American Experience: "The Lie Detector" (Apograph Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2022, aired January 2, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards KPBS showed another American Experience show called “The Lie Detector,” made in 2022 and premiered by PBS on January 2, 2023. This time my husband Charles, newly arrived from work, joined me and we watched it together. The so-called “lie detector” – or polygraph machine, to use its formal name – was the product of three psychological researchers who ended up in a bitter rivalry not only over credit for the invention but also the limits of what it could and could not do. The show, written and directed by Rob Rapley and narrated by André Braugher, gave primary credit for the invention to John Larson, an unlikely officer with the Berkeley Police Department in the early 1920’s. “John Larson wasn’t like the other cops,” Rapley’s narration explained. “The twenty-nine year old was a newcomer to California from New England. He joined the Berkeley Police in 1920, quickly proved himself the worst shot in the department, and was such a bad driver that he wrecked two squad cars in a single day. Worst of all, as far as the old-timers were concerned: he was the only officer in the country with a Ph.D. He spent his spare hours auditing courses on criminal psychiatry, and he was writing a book on fingerprinting.” At the time most police officers routinely beat up and physically abused suspects in custody – the so-called “third degree” – until they confessed. Officers who did this ran into the same problem more recently faced by the U.S. intelligence officers who used torture, euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” on suspected terrorists in Iraq and at Guantánamo. People being tortured aren’t necessarily telling you the truth; they’re telling you what they think you want to hear to make you stop torturing them.

Larson looked for a way to do policing without torture and thought he’d found it in various involuntary bodily responses that supposedly occur when someone is telling a lie and not when they’re telling the truth. Fortunately, his boss – Berkeley Police Chief August Vollmer – was appalled by the abuses of old-style policing and fully supported Larson’s efforts to create what he initially called a “Deception Machine.” Larson brought in a high-school student named Leonarde Keeler as his assistant, and the two tried out their prototype on a real-life crime wave in the Berkeley area: a woman in the girls’ dormitory at UC Berkeley was stealing money, clothes and jewelry from others in the building. Larson thought he had fingered the culprit, Helen Graham, whom he interrogated relentlessly until Graham confessed, quit school and left town. Larson officially called the machine he’d created the “cardio-pneumo-psychograph,” but local journalists covering the story came up with a catchier name: the “lie detector.” But the thefts continued, and Larson realized he’d made a mistake, especially when Graham wrote him a letter saying the only reason she’d confessed was that she’d had a troubled childhood, including a history of being the victim of sexual abuse. “[I]n her fear that this machine was going to uncover her secrets, she made admissions to try to forestall the questioning,” psychologist Matthew Barry Johnson said on the show. Eventually lie detector tests were ruled inadmissible in courts of law – a prohibition that remains in place to this day – and Larson spent the rest of his life crusading against the abuse of his invention. “There is no test in its present state,” he wrote, “suitable for the positive identification of deception.” Unfortunately, two other researchers – including Larson’s own former assistant, Leonarde Keeler – were not so scrupulous.

In the fall of 1922 Larson got a letter from Dr. William Moulton Marston, then head of the psychology department at American University in Washington, D.C., asking Larson to endorse Marston’s “Deception Test.” It was a much cruder instrument than Larson’s “cardio-pneumo-psychograph” – just a blood-pressure cuff that took continuous readings of a subject’s blood pressure during an interrogation – and Larson tried to warn Marston about the limitations of his approach. But Marston had already wangled his way into a high-profile murder case (https://jaapl.org/content/42/2/226). In November 1920 Dr. R. W. Brown, a well-known African-American physician and president of the National Benefit Life Insurance Company, was shot and killed. In August 1921 police arrested James Frye, another Black man, and charged him with Brown’s murder. Marston gave Frye his “Deception Test” and, on the basis of its results, testified that Frye could not have been Dr. Brown’s killer. But the trial court refused to accept Marston’s evidence, an appeals court opinion upheld this, and Frye spent the remaining 18 years of his life in prison, still protesting his innocence. “He believed that his defense was lost in all of the uproar about the lie detector,” Matthew Barry Johnson explained. “The lie detector and Marston became the big story, and his legal defense became secondary.” Marston went on to a long and checkered career, signing a contract with Universal Studios in 1928 to monitor people’s reactions to test screenings of films and recommend re-edits that would supposedly make the movies more effective in bringing about the desired audience reactions. He only lasted six months. Marston then cycled through a series of academic appointments, each one at a less prestigious university than the last, until in 1942 he struck pay dirt. He sold Detective Comics, better known by its initials “D.C.,” on the idea of a female superhero, Wonder Woman. It’s revealing, given Marston’s preoccupation with the scientific detection of truth (or untruth), that one of Wonder Woman’s big superpowers is her so-called “Lasso of Truth,” which forces anyone lassoed with it to tell the truth.

