Obviously, a great deal of the Zodiac case rests on the ability of experts – particularly Sherwood Morrill to examine and identify Zodiac’s handwriting and rule out correspondence that was NOT Zodiac.
But how reliable is forensic handwriting analysis? How reliable are questioned document examiners like Morrill in the first place?
Clearly, QDE and FHA are not exact sciences such as DNA for example, but it is probably more reliable than polygraphs. Still, QDE was less than a decade old as an independent discipline when Morrill was looking at Zodiac’s stuff. Only recently have standardized training and certification been put in place. It was still a new science that lacked a lot of the techniques and rigorous training in use today. But even in modern times there are failures. For example, the Hitler diaries:
In the 1980s, a man approached a German publishing company with 60 handwritten journals purported to be written by Adolf Hitler that had allegedly been discovered in the wreckage of an airplane from WWII. The texts seemed to be genuine, so the publishing company paid $2.3 million for the lot. The diaries were immediately published in newspapers around the world including The London Times. It was The Times that requested a professional handwriting analysis to ensure authenticity.
Three well-respected international experts in forensic handwriting analysis compared these "diaries" to examples that were known to be written by Hitler. All agreed that the diaries were written by the same person who wrote the exemplars. The diaries were for real, they all said.
Except they weren’t. They were complete forgeries that were only discovered through the examination of the ink under ultraviolet light.
Certainly the most significant shortcoming of handwriting analysis as a science is the fact that it is ultimately subjective. It’s an educated guess. Even today, handwriting analysis isn’t always admissible in court. More startling is that there are still no scientific studies that have determined a reliable error rate. In other words, no one really knows how accurate forensic handwriting analysis really is.
Now, I’m not saying that Morrill was a quack or a fraud. But perhaps we should give some pause before immediately assuming that his word is rock-solid proof. QDE and FHA today are looked at skeptically by the scientific community, and 50 years ago it was even worse. Even other experts questioned Morrill’s announcement that the Riverside writings were Zodiac, and the 1978 letter (that is almost universally dismissed as fake) was declared real by Morrill.
My point is that handwriting analysis may not be as reliably accurate as we think it is. Again, at the end of the day, it’s just an educated guess.
Thoughts?
“Murder will out, this my conclusion.”
– Geoffrey Chaucer
Have the samples re-evaluated by a current acknowledged expert graphologist.
Have the samples re-evaluated by a current acknowledged expert graphologist.
That’s an excellent question, and one that I don’t have the answer to. It would be interesting to get the current state QDE to review the alleged and confirmed Zodiac writings (including Riverside) and get their opinion.
I believe they also have software now that scans and compares handwritten documents and provides a percentage of similarity of handwriting. I’d love to see this done with the various Zodiac writings.
“Murder will out, this my conclusion.”
– Geoffrey Chaucer
I think it’s pretty useless tbh. When you look at other cases like the Ramsey case, for example, you could easily find 100 experts saying the mother wrote the note and another 100 saying the opposite.
Have the samples re-evaluated by a current acknowledged expert graphologist.
But it’s not a science now anymore than it was fifty years ago.
I think it has a lot to do with the way we perceive likelihood. More than anything I think handwriting analysis gets a bad rap because of the way its used in court.
To illustrate what I’m saying, suppose you asked a very experienced handwriting expert to examine two documents and after examining them he stated that he was about 70% sure they were written by the same person.
Let’s put that situation in the context of a manhunt. Leads are scarce, the killers on the loose, "70%" match sounds like damn good odds, definitely a strong lead.
Now that same evidence and put it in the context of a criminal trial. The experts on the stand,
the defense asks "and in your opinion what degree of certainty do you have that the handwriting is a match on both documents?"
"I would say I’m about 70% certain the handwriting matches".
All of a sudden that 30% chance of a non-match looks like a window of reasonable doubt big enough to sail a yacht through.
So I would say if you have a credible expert saying that they think this document is a likely match, or this one isn’t; well take it for what it is, a good lead.
The problem with handwriting analysis is that you need lots of samples of writing to compare. And, it is more art than science. Even the same person’s handwriting differs each time he/she writes. So, that is part of the reason why many samples are needed, to get a range of the variance. If I had to take a case to trial, a handwriting expert would be very low on my list of experts that I would want to identify the Defendant. Different experts will likely come to very different conclusions. The best studies on a jury’s reaction to "dueling experts" is that the jury: 1) sides with the expert that is the most qualified, regardless of whether his/her assumptions and conclusions are tied to facts; 2) sides with the expert who is the best looking or most well spoken; or, 3) disregards both experts and just uses common sense.
Handwriting analysis is better suited to rule someone out as an author than to identify them as the author of a document. For that reason, I do not put a great deal of stock in handwriting experts concluding that a given letter was authored by the Zodiac. An honest expert would say something to the effect that the writing is consistent with known Zodiac handwriting and could have been authored by the Zodiac. Because we know forgers can mimic handwriting, it is almost impossible to say that one person authored any given document.
