Stranger Than Fiction

August 2024

Scientific Detectives
by Dean Jobb

From wiretaps and lie detectors to the early communications satellite that helped create today’s interconnected world, a roundup of recent books that take deep dives into historic breakthroughs in forensics, crime detection, and catching crooks.

The San Francisco police knew there was something fishy about Henry Wilkens’s story. He claimed he was driving home with his wife and two young children on a May night in 1922 when three men stopped his car. They demanded money and shot his wife when he tried to grab a gun to defend his family. Anna Wilkens died hours later.

Her husband seemed devastated but was unable to identify the prime suspects, Walter and Arthur Castor, ne’er-do-well brothers who were suddenly flush with cash. Evidence Wilkens had beaten his wife, prompting her to file for divorce, put him in the frame. Police suspected he had orchestrated the robbery, hiring the Castors to do the dirty work of getting rid of his spouse. The problem was, with no confessions and little evidence linking him to the assailants, how could they prove it?

Enter Gus Vollmer, the chief of police in Berkeley, on the other side of San Francisco Bay. A progressive cop, he embraced forensic innovations from fingerprints and laboratory testing to compiling data on the locations and frequency of crimes, earning him the title of “the father of modern policing.” He recruited university graduates as officers—ambitious young men who could outsmart the bad guys. And when he read about experiments that tracked changes in blood pressure when people lied, he assigned one of his “college cops,” John Larson, to build a machine that could catch crooks in their own lies. A third man, Leonarde Keeler, played a key role in the development and promotion of the device.

Larson, the only policeman in the country with a PhD, rigged up a contraption that could monitor and record changes in blood pressure, pulse, and breathing rates. One journalist described it as looking like a combination of a radio, a stethoscope, a dentist’s drill, a wind gauge, and a gas stove. Amazingly, it worked. After tests and refinements, it proved remarkably accurate in detecting lies. Larson called it the “cardio-pneumo-psychograph,” an unwieldly name that did not stick and was soon replaced by the Greek term for “many writing,” which reflected the multiple lines-on-paper recordings it made: the polygraph.

Amit Katwala, an award-winning science journalist and a London-based editor for WIRED, tells this story of invention and detection in Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector (Crooked Lane Books). He combines a novelist’s eye for scene and character with the plot and narrative drive of a thriller. Daniel Dafoe, who noted “the tremor in the blood of a thief” in 1730, gave Katwala his title. This breezy account recreates how the lie detector’s novelty and limitations kept it out of the courtroom, how it gained acceptance as an investigative tool to expose the lies of thieves and killers, the personality clashes among the men who pioneered it, and how the Wilkens murder exposed its limitations. A must-read for anyone interested in the history and development of forensics.

In 1965 the world’s newest crime-fighter weighed eighty-five pounds and hovered 22,000 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Intelsat I, nicknamed Early Bird, was the first commercial communications satellite to be locked into a stationary orbit. It beamed live television broadcasts and instantaneously relayed long-distance telephone calls and fax messages, making the “Global Village” of the Sixties smaller and more interconnected. It also handed law-enforcement agencies a powerful new tool in their hunt for criminals on the lam.

That year Canada’s most wanted fugitive was Georges Lemay, a hoodlum responsible for a string of bank jobs in Montreal—North America’s bank-robbery capital at the time, with an average of almost two heists a day—and a suspect in a couple of murders. In 1961 he lead a crew that drilled and blasted their way into the vault of a branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia and made off with cash and valuables worth more than five million dollars today. Lemay’s gang was rounded up but by the time Early Bird went live four years later, the mastermind had managed to elude both FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and he remained at large.

In Satellite Boy: The International Manhunt for a Master Thief That Launched the Modern Communication Age (Counterpoint), New York author and journalist Andrew Amelinckx tells the fascinating story of how a space-age technological breakthrough was instrumental in bringing Lemay—and countless other crooks in the years that followed—to justice. The New York Times called it “the ultimate electronic improvement” over the limited reach of the traditional wanted poster.

“It was one thing to have a wanted poster with a blurry photo hanging from a post office wall and quite another to have this brand-new technology disseminate the information to millions upon millions of people,” the author writes. “The world was about to shrink for Lemay and other fugitives who had thus far managed to remain under the radar.”

