The Lie Detectors (18 page)

As soon as Keeler got wind of the fair he stumped for a crime lab exhibit, with the lie detector as its centerpiece. The organizers of the fair were happy to oblige him. The idea of hosting a world’s fair in Chicago had originated with businessmen close to Mayor Cermak who wanted to clean up the city’s reputation. Around the world, wherever Chicagoans traveled, they heard, "Bang, bang, Al Capone," accompanied by either the old-style index finger or the new-style double-fisted rat-a-tat. Calvin Goddard promised the organizers that the exhibit by the Northwestern University lab would forever dissociate the words "Chicago" and "crime," so "inseparably linked" in the public mind. The exhibit would also dovetail with the grand theme of the fair, which was called "Century of Progress"—the promise of science.

To those Depression-era Americans who doubted that technological progress was their ally, the organizers offered this stern rejoinder, emblazoned over the fairground entrance: "Science finds, Industry applies, Man conforms." Privately they agreed that the fair of 1933 would offer an "unconscious schooling" in the lesson that science was the cure for social disorder. At a minimum, this meant the fairgrounds themselves had to be well-policed. To this end, the organizers hired one of Vollmer’s college cops to re-create in rough corrupt Chicago an oasis of Berkeley-like lawfulness.

Yet the exhibit suffered from the same paradoxes as the lie detector. Unable to find donors to mount a free exhibit, the lab decided to charge an admission fee. This, in turn, meant luring an audience with "features which might be termed sensational." When Larson, who had contributed his cardio-pneumo-psychogram to the display, saw the "half-witted" exhibit, he called it an advertisement for Keeler’s lie detector. In the end, the exhibit split in two. On the eve of the show, Colonel Goddard was asked to resign as director of the crime lab, in part to relieve Northwestern University of his hefty salary, in part because of rumors of his "overt activities" in answering the "feminine call." Goddard retaliated by mounting a rival crime-fighting exhibit, a "bally-hoo side-show" featuring a display of horror crimes, with instruments of torture and an electric chair, plus a personal appearance by Dorothy Pollock, "Chicago’s Most Beautiful Murderess."

Keeler considered the legitimate exhibit a success. Each day that summer 10,000 people passed by the second floor of the building where he and the other lab regulars answered questions about crime-scene methods and the lie detector in particular. He hoped the exhibit would foster "a more sympathetic understanding between the public and the police." It also served a more practical purpose. When a lockbox was stolen from the Michigan state exhibit, the fairground police used the shoeprint and fingerprinting kit featured in the exhibit to recover the money. No one ever caught the culprits who twice burglarized Goddard’s gun display.

A year after the fair was over, Larson wrote a short note to Keeler asking him to return the borrowed lie detector. By return mail Keeler replied that he was "snowed under" with work, and asked Larson to drop by the crime lab and pick it up himself, or if not, then Keeler could bring it around later. Only twenty blocks separated the South Side Institute from the North Side crime lab, but neither man made the first step. Twenty years later, Larson was still bitter that Keeler had never returned his machine. As the contemporary social critic Philip Wylie wrote of those times, "People…made the farcical assumption that because their machines were efficient and honest, they too partook of those qualities."

"I was fascinated by him," Dorothy said, meaning me, "a real live detective, and used to follow him around making him tell me about his experiences. He told me awful lies, but I believed every word."

—DASHIELL HAMMETT,
THE THIN MAN,
1933

IN THEIR APARTMENT EIGHTEEN STORIES ABOVE THE GOLD
Coast, Nard Keeler played Nick Charles to Kay’s Nora. Like the dashing detective and saucy heroine of Dashiell Hammett’s
The Thin Man,
the handsome young marrieds joshed, drank, and solved crimes together, while disdaining the ugly thugs, crooked cops, and nosy newshounds who disrupted their cocktail-party repartee in the witty heights of the vertical city. He played the sardonic charmer who could handle the heavies. She played the sexy wife who could handle a gun. They had no kids, but plenty of adventures—with Chief, their clever German shepherd (named in honor of August Vollmer) in the role of Asta, the Charleses’ terrier. The Keelers even knew how to leaven murder mystery with screwball comedy. A year after the release of
Bringing Up Baby
(1938), Mr. K. brought home from the Brook-field Zoo a six-month-old baby jaguar, which promptly slashed Mrs. K.’s stockings, ripped her curtains, and caused domestic mayhem—another choice item for the press.

