Larry Farwell Claims His Lie Detector System Can Read Your Mind. Is He a Scam Artist, or a Genius?
30 years after it was first pioneered, the Brain Fingerprinting system is finally being put to the test
On a hot summer day five years ago, a scientist named Larry Farwell knocked on the door of a single-family home in central Florida. A large, disheveled man named Ricky Smith answered. Farwell, who’s 71 now and has shaggy dyed blonde hair and an athletic build, had traveled all the way from Seattle to talk to Smith about a murder.
The crime had occurred 30 years prior, on December 30, 1986, in Iowa. A high school sophomore had been strangled and stabbed, and her body had been found on the east bank of the Missouri River. Smith was friends with the victim’s boyfriend. Prosecutors eventually sent a Burger King employee to prison, but there was evidence of a wrongful conviction. Now Farwell was helping a private investigator uncover new information that might help overturn it. But Farwell wasn’t there just to ask Smith questions — instead, he wanted to attach a set of electrodes to Smith’s scalp and administer a forensic technique he’d invented called “Brain Fingerprinting.”
In practice, Farwell says, Brain Fingerprinting is a kind of memory detector — one that…
