Detection of Deception

the last archive. Wind your watch back a century, step across the threshold and into a lecture hall. The class met twice a week at American University, two blocks from the White House, in the spring of nineteen twenty two. In the evening, all the students were lawyers. There were young men. The professor, only twenty eight, was hardly older

than his students, William Moulton Marston. But Professor Marston had a BA and a JD and a PhD. He was an intellectual rogue, handsome, dangerously charming, almost as charming as he was ambitious. He was trying to establish a new discipline, the science of testimony. The science of how you know whether someone is telling the truth. He liked to teach by way of experiment, and on this particular evening he was conduct getting experiment on what eyewitnesses can actually notice

and remember. It seems to be a regrettable fact that little systematic psychological experimentation is being carried on in the field of testimony. Much valuable material is being produced by psychiatrists, sociologists, and criminologists from time to time, but the subjects of such studies either psychopathic or criminal variants from the criminal variants enter yes. In the middle of Marston's lecture, a young man entered the hall. He wore leather gloves. In

his right hand, he carried an envelope. Tucked under his left arm were three books, one red, one green, one blue. I've read Marston's lecture, and I've read his report on this experiment. What happened next, I like to imagine. Sorry to interrupts, sir, but here the messenger handed the professor the envelope. Professor Marston opened the envelope, pulled out a

yellow paper, and read its contents. While Professor Marston was reading the message, the messenger slid a second envelope into Professor Marston's pocket, and then the messenger, using only his right hand, pulled out of his own pocket a long, green handled knife. The messenger opened a knife and began scraping his gloved left thumb with the edge of the blade, sharpening it on the leather. Yeah, that'll do anyway, Yes, sir,

stood as that man was an actor, an experiment. Take out a fresh sheet of notepaper, this very instant, and write down every fact about what just occurred, every last detail, no matter how seemingly insignificant. You have one minute, my dear listeners. These people are actors, and this too has been asharade an experiment. Please, now, this very instant. Tell me what you just heard. Is that all you can remember? All the details? Let me see if you left anything out?

What university are we at, in what year? What time of days it? What part of the country was the messenger from? What color was his knife? Time? Put down your pencils, pass your paper to the front of the room. All right. Marriston had identified exactly one hundred and forty seven facts that the students could have observed about the messenger, the number and the color of the books, the fact that he held them under one arm is left. The

color of the paper in the first envelope yellow. And then Professor Morriston collected his student's responses and tallied the results. Out of one hundred and forty seven observable facts, the class on average noticed only thirty six, and since two of these facts were errors, I am only counting thirty four, thirty four out of one hundred and forty seven facts, for a testimonial accuracy rate of precisely twenty three percent, and not a single one of you noticed the knife.

This is the last archive of the show about how we know what we know, how we used to know things, and why it seems sometimes lately as if we don't know anything at all. I'm Jill Lapour. This season we're trying to solve a crime. Who killed Truth? This episode, we're looking at a trial set in motion by the experiment Professor Marston conducted that night in nineteen twenty two, an experiment that involved a machine. A machine you've probably heard about. Did you ever hear of a lie detector?

The lie detector? You probably know it from the movies. You may lie to us, you can't lie to that. The machine itself. The polygraph machine was invented by someone else, but the test, the blood pressure test, that had been invented by William Molton Marston, that professor who liked to experiment on his students. Okay, most of us are very good at telling whether or not other people are lying. Marston thought a machine could tell better. See these needles.

You see the even little line this needle's making. When you tell a lie, you're post quickens, and this needle shows it on the chop. We take this sort of thing, this sort of movie scene for granted. There seems like it's all over the place, every police procedural, every episode of law and order. But when you're conducting a historical investigation, you're supposed to pause and think about the things you take for granted, Think about them until you don't take

them for granted anymore, until they get weird. The way, if you think about a word like pumpernickele, after a while, it starts to sound really strange. Pumpernickele, pumpernickele, polygraph, polygraph. And once things get strange, you can ask questions about them because you can see them more clearly. So you can ask why trust a blood pressure test more than your own judgment. It used to be that only God

could decide the truth of testimony. For centuries, murder trials involved the courts trying to get God to speak through the dead body. If it bled when you touched it, you were guilty. Even after trial by jury replaced this sort of thing, Trial by ordeal, This idea that the dead speak lingered in its way. The Lae detector is a kind of ordeal, except it doesn't look for guilt in the blood of the corpse. It looks for guilt in the blood of the accused. Marston described his method

