epstein, author of "the annals of unsolved crime," and err roll morris, author of "a wilderness of error," they talk about crimes that were never solved or partially solved. this is about an hour and a half. >> well, one of the best things that ever happened to me was receiving your book on jeffrey mcdonald to review from "the wall street journal." it opened my eyes to how counternarratives have a taxonomy, how you can follow them from case to case. i don't know if you're still pursuing that case or -- >> i am pursuing it in the sense that my publishers have asked me to do another edition of the book. so i am rewriting parts of the

book, and there's an edition based on a recent hearing in north carolina about case. so that is going to be added to the mix. so i guess the answer is, yes, i'm sorry. >> right. well, i'm glad to hear that. although i think the first edition of it really says everything there is that i can think of to say. basically, you have police have a choice. they can either look for an intruder, which is a lot of work, or they could look at the one surviving fam lu member -- family member, indict him and convict him which is a much easier choice. i think in this, we see this in the iowa map da knox -- amanda knox case, we see this in the sam shepard case. there's a tendency -- i don't know if you agree -- but to

basically take the person closest to the crime which requires the least imagination. >> i would put it slightly differently. i think often there's a tendency to take that explanation which involves the least amount of thought. and up an explanation that sets in early on and persists despite any countervailing evidence. it persists despite everything. you mentioned, someone should do, at some point, a taxonomy of murder cases, because there are all these different kinds and maybe, in fact, you have done just that sort of thing. >> no be, i mean, i've tried, and i was greatly inspired to continue trying when i read your book. but, you know, i think you're

right. you have cases where they find a shooter, and then they have to decide whether someone paid him or someone was behind him or he was a loner. this goes back to the abraham lincoln/john wilkes boopt. yes, he shot lincoln. there were two other assassination attempts that night by associates of booth. so was this as the original finding of the u.s. military commission was, was in this a plot to decapitate the u.s. government, or was john wilkes booth crazy? so you have that kind of taxonomy. you have, you know, again, getting back to your case -- well, you have a number of cases, but getting back to the mcdonald case -- >> i, too, might be a case. who knows? [laughter] >> with okay. we have cases in common. but, you know with amanda knox, they first basically decided that she, she was lying.

she was lying. he did lie to the police. she did lie to the police. it's not that uncommon if you don't have a lawyer and you don't have miranda rights as exist in italy, that under tremendous pressure you lie. >> you don't even have to have tremendous pressure. lying is ubiquitous. i mean if you find any account given by anybody that isn't riddled with lies, really it's probably not given by anyone i know. or none i've read about -- anyone i've read about. the presence of lies is not somehow proof of anything, except that people tell tell contradictory, confusing stories. >> in support of what you're saying, dna has given us another

prism to look at past cases. and project innocence by barry she can -- barry shek, they've had 250 cases where people were wrongly convicted and put in prison. of those they found in 40 of the cases people had confessed the to crimes that they didn't commit. so this, basically, i think, yes, people lie all the time. and, secondly, people try to be accommodating. they try to tell the police interrogator something that he wants to hear. in amanda's case, amanda knox's case, she simply wanted to go home. she had been there for 12 hours, she was exhausted, she was a 20 year old girl, she was high on pot, she wanted to go home. so she told them what they wanted to hear, that a black man had been running out. the only one she could think of was the owner of the bar where she worked. she said, yeah, he came home

with me and killed my roommate. she then later repudiated the statement and said she made it all up, which it turned out she did. he, luckily, had an alibi, an ironcladdal pie even though he spent about -- alibi even though he spent about three months in prison. so he was released. now they actually found the murderer. they actually found a guy whose dna was found in the woman who was murdered, whose fingerprints were found in the room. all the fingerprints belonged to him, the palm prints belonged entirely to him. his sneaker print was in her blood, so they knew he had left the room after she was dead. and yet they persisted. this is the inertia that you mention, they persisted with the amanda knox and simply said, well, she was part of a devil's which he also was part of. so it managed to go on for -- she was in prison for four

years, you know? >> and what i understand -- from what i understand, they intend to pursue the case further. the prosecutors in italy haven't b given up. it's not that i think every prosecution in the end produces a miscarriage of justice. i don't. but what is really aggravating, i think that's probably the right word, over the years is that often what we take to be evidence isn't really evidence of anything, and often real evidence goes uncollected, unobserved, unconsidered. when i talked about the taxonomy of criminal cases, we're all familiar with cases that are just simply unsolved murders where really there are no suspects. no one really is clear at all

who might have committed the crime. then there are cases where, you know, it seems to be a slam dunk. we have a suspect, it seems to be absolutely clear the evidence points to that one suspect, his guilt and to none other. can and then there are cases i myself have been involved with, both the jeffrey mcdonald case and the case i made a movie about, "the thin blue line," where you have two competing narratives about what happened. there are two stories. and two suspects. as well. in the mcdonald case, you could say it was jeffrey mcdonald and then a collection of suspects.

who could have been involved with the murders. and so you have this choice between competing narratives, a and b. and you would think that if you scrutinize evidence carefully enough, closely enough, that you will be able to come to some kind of conclusion habit what really happened -- about what really happened. because the world is constantly, i guess this is the transfer theory of -- [inaudible] the world is constantly exfoliating. it's producing ed of itself. if you -- evidence of itself. if you look closely enough at a crime scene or a criminal, shouldn't you be able to determine what really happened? >> you know, edmund picard who is, i guess, the french sherlock holmes and who basically wrote the classic book that we now see csi-type programs on, you know, he said that if someone commits

a crime, he has to transfer part of himself -- his fingerprints, his, it was before dna, his blood, his fibers on his coat. so compare it to microscopes which developed in the early 20th century. you basically should come to this answer. again, in the amanda knox case, the crime scene indicated one person and one person alone did the crime. they took the second narrative of a conspiracy. in in the oswald case, a case that happened believe it or not 50 years ago this november, and i wrote my thesis at college on it 48 years ago, so i've been deeply immersed in it, they had the same thing. the crime scene analysis showed that oswald did it. his palm print was on the box, the sniper's nest, the bullets, one of them ballistically

matched his gun. everything matched. then, of course, the question is, well, even if he did it, first of all, did he really do it, or was he framed? but even if he did it, was e doing it at someone else's behest? here was a man who had defected to the soviet union and just two months beforehand was seep the cuban secret service in mexico city as well as the russian secret service. so, again, you have to make a choice on which narrative you want. but i would add something to what you said. i think in this a sense we have tabloid journalism that always wants a story that's the most exciting story, and they continue with that story. i think prosecutes, you have tabloid prosecutionings too. they also want a story that continues along the lines that they've established. and evidence that makes them

