Speaker 1: Pushkin. Imagine there's a place in our world where the
Speaker 1: known things go. A corridor of the mind, its walls
Speaker 1: lined with shelves, stopped with proof, and cluttered with clues.
Speaker 1: Here over, on top of this filing cabinet, a wooden
Speaker 1: box with a brass nameplate, w M M damn. It's
Speaker 1: locked this place. This vault stores the facts that matter,
Speaker 1: and matters of fact, all that stands between reasonable doubt
Speaker 1: and the chaos of uncertainty. It lies in a time
Speaker 1: between now and then. The sign on the door reads
Speaker 1: the last archive. Wind your watch back a century, step
Speaker 1: across the threshold and into a lecture hall. The class
Speaker 1: met twice a week at American University, two blocks from
Speaker 1: the White House, in the spring of nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 1: In the evening, all the students were lawyers. There were
Speaker 1: young men. The professor, only twenty eight, was hardly older
Speaker 1: than his students, William Moulton Marston. But Professor Marston had
Speaker 1: a BA and a JD and a PhD. He was
Speaker 1: an intellectual rogue, handsome, dangerously charming, almost as charming as
Speaker 1: he was ambitious. He was trying to establish a new discipline,
Speaker 1: the science of testimony. The science of how you know
Speaker 1: whether someone is telling the truth. He liked to teach
Speaker 1: by way of experiment, and on this particular evening he
Speaker 1: was conduct getting experiment on what eyewitnesses can actually notice
Speaker 1: and remember. It seems to be a regrettable fact that
Speaker 1: little systematic psychological experimentation is being carried on in the
Speaker 1: field of testimony. Much valuable material is being produced by psychiatrists, sociologists,
Speaker 1: and criminologists from time to time, but the subjects of
Speaker 1: such studies either psychopathic or criminal variants from the criminal
Speaker 1: variants enter yes. In the middle of Marston's lecture, a
Speaker 1: young man entered the hall. He wore leather gloves. In
Speaker 1: his right hand, he carried an envelope. Tucked under his
Speaker 1: left arm were three books, one red, one green, one blue.
Speaker 1: I've read Marston's lecture, and I've read his report on
Speaker 1: this experiment. What happened next, I like to imagine. Sorry
Speaker 1: to interrupts, sir, but here the messenger handed the professor
Speaker 1: the envelope. Professor Marston opened the envelope, pulled out a
Speaker 1: yellow paper, and read its contents. While Professor Marston was
Speaker 1: reading the message, the messenger slid a second envelope into
Speaker 1: Professor Marston's pocket, and then the messenger, using only his
Speaker 1: right hand, pulled out of his own pocket a long,
Speaker 1: green handled knife. The messenger opened a knife and began
Speaker 1: scraping his gloved left thumb with the edge of the blade,
Speaker 1: sharpening it on the leather. Yeah, that'll do anyway, Yes, sir,
Speaker 1: stood as that man was an actor, an experiment. Take
Speaker 1: out a fresh sheet of notepaper, this very instant, and
Speaker 1: write down every fact about what just occurred, every last detail,
Speaker 1: no matter how seemingly insignificant. You have one minute, my
Speaker 1: dear listeners. These people are actors, and this too has
Speaker 1: been asharade an experiment. Please, now, this very instant. Tell
Speaker 1: me what you just heard. Is that all you can remember?
Speaker 1: All the details? Let me see if you left anything out?
Speaker 1: What university are we at, in what year? What time
Speaker 1: of days it? What part of the country was the
Speaker 1: messenger from? What color was his knife? Time? Put down
Speaker 1: your pencils, pass your paper to the front of the room.
Speaker 1: All right. Marriston had identified exactly one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: seven facts that the students could have observed about the messenger,
Speaker 1: the number and the color of the books, the fact
Speaker 1: that he held them under one arm is left. The
Speaker 1: color of the paper in the first envelope yellow. And
Speaker 1: then Professor Morriston collected his student's responses and tallied the results.
Speaker 1: Out of one hundred and forty seven observable facts, the
Speaker 1: class on average noticed only thirty six, and since two
Speaker 1: of these facts were errors, I am only counting thirty four,
Speaker 1: thirty four out of one hundred and forty seven facts,
Speaker 1: for a testimonial accuracy rate of precisely twenty three percent,
Speaker 1: and not a single one of you noticed the knife.
Speaker 1: This is the last archive of the show about how
Speaker 1: we know what we know, how we used to know things,
Speaker 1: and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't
Speaker 1: know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season we're
Speaker 1: trying to solve a crime. Who killed Truth? This episode,
Speaker 1: we're looking at a trial set in motion by the
Speaker 1: experiment Professor Marston conducted that night in nineteen twenty two,
Speaker 1: an experiment that involved a machine. A machine you've probably
Speaker 1: heard about. Did you ever hear of a lie detector?
Speaker 1: The lie detector? You probably know it from the movies.
Speaker 1: You may lie to us, you can't lie to that.
Speaker 1: The machine itself. The polygraph machine was invented by someone else,
Speaker 1: but the test, the blood pressure test, that had been
Speaker 1: invented by William Molton Marston, that professor who liked to
Speaker 1: experiment on his students. Okay, most of us are very
Speaker 1: good at telling whether or not other people are lying.
Speaker 1: Marston thought a machine could tell better. See these needles.
