The Lie Detectors (5 page)

When Dr. Larson, a freshly minted Ph.D., joined the Berkeley police force in 1920, it was actually a logical career move. The son of an Indiana quarryman of Nordic stock, John Augustus Larson was born in Shelbourne, Nova Scotia, on December 11, 1893. At a young age he moved with his family to industrial New England, where his parents separated. At Boston University he studied biology as well as classical and modern languages, earning his way through college by working at a variety of odd jobs: busboy, paperboy, stock boy, elevator operator, stonecutter at the quarry, and fireman on the graveyard shift, plus two summers on a hospital ship. For extra cash he caught stray cats on Tremont Street, three or four to a suitcase, which he toted down Boylston Street to be boiled in preparation for zoology demonstrations.

During the school year he tutored wealthy coeds, conscious of his poverty among the college swells. He was just as uneasy among the laboring classes. Working as a summer trolley conductor, he was so assiduous in his ticket-taking—conductors customarily pocketed one fare in three—that his comrades mocked him as an honest fool. His mother told him to quit, "fearing," he recalled, the "antisocial conditioning." Hardworking but impulsive, physically vigorous but clumsy, compulsively honest but self-conscious, Larson set great store by doing the right thing. He wanted to become a criminologist.

Was it fate or upbringing? The family heirloom, signed on the flyleaf by generations of Nordic Larsons, was an early Reformation vilification of perjury: how it was a moral sin to break an oath.

In 1915, at his professor’s suggestion, Larson wrote his master’s thesis for Boston University on fingerprint identification, a technique that was finally being recognized by the courts. Larson created his own classification system, but his greater ambition was to make fingerprinting a predictive science, on the premise that both prints and criminality were heritable. He failed to find any familial pattern amid the swirls, loops, and whorls. His taste for forensic science then took him to Berkeley, where in 1920 he completed his Ph.D. in physiology, examining thyroid deficiencies, then widely believed to be a leading cause of emotional and criminal deviance.

If the old-timers on the force didn’t appreciate the new college cops, they found the doctoral cop unbearable. Larson was running himself ragged: writing a book on his fingerprint system, continuing his lab experiments, auditing courses in criminal psychiatry—all while working the four-to-twelve beat. Vollmer later conceded that the force’s hazing had been particularly cruel. But Larson was not cowed. He may have looked all wet, but he had a fierce sense of honor. When Officer Henry Villa, the department’s self-styled ace detective, ladies’ man, and prizefighter, needled Larson one time too many, Larson put him in a chancery lock so hard he nearly broke the cartilage in Villa’s Roman nose.

The suspects Larson tested in Berkeley between 1921 and 1923 exhibited the full range of American lies: burglars, forgers, bootleggers, arsonists, murderers, blackmailers, gamblers, men, women, students, teachers, juveniles, vagabonds, musicians, housewives, whites, blacks, Chinese, Mexicans. Berkeley aspired to a utopian ideal, but it was still an American town of 60,000. Some subjects were mentally disturbed, others feebleminded, still others drug addicts. The sex offenders were kinked every which way: homosexuals, masturbators, exhibitionists, a medical student accused of disseminating a picture of an erect penis, and two students caught in flagrante delicto. The machine served as a police tool, a screening device, a marriage counselor, a priest. The lie detector became whatever the circumstances called for.

In the hands of the Berkeley police, the situation was most often criminal, and the crime a bike theft (a category in which Berkeley still leads the nation). As with Helen Graham, the lie detector often exposed petty crimes by eliciting confessions: a restaurant chef pleaded guilty to stealing silverware, a paint-store employee to robbing the till, a custodian of the Unitarian Church to pocketing a purse and watch. Alcohol infractions were especially common, with Vollmer generally filing away a written confession and issuing an oral warning.

