FORGERY REVEALED

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 June 1932, Page 4

FORGERY REVEALED

STRANGER THAN FICTION. Imagine the cross of a “t” one-five-hundredths of an inch thicker on one end than on the other, trapping a forger! Or the tail of a single comma exposing an elaborate fraud. Imagine a fake will plot nipped in the. bud through the shape of a dot above an .“i,” or a cunning swindle stopped by the loop of an “e”! Such amazing feats are not taken from the pages of fiction. They are facts. They are on record in the files of scientific criminal hunters. The story of these handwriting experts and their relentless battle to outwit the crooked penmen is an engrossing tale of applied science waging war against crime. In this battle, success often hangs upon strange and slender threads. Thht was the situation in the astonishing “Ghost-Note Case,” solved recently in a southern American State. Six weeks after the death of a wealthy cotton planter, a man from a town 40 miles away presented a note for 5000 dollars to the executors of the estate. He said the -.planter had “borrowed against his crop” for that amount, going to an individual in another community rather than to his local bank to keep friends from learning of his temporary financial embarrassment. The executors were nuzzled. The signature on the note seemed genuine, but they found no record of the transaction in the papers of the deceased. So they submitted the disputed document to the laboratory of a handwriting detective.

THE CROSS ON THE “T.” Peering through compound microscopes and measuring the width oi lines with delicate precision instruments, this expert set to work. In five minutes he had bared the note as a clever forgery through evidence contained in a single, fine line of ink, less than three-sixteenths of an inch in length and only a hundredth of an

inch in width. It was the cross on the “t” in the planter’s name. Although made with a fine steel pen, it was shown by the laboratory instruments, to be nearly a fifth wider at the end than at th'o beginning. That five-hundredth of an inch difference would have meant nothing to an ordinary person, but to the expert it indicated that greater pressure had been applied to the pen at the termination of the stroke than at the start. A microscope examination of some 90 genuine signatures of the planter showed that he always placed the greatest pressure on the pen at the beginning of the stroke, while in the writing of the man who presented the note, the pressure came invariably at the end. In crossing a “t,” everyone presses down on the pen more at one point than another. Some put the pressure at one end, others at the other, a few

in the middle. But however they do it, they always do it the same. It was this slight difference in pressure, of which he was unaware, that tripped up the forger. Confronted with the evidence against him, he confessed that the paper was a “ghost-note,” forged after the death of the planter to defraud the heirs.