Speaker 1: You see the even little line this needle's making. When
Speaker 1: you tell a lie, you're post quickens, and this needle
Speaker 1: shows it on the chop. We take this sort of thing,
Speaker 1: this sort of movie scene for granted. There seems like
Speaker 1: it's all over the place, every police procedural, every episode
Speaker 1: of law and order. But when you're conducting a historical investigation,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to pause and think about the things you
Speaker 1: take for granted, Think about them until you don't take
Speaker 1: them for granted anymore, until they get weird. The way,
Speaker 1: if you think about a word like pumpernickele, after a while,
Speaker 1: it starts to sound really strange. Pumpernickele, pumpernickele, polygraph, polygraph.
Speaker 1: And once things get strange, you can ask questions about
Speaker 1: them because you can see them more clearly. So you
Speaker 1: can ask why trust a blood pressure test more than
Speaker 1: your own judgment. It used to be that only God
Speaker 1: could decide the truth of testimony. For centuries, murder trials
Speaker 1: involved the courts trying to get God to speak through
Speaker 1: the dead body. If it bled when you touched it,
Speaker 1: you were guilty. Even after trial by jury replaced this
Speaker 1: sort of thing, Trial by ordeal, This idea that the
Speaker 1: dead speak lingered in its way. The Lae detector is
Speaker 1: a kind of ordeal, except it doesn't look for guilt
Speaker 1: in the blood of the corpse. It looks for guilt
Speaker 1: in the blood of the accused. Marston described his method
Speaker 1: in his undergraduate thesis. The special problem suggested to me
Speaker 1: in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory was an investigation in the
Speaker 1: changes in blood pressure resulting from an effort to hide
Speaker 1: the truth. Marston kept refining his truthscope all through graduate
Speaker 1: school and law school, and during the First World War
Speaker 1: when he did experiments on soldiers and prisoners of war.
Speaker 1: He was seeking fame and fortune, for sure, but he
Speaker 1: also had a noble motive. When police couldn't get criminals
Speaker 1: to confess, they pretty often beat them up. They gave
Speaker 1: them what was called the third degree. Marston had the
Speaker 1: idea that if police had a lie detector, they'd stop
Speaker 1: beating people up. In nineteen twenty two, at the same time,
Speaker 1: as he was teaching an American university in Washington, Marston
Speaker 1: decided that the time had come for a real world test.
Speaker 1: He wanted to prove that his method worked. To do that,
Speaker 1: he wanted to get the results of a lie detector
Speaker 1: admitted as evidence in a criminal trial. He needed a
Speaker 1: client desperate enough to hand his fate over to an
Speaker 1: untried experiment. Inspector Clifford al Grad record of an interrogation
Speaker 1: in August twenty second, ninety what is your name? James
Speaker 1: Alfonso Frye. James Alfonso Frye would soon become the subject
Speaker 1: of another one of Professor Marston's experiments. Fry was young
Speaker 1: and unmarried. He was lean and handsome, with short hair
Speaker 1: and big ears. He'd fought in the War. He worked
Speaker 1: in a dentist's office, and he was broke. As he
Speaker 1: later wrote, I was a young man of twenty one
Speaker 1: years and penniless. The courts had to assign me a lawyer.
Speaker 1: Police had charged James Alfonso fry with the murder of
Speaker 1: doctor Robert Wade Brown, The President of the National Life
Speaker 1: Insurance Company and the richest black man in Washington. Here's
Speaker 1: what we know about the night Doctor Brown died. It
Speaker 1: was a Saturday in November nineteen twenty. Brown was hosting
Speaker 1: a party at his house celebrating his alma mater's football
Speaker 1: victory when someone knocked at his front door. Brown went
Speaker 1: to answer and was shot dead on his very doorstep.
Speaker 1: The murderer, some people said, escaped down an alley. Browne's
Speaker 1: grieving family and his company together offered a thousand dollars reward,
Speaker 1: but the investigation had come up short. Although a lot
Speaker 1: of Brown's guests witnessed the murder or at least glimpsed
Speaker 1: the murderer, it all happened so suddenly that they could
Speaker 1: remember hardly any details. Months later, the police were still
Speaker 1: searching for Doctor Brown's killer when they arrested a young
Speaker 1: black man on an unrelated robbery charge. It was Fry.
Speaker 1: He and a cousin had robbed a guy of a wallet,
Speaker 1: a ring, and a watch, a petty theft. During his
Speaker 1: trial for robbery, one witness, a man who worked at
Speaker 1: the same dentist's office as for I, told the police
Speaker 1: that Fry had confessed to him that he Fry, had
Speaker 1: killed doctor Robert Brown. And it turned out that Fry
Speaker 1: had in fact been at doctor Brown's house on the
Speaker 1: night of the murder, and that he had brought a gun,
Speaker 1: And when the police questioned Fry, he confessed to the murder.
Speaker 1: The police had to get that confession on record, so
Speaker 1: they brought him into an interrogation room where they questioned
Speaker 1: him all over again. They wouldn't have made an audio recording,
Speaker 1: this is nineteen twenty one, a little too early for that,
Speaker 1: but they made a transcript, and here in the last
Speaker 1: archive we've got a copy. You have told my colleague
Speaker 1: that you killed doctor Brown. Aw are you willing to
Speaker 1: tell me about it? Yes, sir. When I first went
Speaker 1: to doctor Brown's I had a dollar, and I asked
Speaker 1: him to give me a prescription because I had been
Speaker 1: told I had gone a rha real bad. He then
Speaker 1: said he couldn't do anything for me for a dollar.
