by Jack Webb
Late that same day, a garage in East Los Angeles reported back to Headquarters. A green sedan with a dented left fender had just come in. The owner was insistent on a quick repair job because, he said, he had to leave town the same night on business.
With the detectives, Lieutenant Lee Jones rolled immediately to the garage. He picked the sedan clean, then went over it a second time. There was nothing: no hair, no torn bit of clothing, no bloodstains. Then he studied the dented fender with microscopic care. Almost concealed in the dent itself was the perfect imprint of a woman’s lip.
Jones called for a latent print expert, dispatched a second expert to the morgue—and set a criminological precedent. The lip impressions were taken both from the fender and from the body in the morgue, photographed, and blown up for comparison.
On the two sets, Jones found fourteen common, identifying marks in the form of creases, and the little waitress’ pathetic kiss of death was sufficiently strong to support a felony manslaughter complaint against the hit-run driver. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced.
“It was the first time I had ever seen a lip print on a car in a hit-run case,” Jones says. “And it was the first time we had ever tried to get a lip impression from a body. But each set of lips has its own characteristics, which are as identifiable as fingerprints.”
Since justice is a two-way street, SID is just as satisfied with the exoneration of the innocent as the conviction of the guilty.
On one occasion, a suspect was waiting trial for four wanton murders in a series of cocktail bar stickups. The case against him had been nailed tight by six eyewitnesses who had heard him speak and seen him shoot. In build and dress even to his hat, they swore, they knew this was the man.
Shortly before his trial, a lone holdup man knocked over a service station in south Los Angeles, shooting one employee and escaping with a batch of pay checks. A police alarm alerted all banks and check-cashing agencies.
Two days later, when a man presented one of the checks at a cashing establishment, the teller managed to stall him till the cops arrived. A quick search disclosed that he was toting a .38-calibre pistol in a paper bag, and the gun was turned over to the Crime Lab for routine analysis.
Sergeant Russ Camp fired several rounds into the Lab’s water-filled ballistics tank, obtaining slugs with clear, strong striations.
Then the constant every-hour routine of check and crosscheck. He compared them under the microscope with the slugs taken from the bodies of the murder victims. He straightened up hurriedly and called Lee Jones on the intercom.
Jones studied the comparative specimens. “It’s a make,” he told Camp. “All the bullets are from the same gun—the one that killed the bar victims.”
“I know that,” Camp protested. “But we already have that guy!”
“Have we?” Jones asked quietly.
The new suspect denied any knowledge of the four murders. Why, he said, he had bought this gun legitimately in Temple City through a newspaper advertisement. Detectives located the seller, and he recalled the sale had been before the first murder. Thereafter, police proved, the buyer had kept possession of the gun, never lending it to anyone.
It was one of those flukes of mistaken identity which happen so rarely in real-life police work. Both suspects had the same builds and same facial features, the same taste in clothing even to hats. But the second man was the killer, and the original suspect was freed.
Suppose you are in that nightmarish situation beloved by detective fiction writers. The net of circumstantial evidence has closed around you. Nobody believes your rather improbable story, so you demand the lie detector test. What happens then?
For twenty-four hours beforehand, almost as though you were being prepared for a major operation, you must get a normal amount of food and sleep. You should not be under the influence of alcohol, or suffering any physical pain. Severe respiratory trouble such as asthma or even a bad cold will disqualify you.
Once you pass your physical, you are placed in a chair and the measuring apparatus is fastened around your midsection and one arm and on the tip of two fingers. Thereafter, unless you are mentally deficient or extremely phlegmatic, the lie detector will record tell-tale changes in your blood pressure, the tempo of your heartbeat, your breathing and your skin resistance set up by sweat gland activity. These changes, which indicate your reaction to key questions, will be translated into squiggly lines on a chart by a moving recording pen.
You are accused of having pulled a holdup at a downtown Los Angeles jewelry store, and the detectives who have arrested you are standing silent near the polygraph, or lie-detector machine. Lieutenant George Puddy, an expert, is conducting the interrogation.