look foolish like with your thin blue line case where they have to let someone out of prison and admit they made mistakes is not something they want to admit. so i think, you know, for reasons it's knotts -- as you say, it's not just the evidence. it's the evidence and the context in which the evidence was fist examined. >> or the vex of ed -- selection of evidence, the evidence you choose to look at versus the evidence you ignore, the evidence that you fail to collect because you already have a fixed idea of what kind of evidence is relevant and what kind is not. >> but, again, the inertia. once you begin your case, how many people want to find evidence that undermines their own case? with the oklahoma city bombing, they clearly knew who had set off the bomb, and he was

electrocuted, okay? but then they found evidence, 14 eyewitnesses -- and eyewitnesses are very questionable, i'm the first to say -- who said there was a second person who no one could identify with him the morning of the bombing. the prosecutors told the fbi, please, no more investigation because it'll ruin the case. the defense will take it and demand exonerating evidence in each of these cases. we'll never get the case finished. so there's this tendency to finish a case, and once it's finished, to preserve it, i think. >> to not revisit it once you've made the decision that this is how things really happened, why go back, even if the evidence suggests that you should go back, that you may have very well made a mistake. there's another thing in reading your book that i should mention,

because it also is part of my experience in dealing with crime there are cases where you investigate them, and you feel you're getting somewhere. you're actually moving to some kind of conclusion. i sometimes think of them as mathematical series, those mathematical series that converge and those thatdiverge. that as you accumulate more and more and more and more evidence, and i'm an obsessive investigator, you see it pointing in one direction. in "the thin blue line," you saw it pointing to this man who was convicted, his innocence and to the guilt of the 16-year-old texas kid. in the jeffrey macdonald case, you see the evidence clearly

pointing to a miscarriage of justice on the part of those who prosecuted it and investigated the crime. there is really no doubt on that score. ..

or the fail to put them in the box. or from another box. exactly. >> you know, with the macdonald case, which i found fascinating, we had the domestic crime. now, the domestic crime, the dna, the fingerprints, the hairs, the fibers, halve the people, the spouse, the children and everything are all in the house, so finding it is not incriminating because he lived in the house. sham shepard lived in the house. amanda knox lived in the cottage where it happened. so, when you -- the crime scene is only important when you can prove that there was someone that didn't belong there, whether it was edgar allen poe's murder -- has to be an intruder for the crime scene to be conclusive.

>> yes. >> there's also this crazy belief now daze, maybe it's a csi inculcated idea -- that everything can be resolved. don't get me wrong. i'm not a post modernist. i don't think it's somehow indeterminant who killed who in a murder case. and the real world, the fact of the matter, there's someone with a gun or knife who committed the act, and we should be able to determine who that personal is, but having said that, how do we determine who that person is? we do it on the basis of evidence, and dna, no more than any other kind of evidence, isn't the slam-dunk. yes, maybe it's a slam dunk in certain kinds of rape cases, but as you just mentioned, if you're investigating something where in

the murder occurred in that home, would you expect to find his dna in the home? kind of would. how determinative is it? not really determinative at all. and yet the kind of magical thinking that takes over, that dna is going to be a kind of truth serum. you put the dna into a grinder and out pops in all instances, the truth. >> where is dot work in exculpating someone who was found guilty. they've find someone else -- again, rape cases or murder cases are there -- then someone who has been found guilty -- this is what barry sheck has been doing with his innocence project, and each time that his law firm handles of false imprisonment or whatever. so, you're right.

the myth that's been built up in popular culture is that crimes are solved. and that if you have enough young technicians with enough microscopes and they speak the language of forensic, you're going to get a solution. i agree with you. in most cases it's assumed you do get a solution. but not always, and what i find interesting, and why i wrote the annals of unsolved crimes, i'm interested in the idea that not all cases are what they're said to be, and when you look at them you find out a great deal about police procedures, about generalistic procedures, about the vulnerability of evidence which has always been major theme of mine. it doesn't have the strength that people attribute to it. the oj simpson case, which is, we would say, slam-dunk, he was acquitted on dna evidence, in the glove.

>> the world is a very, very strange place. i've always reminded constantly reminded of how strange it is, but how evidence can be neglected, can be corrupted, misunderstood, neglected, isn't just simply something to be considered in the context of true crime. all we have to do is look at recent american history, two wars that we have fought in recent years -- in fact we may be still fighting at least one of them -- were based on evidence and the interpretation of evidence which turned out to be false, and -- yes -- >> can id a another dimension? the political dimension? there is a political context

which things like assassinations occur in, and i'll give queue examples. one is lincoln and the other is kennedy. when lincoln was killed, there was tremendous desire among the government to blame the confederate leaders, and so they convened a commission, and they executed seven people as being the co-conspirators, and they put a few people in jail for life, and they issued warrants for jefferson davis, and the head of the cop fed rat intelligence service,. a year later the whole atmosphere had changed. now we had reconstruction. we wanted to bring this back. they actually acquit who'd have been the master mind in the case and it was forgotten. same thing happened with lee harvey oswald. when he shot kennedy and the information went out to the cia, the cia concluded, this had to be a plot, and they actually

thought there was a case to indict fidel castro. the ambassador, whose name was thomas mann. he began collecting evidence in mexico city. about a week later they decided this would be disastrous, we would wiped up in a war win cuba or maybe russia in a war we didn't want so the one man alone theory, one man, and thomas mann was recalled from mexico city and fired, and that case was -- it was in three weeks, before the warren commission began sitting down for its meetings, the political atmosphere was such they moved to, look, he what a dem -- dim meanted loner. >> it doesn't take a conspiracy

for this to happen. i'm not a conspiracy theorist. all it takes is pressure to believe x rather than y, and the cob shoes mind does the rest of the work. if there's a reason to believe something, you'll find a way to believe it, despite all the evidence. rationality seemingly counts for so very, very, very little in life. maybe nothing. >> or you can say that i am a conspiracist, although i recognize in my book half the cases were done not by conspiracy. it's a very interesting prism to look at something because it brings in a wider context. if you're examining john welk booth you have the picture of what was going on with the

intelligence service of the confederacy. six months before they tried to kidnap lincoln, a plot headed by john wilkes booth. i don't like to peck clued the possibility. >> i agree. >> i think people do act in unison, and you have the kind of conspiracy which is not a conspiracy. like with helena stokely and the hippy gang she is says killed jeffrey macdonald. they didn't do if there to kill him. they went there to get drugs. he resisted being a green beret. the conspiracy was to eliminate her from the trial. although you wonder -- this is to me the central question in all of these things, is there

was a central question certainly in the thin blue line. did the prosecutors deliberately sentence an innocent man to death? that is, did they sentence a man to death knowing in fact he was innocent? he had not been involved in this murder? i don't think so. i think our minds are just too weak. there was a reason for them to believe -- bad reasons but a reason for them to believe one thing rather than the other. i think it's true in the macdonald case as well. easy to point the finger at macdonald, he had developed a kind of, what i consider crazy theory. they looked the crime scene and decided the crime scene had been

staged by macdonald to look like there had been an intruder, but he had done such a very, bad job of staging it, that it was obvious to the police it had been staged. so they developed this theory of this incredibly cunning, manipulative, psycho pathic criminal, who nevertheless was so stupid that he did a job that was easily uncovered by the police. as something to tie vert their attention from the real culprit, namely him. i haven't done this -- you could possibly help me with this. how many times in murders did the police come up with a staged crime scene theory? how unusual is this? >> it's very rare. at least my ability to find it.

