The Lie Detectors (15 page)

Despite Charles’s concerns, Nard and Kay seemed ideally suited: a handsome couple with common interests and passions. Just before their wedding they took a "pre-moon" in the Canadian woods, a two-week canoe expedition during which they sighted moose, bear, and deer, and caught all the fish they could eat. But as much as he derided the filth and corruption of the city, Keeler was always eager to return. Though still subject to bouts of illness, he’d put on weight, and everyone agreed he looked great. Kay too seemed content in the city, though she complained about the grime. The city fulfilled her endless search for novelty. She took up fencing. Unable to afford fine clothes, she rented a sewing machine and learned to make tailored suits. Meanwhile, she had been conducting her own experiments at the institute on the relationship between emotion and galvanic skin resistance. It wasn’t long before this crime-fighting husband and wife were making regular appearances in the Chicago papers.

Soon after their marriage, the Keelers quit their jobs at the institute in favor of full-time positions with Northwestern University’s Scientific Criminal Detection Laboratory, the nation’s first forensic lab. For a decade Dean John Henry Wigmore, America’s foremost expert on the law of evidence, had been urging his university to create a criminal lab on the model of Europe’s new police labs in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, and Lyon. It took the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre to realize his ambition. When five members of Capone’s last rival gang were gunned down on February 14, 1929, along with two bystanders, the city’s newspapers discovered evidence that pointed to police involvement. The killers had arrived in a police-style touring car, wearing police uniforms, and firing police-style Thompson submachine guns. To investigate these ties, the coroner’s office impaneled a special grand jury, whose wealthy foreman, Burt Massee, solicited the advice of Wigmore. Wigmore advised him to call on the new forensic sciences: specifically the testimony of Colonel Calvin Goddard, a former army physician and amateur gun collector who had developed a ballistic analysis that could match each bullet to its individual gun.

Goddard tested every Thompson machine gun owned by the Chicago police and testified that none had fired the bullets found at the scene. Then, when Fred Burke of the Detroit Purple Gang killed a cop in Michigan, Goddard found a match. Science had absolved the police.

Massee, impressed, wanted to bring Goddard to Chicago permanently. But as a member of Chicago’s Crime Commission, Massee knew the byways of official corruption. He insisted on creating a lab "outside the pale of politics and divorced from all petty and narrow influences." Wigmore persuaded him to finance the lab as a private corporation affiliated with Northwestern University. The nonprofit corporate structure would assure outsiders that the lab’s experts were not beholden to financial interests. A modest fee for private cases would make the lab partially self-sustaining, with the staff allowed to consult on their own cases so long as they split any fees with the university. And the lab would supply its services free to government authorities, as well as train police officers, prosecutors, and other forensic experts. Goddard was appointed director and dispatched to Europe to study the world’s most advanced police labs.

Wigmore also wanted to recruit the lie detector for this effort. Twenty years earlier, in the days of Hugo Münsterberg, Wigmore had mocked the psychologist’s attempt to replace the judgment of the jury with a battery of unproved tests. But Wigmore had not ruled out hope that science might one day help the law distinguish truth from falsehood. During the Great War he had supported Marston’s studies. He had closely followed the "promising" work of John Larson. And in 1923, in the second edition of his monumental
Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence,
he had asserted, "If there is ever devised a psychological test for the valuation of witnesses, the law will run to meet it." Indeed, Wigmore had come to believe that science was on the verge of making such a test practicable. Guilty knowledge left a trace as surely as a fingerprint. "As an axe leaves its mark in the speechless tree," he wrote, "so an evil deed leaves its mark in the evil doer’s consciousness." Might Keeler’s new machine be the first to detect that mark? Soon after Keeler arrived in town, Wigmore invited him to demonstrate the new machine to his class at the law school. Against all expectation, Wigmore was impressed. "My former skeptical attitude has been very much altered since I listened to your statement and demonstration."

Goddard had already hired specialists to help with ballistics, toxicology, the microscopic analysis of dust, and crime-scene photography. Now he added Leonarde Keeler, initially half-time, then full-time. The lab also found a job for Katherine Keeler as Goddard’s personal assistant, though she soon acquired her own forensic expertise.

Keeler proved a godsend. The stock market crash ended Massee’s attempt to raise an endowment, and Keeler’s fees from lie detection became the lab’s main source of revenue and public fame. It was not long before the lab needed additional hands. One day an old pal from Berkeley called in on his way to New York. Charlie Wilson never got back on the train. He had practical skills in electronics and soon became an expert polygrapher. Affable but hot-tempered, he played bad cop to Keeler’s good cop. Once at a state fair, told that he couldn’t take target practice because he had had too much to drink, he pulled out his service revolver and began blasting away. Charlie and his wife, Jane, soon became Nard and Kay’s closest friends, and Jane volunteered around the lab as well. The university also hired a young professor of criminal law named Fred Inbau, whom Keeler trained on the lie detector.