Speaker 1: He said, don't you son of a bitches come around
Speaker 1: here with only one dollar? Fry said, then he'd left
Speaker 1: and gone to try to raise money for the medicine
Speaker 1: by pawning his pistol, a forty five automatic. No luck,
Speaker 1: so he said he went back to Brown's with his
Speaker 1: loaded gun tucked into the belt of his pants, but
Speaker 1: when he got there, he said, Brown sent him away again,
Speaker 1: told him if he didn't have the money, to get lost,
Speaker 1: and he struck me over the left eye. Did he
Speaker 1: have any weapon in his hand, No, sir. Then I
Speaker 1: took the butt of the gun and hit him, and
Speaker 1: that didn't do good, because he struck me again. I
Speaker 1: tried to run to the door, and he grabbed me again,
Speaker 1: and I told him to put his hands up, and
Speaker 1: he kept on hitting me, hitting me on the head,
Speaker 1: and then the struggle. I think my gun was fired there,
Speaker 1: just there, with that slight cautious admission, I think my
Speaker 1: gun was fired. James Fry confessed to killing Brown. But Fry,
Speaker 1: who didn't even have a dollar to pay for a prescription,
Speaker 1: couldn't afford a lawyer. Here's where doctor Marston comes in.
Speaker 1: In that course on the law of evidence, two of
Speaker 1: his young students told him about the case, and then
Speaker 1: they volunteered to take Fry's case for free, defending him
Speaker 1: against the charge of murder. First, they went to visit
Speaker 1: Fry in prison. The students, Professor Marston and his contraption,
Speaker 1: a blood pressure cuff or a sphigmo monometer. Marston hooked
Speaker 1: Fry up. Someone took a photograph. You can things in
Speaker 1: a photograph that you can't see in a transcript. In
Speaker 1: the photograph, Frye, a black man, is surrounded by white men.
Speaker 1: Professor Marston and his law students, all in dark suits.
Speaker 1: As they strapped Fry into Marston's machine. Marston grasps Fry's arm,
Speaker 1: taking readings from his body. Fry later described the experience.
Speaker 1: Several months after I had been confined in the DC jail,
Speaker 1: my attorneys came to see me, accompanying a Professor Marston.
Speaker 1: This learned doctor was later known to me as the
Speaker 1: inventor of the lie detector. He asked if I would
Speaker 1: submit to the use of this instrument to such requests,
Speaker 1: I readily agreed. He asked me several questions, none pertaining
Speaker 1: to the case. Then suddenly he launched upon several questions
Speaker 1: going into every detail of the case at the Metropolitan
Speaker 1: Courthouse one month later. This graph was supposed to be
Speaker 1: the ace in the hole for Fry's defense, and perhaps
Speaker 1: it would catapult Fessor Marston to fame as the greatest
Speaker 1: legal mind of his generation. But the judge assigned to
Speaker 1: the case, Chief Justice Walter McCoy, was famously stern, and
Speaker 1: he was miffed. This was a big murder trial and
Speaker 1: a lot of Deasey's black community had come out for it,
Speaker 1: and Marston had alerted the press about it, so there
Speaker 1: were a lot of reporters there too. Judge McCoy was
Speaker 1: no fool. He saw early in the trial the long
Speaker 1: game this Professor Marston was playing. Marston wanted to replace
Speaker 1: trial by jury with trial by light detector all rise.
Speaker 1: The prosecution called a detective who had taken Fry's confession.
Speaker 1: I call the stand detective Clifford Grant. I interrogated James
Speaker 1: Frye on August twenty second, nineteen twenty one. Detective Grant
Speaker 1: testified that Fry had confessed to him, But then Fry's
Speaker 1: lawyer Mattingly started bringing in his witnesses. I called to
Speaker 1: st James Frye could have a glass of water. Not
Speaker 1: a word of my confession was true. Fry recanted. He
Speaker 1: insisted that he hadn't killed Brown. It's going to be
Speaker 1: hard to convince a jury of this, But Marston offered
Speaker 1: to prove with his lie detector where the real truth lay.
Speaker 1: It was a slim hope Fry knew. Fry later wrote
Speaker 1: that there had been no real chance for a black
Speaker 1: man in Washington in nineteen twenty two to get a
Speaker 1: fair trial. If I am neatly dressed and can explain myself,
Speaker 1: I'm considered being a smart alec and must be guilty.
Speaker 1: If I'm dressed in overalls unable to explain the situation,
Speaker 1: then I'm considered a brute and still must be guilty.
Speaker 1: In any ordinary trial, a train of witnesses would make
Speaker 1: their statements, the guests at Brown's house, the police who
Speaker 1: investigated the crime, the people who could give evidence in
Speaker 1: support of Fry's alibi, and then the jury, twelve white
Speaker 1: men would decide who to believe. Those men would find
Speaker 1: the facts of the case an issue a verdict, but
Speaker 1: which words of Fries were true, the confession he'd given
Speaker 1: to the police or the recanting he did right there
Speaker 1: on the stand. Fry's lawyer gamely tried to follow the
Speaker 1: Marston defense plan. If your honor please, at this time,
Speaker 1: I had intended to offer in evidence the testimony of
Speaker 1: doctor William M. Marston, as an expert in deception as
Speaker 1: testimony on what testimony as to the truth or falsity
Speaker 1: of certain statements of the defendant? If your honor, please,
Speaker 1: if you object to it, I will sustain the objection.
