August 7, 2023 • 41 mins
One of the most controversial tools used by investigators is the lie detector. It’s used often to intimidate suspects and sometimes it’s responsible for confessions, real and false. Author Amit Katwala explains how the lie detector’s origin is grounded in deception, abuse, and of course murder.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Fantasy.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
It is like a warning about putting too much faith
in untested technologies or throwing our weight behind flawed technologies.
Just because they're shiny and new doesn't necessarily mean they're
accurate a little better than what's coming before.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:51):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents wicked words about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. One of the most controversial tools used
by investigators is the light detector. It's often used to
(01:14):
intimidate suspects, and sometimes it's responsible for confessions both real
and false. The light detector's origin is grounded in deception abuse,
and of course, murder author Ammett Katwalla tells us about
his book Trimmor's in the Blood, Murder, Obsession, and the
Birth of the Light Detector.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
We can start with the Wilkins case. This is May
nineteen twenty two, so one hundred and one years ago
almost as we're recording this, and a woman called Anna
is driving back from a camping trip in the mountains
with her husband Henry. They're in California in the Santa
Cuez Mountains, driving north towards San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
It's kind of getting late.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
They've got their kids in the backseat, and as they
drive into San Francisco on the edge of the city,
they know it's a car following them, and the car
speeds up and gets closer and closer and closer, and
eventually drives them to the side of the road and
they crash into the curb. And then a guy comes
running up to the window and points a gun at Henry, saying,
you know, give me all your money.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
And then there's a struggle.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Henry tries to reach for his own gun to kind
of tell this bandit to get lost. But what ends
up happening is that the bandit fires a billet into
the car, and rather than hitting Henry, he hits his
wife Anna instead.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So Anna has been shot. The bandit runs off.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Henry drives to hospital, but when he gets to the hospital,
doctors tell him and his wife is dead.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
What do we know about the bandit?
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Because I'm assuming Henry has a decent description, although we
know that witnesses oftentimes don't have a good description when
they've gone through something traumatizing like that.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, his description is pretty vague.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
He describes this kind of like reasonably tall man with
a bandana tied over his face. It was getting dark,
so there wasn't a huge amount of light for him
to see by. He describes the car as being a
red dodge. He describes there being three men in the car.
This is the description that Henry kind of gives to
police that evening when they interview him at the hospital.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
One thing I think is interesting in all of the
research in history, police are skeptical of crime victims who
are giving a description that's too vague, and then they're
also skeptical of crime victims who give a description that
is way too specific.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
So now I start.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
Thinking or wonder, what is the right amount of information
that they're looking for, and police are skeptical at this point,
Is that right.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yes, So they immediately start to get a little bit
skeptical because they interview another witness, a guy called Jacob Corfinkle,
who had kind of seen this little car tase unfold
on Nineteenth Avenue in San Francisco, and his description of
the vehicle did not match Henry's description of the vehicle.
So Henry said that the car that had been following
him and Anna was a red Dodge, but this guy,
Jacob Krfinkell, said it was a blue Hudson. So there
(03:49):
was this one discrepancy right there already. But in all
other ways, Henry seemed like, you know, a distraught husband
who'd just lost his wife. He was so upset in
the hospital that he almost claps passed out. So I
don't think they were really suspicious at this point of
him having been involved or anything like that. They may
even maybe thought that, you know, here's a guy who's
just been through a really traumatic event. Maybe he's not
(04:10):
remembering things clearly, and maybe if we speak to him
in a few days, he'll be able to give us
a fill up picture. But they immediately kind of started
looking for the culprits based on the description that Henry
had given them.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
What is Jacob saying, did he see the whole thing
or did he just see a car trailing them?
Speaker 3 (04:25):
He was parked by the side of the road, or
he was driving along the road with his own family,
and he was with his wife and his son and
the sun. It's noticed in the newspaper account was kind
of like car obsessed, so he could recognize the different
engine noises that the different cars would make, which became
quite significant later on. But so he's driving along and
he sees two cars go speeding past. In the first
car as Henry's yellow Premier car. Henry was a mechanic,
(04:48):
so he loved cars, and he's really proud of this yellow,
bright yellow car that he had. I think of it
in my head a bit like the car from the
Great gat Speed, you know, just.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Sort of speeding along.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
So he saw this one Cargay pass, and then he
saw this other Cargat pass really fast.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
The first thing he saw.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
And then maybe five minutes later, he continues driving further
along the road and he sees Henry's car stop by
the side of the road, and Henry's Henry waves him
down and says, help help. My wife's been shot and
needs to get her to a hospital. So he doesn't
see the crime unfold, but he kind of sees the
kind of two cars go past him. He hears maybe
the gun shot, hears shouting, but he doesn't actually see
(05:21):
the actual shooting. So he can't really confirm anything beyond
the fact that these were the two cars that were involved,
and that Henry was frantic covered in blood, and the
shooting did happen where and when Henry said it happened,
but not how it happened.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Okay, So when do things turn for Henry? Because I'm
assuming that's the road we're heading down right now.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Essentially what happens is over the next kind of three
four days, the police chase down all these leaves. They
stop cars that look similar to the car Henry described,
They pull over suspicious looking people, but none of the
people are you know, the culprits. And then a couple
of days later, what happens is that a garage in
the Mission in San Francisco, two brothers called war and
Arthur Casta come in. What was taken from Henry and
(06:03):
the robbery were three one hundred dollar bills now. One
hundred dollar bills back then were a lot rarer than
they are now. You know, the minimum wage was thirty
three cents an hour, so having one hundred dollar bill
was kind of suspicious unless you were of a particular
social class. So, yeah, a garage in the mission, these
two brothers, Water and Arthur Casta come in and they
tried to pay for a one dollar twenty five car
repair with one hundred dollar bill. By now, it's two
(06:26):
days after the murder, the details of the crime have
been slashed all over the papers and the garage and
is immediately suspicious. So when the brothers leave, he calls
the police. The brothers were sort of well known to
the police. They're these sort of archetypal agents of chaos.
Walter is particularly just a great character who I couldn't
have Whisher for a better character, you know, a better
villain for the book. He's covered in scars, he's got
(06:47):
tattoos all over his hands. The story is apparently that
he was kicked in the head by a horse when
he was a boy, and.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Ever since then he'd been kind of violent and prone
to these kind.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Of impulsive, sort of reckless decisions, and then Arthur is
his brother, kind of rains them in a little bit,
but also has his own sort of criminal past. So
the police get this tip from the garage I know,
they pull these two brothers in for questioning.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
The brothers deny having had anything to do with.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
It, and then they do a police line up where
they ask Henry to kind of come in and say
where these the men that robbed you and shot your wife?
Speaker 2 (07:15):
And Henry says, no, no, I've never seen these men
before in my life.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
That's a couple of days later, but then over the
week after that, it transpires that actually Henry did know
the Caster brothers. In fact, he had worked with water
Cast a few years prior. So parts of his story
were kind of starting to unravel. So if you take
the fact that Jacob Golfingle described a different car to
the car Henry described, and the fact that Henry seemed
to have lied about knowing the Caster brothers and the
police line up, things start to kind of get a
(07:40):
little bit murky, and the police start to get a
little bit suspicious.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
What is their car that they would have used in
this Does it match the description of either Henry's or Jacob's.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, not initially, so they show the Caster brothers car
to Henry and to the attorney, but it's not the
same car. Eventually, once Henry says these aren't the guy,
they let the Caster Brothers go. And it's only after
they let the Caster Brothers go that the police discovered
that actually the car that was used had been rented
from a garage by the Caster Brothers for the day
(08:10):
of the murder and then given back about forty five
minutes after the murder. So they've got a definite link
between the car that was used and the Caster brothers,
and they've got a link between the cast of brothers
and Henry, which both sides kind of denied that link,
and they only put it together kind of after it's
too late, after they've already released the Caster Brothers back
into society.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
So I'm assuming where we're heading is that the police
are going to believe that Henry hired these brothers to
kill his wife for some reason.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
That's right, Yeah, And actually the other thing that kind
of mergers during this time is that although Henry had
been this sort of picture of a grieving husband, there
had been some domestic issues in his marriage who had
been accused of kind of beating his wife Anna. Another
police officer discovered that he had actually filed for divorce
a month prior, so there'd been this kind of growing
tension in the marriage. Putting all this together, they had
(08:57):
this picture of this guy who was growing warm more suspicious,
but they didn't have any evidence. They didn't have the
Caster brothers in Custoine anymore to kind of corroborate that
side of the story, and Henry was still denying everything,
so they didn't really have anything to go on, and
so that's when they decided to turn to this new
machine that had just been invented across the bay in Berkeley.
There's so many fascinating characterism and there's a whole strand
(09:19):
about this guy called William Marston. He's the kind of
originator of the idea of the light detector. So just
to give like a super severer quick review, the theory
behind the light detector is that it works by tracking
your blood pressure and your pulse, and that if you
are lying, your blood pressure and your pulse will change
compared to when you're telling the truth. There had been
suspicions about this going back hundreds or thousands of years.
(09:40):
There's all these stories from ancient China and India folk
theories about how to tell if someone was lying, and
that kind of build on this rough idea. But Marsden
was a Harvard psychologist and he kind of measured peer's
blood pressure while they told lies. And you kind of
notice this link, but he did it in a very
sort of unstructured, kind of ad hoc way. Marsden would
go on to invent Wonder Woman, the character which is.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Kind of mad with the lasso, right, is that what
it was exactly? Yeah, the lasso that made people tell
the truth. That was one of my favorite things about
Wonder Woman.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
And it was inspired by his actual work in light detection,
and he kind of pursued his career in lie detection
in a sort of parallel way to the characters in
my book. But in nineteen twenty one, August Volmer, who
was the chief of police in Berkeley, read this paper
by Marsden in an academic journal. Now, Varma was a
really fascinating guy. He is considered the father of modern
policing because he was the first police chief in America
(10:32):
to really kind of try and bring science to policing.