in his undergraduate thesis. The special problem suggested to me in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory was an investigation in the changes in blood pressure resulting from an effort to hide the truth. Marston kept refining his truthscope all through graduate school and law school, and during the First World War when he did experiments on soldiers and prisoners of war. He was seeking fame and fortune, for sure, but he also had a noble motive. When police couldn't get criminals

to confess, they pretty often beat them up. They gave them what was called the third degree. Marston had the idea that if police had a lie detector, they'd stop beating people up. In nineteen twenty two, at the same time, as he was teaching an American university in Washington, Marston decided that the time had come for a real world test. He wanted to prove that his method worked. To do that, he wanted to get the results of a lie detector

admitted as evidence in a criminal trial. He needed a client desperate enough to hand his fate over to an untried experiment. Inspector Clifford al Grad record of an interrogation in August twenty second, ninety what is your name? James Alfonso Frye. James Alfonso Frye would soon become the subject of another one of Professor Marston's experiments. Fry was young and unmarried. He was lean and handsome, with short hair and big ears. He'd fought in the War. He worked

in a dentist's office, and he was broke. As he later wrote, I was a young man of twenty one years and penniless. The courts had to assign me a lawyer. Police had charged James Alfonso fry with the murder of doctor Robert Wade Brown, The President of the National Life Insurance Company and the richest black man in Washington. Here's what we know about the night Doctor Brown died. It

was a Saturday in November nineteen twenty. Brown was hosting a party at his house celebrating his alma mater's football victory when someone knocked at his front door. Brown went to answer and was shot dead on his very doorstep. The murderer, some people said, escaped down an alley. Browne's grieving family and his company together offered a thousand dollars reward,

but the investigation had come up short. Although a lot of Brown's guests witnessed the murder or at least glimpsed the murderer, it all happened so suddenly that they could remember hardly any details. Months later, the police were still searching for Doctor Brown's killer when they arrested a young black man on an unrelated robbery charge. It was Fry. He and a cousin had robbed a guy of a wallet,

a ring, and a watch, a petty theft. During his trial for robbery, one witness, a man who worked at the same dentist's office as for I, told the police that Fry had confessed to him that he Fry, had killed doctor Robert Brown. And it turned out that Fry had in fact been at doctor Brown's house on the night of the murder, and that he had brought a gun, And when the police questioned Fry, he confessed to the murder.

The police had to get that confession on record, so they brought him into an interrogation room where they questioned him all over again. They wouldn't have made an audio recording, this is nineteen twenty one, a little too early for that, but they made a transcript, and here in the last archive we've got a copy. You have told my colleague that you killed doctor Brown. Aw are you willing to

tell me about it? Yes, sir. When I first went to doctor Brown's I had a dollar, and I asked him to give me a prescription because I had been told I had gone a rha real bad. He then said he couldn't do anything for me for a dollar. He said, don't you son of a bitches come around here with only one dollar? Fry said, then he'd left and gone to try to raise money for the medicine

by pawning his pistol, a forty five automatic. No luck, so he said he went back to Brown's with his loaded gun tucked into the belt of his pants, but when he got there, he said, Brown sent him away again, told him if he didn't have the money, to get lost, and he struck me over the left eye. Did he have any weapon in his hand, No, sir. Then I took the butt of the gun and hit him, and

that didn't do good, because he struck me again. I tried to run to the door, and he grabbed me again, and I told him to put his hands up, and he kept on hitting me, hitting me on the head, and then the struggle. I think my gun was fired there, just there, with that slight cautious admission, I think my gun was fired. James Fry confessed to killing Brown. But Fry, who didn't even have a dollar to pay for a prescription, couldn't afford a lawyer. Here's where doctor Marston comes in.

