The Lie Detectors (17 page)

It was no use. The prosecutor, John Underwood, denounced "any fantastic device which presumes to supplant the greatest lie detector in the world, twelve good men and true." And Judge Crumpacker conceded that he could not let his court be "used as a testing room for an unproven device." "Such a step," he added, "would subject me to ridicule and probably result in a mistrial." (He had no problem, though, with his son’s serving on the defense team.) When the second jury exonerated Kirkland of the major charges, the shockingly light verdict caused pandemonium. Dr. Scott was picked up that evening for drunkenness and tossed into the cell adjoining Kirkland’s.

In his campaign to get the machine into court, Keeler had again tried to enlist the testimony of John Larson. This time, Larson not only complained to Vollmer but wrote directly to Judge Crumpacker, then denounced the charade in a police magazine. As Keeler sheepishly acknowledged, "I’m sure he was quite upset by the whole affair."

Worse, while Larson was criticizing the lab for grandstanding, Orlando Scott was out-grandstanding the lab. It’s hard to say which vexed Keeler more. Soon after Kirkland’s trial, Dr. Scott entered the field of lie detection himself. In short order he was promoting his own 100-percent-effective "Thought-Wave Detector," which tapped, he said, the electrical currents of the brain. In an interrogation room resembling the laboratory setup in the movie version of
Frankenstein
made in 1931, the subject was seated in a giant chair, a metallic halo was fastened around the skull, and electrodes were attached to the base of the skull and both hands. Then Scott would flick the switch and commence the interrogation while a giant needle swung from "True" to "False" on a dial. Not even psychopaths could escape detection, Scott explained; he just cranked up the juice when a dullard was in the chair.

In fact, his instrument measured not "brain waves" but galvanic skin resistance, a proxy for sweat. Yet with this unholy contraption, Scott got results. And thanks to his status as a physician, he was able to pioneer the introduction of lie detector evidence in civil courts. Scott’s machine confirmed that a sixteen-year-old was telling the truth when he said he had killed a twelve-year-old with a stone by accident; the award was reduced to $500. Scott’s lie detector affirmed a wife’s claim that her husband had fathered her child; the divorce court judge ordered the man to pay the expenses of the delivery. Scott’s lie detector belied the alibi of a seventeen-year-old boy accused of the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl who then had a baby; the boy was ordered to pay child support. A federal compensation examiner praised the device for exposing false injury claims. As Larson ruefully acknowledged, "Despite his mumbo-jumbo and perhaps because of it, Scott was remarkably successful in getting confessions."

No wonder Scott infuriated Keeler: the alienist outdid him at his own game. Whereas Keeler restricted sales of his machine, Scott refused to sell his machine at all lest it prove too potent in the wrong hands. Whereas Keeler’s patent gave him a limited monopoly but obliged him to publish his design, Scott showily kept his superpowerful circuitry top secret. Whereas Keeler had provided his services to a limited number of private enterprises, Scott proudly advertised his National Detection of Deception Laboratories with the motto, "Diogenes searched for them—We find them." Soon Keeler was pleading with Scott to stop introducing his contraption into the courtroom and was having Northwestern University threaten to sue Scott if he didn’t stop advertising his onetime affiliation with the school.

Scott’s success confirmed everything Larson despised about Keeler. It’s almost an American axiom: No matter how much you pander to the public, there is always someone willing to take your idea farther down-market than you would dare. Conversely, no matter how much you pride yourself on your intellectual integrity, there is always someone more exigent. Even as Keeler was being chastised by Larson for being inadequately scientific, he had to contend with rivals like Scott for the popular stage. And even as Larson was chastising Keeler for failing to make the scientific grade, he was himself "in the doghouse" with the medical and psychological authorities.

Larson was working days running cases for the Illinois state criminologist, and nights on his big book and report for Vollmer. The more he studied the technique—and the more he saw of Keeler’s methods—the more he was convinced that he himself had been right all along: the lie detector’s results ought never to be determinative. What was new was that Larson had found a framework to express this. The lie detector had to be understood in the context of the medical clinic.

