Confessions of a Lie Detector: years of theft, sex, and murder

by Jim Wygant

  They directed me to a room I had used before. I passed through a barred jail door with yet another electrically controlled lock. At the end of a dingy hallway lined with temporary holding cells and their cargo of restless prisoners was my room. It was apparently used for storage or social workers or any other business considered non-essential. It always contained one or two broken-down desks, usually missing legs or drawers or some other major components, and an assortment of chairs in various stages of decay. I assembled enough furniture for my purposes and pushed the remainder to the far side of the room.

  A jailer brought in Clarence Dillon. He was a slight black man, probably weighing no more than 135 pounds. He was wearing the usual jail coveralls. I introduced myself and invited Dillon to sit down.

  Dillon was accused of armed robbery. He’d had the misfortune to be arrested in the wrong era. Today he would have been released on his own recognizance within a few days. Like many other parts of the United States we’ve had bail reform, and the jails are too full of drug dealers and sex offenders to permit the luxury of storing an accused armed robber there until his trial. It was different then. Dillon had been locked up at Rocky Butte for about four months, unable to make bail.

  I had already read the police reports. The victim was a white man who’d said he had been hitchhiking. He said that Dillon picked him up, but then pointed a gun at him and demanded all his money. When Dillon let the victim out of the car and drove away, the victim wrote down the license number. Dillon was jailed within a couple of days.

  Dillon was noticeably nervous while we talked. He explained that he had a brother serving twenty years in the state prison after a conviction for armed robbery. Dillon was anxious about the possibility that he might share his brother’s fate. His version of what happened between him and the victim was substantially different from the victim’s.

  Dillon admitted that he did stop for the hitchhiker. But he said that the man wanted to buy marijuana, so Dillon offered to sell. The stranger handed over some money, and Dillon told him that the drugs were in the trunk. If the “customer” would step to the rear of the car, Dillon would use his remote control trunk opener to pop the lid. When the victim got out, Dillon drove off with the money. There were no drugs, no weapon, no force or threats, not even a remote control trunk opener. Dillon was describing a con job, a simple larceny, something a long way down the scale from armed robbery.

  Although I hear a lot of silly explanations and excuses in my work, they usually include a complete denial of any wrongdoing. Dillon was willing to admit that he had conned the victim out of his money. But he was afraid he would be sent to prison for twenty years for something he said he did not do, armed robbery.

  As we spoke I hoped that some of Dillon’s nervousness would abate. Unfortunately it only seemed to grow worse. When it came time to begin the test, I noticed that his hands were shaking. I ran one chart before concluding that his uncontrollable trembling made him untestable. I could see it was not deliberate and that he apparently wanted to be tested, so I told him I would return in three days.

  When I came back and met him again in the same dreary room, he was no longer shaking. We discussed the test questions again, then I hooked him up and began running chart paper on my old pen and ink instrument. After three times through the questions I shut off the instrument and evaluated the charts. They indicated that Dillon was telling the truth – that his version, not the victim’s, was the correct one. I assured him that I would convey those results to his attorney that same day.

  I learned later that there had been the usual delays after I wrote my report. Nearly another month passed before a deputy District Attorney summoned the victim into his office. The prosecutor showed the victim my report and asked him, “What does this mean?”

  The victim hesitated.

  The deputy D.A. detailed the penalties for perjury and filing a false police report.

  The victim caved in. He reluctantly admitted that Dillon’s version was true, that there had never been a gun involved. He said he had lied to the police because he was afraid they would not try to get his money back if he told the truth. He never expected someone to sit in jail for several months because of his lie.

  The District Attorney’s office prepared an immediate motion to dismiss the charges against Dillon and to have him released. The victim complained a little, until he was reminded of the possible charges against him.

  –––

  It was only a short time later that I returned to Rocky Butte to test another African-American named Leon Morsby. Morsby was accused of a particularly violent bit of terror inflicted upon a white woman who interrupted a burglary in her home. In this case, there was no question that the crimes reported had actually been committed. The only issue was whether Morsby was the attacker.

  Ingrid Steadman, middle-aged, living alone, arrived home a little late from work. She used her key to open the front door and then closed it behind her after she had entered. In her living room she was confronted by a stranger, a black man she had never seen before. He held a broken bottle as a weapon. He quickly grabbed her and pressed the jagged glass to her neck, forcing her to the floor. He threatened to kill her. He then raped her vaginally and anally. When he was finished, he took a few things of value and walked out the front door. She called the police.

  Ms. Steadman was deeply shaken by the experience but wanted to cooperate with the police in finding her attacker. A few days later she went to the detective division, as requested, and reviewed mug shots of black males. Page after page of black faces may have been a bit overwhelming to Ms. Steadman. She had not previously encountered many blacks. The faces in the mug shots, like those of any one race, white, black, or Asian, all began to look somewhat similar to her. Finally she found a face that looked familiar. Yes, she said, she was sure that it was the face of her attacker.

