The Complete Detective

by Rupert Hughes

  He had, however, accomplished the detective work that had taken him to Germany, and the Passion Players had served successfully as a pretext. But what a Pretext!

  The next time you see a production of Wagner’s four Ring operas at the Metropolitan Opera House, you might be pardoned if you suspected that it was all a pretext of Ray’s to discover if one of the trombone players is issuing false notes.

  23.

  THE LIE DETECTOR DETECTS THE TRUTH

  Lie detection began just after the first lying began. It is the oldest detection in the world.

  The Chinese used for ages an ordeal test. They gave the suspect powdered rice to swallow. The rice powder was a form of saliva test. For various mechanical reasons the confronted liar finds his salivary glands failing and his mouth going dry. Rice powder needs moisture and chokes him.

  The lie detector has often discovered white lies rather creditable than otherwise, and it has rescued many persons from convictions of guilt and some men from prison. One convict was released after thirteen years in the penitentiary. Once the lie detector proved two accused bank robbers innocent despite the positive identifications of five eye-witnesses. The guilty men later made detailed confessions.

  The lie detector has also exposed the altruistic self-sacrifice of people who have confessed to crimes they did not commit in order to save others who did commit them.

  For ages it has been recognized that emotional tensions are reflected in irregular breathing, irregular pulse, changed blood pressure and other reactions. Of late skin-electricity has been discovered, and brain storms proved to be really electric.

  Many years ago Professor Muensterberg of Harvard introduced certain tests. But it remained for Leonarde Keeler to develop and perfect a complicated machine to such efficiency that it is doubted only by those who know little or nothing about it. It is so feared by people who have gone through its tests that the mere invitation to use it has often brought confessions.

  Keeler preferred to call his apparatus a “polygraph,” which might be translated as a “many-writer.” It actually put several pens to writing on charts the various responses to questions asked in such a manner that the answer must be either Yes or No.

  Like other delicate machinery, the polygraph can go wrong or break down when inexpertly managed. If the subject being polygraphed catches his breath at a confusing question, that is registered. If he holds his breath to deceive the instrument, the pen makes a level line; but the breath-holder soon betrays himself because he sets up a shortage of oxygen that must be compensated for by quick breathing later.

  So it is with the other recordings. Self-control by effort in itself exposes a tension. In fact, the detector detects excitement rather than merely lies. Professional gamblers with poker faces often reveal almost hysterical internal flutterings when certain cards fall to them.

  The polygraph works as well in tests of innocent deception. Thus, if you select a card, or a number between one and ten, and try to keep it a secret the inner machineries of thought and emotion are thrown out of gear or held in mesh with such will-power that the strain shows on the polygraph.

  The clever deceiver who gets by successfully at the first trial is likely to show at the end such signs of relief or triumph that these betray the release of the brake.

  Persons vary, of course, in their reactions to all sorts of stimuli. One person may receive the most tragic shocks with a numbness that is as far from indifference as the screams or swoons of another. So each subject must be subjected to very thorough preliminary tests and his or her standard of reaction established as a norm.

  While the lie detector has won its fame by many spectacular exposures of criminals, or by discoveries of the burying places of victims or treasure, its chief activity has been in commercial institutions where its best successes have been kept from public notice.

  Like every other step in human enlightenment and progress it has been ferociously opposed by those whose conservatism is a vice. So the lie detector has been ignored in most communities while put to the fullest use in others. Particularly in Chicago, where Dr. Keeler lived, it is depended upon by bankers, personnel officers, institutions of every sort, the State of Illinois, and the police. Some judges ask for it on occasion. Keeler had an annual retainer from the Governor of Illinois.

  One of the polygraph’s chief values is its power of elimination. When several are suspected, the polygraph will ordinarily acquit all but one or two of suspicion, and thus save unlimited waste of labor and investigation.

  In banks and other institutions where its use is insisted upon at regular intervals, the percentage of dishonesty has been known to fall to almost nothing. Some insurance companies, including Lloyds of London, give a reduction in insurance rates to firms that use a lie detector to test their employees.

  The polygraph draws a dismal picture of average human nature, since thousands of cases establish the fact that, where people are in a position to make petty thefts without much danger of discovery, 62% of them do so. In one chain of retail stores the first tests proved that 76% of the employees had pilfered. The next time the tests were made, only 3% confessed. The fear of the machine compels a certain fear of dishonesty. Even people in charge of charity drives are hardly above the average in peculations, on the theory perhaps that charity begins at home.

  So the polygraph has preventive value. One man connected with safe deposit boxes was thrown into such agitation by the test that he blurted out a future plan to duplicate the key to a certain box and remove the $50,000 it contained.

  In innumerable cases, persons suspected of one theft or other crime have confessed to many more that had never been known of.