In that course on the law of evidence, two of his young students told him about the case, and then they volunteered to take Fry's case for free, defending him against the charge of murder. First, they went to visit Fry in prison. The students, Professor Marston and his contraption, a blood pressure cuff or a sphigmo monometer. Marston hooked Fry up. Someone took a photograph. You can things in

a photograph that you can't see in a transcript. In the photograph, Frye, a black man, is surrounded by white men. Professor Marston and his law students, all in dark suits. As they strapped Fry into Marston's machine. Marston grasps Fry's arm, taking readings from his body. Fry later described the experience. Several months after I had been confined in the DC jail, my attorneys came to see me, accompanying a Professor Marston. This learned doctor was later known to me as the

inventor of the lie detector. He asked if I would submit to the use of this instrument to such requests, I readily agreed. He asked me several questions, none pertaining to the case. Then suddenly he launched upon several questions going into every detail of the case at the Metropolitan Courthouse one month later. This graph was supposed to be the ace in the hole for Fry's defense, and perhaps it would catapult Fessor Marston to fame as the greatest

legal mind of his generation. But the judge assigned to the case, Chief Justice Walter McCoy, was famously stern, and he was miffed. This was a big murder trial and a lot of Deasey's black community had come out for it, and Marston had alerted the press about it, so there were a lot of reporters there too. Judge McCoy was no fool. He saw early in the trial the long game this Professor Marston was playing. Marston wanted to replace trial by jury with trial by light detector all rise.

The prosecution called a detective who had taken Fry's confession. I call the stand detective Clifford Grant. I interrogated James Frye on August twenty second, nineteen twenty one. Detective Grant testified that Fry had confessed to him, But then Fry's lawyer Mattingly started bringing in his witnesses. I called to st James Frye could have a glass of water. Not a word of my confession was true. Fry recanted. He

insisted that he hadn't killed Brown. It's going to be hard to convince a jury of this, But Marston offered to prove with his lie detector where the real truth lay. It was a slim hope Fry knew. Fry later wrote that there had been no real chance for a black man in Washington in nineteen twenty two to get a fair trial. If I am neatly dressed and can explain myself, I'm considered being a smart alec and must be guilty.

If I'm dressed in overalls unable to explain the situation, then I'm considered a brute and still must be guilty. In any ordinary trial, a train of witnesses would make their statements, the guests at Brown's house, the police who investigated the crime, the people who could give evidence in support of Fry's alibi, and then the jury, twelve white

men would decide who to believe. Those men would find the facts of the case an issue a verdict, but which words of Fries were true, the confession he'd given to the police or the recanting he did right there on the stand. Fry's lawyer gamely tried to follow the Marston defense plan. If your honor please, at this time, I had intended to offer in evidence the testimony of doctor William M. Marston, as an expert in deception as testimony on what testimony as to the truth or falsity

of certain statements of the defendant? If your honor, please, if you object to it, I will sustain the objection. No other judge admitted the lie detector test as evidence, and Judge McCoy didn't want to be the first one to do it. He all but begged the prosecution to object to this evidence, and when they didn't, he began objecting himself. The witnesses here on the stand, and it is for the jury to determine whether or not he was telling the truth. That is very true, your honor.

But as expert testimony, is not this proper as competent evidence to go before the jury to ascertain what doctor Marston's opinion is at this time? Oh well, we get to be more or less experts ourselves, and so do the jury upon the question of whether anybody is telling the truth or not. That is what the jury is for. That is what the jury is for. It had taken centuries for ordinary people, even if only still men, white men, to gain the right to serve as jurors of the

guilt or innocence of their peers. But in the early decades of the twentieth century, a lot of scientists calling themselves experts. I thought they knew quite a bit more than jurors, that they had tools, methods, even machines that could find out the truth. Judge McCoy was smart enough to see the size of William Marston's ambition, and he was determined to foil it. When the next witness came to the stand, Mattingly again approached the bench, he had

another proposition. I love this part, the jousting, the little duel, but Mattingly was wildly outmatched. If your honor, please, before this witness begins to testify, may I inquire whether your honor would permit a systolic blood pressure test to be taken during an examination of the witness on the stand. If we are going to have a cystolic test, we all have to test every witness who testifies in the case. If there is any science about it, we might as

well apply the science to every witness. Mind you, I do not know anything about the test at all. I had certain pamphlets submitted to me yesterday to look at. Of some doctor Marston. I believe his thesis when he got his PhD degree I'm going to read them when I come back from my vacation. I see enough in them to know that so far the science has not sufficiently developed detection of deception by blood pressure to make

it a usable instrument in a chord of law. When it is developed to the perfection of the telephone on the telegraph and wireless and a few other things, we will consider it. I shall be dead by that time, probably, and it will bother some other judge, not me. Jed McCoy was a piece of work. After that, Mattingly bumbled along for a little while before concluding, and then the prosecution delivered its closing words. James Fry is the most colossal liar that ever appeared in court. I rest my case.

