by Jim Wygant
Most of the murders for which I have been asked to conduct a polygraph examination were motivated by causes so flimsy that the average person would never regard them as sufficient to justify violence. In many cases murder was simply an impulsive act arising from rage, the kind of rage that most of us do not experience or at least do not indulge. A few of the murders to which I have been exposed were done by someone with a history of uncontrolled, narcissistic behavior, often combined with verbal or physical assaults on those they assumed could not or would not resist. Some murders are driven by the most banal of all motives, theft. And some are simply the result of deranged minds. For most of us, our lives would never become so unmanageable that we ever felt the need to resort to extreme violence. Some people are different. Some among us are often on the edge, teetering on the brink of destructive behavior that could result in the death of another. Even most of those people never tip over the edge. A few do.
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Candy Oakes told several friends that she hated her father and her older sister, Deb. She was convinced her father favored Deb over her. Deb, who was 18, was unusually short, about four-feet tall, and overweight. Candy, age 14, conventional weight and height, said she was embarrassed to be seen with her sister, adding one more element to her toxic regard for Deb. Candy told several acquaintances that her father had physically and sexually abused her for as long as she could remember. The acquaintances later told police they didn’t believe her, not having ever seen any credible indications that anything unusual had happened to Candy at the hands of her widowed father. Most who knew Candy said later that they thought she had been spoiled by her father, who gave her nearly everything she asked for. About a year before the Oakes family finally imploded, Candy began telling friends that she wished her father and Deb were dead.
In Candy’s small group of close acquaintances she was the youngest. Four males ranged in age from a few months older than Candy to eleven years older – age 25. They formed themselves into what they called a motorcycle club, and Candy began trying to enlist the males to kill her father and sister. As an inducement she pointed out that he was moderately wealthy and kept a few vials of gold dust that the killers could share. She gave them a sample of the gold, which later was characterized by investigating officers as a “down payment” for murder. She even provided one of her dad’s handguns, stolen from home with a supply of ammunition.
On the night agreed upon, she allegedly let the others into the house. The 20-year-old male, who had taken a leading role despite not being the oldest, shot and killed Candy’s father and her sister. The band of murderers, harboring the sketchy idea they could escape to another state, then stole the family vehicles, a pickup truck and a car. They were arrested several hundred miles away, still in possession of one of the stolen vehicles. The race to cut a deal with the prosecutor began, typical for crimes with multiple suspects, and the males all said that Candy had asked them to kill her family, had provided a weapon, and had let them in. Candy denied those claims and said that when the guys arrived unexpectedly at the house to commit a theft she had tried to talk them out of harming anyone.
In her initial interview with police she denied knowing anything about the murders. Later she described how the guy carrying the gun fired a shot at her father as he slept and then chased him down the hallway firing several more shots until he dropped. Candy said that her sister Deb came out of her room and then went back in. The shooter reloaded, went to Deb’s room and shot her. Candy insisted that she had tried to prevent the murders, although her inconsistent statements did not provide her with much credibility.
The police were also curious about Candy’s relationship with a former tenant on her father’s property, a man named Fred. After first denying any sexual intimacy with Fred, Candy ultimately admitted to police that she’d been in love with Fred, had kissed him and slept with him (literally), and had written him letters alluding to sexual contact, but she denied having sex with him. Candy’s father had been suspicious of her relationship with Fred, despite her denials of anything improper, and had urged her to stay away from him. Six months before Candy’s father and sister were murdered Fred shot and killed himself. Candy had discovered the body.
I tested Candy while she was being held in a juvenile detention facility. While most juvenile facilities suggest an effort to tone down any conspicuous jail atmosphere, the doors are still steel, make a solid clank when closed, and are kept locked. There is no mistaking detention for the other world outside. After a brief wait in the reception area I was escorted to a private room where Candy waited quietly, head down, hands clasped in her lap. She was wearing regulation custodial garb and had been held in that same facility for four months, but if she had been out on the street in conventional clothing she would have been indistinguishable from any other eighth grader. It would not have been evident that she was the kind of person whose life would stall abruptly in nightmarish suspension with the imposition of two counts of aggravated murder.
I spent two-and-a-half hours with Candy, administering tests on issues her attorney had identified as critical in her defense. She contradicted most of what her co-defendants said about her. She denied asking the others to kill her father and sister. She denied inviting them to come to her home on the date of the murder. She said that when they showed up unexpectedly she tried to get them to leave without hurting anyone. She also denied that her father sexually molested her. This was a reversal of what she’d said before the murder, when she told at least one acquaintance he had begun molesting her when she was three. After she was arrested she told police that he had raped her repeatedly from about the age of 11. She told me that those claims were all lies and that her father had never sexually abused her. Her attorney was naturally disappointed in her withdrawal of that assertion, hoping to use it in her defense.
