by Colin Evans
The first modern attempt to measure emotion as a means of determining truth and deception can be traced to the celebrated Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso. As early as 1895 he was recording changes in blood pressure and pulse rate in police suspects under questioning, though not with any conspicuous success. The next innovation in lie detection came in 1913 when another Italian, psychologist Vittorio Benussi, published a paper on using breath measurement as a means of determining truthfulness. During the First World War an American scientist engaged in counterintelligence, William Marston, took the process one step further, developing a systolic blood pressure gauge that he tested on German prisoners of war. Disillusioned by his results, Marston abandoned its use.
If anyone can lay claim to the title “the Father of the Polygraph,” then that person has to be John Larson, a medical student at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1920, working in close conjunction with local police chief August Vollmer, Larson built the first machine specifically designed to detect lying through plotting on graph paper simultaneous measurements of blood pressure, pulse, and respiration. Several years earlier a Scottish cardiologist, Sir James Mackenzie, had designed a multifunction heart monitor that he called a polygraph, meaning “many writings,” and Larson decided to appropriate the name.
Although immediately popular with police departments right across America, the polygraph suffered a major judicial setback almost right away, when the U.S. Supreme Court (Frye v. United States, 1923) ruled unproven scientific testimony to be legally inadmissible. As a result the polygraph was largely barred from the courtroom, even as its use in everyday life mushroomed, usually in the arena of job applications.
By the 1930s Larson had turned his back on this field of work, and it was left to his protégé, Leonard Keeler, to develop what is now regarded as the prototype of the modern polygraph. At the same time, Keeler also founded a school for the proper training of operatives.
The polygraph works by attaching rubber tubes to the subject’s chest and abdomen, a blood pressure–pulse cuff to the arm, and small metal plates to the fingers. The examiner then asks the subject a series of questions, and the polygraph measures five physical responses. These are:
Thoracic respiration
Abdominal respiration
Perspiration (registered by minuscule changes in skin conductivity of electricity occurring at the fingertip)
Blood pressure
Blood volume
These five responses are then plotted along a horizontal graph, with the location of questions marked at the bottom of the printout. How the questions are framed is critical. Because individuals react differently, the examiner needs to know what triggers a “lie” response in that particular subject. To this end, each test contains certain “control” questions, to which the subject is directed to answer untruthfully. The concomitant anxiety usually registers as a blip on the graph. Once this untruthful benchmark has been established, the actual test can begin.
Numerous questions—some relevant to the case, some not—are fired at the subject. Each response is assigned a number from -3 (indicating a strong negative correlation) to +3 (indicating a strong positive correlation), measured by comparing the relevant response to the previously established controls. Psychology plays its part, with the skilled examiner constantly reminding the subject of just how accurate the polygraph is in catching any lies told.
Once all the responses are added together, a total score of +6 indicates a strong presumption that the subject is lying. Scores that fall between -5 and +5 are not admissible, because they are not felt to be a strong enough indication of veracity.
While no one disputes that polygraphs measure perceptible changes in human response, there can be no guarantee that these changes are prompted by the act of lying. Because stress plays a big factor in any polygraph test—even truthful subjects occasionally send the styluses haywire—much depends on how the examiner interprets the data. And herein lies much of the controversy. Give the same polygraph results to two different examiners and, as tests have shown, it is entirely possible that they will reach opposing conclusions as to the subject’s truthfulness.
Supporters of the polygraph attribute such discrepancies to poor schooling and a lack of experience. A properly trained examiner, they claim, armed with a good instrument, will catch 95 percent of all liars. Critics put the figure much lower and say that with minimal practice almost anyone can be taught how to “beat the machine” by deliberately manipulating their physiological responses to give false positives.
Someone who notably failed to beat the machine was Colin Carpi. Three times he was hooked up to the polygraph, and three times he gave responses that indicated deception.
But before the prosecutors could lay their case before a jury, they first of all had to get Carpi into court. And that was proving to be hellishly difficult. Dominating all else was the question of jurisdiction. Although the body had been found in New York, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Laura had been killed in her Princeton house and then transported to the East River where her body was dumped. After some lukewarm interstate wrangling—New York really wanted to wash its hands of what had been a humiliating public embarrassment—New Jersey found itself saddled with the prosecution of Colin Carpi.
It was a strange case right from the beginning. Despite being indicted for first-degree murder on August 19, 1971, Carpi was released on his own recognizance in the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. This highly unusual state of affairs in a capital case persisted until the following December when a court threw out the original indictment. Carpi’s triumph was short lived. A second appeal, this time by the state, led to the indictment being reinstated.
Still there seemed to be little official appetite for putting Colin Carpi on trial. The curious legal limbo dragged on all through 1972 and for most of the following year, until November 1973, when state prosecutors wearily announced a trial date set for the new year. With this announcement news of the whole bizarre saga finally broke in the New York press.
