The Lie Detectors by Ken Alder Read Free Book Online Page A

Hightower lead a reporter from the San Francisco Examiner to a foggy beach where they found the priest’s body at midnight, buried under a billboard ad for flapjacks. The Examiner was the first paper in William Randolph Hearst’s empire, and with it he had inaugurated a new style of page-one investigation, showing how dastardly criminals would have eluded justice but for "The Invincible Determination of the Examiner. "
    In this instance, the Examiner ’s intrepid reporter persuaded the police to hold Hightower in secret all night so he could file his morning exclusive. Over the next few days, as bigger and bigger headlines splashed across the city’s front pages, reporters and the police competed to gather circumstantial evidence against the suspect. Reporters found experts who matched the ransom note to his typewriter; police discovered a custom-built machine gun in his room, as well as a .45-caliber revolver whose bullets might have killed the priest; reporters unearthed half a canvas tent at the grave site, the other half of which was in Hightower’s room. The prosecutor thought he had Hightower dead to rights. But despite the prosecutor’s threats and a howling lynch mob outside his cell, Hightower admitted nothing. As the reporter described it, "William A. Hightower is unshaken in his surface assumption of innocence. But in his mind is an area like a large bruise. Whenever a question touches upon the edge of that bruise he winces, pauses and maintains silence. Possibility of confession is remote….His high, curving forehead is bland and unwrinkled. His hands do not tremble, nor do his lips quiver."
    Against this effrontery, what could justice do? Thousands of avid readers wanted to know. Then a rival paper, the San Francisco Call and Post, scored a coup of its own. Its editors secretly arranged for Dr. John A. Larson to put Hightower on his scientific "soul test"—with exclusive rights for the Call and Post to publish the findings. The previous night, the prisoner had been unable to sleep, telling his jailer, "My dreams are raising hell with me." Summoned from his cell just after midnight and told that a scientist wished to take his blood pressure, Hightower was strapped to the apparatus and warned, "If you lie to us on a single question we will detect it." The next day, under the headline "S CIENCE I NDICATES H IGHTOWER ’ S G UILT ," the Call and Post filed its exclusive. "Science penetrated the inscrutable face of William A. Hightower today, revealed that beneath an unruffled exterior is a seething torrent of heart throbbing emotions, and that these emotions indicate strongly that he was the murderer of Father Heslin of Colma."
    Nothing could have been more dramatic, more dispassionately heartless than the manner in which science dissected Hightower, felt his heart beats, his pulse, examined his breathing, looked beneath the flesh for indications. And nothing could have been fairer.
    And there, unfurled across the page, were the telltale traces of Hightower’s jagged heartbeat and herky-jerky breath, with ominous black arrows to point out the "explosive" reactions confirming what the public wanted to believe: that behind even the stoniest criminal mask there lurked a conscience, aware of its sins, and that science could track the soul to its lair.
    Inside the paper, Larson described his improvements to Marston’s deception test, already "100% accurate," and Chief Vollmer announced that the graphical record left "no question" that Hightower was guilty. Not only did the Chief think the results reliable enough to be admitted into court; he called Larson’s instrument a forerunner of still better methods, "a mechanical instrument of the future [which] will prove, beyond a question of doubt, the guilt or innocence of the accused." The press rested its case and dubbed the instrument "the Lie Detector." A few weeks later a jury (needing no lie detector) sentenced Hightower to life imprisonment in San