“Do you know if a .32-calibre gun was used?” he asks.
“No,” you say. There is no reaction on the polygraph chart.
“Do you know if a .38-calibre gun was used?”
“No.” Again there is no reaction.
“Do you know if a .45-calibre gun was used?”
“No.”
But this time the needle swerves sharply on the polygraph, and you have given yourself away. You are lying! After the holdup, the detectives had found a .45-calibre Colt outside the store. Despite all your denials, you must have guilty knowledge of the holdup.
No one ever is compelled to take the lie detector test. Though an experienced operator like Lieutenant Puddy will achieve remarkable accuracy in his findings, SID admits the polygraph has its limitations. In fact, a memo to departmental personnel on its use warns:
“Lie detector tests are not a substitute for a thorough preliminary investigation. Such examinations should be regarded as a supplement to a thorough and complete investigation.”
But, in confirming police hunches, in sometimes obtaining confessions which could be corroborated by independent evidence, in subjecting the guilty to a new mental hazard, the polygraph has been an invaluable tool. Sometimes, for clarification, victims and witnesses as well as suspects are subjected to the tests with their permission. These are always done with the knowledge of the Detective Bureau commander.
In LAPD, the lie detector was originally accepted with considerable scientific reserve. Its findings were not admissible as court evidence, and the Crime Lab admired its potentialities rather than its immediate prospects. Then at the end of World War II, Lieutenant Puddy returned to the department after making an outstanding record as an Air Force Combat Intelligence officer in the South Pacific. He had become an expert in the use of the he detector and was immediately assigned to LAPD’s polygraph detail.
In the years since, Puddy has refined the techniques for processing Polygraph subjects, improved the methods of interrogation and established more accurate standards for weighing the results. He has found that some individuals are not “reactors,” that the best tests are made early during the police investigation, that prolonged questioning may exhaust or embitter the subject. Curiously, he has also discovered, the more intelligent the subject the less his chance of beating the machine.
Most curious of all, the guilty who are struggling with their consciences sometimes demand the test, subconsciously recognizing that this is a convenient preliminary toward facing up to confession. Perhaps that is why you insisted on the lie detector when you were being questioned about the jewelry store holdup.
Neighbors who heard the children crying discovered the murder. In the living room, the body of the young mother clad in a housecoat was slumped in an easy chair, a butcher knife through her chest. The three-year-old was trying to rouse her.
Obviously, someone who knew her must have taken her by surprise. There were no signs of a struggle, and the ash tray had not even been knocked off the arm of the chair in which the dead woman sat. But after four months of investigation, the sheriff’s deputies of Kern County were at a standstill.
The victim’s husband, an Air Force sergeant based near Sacramento, had been cleared through a lie detector test. Various neighbors in the little
town of Oildale where the murder took place had been investigated without result.
Then the wife of Vinal Paul Carl reported to the authorities that in recent weeks he had been acting peculiarly. Carl had been among the neighbors who were interrogated and had produced a seemingly ironclad alibi. The authorities were skeptical of his wife’s story, especially when she added that she had found a book of matches with the victim’s name written inside.
“When did you find the matches?” a deputy asked.
“About a week after the murder,” she said.
“Why did you wait so long, almost four months?”
“It crossed my mind, but at first I didn’t think much about it. I knew Paul knew where she lived. Then there was the investigation and, I guess, in the excitement I forgot. But lately he’s been talking a lot about a he detector test. He was wondering whether, if they found out he was lying, that could be used in a trial.”
The Kern County men picked up Carl and decided to give him what he apparently most dreaded—a polygraph examination. Lieutenant Puddy, who handled the interrogation for the sheriff’s deputies, was convinced that the lie detector test showed Carl’s guilt. But on Puddy’s advice, the suspect was allowed to return home for the weekend on his agreement to return for additional tests the following Monday.