So policing in the early twentieth century was like brustal.
Still it was kind of billy clubs and the third
degree and beating confessions out of people. Former wanted to
humanize it a bit and bring in kind of more
scientific rigor and stuff like that, so he brought in.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Radios for his officers.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
He was one of the first police officers to give
them bicycles and made cycles and cars so they could
cover more ground. He pioneered the use of like crime mapping, fingerprinting,
forensic photography, things like that. Another really interesting thing that
Volmer did was he was one of the first police
chiefs in America to hire college graduates to be cops.
So before that it was generally kind of older men.
(11:10):
There wasn't a huge amount of difference between the cops
and the criminals they were trying to catch in terms
of the demographic background and their kind of.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Status in society.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Varma changed that by hiring college cops, and at first
he was kind of kind of widely mocked in the
newspapers were doing this.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
People thought these sort of you.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Know, nineteen and twenty year old boys would be too
soft to really grasp the problem of crime. So anyway,
Volmer read this paper by Marsden about this link between
blood pressure and line detection, and he thought that John Larson,
who was one of his college cops, would be the
perfect person to turn this idea, this insight into a
machine that could actually be used to systematically determine whether
someone was lying during a police interview. So that brings
(11:45):
us to John Larson, who again is you couldn't wish
for a better character. He was a bit older than
the other college cops, he was twenty nine years old.
He wanted to be a criminologist, John Larson, but before
he did that, he wanted to get some kind of
real world experience of crime fighting.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Now.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Larson was stubborn, awkward, just belligerent, often got into like
disputes with his employers.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
I've read so many of his.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Letters, and he's just a fascinatingly sort of prickly character,
and he always works against his own interests.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Large amounts of hubrius is always the impression I had
about John Marson.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, the stubbornness as well, Just the most stubborn man.
And in every way that Varner was kind of egalitarian
and open and friendly. Larson was sort of closed off
and stubborn and stuck his heels in. He was also
a really terrible cop. He would constantly like just he
crashed two cars. He got in fights with his colleagues,
like slept on the job and all this kind of thing.
(12:37):
So I think for last and it was a bit
of a relief when Volmer kind of said to him, Okay,
I'm taking you off the beat and you can just
work on this machine full time. Over the next few
weeks months in the spring of nineteen twenty one, Larson
developed this machine and it looks pretty similar to the
light sexes of today. It's got a kind of pen
that scratches the lines on a scrolling piece of paper.
It's got the blood pressure cuff that goes around your arm.
(12:58):
It's got the neumagrass which makes you're breathing. They wrap
around your chest. Actually, in one hundred years of the
equipment really hasn't changed that much. So over the next
year last and tested this equipment. He solved a few cases,
including some thefts at college dorms. He used the light
detector in the William High Tower, Father Heslin case. Would
you talk about in your book American Sherlock, where I
(13:19):
think it ultimately agreed with the theory in terms of
getting the right answer about whether high Tower had committed
the crime or not, and then a year later he
used it on the Henry Wilkins case.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
What I've found interesting about doing all the research on
the light detector with this case, I'll just summarize very quickly.
So the William high Tower case happened in nineteen twenty one.
A priest goes missing in Colnwick, California and ends up dead,
and there is a man who has arrived at a
church and is trying to guide the police on where
to find this body. And finally the police figure out
(13:52):
that he was the one who did it, William high Tower,
and they bring him and they strap him to this
machine that John Larson had just made portable, I think,
and they strap them and he's petrified and nonsensical. And
that leads me to one of the things that I
know you and I will talk about is why it
doesn't work. William high Tower very clearly had schizophrenia, and
(14:14):
that is one of the things mental health, I mean, medicine,
I mean, there's so many reasons why this is not
an accurate machine, with the exception of scaring the hell
out of people when they're strapped up to it and
they fail.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
You make a really good point.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
You can't assume that someone's blood pulse is racing because
they're lying.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
There could be a myriad of reasons why that's happening
mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
They could be scared of getting caught, or they could
be scared of getting wrongly accused, and the blood pressure
and pulse will do exactly the same thing mm hmm.
And you can't expect everyone to react the same way
to the same questions. High Tower is a perfect example
of someone with mental health condition. There's no reason to
expect that their physiological reaction to a questioning would be
the same as someone else.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
And also, I talked to a forensic psychologist when I
was working on that book who said people with psychopathy
will pass with flying colors because they actually believe the
lies that they're saying. So everything from the medicine to
the bad day you had to whatever. It could say
your blood pressure's high, your heart rates high, but it
can't say why. And I think that's why every time
(15:14):
I see on a true crime show, you know, oh
he failed the lie detector.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Who cares?
Speaker 4 (15:18):
I mean, I guess it intimidates people sometimes into confessions.
But I'm assuming we're going down the road that Henry
gets strapped to one of these lie detectors and they
start asking questions. How do the questions work with a suspect?
Do they start out easy and get hard?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So the way it works generally is the way it's
supposed to work is that you have control questions and
you have target questions, and they're supposed to be yes
or no questions. So the way it works is that
you break it down into the control questions and that
helps you establish a baseline for what that person's body
response is when they're telling the truth, and then when
you ask the target questions, you can then compare their
responses to the target questions to their response to the
(15:56):
baseline questions, and that will give you some indication of
whether they're lying or not. So, for Henry, the target
questions where I think like, do you like the movies?
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Do you smoke? Have you ever seen visions? Do you
drink to excess?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
And then the questions were about the crime, were you
know did you hire anyone to commit this murder? Do
you know, Arthur at Walter Caster, when did you first
see the car?
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Specifics about the crime.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Exactly specifics about the crime. Henry was, you know, kind
of an interesting character as well, quite moody, obviously, kind
of sometimes quite violent. He and Anna were German immigrants.
There were a lot of German immigrants in San Francisco
at the time. There was still a degree of suspicion
about the immigrant community in San Francisco at that time,
particularly after the war. After the First World War, Germans
in America had seen their place in society kind of
(16:40):
slipped somewhat. So there was maybe a degree of bias
against Henry from the press the public. But you know,
Larsen did the test and he analyzed the result. He
said to press afterwards that he was a willing subject,
that he was nervous, but actually he was convinced that
he was telling the truth. In fact, Henry had been
so nervous during the time that it took ages for
(17:01):
the pulse to sort of settle down to the point
where Larson could actually perform the test, which perhaps is
a clue that maybe something wasn't quite right. But yeah,
so Henry passed the test. The examiner kind of splashed
this big story saying, you know, science says he tells
the truth. And there's a column from John Larson about
you know why Larson thought that Henry was telling the truth,
so please let him go. And they continued with their investigation,
(17:23):
basically starting from scratch because the Caster brothers were gone
and Henry seemed to be telling the truth according to
the polygraph machine.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Amazing.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
And in the press, what was the reaction? Did everybody
just think this was the greatest machine ever?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah, up to this point it has been quite positive.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
And I think that both Volma, August Vlmer and John
Larson had been quite effusive in their praise of the machine.
And there was only really after this case that Larson
began to get very worried about this. These are the
words he actually usually called it a Frankenstein's monster. He
began to get very worried about this Frankenstein's monster that
he had unleashed. And I think if it had been
up to John Larson, he would have maintained very very
(18:00):
tight control over the machine and the idea, and no
one else would have used it unless it was under
his directed provision.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
So he could make sure that they were using it properly.
The problem is that in nineteen twenty one, last and
a high school student called Leonard Keeler. Leonard Keeler was
a kind of family friend of August Farmer, and he
was a sixteen precocious, sixteen year old kid who was
kind of sickly in and out of school with various illnesses,
loved the outdoors, used to milk rattlesnakes for their venom,
(18:25):
and like perform close up magic. Basically, Varmer brought Keeler
into the police department one day and Keiler saw Larson
doing a lighter text test on a suspect, and Keeler
was like basically instantly fascinated by this machine, and over
the next few years became Larson's protege i guess kind
of helped him carry the machine around, helped him set
it up in different cases, helped him basically run the tests.
(18:48):
And in the years that follow it was really Leonard
Keeler who was responsible for popularizing the polygraph and spreading
it all across America, and Larson and Keeler basically ended
up absolutely despising each other. Larson thought that Keiler had
sort of bastardized his.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Machine and sold us to the highest bidder, and wasn't
adhering to scientific principles. Keiler thought Larson was stubborn and
stuck up and you know, was trash talking him all
around town.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Which he was.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
So yeah, these two creators the live detector had this
spectacular falling out.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
So what ends up happening ultimately with the Henry Wilkins case.
Do they come to a conclusion do they track down
the Castor brothers.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
So what happens is that as soon as Henry leaves
his lie detector test, he goes home, he goes to
his garage, and then he goes to a secret meeting
with Robert Castor, who is the brother of Walter and
Arthur who are missing. What he doesn't know is that
he's being followed Henry when he does this, So this
is immediately a very very suspicious red flag. You've just
passed the light detectors saying you had nothing to do
(20:01):
with the Caster brothers.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Then you're going to a meeting with their brother immediately afterwards.
So what ends up happening is that the police managed
to eventually find Arthur and bring him back to San Francisco,
and they put him in a jail cell and try
and get him to confess, and he doesn't confess for
a few days, confessed to being part of the murder
of Anna Wilkins, being one of the bandits that pulled
her over and fort her. It takes a few days,
but the way they eventually get a confession is through
(20:25):
some sort of clever thinking by Matthew Brady, who was
the district attorney. They basically put Arthur Caster in this cell,
and then they put this kid in the cell next
to him, who they tell Arthur has been arrested for
the Henry Wilkins case. And all night Arthur can hear
this kid next to him whaling in a cell about
how he's been wrongly accused and how they're going to
execute him.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
And after two nights of this, Arthur's conscience gets the
better of him and he basically tells the police everything.