in the harry oakes case in which the former king of england was involved, they actually did take a class, the person they wanted to frame grabbed the glass and then entered it into evidence. by the time the trial came out this was revealed. but very few instances of actually framing. i find instances where a suicide, at it surreptitiously arranged murder. >> a crime scene where the criminal staged the crime scene, but also crime scenes where the police have examined the crime scene and decided that it was staged, just simply on the basis of looking at it, there's something about it that says,

ooh, this isn't right in the macdonald case, it was a flower pot and a coffee table. these two physical objects seemed to just radiate the fact that this man had lied. coffee table it turned out was knocked over by one of the mp investigators. the coffee table, but how do you know if you walk into a room, whether the room has been staged to look in a certain way so you'll come to some conclusion? maybe this is staged. it's possible. how do you know whether something is staged or not? >> a description of the coffee table in the military hearing for macdonald, where expert witnesses for the prosecutor --

this is from your book -- stated, it's absolutely impossible that the table could land on its edge. it had to be arranged that way. and the judge -- >> deliberately put the coffee table on its side to make it look as to the there had been a struggle in this living room. this was an -- the coffee table was proof that he had been trying to deceive the police. >> the judge said, let's just try it once. the first time they tried it, i rapted on its edge. >> the mp who had been investigating said he had performed -- became call it the coffee table experiment, which is -- they had knocked the coffee table over repeatedly, and the kind of inducktive, empirical move. the coffee table always landed flat on its back with its legs

in the air. the coffee'm table was supine, and the judge for the military trial, finally demanded to be taken to the crime scene, and he kicked the coffee table and it landed exactly as they had found it at the crime scene and in a way that was deemed to be impossible by the military police. >> you know in the amanda knox case, they more or less the same scenario developed. they found the glass from the window that had been broken. they believed the rock had been thrown from the inside rather than from the outside. so they said amanda knox staged a break-in into the house. >> another example. it's an example of the police saying that the crime scene had been staged.

>> right in order to trick them. >> then when they found this -- found the guy who actually had been there and had raped the girl, he foot was in the blood, he had clearly broken the window, as he admitted to get out. the fastes way to get out from the inside was to throw the rock through the window and jump through, which is only ten feet high, and escape. he was scared to death. so they did not reverse -- once they got into the theory -- i think maybe the same is true with jeffrey macdonald. once you wed yourself to the theory sat is seened a staged, whatever evidence you produce that it is not staged in macdidn't nadal's case, the punctured shirt, you present coward evidence to say we have otherred to show -- other evidence to show it was staged. the human mind is very simple.

once you commit yourself to an opinion -- actually, francis bacon said this 400 years ago -- once you commit yourself to an opinion, you hold any evidence hostile to that opinion in abeyance, and any evidence that confirms it, which is called confirmation bias, you select, and confirmation buys, social scientists found out, that given experiments, people tend to pick the evidence that confirms their opinion rather than contradicts their opinion. i think that's another -- we should include that in our tax taxonmy as another locomotive that drives this cases in certain directions. >> and it's worse than that. you can take one piece of evidence, and depending on howl you view it, a theory behind that perception of a piece of evidence, it can flip.

the amazing thing there is really is such a thing as knowledge of the physical world. that's the amazing part. the fact that we get it wrong all the time, doesn't amaze me at all. the fact that there's science -- that's kind of amazing. given our natural predilections we would much prefer probably to burn people at the stake than deal with science. >> going back to what happened in the exchange theory, transfer theory, it's believed in the popular imagination the police just examine the crime scene and it takes them where they're going. you might sale the whole crime scene was staged -- same in the sam shepard -- or they might ignore evidence in the crime scene, and it's not like you see it on television. basically by the time the crime scene is examined and the

evidence comes in, theory has developed and it's that theory which they fit the elements of the crime scene in and throw out the ones that don't fit. and they find expert witnesses. have you been an expert witness in any trials? >> i've been a witness at a trial but never an expert wilt. i'm really not an expert. >> i was an expert witness in hollywood trials because i wrote book bat the economics of hollywood. and it was like a casting agency of hollywood. they looked around, who can give them an opinion, and an honest opinion but if the hospital opinion didn't fit their case, that person would be called. came and interviewed me. my opinion would tend to be perverse, fit their case, and i became the expert was. it's a casting issue, and same is true -- i like your doctor death in texas, who -- 700 or --

a. >> a good number of cases. he became known as dr. death. he told me he had a lot of trouble with his private patience. it was after he became known as the hanging psychiatrist, people were more reluctant on the couch to reveal their deepest thoughts and anxieties. >> but he -- from the interview you did, ask someone to dry a diamond, club, a heart -- >> i'm not a great believer in predictions of what people will or will not do. he was a predicter of human behavior. and i used to joke that i didn't believe you could predict human behavior except in one instance. what the psychiatrist would say in the penalty phase of the capital murder trial, when asked whether the defendant would kill

and kill again, and he would invariably say, yes. he did it in that trial that i eventually overturned, saying that the defendant would kill and kill again, and that a 16-year-old kid had never killed and would never hurt anybody. this proved to be manifestly false. as i like to point out, he managed to be 200% wrong in one case. an achievement or sorts. >> well, the -- i have a question for you. the thin blue line seemed a natural to win an oscar. one of the most amazing documentary that was produced in that year, or five years before or five years after. what happened to it? >> i don't know. i mean, winning oscars is a

tricky thing. >> a small clique of documentary filmmakers? >> i don't want to point the fingers. i'm grateful for having gotten one. the best thing about getting an oscar is you don't have to be resentful about not getting one. >> what is it about crime that appeals to you most of all? >> it's the vulnerability of what we think is certainty, or -- forensic intelligence. before i got into crime, my special writing -- writing about crime. >> right. >> before i committed crime -- my specialty was intelligence services, the kgb and the cia, and i found that the cia continually tried to create an aura that it was omniscient, it

could prove things and knew things. you looked at each case, and one of the main case is looked at was a defector who testified about oswald. never did testify but came over to testify and got thrown in jail, and that case has gone on almost as long as the kennedy assassination. when the cold war ended, i then began to think, well, not only crimes but there are mysteries going back to jack the ripper, some of them are products of basically journalism creating composite characters or creating circulation. some of them are prosecutors that say -- remain determined not to be embarrassed. in amanda knox, the prosecutors are now appealing the -- her acquittal, not because they are sure she is guilty, but because they don't want to be made fools of. so the tendency --