Some subjects, the machine revealed, were victims of crimes that never happened. When Larson questioned a young soldier who claimed to have been bound, gagged, and robbed, the young man hurled invectives: "You go to—! This is an outrage on an American soldier!" Larson, shamefaced, lent the soldier his overcoat and money to travel across the bay. Months later, he had to petition the soldier’s commanding office to get the coat returned. In the interim the soldier had admitted spending the money on a woman friend. For an expert on lying, Larson was a trusting soul.

Among the sex cases, some were criminal, and others offered a glimpse into the intricacies of domestic life. Concerning one marital dispute, Larson wrote: "Mrs. Simons accused of masturbation by husband. Had
puritis ani
[itchy anus]." The organist at the local movie theater who fondled boys in the dark was exiled to Los Angeles to begin a new life; a month later he wrote to "Friend Larson" to kindly inquire, "How is the test?"

When he ran low on cases, Larson asked his fellow college cops to round up hoboes in the train yards. With such vagrants Larson went on "fishing expeditions," asking them if they were being sought by the army, the navy, the police, etc., then showing them a map of the United States and asking if they hailed from this state or that. Not only did he catch military deserters this way; the machine acted as a deterrent. Larson boasted that vagrants soon learned to give Berkeley a wide berth. This confirmed one persistent gripe about Vollmer’s methods: that he had not so much reduced crime as driven it into neighboring towns.

In these early years the lie detector had yet to acquire its aura of infallibility, and as word spread of the machine’s prowess, some locals considered it a challenge. One medical student had heard his professor scoff at the notion of a lie detector. When he was accused of stealing a bicycle, he tried to beat the machine by controlling his breath and tensing his fingers. Writing up the case for publication, Larson claimed that the young man’s record showed "disturbances due to a guilt complex." But the original police file indicates that the student was released after obtaining a "very smooth" record. Only after the student consulted with his father and a lawyer did he confess to having stolen the bike.

Then there is the case of the two bunco men caught dealing a trick deck of cards on an Oakland-bound train. At the Berkeley station house their fingerprints identified them as confidence men with long records. One agreed to sit for a lie test. Despite his stony poker face, Larson read his record as an invisible "tell." But in their cell, the hustlers plotted their revenge. On the wall above their bunk, they drew a subversive cartoon of themselves standing before the solemn bench of justice; and underneath, they scrawled this doggerel on scientific interrogation:

In two years Larson tested 861 subjects in 313 cases, corroborating 80 percent of his findings by post-exam confessions or subsequent (unspecified) checks. In total, 218 criminal suspects were identified and 310 exonerated. It was an impressive achievement, and from it Larson deduced several principles. He discovered that the citizens of Berkeley were overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, at least when interrogated by the police. He noted how easily he obtained confessions. And he found that when he retested suspects after confession, their records appeared similar to those deemed innocent of the crime. He also found that he could train his fellow cops to conduct these tests.

In those same two years Vollmer’s initial skepticism turned to unbridled enthusiasm. The lie detector eased the administration of justice and supplied a physiognomic portrait of the town to match his map of colored pins. And Vollmer was determined to let the world know that Berkeley had defeated the age-old problem of criminal deception. In a ten-part silent movie serial,
Officer 444,
Vollmer played himself—"one of the world’s leading criminologists"—calmly marshaling his scientific police force against a criminal scientist who exploited science for evil purposes. Filmed in Berkeley, the popular serial was meant by Vollmer as an antidote to the hapless Keystone Kops, whose antics he despised. By contrast, Officer 444 was brave and efficient and even got the girl after solving the crime with the help of the "‘lieing machine’—a modern marvel of criminology, which records a crook’s guilt even while he is denying it." And the machine was proving successful in the real world too. When a murder suspect who had been cleared by Larson’s test had his innocence confirmed by an unimpeachable alibi, Vollmer told the press that this was the "most convincing case" yet. "So far we have never made a mistake with our machine. I will not say that it is infallible," he informed the
San Francisco Examiner.
"But thus far, it has proved so."

Then the Officer began to spell out the inscription and then read out once again the joined up letters. "‘Be just!’ it states," he said.

