Thompson was raped at knife point by an intruder in her bedroom. Through her terror, Thompson tried to categorize the details of her assailant's face. She went to the police and worked with an artist to draw a composite sketch. In photo, in a lineup and in court, she identified her rapist as Ronald Cotton.

"I was completely confident," Thompson (now Jennifer Thompson-Cannino) wrote in a 2000 editorial in the New York Times. "I was sure."

But 11 years later, new DNA techniques disproved Cotton's guilt. He'd spent more than a decade in prison for a crime committed by another man, Bobby Poole.

It's likely that working on the police sketch altered Thompson's memory of her rapist's face, Zaragoza said. Later, when she'd picked him out of a lineup, her confidence only grew. Cotton's face started haunting her flashbacks. When she met her real rapist in court, she didn't even recognize him.

What happened to Cotton and Thompson, chronicled in the book "Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption" (St. Martin's Press, 2009), wasn't a weakness of Thompson's, Zaragoza said. Anyone's memory can become twisted with time.

Mike McQueary

So, as Mike McQueary glanced into the shower, was his focus on the victim, who was behind Sandusky or was it on Sandusky (the threat)?

And did the questioning by investigators have an effect on McQueary's memory?  Ziegler's "Victim 2" was a 14 year old boy in 2001, yet McQueary identified the boy as being 10 or 11.  Did the investigators suggest that Sandusky had a habit of showering with young boys that influenced McQueary to state the boy was of a younger age than he actually observed?

These are legitimate questions that aren't posed to make the case that Sandusky is innocent.  As a matter of law, every time Sandusky showered with a minor, he was committing two felonies and one misdemeanor.  However, the science suggests that McQueary's memory of the 2001 incident may have distorted the incident over time or that his recollection of the event was influenced by information provided to him by police during the investigation.   This does not mean McQueary is lying because he may indeed believe that his recollection of events is truly what he saw.  

But I would be willing to be any amount of money that Mike McQueary's recollection of offensive formations and offensive football plays is far superior to his recollection of the events of  February 2001 because his brain has established the schema for performing the recall of that information.

Conclusion

The limits of memory regarding an isolated incident preclude one from remembering exact words or exact details of the event.  It is likely that no one involved in the 2001 incident remembers exactly what was said.  Tim Curley, as athletic director, had many other things on this plate that demanded his attention, particularly the expansion of Beaver Stadium in 2001,  that would taken precedence.  Similarly, Gary Schultz, Joe Paterno, and Graham Spanier, would not have focused on this event, given the multitude of issues they faced on a daily basis.