Confessions of a Lie Detector: years of theft, sex, and murder

by Jim Wygant

  It was in that somewhat compromised frame of mind that I approached Leonard French, who admitted being present while a woman was subjected to an hour of savage terror.

  Leonard is a tall, thin white man, 22 years old, with the kind of wispy blond hair usually seen only on children. On a warm August night Leonard and three of his companions attended an impromptu party. They met at the home of an 18-year-old girl who had been the lover of one of them and currently was keeping company with another of the same group. Somebody went out for beer. Somebody else found some marijuana. They drank and smoked until the boys got restless and decided to go look for a place to “bump.”

  That was their own term for stealing marijuana from someone who was illegally growing it inside his home. In more conventional terms their crime was burglary. And it would remain that unless the intruders encountered someone in the house. Then their crime could easily escalate to robbery or even something worse. They had done “bumps” several times, and had rarely encountered another person. When they did, they usually held a loaded shotgun on that person while they took the marijuana plants. That made it armed robbery, a significantly more serious crime than burglary. The threat of an even worse offense loomed with each encounter. A little more finger pressure on a trigger could instantly advance the crime to murder, but these boys didn’t contemplate those possibilities. It was all an adventure to them, whether there was somebody home or not. They considered it the perfect crime. How could someone complain to the police about having their illegal drugs stolen?

  Their method was absurdly crude. They drove slowly through residential neighborhoods with their car windows down. They sniffed for the strong resin aroma that fresh marijuana plants exude, even when hidden in the basement of a house.

  –––

  On this particular summer night they caught the scent. Misty, one of the girls from the party, was driving the car which had been a gift from her father. Leonard was in front with her, along with Chou, a 21-year-old Asian. Two others were in back, Spitz, a dark-haired 16-year-old with quick, darting eyes, and Alan, blond, average height, 20 years old. It was the teenaged Spitz, eager to prove himself to his older companions, who called out that he smelled “weed.”

  They directed Misty around the block while they tried to identify the source. They were in a former working class neighborhood that had begun to deteriorate. The small wood frame houses all needed paint and yard work. Some of the cars parked at the curb had obviously not moved in a long time.

  The thieves narrowed their search to three houses. They told Misty to park around a corner and they got out. They needed to discover precisely which house, and to see how hard it might be to get in. The four crowded together on the sidewalk and tried to appear as inconspicuous as four young men could possibly be if they went out for a stroll in an unfamiliar neighborhood at midnight.

  They walked past the three houses then turned and started back. They quickly agreed on the marijuana source, the middle house. As they began to venture through the yard to see what the back might look like, a neighbor yelled at them from his window, “What are you guys doing?”

  They ran.

  When they got back to the car they scrambled in and ordered Misty to leave immediately. “The police are coming,” one of them claimed. That fear was unfounded, but they did not know that. Misty drove carefully back to her place, not breaking any traffic laws. The boys were in a high state of excitement.

  The neighbor who yelled at them thought they might be getting ready to do a burglary next door. When they ran off, he assumed he had solved the problem. He did not call the police. He also did not inform anyone at the neighbor’s house of the boys’ activity. He did not know his neighbors well and was reluctant to appear nosy.

  Three nights passed without incident. Then the same four boys met at a party at another girl’s house. They drank and clowned around and shared their plan with two other young men at the party, Lu, a 19-year-old Asian, and Leo, a 23-year-old light-skinned mulatto. At about 2 a.m. all six of them made excuses to the girls and left, getting a ride from another guy at the party who dropped them near their target, the same house they had visited three nights earlier, and drove away. Now without a car, they had neglected to form any plan for transporting the marijuana plants they expected to steal.

  At 2 a.m., all of the windows of the house were dark. The six thieves boldly walked right up to the front door. Spitz, the impulsive 16-year-old, kicked the door loudly, trying to force it open. When it failed to give, Leonard put his shoulder to it. The wood frame cracked loudly and the door popped open. The six spilled into the house.

  The 33-year-old woman asleep in an upstairs bedroom was awakened to the sounds of men shouting that they were the police and this was a raid. She went to the top of the stairs in her tee shirt and exercise tights. A man looked up at her from the foot of the stairs. He held a sawed-off shotgun. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  The man came up the stairs and led her by the hand down to the kitchen, where he kept the shotgun pointed at her. The others were running through the small house, opening closets, looking for something. One of them asked her where the drugs were. She said she didn’t know. Another asked if there were any guns. She told them that she thought the owner of the house kept a shotgun in his bedroom on the main floor. One of them found it.

  Donna Stellar quickly realized that her life was in danger and that these men were not police. Although the man holding the shotgun on her seemed relatively calm, the others were excited and at times nearly irrational. One of them ran outside and pounded on the cellar door. When he came back in the house he complained angrily that the door had been barricaded from the inside.

  “How do you get to the basement?” they asked her. She didn’t know. She had rented the upstairs room less than two months earlier. After that the owner unexpectedly moved out of his main floor bedroom, returning only on weekends. She didn’t like living there alone and had intended to find another place. Now she realized she might never have that opportunity.

