WAS FOSTER'S "SUICIDE" NOTE FORGED? The Senate Whitewater hearings have devoted many hours to the so-called suicide note of former White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster that was allegedly found torn up into 27 scraps of yellow paper in his briefcase six days after his death. The scraps of paper were allegedly found by Steven Neuwirth, a White House Associate Counsel who was boxing up Foster's personal belongings to be returned to his family. Neuwirth testified that he took the scraps to White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum.
The note was undated and unsigned. It said nothing whatever about suicide or farewells to Foster's family. It did suggest that Foster was unhappy about criticism directed at him and the Clintons. This was accepted as evidence that Foster was sufficiently depressed to commit suicide.
The Park Police, who were investigating Foster's death, asked Sgt. Larry Lockhart, U.S. Capitol Police handwriting expert, now retired, to verify that the note was written by Foster. Lockhart was shown the note and a copy of a signed letter known to have been handwritten by Foster. He gave a written opinion that the note and the letter had probably been written by the same person.
The government refused to release photocopies of the reconstructed note and fought efforts by The Wall Street Journal to obtain a copy under the Freedom of Information Act. That is currently on appeal. Those interested could arrange to view the note at the Department of Justice, but this precluded subjecting it to independent tests to verify that Foster had written it. Suspicious minds concluded that was the reason for the refusal to make photocopies available.
On August 2, The Wall Street Journal breached the wall of secrecy by publishing a photo of the actual reconstructed note on its editorial page. This made it possible for the first time to check Sgt. Lockhart's finding that Foster wrote the note. The known sample of Foster's handwriting with which he compared it, a handwritten letter signed by Foster, dated June 18, 1993, can be found on page 1714 of the two volumes of testimony and documents on the death of Vincent Foster released by the Senate Banking Committee last January.
To our untutored eyes, the letter and the note did not appear to have been written by the same hand.... The differences were quite pronounced.
On August 6, Reed Irvine met with Lockhart, showing him a sheet of paper with 12 words that were found in both the Foster letter (Senate Banking Committee Hearings 1994, p. 1714) and the note. They had been copied and enlarged greatly on a copying machine. Lockhart was told that these words came from two documents, neither of which was identified. He was asked if, in his professional opinion, all 12 words had been written by the same person. Lockhart proceded to divide the words into two groups based on differences that he observed. In one group he placed four words from the letter and one from the note. In the other group he placed six words from the note and one from the letter.
In other words he made only one mistake in grouping the words known to have been written by Foster and the words taken from the unsigned note. That was a capital "I" written in cursive script.
When shown blow-ups of parts of the two documents so he could see the context of the words, Lockhart said "very possibly" and "probably" the two documents were written by different persons. He pointed out indications of conscious efforts to imitate Foster's handwriting by the person who wrote the note. At that point he didn't know that he was reversing the opinion he gave the Park Police in July 1993. When that was brought to his attention he acknowledged that he had not used any enlargements for his 1993 analysis. He said he thought the differences he had observed between the two documents might be explained by Foster's mental state or by medication he was taking. He didn't know that the note was supposed to have been written perhaps more than two weeks before Foster's death, long before he had taken any anti-depressant.
The reversal of his opinion had been taped with his knowledge, but he declined to state publicly that the authenticity of the note should be rechecked, using additional documents known to have been written by Foster and employing magnification.
A few days later, another professional handwriting expert took the same test we gave Lockhart. She came to the same conclusion as Lockhart, saying there was a "good probability" they had been written by different persons. (Both experts agreed that it would be desirable to compare the torn-up note with more samples of Foster's handwriting.)
After bringing this to the attention of the Senate Select Committee, the Justice Department and several journalists, we obtained some additional samples of Foster's handwriting and a better copy of the note than the one we copied from the August 2 Wall Street Journal. We haven't yet submitted these to any handwriting experts, but we have scrutinized them carefully.
One thing that is clear is that Foster did not always write with the same care that he wrote the letter that was used as the exemplar when Lockhart first authenticated the note and then reversed himself. Nor was he always consistent in the way he wrote individual words.
The fact that he was writing more carefully when he wrote the letter does help explain the sharp difference in the appearance of the two documents that first gave rise to suspicions that the note was a forgery. The fact that he was not always consistent also weakens the case for forgery, since it rested heavily on differences in the way he wrote the one word that was used several times in both documents--the word "the." These differences were easily seen when the words were enlarged.
That said, we still see indications that the note may have been forged. While the individual words appear close enough to have been written by the same person, given the inconsistencies in Foster's writing, the overall appearance still has a different look in the opinion of some who have examined all the documents. And there are inconsistencies that may be significant. For example, there are four capital I's in cursive script in the documents one in the "suicide" note, one in the letter and two in the other notes. The only one that is distinctly different is the one in the "suicide" note. More study is needed, and we plan to seek the opinions of more experts.