American Experience

(people talking in background, car horn honks)

LISA KORT-BUTLER

We've all lied at some point. We've all tried to figure out when someone else is lying to us. We use these visual clues, whether it's looking for people to avert their eyes, or blushing or they shift their body weight, giving off these tells, essentially.

NARRATOR

It was an ambition as old as humanity itself. In the first decades of the 20th century, three very different researchers claimed that by monitoring the clues within our bodies, they were able to strip away the veils of deceit, detect a lie, and reveal the truth.

DOUGLAS FLOWE

People would be able to receive a fair trial, be interrogated in a way that was humane.

KEN ALDER

You determine guilt or innocence by use of a machine that itself can't be corrupted, doesn't have prejudice, treats everything objectively.

NARRATOR

But this powerful tool proved tragically prone to abuse.

ALDER

The idea is that the machine is doing the detecting, but of course, that can't be true. It's the human operator of the machine that's doing the actual detecting.

GEOFFREY BUNN

People thought that it was going to uncover truths which you yourself may not have even been aware of. And they were frightened of it.

NARRATOR

Over time, the lie detector acquired power and reach beyond anything its creators could have imagined. Millions of Americans were being tested every year, thousands of lives changed forever. I am not, and never have been, a member of the Communist Party.

KORT-BUTLER

It becomes a tool in figuring out not just are they telling me the truth or lying, but are you really who you say you are?

FRANKIE BAILEY

They were peddling this idea of being able to use science to discover truth, that there is some objective truth that we can arrive at with technology.

NARRATOR

The lie detector was a uniquely American phenomenon, an amalgam of crime, science, mass media, and charisma. It fed on doubt and bred the suspicion and jealousy that finally consumed the lives of its inventors.

ALDER

Like Frankenstein's monster, it escaped its creators' control. Indeed, everyone's control.

MAN

Attention! Forward! (gives order) Hands on hips. (continues): Face! Control! Turn! Knee high! Turn! (marching stops) Ready. One, two, three, four, five, six! Turning to the left. Stick 'em up! (gun fires)

NARRATOR

John Larson wasn't like the other cops. The 29-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 was writing a book on fingerprinting.

ALDER

John Larson was a working-class guy who really had a kind of righteous indignation. He isn't always that good with people, but he does have a vision of, of clean policing, scientific and clean policing.

NARRATOR

In the early 1920s, policing wasn't scientific, and it was rarely clean. (crowd clamoring) Most cases were solved by confession, a terrifying number obtained by what was called "the third degree."

FLOWE

It was expected and it was accepted that officers would torture people. You can use any means necessary, even if that means mutilating their body, to get them to confess. But a lot of the time, people who are being tortured were innocent, and sometimes they would end up maybe confessing just to make the torture stop.

NARRATOR

Fortunately for Larson, his boss-- Berkeley police chief August Vollmer-- was a pioneer of scientific, humane, and honest policing.

ALDER

Vollmer was the great police reformer of the early 20th century. His special tool for making cops themselves law-abiding was to give them scientific tools, things like fingerprinting and analysis of crime scenes and categorized methods of operation.

NARRATOR

Perhaps the most revolutionary technology on the horizon was what scientists were calling a "deception test."

BUNN

There was a vision at the time whereby crime was going to be solved through an instrument that could detect a person in the act of telling a lie.

BAILEY

There might not even be a need for a judge and jury, because the machine would reveal to everyone whether or not this person was lying or telling the truth.

NARRATOR

Vollmer knew that an effective deception test was a huge challenge, but in the spring of 1921, he asked his scientist cop to build one. Larson was taking on a daunting scientific challenge using borrowed equipment; his only assistant a local high school student.

ALDER

Vollmer brought Leonarde Keeler to study under Larson. One is a Ph.D. dissertation writer, the other one is a high school student. But they became a kind of team, an oddball team, to some extent.

NARRATOR

For decades, scientists in Europe and America had been looking for clues that a subject was lying. They'd measure the rate and depth of a subject's breathing, their blood pressure, or the time it took to answer a question. They claimed varying degrees of success, but no single measurement could reliably detect a lie. So Larson decided to combine several different monitors in the same device.

KEN QUATTRO

He built a cumbersome machine that allowed him to take continuous blood pressure readings, and he also put a tube around the person's chest so he can notice variations in the respiration.

ALDER

The way that the machine registered the results gave a permanent graphical record, which would ideally be introduced as evidence in court.

BUNN

It was a genuine attempt, a well-meaning attempt, to try to solve crimes without using violence. The truth would come out through science. (birds twittering, people talking in background)

NARRATOR

In the spring of 1921, Larson's device was ready for a trial run. Vollmer sent him to investigate a series of thefts at College Hall, a women's dorm on the University of California-Berkeley campus. The case was trivial-- someone at the dorm was stealing money, jewelry, and clothing from her housemates, but if Larson was able to solve it, the implications would be profound. He started by running tests on each of the women in turn. After the first round of interviews, Larson thought he had his culprit. Sudden changes in blood pressure, heart rate,

and breathing

Helen Graham was hiding something. Graham was grilled repeatedly until she confessed, quit college, and left town. Larson called his device the cardio-pneumo-psychograph, but reporters came up with a catchier name. The press treated the College Hall case as a triumph, proof of the lie detector's revolutionary potential. But for Larson, doubts began creeping in when the College Hall thefts resumed after Graham's departure. She wrote him from her exile to explain her confession. Graham had indeed been hiding something, but it had nothing to do with the College Hall case.

MATTHEW BARRY JOHNSON

This young woman actually had a really troubled history. She'd been sexually abused early in life. In her fear that this machine was going to uncover her secrets, she made admissions to try to forestall the questioning.

J. PATRICK O'BURKE

A polygraph's a very blunt instrument. Human emotions and other extraneous variables cause, you know, physiological arousals. That was part of the problem in the College Hall case.

ALDER

Larson was never really able to be sure that Helen Graham committed the crime. It's the first big case, and right from the beginning, all the ambiguities are there.