Article referenced with permission. In no way am I, Officer.com, or SouthComm Law Enforcement Media affiliated with the site.
While clicking mindlessly through channels late one night, my wife and I came across a now-cancelled show called "Oddities" on the Discovery Channel then rerun marathon style on the Science Channel. The show dealt with a pawn-shop like store in Manhattan which (as Google puts it) dealt with "the strange and the bizarre." I could start a list of weird things they featured on the show - just take Google's word for it, ok? Least I can say is that I was always on the look out for law enforcement related items to research and write about. One episode had featured a client looking to sell a human skull ... a real human skull. They had to get the authorities involved to make sure everything was on the up and up. This inspired an article about the dark world of trafficked human remains which hadn't come about.
... yet ...
My mind always kept watch for the odd and bizarre to share. Thanks to the wonderfully odd Atlas Obscura, I was introduced to Helene Adelaide Shelby. After reading about her and her invention it's pretty obvious that no idea should be left un-investigated. If unfamiliar with the site, they also deal with the strange and bizarre and point out the odd places around the world. If you're looking for a fun weird story, try them out.
Anyway. Let's get back to Shelby, shall we?
In a small, nearly forgotten corner of history, Shelby filed for a patent on August 16, 1927 for what she named, "Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions and photographically recording them" (US #1749090 A).
In "Would You Confess Your Criminal Misdeeds to This Skeleton?" Atlas Obscura's Cara Giaimo writes, "Her invention, which she describes as a 'new and useful apparatus,' is designed to 'produce a state of mind calculated to cause [a criminal], if guilty, to make a confession thereof,' as well as to record that confession."
Wait, WHAT?
Giaimo describes it further. The concept was to take a skeleton (I'm assuming an artificial one, the patent actually says "a figure in the form of a skeleton"), insert some red lights, and pop in a camera. The criminal, alone and stuck in a dark room with this contraption then has this figure revealed to them. The camera captures the confession in case they want to - oh, I don't know - lie about it later. Think of it like the confessional at church, but instead of a wise person of faith you have a horrifying embodiment of death staring at you. It's lit up of course. There are lights from above and below giving it a spooky quality one usually meant for ghost stories around a campfire. Those red lights are it's eyes. It's far more simplistically complicated than I'm making it seem.
Is that coercion? Leading questions are one thing, but is scaring a confession out of a guy by being really really creepy be considered coercion? Comment below and let me know.
Now, call me odd. Call me weird. Call me peculiar. All that's fair. But this seems extremely forward thinking. Shelby doesn't seem to have gotten any credit for it and nor am I sure that Shelby was even the first to think of the idea, BUT if you remove the skeleton figure and the red lightbulbs staring into the criminal's soul was this the inspiration of a mounted surveillance camera?
Allow me to push it even further ... imagine your department's interview room. If you've got the camera in the corner (or multiple) let that be. Instead of the skeleton figure just put an officer standing in the corner with a recording body camera. The officer is just standing there. Staring. Sure that's a MASSIVE waste of time and money - of course. I may be wrong, but if I'm being honest this seems like intimidation.
Though, I do see the similarity with the surveillance camera system. That's where law enforcement investigations are at today. That's where the interview room has been for decades.
This Helene Adelaide Shelby seems to have thought of that, oh, 90 years or so ago. I do wish they tried the skeleton once though. If only for a test. The footage would have been amazing.