—FRANZ KAFKA,
IN THE PENAL COLONY,
1919

THE NEWSPAPERS BAPTIZED THE LIE DETECTOR; THEY
named the device, launched its career, gave it its purpose. The machine made great copy, great pictures, great drama. During the 1920s nothing moved print better than tales of true crime, and here was a new angle on noir stories of depravity: an instrument that let readers peer directly into the criminal soul. The machine’s judgment could be delivered to the morning doorstep, a front-page deus ex machina that resolved the mystery of whodunit—at least until the next morning’s paper. This was voyeurism by retail, and San Francisco’s papers, locked in furious competition, begged Vollmer to try his Berkeley instrument on the city’s bold-headline crimes. With the International Association of Chiefs of Police due in town for their annual convention, its president-elect, Vollmer, decided to showcase his new methods of crime-fighting and sent John Larson across the bay.

The summer after Larson’s triumph at College Hall, a priest had been abducted from the San Francisco diocese by a mysterious stranger in a car. In response to calls from the newspapers, thousands of grief-stricken citizens combed the city streets in search of his body. Yet not until a reward was offered did a mysterious drifter named William Hightower lead a reporter from the
San Francisco Examiner
to a foggy beach where they found the priest’s body at midnight, buried under a billboard ad for flapjacks. The
Examiner
was the first paper in William Randolph Hearst’s empire, and with it he had inaugurated a new style of page-one investigation, showing how dastardly criminals would have eluded justice but for "The Invincible Determination of the
Examiner.
"

In this instance, the
Examiner
’s intrepid reporter persuaded the police to hold Hightower in secret all night so he could file his morning exclusive. Over the next few days, as bigger and bigger headlines splashed across the city’s front pages, reporters and the police competed to gather circumstantial evidence against the suspect. Reporters found experts who matched the ransom note to his typewriter; police discovered a custom-built machine gun in his room, as well as a .45-caliber revolver whose bullets might have killed the priest; reporters unearthed half a canvas tent at the grave site, the other half of which was in Hightower’s room. The prosecutor thought he had Hightower dead to rights. But despite the prosecutor’s threats and a howling lynch mob outside his cell, Hightower admitted nothing. As the reporter described it, "William A. Hightower is unshaken in his surface assumption of innocence. But in his mind is an area like a large bruise. Whenever a question touches upon the edge of that bruise he winces, pauses and maintains silence. Possibility of confession is remote….His high, curving forehead is bland and unwrinkled. His hands do not tremble, nor do his lips quiver."

Against this effrontery, what could justice do? Thousands of avid readers wanted to know. Then a rival paper, the
San Francisco Call and Post,
scored a coup of its own. Its editors secretly arranged for Dr. John A. Larson to put Hightower on his scientific "soul test"—with exclusive rights for the
Call and Post
to publish the findings. The previous night, the prisoner had been unable to sleep, telling his jailer, "My dreams are raising hell with me." Summoned from his cell just after midnight and told that a scientist wished to take his blood pressure, Hightower was strapped to the apparatus and warned, "If you lie to us on a single question we will detect it." The next day, under the headline "S
CIENCE
I
NDICATES
H
IGHTOWER
’
S
G
UILT
," the
Call and Post
filed its exclusive. "Science penetrated the inscrutable face of William A. Hightower today, revealed that beneath an unruffled exterior is a seething torrent of heart throbbing emotions, and that these emotions indicate strongly that he was the murderer of Father Heslin of Colma."

And there, unfurled across the page, were the telltale traces of Hightower’s jagged heartbeat and herky-jerky breath, with ominous black arrows to point out the "explosive" reactions confirming what the public wanted to believe: that behind even the stoniest criminal mask there lurked a conscience, aware of its sins, and that science could track the soul to its lair.

