FBI: Firefighter had right to refuse polygraph test

A special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Saipan said the firefighter at the Department of Public Safety who refused to take the polygraph exam in the case of the missing Luhk sisters was merely exercising his constitutional right.

“That’s that person’s right. We cannot compel anyone to sit down to a polygraph,” Joe Auther said at the Rotary Club of Saipan regular meeting yesterday.

The former firefighter, who refused to undergo a lie detector test in connection with the disappearance of sisters Faloma and Maleina Luhk on May 25, reportedly left for California on Aug. 6 at 4:20am.

Auther, who has been on Saipan for 10 years now, said they encouraged the firefighter to take the test but he chose not to.

“Quite frankly, there’s nothing we can do to make him [take the test] anymore than I can make somebody sit down for an interview with me,” he said. “Everybody has a constitutional right and he exercised it.”

Auther noted that they are still interested in identifying another person of interest—the man with a distinctive birthmark on his right cheek.

“The birthmark person, as we call him, we’re still interested in trying to identify the person. We haven’t really identified who that is,” he said.

Auther underscored that being tagged as a person of interest suggests that “he might have been a witness” to what happened to the Luhk sisters and not necessarily the person who abducted the children,

“We’re not even in a position to say definitively that they actually had been abducted. It sounds crazy that they could just wander off and gotten lost somehow. I’m not a proponent of that theory but any other evidence to the contrary certainly can’t rule it out,” he added.

Since the Luhk sisters were reported missing, the FBI, including other federal agencies, have sent agents to Saipan upon the request of Gov. Benigno R. Fitial and DPS Commissioner Ray Mafnas as part of domestic police cooperation cases.

These cases, Auther said, allow any police department to request for FBI assistance “where we might not normally have any jurisdiction.” The requests involve processing of crime scene evidence in the FBI’s laboratory.

Auther said that federal agents worked with local authorities for any information, including that of persons with interest, which would help the case. “It didn’t matter what federal or local agency you’re with. Everybody [was] united with one common goal,” he added.

According to Auther, the federal statute on kidnapping requires that missing children, especially those of tender years, has a presumption related to an abduction after 24 hours.

“While we still cannot say that that is what happened in this instance, there is that presumption because of passage of time,” he said.

With the possibility of transporting the missing children out of Saipan, Auther said authorities covered their bases by working with the ports and immigration, checking passenger manifests both by specific names and by age.

He said the human remains that were discovered on Sunday belong to an elderly person who lives alone in Kagman and walks around in the area, although their initial assumption was “nobody has been reported missing on Saipan in six months to a year other than these two young girls.”

“So when the remains were found, nobody thought that it could have been anybody other than these young children or at least one of the young children,” said Auther.

He added, “There’s a part of me that would like to see some sort of closure for the families. Certainly, it brings out at least some hope that the children could still be alive, although I must say with the passage of time, being what it is historically, the odds are against that.”