Laboratory psychologists like Marston who boasted about achieving a success rate of 90 to 100 percent were conducting meaningless games. And crime-busters like Keeler who boasted about getting 75 percent of the "guilty" to confess did not know the actual number of guilty individuals and had no way to estimate the number of false confessions. These statistical claims dressed the lie detector in scientific clothes, while evading deep problems involved in the interpretation of emotions. Without a theory to explain how deception produced bodily responses distinct from the anxiety of innocent subjects, there was no way to draw inverse inferences from a record alone. Hence it was no surprise that the field’s two most experienced workers—Larson and Keeler—had disagreed on the interpretation in several prominent cases. On the contrary, the lie detectors’ overconfidence was a strike against them. Larson reminded Vollmer that "all scientists become suspicious of the technique and method of investigation if [it] shows up 100% when dealing with such factors as human emotions."

This was a matter not just of science but of justice. The criminal justice system, like medicine, demanded that subjects be treated individually. Even knowing that 90 percent of patients with typhoid fever died, a physician was obliged to treat each patient as one who might survive. Similarly, even if there was only a 10 percent error rate in distinguishing the innocent from the guilty, the lie detector ought not to assign guilt. His training with Adolf Meyer had taught Larson to treat each person as a unique experiment in nature. "We have made mistakes and will doubtless continue to make mistakes," he reminded Vollmer. In that light, it would be a miscarriage of justice to convey these mistakes to a jury.

This did not mean that Larson considered the polygraph useless. After all, no disease had an absolutely certain diagnosis, yet physicians had a profound understanding of many illnesses. The machine could help diagnose mental illness by "probing for complexes and in the removal of resistances." If this coincidentally solved a crime (by getting corroborating information), that was a worthy result. But the device ought not be called a "lie detector," and Larson was adamant that exams be conducted only by a fully trained psychiatric expert, working in conjunction with experts in psychology, criminology, social work, and police procedure.

Larson’s scientific modesty disappointed Vollmer. Of course Larson was free to write up his research as he saw fit. But Vollmer warned that these conclusions might lead readers to believe the lie detector had no value. "My own opinion is that you cannot throw in the waste basket all of your labors." Perhaps, Vollmer suggested, Larson’s modesty was itself a form of overreaching. How could Larson be so sure that his failure to isolate an identifiable deception response meant there was no such thing? Perhaps his technique was faulty, or his criteria of discrimination had been poorly chosen.

This time Larson stood firm. "I flatly disagree with you," he wrote back, "but any disagreement is due to the difference in approach to the problem and to the training involved." Larson had found a new Chief—that was how Larson now referred to Meyer—and for a scientist, nothing matters more than the respect of the respected. Larson made his choice. And he published.

The book had a difficult gestation. In 1926, when Larson first offered to make Keeler his coauthor, it comprised 600 pages. By the time he returned to Chicago in 1930, it had swollen to 1,000, of which Keeler had supplied five. After sitting on the manuscript for a year, Keeler mailed it back: "Golly, I’m sorry I haven’t had time to wade through the stuff, but…my head buzzes when I think of the things I really should do but don’t." As a consequence, Larson told Vollmer, he could no longer in good conscience include Keeler as his coauthor. He recalled phoning Keeler one day for help running a test; Kay Keeler had phoned back to tell him they were off for an outing to the Indiana dunes. "While this work was being done," Larson told Vollmer, "I didn’t get any outings." Thus have ants always resented grasshoppers.

To Vollmer, however, Larson’s repudiation was a "breach of faith." He reminded Larson that in the Berkeley police school "a [man’s] word was as binding as a National Surety Bond." But Keeler himself—back at Stanford for the summer to finish his degree—generously waived any claim to the book. As a compromise Larson offered to list Keeler as a "contributor." And so Keeler appeared.

