by Jim Wygant
The general manager had told me that Ms. Benedict was a loyal and trusted employee. He did not believe theft was in her character. Now she was telling me that her employer was mean and inconsiderate, that he did not pay her enough, that she had not gotten a raise that she needed and expected, and that she worked long hours without even any simple expressions of gratitude. She had not told me anything like this at the first test. I began to fear for Ms. Benedict.
I ran her through the questions three times and obtained definite results of deception. I told her those results in my usual manner, which is more of an explanation than an accusation. She changed before my eyes, as completely and convincingly as a movie hero turning into a werewolf while the audience watches.
Ms. Benedict suddenly jumped up from her chair. “Fuck you, you bastard,” she screamed – this from a woman who previously had not used harsh language of any kind in my presence. She wrenched open the office door and yelled back over her shoulder, “I’m gonna get you, you sonuvabitch.” I was dumbfounded and embarrassed. I feared that other tenants in the building were probably wondering about the terrible things I must have done to this young woman.
By storming out she had at least obtained one advantage. She was gone before I had any opportunity to try to get an admission from her.
When I described her reaction to the owner of the dealership and his general manager they were incredulous to the point that I think they had begun to doubt anything I might tell them. The behavior I reported did not match the employee they knew. Besides that, they had never heard her make the kind of complaints about unfair treatment that she had unloaded on me before the retest.
Later that day they phoned her to talk about the test results. To their amazement, she gave them an earful of basically the same language she had used with me. She only succeeded in convincing them that I had not exaggerated and that they knew who their thief was. They gladly accepted her resignation.
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Employers are not very good at picking suspects. They did not suspect Lori Benedict. More often they not only fail to identify the true culprit, but wrongly focus their suspicion on someone else. Before I stopped doing tests on commercial thefts, I found that employers invariably named as their most likely suspect the worker they liked the least. That meant that if an employee was a little odd or a little reclusive, he or she was apt to become the prime suspect in an internal theft.
When $500 in cash was missing from a County Auditor’s office, the local police agency, which did not have its own examiner, asked me to test three suspects. The Auditor was certain that the thief was among those three. They consisted of the woman from whose desk the money was believed to have been stolen, another woman who had recently gotten a divorce, and a third who was known to be having problems with personal debts. Nothing else pointed to any of these women as legitimate suspects. It was only their personal circumstances that had marked them.
I carefully went over the details of the loss with the detectives. In preparing polygraph examinations, I can not afford to assume that something has been stolen just because it has disappeared. Beyond that, it would be an even greater sin for me to assume how and when something might have been stolen, unless those circumstances have been established beyond any doubt. I began by trying to ascertain two critical elements: when the money was last seen, and when it was discovered missing. I could be certain only that it disappeared sometime between those two events.
The County Auditor and the police explained that the missing money was from funds collected at the counter on the previous Friday. All of the cash from Friday’s transactions had been stored over the weekend in an office safe. The money had then been retrieved on Monday morning to be counted and sent to the bank. The clerk who was responsible for doing the counting thought that she may have left funds unattended on her desk for a short time on Monday, although she was not certain of that. Later, when she did her count, she discovered the $500 shortage. The Auditor was convinced that one of the clerks must have taken the $500 while it was unattended on the desk. The public had no access to that area, so it had to be an employee.
While this was a workable theory, I explained to the police detectives that I could not ask the clerks if they had taken $500 off the desk. No one was certain about that scenario, so to rely upon it risked missing the thief if circumstances were different than imagined. I only knew that the total receipts for Friday’s counter transactions with the public were $500 greater than the cash that was counted on Monday. To construct valid and comprehensive tests, I could only ask the clerks if they had taken any of the money reported missing. I was not even prepared to accept that the reported amount was correct, since bookkeeping errors often had resulted in incorrect amounts in other cases.
I tested the three “most likely” suspects. Two of them produced definite truthful results. The third was the woman who believed the money had been taken from her desk. She was extremely nervous and produced inconclusive results. I did some further testing with her and reported to the police and the Auditor that her test results were somewhat unclear but I did not believe she had stolen the money.
At that point I asked them what I thought was an obvious question. How sure were they that this was not a bookkeeping error? They told me that there was no doubt. They asked me to test the next three “most likely” suspects.
The office consisted of fifteen clerks, nearly all of them women. Before I had finished I had tested all of them over the course of a week. The results were all clearly truthful except for one more inconclusive test. Again I did some additional testing and reported that I did not believe that person was the thief. We had gone through the entire office without finding the culprit.
I suspect that the police and Auditor may have had doubts about my competency. In the meantime, the local newspaper had learned of the loss and had made front page news out of it. For an elected official this was not a happy matter, and it had already been hanging over his head for about a month. At the urging of the police, the Auditor once more went back to the books.