He tells them that yes, Henry had paid him and
Walter to shoot his wife, but that Walter was the ringleader.
But the first thing Arthur knew about it was when
they started following the car back to San Francisco, and
Walter had just told Arthur that he was going to
run an errand and that he needed his help with something,
(21:03):
so that he was an unwilling accomplice. So that really
obviously was very incriminating for Henry, who had also left
San Francisco at this point, so that the police then
fetched Henry dragged him back to San Francisco with some force,
shall we say, in the sort of.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
A nineteen twenty's a manor.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
They had Arthur Cast in jail as well, but what
they didn't have was Walter Caster when they really needed
Walter as the alleged ring leader to bring charges forward
to take this case to trial. Now, Walter has been
on the run in northern California for a few weeks,
but then he decides to come back to San Francisco
and the police eventually track him down to a house.
It's in Peterrero Hill, so kind of southern San Francisco.
(21:39):
It's his mother's house, so the Caster's mother's house and
the police go over there to apprehend Walter. There's like
three or four police officers and they ring the doorbell.
Mini Caastera, who's their mother, answers the door. She says,
you know, Walter's not here, but through the door they
can see the kind of remains of a helf eaten
breakfast on the kitchen table, and they're with Walter's girlfriend,
who's the one who's kind of led them to that
(22:01):
house as well. So at the door, you've got a
couple of police officers, Walter's girlfriend, and then inside you've
got Mini Castor who's the mother. So the police push
into the house, and as they do, basically chaos breaks out.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
So Walter shoots a few shots.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
He's hiding in the kitchen, shoots the three shots, kills
one of the police officers, shoots the other one above
the eye, and then ends up shooting his girlfriend and
himself in this kind of like five minutes of bloodshed
in this in this house in San Francisco. You know,
John Larson is watching this from across the bay in Berkeley.
He can be reads about it in the newspapers, here's
about it through his colleagues, and he's distraught.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
He's like, God, my machine contributed to this. You know.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
If he had got the right answer, then maybe this
wouldn't have happened. Maybe they would have kept Henry in custody.
Maybe they would have been able to solve the case
without having to resort to this violence. So yeah, that's
kind of where things end up. And then obviously the
case goes to trial over the next few months and
all the events gets presented, and the case is really
like the two sides, you know, on one side, they're arguing
that Henry was the mastermind that he paid the Caster brothers,
(22:57):
and then the other side, the defense's argument is essentially,
you can't trust the brothers. You know, they're so shady,
they're so dodged that you can't trust a word they say.
So it really comes down to like trust and who
you can believe. And eventually Henry gets acquitted. It takes
two trials, but eventually he gets acquitted, and John Larson
is sort of he's never really able to let this
case go. So even though Henry gets acquitted, So after
(23:19):
Henry gets acquitted and released, John Larson kind of makes
the point of actually befriending Henry Wilkins and he helps
him find a new job, and he helps him move
from San Francisco to further northern California, and then he
convinces Henry to do another light detector test a couple
of months later. Larson is so convinced that this guy
is guilty, and he's so convinced that his machine got
it wrong, and he kind of wants to make amends,
so he convinced him to do an a light sexed test,
(23:41):
and Henry passes that one again, and then he also
convinces him to to undergo a truth serium test, which
again is another sort of studo scientific thing from back then,
and again Henry passes that too, and that's kind of
where the case ends with Henry A.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Freeman.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Larson completely turned around on his machine, and he's gone
from thinking it's the greatest thing to pick criminology ever
to thinking of it as a sort of Frankenstein's monster.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Larson doesn't stop it, right, he continues on. They continue
using it.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
He doesn't go to the press and say I got
to tell you, I think that my machine got this wrong.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
He doesn't do that.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
I think even by then it's too late.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
By then, it's the mid nineteen twenties and Kila and
Volmo of moved to la and then they move to
Chicago and they take the light detector with him, and
they get splashy headlines about how effective it is, and
then they roll it out across the world and Larson
watches this from a place of increasing frustration over the
next you know, thirty years, as this machine that he
thought would bring about justice actually becomes just like another
(24:41):
form of psychological manipulation. He wanted to use the light
detectors to end physical torture, but actually what he ended
up creating was a tool of psychological torture.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
And that's one of the great sadnesses.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Now, what I remember is sometime in the twenties, was
it the US Supreme Court or was it California's Supreme
Court that said this is stupid, you cannot use it
in court, which I was shocked because they were letting
everything into court. So even in the twenties, judges were saying,
I don't think this is good evidence.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Did that not slow this thing down? I guess not.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
You're talking about the Fry case, yes, which is a
really famous legal standard. Say, this is what William Marston
was working kind of on the side. So while Larson
and Quila and Valmore were solving crimes in San Francisco,
William Marsden was on the other coast. He was in
Washington teaching law and trying to get the polygraph or
get lie detection accepted in court. He brought this case
to court centering around a murder of a prominent doctor
(25:38):
in Washington by a guy called James Alfonse Frye, who
was the first world wolvet, and the judge in this
case said that you can't use a new invention in
a federal court room until it's kind of reached broad
acceptance by experts in the field, and that became the
known as the fry standard, and for decades, even until
I think the nineteen seventies or eighties, it was kind
(25:58):
of the de facto that American courts decided whether or
not new inventions like fingerprinting, like DNA, like hair analysis,
whatever it might be, whether they were acceptable in court.
So yes, the five standard actually barred the polygraph from
federal court rooms, has barred the polygraph from federal courtrooms
ever since it was invented, essentially one hundred years. The
problem is that the polygraph is used not necessarily in
(26:21):
federal court rooms, but kind of in parts of investigations
before cases get to trial.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
It's used because it's a quicker way of getting confession.
It's used as a way of co.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Escing intimidating exactly. So tell me about the next big case.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
You've got John Larson who has used this, and other
people now are using this. Are they using the lie
detector as the sole source of evidence in any criminal case?
Or does there have to be something else there even
in the nineteen twenties for them to say preponderance of
evidence for guilt.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's the same system hasn't changed.
So I think, you know, you do need other evidence.
I guess the problem comes when you he biased proceedings.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
By using the light detector, You know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
You have to question whether someone can get a fair
trial if all over the newspapers it's been splashed has
failed lie detector test, all that kind of thing, or
whether it leads the police down certain avenues of investigation
or closes off other avenues of investigation because of this
faulty reasoning, was faulty science. Keiler in particular involve around
loss and worked on a bunch of cases over the
next few decades, and I covered some other than in
(27:25):
the book. And they moved from San Francisco to la
and then they ended up in Chicago, which was sort
of the crime capitol maybe of the world. In the
nineteen thirties. Actually, you know, you al Capone and like
it was just amazing city of like, you know, you
had the stockyards, and you had the massive immigration, and
you had gangs and mobsters and all this kind of
(27:46):
stuff going on, and it was.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Like not long.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
It was around the time of the Valentine's Day massacre,
you know, that famous series of killings in Chicago, So
it was around that kind of time. So it's all
sort of film noir, the Untouchables, elliot ness, all that
kind of stuff. But yeah, they pitched up there, Kala
and Volma and Lasten to a certain extent, founded like
an institute of criminology and tried to kind of commercialize
and expand the use of criminology forensic science to fight crime.
(28:11):
And they did some really interesting stuff, and I thought,
some really fascinating cases. And then the second case I
look at the book is about the murder of a
guy called Max Dent. He's kind of a sort of
low level drug dealer turned informant in Chicago, in the
West Side of Chicago in nineteen thirty five, and one day,
Max Dent is walking to get cigarettes and he gets
gunned down by a mysterious assailant and police like kind
(28:33):
of the other investigative work, and they quickly find the
culprit or, the alleged culprit guy called Joe Rappaport, who
is one of the guys that Max Dent had informed against,
and in fact was the only person who Max Dent
had informed against who was not yet behind bars.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
He was still awaiting trial.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
But Dent had a lot of enemies, so it could
have been that someone who was already in jail because
of him had hired someone to kill him or whatever.
So it wasn't you know, one hundred percent of done deal.
So Rappaport gets given the death penalty. So he's sentenced
to you to death, and he's on death row, and
his sister Rose writes hundreds of letters to anyone she
can to try and get the sentence commuted or delayed
(29:10):
or whatever, and over the course of several months years,
the execution date keeps getting pushed back and.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Delayed for various reasons. So you know, it appeals.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Then there's like Jewish holidays that it can't happen, and
then eventually it comes to Henry Horner. He was the
governor of Illinois, at the time, and he gets the
final decision on whether or not this guy is going
to live or die, whether he's finally going to.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Face the electric chair or not.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Henry Horner was the governor of Illinois at this time,
but previously he'd been a judge and actually he'd use
the light detector to solve a case of police corruption
in Chicago a couple of years earlier. So he knew
Leonard Killer, and he knew aug was Volmer, and he
knew about the lighte detector. So when it finally came
down after four days of execution, it finally came down
to this decision about whether this Skuyja Rappaport should get
(29:56):
executed or not. Horner said to him, he said, if
you can pass the light detector test, then we won't
execute you. Oh my gosh, well yeah, which is kind
of nuts. So this is like March nineteen thirty seven.