Beneath their windows, the Depression ground grimly along. But who said marriage couldn’t be sexy? Nard admired Kay in her modern finery: her pert hats, homemade suits, and "fantastic pajamas." The consensus among Nard’s family and friends in those early years (especially among the women) was that Kay loved Nard more than Nard loved Kay. She certainly didn’t like his trips away from home. "If I had a hundred a day," she wrote to her parents, "I’d pay him the same to stick around Chicago." But he didn’t like her to leave town either. "I miss the grand girl," he wrote to Vollmer. Kay took a sardonic pride in her husband’s charm. When a glamorous actress raved about Nard after one of his public demonstrations, Kay remarked wryly: "He certainly has a gift of attraction for men and women alike." Nard admired Kay’s brains, her looks, her pluck. Their marriage was founded on playful competition and mock jealousy. Writing to her father-in-law, the prudish poet, Kay teased:

They made a smart team, and people constantly dropped by their apartment: friends, family, family friends, friends of friends, colleagues from the lab, business acquaintances, drinking companions. The Keelers entertained so often that it was a year into their marriage before Nard could say they were finally alone together. They had returned to California for the summer so Nard could finish his degree at Stanford. No sooner had he wondered "how bride and groom will get along without chaperones" than old friends of Kay’s showed up bearing chocolate milk shakes. After Leonarde scraped through the exams, they returned to Chicago, the city they had made their own.

After that, Nard and Kay managed to get away periodically. In the summer of 1932, they left the wilting heat of civilization for a two-week canoe trip in the cool woods of Wisconsin, just the two of them and a nine-pound tent. They didn’t reach the halfway hotel until three in the morning; yet even at that late hour—while Nard (with a stomachache) undressed for bed—Kay set the scene for her mother: the two of them hurtling north through the darkness at fifty-five miles per hour as their radio played snatches of news, music, and police dispatches about a "man in a hotel causing trouble…, [a]nd beside me was the man who made it impossible to lie with any feeling of security. Very ultra moderne indeed, Madame!"

To his credit, Leonarde did everything he could to help Kay enter the lists of scientific crime-fighters. Soon after their marriage she set out to become the lab’s document examiner and handwriting expert. At Vollmer’s criminology class at the University of Chicago she studied with Albert S. Osborn, America’s foremost expert; and she completed her apprenticeship under Herbert J. Walter, the mild-mannered man who had testified in the income tax case against Al Capone. In 1931 twenty-five-year-old Katherine Keeler became America’s first female practitioner of the world’s original forensic science.

As the first courtroom witnesses to claim the illustrious title "expert"—a claim dating back to the Renaissance—handwriting analysts served as the archetype for all subsequent forensic scientists, including the lie detectors. All forensic scientists make a fundamental assumption that each person’s bodily actions leave an idiosyncratic trace. For instance, according to handwriting experts, the way each writer forms characters is a distinct expression of his or her own personal character (a term derived from the Greek word for a pointed stick that made a mark). Over time, this bodily habit—whether innate or acquired—becomes so deeply engrained that it cannot be entirely disguised or imitated. Indeed, early modern handwriting experts advised that this sort of personal consistency was the best surety against having one’s handwriting forged. Paradoxically, this meant that to identify a person’s signature—a supreme act of the conscious will—experts relied on the person’s unconscious habits, in much the way the polygraph operators implied that unconscious physiological reactions affirmed or belied a person’s willful statements.

