Kathryn Thorndycraft is one of an elite few forensic handwriting analyists in Scotland. The police-trained practitioner has gone into private practice, where she faces competition from self-professed experts whose credentials can be less than solid.

For want of a nail, the ship was sunk and the battle lost. Such fine detail can apply in the largest of criminal trials too, where the largest, most carefully constructed Crown case can stand or fall on the single, crucial piece of evidence that completes the chain linking the offender to the offence. There are few practitioners of this kind of work, a scarcity which ensures that the few who possess genuine expertise become invaluable to the prosecution network. So much so that one such practitioner received bomb threats at his home.

Kathryn Thorndycraft, who practices the mysterious art of forensic handwriting analysis from an upstairs room at her home somewhere in Scotland, is undeterred. Cases like the infamous Klondyke affair, which in 1994 saw a Spanish sea captain sentenced for 30 years for smuggling £100 million worth of cocaine into Scotland -the UK’s largest drugs haul- relied on her handwriting analysis to secure the conviction. And she had to give evidence against a client of one of the biggest guns in the law. Not bad for a woman who, at the time, was still a novice, giving evidence in what was her first case, in an intimidating High Court.

“Donald Findlay QC had to cross examine me in the High Court in Glasgow, and this was my first big case in court, a huge case. And of course he asked me how I was qualified as a document examiner,” she told The Firm when we met her at her home.

“I was really pleased, I really stood up to him, and we won that case, which made Scottish legal history. There aren’t too many people in my field, especially in the UK. Most have come from a government or police background. In the states there are quite a few “self taught” people, who started off as graphologists. It stands you in good stead to have a police background, especially when you are standing up in court and being cross examined.     

“If I have a case, I need known writings, sample writings for comparison, and we had a little note found in the captain’s cabin, which linked him to two men helping him in the Ullapool area. So we had to prove this little bit of writing was his. After he left Scotland he went off to Spain, through the Bahamas, to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and had to fill in forms to check his boat through customs, so all these customs and excise men witnessed him filling in the forms. Whilst he was in the Halifax detention centre, he tried to commit suicide, he cut his throat, but survived. He wrote a really, really long suicide note in beautiful handwriting. The warder at the prison saw him doing this, and he had to come and be a witness as well, and we used that as his known writing.”

The fact that Thorndycraft’s main competition now comes from graphology charlatans claiming to have court-capable expertise highlights a crucial gap in the justice system that has only recently emerged. A lot has changed since the former bank cashier followed her curiosity and answered a newspaper job advert for a document examiner with the local police force. She soon found herself training with the CID, learning the skills of scene of crime photography and examination of handwriting and fingerprints, before specialising in handwriting. She was then, crucially, authorised to appear in court by the then Scottish Secretary to be an expert for the courts in handwriting and document examination, a certification which has since been somewhat bastardised and emasculated, to say the least.

Thorndycraft now works independently of the police and the prosecution service in the private sector, although is still asked to apply her expertise in court cases, in addition to her work undertaken principally for corporate clients.

“I spotted a niche in the market, and opened up my own business in 1998, starting out on my own. I don’t get police work in Scotland. In England, no police office does its own work, it is all outside agencies,” she explains.

“My clients are defence lawyers, firms with internal fraud, members of the public receiving anonymous letters. In a firm someone might sign someone else’s signature on a contract, or to say something has been examined or delivered. I get a lot of drugs orientated cases, looking at what are called tick lists, where someone, an accused, answers the phone and writes down initials and quantities of drugs. They will have a pile of paper by the telephone, which the drug squad will find, with someone’s handwriting on. Lots of people may live there, there may be several people’s writing on one piece of paper. The defence may ask me to determine what their client did or did not write.”
 
Kathryn’s workroom at home is unprepossessing, lined with the sort of specialist and general books you would expect to see in the relaxed inner sanctum of the professional. But in addition to the usual PCs and printers, the desktops are also home to a curious array of specialist hardware, pricier than a luxury car but as unassuming looking as a microwave oven, that are the tools in the workshop of this most alchemical of trades.

“When I went private, I had to give exactly the same service as the police do, so I bought all the equipment I used in the police lab,” she explains, referring to the radio spectral comparator in the corner, which breaks down inks for analysis. There is also an electrostatic detector, an apparatus which emits an electrostatic charge into a document for analysis. The charge attracts overlaid plastic to indentations on the paper, and when carbon fibres are sprinkled over, the paper exhibits a unique ‘fingerprint’ It is, as she pointed out, something a little bit more methodical than graphology.

“If possible, for the best evidence, I need the original document. Sometimes the original has been thrown away or only copies are available, and that can lower the probability of authorship,” she explains.

Kathryn Thorndycraft is one of an elite few experts whose credentials and experience can stand the robust scrutiny of a judicial cross examination and not be found wanting. The fact that her area of expertise is intermittently invaded by purveyors of graphology whose scientific methodology is as reliable as a horoscope proves that this most fragile corner of the justice system requires shoring up to ensure that those convicted on the basis if expert evidence can be certain of the probity of the scrutiny that has been applied.