By this point, everyone's a lot older and a bit
more battered. Quila has gone from being this kind of
like fresh faced sixteen year old kid who he's in
his early thirties and he's got a drinking problem and
(30:19):
his life is a mess, you know, and all this
kind of stuff. Larsen has been basically like exiled from
plight society because of his belligerence and his sort of
ability to rugby blook the wrong way. Bomber's back in
San Francisco. His health is deteriorating. So Quila kind of
goes to the Cook County jail with the light detector
in toe. So I should say that Keila kind of
(30:40):
redesigned the light detector when he made it more sleek
and commercial. He made this beautiful kind of John Larson's
lighte detector was kind of scraggly and sort of like rustic.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
In a suitcase.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, and then Keiler bought this kind of nice wornup
box with like beautiful little dials and a little scroll
of paper and stuff like that. So Quiler kind of
turns up at the Cook County with the slideer sector
and he does the light detected test on joy Rapport. Now,
when Larsen had designed the test, it was supposed to
be kind of done in a way that you know,
quiet room, quite surroundings, everyone at peace. And this test
(31:14):
was done in a jail cell at Kirk County with
police officers and kind of media peering through the bars
with the lights flickering because they were testing the electric
chair in the next room. But it's like, how are
you supposed to be calm in that scenario. So Rappaport
fails the tests. He that calls up the governor and
says he's failed the test, and half an hour later
(31:36):
he goes to the electric chair.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
And it's a really harrowing case. My view is that
Joe Rapperport was probably guilty. I mean, my view is
that the death founalty shouldn't be used. But that's this
kind of separate issue. If we are going to use it,
you cannot use it on the basis of a series
our scientific tests. Yeah, carried out under these conditions. You know,
he was convicted by a jury. That's fair enough. Let
(31:58):
that stand. Don't bring this kind of pseudoscientific stuff into
the box. You know, this, this test should not have
been given the last word on this guy's life basically.
So yeah, and that's kind of where the kind of
main section of the book ends. And then you know,
Last and Quila continued to bicker. This was sort of
the last draw for Last and he was just like
again absolutely distraught by what his invention had been used
(32:20):
for and you know, he wrote one hundreds of letters
complaining about about this tequila into anyone else would listen about,
you know, how this Frankenstein monster had got out of
his control. And yeah, Quila's life kind of unraveled a
bit after this as well. He drank more and more
and more and he died really young.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
He had like a heart condition.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
And yeah, so I think it's interesting that this machine
that sort of has transformed the justice system also sort
of wrecked its creators lives largely had such a big
impact on them. You know, even the cases they worked
on it, they really affected them.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
You know, if you look at the National Sciences Report,
which analyzed each essentially tool of forensic science that we
use and sort of rates it and says, this is
what's reliable. Toxicology is reliable, DNA generally is reliable. And
then you look at these pattern matching things, right, so
fingerprinting and footprints and shoeprints and stuff where you're really
(33:09):
depending on the analyst to know what they're doing and
to make these comparisons. At least in the nineteen twenties
and thirties, do you think about the light detector test
and it's not even a the analyst doesn't know what
they're doing.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
It's the it doesn't measure the right thing, you know.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
It's like taking a blood test and saying, well, I'm gonna,
you know, try to detect this poison, but testing it
for the wrong poison completely.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Oh, there's no poison in here.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Well, you tested for arsenic and you're looking for you know,
perhaps or strychnine in there. So I thought the book
really was grounded in a lot of relevance today because
we are seeing so much, just this huge amount of
evidence that comes from all of these different sources, and
some of it is very very good and some of
(33:53):
it's not. And I think when we see this like
flashy scene of police officers trapping someone up to a
light detector test, it's I'm sure terrifying to anybody, guilty
or not guilty.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, that's right. I think you make a really interesting point.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
I mean, Kilo himself said that the polygraph is no
more of a lie detector than a stethoscope.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
As a light detector.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah, all it's doing is recording your pulse and your
blood pressure and you're breathing and then writing it down
on the chart. And it requires some human interpretation. Therefore
bias creeps in, and it's not an objective measurement. It's
very subjective. There's huge discrepancies in being found guilty depending
on your race and gender and things like that. It's
very unregulated. And the reason I wrote the book actually
(34:31):
was that, as you say, this was one hundred years ago,
and we've known about the faulty reasoning behind this machine
for one hundred years. But what we're seeing today is
a proliferation of other lie detector technologies, using brain scans,
using AI, using people dilation.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Facial recognition. I mean, there's so much.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Yeah, exactly, and they all kind of suffer from the
same fundamental flaw, which is that there's no such thing
as a lie detector. If you talk to people in
the field, they'll say there's no telltale sign of lying.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That's true for everyone all the time. There's no such
thing as like Pinocchio's nose.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Right, even if your light detector works for ninety percent
of people, that's still a huge number of people. That
doesn't work for yea, even if it works for ninety
nine percent of people, Well, how can you be sure
that the person you're using on isn't in that one percent.
And actually the cases where it gets used are those
EDU cases, right, the cases where it's not clear who
did it, it's not clear he's telling the truth, and
those are exactly the cases where the light detector is
(35:25):
likely to go wrong.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Well, Paul Holes and I often talk about having one
piece of evidence that seems rock solid, like DNA evidence,
versus having a huge amount of circumstantial evidence. He would
rather have a case with a lot of circumstantial evidence
that's unbreakable. You know, That's just it paints a picture
versus DNA where any good defense attorney is going to
be able to say, yeah, but this lab had that
(35:48):
problem that one time. Is it possible that the chain
of custody was broken that one time?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
So I feel like the light detector test.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
I know it's used as a tool, and probably I'll
hear from sigators saying, well, it's a He'll thank me
if something happens to one of your family members and
we catch the guy and they confess to hurting your
family member using the light detector. But you know, as
my father always said, he would rather have a hundred
criminals go free than one person who's innocently behind bars.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting point.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
And there's something I really struggled with as well, because
I don't, you know, this tool has undoubtedly put really
bad guys away, you know what I mean. It has
has undoubtedly helped solve crimes, but then it has also
perpetrated huge miscarriages of justice. So I don't know how
you balance that, and that's something I really kind of
grappled with a lot when I was writing the book.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
I think it's probably there are probably other ways of
getting convictions where you need to get convictions that don't
risk the damage that the light detector can potentially cause.
And there's a lot of examples of remecent history of
people who have been wrongly convicted based on polygraph tests
or light detectors, and the damage that causes is irreversible.
I think, especially when you combine bad science with the
(36:57):
jury system a panel of non experts, it's very.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Easy to be overruled by this stuff.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Oh yeah, and you know, you get these experts in
their field, and they get flown in from across the
country to impress upon you how much they know about
this technology and they say this technology is infallible, you know,
and you don't really understand it, because why would you write,
You're just a panel of ordinary people, you know, by design.
So these things can be useful if you put the
right amount of weight on them. I think the problem
with the light detector is because it's such a compelling idea,
(37:24):
something we've longed for for centuries. Too much weight gets
put on the findings of a light detector test, and
therefore it gets excus cases, excus things. It messes up
with the justice system, and that's my kind of issue
with it, I think.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
So to close this out, I will say that with
Oscar Heinrich, who's my forensic scientist in American Churlo, he
had about four or five thousand letters in his archive.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
I read probably half of them.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
I never once read a letter in which he expresses
doubt in a case that he closed. Do you think
I think we know the answer to John Larson. Obviously
he expressed doubt, and he was, it seems like, remorseful
for even creating this thing to begin with. Do you
think that August Volmer, the police chief, or Keeler the
(38:09):
assistant ever had any doubts about the machine the way
John Morrison did.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
I think that privately, they probably did. I think their
incentives were different. I think Larson was chasing justice. I
think Volmer was chasing kind of a kinder way of
doing policing. And I think maybe this is a bit
uncharitable tequila. But I think Keela was chasing fame, fortune.
You know, he was chasing something else, and maybe his
(38:33):
same It didn't really matter too much about whether the
cases that he was working on were solved. He wanted
the rush, the publicity, the adrenaline of working on the cases,
of being in the mix of you know, tussling with
bad guys and gangsters and robbers. So yeah, I don't
really know. Actually, I think that's a really interesting question.
It doesn't come across in their letters to each other, certainly,
but maybe there are the conversations that they had where
(38:55):
it's mentioned.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
I feel like a lack of self reflection that comes
with some self doubt should be a requirement for anyone
who holds someone's life in their hands.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
And for me, I.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Was so startled to say, Gosh, this man does not
believe he's ever made a mistake, and clearly he has
made mistakes. So yeah, something to think about with this
book in particular is you do have an awful lot
of people who are propelling this machine forward, who are
responsible for sending people away for life, for executing them
(39:31):
or setting them free, and it's all based on a
machine that we now know is no good.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
What I will say is that once the box is open,
it's like Pandora's Box, right. You know, even if Kilo
and Las and Volmer heard all said we should stop
using this, by the time they've opened the box, it's
too late, you know. As well as those guys, there
were dozens of other people that were doing similar things
after the initial invention, so it's out there now. So
it's about how you design robust systems to stop these
things from kind of getting misused.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis a Morosi. Our
associate producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by
John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga.
(40:31):
Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at
info at.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Tenfoldmorewicked dot com.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for
Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Fantasy.
Speaker 3 (00:12):
It is like a warning about putting too much faith
in untested technologies or throwing our weight behind flawed technologies.
Just because they're shiny and new doesn't necessarily mean they're
accurate a little better than what's coming before.
