The Lie Detectors (10 page)

In the early twentieth century, the village of Los Olivos, thirty-seven miles north of Santa Barbara, was a dusty, isolated hamlet, five miles off the coastal highway, whose 500 residents had a life as insular as the residents of any Appalachian settlement. Sometime around 1916 a seventy-year-old itinerant blacksmith named John J. McGuire began feuding with his neighbors, especially when he was drunk, as he often was. Apparently the local children tossed rocks onto the tin roof of his shop while he was shoeing horses. McGuire quarreled most violently with his neighbor William H. Downs, the town’s postmaster, barber, and headman. Their enmity turned ugly after McGuire went around town saying that he’d caught Downs practicing cunnilingus on his wife and forcing his children to fellate him. Then, one afternoon, according to Downs, McGuire barged into his store, drew his gun, and told the storekeeper to say his final prayers. Though McGuire left without firing a shot, Downs decided to take action. For starters, he called in the law. The constable sent old man McGuire down to the Santa Barbara jail for thirty days to let the quarrel cool off. No such luck. Three days after McGuire returned to Los Olivos, at three o’clock in the morning on December 16, 1923, a huge explosion ripped through his shack. Although the blast was heard as far away as Santa Barbara, none of the townsfolk got out of bed. Instead a nearby telephone crew had to carry McGuire’s mangled body to a Santa Barbara hospital, where he died a day later—though not before damning Bill Downs to hell and blaming him for the bombing. Suspicion was further aroused when the county sheriff uncovered a freshly dug trench—ideal for a fuse?—running under the fence from Downs’s property to McGuire’s.

Downs denied any knowledge of the trench, and flaunted his airtight alibi: he had spent the night of the explosion with his family in a hotel in Hollywood. No one in town admitted having any foreknowledge of the blast (though some witnesses later testified that the entire town had actually drawn lots to decide who would do the deed). For four months the investigation was stalled. Then the district attorney of Santa Barbara hired a new assistant, Williard Kemp, who happened to be the King Kleagle of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Kemp had heard reports of Keeler’s lie detector and decided to set an unorthodox trap. He told Downs that the best way to avoid prosecution was to get in good with law enforcement officers by joining the Klan. To this, Downs eagerly assented. Kemp then secretly arranged for a fake Klan initiation, with the lie detector to play the starring role. In mid-April, Keeler and Sloan drove up from Los Angeles to don Klan regalia and join Kemp, a court stenographer, and twenty other fake initiates, all actual Klan members. Downs was escorted into the initiation room, strapped into the machine, asked a few harmless questions, and then told: "In the solemn secrecy of this room you may answer the questions put to you without fear or favor, for we must ask you, that the records of this organization may be kept clear of all unworthy names, questions pertaining to the death last December of John J. Maguire. Have you any objection to this test?"

A startled Downs answered, "No."

Of the thirty questions that followed, twenty-five named bombing suspects, including Downs himself and his father. Like the map test Larson had used to identify the home state of vagrants, this "peak of tension test" is today known as the "guilty knowledge test." In all cases, Downs denied the charges or kept silent.

No matter. Keeler determined that Downs had specifically reacted to seven names, and a posse quickly rounded up five men for interrogation. After thirty-six hours of interrogation without break, punctuated by sessions on the lie detector, Keeler discovered that two—Harvey Stonebarger, owner of a local machine shop; and William Crawford, a wealthy rancher—reacted strongly when asked if Downs did the killing. Sloan, reporting for the
Los Angeles Times,
fanned rumors that, thanks to the lie detector, confessions would soon be forthcoming. Finally, after an additional thirty-six hours of uninterrupted interrogation on the "mechanical truthseeker," Stonebarger fell to his knees, sobbing, and confessed. Downs and his father had planned the bombing, he confessed; they had bought the explosives, laid the charge with Stonebarger’s help, and left town. Then Crawford had lit the fuse with his cigar. The prosecutors jailed all four men. But at the trial Stonebarger recanted his confession on the witness stand and accused the prosecutors of forcing him to tell falsehoods by threatening him with "inhuman third degree" techniques. The men were acquitted.

The lie detector, it turned out, was not so much a thing-in-itself as a mirror that magnified the context in which it was used. Change the context, and the meaning changed. The machine could just as easily amplify the intimidating mob violence of the Ku Klux Klan as the sanctioned investigation of the model station house. Like any mirror (like any placebo), it was not so much an agent in itself as a question: What do you believe?

