Forgery is pretty much a self-serving crime. Either the perpetrator of the fraud is trying to blame someone for something, cover up their own actions, or benefit financially, with the last category likely being the most common.

Document examination starts out with the rudiments of examining ink and paper, and matching it to the era in which it was reportedly produced. Human intellect and a good eye goes a long ways, but when that isn’t far enough, enter the technological aids such as ultra violet light for detecting erasures, and carbon dating to determine the age of paper. Forgery is as old as the hills, and proving it involves not only chasing down the modern tamperer, but the ancient one as well, when antiquity is in question. Forensics spans the ages.

One of the most frequent areas of forgery is in Wills. A person’s handwriting often deteriorates with age, and the elderly will often struggle to write as they once did. A forgery of their handwriting may contain letter formation, spacing, and breaks in the writing not consistent with the actual person’s hand. The German magazine Stern, learned a $4 million dollar lesson in 1983, when it purchased 62 volumes of private diaries reportedly written by Hitler. They failed to notice that all the entries were made in a firm, consistent hand, disregarding the fact that Hitler’s hand became less and less controlled as palsy affected him.

For the sloppy forger, it’s sometimes the choice of words and phrasing or sentence structure that gives them away. Or it can be not going that extra mile to obtain the paper appropriately available for the date on the document.  In 1992, Emily Will, a document examiner was asked to examine what purported to be an original copy of the Declaration of Independence. And a fine example it was, right down to the signatures. But the paper had been manufactured by a process not available until 100 years after the signing. What Ms. Will examined, was one of a commemorative set of hand-inscribed copies, done in 1876 to celebrate the Centennial. It was a forgery…but a “legitimate” one.

Sometime the forgers “get it right”, and make stupid mistakes. Mark Hofmann led the Mormon church down the garden path in the mid 1980s with letters purportedly to and from founder Joseph Smith, explaining much of the missing church history and doctrine. His paper trail ended in murder and a jail sentence.  However, Hofmann had not restricted his forgeries to things ecclesiastical. In 1997, Emily Dickenson’s hometown library purchased a previously unknown treatise on death and the meaning of life. Sotheby’s auction house complimented the forger for their attention to detail, having somehow managed to acquire not only paper from the appropriate era with watermark intact, but for having used the same writing instruments that Dickenson did. The forgery only came to light when a Dickenson collector reported having been offered the same paper, ten years before, by Mark Hofmann.