Speaker 1: No other judge admitted the lie detector test as evidence,
Speaker 1: and Judge McCoy didn't want to be the first one
Speaker 1: to do it. He all but begged the prosecution to
Speaker 1: object to this evidence, and when they didn't, he began
Speaker 1: objecting himself. The witnesses here on the stand, and it
Speaker 1: is for the jury to determine whether or not he
Speaker 1: was telling the truth. That is very true, your honor.
Speaker 1: But as expert testimony, is not this proper as competent
Speaker 1: evidence to go before the jury to ascertain what doctor
Speaker 1: Marston's opinion is at this time? Oh well, we get
Speaker 1: to be more or less experts ourselves, and so do
Speaker 1: the jury upon the question of whether anybody is telling
Speaker 1: the truth or not. That is what the jury is for.
Speaker 1: That is what the jury is for. It had taken
Speaker 1: centuries for ordinary people, even if only still men, white men,
Speaker 1: to gain the right to serve as jurors of the
Speaker 1: guilt or innocence of their peers. But in the early
Speaker 1: decades of the twentieth century, a lot of scientists calling
Speaker 1: themselves experts. I thought they knew quite a bit more
Speaker 1: than jurors, that they had tools, methods, even machines that
Speaker 1: could find out the truth. Judge McCoy was smart enough
Speaker 1: to see the size of William Marston's ambition, and he
Speaker 1: was determined to foil it. When the next witness came
Speaker 1: to the stand, Mattingly again approached the bench, he had
Speaker 1: another proposition. I love this part, the jousting, the little duel,
Speaker 1: but Mattingly was wildly outmatched. If your honor, please, before
Speaker 1: this witness begins to testify, may I inquire whether your
Speaker 1: honor would permit a systolic blood pressure test to be
Speaker 1: taken during an examination of the witness on the stand.
Speaker 1: If we are going to have a cystolic test, we
Speaker 1: all have to test every witness who testifies in the case.
Speaker 1: If there is any science about it, we might as
Speaker 1: well apply the science to every witness. Mind you, I
Speaker 1: do not know anything about the test at all. I
Speaker 1: had certain pamphlets submitted to me yesterday to look at.
Speaker 1: Of some doctor Marston. I believe his thesis when he
Speaker 1: got his PhD degree I'm going to read them when
Speaker 1: I come back from my vacation. I see enough in
Speaker 1: them to know that so far the science has not
Speaker 1: sufficiently developed detection of deception by blood pressure to make
Speaker 1: it a usable instrument in a chord of law. When
Speaker 1: it is developed to the perfection of the telephone on
Speaker 1: the telegraph and wireless and a few other things, we
Speaker 1: will consider it. I shall be dead by that time, probably,
Speaker 1: and it will bother some other judge, not me. Jed
Speaker 1: McCoy was a piece of work. After that, Mattingly bumbled
Speaker 1: along for a little while before concluding, and then the
Speaker 1: prosecution delivered its closing words. James Fry is the most
Speaker 1: colossal liar that ever appeared in court. I rest my case.
Speaker 1: The jury deliberated for less than an hour and found
Speaker 1: James Fry guilty of second degree murder. Judge McCoy sentenced
Speaker 1: him to life in prison, and Fry went by train
Speaker 1: to Leavenworth. He was supposed to spend the rest of
Speaker 1: his days in jail. Professor Marston was conducting an experiment,
Speaker 1: but it's not an accident that his test subject was
Speaker 1: a penniless black man accused of murder. Marston became a
Speaker 1: psychologist at a time when social scientists of every stripe
Speaker 1: were expected to try and solve what was called the
Speaker 1: Negro problem. What that problem was shifted all the time,
Speaker 1: but never the commitment to the notion that facts alone
Speaker 1: couldn't solve the Negro problem. Only numbers could. Social scientists
Speaker 1: counted everything they measured, the circumference of the skull, the
Speaker 1: length of a life, the density of a neighborhood, the
Speaker 1: pressure of blood. Nearly a century after the Fry Trial,
Speaker 1: historians still spend a lot of time looking back at
Speaker 1: this moment, the period from about eighteen ninety to nineteen thirty.
Speaker 1: Some of the best work in this field is done
Speaker 1: by a colleague of mine, Khalil Gibran Mohammed, Professor of History, Race,
Speaker 1: and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The first
Speaker 1: time I met him was at an academic conference with
Speaker 1: a one word title, Numbers. Were both really interested in
Speaker 1: numbers and why people count things, what kind of knowledge
Speaker 1: numbers add up to, and what they subtract. One of
Speaker 1: the most amazing things about the late nineteenth century looking
Speaker 1: at that kind of local and national data is added
Speaker 1: looked today like an Excel spreadsheet printed out and folded
Speaker 1: many many times over. A lot of Khalimahamma's work focuses
Speaker 1: on how after the Civil War, after emancipation, sociologists and
Speaker 1: government agencies collected statistics on black crime to argue that
Speaker 1: black people were by their very nature criminal, that they
Speaker 1: were genetically not fit for their freedom, and so had
Speaker 1: to be watched and studied endlessly. You could almost think
Speaker 1: of it like a person who is in rehab, and
Speaker 1: you develop certain protocols to keep track of their progress.