The jury deliberated for less than an hour and found James Fry guilty of second degree murder. Judge McCoy sentenced him to life in prison, and Fry went by train to Leavenworth. He was supposed to spend the rest of his days in jail. Professor Marston was conducting an experiment, but it's not an accident that his test subject was

a penniless black man accused of murder. Marston became a psychologist at a time when social scientists of every stripe were expected to try and solve what was called the Negro problem. What that problem was shifted all the time, but never the commitment to the notion that facts alone couldn't solve the Negro problem. Only numbers could. Social scientists counted everything they measured, the circumference of the skull, the length of a life, the density of a neighborhood, the

pressure of blood. Nearly a century after the Fry Trial, historians still spend a lot of time looking back at this moment, the period from about eighteen ninety to nineteen thirty. Some of the best work in this field is done by a colleague of mine, Khalil Gibran Mohammed, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. The first time I met him was at an academic conference with

a one word title, Numbers. Were both really interested in numbers and why people count things, what kind of knowledge numbers add up to, and what they subtract. One of the most amazing things about the late nineteenth century looking at that kind of local and national data is added looked today like an Excel spreadsheet printed out and folded

many many times over. A lot of Khalimahamma's work focuses on how after the Civil War, after emancipation, sociologists and government agencies collected statistics on black crime to argue that black people were by their very nature criminal, that they were genetically not fit for their freedom, and so had to be watched and studied endlessly. You could almost think of it like a person who is in rehab, and you develop certain protocols to keep track of their progress.

How many meals, how many hours do they sleep, what are the signs of a healthy lifestyle. Whereas you wouldn't do this for a normal person, You wouldn't keep a ledger of such things. And so, to use this metaphor, it was that ledger keeping of African Americans that was a reflection of those same progressives thinking black people are not still fully ready for full participation, so we'll keep an eye on this crime thing. Well, the truth is,

we live in the wake of all these ideas. They're baked in to our consciousness already, so we know what to make of it. We can either make of it that black people have a crime problem, or that black people are subject to systematic racism and system or we might say some mixture of boat. These ideas we live in that are already in our consciousness, A lot of them go back to a man named Frederick Hoffman. In eighteen ninety six, he published a book called Race Traits

and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman wanted to argue that Blacks were inferior. Up until then, those arguments had been based on racial pseudoscience, measuring skull sizes or some other physical differences. Hoffman was pretty innovative and shifting that gaze to crime statistics, and from that point forward, the framework that he used that the disproportionate evidence of black people being in prison was was on its own, with

no further analysis, no footnotes, no asterisks. The best proof that black people were inferior to people of European descent. Police discrimination and brutality didn't matter, rates of conviction mattered, other factors, and the culture just soaks it up like a sponge. Yeah, and it still does. Professor William Moulton Marston. He wanted to turn James Frye into a set of numbers.

The numbers on the graph paper from his lie detector test Marston wanted to turn Fry into a number, not to prove that he was a criminal, but to prove that he wasn't. And maybe I should admit here, I don't know whether James Frye was guilty or not. He was at the scene of the crime, he had a motive, he had a weapon, and he confessed. So it looks pretty bad. But then again, Marston had a lot on the line, and he was pretty sure that Fry was innocent.

I might not be sure whether fry was guilty or not, but I'm pretty sure Marston ever expected to get fry acquitted. Instead, he was hoping to take Fry's case all the way to the Supreme Court to demonstrate the merit of his invention. Marston dreamed of convincing the nation's highest court that his machine could tell better than any jury who was telling the truth. Men come to judge this question by certain arbitrary standards in the course of their dealings with others.

