Episode 2: In Your Mind's Eye
Police hypnotize their key witness. Did it change her memory?
Hi listeners!
We’re back with episode 2 of The Unforgotten, Season 5: Riding Shotgun!
In the season premiere, our host, Michelle Pitcher, introduced you to Charles Flores, who’s been on death row for nearly three decades. He was convicted of murdering Betty Black during a home invasion in the Dallas suburbs in 1998.
The case against him is primarily based on witness testimony, and the most important witness, Jill Bargainer, was hypnotized by police before she ever took the stand. This episode is all about hypnosis and how it may — or may not — affect our memories.
Listen to Episode 2: In Your Mind’s Eye wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
I’ll be honest, before working on this season, I was kind of scared of hypnosis. My high school actually had a professional hypnotist at our graduation event, and it was a bit of a crazy feeling to not be in control of my own body.
In this episode, we learn that hypnotism is a lot more complicated than that. Michelle actually lets an 87-year-old former detective and forensic hypnosis expert named Marx Howell hypnotize her in the middle of a public library study room. That scene alone is worth the listen.
Howell says being hypnotized is really just a state of relaxation, and the hypnotized people at events like my graduation just feel more comfortable, say, acting like a zoo animal, than they normally would. It allows them to let loose in a way that normally wouldn’t be socially acceptable. For forensic hypnosis, the idea is that this “state of relaxation” can be used to help a witness better remember what they saw.
Critics say hypnosis doesn’t recover memories so much as reshape them, helping a witness absorb suggestions and come away more confident in details that may not be true. The Texas Legislature even outlawed testimony based on forensic hypnosis in 2023.
The episode also looks at Jill’s actual hypnosis session from 1998. It was the first time the officer conducting it had ever hypnotized anyone, and while it didn’t dramatically unlock new information or memories at the time, the details Jill recalled — and how her memory changed in the months after — turn out to matter enormously for Charles Flores’s case.
We also hear from memory researchers who study exactly this kind of thing, and they have a lot to say about the science of eyewitness testimony. Turns out our memories are a lot more complicated than you might think, and eyewitnesses might not be as reliable as we’d like them to be.
Thank you so much for subscribing, and we’ll be back next week! — Aislyn