The Lie Detectors (14 page)

The goal of Vollmer and his disciples was to persuade their colleagues that these methods were counterproductive: that they often produced false testimony, led juries to acquit, or obliged appellate courts to overturn verdicts. In the mid-1930s, the U.S. Supreme Court finally began overturning state court convictions based on coerced confessions, announcing: "The rack and torture chamber may not be substituted for the witness stand." Meanwhile critics were urging a more radical course; they wanted the courts to reclaim from the police their monopoly on interrogations, a monopoly the courts still held in Britain.

It was on just this point that Vollmer and the Wickersham Commission offered the police an out. If the police valued their prerogative to interrogate, the report noted, they would need to drop the third degree and adopt new scientific methods such as the lie detector. Persuading the cops would not be easy, of course. Offered a chance to adopt the lie detector, one police official in Chicago had held out a clenched fist and answered, "Here’s the best lie detector."

Keeler’s challenge was to convince the police that his technique could get the sort of outcome they wanted—ideally a confession—while assuring the public that the instrument would constrain police violence and illegality. Two cases from this period showed how he tried to navigate between these contrary tugs.

In Seattle, a five-time loser, Decasto Earl Mayer, was suspected of murdering a young naval officer named James Bassett and stealing his blue roadster. Bassett had been missing for a week when Mayer was picked up in Oakland with his stepmother in Bassett’s car. A year later, in 1929, with Mayer unwilling to help locate the cadaver, the prosecutors consulted August Vollmer, who persuaded them to ask Larson if he would be willing to try the experiment. Larson generously referred them to Keeler.

Mayer had already been thoroughly worked over—including being forcibly injected by Dr. House with his truth serum—so Keeler devised a guilty-knowledge test. For seven days, eight hours a day, Keeler interrogated Mayer on the machine. He began with general questions: Is Bassett’s body in the lake? Is Bassett’s body in a well? When Mayer seemed to react to questions about cemeteries, Keeler asked Mayer whether he had placed the body in a grave. Had he placed it under a concrete slab? By Sunday Keeler had zoomed in on a cemetery near Mayer’s old house and was making the prisoner go through the graves one by one, when Mayer ripped free of his restraints and did what Helen Graham had only threatened to do: he "smashed the machine." Two deputies had to drag him to his cell.

Keeler repaired the instrument and resumed the interrogation that evening with the prisoner wearing a metal Oregon boot that tightened each time his leg moved. The next morning, according to the prosecutor, Mayer privately offered to confess, saying: "I know what that machine is. I know it’s recording the truth. I can’t beat it." Keeler (listening through the door) wired the good news back to Chicago:

But no sooner had the story gone out on the wires than Mayer denied his confession and asked to be returned to the machine, announcing, with apparent fatalism, that "the machine will tell." Yet he still refused to look at cemetery maps. When two deputies tried to pry his eyes open, he rolled his pupils up into his skull. At that point he had a seizure and had to be sedated.

The next morning Mayer’s bleary mug shot stared up from newspapers across the nation, gaunt as a skeleton, his eyes smudged with black despair, alongside a "setup" photo picturing Keeler bent over the lie detector. Later that day Mayer’s lawyers accused the prosecutors of torturing the detainee. Superior Judge Malcolm Douglas agreed. He called Mayer’s treatment "more in keeping with [the] days of…the Spanish Inquisition than of this present enlightened civilization." He banned any further use of the lie detector against the detainee’s wishes. For several days, investigators dug up graves, without success.

The Mayer case seemed to belie the promise of the lie detector.
The Nation
called it torture. The
Harvard Law Review
was appalled. The muckraking book
Our Lawless Police
wondered how an interrogation begun with the ultramodern lie detector had degenerated into medieval barbarism. Even the Wickersham Report called it "one of the outstanding third-degree cases in the United States." Larson was ashamed and apoplectic.

Keeler saw things differently. In a thinly disguised account, his allies in Chicago scored the case as an exemplary "win" for the lie detector, even though they had to "adjust" the facts to reach this conclusion. In their version, the interrogation took place in a "laboratory," the test quickly identified the correct cemetery, and its results led the prosecutors directly to a disturbed grave where the victim’s body was discovered. All this was a complete fabrication.

