detectives

A DNA test on a Polish woman claiming to be Madeleine McCann has “conclusively” proved she is not the missing child, a court has heard.

Julia Wandelt, 24, had a sample analysed after she was arrested in February over the alleged stalking of Madeleine’s parents Kate and Gerry.

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Detective Chief Inspector Mark Cranwell told a court today that when Ms Wandelt’s DNA was compared with Maddie’s the results were clear.

When asked what they proved, Cranwell replied: “A comparison took place and it conclusively proved that Julia Wandelt is not Madeleine McCann.”

The trial over Ms Wandelt’s alleged stalking of the McCann’s is ongoing as a court heard this month she is said to have bombarded Kate and Gerry with calls, letters and messages over almost three years.

Leicester crown court was played clips she left after she got the family’s phone number from Portuguese police records.

In one, Polish national Wandelt, 24, tells Kate: “I know you probably think Madeleine is dead, but she is not. I am her.”

She denies the stalking claims.

The railroad tunnel in which John Doe #135 was found had spooky graffiti and a dark mystique, the kind of place kids dared each other to walk through at night. People called it the Manson Tunnel — the cult leader and his disciples had lived nearby at the Spahn Movie Ranch — and someone had spray-painted HOLY TERROR over the entrance.

By June 1990, occult-inspired mayhem had become a common theme in the Los Angeles mediasphere. The serial killer known as the Night Stalker, a professed Satanist, had been sentenced to death a year before, and the McMartin Preschool molestation case, with its wild claims of ritual abuse of children, was still slogging through the courts.

So when venturesome local teenagers discovered a young man’s body in the pitch-black tunnel above Chatsworth Park, the LAPD considered the possibility of occult motives. The victim was soon identified as Ronald Baker, a 21-year-old UCLA student majoring in astrophysics. He had been killed on June 21, a day considered holy by occultists, at a site where they were known to congregate.

Ronald Baker in an undated photo.

(Courtesy of Patty Elliott)

Baker was skinny and physically unimposing, with a mop of curly blond hair. He had been to the tunnel before, and was known to meditate in the area. He had 18 stab wounds, and his throat had been slashed. On his necklace: a pentagram pendant. In the bedroom of his Van Nuys apartment: witchcraft books, a pentagram-decorated candle and a flier for Mystic’s Circle, a group devoted to “shamanism” and “magick.”

Headline writers leaned into the angle. “Student killed on solstice may have been sacrificed,” read the Daily News. “Slain man frequently visited site of occultists,” declared The Times.

Baker, detectives learned, had been a sweet-tempered practitioner of Wicca, a form of nature worship that shunned violence. He was shy, introverted and “adamantly against Satanism,” a friend said. But as one detective speculated to reporters, “We don’t know if at some point he graduated from the light to the dark side of that.”

Investigators examine the scene where Ronald Baker’s body was found.

(Los Angeles Police Department )

People said he had no enemies. He loved “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” singalongs, and worked a candle-making booth at Renaissance faires. He had written his sister a birthday card in Elizabethan English.

Had he gone into the hills to meditate and stumbled across practitioners of more malignant magic? He was known as a light drinker, but toxicology results showed he was heavily drunk when he died.

In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.

Had someone he trusted lured him to the tunnel? How was his death connected to the raspy-voiced man who placed calls to Baker’s father around that time, demanding a $100,000 ransom in exchange for his son’s life?

U.S. Army photo of Nathan Blalock.

(U.S. Army)

Baker’s housemates, Duncan Martinez and Nathan Blalock, both military veterans in their early 20s, had been the last known people to see him alive, and served as each other’s alibis. They said they had dropped him off at a Van Nuys bus stop, and that he had planned to join his Mystic’s Circle friends for the solstice.

There had been no sign of animosity between the roommates, and Baker considered Martinez, an ex-Marine, one of his best friends. They had met working at Sears, years earlier.

Martinez helped to carry Baker’s casket and spoke movingly at his memorial service at Woodland Hills United Methodist Church. His friend was “never real physically strong, like a lot of the guys I know,” Martinez said, but was the “friendliest, sweetest guy.”

His voice filled with emotion. “He would talk to anybody and be there for anybody at the drop of a dime,” Martinez continued. “And I just hope that it’s something I can get over, because I love him. It’s just hard to think of a time without Ron.”

But something about the roommates’ story strained logic. When Baker’s father had alerted them to the ransom calls, the roommates said they had looked for him at Chatsworth Park, knowing it was one of Baker’s favorite haunts. Why would they assume a kidnapper had taken him there?

Duncan Martinez in an LAPD interview room.

(Los Angeles Police Department)

There was another troubling detail: Martinez had cashed a $109 check he said Baker had given him, but a handwriting expert determined that Baker’s signature was forged.

Martinez agreed to a polygraph test, described his friend’s murder as “a pretty unsensible crime” and insisted he had nothing to do with it. “I’ve never known anybody to carry a grudge or even dislike Ron for more than a minute, you know,” Martinez said.

The test showed deception, and he fled the state. He was gone for nearly 18 months.

He turned up in Utah, where he was arrested on a warrant for lying on a passport application. He had been hoping to reinvent himself as “Jonathan Wayne Miller,” an identity he had stolen from a toddler who died after accidentally drinking Drano in 1974, said LAPD Det. Rick Jackson, now retired. Jackson said Martinez sliced the child’s death certificate out of a Massachusetts state archive, hoping to disguise his fraud.

In February 1992, after being assured his statement could not be used against him, Martinez finally talked. He said it had been Blalock’s idea. They had been watching an old episode of “Dragnet” about a botched kidnapping. Martinez was an ex-Marine, and Blalock was ex-Army. With their military know-how, they believed they could do a better job.

They lured Baker to the park with a case of beer and the promise of meeting girls, and Blalock stabbed him with a Marine Corps Ka-Bar knife Martinez had lent him. Baker begged Martinez for help, and Martinez responded by telling his knife-wielding friend to finish the job.

“I told him to make sure that it was over, because I didn’t want Ron to suffer,” Martinez said. “I believe Nathan slit his throat a couple of times.” He admitted to disguising his voice while making ransom calls to Baker’s father.

