The Lie Detectors (12 page)

When Herman Adler replaced Healy in 1916, he expanded this mission. At the time the institute was placed under the Illinois Bureau of Public Welfare’s Criminology Division. In addition to the 1,000 children evaluated for the juvenile court each year, the institute became responsible for psychiatric evaluations of all state prisoners and parole applicants. Access to these populations made the institute an ideal testing ground for the lie detector.

As fate would have it, the most notorious juvenile crime in American history hit the front pages just as John Larson arrived in Chicago. Overnight the nation became consumed with why Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two precocious friends from privileged families in Chicago, had capriciously but deliberately murdered a fourteen-year-old boy they hardly knew. Larson, watching the affair, bemoaned the farcical light the trial shone on the so-called "impartial administration of justice"; the "hysterical" newspaper accounts; and especially the blatherings of the self-important psychiatrists of every stripe.

According to the state’s official psychiatrists, Leopold and Loeb were fantasists engaged in games of dominance and deception. The young genius, Nathan Leopold, they reported, had often fantasized that he was a willing slave to a king whose life he had saved, and whom he deceived. Handsome, suave Richard Loeb had long fancied himself a master criminal; as befitted a skillful and unrepentant liar, he had a reputation for being frank and truthful. Even when his examiners knew he was lying, they admitted that they could not detect any telltale sign. Healy, back in town to testify for the defense, carried out a battery of psychiatric tests. His testimony hinged on the divergence between the young men’s superior intellect and their warped emotional life, a divergence so great it resembled a split personality. Yet as he admitted on cross-examination, as both were consummate liars how could he be sure?

Larson was sure he could do better—get "good stuff on them"—if he could only run them on his machine. Not only did it prey on the disjuncture between the intellect and emotion; it was ideally suited to distinguish psychiatric illnesses from fakery. Yet not until Leopold and Loeb were saved from the electric chair did the Institute for Juvenile Research assume control over America’s most notorious killers. In the Joliet prison, Larson subjected them to his own tests, including a session with Loeb on the lie detector. As was his wont, he even tried to befriend the pair, seeking over the years to solve the riddle that had eluded so many rival experts. This attempt would prove his undoing.

In the meantime, as the institute’s staff swelled to 100—thanks to philanthropy spurred by the fear of another Leopold and Loeb—Larson had to defend his approach against rival methods. All happy families may be alike, but dogooders don’t always get along. The lie detector may have initially seemed to finesse divergences within the reform movement, but it also threatened to expose fissures. Sociological investigators urged delinquents to tell "their own story." Those in the Healy-Adler "orthopsychiatric" camp approached their patients from a medical-psychiatric point of view. Still others, like John Larson, looked to physiology for evidence of criminal pathology. The institute tried to weave these strands together by having each patient examined by a team of professionals, including a social worker, a physician, a psychologist, and a recreation worker. All these examinations culminated in a series of in-depth psychiatric interviews. But friction developed beneath the surface.

Even among the physiologists, there were differences. Larson’s colleague Chester Darrow tested his subjects in a "PhotoPolygraph," an experimental cocoon in which pubescent boys and girls were subjected to various stimuli while festooned with gauges. Boys were read phrases like "masturbation pleasant," then smacked on the head. Girls were read words like "menstruation," followed by a slap. Darrow envisaged his apparatus not so much as a lie detector but rather as a way to explore the general relations between emotions and reflex reactions, showing for instance that forms of stress which provoked the flight-fight response also produced sweaty palms, which presumably had once been useful for gaining traction. Darrow helped found the science of psychophysiology.

Larson, by contrast, focused on individual cases and cures. Between 1923 and 1927, he questioned over 200 children. Some were frightened by the test and cried, but when told they would come to no harm, all submitted, except one five-year-old girl. About half had been referred for making false accusations (usually of a sexual nature) against adults, for faking psychiatric conditions, or for confessing to crimes they had not committed. The other half were suspected of lying to a nurse or had refused to speak. Larson extracted confessions from over half the children—without, he noted, directly accusing them of lying. He then returned them to their caseworkers with their resistance removed. For instance, he got a boy who lied repeatedly about sex to confess to masturbation, whereupon the boy showed no further reaction on the instrument. Once this boy was freed from the lie, psychotherapy could begin. Only 8 percent had their stories confirmed by the test. This left a large group of children, nearly 40 percent, whose tests Larson marked "disturbed" and sent back with a notice that the polygraph test should not be used as evidence in court. Yet even in these cases Larson thought he had identified the complexes inhibiting therapy.

