A forensic psychologist has revealed the moment a killer soldier’s ‘fake pity party’ gave him away after he executed his estranged wife and her mother with an assault rifle.
Craig Savage, 35, shot Michelle Savage, 32, seven times and Heather Whitbread, 53, six times before he also murdered their pet Zeus at their home in St Leonards, East Sussex in March 2018.
Now an expert has revealed how footage of officers quizzing him on the murder at his former wife’s East Sussex home show him putting on a performance.
In the brand-new series of Faking It: Tears of a Crime, which airs at 10pm Saturdays on Quest Red, a panel of British experts in psychology, body language and speech analyse police interview footage of Savage, and pinpoint the moments Savage betrayed himself.
After studying the clips, expert Kerry Daynes says: ‘What you’re really seeing in the interview is Savage pulling a pity party. It’s a pity party for one.’
A forensic psychologist has revealed the moment a killer soldier’s ‘fake pity party’ gave him away after he executed his estranged wife and her mother with an assault rifle
Under arrest for the murders, Savage sits in the interview room wrapped in a blanket, looking sullenly at the floor.
His story was that he never intended to murder Michelle and Heather but to instead kidnap his ex-wife in the hope that police would shoot him dead in front of her.
But Savage’s account was laced with subconscious signs of deception that his body and speech couldn’t control, indicating that this was a murder plot all along.
As body language expert Cliff Lansley highlights, Savage puts on a performance for the police, feigning sadness like a sulking child.
Savage gunned down his ex-partner Michelle Poskitt and her mother Heather Whitbread 13 times in the ‘execution style’ killings in March 2018
He says: ‘He appears sad on the surface, but when you look at the individual behaviours and duration of this, this is a poor attempt at performing sadness.
‘The duration of sadness is one of the most enduring of emotions, but then we have probably a 10-15 second offset.
‘So, he transitions into emotion on the onset, we’ve got the duration and the offset all completed inside six seconds. That’s impossible.’
Using a tissue as a prop and squeezing his brow, Savage continues to shed tears, hammering home that deception is at play.
In the brand-new series of Faking It: Tears of a Crime, which airs at 10pm on Saturday on Quest Red, a panel of British experts pinpoint the moment Savage’s body language and speech betrayed his guilt
‘He’s squeezing his brows, like we see with sulking children,’ Cliff says.
‘So genuine sadness is not pressured; it’s just lifted. So, against gravity the inner brows rise. If we see it squeezed, then that suggests performance.’
As the interview progresses, Savage professes to officers that the gun suddenly went off by itself, resulting in the deaths of his ex-wife and mother-in-law. But it’s not just Savage’s body language that suggests deception.
Professor of Linguistics Dawn Archer pinpoints that Savage continually tries to distance himself from the event, saying: ‘We then have a very long eight-second pause, and he’s trying to claim a lack of responsibility.
Body language expert Cliff Lansley compares Savage to ‘a sulking child’ as he squeezed his brows during the police interview
‘So, it’s the weapon that went off so many times in so many directions. So, you can imagine that there’s lots of bullets flying around.
‘But his description suggests that it was happening to him rather than him being the cause of that weapon going off.’
When challenged by police, Savage becomes emotional, repeatedly telling the interview ‘no.’
As Dawn highlights, Savage’s pitchy delivery of these seven ‘noes’ in quick succession further indicate fakery.
She reveals: ‘He says ‘no,’ but he says ‘no’ a total of seven times and his voice quality changes after the first three, so he seems to get more emotional as he repeats the ‘no, no, no…
‘And they’re accompanied by headshakes. At this point he’s doing it for emphasis. No, I don’t believe him.’
Trying to convince the police that this was an elaborate suicide attempt gone wrong, a distressed Savage tries to get his side of the story across.
Meanwhile Kerry asserts Savage is merely trying to elicit sympathy from officers, knowing full well he intended to kill his victims.
In October 2018, Savage was jailed for 38 years for gunning down his estranged wife, mother-in-law and family dog in a killing spree described as a ‘brutal and systematic execution’ after she rejected him and refused to reconcile
She explains: ‘What you’re really seeing in the interview is Savage pulling a pity party. It’s a pity party for one. I think that he’s mulled this over as one of his possible options.
‘But he’s rejected it. Because, of course, that means hurting him rather than hurting Michelle which is what he really wants to do.’
With evidence stacked up against Savage, it soon transpired to police that Savage’s original plan was to kidnap, rape and then kill Michelle.
When that plan didn’t work, he fast-tracked his deadly plot to the third and final tier, going straight for his rifle.
As Prosecutor Benjamin Aina explains, it was a brutal and shocking killing, adding: ‘Seven bullets were discharged into Michelle. She was in a kneeling position at the time when she was shot.
Savage told his trial he loved his ex-wife, was broken by their split and had planned to provoke police into fatally shooting him by kidnapping her
One of the shots had the muzzle of the gun so close to the skin that the muzzle imprint was left on her body. That indicates an execution-style shooting,’ he says, going onto to explain how Savage then gunned down his mother-in-law as she tried to flee.
‘Six bullets were discharged into Heather Whitbread, most of the shots were into her back.’
On trial for murder, the jury took just two hours to unanimously find Savage guilty of the murders of Michelle and Heather and he was jailed for 38 years.
For Kerry, the length of Savage’s sentence reflects the cold and calculated nature of his crime as she explains: ‘He’s behaved in the most cowardly way possible, attacking defenceless women.
‘An absolutely well thought out, planned, targeted attack and he didn’t miss a single shot.’
The brand-new series of Faking It: Tears of a Crime concludes at 10pm on Saturday exclusively on Quest Red and available to stream on dplay.