Speaker 4 (00:30):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast Tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show, and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:51):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents wicked words about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. One of the most controversial tools used
by investigators is the light detector. It's often used to
(01:14):
intimidate suspects, and sometimes it's responsible for confessions both real
and false. The light detector's origin is grounded in deception abuse,
and of course, murder author Ammett Katwalla tells us about
his book Trimmor's in the Blood, Murder, Obsession, and the
Birth of the Light Detector.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
We can start with the Wilkins case. This is May
nineteen twenty two, so one hundred and one years ago
almost as we're recording this, and a woman called Anna
is driving back from a camping trip in the mountains
with her husband Henry. They're in California in the Santa
Cuez Mountains, driving north towards San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
It's kind of getting late.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
They've got their kids in the backseat, and as they
drive into San Francisco on the edge of the city,
they know it's a car following them, and the car
speeds up and gets closer and closer and closer, and
eventually drives them to the side of the road and
they crash into the curb. And then a guy comes
running up to the window and points a gun at Henry, saying,
you know, give me all your money.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
And then there's a struggle.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Henry tries to reach for his own gun to kind
of tell this bandit to get lost. But what ends
up happening is that the bandit fires a billet into
the car, and rather than hitting Henry, he hits his
wife Anna instead.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So Anna has been shot. The bandit runs off.
Speaker 3 (02:26):
Henry drives to hospital, but when he gets to the hospital,
doctors tell him and his wife is dead.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
What do we know about the bandit?
Speaker 4 (02:32):
Because I'm assuming Henry has a decent description, although we
know that witnesses oftentimes don't have a good description when
they've gone through something traumatizing like that.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
Yeah, his description is pretty vague.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
He describes this kind of like reasonably tall man with
a bandana tied over his face. It was getting dark,
so there wasn't a huge amount of light for him
to see by. He describes the car as being a
red dodge. He describes there being three men in the car.
This is the description that Henry kind of gives to
police that evening when they interview him at the hospital.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
One thing I think is interesting in all of the
research in history, police are skeptical of crime victims who
are giving a description that's too vague, and then they're
also skeptical of crime victims who give a description that
is way too specific.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
So now I start.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
Thinking or wonder, what is the right amount of information
that they're looking for, and police are skeptical at this point,
Is that right.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Yes, So they immediately start to get a little bit
skeptical because they interview another witness, a guy called Jacob Corfinkle,
who had kind of seen this little car tase unfold
on Nineteenth Avenue in San Francisco, and his description of
the vehicle did not match Henry's description of the vehicle.
So Henry said that the car that had been following
him and Anna was a red Dodge, but this guy,
Jacob Krfinkell, said it was a blue Hudson. So there
(03:49):
was this one discrepancy right there already. But in all
other ways, Henry seemed like, you know, a distraught husband
who'd just lost his wife. He was so upset in
the hospital that he almost claps passed out. So I
don't think they were really suspicious at this point of
him having been involved or anything like that. They may
even maybe thought that, you know, here's a guy who's
just been through a really traumatic event. Maybe he's not
(04:10):
remembering things clearly, and maybe if we speak to him
in a few days, he'll be able to give us
a fill up picture. But they immediately kind of started
looking for the culprits based on the description that Henry
had given them.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
What is Jacob saying, did he see the whole thing
or did he just see a car trailing them?
Speaker 3 (04:25):
He was parked by the side of the road, or
he was driving along the road with his own family,
and he was with his wife and his son and
the sun. It's noticed in the newspaper account was kind
of like car obsessed, so he could recognize the different
engine noises that the different cars would make, which became
quite significant later on. But so he's driving along and
he sees two cars go speeding past. In the first
car as Henry's yellow Premier car. Henry was a mechanic,
(04:48):
so he loved cars, and he's really proud of this yellow,
bright yellow car that he had. I think of it
in my head a bit like the car from the
Great gat Speed, you know, just.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Sort of speeding along.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
So he saw this one Cargay pass, and then he
saw this other Cargat pass really fast.
Speaker 2 (05:00):
The first thing he saw.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
And then maybe five minutes later, he continues driving further
along the road and he sees Henry's car stop by
the side of the road, and Henry's Henry waves him
down and says, help help. My wife's been shot and
needs to get her to a hospital. So he doesn't
see the crime unfold, but he kind of sees the
kind of two cars go past him. He hears maybe
the gun shot, hears shouting, but he doesn't actually see
(05:21):
the actual shooting. So he can't really confirm anything beyond
the fact that these were the two cars that were involved,
and that Henry was frantic covered in blood, and the
shooting did happen where and when Henry said it happened,
but not how it happened.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Okay, So when do things turn for Henry? Because I'm
assuming that's the road we're heading down right now.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Essentially what happens is over the next kind of three
four days, the police chase down all these leaves. They
stop cars that look similar to the car Henry described,
They pull over suspicious looking people, but none of the
people are you know, the culprits. And then a couple
of days later, what happens is that a garage in
the Mission in San Francisco, two brothers called war and
Arthur Casta come in. What was taken from Henry and
(06:03):
the robbery were three one hundred dollar bills now. One
hundred dollar bills back then were a lot rarer than
they are now. You know, the minimum wage was thirty
three cents an hour, so having one hundred dollar bill
was kind of suspicious unless you were of a particular
social class. So, yeah, a garage in the mission, these
two brothers, Water and Arthur Casta come in and they
tried to pay for a one dollar twenty five car
repair with one hundred dollar bill. By now, it's two
(06:26):
days after the murder, the details of the crime have
been slashed all over the papers and the garage and
is immediately suspicious. So when the brothers leave, he calls
the police. The brothers were sort of well known to
the police. They're these sort of archetypal agents of chaos.
Walter is particularly just a great character who I couldn't
have Whisher for a better character, you know, a better
villain for the book. He's covered in scars, he's got
(06:47):
tattoos all over his hands. The story is apparently that
he was kicked in the head by a horse when
he was a boy, and.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Ever since then he'd been kind of violent and prone
to these kind.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Of impulsive, sort of reckless decisions, and then Arthur is
his brother, kind of rains them in a little bit,
but also has his own sort of criminal past. So
the police get this tip from the garage I know,
they pull these two brothers in for questioning.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
The brothers deny having had anything to do with.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
It, and then they do a police line up where
they ask Henry to kind of come in and say
where these the men that robbed you and shot your wife?
Speaker 2 (07:15):
And Henry says, no, no, I've never seen these men
before in my life.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
That's a couple of days later, but then over the
week after that, it transpires that actually Henry did know
the Caster brothers. In fact, he had worked with water
Cast a few years prior. So parts of his story
were kind of starting to unravel. So if you take
the fact that Jacob Golfingle described a different car to
the car Henry described, and the fact that Henry seemed
to have lied about knowing the Caster brothers and the
police line up, things start to kind of get a
(07:40):
little bit murky, and the police start to get a
little bit suspicious.
Speaker 4 (07:44):
What is their car that they would have used in
this Does it match the description of either Henry's or Jacob's.
Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, not initially, so they show the Caster brothers car
to Henry and to the attorney, but it's not the
same car. Eventually, once Henry says these aren't the guy,
they let the Caster Brothers go. And it's only after
they let the Caster Brothers go that the police discovered
that actually the car that was used had been rented
from a garage by the Caster Brothers for the day
(08:10):
of the murder and then given back about forty five
minutes after the murder. So they've got a definite link
between the car that was used and the Caster brothers,
and they've got a link between the cast of brothers
and Henry, which both sides kind of denied that link,
and they only put it together kind of after it's
too late, after they've already released the Caster Brothers back
into society.
Speaker 4 (08:26):
So I'm assuming where we're heading is that the police
are going to believe that Henry hired these brothers to
kill his wife for some reason.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
That's right, Yeah, And actually the other thing that kind
of mergers during this time is that although Henry had
been this sort of picture of a grieving husband, there
had been some domestic issues in his marriage who had
been accused of kind of beating his wife Anna. Another
police officer discovered that he had actually filed for divorce
a month prior, so there'd been this kind of growing
tension in the marriage. Putting all this together, they had
(08:57):
this picture of this guy who was growing warm more suspicious,
but they didn't have any evidence. They didn't have the
Caster brothers in Custoine anymore to kind of corroborate that
side of the story, and Henry was still denying everything,
so they didn't really have anything to go on, and
so that's when they decided to turn to this new
machine that had just been invented across the bay in Berkeley.
There's so many fascinating characterism and there's a whole strand
(09:19):
about this guy called William Marston. He's the kind of
originator of the idea of the light detector. So just
to give like a super severer quick review, the theory
behind the light detector is that it works by tracking
your blood pressure and your pulse, and that if you
are lying, your blood pressure and your pulse will change
compared to when you're telling the truth. There had been
suspicions about this going back hundreds or thousands of years.
(09:40):
There's all these stories from ancient China and India folk
theories about how to tell if someone was lying, and
that kind of build on this rough idea. But Marsden
was a Harvard psychologist and he kind of measured peer's
blood pressure while they told lies. And you kind of
notice this link, but he did it in a very
sort of unstructured, kind of ad hoc way. Marsden would
go on to invent Wonder Woman, the character which is.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Kind of mad with the lasso, right, is that what
it was exactly? Yeah, the lasso that made people tell
the truth. That was one of my favorite things about
Wonder Woman.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
And it was inspired by his actual work in light detection,
and he kind of pursued his career in lie detection
in a sort of parallel way to the characters in
my book. But in nineteen twenty one, August Volmer, who
was the chief of police in Berkeley, read this paper
by Marsden in an academic journal. Now, Varma was a
really fascinating guy. He is considered the father of modern
policing because he was the first police chief in America
(10:32):
to really kind of try and bring science to policing.
So policing in the early twentieth century was like brustal.
Still it was kind of billy clubs and the third
degree and beating confessions out of people. Former wanted to
humanize it a bit and bring in kind of more
scientific rigor and stuff like that, so he brought in.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Radios for his officers.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
He was one of the first police officers to give
them bicycles and made cycles and cars so they could
cover more ground. He pioneered the use of like crime mapping, fingerprinting,
forensic photography, things like that. Another really interesting thing that
Volmer did was he was one of the first police
chiefs in America to hire college graduates to be cops.
