Authors: Ken Alder
There are two kinds of liars the kind that lie and the kind that don’t lie the kind that lie are no good.
—GERTRUDE STEIN,
A NOVEL OF THANK YOU,
1925
Her eyelids drooped. "Oh, I’m so tired," she said tremulously, "so tired of it all, of myself, of lying and thinking up lies, and of not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth. I wish I—"
She put her hands up to Spade’s cheeks, put her open mouth hard against his mouth, her body flat against his body.
—DASHIELL HAMMETT,
THE MALTESE FALCON,
1929
THE CASE HAD ALL THE SIGNS OF AN INSIDE JOB. ONE OF
the ninety young women in College Hall was a sneak thief. For several months, someone had been filching personal possessions from the rooms of her dorm sisters: silk underthings, registered letters, fancy jewelry, cash. It was the springtime of the Jazz Age in 1921, and young women were returning to the boardinghouse on the campus at Berkeley to find their evening gowns spread out on their beds, as if someone had been sizing them up. A sophomore from Bakersfield had been robbed of $45 she had hidden inside a textbook; a freshman from Lodi lost money and jewelry valued at $100; and Margaret Taylor, a freshman from San Diego, could not find her diamond ring worth $400—though she wondered whether she had simply misplaced it.
Unable to wring a confession from any of her boarders, the housemother turned to the Berkeley police department, famous for introducing modern scientific techniques into crime-fighting. But Jack Fisher, an old-time cop on the force, didn’t have much to go on. He learned that on March 26, Ruth Benedict had put $65 in her purse before going down to dinner at six; when she returned at six-thirty, the money was gone. One boarder, Alison Holt, had been seen watching Benedict hide her purse, and had not come down to dinner immediately. This made her Fisher’s prime suspect, especially as she was "one of these big baby eyed types [who] cannot remember what took place on any given date and answers all questions with the big innocent baby stare." The other girls thought her "queer."
Also, at that same meal, another young woman, Helen Graham, had carried a plate up to a Miss Arden, sick in her room. Officer Fisher was plied with various rumors about Miss Graham, a tall, well-proportioned woman with deep-set eyes, dramatic eyebrows, and an intense manner. Her roommate told him Miss Graham spent money out of proportion to her modest Kansas background; also, she wore a diamond ring and a pendant with big stones. She was a bit older than the other young women and had trained as a nurse. "She is of the highly nervous type," Fisher wrote, "and has been suspected of being a hop head." She also had more experience when it came to men, and her dorm sisters seemed to resent her for it.
Then there was Muriel Hills, who had been seen in the vicinity of another theft: a "very nervous type, the muscles of the eyes seem to be affected, the eyes moving all the time, and she…has to hold her head sideways to see who she is talking to."
So far Fisher had a baby-faced queer girl, a high-strung bad girl, and a jittery nervous girl, plus other suspects. He did not see, amid these female intrigues, how he would ever solve the case.
Then the housemother began to worry that repeated visits by the police would give the house a bad reputation. College Hall was the sole sanctioned residence at the University of California, filled with respectable young women of eighteen and nineteen from good families. The housemother asked that the investigation be wound down.
So Fisher called in his colleague John Augustus Larson, the nation’s first and only doctoral cop: a twenty-nine-year-old rookie who had earned a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of California. Larson was a solid man of medium height, who led with his forehead, his blond hair pasted firmly to one side. A man with something to prove. He was currently working the four-to-twelve downtown beat like any other rookie, but he was not much of a cop in other respects. For one thing, he was almost blind in his right eye and was the worst shot in the department. For another, he was just learning to drive and had recently wrecked two squad cars in a single day. Meanwhile, he was still toiling in a university lab looking to bring new scientific methods to police work.
Only a few weeks back, Larson had read an article entitled "Physiological Possibilities of the Deception Test," by the lawyer-psychologist William Moulton Marston. In experiments conducted at Hugo Münsterberg’s famous emotion laboratory at Harvard, Marston had discovered that he could determine which of his fellow students were spinning tall tales and which were giving an honest account. All he had to do was track the rise in their blood pressure as they reached the climax of their story. Larson wondered: might this method be applied to the dirty business of police interrogation?
As a trained physiologist, however, Larson saw several ways to improve Marston’s technique. He began by reversing Marston’s procedure. Whereas Marston had taken intermittent blood pressure readings while his subjects told their tall tales, Larson decided to take continuous readings while his subjects answered specific questions. With the help of a lab technician, he assembled an apparatus that registered a subject’s systolic blood pressure and breathing depth, and recorded these values permanently on a roll of smoke-blackened paper. Though the machine would record the relative values of a pulse-pressure amalgam, and not the absolute value of the blood pressure, as Marston’s cuff method did, its great advantage was that the automated device minimized the examiner’s judgment in taking the readings, thereby fulfilling one criterion of the scientific method, which was to "eliminate all personal factors wherever possible." This was particularly important in cases where the examiner might be led astray by his own feelings about a test.
In another sense, however, Larson’s procedure was hardly new. For more than half a century physiologists had used this sort of automatic recording device to track bodily processes beneath the skin. Some had even tried to correlate these interior reactions with subjective feelings. As early as 1858, the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey had built a device that simultaneously recorded changes in blood pressure, respiration, and pulse rates while his subjects experienced nausea, sharp noises, and "stress." By the late nineteenth century, the American psychologist William James had come to
define
emotion as bodily changes that occurred in response to the cognition of an exciting stimulus. Larson was simply proposing to read the body’s emotional script for signs of deception.