But he never provided a location to deliver the ransom money. The scheme seemed as harebrained as it was cruel, and Martinez offered little to lend clarity. He sounded as clueless as anyone else, or pretended to be. “You know, it doesn’t completely click with me either,” he said.

“They ruined their lives, and all of the families’ lives, with the stupidest crime,” Patty Baker Elliott, the victim’s elder sister, told The Times in a recent interview.

Ronald and Patty Baker at her college graduation in the 1980s.

(Courtesy of Baker family)

In the end, the occult trappings were a red herring, apparently intended to throw police off the scent of the real culprits and the real motive.

The killers “set this thing up for the summer solstice, because they knew he wanted to be out, hopefully celebrating the solstice,” Jackson said in a recent interview. “What are the chances, of all the days, this is the one they choose to do it on?”

Jackson, one of the two chief detectives on the case, recounts the investigation in his book “Black Tunnel White Magic: A Murder, a Detective’s Obsession, and ‘90s Los Angeles at the Brink,” which he wrote with author and journalist Matthew McGough.

Blalock was charged with murder. To the frustration of detectives, who believed him equally guilty, Martinez remained free. His statements, given under a grant of immunity, could not be used against him.

Det. Rick Jackson in the LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division squad room.

(Los Angeles Police Department )

“I almost blame Duncan more, because he was in the position, as Ron’s best friend, to stop this whole thing and say, ‘Wait a minute, Nathan, what the hell are we talking about here?’” Jackson said. “He didn’t, and he let it go through, and what happened, happened.”

Martinez might have escaped justice, but he blundered. Arrested for burglarizing a Utah sporting goods store, he claimed a man had coerced him into stealing a mountain bike by threatening to expose his role in the California murder.

As a Salt Lake City detective recorded him, Martinez put himself at the scene of his roommate’s death while downplaying his guilt — an admission made with no promise of immunity, and therefore enough to charge him.

“That’s the first time we could legally put him in the tunnel,” Jackson said.

Jurors found both men guilty of first-degree murder, and they were sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

In June 2020, Baker’s sister was startled to come across a news site reporting that Gov. Gavin Newsom had intervened to commute Martinez’s sentence, making him eligible for parole. No one had told her. The governor’s office said at the time that Martinez had “committed himself to self-improvement” during his quarter-century in prison.

The news was no less a shock to Jackson, who thought the language of the commutation minimized Martinez’s role in concocting the kidnapping plan that led to the murder. He said he regarded Martinez as a “pathological liar,” and one of the most manipulative people he’d met in his long career.

Martinez had not only failed to help Baker, but had urged Blalock to “finish him off” and then posed as a consoling friend to the grieving family. The victim’s sister remembers how skillfully Martinez counterfeited compassion.

“He hugged everybody and talked to everybody at the service,” she said. “He cried. He got choked up and cried during his eulogy.”

A prosecutor intended to argue against Martinez’s release at the parole hearing, but then-newly elected L.A. Dist. Atty. George Gascon instituted a policy forbidding his office from sending advocates. The victim’s sister spoke of her loss. Jackson spoke of Martinez’s gift for deception.

“It was like spitting into the wind,” Jackson said.

The parole board sided with Martinez, and he left prison in April 2021. Blalock remains behind bars.

Rick Jackson and Matthew McGough, authors of “Black Tunnel White Magic.”

(JJ Geiger)

For 35 years now, the retired detective has been reflecting on the case, and the senselessness at its core. Jackson came to think of it as a “folie à deux” murder, a term that means “madness of two” and refers to criminal duos whose members probably would not have done it solo. He regarded it as “my blue-collar Leopold and Loeb case,” comparing it to the wealthy Chicago teenagers who murdered a boy in 1924 with the motive of committing the perfect crime.

An old cop show about a kidnapping had provoked the two young vets to start bouncing ideas off each other, until a plan took shape to try it themselves. They weighed possible targets. The student they shared an apartment with, the Wiccan pacifist without enemies, somehow seemed a convenient one.

“You have to understand their personalities, especially together,” Jackson said. “It’s kind of like, ‘I’m gonna one-up you, and make it even better.’ One of them would say, ‘Yeah, we could do this instead.’ And, ‘Yeah, that sounds cool, but I think we should do this, too.’”

There’s nothing funny about murder, but it’s a handy device on which to hang a comedy.

To be sure, there are those who like their mysteries dark and — ugh — “gritty.” But the tenderhearted like their puzzles too, and the whole rigmarole of eccentric sleuths, colorful suspects and solve-along-at-home stories; for them — and I mean us — the world is troubling enough without adding invented psychopaths and serial killers to the heap. A spoonful of sugar helps the homicide go down.

Two new mysteries full of comedy, or comedies full of mystery, premiere Thursday. “The Residence,” on Netflix, stars Uzo Aduba as a sleuth with a passion for bird-watching; “Ludwig,” on BritBox, offers David Mitchell as a professional puzzle maker impersonating his missing twin brother, a police detective. They’re tonally distinct, but both are fun and easy to recommend.

Created and written by Paul William Davies, “The Residence” is essentially a blown-out version of an Agatha Christie country-house mystery — a fact it acknowledges with a shot of a Christie paperback — set in the White House, among its many chambers, public, private and practical. (There are some cute dollhouse representations of the layout, and the life-size re-creations are impressive.) With its upstairs-downstairs dynamic — the “us” and “them” of it is explicitly laid out — large cast and grand beehive setting, it suggests a wackier contemporary American “Gosford Park.”

The victim is White House head usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito), who keeps things running smoothly around the place, found dead in the family quarters as a wingding is underway in a ballroom below. The party is celebrating Australia, which makes possible a guest shot from Kylie Minogue, who will perform, and a running joke involving Hugh Jackman, whose face is never seen, as the actor is not Hugh Jackman, which is part of the joke. Unless, it actually is Hugh Jackman, which would be an even better joke.

Who killed White House usher A.B. Wynter? There is no lack of suspects in “The Residence.”

