Read from Chapter 1, "Science Nabs Sorority Sneak", from The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession by Ken Alder:

"The case had all the signs of an inside job. One of the ninety young women in College Hall was a sneak thief. For several months, someone had been filching personal possessions from the rooms of her dorm sisters: silk underthings, registered letters, fancy jewelry, cash. It was the springtime of the Jazz Age in 1921, and young women were returning to the boardinghouse on the campus at Berkeley to find their evening gowns spread out on their beds, as if someone had been sizing them up. A sophomore from Bakersfield had been robbed of $45 she had hidden inside a textbook; a freshman from Lodi lost money and jewelry valued at $100; and Margaret Taylor, a freshman from San Diego, could not find her diamond ring worth $400—though she wondered whether she had simply misplaced it.

Unable to wring a confession from any of her boarders, the housemother turned to the Berkeley police department, famous for introducing modern scientific techniques into crime-fighting. But Jack Fisher, an oldtime cop on the force, didn’t have much to go on. He learned that on March 26, Ruth Benedict had put $65 in her purse before going down to dinner at six; when she returned at six-thirty, the money was gone. One boarder, Alison Holt, had been seen watching Benedict hide her purse, and had not come down to dinner immediately. This made her Fisher’s prime suspect,
especially as she was “one of these big baby eyed types [who] cannot remember what took place on any given date and answers all questions with the big innocent baby stare.” The other girls thought her “queer.”

Also, at that same meal, another young woman, Helen Graham, had carried a plate up to a Miss Arden, sick in her room. Officer Fisher was plied with various rumors about Miss Graham, a tall, well-proportioned woman with deep-set eyes, dramatic eyebrows, and an intense manner. Her roommate told him Miss Graham spent money out of proportion to her modest Kansas background; also, she wore a diamond ring and a pendant with big stones. She was a bit older than the other young women and had trained as a nurse. “She is of the highly nervous type,” Fisher wrote, “and has been suspected of being a hop head.” She also had more experience when it came to men, and her dorm sisters seemed to resent her for it.

Then there was Muriel Hills, who had been seen in the vicinity of another theft: a “very nervous type, the muscles of the eyes seem to be affected, the eyes moving all the time, and she . . . has to hold her head sideways to see who she is talking to.”

So far Fisher had a baby-faced queer girl, a high-strung bad girl, and a jittery nervous girl, plus other suspects. He did not see, amid these female intrigues, how he would ever solve the case.

Then the housemother began to worry that repeated visits by the police would give the house a bad reputation. College Hall was the sole sanctioned residence at the University of California, filled with respectable young women of eighteen and nineteen from good families. The housemother asked that the investigation be wound down.

So Fisher called in his colleague John Augustus Larson, the nation’s first and only doctoral cop: a twenty-nine-year-old rookie who had earned a Ph.D. in physiology from the University of California. Larson was a solid man of medium height, who led with his forehead, his blond hair pasted firmly to one side. A man with something to prove. He was currently working the four-to-twelve downtown beat like any other rookie, but he was not much of a cop in other respects. For one thing, he was almost blind in his right eye and was the worst shot in the department. For another, he was just learning to drive and had recently wrecked two squad cars in a single day. Meanwhile, he was still toiling in a university lab looking to bring new scientific methods to police work."