The Lie Detectors (20 page)

Then, only three weeks before Rappaport’s execution, Keeler had blacked out while he was boarding a train home from Boston. "My sympathetic nervous system got tangled up, giving me a rare thrill that I hope comes only once in a lifetime." The attacks had since resumed, and his physician urged a temporary leave from the stressful business of inducing stress in others.

Rappaport’s aggrieved sister did what she could to exacerbate these woes. She had fixated on the lie detector as the cause of her brother’s death, and she began sending Keeler bitter letters laced with curses, prophesying that he would be punished for his sin, that he would be paralyzed, that he would be struck dumb. Keeler contemplated taking legal action against her, even as he continued, against the advice of his friends, to read the letters. His sister thought that the letters directly affected his health. A year later, while he was traveling in Cleveland, his left arm and leg were briefly paralyzed.

Another calamity followed. When Charles Keeler read in the
Berkeley Gazette
about Rappaport’s execution, he was deeply distressed. The next day, while minding his eldest daughter’s twin girls, he tripped over a small dog and broke his femur. For several months he convalesced in bed, and then, on the verge of recovery, he died of a heart attack on July 31, 1937. The idealist, dreamer, and poet of utopian Berkeley was dead at sixty-five.

The newspapers, which had once hung on Charles Keeler’s every word, hardly noticed his passing. His poetry was outmoded; his Cosmic Religion had flopped; his inquiries into the realm of the spirits had proved fruitless. Yet until the day of his death he never gave up on his ambition to find a purposeful intelligence in nature, or on his plea for mutual understanding, or on his hope for his own Leonardo. "I’ve been trying to think of something new for you to invent, but have been too weak to think to much purpose of late. But you don’t want to just have the Keeler Polygraph as your contribution, however important that may be."

Nard, who had just returned from heart treatment at the Mayo Clinic, rushed back to Berkeley to meet with his sisters. While he tried to put a brave face on his loss, he feared that his own heart had the same weakness. Because of the cardiac arrhythmia he had discovered as an undergrad while testing himself on his polygraph, he could not buy life insurance. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic urged him to get "his nervous system in shape," and Kay understood this to mean that his illness, like his father’s, was "most of it…mental." In his grief, Keeler turned to Vollmer. "I suppose it sounds foolish for a guy my age to say it—but you know when a father goes, one looks to someone else to take his place—and of all the people in the world, Chief, you’re it."

He needed the support. That summer, while the Keelers were cruising in the Caribbean on a much needed vacation, Leon Green, the dean of the law school at Northwestern University, entered into secret negotiations to sell the crime lab to the city of Chicago for $25,000, with all its equipment and personnel intact. From the university’s point of view, the sale represented a success: having nurtured a forensic lab with a reputation for scientific neutrality, Northwestern could now pass it on to the city that needed it most. For its part, the city had long coveted such a lab; but before signing the deal the police had just one nonnegotiable condition: under no circumstances would they employ Leonarde or Katherine Keeler.

No explanation for this condition was ever given. Perhaps it was enough that the Keelers were friends of Governor Horner and hence enemies of the Chicago political machine. The full explanation was probably more general and more personal. The Chicago police had never liked the lab’s getting credit for solving cases, and Keeler’s mania for publicity had won him a long list of enemies in law enforcement. The university accepted the deal.

To be cut in this way was humiliating. Because of this, and other betrayals, Keeler considered Dean Green a two-faced liar, and as much as told him so. The bitterness reached such intensity that the morning after the sale, Katherine Keeler absconded with the lab’s photographic equipment and Nard’s lie detector records, which she announced they would keep "until Mr. Keeler decided what to do with them." To Fred Inbau, the lab’s newly appointed director, this was simply theft. It made no difference that Kay had used the equipment for seven years, or that the records represented Nard’s lifework—the sort of customary claim that Keeler prosecuted mercilessly among bank tellers, wayward cops, and retail clerks. Only when Inbau threatened to inform the city police did Kay return the equipment. But Leonarde kept the polygraph charts for the book he always said he was planning to write.

In truth, Kay considered the demise of the lab a blessing. For years she had envied Nard the fact that the lie detector was his own invention, whereas she had never done anything original. Within a month she had leased an office in the Continental Bank Building downtown in the Loop and opened the nation’s first all-female detective agency. Joining Katherine were her friend Jane Wilson, whom Kay had trained in photography; Edna Howie, an attractive, poised young woman from Wichita, whom Kay was training in handwriting analysis; and Viola Stevens, the crime lab’s former secretary. Nearly 200 people, including John Henry Wigmore, attended her grand opening.

