The Wrong Man by James Neff

Author:James Neff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media

23

POLYGRAPH

The Bay Village police did not give up trying to make Richard Eberling take a polygraph test. In mid-November 1959, Lt. Jay Hubach arranged for an examination by the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, an hour’s drive south in Mansfield, Ohio. Officially, the Bay Village police had reopened the Sheppard murder case and were treating Eberling as a suspect.

At about the same time, Eberling was sent to the Cleveland Clinic for a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation following his grand-larceny indictment. Dr. Louis J. Karnosh examined and tested him, particularly about his childhood and the behaviors that led to the crimes. “Since 1953, he has been subject to compulsive stealing, which is one form of kleptomania,” Karnosh’s report read in part. “The temptation to this type of misdemeanor came to him frequently during the time of his job which was that of a window-washer of private homes. Since that time he has taken something like 100 various objects including diamond pins and rings and various art objects which he secreted in his own home. He admitted a certain peculiar pleasure in obtaining the stolen material and obtains a certain degree of security in possessing these objects—none of which he has converted into cash. He admits that the impulse to take the stolen material is not normal and that the objects which he stole were all symbolic of some craving which he, himself, is quite unable to crystalize.”

Eberling had no masculine interests, and his foster mother was “demanding, domineering, possessive,” Karnosh wrote. He diagnosed Eberling as an “immature personality, with obsessive compulsive disorder, manifested by kleptomania. I believe that he is in dire need of prolonged psychiatric care which we recommend.”

A week later polygraph examiner A. S. Kimball hooked Eberling to the lie box: girding his chest was a constrictor that measured respiration; a blood-pressure cuff circled an arm; attached galvanic skin-response sensors were clamped on a fingertip. As Eberling was asked questions, the machine graphed his body’s responses.

A polygraph machine doesn’t actually detect lies. It records stress as certain questions are asked. A skilled examiner interprets the results. In the hands of a highly trained examiner, the polygraph is a fairly reliable investigative tool. Its strength lies in excluding suspects who passed. Interrogation afterward leads to confessions. It is a forensic version of a stethoscope.

Kimball asked control questions—Do you live in Ohio? Is today Thursday?—to establish a baseline for a truthful answer.

“Are you positive that you deposited your own blood in the Sheppard residence prior to Marilyn’s death?”

Yes.

“Are you positive that the French door to the study was left unlocked?”

Yes.

“Did you kill Marilyn Sheppard?”

No.

“Do you know what weapon was used to kill Marilyn?”

No.

“Did you set the Sheppard residence on fire?”

No.

Kimball repeated the test two more times, asking the same questions. He concluded that Eberling did not show deception in his answers.

In the hands of an inexperienced examiner, the polygraph is a dangerous crime-fighting tool. Years later, the director of the Department of Defense’s Polygraph Institute studied the tracings and questions and said that Eberling’s tests were inconclusive.

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