Eyewitness to Murder, Part Two

On April 13, 2010, I wrote a blog piece entitled “Eyewitness to Murder,” in which I recounted my involvement with a 1975 shooting spree in Wheaton, Maryland. Seven people (all African-American) were shot; two of them died. The killer also died, shot by police. He was white.

Although I drove within feet of the killer and his fourth victim, I completely misread the situation. It was so inconceivable to me that a killing spree was taking place on a sunny Sunday afternoon in downtown Wheaton that I failed to process anything going on around me. I couldn’t have picked out the killer from a police lineup even though I saw him clearly. There was just enough askew about the situation that I decided for safety’s sake to drop by the police station on my way home — and it was there I learned that I had been an eyewitness to murder.

The incident itself quickly dropped off the front pages and has largely been lost to history. With the killer dead, there was no trial, and the number of victims was too small to register with the national media. The incident — and my failure — have stuck with me for many years, and armed with Google, I decided to find out what I could learn, and uploaded my blog piece on the 35th anniversary of the shootings.

For the record, and because it can’t be stated often enough, the victims were:

• John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland: died.
• Laureen D. Sligh, 40, his wife: wounded in both legs, survived.
• Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville: minor injuries when his car crashed.
• Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17, a freshman at the University of Maryland: wounded in the abdomen, but survived. Navy was the victim I saw.
• Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC: killed.
• Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, Maryland: wounded.
• Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville: wounded.

The killer was Michael Edward Pearch, an unemployed carpenter living with his mother in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Since I first published the piece, I’ve heard from several other people connected to the incident.

About six months after “Eyewitness to Murder” appeared on my blog, I got an email from the daughter of John and Laureen Sligh. We exchanged emails and a few telephone calls, and finally arranged to have lunch on April 13, 2011, the 36th anniversary of the shooting. She told me her story. Her parents normally went to the movies on Sunday afternoon, and were just leaving the Wheaton Plaza theaters in separate cars when they encountered the shooter. The daughter herself was watching television when a special bulletin interrupted her show — and that’s how she learned her father was dead and her mother in the hospital. No one had bothered to sequester the news until the next of kin could be informed.

Both John and Laureen Sligh were scientists working for the Department of Defense. John Sligh was also a businessman and had purchased several small businesses. After his death, Laureen Sligh moved back to her home in Mississippi, and the businesses were left to the care of a relative who unfortunately was unable to keep them going, leaving the daughter without much in the way of means. We’ve kept in touch, and I’ve been pleased to hear that her daughters in turn are doing well; the youngest has ambitions to go to medical school.

I next heard from a man who was investigating the disappearance of the Lyon sisters, an unsolved case of two young girls who vanished in Wheaton in 1975.  Although there’s no known direct connection between Pearch and the disappearance of the Lyon girls, Pearch’s killing spree makes him an obvious potential suspect.

An anonymous comment in June 2012 gave me some more information about Harold Navy, Jr. He wrote, “I'd just like to add a correction, if I may? I remember Harold Navy Jr, being shot in the upper leg and it affected his basketball playing as he had a long recouperation. I remember him returning to High School basketball after the shooting, so I don't think he was yet a freshman in college.”

In August, I heard from another eyewitness, who wrote, “I was in early elementary school at the time of this horrific crime. My family was in the Wheaton Pharmacy (now long gone, but it was in the shopping center with Planters Peanuts,etc.on Georgia Ave.). My memories are vague, but I do remember hearing the gun fire, hiding in the small bathroom with the wife of the owner, my mother and my brother while my father and the pharmacist grabbed heavy objects, ducked behind the counter and waited (seems silly in hindsight, but it was all they could do). I had supressed my memories until the sniper shootings several years ago. I was surprised that this crime never re surfaced in the media. We also found out after the attacks that as a white family, we most likely were safe, but there was no way to know that at the time.”

And finally, a little over a month ago, I heard from one more person — someone who had known the killer.

“My connection to this event is before the fact. I had met Mike Pearch a couple of years before the shooting and spent a lot of time with him camping over three days. With only one exception, our paths did not cross again for about two years, until I happened to randomly wind up doing yard work at his mother's house about 24 hours before the shooting began. 



“Mike recognized me and came out of the house to talk. The conversation lasted about fifteen or twenty minutes and mostly covered the past two years. I know that there was much more behind his actions, but I have always been haunted by the question of whether something about that conversation may have been the final trigger for him to snap. I strongly suspect that the whole time he was speaking with me that he already had at least some idea about what he was going to do and perhaps he had already planned every detail. 



“Not that I think it would have made much of a difference but I was never interviewed by the police. I don't think they ever knew much of anything about me or that I had just spoken to Mike. I was only fifteen at the time and could not figure out what to do with what I knew. My parents were even afraid to talk to me about it beyond being the ones to inform me about the shooting.