Instead of winning him their gratitude, however, Larson’s work threatened to expose his colleagues as dupes. And to be honest—always Larson’s policy—he let them know it. Thanks to the lie detector, he boasted, he was "showing up some of the methods of these pseudo scientists and psychologists and psychiatrists who think themselves so almighty." The sociologists had no way to vet the tall tales the children fed them (and it was no good claiming, as they sometimes did, that the patients’ braggadocio was the phenomenon they were studying). Larson had particular contempt for the female social workers, who acted, he said, as if they "run the roost." He didn’t let them sit in on his cases. "One woman, especially has been pestering me to get in, and just because she [is] a pest I didn’t let her in." The women couldn’t understand how he could get confessions in ten minutes on cases that had baffled them for ages. "It seems these women have an idea that I use some brutal or unscientific method of getting the confession and they want to get the goods on me."

He didn’t think much more of the psychiatrists. It didn’t help that they were mostly Jews. Larson considered Adler, with whom he was cowriting a paper on self-deception, a self-promoting fraud and "colossal joke." He told Vollmer that he already considered himself a better psychiatrist "than this baby here," thanks to his police experience—and his machine. In one quick session on the machine, Larson solved the staff’s learned controversy over the hallucinations of "Tony" (age fifteen). Larson got the boy to admit he was making the whole thing up: "Dose guys were kidding me and I went one better, gees doc….I made suckers out ofdose boids didn’t I?"

These resentments boiled to the surface when Adler, under pressure to cut the budget, fired Larson’s assistant and insisted that Larson quit medical school to work full-time at the institute. He also wanted to know why Larson had not upgraded the lie detector, or spent more time interrogating prisoners at Joliet. That did it. Larson exploded. He had not come to the institute to work on machinery; he was counting on Keeler for that.

As for Joliet, Adler himself had blocked Larson from telling the truth about the nefarious goings-on there. "Any honorable work there was a farce. Either the convict was innocent and framed in by officials whom Adler said we could not and dare not expose, or he was guilty and was buying his way out through channels we must ignore." In a series of lengthy midnight letters to Vollmer, typed at a frantic clip, Larson laid out a plot worthy of 1920s Chicago in the raw. The story revolved around Walter Stevens, the "immune gunman" himself, a onetime labor slugger, now top triggerman for Johnny Torrio, who once boasted, "I own the police." Stevens had been arrested 300 times yet had never paid a fine or done time, lodging comfortably in a policeman’s apartment while the cops searched for him, until at long last he was brought to trial for the murder of a cop in Aurora. A dozen big-city pols, including the chief clerk of the criminal court of Cook County, confirmed Stevens’s alibi, repayment for services rendered during the governor’s recent trial for embezzlement, during which Stevens had destroyed evidence and intimidated witnesses. But the trial was in Kane County and the jury voted to convict. Even then it took public pressure and a Supreme Court ruling to dissuade the governor from granting him clemency. "Nobody knows just what the mysterious influence is that protects [Stevens] and imperils the public," said the
Chicago Tribune,
"but most folks express it in the word ‘politics.’"

In prison, the dapper Stevens had sat for a session on Larson’s lie detector, boasting afterward of his complicity in multiple murders, his pull with the authorities, and his confidence that the parole board would set him free after the primary elections. Larson had the temerity to write all this down. Moreover, he got his hands on a carbon copy of a letter from Stevens—smuggled out of Statesville by a trustee who had risked his life—indicating that Walter Jenkins, director of Public Welfare (and hence Adler’s boss), was holding out for $2,400 to secure Stevens’s release by the parole board. Not long after the primaries, lo and behold, Stevens was paroled and promptly disappeared.

