Disputed Handwriting Part 4

The signature, after being photographed, is carefully traced over with ink, and the body of the check is filled up for whatever amount is desired. The maker of the check is requested to identify the person who holds it, and as a general thing he does not wait to see the money paid. The moment his back is turned, the layer-down palms the small check and presents the large one. This way of obtaining money is without the a.s.sistance of a middle man. Private marks on a check are no safeguards at all, although a great many merchants believe they can prevent forgery by making certain dots, or seeming slips of the pen, which are known only to the paying teller and themselves. This precaution becomes useless when the forger uses the camera. Safe breakers are often called upon by forgers and asked to secure a sheet of checks out of a checkbook. When this is accomplished a few canceled checks are taken at the same time. These are given to the forger and he fills them up for large amounts, after tracing or copying the signature. The safe burglars receive a percentage on the amount realized. If your safe vault or desk is broken open, where your check-book is kept, carefully count the leaves in your check-book, also your canceled checks. If any are missing, notify the banks, and begin using a different style of check immediately. The sneak thief, while plying his trade, often secures unsigned bonds of some corporation which has put the signed bonds in circulation, leaving the rest unsigned until the next meeting of the directors.

Frequently unsigned bonds are left in the bank vault for safe keeping.

These are stolen and sent to the penman or "scratcher." Then a genuine signed bond is purchased, from which the signatures are copied and then forged. The same trick has been played on unsigned bank notes, but on the bank notes almost any name will do, as no person looks at the signature, as long as the note appears genuine.

The ingenuity of a countless army of sharpers is constantly at work in this country, devising plans to obtain funds dishonestly, without work, but, in fact, they often expend more time, skill, and labor in carrying out their nefarious schemes than would serve to earn the sum they finally secure, by honest labor. Every banker must, therefore, be on his guard, and should acquaint himself with the most approved means of detecting and avoiding the most common swindlers. This is just as necessary as it is to lock his books and cash in his safe before going home.

Next to the counterfeiter, the forger is the most dangerous criminal in business life. Transactions involving the largest sums of money are completed on the faith in the genuineness of a signature. Hence every effort should be made to acquire the art of detecting an imitation at a glance. This can be done only by considerable practice. It is a.s.serted that every signature has character about it which cannot be perfectly copied, and which can always be detected by an experienced eye. This is problematical, but certainly a skilful bank teller can hardly be deceived by the forgery of a name of a well-known depositor.

A banker should accustom himself to scrutinize closely the signatures of those with whom he deals. He should cut off their names from the backs of checks and notes, and paste them in alphabetical order in an autograph book devoted to that purpose, and compare any suspicious signature with the genuine one.

In consequence of the numerous frauds committed by forged checks, some of the European bankers have adopted the custom of sending with their letter of advice a photograph of the person in whose favor the credit has been issued, and to stop the payment when the person who presents himself at the bank does not resemble the picture. If this practice were to become universal, the object of preventing frauds could be well attained.

Instead of the signature being forged, the amount of a check, etc., may be altered. This is done either by changing the letters and figures, or by the use of an erasive fluid. The perfection with which the latter alteration can be performed is so complete that the most skilful eye cannot detect the imposture. A person may deposit a hundred dollars with a house in New York, and obtain their draft for that amount on Philadelphia; he then alters the one hundred to one thousand by erasing a portion of the letters and figures and cashes the draft at a broker's. The latter recognizes the signature, and has no suspicion of the fraud until too late.

The means to secure entire protection against this is by using an ink which cannot be erased by chemicals, or at least such chemicals as are familiarly known to the cla.s.s of criminals who make this a specialty.

Every well-regulated bank now uses a machine for punching or perforating a series of small holes in the check, so that any increase or decrease of the number of letters written is immediately detected.

Many banks have been swindled in the following manner: A check, say for ten dollars, is obtained from a depositor of a bank, and a blank check exactly like the filled-in check is secured. The two checks are laid one upon the other, so that the edges are exactly even. Both checks are then torn irregularly across, and in such a way that the signature on the filled check appears on one piece and the amount and name of the payee on the other. The checks having been held together while being torn, of course one piece of blank check will exactly fit the other piece of the filled check. The swindler then fills in one piece of the blank check with the name of the payee and an amount to suit himself, takes it with the piece of the genuine check containing the signature to the bank, and explains that the check was accidently torn. The teller can put the pieces together, and as they will fit exactly, the chances are that he will think that the pieces are parts of the same check, and becomes a victim of the swindle. The trick, of course, suggests its own remedy.