This whole episode is to me like a manila file folder that has no place in the file cabinet. I try to put it somewhere; maybe in the wrong drawer, maybe in the trash, maybe I try to bury it under other things but sooner or later it keeps reappearing on top of the file cabinet. I suspect you and others, connected to this event, feel the same way. And always the question, ‘Is there anything I could have done?’



Obviously, there is not a thing I can do to change the past but if there is any way that sharing what I know can bring some relief to someone else affected by this tragedy then perhaps I could finally put this in the file cabinet under, ‘Something good finally came out of that part of my life.’”

For the story of how we met, and what I’ve learned since then, stay tuned.

See No Evil (Part 17 of Cognitive Biases)

Our 17th installment features the selection bias, selective perception in general, and the self-fulfilling prophecy.


Selection Bias

There’s a growing argument that telephone polls, once the gold standard of scientific opinion surveys, are becoming less reliable. More and more people are refusing to participate, meaning that the actual sample becomes to some extent self-selected: a random sample of people who like to take polls. People who don’t like to take polls are underrepresented in the results, and there’s no guarantee that class feels the same as the class answering.

Selection bias can happen in any scientific study requiring a statistical sample that is representative of some larger population: if the selection is flawed, and if other statistical analysis does not correct for the skew, the conclusions are not reliable.

There are several types of selection bias:

• Sampling bias. Systemic error resulting from a non-random population sample. Examples include self-selection, pre-screening, and discounting test subjects that don’t finish.
• Time interval bias. Error resulting from a flawed selection of the time interval. Examples include starting on an unusually low year and ending on an unusually high one, terminating a trial early when its results support your desired conclusion or favoring larger or shorter intervals in measuring change.
• Exposure bias. Error resulting from amplifying trends. When one disease predisposes someone for a second disease, the treatment for the first disease can appear correlated with the appearance of the second disease. An effective but not perfect treatment given to people at high risk of getting a particular disease could potentially result in the appearance of the treatment causing the disease, since the high-risk population would naturally include a higher number of people who got the treatment and the disease.
• Data bias. Rejection of “bad” data on arbitrary grounds, ignoring or discounting outliers, partitioning data with knowledge of the partitions, then analyzing them with tests designed for blindly chosen ones.
• Studies bias. Earlier, we looked at publication bias, the tendency to publish studies with positive results and ignore ones with negative results. If you put together a meta-analysis without correcting for publication bias, you’ve got a studies bias. Or you can perform repeated experiments and report only the favorable results, classifying the others as calibration tests or preliminary studies.
• Attrition bias. A selection bias resulting from people dropping out of a study over time. If you study the effectiveness of a weight loss program only by measuring outcomes for people who complete the whole program, it’ll often look very effective indeed — but it ignores the potentially vast number of people who tried and gave up.

In general, you can’t overcome a selection biases with statistical analysis of existing data alone. Informal workarounds examine correlations between background variables and a treatment indicator, but what’s missing is the correlation between unobserved determinants of the outcome and unobserved determinants of selection into the sample that create the bias. What you don’t see doesn’t have to be identical to what you do see.


Selective Perception

Expectations affect perception.

We know people are suggestible: several studies have shown that students who were told they were consuming alcohol when they weren’t still got drunk enough their driving was affected.

In one classic study, viewers watched a filmstrip of a particularly violent Princeton-Dartmouth football game. Princeton viewers reported seeing nearly twice as many rule infractions committed by the Dartmouth team than did Dartmouth viewers. One Dartmouth alumnus did not see any infractions committed by the Dartmouth side and sent a message that he’d only seen part of the film and wanted the rest.

Selective perception is also an issue for advertisers, as consumers may engage with some ads and not others based on their pre-existing beliefs about the brand. Seymour Smith, a prominent advertising researcher, found evidence for selective perception in advertising research in the early 1960s. People who like, buy, or are considering buying a brand are more likely to notice advertising than are those who are neutral toward the brand. It’s hard to measure the quality of the advertising if the only people who notice it are already predisposed to like the brand.



Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. The term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton, who formalized its structure and consequences in his 1949 book Social Theory and Social Structure.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is initially false: it becomes true by evoking the behavior that makes it come true. The actual course of events is offered as proof that the prophecy was originally true.

Self-fulfilling prophecies have been used in education as a type of placebo effect.

The effects of teacher attitudes, beliefs and values, affecting their expectations have been tested repeatedly. A famous example includes a study where teachers were told arbitrarily that random students were "going to blossom". The prophecy indeed self-fulfilled:  those random students actually ended the year with significantly greater improvements.


