The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Don’t believe the polygraph
A century ago, a jumble of equipment attached to a breadboard seemed to promise the end of crime
352pp, Mudlark, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £11.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
There is a fine topical gag in Agatha Christie’s 1925 novel The Secret of Chimneys, when Lord Caterham, host of an inevitably murder-heavy country house party, fears that the police will make use of that new-fangled foreign invention, the lie detector machine. “[They] put India-rubber bands round your arm and then reconstruct the crime and make you jump and it’s registered on a thermometer. I know […] I shall register 122, or something perfectly frightful, and they’ll haul me off to jail at once.”
This hazy-on-detail scepticism represents the prevailing attitude to the fledgling polygraph machine in Britain and, as so often, the dash of xenophobia and dollop of Luddism at the heart of good old English common sense did not prevent it from making the right call. As Amit Katwala’s new book on the invention of the polygraph a century ago makes clear, the machine “was not infallible, not objective, and, ultimately, not scientific. It amplified and reflected the flaws in society and the scars of the men who built it.”
The scarred men in question were “a visionary police chief, a rookie cop and a teenage magician” in San Francisco. The visionary cop was August Vollmer, a pioneer in numerous aspects of policing, who was moved to pursue the development of lie detectors on the grounds that they might represent the only interrogation method that his men would accept as superior to beating up suspects.
In 1921 he asked a new recruit, John Augustus Larson – the first American policeman with an academic doctorate – to work on the construction of a lie detector machine whenever he wasn’t on the beat. Larson’s prototype polygraph – or “cardio-pneumo-psychograph”, as he called it – comprised “a grab bag of medical equipment attached to a wooden breadboard”, but Vollmer and Larson satisfied themselves that it provided accurate measurements of the changes in blood pressure and breathing that attended a lie.
The third key figure in the early life of the polygraph was Leonarde Keeler, an amateur magician and Sherlock Holmes nut who became involved in the project when he started doing odd jobs at Vollmer’s station as a teenager. He not only went on to refine the polygraph and make it portable, but became its loudest champion.
Although not a professional police officer himself, Keeler carTREMORS ried out his own investigations – he invited one murder suspect to a faked Ku Klux Klan meeting and used the polygraph on him, telling him it was part of an initiation ceremony – and was prone to informing the press that the machine would soon bring about a 100 per cent crime clear-up rate and make juries obsolete. This infuriated Larson, who thought Keeler’s crankish-sounding pronouncements ensured the continuing inadmissibility of polygraph readings in court.
Katwala’s book is something of a grab bag itself. As well as presenting us with potted biographies of Vollmer, Larson and Keeler and detailing their fallings-out, it also recounts the ins and outs of two murder cases in which, Katwala maintains, the polygraph contributed to two probable miscarriages of justice. (Based on the evidence he musters, I would downgrade his probable to possible; but he certainly demonstrates how easily the polygraph can be manipulated, unconsciously or otherwise.)
Indeed he goes into these murders, and the lives of the suspects, investigators, lawyers and so on, in such detail that the polygraph and its inventors often vanish for dozens of pages at a time; and although his narrative deploys its twists and maintains suspense with some skill, the connoisseur of true crime may wonder if these two cases are really worth such extensive treatment.
The book is at its most interesting when dealing – with greater concision – with some of the other strange cases that came the polygraph’s way, including that of William Hightower, a nutter who murdered a priest for no good reason. Some incidents deserve more coverage – the man who suddenly threw himself out of an eighth-floor window in the middle of one of Keeler’s polygraph tests surely merits more than one sentence.
Katwala tells his various tales with admirable lucidity, only occasionally lapsing into the portentous purple prose beloved of true-crime writers, and the book is rich with colourful incidental detail. He is wise to quote liberally from US newspapers of the period, with their sublime epithets: one judge who had a habit of allowing attorneys to leave early when their wives were due to give birth was dubbed “aid to the stork”.
In a worrying coda, Katwala points out that our current government has abandoned previous Lord Caterham-esque cynicism to authorise the increased use of polygraph machines in police work. We now have artificially intelligent lie detectors, which are supposedly more accurate. But has anyone invented a machine that tells you if the machine is fibbing?
Jähner’s magnificent history details how Germany extricated itself from the horrors of Nazism in the decade after its “zero hour” defeat in 1945 – and began a miraculous economic recovery.
CIVILISATIONS by Laurent Binet 320pp, Vintage, £9.99
Laurent Binet’s glorious counterfactual novel turns world history on its head by asking: what if the Incas had invaded Europe in 1531? Funny, profound and provocative, this is the HHhH author’s best book yet.
MONICA JONES, PHILIP LARKIN AND ME by John Sutherland 288pp, W&N, £10.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Drawing on unpublished letters, Sutherland’s biography celebrates a woman who smothered her brilliance in life-long service to Larkin’s fickle affections.