The Lie Detectors (29 page)

Since the mid-1930s Hoover had kept close tabs on the device he always called "experimental." In 1935, he ordered the special agent E. P. Coffey to spend a week in Keeler’s lab training on the Keeler Polygraph and observing bank cases. (Hoover had always been envious of the Northwestern University crime lab for getting the jump on his own.) Initially skeptical, Coffey had returned to Washington persuaded that the instrument produced results, albeit only in the hands of a skilled operator such as Keeler. This conclusion confirmed Hoover’s suspicion—corroborated by his correspondence with John Larson—that the lie detector gave the operator wide discretion over the findings.

Still, the FBI did purchase a Keeler Polygraph and Coffey conducted experimental tests on his fellow agents, with mixed results. During the 1940s the FBI even secretly began to use the test in selected cases of embezzlement and sabotage—though it deliberately concealed this fact from both the public and other government agencies, lest they come to expect an exam in all cases, or worse, demand to know if an exam had exonerated a person the bureau wished to charge. Then, in the early 1950s, the bureau abandoned the machine altogether. Hoover thought its results particularly misleading in screening for political loyalty, a situation where many emotions came into play. After all, to the extent the machine was believed, it offered an alternative to Hoover’s own machinery of accusation, which he preferred to operate outside public scrutiny. Tellingly, he always insisted that the machine was ineffectual against sexual deviates. "I personally would not want to accept solely the evidence of what the operator of a lie detector says the lie detector shows in proving that a man was or was not a sex deviate." And no wonder, given the rumors, whether true or false, of his own proclivities.

In the end, the "lavender scare" ruined more lives than the "red scare," and proved an equally potent weapon in the battle to shift America’s domestic politics and foreign policy toward the machismo right. The historian Robert D. Dean has plausibly suggested that the foreign policy establishment was so eager to display its manliness that it marched the nation into Vietnam. And the historian David K. Johnson has suggested that one unintended consequence of the lavender scare was to push the American homosexual community to organize itself politically for the first time. It is no accident, he notes, that Frank Kameny, founder of the nation’s first publicly active gay group, was both a scientist and a civil servant who lost his job in the purge. The lie detector was, of course, no more than a tool in these larger struggles, and an ambiguous one at that. The instrument bred suspicions as fast as it assuaged them, creating suspect foreigners, suspect friends, suspect selves. In the process, the lie detector blurred the differences between formal crimes and personal sins, political views and sexual identity. In the end, everyone was a potential subject of suspicion: after all, we’re all pink inside.

He was of no real importance, of course. Just a human being with blood and a brain and emotions.

—RAYMOND CHANDLER,
THE LONG GOODBYE,
1954

THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, LEONARDE KEELER HAD SERVED
authority. Though he never wore a uniform or drew pay from the government, he had consulted for police and prosecutors, seconded corporate managers, and subcontracted himself out to the U.S. Army. Not an organization man himself, he had labored at the behest of organization men, with this one proviso: he was free to exonerate as well as condemn. Now, in the postwar period, in business for himself, Keeler began to offer a new service: absolution. From across America, the letters poured in.

Some of the writers were troubled by a nameless guilt. "No one has ever accused me of doing anything wrong," confided one seventy-four-year-old woman, "but for a long time I have felt that my movements were watched with suspicion." She dated her troubles to the day, thirty years earlier, when she had "picked up an empty glass case by mistake." Now she felt under arrest in her own room. Might the lie detector absolve her? An elderly man wanted to take a lie detector test to prove to his psychiatrist that he had never worked for the Secret Service.

For decades petitioners had sought Keeler’s exoneration for crimes, real and imaginary. Now their fellow citizens longed to hear tales of vindication. To assuage that longing Keeler joined in 1949 with two new pals, Erle Stanley Gardner and Raymond Schindler—America’s top-selling novelist and its most famous detective—to found the "Court of Last Resort," an exculpation service for a Kafkaesque age. When police and prosecutors presumed your guilt, when law courts favored the rich and powerful, when politicians ignored your plight, you could still appeal to the Court of Last Resort and its famous lie detector.

