Sudden Recall of Forgotten Crimes Is a Puzzler for Juries, Experts Say : Justice: Experts disagree on whether suppressed traumas can be truthfully described years later. Parents have been sued for long-ago abuses.

By MALCOLM RITTER

June 30, 1991 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK — During a violent argument with a friend, John Mudd Jr. says, he suddenly recalled events of his childhood he had forgotten for 15 years. He gave the information to police, and two people were charged with killing his father.

Another investigation was launched after a 38-year-old man being counseled for on-the-job stress suddenly recalled that, as a 9-year-old, he saw a minister stab a young girl.

And in California, a 29-year-old woman testified that she had suddenly remembered seeing her father kill her playmate about 20 years earlier. The father was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in January.

In other, less publicized cases, adults who have recovered long-suppressed memories have charged their parents with abusing them as children.

It is true that children can blot traumatic experiences out of their minds, and that recollections of them can return in adult life. The big question for a jury, of course, is how much faith should be placed in what a witness describes as a long-forgotten memory.

Research has not yet found an answer, and the courts are left with conflicting opinions, according to experts on memory and reaction to stress.

“It’s a legal nightmare,” said Dr. Bessel van der Kolk of Harvard Medical School, who is president of the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies.

A claim such as Mudd’s of a suddenly returned memory is “plausible, but there’s no data to suggest that (the memory) would be true, and there’s no data to suggest that it would not be true,” said Karen Saywitz, an assistant psychiatry professor at UCLA.

Mudd, 20, testified in April that he was about to hit a friend with a chair during a fight when he glimpsed the flag on the wall that had covered his father’s casket.

“I dropped the chair, went to the hallway, bent down . . . that’s when my father’s murder came back to me,” he later told a coroner’s hearing in Pittsburgh.

Mudd was 5 in 1975, when his father was found shot to death in his home. His family did not allow police to interview him at the time.

Mudd says he now remembers being seated on the couch with his mother and father when the living room lights went out. He remembers his father going down to the basement to investigate.

“I remember hearing seven loud noises. . . . It almost sounded like smacking a pillow that was beside you,” Mudd testified. Then, he said, he recalled seeing his father’s body at the bottom of the basement steps.

Mudd said he recalled seeing Steven Slutzker, now 40, of Canton, Ohio, entering the living room from the kitchen, and remembers that his mother let Slutzker out of the house.

Slutzker’s lawyer called Mudd’s story preposterous, but Slutzker and Mudd’s mother have been ordered to stand trial.

Children can push memories of traumatic or painful events out of their minds as a defense against being overwhelmed, a process called repression or dissociation, experts say. The forgotten memories can come back when children grow up and feel less threatened by them. The memory’s return might be triggered by some experience or may emerge during psychotherapy.

In one study of adults who reported being molested as children, almost 60% of them said they had forgotten about the abuse by the time they were 18, said John Briere, an assistant professor of psychiatry at USC’s School of Medicine.

When memories of a childhood trauma return after a long period of having been forgotten, “it is my clinical impression that these memories are relatively accurate,” no more or less so than the normal recall of long-ago events, said Briere, who treats adults who were molested as children.

Harvard’s Van der Kolk said he tends to believe memories that emerge in his patients are true, although “we don’t know well enough how memory works to really give hard evidence” to justify belief in a particular recollection.

“It’s very hard to know what to believe,” and patients themselves are often unsure of the reliability of the apparent memories, he said.

Dr. Roland Summit of the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center said he is treating one woman who has a mental image of being raped by her father. After four years, her belief as to whether it really happened still depends on whether she is feeling independent and strong at the time, he said.

“If my client sued her father, I would be hard pressed to testify on whether I thought those memories were accurate,” he said.

Others doubt the validity of such memories. “I would just question the reliability of something that sprung to life after going to sleep for 20 years,” said psychologist Elizabeth Loftus of the University of Washington at Seattle, an authority on eyewitness recall.

In some cases she has been involved in, the recovered memory “pops back in different forms, depending on what day it is,” she said.

Some psychologists and psychiatrists said they are concerned about memories that emerge during psychotherapy. They said therapy often is the genesis of accusations of long-ago sexual abuse by parents.

Such memories may be unwittingly colored by therapists or may be just plain fantasies, they said, but Briere said he doubted either concern was a significant problem. Saywitz and others said that just because a memory emerged during psychotherapy, it should not be branded fantasy. It may take the safety of a therapist’s office to let a painful memory emerge, she said.

Other experts cautioned that childhood memories were formed through the eyes of a child, who may have misinterpreted what was seen, and that the traumatic nature of some memories may affect how accurately they are recalled.