It is a well-known fact that there are banks in the country that have paid thousands of dollars on raised checks, and decided that it was cheaper for them to pocket the loss than to have the facts become known.

The New York Court of Appeals holds that the maker of a check is obliged to use all due diligence in protecting it, and the omission to use the most effectual protection against alterations is regarded as an evidence of neglect.

Here are a few points about raising checks and drafts that should be carefully noted: To successfully raise a check or draft requires so much less skill or art than to accomplish a forgery that it has of late become alarmingly prevalent. Often where a check or draft is printed on ordinary paper the original figures are removed by some chemical process so skilfully that no alteration can be detected, even with a strong magnifying gla.s.s.

It is not uncommon, when filling up checks or drafts, to take another pen, and with red ink write the amount across the face of the paper, and again make the figures in and through the signature. All these precautions may make tampering with the amount more difficult for a clumsy novice, but it only imposes a few moments' more work upon the accomplished manipulator. He takes his strong solution of chloride of lime and rain water, or other prepared chemicals, and with a pen suited to the purpose, by neutralizing and abstracting the coloring properties of the ink, he carefully obliterates such portions of the lines in the figures and written amounts as suits his purpose, then easily makes the alteration he desires, the red ink coming out as readily as black. And if the tint or coloring of the paper should have been affected by his cautious touch, he takes the proper shade of crayon or water-color, and carefully replaces the original shade.

Now, the signature not being touched, but remaining genuine, and the payer not being supposed to know who wrote the check, but only who signed it, he pays the amount specified, and the law holds the "maker of the check responsible when there is nothing in its appearance to excite suspicion, and the signature is proven genuine."

CHAPTER VII

THE HANDWRITING EXPERT

No Law Regulating Experience and Skill Necessary to Const.i.tute An Expert--Experts Held Competent to Testify in Court--Bank Officials and Employes Favored--An Expert On Signatures--Methods Experts Employ to Identify the Work of the Pen--Where and When an Expert's Services Are Needed--Large Field and Growing Demand for Experts--Qualifications of a Handwriting Expert--How the Work Is Done--A Good Expert Continuously Employed--The Expert and the Charlatan--Qualifying as an Expert--A System Which Produces Results--Princ.i.p.al Tests Applied by Handwriting Experts to Determine Genuineness--Identification of Individual by His Handwriting--How to Tell Kind of Ink and Process Used to Forge a Writing--Rules Followed by Experts in Determining Cases--The Testimony of a Handwriting Expert--Explaining Methods Employed to Detect Forged Handwriting--The Courts and Experts--What an Expert May Testify to--Trapping a Witness--Proving Handwriting by Experts--General Laws Regulating Experts--The Base Work of a Handwriting Expert--Important Facts an Expert Begins Examination With--A Few Words of Advice and Suggestion About "Pen Scope"--Detection of Forgery Easy If Rules Suggested Are Observed--Expert Witnesses, Courts, and Jurors.

There is no rule of law fixing the precise amount of experience or degree of skill necessary to const.i.tute a handwriting expert. The witness need not be engaged in any particular business or claim to be a professional expert. He must, however, claim to have experience.

With that limitation, cas.h.i.+ers, paying tellers, other bank officers, attorneys, bookkeepers, business men, conveyancers, county officials, photographers, treasurers and clerks of railroads, etc., and writing teachers have in various cases been held competent to testify as an expert. And it has been held that experience with handwriting generally or specially will enable the witness to testify specially or generally thereto. Bank officials, and especially cas.h.i.+ers, tellers, and book-keepers, are usually regarded as competent by most courts to pa.s.s authoritatively upon handwriting.

Generally speaking, the witness must claim to be an expert, or at least show that he had the means of gaining experience. He need not claim to be an expert, but he must claim to have had such experience as will make him feel competent to express an opinion.

He may always give the reasons for his opinion, but he must confine his testimony to his opinion based on the handwriting itself, and not as affected by the facts of the case. He cannot state any inferences deduced from the facts. He must also testify himself. Evidence of what an expert has said with reference to a writing is inadmissible for the purpose of bringing that opinion before the court.

An expert may be tested with other papers in the case, but not with irrelevant papers, and the whole of the test paper must be shown him.

He is ent.i.tled to see it all.

Letter-press copies and duplicates made by writing machines are not originals and therefore cannot be used as a standard of comparison.

An expert cannot give an opinion as to the genuineness of a signature based upon a comparison thereof with signatures not before the court.