  A report was written and sent over to the District Attorney’s office. A warrant was issued for Leon Morsby, the man in the picture. The warrant was filed away to await service. No current address was known for Morsby. There was no active attempt to locate him. The assumption was that he would eventually turn up, like so many others who had outstanding warrants.

  He did, without much delay. Morsby had the misfortune to walk by Central Precinct as an officer who knew him was leaving. The officer also knew about the warrant. Morsby went directly to jail.

  Again a few months passed before I was asked to conduct an examination, a few months of Morsby stewing in the crowded jail fortress of Rocky Butte. I set up my instrument in the usual room at the end of the hallway. When Morsby first came in, I suspected that there might have been a mistake. Morsby was about seven feet tall. He had to duck to get through doorways.

  His height was so conspicuous that I would have expected any victim to notice it. But the police reports described Ms. Steadman’s attacker as only a little over six feet, an unremarkable height. It was possible that Ms. Steadman had been so terrorized she had not noticed that her attacker was as tall as a basketball player, but it did seem odd. I knew also that when she identified Morsby in a mug shot, she saw only his face and shoulders. She would not have gotten any idea of his height from the photograph.

  During my pretest conversation with Morsby I asked if he had appeared in a lineup, where his unusual height would immediately be evident. He said that he had not. Nobody had asked for one.

  The test itself was relatively simple. It is the kind of issue that polygraph examiners love – a well-defined single incident that is answered with total denial by the suspect. I ran three charts and he passed. The test indicated that he was not the man who attacked Ingrid Steadman.

  I sent my report to his attorney and asked her about a lineup. She said that she had not wanted to risk it, and the District Attorney’s office had shown no interest. She forwarded my report to the D.A. Due to the seriousness of the case, which included charges of rape, sodomy, robbery, burglary, and kidnap (by holding the victim against her will),
the D.A. wanted a police examiner to review my test. The police examiner chosen happened to be one who had never been known to accept any private polygraph examiner’s results. He asked to retest the suspect. I recommended to the defense attorney that she allow the retest.

  All of this took time, as things do when they pass between several different offices. But when the retest was finally accomplished the police examiner agreed with my results. He too thought that the suspect was telling the truth. Finally, both the deputy D.A. and the defense attorney decided that the time was right for a lineup, where Morsby’s height would be apparent.

  When the victim saw him in person for the first time, she withdrew her identification, saying she could not be certain. Morsby was released. He had spent a little more than four months at Rocky Butte.

  We know from DNA analysis in recent years, long after the Morsby case was resolved, that eyewitness identification is often wrong. It is probably more unreliable than any other form of testimony routinely presented at a criminal trial. It remains, however, the foundation of many convictions. In cases where there is no body fluid to submit to DNA analysis, there is no means of challenging mistaken identification except to try to persuade a jury that even a witness who says “I’m sure” may be wrong.

  –––

  William Griddling did not ever spend a day in jail, but for a few months he was the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his wife and infant daughter.

  Griddling, a plumber, married Rachel in August, 1987, when he was 24 and she was 23. It was the second marriage for each of them. They moved into a mobile home situated on a secluded lot in a rural area. Within weeks Rachel became pregnant, and a little less than 10 months later their daughter Janine was born. By then the marriage had already begun to fail.

  When Janine was only about a month old, Rachel left with her to spend a month with her parents, hoping that the separation would permit her and William an opportunity to reconstruct their relationship. But William had found someone else. He had begun dating the step-daughter of his employer.

  Rachel came back to the mobile home for a brief reconciliation, but the couple quickly decided to separate. William moved into an apartment. His relationship with the employer’s step-daughter deepened. A month after he left Rachel he told her that he was going to file for divorce and would remove his personal possessions from their trailer. He acted quickly, filing the petition only a few days later. That day after that he made his fateful journey to the mobile home to pick up his things. He was accompanied in his truck by his new girlfriend. Two other pickups followed with friends, Becky and Dick Johnson, and Brian Woods, who had all offered to help him with the move.

  They pulled up the gravel drive onto the property and parked in a neat row behind Rachel’s car. William walked up to the front door and knocked. The others waited near the three pickup trucks.

  The knock at the door went unanswered.

  William tried again. Still no answer. He walked around to the side of the mobile home where there was another door. He turned the handle and the door swung open. He found Rachel and Janine on the living room sofa.

  Rachel had been sitting upright but was now slumped over. She had been shot once in the head. In her lap she still held her dead infant daughter, also shot once in the head.

  –––

  In murder cases in which there are no obvious suspects, police tend to be guided in their suspicions by broken relationships and other kinds of personal disputes. Those have proven to be fruitful grounds for nurturing a murder investigation to the point of arrest. Stranger-to-stranger murders are much less common. So the police generally try to eliminate obvious suspects before they begin the awesome task of attempting to find someone who had no connection with his victim.

