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

by Jim Wygant

  Neither the defense attorney nor the district attorney were satisfied with the inconclusive test result, although they were pleased that my conversation with Massingen had clarified some of his earlier claims. The defense attorney asked about a retest. I discouraged it. The State had paid for my services and I thought that any further expenditure on Massingen would be wasted, unlikely to produce any clearer results. I suggested that if they were determined to proceed, they should consider a different examiner.

  They obtained more State money and hired a second examiner. That examiner told me later that his experience with Massingen had been nearly a duplicate of my own. The examiner experienced difficulty in pinning down Massingen to any definite statement that did not include assumptions and poorly recalled conversations. The results of his test were the same as mine, inconclusive. His charts had also been unusually flat.

  At that point the defense attorney gave up on the Francke angle that he had hoped might help his client with his own murder sentence. The district attorney also lost interest and focused more intensely on another suspect – Frank Gable, who was ultimately convicted of the Francke murder. By coincidence, the day I tested Massingen was also the same day that Gable was first mentioned in the press as a suspect.

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  The State of Oregon bought a polygraph examination and paid for the time of a defense attorney and a district attorney. At least the test on Pettygrove had been paid for by his family. The examinations of the two men were probably unnecessary. As I prepared each man for examination, I heard the initially exaggerated claims give way to vague assumptions and “I can’t remember.” Even if both men had been telling the truth, the information they were trying to peddle turned out to be of such minor consequence that it would have contributed little or nothing toward identifying and prosecuting Francke’s murderer.

  Both prisoners were familiar with the Francke case from the unrelenting coverage by the media. Both knew that other inmates had been granted unaccustomed credibility and raised to the level of news sources by columnists and reporters. Both men must have assumed they would achieve a similar level of acceptance with police officers and district attorneys. They were wrong. Even if a vague story with no corroboration was good enough for some members of the press, it would never make it in court.

  15. Mistakes

  For one month, February, 1994, the news media and the public seemed unable to decide whether they loved or hated polygraph. At first polygraph was uncritically accepted as an absolute science that delivered final proof of something everyone already suspected. Then it was treated as a complete failure, a misleading, error-prone process that exonerated the guilty and condemned the innocent. These contradictory opinions flowed freely within a time frame of only a few weeks.

  Absolute positions are rarely correct, but strong judgments that either endorse or condemn polygraph have plagued it since its inception. That inconsistency probably represents the public’s instinctive craving for simple answers: “We don’t want explanations. We want ‘facts’,” and that usually means only what validates what we already believe. It follows that prejudice and opinions are often mistaken for “facts.”

  Two circumstances occurred in February, 1994, that renewed the old debate about the accuracy of polygraph. They were as unrelated as any two events could possibly be. One of them involved Tonya Harding1, an Olympic figure skater. The other involved Aldrich Ames, a spy within the Central Intelligence Agency. For a short time, their two stories shared the news.

  Harding’s tale began on an ice rink in early January, 1994. Another skater, Nancy Kerrigan, was attacked by a man with a club at an Olympic qualifying competition held in Detroit. The stranger rushed up to her at the side of the rink during practice. He bashed her on the leg with what was later determined to be a police style baton, a “billy club.” Although no bones were broken, the blow was strong enough to cause tissue damage and to raise a large swelling. Kerrigan withdrew from the Detroit competition but was named to the Olympic skating team anyway. Tonya Harding was also placed on the team, based upon her skating performance in that same Detroit competition.

  The news media speculated that a deranged fan was responsible for the attack. No one suggested that Kerrigan had been injured at the instigation of another skater to keep her out of the Olympics. The nature of the sport made that nearly unthinkable. Among athletic competitions, women’s figure skating is the epitome of grace and individual effort. Figure skaters take the ice alone. They do not compete directly against each other.

  The nation was astonished a few days later when Tonya Harding’s bodyguard, Shawn Eckardt, began to talk. He implicated himself, Tonya Harding’s lover (who was also her former husband), and two other men. Eckardt, the bodyguard, was a beefy young man given to grandiose claims about his background in international espionage. He turned out to be a former competitive body builder. Jeff Gillooly, the lover, was a scrawny schemer who had married and divorced Harding twice. Harding herself was a tough-talking blonde whose public postures switched quickly between petulance, egotism, and girlish innocence.

  The story monopolized the news for about two months as additional details dribbled out. Within a few weeks of the attack, Gillooly gave the FBI a statement admitting his own role and implicating the others, including Harding. He was indicted and quickly arranged to plead guilty to a racketeering charge. He was sentenced to two years in prison.

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  The motive for the attack was assumed to be money, although none of the principals talked much about that. An Olympic skater could pick up millions of dollars for product endorsements, as well as professional skating jobs. As the accusations and denials passed back and forth between Harding and the four accused men, some of the public regarded Harding as an unwitting pawn. Others felt she may have been the driving force behind the attack against Kerrigan.

