The Truth Machine (31 page)

In addition to serving the community, Vollmer argued the police should arm themselves with science. For this reason he has consequently been called “the father of modern police science.”
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In his 1921 presidential address to the International Association of the Chiefs of Police, he proposed that the police should become “armed with facts, not fancies, and with a constructive program for the mental, physical and moral health of the subject.”
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The policeman was to become a “practical criminologist.” Inefficient trial-and-error methods of the past must be replaced, he said, with those employed by “microscopists, chemical analysts, medicopsychologists, and handwriting experts.”
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“With very few exceptions,” Vollmer wrote, “our archaic system is responsible for deplorable conditions.” “Our whole method must be abolished before we can succeed. We must devise scientific methods and apply them to the investigation and removal of social, economic, physical, mental, and moral factors underlying crime and vice. Prevention and not punishment must be our ultimate objective. We must develop experts who have intelligence, training, and character, and they must employ the best scientific and professional tools.”
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Police officers must have special qualities of “intelligence, tact and sympathy,” as well as a knowledge of “medicolegal evidence, and even of general medical and psychological principles” and scientific investigation.
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Vollmer's drive towards professionalism was a welcome message during the progressive era, concerned as it was with rising crime rates. Crime was a primary public anxiety during the decade of prohibition and well into the 1930s, a concern Vollmer astutely exploited in his dealings with the press. Public support was crucial if his reforms were to attract funding and become law. Crime control was an important political issue during the 1920s and 1930s.
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Although a competent politician in his own dealings with the press, policy makers, and the wider community, Vollmer maintained that a professional police force must be divorced from politics. Politics was a major threat to professionalization; neutral autonomy was the key concept in his new bureaucracy.
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Such ideas resonated with a cynical electorate disgruntled with
corruption and dismayed at the political influence on police appointments. A professional police force, Vollmer argued, would simply be concerned with the disinterested pursuit of truth.

It is not surprising then that Vollmer encouraged the construction of the first lie detector to be employed in a police force with any regularity. The perfect symbol of the new scientific and professional ethos, it was also a marvelous device with which to attract publicity, a Trojan Horse for his reformist agenda. John Larson, at the time one of Vollmer's “college cops,” was detailed to build the instrument, and he was to be helped by Keeler, by then a seventeen-year-old high school student.
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The instrument embodied many of the values central to the emerging philosophy of professional policing. It was a technology that exploited the wisdom of the social sciences, and although also an interrogation device of sorts (more often than not eliciting confessions prior to the examination), it was evidently ethically superior to the third degree. Attending to the interior life of the individual, and claiming to ascertain truth with scientific accuracy, its objectivity symbolized the new ideals of policing, committed as they were to ending corruption and incompetence. The objective status of the instrument mirrored the police's putatively apolitical status. In this regard it fulfilled a crucial public relations function. It was a potent symbol of the progressive era sensibility, a sensibility that, at its most optimistic, aimed to transform society.
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When Vollmer was invited to transform the Los Angeles police as he had Berkeley's, Keeler immediately followed. “It is a pleasure to us to know he is where he comes under your inspiring influence,” wrote Leonarde's father to Vollmer, “and we are continuously grateful to you for all you have done for him.”
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Vollmer and his wife would come to regard Leonarde as their “adopted son.” Keeler in turn would visit “the Chief” at every opportunity, and would maintain a lifelong correspondence with the man he regarded as his mentor. After his father's death in 1937, Keeler wrote to Vollmer to express thanks for his condolences and support: “I suppose it sounds foolish for a guy my age to say it,—but you know when a father goes one looks to someone else to take his place—and of all the people in the world, Chief, you're it.”
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The young criminologist would later address Vollmer as “Dad Chief.”
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He even named his pet dog “Chief,” after “America's Number 1 crime fighter.”