Inside the paper, Larson described his improvements to Marston’s deception test, already "100% accurate," and Chief Vollmer announced that the graphical record left "no question" that Hightower was guilty. Not only did the Chief think the results reliable enough to be admitted into court; he called Larson’s instrument a forerunner of still better methods, "a mechanical instrument of the future [which] will prove, beyond a question of doubt, the guilt or innocence of the accused." The press rested its case and dubbed the instrument "the Lie Detector." A few weeks later a jury (needing no lie detector) sentenced Hightower to life imprisonment in San Quentin.

Less than a year later, as the city geared up to welcome the International Association of Police Chiefs, the association’s president August Vollmer gave Larson a chance to demonstrate his technique before 300 police chiefs. "No longer can we hope to compete with criminals," Vollmer announced in his presidential address, "unless we discard antiquated and obsolete equipment and strengthen our force with the recognized and desirable tools of our profession." That evening, on the roof of the Saint Francis Hotel, Larson demonstrated his device, with San Francisco’s police chief, Daniel O’Brien, in the hot seat, telling whoppers.

As luck would have it, a more grisly test of the lie detector was simultaneously under way. One week earlier, the San Francisco police had invited Larson to investigate a crime that had horrified readers across the nation: a husband accused of complicity in his wife’s murder. On Tuesday evening, May 30, 1922, Henry and Anna Wilkens had been returning from an outing in the Santa Cruz mountains with Henry, Jr., age eight, and Helen, age three, when another car forced them to the curb, and a gunman jumped out, stuck a revolver through the driver’s-side window, and demanded cash. Wilkens docilely handed over three $100 bills. But when the bandit reached across him to grab his wife’s diamond engagement and wedding rings, the husband reacted with pardonable fury. "Haven’t you enough?" he said, and reached for his own gun in the vehicle’s side pocket. Unfortunately, the bandit shot first and struck dear Anna in the chest, before speeding off. Outraged headlines played to the nation’s growing obsession with car bandits. At the inquest, Henry, Jr., touched the raw nerve of the tragedy "My daddy loved my mother—she died to save the bandit’s bullet from hitting him."

But the police, always suspicious, soon directed their attention toward the grieving husband. Two days after the murder, two hardened ex-cons, Walter and Arthur Castor, sons of a San Francisco police officer killed in the line of duty, had been questioned by the police after trying to buy gas with a $100 bill. Wilkens failed to recognize either man in the police lineup. But no sooner had the Castors been released than the police learned that Wilkens had actually employed Walter Castor in his auto shop four years earlier. By then, the Castor brothers had vanished. So the police asked Wilkens if he would be willing to submit to a lie test.

In the city’s Hall of Justice, Larson set up his modified assemblage. The device (now stored in the Smithsonian) was even more Rube Goldbergian than before. The reporter for the
Examiner
described it as "a combination of a radio set, a stethoscope, a dentist’s drill, a gas stove, an aeronoid barometer, a time ball, a wind gauge, and an Ingersoll watch." In short, it was the sort of "mystic apparatus" one might find in a "thought laboratory."

In fact, on its six-foot-long plank, the mechanical-electrical device resembled nothing so much as a mechanized human body flayed open for inspection, like a cubist anatomy lesson. Each instrument was the end product of decades of physiological research. Each transposed the activity of an internal organ onto an external mechanism, which mimicked its action in a way that was measurable. Each was animated by the living force that drove the subject’s bodily functions. The pulsating rubber hose extended the swelling arteries to record the blood pressure. The rubberdrum tambour rose and fell with the lungs to measure the depth of breathing. The clock-wound motor drove the mechanism like the muscles of the constrained subject. The electronic circuit, poised like the nervous system, reacted the instant a puff of air signaled speech. Finally, and most visibly, looping between the two upright drums was the blackened sheet of paper—broad as a human torso—where needles scratched out the instruments’ response, as if scoring their message on the subject’s skin.