For previous installments, click on "Cognitive Bias" in the tag cloud to your right.

Eyewitness to Murder

Today, Tuesday, April 13, 2010, is the 35th anniversary of a killing spree in Wheaton, Maryland. My girlfriend and I were on our way home from Young Frankenstein when we drove right through the middle of it.

Michael Edward Pearch shot seven people, all African-American, killing two and wounding the rest. There were indications, police said, that the shooting were racially motivated. All the victims were black and the gunman was white. He passed up at least one car with whites, said police, as he walked down a highway looking for another target.

There were at least two such cars. One of them was mine.

Here’s the story.

Pearch, an unemployed carpenter living with his mother in Silver Spring, Maryland, left home about 7:30p on Sunday, April 13, 1975, and drove to the nearby Wheaton Plaza shopping mall. He was wearing his Army fatigues, a knapsack with 250 rounds of ammunition, and a machete strapped to his chest. He carried a .45 caliber automatic pistol.

He walked to the traffic light at the entrance ot the mall, where he shot and killed John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland, and wounded his wife, Laureen D. Sligh, 40, in both legs. He walked to the next car and fired at Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville, but missed. Gomes swerved, crashing his car into another. He suffered minor injuries.

The panic started at once. “Some witnesses ducked for cover. Others just stood there and watched in disbelieving shock,” said police captain Miles Daniels. One particularly brave man (I don’t know his name) called the police and began following the gunman.

We were on our way home from the movies. It was a warm spring evening. The car windows were open. As I neared the intersection of Georgia Avenue and University Boulevard (a major intersection), I heard what I thought at first were gunshots.

But gunshots on a lazy Sunday evening on a busy suburban street? Surely, I must be imagining things. Then I saw the man who had followed the gunman. He was ducking behind cars. Well, if there wasn’t any gunfire, then surely the man was just playing some sort of game.

The light turned green. I pulled forward. As I reached the intersection, I saw two men in the left turn lane on the other side of the street. One man was standing. He was white. One man was face down. He was black. In his right hand, he was carrying a brown paper bag.

If there wasn’t any gunfire, and the man ducking behind cars was playing some sort of game, then I figured I was looking at some drunks, with one of them (clutching his booze in a brown paper bag) passed out in the street.

As I drove through the intersection, I passed within five feet of Michael Edward Pearch, the shooter, and his most recent victim, Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17 years old and a freshman at the University of Maryland. Navy was working as a busboy at the Anchor Inn, right on the corner of Georgia and University. He had been sent across the street to a supermarket to buy a jar of applesauce, the contents of that brown paper bag. He was wounded in the abdomen, but survived.

There was a police station about a mile north of the intersection, right on our way home, so I pulled in. “There’s a drunk passed out in the left turn lane at Georgia and University,” I told the officer at the desk.

“Wait here,” the officer said.

Moments later three plainclothes officers came out of the back room. “Are those the eyewitnesses to the murders?” one of the officers asked.

It was not until that moment that I had any idea what I had seen.

We spent the rest of the evening in a room with an increasing number of witnesses. It wasn't until afterward that I learned the rest of the story.

Walking up Georgia Avenue, the gunman shot and killed Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC, and then shot and wounded Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, who was in the next car.

Two policemen spotted the shooting and ordered Pearch to halt. He turned, looked at the officers, then walked to the next car with African-Americans and fired again, wounding Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville. The two officers opened fire with a shotgun and a pistol, and killed Pearch.

“He was smiling. I thought he had been shooting blanks,” said William Painter, one of the 40-50 witnesses.

* * *

Some of my interest in cognitive biases and perceptual distortions stems from this incident. Eyewitness testimony, experts know, is not particularly reliable, especially from people not trained in the art. I was within five feet of the murderer, but couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup on a bet. I had no idea what was going on. I am still ashamed.

Selective perception underlies a lot of cognitive biases. We adjust and filter the world around us according to our sense of what the world should be, and therefore miss a lot about what the world really is.

I’ve been trying to get the details of this story for a long time, but even in a Google world, it’s hard to find. Perhaps it’s the small number of victims, but this particular incident doesn’t show up on any list of racial violence I can find. There’s a United Press article that appeared in various papers, ranging from the Fort Scott (Kansas) Tribune to the St. Petersburg (Florida) Evening Independent.

Michael Edward Pearch is mentioned as a potential suspect in the Wheaton abduction of the Lyon sisters, but there’s no evidence other than his killing spree to link him to the murders, and the Lyons were white. He’s also mentioned on at least one white supremicist site, where he’s a hero.

On the anniversary of this terrible event, I remember the victims, and remember also the lessons of my own failure to perceive what was going on all around me.