“You either know who caused the death, or you caused it yourself,” he was told bluntly as he departed. Puddy wanted the delay so Carl’s fears would work on him. And, sure enough, first thing the next Monday, he blurted: “I know who did it. My conscience has been bothering me terribly.”
It was his own father-in-law, he said. By chance, he had followed the older man on the night of the murder and seen him go into the victim’s house. Puddy was dissatisfied. He got the father-in-law to consent to the polygraph test, and it was immediately obvious that he knew nothing of the slaying.
Carl was then re-tested, and the shaking polygraph needle made it clearer than ever that he was guilty. When police suggested a confrontation with the father-in-law, he broke and admitted the killing. But he was still lying. He tried to put the blame on the dead woman, saying that she had threatened to expose his infidelity, and that in a struggle, she had been accidentally stabbed. A re-enactment showed that this story, too, was fiction. He finally admitted he had killed the housewife when she rejected his advances.*
*Vinal Paul Carl pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.
Despite his many evasions, Lieutenant Puddy is convinced that Carl had wanted to be caught and had welcomed the lie detector tests. “There is an inner writhing that must be quieted,” the lieutenant explains. “We want to quiet it for them. At this stage, it’s about all we can do to help them.”
There was one occasion when Puddy was rather worried about his beloved machine.
A Los Angeles jewelry firm had been robbed of $20,000; and, since entry had been made without tripping the burglar alarm, the owner was convinced it was an inside job.
One after another, Puddy patiently interrogated all forty employees without once making his needle jump. The only conclusion was that an outsider had beaten the alarm system, which seemed impossible, or that one of the forty had beaten the polygraph.
To Puddy, this also seemed impossible, but for two weeks the lie detector was under a cloud as far as everyone else in LAPD was concerned. And then in Arizona the thieves were seized with the loot. It turned out that one was a former employee of the firm and thus had known how to slip in through a skylight without setting off the alarm.
Although he hadn’t cracked it, that case gave Lieutenant Puddy a great deal of satisfaction.
II
Charley Pellanda’s great ambition in life was to qualify himself as a faith healer, and his mentor, Rachel (Butterfly) Uwanawich, assured him that his prospects were highly promising. But finally Charley came to the searching last test, which a less dedicated man could scarcely have passed.
As proof of his faith, Charley had to produce his life savings in the form of cash. The money was wrapped into a package and handed back to him.
“Take this out onto the sea,” the novice healer was instructed. “Cast it into the sea. This way alone can you dedicate your inner self and join the sanctified and mystic order of the faith healer.”
Charley blinked but obeyed. Out in the open water between Los Angeles and Catalina Island, he yielded to a momentary nostalgia—because, after all, $21,500 is a lot of money—and peeked for a last time at the nest egg he was sacrificing.
It wasn’t there. The package contained bundles of paper scissored to the size of greenbacks.
Immediately, Charley put about and returned to confront The Butterfly. More in sorrow at the loss of a promising disciple than resentment over his charges, she persuaded Charley that he needed rest in a hospital.
Charley agreed—till he found himself in the Camarillo State Hospital for the mentally ill near Los Angeles. Relatives sprung him, and he came to LAPD’s seventeen-man Bunco Squad with his story of faith and disillusion.
The Bunco cops, recognizing an interesting professional variation on the old Mexican charity switch, promised to help Charley get back at least part of his money.*
*Rachel Uwanawich (Rose Wayne) was sentenced for grand theft.
Because so many retired persons cluster in southern California, Los Angeles is the national capital of the con man, and the marriage and religious bunks are almost a city industry. There are also “doctors,” “professors” and “noblemen” who prey on hope, senility, and ignorance and those despicable practitioners of the “fruit shake.” The latter, posing as policemen, threaten to “arrest” homosexuals unless they are paid off.
To meet fraud with enforcement, the Bunco Squad is subdivided into teams of experts. One wars on the marriage bunks and social clubs, along with borrowing, short-change and auction rackets. Business bunks require a team of their own, while a third subsquad investigates false advertising, rental bunks and repair rackets.