Speaker 1: How many meals, how many hours do they sleep, what
Speaker 1: are the signs of a healthy lifestyle. Whereas you wouldn't
Speaker 1: do this for a normal person, You wouldn't keep a
Speaker 1: ledger of such things. And so, to use this metaphor,
Speaker 1: it was that ledger keeping of African Americans that was
Speaker 1: a reflection of those same progressives thinking black people are
Speaker 1: not still fully ready for full participation, so we'll keep
Speaker 1: an eye on this crime thing. Well, the truth is,
Speaker 1: we live in the wake of all these ideas. They're
Speaker 1: baked in to our consciousness already, so we know what
Speaker 1: to make of it. We can either make of it
Speaker 1: that black people have a crime problem, or that black
Speaker 1: people are subject to systematic racism and system or we
Speaker 1: might say some mixture of boat. These ideas we live
Speaker 1: in that are already in our consciousness, A lot of
Speaker 1: them go back to a man named Frederick Hoffman. In
Speaker 1: eighteen ninety six, he published a book called Race Traits
Speaker 1: and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman wanted to argue
Speaker 1: that Blacks were inferior. Up until then, those arguments had
Speaker 1: been based on racial pseudoscience, measuring skull sizes or some
Speaker 1: other physical differences. Hoffman was pretty innovative and shifting that
Speaker 1: gaze to crime statistics, and from that point forward, the
Speaker 1: framework that he used that the disproportionate evidence of black
Speaker 1: people being in prison was was on its own, with
Speaker 1: no further analysis, no footnotes, no asterisks. The best proof
Speaker 1: that black people were inferior to people of European descent.
Speaker 1: Police discrimination and brutality didn't matter, rates of conviction mattered,
Speaker 1: other factors, and the culture just soaks it up like
Speaker 1: a sponge. Yeah, and it still does. Professor William Moulton Marston.
Speaker 1: He wanted to turn James Frye into a set of numbers.
Speaker 1: The numbers on the graph paper from his lie detector
Speaker 1: test Marston wanted to turn Fry into a number, not
Speaker 1: to prove that he was a criminal, but to prove
Speaker 1: that he wasn't. And maybe I should admit here, I
Speaker 1: don't know whether James Frye was guilty or not. He
Speaker 1: was at the scene of the crime, he had a motive,
Speaker 1: he had a weapon, and he confessed. So it looks
Speaker 1: pretty bad. But then again, Marston had a lot on
Speaker 1: the line, and he was pretty sure that Fry was innocent.
Speaker 1: I might not be sure whether fry was guilty or not,
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty sure Marston ever expected to get fry acquitted. Instead,
Speaker 1: he was hoping to take Fry's case all the way
Speaker 1: to the Supreme Court to demonstrate the merit of his invention.
Speaker 1: Marston dreamed of convincing the nation's highest court that his
Speaker 1: machine could tell better than any jury who was telling
Speaker 1: the truth. Men come to judge this question by certain
Speaker 1: arbitrary standards in the course of their dealings with others.
Speaker 1: After for I went to prison, Marston helped to student
Speaker 1: lawyers file an appeal. Or to be honest, I'm pretty
Speaker 1: sure Marston just wrote the brief himself. It asked, how
Speaker 1: does the court tell whether or not someone is lying.
Speaker 1: The decision may hinge upon the look in the eyes,
Speaker 1: the expression on the face, the nervous condition of the witness,
Speaker 1: the rosy flush which suffuses his countenance, or upon any
Speaker 1: one of many other evidences which may or may not
Speaker 1: be taken to indicate truth or deception. We say that
Speaker 1: there is no standard and no logical or reasonable basis
Speaker 1: for the determination of this question in general, in the
Speaker 1: absence of positive evidence of deception, and that if science
Speaker 1: has developed a method of accurately determining whether a man
Speaker 1: is in a mental condition or state of truth or
Speaker 1: of deception, the court and jury should be given the
Speaker 1: benefit of this assistance. But the State, in its own
Speaker 1: brief said that the idea of trial by lie detector
Speaker 1: was ridiculous. Whatever may be said against the system of
Speaker 1: trial by jury under the Constitution and laws, a jury
Speaker 1: of twelve impartial men are peculiarly fitted to sift conflicting
Speaker 1: and contradictory testimony and derive at a just verdict. As
Speaker 1: for Marston, whether he can or cannot detect deception is
Speaker 1: something that does not appear to be known to anyone
Speaker 1: except doctor Marston. At the end of nineteen twenty three,
Speaker 1: the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision and
Speaker 1: Fry versus the United States. The court ruled against Fry
Speaker 1: and also against Marston and his lie Detector, and the
Speaker 1: decision established a new rule of evidence, something that came
Speaker 1: to be called the Frie test. It became the most
Speaker 1: cited precedent in the history of law and science. The
Speaker 1: Frie test is a test of evidence, a rule that
Speaker 1: a judge applies and deciding whether or not to admit
Speaker 1: the testimony of a supposed expert. It's only eighty one
Speaker 1: words long, but I'm going to make you listen to
Speaker 1: all of them. Listen for what the rule says, but
Speaker 1: listen to for what it doesn't say. Just when a
Speaker 1: scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental
Speaker 1: and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this
Speaker 1: twilight zone, the evidential force of the principle must be recognized.
