Today’s planned interviews of Lisa Irwin’s two brothers has been postponed.
It may never happen now, because the case took a bizarre turn late Thursday as two attorneys for the family appeared to be in open conflict.
Kansas City attorney Cyndy Short said she had heard reports that New York lawyer Joe Tacopina had fired her from the case.
“He’s not in a position to fire anyone,” Short told The Star. “I work for the client, not him.”
Police told The Star’s reporting partner, KCTV-5, that Tacopina indicated the much-anticipated interviews with the brothers might happen next week.
Tacopina declined comment to The Star.
But Short said that if she has her way, the interviews with the brothers, ages 8 and 5, would likely never happen — for the sake of the boys and the case. The brothers were interviewed earlier, and she’s worried about additional trauma to them.
“I’ve done research and see more potential for harm than good with the interview,” Short said late Thursday. “It won’t happen tomorrow and maybe never.”
But if it does happen, the interviewer would face special challenges with subjects so young.
“You have to be very careful about the questions you ask and the words you use,” said Erin Miller Weiss, a social worker and forensic interviewer who is not involved in the Irwin case.
According to Kansas City police, the family has not allowed the boys to be interviewed since Oct. 4. That was the day Lisa’s parents, Deborah Bradley and Jeremy Irwin, reported that the then-10-month-old girl had been abducted from the family home.
The two boys reportedly were in the house on North Lister Avenue the night Lisa vanished; police have not revealed anything about what the boys already have said.
As in the first interviews of the two boys, police planned to use a specialist trained in child forensic interviewing to speak to the children in a non-confrontational setting.
That’s important both for drawing out valid information and for minimizing any trauma, said Susan Crain Lewis, president of the advocacy group Mental Health America of the Heartland.
“Repeated interviews of children, certainly kids this age, cause a great deal of additional stress,” Lewis said. “Having a specially trained interviewer is absolutely commendable.”
Children can feel threatened if they’re interviewed in a room crowded with lawyers and detectives, Lewis said. And repeated interviews asking the same questions over and over in different ways can confuse children and lead them to change their stories.
And while adults may find that bad experiences lose their sting the more often they talk about them, for children revisiting unpleasant memories can make them increasingly painful, Lewis said.
Forensic interviewers who work with children go through intensive training to learn how to obtain information gently and objectively. They study how children’s memories work, the ways they understand things and how they answer questions. The interviewers may come from backgrounds in social services, mental health or law enforcement, but generally they all have had experience in child welfare.
Weiss works with Sunflower House, a children’s advocacy center in Shawnee that serves Johnson and Wyandotte counties. The center interviews children — as young as 3 and as old as 17 — who are alleged victims of abuse or who allegedly witnessed a violent crime.
She conducts her interviews one on one in a pleasant room with comfortable upholstered furniture. Police and other witnesses watch on a closed-circuit television in a separate room.
Weiss starts by building rapport, asking children general questions about themselves and what they like to do.
Weiss also sets ground rules for the interview: We are here to talk about the truth, she tells the child. It’s OK if you don’t know something. Don’t guess, don’t pretend. If I get something wrong, tell me.
Weiss’ first questions are general and open-ended: Tell me about everything that is going on, she’ll ask.
Then come the follow-up questions.
“When children say they have witnessed or experienced something, we ask for a lot of details,” she said. “ ‘What did you see, what did you hear? What did people say? Did anyone tell you what to say?’ ”
Interviews generally last 20 minutes to an hour, but they can go longer.
Weiss said she tries to get as many details as possible so that the child doesn’t have to be interviewed again. Children the ages of Lisa’s brothers should be able to describe what they have seen, she said. They understand concepts of time and should be able to provide a narrative of events.
Law enforcement began to routinely use interviewers like Weiss trained to work with children largely as a reaction to what forensic psychologist Hollida Wakefield called “the day care hysteria in the 1980s.”
At day care centers, preschools and other venues nationwide, people were accused of multiple cases of child sexual abuse, sometimes involving bizarre satanic rituals.
“People would say it has to be true because children were giving the same story all over the country,” said Wakefield, of Northfield, Minn., who has written about these issues.. “But they were learning these stories through highly coercive interviews with leading, suggestive questions.”
Many convictions in these cases were later overturned or brought into serious doubt. Researchers began to study what had happened.
“They found that children can be led to say these things,” Wakefield said. “Little kids, they learn these stories and they develop into actual memories.”
With these findings in mind, guidelines were developed for conducting fair interviews with children, Wakefield said.
“You have to go into these cases with an open mind,” she said. “The main problem is when the interviewer thinks he knows what has happened and is trying to get confirmation.”