Meanwhile, Leonarde Keeler went on to a lucrative career that kicked off in 1923, when he followed August Vollmer to Los Angeles. Vollmer had just been hired as L.A.’s police chief to clean up the department’s chronic corruption, and Keeler moved with him and patented an improved model of Larson’s device, which he called the “Polygraph” because it measured various involuntary bodily responses and recorded them on a graph. Keeler actually got Marston’s old job at Universal after the studio let Marston go, but after the notorious St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago on February 14, 1929 Keeler and his wife Katherine were hired by Northwestern University to join their Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory. As historian Ken Alder explained on the program, “The goal for Keeler was to turn this delicate scientific apparatus that Larson had created into a robust box that could be easily transported and was simple enough to use that even a cop – not some Ph.D. cop but just an ordinary cop – could use the device.” Keeler also marketed his gadget to employers – especially banks anxious about their employees pilfering cash from the tills – and found a booming new market. “Keeler's brought in to solve a number of crimes at banks and one of the things he discovers is that many different employees of the bank have been committing petty crimes, pocketing cash on occasion,” Alder explained. “Keeler said, ‘I will come back and retest these people regularly every six months, and you will be amazed that these will become your most honest employees.’ And this began to spread really widely.” Keeler’s career was also boosted by the Wickersham Report, the result of a nationwide investigation of police departments that revealed the often brutal and abusive tactics cops used to gain confessions.

“When Keeler started at the Crime Lab, he was one of the only operators in the country, and his department almost an afterthought,” Rapley’s narration said. “Within two years, he was doing more business than all other departments combined. In 1933, he was given an award for the most outstanding civic contribution to Chicago. Cops came from around the country to study with him at the Crime Lab; they spread the word back home. Keeler was becoming a media darling.” Though the polygraph still wasn’t considered admissible in nearly all courts of law, its use as an interrogation technique was quickly embraced by police departments. Keeler himself conceded, “The success of this device is attributed in large measure to the psychological effect it has in bringing about confessions.” The end of World War II and the abrupt change in the U.S. “party line” from the Soviet Union as heroic defender against Nazi Germany to evil monstrosity out to destroy the “American Way of Life” and impose Communism on us by force led to an immense new market for the polygraph. The U.S. nuclear weapons lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee ordered polygraph tests for all its employees, and regular polygraphing contributed to the climate of fear surrounding the so-called McCarthy era. Queer employees of the U.S. government lived in special fear as the government went after so-called “perverts” and, when they found one, they not only fired them but “outed” them at a time when being Gay was illegal in all U.S. states and it was virtually impossible for people publicly known as Gay, Lesbian or Bisexual to find employment. (The show featured footage of the very first march for Queer rights in U.S. history: the 1965 demonstration led by Washington, D.C. Mattachine Society official Frank Kameny, a former government astronomer who’d been fired and disgraced for being Gay.)

Keeler gradually shifted his attentions from using the polygraph to establish guilt (or psychologically coerce people into confessing to crimes whether they committed them or not) to using it to prove the innocence of the unjustly convicted. He even played himself in the 1948 movie Call Northside 777, which starred James Stewart as an intrepid reporter convinced that a particular Death Row inmate didn’t really murder the person he was convicted and sent there for killing. Unfortunately, two of the three people involved in inventing the lie detector died young; William Moulton Marston of a stroke, aggravated by polio, in 1947 at age 53; and Leonarde Keeler, also of a stroke brought on by tobacco, alcohol and stress, in 1949 at age 45. John Larson lived to be 74 but he too was consumed by the machine he’d invented – he even compared himself to Baron Frankenstein as the man who created a monster and then couldn’t control it – and he died in the middle of writing an unpublished exposé of the abuses of the lie detector that had grown to 900 pages. Polygraph abuse lasted until the 1980’s, when unrepentant Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan became President and ordered a return to the 1950’s policy of mass polygraph testing of government employees. However, the Zeitgeist had turned and in 1988 Reagan reluctantly signed a law passed by Congress to ban the use of polygraphs by most employers, including private-sector ones. “[T]hree hundred thousand honest Americans are branded as liars every year,” protested Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Writer-director Rapley gives the last words in his documentary to historian Douglas Flowe: “The lie detector persists even though we understand that it's not necessarily accurate. It's about this uniquely American confidence in technology. … The lie detector takes a problem that can’t be controlled and turns it into something that, at least in your imagination, can be controlled. There can be a sense of certainty. And Americans are looking for certainty.”