There is an old medical saw that “doctors bury their mistakes,” and over the previous two years Helpern had certainly done his damnedest to bury the Carpi case. In this endeavor he’d been outstandingly successful. So much so, that when the thunderstorm finally did break above the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, its veteran leader was on the verge of retirement. Not that Helpern got off entirely scot-free; those final few weeks in office were among the most awkward and testing of his lengthy career.
The story broke on November 28, 1973, and that day John F. Devlin was wheeled out to face a hostile press. He had first joined the OCME on a part-time basis in 1959. Three years later he became full time and in 1969 was appointed to the position of deputy chief medical examiner. He was experienced and thoroughly professional, with a strong pragmatic streak. When he told reporters that he had not conducted a full autopsy first time around because there was no reason to suspect foul play and because the office was “very busy,” he was merely articulating long held office practice. He went on to explain: “We get a lot of bodies out of the river when it warms up at that time of the year and we’ve got to get rid of them as soon as possible. They pile up, and there’s no room for them.” Visions of a corpse-filled conveyor belt may have unsettled some of the more timorous, but in the day-to-day business of body disposal, practicality rules. After all, there are only so many refrigerated lockers. Pressed by reporters as to how the head came to be severed, the deputy CME said he didn’t know. He flatly denied having authorized the procedure; nor did he have any idea who had done so.
Mayor John Lindsay might have just lost the recent election to Abraham Beame, but he was determined to shrug off any suggestion that he was a lame duck. One day after the story broke, he ordered an inquiry into operations at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. This only heightened press fervor, most of it directed at the outgoing chief. Helpern did his best to divert the attacks by saying that the impendi
ng trial constrained him from commenting about the case, but this didn’t prevent him muttering darkly that details of the story had been deliberately leaked by a certain high-ranking staff member out to “besmirch” the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Although Helpern refrained from naming names, given his well-advertised dislike and distrust of one particular colleague, Holmesian levels of deduction were not necessary to isolate his suspect.
The inquiry into the OCME lasted for two weeks, and was headed by Gerald Frug of the Health Services Administration. So far as the OCME was concerned, his report—submitted on December 10—was like the curate’s egg, good in parts. Frug’s primary conclusion was that the OCME had acted appropriately when it severed the head, because the “expensive and highly specialized” dental work might be an aid to future identification, and that as a result of this incident the OCME was investigating the merits of having X-rays performed on all bodies brought in. So far so good; then came the zinger. When Frug went digging, he discovered that the severance had been ordered by none other than John F. Devlin! Having earlier denied any part in the incident, the deputy CME was now forced to come clean. He had authorized the action, he said, because the head had “decomposed to the point where [it] was merely a skull, and the removal of the skull was a convenient and appropriate way to preserve the dental work for later identification.”
Bad news is often like a stone dropped into a pond. What begins as a small disturbance can, as the ripples spread outward, dislodge other problems and allow them to bubble to the surface. This case was a prime example. In short order, fallout from the report uncovered more disturbing revelations, this time concerning a perceived indifference shown toward dead people in New York City. Barely a month previously, on November 16, 1973, a fifty-six-year-old stockbroker named George Gutterman had collapsed of a heart attack on a street in Queens. He was declared DOA at the City Hospital Center in Elmhurst. Despite the fact that Gutterman was carrying substantial ID, including photographs and even fingerprint records, no city agency bothered to contact the family. Only dogged research by family members uncovered the truth. Six days later, just as Gutterman was being prepared for a pauper’s grave by Hebrew Free Burial, he was finally identified.
Even though this oversight did not reflect directly on the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, it was yet another jab of detrimental news to greet the unfortunate Dr. Dominick DiMaio when he took over as acting CME on January 7, 1974. Ten days later, some very anxious New York eyes were focused on Trenton, New Jersey, as the trial of Colin Carpi opened.
When Mercer County assistant prosecutor Richard M. Altman made his opening address to the jury, he didn’t waste any words; discard all the bizarre hoopla that attended the discovery of Laura’s body and this was a straightforward case with the oldest of motives. Colin Carpi, he said, was a man consumed by hatred and bitterness toward his estranged wife, and rather than topple into the abyss of certain financial ruin, he had “carefully planned and carried out the execution [of Laura].” Altman played up Carpi’s cleverness, his Ivy League schooling, portraying him as some warped genius who thought he had committed “the perfect crime.” Except that, before the body was discovered, he “did something no human being in the world could have done—it was the one mistake he made.” That mistake, Altman promised, would be revealed in testimony. He called it “more dramatic than anything else you will ever hear in a courtroom…a fatal error that bespoke his guilt loudly and clearly.”