So before that it was generally kind of older men.
(11:10):
There wasn't a huge amount of difference between the cops
and the criminals they were trying to catch in terms
of the demographic background and their kind of.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Status in society.
Speaker 3 (11:18):
Varma changed that by hiring college cops, and at first
he was kind of kind of widely mocked in the
newspapers were doing this.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
People thought these sort of you.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Know, nineteen and twenty year old boys would be too
soft to really grasp the problem of crime. So anyway,
Volmer read this paper by Marsden about this link between
blood pressure and line detection, and he thought that John Larson,
who was one of his college cops, would be the
perfect person to turn this idea, this insight into a
machine that could actually be used to systematically determine whether
someone was lying during a police interview. So that brings
(11:45):
us to John Larson, who again is you couldn't wish
for a better character. He was a bit older than
the other college cops, he was twenty nine years old.
He wanted to be a criminologist, John Larson, but before
he did that, he wanted to get some kind of
real world experience of crime fighting.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Now.
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Larson was stubborn, awkward, just belligerent, often got into like
disputes with his employers.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
I've read so many of his.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Letters, and he's just a fascinatingly sort of prickly character,
and he always works against his own interests.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Large amounts of hubrius is always the impression I had
about John Marson.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Yeah, the stubbornness as well, Just the most stubborn man.
And in every way that Varner was kind of egalitarian
and open and friendly. Larson was sort of closed off
and stubborn and stuck his heels in. He was also
a really terrible cop. He would constantly like just he
crashed two cars. He got in fights with his colleagues,
like slept on the job and all this kind of thing.
(12:37):
So I think for last and it was a bit
of a relief when Volmer kind of said to him, Okay,
I'm taking you off the beat and you can just
work on this machine full time. Over the next few
weeks months in the spring of nineteen twenty one, Larson
developed this machine and it looks pretty similar to the
light sexes of today. It's got a kind of pen
that scratches the lines on a scrolling piece of paper.
It's got the blood pressure cuff that goes around your arm.
(12:58):
It's got the neumagrass which makes you're breathing. They wrap
around your chest. Actually, in one hundred years of the
equipment really hasn't changed that much. So over the next
year last and tested this equipment. He solved a few cases,
including some thefts at college dorms. He used the light
detector in the William High Tower, Father Heslin case. Would
you talk about in your book American Sherlock, where I
(13:19):
think it ultimately agreed with the theory in terms of
getting the right answer about whether high Tower had committed
the crime or not, and then a year later he
used it on the Henry Wilkins case.
Speaker 4 (13:30):
What I've found interesting about doing all the research on
the light detector with this case, I'll just summarize very quickly.
So the William high Tower case happened in nineteen twenty one.
A priest goes missing in Colnwick, California and ends up dead,
and there is a man who has arrived at a
church and is trying to guide the police on where
to find this body. And finally the police figure out
(13:52):
that he was the one who did it, William high Tower,
and they bring him and they strap him to this
machine that John Larson had just made portable, I think,
and they strap them and he's petrified and nonsensical. And
that leads me to one of the things that I
know you and I will talk about is why it
doesn't work. William high Tower very clearly had schizophrenia, and
(14:14):
that is one of the things mental health, I mean, medicine,
I mean, there's so many reasons why this is not
an accurate machine, with the exception of scaring the hell
out of people when they're strapped up to it and
they fail.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
You make a really good point.
Speaker 3 (14:27):
You can't assume that someone's blood pulse is racing because
they're lying.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
There could be a myriad of reasons why that's happening
mm hmm.
Speaker 3 (14:32):
They could be scared of getting caught, or they could
be scared of getting wrongly accused, and the blood pressure
and pulse will do exactly the same thing mm hmm.
And you can't expect everyone to react the same way
to the same questions. High Tower is a perfect example
of someone with mental health condition. There's no reason to
expect that their physiological reaction to a questioning would be
the same as someone else.
Speaker 4 (14:51):
And also, I talked to a forensic psychologist when I
was working on that book who said people with psychopathy
will pass with flying colors because they actually believe the
lies that they're saying. So everything from the medicine to
the bad day you had to whatever. It could say
your blood pressure's high, your heart rates high, but it
can't say why. And I think that's why every time
(15:14):
I see on a true crime show, you know, oh
he failed the lie detector.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Who cares?
Speaker 4 (15:18):
I mean, I guess it intimidates people sometimes into confessions.
But I'm assuming we're going down the road that Henry
gets strapped to one of these lie detectors and they
start asking questions. How do the questions work with a suspect?
Do they start out easy and get hard?
Speaker 3 (15:34):
So the way it works generally is the way it's
supposed to work is that you have control questions and
you have target questions, and they're supposed to be yes
or no questions. So the way it works is that
you break it down into the control questions and that
helps you establish a baseline for what that person's body
response is when they're telling the truth, and then when
you ask the target questions, you can then compare their
responses to the target questions to their response to the
(15:56):
baseline questions, and that will give you some indication of
whether they're lying or not. So, for Henry, the target
questions where I think like, do you like the movies?
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Do you smoke? Have you ever seen visions? Do you
drink to excess?
Speaker 3 (16:08):
And then the questions were about the crime, were you
know did you hire anyone to commit this murder? Do
you know, Arthur at Walter Caster, when did you first
see the car?
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Specifics about the crime.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
Exactly specifics about the crime. Henry was, you know, kind
of an interesting character as well, quite moody, obviously, kind
of sometimes quite violent. He and Anna were German immigrants.
There were a lot of German immigrants in San Francisco
at the time. There was still a degree of suspicion
about the immigrant community in San Francisco at that time,
particularly after the war. After the First World War, Germans
in America had seen their place in society kind of
(16:40):
slipped somewhat. So there was maybe a degree of bias
against Henry from the press the public. But you know,
Larsen did the test and he analyzed the result. He
said to press afterwards that he was a willing subject,
that he was nervous, but actually he was convinced that
he was telling the truth. In fact, Henry had been
so nervous during the time that it took ages for
(17:01):
the pulse to sort of settle down to the point
where Larson could actually perform the test, which perhaps is
a clue that maybe something wasn't quite right. But yeah,
so Henry passed the test. The examiner kind of splashed
this big story saying, you know, science says he tells
the truth. And there's a column from John Larson about
you know why Larson thought that Henry was telling the truth,
so please let him go. And they continued with their investigation,
(17:23):
basically starting from scratch because the Caster brothers were gone
and Henry seemed to be telling the truth according to
the polygraph machine.
Speaker 1 (17:30):
Amazing.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
And in the press, what was the reaction? Did everybody
just think this was the greatest machine ever?
Speaker 2 (17:36):
Yeah, up to this point it has been quite positive.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
And I think that both Volma, August Vlmer and John
Larson had been quite effusive in their praise of the machine.
And there was only really after this case that Larson
began to get very worried about this. These are the
words he actually usually called it a Frankenstein's monster. He
began to get very worried about this Frankenstein's monster that
he had unleashed. And I think if it had been
up to John Larson, he would have maintained very very
(18:00):
tight control over the machine and the idea, and no
one else would have used it unless it was under
his directed provision.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
So he could make sure that they were using it properly.
The problem is that in nineteen twenty one, last and
a high school student called Leonard Keeler. Leonard Keeler was
a kind of family friend of August Farmer, and he
was a sixteen precocious, sixteen year old kid who was
kind of sickly in and out of school with various illnesses,
loved the outdoors, used to milk rattlesnakes for their venom,
(18:25):
and like perform close up magic. Basically, Varmer brought Keeler
into the police department one day and Keiler saw Larson
doing a lighter text test on a suspect, and Keeler
was like basically instantly fascinated by this machine, and over
the next few years became Larson's protege i guess kind
of helped him carry the machine around, helped him set
it up in different cases, helped him basically run the tests.
(18:48):
And in the years that follow it was really Leonard
Keeler who was responsible for popularizing the polygraph and spreading
it all across America, and Larson and Keeler basically ended
up absolutely despising each other. Larson thought that Keiler had
sort of bastardized his.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
Machine and sold us to the highest bidder, and wasn't
adhering to scientific principles. Keiler thought Larson was stubborn and
stuck up and you know, was trash talking him all
around town.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Which he was.
Speaker 3 (19:14):
So yeah, these two creators the live detector had this
spectacular falling out.
Speaker 4 (19:32):
So what ends up happening ultimately with the Henry Wilkins case.
Do they come to a conclusion do they track down
the Castor brothers.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
So what happens is that as soon as Henry leaves
his lie detector test, he goes home, he goes to
his garage, and then he goes to a secret meeting
with Robert Castor, who is the brother of Walter and
Arthur who are missing. What he doesn't know is that
he's being followed Henry when he does this, So this
is immediately a very very suspicious red flag. You've just
passed the light detectors saying you had nothing to do
(20:01):
with the Caster brothers.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
Then you're going to a meeting with their brother immediately afterwards.
So what ends up happening is that the police managed
to eventually find Arthur and bring him back to San Francisco,
and they put him in a jail cell and try
and get him to confess, and he doesn't confess for
a few days, confessed to being part of the murder
of Anna Wilkins, being one of the bandits that pulled
her over and fort her. It takes a few days,
but the way they eventually get a confession is through
(20:25):
some sort of clever thinking by Matthew Brady, who was
the district attorney. They basically put Arthur Caster in this cell,
and then they put this kid in the cell next
to him, who they tell Arthur has been arrested for
the Henry Wilkins case. And all night Arthur can hear
this kid next to him whaling in a cell about
how he's been wrongly accused and how they're going to
execute him.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
And after two nights of this, Arthur's conscience gets the
better of him and he basically tells the police everything.