After for I went to prison, Marston helped to student lawyers file an appeal. Or to be honest, I'm pretty sure Marston just wrote the brief himself. It asked, how does the court tell whether or not someone is lying. The decision may hinge upon the look in the eyes, the expression on the face, the nervous condition of the witness, the rosy flush which suffuses his countenance, or upon any one of many other evidences which may or may not

be taken to indicate truth or deception. We say that there is no standard and no logical or reasonable basis for the determination of this question in general, in the absence of positive evidence of deception, and that if science has developed a method of accurately determining whether a man is in a mental condition or state of truth or of deception, the court and jury should be given the benefit of this assistance. But the State, in its own brief said that the idea of trial by lie detector

was ridiculous. Whatever may be said against the system of trial by jury under the Constitution and laws, a jury of twelve impartial men are peculiarly fitted to sift conflicting and contradictory testimony and derive at a just verdict. As for Marston, whether he can or cannot detect deception is something that does not appear to be known to anyone except doctor Marston. At the end of nineteen twenty three, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued its decision and

Fry versus the United States. The court ruled against Fry and also against Marston and his lie Detector, and the decision established a new rule of evidence, something that came to be called the Frie test. It became the most cited precedent in the history of law and science. The Frie test is a test of evidence, a rule that a judge applies and deciding whether or not to admit the testimony of a supposed expert. It's only eighty one words long, but I'm going to make you listen to

all of them. Listen for what the rule says, but listen to for what it doesn't say. Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between the experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone, the evidential force of the principle must be recognized. And while the courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made

must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance. In the particular field in which it belongs. All of the facts of Fry's case were stripped out of the ruling. That's how the law works. All that survives when court supply the Fried test are those eighty one words. Everything else is erased, including one very important circumstance, something pretty widely known at the time, but that since then has

been almost entirely forgotten. That fact is this. Between Fry's trial and disappeal, federal marshals went to the office of Professor William Molton Marston at American University, and there they arrested him for fraud. It turns out that the inventor of the light detector test, he was a notorious liar. So did he ever give you guys a light detector test? Oh? Yes, we were experimental animals. So tell me about that. Was

it like? Well, sham? Really, none of us hadn't believed it at all, And as far as settling disputes around the house, it was laughable. That's Burne Holloway Marston, the son of William Moulton Marston, he of lie detector fame Byrne is eighty eight, a retired obstetrician. He's a sweetheart. I first met him a few years back when I got fascinated by the crazy, truly crazy story of his father. Burne was born in nineteen thirty one, nine years after

the Fried Child. Little Burne was beloved and like everything else in his father's life, he was an experiment, a test case, among other things, for his father's lie detector test. So it was like, hoostile know Don's sweater? Was it you, Peter, you Burne, Let's give you a lie detector tests? No,

it wasn't a regular basis, but it didn't happen. The fact that Marston was a father of four and used to use his lie detector test on his kids is a good story, But there are other reasons to spend a little bit of time with Marston's private life, because it's completely zaney, and second, because Marston's public persona turns out to have been one big lie. Marston lie meter inventor arrested charged by Boston authorities with using the mails

to defraud. William Marston, a professor at the American University, was arrested yesterday at a preliminary hearing. He was held in a three thousand dollars bond Marston several months ago, constructed a machine which he declared could detect lies. The churches against Marston actually had nothing to do with the lie detector. They had to do with a super sketchy business scheme of his. The churches were also eventually dropped. But all this was going on at the same time

Marston was working on Fry's appeal. Marston lost that appeal, Frye lost that appeal, and Marston got fired from American University. But that wasn't the end of William Moulton Marston. He got another job teaching at Tufts, where he began an affair with one of his undergraduates, a young feminist named Alive Byrne. She came from a radical family. Her mother and her aunt, Margaret Sanger, had together opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. What became planned

parented my friend Burne Marston. Olive Byrne was his mother. My mother was a swassie, blue collar, Irish, witty, attractive black irish black hair and pale skin, freckles and those blue eyes and a blue eyes. Since that was the beginning of the ah Yes the manaji Professor Morriston had radical ideas about sex and about gender roles too. He had four children by two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway and Burne's mother, Alive Burne. Burne's own name is a

mashup Burn, Holloway, Marston. He's got the names of each of his three parents. The grown ups lived as a threesome, which, as you might guess, was something of a family secret because at the time you could be blacklisted from academia, from any job for homosexuality, not to mention polyamory. The Marston clan eventually moved to Ryan, New York, to a big house, a place they called Cherry Orchard. Burn always says it was an incredibly fun way to grow up

with so much love and this kookie father. He did not conform him. You could hear him coughing at night. He smoked all the time, and he cerebrated better in the reclining with a whiskey. And he was a big guy. Yeah he was me, Yeah, he was, I thank you. It's probably about six feet so his weight very one st at the time. He got to three hundred and then he said, that's great. I'm going to join the fat Man's Club in New York. Which is actually that's