Everyone in the lab was devoted to publicizing its work. This was not just good for business; it was the key to enhancing the lie detector’s aura of effectiveness, and hence its actual effectiveness. Keeler demonstrated his machine to dozens of business groups, ladies’ clubs, criminologists, scientists, and journalists. He scored a press notice whenever he solved a sensational case. In addition, the lab published the
American Journal of Police Science,
the first journal in the United States devoted to the science of criminal investigation. The inaugural issue contained Keeler’s first write-up of his lie detector. Also, the lab began a series of biannual monthlong courses, training fifty police officers at a time in the collection of evidence and the use of the lie detector. One student that first year was the FBI agent Charles Appel, who returned to Washington, D.C., to organize the FBI’s crime lab along similar lines.

The most influential alumnus of the course, however, was neither a cop nor a prosecutor, but a cartoonist. Chester Gould, a graduate of Northwestern University, signed up, he said, "to further my knowledge of criminology." Gould was the creator of "Dick Tracy," the
Chicago Tribune
’s premier crime-fighter, and the first to bring the violence of the pulps to the comics. Central to Tracy’s success was his use of science to defeat crime and the political corruption that fed it. Tracy himself could be read as a composite portrait of the members of the Northwestern University crime lab, with a passing resemblance to Colonel Goddard. And Gould put his own forensic lessons to good use, having Tracy tap telephones, identify bullets, test dust particles, distinguish animal from human blood, and put dozens of suspects on the lie detector.

"Dick Tracy" was fiction, that form of lie in which the forces of law and order triumph over crime on a serial basis. Chicago was real, that form of truth in which human criminality works its daily will. Though Keeler had begun to accumulate an impressive scorecard of cases, he had yet to win the approval of the Chicago police. He regularly shared a whiskey in Chicago’s finest men’s club with patrons such as Governor Horner, Dean Wigmore, Massee, and Vollmer. He dashed around town in the crime lab’s Nash, which had gold shields in front and at the rear, plus a huge silver siren up top; so that, in the words of his glamorous crime-fighting wife, "We take our place in traffic now." In 1933, at age twenty-nine, he was honored for making a "most outstanding" contribution to civic life in Chicago. Yet the Chicago police still wouldn’t let him near their suspects. Asked to comment on Keeler’s award, the city’s chief of detectives laughed derisively: "I don’t know anything about the ‘lie detector.’"

She frowned. "But, Mr. Beaumont, why should people think it unless there’s some sort of evidence, or something that can be made to look like evidence?"

He looked curiously and amusedly at her.

—DASHIELL HAMMETT,
THE GLASS KEY,
1931

UNDER VOLLMER’S GUIDANCE, LARSON AND KEELER RESUMED
cooperation. Larson promised to list Keeler as coauthor of his book on the scientific validity of lie detection. Keeler offered to contribute case results and help Larson find a publisher. In the short run, the two were to work with a committee of Chicago’s leading psychologists and criminologists—chaired by Vollmer—to resolve what Larson called [
sic
throughout], "the problems of standardization, scientific controlled and objective evaluation of validity."

But proximity can sharpen differences, and overlapping goals can make divergent strategies divisive. Working side by side, Keeler and Larson discovered they didn’t trust each other. The Keelers had settled on the North Side to be near the crime lab. The Larsons took up residence on the South Side, with access to the Institute for Juvenile Research and the Joliet penitentiary. They might as well have been living in two different Chicagos. Keeler had signed on to the North Side strategy of manly managerial crime-fighting, Larson to the South Side strategy of therapeutic reform. The outcome would be two distinct lie detectors.

Their collaboration began with a moral victory. In April 1930, two collection agents from Chicago, doing business with a bank in Black Creek, Wisconsin (population 500), returned that afternoon—according to the deputy bank teller and some other victims—to rob the bank of $733. It looked like an open-and-shut case. But the men had a good alibi and a good lawyer, who sent them to be tested by Keeler. When Keeler affirmed their innocence, the defense lawyer asked him to testify.

Without a college degree, Keeler would have been an easy mark on the stand. So he immediately got on the horn and "shouted loudly for John L. with his experience and many degrees." And Larson agreed to help, despite his previous opposition to using the lie detector in the courtroom. In later years he ascribed this lapse to his need to gather scientific information for his book; at the time, it sounded more like a matter of friendship.

