The Lie Detectors (30 page)

The publicity given the Majczek case—and Erle Stanley Gardner’s own role in a reprieve from death row—inspired Gardner, Schindler, and Keeler to found the Court of Last Resort, a chance for convicted men and women to appeal to two authorities even more sacrosanct than the law. Ordinary Americans deserved access to the same scientific defense as Marigny. And every American ought to be free to present a case to the true court of last resort, the American people. Working with the publisher of
Argosy,
a men’s monthly devoted to detective stories and manly adventures, Gardner explained his court’s plan to place scientific expertise before the public, or at least before the next best thing, the American magazine subscriber. He urged subscribers to become "a militant body who are willing to fight for justice." "Remember," he told them, "this is
your
Court. We are merely investigators."

The Court of Last Resort was not bound by the legal maneuverings whereby prosecutors bamboozled jurors, experts faced humiliating cross-examinations, and persnickety judges barred the door to valuable techniques like lie detection. This was the route of the men’s magazine to swift and certain justice. Gardner boasted the Court of Last Resort gave voice to those who believed that state power had run amok. It planned its own fleet of mobile forensic labs, one for each state, with teams of crime scene investigators.

First, however, it had to decide which cases to take on. As Gardner put it: "We had to know the men we were talking with were telling the truth." This was a job for the lie detector. "[W]hen Keeler pronounced it as his opinion that a man was guilty, he usually had the definite proof to back up his contention."

Public officials responded warily to the Court of Last Resort. Some prosecutors dismissed it as a publicity stunt. Others cooperated in hopes of assuring the public that no innocent man was incarcerated. Yet when prosecutors reopened cases, they discovered miscarriages of justice.

Though Keeler helped on two early cases, he never made the switch to defense. As he told his collaborators, with every prisoner in Joliet clamoring for a test, officials in Illinois now insisted on preapproving each one. Besides, his own health was erratic. In his place, the Court of Last Resort turned to two of his disciples. Even so, the court was swamped with pleas, and its achievements were mixed. By the mid-1950s its subscriptions were dropping. In 1957–1958 it enjoyed a brief run as a TV drama opposite
Dragnet.
When Gardner finally dissociated himself from the Court of Last Resort, it was handed over to the American Polygraph Association, which rechristened it the "Case Review Committee." By the 1960s, the lie detector had its own television show, in which polygraph tests were run "live" before millions of viewers. This strategy of using scientific investigations to publicly expose wrongful convictions would not be taken up again until the 1990s, when DNA evidence helped reopen old cases to public scrutiny.

In the years after Kay left him, when he wasn’t pursuing criminals, exonerating innocents, and drinking at the city’s hot spots, Keeler let himself be seduced by a series of beautiful, spirited women—none of whom trusted him. Or at least, all of them tried to improve him, and none succeeded. Through everything, Keeler maintained his outward cool. The gossip columnists figured him for the "still-waters-run-deep" type. Girls were warned to watch their alibis when the "lie detector man" was around. He was still known to use his lie detector machine as an aid in seduction, as he had done since high school, with his pal the Commander tipping him off about "good ones" who expressed interest in a "personal demonstration." (Among them, perhaps, was the Commander’s wife; the two men broke off contact after the McDonalds’ divorce, and Keeler was later accused of being her lover.)

In the Bahamas Keeler was pursued by his exuberant, glossy hostess, a twenty-one-year-old baroness, originally Marie Goodwill of Montreal, married to a Swedish earl of forty, whom she called "Papa" and with whom she had a one-year-old daughter. By her own admission she was a possessive mistress who feared discovery but defied it. "My darling," she scrawled in one mid-morning missive to Keeler, "I wonder how I can live without someday betraying myself to others in my looks at you, for when, like us, the fruit is forbidden, then must a glance, a touch, tell so very much." Not that she cared whether her husband disapproved or not (apparently he didn’t). Nor did she care what the censor thought. "After all, if the Imperial British censor cannot smile to himself and keep a secret, what has become of Imperial British censorship[?]"

Back on the mainland, Keeler took up with Sarah Elizabeth Rodger, a former debutante who had already published a raft of stories for women’s magazines, a book of poetry (
If I Cry Release
), and two novels (
Strange Woman
and
Not with My Heart
). When she met Keeler in New York in 1943, she was divorced and had a five-year-old son. In Chicago they cruised on the lake, drank at the Pump Room, and canoodled in his office while his secretary was on break. Rodger was a woman who knew enough not to trust men, yet knew how little ground they had to trust women, who had little reason to trust one another, despite how famously they all got along. She sent a copy of her title poem, "If I Cry Release," to Keeler: "Oh hold me closely, say the lovely lie/ And then have done. The little rapture slips/ To nothing—even underneath your lips."

In her fiction men and women smolder under society’s conventions. They blush, flush, and otherwise betray their secret desires. Romance fiction had this in common with the lie detector: both were based on a sentimental appreciation of the human body, the idea that the beating heart and heaving breast spoke a truth deeper than words—though those words were inevitably confessed in the end. Keeler, she recognized, was that rare man, "one you can tell anything to." Yet she also recognized the dangers of such seductive listening. It made him the sort of man a woman could read anything into, a mirror of her feelings, an enchanting lie detector. When his letters to her proved insufficiently heartfelt, she wrote herself love letters on his behalf (with parenthetical commentary) for him to mail back to her.

When she pressed too hard for marriage, the relationship ended; she married someone else soon after.

