The Case That Built the Method
The Nunez Interrogation: The Case That Changed How I Train
An origin story for Teach to Talk® and the Adaptive Strategies Compass™, written by Joseph R. Auriemma, Jr.
An origin story for Teach to Talk® and the Adaptive Strategies Compass™, written by Joseph R. Auriemma, Jr.
On November 29, 2011, Thomas Kolman Jr. was found dead in the parking lot of a Planet Fitness in the Town of Ulster, New York. The medical examiner ruled the death an acute midazolam poisoning. The lead suspect was Tom's best friend, Dr. Gilberto Nunez, a Kingston dentist who had been carrying on an eleven-month affair with Tom's wife.
On February 7, 2012, I was one of two investigators who sat across from Dr. Nunez for the second interview of this investigation. That interview ran roughly seven hours. Most of it never reached the jury.
This is the case that became the foundation of Teach to Talk® and the Adaptive Strategies Compass™. It is also the case that has stayed with me every day since.
He was describing my work.
When Judge Donald Williams sentenced Dr. Nunez in February 2017, he described, on the record, what he had watched on the recording of that February 7th interview. He called it roughly six hours of some of the most aggressive, accusatorial interrogation he had ever seen, accusing the man across the table of murdering his best friend.
He was describing my work.
Before trial, Dr. Nunez's defense team moved to suppress the statements taken during that interview on Miranda and voluntariness grounds. They won. The court precluded a substantial portion of what we obtained. The jury never saw the recording in full. They never watched Dr. Nunez sit through hours of accusation and remain, in the judge's words, eerily calm. The single most psychologically loaded piece of evidence in the case, the one that had convinced everyone in our investigation we had the right man, never reached the jury box.
The jury deliberated for six hours. They acquitted him of second-degree murder.
The court file ends with the verdict and with the sentencing on the unrelated forgery, insurance fraud, and pistol permit charges. The human file does not.
In the years that followed, the Kolman family carried losses no court document accounts for. Tom's son, who was a teenager when his father died, later took his own life. There is no version of this case where that fact is not present in the room with me.
I do not write this to claim a result I did not cause, and I do not write it to absolve myself of one I might have. I write it because anyone who teaches investigative interviewing, particularly any law enforcement officer who steps into a room with a grieving family on one side and a presumptively innocent suspect on the other, owes the work the honesty of admitting what is at stake. The work is not abstract. The methodology is not academic. People are watching, and people are bearing the weight of every choice we make in that room, long after we go home.
I built these tools because I did not have them when I needed them.
I was trained the way most American investigators of my generation were trained. The accusatorial framework I used on February 7, 2012, was not an outlier. It was the standard. It was what the profession taught, what the manuals endorsed, and what the courts had not yet meaningfully pushed back against.
What I learned from this case, what the judge said out loud at sentencing, and what every honest review of the trial record makes clear, is that the standard methodology produced exactly the result it was statistically likely to produce. A suppressed interview. A circumstantial prosecution that could not carry itself without the testimonial weight that had been excluded. A verdict no one in the investigation expected and no one in the family deserved.
Teach to Talk® is the methodology I built in response. It is not a refined version of accusatorial work. It is the alternative to it. Teach to Talk® is a rapport-based, conversational, evidence-based approach to investigative interviewing, grounded in empathy, trust, and open dialogue. It rejects pressure, manipulation, bluffing, and confrontation as primary tools. It is the philosophy expressed in one sentence: you don't need a script, you need a strategy.
The Adaptive Strategies Compass™ is the practical instrument that makes that philosophy operational. It guides investigators through the conversation in real time, integrating the seven evidence-based methodologies I now teach in every ASC course:
Together, these methodologies replace the pressure I once used with a system that produces information that is more reliable, more admissible, and more humane.
I built these tools because I did not have them when I needed them.
The interview is the case.
Three principles from this case shape every course I teach.
When testimonial evidence is the spine of a prosecution, the suppression hearing is the trial. Anything in the room a court can later call coercive, custodial without warning, or involuntary is anything that can collapse the case before opening statements. The interview is not preparation for the case. It is the case.
People do not tell the truth because they are forced to. They tell the truth because they feel safe enough, heard enough, and respected enough to. A rapport-based, conversational interview built on empathy and trust produces what coercion cannot: information that is accurate, statements that survive legal challenge, and outcomes that hold up under scrutiny. This is the entire premise of Teach to Talk® and the Adaptive Strategies Compass™.
A wrongful conviction is a catastrophe. A wrongful acquittal is also a catastrophe. The standard for our work is not whether we produced an admission. It is whether we produced an outcome that was true, admissible, and proportionate to the gravity of what we were investigating.
I discuss the Nunez case during my investigative interviewing courses. Not as a war story, and not as a confession. As the foundation of a methodology built by someone who has stood inside the consequence and decided to spend the rest of his career making sure other investigators do not have to.
If your agency, department, academy, or program is ready to take a serious look at how your investigators interview, contact ASC for course offerings, on-site training, and the full Teach to Talk® curriculum.