Michael Ansell, Document & Handwriting Examiner
EWI member Michael Ansell describes his professional activity and demonstrates that, far from a quiet life in the laboratory, his work can produce some startling experiences.
When filling in the application form for EWI seminars I often have difficulty completing the entry ‘Profession’. This is because the simple description of my profession is ‘Handwriting Expert’ or ‘Document Examiner’. The problem with the former description is that when attending a seminar wearing a ‘Handwriting Expert’ badge I am usually asked the question “Do you determine a person’s character from their writing?” My answer is no. If it can be done at all, that is the province of graphology which is a different discipline. The problem with the latter description, ‘Document Examiner’, is that it tends to indicate that I examine the documents rather than the handwriting; but, as a science graduate, I do both. The description given in court is that I am a ‘forensic scientist specialising in the examination of documents and handwriting’. I am one of a small number of scientists who started work in a different forensic speciality – in my case drugs and toxicology – and subsequently trained in document examination.
The balance of work in my field is possibly different from that of many members of the EWI because almost all my income comes from forensic casework. Most of my work involves determining authorship of disputed handwriting and signatures on, for example, cheques, agreements, wills, benefit claims and so forth, and it is divided fairly equally between criminal and civil cases. My work also includes comparisons of typescripts and of inks as well as alterations to documents for which sophisticated scientific techniques may need to be employed. Anyone who watches crime programmes on television – either fact or fiction – will undoubtedly have seen ESDA (electro-static detection apparatus) in use looking for indented impressions of writing and possibly a video spectral comparator (VSC) being used for the non-destructive examination of inks. Both these essential pieces of equipment are found in any document examination laboratory.
The new technique on the block is Raman spectroscopy. Apart from its inclusion in the Vinland map programme, this technique does not appear to have had much publicity yet. However, the paper in which I wrote about it with a colleague has been published in Science and Justice – the magazine of the Forensic Science Society.
I have touched on the research side of my work and at present I am involved in a pilot project with the University of Kent and the Forensic Science Service on handwriting classification. I also lecture at the University of Kent and offer occasional training courses to banks and, through an EWI contact, seminars such as the one run last year in Mauritius on money laundering.
Although document examination does not usually feature in high profile criminal cases such as murders I did examine diaries in the Neilson case in North London. I have also been asked to examine ‘blood’ in a black magic case. Rather disappointingly, it turned out to be red ink! I have given evidence on at least 1500 occasions to a wide variety of courts and tribunals worldwide. One of the most interesting court venues was at a grand prix motor racing tribunal in Paris in which the signature of a steward disqualifying a driver had been forged. Very large sums of money can rest upon the result of such proceedings but the document examination work itself was not as interesting as a recent graffiti case for Southwark Crown Court; and nothing concentrates the mind more than an appearance at the Court of Appeal in London or Ghent.
Although I do not examine paintings for their authenticity I am sometimes asked to examine writing on paintings to determine their provenance. I examined the Tom Keating forgeries of Samuel Palmer paintings allegedly executed in 1842 on which the fluffy white clouds contained titanium dioxide which is a pigment not introduced until the 1960s.
However, offering to carry out an analysis of writing on paintings did once cause a horrible problem for my whole family. A few years ago I analysed a document on behalf of a client appearing in a civil court. At the time I had very little feedback about the case. I subsequently found out however that, in total, three experts had been instructed and all three of us had concluded that my client was not correct in what he was saying.
Some months later I was asked to compare writing on some miniature paintings, and this client was most insistent that I should open the package containing the paintings personally. The package was due to arrive by courier. But the next we knew about the matter was the arrival at midnight of two police officers who told me that there had been a serious incident in which one of the other experts had received a shoe box full of live shotgun cartridges and nails from the disenchanted client in the civil case which had exploded, seriously injuring both the expert and his wife. They had also found a box addressed to me on which they carried out a controlled explosion but were still so concerned that they asked us to leave our home for three days.
Clearly document examination can be more exciting than I anticipated - or maybe this is just life in the civil courts?