Keeler socialized with law enforcers and Hollywood entertainers alike. During the 1920s he met stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford, and he was a long-time friend of Cecil B. DeMille's niece, Agnes de Mille.
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The law and Hollywood would become the polarities between which Keeler
would forge a personal style, an uneasy ambivalence the lie detector would also embody. Although it was a scientific crime-fighting tool it was also sensational and newsworthy. One of the earliest magazine articles about the lie detector expressed this double-identity well. The 1924
Collier's
piece “The Future Looks Dark for Liars” was illustrated with a photograph of “The Lie Detector in Action.” Keeler can be seen operating the primitive-looking machine, which sits on a table. Significantly, the author chose to use a theatrical metaphor to describe the novel scientific instrument. After all, Keeler had— significantly—built some of his early models in a shack on an empty Hollywood lot.
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And despite claiming it had no “vaudeville features,” the journalist was obliged to make some sensational claims about “this strange machine” that was about to make crime almost impossible. “We never found it to err,” Keeler said. “A very proud, tired, keen-eyed young man, Leonarde Keeler!”
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The “youthful inventor” spent the rest of the 1920s working for Vollmer, refining his instrument and technique and attending university. In 1925 (a year after
Collier's
had reassured its readers that “the high-spirited young men who are living night and day with the real lie-detecting idea” were “altruistic real scientists” “with no commercial ambitions”
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), Keeler attempted to patent a mechanism that allowed him to market the “Keeler Polygraph.” It was a prescient move: by the late thirties he would find it necessary to fully commercialize his activities.

Keeler's first real professional opportunity came in 1929 with the founding of the Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago. Through Vollmer, Keeler was introduced to the Institute's director, Herman Adler, who offered him a full-time job. The position allowed him to perform experiments with the lie detector, and in 1930 he published his first research paper, “A Method for Detecting Deception.”
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Although he recognized that the Institute post was an important opportunity, Charles Keeler attributed his son's poor university performance to his spending too much time with the lie detector. “I am afraid he is a little too indifferent about degrees,” he added. Nevertheless, he asked Vollmer if Leonarde's work with Adler could count toward his Stanford degree.
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A short while after taking up the Institute for Juvenile Research position, however, a new opportunity arose. Appalled by the 1929 St. Valentine's Day massacre, two Chicago businessmen, Burt Massee and Walter Olson, had resolved to counteract what they perceived as a rising wave of criminal activity in the city. With the encouragement of Dean John Henry Wigmore, the nation's principal expert on the law of evidence, Northwestern University's Scientific Criminal Detection Laboratory opened in 1930. Science was
to lead the fight against crime. Ballistics expert Colonel Calvin Goddard was appointed director of the laboratory, and Keeler was hired as the resident polygraph operator. Keeler's sister later recalled that while he had a great deal of experience by this point, he was still “waiting in the wings.” The “stage was set, the actors ready,” she wrote, “but the curtain had not yet risen on the big show.”
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The theatrical metaphor was appropriate. Not only would his successful cases be widely publicized in the newspapers and on the radio, but Keeler himself would soon perform on the national media stage.

Not long after he had taken up the Chicago position, the
New York Times
reported that the lie detector had been used to solve a bizarre but typically newsworthy case.
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William Tobin, a policeman, had been responsible for looking after a valuable trick canary—the only estate left by a woman who had committed suicide. Tobin shirked his responsibilities, however, because a few days after the bereavement, the dead bird was found in a pile of rubbish. Keeler was able to solve the case by subjecting Tobin to a lie detector test. The suspect, who “displayed marked tension regarding the disappearance of the canary,” eventually confessed to killing a cheaper bird and placing it in a dark corner of the apartment. The incident provided Keeler with an opportunity to publish his second paper in the
American Journal of Police Science,
“The Canary Murder Case.”
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Although most of the events reported by the press were rarely so trivial, the lie detector was invariably associated with the more sensational and newsworthy aspects of crime fighting. In 1931, Keeler's instrument cleared one of Al Capone's lieutenant's, Gus Winkler, of involvement in a $2,500,000 bank robbery.
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In 1933, Joe Blazenzits was freed from the Marquette Penitentiary in Michigan, having passed a lie detector test conducted by Keeler. Convinced of his innocence, two of Blazenzits' female correspondents had campaigned for the convict's release for five years. Having read about the instrument in a magazine, the women considered the Keeler polygraph their last chance at freedom. According to Eloise Keeler, one of the women later married the former inmate.
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Keeler was regularly approached by people who thought his instrument could help solve their own problem cases. In 1934 the wife of the convicted Lindbergh baby kidnapper Bruno Hauptmann contacted him to see if a lie test could help in his case.