  William discovered within a few days of Rachel’s death that the detectives from the Sheriff’s Office regarded him as a suspect. They knew that the murder weapon had been a rifle. They asked if he owned one. They wanted to know where he had been the night before, what he had been doing, who had seen him, why he had taken “witnesses” with him when he went to get his things. Every question they asked alarmed him and, at the same time, twisted the knife of another kind of guilt – that he had spent the night with his new girlfriend, that he had left his wife and daughter vulnerable to attack while he pursued his own pleasures, that two human beings might not have died if he had tried harder to make his marriage work.

  The detectives weighed what they knew and decided that William must have been the murderer, or had gotten someone else to do it for him. Maybe he thought that Rachel would interfere with his relationship with the new girlfriend. There was no proof of that, but it provided a possible motive. Another persuasive factor: the detectives could find no signs of forced entry into the trailer. That suggested that Rachel knew her killer. So did the fact that there were no indications of a struggle. She and her child had been executed while they sat quietly on the sofa.

  Despite these suspicions, there was no evidence, no weapon found, not even anything circumstantial to link William to the murders. And he steadfastly refused to admit the crimes. The detectives tried all of their usual interrogation tricks, ranging from blaming the victim to trying to shame the suspect. Nothing worked. Finally they offered a polygraph examination. William sought the advice of one of the top criminal defense attorneys in the area. That attorney stalled the detectives and arranged for me to do a confidential examination.

  I saw William exactly one week after he walked into the blood bath that had once been his living room. I could see that he was still troubled, but whether it was from having murdered his family or having unwittingly left them to that fate I did not know.

  William admitted that he’d had difficulties with alcohol and drugs when he left high school, and that he had spent about a month in a treatment program. Like most such programs it had limited success. William still drank. He admitted to me that one night at home with Rachel he’d been so drunk he had doubled up his fist to hit her. He had stopped short, frightened by what the combination of anger and alcohol did to him.

  William had not seen much serious trouble before. He had never been arrested for anything other than traffic offenses. He knew that he was facing the two worst things that were ever likely to happen to him – the murders of his wife and child, and the suspicion that he was the killer.

  We prepared a list of ten questions that would comprise his test. Three of the questions asked him about the murders. Two of those were quite direct:

  Did you yourself fire the shot that caused the death of Rachel?

  Were you the one who fired the shot that caused the death of Janine?

  The third of the issue questions represented an attempt to eliminate the possibility that William had planned for someone else to kill his wife and child. That question asked:

  While you and the Johnsons were driving to your mobile home last Thursday, did you already know that Rachel and Janine had been shot?

  William answered “no” to all three of those questions. We prepared the remaining seven questions and went over all ten of them again carefully. Then I escorted William to the chair in which we would conduct the examination. I fastened the customary attachments – tubes around the chest, electrodes on the finger tips, and blood pressure cuff on the biceps. I gave the usual last minute instructions. I reminded William to remain still and to be certain that all ten of his answers were truthful. I switched on the instrument and began to roll chart paper.

  I spoke each question in a moderate voice and without any emphasis. I marked directly on the paper chart the number of each question, where I started and stopped speaking, and William’s answer, indicated by a plus or minus sign. It took about four minutes to read all ten questions. We took a break of about a minute. Then I inflated the blood pressure cuff again and repeated the process, this time asking the questions in a different sequence. A third chart followed.

  The charts were clear and did not actually require scoring to reach a
decision, but I routinely score all tests. The numbers only confirmed what was already evident, that William’s body reacted to the examination questions in a way that corresponded to someone telling the truth.

  His attorney made the results known to the detectives, who asked to have a State Police examiner review my test. That examiner was the same one encountered in the Morsby case, and he was not about to alter his practice of refusing to accept the conclusions of a private polygraph examiner, even after he’d reviewed the charts. When I spoke with him he suggested that I must have made a mistake in my test, because the Sheriff’s detectives had told him how certain they were that William was the murderer. He scheduled William for a retest.

  His results were the same as my own.

  The detectives now faced a major problem. The case was about two weeks old and they had not spent any time looking for anyone else. They had not a single lead, and it was seriously late to be getting started. Evidence could have been destroyed, false alibis constructed.

  It was only five weeks later that the case was solved through the good sense of another police polygraph examiner. A teenaged boy with a bullet wound in his hand claimed to have been the victim of a random shooting. Something about his story sounded false, so the investigating officer suggested a polygraph test. The boy was sent to Dean Maunu, an examiner for the Portland Police, who had no reason to associate the wounded boy with two unsolved murders in another county.

  Detective Maunu tested the boy about the source of the bullet wound. When the boy produced indications of deception on his test, Maunu began to question him. The boy admitted that the wound had been self-inflicted. The examiner pressed him for more of an explanation. Finally the boy broke down, began crying, and revealed that he and another teenaged boy were the murderers of Rachel and Janine. The boy had shot himself in the hand and then reported it to police because he thought he would deflect any suspicion about the murders. His figured that the police would believe he had been shot by the murderer, who must be some unknown stranger. In trying to avoid suspicion he had only managed to incriminate himself. The police had advanced no interest in this boy until he forced them to notice him.