The resulting device, which Larson dubbed the "cardio-pneumopsychograph," was a bulky Rube Goldberg contraption, and this is no idle comparison. Reuben Lucius Goldberg, class of 1904, the Berkeley engineering school’s most famous graduate, had recently achieved renown for his cartoons skewering the American credo that all of life’s problems had a mechanical solution. And what was Larson’s "cardio-pneumo-psychograph" if not a mechanical solution to one of life’s oldest mysteries: What is going on inside the head of another person?
At the same time, in keeping with police procedures, Larson swapped Marston’s analysis of invented stories in favor of a "controlled" comparison of answers to yes-no questions, some irrelevant to the matter under investigation, others of an accusatory nature. One of the great challenges of lie detection was to match the human ingenuity for deceit. Dissembling comes in many guises: Machiavellian lies are disseminated by the strong; defensive lies are woven by the weak; and white lies keep the social machinery running smoothly. As the essayist Michel de Montaigne once observed, "If a lie, like truth, had only one face, we could be on better terms, for certainty should then be the reverse of what the liar said. But the reverse side of the truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits." By narrowing the range of possible deception postulated by Montaigne, Larson could calibrate the device for each person. He also insisted that all the questions be identical for each suspect, and that all be posed in a monotone.
Finally, instead of testing his technique against Marston’s role-playing games, Larson found an experimental setup more in tune with the world of practiced deceivers. In the past decade psychologists had largely given up trying to derive the universal qualities of mind by introspecting within their own roomy consciousness, and had instead begun to deduce human behavior by testing the outward responses of ordinary individuals. As the most convenient source of ordinary individuals, university undergraduates had become the preferred subjects of laboratory psychology; they also had the advantage of being relatively homogeneous, healthy, able to follow simple directions, and unlikely to complain. Larson found a way to preserve these advantages and still investigate a serious matter. Larson set out to investigate crime in Berkeley’s sororities. In this real-life test the examiner could not know the identity of the guilty party in advance. He might also never know whether he had truly solved the mystery.
For just this reason, Larson planned his protocol with care. He readily secured permission from the housemother and the young women to run the test; after all, he noted, anyone who refused would have appeared guilty. He devised his list of yes-no questions: first a set of innocuous questions to define the student’s "normal" bodily response, to be followed by a set of questions pertinent to the crime. Then he invited five young women—two victims and three suspects—to the physiology lab on the Berkeley campus for "a preliminary or sparring examination." Of these, four produced records of sufficient ambiguity to justify retesting: big-eyed Holt; worldly Graham; sickly Arden; and even Ethel McCutcheon, one of the young women who claimed to have been robbed. Larson attributed the poor discrimination in his results to the fact that he had peppered the subjects with questions too rapidly; in the future he would allow more time for tension to build. At last, on April 19, 1921, he turned to the main event: a full-scale test on the same young women, plus nine presumably innocent women from the house, who would serve as his controls.
Larson began with Margaret Taylor, the freshman who had lost the $400 diamond ring. Not that he doubted her word; she had been one of his and Fisher’s "confidential informants" inside the dorm. But a policeman must always be skeptical, as many a complaint was faked and many a victim embroidered her tale of woe.
While the other young women waited in the antechamber, he invited Margaret Taylor into his lab and seated her alongside the elaborate machine. She was a blue-eyed, fair-haired specimen of the California southland, an eighteen-year-old native of San Diego with honest-to-goodness golden ringlets cascading to her shoulders. Larson wrapped one of her bare biceps in a cuff to calibrate her blood pressure, then strapped the automatic bloodpressure gauge to her other bare arm and pumped its cuff until it gripped her firmly. He wound a rubber hose with its leather brazier tight around her chest to measure the depth of her breathing, then told her to hold her body perfectly still, lest the least muscular movement be mistaken for a guilty reaction. Then he turned the instruments on. The drums began to revolve, the black recording paper turned, and the long rubber hoses swelled and subsided to the rhythm of her body’s organs, while a pair of long sharp needles scratched out her body’s message against the black recording paper, as if tracing a silhouette of her thoughts. After a short preamble, he began.
Each test took no more than six minutes. Much longer than that, and the pressure cuff became "uncomfortable and painful." Larson worked his way systematically through the list until he came to Helen Graham, the full-figured student nurse with dark eyes and eyebrows.
No sooner had he brought up the subject of the diamond ring and stolen money—"The test shows you stole it. Did you spend it?"—than Graham’s record showed a precipitous drop in blood pressure before beginning what looked to be an alarming rise, along with skipped heartbeats and an apparent halt in her breathing. Then, as Larson leaned forward to calibrate her blood pressure, the young woman exploded with rage. Ripping off the restraining cuffs, she leaped to her feet and ran over to the rotating drum to read the squiggly lines that traced her body’s reactions. Larson’s police report describes what happened next:
We forcibly prevented her from going near the drums and upon going outside she told Miss Holt that if I had not had her tied down she would have smashed Officer Fisher in the face and told another girl that she felt like tearing up the record. Just before leaving the room she told all of us that the questions asked were perfectly atrocious and that she agreed with [the housemother] that such things should not be allowed.
Whereupon she rushed back to College Hall to accuse her roommate of betraying her, stormed out of the dorm in a rage, and "promptly spent the night with her lover."
None of the other students, according to Larson, posed any objections to the test. Nor, he reported in a scientific paper, did their tests show any anomalies—although the record of Alison Holt had not been entirely untroubled. Overnight, Larson learned more about Helen Graham from Miss Taylor and the other good women of College Hall. Apparently, she had doped herself before the preliminary test and slept heavily that afternoon; this may have accounted for her serenity the first time around. Moreover, she had admitted to friends that she had once stolen a notebook to cheat on a high school exam, had conducted more than one "affaire d’amour," and had once taken quinine to induce an abortion.