>> but the desire not to be made a fool of can convince you that you have done the right thing, that you know what really happened. >> i think people -- it's very easy for anybody -- i include myself in this regard -- to convince themselves that they're right about whatever it is they believe. people do it all the time. and the only reluctantly surrender those beliefs, and often, as i say, evidence doesn't really trump anything. >> you mentioned before dna evidence and the amanda knox thing they found two minute pieces of dna which supported their theory, but in italy they make videos when they're examining dna, maybe in america, too. the video showed that the police technician, who first examined the specimens with amanda knox dna on them, did not change her

gloves when she picked up the other specimen, so we have another case of transfer. this is -- we have basically transferring dna by faulty police procedures, which happens all the time. but i then got -- i also got interested in the whole political dimension to crimes of espionage, assassination, fake suicides. it's interesting. >> for sure. something you mentioned, which i think is always -- also part of this, whenever i hear anyone saying that they have irrefutable proof, they're absolutely certain of someone's guilt, that they know everything. not even beyond a reasonable doubt but beyond any doubt. reasonable or otherwise. i'm always a little suspicious because i don't really believe in that sort of thing.

i believe in the fallibility of humans, not in they're infallibility. not even in the infallibility of a pope as we have most recently seen. >> face is the -- fate is the only thing that can't be contradicted by counterevidence. the very definition of evidence is it can be contributed. scientific method. if you can't contradict it, then it's -- it cannot be considered objective science. everything -- evidence by its nature can be contradicted. maybe you need -- you can't contradict it because you can't final it but what can't be contradicted is an act of faith. religion is an agent of faith no way of contradicting it, and no one should contradict it as far as i'm concerned because it lets fate be fate, and we should be interested in cases which people

claim that the evidence proves something beyond a shadow of a doubt. >> seem to be in love with -- one thing we know about basis theorum if evidence doesn't counseled for anything, you can't -- you start off and end up in the same place no matter what. sad but true. >> i want to add one other fact. and that is time. take the kennedy assassination. november, 50 years will have elapsed. it's no -- no evidence has emerged in those 50 years contradicting the warren commission. i would say it's a strongly favors the warren commission report. in other words, over time, you expect something to leak out. this might also be maybe

everything has been obliterated, as we have seen, in mafia movies and every witness has been killed. but you think that all the decades, some leakage would appear, and it appears -- you know in the macdonald case, just refused to recognize it. but you found the u.s. marshal, jack brit -- >> jim brit -- >> the other phone call was jack friar -- jim brit who years later came forward with an affidavit saying that helen stokeley -- helena stokeley, the more than claimed to have done the murder, she told her story to the prosecutor, whose name was blackburn? >> it takes you deeper and deeper into a kind of nightmare because britt's own account was

then assailed by the prosecutors. and so you go in this strange merry go round to nowhere. the case i find -- as i say there's only prove for me of prosecutorial and investigative malfeasance. but if you ask me, can you prove he didn't do it, so much of the evidence is gone, is lost. i have my own beliefs about the case. i believe he is innocent. but there's this -- take the kennedy assassination. askewously avoided it because witness ounce of the tee deepest rabbit holes you can run down, and many of the people, i think it's quite extraordinary you're still standing here. many of them people who have gone down that rabbit hole never

emerge again. they vanish. it always scared me and part of it, my belief that the evidence was collected in such a weird way, so much remained uncollected. and so much pressure from different diverse interest groups to believe one thing versus another. who knows how you could ever get at the truth. >> this is a rabbit hole i did go down beginning -- >> being famous for it, my undergraduate thesis, wrote a letter to earl warren, can i interview you, and she did me the greatest favor possible, he said, no, i promise node one can interview me so see the general counsel so i wrote the general counsel and said chief justice warren suggested i see you and

that opened the doors to the rabbit hole. but you can have a coverup and not a conspiracy. the conspiracy could be the coverup. and when kennedy was killed, there were -- everyone had an interest in not lifting up the rock and looking what was below it. robert kennedy, who closed down part of the investigation, and took part of the x-rays away because robert kennedy has been involved in plots to assassinate castro, and he still had political amibitions. he was going to be president. he did not want the aassassinations to come out. the fbi had something to cover up. oswald had come to their offices a couple weeks before and said, i'm going to blow up your offices unless you leave my wife alone. they burned his statement,

which -- rather than informing the secret service. the secret service, their agents were all drinking the night before, and they really -- i had to say, didn't really protect him as we see in movies. the cia knew that oswald had tried to assassinate general walker that april, and they didn't want that coming out. so the russians didn't want anything coming out about oswald's time in. castro didn't want nothing come out about his visits to the embassy. everybody had a rope to -- reason to not lift the rock. that doesn't mean any of the parties did the asass anyway oswald might have done it alone and the coverup was the conspiracy, which would account for why the evidence was in the state that you described it.

>> there's also a principle ofable -- of anticuriosity. i often think myself, how much would it cost me to hear mess someone is telling you a story you just do not want to hear. how much can i pay you to stop immediately. i should give you one piece of information. when i was working on the thin blue line, a murder that occurred in dallas, and i befriended the then-district attorney of dallas county, henry wade. henry wade had been district attorney of dallas since 1950. was in the '80s, he is the

wade of roe vs. wade and was the prosecutor of jack ruby in dallas. the district attorney of dallas county when kennedy was assassinated. i never really asked him all that much about the assassination because i was focused on a different crime. seems kind of silly in retrospect, but true enough. >> i did interview him and ask him about it. >> what did he say to you? >> well, you know, he believed that oswald had to be a trained agent because the dallas police had done the original interrogation, and oswald's answers were so -- he was so unshakable, which goes back to what we were saying. the police expect they can rile people and get them to say what they want, and oswald just kept asking for a lawyer and kept -- so, yeah -- of course, henry wade's points -- there are many opinions.