In stores, streets, and theaters, another team quietly watches for touts, impersonators and similar phonies who dare to work openly. Finally, though you would think such grifts died with the Old West, Buncomen are still breaking up rigged coin games, three-card monte, and “solid gold brick” sales.
Unlike most detective squads, the Bunco sleuths rarely use LAPD’s elaborate IBM procedure to detect criminal M.O. Whether it’s the Texas “Atomotrone” (a $30 gadget supposedly efficacious in treatment of some 87 diseases) or the Denver “tubeless radio” (a pocket-sized radio which would require a one-hundred-foot antenna), the squad keeps track of con games being pulled all over the country. Flimflam artists who have been run out of other states often relocate in Los Angeles; and the Bunco squad is ready and waiting with fat files on their M.O.s.
The game may be as petty as “Dr.” John E. O’Malley’s $5 street pitch, or as grandiose as H. C. Mills’ $1,000,000 stock mining swindles. Bunco Division is impartial in enforcing the fraud laws.
The “doctor,” who usually identified himself as a Philippine physician, would approach the innocent on the street with a canning jar in his hand. “I have a dangerous bug in this bottle,” he would say impressively. “I must get to Stanford University at once in the interests of science! Can you lend me $5 for bus fare?” For $5, very few persons want to delay scientific progress, and the “doctor” lived comfortably on his modest grift till the Bunco Squad checked his academic background. O’Malley was a graduate only of several state and federal prisons.*
*O’Malley was convicted and sentenced in February, 1956.
Homer Cecil Mills, the sixty-seven-year-old gray flannel king of the mining stock swindlers, was a more formidable opponent. A disbarred lawyer who had done time for forgery, he knew every legal trick in the book and despite numerous actions by government agencies, he operated successfully for ten years.
Once, in fact, for thirty days, he single-handedly stood off an entire battery
of U.S. attorneys trying to pin a federal rap on him in the Chicago area. Afterward, he even sold his stock to some members of the jury which had acquitted him, according to the pained scuttlebutt which reached Los Angeles.
Bunco first heard of him through an anonymous tip that he had transferred his operations to a downtown Los Angeles hotel. He hooked his suckers through ads in the “Business Opportunities” columns of leading papers in Los Angeles and a number of other large cities. He landed them in his hotel suite, a glittering sucker trap adorned with strange mining gadgets, specimens of uranium ore and sacks of gold dust. For the few doubting Thomases, he arranged personal inspections of his Nevada mine which was thoughtfully “salted” in advance with specimens of high-yield ore.
Lieutenant W. C. Hull was LAPD’s specialist on schemes involving corporate securities. He had been a detective for a dozen years, including five years in the crack Intelligence Division. But he knew that Mills was going to be the slipperiest challenge of his career. He began to amass his facts.
Mills was promoting the Blossom Mine, a supposedly rich uranium field at Searchlight, Nevada, which actually had once yielded a rich ore strike. But now, Hull determined, it was a washed-up hole, and furthermore Mills didn’t have clear title or interest in the property. Posing as an investor in from Seattle, the detective phoned for an appointment, and the affable Mills granted him one the same day.
Thereafter, for almost three weeks, they met daily. As he lavishly entertained his new pigeon, Mills outlined a stock offer only a fool would turn down.
For $3,000, Hull could pick up 30,000 shares of Blossom at ten cents a share with the promise of ten per cent of all the revenue delved from the delivery of the uranium ore to a smelting company. Why, Mills indicated, he should double his money within a year!
Thus persuaded, Bunco Lieutenant Hull and his “wife,” Madaleine Asdel, a civilian secretary in the division, visited Hull’s hotel suite with a bank cashier’s check for $3,000. Mills told him he had come just in time. A $4,000 ore shipment was then on its way to the smelter and a $10,000 shipment was scheduled to follow the next month. He showed him an assay report valuing the ore at $326.48 a ton.