Seven years later, Mayer’s stepmother confessed to a cop disguised as a priest. She said the corpse had been buried in dispersed sites, none of which were cemeteries. Finally able to charge Mayer with murder, the prosecutors were robbed of victory when he hanged himself in his cell, his nose and throat filled with wadded-up paper. The Mayer case, like the case of the Ku Klux Klan in Santa Barbara, showed how easily the lie detector could become an adjunct to the third degree, rather than its antidote.

Soon after, Keeler took on a case in Chicago that seemed its antithesis: four cops accused of killing a trick canary! Trivial as it seemed, the case taught a potent lesson. For years Probate Judge Henry Horner had tried to stop the police from robbing estates that they were meant to be guarding. Only a few years earlier he had charged fifteen policemen with stealing a priceless violin from a dead man’s shop. This time he turned for advice to the visiting professor August Vollmer, who recommended the services of Leonarde Keeler. The newspapers had a field day with the judge’s efforts to get to the bottom of this comical crime. But Horner had a serious lesson in mind; he wanted to show the police that they would be bound by the law.

These were the facts. On October 6, 1929, Anna Gustafson, the impoverished proprietor of a tearoom in Chicago, committed suicide by taking gas. Her body was found by her lodger, who also discovered her most prized possession, a trick canary named Nimble, still singing in its cage despite the gas. The police came, removed Gustafson’s body, and stood guard over the premises. The next day, when the lodger came by to retrieve his possessions, he noticed that the bird (estimated worth: $100) was missing. Three days later another friend of Gustafson’s came by and found a dead bird atop the sewing table, but doubted that it was Nimble. She also noticed that some silverware and clothes were missing.

Gustafson’s friends accused the police of taking these items and substituting a dead bird for Nimble. The police denied these accusations and suggested that the bird must have died of the gas. The coroner’s office conducted an avian autopsy, which revealed that the bird had died of "fractures of the cervical vertebrae caused by wringing of the neck." A few days later the bird’s body was exhumed so an ornithologist could affirm that it was not a member of a singing species.

As Gustafson had died intestate, jurisdiction over her estate fell to Judge Henry Horner, a prominent jurist soon to be elected governor of Illinois. Despite Horner’s stern cross-examination, all four police guards denied any hand in Nimble’s fate. Indeed, one officer, William Tobin, had the effrontery to claim that while he was on duty Nimble had flown out the window; that five days later the same bird had flown back in the same window; and that the bird had then promptly died.

On February 13, in Horner’s chambers, Keeler and Vollmer examined all four officers on Keeler’s apparatus (AC current having been installed for the purpose). Keeler concluded that Tobin reacted strongly to questions about the theft and about the complicity of another officer, named Gall. Gall’s reaction likewise indicated participation. A third officer gave a clear record, except when asked about Tobin and Gall; he was allowed to go. The fourth officer, named Dompke, gave a clear test except when asked whether he had taken anything from the house. After a second test Dompke confessed that he had taken a lamp shade, worth sixty cents. He was told to go home. As neither Tobin nor Gall would confess, Horner fined the officers, pending appeal. The civil service commission threw up its hands: "This looks as if there’s been a fix. Case under advisement." But Horner would not back down, despite being threatened by phone. He kept bringing the officers in for testing—with the newspapers covering each twist—until Tobin privately promised to bring in the guilty party. Later that day, he brought in Gall, who confessed but said that Tobin helped him.

A year of interrogation and humiliation had solved the "canary murder case." Not even the lawman’s code of silence had withstood the lie detector’s ability to focus the public’s attention; the device was like a magnifying lens that brought the conscience of the many against the one. "Another notch in our gun," gloated Keeler. "Judge Horner doesn’t believe there’ll be any more stealing by police officers." Trivial on the surface, the case was a telling victory against police corruption. Much like sorority sisters, police officers are insiders with their own codes and secrets. Cops, moreover, were used to operating in a legal gray zone, pocketing the "takings" they considered a perk of the job. What others called corruption, they considered part of the customary practices of their trade. But thanks to Horner’s backing, Keeler’s lie detector had drawn a sharp line between lawful and dishonest behavior.