He examined all of the transactions from that critical Friday. He made a list of the names and addresses of persons who had paid the Auditor’s Office at least five hundred dollars. Perhaps one of them could offer a clue. At the very least they might provide a copy of a cancelled check with a suspicious endorsement.
They began the tedious and embarrassing process of knocking on doors. At one of those addresses the representative from the Auditor’s Office was greeted by a surly man who’d had a transaction for exactly $500. He was shown a copy of his receipt and asked to produce his cancelled check. He hesitated, he grumbled, complaining about the incompetency of the Auditor’s Office and the banks, and he finally said that his check had not cleared the bank. Without any further argument, he wrote out a full payment of $500.
All of those clerks had been telling the truth. In reconstructing what might have happened that Friday, the police and Auditor concluded that the clerk who had helped that man had probably become distracted and given him a receipt without ever collecting his money. The $500 had not been stolen. It had never been there to begin with.
Despite weeks of extensive publicity in the local press about the loss, the customer had not come forward. He had to have realized from the news stories that the employees in the office were suffering under suspicion of theft. He remained silent until confronted in his own home. If the polygraph tests had not forced the investigators to look outside the office, the true culprit might never have been identified.
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It is natural for the guilty to try to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, like the customer from the Auditor’s Office who tried to hide his failure to pay. Often those efforts have the opposite effect and only focus suspicion.
I received an unusual request to test the trustees and officers of a fraternal lodge. Again it was a case of money missing from a safe. First there had been a theft in early June of about $500 from funds use
d for a daily door prize. Then about three weeks later more than $1,000 disappeared. In addition to that, a few months earlier someone had salvaged tickets that should have been destroyed and then re-used them to collect additional payouts for gambling machines.
In the days before State-sponsored lottery and poker machines, most fraternal lodges dabbled in gambling, even if it was against local laws. In this case the lodge had a few illegal video poker games. Rather than paying cash for a winning hand, the bartender gave out script. The gambler could later cash in all of his script with that same bartender. It was a subterfuge to get around gambling laws. It would never have prevailed in court, but it had been widely practiced for years everywhere where there were laws restricting gambling. In this lodge, the script or tickets were also used for internal bookkeeping, to keep track of how much money had been paid out. After that they were supposed to be destroyed. Someone had been stealing the redeemed tickets from the safe and cashing them a second time.
Altogether the lodge brothers were looking at three different kinds of theft, $500 from door prize money, $1,000 from the safe, and an uncertain amount in re-circulated payoff tickets. There might have been as many as three different thieves, although only one or two persons was more likely.
The theft from the safe had an interesting complication. The safe had a combination lock and also an internal key lock. Limiting access to the combination and the key would have kept this safe relatively secure. The lodge brothers managed to defeat their available security. They wrote the combination on a piece of paper and put that in a second, smaller safe on the other side of the room. That safe needed only a key to open it, and all of the club officers and the five trustees had the key to the smaller safe. Some of them denied knowing that the combination to the big safe was kept there, but there was no way to be sure.
The losses had occurred in the spring, and it was November before I did the first polygraph test. In the meantime the “brothers” had been squabbling among themselves. One of them, trustee Mitch Irons, had quickly demanded that they check for fingerprints. They hired their own expert who dusted for prints about a week after the theft. It was a foolish venture, since the prints of any of the officers and trustees could have been found on the safe for legitimate reasons. In the end that didn’t matter, since no identifiable prints were found.
After that, the lodge brothers were in serious disagreement about how to proceed. Someone suggested calling the police. In most communities the police knew that fraternal lodges provided illegal gambling for the pleasure of members. Policemen themselves often belonged to such lodges, dropping by when off-duty. But in the course of an official investigation most police departments would find it awkward to try to ignore conspicuous gambling, and probably would not consent to initiating an investigation that pretended to remain blind to illegal gambling. The police were not an option for the brothers.
One of the lodge brothers suggested polygraph examinations. Somebody else came up with the name of an examiner who is a friend of mine. That examiner scheduled tests for seven persons, including all five trustees. But the trustees had split into two factions consisting of Mitch Irons and a close friend on one side and everybody else on the other. Irons and his friend refused the tests. They accused the others, one of whom had selected the examiner, of probably rigging the tests. All seven tests were called off.
The trustees decided to seek neutral advice and asked the lodge attorney for a recommendation. He gave them my name. They held another meeting at which they decided to contact me. Irons and his friend declined to attend, but had already said they would be willing to undergo the same polygraph examinations as the others. The trustees decided that the test would be limited to the last theft, the one in late June of more than $1,000 from the safe. It was the biggest loss and they felt they had already figured out who had been re-circulating payoff tickets. In order to get that brother to take a polygraph test on the theft from the safe, they dropped the issue of the tickets and the missing door prize money.
