The Lie Detectors (31 page)

When the doctor finally arrived with two medics and a stretcher, Nard fled to de Mille to beg for absolution. He spent the first three weeks of January in the hospital tortured by the "bitter memory of that massacre of December 31, 1943."

Eleven months later, Katherine Dussaq (formerly Kay Keeler) was killed in a nighttime airplane crash outside Patterson Field, Ohio, one of forty women pilots who died in service during World War II. She had been flying around the country trying to reverse the army’s plan to disband the WASPs and had run out of fuel in bad weather. The news of her death drove Keeler into a new paroxysm of grief. Her mother wrote to comfort him: "Kay loved to live dangerously and at last chance caught up with her and perhaps she would not have had it otherwise."

In 1948 Keeler spent several months in a sanatorium in California getting treatment for severe hypertension. His blood pressure had hit 248 over 154, and the doctors ordered him to change his ways. A single cigarette would push the pressure up twenty points, and his drinking didn’t help. His friends tried to intervene. Vollmer offered him a kind of sinecure as a professor of criminology in Berkeley. But Keeler turned it down. He had spent twenty years building up his business, he told Vollmer, and still hoped to make Chicago the world center of polygraphic studies.

Yet behind the bravado, Keeler, Inc. was struggling. Total income had risen from $17,000 in 1947 to $20,000 in 1948, barely enough to pay salaries. Privately, Keeler admitted that he was a "complete wash-out" as a businessman. He didn’t even keep books. There were times when he was so drunk he couldn’t conduct business. There were many lost weekends.

Then on Memorial Day weekend in 1949, while visiting a disciple in Michigan, Keeler had another "blowup." He developed double vision and discovered blood in his urine. He spent five weeks in a hospital in Chicago on a low-sodium diet of rice and fruit, followed by two weeks at the Mayo Clinic. The bed rest wore on his nerves. The doctors recommended a vacation, preferably "on a wharf with my big toe dangling in the water as fish bait." He announced that he was granting himself a year’s leave from lie detection.

That summer his systolic blood pressure hovered around 190. In September he made one last trip to visit his old friends the Wilsons at their summer cottage in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. On the night of September 7, he suffered a major stroke. For several days he lay unconscious in Door County Memorial Hospital, while friends urged him to put up a good fight. He never got the message. He died on September 20, 1949, at the age of forty-five.

His sisters divided Leonarde’s bric-a-brac; sold Keeler, Inc. to an employee for $10,000; and granted his manufacturer sole rights to design and sell the "Keeler Polygraph," subject to a 7 percent royalty fee. The newspapers noted his passing—"I
NVENTOR OF
L
IE
T
EST
D
IES
"—and led off his obituary with his early sorority case. His faithful secretary, Viola Stevens, set up a charity for high blood pressure in his name. And his beloved sister launched a radio series, "The Hidden Truth," which dramatized (and embellished) his greatest cases. Though it was soon surpassed by rival firms, the Keeler Polygraph Institute continued to train operators and conduct personnel work for several decades.

Death is the ultimate deus ex machina. However expected, its arrival always comes as something of a surprise, and is rarely aesthetically pleasing. Death appears to resolve all doubts, but only by shoving the ambiguities—the mind-body problem included—into a box.

The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss tells the story of a skeptical young Kwakiutl Indian from the Pacific Northwest who decided to study with the local shamans to find out whether their cures were "true or only made up." Indeed, young Quesalid soon discovered that, among the other tricks of the trade, the shamans often concealed a tuft of eagle down in their mouth, which they then spat out as a "bloody worm," pronouncing this to be the source of their patient’s sickness. Yet Quesalid also found that the ill greatly desired his aid and that the trick with the bloody worm seemed to heal the sick. In time, he even came to disparage other cures as inadequate or fake. In the end, Lévi-Strauss concludes, "Quesalid did not become a great shaman because he cured his patients; he cured his patients because he became a great shaman." Leonard Keeler was such a shaman.

FRANKENSTEIN:
They? I am the one to find him….I’m the one who’s guilty. I created the Monster—I must be the one to destroy him!

—FRANKENSTEIN,
UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 1931

CHIEF VOLLMER FELT KEELER’S LOSS ACUTELY. "I REGARDED
him with the affection that a father would a son and I am certain that he had a feeling of loyalty to me that is only found in father and son relationships." For more than twenty years the Chief had shared Keeler’s joys, as well as the secrets that gnawed at his heart. "I was his leaning post when he felt too weak to stand alone." Yet he had no hesitation in pronouncing his young protégé "one of the finest men that I have ever known."

Imagine, then, the Chief’s response when John Larson, after a two-decade silence, took the occasion of Keeler’s death to write him a five-page letter filled with innuendo, reproach, and slurs. Over the years, Larson had kept close tabs on Keeler’s successes and blowups, noting with special satisfaction the collapse of the Northwestern University crime lab and the refusal of the Chicago police to accept Nard. In private letters, in unpublished manuscripts, in private conversation, and even in print (albeit with more circumspection), he expressed his withering contempt for the man whom he had trained, and who had betrayed their common purpose. It was the one error he acknowledged: how in a moment of weakness—as a personal favor to Vollmer—he had agreed to train a single lay operator, that "high school kid in short pants," Leonarde Keeler. And how he regretted it! In Keeler, he had created a monster: a "salesman," an "exploiter," a showman who had "prostituted" his technique by exacerbating, not alleviating, his subjects’ feelings of guilt. Thanks to Keeler’s example "each pseudo-expert carries about his ‘lie box,’" the result being "a brainwashing of the public by quacks."

