Durst’s attorneys, he said, will probably look for a credible expert to say that “Beverley” is a fairly common misspelling and that the similar handwriting characteristics aren’t unique enough to prove the two notes are by the same person.A case of mistaken identity. Osborn declined to talk to The Times, saying in an email that he is a potential witness and that a Los Angeles prosecutor assigned to the case had asked him not to speak to the media.Ī trial could come down to “dueling experts” and how they view similarities and differences between the two sets of handwriting, said defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Adam Braun. In the HBO documentary, “The Jinx,” forensic document examiner John Paul Osborn said there were unique handwriting characteristics between the “cadaver” note and materials filmmakers gave him as examples of Durst’s writing. In both cases, she said, there were Ls with a little curve at the bottom, calling it “a point of comparison.” There are also Es in both samples in which the top cross bar is longer than the bottom cross bar and Ss in which the bottom part bulges larger than the top part. Lowe, president of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation, said she’d seen the writing samples from the documentary posted online and thought there was “a strong probability” that both samples were written by the same person. Director Andrew Jarecki held up blown-up versions of the misspelled city from the envelope of each and asked, “Can you tell me which one you didn’t write?” In the final episode of a six-part HBO documentary about Durst and his links to three deaths, he admitted he wrote the letter to Berman but denied writing the “cadaver” note. In both samples, the writing is in all capital letters, and Beverly Hills is misspelled as “Beverley Hills.” Now it appears likely to feature once again in a high-profile murder case as Los Angeles awaits the extradition of real estate scion Robert Durst from New Orleans in connection with the December 2000 killing of writer Susan Berman.Īmong the evidence against Durst is a letter sent to Berman in 1999 that has handwriting strikingly similar to that on an anonymous note sent to Beverly Hills police at the time of Berman’s killing, telling them that they would find “a cadaver” at Berman’s house. Handwriting evidence has a long and sometimes controversial history.
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