As Katherine liked to explain to jurors, it was just a matter of reading the clues, something that ordinary men and women did all the time. "Can you tell the tracks of a running deer from those of a walking deer…? Can you tell machine sewing from hand sewing? It takes no Sherlock Holmes to answer these questions affirmatively." Of course, each individual’s handwriting differed each time the person set pen to paper, depending on age, circumstances, health, and mood. This is why handwriting analysts compiled a set of comparative documents from the writer’s past, much as polygraph operators took a "normal" for each subject by asking irrelevant questions to compare with (possibly) deceptive answers. Properly read, such traces were more reliable indicators than whimsical memory or the obfuscations of a criminal mind. The problem is that any two things are bound to differ in some respects while being similar in others, making it all too easy for experts to emphasize just those similarities and differences that made their case according to their personal predilections. Indeed, all too often handwriting analysts disagreed with one another. This is not to say that the art of comparison was entirely without value; the trick was to bolster the plausibility of the identification by amassing corroborating inferences: not just in the handwriting, but in the ink, the paper, and the spelling. This was rarely an option available to the lie detectors, for whom the only external corroboration was a confession, the very reaction they sought to elicit.

As Kay was the first to admit, her work attracted extra attention from the press (and hence from clients), thanks to the contrast between her comely looks, her arcane skill, and the foul deeds at issue. "Mrs. Keeler, [a] tall girlish blonde with blue eyes, appears entirely too young and pretty to be associated with the grim business of fighting crime." She had mixed feelings about this attention. She shaved two years off her age for all official business. She was ecstatic when she first appeared on the front page of the
Chicago Tribune,
after testifying against an extortionist who had sent death threats to four society brides—though this was the sort of case, she noted with exasperation, that would have put Nard on the front page for a week. (Also, her photo, on the back page, was perfectly rotten because she had forgotten to turn up the collar of her new coat.)

But she soon found herself featured in the papers "to a nauseatingly disproportionate degree." The Sunday supplements thrilled to the idea of an attractive "girl" sleuth. A typical photo spread—"H
OW
S
CIENCE
W
ARS ON
C
RIME
"—showed Katherine, in a velvet dress and marcelled hair, in the lab preparing slides for a microanalysis of fibers, photographing a dubious signature, and pointing a test gun straight at the reader.

The one time that her sex actually helped her do her job was the most dangerous. During the Depression, Sears, Roebuck began losing $1 million a year because of forged checks from "Bloody" Breathitt County, Kentucky. One brazen schemer signed his name "E. Normous Wealth." Private investigators were warned off with shotguns. But Kay laid out an ingenious plan to get comparative signatures. In June 1933, she and her best friend, Jane Wilson, posed as doctoral students doing eugenical research on "pure blooded" Americans, and rode horses into the Kentucky hills. Whenever they found a family with new Sears equipment, "I’d look at some small boy and say,‘Jane—see he has the perfect type of eyes!’ Jane would paw over the glass eyes in the box, pick out one, and agree that the boy had an unusual example of type Y-62 eyes." Then they would ask their subjects to sign their names to certify the research. One day, a ten-year-old boy accosted them with a rifle, "You’uns better git out of these mountains—quick." They did. A year later, the Post Office Inspection Service had used their identifications to convict 150 persons. Leonarde was immensely proud of his wife’s pluck.

It took equal courage to battle the electoral fraud that was the sustaining crime of the Chicago political machine. In the primaries of the 1920s—marred by kidnappings, shootings, and murder—ballots were weighed, not counted. But after the Democrats consolidated control in the 1930s, the vote padding took place peaceably, behind closed doors. The
Illinois Crime Survey
listed twenty-five ways to rig votes, each with dozens of variations. Scams multiplied as fast as officials could write rules to prevent them—and no wonder, since the officials benefited from the scams. Kay’s investigations of election fraud in Chicago convinced Leonarde that "[t]he ballot, the one weapon of the honest citizen, is a meaningless scrap of paper."