By contrast, Larson, said Larson—referring to himself in the third person—had "always refused to commercialize his method, patent apparatus, or train lay operators." Privately, he gave Keeler this much: the young man had been a master showman whose "flamboyant self-confidence undoubtedly struck terror in many of the guilty subjects" and got them to confess.

Keeler’s death seemed to offer Larson a chance to kill the monster once and for all. When Keeler’s former manufacturer asked to use Larson’s name to promote its device, he spurned the offer. He enlisted old colleagues to verify that it was he, not Keeler who had invented the lie detector—not that any one had "invented" anything, he hastened to add. Some, like the old cop in Berkeley, Frank Waterbury, fed him stories about Keeler’s misdeeds.

When Larson wrote to Vollmer in 1951, his pent-up resentment outran his prose. He was writing, he informed Vollmer, to set the record straight. The "many years of exploitation by Lee, Keeler and many others" had allowed the "so-called lie detector" to be turned into a "psychological third degree." This had been disastrous from a scientific point of view. "We have found that the error in the interpretation of records may range as high as 40%." By contrast, Larson had spent forty years assembling the records that would tell the true story of the lie detector’s birth and its fall from grace: how the instrument that he had developed at Berkeley had been debased by Keeler.

The Chief’s reply was courteous but curt.

The Chief—recently named "America’s greatest cop" by
Collier’s
—was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and had been diagnosed with throat cancer. His wife had died a few years back. Yet his mind was as lucid as ever. He told his friends that he would never be an invalid. One afternoon he asked his young successor to bring him his service revolver from his old desk. A few weeks later, on November 4, 1955, after helping his housekeeper make the beds, he stepped into the hallway, told her to call the police, and shot himself.

His death was of a piece with his life: unsentimental, but with a human touch. In the previous month, he had systematically purged all embarrassing correspondence from his files. The contents of a policeman’s desk are not for public consumption. Since his appointment as Berkeley’s chief of police fifty years ago, his program of professionalization had become the lodestar of American law enforcement. In 1960, his disciple O. W. Wilson was appointed police chief of Chicago.

But neither Keeler’s death nor Vollmer’s brought Larson any nearer to his goal of caging the monster he had unwittingly unleashed. On the contrary, his frustration grew as he realized that the machine had outlived Keeler, outlived Vollmer, would outlive them all. Where there had once been a single Keeler, now there were hundreds, each touting his own device. The machine had begun to breed, proliferate, mutate. As Larson shifted jobs, he obsessively tracked the monster’s wreckage, collecting news clippings, scientific reports, and sensational police cases for his final refutation.

The medical troubles that caused Larson to be rejected by the army—bad eyesight, prostate trouble, kidney stones, arthritis, ulcers, and possible growths in his left ankle—never reduced his capacity for work, not even when those cancerous growths cost him his leg in 1947. Two days after his third operation he was back at work, putting in ten-and twelve-hour days, six days a week, without holidays or a day off, as he hop-skipped with a wooden prosthesis around the country, working at a dozen different posts, each cut short by that insidious force known as "politics."

Trading Chicago for Detroit had not meant an escape from corruption: the judges in Detroit were just as beholden, the bureaucrats as craven, the criminals as well-connected. Larson took a one-year position at a psychiatric clinic on Long Island before quarreling with the director. Then he worked seven months in Seattle, at an asylum, only to leave because of "their disorganized methods of thought." Then he worked for seven months at a drying-out clinic in Blythewood, Connecticut, but quit because he refused to toe the Freudian line. Next came New Mexico, where he was chief psychiatrist at the state asylum; the pay was execrable and the patronage politics were fierce. A year later he was medical director of the Arizona State Hospital for the Insane, a post he held for two years, "cleaning up an awful mess," until he was denounced by "political snipers" in the local press and forced out of office. He had dared to suggest that the asylum’s most famous prisoner, Winnie Ruth Judd, the alluring trunk-murderess, was the secret paramour of several of Arizona’s leading politicians.

He managed to hold on from 1949 to 1957 as medical director of the Indiana state mental facility in Logansport. There he banned the strait-jacket, introduced penicillin for syphilitic patients, and opened a successful chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. Annual operating costs rose, but Larson’s outpatient treatments freed beds and saved the cost of a new facility. He also used a lie detector—which he now called a "Reactograph"—to test lobotomy patients, diagnose mental disease, and continue his efforts to standardize testing for deception. His reforms were recognized in 1951 by the American Psychiatric Association, which granted Logansport second-place honors for most improved institution. A glowing write-up in
Life
magazine was as close as he would come to public fame.