  But this is not the place to yield to temptation and retail the all-but-innumerable victories it has gained over the human will to deceive and the habits of dishonesty. Nor is it the place to describe its exact mechanisms. The point here is that, from the first, Ray Schindler saw its value and not only made use of it but went into close alliance with Dr. Keeler for its improvement and the enlargement of its field. He calls it “the most important contribution to crime detection of the last generation.” He allied himself with Dr. Keeler, Dr. Le-Moyne Snyder, the medico-legal expert, William W. Harper, the forensic physicist, and Clark Sellers, the famous handwriting expert, in forming the complete crime investigation service incorporated as “Scientific Evidence, Inc.” whose resources and experience are available to anyone faced with a difficult problem involving crime or the suspicion of it.

  An example of the effectiveness of the polygraph is seen in Ray’s experience with a young man accused of having stolen cameras and quantities of film from his employer at a time when war needs gave them high value. He had a wife and two children and his record had been blameless hitherto.

  After Ray had made the necessary investigations he confronted the young man with the evidence he had accumulated, and soon wrung from him a frank confession that he had stolen merchandise valued at no less than $11,000.

  The exactness of the sum and Ray’s experience that men rarely confessed their entire guilt, led him to put the man through the lie detector. Within fifteen minutes he tripled the total of his thefts. The reason he had stopped at $11,000 was that he knew he could raise that amount by selling his home and such securities as he had. He thought that the restitution of that amount would clear him.

  His employers had never dreamed that his peculations had reached the handy sum of over $35,000, and, at Ray’s suggestion, they decided not to take an expensive revenge by sending him to the penitentiary but to let him pay back gradually what he had carried off.

  The constantly amazing thing is the discovery every day that institutions where incessant watch is kept over employees are often unaware of a constant drainage by veteran employees. Not long ago a woman who had been awarded a medal for faithful and honest service extending over twenty years was caught by a little slip-up and confessed that she had abstracted a grand total of $180,000 during those unsuspect
ed years.

  In almost unnumbered cases men and women put through the test only because such a test is being made of everybody on the force are bewildered into confessions of startling depravity. Incessantly, the employee who is sent through the mill because a thousand dollars is missing comes through with an admission that he or she has really stolen much more.

  Now and then a subject has made an hysterical attack on the apparatus itself as if it were a fiend of uncanny and diabolic power. But, ordinarily, the victim’s skull becomes a seething caldron of such bafflement, turmoil, and resource-lessness that the long-held secrets are expelled in desperation. They grow spiritually seasick with the churning motion the relentless, unpredictable questions set up in their souls, and find their only relief in doing as other seasick wretches do, vomiting up the indigestible contents of their queasy consciences.

  While Ray Schindler makes constant use of the lie detector, one of its most dramatic successes was scored in Los Angeles in 1946. It chanced that Dr. Keeler and Dr. Snyder and Ray had visited the city for a vacation. It became a busman’s holiday; for, when they took a friendly luncheon with Ray Pinker, the brilliant chief of the Los Angeles Crime Laboratory, Jack Donahue, chief of the Homicide Squad, and various other friends, the three Easterners were taken for a ride.

  The police had been brought to a standstill by a murder case in which they were certain of the guilty man, but could not prove his guilt and could not even prove that a crime had been committed. All they knew was that Mrs. Hills, the wife of a well-to-do horticulturist, had disappeared. She and her husband had quarrelled frequently and noisily and, finally, according to the husband, she had decided to leave him and go back to her mother farther East. She had two sons and a daughter by a previous husband, but throughout the case they sided strangely with their step-father.

  Now, the missing Mrs. Hills had a set of false teeth. She often removed them; but, whenever the doorbell rang, she always scurried about to find and replace them. Two or three days after her alleged departure, her daughter, cleaning up her room, noted something faintly glowing far under the bed. Dragging it out it proved to be the grinning ghastly false teeth of her mother!

  Since Mrs. Hills would never even go to the door without them, it was dazing to find that she had gone so far away for so long and left them on the floor.

  Word of the find was promptly reported to the police and Mr. Hills’ plausible story of her departure was suddenly bitten in two by a denture. He simply said he could not explain why his wife should have forgotten so important a part of her wardrobe; but there it was.

  With a sort of divining rod made for that purpose, the ground on the Hills property was searched for days by driving that rod into the ground to see if a body could be located. The police had dragged neighboring ponds and lakes with no more success.

  Hills had visited the police headquarters frequently for over six months importuning them to find his wife, and the police radio had blasted out her description and asked the public for information regarding anyone remembering Mrs. Hills. The police, therefore, had Hills in their mind as the number one suspect. But there was no corpse and no evidence of a crime.

  It was while Keeler and Ray were lunching with Ray Pinker, Jack Donahue and others that they were told of the Hills case. It was suggested that Keeler put Hills on the lie detector.

  Since the submission has to be voluntary, it was necessary to persuade Hills to take the treatment. He called his lawyer, who vigorously advised him to avoid it. But the three Easterners talked to him, told him how bad it looked to refuse to be questioned about his absent wife, how little an innocent man had to fear, and assured him that, in any case, the lie detector would not appear in court.

  At last he consented. He entered the room where Keeler applied the various instruments to him. He never guessed that Ray Schindler and others were studying him from a darkened room.

