Pretty much the worst thing that could happen is somebody being falsely convicted for a crime.
Any one of us could be a victim or a witness of a crime,
hopefully we won't be but potentially we could all be suspects of a crime as well.
One of the attractions of a murder mystery evening for us was that if you turn on
the television or if you open a best-selling novel you understand what's at stake in
a murder investigation.
Everything along the way that people experienced, listened to, were as authentic
as we could make them.
Our audience immediately understood how important the stakes are
for the types of information we deal with, the type of research that we do.
They were immediately on task there, and they were fired up to solve this crime.
Good evening everyone, my name is Detective Chief Inspector Gavin Oxburgh,
and I am the senior investigating officer in this case.
The core group of us within the Forensic Psychology Unit
got together and we wanted to host something that was more fun, more immersive, a piece of
educational theatre whereby people could come along and they were invited
to solve a murder.
Even putting together the event was fascinating - so often we
work on academic projects in our offices, in our labs, but doing something this open
to public scrutiny, public involvement, it was an interesting challenge.
My research is on deception, so I was trying to make sure that we picked the juiciest
possible instances of lies and liars that we could to try to baffle our audience.
My area or field is mentally disordered suspects and there's a lot of stereotypes out there at the moment
there's lots of psychological literature that highlights how mentally disordered
individuals are more dangerous, so what I really wanted to do was almost test some of
those stereotypes within public perception, so we had actors playing four
suspects, two of which were mentally disordered and I really wanted to see if
members of the public would rear towards those with mental disorders as the
perpetrators of the crime because of that mental disorder label, and actually
they didn't, which is a good thing.
We also took the opportunity of eliciting
information from our audience members in slightly different ways, so there was one
part during the evening whereby
half of our audience were asked to remember various facts that had been
presented to them earlier in the evening,
whereas the other group were given some kind of extra psychologically based
techniques to see how they could facilitate their retrieval and organise
their memories and in doing so maybe remember more of the information that had
been presented to them, and so that's still to analyse.
My area of expertise is human memory and applied memories,
and I've been lucky enough to work closely enough
with the police whereby some of the research that is being conducted at
Goldsmiths is now used by police, and the first few times where you get a phone-call
saying: we've used your interview technique that you developed, that's a
really exciting end point.
I suppose one positive outcome is that the majority of
our audience believed one of our characters was the guilty person and he
actually had been the person who had committed the crime and this was based
on a real-life case.
...And I will let you know. Could the real guilty person please step forward?
Yeah! (claps and hisses) Murderer! Murderer!
Goldsmiths is an ideal venue to combine disciplines, to draw on expertise from different departments,
and so this was one of our first forays into that.
It's not just research that we do in the Forensic Psychology Unit, it's also teaching and
consultancy, and so we've now been able to develop a couple of new programmes -
we've got a forensic psychology Msc at Masters level, we've also got an undergraduate
forensic stream that just started last year as well.
We all combine our expertise to teach on that.
I think there's a lot of appetite for
information of this type - we live in a very sort of complex environment now with various security
threats and I think people are genuinely interested in what the police are doing,
what academics and researchers are doing to try to make the world a safer place.
We've also been discussing future immersive theatre
events, so very different to a murder mystery but still inviting people to come in, take part,
be involved, make decisions and we'll feedback on their performance.