The transcript was in Q&A format with very little description added. It was easy and fast to read, the questions and answers mostly short at first. Back and forth like Ping-Pong.

They began by reading Winslow his rights and having the sixteen-year-old acknowledge that he understood them. Then they went through a series of questions employed at the start of interviews with juveniles. These were designed to elicit his knowledge of right and wrong. Once that was established, Winslow became fair game.

For his part, Winslow fell victim to ego and the oldest flaw in the human book. He thought he could outsmart them. He thought he could talk his way out of it and maybe pick up some inside information about their investigation. So he readily agreed to talk to them—what innocent kid wouldn’t?—and they played him like a three-string bass guitar. Dum-de-dum-de-dumb. Getting every implausible explanation and outright lie on record.

I breezed through the first two hundred pages, skipping page after page of Winslow’s denials of knowing anything or seeing anything pertaining to Denise Babbit’s murder. Then, in very casual conversation, the detectives turned the questions toward Winslow’s whereabouts on the night in question, obviously trying to get either facts or lies on the record, because either way they would be helpful to the case—a fact was a marker that could help them navigate through the interview; a lie could be used like a club on Winslow when revealed.

Winslow told them that he was at home sleeping and his “moms”—Wanda Sessums—could vouch for him. He continually denied any knowledge of Denise Babbit, repeatedly rejected knowing her or anything about her abduction and murder. He held up like a rock, but then on page 305 the detectives started lying to him and setting traps.

WALKER: That’s not going to work, Alonzo. You gotta give us something here. You can’t just sit there and say no, no, no, I don’t know anything, and expect to walk out of here. We know you know something. I mean, we know it, son.

WINSLOW: You don’t know shit. I ain’t ever seen that girl you been talking about.

WALKER: Really? Then how come we got you on tape dropping her car in that parking lot by the beach?

WINSLOW: What tape you got?

WALKER: The one of the parking lot. We got you getting out of that car and nobody else goes near it until they find the body in it. That puts this whole thing on you, man.

WINSLOW: Nah, it ain’t me. I didn’t do this.

As far as I knew from the discovery documents the defense lawyer had given me, there was no video that showed the victim’s Mazda being left in the parking lot. But I also knew that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the legality of the police’s lying to a suspect if the lie would reasonably be seen as such by an innocent person. By spinning everything off the one piece of evidence they did have—Winslow’s fingerprint on the rearview mirror—they were within bounds of this guideline and they were leading Winslow down the path.

I once wrote a story about an interrogation where the detectives showed the suspect an evidence bag containing the gun used in the murder.