Phil Houston
speaker
130 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard May 2025
Phil Houston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yeah, that's how I would have done it if I were in your shoes. This scripting, this is what I and my colleagues have done for years and years and years. And it just works. It works often when nothing else does work.
You know, nobody else did. You know, nobody else has.
Megan, I thought that your interview with him was great. It elicited a lot of deceptive behavior. The overarching mistakes that he made primarily were his failure to deny definitively
You know, the thing is... ask him a very difficult question, but in a very low key manner. And one of the reasons that he talked to you so much, I believe, is that you didn't give him a reason to dislike you. And he let his guard down some. And in doing so, he gave some lengthier responses than he needed to. And that's where the deceptive behavior began to fold in. In this particular case,
He said, I don't have any involvement. And he used the present tense. I don't have any involvement. That was his messaging throughout all of this. But in reality, the truthful person is going to focus on the crime itself and say, I didn't have any involvement in what happened that night.
And it's the equivalent of saying, you know, where the truthful person says, I didn't do it, versus the deceptive person says, I wouldn't do it. He's trying to impress the latter message on you, but it's clearly deceptive. Also, when he said, that's what I'm saying, I didn't have any involvement or I don't have any involvement, that's what I'm saying.
That doesn't mean that isn't what it is, so to speak. In other words, he's not saying I wasn't involved. This is just what I'm saying at this particular point. So that one was a real key right off the bat that there's probably more lies to follow.
In there, the deceptive behavior that really stood out was his immediate aggression against the FBI. And the truthful person wouldn't be thinking answering truthfully is going to land me in prison for five years, you know, or just because this is a death penalty case.
Yeah. He's using the convincing statements. And then you look at how he's standing on the ladder. He's trying to look very nonchalant up there. But in fact, he's very threatened by you and very intimidated internally by the questions you're asking, Megyn. But you didn't give him an opening to criticize or accuse you or attack you. And that made it very, very difficult for him.
If you recall, he was standing up in a straighter posture when you got there. He wasn't leaning on the ladder in that manner. And when you guys walked up, Then he immediately leaned over and he hunched down. He was intimidated. He doesn't know who you are. He doesn't know what your intentions are. So he's a little scared.
And so that anchor point movement that we saw represented a spike in his anxiety. And he'd sit tight and just look like he's not threatened. And that's a thing you'll see in prison a lot. The key is people have to look and act as if they're not threatened by anything or anyone around them. And given his prison time, he's pretty good at that.
exactly where you were going, Megan, again, it represents a very significant spike in his anxiety level here. And it's interesting, why on earth would someone who's telling the truth need to admit that while they weren't, didn't say they had taken the phones that were missing, but they found other phones on that particular night by coincidence, so to speak,
Who in their right mind would do that if you're telling the truth? Because, and what he recognizes is that by saying that he even had phones, that he did find phones that night, is almost as equally incriminating as the fact that the phones, he had the phones that were missing. It's clearly one and the same.
So that's what led him to say, in my opinion, what led him to say, oh, I was just lying to her at that particular time.
I think one of the reasons he might have been doing that as well is that between that night and today or the day that you're interviewing him, he has probably told someone, one or two people, that he did find phones that night and then realized that when you ask him the question and, uh-oh, I need to come up with a reason as to why I had phones or maybe someone saw him with phones that night
Exactly.
I think, Megan, what he's trying to do there, going back to the concept of convincing statements or persuasion behavior, what he's trying to do is he's trying to say, hey, if I did something wrong, I'm more than willing to step up and admit it. And often that convinces people who aren't really attuned to the behavior and the reality of the situation, and they buy into it.
And that's what he's hoping would happen here.
It's the same sequencing of deceptive behavior that we just saw, almost identical to what we just saw with Tanko.
There's little doubt in my mind, in my opinion, that he is directly involved, if not unilaterally, the person that took the baby. That's strong. Not just from this interview, but it's from the history of the evolution of the case and the things that we learned about him over the years.
Showing 61–80 of 130 · page 4 of 7
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