On the eve of the trial’s final day, the jury was dismissed so that Keeler and Larson might explain their findings. When the chief prosecutor responded to Keeler’s proposition with a sneer and lawyerly contumely, Keeler challenged him to a card test and identified his card on the spot as the king of clubs. This coup was to no avail. The judge refused to let the lie detector usurp the jury’s role. And with so many eyewitnesses, a conviction seemed assured.

Yet the next day, in a reversal worthy of Perry Mason, the defense attorney’s daughter, Appleton’s sole female lawyer, reported that she had just obtained a confession to the Black Creek robbery from two men being held in Minneapolis. The trial was halted, and the accused men were set free.

Keeler and Larson spent a celebratory weekend in Chicago trying to persuade the Institute for Juvenile Research and the Northwestern crime lab to hire both of them half-time. Unfortunately, as Keeler informed Vollmer, "doggone John, the poor fish" had blown it. He had "arrived [for his interview] in one of his hyper states of mind, without a damn for his appearance, talked around in circles instead of the questions at hand and had his feet so far off the ground that he made a poor impression on the [Northwestern] group. In consequence he has been ruled off."

Instead, Larson resumed work under the old arrangement: half-time in medicine and half-time as an assistant state criminologist at the Institute for Juvenile Research, conducting lie detector research for Vollmer’s committee. For six months all seemed to be going well. Then Vollmer abruptly resigned his position in Chicago to return to Berkeley (for reasons never clearly identified), and everything went sour. In short order, Larson and Keeler went from being collaborators to being bitter rivals.

Though Vollmer’s committee drew on the best experts in Chicago, none met with Larson’s approval. L. L. Thurstone, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, insisted on the statistical analysis of artificial tests in which undergraduates told lies about meaningless games. The two other professors—Harold Lasswell, Keeler’s erstwhile analyst; and Chester Darrow, the physiologist—knew nothing about criminal matters.

Initially Larson exempted Leonarde Keeler from his criticisms. Still, as the senior scientist, he also felt entitled to lay down standard protocols so that their case reports could be compared. He insisted that Keeler have a physician present at every test; a girl had fainted during a recent exam, and someday a subject might suffer a heart attack or even die. Larson wrote a preamble for Keeler so that subjects would be advised that they might opt out if they objected to the test. He laid down the proper sequence of relevant and irrelevant questions, their timing, and their maximum duration, warning Keeler not to exceed these limits. He gave precise instructions on how high to inflate the blood pressure cuff, both to standardize their procedures and to ensure that the cuff did not cause discomfort. He insisted that Keeler stick to specific crimes and not go on "fishing expeditions" to elicit guilty reactions. Finally, he demanded that subjects who confessed be asked to sign a statement affirming no "rough means" had been used.

Larson was soon dishing out secondhand criticisms of their protégé to Vollmer. Apparently Keeler ignored his instructions. Worse, Larson had heard that Keeler was publicly touting the machine as "infallible," an exaggeration which tarnished the field’s reputation among serious scientists. Also, Larson’s assistant at the institute had told him that Keeler cheated on the card test by relying on clues from the audience and marked decks, just like a showman. Larson even wondered whether Keeler was too restless for research—not, he hastened to add, that he agreed with the psychiatrist in Berkeley who had once diagnosed Keeler as having a psychopathic personality. Finally, Larson had heard rumors that Keeler was turning the Northwestern University crime lab into a commercial operation. Larson urged Vollmer to rein in "our young enthusiast."

There had always been a paradox at the heart of Larson’s commitment to open science. Larson recognized that Keeler had produced a polygraph machine without which researchers like himself could not hope to create a science of lie detection, and he advised all his scientific colleagues that the Keeler Polygraph was the "best modification available at the present time." But now that Keeler had actually received his patent, Larson reported that physiologists were criticizing Keeler, saying, "This sort of thing is not done in research circles." Suddenly, Larson was priding himself on not having taken the "unethical" route of patenting his own earlier device—despite the urging of friends. Unlike Keeler, he noted, he had always published his results in journals of criminology and psychology, as it was priority that mattered in science. He wrote to his former disciple, "You have never recognized the difference between
meum
and
teum
[mine and thine] as far as priority and scientific research is concerned." He feared that Keeler would sell machines "to every Tom, Dick, and Harry," allowing poorly trained operators to ruin the reputation of the new science.