and when i stress in my book, i try to put down what happened. then i tried to put down the their riz. not all of them but a few. and then i tried to put down my opinion. many ways my opinion isn't any better than anyone else's opinion. >> i agree. henry wade is one person among many, but i did on one occasion ask him whether he thought that lee harvey oswald acted alone. and he said, of course not. >> i recently checked my diary and found i was in dallas the night of the murder in blue -- in 1976 doing interviews for my second book, so i could have been a suspect. i wasn't a drifter. >> maybe we can look into this. >> how people have look into the

kennedy assassination -- and this brings to us your umbrella man -- they have taken photographs and found someone. what is he doing and dallas that day? that do these three bums doing on the overpass, and then began to construction scenarios. so, you know, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and maybe this was the man who was convicted in thin blue line --cats what he claimed, just happened to get a ride someone. the worst thing is it all comes down to timing. if you really want to find evidence to prove something, usually you can find it or you can construe it in such a way that it proves the point, or seemingly proves the point you want to make. there's a story from my childhood. i was 10, 11 years old. i was fascinated -- ahad a rand

mcnally's atlas of the world that i loved. i would page through constantly. and my brother had told me this question you're supposed to ask people. which is further west, reno, nevada, or los angeles? and people immediately say, los angeles. but reno, nevada, is further west. so i bet this kid in the neighborhood -- i bet him a dollar, and i said, you know, we're wrong. so i get auto atlas and show him clearly that it's further west than los angeles. and he says to me, i think it was very, very important point. he says to me, lines of longitude don't run across the water.

so, what do you do? he was bigger than me. again, when you come to police departments -- and we've seen recently two murders in texas, the prosecutors -- there was great film by eli kazam called boomerang. basically police departments want to close a case, which means find a drifter, arrest him, convict him, and i know this sounds cynical -- >> boomerang is a really truly great movie. -- >> it is. >> no fooling. >> you know, movies also speak truth. i'm not talking about document riz, of course, -- documentaries, but they tell you what really can help in a world, and in the world basically we

live in a world of bureaucracies and the police and prosecutors basically are bureaucracies and they want to clear cases. they get people to confess. one person confesses to one murder and he did the murder. they don't have much compunction against getting him to conference for 29 other murders. one of the thing i found out looking at serial murders, kind of shocked me. one of the -- jonbenet ramsey? when she was kidnap there are two theories. one, someone in the family did and it, one, an entire did it. intruders -- >> no intruder, intruders, please check the appropriate box. >> i just have to look for how many intruders were in the area. how many child molesters were in

the area ask and was shocked at wikipedia, they had a list of something like 3,000 unsolved serial murder cases and any one of them could have trade into bolder, colorado, and hundreds of unregistered child molesters. so you can't exclude the intruder. we've all seen the fugitive on television where the guy tries to prove there's an intruder, but there are intruders. the manson case was a case of intruders breaking in, and the original police theory of the case, the original theory, was roman polanski did it. luckily he had an alibi. he was in london at the time. but the police loved that idea because polanski is -- much more than jeffrey macdonald, this drugged-up weirdo. then -- >> he was a drugged-up weirdo. >> i'm sure he was. then another case happened about

the same time, the la bianca case, "pig" was wherein on the wall, everything. the police did not connect these two cases because they believed that one was drug-related case and the other was a hollywood case, and finally they arrested someone on a speeding ticket, one of the women involved in mansons a gang, and told them about both cases, and then they had -- had to have a whole knew theory. but "pig" was written on jeffrey macdonald's wall. strikes me is it possible to conceive this man would stab himself in order to frame the manson gang by writing "pig" on the wall. none of it made any sense to me. hmm. a pig is a really good example, just the kind of thing i was talking about. you see the word "pig" written in blood. well, that could be evidence

that there's manson style crazy hippies who killed the family, or it could be proof that macdonald wrote "pig" to make it seemed he staged the writing to make the police think that there had been a manson-style intruders. evidence is very, very finnicky kind of thing, and how you reason your way with evidence through to some kind of conclusion really deeply fascinates me. >> we have a criminal system where you start with motive, means, and opportunity. where anyone living in a family has the opportunity and the means. just anyone, whether it's sam shepard or anyone -- >> anybody in the family usually has a motive. >> they attribute 0 -- motive to

him. one motive is you have an insurance policy on your wife, like double indemnity. or your husband in that case. and when you try to say, well, any married person has a reason to kill their spouse. it's a very profound statement about one of our social institutions. i'm not disagreeing with it, but the police suddenly think that. >> so you have a made case with family. you don't have to good further than sam shepard. here's another tricky matter that is interesting. say your evidence is kind of shaky, the physical evidencees not conclusive. subject to interpretation. alternative interpretation. then somehow motive suddenly becomes the trump card. one of the things i really hated about the case that i made a

movie about in texas, and one of the things i really hate about the jeffrey macdonald case, it makes me actually very, very angry, is unable to sort of crack the case with physical evidence, you then play your trump card, your so-called supposed trump card. you call the defendant a psycho path. a psychopath. now, in the thin blue line case, the defendant was called a psychopath, or sociopath -- take your choice -- because he went to work every day. he didn't change his physical appearance. he didn't try to run. he didn't hide. blah blah blah blah, he didn't change his habits. and in any discernible way. what does that mean? will, of course, it means that he is so deeply psychopathic, so

deeply sociopathic, that he could, one, kill a dallas police officer, and then walk away and not really care. ditto, jeffrey macdonald. can't crack the case? can't figure out whether he did it or didn't do it? don't really want to deal with the evidence. call him a psychopath. of course. of course he is a psychopath. only a psychopath would brutally murder his two baby daughters and wife. bludgeon and stab them to death. and now you have a perfect explanation for everything. you don't have to think about it anymore. >> evidence of bag psychopath is you act remarksat you get cop

size answers -- >> anything could be evidence for psychopathy. even me talking and complaining about it probably is indicative of some really deep, troublesome, psychopathy on my apartment and when you find that the psychopath raises some questions. you can then bring in drugs. a person took amphetamine. >> drugs are great, too. drugs are very, very bad. >> again in the late '60s, every doctor -- not eave doctor -- but it was quite come -- i was at harvard then but students took at felt means so they can focus, and if you're an emergency room doctor it's not that unusual you take amphetamines, and torches millions of people take am get means but didn't kill their families, but they -- the popular interpretation that was

the explanation, he became a psychopath for the those few minutes. there was a three-pronged explanation. bed-wetting. he had come home to find that one of the baby girls had wet the bed. diet pills. diet pill called escotral, and amphetamines. and sigh -- psychopathy. so you've put those three things together and kaboom. the only problem is, this diet pill. how many pills had been distributed in the united states? well, the answer is, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds if not more million of these. what is the evidence that these

were a cause of extreme violent behavior? nil. bed-wetting? a green beret, princeton graduate, emergency room physician, never had to deal with bodily fluids? never saw blood? never saw europe? oh, my god. the bed is wet. i think i'll just slaughter my family. the case annoys me. then there was his appearance in the dick cavette show. andle sam shepard and amanda knox seemed complacent. >> don't go on the dick cavette

show. >> championed jeffrey's independence for 30 something years which i consider heroic. >> should we take some questions? >> yes, please. >> i was going to ask you a question. i read your book, and i understood at the time they were looking at some further evidence to get him off, jeffrey macdonald off. they were adding -- going to have a hearing -- >> yes. >> i honestly have lost track of that, and i'm just wondering if you could update the group on that. did anything come out of that? i know your book was going to play -- insit gaiting a -- >> i should encourage you to read the revised edition of the book. it's not an easy answer. i would rather talk about ed's book than -- but thank you.