Most decisive of all was Franja Hutchins, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Robert Hutchins, the formidable chancellor of the University of Chicago. When Franja was fourteen, her mother, an artist, shocked the faculty by illustrating her annual Christmas card with a drawing of the pubescent Franja in pigtails, stark naked, holding seasonal candles. By the time she was sixteen the society pages were aflutter over this "stunning young woman," so "tall and poised, with dark brown curls that frame her pretty face." By the time she was a freshman at Bennington she was romantically linked to Keeler, then thirty-nine. She reassured him that the age difference meant nothing. A twenty-one-year-old friend of hers had married a man of fifty, "so take heart, young man." One gossip columnist imagined them engaged. Privately, Franja sent Keeler overwrought poems, hinting at secrecy and betrayal, including, "We cannot love/ or trust."

Her ambition for him made her nag. But Keeler never put any more effort into his women than his business. He lived comfortably in his bachelor’s apartment in the pseudo-Renaissance villa on Dearborn, two blocks south of Lincoln Park in one of the city’s most elegant districts. He had a maid to clean his apartment and cook his meals, including breakfast. What more did he need?

The public Keeler was everything the private Keeler could never be. In public, he was gregarious, charming, a pal to all the world: one of the manly men who got things done. Wherever he went, the women cooed, the alcohol was poured. "My hobby is collecting friends," he once said. As one eulogist would comment: "Many times he neglected his business for his hobby." Privately, he was wounded, wary, mistrustful. He considered himself a failure and bemoaned the narrowness of his achievement. Alone, he hated himself, and so he hated to be alone. Leonarde Keeler was a man whose most intimate relations took place in a soundproof interrogation room where men and women bared their souls—at some risk to his own.

Even the ordained priest taking confessions in the name of an all-knowing power runs an acknowledged risk. Confession manuals since the Middle Ages have guided confessors on how to conduct themselves, both for the sake of the souls of the penitent and for their own. Priests were warned not to inquire too directly into the sex life of married couples lest they develop a prurient interest, or into any matter out of idle curiosity. Inquisitors had to be at least forty years old and of strong character: honest, prudent, virtuous, and versed in theology. Moreover, priests and inquisitors could always turn to one another for absolution. Where could the operator of the lie detector turn?

The operator of the lie detector claimed to draw on the preeminent authorities of the modern age: science and the law. But Keeler knew better. What comfort did science or the law offer him? The lie detector was condemned by respectable science, and only half acknowledged by the law. Where then could he turn for absolution, except perhaps to alcohol, the universal solvent? Even psychiatrists see psychiatrists. What about lie detectors?

The damage done by the mechanical lie detector—like the destruction wrought by the third degree or judicial torture—is not confined to its subjects, or even to the legal system that bears the burden of unreliable confessions and distorted justice. The interrogator also pays the price of perpetual mistrust and human isolation, like Dostoevsky’s "Grand Inquisitor." According to the head of the polygraph unit for New York City, all the polygraphers of Keeler’s generation were alcoholics.

In her diaries Agnes de Mille left a searing record of one of Keeler’s grand meltdowns. She was in Chicago at Christmas 1943 to celebrate the opening of
Oklahoma!
—though a bit blue because her bridegroom had been shipped off to Europe. She wanted to elicit some sympathy from Keeler; but the first time she tried, he had a blond singer on his arm, and the second time he had a redhead. Finally, he invited her to his apartment for what she thought would be a companionable New Year’s celebration. When she arrived, a party was in full swing. Keeler’s personal physician, himself well liquored up, pulled de Mille aside to warn her not to let Leonarde drink too much. "This is the anniversary of Kay’s leaving, and he’s never anything short of desperate. Watch him."

She tried. She followed the party to the Double Eagle, where dancing Russian waiters served flaming shish kebabs. But she lost Keeler in the roar that always greeted him. When she next sighted him, he was stationed at the bar beside a pretty blond and sagging at the knees—but not from love or drink. Something was badly wrong. By the time she got there, he was pushing past her and out the door—only to return, moments later, flashing his gold police badge and flanked by two large men.

The coat-check girl gave her the lowdown. Apparently Nard had ordered a boorish lout to stop pestering the blond, and the drunk had hit him "low, very low." But Keeler hadn’t struck back. He had walked away, then returned to arrest the lout. Now the drinking could begin in earnest. Keeler was lit up, manic.

By the time she coaxed him back alone to his apartment his charm had turned to melancholy. Half sobbing, he recited his bitter catechism: "How Kay had betrayed him, how he had put a detective on her and found out the extent of her infidelity, how nobody cared for him, how he despised his daily occupations." During an interval, de Mille hid the whiskey. "He was the greatest detective in America and he couldn’t find his own bottles of whiskey right under the sink." Keeler slammed his fist into the door, called her a bitch, then crumpled.

She was stroking his damp hair when the doorbell announced another set of revelers, including a glittery brunette who quickly located the booze. De Mille pleaded, "He’s been drinking for forty-eight hours nonstop. No food. He’s on the point of collapse. I’m going to send for a doctor and first aid. You mustn’t do this. It’s wicked."

"Who are the hell are you?" sneered the brunette. "His New York lay or something?" Even Nard shoved de Mille aside. "Sorry, honey, but I don’t think you know about these things."

Instead of the doctor, it was the doctor’s wife who arrived, a small, white-haired woman in her sixties, as blotto as the rest of them. "Didn’t expect me, did you?" she giggled, her speech slurred like a child’s. She ordered the men to carry Nard into the bedroom, then ordered them out, gave de Mille a wink, and shut the door behind her. Silence.

Nard sat up long enough to convey the doctor’s wife’s malicious verdict: that de Mille was just acting the war widow; that what she needed was a screw. De Mille slapped him hard. Nard kissed her hand, then toppled over.