Perfect Murder, Perfect Town - Lawrence Schiller [84]
Alex Hunter took great interest in the proceedings, since he considered the handwritten ransom note the single most important piece of evidence in the Ramsey case. Besides, Michael Tigar was associated with Ramsey attorneys Hal Haddon and Lee Foreman, so his motion in the Oklahoma City case might offer insight into the Ramsey team’s thinking.
The two defense lawyers representing Nichols and McVeigh were attempting to exclude testimony from the government’s expert witnesses, who would tell jurors that McVeigh’s handwriting matched that of a “Robert Kling” who had signed a rental contract for the truck used in the Oklahoma City bombing. In his oral argument, Tigar told the court that handwriting analysis was “junk science.”
During the hearing, Judge Matsch said, “The problem with handwriting is that there is no verification-type testing of these opinion results. In addition, there has never been within the discipline any agreement on how to express the results.” The judge added, “There is no standardized nomenclature. Therefore, it seems to me that we should draw the distinction between somebody getting on the stand and saying ‘Yeah, written by the same person, or no, not written by the same person’ versus ‘These are the similarities or these are the dissimilarities,’ and the jury can decide.”
Judge Matsch asked Merritt whether she would object if a government witness were instructed to note only similarities or discrepancies.
“I object to it because it is too subjective,” the attorney replied. “When we question these handwriting experts on the stand, you will see that they cannot answer basic questions, such as how many differences does it take before you will say that this is an irreconcilable, significant difference?”
“That’s the point I made earlier,” Matsch replied, “that there are no standards. And because there are no standards, it’s not verifiable.”
Later in the proceedings, Merritt added, “It’s not science; and it’s not science because it cannot be empirically tested. It isn’t subject to peer review or publication. There is no known error rate. There is really a dearth of studies.”
Attorney Tigar added: “The problem is that handwriting analysis, like hair analysis, is one of those fields invented by a small group of people. These people did not have any outside folks criticizing their work. There is the danger of oversell.”
In the end, the judge ruled that he would not bar the government from presenting a witness to testify about similarities between the signature of “Kling” and McVeigh. But he would not allow any testimony offering definitive conclusions.
Weeks later, the court issued an even more restrictive ruling, and federal prosecutors dropped their plans to call handwriting analysts.
In Boulder, Alex Hunter asked his staff to study the limitations they might encounter in presenting handwriting evidence in court.
On February 7, Detective Arndt reinterviewed Bill McReynolds and his wife, Janet, upon their return from a long-planned trip to Spain. Again they said they had been at home the night of JonBenét’s death. When Arndt asked what McReynolds knew about JonBenét’s statement to Barbara Kostanick—that Santa would pay her a secret visit the day after Christmas—McReynolds said that though he was Santa at the Ramseys’ Christmas party, he had never spoken to the child about meeting her. McReynolds agreed to give the police handwriting, hair, and blood samples. Several days later, Detective Gosage began a series of interviews with the family members who, according to the McReynoldses, had visited them on Christmas Day.
That same week, Koby and Eller met with Alex Hunter in his office at the Justice Center. Hofstrom and Wise joined them. Chief Koby said that his department would no longer share critical information on the case with the DA, because Eller thought that they might pass it on to the Ramseys