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

Quentin.
     
    Less than a year later, as the city geared up to welcome the International Association of Police Chiefs, the association’s president August Vollmer gave Larson a chance to demonstrate his technique before 300 police chiefs. "No longer can we hope to compete with criminals," Vollmer announced in his presidential address, "unless we discard antiquated and obsolete equipment and strengthen our force with the recognized and desirable tools of our profession." That evening, on the roof of the Saint Francis Hotel, Larson demonstrated his device, with San Francisco’s police chief, Daniel O’Brien, in the hot seat, telling whoppers.
    As luck would have it, a more grisly test of the lie detector was simultaneously under way. One week earlier, the San Francisco police had invited Larson to investigate a crime that had horrified readers across the nation: a husband accused of complicity in his wife’s murder. On Tuesday evening, May 30, 1922, Henry and Anna Wilkens had been returning from an outing in the Santa Cruz mountains with Henry, Jr., age eight, and Helen, age three, when another car forced them to the curb, and a gunman jumped out, stuck a revolver through the driver’s-side window, and demanded cash. Wilkens docilely handed over three $100 bills. But when the bandit reached across him to grab his wife’s diamond engagement and wedding rings, the husband reacted with pardonable fury. "Haven’t you enough?" he said, and reached for his own gun in the vehicle’s side pocket. Unfortunately, the bandit shot first and struck dear Anna in the chest, before speeding off. Outraged headlines played to the nation’s growing obsession with car bandits. At the inquest, Henry, Jr., touched the raw nerve of the tragedy "My daddy loved my mother—she died to save the bandit’s bullet from hitting him."
    But the police, always suspicious, soon directed their attention toward the grieving husband. Two days after the murder, two hardened ex-cons, Walter and Arthur Castor, sons of a San Francisco police officer killed in the line of duty, had been questioned by the police after trying to buy gas with a $100 bill. Wilkens failed to recognize either man in the police lineup. But no sooner had the Castors been released than the police learned that Wilkens had actually employed Walter Castor in his auto shop four years earlier. By then, the Castor brothers had vanished. So the police asked Wilkens if he would be willing to submit to a lie test.
    In the city’s Hall of Justice, Larson set up his modified assemblage. The device (now stored in the Smithsonian) was even more Rube Goldbergian than before. The reporter for the Examiner described it as "a combination of a radio set, a stethoscope, a dentist’s drill, a gas stove, an aeronoid barometer, a time ball, a wind gauge, and an Ingersoll watch." In short, it was the sort of "mystic apparatus" one might find in a "thought laboratory."
    In fact, on its six-foot-long plank, the mechanical-electrical device resembled nothing so much as a mechanized human body flayed open for inspection, like a cubist anatomy lesson. Each instrument was the end product of decades of physiological research. Each transposed the activity of an internal organ onto an external mechanism, which mimicked its action in a way that was measurable. Each was animated by the living force that drove the subject’s bodily functions. The pulsating rubber hose extended the swelling arteries to record the blood pressure. The rubberdrum tambour rose and fell with the lungs to measure the depth of breathing. The clock-wound motor drove the mechanism like the muscles of the constrained subject. The electronic circuit, poised like the nervous system, reacted the instant a puff of air signaled speech. Finally, and most visibly, looping between the two upright drums was the blackened sheet of paper—broad as a human torso—where needles scratched out the instruments’ response, as if scoring their message on the