Leonarde Keeler had always operated the lie detector like a deus ex machina, an oracle whose judgments descended on the scene of human entanglement like a mechanical god descending from the rafters: condemning the guilty, absolving the innocent, and making retrospective sense of the drama. The lie detector resolved ambiguity by shoving it into a box. This form of justice has never satisfied the critics. Aristotle hated the device of the deus ex machina. He held that the resolution of a drama had to emerge from within the logic and conflicts of the plot itself. The courtroom trial is one such drama, in which the audience—the jury—sorts through the crosscutting motives and actions to render final judgment. But courtroom justice is expensive, delayed, and untidy. On behalf of millions of Americans disappointed by legalistic wrangling, the Court of Last Resort summoned two gods of our own day—science and publicity—to render final judgment. In this capacity Keeler won his greatest public fame, without himself receiving absolution.

Keeler’s first step toward the summit of celebrity began with the case of Harry Oakes. In the midst of World War II, the press barons nevertheless found room on their front pages for the scandals of the rich, famous, and aristocratic. In 1943, hundreds of correspondents descended on the Bahamas to cover the trial of Count Alfred de Marigny, accused of bashing in the skull of his multimillionaire father-in-law, Sir Harry Oakes. Oakes had been the owner of the western hemisphere’s wealthiest gold mine, and an intimate friend of the duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the British throne and was now royal governor of the Bahamas. Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, sent by the Hearst papers to get the "behind the scenes stuff that other writers can’t get," called it the "greatest murder mystery of all time" and "the most intense drama of the century."

On the morning of July 8, 1943, Oakes’s friend and real estate agent Harold Christie had discovered Oakes in bed, his head crushed and his body ritualistically burned. The duke of Windsor delayed the public announcement long enough to assign the case to a pair of detectives from Miami—his sometime bodyguards—who pinned the blame on Marigny, a twice-divorced French roué who had married Oakes’s svelte, redheaded daughter Nancy two days after her eighteenth birthday. Father and son-inlaw were known to detest each another.

Yet Nancy stood by her husband. She hired America’s most famous detective, Raymond Schindler, who in turn hired Keeler. The sleuths lodged with Nancy’s friend from boarding school, the baroness Marie af Trolle, where they entertained reporters. Nancy wanted the detectives not just to hunt for scientific clues but to "turn around the bad publicity…and see that the truth is told."

Gardner’s job was to guide millions of readers through the legal stratagems, "just as Perry Mason would do if he were summing up the case." The challenge for the defense, as Gardner saw it, was to explain Marigny’s fingerprint in the Oakes mansion, which Marigny claimed not to have visited in two years. In his first dispatch, Gardner promised an interview with Professor Leonarde Keeler, "T
HE
M
AN
W
HO
R
EADS
M
INDS WITH A
B
OX
." Keeler, announced Gardner, had come to test Marigny on his lie detector—in open court! Of course, as the British courts did not accept the lie detector as evidence, Keeler would simply offer to test Marigny in open court, a challenge that Marigny would surely accept.

Keeler never issued his challenge. John Larson, hearing of this plan for "grandstanding," spent several hours on the phone, briefing the prosecutors on the instrument’s flaws. But Keeler’s other forensic skills did help win the day for the defense. He proved that the copy of Marigny’s fingerprint taken from the crime scene could not have been lifted from a Chinese screen, as the American detectives claimed, since the image lacked the telltale background design.

The lie detector had been denied its day in court, but the court of public opinion would not be disappointed. Like a gun waved conspicuously in the first act, the device had to go off before the final curtain. Two days after Marigny’s acquittal, at a victory celebration at the home of the baroness af Trolle—by now passionately in love with Keeler—the machine was brought out for its delayed performance. Keeler was playing the card-guessing game with the ladies, the newspapers were informed, when Marigny, seized with the desire to clear his name, overruled his lawyer’s scruples and volunteered to be put on the machine. Wonder of wonders, reported the newsreels, he was cleared by the box.

The case lifted Keeler to a new level of American stardom. It was the apotheosis of the lie detector, the moment when it rose above its quasi-scientific origins and ascended into the realm of pure publicity known as celebrity. Back on the mainland, Keeler received the full three-part treatment in the
Saturday Evening Post.
"The Magic Lie Detector"—by the first writer to win a Pulitzer Prize for science journalism—was an ode to the miraculous potency of the polygraph, a triumph for science as superstition. Then Keeler reached the apogee of fame: he was asked to play himself in a Hollywood movie.

