Background
It is always nice to receive confirmation of our test results, even when the result was adjudicated as being Deceptive. We received a telephone call from an examinee that we had tested in Huyton near Liverpool some three weeks earlier. She had agreed to sit the examination because her Grandmother suspected her of stealing money from her home.
The client, the Grandmother, lived with her husband in the Woolton area of Liverpool. He had been admitted to the hospital and then moved into Step-down care in a Belle Vale Care Home. The examinee was concerned for her Grandmother, now living alone for the first time, and began visiting her more regularly, cleaning in the places her Grandmother was now too frail to reach, and generally keeping her company.
The Missing Savings
A Social Worker had called on the Grandmother to make an assessment of the home before her husband could be discharged from care, and during that conversation, the subject of savings came up. When the Social Worker left, the Grandmother went to her secret place and looked for a sum of money she knew the couple kept in cash at the house. To her horror, she was unable to find it, and over the next few days, she basically searched every nook and cranny, looking for the cash.
Eventually, she gave up, and during one of her visits to the Liverpool Belle View Care Home, she decided to tell her husband that the money had disappeared, or more directly, someone had stolen it.
The husband was far from pleased but told her to forget about it and that he would sort it out when he was discharged back to his home in Woolton. However, the Grandmother could not get it off her mind and eventually arrived on the examinee’s doorstep in Huyton, accusing her of stealing the money.
The Test
In a mixture of desperation and disbelief, the examinee suggested that she take a lie detector test to prove her innocence. The Grandmother agreed, and the test was booked.
During the pre-test interview, the importance of disclosing every detail to the examiner prior to the test being conducted is always stressed to any examinee. The granddaughter was adamant that she had not taken the savings and presented as if she would pass the test. The polygraph charts (data) totally disagreed with the client’s confident persona, and she clearly failed the test.
During the post-test interview, she stated that she had forgotten to admit that many years earlier she had actually taken a £2 coin from her grandparents’ piggy bank and protested that was the reason she had failed the test. The Grandmother would have none of her denials or excuses and ushered her out of the office.
The Truth Revealed
So to receive a call from the examinee, a) to apologise for not being totally truthful in the examination, and b) to inform us that she was, in fact, proven innocent by her own Grandfather when he returned home, was excellent confirmation of the original test results.
Her Grandfather had apparently removed the savings when he became aware that he needed hospitalisation. He didn’t want the savings declared to the authorities because he had heard stories of couples with savings being forced to pay for their aftercare, and, thinking his wife would admit the existence of the money to Social Services, he had found another place to keep it.
Having told his wife he would sort it out on his discharge and he hadn’t known that the polygraph test had been arranged.
Outcome
The examinee accepted that the examination results were accurate, but had also been extremely upset to think her family would no longer trust her, and informed us that she was bothered about our opinion of someone who appeared to have stolen from the family.
Being a Liverpool girl, she even saw the funny side of the situation when describing her Grandmother’s reaction when her husband told her the money was safe. Apparently, her response was unprintable!