When the human witnesses were in cahoots, an election judge had to rely on traces left behind unconsciously. In 1934, in one recount in Cook County, in which 29 percent of ballots were found to have been falsified, Kay’s testimony proved that hundreds of votes on tally sheets had been tacked on after the fact. Instead of being irregularly marked, as would have been the case had the tallier shifted from candidate to candidate as their names were called out, the marks were all of the same length and angle, as if ticked off in rapid succession. Moreover, the marks showed a tiny characteristic uptick at the bottom of each line as the tallier’s pen anticipated the downward stroke of the next line. This minute trace was enough to convict. In another case, she relied on faint indentations, visible only in sunlight, made by pen pressure on one ballot atop another. By 1940 she had assisted in 100 convictions involving fraudulent ballots, part of the same scientific battle her husband fought against Chicago’s political machine.

By the mid-1930s, Leonarde and Katherine Keeler were the crime lab’s mainstays, with Nard serving as unofficial director. Despite many promises to shift from crime-fighting to scientific research, he preferred running cases. And no case better dramatized the crime lab’s capabilities—and allegiance—than the Valier bombing. Described as the nation’s first case constructed wholly around forensic evidence, it tested the skills of every member of Keeler’s staff, beginning with Nard’s facility with his lie detector. Prosecutors were skeptical that this sort of scientific evidence could persuade a lay jury anywhere, let alone in rural Illinois. But as the local paper reported, the culprits had not grasped "the extent that modern science has progressed in pointing the finger of guilt at those who think that punishment may be evaded when no person actually sees a crime committed." From fragmentary traces found amid a chaotic wreckage, the lab recreated a coherent chain of events. It was as if science could run the film of time backward and piece Humpty Dumpty back together again.

The Valier mine was located in coal-rich "Little Egypt" at the southern tip of the Illinois dagger. When it was founded by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in 1917, it was the largest and most modern coal mine in the world. Twenty years later it still employed 500 miners, all members of the Union of Mine Workers (UMW), accused by the breakaway Progressive Mine Workers of colluding with mine owners. During the Depression their conflict had escalated into something like a civil war. A nearby march by 12,000 members of the Progressive Mine Workers was violently dispersed by club-wielding sheriffs and deputized UMW members in the Battle of Mulkeytown. Keeler tallied some 300 violent incidents between 1933 and 1935, including at least ten murders and 100 bombings—all unsolved.

Then at two o’clock in the morning on August 26, 1935, a huge explosion destroyed the Valier engine house. An hour later four deputies affiliated with the UMW roused Mitch McDonald and Robbie Robertson from bed. Only that afternoon the two had attended a memorial for a Progressive leader killed by a member of the UMW during a strike in 1933 that had cost them their jobs at the Valier mine and led them to join the Progressive Union. Though the deputies found nothing incriminating and didn’t have a warrant, they hauled McDonald and Robertson off to jail. That morning, the mine manager called Governor Horner; within twenty-four hours, Leonarde Keeler and Charlie Wilson were on-site seeking clues.

Amid the physical wreckage of the engine house Keeler picked out a half-shattered alarm clock, which he assumed was the bomb’s timer because of its copper leads and adhesive tape. And amid the human wreckage of this labor struggle he picked out evidence of guilty knowledge: a physiological reaction from McDonald and Robertson after an eighteen-hour interrogation on the lie detector that was so intense that Robertson had ended it by smashing the machine with his fist. Keeler’s goal was to connect these two sorts of evidence.

Though he failed to get a confession from either man, Keeler extracted an admission almost as telling. Robertson admitted he had tape "like" the tape on the alarm clock in a first-aid kit in his home, adding, "You can go out to my house and see if you want to." McDonald similarly admitted owning fishing line and copper wire "like" those found with the alarm clock. These items, considered innocuous by both the police and the suspects alike—Who didn’t have a first-aid kit? Who didn’t own fishing line?—were taken to Chicago to be analyzed in the Northwestern University lab. At the trial seven months later the staff returned to declare a match. Charlie Wilson matched the microscopic scratchings on the household copper wire with those on the alarm clock. Katherine Keeler matched the jagged cuts in the tape from the first-aid kit with the tape on the alarm clock, confirming that the thread count and weave were identical. Ed O’Neil matched the fibers in the fishing line with those on the bomb mechanism. And fragment by fragment the crime lab pieced the past together.