The Lie Detectors (11 page)

Keeler honed that personal mastery during his years at Stanford when he developed what one might call the "software" of lie detection: interrogation rituals that allowed the operator to extract maximum information from the subject, ideally a confession. While the subject was mentally preoccupied with what the machine recorded—a classic misdirection, familiar in stagecraft—the "software" allowed the operator to work his will. This software was a key component of Keeler’s know-how; it was what made Keeler himself a lie detector, and it constituted his true innovation.

Keeler began by calibrating his instrument against the one Larson had left behind in Berkeley. He tested the device first on himself, only to discover a cardiovascular abnormality, a legacy of his old streptococcus infection that caused his heart to skip a beat every time he was under stress. So he switched to testing the machine on friends and roommates, administering doses of sodium nitrite and amyl nitrite (supplied by his uncle, a physician) and tracking the acceleration of their pulse until he had to dose them with coffee to keep them from fainting. He tested students after depriving them of sleep for seventy-two hours, and took recordings of mental patients at the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, where he discovered that he could identify paranoid, schizophrenic, and catatonic patients from the pattern of their blood pressure.

Keeler organized these interrogation rituals around a well-conceived geometry. The room was to be quiet and unadorned. In later years, it would be equipped with a one-way mirror. In a pretest interview, the interrogator discussed the phrasing of the questions he would ask, giving the subject time to resolve doubts about their meaning (and reveal additional facts about the case). The interrogator then took an initial reading to set the polygraph’s arm cuff at a pressure most people could tolerate for about fifteen to twenty minutes. He then hooked up the seated subject to the machine, took a position from which the subject could not see the machine, and began asking alternating relevant and irrelevant questions at one-minute intervals.

But that was not the end of the interrogation. Instead, the subject was shown the chart and offered a chance to explain any anomalous reactions, which were then reformulated or repeated in a second run on the machine, the whole series being repeated until the record showed no anomalous reaction. This ritual was designed to focus the subject’s mind on the matter at hand, make her conscious of the stakes of deception, and put her in the position of having to explain herself. Under those conditions, Keeler discovered, an astounding number of people would tell him everything he wanted to know.

Soon after he arrived in Stanford he added a new twist: the "card test," one of Keeler’s signature gambits. Immediately after hooking a subject up to the machine, Keeler presented her with a deck of eight ordinary playing cards, asked her to select one, and then instructed her to deny that each card was hers as he flipped them over one by one—even when it was her chosen card. Then, by examining the record of her physiological reactions, Keeler identified the card. The trick had several purposes. It obliged the subject to tell a lie, providing Keeler with a record he could compare with possible lies down the road. More important, it convinced the subject that he could catch her telling a lie, heightening her fear of being caught and hence the likelihood of her being caught. Keeler boasted that he had been able to catch all but two out of sixty students who played the card test.

But just to make sure, Keeler often used his skills as an amateur magician to stack the deck.

Not everyone fell for his ruse. A young Stanford undergraduate named Katherine (Kay) Applegate, a fellow psych major, first snagged Keeler’s attention when she beat the card trick. Miss Applegate was hardly the innocent victim John Larson had discovered in Margaret Taylor. Somehow she concealed her true feelings from Keeler. According to Applegate family lore, Kay had only pretended to look at her card in the first place. She beat the machine by refusing to play by its rules and she soon returned to tweak the lie detector and its owner.

It began as a college prank. Late one night she sneaked into the psychology lab with a girlfriend and inserted a mannequin into the lab’s instrument for testing muscle reflexes. When the self-appointed guardians of the mental sciences threatened to sniff out the guilty party by running every major on the lie detector, the women struck again. As she gleefully informed her parents: "We bought some men’s underwear, dyed it purple and decorated it appropriately, and went down at midnight and put [the dressed mannequin] in the lie machine. It created a sensation and we are strongly suspected but so far have maintained our innocence quite beautifully."

