That Signature on Bottom Line Isn’t Always Last Word

It is a strange and exacting craft, exposing forgeries.

For John J. “Jack” Harris, it meant 49 years of staring at near-identical scrawls to determine whether someone had tripped over his own greed.

The craft took Harris from a dusty Hong Kong document warehouse to the glaring arena of live TV coverage, from the Byzantine fiscal records of J. Paul Getty to the post-mortem squabbling of rapper Easy-E’s six widows.

He hunkered over bogus cursive with a microscope and reduced mystery typewriter fonts to year, make and model in his search for the truth of authorship.

Harris used his skills as a “questioned document examiner” to expose the reputed will of aviation billionaire Howard Hughes as a rank fraud. And he verified that Oxnard deli clerk Diana Haun did indeed rent the car in which she kidnapped and stabbed Ventura mother Sherri Dally.

And after nearly half a century in the forensic business--as the twin confounders of inkjet printer and high-resolution photocopier threaten to make the fraud-exposure business even more challenging--Harris has reluctantly retired. With a full career behind him and the promise of golf, travel and relaxation ahead in his hilltop home overlooking the avocado groves of Somis.

In his time, Harris has learned that two things drive men and women to forge--and he has a 4-foot-long file drawer full of fake wills to prove it.

“Either a person is an outright crook and he’s trying to steal an estate,” says Harris, 74. “Or it’s a family affair--close friends who have never committed a crime in their life . . . who think they’ve been wronged or think that they knew what the testator wanted, but that nobody had put it down on paper.”

He began the craft at the feet of his father, who founded a handwriting-analysis firm in Seattle and later ferreted out forgers for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

As a child, young Jack Harris had met all the experts who testified on Bruno Hauptmann’s ransom note in the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh’s baby.

And by the time he reached junior high school, he was collecting typewriter font specimens from schools and steno agencies for his father’s specimen bank.

With a 1948 degree from UCLA, Harris joined the firm as an apprentice to his dad for three years. Harris and Harris they became, and Jack later followed his father’s footsteps through seven years as a document examiner for the Los Angeles County sheriff.

Early on, he knew he loved it.

He sniffed out bum I’s and poorly crossed Ts on forged checks; he fingered bookies by deciphering the coded scrawls they used to take down bets.

He exposed his share of “six-pack wills”--ludicrous attempts drafted by greedy drunks who scribbled in supposedly foolproof clauses for themselves such as “If you can prove this is a forgery, you can inherit my entire estate.”

He especially enjoyed snaring forgers who had written fake wills in ballpoint pen and carelessly dated them before 1945--the year that ballpoints were invented.

“That was fun,” he chuckles.

In 1957, Harris launched a civil practice that would take him places he had never dreamed of going and introduce him to the lives of people he might never have met otherwise.

When Juan V. Corona was tried for the 1971 mass slayings of 25 itinerant farm workers near Yuba City, Harris was called in to verify that a list of the victims was in Corona’s own handwriting. He matched the ink to one of only 250 multicolored Italian ballpoints sold in this country.

After Rock Hudson died of AIDS in 1985, Harris ruled that the movie star had indeed written notes to boyfriend Marc Christian--confirming that the two had had a relationship and strengthening a damage suit against Hudson’s estate that netted Christian $14.5-million.

And Harris scrutinized the last will and testament of gangsta rapper Eric Wright, known to fans as Easy-E, who died in 1995 and left behind a wife and five other women with whom he had fathered children.

Several of the women wanted Wright’s estate to immediately disburse the money--despite a provision in his will forbidding the payout until the children reached age 21.

The children’s mothers alleged that the initials on the rapper’s most recent will were fakes because they were more streamlined than the elaborate signatures Wright had scrawled on earlier papers.

But Harris verified Wright’s latest will. He matched the rapper’s swooping initials to others penned on recent music contracts, ruling that this was no forgery, but that Wright’s signature had become more simple over the years as he got used to signing things in a hurry.

Harris has examined and testified in at least 1,000 more questioned-document cases, from the petty to the grandiose.

He has scrutinized wills that sundered once-loving families of common folk, and has verified signatures in the massive estates of oil barons J. Paul Getty and Armand Hammer, on which the ownership of billions hinged.