Initially Nard and Kay had talked of opening a crime lab together—as a real-life Nick and Nora—but Kay didn’t think it wise. In the first place, lie detection and handwriting analysis couldn’t readily share the same office space. Then there was Kay’s desire for personal recognition. "As long as I am with Nard people have a confused impression that I am a wifely assistant. Now it is clear to everyone I have my own business well defined along certain lines." Finally, Nard had a tendency to procrastinate, and she didn’t like to dawdle. Besides, they would avoid conflict by working apart. "We get along better now that our businesses are separate."

Kay was also convinced that the demise of the crime lab would do Nard good. In 1939, he opened his own firm devoted to lie detection cases.

It was well said of a certain German book, that "
er lasst sich nicht lesen"—
it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.

—EDGAR ALLAN POE, "THE MAN OF THE CROWD," 1850

THE PSYCHIATRIC PROFESSION HAS DEVELOPED A KNACK
for "making people up," a phrase coined by the philosopher Ian Hacking to describe how the process of classifying people can gradually transform their sense of self until they exhibit the symptoms that confirm their diagnosis. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, under the amplification of the new culture of mass testing, this looping process likewise transformed the great mass of "normal" Americans. Hence, when a polygraph operator obtained the "normal" for a particular citizen—calibrating the device for that fraught state of elevated blood pressure, accelerated pulse, and rapid breathing known as "test anxiety"—he was simply confirming conditions of life under the testing regime. Add to this those gambits that increased the subject’s apprehension—such ruses as the card trick (known today as the "stimulation test")—plus the foreknowledge that any misstep might indicate complicity in wrongdoing, and "normal" refers to an individual afraid of being accused of failing a very serious exam. Welcome to
Amerika,
true-false edition.

John Larson wanted to transform the so-called lie detector from a method of inducing anxiety into a technique to relieve it, from a pseudoscientific oracle into a diagnosis of the self. He was determined to rein in the mechanical monster he had unleashed. He had energy and persistence and an endless supply of criminal minds to unlock. His young wife had put it best: "Something in his personality seems to draw him irrestably [
sic
] toward unsolved problems." It was for this reason, as much as any other, that he was run out of Chicago.

Sometime between 1932 and 1934 Larson shaved off his Hitler-like toothbrush moustache. He was living on the South Side, working part-time at a municipal neurological clinic, squeezing in two days a week of research at the Institute for Juvenile Research, and running deception tests on inmates at Joliet. Though he had stopped writing scientific papers, he fired back a rejoinder whenever Keeler appeared on the front pages with more egregious abuse. In January 1934, the nation’s leading police journal published an interview with Larson headed "Has the ‘Lie Detector’ Failed?" This was a rhetorical question. In the interview, Larson claimed credit for the machine and disavowed any responsibility for its abuse. He singled out Keeler as his "first pupil," then blamed Keeler for training unethical interrogators. He insisted that the instrument was fit only for psychiatric diagnosis, then offered his services free to the Chicago police to test their criminal suspects.

At the core of Larson’s ambition for the lie detector was its ability to distinguish between genuine delusion and faked belief. The technique tested for duplicity, that doubleness of self occasioned by a split between the body’s emotional response and the mind’s willful stratagems. It would not flag either a pathological liar or a person of sincere delusions. Even Keeler often pointed out that the lie detector "does not apply to small children, morons, unethical savages, or insane persons, but for normal civilized persons it is a very reliable guide." In other words, the polygraph hunted for a conscience—civilization’s most elevated product—in the very people accused of having violated society’s moral code. At the limit, it could test for the subject’s belief in his own self, a matter of some uncertainty in the case of Allen R. Hammel.

On December 15, 1933, Hammel, a guard for Brinks Express, fled the Chicago Loop with $39,000. But the man arrested four months later with $935 in his pocket and Hammel’s security badge in his apartment claimed to be not Hammel but "Burt Armstrong"—and persisted in this claim, despite being identified as Hammel by former colleagues, by a tattoo on his arm, and by his young children and distraught wife. "Lady," he told her, "I never saw you in my life." To complicate matters, a woman in Ohio identified Hammel as her missing husband and the father of her children.