I conducted tests of seven lodge officers and trustees over a two week period. Each of the trustees had been instructed to contact me directly to arrange an appointment. One after another they called, came in, and produced definite indications of truthfulness. Among them was the friend of Mitch Irons. Finally we were left only with Irons, the one who had suggested the futile enterprise of dusting for fingerprints and who had refused to be tested by the other examiner. I reported that I had not heard from him. His lodge brothers got after him and he finally called.
His call came on a day when I was working out of town. I had left word that I would return around 3 p.m. His own message was that he wanted to arrange for a polygraph test but if I wasn’t able to do it that day he didn’t know when he would have time. He left a phone number. I completed my outside work sooner than expected and returned to my office at about 1 p.m. I immediately called the number that Mitch Irons had left. There was no answer. There continued to be no answer until shortly after three o’clock, when an unidentified woman answered. She said Irons was not there and she did not know when he would return. I left my own name and phone number and assured her that I still had time to see him that day. If he was bluffing, I was calling it. If he was not, I’d be pleased to see him. He never returned my call.
I told the trustees what had happened. The consequence was that Brother Irons had gone to such great lengths to avoid a polygraph test that his lodge brothers were all convinced he was the thief. They also believed he had asked for the fingerprint dusting because he knew that even if his own prints were found he could easily explain them away – as a trustee he had legitimate access to the safe.
Ultimately, Irons tried so hard to avoid suspicion that he only managed to focus it upon himself. He stepped down from his lodge position a short time later, complaining that he did not want to associate with people who did not trust him. By then, the feeling was mutual.
17. Some Of The Worst
There is no single profile that fits murders. I have interviewed a 14-year-old boy accused of a gang-related murder, a 14-year-old girl accused of recruiting a few of her friends to murder her father and sister, an adult male who shot his brother, a teenager who joined his younger brother in shooting and bludgeoning their father to death, a couple of street kids who were primary participants in a mob that kicked and stomped a stranger to death, a serial killer of prostitutes who was suspected of also killing a young couple he barely knew years earlier, a parolee who abducted, raped, and murdered a teenaged girl, a deaf man who murdered his male roommate, a government employee charged with supervising juveniles on parole who instead subjected them to sexual abuse, tried to murder one and may have murdered another, a man who attacked two brothers while they were in sleeping bags along a river, stabbing both to death without apparent motive, and others accused of assorted murders arising from botched robbery attempts, petty disputes, and romantic betrayals, real and imagined. Many of these cases involved drugs, either sought or previously consumed. There were also a disturbing number of cases of adults whose impatience and rage led them to kill children in their care, some of them infants; and the case of a call girl who led her pimp to the home of a wealthy client, where the pimp bound and murdered the client in order to steal some of the wealth he believed would be lying around. These cases are memorable because they produced indications of deception, and most went on to enter guilty pleas or be found guilty at trial. One murderer confessed to me before we even began the test. In other words, I am convinced from all information available that these people were genuine murderers, or at least complicit in murder. Many of them I tested in a jail or juvenile holding facility. The man who stabbed the sleeping campers had to be tested in partial restraints because the jailers insisted he had been violent toward them and they were concerned about my safety. As it turned out, neither he nor any of these others were physically aggressive towards me.
Murder is the most violent act that one human can commit against another. The
fact that one of the Ten Commandments forbids it only demonstrates that murder has darkened the moral code of the human race since Cain killed Abel. In the 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem Hannah Arendt wrote of “the banality of evil” in trying to understand Eichmann and the phenomenon of the holocaust. We are impressed with how petty the people are who commit or enable murder and how little motivation is needed to move them to commit such a heinous act. We wonder what can deliver any individual to the moment at which he ends the life of another who stands vulnerable before him.
While conducting examinations on murder issues I have typically not felt the degree of outrage and sadness for the human condition that I have felt while creating this written summary of some of those same cases. Seeing so many listed is provoking in a way that sitting in a room with an accused murderer is not. In any occupation we tend to focus on the task before us, wanting to follow an appropriate protocol, trying to remember to do all the necessary things, wanting to avoid making any mistakes. I suppose a surgeon does not usually think of his patient as a personality but rather as an abstract mass of tissue and bone, a task to be accomplished, a challenge to be met. As a police reporter for a newspaper and later an investigator in a District Attorney’s office I witnessed the disorder, the indignity of crime scenes, and the clinical detachment of autopsies. Those events, real crime scenes and the post mortem necessities that follow, form more indelible memories than the quiet, orderly conversations I have had with people accused of the most brutal murders.
Is one murder worse than another? Is mass murder worse than the killing of one person? Is the murder of a relative worse than the same act committed against a stranger? Does the method of murder make one killing worse than another? There is no answer to those questions. How bad any murder is, how deeply we survivors feel the loss and the stain of evil, depends on how we are situated with respect to the principle actors. Someone snug in his or her home, watching the evening news, is apt to forget the murder story by the following day. The juror at the trial will never forget it, but will feel less disturbed by it than the police officer who was first on the scene. And that officer will be less distressed than the parents or children or siblings of the deceased, the survivors.