Speaker 1: And while the courts will go a long way in
Speaker 1: admitting expert testimony deduced from a well recognized scientific principle
Speaker 1: or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made
Speaker 1: must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance. In
Speaker 1: the particular field in which it belongs. All of the
Speaker 1: facts of Fry's case were stripped out of the ruling.
Speaker 1: That's how the law works. All that survives when court
Speaker 1: supply the Fried test are those eighty one words. Everything
Speaker 1: else is erased, including one very important circumstance, something pretty
Speaker 1: widely known at the time, but that since then has
Speaker 1: been almost entirely forgotten. That fact is this. Between Fry's
Speaker 1: trial and disappeal, federal marshals went to the office of
Speaker 1: Professor William Molton Marston at American University, and there they
Speaker 1: arrested him for fraud. It turns out that the inventor
Speaker 1: of the light detector test, he was a notorious liar.
Speaker 1: So did he ever give you guys a light detector test? Oh? Yes,
Speaker 1: we were experimental animals. So tell me about that. Was
Speaker 1: it like? Well, sham? Really, none of us hadn't believed
Speaker 1: it at all, And as far as settling disputes around
Speaker 1: the house, it was laughable. That's Burne Holloway Marston, the
Speaker 1: son of William Moulton Marston, he of lie detector fame
Speaker 1: Byrne is eighty eight, a retired obstetrician. He's a sweetheart.
Speaker 1: I first met him a few years back when I
Speaker 1: got fascinated by the crazy, truly crazy story of his father.
Speaker 1: Burne was born in nineteen thirty one, nine years after
Speaker 1: the Fried Child. Little Burne was beloved and like everything
Speaker 1: else in his father's life, he was an experiment, a
Speaker 1: test case, among other things, for his father's lie detector test.
Speaker 1: So it was like, hoostile know Don's sweater? Was it you, Peter,
Speaker 1: you Burne, Let's give you a lie detector tests? No,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a regular basis, but it didn't happen. The
Speaker 1: fact that Marston was a father of four and used
Speaker 1: to use his lie detector test on his kids is
Speaker 1: a good story, But there are other reasons to spend
Speaker 1: a little bit of time with Marston's private life, because
Speaker 1: it's completely zaney, and second, because Marston's public persona turns
Speaker 1: out to have been one big lie. Marston lie meter
Speaker 1: inventor arrested charged by Boston authorities with using the mails
Speaker 1: to defraud. William Marston, a professor at the American University,
Speaker 1: was arrested yesterday at a preliminary hearing. He was held
Speaker 1: in a three thousand dollars bond Marston several months ago,
Speaker 1: constructed a machine which he declared could detect lies. The
Speaker 1: churches against Marston actually had nothing to do with the
Speaker 1: lie detector. They had to do with a super sketchy
Speaker 1: business scheme of his. The churches were also eventually dropped.
Speaker 1: But all this was going on at the same time
Speaker 1: Marston was working on Fry's appeal. Marston lost that appeal,
Speaker 1: Frye lost that appeal, and Marston got fired from American University.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't the end of William Moulton Marston. He
Speaker 1: got another job teaching at Tufts, where he began an
Speaker 1: affair with one of his undergraduates, a young feminist named
Speaker 1: Alive Byrne. She came from a radical family. Her mother
Speaker 1: and her aunt, Margaret Sanger, had together opened the first
Speaker 1: birth control clinic in the United States. What became planned
Speaker 1: parented my friend Burne Marston. Olive Byrne was his mother.
Speaker 1: My mother was a swassie, blue collar, Irish, witty, attractive
Speaker 1: black irish black hair and pale skin, freckles and those
Speaker 1: blue eyes and a blue eyes. Since that was the
Speaker 1: beginning of the ah Yes the manaji Professor Morriston had
Speaker 1: radical ideas about sex and about gender roles too. He
Speaker 1: had four children by two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway
Speaker 1: and Burne's mother, Alive Burne. Burne's own name is a
Speaker 1: mashup Burn, Holloway, Marston. He's got the names of each
Speaker 1: of his three parents. The grown ups lived as a threesome, which,
Speaker 1: as you might guess, was something of a family secret
Speaker 1: because at the time you could be blacklisted from academia,
Speaker 1: from any job for homosexuality, not to mention polyamory. The
Speaker 1: Marston clan eventually moved to Ryan, New York, to a
Speaker 1: big house, a place they called Cherry Orchard. Burn always
Speaker 1: says it was an incredibly fun way to grow up
Speaker 1: with so much love and this kookie father. He did
Speaker 1: not conform him. You could hear him coughing at night.
Speaker 1: He smoked all the time, and he cerebrated better in
Speaker 1: the reclining with a whiskey. And he was a big guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah he was me, Yeah, he was, I thank you.
Speaker 1: It's probably about six feet so his weight very one
Speaker 1: st at the time. He got to three hundred and
Speaker 1: then he said, that's great. I'm going to join the
Speaker 1: fat Man's Club in New York. Which is actually that's
Speaker 1: the real thing. But he that was his life. He
Speaker 1: was always creating, I guess because as you know, the
Speaker 1: variety of things that he did were incredibly He always
Speaker 1: self helped stuff for leader, threw himself into things when
Speaker 1: you know when he did them. Marston was furiously curious,
Speaker 1: always conducting experiments, always looking for the next big thing.
Speaker 1: But whenever anyone found out about his polyamorous family arrangements,
Speaker 1: they fired him. He lost his job at Tufts, and
Speaker 1: then he lost a job at Columbia. So then he went,
Speaker 1: we're all disgraced academics hoped to go. He went to Hollywood.