He tells them that yes, Henry had paid him and
Walter to shoot his wife, but that Walter was the ringleader.
But the first thing Arthur knew about it was when
they started following the car back to San Francisco, and
Walter had just told Arthur that he was going to
run an errand and that he needed his help with something,
(21:03):
so that he was an unwilling accomplice. So that really
obviously was very incriminating for Henry, who had also left
San Francisco at this point, so that the police then
fetched Henry dragged him back to San Francisco with some force,
shall we say, in the sort of.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
A nineteen twenty's a manor.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
They had Arthur Cast in jail as well, but what
they didn't have was Walter Caster when they really needed
Walter as the alleged ring leader to bring charges forward
to take this case to trial. Now, Walter has been
on the run in northern California for a few weeks,
but then he decides to come back to San Francisco
and the police eventually track him down to a house.
It's in Peterrero Hill, so kind of southern San Francisco.
(21:39):
It's his mother's house, so the Caster's mother's house and
the police go over there to apprehend Walter. There's like
three or four police officers and they ring the doorbell.
Mini Caastera, who's their mother, answers the door. She says,
you know, Walter's not here, but through the door they
can see the kind of remains of a helf eaten
breakfast on the kitchen table, and they're with Walter's girlfriend,
who's the one who's kind of led them to that
(22:01):
house as well. So at the door, you've got a
couple of police officers, Walter's girlfriend, and then inside you've
got Mini Castor who's the mother. So the police push
into the house, and as they do, basically chaos breaks out.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
So Walter shoots a few shots.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
He's hiding in the kitchen, shoots the three shots, kills
one of the police officers, shoots the other one above
the eye, and then ends up shooting his girlfriend and
himself in this kind of like five minutes of bloodshed
in this in this house in San Francisco. You know,
John Larson is watching this from across the bay in Berkeley.
He can be reads about it in the newspapers, here's
about it through his colleagues, and he's distraught.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
He's like, God, my machine contributed to this. You know.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
If he had got the right answer, then maybe this
wouldn't have happened. Maybe they would have kept Henry in custody.
Maybe they would have been able to solve the case
without having to resort to this violence. So yeah, that's
kind of where things end up. And then obviously the
case goes to trial over the next few months and
all the events gets presented, and the case is really
like the two sides, you know, on one side, they're arguing
that Henry was the mastermind that he paid the Caster brothers,
(22:57):
and then the other side, the defense's argument is essentially,
you can't trust the brothers. You know, they're so shady,
they're so dodged that you can't trust a word they say.
So it really comes down to like trust and who
you can believe. And eventually Henry gets acquitted. It takes
two trials, but eventually he gets acquitted, and John Larson
is sort of he's never really able to let this
case go. So even though Henry gets acquitted, So after
(23:19):
Henry gets acquitted and released, John Larson kind of makes
the point of actually befriending Henry Wilkins and he helps
him find a new job, and he helps him move
from San Francisco to further northern California, and then he
convinces Henry to do another light detector test a couple
of months later. Larson is so convinced that this guy
is guilty, and he's so convinced that his machine got
it wrong, and he kind of wants to make amends,
so he convinced him to do an a light sexed test,
(23:41):
and Henry passes that one again, and then he also
convinces him to to undergo a truth serium test, which
again is another sort of studo scientific thing from back then,
and again Henry passes that too, and that's kind of
where the case ends with Henry A.
Speaker 2 (23:55):
Freeman.
Speaker 3 (23:56):
Larson completely turned around on his machine, and he's gone
from thinking it's the greatest thing to pick criminology ever
to thinking of it as a sort of Frankenstein's monster.
Speaker 1 (24:05):
Larson doesn't stop it, right, he continues on. They continue
using it.
Speaker 4 (24:10):
He doesn't go to the press and say I got
to tell you, I think that my machine got this wrong.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
He doesn't do that.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
I think even by then it's too late.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
By then, it's the mid nineteen twenties and Kila and
Volmo of moved to la and then they move to
Chicago and they take the light detector with him, and
they get splashy headlines about how effective it is, and
then they roll it out across the world and Larson
watches this from a place of increasing frustration over the
next you know, thirty years, as this machine that he
thought would bring about justice actually becomes just like another
(24:41):
form of psychological manipulation. He wanted to use the light
detectors to end physical torture, but actually what he ended
up creating was a tool of psychological torture.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
And that's one of the great sadnesses.
Speaker 4 (24:53):
Now, what I remember is sometime in the twenties, was
it the US Supreme Court or was it California's Supreme
Court that said this is stupid, you cannot use it
in court, which I was shocked because they were letting
everything into court. So even in the twenties, judges were saying,
I don't think this is good evidence.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Did that not slow this thing down? I guess not.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
You're talking about the Fry case, yes, which is a
really famous legal standard. Say, this is what William Marston
was working kind of on the side. So while Larson
and Quila and Valmore were solving crimes in San Francisco,
William Marsden was on the other coast. He was in
Washington teaching law and trying to get the polygraph or
get lie detection accepted in court. He brought this case
to court centering around a murder of a prominent doctor
(25:38):
in Washington by a guy called James Alfonse Frye, who
was the first world wolvet, and the judge in this
case said that you can't use a new invention in
a federal court room until it's kind of reached broad
acceptance by experts in the field, and that became the
known as the fry standard, and for decades, even until
I think the nineteen seventies or eighties, it was kind
(25:58):
of the de facto that American courts decided whether or
not new inventions like fingerprinting, like DNA, like hair analysis,
whatever it might be, whether they were acceptable in court.
So yes, the five standard actually barred the polygraph from
federal court rooms, has barred the polygraph from federal courtrooms
ever since it was invented, essentially one hundred years. The
problem is that the polygraph is used not necessarily in
(26:21):
federal court rooms, but kind of in parts of investigations
before cases get to trial.
Speaker 2 (26:24):
It's used because it's a quicker way of getting confession.
It's used as a way of co.
Speaker 1 (26:28):
Escing intimidating exactly. So tell me about the next big case.
Speaker 4 (26:33):
You've got John Larson who has used this, and other
people now are using this. Are they using the lie
detector as the sole source of evidence in any criminal case?
Or does there have to be something else there even
in the nineteen twenties for them to say preponderance of
evidence for guilt.
Speaker 3 (26:54):
Yeah, it's I mean, it's the same system hasn't changed.
So I think, you know, you do need other evidence.
I guess the problem comes when you he biased proceedings.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
By using the light detector, You know what I mean.
Speaker 3 (27:04):
You have to question whether someone can get a fair
trial if all over the newspapers it's been splashed has
failed lie detector test, all that kind of thing, or
whether it leads the police down certain avenues of investigation
or closes off other avenues of investigation because of this
faulty reasoning, was faulty science. Keiler in particular involve around
loss and worked on a bunch of cases over the
next few decades, and I covered some other than in
(27:25):
the book. And they moved from San Francisco to la
and then they ended up in Chicago, which was sort
of the crime capitol maybe of the world. In the
nineteen thirties. Actually, you know, you al Capone and like
it was just amazing city of like, you know, you
had the stockyards, and you had the massive immigration, and
you had gangs and mobsters and all this kind of
(27:46):
stuff going on, and it was.
Speaker 2 (27:47):
Like not long.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
It was around the time of the Valentine's Day massacre,
you know, that famous series of killings in Chicago, So
it was around that kind of time. So it's all
sort of film noir, the Untouchables, elliot ness, all that
kind of stuff. But yeah, they pitched up there, Kala
and Volma and Lasten to a certain extent, founded like
an institute of criminology and tried to kind of commercialize
and expand the use of criminology forensic science to fight crime.
(28:11):
And they did some really interesting stuff, and I thought,
some really fascinating cases. And then the second case I
look at the book is about the murder of a
guy called Max Dent. He's kind of a sort of
low level drug dealer turned informant in Chicago, in the
West Side of Chicago in nineteen thirty five, and one day,
Max Dent is walking to get cigarettes and he gets
gunned down by a mysterious assailant and police like kind
(28:33):
of the other investigative work, and they quickly find the
culprit or, the alleged culprit guy called Joe Rappaport, who
is one of the guys that Max Dent had informed against,
and in fact was the only person who Max Dent
had informed against who was not yet behind bars.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
He was still awaiting trial.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
But Dent had a lot of enemies, so it could
have been that someone who was already in jail because
of him had hired someone to kill him or whatever.
So it wasn't you know, one hundred percent of done deal.
So Rappaport gets given the death penalty. So he's sentenced
to you to death, and he's on death row, and
his sister Rose writes hundreds of letters to anyone she
can to try and get the sentence commuted or delayed
(29:10):
or whatever, and over the course of several months years,
the execution date keeps getting pushed back and.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Delayed for various reasons. So you know, it appeals.
Speaker 3 (29:21):
Then there's like Jewish holidays that it can't happen, and
then eventually it comes to Henry Horner. He was the
governor of Illinois, at the time, and he gets the
final decision on whether or not this guy is going
to live or die, whether he's finally going to.
Speaker 2 (29:33):
Face the electric chair or not.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Henry Horner was the governor of Illinois at this time,
but previously he'd been a judge and actually he'd use
the light detector to solve a case of police corruption
in Chicago a couple of years earlier. So he knew
Leonard Killer, and he knew aug was Volmer, and he
knew about the lighte detector. So when it finally came
down after four days of execution, it finally came down
to this decision about whether this Skuyja Rappaport should get
(29:56):
executed or not. Horner said to him, he said, if
you can pass the light detector test, then we won't
execute you. Oh my gosh, well yeah, which is kind
of nuts. So this is like March nineteen thirty seven.