yes, there's more to the story. it goes on. >> you also brought occupy the count of monte cristo, a man whose was sent often bought was not guilty. i you've feel you're not guilty, you can get parole, have camp passion but if you believe you're innocent, it must be terrible, if he is innocent. >> i would think it's pretty terrible, yes. >> can i ask another question? >> what about amanda knox? >> i have 36 cases -- i start with jack the ripper, and i move into sort of russian political cases. so it's -- you read whenever

you're bed in. you're not supposed to sit and read the whole thing, cakeses you're not interested in. >> don't tell people that. >> i want to ask you a question. you imagine that amanda knox -- i know they're re-opening the case against her and you said they found this other fella. is this other fella been tried and convicted? >> he was convicted of murder. it's -- the prosecutor in the case, five years before this case, did a famous italian case called the monster of florence case. or he tried to say that a dentist, who died, was killed by a satanic cult. and it didn't exist and me man committed suicide. so when it got to the main da

knox, not that many murder cases. when he got into another high profile case he took his theory from the last case of the satanic cult, and they instantly -- he called her a shih she-devil and said it was cult orgy. so you have a persistence. the case has only been re-opened because an appeals court -- they haven't even stated their logic, but in italy, cases go on forever. one case went on for 20 years where he was accused of killing of somebody being part of the mav acquitted, convicted, acquitted, convicted. i don't know much about the italianity system but i'm glad we don't have it here in doing that case, i did believe that the miranda rights are the best thing that ever happened north just to justice but to history. i don't know in thin blue line -- in 1976, did they read

the miranda rights to him? >> they did read his rights to him. >> i remember at it one of my favorite questions from a journalist around the time i made the then blue line. i was asked by dallas journalist whether i had read miranda rights to each of my interview subjects. before i interviewed anyone, i would say, i guess according to him, should say, that you have a right to remain silent. you have a right to have an attorney except you should know that anything you tell me will be used against you in -- what is it, the court of public opinion? i don't know. and i told him that, guess what? i'm a filmmaker, not a cop. i don't read people their

miranda rights. that's not part of what i'm even supposed to do. in part of this -- i think this is something we're forgetting about nowdays. there's a kind of journalist idea -- i mean, i mourn the passing of tony lewis this last week, who i considered to be a great american. when i had my argument about the rand mcnally atlas and the location of reno when was a little boy, the important thing to remember is there are thugs out there, and that truth, rationality, doesn't really count for very much. so how do you level the playing field? can the police, can the government, act like thugs?

i'm not saying they do. all the time. but they have compared to an individual such enormous power that we feel the playing field should be leveled. should be at least some kind of fig leaf, perhaps at best, that defendants should have a fighting chance. >> i think a lot of the -- you discuss, bias, the inertia of cases, everyone lies. so, i believe main -- amanda knox is innocent. she is guilty of having lied. your book is very good on this. but if you -- >> thank you. >> if you lie, it doesn't mean

you have killed someone. if you cover up, it -- you haven't necessarily killed someone. in both the shepard case and the macdonald case, there were inconsistent statements made by the suspect. that didn't mean they did the murder. so i think we -- the media has a different interest, starting we jack the ripper, which built circulation for papers, because what's better for circulation than a severallal killer with a pet name, whether at it hospital sam, or jack the ripper, the zodiac, and you sell a lot of papers. and they're not cynical. once they established a file and having been a journalist, i can say the way journalism works is you advance the story you don't substitute an entirely new story or counter-narrative. if you do you're in trouble because it doesn't fit with the fact checkers on your newspaper

because they check "the new york times." so i think there are forces working that make the playing field far from level, if i can say that. >> give you the microphone. >> isn't it true these days that questioning a lot of -- has been called evidence, the reliability of so-called evidence? i mean, starting off with -- for a long time a they didn't question witnesses' statements and -- and now at it ballistics, the bullet match the gun? and even fingerprints, i've heard are questionable. and that's new. i think. don't you agree with that? >> i think is a errol said,

everything fits a pattern like a mathematic series you don't have to question the fingerprints bass they fit with the palm prison. at it only when there's an alternative or counter-theory, and then it's very hard. the evidence itself is selected. it's not that the evidence -- i agree with you. i can find very few cases where the evidence is actually forged, at least i can't find them. but i don't think they are. i think selection and what you present is enough to give a distorted view. and once you have a false reporting, prosecutors leak information all the time. the one in amanda knox leaked information to few reporter, one from the daily beast, one the daily mail, saying that the mixed blood of amanda knox and the victim, meredith kerr sher,

they were mixed together at the crime scene. completely false. once that got established in the press you'll read it today. my favorite case, the radio active spy who became radio active and died, it crosses every line. stabbed in the press he was poisoned drinking tea. the fact is he died 22 days after he drank the tea there was no evidence because the tea cups in hotels are washed. and all they knew is that there was this drug in the hotel but he had flinch sushi in a bar. he wasn't to a go go lap-dancing place two weeks ladder. he -- wherever he went there was

the same traces. so basically you come up with the theory, he is poisoned, okay? and so tea, appeals to everybody. very hard convincing people, they've read it over and over again, but i just read at that in the wall street journal, and it becomes very difficult, for me at least. ...

>> i would prefer that you ask that questions about his work rather than me because i am here really -- >> you do make the most extraordinary movies and unexpected ones. i am happy to answer questions about my book. >> there is a case of -- from arkansas which i am hoping you may know some of the particulars about to. there were three young boys who were convicted of killing a 5-year-old child. and there were satanic things about it. >> it's like the iraqi war.

>> they were -- there were some students in, i think, chicago, who took on this case. they saw all sorts of problems with it. the case apparently fell apart, yet mike huckabee who may run for president four years from now refuses to five they were not exonerate it. there were not said to be innocent, but there were released from jail. mike huckabee, who is going to run for president may in four years refuses to acknowledge there is any kind of innocence or malfeasance on the part of the prosecution. and i think during this time, the time of the trial basically the people who arkansas were

basically -- had thought of them as just guilty. -- >> but not mike huckabee. >> yes. including mike huckabee. >> including mike huckabee. he just refuses to knowledge that they might be innocent. >> again, it is the commitment, even if there has been -- and read the story in the new york times, i don't know anything beyond what you said are it said. it sounds like a miscarriage of justice. people are committed. they're inside the process. and they might honestly believe because you want to believe. you want to believe you're right. you don't want to believe your falsifying things. i cannot speak for huckabee, but i am just saying. people who are district attorneys, policemen, police witnesses, they don't say, oh, i was wrong, even when they're presented with dna this shows

