![]() Most damning of all, she told numerous people that she first remembered George’s homicide while under hypnosis, but then-surely after learning that hypnosis-related evidence is inadmissible in California courts, because it can’t be trusted-she altered her narrative and denied having ever undergone the procedure. ![]() She also came to remember being raped by one of George’s friends, but after saying the attacker was Black, she flip-flopped and asserted that he was actually her white uncle (the confusion, allegedly, stemmed from a Jimi Hendrix poster hanging on the wall). She admitted that she had a book and film deal in the works (which eventually resulted in the 1992 TV movie Fatal Memories starring Shelley Long as Eileen), thereby revealing her financial motive in seeing her dad get convicted. She said that she and George picked Susan up on the morning of her disappearance, only to switch gears and say it happened in the afternoon. From the get-go, however, Eileen wasn’t very believable. Since there was no other physical or anecdotal evidence that suggested George had been directly responsible for Susan’s slaying, the prosecution relied exclusively on Eileen’s unsubstantiated version of events. It’s mostly, however, an investigation into the plausibility of Eileen’s brand of repressed memory. 11) is a tale about sexual abuse, family dysfunction, and the nature of reasonable doubt. ![]() Writers/directors Yotam Guendelman and Ari Pines’ four-part Showtime docuseries Buried (Oct. What ensued was a court case like few others, hinging as it did on the trustworthiness of star witness Eileen, a freckle-faced redhead who admitted that she had grown up very close to her father, but who was now convinced that she had seen him fiendishly take the life of her childhood friend. That was certainly the story forwarded by Eileen, and embraced by prosecutors (and their team of experts) who jumped at the chance to use Eileen’s unique circumstances to put George on trial. These individuals are, in effect, completely unaware of their memories, until they spring forth due to some unexpected stimuli. Yet in 1990, a jury decided that George Franklin was guilty of the 1969 murder of Susan Nason, the best friend of his 8-year-old daughter Eileen, based solely on the adult Eileen’s claim that, while staring into the eyes of her own child, she was suddenly beset by a heretofore-forgotten vision of her father fatally striking Susan with a large stone.Įileen thus became the poster child for the modern theory of repressed memory, which contends that when faced with unthinkable trauma, people often lock recollections of those experiences away in a deep, dark subconscious compartment, where it can have no effect on their day-to-day lives. The reason eyewitness testimony requires corroboration in a criminal trial is that memory-an internal account that can’t be verified by anyone else, and which may consciously or unconsciously change over time thanks to a variety of factors-is inherently unreliable.
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