For the rest of the day, as a light drizzle slicked the paths and parks of Berkeley, Larson attached his machine to woman after woman, repeating his list of questions again and again. Then he came to Helen Graham.
Graham was slightly older than most of the other residents of College Hall. She had trained as a nurse before enrolling at Berkeley. In her yearbook photo, she’s turned away from the camera, looking back at the lens with a smirk, her dark hair cut into a flapper bob. Graham’s roommates were suspicious of her clothing and fine jewelry—which, one of them told Detective Fisher, seemed out of step with her modest Kansas family. “She is of the highly nervous type and has been suspected of being a hophead,” Fisher reported, using slang for an addict or drinker. She was one of his main suspects.
Graham showed no emotion as Larson worked his way through the list of questions—until he got to ones about the missing money and jewelry. “Did you take Miss Taylor’s ring?” Larson asked. After she answered a quick “no,” he glanced at the chart.
“The test shows you stole it,” he said flatly.
Graham seemed to stop breathing. She glared at Larson. “I think all these questions are an insult,” she said. “Just because I’m excited and mad at being asked all these questions, the needle jumps, and you think I’m lying.” Her eyes burned with rage. She started shouting. “It’s the third degree, that’s what it is. The needle shoots up and I’m a liar!”
“No one has said you are a liar,” Larson said in a low voice, trying to defuse the situation.
“You’re trying to make me out a thief—that’s what you’re doing. I won’t stand for it.”
As Larson leaned forward to take Graham’s blood pressure reading, she burst out of the chair and charged over to the spinning drums of the polygraph, which were still tracing her body’s increasingly violent movements. Larson and Fisher jumped up and had to hold her back from destroying the equipment as she railed against the men and their machine. Her blood pressure and heart rate were still going up as she tore the cuff off her arm.
“Are you through with this crazy stunt?” she spat.
“Yes, we’re through,” Larson replied.
But Graham was already charging out of the room. Outside, she told one of the other women she had wanted to tear up the charts, and that if she hadn’t been restrained by the equipment she would have “smashed Officer Fisher in the face.”
Inside, Larson and Vollmer exchanged glances. “That isn’t the girl the housemother suspected, but I’m betting she’s the one,” Larson said.
“I don’t think there is any doubt of it, but we have no confession,” Vollmer said. “I’ll have the girl watched. Maybe we’ll get some real evidence.”
Overnight, Larson found out more about Graham from the other women in the dorm. They told Larson and Fisher that Graham had been entangled in several passionate affairs and that she’d once induced an abortion by taking the anti-malaria drug quinine—hardly relevant to the case, but a cause for suspicion by the attitudes of the time.
The next day, Graham turned up at the police department, demanding to speak to Larson and asking to see the chart. Larson and Fisher then interrogated her for 12 hours while she continued to maintain her innocence. Eventually, though, she broke into “an attack of sobbing,” and said that yes, it was possible she might have taken the items in her sleep.
