Exposing The Big Lie : From the case of Charles Stuart to the tragic actions of Susan Smith, when a ‘victim’s’story doesn’t add up, sometimes all police really have to go on are gut feelings and plain old experience.

A bullet to the gut can explain a lot.

Charles Stuart--bleeding, confused, about to lose consciousness--calls Boston police to report he’s been held up. He’s shot, his wife is shot--maybe dead, and he is lost.

Where are you? asks the dispatcher.

Stuart’s voice chokes with panic. He doesn’t know the streets.

When the police finally locate him, by a strange twist of fate, a crew from the television show “Rescue 911” is riding along.

The cameras are rolling as Stuart, his pregnant wife dying on the seat beside him, is helped from their blood-spattered sedan. His face is ashen, his features contorted. He is clutching his belly.

It was a scene the district attorney’s homicide chief Phyllis Broker would return to again and again.

“What a classic picture. He looks like a devil. You could see it as a man in excruciating pain--or you could see it as a man trying to get himself together so he can pull this off.”

Broker, whose unit examines every violent death that occurs in Boston’s Suffolk County, wasn’t the first or the only person with “a bad feeling” about Stuart’s story.

Why, detectives wondered, had he been shot in the abdomen while his wife had been shot in the head? And why couldn’t he describe where he was more accurately so his wife and unborn baby might have been saved?

Still, says Broker, Stuart’s story was compelling. For the next 2 1/2 months, Stuart, the charming onetime football star, escaped indictment for the murder of his wife.

“Lying there in his hospital bed, he could be very convincing,” Broker says.

Charles Stuart’s deadly fraud ended when he leaped to his death from a Boston bridge.

“The only time, the only moment I knew for certain [that Stuart had lied],” says Broker, “was when he jumped.”

When handsome Charles Stuarts and sweet-faced Susan Smiths tell us their breathtaking stories, they evoke genuine pity and terror. Anxious to believe them--and just as anxious to believe no husband or mother could commit such heinous crimes, our first impulse may be to offer rewards, help the victim, find the killer.

But for police who have seen it all and heard it all, the first impulse is to give the “victim” a polygraph.

While it may sound hard and cynical, says forensic psychiatrist Bruce Danto of Fullerton, that is how crimes are solved.

“To catch bad guys, “ says Danto, “investigators have to proceed on two assumptions: First, stories have to make sense; second, people frequently lie.

“I was a cop for eight years before becoming an M.D. and in both psychiatry and police work, people lie all the time. After a while, you feel like no one tells the truth, that justice and honesty are myths of the criminal justice system.”

As lies go, Stuart’s was a stunner. Overnight, the man who had been the object of universal sympathy was transformed into a cold-blooded killer.

But as horrific as it was, the Stuart case was only the beginning. Soon came Smith and other weeping parents with their news conference pleas for the safe return of children they knew were already dead.

Victim or villain? Schemer or saint? How do police get to the truth beneath the lies?

Even as the networks were broadcasting Smith’s tearful appeals, Howard Wells, the soft-spoken sheriff of Union County, S.C., was beginning to doubt her story.

For nine days, Wells, his deputies, and a team of FBI agents took turns asking Smith to tell them again exactly what happened to her two little boys.

Every time she hesitated to answer, failed to remember a part of her story or refused to look an interrogator in the eye, her credibility shrank.

To her face, they told her they didn’t believe her. Over and over, one agent told Smith, “We know it didn’t happen that way. We know you are lying.”

Smith’s odd demeanor also fueled suspicions. “She would make sounds of crying, but I would look at her eyes--no water, no tears,” testified FBI agent, David Espie.

By the time Smith confessed to drowning her sons, few were surprised. When Sheriff Wells sat down with Smith in the local Baptist church to pray, he told her the truth had to be revealed.

“She dropped her head and started crying. Then she asked me for my gun so she could shoot herself.”

Wells asked her why she wanted to kill herself.