The standard of comparison used by the expert must be produced in court. Photographic copies are admissible when accompanied by the originals. When original writings are in evidence and the genuineness thereof disputed, magnified photographic copies of the writing and of admitted genuine writings are admissible in evidence, for comparison by jury or expert when accompanied by competent preliminary proof that the copies are accurate in all respects except as to size and color.

The services of the expert are required in a wide range of civil and criminal cases. Where handwriting is questioned on notes, checks, drafts, receipts, wills, deeds, mortgages, bonds, anonymous letters, money orders, registered letter receipts, letters, pension papers, and in smuggling, and in short, on any kind of doc.u.ment where it becomes necessary to establish the ident.i.ty of the writer, the expert is called in. Life, liberty, honor, and property are frequently balanced on a pen point--a few marks of the pen being the determining feature of many a case.

The handwriting of the schoolboy and schoolgirl, though crude, is conventional and idealized. It has but few characteristics so long as the school model or copy-book hand is the goal. The pupil gives constant attention to the handwriting as well as to the thought. A number of students of about the same grade, under the same teacher, will write much alike. Fifteen or twenty of these students could each write a line on a page and it might baffle a layman, and perhaps puzzle an expert, to tell whether or not more than one person wrote the page. This constant striving after one ideal, and putting thought on the handwriting, had drawn them all toward that ideal and away from individuality.

The employment of professional handwriting experts as witnesses in court cases that often involve enormous sums of money, or the liberty or even the lives of suspected malefactors, has awakened widespread interest in the methods of this cla.s.s of experts, their resources and capabilities in conserving the ends of justice.

Many uninformed people appear to look on the handwriting expert as one who, by intuition or the possession of some mysterious occult power, is enabled to distinguish at a glance the true and the spurious in any questioned handwriting. Nothing could be further from the fact.

The secret of his power--as in any other line of scientific research--lies wholly in his intimate familiarity with the innumerable physical details which comprise the written line or word or letter--sometimes so slight a matter as the dotting of an _i_ or the placing of a comma. It is precisely the same specialized sense, born of acute observation and minute scrutiny that enables an expert chemist to take two powders of like weight and color, identical in appearance to the common eye and perhaps in taste to the common palate, and say: This drug is harmless, wholesome; that is a deadly poison--and to specify not only their various individual const.i.tuents but the exact proportion of each. The trained eye of the handwriting expert (as in another case could that of the expert chemist) can often detect at a glance certain distinguis.h.i.+ng earmarks of submitted writing that enable him to fix the ident.i.ty of the writer almost off-hand. In the the great majority of cases, however, the cunning of the forger calls for deliberate, painstaking study and investigation before the conscientious expert is willing to announce with absolute surety an opinion so often fraught with tremendous possibilities for good or for evil.

Nothing else that a person does is so characteristic as the handwriting, and the identification of the individual can be established by it better than by portraits or almost any other means.

As lawyers and laymen and courts are finding this out, the handwriting expert is more and more called upon to untangle snarled questions and to right wrongs.

It is only when attention is directed to this interesting science by the wide publicity given to some great case in which handwriting plays an important part that the notice of the general public is drawn to it. The average person would be surprised to know of the great number of cases that find their way to the office of the handwriting expert.

The man who has made a success in this line is constantly in demand, and makes frequent trips to distant points to appear as witness in courts.

Though nearly every large town has some one who devotes some attention to handwriting, there are but five or six men in this country who give to it practically all of their time, and who have gone very deeply into the subject.

To allow any person to qualify as an "expert" and to testify as such is a matter wholly within the discretion of the court. Unfortunately, courts frequently are lax in determining this question. Almost any one who can write is permitted to give alleged "expert" testimony regarding handwriting. In one well-known case, a case, too, involving life and death--the court unwittingly accepted the "expert" testimony of a witness who, it was afterward proven, was unable to write even so much as his own name. In the litigation attending the disposal of large mining interests held at b.u.t.te, Montana, the court permitted testimony in regard to the handwriting of the testator from a witness who admitted that he had seen the testator write but once, and that in lead pencil over twenty years before.

Any one accustomed to writing is usually allowed to qualify as an "expert." To the lay mind it is natural to confound experts who have studied the subject deeply in all its various phases with those who have had occasion to examine it casually, or who may possess uncommon facility with the pen without ever having had occasion to investigate scientifically just those little illusive points upon which the professional expert places his reliance.

Hence, when we read of "experts" being mistaken, or of an equal number of them appearing on opposite sides of the same case, it will nearly always be found upon investigation that they are of the cla.s.s described above, whose lack of thorough special training and specialized experience really should have disqualified them from giving testimony. Though any one may call himself an "expert," or a "professional expert," for that matter, thus opening the door to charlatanism in exactly the same manner that it is opened more or less in all vocations, yet, as a matter of fact, it is very rare that professional handwriting experts testify to a contrary state of facts, and the cases in which they have been proven mistaken are remarkably few.