Keeler believed that the accusations of intimidation in the case were overblown. As subsequent cases would show, he was willing to do what it took. It was not just the lie detector that took its cue from the context. The young man who operated the lie detector could conform just as easily. Larson, by contrast, was appalled. Furnished by Sloan with a behind-the-scenes account of the case, Larson likened the interrogation to torture. Indeed, in his book of 1932, ostensibly cowritten by Leonarde Keeler, he obliquely condemned Keeler for resorting to such methods.

In the short run, however, Keeler and Vollmer were eager to convince the police that their methods got results. In the months after Vollmer’s arrival in Los Angeles, the arrest rate increased sevenfold, the crime rate dipped slightly, and citizens acquired a new respect for the police—or so the newspapers reported. Behind the scenes, progress was less encouraging. Many of the Chief’s public supporters were undermining him.

Outwardly, Vollmer had the support of the business elite. They stood by him when he moved against the "fixers" who funneled money from African-Americans to the political machine. They were less pleased when he forbade harassment of the Wobblies. And they were furious when he attacked corruption at its source by setting up a covert gambling den to nab policemen and politicians on the take. Through back channels the "kings of the underworld" warned him that they had financed Mayor Cryer’s campaign, and unless he left gambling alone, "the hounds would immediately be unloosed." Soon city councilmen were denouncing the Chief’s high-handed ways.

In the meantime, Vollmer lost the support of his own department. Someone had leaked to the newspapers the results of his IQ survey, showing that only 27 percent of officers had received a grade of A or B. This implied that three-quarters of the force were incapable of carrying out their tasks and 7 percent were less capable than a fourth-grader. To add to the insult, the public was given the score of every cop by name. Soon one newspaper was describing Vollmer as "tired, jaded, his voice nervously sharp."

As the end of his year in Los Angeles approached—and the renewal of his appointment began to be publicly debated—a quip circulated through the town: "The first of September will see the last of August." In fact, August Vollmer did not outlast July. His enemies arranged for a sex scandal to escort him out of town. The setup was the oldest form of entrapment, but as Vollmer acknowledged, "Sometimes a frame-up can be staged so perfectly as to seem almost true." On the front page of the
Los Angeles Times
were the coy brown eyes and ample décolletage of the twice-divorced "concert singer" Charlotte Lex, who had filed a $50,000 breach-of-promise suit against the Chief, alleging that they had been lovers since his arrival in Los Angeles. Among her accusations was that Vollmer’s lovemaking resembled that of "a cave man."

Vollmer’s response to these imputations would become a staple of American scandal management: he offered to test his word against that of Mrs. Lex on the lie detector. "If such a test were made," he challenged her in the press, "the suit would never appear in court."

Needless to say, Mrs. Lex spurned the ordeal. On aquamarine hotel stationery she accused the Chief of ungentlemanly tactics, while she angled for a settlement.

By then Vollmer had rushed back to Berkeley to marry his longtime friend Millicent "Pat" Gardner, who publicly rebutted the foul characterizations. As for Mrs. Lex, Vollmer declared her "either mentally unbalanced or…a tool ofthe underworld." Indeed, the two men who seconded Mrs. Lex’s cause were none other than the ministers Shuler and Briegleb. By then Vollmer’s contacts had dug up enough dirt on her, and he had her suit quashed.

No wonder Vollmer’s assessment of his time in Los Angeles was tinged with bitterness. In his summary report of 1924—the foundational text of professional policing—Vollmer laid out what it would take for Los Angeles to complete the job. But printed alongside his blueprint was its negation: his own police captains jawing about what they thought it would take to enforce the law in Los Angeles, including (1) an end to trial by a jury of one’s peers, (2) an end to marriage for "diseased or mentally deficient persons" (with compulsory sterilization), (3) an end to the presumption of innocence, and (4) an end to the existence of whole peoples. ("The Chinese have no excuse for existence. They are gamblers and dope fiends. They are a menace to our community.") The captains ascribed crime to dope, prostitution, Mexicans, and citizens who blamed the police when the courts let crooks off scot-free. Captain R. Lee Heath, appointed Vollmer’s successor, warned that the police could not enforce the laws in a city of "poorly assimilated races" without recourse to physical force.