Perhaps because of these conflicts
Lying and Its Detection,
published by the University of Chicago Press in 1932, turned out to be a strange book. Larson himself referred to it as a "source book," meaning a compilation of work in the field, rather than his own views. The book opened with no fewer than three prefaces: one by Vollmer, one by the physiologist who directed Larson’s dissertation, and one by a leading psychiatrist. Adolf Meyer had refused to contribute; he felt that this parade of authorities "savored of cheap publicity." The prefaces were followed by three major sections of extracts from commentators on deception, printed in minuscule type. First came the philosophers and psychologists on the prevalence of lying in different sorts of persons: children, women, psychopaths, and "normal" men. Then came the legal authorities on the history of exacting truth: by trial by ordeal, by torture, by "third degree" methods, and by adversarial justice. Third came a tour of recent physiological research on deception. Only in the fourth section did Larson present case studies from his twelve years of research, grouped as penitentiary cases, confession cases, "insider" cases (including the College Hall case), and murder cases. Amid these he slipped in oblique slurs against Keeler’s handling of various cases, such as the Ku Klux Klan case, the Mayer case, and the Kirkland case.

The book offered no insight into the mind-body relationship that presumably governed the action of the lie detector. It did not explain why the technique worked or failed. It gave no statistical assessment. As Larson was wont to say, "Each case is a clinical entity within itself." By implication, however, the book did make two contradictory claims. First, it suggested that the so-called lie detector was a diagnostic tool in the hands of a well-trained criminologist. Indeed, the book’s historical story line implied that scientific progress had finally put the interrogation of suspects on a humane footing, protecting the innocent and insulating the police from politics. But then, in a contradictory vein, the book suggested that the so-called lie detector would probably never determine a person’s guilt or innocence, except as an adjunct to police interrogation, principally by extracting confessions.

Even reviewers who praised the book as "ultra-conservative" for its refusal to perpetuate popular myths about the lie detector noted that Larson provided no alternative scientific account. Others pronounced themselves baffled and disappointed. What sort of science offers a parade of undigested authorities and refuses to make generalizations? For his part, Keeler did not fail to notice the slurs. Larson, he wrote to Vollmer, "published every slanderous thing he could think of about me….I feel that Ican hardly trust him in the future."

It was time for Vollmer to choose among his disciples, and he did not hesitate: between Larson’s hyperactive scrupulousness and Keeler’s cool effectiveness, there really wasn’t much choice. He wrote back to Keeler to console his young disciple. Larson, Vollmer said, had acted ignobly; indeed, the psychiatrist might not even be right in the head. "It is my opinion that Larson may be slipping slightly….It is possible that the poor chap is overworked." For the future, he suggested that Keeler ignore Larson’s barbs and treat him with indifferent courtesy. And Keeler agreed to do so, despite Larson’s provocations.

Keeler thought Larson’s accusations of scientific duplicity were themselves two-faced. How hypocritical of Larson to accuse him of peddling polygraphs to incompetent examiners and simultaneously gripe that he was holding back sales. And Keeler had heard rumors that Larson was under the "delusion" that Keeler was trying to get him fired from his job as Illinois state criminologist, and in "retaliation" was seeking to get Keeler fired from Northwestern.

Keeler admitted to Vollmer that his patience was running out, but that he would continue to "try to speak kindly of John and…ignore his foolishness." He even professed a willingness to offer Larson a half share in his patents if that "could save him from a complete mental breakdown"—though Keeler doubted it would help. In any case, Keeler never made the offer. But he did make one last effort to reach out.

As for the Chief, he practiced what he preached. He wrote a brief note acknowledging receipt of Larson’s book, then dropped all contact with Larson for twenty years.

Keeler likewise blandly thanked Larson for sending him a copy. After all, it’s easy to be gracious when you’ve won. Larson’s reply feigned oblivion: "I am glad to hear from you as I feel we can do rather good work if we keep together." As it happened, the two men made one final, halfhearted effort to collaborate. Chicago was preparing for a spectacular world’s fair, a potential showcase for the lie detector.