The Lie Detectors (9 page)

Adventurous but vulnerable, sociable but guarded, Leonarde Keeler was determined to make his mark. Raised to be an individualist, he was happiest in a group. Raised to be a second Leonardo da Vinci, marrying science and art, he took up Vollmer’s practical badge of science and crime-fighting. Born in a redwood house consecrated to domestic fidelity, he built his life around a mechanical "box" predicated on mistrust. The box would become his personal obsession and his point of entry into human relations. He would use it to wring confessions from hardened criminals, help managers check the loyalty of their employees, and spy into troubled affairs of the heart.

And don’t kid yourselves that there’s any law in Poisonville except what you make for yourself.

—DASHIELL HAMMETT,
RED HARVEST,
1929

BEFORE TOUGH-MINDED CRIME-FIGHTERS WOULD AGREE
that the lie detector fought crime, the technique would have to prove its mettle in a tougher town than Berkeley. So when a secret delegation from Los Angeles approached August Vollmer in 1923 to see if he would be willing to transplant his scientific methods to the nation’s fastest-growing metropolis, he agreed to consider it, as long as he would not have to "battle politicians or political influences either within or without the department." Vollmer knew, of course, that he would be confronting politics at every turn—that was why he encouraged Keeler to join him.

That the city would approach an outsider like Vollmer for police chief shows how deeply city leaders feared their metropolis was on the verge of a violent unraveling. Vollmer’s name had originally been placed in candidacy by the civilian Crime Commission, founded by the great oligarch himself, Harry Chandler, publisher of the
Los Angeles Times.
The commission wanted more efficient police to protect private property, combat union radicalism, and support all those organizations dedicated to 100 percent Americanism. With the city in the throes of a vicious crime wave and the police department "honeycombed with crooks," city leaders feared vigilante violence.

Yet the final approval to hire Vollmer came from the very people inciting this populist revolt. For the past few years, the reverends Gustav Briegleb and "Fighting Bob" Shuler, pioneer radio evangelists and founders of the modern fundamentalist movement, had thundered against crime and licentiousness, as well as the corrupt police and judges who let vice besmirch America’s one "white spot." "Is it true that thugs and thieves, libertines and degenerates, dope sellers and other criminals are operating on our streets with apparent security and if so, who is responsible for such a [
sic
] conditions?"

Briegleb and Shuler believed that justice in Los Angeles was so hard to come by that parishioners sometimes had to take the law into their own hands. Shuler defended a gang of "White Knights" who had nearly flogged to death a man they (falsely) believed had assaulted a teenage girl. He defended leaders of the Ku Klux Klan on trial for attacking a family of Spanish-Mexican "bootleggers" in Inglewood, even after one of the 200 night riders—fatally wounded by the night marshal—turned out, under his mask, to be the local chief constable. The ensuing trial showed how deeply the Klan had permeated the Los Angeles police. Even Police Chief Louis Oaks was found to be a member of the Klan, as were some 10 percent of police officers and any number of prosecutors and district attorneys. In Anaheim, the Klan controlled the city council, and police officers there were asked to patrol the streets in Klan regalia.

Then, when one of Oaks’s captains had the temerity to insult Shuler’s flock as a "semi-intelligent" mob, Shuler and Briegleb led their howling congregants into Mayor Cryer’s office to demand a crackdown on vice and to lay down an ultimatum: if Chief Oaks was not deposed, the two ministers would petition to recall the mayor. Kent Kane Parrot, the mayor’s patronage chief, had little reason not to comply; cracking down on petty vice dealers enabled him to extract a bigger protection fee from their bosses. But no sooner had Chief Oaks tried to crack down on Parrot’s main ally inside the police department than the chief was conveniently discovered in the backseat of a car with a half-naked young woman and a half-empty bottle of whisky, and promptly fired. It was enough to make the
Los Angeles Times
wonder "W
HO
R
UNS THE
C
ITY
?"