  With the winter Olympics fast approaching, several athletic committees faced an unprecedented quandary – what to do about Tonya Harding. There were accusations against Harding, but she had not been formally charged with anything. When the U.S. Olympic committee threatened to remove Harding from competition, her attorney filed a civil suit, demanding that Harding be kept on the roster. The issue was quickly decided when the principals met in Oregon for preliminary action on the civil suit. They came away with an agreement that Harding would go to the Norway competition and the suit would be dropped.

  While Harding was preparing to leave for the Olympics, a Portland television station broke the story that the skater’s attorney had secretly submitted her to three polygraph examinations. The newsman said that Harding had failed one test and passed a second by the same Oregon examiner. Nothing more was said about those two tests. Then came details of a third test by an examiner from Salt Lake City, Dr. David Raskin, a psychologist. The news anchor reported where the test had been done, the date it had been done, and the questions that Harding had been asked about her involvement in the attack on Kerrigan. Harding had reportedly flunked that test.

  The TV station did not name its source. However, the information about that last polygraph test was so detailed that there were few possibilities. Certainly neither Harding nor her attorney had any reason to disclose that information, since the results were not helpful to them. And Harding had largely severed her relationship with ex-husband Gillooly by then, virtually eliminating him as a source for all of the precise details revealed by the TV station.

  Raskin, identified by the TV station as the examiner in that third Harding test, was a kind of renegade within the polygraph community. In the 1970s at the University of Utah he had done pioneering research on polygraph validity and reliability. But he liked to be the center of attention. He had been involved in two of the most highly publicized criminal cases of his time, testing Patty Hearst, a newspaper magnate descendant who had been kidnapped and then assisted in robbing a bank, and John DeLorean, a briefly famous car manufacturer. Raskin had appeared at legislative hearings and as an
expert in court. Other examiners tended to dislike or distrust him, because of his big ego and his public criticism of some aspects of polygraph testing. Many of those who had seen a video tape of his test of DeLorean were critical of his procedures, probably more than they would have been of an examiner they admired.

  After Raskin’s name came up in the Harding case, he was asked by a television reporter in Salt Lake City whether he would verify his participation. He said it would be unethical for him to breach confidentiality, which was true. The fact remains, if he did obtain test results indicating that Harding was lying, no one stood to gain more from the release of that information than Raskin himself. His name consequently became associated with an event of considerable interest to the media. Without the leak to the press, any work Raskin did in the Harding case would have remained unknown to the general public.

  Whether Raskin actually did examine Tonya Harding has never been confirmed publicly by her, her attorney, or Raskin himself, so the information that was leaked remains unverified. The identity of the person who leaked it also has not been disclosed by the television station.

  That brings us to something that is known, and to my purpose in relating this story. According to the media reports, Harding had failed two polygraph tests and passed one. No one seemed concerned about the apparent contradiction there. The common theory among news commentators seemed to be that if she failed two out of three she must be lying. The regard given to polygraph in the Harding matter, as represented by the reports from the news media, was highly uncritical. There were no accompanying reminders that polygraph is not 100 per cent accurate, no attention drawn to the apparent discrepancy between two unfavorable results and one favorable. The news media simply laid out the “facts,” which in this instance became: first, there had been polygraph tests; and second, the results indicated that Harding was lying. This unquestioning approach to polygraph was probably influenced by opinions that many people already held about Tonya Harding. The polygraph results verified what was already suspected or believed.

  Although the questions allegedly used in Raskin’s test were reported on television, the media never reported what Harding had been asked in the two tests that supposedly preceded Raskin’s, done by a different examiner. Presumably the TV station did not get detailed information about those two tests. The fact that one of those tests may have indicated lying while another produced a conclusion of truthfulness does not necessarily represent a contradiction. Without knowing the questions asked, there is no way to understand the significance of those results. They could indicate an error. They might also indicate different issues.

  Polygraph examiners are often asked to test on limited aspects of some bigger scheme, and it is possible for someone to be truthful in that limited context. A common example is the bank robber who denies that he had a real gun in his pocket. The fact that he may produce truthful test results on that narrow issue does not mean that someone else robbed the bank.

  There is another possible explanation for contradictory test results. The examiner may have had incomplete or inaccurate information for one of the tests. He may have asked the wrong questions, accidentally providing the client an opportunity to answer truthfully.

  None of these considerations were explored in the media, which only seemed grateful for more “facts” to report, something to keep the Harding story alive for a few more days.

  Harding eventually admitted that she learned about the conspiracy to attack Kerrigan shortly after it happened, but did not report it to authorities. In March, a little more than two months after the attack, Tonya Harding pleaded guilty to hindering prosecution. Although this is a relatively minor crime, the sentence was stiff. The judge ordered her to resign from the U.S. Figure Skating Association. The effect of that was to prevent her from participation in any further amateur competition, including a world figure skating event scheduled to begin only a few days later in Japan. She was placed on 3 years probation, fined $100,000, and ordered to contribute $50,000 to the Special Olympics. The sentence also included 500 hours of community service and a psychological evaluation.