Like most examinees, she was cooperative. We discussed questions for the first of the tests and then completed a set of charts. The second and third tests, on different issues, proceeded similarly. The results indicated Candy was lying – when she denied recruiting the murderers and when she said she tried to dissuade them on the night of the crime.
At the age of 14, Candy was one year too young to be remanded to adult court. The justice system is understandably uncomfortable in dealing with child murderers and proceeds awkwardly, partly because it has few precedents. Typically someone found guilty of murder in juvenile court is held in custody until reaching adulthood, when he or she might be released or might face further judicial determinations and additional confinement as an adult. I don’t know what eventually happened to Candy. Juvenile records are sealed. Her colleagues, except for the youngest male, were sufficient age to be prosecuted for murder as adults, and they were. The oldest, who had a prior police record, accepted a plea agreement and went to prison, rather than risk a worse outcome at trial. More than two decades later he was producing art in prison, which caught the attention of a gallery that put it on display and promoted a newspaper story that capitalized on the novelty of a murderer who painted. After the article appeared, the prisoner wrote to the newspaper to complain that their story misinterpreted one of his paintings. He concluded by saying, “This composition attempts to expose the ‘joke’ of the courts, coercing me with false promises, into throwing all rights away and pleading guilty.” When he sent that letter he had advanced in age from a 25-year-old participant in murder to a prisoner who was about the same age as Candy’s father at the time he was killed.
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One of the most troubling murder cases I ever worked on was that of a man whose true name was Ladon Stephens. The case and all of its messy prologue were widely reported in the press and resulted in law suits against the county that was supposed to be supervising his parole. At that time I was conducting some polygraph examinations for the county’s corrections division, mostly on convicted sex offenders.
I have never been comfortable with the whole post-conviction sex offender treatment co
ncept, which includes a polygraph element. After the program began in the 1980s it grew rapidly, with great enthusiasm expressed by all of those charged with supervising convicted offenders. It seemed that the only ones who didn’t like it were those on parole or probation. The program, which is now embraced by corrections agencies throughout the United States, may have started in Oregon with the late Judge John Beatty, a circuit court judge in Multnomah County. As prosecutions of sex offenders increased, Judge Beatty sought an alternative to prison sentences. The customary alternative was probation, but Judge Beatty wanted a means of being more certain that the convicted offenders were not committing new crimes. He conferred with the Oregon State Police and they devised a program for conducting periodic tests of convicted sex offenders.
The State Police, typically underfunded, quickly became swamped by the numbers. A decision was made to farm out the testing to private examiners. At the same time, another condition was added, that convicted sex offenders enter a privately administered program of group counseling. In other words, what had once been a government function, supervision of convicted criminals, became privatized. The probation officers loved it because it freed up time to deal with their growing caseloads. In practice, the concept was simple. The treatment provider, in concert with the probation officer and the polygraph examiner, would decide whether the probationer was in compliance with the terms of his probation and how long he should continue in treatment. No one seemed concerned that the treatment providers and polygraph examiners had an apparent conflict of interest in deciding whether a paying probationer had successfully completed his treatment.
All sex offenders were treated equally, meaning that all were referred into these programs, which is still the case in most jurisdictions. Statistics from the FBI indicate that recidivism among convicted sex offenders is dramatically less than for most other serious crimes. A possible explanation is that most sex offenses are crimes of opportunity, and that discovery and punishment in most cases is enough to assure that the crime won’t be repeated. Many of these cases involve step-fathers or boyfriends in a relationship with the victim’s mother. With the added element of excess alcohol, the man commits a criminal act. Most sex offenders do not fit the definition of a pedophile, a predator with a persistent sexual preference for juveniles. Treating all sex offenders equally may mean that those like Ladon Stephens who deserve the most attention do not get the level of supervision needed.
From an examiner’s point of view there was another worry about the treatment concept. The polygraph tests were unproven. Virtually all polygraph research, as conducted in university laboratories by psychologists and physiologists, derives from specific issues. Typically, a mock crime is created, often a staged theft of something from an office. The subsequent polygraph test targets that one issue. No researcher has yet found the means to construct a laboratory paradigm that addresses non-specific behavior over an extended period of time. There would be no way to know “ground truth,” the absolute facts of what happened in the past, which is only possible when those facts are created and controlled as part of the study. Without knowing ground truth, the accuracy or validity of a test can not be determined precisely. Tests on convicted sex offenders do not usually embrace specific issues. They customarily ask something like, “Have you engaged in sexual contact with anyone under 18 since your last test?” There is no victim’s complaint, no specific allegation. Treatment providers favor these tests because they foster a degree of control over a probationer that the therapists and probation officers find desirable, and probationers often volunteer information in the course of the examination that is more revealing than what they might mention during group counseling sessions.