Keeler was captivated. For an English composition class, he wrote up a version of the sorority sneak-thief case, melding Larson’s famous coup at College Hall with his own experiences investigating a sorority in Los Angeles. The resulting soft-core tale differed from Larson’s experience in one crucial respect, however. In Keeler’s version, the man with the lie detector does not marry the innocent victim. He marries the duplicitous perpetrator—albeit after she reforms.

Keeler and Applegate, competitive pranksters, had much in common. Kay wrote to her mother about her new friend Nard Keeler, "the lie detector man." He had taken her riding in his roadster and out for a milk shake. He had shown her his snake farm and his photographs of the high Sierra. But Mommie mustn’t get the wrong idea. This new type of male-female friendship took some explaining to the older generation. "Nard Keeler is the pleasantest thing I know of but that is as far as it goes." It would be several years before they became romantically involved.

Kay was a striking young woman, a blue-eyed, fair-haired girl from rural Washington state, strong-willed and independent, with a sharp tongue and a dash of self-mockery. "Friday night and no news except that I am 5′6 3/10″ tall and weigh 1293/4 lb. with no clothes and am in excellent shape." She was as comfortable on a horse as behind the wheel of a car. Her Applegate forebears had been among the first white settlers in the Pacific northwest, and while she was self-conscious about her lack of urban polish, she was proud of it too. She could be difficult, with quick changes of mood, slow speech, and a sarcastic turn of phrase. At times she was beset by a painful social shyness, punctuated by bursts of risk-taking.

Leonarde’s younger sister—who grew fond of Kay, but was always protective of her beloved brother—described her as possessed of "an aloof dignity." She kept her longish nose unpowdered, her red cheeks unrouged, her lips colored with just a dash of lipstick. She wore glasses, though none of her photographs show this. She was tough-minded and considerably smarter than Leonarde: "startlingly brilliant," he later boasted to his father. "I only wish I had the keen mentality she possesses."

All her life she showed remarkable bravery: as a rodeo rider, as a criminologist, and as a pilot with the Women’s Auxiliary Service in World WarII. Her courage included facing down social disapproval. The way to conquer fear was to always tell the truth. She was either all for something, or all against it. After only two months at Stanford she had fallen for a law student. "He is over six feet tall and weighs just the right amount—being beautifully athletic, [and] the best looking man I’ve seen on the campus." Six months later she informed her parents to "get it through your beans: it is ALL OVER!" She announced that she was too selfish to ever get married.

Thereafter, she set out to enjoy herself. After graduating in 1927, she and a girlfriend stowed away on a steamer bound for Oahu, where she flipped pancakes in a restaurant window, worked as a "forelady" in a pineapple cannery, chauffeured a tourist bus, and even learned to surf. Most exhilarating of all, she piloted a World War I "Jennie," her first taste of flying, the great love of her life.

Keeler did not graduate with Katherine or the rest of the class of 1927. Having earned C’s and D’s in almost every course except experimental psychology, having failed psychological statistics (a required course for majors), having racked up more "incompletes" than any other Stanford student within memory, he stayed on. When he finally left in 1929, he still had no diploma—to his father’s eternal shame. It was all Professor Miles’s fault, agreed father and son; the psychology professor was exacting his revenge for being cut out of the lie detector.

By then Leonarde had a more important reward: a job at Chicago’s Institute for Juvenile Research, where he would be replacing John Larson. Moreover, he at last had a working model of his machine, patent pending. Vollmer wrote to Larson: "Keeler has built a perfectly splendid machine which is now ready for the market…. [I]t is a fool-proof portable instrument which gives a quantitative and qualitative curve….It is a very interesting and simple device and will undoubtedly do the job." Keeler promised Larson dibs on the first machine: "You’re the only other man I want experimenting with it for the present." It was time to take the machine where the action was.

He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.

