Analysts Help Solve Crimes, Select Personnel : The Handwriting on the Wall May Spell Guilt

The district attorney did not have much to go on to prosecute a self-confessed Satan worshiper charged with murdering 10 downtown derelicts. No eyewitnesses, fingerprints or weapons had been uncovered to link the so-called Skid Row Stabber with the random killings.

But the prosecutor did have two samples of writing:

Graffiti scrawled on a bathroom stall in the downtown Greyhound bus station reading, “My name is Luther. I kill wino’s to put them out of their misery,” and a ripped piece of cardboard with the word “Satan” scratched on it, found next to one of the victims.

With the trial about to begin, the prosecutor also had Bruce Greenwood.

Greenwood, a 41-year-old Sherman Oaks resident, is director of the Los Angeles Police Department’s questioned documents section. As the top police handwriting analyst, he was the expert witness whose testimony linked the handwriting samples to the accused man, Bobby Joe Maxwell.

Suzanne Von Kamp of Van Nuys also is a professional handwriting analyst. Like Greenwood, she often helps lawyers--by examining signatures on contracts, for instance. She, too, finds herself in court as a witness.

That, however, is about all Von Kamp and Greenwood have in common. Although their jobs sound similar, in style and philosophy they are at opposite poles in a divided profession.

Greenwood, a man with rigid posture and polished shoes, is not given to light conversation. His approach to handwriting analysis is equally conservative.

His role in the Skid Row Stabber case is a classic example of the way law enforcement officers--from J. Edgar Hoover to Joe Friday--have used handwriting analysis for years. When Greenwood appeared in court, he tried only to show that the samples of writing entered as evidence were written by the same person, Maxwell.

Von Kamp, 35, who favors long fingernails and crinkled mid-calf boots, calls herself a psychographologist and claims to be able to do much more than tell whether two samples of writing come from the same person.

She said she can tell by looking at a handwritten paragraph whether the author is aggressive, impressionable, dishonest, violent, passive or neurotic. She said she can tell whether the writer is an alcoholic, a homosexual or a child abuser. She said she can even determine if people play around behind their spouses’ backs.

“It’s all in the handwriting,” she said. “There’s no disguising it.”

She interprets rounded M’s as indicating that the writer is easily influenced and emotional. Small writing with pointed M’s means that the writer is capable of making independent decisions and is not easily influenced, she said.

Besides working for area attorneys, Von Kamp appears at nightclubs, sweet-16 birthday parties and bar mitzvahs. She began handwriting analysis after attending 12 hours of classroom training given by a Van Nuys school called the Hypnosis Motivation Institute.

Von Kamp purports to reveal character traits of the writer. Greenwood said such analysis is impossible and limits himself to identification of characteristics of the handwriting. “Anything else would be speculation,” he said.

Despite the protests of Greenwood and other conservative handwriting experts, many attorneys are using graphologists for dozens of tasks, including examination of phony documents, selection of jury members and deciding which office personnel to hire.

Samuel Shore, a Los Angeles physician and attorney who specializes in malpractice cases, frequently hires Harris & Harris Inc., the oldest document examination firm in Southern California, to match signatures and inks on subpoenaed medical records.

“More and more we find medical records that have been tampered with,” Shore said. “The examiner can determine if certain patient files have been altered or doctored to cover up mistakes.”

Home-Correspondence School

The largest training service in the United States for handwriting analysis is a home-correspondence school run by the Chicago-based International Graphoanalysis Society, which claims 10,000 members nationwide. It offers a proficiency certificate in graphoanalysis after an 18-month course of study.

Most graphologists charge $300 a day in court and $50 an hour for consultation.

Kenneth Spring, a Woodland Hills attorney, recently hired a graphologist to help him screen candidates for a secretarial job in his office.

“It was an excellent tool,” said Spring, who had 12 job applicants write a page-long letter. “I had my handwriting examined first,” he said, “so that I knew I’d be compatible with the person who was going to work for me.”

Each summer the International Graphoanalysis Society offers a five-hour course in graphoanalysis and jury selection, which includes training in picking a sympathetic jury by looking at the information cards written by potential jurors.

Paul Weast, a handwriting analyst from Orange County who has taken the class, said the goal is to identify members of the jury “who are open, not stubborn, who can be persuaded.” Weast said, however, that no attorney has hired him for jury selection.

Some attorneys regularly employ graphologists to help them select jurors, according to articles in such publications as the American Bar Assn. Journal and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin. Quoting a Chicago graphologist, the Bulletin said, “Many lawyers want to keep quiet about the technique because it provides a tremendous advantage.”

Police Detective Richard LeVos, who spends much of his time tracing elaborate fraud schemes that often involve counterfeit documents, also does not discount graphology as a way to find out about personality.

“As your mood changes, your handwriting changes, day to day, hour to hour,” he said.

Not surprisingly, the conservative handwriting analysts are not mild in their opinions of the others.

John Harris of the 58-year-old firm of Harris & Harris is leading a lobbying effort in Sacramento for legislation setting standards for handwriting analysts who testify in California courts. He has asked that expert status be limited to those certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners.

Only 220 people nationwide are certified by the Maryland-based board, which requires candidates to have five years of professional experience and at least two years of approved full-time training and to pass an exam.

“People without proper training are ruining the field,” said Karen Chiarodit, who, along with Greenwood, is one of five examiners of questioned documents for Los Angeles police. To qualify for the job, Chiarodit had to pass a two-year, 40-hour-a-week, on-the-job training program given by the Police Department and an 80-hour course administered by the FBI.

“A lot of graphologists are like tea-leaf readers,” Chiarodit said. “It’s fine for parties, but there just isn’t any scientific basis for what they claim.”

The work handled by Greenwood’s unit has increased by more than 30% over the last 10 years, from about 40,000 documents a year to about 55,000 documents annually.

In few cases was Greenwood’s work more critical than in the investigation of the Skid Row killings, which plagued Los Angeles in late 1978 and early 1979.

Police picked up Maxwell, a 34-year-old unemployed laborer, after he was spotted in the area with a knife. They had to release him for lack of evidence.

Then investigators received a tip. Someone using the men’s room in the downtown Greyhound bus station at 6th and Los Angeles streets noticed the bizarre graffiti on one of the bathroom stalls. He reported the note to Greyhound officials, who called the police.

After Greenwood examined the scribble, police again arrested Maxwell.

60 Hours of Study

Greenwood said he spent 60 hours studying the graffiti, as well the cardboard note with the word “Satan” printed on it, before making a positive identification. Greenwood’s conclusion was that both messages had been written by Maxwell, whose handwriting samples were taken from rambling letters and notebooks found in his flophouse room.

Greenwood said he was able to find similarities in Maxwell’s “letter design, the initial stoke, the ending stoke, the size, proportion, spacing habit between letters and words, slant of the writing, the placing of the T crossings, I dots.”

After a Los Angeles jury found Maxwell guilty of two of the Skid Row murders, he was sentenced Sept. 6 to life in prison without possibility of parole. The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Sterling Norris, said jurors told him that their decision was based largely on Greenwood’s testimony.