Speaker 1: He was in all the gossip columns New York Evening Post.
Speaker 1: Doctor Marston, who won't write ba PhD in L'll b
Speaker 1: after his name in another week because Hollywood is touchy
Speaker 1: about such things, is going to be the psychological authority
Speaker 1: behind all forthcoming motion pictures. From one big concern in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, Marston went to work for Universal Studios as
Speaker 1: a consulting psychologist, mainly on horror films. What did he
Speaker 1: do is he took up whole audiences to his wide
Speaker 1: detector while they watched the rushes. Then he'd advised the
Speaker 1: studio about whether the films were too racy or too scary,
Speaker 1: or not scary enough or not racy enough. He did
Speaker 1: other nutty experiments too. Doctor Marston and Emotions. It's eighteenth
Speaker 1: of July nineteen thirty and doctor William Marston demonstrates complicated
Speaker 1: device whereby he claims he can determine and compute comparative
Speaker 1: emotions of blondes, brunettes and redheads. Says Marston, Ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: hold onto your hats. Here comes the real voice of
Speaker 1: William Marston. This is the spigmamnometer, an instrument which measures
Speaker 1: the subject's blood pressure. This is the kimograph drum, which
Speaker 1: records the breathing. The breathing is taken with anomograph around
Speaker 1: the subject's chest. We are now going to test the
Speaker 1: girl's reactions to gambling. The announcer watches the needle etche
Speaker 1: marks into a rotating drum. Thing of the jig a kinograph.
Speaker 1: There's kidograph with the indicator showing one girl's reaction the
Speaker 1: game of chats. Needle is moved by subject's breathing. Here
Speaker 1: we see how redhead reacts to gambling and as she wins.
Speaker 1: Marston's emotion finder indicates that redheads show a most emotion
Speaker 1: when gambling. When I visited Bernard's house, we watched the
Speaker 1: newsreel together. He did it come out the year he
Speaker 1: was born? Oh man, that's just so it's like a
Speaker 1: quack show from from the twenties? Is I don't know,
Speaker 1: but like did he believe that? Where is that just showing?
Speaker 1: I think it was shy. He had walk on the
Speaker 1: parapose of in New York City. Uh, you know, twenty
Speaker 1: stories up and see which one would react the most.
Speaker 1: I mean it's a yeah, it's a little it's not
Speaker 1: very scientific. Yeah, I have a theory. I think people
Speaker 1: who study lying tend to be liars, compulsive liars. Marston
Speaker 1: definitely was what are the facts about razor blade quality?
Speaker 1: That's what you let wanted to know, and that's why
Speaker 1: you let retain Doctor William Moulton Marston, eminent psychologist and
Speaker 1: originator of the famous lie detector, to conduct scientific tests
Speaker 1: that reveal the whole truth. Truck drivers, bank presidents, men
Speaker 1: in every walk of life. These men shade while every
Speaker 1: reaction is measured and recorded, not knowing which blade is which,
Speaker 1: each subject shades, one half his face with a Gillette blade,
Speaker 1: the other with the blade of a competitive brand, while
Speaker 1: the line detector accurately charts the reactions. In more than
Speaker 1: nine out of every ten cases, the shavers choose Gillette,
Speaker 1: says doctor Marston, the results of my study make it
Speaker 1: possible for me to state flatly and back my statements
Speaker 1: with positive proof that Gillette blades are far superior in
Speaker 1: every respect to competitive blades tested. Gillette blades precision made
Speaker 1: The FBI apparently had by now had enough of doctor
Speaker 1: William Moulton Marston and decided to investigate this Gillette scheme.
Speaker 1: FBI agents brought Marston to a police station in Detroit
Speaker 1: and told him to replicate his experiments while police officers
Speaker 1: looked on. He couldn't. Only five and ten men tested
Speaker 1: in the station preferred Gillette. FBI director j Edgar Hoover
Speaker 1: wrote a note to himself in his Marston file. I
Speaker 1: always thought this fellow Marston was a phony, and this
Speaker 1: proves it. But if Marston was a compulsive liar, so
Speaker 1: is olive Byrne. She wrote articles for a women's magazine
Speaker 1: for years, and in those articles she'd quote the famed
Speaker 1: psychologist William Marston as if he were a stranger, when
Speaker 1: of course they lived together. She once wrote an article
Speaker 1: about the Fry case, and in nineteen thirty six, when
Speaker 1: Fry applied for a pardon, he included her article with
Speaker 1: his application. I find this a little heartbreaking. Fry was
Speaker 1: thirty four then, he'd been in prison since he was
Speaker 1: twenty two. I don't know if he killed doctor Robert Brown.
Speaker 1: I think there's a real chance he did, but I
Speaker 1: do know for certain that he didn't get a fair trial.
Speaker 1: He filed petition after petition, insisting on his innocence. Had
Speaker 1: I been fortunate to have had lawyers, judges or intelligent
Speaker 1: people on the jury, I would never have been convicted.
Speaker 1: I'm anxious to have the case reopened, if possible, in
Speaker 1: order that my name could be cleared. The courts denied
Speaker 1: his petition two years later, in nineteen thirty eight, Marston
Speaker 1: published a book called The Lie Detector Test and gave
Speaker 1: a copy to Burn, inscribing it for Burn Marston to
Speaker 1: help him always tell the truth with love from Daddy.