One organ, of course, was conspicuously absent. The instrument lacked any correlate for the brain. You are nothing but a body, the apparatus implied, a mechanical cadaver laid out on the table—with this one difference: the cadaver on the table was not quite dead. So long as the machine was hooked up to the living, breathing subject, it became a kind of Frankenstein’s monster, an artificial human given life by the subject to whom it was intimately attached. No wonder Wilkens was reluctant to undergo the ordeal. But the police gave him the veiled threat they always give in such cases; they told him that if his "hands were clean," he had nothing to fear. He agreed—with a sullen expression and gloomy black eyes.

So while the intense, high-minded Dr. Larson hovered over his creation, Wilkens’s sleeves were rolled up to reveal a surprising musculature and a navy tattoo. The rubber "bands" were wound tight around his biceps and pumped full of air, and the rubber-and-leather "brazier" was strapped tight around his chest. After a short preamble Larson posed his questions at one-minute intervals, beginning with innocuous "controls": Did Wilkens like the movies? (Yes.) Had he had a nervous breakdown? (Yes.) Had he suffered from heart trouble? (No.) Did he walk in his sleep? (No.) Did he fear going insane? (No.) Then, once Wilkens’s nerves had settled, Larson began to probe the possibility that Wilkens had plotted to murder his own wife.

Several hours later, the interrogation done, Larson gave his exclusive verdict to the
Examiner.
Although Wilkens had been extremely nervous during the interrogation, Larson’s "hasty examination" suggested that he was not implicated in the crime. Around the bay, the newspapers announced that Wilkens had given the lie detector a "run for its money and emerged with flying colors."

This was not quite correct. As Larson privately acknowledged, Wilkens’s record was "doubtful." When Vollmer reviewed the records that evening, he doubted Larson’s interpretation—though publicly he seconded his officer’s judgment.

Nor were the San Francisco police entirely convinced, and with good reason. As Wilkens left the Hall of Justice, supposedly cleared of any wrong-doing, a detective tailed him to a secret meeting with Robert Castor, brother of the men he denied knowing. The detective observed them exchange money and overheard Wilkens boast about his experience on the lie machine. A week later, on the same day that August Vollmer urged his fellow police chiefs to adopt national identification files, criminal psychology, and routine use of the lie detector, Arthur Castor was arrested in Eureka and escorted in chains back to San Francisco. The next day, John Larson offered the chiefs a summary of millennial progress in the detection of human deception, from the medieval ordeal and torture to the "third degree" and the scientific innovations currently underway in Berkeley. The police chiefs left town with the distinct impression that science would help them win the war against crime. But the cops on the Wilkens case weren’t so sure.

A month after the chiefs left town, the jailed Arthur Castor publicly confessed that Henry Wilkens had paid him to murder Anna. In short order, Wilkens was arrested and interrogated by the police in the traditional manner—to the point that he had to be hospitalized for "appendicitis." Larson was appalled by the cruelty, yet the widower still would not admit his guilt.

Then the story took a still more grisly turn. On August 2—a week before Dr. Larson married Miss Taylor—Walter Castor, still hiding out in San Francisco, was betrayed by his lover (his brother Robert’s wife), and in a dramatic shootout, killed her and a policeman before succumbing to a hail of bullets. The same day the
Examiner
announced the wedding of Dr. Larson and Miss Taylor, an article two columns over revealed that Wilkens had been the lover of his wife’s sister and that prosecutors were investigating his other infidelities as well as his history of wife-beating. With headlines surging to new heights, the police became more determined than ever to make this wife-killer and cop-killer pay.

During a contentious monthlong trial, the prosecutors exposed Wilkens as an admitted liar on matters ranging from the fate of his wife’s rings to his affair with her sister, while the defense challenged the honesty of Castor’s confession, for which Castor had been given immunity. There was a brief moment when Larson believed that he and his lie detector evidence might be summoned before the court on Wilkens’s behalf, but the defense never did call him, presumably because Wilkens had already admitted lies the machine had failed to catch. The jury deadlocked, six to six. In a second trial, Wilkens was acquitted, much to the consternation of the judge and the public.