"[I]t is my opinion," Vollmer wrote nine years later, "that under the present system and laws the police department of Los Angeles will never be separated from politics, nor be free from the vicious and frequently unfounded attacks made upon the department by some of the newspapers and preachers of Los Angeles." Vollmer expected that progress would take at least two generations. Indeed, it was not until the late 1940s that Vollmer’s plan was dusted off for the LAPD. By then, "professionalization" had become the catchphrase of modern policing—though its purpose had strayed far from Vollmer’s vision of insulating the police from politics. When the LAPD finally did insulate its ranks from politics, it did so as much to avoid accountability to ordinary citizens as to escape corrupt politicians. And it didn’t even have to give up strong-arm tactics. The situation with the lie detector is parallel: touted as a substitute for arbitrary and violent police interrogations, it could readily be used to extend those techniques. And young Leonarde Keeler showed the way.

[A]nd even psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved a dull subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather than the study of personality and influence. That was a noon class, and it always sent him dozing. Having found that "subjective and objective, sir," answered most of the questions, he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became a class joke when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by Ferrenby or Sloane to gasp it out.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE,
1920

SOON AFTER VOLLMER QUIT LOS ANGELES, SO DID KEELER.
Charles didn’t think it safe for his son to stay on without the Chief’s protection. To ease the transfer north—to Stanford this time, ostensibly as a premed—Charles sent the dean a six-page hagiography of his son: from his childhood in the company of John Muir to his forays into forensic psychology, plus everything in between: "He is a practical beekeeper and can handle a hive in all conditions." Charles even contacted Walter R. Miles, a professor in the psychology department at Stanford, to ask if he would supervise Leonarde’s work on the lie detector.

Keeler soon became a famous figure on campus. As always, his physical grace and personal charm won him admirers. His lie detector gave him an aura of mystery: an undergrad who had tangled with real-life criminals! With his father unable to cover school fees, he hit on a novel approach to tuition: in an abandoned windmill behind his shack in the hills he set up a dairy farm for snakes. Once a week he fed his seventy-five caged rattlers hamburger meat through a bicycle pump, and every other week he gently pried apart their jaws and "milked" their glands for venom, which he sold to a drug company.

Keeler spent no more time in the classroom than he had before. From the moment of his arrival on campus he was at odds with "the billiard ball tops." The profs were dull; his classes were useless. "If study interferes with the college," proclaimed one famous campus novel of 1924, "—out with the study." Instead, Keeler took flying lessons at the local airfield, and cruised the perimeter of the bay in his spanking new Ford: speeding, drinking, and nearly landing in jail after almost losing his life in a triple 360 on wet pavement with a friend—a lovely actress—vomiting behind the wheel. It was enough to make a young man ask: "And what are the symptoms of love-sickness?" Some young women nicknamed him "Rattlesnake"—with affection, it seems. Others called him a peach, "sweetest when stewed."

What remained of his time he devoted to the lie detector. Professor Miles, initially skeptical, was won over by Keeler’s charm and provided him with lab space, equipment, and a lab tech. A notebook from this period shows Keeler refining the instrument, developing new interrogation techniques, and experimenting on "normal" and "deviant" subjects. Most of his effort was directed toward securing a patent for his machine. He poured his mother’s inheritance into building a test model and hired a law firm in San Francisco to submit his application. Intermittently he updated Larson.

Vollmer had mapped out a division of labor for his two disciples: Keeler was to pursue the mechanical end of lie detection, with an eye on commercial payoff, while Larson validated the technique scientifically. But this division, which suited their personal ambitions, also threatened to drive them apart. While Larson pursued "open science," Keeler sought "proprietary know-how." The marriage of these two strategies has often been credited for America’s technological and scientific prowess. But for practitioners they are often in tension, each racked by internal contradictions. And these contradictions ultimately set Larson and Keeler at odds.

The strategy of open science assumes that objective knowledge is produced when the scientist’s "disinterestedness" is guaranteed by norms of behavior that spurn venality in favor of the free dissemination of discoveries. The assumption—which emerged fitfully over the course of modern science—was that meritocratic institutions would reward worthy contributions with the resources to continue research. Under such a system, reputation is a scientist’s most prized possession. But why would any society sponsor such knowledge? Princely states or private universities might do it to enhance their prestige, but this hardly accounts for the ratio of money spent in the United States on physics and ballet. In fact, the difference is largely due to the additional claim (often advanced by scientists themselves) that open science produced a body of public knowledge that others found useful, if not immediately, then over the long haul. Such considerations have long induced scientists to point their research in directions that serve their sponsors’ interests.