  Less than two weeks later, a special Multnomah County Grand Jury, which had been reviewing evidence of the Kerrigan attack since shortly after it occurred, returned indictments against the three remaining men, who eventually pleaded guilty. The Grand Jury also identified Tonya Harding as an unindicted conspirator in the planned attack, despite her claim that she’d only learned about it afterwards. That unusual finding only meant that the District Attorney had convinced the Grand Jury that he had enough evidence to prosecute Harding as a conspirator, if he really wanted to. Whether there was enough for a conviction will never be known.

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  About two weeks before Tonya Harding’s guilty plea, another story broke about a spy within the Central Intelligence Agency. Aldrich Hazen Ames had risen to the upper hierarchy of the agency before he was accused of being a spy, first for the Soviet Union and later for Russia. After Ames and his wife were arrested, the U.S. government claimed that the pair received about $2.5 million for spying over a period of about eight years.

  The press initially reported that during Ames’ career as a spy he had taken and passed two polygraph examinations that were specifically intended to catch spies.

  Newsweek characterized Ames’ betrayal of his government as “the worst spy scandal since the Rosenbergs.” The magazine described Ames as “...cocky enough to beat a lie detector test in 1986 and then again in 1991.” They added that “Ames would not be the first spy to go undetected by the polygraph,” although they did not explain what they meant by that.

  Unlike the Harding case, where three polygraph test results that were apparently inconsistent did not raise a glimmer of curiosity, the Ames case resulted in dismissal of polygraph as something a “cocky” attitude could subvert. Ames himself later referred to polygraph as “witch-doctory.” He said that all he needed to beat a polygraph test were “confidence and a friendly relationship with the examiner.”

  Ames was 52 when he was arrested. He had worked with the C.I.A. for a little more than 30 years. He joined in 1962, two years after his father retired from the Agency. Published reports indicated that his first 20 years with the C.I.A. were relatively uneventful and that his career was undistinguished. As in most bureaucracies, increasing seniority and avoidance of any significant failures practically guaranteed advancement.

  In 1982 Ames was sent to Mexico City to recruit contacts for the C.I.A. He developed a personal interest there in Maria del Rosario Casas Dupuy, 11 years younger than himself. Rosario worked as a cultural attaché in the Colombian embassy in Mexico City. Ames and Rosario became intimate. He was still married at that time to another C.I.A. agent. He divorced his wife and, in 1985, married Rosario. The U.S. government later alleged it was that same year that Ames accepted his first payment from the Soviets as a spy.

  Only one year later Ames underwent a polygraph examination. He would have been “dirty” at that time, new to the practice of betrayal and presumably more nervous than someone more experienced; and yet, according to information initially released by the C.I.A., the polygraph test did not reveal anything. In 1991 Ames was asked to undergo another examination. The C.I.A. later told the news media that nothing was revealed in that second test.

  Although those claims about the failures of two polygraph tests were widely disseminated by weekly news magazines and TV news programs, a later story that refuted those allegations received much less exposure.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been feuding with the C.I.A. for several years, complaining about lax security. After Ames was arrested, the F.B.I. issued its own report of the Ames polygraph examinations. According to F.B.I. experts, Ames had produced results indicating lying on both tests, and on a retest done after the initial 1991 examination.

  That story about polygraph accuracy was reported by Tim Weiner on the front page of the March 8, 1994, New York Times. In a commentary on the op
-ed page of that same issue, Ronald Kessler wrote, “...The polygraph was accurate [Kessler’s emphasis] in Mr. Ames’ case. According to several people inside and outside the agency who are familiar with the results, he failed all three tests....” Kessler claimed that a negative report from the 1986 test was “shelved.” In 1991, Kessler said, Ames failed his first test and then failed again on a retest, but convinced the examiner that his poor performance was only because of his concerns about financial problems. The point made by Kessler and the F.B.I. was that polygraph had worked fine, but the C.I.A. had ignored the results.

  In that same year of 1991, after receiving a tip that Ames was apparently spending beyond his means, the C.I.A. finally became suspicious of him. His bosses reportedly transferred him from his highly sensitive work in counter-intelligence to the less critical area of counter-narcotics. The F.B.I. also began intensive surveillance of Ames.

  Because the government is naturally guarded in what it reveals about problems within its most secret agencies, we can be certain only that we do not know everything about Ames. We do know from past spy cases, both in this country and in England, that suspicions often arise and linger for several years before an agency can become convinced enough to take decisive action. Ames came under strong enough suspicion in 1991 to warrant a watch on his movements. We will probably never know what lesser suspicions there might have been before that.