  The first questions Keeler asked him were meant to overcome his natural uneasiness and to adjust the machine and its calculators to his individual scale of tension. He began to feel rather foolishly at home when the dreaded inquisition amounted only to such foolish questions as made him giggle with their silliness:

  “Do you live in Van Nuys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have breakfast this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you wearing a green tie?”

  “No”

  “A red tie?”

  “Yes.”

  After an easy and easing while of this, Keeler’s soft voice suddenly murmured:

  “Did you shoot your wife?”

  “No!!”

  “Did you stab her?”

  “No!”

  “Did you push her over a cliff?”

  “No.”

  “Did you choke her?”

  “N-no.”

  The unseen pens were palsied by that question. But Keeler’s tone and manner were unchanged:

  “Did you throw your wife into the ocean?”

  The pens calmed down as he answered:

  “No!!”

  “Did you throw her into a fire?”

  “No!!!”

  “Did you bury her?”

  The pens shivered before he could answer with a dry throat:

  “No.”

  Still Keeler made no sign that he suspected any of the answers to be revealing. After a few more idle and calm-restoring queries, he began:

  “Did you bury her on your property?”

  “No!”

  “On your neighbor’s property?”

  N-no.

  Finally, when Hills was limp and more afraid of himself than of that inhuman machine, Keeler disengaged him and called in the others. The lie detector had told Keeler that Hills had strangled his wife and buried her. Now he was told: “Let’s go dig up your your wife and give the poor thing a decent burial.”

  “Of course!” he said, and led the police, Keeler and Snyder to a spot just over his line in a large cabbage patch on the neighbor’s property. There the spade was applied.

  Five feet underground they came across a fur coat, and beneath that the body of the wife. She had been choked to death. Her husband had killed her in a furious wrangle, carried her out of the house in the dark, dug her grave, given her a grisly funeral, shovelled the earth over her, and disguised the places as best he could.

  He might never have been convicted if the police had not done what they could, especially about those poor teeth of hers. Even so, he might have escaped if the lie detector had not winnowed his thoughts and shaken out the grain of truth. The lie detector was not introduced in the Los Angeles County Courts, but the results of its work were there. The jury found Hills guilty and the judge sentenced him to death in the lethal gas chamber at San Quentin. In February of 1948, the Governor of California commuted his sentence to life imprisonment.

  By an odd coincidence, I happened to be visiting that penitentiary the very day the Sheriff’s men delivered him there with a commitment letter from the Judge instructing the Warden to keep him safe until a certain date, then put him to death.

  This sentence was never carried out. Strangely, the man’s stepchildren and the wife’s own sisters clung to the murderer, kissed him, wept over him, pleaded for him. Murderers are apt to be such nice people—otherwise.

  The devotion of the stepchildren and other testimony as to Hills’ character made a strong argument that he had not killed his wife by cold premeditation, but had been driven to a frenzy by her temper and had slain her in a sudden flare of helpless anger. So Governor Earl Warren yielded to many appeals, in which the stepchildren and the sisters-in-law joined. He commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

  Ray Schindler feels that this action was just; for, after the body was recovered, he had a long talk with Hills and with the dead woman’s children, and he was convinced that the slaying was not done with cold calculation and premeditation.

  The Moral here would seem to be that wives should not deal too hars
hly with their husbands. There are murders enough by wives to make the same advice applicable to husbands.

  24.

  THE LOST GIRL

  The modern emancipation of women and the opening to them of a whole world of opportunity has meant also the emancipation of girls. Opportunity is also temptation, which many of them have resisted everything else but.

  Up to the Twentieth Century it was the boys who ran away from home; girls rarely left except in an elopement with some man. Now and then in the past some freakish lass would break away into a life of such adventure as made “the Spanish nun” an almost fabulous character; and there have been a few women pirates and soldiers more or less disguised—though a man’s clothes are less of a disguise than an emphasis of a normal female form.

  In our century, however, girls began to run away in swarms. The stolen automobile and the pick-up of the hitchhiker enable the fugitive to escape at a rate hard to follow; and the multitude of ways of earning a living in big cities offer the runaway a perfect concealment with a means of support.

  Along with this new freedom came a multiplied array of perils not only to morals but to life itself. Whether sex-crimes are more numerous now in proportion to the population than before may be a matter of doubt; but there is no doubt of the enormous increase of population in the last century, and the raper and the murderer have immensely increased opportunities for speed of attack and escape.

  When, then, a young girl vanishes nowadays, her parents have reason to fear what is called a fate “worse than death,” or even death itself. The runaway boy faced such danger, too, and the life of the tramp and the hobo with its camps in the jungle subjected the lad to moral dangers as well as physical. But a boy was supposed to be able to take care of himself and to run the gauntlet of dangers without permanent harm. This was not always true by any means, as the horrible increase of juvenile delinquency keeps proving. Still, there are peculiar terrors surrounding the fate of a girl or a young woman who disappears.