—SIGMUND FREUD, "FRAGMENT OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA," 1901

BOARDING THE "EL" THAT FIRST SUMMER IN CHICAGO OF
1924, John Larson was relieved of $189 by a dip mob. That was nearly a month’s pay. He had been squeezing onto the train at the La Salle Street platform—a bulky suitcase containing the lie detector in one hand; a volume of Herbert Spencer, patron saint of social Darwinism, in the other—when two youths pushed past him, and as he turned to apologize for blocking their way, the "dip" lifted his wallet from his inside coat pocket and skittered out the closing doors before Larson realized he’d been played. Too late: the park district cop on the platform waved the train on. Later, at the detective bureau, the desk officer dissuaded Larson from signing a complaint unless he was sure he recognized the culprits among the gallery of rogues. And since Larson, as usual, wasn’t
sure
…

Welcome to Chicago, "[it’s] getting to be a great town," as Charles Drouet said to Sister Carrie as their train pulled into the station. Or in the words of Sidney Blotzman, the real-life juvenile miscreant of
The Natural History of a Delinquent Career,
reminiscing about his first "el" trip to the Loop: "Nothing at home nor at school equaled this joyous occasion….Wildbedlam reigned everywhere and system was unknown….To mix with thecrowd, and to struggle from one interesting thing to another, always seeking something more interesting and receiving many pleasant surprises, was one thing that I never grew tired of, no matter how many hours or how many days I spent at it. When I finally arrived home my lying lessons came in handy and proved very useful in pulling the wool over my mother’s eyes."

This was how the system worked. The dip mobs recruited young kids from the slums. The delinquents worked in gangs. In return for protection, the mobs cut the cops in on the take. Those who were caught bought their way out higher up the chain.

Describing his rude welcome to Chicago in a letter to Vollmer, Larson mocked himself as a sap, but also expressed his fury. He vowed to look out for the gang on his own, both in the Loop and at the Joliet prison where he was beginning to run deception tests on the inmates. Thanks to the instrument he soon identified the pickpockets as confederates of "Immune Eddy," a racketeer famous for getting out of prison as fast as the authorities could toss him in. Larson began to troll downtown in hope of "playing the loop for these same babies, and if they ever trip us again, if I found anything doing, I think that there won’t be any necessity for complaint, for they will be taught a lesson through a few broken limbs."

Larson had always been impulsive, and Chicago brought violent passions to the fore. Larson had begun to study criminal paranoia—"the disease is ushered in by delusions of persecution"—and the city was a web of conspiracies. He was attending medical school and working part-time at the Institute for Juvenile Research, where the intrigues made his head spin. The director there, the psychiatrist Herman Adler, had been angling to get his mitts on a lie machine since first hearing of the device. Adler had even come out to California one summer, working alongside Larson analyzing suspects. Now he had brought Larson to Chicago, paying him to construct a quasi-portable lie detector and giving him a two-room laboratory. The setup seemed ideal, except that nothing in Chicago was as it seemed.

In the 1920s, Chicago was where the action was if you were criminally inclined—or, for that matter, a criminologist. The city was the murder capital of the world: boomtown of gangsters and bootleggers, habitat of rackets and racketeers. Right across the back alley from Larson’s office was one of Al Capone’s "sugar buildings," where Eliot Ness, the untouchable himself, one day dragooned Larson into helping out on a raid. This sort of depravity was exactly why Larson had come. Chicago, Larson wrote to Vollmer, was a "city fronting a lake of drinking water drained by a sewage canal." But the city, he acknowledged, had one "redeeming feature": "its vast clinical wealth of disease—especially syphilis and crime and everything that is wrong with the present day civilization."

The challenge of Chicago was that crime was not just on the "outside" in the Loop, the tenements, and the vice districts; crime was also on the "inside," among the supposed enforcers of the law. Larson wrote to Vollmer that Chicago "has any [city] in the country backed off the map for dirty, dumb police work and crooked judicial administration." Everyone was on the take: the thuggish police, the duplicitous prosecutors, the bought judges, the feudal wardens, and the corrupt parole boards—all the way up to the crooked pols who appointed these underlings on instruction from the crime bosses. Fueling the regime was street-level enforcement by the city police. "[T]he cops use every antediluvian method that there is here," Larson wrote to Vollmer. Their method of eliciting evidence was with "rubber hose, black jack, and boot, and I have seen some first hand examples."