  While the search continued, the man with the shotgun took Donna back up to her room. He had her sit on the bed. He spoke softly, trying to reassure her, but he continued to hold the shotgun pointed at her. Then he switched off the room light.

  His hand fondled her breasts, first through the tee shirt and then underneath. She did not resist. He ordered her to disrobe. She did as instructed. He told her to get down on all fours on the bed, her back to him. He dropped his pants and tried to have sex with her, but he did not have an erection and could not penetrate her. He ordered her to turn around and suck on his penis. As she did that, he laid the shotgun barrel across her shoulder.

  There was a bright flash and deafening explosion in the room. Donna thought immediately that she had been killed. Her hearing was temporarily gone. The young man with the gun pulled up his pants and ran out of the room.

  Donna’s back was burned from the shotgun blast, but the pellets themselves had missed her and had torn a gaping hole in the mattress behind her. She put her clothes back on and waited for the terror to end. Downstairs she could hear yelling, one of them saying “he shot the bitch.”

  The possibility that Donna had been murdered was for a while of less concern to the thieves than their discovery of a secret hatch in the floor of a closet. It led to the cellar and to a rich harvest of maturing marijuana plants. The thieves pulled the plants and passed them back up through the hatch in the floor.

  While they were doing that, one of them suggested that the one with the shotgun check the woman upstairs, to see if he had accidentally killed her. He went back up and found her dressed and sitting on her bed. “Are you all right?” he asked. She said that she was. But that reassurance only inspired him to renew his sexual assault on her. He ordered her to disrobe again. She did, and this time he succeeded in entering her “dog” style, from the rear.

  Two of the others came upstairs to see what had happened, still entertaining the possibility of finding
someone dead or wounded from a shotgun blast. As they stood in the doorway observing the victim being raped, one of them said, “I want in on this.” He dropped his pants and had Donna suck his penis while his colleague continued to rape her.

  Soon five of the six thieves were in the room. Two traded off on rear-entry rape. The other three took turns forcing Donna to give them “blow jobs.”

  After a while, five of the six thieves decided that it was time to leave. One of them had to make a final trip back to the bedroom to physically pull off their remaining colleague, who was still compelling Donna to endure forced sexual intercourse.

  They loaded the marijuana into the trunk of Donna’s car and stole that too. When they were gone, Donna called the police.

  –––

  Initially there was no means to identify the suspects. Donna did not know any of them; she did not recognize any photos from the files of previously arrested criminals; and the intruders themselves had not left any identifying evidence behind. But within a few weeks names started to surface, due almost entirely to exceptional work by one police officer, Wayne Svilar of the Portland Police. He had been temporarily reassigned from patrol to fill a shortage in the detective division. He matched up reports of otherwise disconnected events, identified one suspect, then another, got a statement from one of the girls the suspects knew, and gradually penetrated the cloak of anonymity that the young men had assumed would shield them.

  Five of the six were arrested, including Leonard French, the suspect I would be asked to test. The charges against the five were all the same: several major felony counts that included rape, sodomy, burglary, armed robbery, and kidnapping (for forcibly detaining the victim).

  The man who owned the house and had been growing the marijuana secretly in the basement apologized to the victim. He told the police about his illegal drug activity and agreed to testify in the rape trial. He was not prosecuted.

  A different attorney was appointed to represent each of the five suspects, and the lawyers quickly began jockeying for position in the race to the District Attorney’s office.

  The attorneys knew that the first one of the suspects to admit his crime and testify for the state against the others could cut a relatively good deal. It always worked that way with multiple defendants. And any deal was good if it offered something better than a hopeless trial on five major felonies. The first problem the attorneys faced was convincing their clients of the wisdom of plea bargaining. Related to that was the secondary problem of trying to figure out who had done what inside the house. As each suspect began to talk, he told the same story about himself. Each claimed that he had done nothing to the victim, that the others had done it all. This was obviously a lie, since the victim credibly claimed that five different males had forced her to engage in sexual acts. The victim herself was not able to help much in identifying her assailants since the room had been dark and she had been in a state of terror.

  Tension grew among the five co-defendants for several weeks, each waiting to see if one of the others would cooperate with the prosecutors. Finally it happened. Spitz, the 16-year-old, “rolled over” and agreed to testify. By all accounts he had been one of the two who had raped the victim repeatedly. The next day one of the Asians unexpectedly pleaded guilty to reduced charges in exchange for a guaranteed thirty-year sentence, about half of which he might actually serve. He was believed to be the other rapist. There were still three other suspects in custody and one yet to be arrested, all now looking at the possibility of having two of their former colleagues testify against them. It became even more important for Leonard French to prove his story.

  Leonard’s story was that he had not gone in the bedroom, had not had any kind of sexual contact with the victim. This was possible, since the police knew that there were six perpetrators but only five had sexually attacked the victim. She had reported that one of those who had forced her to engage in oral sex had been blond. Leonard was one of the two blond suspects, and the other one was also claiming that he had done nothing sexual.