(Jessica Brooks / Netflix)

The discovery of the body, an apparent suicide — though anyone with any experience of TV mysteries will spot problems — brings in representatives from the FBI, the Park Police and the local constabulary, whose chief (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) arrives with “world’s greatest” Det. Cornelia Cupp (Aduba). “Wow, it’s a lot of dudes,” she says, eyeballing the assembled lawmen, including FBI Special Agent Edwin Park (Randall Park), who will become her doubting partner through the investigation.

There are no lack of suspects. Is it assistant usher Jasmine Haney (Susan Kelechi Watson), tired of waiting for Wynter’s job; the president’s shiftless brother Tripp Morgan (Jason Lee) and dipsomaniac mother-in-law Nan Cox (Jane Curtin); his best friend and advisor Harry Hollinger (Ken Marino), who yells a lot; or First Gentleman Elliot Morgan (Barrett Foa)? (In this fantasy world, America has elected a gay president, played by Paul Fitzgerald.) Could it be the disgruntled Swiss pastry chef (Bronson Pinchot); the ambitious new head chef (May Wiseman); the social secretary (Molly Griffs), who wants to “reinvent the White House as a concept”; the drunk butler (Edwina Findley); the tall butler (Al Mitchell); the gardener (Rebecca Field); or the engineer (Mel Rodriguez)? Or one of too many others to mention?

The plot is framed by testimony developed at a subsequent congressional investigation, chaired by a senator played by Al Franken, formerly a real-life senator, with Eliza Coupe as an opposition troublemaker. Marino’s character will accuse Franken’s character of turning the hearing into “a murder mystery.” “Murder mysteries are so popular right now,” replies Franken, getting meta for a moment.

Few of the characters represent more than an attitude, but the actors are having a contagious good time, and Aduba’s detective seems deep by virtue of being something of an enigma; her preferred method of interrogation is to stare and say nothing. (She will get a bit of broadening backstory, or side-story, eventually). Things in her head are always clicking, though she is liable too to go off birding, for which the White House grounds are apparently quite good. Aduba’s an imposing presence in any case, and one would hope to see her character enlisted in further Cornelia Cupp adventures — the name itself seems too good to waste — if perhaps shorter than the current season’s eight episodes, which are by temporal necessity here and there padded. (“It’s hard to keep track of everything,” Cupp says at one point, as if in sympathy with the viewer.) There could be twice as many stories if they made them half as long, and four times as many at a perfectly generous two hours.

David Mitchell stars as John “Ludwig” Taylor in BritBox’s “Ludwig.”

(Colin Hutton / BritBox)

In the wonderful, Cambridge-set “Ludwig,” David Mitchell, best known here for “Peep Show,” “Upstart Crow” and as an irascible team captain on the panel show “Would I Lie to You?,” plays John Taylor, a professional inventor of puzzles — awkward, timid, with no social life and a disconnect from and disdain for modern times that Mitchell’s own self-presentation sometimes suggests. (No one expresses disdain quite as hilariously.) “Ludwig” is how John signs his puzzles, which allows for a score borrowed from Beethoven; there’s no deeper meaning, unless I missed it.

When his twin brother, Det. Chief Inspector James Taylor, disappears, John’s sister-in-law, Lucy (the divine Anna Maxwell Martin) enlists John to impersonate James in order to search his office for clues; but John, mistaken for James, is drafted into an investigation, and because he has a talent for seeing abstractly and solving things, he finds himself stuck in the role. His greater challenge, and the source of the series’ comedy, is impersonating a more-or-less normal person — even though John’s been rated “two points above” genius, “I find that never helps when it comes to chatting.” He calls a medical examiner’s report a “how-did-they-die test,” he can’t park a car properly, and, having lived largely inside his house, has a limited understanding of ordinary human concourse.

The six-episode show combines episodic mysteries with a seasonal plotline surrounding the whereabouts of James, which Lucy takes up — a fast-slow rhythm that keeps things lively in the short term and intriguing in the long. It’s a dramatic given that John, who begins this adventure unsure of himself, will become more confident as the job goes on and become closer to his adopted colleagues, especially partner Det. Inspector Russell Carter (Dipo Ola), just as by moving in with Lucy and teenage nephew, Henry (Dylan Hughes), he’ll gain a richer experience of family.

Mitchell is really the sole comic figure here, but on his own he’s enough to call “Ludwig” a comedy. Still, some deep drama — amplified by the Beethoven quotes on the soundtrack — surrounds him, and involves him, as John reckons with his past and present. Every mystery sets its own level of emotional depth, but even those in which murder is little more than an excuse for the detective to get out of bed and the story no more profound than a game of Clue can turn sad as motives are revealed and hapless killers taken away. “Ludwig” plays its minor and major chords, its darker and lighter passages, with equal clarity and force.

Uzo Aduba knows how to stare.

First, there was her piercing fixation as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in 90 episodes of “Orange Is the New Black.” Then, her room-commanding gaze as politician Shirley Chisholm in “Mrs. America,” followed by her nuanced poker face as therapist Dr. Brooke Taylor on the fourth season of “In Treatment.”

Now, as Det. Cordelia Cupp on Netflix’s Shondaland-produced screwball caper “The Residence,” premiering Thursday, Aduba plays an extremely perceptive, bird-watching investigator whose unconventional methods and unblinking looks help solve a White House murder mystery.

On her quest to figure out who killed the residence’s chief usher, Aduba’s Cupp revels in silence and dryly delivers her crime-scene observations. Some of the series’ most captivating scenes involve Cupp simply staring at her various suspects as they squirm and voluntarily incriminate themselves.

“Uzo has this ability to have so much going on in complete moments of a deadpan silence,” said co-star Randall Park, who plays FBI agent Edwin Park. “I was so inspired by that.”

By the time the season finale of “The Residence” comes around and Cupp gets to gleefully reveal how she solved the mystery, “She feels almost like a buried powder keg or a kettle of water on the stovetop,” Aduba said in a video interview, “slowly bubbling until it whistles at the end.”

In “The Residence,” Uzo Aduba plays Det. Cordelia Cupp opposite Randall Park, who co-stars as FBI agent Edwin Park.

(Erin Simkin / Netflix)

In real life, Aduba is constantly at a boil.