This made Chicago the premier test case for Vollmer’s reform crusade, and Larson had been compiling a catalog of police abuses—until Adler ordered him not to meddle in police activities. He published the list of abuses anyway, contrasting Chicago’s horrors with Vollmer’s remarkable achievements in Berkeley, just to prove that an honest police force was "not Utopian." "I sure would like to work with you in this city," Larson wrote to the Chief, "but you would probably be bumped off inside five minutes, as [the] politics is too strong." When a city engineer arranged for Larson to demonstrate his lie detector to the mayor, the politico listened with apparent boredom until the engineer explained how the machine might be used to test city workers about their complicity in graft. That woke the mayor up. He ordered Larson out of his office and into the office of the police chief, who likewise refused to sit for a demonstration and instead grilled Larson and his assistants about their qualifications.

Larson would spend a total of nine years in Chicago. From 1923 to 1927 he divided his time between medical school and research at the Institute for Juvenile Research. Then, after a two-year fellowship in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and a year at a psychiatric hospital in Iowa, he returned for another five years at the Institute for Juvenile Research, from 1930 to1935. During those years, Larson made himself into a Diogenes by the lake; his goal was to transform the "lie detector" into a new kind of diagnostic instrument that could track criminality to its psychophysiological source. Hardly two years passed before he was accusing colleagues of lying, accused of being a liar, and asked to sign statements he considered lies.

Chicago was not only world-famous for crime but also world-famous for what it was doing to address the causes of crime. In the early decades of the twentieth century a coterie of well-to-do businessmen and their well-meaning wives had joined arms with rising professionals in medicine, law, and the social sciences to reform the justice system. These progressives rejected the Victorian assumption that a criminal was a moral failure to be punished by unyielding law. Instead, they converged on the notion that crime was to be treated like a disease. The question was: what kind of disease?

Some of these progressives—the "nurture" progressives—turned to the new social sciences to suggest that criminality was a product of an unhealthy environment. Moral reformers like Jane Addams reached out to impoverished neighborhoods with welfare projects like the Hull-House settlement. Sociologists at the University of Chicago marked out city neighborhoods like laboratories in the hope of studying crime in its ecological niche. Finally, the city’s psychiatric and legal elite banded together to find new ways to treat delinquents whose lives had been deformed by violent surroundings. Meanwhile, another group of progressives—the "nature" progressives—focused on the laws of heredity, and blamed the growing crime rate on racial degeneracy. These eugenicists proposed laws to sterilize the unfit and curtail immigration. Both nature and nurture progressives agreed that criminality was, in some sense, driven by forces beyond individual control, and that this disease was, in the final analysis, an affliction of the mind that began young and ultimately warped the delinquent.

These progressives, most of them affiliated with the city’s South Side, founded institutions to match their vision. In 1899, under the impetus of women moral crusaders, the state of Illinois launched the world’s first juvenile court in Chicago. In 1909 additional philanthropic efforts created the Institute for Juvenile Research to supply the court with social-psychological evaluations of young offenders. In 1910 John Wigmore of Northwestern University Law School founded the nation’s first criminological research center, the American Institute for Criminal Law and Criminology, and its flagship journal. And Chicago itself established the nation’s first and largest municipal court to deal with tens of thousands of annual quasi-crimes, plus a rival psychopathological laboratory of a eugenic bent to analyze offenders for deviance and feeblemindedness.

