The Lie Detectors by Ken Alder Read Free Book Online

‘smoker’ poker game?"
    "And was the game on the up and up?"
    "Or did you use marked cards?"
    "And did you think you could get away
    By running through back yards?"
    "Please answer each question
    By saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’;
    Don’t wiggle there while in the chair,
    And don’t answer quite so slow."
    These are some of the things they ask—
    If they think that you are green—
    In Berkeley’s super city jail
    In front of the lying machine.
    In two years Larson tested 861 subjects in 313 cases, corroborating 80 percent of his findings by post-exam confessions or subsequent (unspecified) checks. In total, 218 criminal suspects were identified and 310 exonerated. It was an impressive achievement, and from it Larson deduced several principles. He discovered that the citizens of Berkeley were overwhelmed by a sense of guilt, at least when interrogated by the police. He noted how easily he obtained confessions. And he found that when he retested suspects after confession, their records appeared similar to those deemed innocent of the crime. He also found that he could train his fellow cops to conduct these tests.
    In those same two years Vollmer’s initial skepticism turned to unbridled enthusiasm. The lie detector eased the administration of justice and supplied a physiognomic portrait of the town to match his map of colored pins. And Vollmer was determined to let the world know that Berkeley had defeated the age-old problem of criminal deception. In a ten-part silent movie serial, Officer 444, Vollmer played himself—"one of the world’s leading criminologists"—calmly marshaling his scientific police force against a criminal scientist who exploited science for evil purposes. Filmed in Berkeley, the popular serial was meant by Vollmer as an antidote to the hapless Keystone Kops, whose antics he despised. By contrast, Officer 444 was brave and efficient and even got the girl after solving the crime with the help of the "‘lieing machine’—a modern marvel of criminology, which records a crook’s guilt even while he is denying it." And the machine was proving successful in the real world too. When a murder suspect who had been cleared by Larson’s test had his innocence confirmed by an unimpeachable alibi, Vollmer told the press that this was the "most convincing case" yet. "So far we have never made a mistake with our machine. I will not say that it is infallible," he informed the San Francisco Examiner. "But thus far, it has proved so."

Chapter 3
A Window on the Soul
    Then the Officer began to spell out the inscription and then read out once again the joined up letters. "‘Be just!’ it states," he said.
    —FRANZ KAFKA, IN THE PENAL COLONY, 1919
    THE NEWSPAPERS BAPTIZED THE LIE DETECTOR; THEY named the device, launched its career, gave it its purpose. The machine made great copy, great pictures, great drama. During the 1920s nothing moved print better than tales of true crime, and here was a new angle on noir stories of depravity: an instrument that let readers peer directly into the criminal soul. The machine’s judgment could be delivered to the morning doorstep, a front-page deus ex machina that resolved the mystery of whodunit—at least until the next morning’s paper. This was voyeurism by retail, and San Francisco’s papers, locked in furious competition, begged Vollmer to try his Berkeley instrument on the city’s bold-headline crimes. With the International Association of Chiefs of Police due in town for their annual convention, its president-elect, Vollmer, decided to showcase his new methods of crime-fighting and sent John Larson across the bay.
    The summer after Larson’s triumph at College Hall, a priest had been abducted from the San Francisco diocese by a mysterious stranger in a car. In response to calls from the newspapers, thousands of grief-stricken citizens combed the city streets in search of his body. Yet not until a reward was offered did a mysterious drifter named William