This was some boast for any prosecutor to make, and many who were familiar with the case privately questioned Altman’s strategy. Promise the jury a smoking gun and you’d better deliver; come up short, and no panel would forgive you. Altman decided to get the bad news out of the way early on. Few expert witnesses have ever had to consume a larger portion of humble pie than that dished up to Dr. John F. Devlin in that Trenton courtroom. His admission that he had initially ascribed Laura’s death to drowning was hugely damaging, as was the way he was made to parade—like some recalcitrant schoolboy—before the jury one by one, showing each the elusive .32-caliber slug he had missed. He explained that it was not OCME policy to remove heads unless they were so decomposed as to be skeletonized, and then only if they were needed for possible later identification. In the Carpi case, he had deemed it necessary to keep the jaws because the teeth showed elaborate dental work. The head had been severed on his orders, he said, because removing the jaws alone would have entailed more mutilation.
Altman did his best to paper over the cracks. While conceding that the OCME had fallen short of its own high investigative standards, he quite rightly praised the office as “one of the finest in the country.” Only time would tell if Altman’s airbrushing mission had done the trick; for now, it looked to be uphill all the way.
Originally the defense had questioned whether the body was actually that of Laura Carpi; however, the testimony of Dr. Lowell J. Levine, dental consultant to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and one of the world’s foremost forensic odontologists, effectively demolished that thin argument early in the proceedings. As he put it, “Dental X-rays are as unique as a fingerprint for identification purposes.”
Of all the components of the human body, virtually nothing outlasts the teeth after death. This durability makes them ideally suited as a means of identification. Indeed, in the aftermath of serious fires, such as the Waco inferno, teeth are often the only means of identifying scorched remains.
Identification by teeth is not new. It dates back to A.D. 49, and the time of Nero. Allegedly, Nero’s mother, Agrippina, ordered her rival Lollia Paulina to commit suicide, with instructions for her soldiers to bring back Lollia’s head as proof that she was dead. When presented with the head, Agrippina found identification an impossibility, until she examined the teeth and, on finding a distinctively discolored front tooth, realized that her hated enemy would trouble her no more. During the U.S. Revolutionary War, none other than Paul Revere (a young dentist) helped identify war casualties by their bridgework. Almost two centuries later and dental records again played a significant part in history, this time at the end of World War II, to identify the remains of Adolf Hitler.
It is frequently claimed that no two people have identical teeth; however, it should be remembered that unlike fingerprints, which remain unchanged from birth, dentition achieves its uniqueness through use and wear. For successful identification, both ante-and postmortem records must be available. From such data, it is often possible to make an identification from a single tooth.
There are an estimated two hundred different tooth charting methods in use throughout the world. All provide a means of identification that is elegant and almost 100 percent reliable. The American approach, called the Universal System, allocates a different number to each of the thirty-two adult teeth, beginning with the upper-right third molar (1), round the mouth to the lower-right third molar (32). Information is recorded about the five visible surfaces of each tooth, from which it is generally possible to complete a dental grid, or odontogram, unique to that individual.
As regular visits to the dentist become a way of life for more people, so the database of fillings, extractions, bridges, dentures, and deformities expands. Every addition brings an increased chance of identification, should one ever be necessary.
With all doubts about the identification of Laura Carpi cast aside, everything now boiled down to a single question: who killed her? So far as the state was concerned, Colin Carpi punched all the right buttons; he had the means, the opportunity, and certainly the motive to get rid of his wife. At stake were hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, in what had degenerated into a savage divorce battle. If Laura won the case—an outcome that looked odds-on—Colin would be wiped out financially. The closer they came to the wire, the meaner Colin turned, or so it was alleged. Several people claimed to have heard him threaten his estranged wife.
One was a member of Laura’s legal team, John A. Hartman III. He testified about an unpleasant
incident that occurred when Carpi had been questioned for a deposition on his financial status. It had been a tense, edgy meeting for all concerned. After the deposition, both parties had entered the elevator as a group, only for Carpi to suddenly turn on his wife and say, “You’ve really done it this time, Laura. You’ve come to the end of your rope.” Another attorney, Russell W. Annich Jr., who was present, said he didn’t recall the exact words, but in essence they were, “Laura, you’ve just about reached the end of the line.”
Hartman wasn’t through yet. He told how Laura had also confided that on January 31—just over a week before she disappeared—Carpi had “pushed in” her front door, run upstairs “slamming” doors, then rushed back downstairs and into the dining room where she had been vacuuming. She said the defendant “had a blank stare about him” and that “his face was red, with blood vessels protruding in his head…he appeared to be about to do something to her.” Hartman continued: “She clenched the vacuum cleaner and warned him that if he took one step toward her, she would clout him with it. He said, ‘I promised my lawyers I was going to catch you this weekend and I’m going to fix you.’”
On the day following the disappearance, Hartman said, he had gone to Laura’s house, and had seen Carpi sitting in his car in the driveway. He told the court that Carpi had “elongated” scratches on the left side of his face from the temple to the cheek.
Someone else who’d seen these reported scratches was Detective Sergeant Norman Servis of the Princeton Township Police Department. He had questioned Carpi that same day and saw not only the scratches but also bruises on the back of his right hand and a scratch between thumb and index finger.