Yet thanks in part to Prohibition, by the time Larson arrived in Chicago the crime rate had soared to fearsome heights, and a new generation of hardheaded civic leaders were demanding that criminals be confronted with "swift implacable justice." In 1919 a group of businessmen founded the Chicago Crime Commission, which took the view that crime was a well-managed business conducted by depraved but rational men, and could be combated only by an equally well-managed "war on crime" fought with scientific means. These new crime-fighters, associated with the city’s North Side, sneered at the South Side progressives as effeminate dogooders. Said the head of the commission, "The mawkish sympathy of good, but softheaded women with the most degraded and persistent criminals of the male sex is one of the signs of unhealthy public sentiment." The concurrent rise of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was fueled by a similar assertion of manly resolve and scientific incorruptibility.

The one thing on which all crime-fighters agreed was that science had the cure: whether it was the social science of the nurture progressives, the biomedical science of the nature progressives, or the managerial police science of the Crime Commission. The great virtue of the lie detector was that it seemed—at least initially—to finesse all these contradictions. Suspects on the lie detector were acknowledged to be willful, rational beings who knew right from wrong and could freely affirm or deny guilt. At the same time, the success of the lie detector depended on subjects’ inability to control their bodily emotional reactions, whether those reactions were socially conditioned or innate. It was while working at the Institute that Larson first explained how this equivocation was captured by the instrument’s two measures. A rise in a subject’s blood pressure—presumably caused by an irrepressible fear of being caught—signified an involuntary reaction of the autonomic nervous system, or that self which dwells in the heart. A hitch in the breathing rate—presumably caused by a conscious preparation to tell an untruth—signified an action of the central nervous system, or that self which resides in the brain. Willful or conditioned, free or determined, brain or heart, the divided subject was caught either way she turned; damned if she had done the deed, and double-damned if she denied it. Unless, of course, the subject was self-deceiving. In that case, Larson noted, the lie detector became a tool for separating malingerers from psychotics, making the device an aid in psychiatric diagnosis, the core mission of the Institute for Juvenile Research. It was a machine as marvelous and equivocal as the human machine it mimicked.

No one believes in the myth of honest children any more. On the contrary, we assume that kids lie readily. But we still wonder why. Does lying come naturally, or is it learned? Are children malign little devils or fabulists who delight in make-believe? Even as the psychologists of the early twentieth century shucked off the moralistic tone of their Victorian fathers—accepting deception as a natural part of human development—they still considered it a stage to be overcome on the road to adulthood. G. Stanley Hall, the great psychologist of adolescence, suggested that truthfulness "comes hard and
late.
" For Hall, this process of personal maturation recapitulated the emotionally fraught development of his "precocious" homeland as it lurched from savagery to industrial civilization—making the individual passage to adulthood all the more difficult as society became more complex and demanding. Many young people risked falling into a life of crime. Indeed, an apparent epidemic of juvenile delinquency in the 1920s prompted a nationwide obsession with childhood deceit. The portrait of American childhood was disheartening. Studies seemed to show that as many as half of all schoolchildren had cheated in class at one time or other, with dishonesty rates rising as one descended the scale of IQ and social standing. This was read as a sign of America’s growing pains, a disjuncture between primitive social conditions and industrial modernity. And no city in America had experienced sharper growing pains than Chicago, the self-proclaimed adolescent metropolis.

William Healy, first director of the Institute for Juvenile Research, conceived of lying as a gateway vice: bad enough in itself, worse for what it led to—and for what it obscured. Healy was a disciple of both William James and Hugo Münsterberg, and he was in close contact with August Vollmer in Berkeley. Healy found lying "excessive and notorious" in only 15 percent of male juvenile offenders and 26 percent of females. Yet in many cases deception obscured the deeper sources of crime. According to Healy, dishonesty was a product of poverty, aberrant home conditions, gang pressures, and "clandestine sexual habits." These social conditions laid down patterns in the child’s emotional life, which could be treated only by honest engagement between the child, the child’s parents or guardians, and (if need be) professional psychiatrists and social workers. Reduce childhood deception, Healy argued, and you just might straighten out any criminal tendencies before the youth grew crooked.