The 44-year-old is an effusive storyteller who delights in the details as she grins broadly or furrows her brow in thought. As a listener, she’s equally open, intermittently widening her eyes in concern or throwing her head back to laugh at full tilt.

She seems to relish experiencing the full spectrum of human emotions, whether sitting in grief, sharing her trepidations about starting a new fitness routine on TikTok or simply making shrimp tacos while listening to Tracy Chapman.

As Aduba’s “Mrs. America” co-star Cate Blanchett put it in a separate phone interview: “When I think about her, I think about how much I want to be alive.”

Moving into “The Residence”

In the long tradition of eccentric detectives onscreen — Inspector Clouseau, Miss Marple, Benoit Blanc, Sherlock Holmes, Jessica Fletcher, Hercule Poirot — they are almost always white and frequently men.

In short, they don’t usually look like Aduba.

“Revolution is taking someone like me and putting her in any role and genre they’d consider right for a white woman,” Aduba wrote in her 2024 memoir, “The Road Is Good” (the title is a translation from Igbo to English of her full first name).

Did she view playing Cordelia Cupp as revolutionary?

“Absolutely,” Aduba said. “Even down to the costuming. What I found so satisfying and educational was when I’m in that tweed coat, and you see the vest and the collared shirt and the bag and the whole thing together, you see how exactly right it is that anybody, metaphorically, can don that cape.”

Aduba on playing a detective: “What I found so satisfying and educational was when I’m in that tweed coat, and you see the vest and the collared shirt and the bag and the whole thing together, you see how exactly right it is that anybody, metaphorically, can don that cape.”

(Jessica Brooks / Netflix)

Shondaland, the production company helmed by Shonda Rhimes and famed for series such as “Scandal,” “How to Get Away With Murder” and “Bridgerton,” had kept Aduba on its radar for a while as it considered projects that might make sense for her to lead, said Shondaland executive Betsy Beers.

“She was born to be the lead of a show,” Beers said. “She’s the real deal, and she’s the full package.”

“I have been a huge fan of Uzo for years, and I was thrilled when she signed on to do this show,” said Rhimes in an email. “Watching her bring Det. Cupp to life, infusing the character with her own charm, humor and sincerity has been a true joy.”

According to Shondaland executive Betsy Beers, Uzo Aduba had been on the production company’s radar for a while. “She was born to be the lead of a show,” she said.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Still, few shows experience as much tumult and change in a single season as “The Residence” did. First came the 2023 Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes, which halted production for several months after they’d filmed four of the show’s eight episodes.

Then, during that hiatus, Andre Braugher, who originally played the victim at the center of the mystery, died after a brief illness in December 2023. When production resumed in early 2024, Giancarlo Esposito took Braugher’s place and reshot his scenes. Park said Aduba’s “bright spirit” served as the cast’s “guiding light” as they navigated that difficult time.

Aduba, who had been pregnant while shooting the first batch of episodes, also gave birth during the pause and returned to set new mom to a daughter, Adaiba (with her husband, filmmaker Robert Sweeting).

“That was wild,” she said of transitioning to motherhood during the shoot, adding that the cast “really clung to each other because we had experienced birth, we had experienced loss.”

“The Residence” creator and showrunner Paul William Davies credited Aduba’s leadership with setting the tone for the rest of the cast and crew as they navigated the changes.

“I think everybody brought their best work because they could see the person that was No. 1 on the call sheet was working just as hard as any other person, if not more so, and treated everybody with kindness and respect,” Davies said. “It makes an enormous difference in how a show runs when you have somebody like that leading the effort.”

A “terrifying” leap

Uzoamaka Aduba was always going to be a star. It just wasn’t clear what kind of a star she would be.

First, there was figure skating. Growing up in Medfield, Mass., a small, predominantly white town outside of Boston, Aduba idolized Surya Bonaly, the French skater known for landing backflips on the ice and one of the few prominent Black figure skaters at the time.

By high school, Aduba was traveling hours to train and compete on her quest to make the U.S. national team. But skating was expensive, and the family’s finances were stretched thin between Aduba and her four college-bound siblings.

So she switched to track. Again, she excelled, and she earned a track scholarship to Boston University, where she honed her powerhouse vocals and love of theater as a voice major.

After graduating in 2005, she moved to New York, scraping by waiting tables at a seafood restaurant near Times Square as she landed roles in off-Broadway and eventually Broadway productions, including a 2011 revival of “Godspell.”

By 2012, she had gotten to a place in her theater career where she could pay her rent and live comfortably without taking odd jobs on the side. But she longed for a new challenge. She told her agent to only put her forward for TV and film auditions and to turn down any theater offers that might come in.

After several years of working in theater, Uzo Aduba decided she wanted to branch out to TV and film.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

It was a bold strategy. Apart from a faceless shot briefly featured in a reenactment scene in a PBS slavery docuseries, Aduba had never acted on camera before. Theater had seemed to be an inclusive space “like an island of misfit toys,” she said, but television was a medium she viewed as largely off-limits to her.

“Not just as a Black woman — as a dark-skinned, non-Western-conforming Black woman of African beauty, with a name that no one has ever heard or seen before, with a gap in my teeth, with my full lips, with my broad nose,” Aduba said. “I had seen one woman, really, maybe a handful: Whoopi [Goldberg]. Alfre [Woodard]. Beah [Richards]. I think even that list feels too long. It didn’t feel wide, the atmosphere.”

Aduba spent that summer going on nearly 100 TV and film auditions and facing rejection after rejection, as her worst fears seemed to be confirmed.

“I was watching my bank account go down and down and down and the nos go up and up and up. I was terrified,” she said. “If I’m being really, really honest — financially, it was terrifying, yes, but it was even scarier to try to risk going into this medium of television and film at that time, because I was confident there was no place for me. I was trying to go into something that I didn’t think I was invited to, and I was hearing enough nos to feel like I wasn’t invited.”

Earning the industry’s respect

On a blistering summer day, Aduba quickly styled her hair in Bantu knots as she prepared to trudge to another round of back-to-back auditions, certain more nos were on the way. She had almost reached her breaking point.

One audition was for a new streaming series called “Orange Is the New Black,” a novelty concept in an age where Netflix still mailed DVDs.

