The Lie Detectors (3 page)

The next day, a distraught Helen Graham came to the police station, demanding to see her record. For twelve hours, Larson and Fisher bombarded her with questions until she "broke down and had an attack of sobbing." She continued to assert her innocence, but admitted she might have taken the items "in her sleep or in some possible mental disorder." She even offered to replace the ring and money if that would end the investigation. Larson, playing the good cop, told her she ought not to make restitution if she was innocent. Fisher, playing the bad cop, told her that if she was guilty, she would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Then she was sent home.

Every day that week she stopped at the police station to demand an appointment, but by prior agreement, the police refused to speak with her. Only when she threatened suicide did Larson meet with her again. Again she insisted on making restitution with the understanding that the case be closed. Again he refused to accept the money unless she admitted her guilt. A few days later, she returned with a substitute diamond ring; the original, she said, had been "lost." But as this new ring was of lesser value, Miss Taylor insisted on another. The next day, the police tailed Graham when she took the ferry across to San Francisco to meet her lover, Roger Harvey, with whom she went to Morgan’s jewelry store to pick out a suitable replacement ring. That evening, she presented the ring to Larson, swearing that the stone was similar to the original, while admitting that the original setting had been melted down. The next day, she was followed again, but this time she "made" the tail and eluded him.

The denouement came on April 30, when Larson arranged an interrogation in the time-honored manner: "Officer Fisher played the role of ‘hard-boiled cop’ with his usual adroitness, and I was her friend." After several hours, Fisher stormed out of the room, telling her that when he returned he would show her she had been "booked for San Quentin." While he was gone Larson got Graham to admit taking the money and the ring, plus some hose off the line—though she denied stealing underwear. She then signed this confession in Fisher’s presence, agreed to make restitution, and gave Larson and Fisher a version of her life history. After that she moved into a hotel, withdrew from the university, and prepared to return to Kansas, where she would wait for Harvey to come and marry her.

It was the first real-life crime solved by the "lie detector," though some time would pass before hard-boiled reporters, the sort of men who judge a thing by the end it serves, would give Larson’s cardio-pneumo-psychogram that name—to his perpetual irritation. Of course, Larson’s rigged assembly had not itself exposed the guilty party. Instead, the instrument had nabbed Helen Graham by indirection: heightening her sense that she had been marked out as guilty; confronting her with the jagged evidence of her guilt; and then tightening the emotional screws until, in a climactic scene, she broke down and confessed. Its success owed less to the modern science of experimental psychology than to archaic rituals of guilt and absolution.

For Larson, the College Hall case did more than launch the American lie detector; it turned his life inside out. For one thing, it flung him on a scientific quest that would consume his efforts until the day he died, an old man obsessed with the device he had unleashed on the world. "Beyond my expectation," he would write shortly before his death, "thru uncontrollable factors, this scientific investigation became for practical purposes a Frankenstein’s monster, which I have spent over 40 years in combatting." In the interim, his machine-brought-to-life would commandeer America’s police forces, its business establishment, the national security apparatus of the U.S. government, and the public’s imagination.

The College Hall case also changed Larson’s life more intimately. One year after strapping her to his instrument, Larson married Margaret Taylor, the freshman victim of the College Hall thief. Immediately after the ceremony, a raiding party of college cops handcuffed the newlyweds together, packed them into a paddy wagon, and abandoned them in the countryside as a prank. As one of Larson’s assistants would later acknowledge, "It was an odd way to begin a romance." A thirty-year-old Ph.D. cop married a nineteen-year-old Californian coed whose diamond ring he had recovered. The first time he met his wife-to-be he strapped her down and probed her innermost thoughts and feelings. Years later, he still had the record of their first meeting in his files, the zigzag trace of her heart as he asked her, "Are you interested in this test?"

The meet-cute story certainly proved irresistible to the boys in the press room. "I
NVENTOR OF
L
IE
D
ETECTOR
T
RAPS
B
RIDE
," read the headline above their oval portraits on the front page of the
San Francisco Examiner.
According to the newspaper, Miss Taylor was so grateful for the return of her ring that she volunteered to play the role of "criminal" in further scientific tests of the detector. This, of course, involved asking personal questions. Then, one day, Dr. Larson was inspired to take their relationship to a more intimate level:

Though Larson derided the newspaper dialogue as "pure hooey," he privately acknowledged that the story contained a germ of truth. He had been trying, he said, to eliminate all those factors, aside from criminal guilt, which might have influenced the young women’s responses, when it dawned on him that some of them "might have been reacting to the questioner, not the questions." So the Ph.D. cop brought back the attractive young Miss Taylor to test this proposition on the machine; first by asking her to lie to him, then by asking her out.

The instrument’s allure was irresistible that way. Given a chance to peer into the soul of a colleague, a friend, or a (potential) lover, who would not be tempted to pose a few personal questions?

Yet Larson soon had reason to doubt that he had actually solved the College Hall case. Was Helen Graham guilty, or had she merely
felt
guilty? After all, she had been subjected to a month of intense pressure and surveillance by the police, not to mention by her dorm sisters and housemother. They had turned Graham inside out, but what did anyone really know about her?