Speaker 1: The next year, Fry was prulled. He'd served more than
Speaker 1: eighteen years in prison. On his release, still determined to
Speaker 1: prove his innocence, he renewed his petition for a pardon.
Speaker 1: Since my freedom from prison, I have married and have
Speaker 1: a fine wife. He petitioned again and again, even applying
Speaker 1: for presidential pardon. I gotta wonder would a guilty man
Speaker 1: have kept on pressing the case years after his release.
Speaker 1: Most people are under an impression that because a person
Speaker 1: has been indicted, tried, and sentenced, they are guilty. They
Speaker 1: do not stop to realize the fact that and all
Speaker 1: three conditions named above are human decisions, and that no
Speaker 1: human decision is infallible. I am innocent of the charge
Speaker 1: against me. I have every reason to believe that the
Speaker 1: courts of the District of Columbia thought so. After all,
Speaker 1: this is Washington, and the question of race plays an
Speaker 1: important part even in the courts. James Fry died in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six, his name was never cleared. Instead, it
Speaker 1: lived on as the name of a test of evidence.
Speaker 1: Fry's name also became a verb. To be fried is
Speaker 1: to have your expert witnesses testimony deemed inadmissible. Marston's name
Speaker 1: isn't a verb. He don't get Marston if you take
Speaker 1: a lie detector test instead. Marston is hardly remembered for
Speaker 1: the lie detector test. He's remembered for a different invention
Speaker 1: of his called Onto Your Headphones. It's about to get weird.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty one, Marston, his wife Elizabeth Holloway, and
Speaker 1: his other wife Alive Byrne created the comic book superhero
Speaker 1: wonder Woman, the best known feminist icon of all time.
Speaker 1: She fights for women's rights. She's in fact based on
Speaker 1: Margaret Sanger, founder of Plant Parenthood. I came across the
Speaker 1: evidence of this entire crazy story years ago in an archive,
Speaker 1: and I had to write a book about it. It's
Speaker 1: called The Secret History of Wonder Woman. It's a story
Speaker 1: about feminism, but it's also a story about evidence and truth.
Speaker 1: Wonder Woman fights for justice on her foe arms. She
Speaker 1: wears two middle bracelets that can stop bullets. They look
Speaker 1: just like the ones Alive Byrne used to wear, and
Speaker 1: of course she has her own lie detector. Marston once
Speaker 1: wrote a wonder Woman's story about the Fry trial. I
Speaker 1: am pretty sure none of One Woman's readers recognize the illusion.
Speaker 1: But in this particular story, Marston imagines a courtroom scene
Speaker 1: and which wonder Woman tries to get a judge to
Speaker 1: accept as evidence the results of an interrogation she's conducted
Speaker 1: using her golden lasso of truth. I understand you examine
Speaker 1: this defendant with your remarkable Amazonian lasso. Yes, oh well
Speaker 1: it's highly irregular. I'd like to hear your finding. I
Speaker 1: will show you judge objection sustain. Okay. So then Wonder
Speaker 1: Woman lassoes the defendant Priscilla Rich and drags her to
Speaker 1: the witness stand and gets her to confess that yes, yes,
Speaker 1: she really is the supervillain known as the Cheetah, after
Speaker 1: which the odd, grateful and besotted judge shakes Wonder Woman's hand.
Speaker 1: Your advice was invaluable, Wonder Woman. I wish you'd give
Speaker 1: me further call on me anytime. Marston rewrote the story
Speaker 1: of the Fry Trial the way he'd wanted it to
Speaker 1: come out, with himself as the hero and Judge McCoy
Speaker 1: worshiping him. But in nineteen forty four, just when Marston
Speaker 1: finally realized this triumph with Wonder Woman, he got really sick.
Speaker 1: He had well apparently was polio, and this is coincided
Speaker 1: with the success of Wonder What. He was finally making
Speaker 1: it something as he kind of yeah, pay him enough
Speaker 1: money to support all these people and watch something be
Speaker 1: successful and watching be successful and it was I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a kind of a tragic life and means yeah, right,
Speaker 1: because Wonder Woman has endured outside of the Last Archive,
Speaker 1: very little. Last James Fry is all but forgotten except
Speaker 1: for his last name. A test of truth, but in
Speaker 1: just injustice endures, and if you want to fight it,
Speaker 1: you don't need a lasso of truth or a lie detector,
Speaker 1: but you do need knowledge and evidence, even the kind
Speaker 1: of evidence we'll try to find in the next episode
Speaker 1: of The Last Archive, The Evidence of the Invisible. The
Speaker 1: Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mcabin and Ben
Speaker 1: Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our
Speaker 1: executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrella is our engineer.
Speaker 1: Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss
Speaker 1: and John Evans Hostelwagen Symfinett. Many of our sound effects
Speaker 1: are from Harry Janett Junior and the Star Ganette Foundation.
Speaker 1: Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones,
Speaker 1: Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent.
Speaker 1: The last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater,
Speaker 1: Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School, Alex Allenson at the
Speaker 1: Bridge Sound and Stage, and at Pushkin to Heather Fane,
Speaker 1: Maya Knig, Carly Migliori, Emily Rustick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg.
Speaker 1: Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley,
Speaker 1: Olive Ruskin Kutz, and Emily Spector. Particular thanks to the
Speaker 1: National Archives and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College.
Speaker 1: I'm Jill Lapour.