Casting director Jennifer Euston had seen Aduba perform in “Godspell” on Broadway the previous fall and been wowed by her haunting solo, “By My Side.” Because Aduba’s agent mentioned that her client also ran track, Euston asked Aduba to audition for the part of Janae, a former track star who lands in Litchfield Penitentiary.

Aduba nailed her audition, and Euston excitedly sent her tape to showrunner Jenji Kohan.

“I want her for Crazy Eyes,” Euston recalled Kohan telling her right away. Euston hadn’t even begun casting that role, but they offered her the part without considering other actors or having her return to read for it.

Uzo Aduba as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in Season 2 of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black.” The breakout role earned her two Emmys over the show’s seven seasons.

(JoJo Whilden / Netflix)

By Aduba’s estimates, she began “Orange Is the New Black” as No. 53 on a call sheet of 60 rotating ensemble cast members. Suzanne (a.k.a. Crazy Eyes) was originally slated to appear in only two or three episodes, but thanks to Aduba’s performance, the character grew into a series regular and fan favorite that earned Aduba two Emmys.

“She’s very grounded. She’s very centered,” Euston said of Aduba.”That’s what you needed to be able to pull off a role like Crazy Eyes in earnest, to really be believable.”

When “Orange Is the New Black” ended in 2019, Aduba followed it with the limited series “Mrs. America,” in which she played Chisholm, the first Black candidate for a major party’s presidential nomination.

The FX show was executive produced by Blanchett, who also co-starred as conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, and when they began the table read for the Chisholm-centric third episode, Aduba left the Oscar winner speechless.

As Aduba ran through scenes in which Chisholm triumphantly campaigned or despaired at the obstacles to her success, “You could hear a pin drop,” Blanchett said. “It’s like she had already imbibed the spirit of Chisholm, and that was a really remarkable moment for all of us. Everyone left the read and we couldn’t speak. It was jaw-dropping.”

After “Orange Is the New Black,” Uzo Aduba earned her third Emmy portraying trailblazing politician Shirley Chisholm in “Mrs. America.”

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Aduba’s work on “Mrs. America” earned her a third Emmy, but it was also a period filled with deep sadness. While filming, Aduba had been grappling with her mother’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis.

“She’s somebody who carries an understanding that to be fully alive, you have to embrace grief, and that’s something that I really appreciate with her,” Blanchett said. “She doesn’t get bogged down in that grief, but she carries it with her, with grace and dignity.”

And when Aduba began working on her memoir soon after, she shifted focus from writing about her own Hollywood tales to delving into her parents’ early lives in Nigeria, their immigration journey to the U.S. and how her mother had raised Aduba to take on the world.

“It just felt like, without her really saying it, she knew this [book] was probably the lasting account of her life, and that became a priority to me, the story of our lives together,” Aduba said of her mother, Nonyem, who died in 2020. “She made me believe I could do anything, and I foolishly believed her.”

Aduba is hoping to inspire her now 16-month-old daughter in a similar manner. She recently filmed the crime-drama movie “Roofman” opposite Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, an experience she called “very freeing” and one that gave her “the chance to do things I’ve never done onscreen.” As of publication, Netflix has not confirmed a second season of “The Residence.” However, the streamer submitted the show as a comedy rather than a limited series for Emmys consideration, hinting at a renewal. Showrunner Davies also said he would “love to be able to tell more Cordelia stories, and I have plenty to tell.”

The actor isn’t sure what career frontiers she’d like to chart next. Perhaps a movie musical or a return to the stage, but she’s keeping her options open.

“That’s the job of the artist, right? It’s to not live in the safe space. It’s to always challenge yourself, to do the hard thing, to take the risky shot,” Aduba said. “I don’t know what’s next. I know I don’t want to be comfortable. I do know that. So, whatever form that takes, I’m interested.”

Thomas Perez Jr. was hours into an interrogation by police about his missing father when they dropped some devastating news: A body had been found.

Thomas Perez Sr., they told his son, was dead.

The news crushed Perez, but he never considered that the authorities could be lying.

They were. The tale of his father on a gurney in the morgue was a deception used to push Perez to confess to killing him.

Over several more hours, interview transcripts show, detectives shut Perez down when, again and again, he told them he hadn’t harmed anyone. Instead, they hammered him with accusations. Exhausted, in despair and desperate to stop the “pounding,” Perez said later, he finally agreed with police that he had killed his father.

Then, he tried to hang himself using a shoelace — hours before his father was located, alive and well.

“They were not listening to me telling them the truth,” Perez told Times reporters recently, trying to explain why he would falsely confess. “Their continual attack on me came to the point where I no longer wanted to tolerate it. I felt, ‘I have to end this.’”

Thomas Perez Jr. falsely confessed to killing his father after a 17-hour interrogation by Fontana police during which they lied about their evidence and told him his dog would be euthanized.

(Fontana Police Department via Law Office of Jerry L. Steering)

In their push to break down a man they suspected of being a killer, Fontana officers were drawing on the playbook of a combative and sometimes deceptive interrogation philosophy that has been widely embraced by police departments across the country for almost 80 years. It is a method that trains detectives to pursue a confession and be unrelenting in their questioning when they believe they have the guilty suspect, and even lie about evidence.

The method is so widespread that it has been glamorized in film and TV procedurals such as “Law and Order”: a tough and driven detective goes into “the box,” as interrogation rooms are sometimes called, and obtains a confession from a suspect through trickery or sheer force of will. Some policing experts say that, properly used, the method can elicit truth from criminals who are lying.

But increasingly, critics and criminal justice experts — including both law enforcement leaders and civil rights advocates — have raised concerns that the method, especially if deployed irresponsibly or to excess, can lead to false confessions and fabricated testimony, putting the wrong person behind bars and leaving criminals free to commit more crimes. In recent years, some experts have been pushing a newer method of interviewing suspects, developed by intelligence services in the wake of the 911 terrorist attacks, that discourages lying to suspects and focuses on gaining information and building rapport.

“There is no question in my mind that there are innocent people sitting in prison, based on the approach the law enforcement took,” said retired Los Angeles Police Department Det. Tim Marcia, who helped the LAPD’s elite Robbery-Homicide Division adopt more modern methods of interrogation.