During his time in Logansport, Larson also founded the International Society of Police Psychiatry and Criminology, a gathering of like-minded criminologists from Indiana. Despite his incipient paranoia, Larson always inspired loyalty from those who admired his integrity. Captain Robert Borkenstein, head of the Indiana state police lab, accepted Larson’s offer to be a coauthor of his book, and the two published a brisk defense of Larson’s team approach to clinical polygraphy and offered to train operators in their methods. They had no takers. Increasingly, Larson supported antipolygraph laws, sending rambling letters to politicians in states considering a ban on testing.

Yet even at Logansport, Larson’s scrupulousness bred resentment. When he uncovered a scheme to line the pockets of one of the governor’s chief aides, he was promptly fired. Recommending Larson for another job, one friend explained: "[Larson] is one of the most honest and hard working men I have ever known and he cannot tolerate dishonesty or inefficiency in any form."

Larson resumed his nomadic ways, taking five more jobs in as many years. At the Tennessee Maximum Security State Penitentiary, he fired thirty-five asylum workers and brought in an undercover attorney to investigate horrific conditions: patients remained naked in cells, forgotten except for the guards who sold them alcohol and beat them. Two years later he was on his way again. Besides, Marge, who had hated the cold weather in Chicago, found Tennessee too hot and humid. In 1955 she was diagnosed with a bowel obstruction, and the surgeon removed two feet of intestine. Thereafter she needed constant doses of glucose and suffered occasional convulsions. She died on December 12, 1960, at the age of fifty-seven. Without her, Larson was disoriented.

When one young staff psychologist recognized his boss as
the
Dr. John Augustus Larson of lie-detector fame, he found Larson much diminished: one-legged and nearly deaf, with poor eyesight and faulty comprehension. Though the psychologist estimated Larson to be well into his eighties, he was only sixty-seven. Yet he was still putting in "fifteen-to-twenty hour days," and a pastor praised his compassion for each patient. At the same time, even Borkenstein recognized his colleague’s "eccentricities." Borkenstein explained: "Sometimes his idealism and unwillingness to compromise for financial gain has led him to be misunderstood by many people. He is relentless in his defense of his convictions." After so many years of fierce battles against dishonesty Larson seemed to have become somewhat loopy. He had become a kind of Dr. Dippy, the asylum keeper as mad as his patients.

The final years of Larson’s career saw him working as psychiatric director at mental institutions in Montana (ten months), Iowa (two years), and South Dakota (one year), before retiring to Nashville in 1963, now seventy, living on Social Security and a $200 annuity.

Rarely had he collected the fees his patients owed him. He was too trusting, his friends told him—too trusting and too paranoid. Yet his chaotic energy showed no sign of tapering off. His mind had always raced ahead of his ability to convey his thoughts, jumping from idea to idea until the initial point was lost. His writing had always been an illegible scrawl, his syntax mangled, his typing erratic. Early in his career, he had dictated letters to his wife, who cleaned up his prose for publication. A succession of secretaries at various asylums had organized his correspondence. Now he had no help. He rented rooms in the Nashville Colony Motel Court, where he devoted one room to his voluminous files.

For forty years, he had carted around his accumulated correspondence, polygraph records, data sheets. The time had come for him to get all this "whipped into shape" for his "magnum opus." In the 1940s his manuscript had been provisionally titled "Unmasking the Lie Detector." By the 1950s, it had acquired a more noble title: "Psychobiology of Detection and Removal of Stress during Interrogation, with Special Reference to Larson’s Cardio-Pneumo-Psychogram Test." Pitching the book to the managing editor at the University of Chicago Press, he explained his ambition this way [
sic
throughout]:

The book, he promised, would pick up where the first left off, covering the "Alpha and Omega of the Cardio-pneumo-psychogram." Its central feature would be extracts from his personal file of 900 letters—especially the correspondence between himself, Keeler, Vollmer, and Marston. Or, as he put it in his final will and testament [again,
sic
throughout]: "the entire work plusveryhot letters 890 showing Keeler’s criminal record; Marstons Million racket case we blew up for the Gillette co. and give it if kept intact." These documents would expose Keeler’s duplicity: the way he had stolen the ideas of others; affixed his name to a machine he had done nothing to create; and bungled a whole string of cases, including the Santa Barbara Klan case, the Mayer case in Seattle, and Rappaport’s execution. It would be a history based on original sources, not on "cheese-cake type news interviews." He did not mention the fact that it was now 9,000 pages long.

There is no record of any reply from the press.

In the early months of 1963—after several months in Chicago recuperating from an infected prostate; and a short break for a nostalgic visit to Berkeley where he was honored for his innovation—Larson moved back into the Colony Court Motel to resume work. On September 23, 1965, he was sitting on the patio, sorting through his manuscripts with the help of his wife’s cousin, when he had a sudden heart attack and died, age seventy-four.

As instructed in Larson’s will, Robert Borkenstein went through Larson’s papers to prepare the manuscript for publication. He found thousands of pages in no particular order, scramble-typed by Larson, along with thousands of letters, bundled lie detector records, tattoo records, fingerprint records, and modus operandi files. Borkenstein searched valiantly for a "key to this puzzle," but found himself unable to locate a "cohesive vein of material that I could call a manuscript."