Under Interrogation

There is a persistent fantasy from another era that big-city reporters dream of retiring to the relaxation of running a country weekly where they would be their own boss. Long before I became a big-city reporter, I learned that the small-town reality is different. 

My first reporting job, in 1960, was at the South Lyon Herald. Editor Jack Hoffman was a protégé of U-M journalism professor Wes Maurer, a family friend. I’d worked on the University High School newspaper, the Broadcaster, and had participated in the journalism department’s summer program. Hoffman hired me at $55 a week. 

I don’t know how he managed before he hired me. He was still working full time after I came on board, and I was putting in far more than forty hours a week writing stories for South Lyon and its Whitmore Lake edition, taking pictures, hand-setting my own headlines on a Ludlow machine at the printing plant in Northville, delivering bundles of newspapers to stores in Whitmore Lake, and sometimes collecting overdue ad bills. 

The papers were printed on Thursdays, so Wednesdays meant working late to put it to bed. I needed another two hours after everyone else had left to finish up my stories. It was about 1:30 a.m. on a Thursday when I finally bailed out of the office, took Pontiac Tr. from South Lyon to Ann Arbor, and turned east on Fuller Rd. past the University Hospital and the Veterans Administration Hospital. 

I turned south on Geddes Rd.—Huron Pkwy. was still years in the future—and crossed the Huron River. A slow-moving freight train heading toward Detroit beat me to the grade crossing on the far side. 

I waited and waited. It slowed to a halt, sat there for about five minutes, then started up again with sequential clanks as the couplings tightened between each of the freight cars. I saw the lights of a car coming down the steep hill on Geddes. The headlights flashed periodically through the gaps between the boxcars. Then the headlights disappeared.

The instant the caboose passed (there were still cabooses in 1960), I raced across the tracks before the crossing lights stopped. Too late, I saw that those headlights belonged to an Ann Arbor Police car that had backed onto Huron River Dr. 

I cursed my impatience as he pulled in behind me and turned on his flashers. There’s no shoulder on that section of Geddes. I drove slowly to the top of the hill and pulled into the driveway that served my parents’ house and two other residences. I stopped halfway down the driveway. The officer ordered me into the back seat of his cruiser. I asked to inform my parents in case they woke up and saw my empty car. He refused. I thought that was extreme for running a train signal, but I didn’t protest as he drove me to the police station downtown. 

They sat me down in a room with a table and a bunch of chairs and actually tilted a desk lamp so it shone directly into my eyes. One man did the questioning while other officers rotated in and out of the room. My interrogator was precise and seemingly emotionless. The other officers had lips drawn tight and glared. He asked who I was, where I’d come from, what route I had followed, whether I had seen anyone, had stopped, and had anything happened along the way. 

It was the same thing over and over again. I answered every question, repeatedly asking what had happened and what I had supposedly done. He refused to answer. I demanded that he let me call my parents. He refused. I figured it was probably a hit-and-run, and I should be okay. They would check my decrepit 1950 Chevy, and there would be no evidence that I hit anybody. 

I was White, a journalist of sorts, an upper-middle-class son of a university professor in a university town. I had been picked up once for fireworks when I was in high school, once for egging a car full of kids from a different high school. I was pretty sure no record existed. What could go wrong? 

They left me alone in the room for what seemed like an hour. Finally, the officer who had arrested me came in to say I was being released and drove me home. He refused to say what it had been about. This was all pre-Miranda: no right to silence, no right to a phone call, no right to an attorney. I felt abused. 

I waited until morning to tell my parents. My father called Peter Darrow, attorney, chair of the Washtenaw County Democratic Party, and friend of the family. Darrow had sold me my Chevy for $75. It had been his mother’s. Two days later, Peter came out to the house with a chilling story. 

It seems a young woman had been out with her boyfriend, and they had made love. She had badly overstayed her curfew and was petrified that her father would beat her when she finally got home. She had run into the VA Hospital on Fuller, claiming she had been kidnapped and raped and had just escaped. With my being held up by the train, the timing was perfect. I was the only young man anywhere in the area whom the police had encountered. 

So why did they let me go? It turned out they pressed the girl about what her assailant was wearing. She said Levi’s and a T-shirt. I was wearing a dress shirt, sports coat, and slacks. There was no change of clothes in my car. They confronted the girl. She eventually confessed to cooking up the story. 

I stewed about it for a long time. What if I had been a poor Black kid, and they had held a lineup rather than challenging her story? She would have known that they had arrested a “suspect.” I would have had perhaps one chance in six of being picked out if the police had played it straight. But police didn’t always play it straight, particularly when they were sure they had their man. 

I was working for the Ypsilanti Press in 1966 when the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, decided in Miranda v. Arizona that an accused felon had the right to an attorney and the right not to incriminate themself. I wrote up my personal story as a sidebar to the historic ruling. 

For years, the Miranda decision had been attacked by law-and-order types for supposedly handcuffing the police and coddling criminals. But I have come to believe that Miranda was one of the best things that could have happened to good cops. 

My reasoning is straightforward: When you can’t count on sweating a confession out of a suspect, you have to conduct an actual investigation, and this has made officers better investigators. That doesn’t mean that “Central Park Five” miscarriages of justice won’t happen. As my later work would demonstrate, too many police, prosecutors, and judges remain agents of injustice, serving their own ends. 

I finished up my year under Hoffman’s tutelage, enrolled at the U-M, quit going to half my classes midway through the semester, and then quit entirely. I started getting letters from my draft board that I stuck in a drawer unopened. 

I got a call at home from Prof. Maurer. He had set up a journalism internship program at the Grand Haven Daily Tribune on the west coast of Michigan. He offered me a choice: He could enroll me in the internship with a tuition waiver and a draft deferment, or I could report for a pre-induction physical. 

He never told me his connection to my draft board. I never asked. I got in my car (I’d traded up to a 1957 Chevy) and drove to Grand Haven. 

Cain took early retirement from the Ann Arbor News in 1998. After completing a bachelor’s degree and the coursework for a master’s at EMU, he has been a woodworker and jeweler, selling at the Sunday Artisan Market in Kerrytown. He and his wife, Pat, have seven children and eight grandchildren.