A 2003 photo of Los Angeles Police Department Dets. Rick Jackson, left, and Tim Marcia unpacking evidence related to a 20–year–old murder case.

(Los Angeles Times)

About 13% of exonerations since 1989 — totaling 458 people — have involved false confessions, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of UC Irvine, University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. One 2016 study by the Innocence Project found that about 50% of the time, the real culprits in those crimes were later located through DNA, and had gone on to collectively commit an additional 142 violent crimes.

Amid concerns about the practice, the California Legislature in 2021 passed a law requiring all training for investigators be science-based methods. The law was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who noted the potential costs to the state of making such training mandatory.

Now, lacking that mandate, there is a culture war within California law enforcement about how suspects should be interrogated. Some have embraced the new approach, among them El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson, who helped write the vetoed legislation. “It’s ethical and more effective,” he said.

Others say police, when faced with lying criminals out to do harm, must sometimes lie and pressure them in the interests of public safety.

“There are times where it’s extremely valuable to solve crimes and to, you know, get to the end of a case,” said Fontana Police Chief Michael Dorsey.

Fontana recently paid Perez $900,000 to settle a lawsuit he filed against the department over the 2018 episode, and Dorsey said that his department has instituted some changes in the wake of the Perez case.

But telling officers not to lie during interrogations is not among them.

For a year, The Times has investigated this divide around interrogations, examining methods as well as multiple cases involving false confessions.

Part One: The wrong guy

El Dorado County Dist. Atty. Vern Pierson has become a leading critic of commonly used police interrogation tactics he believes can lead to false confessions.

(Max Whittaker / For The Times)

Pierson, the El Dorado County D.A., is in some respects about as far from a progressive prosecutor as it is possible to be. A former expert marksman in the Army, he is a conservative Republican elected in a deep red county and an author of Proposition 36, the new “tough on crime” law California voters approved last November.

When he took office in 2007, Pierson was skeptical of reform advocates, such as the Innocence Project, that claimed there were untold numbers of people wrongly locked up in prisons around the country.

“I kind of have a love-hate relationship with the Innocence Project,” he said. “I appreciate what they do. … But on the other hand, I think sometimes, oftentimes, you know, they’re representing people who are factually guilty.”

Then, he discovered his office had locked up someone for murder who was, in fact, innocent.

After an investigation prompted by the Northern California Innocence Project, Pierson in 2020 asked the court to exonerate Ricky Davis, who had been convicted of the 1985 murder of Jane Hylton, a newspaper columnist. In 2022, Pierson convicted another man, Michael Green, for her murder, based on new DNA evidence.

Ricky Davis addresses the court at the 2024 exoneration hearing of Connie Dahl. Davis and Dahl were wrongfully convicted of a 1985 murder after Dahl provided a false confession.

(Jose Luis Villegas / For the Times)

Earlier this year, Pierson also posthumously exonerated Connie Dahl, who falsely confessed to helping Davis carry out the crime, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and died in 2014 after helping to convict Davis.

The experience affected Pierson profoundly. He became convinced that Dahl had broken under the relentless questioning of detectives who had been trained to use deception and aggressively pursue confessions once they had identified a suspect. Detectives had falsely told Dahl there was physical evidence linking her to the crime.

Pierson personally went to Davis’ cell to tell him he was being freed, and promised Davis he would work to make sure others were not convicted with false confessions gleaned from “guilt-presumptive” interrogations that assumed from the start that detectives had the right person.

“I told him, I’m going to change the way law enforcement is trained, and the way detectives, specifically, do interviews and interrogations,” Pierson recalls. “And I, you know, I intend to do that.”

But as Pierson would discover, like many reformers before him, that meant changing a mindset that has been entrenched for generations.

Part Two: The third degree

A 1925 photo of prosecutor Buron Fitts, left. As L.A. County’s district attorney from 1928 to 1940, Fitts presided over cases in which defendants later said they had confessed after investigators beat them.

(Los Angeles Times)

In the first decades of the 20th century, police officers across the country had an astonishingly effective method of getting suspects they believed guilty of certain crimes to confess.

It was known as “the third degree” and involved tactics that today would be considered torture: brutal beatings; deprivation of food, water, sleep and toilets; prolonged confinement. Despite being illegal, the approach was widespread, according to a 1931 report from the federal Department of Justice. That report, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren would later point out, also cautioned that the method “involves also the dangers of false confessions” and “tends to make police and prosecutors less zealous in the search for objective evidence.”

But no one could say it didn’t work: In some departments, police were clearing huge numbers of homicides.

Still, eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to it. In 1936, the court found, in Brown vs. Mississippi, that confessions obtained by use of torture would not be admissible in court. Four years later, in Chambers vs. Florida, the court tossed confessions made after interrogations under “circumstances calculated to inspire terror.”

The message got through to law enforcement agencies across the country: Infliction of physical pain and duress was out. But it left many detectives with a pressing question: How were they supposed to solve crimes going forward?

John Reid, a former Chicago police officer and polygraph expert, and Fred E. Inbau, a criminologist and former director of Northwestern Law School’s Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, had an answer.

Rather than beat people suspected of crimes until they confessed, the two developed an interrogation method designed to get people to talk without laying a finger on them.

The Reid Technique, as it came to be known, relies on insights from behavioral science to help police officers determine if a suspect is likely guilty, or if a witness is telling the truth. The three basic steps are to gather evidence; talk to those involved in non-confrontational, fact-gathering interviews; then interrogate those suspected of guilt.

The interrogation is meant to leave a suspect little room to lie or evade, and detectives are taught that they should do the majority of the talking, according to Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid and Associates, the for-profit company that provides training in the method. While investigators are told not to falsely offer leniency, they are taught to present moral or psychological justifications for crimes that could work to put the subject at ease.

“In most instances, it’s easier for someone to acknowledge that they’ve done something if, in their mind, they can kind of minimize their culpability,” Buckley said.

You committed the crime — but you had a good reason to do it, the detective might say, for example. A child molester might be told that the victim looked older, or that the investigator, too, finds the child to be attractive.