Experts who have a natural apt.i.tude coupled with experience that produces skill are able, by a system which they have reduced to a science, to detect the spurious from the genuine handwriting with almost unvarying success. But their conclusions are not reached by second sight or sleight-of-hand methods, but rather by painstaking, scientific investigation.

Some of the princ.i.p.al tests applied to determine the genuineness of handwriting are these: The actual and relative slant of the letters or the angles between their stems and the base; the constancy and accuracy with which a straight line is followed as a base; the amount of pressure used on the pen and the part of the stroke where it is applied, and the positions of the line as a whole relative to the edges of the paper. The simplest punctuation mark under the microscope has its own individuality. It would be difficult to find two writers whose semicolons and quotation marks cannot be distinguished at a glance. The dotting of the _i_ and crossing of the _t_ afford an infinite number of relations between points and lines, and in both of these the time element and the freedom of muscular movement play important parts. Even the health and self-control of the penman, as well as the physical circ.u.mstances, show their influence on these little strokes.

The identification of the individual by means of his handwriting is of great value in legal trials and outside of courts. Its use cannot be dispensed with any more than can the knowledge obtained in any other line of science.

One often hears a man boast of his ability to successfully duplicate another person's signature or handwriting, and to the casual observer the counterfeit really will bear a striking resemblance to the original. However, let the two be placed in the hands of an expert on disputed handwriting and he will pretty quickly determine which is the original and which the forgery. Furthermore, he will tell you what process was used to make the duplicate, for there are several methods in use among forgers, and can even tell the composition of the ink.

In the determination of any handwriting there is no actual rule to guide an expert, as each case must be a law unto itself. The time of day that the signature was made and the condition for the moment of the individual have considerable bearing on the case, as has also the writer's general physical condition. Whether he was standing or sitting when the signature was made is a matter of importance. The quality of the paper and the make of the pen also have to be taken into consideration. In the case of forgery, where the forger has employed a finger movement writing with the muscles and apparently without education, there is scarcely any difficulty in arriving at a conclusion. The long flowing hand is easy to detect. When, however, the writing is finical a large ma.s.s of material has to be examined before a decision can be reached.

The testimony of an expert is without doubt the most dangerous kind of evidence when not supported by additional testimony; but, on the other hand, if the known facts fit in well, it is the strongest kind of testimony that can be submitted, and is usually known as "opinioned evidence." There probably is no cla.s.s of professional witnesses which is subjected to such severe cross-examination as experts in handwriting, and, considering the great importance of their testimony, they should be ever ready and willing to explain the methods employed by them in arriving at their decision, which, of course, is the result of a comparison of the a.n.a.lyses of several pieces of writing, taking account of all exaggerations, idiosyncrasies and unusual peculiarities.

All evidence of handwriting, except where the witness has seen the writing in question written, is derived from four sources: First, from comparison; second, from the internal evidence of the writing itself; third, from the knowledge of the writing, from having frequently seen a person write; fourth, where one has received letters whose authors.h.i.+p has been subsequently verified by admission, or acted upon in such manner as to receive the approval of the writer. Comparison is made between the writing in question and other writing admitted by the writer to be genuine, or otherwise proved to be so to the satisfaction of the court.

The evidence adduced from comparison is more or less certain according to the skill of the expert and the circ.u.mstances of the case. Internal evidence is such as is presented by the peculiar quality of lines when drawn or worked up by slowly following traced lines, retouched shades, rubbered surface of the paper, and every indication of an artificial or mechanical process of producing writing.

Testimony based upon a knowledge of writing gained from having at some time seen a person write is the most fallacious of all testimony respecting handwriting; it can be only a mental comparison of writing in question with such a vague idea or mental picture as may remain from a casual view of the writing at some time more or less remote; and besides, one may perceive another in the act of writing and yet have little or no opportunity of forming any mental conception of it, even at the time of writing.

In some cases where the courts will permit it the expert witness may fully explain upon what he bases his opinion but it oftener occurs that the trial judge will limit the evidence down to the very narrow scope and the mere relation of such facts as the jury can see. Where a forgery is well executed the difference in general appearance between it and the genuine writing of the person whose signature is questioned, when compared, is very small. The limit put upon expert evidence by the trial judge takes from the effect of the testimony all the benefit of an explanation of the facts upon which the opinion is founded.