As Larson honed his technique that year on a dozen more sorority cases, he became increasingly convinced that even an innocent person could be tripped up. Physicians had long been aware that certain physical signs were altered by the medical examination itself. The act of taking patients’ blood pressure, for instance, raised their blood pressure, and insurance examiners even factored in this test anxiety. By asking innocuous questions, Larson was able to define each subject’s "test normal." But in the context of a police interrogation, a question like "Did you steal the ring?" was surely more stressful than "Do you like math?"—whether or not the subject was guilty. And there was the rub: guilty of what? As Larson quickly discovered, even people who had not committed the crime in question were troubled by "complexes" brought to the fore by interrogation. These clusters of emotions had to be cleared away before the subject could be cleared of the crime; and this in turn meant delving into their personal history, getting them to confess to unacknowledged "crimes," some real and some imaginary, with no sure way to distinguish between them. In the course of his sorority investigations, Larson unmasked midnight poker games, petty shoplifters, pregnancies, and attempted abortions, often without solving the original crime itself.

In another case of petty theft, when Larson put the supposed victim on his machine, she confessed to being pregnant and having gonorrhea, and threatened to commit suicide. A physician found no trace of gonorrhea or pregnancy, but he sent her to the Pacific Coast Rescue and Protective Society for psychiatric observation. In his effort to solve a petty crime, Larson had opened up a greater mystery. Larson, who had been thinking of attending law school, decided to study forensic psychiatry instead.

As for Helen Graham, as part of her police confession Larson extracted a version of her life history, with particular attention to her sexual past. "My first knowledge of sex matters came at the age of 7 years; we had a man working for us on the farm…[who] taught me all the things that a girl should know and used to play with my parts." She had sexual intercourse at fourteen. A long-term sexual relationship began at fifteen. "I taught him the things that was taught to me." She then pursued an affair with a medical student before coming to California and meeting Roger Harvey.

All this gave her an acute sense of shame. Among the litany of sins she confessed to Larson: she had once been caught stealing a notebook to cheat on a test in high school. "As the town was small, I always thought that everyone knew about it and that made me very unhappy….I think I have never told you that I can hear voices in the air, and I firmly believe that the trees speak." Larson began to suspect that Graham’s confession was the product of an overactive sense of guilt. No sooner had she returned home to Kansas than she wrote to say her confession had been obtained by trickery, and only out of fear that her affair would be exposed. The episode had precipitated a "complete nervous breakdown," she said, and she had even contemplated suicide. In his write-up of the case, Larson acknowledged that Graham presented "all the indications of a psychopath, in all probability of a manic-depressive type." Indeed, the evidence strongly suggests that Helen Graham was singled out mainly for her sexual transgressions, much like her contemporary Carrie Buck, whose sterilization, supposedly for "eugenical reasons," was upheld by the Supreme Court.

For his part, Larson wrote Graham a letter of consolation. He pointed out that she had much to live for. If she was guilty, she had been treated leniently. If she was innocent, why had she told so many fluctuating and contradictory stories? He told her not to lose her faith in men. "I am very sorry that you have been feeling blue and wish that I could do something to make you feel better." A year later, she wrote a more upbeat letter to August Vollmer, Berkeley’s chief of police. Though Harvey had never turned up in Kansas, she had met a charming Irish architect who was working on her parents’ home. As for John Larson, she wrote, "Dr. Larson is indeed a wonderful scientist and truly a Man. The department was indeed fortunate in securing his services." Yet she still insisted on her innocence. "This," she wrote "is the closing ‘chapter’ of my case."

But for the lie detector, it was the opening. The Berkeley police ballyhooed the machine’s victory over deception. Chief Vollmer himself was the first to tell the story for the general public, in a soft-core version he published that year in the
Los Angeles Times.
Casting himself in the role of Sam Spade, the Chief wallowed in the hothouse sexuality of the all-female dorm. "Listening in on the heart beats of fifty charming, impulsive, romantic university coeds to discover which one was a thief and save an innocent pretty girl from unmerited disgrace was a job big enough, if not impossible, for the average police department." For what "average criminologist" could possibly stand up against the collective judgment of "forty-nine giggling, thoughtless, loving embodiments of budding flapper exuberance"—especially when they had already fingered the aloof Marjorie Small as the thief? According to the testimony of Georgia Long—a "magnetic, gorgeous creature" with "revealing eyes of purple velvet"—Miss Small had been seen entering another girl’s room and removing the stolen book. But Dr. Larson’s machine quickly discerned the "wild reactions" beneath Miss Long’s cool front. "Her face was like a mask now, cold, composed. The dark lashes lifted to discover hard, steady eyes. The smile was gone. She leaned forward slightly and gritted her teeth as if determined to betray no more emotion." Yet against her will the machine read her body’s message. Haunted by her guilt, she broke down in tears and confessed to having stolen the book. Yes, appearances can be deceiving—especially in a tight sweater and pearls—but the lie detector could not be seduced or bamboozled. In his two years with the Berkeley police, Larson would investigate some two dozen sorority cases, and very few fraternities.

In an America beset with gangland murders, industrial sabotage, bootlegging, and political corruption, these trivial sorority cases dramatized the lie detector’s potential as an instrument of justice. Its proponents—and editors quick to see the hot angle to a story—took advantage of the age-old misogynistic assumption, applied first to Eve, that women are subtle, deceitful, and collusive, if only to confer the contrasting virtues on the machine’s operator. Where cops were distracted by appearances, the lie detector probed beneath the skin. Where institutions were corrupt, the machine could not be bribed. Where men were slaves to their emotions (and to the organs those emotions aroused), the machine recorded the emotions of others, so that its operator could remain dispassionate. Like the antiheroes of Dashiell Hammett’s new style of crime fiction, the lie detector operated in the name of disinterested justice.

This was a man’s justice: skeptical, mistrustful, objective—with women cast as creatures of guile and temptation. It’s the oldest dichotomy in the nature lore of the West—masculine science investigating feminine mystery. And it played to a lurid sort of voyeurism. As one polygraph examiner later admitted, "I sometimes feel like a window peeper."