“The core of the Reid interrogation process is ‘theme development,’ in which the investigator presents a moral or psychological excuse for the subject’s behavior. The interrogation theme reinforces the subject’s rationalizations or justifications for committing the crime,” Reid and Associates explains in a bulletin titled “Common Erroneous and False Statements About the Reid Technique.”

The Reid Technique also condones lying in certain circumstances, as long as it doesn’t involve “incontrovertible or dispositive evidence,” noting that the Supreme Court in 1969 in Frazier vs. Cupp ruled that police lying to a suspect did not make an “otherwise voluntary confession inadmissible.”

Reid trainings were soon used by police departments across the country. Quickly, competitors tweaked the method and opened their own training companies based on similar principles. Today, there are many companies across the U.S. that teach a version of interrogations that includes deception and the notion that, with proper training, officers can detect when someone is lying.

A 2004 photo of Washington D.C. Metro Police Det. Jim Trainum.

(James M. Thresher / Getty Images)

“It does work,” said retired Washington D.C. Metro Police Det. Jim Trainum, who said he embraced the approach when he became a homicide detective in the 1990s after buying and studying a book Reid and Inbau wrote together, “Criminal Interrogation and Confessions.”

But Trainum said he soon discovered something else. The method, he said, “works too well.”

Trainum has since retired and authored his own book: “How the Police Generate False Confessions: An Inside Look at the Interrogation Room.” He recounted a case he worked in the 1990s, when a man was found savagely beaten to death by the banks of the Anacostia River. The man had been robbed, and his credit card had been used all over town.

Police had a composite sketch of the person using the card, and after it was circulated, a tip led them to a 19-year-old woman living in a homeless shelter. Police obtained samples of her handwriting, and went to a handwriting expert, who declared them to be a match to receipt signatures for charges on the dead man’s credit card.

During the first hours of her interrogation, the woman denied all knowledge of the crime. Trainum, unrelenting, continued to deploy tactics he believed would get to the truth.

Finally, Trainum recounted, “she tells us that, ‘you’re right. I signed the credit card slips.’”

A breakthrough.

The detectives kept at her. After 17 hours, she had confessed that she knew the dead man. He had abused her. So she and some friends had abducted and beaten him. The woman, who had a baby back at the homeless shelter she was anxious to return to, said she hadn’t meant for him to die.

She was charged with murder and locked up — away from her baby — to await trial.

Then she recanted.

Trumain decided to gather more evidence against her. He went to the homeless shelter where she lived — which had a strict sign in/sign out policy — to get its logs, to prove she was out at the time of the man’s abduction and during the times she had used his credit card.

Papers in hand, he said, he was driving back to the station when he started to glance through them. “I about wrecked the car,” he said. “According to that [log] book, there was no way she could have committed that murder.”

In confusion, Trumain went to a second handwriting expert, this one at the FBI, to make sure that evidence, at least, would hold up. Another nasty surprise: The FBI’s expert said the handwriting didn’t match.

At that point, Trumain realized he had overlooked something big: The woman had an infant. This meant she would have been seven months pregnant at the time of the murder. The suspect they were looking for had not appeared pregnant at all.

He had locked up the wrong person.

(The woman later told the radio program “This American Life” that she had confessed because she was exhausted, police weren’t listening to her and if she told them something, perhaps they would let her go home.)

Trainum was shaken. “I feel bad,” he said. “But I feel confused. Why would she have confessed?”

Buckley, the president of Reid & Associates, said he is not familiar with the details of Trainum’s case, but that in most instances of false confessions he has examined, investigators have not followed best practices.

“It’s usually that they’re engaging in inappropriate behaviors that the courts have long deemed to be coercive,” Buckley said.

Part Three: Why do innocent people confess?

Still, the question of why innocent people confess was coming up more and more often in the 1990s, after the introduction of forensic DNA testing that provided hard evidence of innocence or guilt.

The first DNA exoneration happened in 1989, freeing a Chicago man in prison for a rape that never occurred. The alleged teenage victim, frightened that her parents might discover she was sexually active, later admitted she had fabricated the story. After that, DNA exonerations became almost common, and startling similarities between the cases began to emerge.

Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of San Francisco and a leading expert on the topic, said “police-induced false confessions are a leading cause of wrongful conviction of the innocent.”

Though about a quarter of DNA exonerations involve a false confession, that percentage jumps to more than 34% for those who were under 18 when wrongfully convicted, and 69% for those with mental disabilities, according a 2022 analysis by the National Registry of Exonerations.

The percentage of wrongful convictions that include false confessions also leaped when the crime was a homicide. Sixty percent of wrongful convictions for people found guilty of homicide involved a false confession, according to Saul Kassin, the author of the 2022 book “Duped: Why Innocent People Confess and Why We Believe Their Confessions.”

One early study in 2004 found that 84% of documented false confessions happened when interrogations lasted longer than six hours.

That was a factor in one of the most notorious false confession cases, that of the Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five.

In 1989, in a crime that transfixed New York City, five teenagers, Black and Hispanic, were convicted of participating in a violent assault on a jogger in Central Park. All five were interrogated for hours by detectives and ultimately implicated themselves. They recanted, but it was too late. They were convicted and spent years in prison before a confession by the real perpetrator and DNA evidence proved they had not been involved in the crime.

“When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours,” one of the five, Yusef Salaam, now a member of the New York City Council, wrote in 2016 in the Washington Post. “Under duress, we falsely confessed.”

After spending 17 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit, Lombardo Palacios walks out of the Los Angeles County courthouse a free man with his mother, Claudia Ortiz.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

The cases aren’t just historical. Last week, Lombardo Palacios and his co-defendant, Charlotte Pleytez, had their murder convictions thrown out by a Los Angeles judge at the request of Los Angeles County Dist. Attn. Nathan Hochman. At 15, after an hours-long interrogation, Palacios falsely confessed to involvement in a 2007 gang shooting in Hollywood. He recanted his statement, but it wasn’t until a private investigator recently tracked down other suspects that the case was reopened. They were released this month after 17 years of incarceration.

Despite growing concern from social justice activists and defense teams about guilt-presumptive methods of questioning, serious concerns about interrogation techniques weren’t raised by those conducting them until about 2005, after the Washington Post reported that the United States was holding terror suspects in secret overseas prisons where torture was used.