Ladon Stephens had at least two polygraph tests, one done by me, but ultimately the press joined with the general public in concluding that Stephens should have gotten much more attention from everyone.
Stephens was 28 years old when I met him. He had spent most of his adolescence and adult years in custody. From 15 to 18 he was held in a state correctional facility for juveniles as a consequence of attacks against young girls when he was 14. On three separate occasions he used a knife to threaten girls who were 10, 12, and 14 years old. He forced the youngest to perform oral sex on him, and he attempted to rape the oldest. The incident with the 12-year-old was interrupted by an adult. Stephens told me that he remembered the three incidents only vaguely, but he did not dispute the facts as recorded in the police reports. He characterized the offenses as an anomaly: a brief period of aberrant behavior that was neither triggered by any particular events nor preceded by any other similar conduct. If that were true it would be unusual.
Stephens did not manage to stay free very long. Only two years after his release from the juvenile facility, he was arrested again as an adult, this time for a one-day spree of four attempted abductions. He approached four different female pedestrians in his car and ordered them at gunpoint to get in. None complied. Stephens later said that the gun was only a pellet pistol, but one of the victims, age 13, said she heard a shot fired as she ran away. A 14-year-old froze in place on the sidewalk and Stephens drove off. A 12-year-old accompanied by her 10-year-old sister screamed, causing Stephens to flee. His last victim that day was an anonymous prostitute who was savvy enough to get his license number and report it. The car he was driving was his first, and he’d had it for only two days. He attributed the “shot” heard by one girl to a backfire from the car. The actual weapon was never retrieved, so whether the gun was real or not was never resolved. Stephens spent the next 80 months in adult prison. When I met him he was 28 years old and had been released on parole less than three months earlier.
Although he consented to being polygraphed, he clearly was not happy about being in my office. He was sullen, angry, and uncommunicative, often speaking only enough to confirm or deny a question I put to him directly. I asked him why he targeted girls who were so young, and he told me that he thought it was because he wanted to exercise control. In journals that he wrote, later released publicly, he again referred to his desire to be in control with victims who were too young to pose a threat to him. He identified the act of getting into a car to drive as being “the beginning of my cycle,” and mentioned how he frequented “high-risk areas.” His terminology revealed less about any self-awareness than about the amount of exposure he’d had to sex offender treatment, where the ideas of control, cycles, and high-risk are repeated incessantly.
I have tested many convicted sex offenders and found most of them mild-mannered, extremely cooperative, and generally intent on doing everything possible to avoid any further jail time. Stephens was not like that. Even though most of the others I saw had not spent anything like the amount of time Stephens endured in correctional facilities, there was an attitude about Stephens that went substantially beyond a parolee’s customary distrust of strangers and distaste for any form of authority. I saw something in him that I felt was dangerous, which I have rarely observed in other examinees. In my estimation he qualified for being described as “evil,” a term reserved for only a very few people of a type most of us encounter only in movies.
Stephens did not participate much in his polygraph test. Even though I offered him an opportunity to challenge any of the test questions I presented, he accepted everything as though he didn’t care. He did not appear to have anything invested in the test. The examination questions were typical for someone with his background, focusing on whether he’d tried to force sexual contact on anyone not already disclosed, both during the brief period of his release and also everything before that. He denied that he had. The charts were unclear, meaning that no pattern emerged that was consistent with what we usually saw when someone was lying or telling the truth. A computerized chart evaluation returned a result indicating possible deception on one of the questions, but when I reviewed the charts I did not find support for that conclusion, which is what I wrote in my report.
After I sent the report I picked up the phon
e and did something I have done on only a few other occasions. I alerted the recipient of the report to my personal concerns that Stephens was dangerous. I did not put that in writing because I had no professional basis for offering such a conclusion. My view was based on personal observation and had nothing to do with polygraph. I did the same once in an arson case, when I was afraid the suspect was going to burn down a witness’s home, and in an attempted murder, because I wanted to alert the attorney to his possible risk in being alone with his client.
I never saw Stephens again. He had at least one more polygraph examination with another examiner, whom I understood encountered difficulties similar to what I experienced.
Five years later Stephens was arrested for murder, and I learned then that he had committed at least two forcible rapes of teenaged girls in the month before I tested him. Those were girls he pulled off the street, choked, and raped. Within a matter of months after my examination he did the same again at least one more time. Those crimes, though reported immediately to police, remained unsolved from the time they were committed in 1997 until 2002, when Stephens broke into a young woman’s home, choked and raped her on the floor of her living room, and left her for dead. She not only survived, she recognized her attacker. He was a boyfriend of her cousin. Stephens was quickly arrested.