In 1948, Twentieth Century Fox released
Call Northside 777,
starring James Stewart. It was based on the real-life vindication of Joe Majczek, a Chicagoan who had spent eleven years in Joliet for the murder of a police officer during a holdup at a delicatessen. Vera Walush, the proprietress and sole eyewitness, had identified Majczek and his partner Theodore Marcinkiewicz as the killers; the jury disbelieved their alibis; and in 1933 the judge sentenced both men to ninety-nine years in prison. Eleven years later, the reporter James McGuire of the
Chicago Times
learned that Majczek’s mother was scrubbing floors to assemble a $5000 reward for evidence to prove her son’s innocence. What began as a human interest story became a newspaper crusade to exonerate Majczek.

McGuire learned that the trial judge (since deceased) had had doubts about the case; that no other witness had identified the two men; that the "delicatessen" was a speakeasy; and that Walush, who had been hiding in a closet during the robbery, had twice failed to pick out the two accused men in a police lineup before changing her story the next day, apparently under pressure from the police. Indeed, the police had altered the date on Majczek’s arrest sheet to cover up this switch. Furthermore, the killing had occurred before the Chicago world’s fair, so the cops themselves were under intense pressure to solve the case quickly. Still, there was no proof that Majczek was innocent until McGuire arranged with Keeler for Majczek to take a polygraph test in November 1944. The morning headline announced the machine’s judgment: "Lie Detector Clears Joe." It was the 1930s all over again—the lie detector versus police corruption—but this time with the lie detector playing defense. On August 15, 1945, Majczek was pardoned by the governor and was given $24,000 in compensation, plus $1,000 from Fox for the rights to his story. The movie took the form of a film noir documentary, advertised with the line "Every word is true." Shot on location, in rancid city neighborhoods, it touted the superiority of the independent investigator over the sclerotic formality of the law, and impartial scientific evidence over self-interested testimony. The movie gazed into the shadowy mirror of noir paranoia: the story of an innocent man who is incarcerated—and finally exonerated, though no thanks to the official guardians of the law.

Keeler’s lie detector makes its entrance at the fulcrum of the plot. The scene opens with a close-up of a bulky apparatus of knobs and dials—"a formidable looking-machine," says the screenplay—while a husky voice explains that "[t]he only thing the machine is for is to record the emotional reactions of an individual." The camera then rises toward the large blond man in the wide lapels who is instructing the reporter while he lovingly adjusts the machine with supple fingers. Keeler is not movie-star handsome, but real-life handsome, if a tad haggard, with a broad body, a reassuring Nordic face, and hair flipped neatly to one side. His explanation done, the reporter leaves and the prisoner is brought in. He is a small man, visibly nervous and obviously "ethnic," but not shifty-eyed: a decent man who has gotten a bad rap. With clinical courtesy, Keeler invites the ethnic man to take a seat and relax. Then he hooks him up to the machine and asks him to pick a card, any card.

As the interrogation begins, we watch the prisoner’s chest rise and fall, his eyes dart left and right, his nostrils flare, his fingers twitch, and the machine’s needles dance across the page. It is an intimate moment, and the camera delicately averts its gaze. By the time it returns to the interrogation room, the session is done. Keeler lights a post-interrogation cigarette and passes it to Majczek before releasing him from the chair and dismissing him. The two reporters rush in.

It was as if the machine had read Majczek’s soul. The next scene has honest Jimmy Stewart typing the only possible conclusion: "P
ASSES
L
IE
T
EST
."

But in real life, Majczek was back in trouble, and once again calling on the services of the lie detector. This is the problem with summoning a deus ex machina: let it descend from the rafters but once, and there will be no end of human mysteries it will be asked to resolve. According to Majczek, the state legislator who had sponsored his restitution had demanded a $5,000 cut for his pains. "[A] lawyer would ask for a bigger fee," he’d allegedly said. This the legislator denied, and demanded that Keeler give him a lie detector test to clear his name. When Keeler refused, the legislator turned to Keeler’s nemesis, Orlando Scott, who posed the legislator in his "brainwave detector" for an exclusive in the
Chicago Herald American
—and found him truthful too. This prompted Majczek to turn to Keeler for another test, to be published in the
Chicago Times,
to prove he was telling "the entire truth"—whereupon the legislator responded that he "didn’t believe in the lie detector" anyway.

Then Theodore Marcinkiewicz, Majczek’s partner, still in prison, demanded that Keeler test him too. His test indicated that he was lying, even after he admitted stealing cars, robbing government trucks, casing Walush’s speakeasy, and pulling a previous crime with Majczek (who, it now turned out, may have done time for an earlier robbery). As none of these episodes meshed with the reporter’s story line, none was reported. Two years later Marcinkiewicz was also freed.