The strategy of proprietary know-how, on the other hand, takes social utility as its starting point, and aims to extract profits from knowledge through products or services. To do so, however, often means keeping the knowledge private so as not to dilute its market value or give an advantage to competitors. One way to do this is to keep the knowledge secret in the manner of medieval guilds, the Coca-Cola Corporation, or the Manhattan Project. The problem here is that it is not easy to keep a secret, especially while convincing others that the know-how can be applied. For its part, society worries that valuable secrets will die with their creators, never generating new knowledge. That is why modern societies have created patent systems, which offer a time-limited monopoly over the use of knowledge, but also require inventors to publish. For the inventor, the challenge then becomes one of timing: deciding when to keep the information secret and when to apply for a patent. The problem here is that the profits generated by proprietary knowledge give outsiders reason to doubt the "disinterestedness" of the knowledge-peddler.

These two paths to creating knowledge rarely exist in these ideal forms, of course. It is their uneasy hybridization which holds tenuous sway in our modern republic. Many investigators in pursuit of open science wish to apply their work to solve social problems—if only to confirm their possession of the truth. Many cultivators of proprietary know-how care passionately about their reputation—if only to better market their discoveries or expertise. Open science and proprietary know-how are mutually dependent, even as they subvert one another.

Under Vollmer’s prodding, Keeler and Larson both expressed a desire to collaborate, but their promises were fraught with tension. Larson urged Keeler to create a standardized instrument and join him in setting up research protocols. Cooperation was even the best way to get the lie detector accepted by the courts. As he advised his young disciple, the best way to satisfy the demands of the Frye rule was to "let [the courts] come to us, and they will some [
sic
] of these days if enough of us cooperate." Until that time, practitioners had to trust one another, share their work, and criticize each other frankly. Yet Larson often had to pester Vollmer for updates on Keeler’s progress.

But for Keeler, success meant seeing his lie detector widely employed—and counting the remuneration. During his six-year struggle to secure a patent, he oscillated between providing Larson with vague reports on his progress (under the impetus of Vollmer’s scolding), and jealously guarding his methods. "Yes, I am ashamed of myself," he confessed to the Chief. "I know mighty well that there is no one that can help me more than Larson in this work." But working on the lie detector seemed to breed mistrust.

From Chicago, Larson periodically confronted Keeler by mail. "You might not be glad to receive this communication as it might look as though I were calling you on the carpet." He heard from Vollmer that Keeler wanted "to get everything protected before writing." This silence, Larson deduced, must have been caused by some senior person trying to capitalize on Keeler’s work. Larson assured his young friend that he had no such designs, "as from our past relations you surely know that I would take nothing from you, but on the other hand, [I am] trying to stimulate you and to give you every sort of lead possible." Larson had already declined to patent his own device, he pointed out. Instead he had put his trust in Keeler’s aptitude for mechanics and experimental work, with Keeler to reap whatever financial rewards ensued. "I then could devote my time to clinical experimentation."

As if on cue, Keeler pinned the blame on Miles. First Edwards the physicist, then Sloan the reporter-machinist, and now Miles the psychologist had each wanted to take control of the machine. The generous psychology professor had been playing a double game: supplying Keeler with lab space and equipment only to gain ownership of the lie detector. He had become reluctant to let Keeler demonstrate the machine publicly. And it was Miles who had dissuaded Keeler from sharing his progress with Larson—or so Keeler wrote. "After all your kindnesses, help and advice, you were the incentive which started me in this work, and you certainly deserve to know what I was doing. I have made it clear to Miles that whatever I am doing under him or in his department that I should be free to disclose any developments in my field to you."

Then, to top it all off, Miles had showed the device to a representative from Tycos Instruments. Professor and undergraduate were now traveling east to confer with the manufacturers. On their way they would pass through Chicago. This would be Keeler and Larson’s first meeting since1923.

That brief stop in Chicago in April 1927 had a lasting impact on Keeler’s life. In the morning Keeler met with Herman Adler, director of the Institute of Juvenile Research, who offered him a job—though two years would pass before Keeler could accept. In the afternoon, Keeler secretly met with Larson to show him the drawings of the machine—against Miles’s explicit instructions—and to solicit his views on how to manage ownership of the apparatus.

