Medicine: Scopolamine Confession

Scopolamine is a hypnotic drug made from henbane. As scopolamine hydrobromide solution it is widely used for inducing twilight sleep at childbirth, for quieting maniacs, drug addicts, alcoholics. Some years ago the late Dr. Robert Ernest House of Ferris, Tex. discovered, on administering scopolamine during an obstetrical case, that his patient was babbling things which she would not ordinarily have told. It seemed that the drug, by a selective action on the brain centres, inhibited a person’s ability to withhold information from a questioner. In addition it was found that scopolamine, like actual hypnosis, might dredge up forgotten facts from the unconscious. Police hesitated to use the stuff because it was fatal if mishandled and because evidence obtained by means of it was not directly admissible in court. In Birmingham, Ala., however, an alert district attorney cornered a gang of ax murderers by running down leads gained from scopolamine confessions. In Kansas City, an alert detective chief named Thomas Higgins heard about the Birmingham successes. Last fortnight he thanked his stars that he had. One morning Higgins’ men were called to a room in a Kansas City apartment hotel where they found on a bed the naked corpse of a woman with cuts and bruises on her face, tooth marks on her body, blood on the pillow. Her clothing, torn in strips, was strewn on the floor. Identified as a Mrs. Florence Harlass, she was found by the coroner to have died of a heavy blow on the head. She had been dead about twelve hours, but a woman’s voice had answered the telephone in the room only two hours before the body was found. Perplexed, the policemen hunted the man with whom Mrs. Harlass had been living, a butcher named Frisch. Frisch said he had not seen his mistress for two days, had spent the time in “night clubs.” He had obviously been drunk. Asked if he would take scopolamine to refresh his memory, he agreed. Frisch was taken to a hospital, given four hypodermic injections of 1/150 grains each. For three hours he was incoherent. Then he revealed that he had downed several drinks with Mrs. Harlass, tried to quiet her when she became boisterous, struck and choked her, tore her clothes. When she fell, cracked her head against a metal bedpost and lost consciousness, Frisch tried to revive her by biting her, failed, remained several hours, departed. What he did not tell while under the influence of scopolamine was that he had imitated a woman’s voice when he answered the telephone. He was held for first-degree murder. In Science versus Crime,* a vivid survey of modern scientific criminology, Author Henry Morton Robinson has glowing things to say of scopolamine, believes extensive, skillful use of it would eliminate much third-degree brutality. Quite another view was apparent in a blast last week from Dean Paul G. Toohey of Kansas City’s Rockhurst College, who was outraged by the Frisch confession. “The procedure,” Dean Toohey roared, “is unjust … an arrogant, unethical, immoral defiance of human rights and U. S. Constitutional guarantees . . . employed by the police department of the Tammany of the West!”

*Bobbs-Merrill ($2.50).