the real thing. But he that was his life. He was always creating, I guess because as you know, the variety of things that he did were incredibly He always self helped stuff for leader, threw himself into things when you know when he did them. Marston was furiously curious, always conducting experiments, always looking for the next big thing. But whenever anyone found out about his polyamorous family arrangements, they fired him. He lost his job at Tufts, and

then he lost a job at Columbia. So then he went, we're all disgraced academics hoped to go. He went to Hollywood. He was in all the gossip columns New York Evening Post. Doctor Marston, who won't write ba PhD in L'll b after his name in another week because Hollywood is touchy about such things, is going to be the psychological authority behind all forthcoming motion pictures. From one big concern in Los Angeles, Marston went to work for Universal Studios as

a consulting psychologist, mainly on horror films. What did he do is he took up whole audiences to his wide detector while they watched the rushes. Then he'd advised the studio about whether the films were too racy or too scary, or not scary enough or not racy enough. He did other nutty experiments too. Doctor Marston and Emotions. It's eighteenth of July nineteen thirty and doctor William Marston demonstrates complicated device whereby he claims he can determine and compute comparative

emotions of blondes, brunettes and redheads. Says Marston, Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto your hats. Here comes the real voice of William Marston. This is the spigmamnometer, an instrument which measures the subject's blood pressure. This is the kimograph drum, which records the breathing. The breathing is taken with anomograph around the subject's chest. We are now going to test the girl's reactions to gambling. The announcer watches the needle etche

marks into a rotating drum. Thing of the jig a kinograph. There's kidograph with the indicator showing one girl's reaction the game of chats. Needle is moved by subject's breathing. Here we see how redhead reacts to gambling and as she wins. Marston's emotion finder indicates that redheads show a most emotion when gambling. When I visited Bernard's house, we watched the newsreel together. He did it come out the year he was born? Oh man, that's just so it's like a

quack show from from the twenties? Is I don't know, but like did he believe that? Where is that just showing? I think it was shy. He had walk on the parapose of in New York City. Uh, you know, twenty stories up and see which one would react the most. I mean it's a yeah, it's a little it's not very scientific. Yeah, I have a theory. I think people who study lying tend to be liars, compulsive liars. Marston definitely was what are the facts about razor blade quality?

That's what you let wanted to know, and that's why you let retain Doctor William Moulton Marston, eminent psychologist and originator of the famous lie detector, to conduct scientific tests that reveal the whole truth. Truck drivers, bank presidents, men in every walk of life. These men shade while every reaction is measured and recorded, not knowing which blade is which, each subject shades, one half his face with a Gillette blade, the other with the blade of a competitive brand, while

the line detector accurately charts the reactions. In more than nine out of every ten cases, the shavers choose Gillette, says doctor Marston, the results of my study make it possible for me to state flatly and back my statements with positive proof that Gillette blades are far superior in every respect to competitive blades tested. Gillette blades precision made The FBI apparently had by now had enough of doctor William Moulton Marston and decided to investigate this Gillette scheme.

FBI agents brought Marston to a police station in Detroit and told him to replicate his experiments while police officers looked on. He couldn't. Only five and ten men tested in the station preferred Gillette. FBI director j Edgar Hoover wrote a note to himself in his Marston file. I always thought this fellow Marston was a phony, and this proves it. But if Marston was a compulsive liar, so

is olive Byrne. She wrote articles for a women's magazine for years, and in those articles she'd quote the famed psychologist William Marston as if he were a stranger, when of course they lived together. She once wrote an article about the Fry case, and in nineteen thirty six, when Fry applied for a pardon, he included her article with his application. I find this a little heartbreaking. Fry was thirty four then, he'd been in prison since he was

twenty two. I don't know if he killed doctor Robert Brown. I think there's a real chance he did, but I do know for certain that he didn't get a fair trial. He filed petition after petition, insisting on his innocence. Had I been fortunate to have had lawyers, judges or intelligent people on the jury, I would never have been convicted. I'm anxious to have the case reopened, if possible, in

order that my name could be cleared. The courts denied his petition two years later, in nineteen thirty eight, Marston published a book called The Lie Detector Test and gave a copy to Burn, inscribing it for Burn Marston to help him always tell the truth with love from Daddy. The next year, Fry was prulled. He'd served more than eighteen years in prison. On his release, still determined to prove his innocence, he renewed his petition for a pardon.

