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Israel Police Have New Tool:
A Voice Identification Lab
WENDY ELLIMAN
Special to The Jewish News
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•
n June 8, 1980, 33-year-old
artist Zvi Gur cruised slowly
past the shopping center of a
well-to-do neighborhood
near Tel Aviv. He spotted his victim
almost at once: Eight-year-old Oren
Yarden who was playing with his bike.
Things moved fast. Mr. Gur urged
the boy into the car and sped to
nearby Rishon-le-Zion, from where
he placed the first of four fatal
phone calls.
"I've got the boy!" he told Oren's
mother. "It'll •cost you to get him
back." The following morning, in. a
phone conversation with Oren's
father, Gur was more specific: He
wanted $70,000 in exchange for
Oren. Two further phone calls gave
instructions about where and how to
leave the ransom.
At this point, events took a sudden
tragic spiral. Some time between June
8 and 10, Gur strangled Oren ("the
Devil made me do it," he later
explained) and buried him in a sand
dune south of Netanya. A vast man-
hunt uncovered the child's body some
three weeks later.
Oren's death gripped the country.
Over 1,500 people came to his funeral
and some 6,000 condolence letters
poured into his home. Meanwhile, the
police were closing in on the murder-
er. Marked ransom money, which had
showed up in a Rehovot bank, led to
four suspects, one of them Gur. He
was arrested, but the money itself was
insufficient to nail him. It took three
days of questioning before Gur broke
down and confessed to kidnapping
and murder. What clinched his con-
- fession, and the 59-year sentence later
handed down, was a technique then
new to Israel: spectrographic voice
identification.
"The case of Zvi Gur was among
the first major successes of the Israel
Police's Voice Laboratory," says
American-born Yishai Tobin, a profes-
sor of linguistics who created the lab.
"The acoustic information we gath-
ered from Gur's phone calls to the
family allowed us to exclude two of
the four suspects immediately, and
later the third."
Voice identification as a science is
some 30 years old. Scotland Yard,
Interpol and the FBI all use it, giving
it the same validity as the polygraph
lie-detector test — a useful and often
conclusive tool but not universally
admissible in court.
Both success and the limitations of
technique were borne out in the Gur
case, says Professor Tobin. "In the end,
we narrowed it down to Gur and one -mg
other suspect. The second man was
the same height and size as Gur, and,
in fact, lived down the street from
him."
Another major research project at
the police lab is an area known as
deceptive communication. "This is
essentially an attempt to judge •
whether people are telling the truth ;
based on what they say — either
Amo
according to the content of what they
say or according to parameters related
to the voice," explains Professor Tobin.
"One theory we're examining is that
when people are tense or lie, they use
more words or several words for one
idea. So, according to this theory, the
higher the lexical change, the more
likely it is that someone is lying. ,
Another idea we're examining is that -010
when people are tense, the pitch and
fundamental frequency of the voice
rise. A basic question in this line of
research, however, • is, are people always
tense when they lie? Or, conversely,
are tense people necessarily lying?"
Twenty years ago, as the vast possi-
bilities of the microchip were making
themselves felt, it seemed that auto-
matic voice identification was just
110
around the corner. The human voice,
however, turned o' ut to be so complex
that no. automatic method of speaker
identification has yet been developed -110
— or is likely to be so, according to
Professor Tobin.
—WZPS
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