By the time Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, there was momentum not only to repudiate the use of torture by U.S. intelligence agencies, but also to embrace new methods that were deemed more ethical and reliable. In August 2009, Obama ordered the creation of the cross-agency High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG. Along with handling the interrogation of terror suspects, the HIG was charged with creating best practices for interrogations.

Other countries had already moved away from combative interrogations in their civilian policing. In the 1990s, England and Wales, under pressure over coerced confessions, had pioneered an interrogation method that forbids lying and relies on open-ended questioning. In ensuing years, lying by police would be outlawed in other European countries, Japan and Australia. The HIG studied those models, then created its own protocols.

One of HIG’s early partners in turning research into methods was the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division. The LAPD in 2012 sent two homicide detectives to HIG training: Marcia and colleague Gregory Stearns.

Stearns said in a recent interview that one day in the class convinced him of its value.

LAPD Det. Gregory Stearns at police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

“I bought into it right away,” he said. Beyond the open-ended questions, he saw how the techniques encouraged investigators to prepare for interviews, rather than relying on spur-of-the-moment intuition or tricks.

“That’s the thing that really struck me at first,” he said. “Sometimes we’ll spend weeks, months, years, investigating things like homicides, and then if the moment comes when you’re actually going to be interviewing a suspect, you know, how much time did you really spend getting ready for that?”

The new ideas, he said, backed by scientific proof that they were effective, were “really knocking down a lot of the myths that have been passed down to generations of investigators.”

Marcia worked with HIG to use the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division as a laboratory to study the methods further.

Part Four: The culture war

The approach has been slower to take hold across law enforcement in general.

Still, as evidence mounted that some groups — including young people and people with mental disabilities — were more susceptible to false confessions, legislators began to take notice.

States began to pass laws outlawing the use of psychological pressure or lies in interrogations of minors, starting with Illinois in 2021. California followed suit with legislation, passed in 2022, that took effect last January.

Supporters of that bill argued that “law enforcement’s use of deceptive interrogation methods, such as threats, physical harm, deception, or psychologically manipulative tactics … create an incredibly high risk for eliciting a false confession from anyone, and particularly youth.”

“We could be unfairly interrogating people in parts of our state, and I think that is wrong,” former state Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa), said of his push to make training in new techniques mandatory.

(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)

Then-state Sen. Bill Dodd had also attempted to curtail those types of interrogation methods across the board with 2021 legislation that would have made training in new techniques the mandatory requirement moving forward. Newsom, noting the costs, vetoed Dodd’s bill and instead instructed the Commission on Police Officer Standards and Training, commonly known as POST, to develop optional classes.

Undeterred, Pierson has continued to wage his campaign. POST has made the new evidence-based method standard training for detectives who come through its programs. And many training companies operating in California now advise against long interrogations and a reliance on lying and manipulation — though lying still remains a tactic police are allowed to use.

But changing how detectives work inside interrogation rooms is a tougher task, many policing experts said.

The Dodd bill was opposed by the California Statewide Law Enforcement Assn., which represents investigators in a number of state agencies.

“This legislation goes too far by prohibiting the use of long-standing interrogation practices, which are only used when an investigator is reasonably certain of the suspect’s involvement ,” the association wrote in its formal comments.

It added that “by limiting the scope” of what investigators can say in the interrogation room, “investigations will grind to a halt.”

Dennis Gomez, a retired police lieutenant from the city of Orange who recently took over California’s Behavior Analysis Training Institute, a private company that trains police officers how to question people, said he is familiar with the sentiment.

“It is a culture,” he said. “And it is so hard to change that.”

He said some detectives come to his courses resistant to the idea that they can solve cases without the tools of lying and pressure many have relied upon for years.

“In the early part of the week, they say, ‘This is ridiculous. How are we ever going to get a confession,’” he said.

But after the course is finished, Gomez said, detectives often tell him they wish they could have learned the newer methods sooner.

Andrew Mendosa, who oversees interviewing and interrogation training for POST, called losing the ability to lie about facts and evidence many officers’ “biggest fear.” But Mendosa said that many detectives eventually realize that if they prepare for interviews with suspects by gathering evidence, and take a holistic approach, they don’t need to lie to them. Mendosa said he was confident that the new interrogation methods would eventually be adopted across California, though it may take a generational shift.

Pierson wants the state to be more proactive in making training mandatory, and he doesn’t accept the governor’s reasoning that it would cost too much.

“I know that a single false confession leading to a conviction is going to cost taxpayers more,” he said.

He points to one study that shows California spent more than $200 million between 1989 and 2012 because of wrongful convictions, a sum tied to more than 2,100 years of time spent behind bars by innocent people.

Dodd, the former state senator, also questions leaving the decision on training to California’s hundreds of law enforcement departments. “If the sheriff in your unit doesn’t believe in this and doesn’t send you to be trained, then you don’t get trained,” he said. “We could be unfairly interrogating people in parts of our state, and I think that is wrong.”

In Fontana, Police Chief Dorsey said the Perez case had sparked some changes internally as the department has sought to use the debacle “as an opportunity to be better.”

For example, he said, the department has ramped up mental health training and launched a collaboration with San Bernardino’s Behavioral Health Department. He also said that the length of time that police officers interrogated Perez was “excessive.”

But Dorsey said he did not conclude from the episode that lying to suspects during interrogations is always problematic. The two detectives, he said, “were truly out just trying to do the best they could” and had reason to believe, based on their assessment of the Perez home, that a violent crime had occurred.

“Were they perfect? No,” he said. But, “we’ve used this as an opportunity to be better.”

And while he called the debate over interrogation methods a “complex question,” he said he remains convinced “that there’s a point in time to use ruses in interrogation techniques.”

“I don’t want any contact, ever, with any police officer,” Thomas Perez Jr., left, says of his lost faith in law enforcement. “I see a police car, I look the other way.”

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

More than five years after his ordeal, Perez says the episode has left him anxious. And he no longer looks upon police as a force for good.

“I don’t want any contact, ever, with any police officer. I see a police car, I look the other way,” he said. “I see an officer walking around, I go the other direction.”