  I tested Leonard in the Portland Justice Center Jail, a modern downtown building distinguished by steel doors, electric locks, and television cameras mounted along the ceilings. Leonard was nervous. He had a brother serving twenty years for rape. Leonard was also relatively smart, even if he’d never put his intelligence to much good use. He said that he had told his companions as they left the house that they shouldn’t have raped the woman, that it was not right and would only bring them trouble. Leonard was the father of a two-year-old daughter and said that he didn’t want to spend her childhood locked away behind bars. He had waited outside the house, he said, while the rest of them were upstairs.

  Leonard passed his polygraph examination on sexual contact with the victim. I was convinced he was telling the truth about at least that portion of what happened.

  His attorney presented my results to the District Attorney’s office. About six weeks after he had been arrested, Leonard was released from jail under close supervision, meaning that he had to report daily until his trial.

  –––

  Leonard’s problems were not yet over. He was released from jail at about 5:30 p.m., and at about midnight someone blew up the car of one of the witnesses in the case, a girl named Misty who had talked to the police.

  The District Attorney immediately petitioned for another bail hearing on Leonard, claiming that he must be associated with the bombing, since the other defendants were all still in custody (except for the one who remained a fugitive). At the bomb site there was nothing to identify the culprit. No one had seen anything, and the bomb fragments were from easily obtainable materials. The device was a pipe bomb, constructed from a few plumbing supplies, a length of fuse, and match heads. It had been placed under the car and had blown a hole through the rear floor. There was no note or phone call that referred to the bomb, so it was not even certain that the incident was related to the pending prosecutions.

  The D.A. argued that the bombing must be associated with threatening phone calls made to Misty. Before Leonard was released from custody, Misty had received calls from voices she could not identify. The phone company put a “trap” on her line to lock incoming calls for a trace. They discovered that the calls originated from a pay phone in the Justice Center Jail, accessible to any prisoner.

  Leonard’s attorney sent him back to me for another polygraph examination. This time we met in my office.

  Leonard seemed defeated when I saw him that second time. He’d had only a few hours of freedom before he was again accused of something that he claimed was somebody else’s fault. He again spoke of his infant daughter and his fear that he would be locked away where he could not help raise her.

  Leonard reminded me that Misty had been the girlfriend of one of the other suspects, Lu. She had given the police information that probably facilitated Lu’s arrest. On the other hand, nothing she told the police contributed in any material way to Leonard’s arrest. Leonard claimed to be without motive for revenge against Misty.

  He also claimed that Lu told him in jail of a friend’s pledge to “get” Misty. The friend was in another jail at the time and communicated this promise to Lu by phone. The friend said he would do something as soon as he got out. The helpful friend didn’t know Misty and had not been involved in the crime, but was apparently motivated by his concept of loyalty to another criminal, Lu.

  Leonard didn’t know if that story about Lu’s friend represented a real threat, had been totally fabricated by Lu, as are so many other tales told in jail, or was simply posturing by Lu’s friend. There was no way to be sure. Leonard didn’t even know the name of the friend.

  Leonard insisted that it was only an unfortunate coincidence that the bombing happened on the night he was released from jail. He said he would not be so stupid to do something as serious as threatening a witness.

  The polygraph test did not go well. The charts were flat. Leonard had told me before we began that he had gotten very little sl
eep because of his anxiety about being sent to prison. He also seemed pathetically defeated, as though nothing he did would make any difference any more, that his future was all bad luck and failure. The test produced inconclusive results, meaning that the charts did not indicate clearly either lying or truthfulness. I suggested a retest, which Leonard quickly accepted. The next day we got the same results. Polygraph was not going to help him counter suspicions that he had blown up Misty’s car.

  At that point I temporarily lost interest in this case and moved on to other matters. As I left it, the bombing could not definitely be connected to any of the suspects. But I kept thinking about the threatening phone calls. The fact that at least one of these guys made (or arranged) those calls from jail was a clear indication of the moral fiber of all of them. They enjoyed each other’s company. They committed crimes together. They owned the power to put strangers in fear for their lives. They liked all of this so much that even when they were all in jail together, facing the possibility of spending years in that condition, at least one of them kept at it, threatening a teenaged girl by telephone.

  Leonard may have been the only one of the six smart enough to see that he had made a mistake. For a while he had enjoyed the thrill of associating with reckless, impulsive friends. But the criminal justice system had caught up with him and demanded satisfaction. Unlike the others, he didn’t try to blame anyone else for his problems. He told me that he knew he had created his own trouble from the choices he had made. He regretted that he had not thought of the consequences sooner.

  The sixth participant in the crime was arrested within a few months. By then the original five had already worked their plea bargains with the D.A. The sixth man chose trial, where he was convicted of burglary, robbery, kidnapping, car theft, and assault. Leonard was allowed to plead guilty to burglary, robbery, and car theft. Rape and sodomy charges against him were dropped. His recommended sentence was six years in prison. It was the lightest sentence recommended for any of the participants, but I guessed that would have been little consolation to Leonard, who had compromised his hopes for being a father to his infant daughter.