“She said, ‘You don’t understand. My children are not all right.”’

Wells nodded. He had understood for some time.

Jolynn Ritchie of Dayton, Ohio, made it clear during the massive search for her missing daughter that she was “no Susan Smith.”

The fact that she said that made police wonder.

Ritchie’s frantic 911 call on July 18 had rallied the entire city. Almost 5,000 people called a news hot line to hear her sobbing, hysterical pleas for help. They mobilized searches, printed 20,000 leaflets, wore T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of the missing 4-year-old.

But while neighbors were handing out 200 pink ribbons and organizing prayer vigils, detectives were proceeding as if Ritchie knew more about the disappearance of her daughter, Samantha, than she was letting on.

Her stories didn’t match those of witnesses. Times didn’t coincide. There were complaints Ritchie wouldn’t help search, that she only seemed to grieve when she had a television audience.

Four days after Samantha was reported missing, her body was found in an abandoned foundry. Her mother has pleaded not guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter and inducing public panic. A trial date has not yet been set.

In the blush of horror from the Smith case, the U.S. Justice Department had set to work codifying the growing cynicism over parents’ reports of abducted children.

Last fall, the department issued the first manual of its kind, a how-to book for handling missing children cases.

With straightforward guidelines and checklists, investigators are directed to assume foul play and immediately submit parents to lie-detector tests. (Susan Smith failed two polygraphs.)

While it may seem harsh to assume parents will harm their own children, crime statistics show that is often the case. Each year, 3,200 to 4,600 children are abducted by non-family members, and 495,000 children run away, are abandoned, are abducted by family members or otherwise lost, injured or missing, according to the Justice Department.

“Gut reaction? Intuition? No, what you’re really talking about when cops feel, or smell, or taste something wrong is experience,” says psychiatrist Danto. “Of course, you’re more suspicious of people who avert their eyes, people who are sweating, people who give you three, four different stories of the same event, but that’s not enough.

“Ultimately, a good cop knows how to smell a rat because he’s had enough experience, because he--or she--has talked to enough rats.”

On a gloomy Friday before Christmas 1993, Rigo Romero was called to the Downtown Greyhound terminal to help search for missing 4-year-old Matthew Vera.

“The mother said he’d disappeared after she told him he couldn’t have a quarter to play in the video arcade. We followed up tips and set up perimeters but by about 1 a.m., it was clear he was gone.”

Romero went home with Matthew’s picture in his pocket. The next day, he got a call from another officer. “Guess what? He’s been found!”

Romero rushed to the Newton Division station to meet “the hero” who found Matthew. “The boy was safe, but, well, it’s hard to describe, but something felt very wrong to me. This man who found Matthew was very, very nervous, like he just wanted to get out of there.”

The man said his name was Jose Jimenez and after reluctantly posing for a few photos, he left. But as word of his “heroism” spread, offers of jobs, apartments, even money began pouring in to police, to Romero.

Romero found the reluctant hero and, over a root beer, asked him, “Is there anything you want to tell me? Anything you want me to know?”

“I had no evidence of anything wrong, except maybe he was undocumented, but it felt bad.... Then a really strange thing happened, after a week or so, this so-called hero calls me at the station wanting to know if there are any more offers of money for him.”

By then, Romero could have predicted what would happen next. And it did. Another boy--a 3-year-old this time--was lost Downtown. A $25,000 reward was offered.

“And guess who suddenly appeared with the little lost boy to claim it? Yes, our hero--this time with a new name,” Romero says. The man, whose real name is Mario Sosa, was sentenced last fall to eight years in prison on kidnaping and child-stealing charges.

“He never fit the profile of someone who’s found a missing child. He just didn’t have that in him. The unfortunate truth is that not everybody tells you the truth.

“I did not feel good about being right especially. I was an unwilling participant; I gave him the rewards; I bought him a root beer. It’s something we can all learn from.”