In the early 1920s, two true-blue American solutions to the uncertainties of the law—the lynch mob and the third degree—were converging on Los Angeles. The lynch mob, a legacy of southern slave patrols, swarmed directly to the vengeful heart of justice and strung up its victim in an ecstasy of righteousness. The third degree, a legacy of northern urban patrolmen, was more measured, a beating delivered by pros, so that the suspect could be handed over to formal procedures of the law with his confession tied around his neck. In the early 1920s, as America’s second wave of the Ku Klux Klan surged across the nation, the lynch mob seemed to be coming to urban America, with the third degree as its station-house auxiliary. The
Los Angeles Times
warned that the city had reached a crossroads. "Business has continued to flow in this direction very largely for the reason that this community has always been a place where law and order were supreme—where the courts were respected and where mob rule had no roots." Vollmer’s scientific policing offered a way out of this abyss, providing certainty in law enforcement while evading populist violence and a lawless police force.

So it was a desperate mayor who sent a second delegation to Berkeley to vet August Vollmer, a delegation consisting of Kent Parrot, the Reverend Bob Shuler, and Reverend S. T. Montgomery (head of the Anti-Saloon League). Vollmer agreed to place himself on loan to Los Angeles for one year.

Instead of a university town of 40,000, Vollmer now policed an urban center of 800,000. Instead of two dozen cops, he now commanded nearly 2,000. But Vollmer had not risen to be police chief of Berkeley without knowing how to play the game. On his arrival he immediately announced his intention to "divorce" police work and politics, then spent six hours a day meeting the public, publishing articles in the
Los Angeles Record
(the city’s reform paper), and giving regular interviews to the
Los Angeles Times.
He even addressed Shuler’s congregation, promising to clean up the department if they would cease heckling the police.

Vollmer offered himself up as a "new type of police chief," unlike the two-fisted chieftains of yore. One early newspaper profile established the new chief as the modern executive: decisive, factual, all-seeing. "Somehow one feels, after looking Chief Vollmer in the eyes while he is talking, that is exactly the man to do the job, no matter what it is."

Vollmer set out to make the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) honest and efficient. He created a records department as the "hub of the police wheel," with a tabulating machine to map crime by place and modus operandi. He divided the force by function, segregating tasks such as vice, traffic, and detective work so that local police stations could adapt to shifts in population and crime. He created a 250-man "flying squad" of "crime crushers" equipped with prowler cars for quick pursuit to wipe out gambling dens and end the scourge of automobile thefts. He pushed through a $1.6 million bond issue and a bigger police budget to fund new stations, hire 500 more officers, and build more jails. "I am going to strip all the mystery and hokum from police work and place it on the basis of efficiency," the Chief proclaimed.

As in Berkeley, the key was better-quality personnel. This entailed insulating officers from the spoils system of municipal politics. Vollmer got the mayor to fire the commissioners after they refused to dismiss two cops accused of taking bribes. In his year as chief, 115 of his officers (nearly 7 percent) left under "pressure," that is to say, for such peccadilloes as stealing, neglect of duty, intoxication, suspicion of murder, and suspicion of rape. At the same time he won civil service protection for the police leadership, and he made all officers take intelligence exams to qualify for their posts. When quibblers insisted that he take the exam too—expecting a man with only a sixth-grade education to flounder—he outscored all his junior officers (albeit with a formula that added points for police experience and military service). He established a police academy and obliged his ranking officers to attend classes in criminal psychology, criminology, forensic science, and collection of evidence.

And Vollmer announced that he would not tolerate police brutality or vigilante justice. When thugs hired by industrialists destroyed the Wobblies’ union hall, he denounced the lawless action and refused to send the police to bust strikes. In his annual report he included an article by the local head of the American Civil Liberties Union denouncing the third degree. That said, Vollmer was not a by-the-books officer. He hated the "foolish worship of technicalities," which undid arrests of vagrants. He sometimes expressed a desire to see his officers shoot a few criminals to set an example. And to resolve these contradictions, he promised the city a new scientific tool to sort out true testimony from lies and good cops from bad, and to end the need for populist violence or police brutality: the lie detector, which he grandly referred to as "a modified, simplified, and humane third degree."

Keeler had just begun his course work at the University of California-Berkeley in the fall of 1923—without notable success—when fire swept through the Berkeley neighborhood of his infancy. The lingering smoke affected his breathing, and with his Berkeley grades already in the tank, he decided to transfer to the university’s "southern branch" (as UCLA was then known) and join his mentor.

