Around midnight on the evening of 22-23 February 2015, two armed men accosted Matthew Yussman at his New Britain, Connecticut home. They held Yussman and his mother at gunpoint, forced Yussman, the chief financial officer of a credit union, to wear a device that they said was a bomb, and early in the morning made him call his credit union’s New Britain branch and direct a fellow employee to evacuate the building and meet him there to provide the combination to the vault. The credit union employee called the police, and the two armed men eventually released Yussman without having obtained any money from the credit union. The device strapped to Yussman turned out not to be an actual bomb.
Later that same day, Yussman failed a polygraph “test” administered by the New Britain police, who used the polygraph results to obtain a warrant to search Yussman’s home, car, computer, cell phone, and other items. Yussman, the victim of a violent crime, became a suspect and had his good name besmirched thanks at least in part to the New Britain police’s reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy.
Now, roughly one year later, Yussman has been absolved by the confession of one of the two men who invaded his home.