that the person didn't commit the crime. so i think it is an endemic problem. the only reason it really is a problem is, the public is bought up now on programs like csi and news reporting, which makes a sound that everything is solved. my view is, a lot of things may be solved and all but there are many mysteries that remain unsolved. >> you had mentioned the award, one of the great masterpieces of american literature, when paul is in the process of inventing the detective story, long before csi, part of the 19th century, there was this belief, maybe it's a kind of post and light and a belief that the application of reasoning would

eventually force some kind of conclusion. whereas this is a perfect example because it is and no intruder entered terry. you know they had to be an intruder, but they can't possibly have been venture. what kind of intruder could it be? it goes on and on and on and on and on. and all of these stories the author, that creates this detective who claim that just by looking at a single footprint he could completely solve the case. all evidence is interconnected. you find one piece of it and the rest of it falls into place. it is an idea that i believe has persisted over the years and has become, if not -- if anything,

has become even stronger today. and to the idea might be important to the social fabric. people believing that the justice system works means that they don't commit crimes. but the one thing to remember is that nothing is so obvious that it is obvious. our interpretations of evidence can be wrong. in fact, terribly wrong. knowledge is provisional, not certain. we may be convinced that we know what the truth is, and maybe we do know. at the beginning of my book i quote a passage from bertrand russell's principles of mathematics. maybe is the interaction to mathematical philosophy. and he compares napoleon to

hamlet. and he says that when we come to the end of what shakespeare wrote about hamlet, we have exhausted everything that we can possibly know about this character. with napoleon napoleon, yes, he is dead, but napoleon can always prove a strong. there can always be new evidence uncovered that proves us from. the world, reality is that almost infinitely complex and deep. the search for what is really true is a never ending process that goes on properly speaking forever. yes. sorry. >> what do you think about a

man's capacity to deal with ambiguity? >> excuse me? >> man's capacity to deal with ambiguity? i say that from my own experience. what to tell you. i work with children with very complicated ellises. >> insert complicated. >> they want to have a reason for this to happen. >> a great deal of work was done at harvard, at chicago, psychology, experiments were done. formally test people trying to conform to the answer. the confirmation bias. many, many principals. there is a movie that i am only recommending because it is absolutely everything in the movie is in the videotapes.

you can get it on netflix. you just would not believe the story. a prankster calls up mcdonald's in mount washington, kentucky. and he convinces a perfectly nice manager, a perfectly decent person and a perfectly intelligent person to a strip search a young woman, a college graduate who works -- also very nice. she's a thief. but the time this process gets done and every moment is recorded in the cameras the office, not even going to say what happens, but its banking, sex, everything but a prankster. people cannot. when i saw the movie has said, no one could act of light. naturally i would and looked up the incident and not washington. from the videotapes they had

everything that happened. siemens ag in ways we don't expect intact. it's not like a novel. they act according to certain rules. people connect very crazy. they are not just people we suspected criminals. it's also true prosecutors to mchenry wait a minute to many people in our society act in ways that seem completely bizarre. one of my larger investigations was into dominique strauss-kahn i went and saw him. he is a man who will be president of france. the head of the imf. one of the most powerful people in the world. a maid comes in his room. the maid has the story of what happens. he has the story of what happens there were video cameras in the hallways, not in the room.

telephone records. i try to reconstruct what happened. finally you come out to at least in my opinion, that in her view she is honestly telling a story where she was forced to perform a sexual act. in his view she simply responded to his voice commands which were pretty disgusting, but, you know, but people saw themselves as innocent. it is so easy to say to my woman would do that or a man would do that. we know from bill clinton and monica, people do lots of things that you don't expect them to do i think that when you approach a mystery, and that is why i like to the girl into a very complicated cases, cases -- cases that everyone things are resolved and try to see, does this make sense? in what ways does it make sense? in what ways does it make sense? i don't think that we can trust

our rationality or even our opinions. another question. >> the marry scheck case that i just saw the other nine, the talk of a where was the prosecutor. there was a fire in nutshell. nineteen people died. the prosecutor or the judge, i can't remember who it was. i think it was a prosecutor said that he was sure was arson and that a young black man had to have been want to fed chair set the fire. and that when he was questioned many years later he said, well, there were black young man in using fire to smelt or to do something in their job. therefore it's only logical that the fire was set by one of these

guys. and 30 years later they had -- or a number of years later they had testimony of the arsonist, arson experts in the world. no evidence of arson whatsoever. the sky was in jail for i don't know how many years. and the prosecutors still said to well well, it was logical. it must've been. >> part of our process, you have a defense lawyer, a defense team and you have a prosecution team. you have discovery and exonerating evidence that has to be given to the defense. if the system works well the defense should be able to bring up that there is no evidence. what dna analysis is done is take something that didn't exist

at the time of the cases, but overtime dna can be found and tested. so basically he has provided a new way of looking at old cases. it's his project in a sense, and it is a very interesting project. one of the most interesting things i found is not that guilty people -- innocent people were convicted, but that these innocent people told lies, including that they did the crime didn't do. that goes to your point about human psychology and to the point about how fragile the whole system of evidences. we wanted to be anything but fragile. the old principles that is better to have a thousand guilty people go free than one innocent person is convicted. that is not our system marks.

>> one more question. >> yes. the world of crime is no different and the rest of the world. capacity for deception. we look at the sky. we're looking at clouds. we're really looking for rabbits and elephants. we come into the world, a visceral experience with some much prejudice. what is we're looking at. >> what i found is that your phone, i never knew this before. i went to blackberry. every two seconds it sends out a signal a word was. you know, our surveillance society in not to mention certain to be flying overhead drones with taking pictures of everything and archiving them, you know, different forms of evidence in the future, but i think that the principal that

was being discussed, the principal that once the inertia sets and, once the prosecution is committed and journalism is committed and the public is committed to believing they have an answer it takes a lot of effort to reverse that, as you did. it is very difficult. it happens. in one of my cases hitler came to power. the world changed. two narratives -- three narratives. one man alone did it and was crazy. two, the nazis did it as a provocation so they could take over the country. third, the communist that it. two trials. eventually -- i mean to my test came to conclusion that the one crazy man with the fires. you know, this is after 75 years

and i am not sure either. >> have you looked into september 11th of? >> i could have, but i avoided. >> and ask why? >> talking of rebels. >> okay. >> too many cases, too little time. i did look into it. just one of the things that occurred to me about september 11th. a think i read about in the wall street journal. the evidence extracted about what happened to mother is no doubt as to who did, but how he did is another question. the evidence extracted from kaywun sam and his two associates, it was extracted by water boarding. now there is a huge issue in this movie. >> zero dart 30. >> thank you. zero dark 30, was a torture ever

produces dancers. well, my point is, a torture doesn't produce answers, and one even get into that question, do we really know that much about the mechanics of the plot? we certainly know who was behind the plot. know who the pilots' work. beyond that i think it may be more to that story. in this book -- there might be volume to, but in this case it is not given to it. >> one big development as far as i'm concerned is technology, the web. and in some real sense we have all become journalists, reporters. we all can take pictures constantly. we can write about what we see. we can share our experiences with others. it is not just the province of a small group of people that are

disturbing information to the masses. it has become a more populist kind of thing. without cellphone cameras we would never be aware of up to grade. i think that is a really good thing. journalism is becoming a different kind of enterprise. maybe the dangers in it, the fact that anybody can practice, anybody can do journalism, but in balance we have access to more information about ourselves in our government then we have any other time in history. one caveat, the government has more information about us. our credit card records, telephone records, are e-mails. it has everything. so, yes, the republicans more information. los angeles police beating rodney king, but we don't know the extent.