Larson’s strict protocols and lofty principles did not sit well with Keeler’s sense of his prerogatives as inventor, or with the sort of interrogation Keeler wished to run. Yet there was a paradox at the heart of Keeler’s ambitions too. Keeler needed to produce reliable machines, accepted as standard in the field. But he realized that the best way for him to make money from the device was, as he put it, to "control the instrument and lease his services." Thus, when Walgreens wanted to buy several machines to set up its own in-house security team, he refused, and offered to consult for the company instead. As he confided to an associate, he made only $125 from each machine sold, and each sale created a competitor. That is why Keeler retained a veto right on every sale. So he was not being disingenuous when he assured Larson that he was doing all he could to prevent the "prostitution and promiscuous use" of his polygraph. But this short-term sacrifice of sales was worthwhile only if he cultivated his public renown.

Keeler and his colleagues at Northwestern University certainly had a knack for inserting themselves into crime stories. The machine didn’t always break the case, but it always got a headline. When the attractive step-daughter of a merchant in Rock Island, Illinois, was found dead, trussed up and half naked in an icy Illinois river, Keeler’s machine fingered the neighbors’ son, who later confessed and was convicted of murder. When apaunchy assistant embalmer from Rockford claimed that two highway bandits shot his wife on her fifty-third birthday, Keeler put him on the machine and soon had him confessing in tearful sobs. When a prominent woman physician of sixty-two was suspected of murdering her daughter-in-law on the operating table in the basement of her gloomy Chicago mansion, a nonstop lie detection interrogation produced two confessions: the first by the loyal son seeking to shift blame away from his mother, the second by the steely mother seeking to shield her beloved son. The mother was imprisoned on manslaughter charges.

The risk of this strategy was that it stoked a demand Keeler could not satisfy, tempting rivals to enter the market. His patent offered little protection. Moreover, his rivals had pedigrees of their own. Chester Darrow’s machine by the Stoelting Company was already on the market. CaptainC. D. Lee, one of Vollmer’s oldest aides, sold a Berkeley Psychograph, which was almost identical to Keeler’s device except that its tambours were still all-rubber. As Lee explained, Keeler’s metal ones were prone to fracture and required frequent calibration because they needed long, fragile pen arms to amplify their slight movement.

Under this pressure, Keeler gradually switched strategies. Through most of the 1930s he sold his machine only to police officers trained in his courses at Northwestern University. Then in the late 1930s he allowed Walgreens and a few others to purchase machines. But as long as he remained at the crime lab, Keeler preferred to trade on his personal renown as an interrogator.

More divisive than their fights over the hardware of the polygraph were Keeler and Larson’s disputes over the "software" of interrogation. Larson had found that as many as half of the subjects reacted with guilt when asked a broad question about complicity in crime. Larson’s obstacle was Keeler’s opportunity. One month after the crash of 1929, still working at Joliet, Keeler confided to Vollmer an idea he had been "tossing about among the fleeting clouds." Many department stores, he noticed, were losing money to their employees’ "crooked twists." What if he subjected each employee to a lie detector test every six months, weeding out the "lifters" and putting "the fear of the Lord" in the rest? Marshall Field lost $50,000 a year to pilfering by employees; if he reduced the theft by, say, 75 percent, the retailer could pay him $12,000 and still come out ahead. With American businesses as a whole losing nearly $337 million a year to employees’ pilfering, there was a huge market for testing honesty.

One early case showed how easily it could be done. When the state’s attorney called in Keeler to test a bank teller for embezzlement, the polygraph test showed no evidence of guilt; but when Keeler ran other employees, three tellers confessed to pocketing the bank’s money and the vice president showed signs of guilt. Within a year Keeler was offering businesses in Chicago his services as an enforcer of honesty. In 1931 he signed an agreement with the Chicago representative of Lloyds of London, who promised banks a 10 percent reduction in their insurance premium if they let Keeler test their employees periodically. What he found shocked managers. In bank after bank, about 10 to 25 percent of employees confessed to thievery. Most of the thefts involved a furtive dip into petty cash, losses that would not show up in the account books.

The managers’ reflex was to fire these employees, but Keeler urged that they be quietly retained and retested regularly. There was no need to make a fuss while the public was skittish about bank closures. Besides, he promised, the confessed tellers would henceforth be the bank’s most honest employees. Indeed, of the 1,000 tellers tested during his first two years at Northwestern University, only three resumed pilfering—or admitted as much on Keeler’s return. The lie detector become a psychological deterrent as much as a catcher of thieves. This strategy also brought Keeler back in for another round of remunerative testing. And because he split his fees fifty-fifty with the crime lab, his screening venture soon became its financial mainstay.

As for employees who protested, Keeler advised managers to inform them that the insurance company had made the test a requirement for bonding. "Under the circumstances employees have very little or no resentment to the test." Many, he said, actually felt better after owning up to their misdeeds. In reality, though, many tellers were fired or resigned after failing tests; of the twenty employees at Lake View Trust, three were discharged for taking previously unnoticed sums, and two resigned rather than accept a transfer.