The prosecutors in Chicago thought Hammel’s claim of being "Armstrong" was bunk. But some psychiatrists speculated that Hammel suffered from disassociation, his amnesia being the result of a dual personality. His brother acknowledged that Hammel’s skull had once been fractured in a motorcycle accident. A family physician also testified that Hammel had long suffered from epilepsy, although another physician called it "pseudoepilepsy" and denounced him as a faker. This was just the sort of mystery Larson’s lie detector was meant to resolve: the relationship between surface and depth, authentic and inauthentic self, conscious will and irresistible reaction.

But the prosecutors who asked Larson to examine Hammel were disappointed by his findings. At no time did Hammel register anything other than equanimity. "His answers all agree with his contention that he is Armstrong," Larson announced; he "believes what he is saying." No matter: the prosecutors easily persuaded the jury to convict Hammel, despite his dramatic seizure on the witness stand.

For the next year, with Hammel in Joliet, Larson treated the inmate with hypnosis and monitored Hammel’s mental progress with his instrument. Sometimes Hammel’s elaborate stories about being "Armstrong" rang "true as truth"; a week later, the prison psychiatrists would conclude that he was playing them for suckers. After three years in prison, Hammel was declared insane, and he died a year later. Yet even then Larson wouldn’t relinquish the mystery. He tried to get Hammel’s autopsy report, or better yet, access to his dissected brain. Obsessed with individual cases, Larson could never come to any final conclusions. Yet his job obliged him to do just that, and failure had consequences, for both his subjects and himself.

In his capacity as assistant state criminologist Larson was expected primarily to predict human behavior, specifically to advise the parole board—at a rate of 100 to 150 inmates a month—as to which ones posed a risk to society. But predicting human behavior is never an easy job, and it is especially hard when the stakes are high and time is short. The Illinois plan for variable sentencing had been a pillar of reformed justice in Chicago, letting prison administrators tailor reward and punishment to each case, control the prison population, and manage the social risk posed by recidivists. Unfortunately, this discretion also gave new scope to political corruption. So the reformers in Chicago had again tried to swap scientific methods for insiders’ pull and set objective criteria for release. The question was which science and which criteria.

Like his fellow psychiatrists, Larson championed individualized assessments. The rival approach, advocated by his colleagues at the Institute for Juvenile Research, such as Ernest Burgess (also of the University of Chicago), was to predict success statistically, correlating recidivism rates with factors such as age, crime, job skills, and alcoholism, along with behavior as assessed according to the prison merit system. This effort formed the core of the new quantitative sociology. One intriguing variant let prisoners predict whether their fellow inmates would go straight, and then tried to systematize those hunches. The prisoners secretly selected to predict the behavior of their fellow inmates were none other than Leopold and Loeb. Indeed, Nathan Leopold, under a pseudonym, had published papers on statistical prediction of success on parole.

Joliet’s most famous prisoners were still America’s most famous prisoners, and Larson still wanted to use the two young men to validate his approach to psychiatric lie detection. By comparing their polygraph records against those of unconfessed killers, he hoped to identify the signs of unassuaged guilt. Leopold, the younger, more brilliant murderer, refused to sit for the exam. Having his blood pressure taken, he said, made him "neurotic and overactive." He had always presented himself as a Nietzschean superman whose mental abilities transcended others’. But he realized that he was hardly likely to get parole on those grounds. So Leopold published papers suggesting which criteria might be used to set the optimal number of factors that would predict success on parole: too few, and prediction suffered; too many, and each prisoner became a category of one. This helps explain why Leopold never had much respect for Larson or for Larson’s lie detector. He considered the individualist approach insufficiently scientific.

Larson, by contrast, felt that a statistical approach slighted the person’s total history. (For the record, Larson judged Leopold one of the "precocious, egocentric, psychosexual deviates" at Joliet.) His individualized lie detection technique would succeed in conjunction with a team comprising a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a social worker, a sociologist, and a statistician. By the late 1930s he had amassed the records of 2,200 prisoners on his lie detector, a quarter of whom he judged mentally disturbed.

Richard Loeb, the slightly older, more affable murderer, happily cooperated with Larson in this project. His polygraph showed "no significant disturbances" when he was discussing his confessed murder. Only when Loeb told a deliberate lie at Larson’s request did the apparatus record any disturbance. Over the years, Larson became quite fond of Loeb and thought he understood Loeb well.

