The Use of Space in the Handwriting of Murderers

Copyright 1993 - 2004 by Nigel Bradley

Introduction

Various attempts have been made to identify criminals from non-criminals solely on the basis of handwriting inspection (for example see Iannetta 2000) as this would provide a useful tool in criminal investigations.

The space occupied by handwriting may offer a clue to a writer's thoughts. A research design proposed by Mendel in 1947 was adapted whereby the zones of one hundred words were examined.  The entry for ‘Marketing’ in the Encyclopedia Britannica was used.  Upper zone letters were defined as b,d,h,k,l,t and lower zone letters were g,j,p,q,y.  The letter f is unique since it spans all three zones.   Any capital letters were excluded from the analysis. The frequency of use of particular parts of the written language found were as seen in Table 1. (This was done  in February 1993)

Table 1 The space occupied by words in the English language

These results are very similar to the findings of Mendel. He found an incidence of exactly 74% for middle zone letters and the next most important zone being the upper zone. Prompted by this simple observation further research is needed to continually repeat the above exercise, then to discover whether it differs from individual to individual. Does a romantic writer use more upper zone letters than a serial killer for example?

In 1996 the study was extended to examine the use of the three zones of handwriting by two murderers - Fred West (12 murders) and Michael Sams (1 murder). Two specimens of writing obtained from the individuals, they had been reproduced in newspapers (News of the World and Mail on Sunday 1995). These were inspected ad set against a control sample created in 1993 (above). They are shown in Table 2. A further example was added in 2003 on a script by Ian Huntley (2 murders). In Huntley's case it must be noted that he wrote the specimen in capital letters. This appears to be the usual method he uses. Click here to see the SPECIMEN used.

Table 2 Control against three murderers

These results encourage us to examine the writings of other murderers.   A working hypothesis is that these types of individuals are more likely to choose to use words with letters which are in the lower zone.   The hypothesis cannot be rejected from the analysis above.   The implications to criminology of such findings are important.

References

Iannetta, K,  Craine JF, McLaughlin DG,(2000) Danger Between the Lines: A reference Manual For the Profiling of Violent Behaviour, Hawaii

Mendel, Alfred O. (1947) Personality in Handwriting; a Handbook of American Graphology. Stephen Daye Press, New York

News of the World    8/1/1995 pg.7  (West specimen)

The Mail on Sunday 19/1/1995 pg.1 (Sams specimen)

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