Lots of government employees take their skills into the private sector where they make a healthy living telling clients how to beat the system. But for Doug Williams, it didn’t work out so well. The former Oklahoma City police officer faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to federal charges that he operated a business that trained people how to successfully lie during polygraph tests.
Williams, 69, abruptly ended his trial this week when he decided to plead guilty to five counts of obstruction of justice and mail fraud after he was caught in a sting operation by undercover federal agents posing as customers who wanted to cheat a lie detector test—a service Williams openly advertised on his website, Polygraph.com. The Website has since been shut down. The federal indictment is here.
Showing a person techniques to use during a lie detector test isn’t a crime. Knowingly helping someone who admittedly broke the law to successfully lie on a government polygraph is obstruction of justice—and that’s what led to the arrest of Williams, who spent 10 years as the OCPD’s internal polygraph division before leaving the force in 1979.
“I haven’t lived this long and f**ked the government this long and done such a controversial thing that I do for this long and got away with it without any trouble whatsoever by being a dumbass,” Williams said to the undercover agent, according to the indictment.
In another sting operation, Williams agreed to help an undercover agent posing as a police officer who was applying for a job with Customs and Border Protection and was asked to take a polygraph. He explained that had used drugs and had sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl and he didn’t think he’d pass the lie detector test. Williams agreed to help the agent lie.
Contacted by phone, Williams hung up when asked for comment by Vocativ.
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