the surveillance is archived. it is not that they have a camera in a drone. it's called the odyssey perry 250,000 cameras. people are sitting there looking at it. they just archive it. if someone wants to know what epstein and mars do after they left the harvard coop, then of the date. you take the phone records. they see that we went home. >> there welcome to that. >> anyway, they do so much. [applause] >> thank you for request since. >> every weekend book tv offers 48 hours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. >> and now from our recent visit to arizona with time warner cable, a local partner, we hear from a local author whose book

post revolutionary chicano literature talks about the impact of chicano women in literature and the unique role of the plan. >> i believe that historic fleet they are invested. the day-to-day lives of real people in real places. for example, chicago, texas, many, many texas women writers are embracing a sense of place that is part of identity. so when i think other feminist writers to work with the let's say some of the great ones, anybody like that, i think sometimes that the criticism that could be made is that there is an immediate sense of wanting to be a global sisterhood or a global elegant demand. but then we get away from at the same time we have to live a day to day life. for writers in particular, they are about addressing that day to

day life as a place of strength to deal with the larger picture. i think one of the most important is this sense of empowerment that what has to be said is significant to him whether it is a poem about watching your grandmother make tortillas or to mollet's, which is very typical, i think, to stories and fables about the virgin the guadalupe perry's about empowerment, but it is also about a deep looking inside and a connection with both the sense of self creating an identity that is yours, but also a familiarity in the sense of connection with the family and for many chicanos with the past all the way to the distant past and the 19th century, let's say. oddly enough, i think that instead of looking inside ourselves as a meditative philosophical thing, 3 million americans, we're just simply selfish. it is not really about learning about ourselves to become a better part of humanity or to

become more connected with that which raised this year it is about i want to my needs. i do think that those voices of introspection for a new purpose of looking outward and benefiting something beyond ourselves. i think those are getting along. >> to of the texts that i write about were only published in the 1990's and their full form. so i think from the 1990's onward writers have been looking back it doesn't recognizing a pattern in their own work that they can now see, gosh, i wonder, how did people make when everything was so against them, we had no power, no right to vote. they're looking back at that and seeing that their grandmothers, grandfathers to my great-grandmother's had a community to build out of. as part of what made it possible for the new writers do exist. i grew up in san antonio. i grope in the majority, which is a very different place for your average mexican american team on this country. and i will be frank.

until i moved to the university of iowa to my graduate study to my did not realize there were this many white people in the world because centennial is very much a mexican-american stronghold. i thought of myself as mexican. nice english was simply what was spoken. when i moved up there i was originally going to work on shakespeare. of work and french pilots. and then the culture shock was so great that i really kind of retreated into myself and got introduced. i recognize try to negotiate to lives. very articulate, very good english. a good scholar, but there were also very strange looks. who are you ready to come from. reading that book single-handedly led me on to this path. trying to swim through that book is and lightning and, thankfully

for me i got over the fright. became definitely something in power. and the necessity we have of labeling, i think it is easy to say, oh, the chicano movement coincided with the black power movement. yes. it was all about the 60's. i think as a nation we are credible reports in our history. want people to look at it and realized that when they explore any type of depth of the things of their passionate about the will find connections that they may not expect. i wanted to be open to the joy of finding it and also the knowledge and introspection that-to bring to you. really need to think about where we can, while we're here. >> for more information on book tv recent visit to yuma, ariz., and the many other cities visited by our local content vehicles cut to c-span.org / local content. >> what happened in minneapolis

in april of 1999? >> i start the booklet that meeting. it is so informative of the industry's attitude and strategies. 1999, obese the epidemic was just beginning to emerge. it raised concern, not only among consumer activists and nutritious, but among people inside the process food industry they gathered together for a very rare meeting, ceos of some of the top manufacturers in north america who get together at the old minneapolis headquarters, the old post barry headquarters in minneapolis to talk about none other than this emerging crisis for the industry. and up in front of them got none other than one of their own. his name is michael mind. vice-president of kraft. he was armed with 114 slides. he laid at the feet of these ceos and presidents of these

largest food companies responsibility for the not only obesity crisis, but he cited the rising -- rise in cases of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease. he even learned their foods with several cancers. he pled with them to collectively start doing something on behalf of consumers . michael mudd knew that the competition inside the food industry -- and it's funny. you walk into the grocery store and it seems so tranquil periods of music playing. doing everything they can to encourage you to shop and buy. but behind the scenes the food industry is intensely competitive. he understood that the only way to move the industry, but them toward a healthier profile of their product would be to get them collectively to do something. from his vantage point, the meeting was an utter failure. the ceos reacted defensively. they said, look, we are already

offering people choices. we have low-fat this commotion your fat that. if there really want that taken by those alternative products. we are beholden to both the consumers and our own shareholders. they left the meeting basically going back to what they have been doing and continue to do which is having a deep reliance on assault to muster, and fat. >> host: what are processed foods? >> guest: i am still looking at what people like to call all processed foods because even a baby carriage can be defined as a processed food because it does not grow the way in the ground. it is a regular carrier that kids shaved into the bay leaf form. but typically -- for my sense processed foods are those things that take ingredients and highly refined, highly processed them, and the formulas to the products of i am writing about in the book are incredibly dependent on

salt, sugar, fat. it is not a mystery. you can pick up the label and you can see, thanks to some government regulation that we have and labeling, you can see the amounts of salt, sugar, fat in these items, and it is rather extraordinary. across the board the kershaw store, just how reliant the industry is on these three ingredients, not just for flavor, but for convenience because they can act as preservatives and also below cost because they can help the industry avoid using more costly ingredients like fresh herbs and spices. >> are you interested in being a part of book tv online book club? ..

accusation, false witness and other terrorists of our time. she combines all of her stories on false sex crime accusations throughout the 80's and 90's to argue there is a flaw in the justice system. this is about an hour. c-span: dorothy rabinowitz where did you get