Since my freedom from prison, I have married and have a fine wife. He petitioned again and again, even applying for presidential pardon. I gotta wonder would a guilty man have kept on pressing the case years after his release. Most people are under an impression that because a person has been indicted, tried, and sentenced, they are guilty. They do not stop to realize the fact that and all three conditions named above are human decisions, and that no

human decision is infallible. I am innocent of the charge against me. I have every reason to believe that the courts of the District of Columbia thought so. After all, this is Washington, and the question of race plays an important part even in the courts. James Fry died in nineteen fifty six, his name was never cleared. Instead, it lived on as the name of a test of evidence. Fry's name also became a verb. To be fried is to have your expert witnesses testimony deemed inadmissible. Marston's name

isn't a verb. He don't get Marston if you take a lie detector test instead. Marston is hardly remembered for the lie detector test. He's remembered for a different invention of his called Onto Your Headphones. It's about to get weird. In nineteen forty one, Marston, his wife Elizabeth Holloway, and his other wife Alive Byrne created the comic book superhero wonder Woman, the best known feminist icon of all time. She fights for women's rights. She's in fact based on

Margaret Sanger, founder of Plant Parenthood. I came across the evidence of this entire crazy story years ago in an archive, and I had to write a book about it. It's called The Secret History of Wonder Woman. It's a story about feminism, but it's also a story about evidence and truth. Wonder Woman fights for justice on her foe arms. She wears two middle bracelets that can stop bullets. They look just like the ones Alive Byrne used to wear, and of course she has her own lie detector. Marston once

wrote a wonder Woman's story about the Fry trial. I am pretty sure none of One Woman's readers recognize the illusion. But in this particular story, Marston imagines a courtroom scene and which wonder Woman tries to get a judge to accept as evidence the results of an interrogation she's conducted using her golden lasso of truth. I understand you examine this defendant with your remarkable Amazonian lasso. Yes, oh well it's highly irregular. I'd like to hear your finding. I

will show you judge objection sustain. Okay. So then Wonder Woman lassoes the defendant Priscilla Rich and drags her to the witness stand and gets her to confess that yes, yes, she really is the supervillain known as the Cheetah, after which the odd, grateful and besotted judge shakes Wonder Woman's hand. Your advice was invaluable, Wonder Woman. I wish you'd give

me further call on me anytime. Marston rewrote the story of the Fry Trial the way he'd wanted it to come out, with himself as the hero and Judge McCoy worshiping him. But in nineteen forty four, just when Marston finally realized this triumph with Wonder Woman, he got really sick. He had well apparently was polio, and this is coincided

with the success of Wonder What. He was finally making it something as he kind of yeah, pay him enough money to support all these people and watch something be successful and watching be successful and it was I mean, that's a kind of a tragic life and means yeah, right, because Wonder Woman has endured outside of the Last Archive, very little. Last James Fry is all but forgotten except

for his last name. A test of truth, but in just injustice endures, and if you want to fight it, you don't need a lasso of truth or a lie detector, but you do need knowledge and evidence, even the kind of evidence we'll try to find in the next episode of The Last Archive, The Evidence of the Invisible. The Last Archive is produced by Sophie Crane mcabin and Ben Natt of Haffrey. Our editor is Julia Barton and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jason Gambrella is our engineer.

Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by Matthias Boss and John Evans Hostelwagen Symfinett. Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janett Junior and the Star Ganette Foundation. Our fool Proof players are Barlow, Adamson, Daniel Burger, Jones, Jesse Hinson, John Kuntz, Becca A. Lewis and Maurice Emmanuel Parent. The last Archive is brought to you by Pushkin Industries.

Special thanks to Ryan McKittrick in the American Repertory Theater, Emily Shulman at Harvard Law School, Alex Allenson at the Bridge Sound and Stage, and at Pushkin to Heather Fane, Maya Knig, Carly Migliori, Emily Rustick, Maggie Taylor, and Jacob Weisberg. Our research assistants are Michelle Gaw, Olivia Oldham, Henrietta Riley, Olive Ruskin Kutz, and Emily Spector. Particular thanks to the National Archives and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. I'm Jill Lapour.