Whenever they could, Vollmer’s disciples put cops on the lie detector. When one of Vollmer’s college cops was appointed police chief of Evanston, a suburb of Chicago, he immediately invited Larson to subject officers to tests. By 1933 Keeler was using the technique on the chief’s successor in Evanston, accused of graft, selling liquor, tolerating roadhouse gambling, and threatening opponents. The department in Berkeley had added an obligatory session on the lie detector for all recruits. And in Wichita, Kansas, another disciple of Vollmer’s ordered lie detector tests for police applicants; he discovered that eight out of twenty-two had lied on their forms or exhibited psychopathic reactions.

To maximize the publicity in Chicago, Judge Horner arranged a command performance, letting himself be tested on Keeler’s machine in the presence of a reporter for the
Chicago Tribune
; the police commissioner; the coroner, Bundesen; and a businessman, Burt Massee, who was a sponsor of Northwestern University’s Scientific Crime Detection Lab, and whose latest hire was none other than Leonarde Keeler.

Four months later, on August 8, 1930, Judge Horner administered a truth test in a short ritual of his own, uniting Leonarde with Katherine Applegate in holy matrimony. When Horner asked, "Do you take this woman…?" Keeler replied, "I do"—though Leonarde’s family and friends seemed to think (as his father put it): "She cared more for you than you did for her." Sensing that something was afoot, Charles had warned his son that Katherine Applegate was "on your trail," and advised him not to be swayed by "the romantic and sentimental associations of the moment." But Leonarde had assured him that their compatibility had been gauged by the most up-to-date psychological tests. He had even persuaded Adler to give Katherine a job at the institute working alongside him.

Once the deed was done, however, Charles quickly sent a conciliatory note to Kay: "[W]e know that the girl he loves is fine and true." He also gave the couple an original Keith landscape as a wedding present. Nard’s sister Eloise sent the newlyweds a toy handgun, which came with directions for managing "wayward husbands." The toy proved more dangerous than it looked, however, raising a welter of pimples on the bridegroom’s arm. Kay promised never to use it again.

What difference would it have made, one wonders, if instead of simply plighting their troth before a judge, bride and groom were instead hooked up to a lie detector while they took their vows? The proposal was not farfetched. Within a year, Keeler and his associates at the Northwestern University crime lab had arranged an honest wedding for Harriet Berger and Vaclav Rund. The
Chicago Herald-American
announced it on the front page, "S
O
T
HIS
I
S
L
OVE
!" with a graphical record of the ceremony: the groom’s blood pressure starting high (prenuptial doubts?), then declining steadily during the ceremony; the bride’s blood pressure starting low (feeling faint?), before a gradual ascent that leaped upward when the groom was asked "Do you take this woman…?" And when the judge pronounced them husband and wife, the two lines crossed.

More hard-core methods were coming. A year later, the cardiologist Ernst Boas in New York devised a tachycardiogram (with a 100-foot lead) to record the heart rates of 100 volunteers performing mundane tasks, including a poker game; and a husband and wife engaged in coitus, during which the woman experienced four orgasms in twenty-five minutes, each driving her heart rate to 145 beats per minute, the last coinciding with her partner’s, whose heart rate likewise peaked at 145. Though the test enabled Boas to draw a medical lesson about the risk of sudden death during coitus, he acknowledged that the relationship between heart action and human emotions was "infinitely more baffling." This did not stop his colleague from trying to market the device to the FBI as a lie detector. And by the middle of the 1930s Freud’s heretical student, Wilhelm Reich, went them one better, measuring the galvanic responses on the nipple, tongue, clitoris, and glans of the penis. By 1939 Reich had arrived in America, a magnet for machine-body therapeutics, where he constructed large crates lined with alternating metal and organic materials—his so-called orgone boxes—to channel bioenergy and cure mind-body imbalances, including cancer and sexual dysfunction. He reported excellent results, but then, so do practitioners of lie detection.