According to Larson, Adler "nearly had a hemorrhage" when he saw the complaint. Adler demanded that he drop the case, as it was "loaded at both ends," and forswear his accusations. Larson refused. How could he admit to being "wrong and a liar in everything," when he was the one who was telling the truth? How, Larson wanted to know, could Adler square this sordid tale with his claim that the Institute for Juvenile Research merely provided scientific advice to the parole board? His only other option was resignation. Their exchanges became shouting matches. Adler accused Larson of using "caveman tactics"; Larson accused Adler of breaking his promises, of becoming hysterical.

Sensing conspiracies everywhere made Larson paranoid. Whenever he spoke with Adler on the phone, he made sure his wife secretly listened in. He took out $5,000 in life insurance. On several occasions he asked Vollmer to "ditch" his letters "for paranoid reasons." Winding through the maze of corruption, he sometimes wondered if he himself was lost. He admitted that his letters were "scatter-brained." He was so apoplectic that he sometimes felt like exploding. To bear the burden of the truth was agonizing.

From California, Vollmer tried to calm his disciple. The "strong-arm methods" of police work were not suitable for his colleagues. "Your reactions of necessity will be the full-blooded American reaction, but be patient and your time will come." He warned Larson not to run afoul of men who could louse up his chance for a medical degree, and advised him to drop the Stevens scandal, bide his time, and then, once he got his M.D., show them all up. In the meantime he needed the institute’s access to subjects. With one quick phone call, Vollmer persuaded Adler to take Larson back at the institute.

In his letters to Vollmer, Larson had vilified Adler as a liar, loyal only to his own interests; no wonder, Larson said, no one trusted the psychiatrist. Larson, by contrast, considered himself loyal to his ideals, uncorrupted by material gain or personal advantage, and unswervingly honest. If anything, he was proud of his "natural inclination…to tell people what I think of them." These were the qualities of a trustworthy man. "I at least have open enemies," he typed in a letter to Vollmer, adding by hand, "if any."

In 1927, John A. Larson, M.D., Ph.D., left the cesspool of corrupt Chicago to take a fellowship in psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins Medical School. Adolf Meyer, head of the Phipps Clinic there, was America’s most influential psychiatrist, a Swiss-trained neurologist who had brought modern clinical methods to the New World, only to discover, under the influence of William James and John Dewey, the possibility of a "truly American advance" toward "a new conception of man." Again, it was Vollmer’s connections that sprang the fellowship for Larson: Meyer had first been introduced to Larson in Vollmer’s office. Meyer called his approach "psychobiology," and he explained its principles in a lecture before Larson and the Institute for Juvenile Research in 1926.

Psychobiology sought to unite all contending schools under one pacific faith; it combined the Freudians’ emphasis on dynamic psychology, the behaviorists’ focus on public actions, the psychiatrists’ mania for classification, the neurologists’ focus on brain function, the physiologists’ researches into the bodily correlates of the emotions, and even the sociologists’ understanding of the environment. What organized this contradictory mélange was an intense focus on the individual patient, the "person," as Meyer disarmingly put it, with each individual to be considered "an experiment in nature." The task of the psychobiologist was to help the patient adjust to the conditions of life, much as animals either adjusted to their circumstances or faced the Darwinian consequences. Meyer’s method was both simple and humane. But to its critics, psychobiology was both simplistic and moralistic.

Take the problem of eliciting the facts of a life history. Meyer had a naive faith that the psychiatrist could elicit the most relevant facts from each patient, whereas Freud and his successors were convinced that only roundabout maneuvers, like the analysis of dreams or free associations, could coax patients to reveal traumas hidden even from themselves. For Freud, the manner in which self-deluding patients represented their lives was as apt a key to their psyche as what had "actually happened." Because patients’ lies were as revelatory as the truth, a lie detector had little value. For his part, Meyer was confident that any fact worth recording was the sort of public, objective fact the physician and patient could readily agree on. To aid in this, the psychiatrist might well use intelligence tests, memory tests, and even physiological tests like a lie detector. Hence, Meyer was intrigued by Larson’s technique, even as he insisted that it was only a tool of diagnosis.