It is doubtful that he ever attended class. The city was itself an education: the idle rich waiting to move into their cemetery plots; the Idaho farmers dreaming of getting rich; and the "morbid, painted-up" women, so interesting "from a physiological point of view." In the auction houses he watched hucksters stoke the bidding far beyond the items’ worth. "You can get more knowledge of the inside workings of people’s brains in one of those sales in five minutes than you could from a year’s study of some dry professor’s book." Keeler thought Los Angeles a "crook’s paradise" with a "hodgepodge of riff raffs that could be easily dropped in the Pacific Ocean and yet not have the country feel the loss."

Two weeks after Vollmer gave Keeler the go-ahead, the
Los Angeles Times
announced the machine’s "first victim" on the front page. Bert T. Vernon—a "giant negro"—had quarreled with a fellow tenant and shot him before a multitude of witnesses (who were presumably thought to lack credibility because they were black). After some preliminary questioning on the machine, Vernon confessed to the deed. The newspapers recorded more victims that winter. When a suspect in a botched bank job reacted with agitation on Keeler’s lie detector, further interrogation led to a full confession. When a suave bank bandit was told that his record on the machine showed "great inward emotion," he confessed. When $10,000 in jewelry was pilfered from the screen stars Jack Pickford and Marilyn Miller, Keeler interrogated the servants.

The most telling victory came when Keeler got a cop to confess to having stolen a pistol taken as evidence in a case of sexual assault. While some police officers denied the instrument had solved the crime itself, the message was clear: the box could be used on them. But the hard boys at the LAPD would have none of it. They refused to give Keeler an official role on the force. Even the money to build his new machine came out of the Chief’s discretionary funds.

To build it, Keeler had enlisted the aid of Hiram Edwards, an assistant professor of physics at UCLA who was a family friend. Edwards housed Keeler on his arrival in Los Angeles, and helped him build a more sensitive and reliable tambour, the crucial link in the instrument that transferred the pressure in the rubber tubes into the movement of the pen. Their relationship broke off, however, when Edwards wanted to exploit the device commercially, or so Keeler informed Larson. "It seems to me that this work is altogether too much in its infancy to start anything in a commercial way; and besides my interest is more in the results obtained than in the actual mechanics."

Writing from Chicago, Larson approved of his disciple’s high-mindedness. "You did right to keep out of the commercial proposition of Edwards, for I think it would ruin you scientifically." Before he could take his machine to market, Keeler had at least three problems to solve: how to register blood pressure fluctuations in quantitative terms, how to combine physiological measures on a single scale, and how to make the device portable. Only then, noted Larson, would Keeler have "something very good and worth getting a patent on at once."

Keeler was aiming in just that direction. With two pals he moved into a one-room shack on an empty lot in Hollywood, where he bootlegged enough electricity to try new designs. One evening in March Keeler came back to find the shack in flames. He told his father that the lie detector had been saved. The truth, he admitted to Larson, was that the machine had been incinerated, and he had begun work on an improved version.

Again, Keeler got expert assistance, this time from Charles A. Sloan, crime editor for the
Los Angeles Times,
yet another in Keeler’s long series of protective friends. Sloan was not just a publicist; he was also a skilled machinist, and that winter Keeler moved in with him so they might work in his machine shop. Their new device, the first to be driven by AC power, included a second pressure reducer and a more reliable recording mechanism. Sloan had come to appreciate Keeler and his machine while covering the disappearance and murder of the wealthy mine owner George E. Schick. Though Keeler’s "uncanny" machine had been unable to crack the case, Sloan’s articles in the
Los Angeles Times
described Keeler as a twenty-year-old whiz kid whose "emotiograph" never erred. Thanks to the lie detector, Sloan wrote, "the inhumane methods of the third degree will be to future generations as unknown as the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition are to the present school child." In fact, thanks to Sloan, Keeler discovered that the machine need not wean the police from third-degree methods so much as give a scientific edge to coercive interrogation. Although Keeler was not noted for his modesty, this was one case he never publicized.