Amelinckx recounts Lemay’s crimes and the manhunt that followed in tandem with the story of Harold Rosen, the engineer who championed the idea of launching a communications satellite into geosynchronous orbit. Opposition is overcome, technical hurdles are cleared, and rebounds erase a failed launch and other setbacks until Intelsat I is brought online. When a segment on the world’s most wanted criminals was featured on a 1965 CBS special that celebrated television’s new global reach, Lemay was the lone Canadian crook whose face appeared onscreen. Someone recognized him, and his days of living the good life in Florida under an assumed name were numbered. “It took a satellite to catch me,” Lemay boasted when he was arrested.

The intertwined stories of Lemay’s capture and Rosen’s technological triumph are filled with drama and plot twists. Amelinckx does them justice with fast-paced prose, remarkable detail, and keen insights into science as well as police investigations. Today’s interconnected world and the lightning speed of Google searches make it harder than ever for fugitives to run and hide. And “it all started,” as this book asserts, “because of a Canadian bank robber and a Louisiana-born engineer.”

When the State of Washington banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol in 1916—four years ahead of the imposition of nationwide prohibition—a Seattle police lieutenant named Roy Olmstead saw an opportunity. He began running his own bootlegging operation on the side, smuggling booze from Canada. Caught trying to escape from a raid by federal agents on one of his shipments, Olmstead lost his day job as a law enforcer and was free to focus on breaking the law full-time.

He built an international operation that imported thousands of cases of whiskey and other liquors from England to Washington. Freighters delivered the alcohol from Vancouver, British Columbia to rendezvous points just outside American waters, where cargoes were transferred to speedboats that dashed across the border to shore. A fleet of trucks and dozens of employees took over and ferried booze to distribution centers and thirsty customers. Olmstead was soon known as Seattle’s “King of the Bootleggers.” He set up KFQX, one of the city’s first commercial radio stations, and it was rumored his wife, who read bedtime stories on air for children, was sending coded messages to Olmstead’s network of smugglers and teamsters.

It turned out he used a more conventional device to communicate with underlings and run his bootlegging empire: the telephone. And, like Georges Lemay, it would take a technological innovation to put him behind bars. In 1924 federal agents began tapping the battery of phones Olmstead used to coordinate his operation. The hundreds of pages of notes they amassed helped to indict the Pacific Coast’s bootlegging czar for conspiracy to import and sell illegal booze.

Brian Hochman, a professor at Georgetown University, showcases this early law-enforcement use of wiretaps in The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard University Press), a comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and engagingly written overview of the development, use, and abuse of electronic surveillance. “As late as the mid-1960s, a vocal majority of Americans believed that no one—not even sworn agents of the law, under strict controls—had the right to eavesdrop on private conversations,” he writes. “Now it’s a standard investigative tactic, indispensable in the detection of crime and essential to the protection of national security. How,” he asks, “did we get from there to here?”

Hochman shows that wiretapping is almost as old as electronic communication itself. During the Civil War, barely two decades after Samuel Morse perfected the telegraph, Union and Confederate operatives tapped lines to monitor the movements of the other side’s troops and supplies, and sometimes to distribute misleading information to fool the enemy. Criminals were quick to grasp the potential for profit. Lines were tapped to gather insider information about businesses and the tips were used to reap stock market windfalls. Con artists targeted horse-racing results, intercepting messages sent from tracks to betting shops and pulling off swindles like the delayed-race-results scam made famous in the movie The Sting.

Olmstead’s conviction and four-year prison term sparked the first legal battle over whether law-enforcement agencies had the right to intercept messages and violate personal privacy. By the mid-1920s Washington was one of twenty-eight states that had outlawed wiretapping. The issue went all the way to the Supreme Court, which endorsed electronic eavesdropping as an investigative tool by a narrow, 5-4 margin. The majority ruled the practice did not violate constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure or self-incrimination. One of the dissenting judges, however, decried the surveillance as a violation of “the right to be left alone” and a second, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, condemned wiretapping as a “dirty business.”

Hochman reviews that tug of war between wiretapping proponents and privacy advocates in the decades that followed. It was not until the late 1960s that the Supreme Court again weighed in and authorized wiretapping by government agencies under a regime of judicial oversight. The author explores legal and illegal uses of electronic surveillance, both to fight crime and by national security agencies, up to and after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the Patriot Act’s authorization of wider surveillance practices, and the advent of new technologies and new methods of data collection. The “dirty business” of wiretapping has become normalized, he concludes, glorified in movies and TV cop shows and accepted “in the most banal corners of American life” as a necessary evil to keep us safe.

Roy Olmstead’s prosecution for bootlegging a century ago has cast a long shadow.

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Dean Jobb’s new book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books), is the incredible true story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. For more on this and his other true crime books, find him at deanjobb.com.