It was all the more shocking, then, when in late January 1936 John Larson responded to cries in the prison corridor and became the first official on the scene as Richard Loeb staggered out of a private jailhouse bathroom, his naked body dripping with water and gushing blood. Standing above him was his former cellmate James Day, also wet and naked, but unbloodied, an open razor still in his hand. After dispatching Loeb to the infirmary (where he died), Larson had Day hauled into his office for a severe interrogation.

Who needed a lie detector?
Res ipsa loquitur:
for once the thing really did seem to speak for itself. Or did it? Day claimed he had acted in self-defense. Originally sentenced to one to ten years for stealing $26 at gunpoint at the age of nineteen, he had been denied parole for violent behavior and transferred to Joliet, where he fell into the orbit of "Dickie" Loeb and became Loeb’s cellmate. Loeb had shared his special privileges (and possibly more) with Day until two weeks earlier, when Day was transferred out of Loeb’s cell as part of a crackdown by a new warden. Loeb, Day said, had then tricked him into entering a private shower, locked the door, and threatened to cut him with a razor if he didn’t change his "narrow minded" attitude. Day had gone so far as to disrobe before he got a chance to kick Loeb in the groin, get the razor away from him, and slash blindly while the hot water poured down on them both. There was presumably more to this tale, but suddenly Day clammed up. "Jesus God, I can’t tell you all this to put down."

Prison officials agreed; anxious to suppress lurid tales of misrule, favoritism, and "abnormal proposals," they took their own statement from Day the next day, and ordered Larson to stay away from the press, inquest, and trial. Even so, the papers in Chicago, eager to fan the flames of scandal, quoted Larson extensively. Readers learned that Leopold and Loeb enjoyed breakfast rolls each morning in the privacy of Leopold’s cell, ran the prison library and school, had access to a sizable bank account and private bathrooms, and abused their position "to reward ‘broadminded’ convicts with money and favors."

Horner’s rivals in the forthcoming primary took aim at the governor. "Can we forget that Loeb and Leopold, two degenerate murderers whose families are lifelong friends of my opponent, have been allowed to direct the politics of the entire penitentiary, teaching the prisoners, getting work assignments for them at will, conducting gambling operations, and being provided private baths?" Behind the scenes, Horner’s prison administration set about suppressing the story, while in the
Chicago Tribune
Larson denounced corruption in the prison.

This time, without Vollmer to rescue him from the consequences of his own integrity, Larson was soon fired, nominally for recommending that Day hire Larson’s wife’s cousin as his attorney. (In fact, Day was found not guilty by reason of self-defense.) Worse accusations against Larson were making the rounds. Police gossip had it that Larson had lost his job for being too close to the prisoners. "Poor old John," Keeler wrote to Vollmer, "finally stumbled and badly stubbed his toe." According to Keeler, Larson had threatened to commit Day to a criminal mental facility "for the rest of his life" if Day didn’t hire Larson’s wife’s cousin as his lawyer. Though Larson quickly found a new post in Detroit at the Psychopathic Clinic attached to the municipal courts, Keeler did not predict success. "I fear," he wrote to Vollmer, "that he will embarrass the authorities there and be on his way again."

In Detroit, Larson nursed his grievances. He was painfully conscious of having surrendered Chicago—world capital of crime and criminology—to Keeler and Keeler’s cronies. From outside, Larson tried to rally the opposition. He resumed contact with William Marston in hopes of forming a united front against Keeler. He contacted J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI to denounce Keeler’s "false claims" about the lie detector and his training scheme—a "racket" that had ruined the field with "quacks."

His obsession with Keeler made Larson see conspiracies everywhere. As fast as he secured new allies, he turned on them. He publicly announced that he had stopped using the Keeler Polygraph; and he permitted CaptainC. D. Lee to advertise his Berkeley Psychograph as the "same as used by Larson," then accused Lee of exploiting his reputation and complained that Lee’s machine did not work very well either. When a former assistant at the institute proposed a National Polygraph Operators Society to set professional standards for the field, Larson blasted the effort as Keeler’s secret handiwork. The assistant’s retort ended up in Hoover’s files: "You have a strange way of showing any appreciation for loyalty, by accusing those who would be your friends of ulterior motives and selfishness." Behind the scenes, Keeler—no friend of polygraph standards—had been trying to quash the society.