He returned to Stanford to finalize his patent application and begin discussions with a manufacturer in Oakland. Securing that patent—the foundation of Keeler’s mystique—would prove frustrating. The problem was that the machine was hardly new.

After reviewing his initial application of 1925 for "Recording Arterial Blood Pressure," the U.S. Patent Office rejected every claim but a minor one about the design of the tambours. Even his own attorneys doubted that Keeler had done more than combine familiar off-the-shelf instruments. Nor was the Patent Office persuaded on the basis of the "great scientific interest" in his device. So Keeler gradually limited his claims to the redesign of the tambour (courtesy of Edwards and Sloan), now robustly fashioned like an accordion of alternating rubber and metal. It still did not give an absolute reading of blood pressure—none of the automatic machines did that—but it highlighted variations in an amalgamated mix of systolic pressure and pulse. On this basis, he was awarded a patent in January 1931 for an "Apparatus for Recording Arterial Blood Pressure."

By then, Keeler had been negotiating for several years with the Western Electro-Mechanical Company of Oakland. Keeler’s father, who had complained about his son’s obsession with the lie detector, was incapable of remaining unenthusiastic about anything for long. When Leonarde brought him in on the venture as a fifty-fifty partner he suddenly became its biggest promoter, quibbling with the manufacturer over pricing, packaging, brochures, royalties, and even technical matters. Always one to think in universal terms, he wanted to pursue patents in Canada, England, Germany, France, and Italy.

The sticking point was sales. The manufacturer wanted to maximize the multiple of sales and price, and looked forward to marketing the machine to hospitals, police departments, and psychopathic clinics (which is to say, for the sick, the bad, and the mad). Charles wanted to go farther, dispatching sales agents across the nation to sell the machine to the personnel departments of factories, banks, trusts, and insurance companies, wherever people needed to vet the honesty of their colleagues. He even thought the machine could be used to weed out the fakes among spiritualistic mediums, thereby putting psychical research on a scientific footing. More prosaically, vast sales would provide a steady income while his son pursued more lofty avenues of research into the subtle relationship of mind and body.

But Leonarde took a different tack. He insisted that his contract give him a veto over every sale. Keeler realized that the instrument could not guarantee reliable results on its own, and that the reputation of his machine (and hence its long-term sales prospects) might be damaged if he "turn[ed] out machines promiscuously to untrained individuals." Keeler’s strategy was therefore based not on selling the machine itself but on selling his personal know-how.

The manufacturer complained that lie detection would never be accepted widely until Keeler sold a standardized instrument—but standardization was difficult to achieve in small production runs. They had their own reputation to consider. Keeler sympathized, but insisted on the restrictions.

There was one final crucial matter to resolve: what would the device be called? Although newspapermen had named it the "lie detector," experts detested that name because the machine did not detect lies as such (though this is in practice exactly what they used it to do). Keeler gathered suggestions for an alternative. Charles Keeler preferred "Emotograph" as both simple and expressive. For a long time, Leonarde stuck with "Respondograph" because it seemed to convey the ambiguity he wanted. In the end he settled on the Keeler Polygraph: "polygraph" was the familiar term for any device that recorded multiple bodily measures. In retrospect Larson came to see this decision as the moment of the fall, the fateful moment when the quest to explore the human psyche in its normal and pathological variants devolved into a "commercial and purely mechanical" venture. As Larson would note, the very familiarity of the description, "many writing instrument," was a sleight of hand "with no specific connotation," leaving only Keeler’s personal mastery in view.

Yet every invention worthy of the name must claim an inventor, by which choice it reveals the sort of invention it is. By now the lie detector had accumulated a host of "inventors." First had come Münsterberg with his word-association tests and theories of human automatons. Then had come Marston with his blood pressure cuff and undergraduate games. Then Larson had joined their ranks, publishing papers on how a physiological apparatus could be applied to real-life crimes. And now Keeler had put in his claim, with his patented device. In keeping with its origins in open science, Larson’s contraption had been open for inspection. In keeping with its proprietary purposes, Keeler packed the same workings inside an elegant walnut "box" which was simultaneously more portable and more mysterious, and which extruded a thin scroll of lightly ruled paper on which two delicate pens left an inky red judgment, a judgment whose meaning only the box’s priestly operator could divine. The oracle of the Keeler Polygraph was Leonarde Keeler.