In addition to giving real lie detector examinations, Keeler also gave demonstrations to organizations such as the Police Lieutenant's Association, Dean Wigmore's Northwestern University law class, the Lakeview Lions' Club, and the Women's Aid Society. In 1933 he received a Distinguished Service Award
from the Chicago Junior Association of Commerce for making “the most outstanding civic contribution to Chicago” the previous year.
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He was credited with obtaining fifty-four direct confessions out of 627 deception tests of crime suspects. “The steadily growing number of cases on which Mr. Keeler is called,” the spokesman for the award committee said, “shows that his work is winning increasing recognition.” “In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that the laboratory is fast becoming a second Scotland Yard.”
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Eloise Keeler dates Leonarde's attainment of “acclaim and fame” to this incident: “From now on, he would no longer be the boy wonder or the “youthful” Leonarde Keeler. He was recognized now as the authority in his field. He'd have friends galore—many who loved him for his charm, his gift of storytelling, and way with people. Others would want something or would envy his popularity.”
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The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory provided Keeler with a base from which he could develop his machine. If the lie detector symbolized the dreams of criminology, and Keeler was the instrument's guardian, then it was ironic that a man with such minimal qualifications should come to assume—in the public eye at least—the mantle of the nation's chief criminologist. But the new criminology was exciting and newsworthy, and the photogenic young man was confident dealing with fellow cops, journalists, and radio producers alike. Keeler's fame increased steadily throughout the 1930s, partly because his students and followers depicted the “Keeler Polygraph” as synonymous with the lie detector. In a 1935
Scientific Monthly
article, Fred Inbau explained that there was only one reliable kind of instrument, the “Keeler Polygraph.” “An instrument of this type should be distinguished from the numerous other so-called ‘lie-detectors' frequently found in the psychology departments of many universities,” wrote Inbau, one of Keeler's early students.
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The ability of the instrument to symbolize the new criminology was also a factor that led to Keeler's involvement in another publicity stunt, the hapless “Illinois State Police Mobile Crime Detection Laboratory and Emergency Unit.” Keeler worked on the ill-fated venture with T. P. Sullivan. The two men, longstanding friends who had worked on many cases together, “received nationwide publicity” for their creation.
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Brought into service in 1942, the “Mobile Crime Lab” was an armor-plated bus crammed with technical equipment. “It is almost a complete crime detection laboratory on wheels,” Keeler enthused, “a rolling police department with better equipment than the majority of departments in the country; a mobile hospital where two major operations can be performed simultaneously; a combat unit tough enough to handle anything short of an army tank; an emergency electric power station,
radio transmitter, fire fighting and life-saving unit; in general, a complete emergency outfit designed to bring the finest in crime detection, law enforcement, and life-saving facilities to any part of the state on a few hours notice.”
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Some publicity film of the mobile crime laboratory in action survives.
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The “speedy juggernaut of justice” is seen arriving at the scene of a stakeout. Fired upon by a bandit, the bullet-proof turret is raised and a police officer returns fire from an aperture. Overwhelmed by the unit's superior firepower, the bandit surrenders and after being arrested and brought into the mobile crime lab itself, is given a lie detector test. Fingerprint and chemical analysis would doubtless follow, viewers can assume. As if to symbolize its importance to the project of scientific criminology, the lie detector was situated in the middle of the mobile crime lab, at the epicenter of scientific criminology.
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“Alas, the mobile unit turned out to be a dud,” recalled Eloise Keeler. It was too small “for a crime lab or hospital, too big for a mobile unit.” Nevertheless, the bus still performed an important function: “it was used mainly as an exhibit at fairs,” a pathetic but appropriate final resting place. After all, that which had spawned it, the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, was also, to some extent, a showcase enterprise.