By this point, everyone's a lot older and a bit
more battered. Quila has gone from being this kind of
like fresh faced sixteen year old kid who he's in
his early thirties and he's got a drinking problem and
(30:19):
his life is a mess, you know, and all this
kind of stuff. Larsen has been basically like exiled from
plight society because of his belligerence and his sort of
ability to rugby blook the wrong way. Bomber's back in
San Francisco. His health is deteriorating. So Quila kind of
goes to the Cook County jail with the light detector
in toe. So I should say that Keila kind of
(30:40):
redesigned the light detector when he made it more sleek
and commercial. He made this beautiful kind of John Larson's
lighte detector was kind of scraggly and sort of like rustic.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
In a suitcase.
Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah, and then Keiler bought this kind of nice wornup
box with like beautiful little dials and a little scroll
of paper and stuff like that. So Quiler kind of
turns up at the Cook County with the slideer sector
and he does the light detected test on joy Rapport. Now,
when Larsen had designed the test, it was supposed to
be kind of done in a way that you know,
quiet room, quite surroundings, everyone at peace. And this test
(31:14):
was done in a jail cell at Kirk County with
police officers and kind of media peering through the bars
with the lights flickering because they were testing the electric
chair in the next room. But it's like, how are
you supposed to be calm in that scenario. So Rappaport
fails the tests. He that calls up the governor and
says he's failed the test, and half an hour later
(31:36):
he goes to the electric chair.
Speaker 1 (31:37):
Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
And it's a really harrowing case. My view is that
Joe Rapperport was probably guilty. I mean, my view is
that the death founalty shouldn't be used. But that's this
kind of separate issue. If we are going to use it,
you cannot use it on the basis of a series
our scientific tests. Yeah, carried out under these conditions. You know,
he was convicted by a jury. That's fair enough. Let
(31:58):
that stand. Don't bring this kind of pseudoscientific stuff into
the box. You know, this, this test should not have
been given the last word on this guy's life basically.
So yeah, and that's kind of where the kind of
main section of the book ends. And then you know,
Last and Quila continued to bicker. This was sort of
the last draw for Last and he was just like
again absolutely distraught by what his invention had been used
(32:20):
for and you know, he wrote one hundreds of letters
complaining about about this tequila into anyone else would listen about,
you know, how this Frankenstein monster had got out of
his control. And yeah, Quila's life kind of unraveled a
bit after this as well. He drank more and more
and more and he died really young.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
He had like a heart condition.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
And yeah, so I think it's interesting that this machine
that sort of has transformed the justice system also sort
of wrecked its creators lives largely had such a big
impact on them. You know, even the cases they worked
on it, they really affected them.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
You know, if you look at the National Sciences Report,
which analyzed each essentially tool of forensic science that we
use and sort of rates it and says, this is
what's reliable. Toxicology is reliable, DNA generally is reliable. And
then you look at these pattern matching things, right, so
fingerprinting and footprints and shoeprints and stuff where you're really
(33:09):
depending on the analyst to know what they're doing and
to make these comparisons. At least in the nineteen twenties
and thirties, do you think about the light detector test
and it's not even a the analyst doesn't know what
they're doing.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
It's the it doesn't measure the right thing, you know.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
It's like taking a blood test and saying, well, I'm gonna,
you know, try to detect this poison, but testing it
for the wrong poison completely.
Speaker 1 (33:31):
Oh, there's no poison in here.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Well, you tested for arsenic and you're looking for you know,
perhaps or strychnine in there. So I thought the book
really was grounded in a lot of relevance today because
we are seeing so much, just this huge amount of
evidence that comes from all of these different sources, and
some of it is very very good and some of
(33:53):
it's not. And I think when we see this like
flashy scene of police officers trapping someone up to a
light detector test, it's I'm sure terrifying to anybody, guilty
or not guilty.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, that's right. I think you make a really interesting point.
Speaker 3 (34:06):
I mean, Kilo himself said that the polygraph is no
more of a lie detector than a stethoscope.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
As a light detector.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Yeah, all it's doing is recording your pulse and your
blood pressure and you're breathing and then writing it down
on the chart. And it requires some human interpretation. Therefore
bias creeps in, and it's not an objective measurement. It's
very subjective. There's huge discrepancies in being found guilty depending
on your race and gender and things like that. It's
very unregulated. And the reason I wrote the book actually
(34:31):
was that, as you say, this was one hundred years ago,
and we've known about the faulty reasoning behind this machine
for one hundred years. But what we're seeing today is
a proliferation of other lie detector technologies, using brain scans,
using AI, using people dilation.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
Facial recognition. I mean, there's so much.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Yeah, exactly, and they all kind of suffer from the
same fundamental flaw, which is that there's no such thing
as a lie detector. If you talk to people in
the field, they'll say there's no telltale sign of lying.
Speaker 2 (35:01):
That's true for everyone all the time. There's no such
thing as like Pinocchio's nose.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Right, even if your light detector works for ninety percent
of people, that's still a huge number of people. That
doesn't work for yea, even if it works for ninety
nine percent of people, Well, how can you be sure
that the person you're using on isn't in that one percent.
And actually the cases where it gets used are those
EDU cases, right, the cases where it's not clear who
did it, it's not clear he's telling the truth, and
those are exactly the cases where the light detector is
(35:25):
likely to go wrong.
Speaker 4 (35:27):
Well, Paul Holes and I often talk about having one
piece of evidence that seems rock solid, like DNA evidence,
versus having a huge amount of circumstantial evidence. He would
rather have a case with a lot of circumstantial evidence
that's unbreakable. You know, That's just it paints a picture
versus DNA where any good defense attorney is going to
be able to say, yeah, but this lab had that
(35:48):
problem that one time. Is it possible that the chain
of custody was broken that one time?
Speaker 1 (35:55):
So I feel like the light detector test.
Speaker 4 (35:57):
I know it's used as a tool, and probably I'll
hear from sigators saying, well, it's a He'll thank me
if something happens to one of your family members and
we catch the guy and they confess to hurting your
family member using the light detector. But you know, as
my father always said, he would rather have a hundred
criminals go free than one person who's innocently behind bars.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting point.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
And there's something I really struggled with as well, because
I don't, you know, this tool has undoubtedly put really
bad guys away, you know what I mean. It has
has undoubtedly helped solve crimes, but then it has also
perpetrated huge miscarriages of justice. So I don't know how
you balance that, and that's something I really kind of
grappled with a lot when I was writing the book.
Speaker 2 (36:35):
I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (36:36):
I think it's probably there are probably other ways of
getting convictions where you need to get convictions that don't
risk the damage that the light detector can potentially cause.
And there's a lot of examples of remecent history of
people who have been wrongly convicted based on polygraph tests
or light detectors, and the damage that causes is irreversible.
I think, especially when you combine bad science with the
(36:57):
jury system a panel of non experts, it's very.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Easy to be overruled by this stuff.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Oh yeah, and you know, you get these experts in
their field, and they get flown in from across the
country to impress upon you how much they know about
this technology and they say this technology is infallible, you know,
and you don't really understand it, because why would you write,
You're just a panel of ordinary people, you know, by design.
So these things can be useful if you put the
right amount of weight on them. I think the problem
with the light detector is because it's such a compelling idea,
(37:24):
something we've longed for for centuries. Too much weight gets
put on the findings of a light detector test, and
therefore it gets excus cases, excus things. It messes up
with the justice system, and that's my kind of issue
with it, I think.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
So to close this out, I will say that with
Oscar Heinrich, who's my forensic scientist in American Churlo, he
had about four or five thousand letters in his archive.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
I read probably half of them.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
I never once read a letter in which he expresses
doubt in a case that he closed. Do you think
I think we know the answer to John Larson. Obviously
he expressed doubt, and he was, it seems like, remorseful
for even creating this thing to begin with. Do you
think that August Volmer, the police chief, or Keeler the
(38:09):
assistant ever had any doubts about the machine the way
John Morrison did.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
I think that privately, they probably did. I think their
incentives were different. I think Larson was chasing justice. I
think Volmer was chasing kind of a kinder way of
doing policing. And I think maybe this is a bit
uncharitable tequila. But I think Keela was chasing fame, fortune.
You know, he was chasing something else, and maybe his
(38:33):
same It didn't really matter too much about whether the
cases that he was working on were solved. He wanted
the rush, the publicity, the adrenaline of working on the cases,
of being in the mix of you know, tussling with
bad guys and gangsters and robbers. So yeah, I don't
really know. Actually, I think that's a really interesting question.
It doesn't come across in their letters to each other, certainly,
but maybe there are the conversations that they had where
(38:55):
it's mentioned.
Speaker 4 (38:56):
I feel like a lack of self reflection that comes
with some self doubt should be a requirement for anyone
who holds someone's life in their hands.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
And for me, I.
Speaker 4 (39:09):
Was so startled to say, Gosh, this man does not
believe he's ever made a mistake, and clearly he has
made mistakes. So yeah, something to think about with this
book in particular is you do have an awful lot
of people who are propelling this machine forward, who are
responsible for sending people away for life, for executing them
(39:31):
or setting them free, and it's all based on a
machine that we now know is no good.
Speaker 2 (39:36):
Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
What I will say is that once the box is open,
it's like Pandora's Box, right. You know, even if Kilo
and Las and Volmer heard all said we should stop
using this, by the time they've opened the box, it's
too late, you know. As well as those guys, there
were dozens of other people that were doing similar things
after the initial invention, so it's out there now. So
it's about how you design robust systems to stop these
things from kind of getting misused.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock. This has been an exactly
right production. Our senior producer is Alexis a Morosi. Our
associate producer is Alex Chi. This episode was mixed by
John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga.
(40:31):
Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff, and Danielle Kramer.
Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more
Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold more. And if you
know of a historical crime that could use some attention
from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at
info at.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Tenfoldmorewicked dot com.
Speaker 4 (40:51):
We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for
Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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