Harris also exposed a bank cheat: He found evidence in a Hong Kong court’s warehouse by digging through boxes of dusty correspondence from the Singapore branch of a Russian bank until he found a thank-you note for some flowers that the embezzler had copied onto papers “approving” a multimillion-dollar loan to himself.

That one, he says, “was like finding a needle in a rice pile.”

Harris is not perfect: “I’ve had some that I’ve stared at and stared at and never made up my mind. You can’t try too hard, because if it isn’t there, it isn’t there. You have to move on to other evidence.”

He has grown expert in recognizing the exquisite subtleties of human greed.

“Funny things happen when people get into estates, and one person’s going to have the condo in Hawaii and the Mercedes Benz and the other person’s not going to get anything,” Harris mused. “The Hughes people spent a quarter of a million dollars trying to find a will.”

Ah, the Hughes case.

Billionaire aviation magnate Howard R. Hughes died in 1976, apparently without a valid will.

Twenty-four days later, a Mormon church official found on his desk a riddle wrapped in mystery: an envelope addressed to the church president that contained a second, older envelope that in turn contained a yellowed, hand-written, three-page document purporting to be Hughes’ last will and testament.

It had reportedly been found by Nevada gas station owner Melvin Dummar--who was named in the document to receive a 1/16th share of the $2.5-billion estate because Dummar had found Hughes wandering bloody and disoriented by a desert highway, driven him to Las Vegas and given him a quarter.

Concerned the will might be a fraud, Hughes’ relatives called Harris.

Harris was quite familiar with the billionaire’s handwriting. He had testified in a wrongful-termination suit by former Hughes lieutenant Robert Mayheu that Hughes had indeed written memos to Mayheu. And he had verified Hughes’ signature for the Nevada State Gaming Control Board when the billionaire applied for a casino license.

“I looked at the three-page document,” Harris recalled in an article he wrote for the Journal of Forensic Sciences.

“Looked at it again. And again,” Harris wrote. “The song Peggy Lee made famous came to mind: ‘Is That All There Is?’ What a miserable looking document and what a letdown! Someone had certainly tried to copy his handwriting, but it was no billion-dollar effort. And it had been water soaked to boot.

“We did not need armed guards! What to do? I really wanted to laugh out loud. This was not the real thing; it was more like a contest in which someone had sent in a facsimile ‘boxtop’ to enter the ‘Howard Hughes Will Contest.’ ”

But Harris pressed on, examining the document by microscope and taking enough photographs to confirm his suspicion. It was, he announced several hours later, a rank fraud.

But the news media quickly found a folk hero in Dummar, who found high-powered lawyer Marvin Mitchelson and sued for his “share” of the Hughes billions.

Harris assembled his case. He built photographic alphabets out of handwritten letters from Hughes documents and compared them to letters from the Mormon Will.

FBI agents found Dummar’s fingerprints on one of the envelopes, and on a copy of “Hoax,” a Clifford Irving book containing photos of Hughes’ signature. Harris matched the “Hoax” signature to the one on the will, and determined that Hughes’ name had been traced straight from the book.

Then he made his case to the jury. He showed them the difference in Hughes’ handwriting, how he wrote his Ps in a single stroke, but later switched to two-stroke Ps when he fell ill. He showed them photographic comparisons of the will signature with the “Hoax” signature.

The last was the clincher--a cut-and-paste comparison of letters from the Mormon Will and Hughes’ own writing that Harris had arranged to spell out, “This is not my will. Howard R. Hughes.”

“One of the jurors started laughing,” Harris recalled. “And pretty soon all the jurors were laughing. And that was it.” The jury agreed. The will was a fraud.

Harris looks back on his career with satisfaction, and at the future with trepidation.

“It’s a new generation. We’re approaching a cashless, checkless and signatureless society,” he said. “The future of the work--who knows what it’s going to be like 25 years from now, with all the electronic computer advancements?

“We exist by the documents we have,” Harris said. “I’ve had forged birth certificates, forged death certificates and everything in between. But if this country can’t rely on the validity of documents, it can’t rely on anything.”

Times researcher William Holmes contributed to this report.