seem regular.” Undeterred, Hale approached a second insurance
company. The application asked if Roan had previously been
turned down by a competitor. The answer “no” was filled in. An
insurance agent who reviewed the application later told
authorities, “I knew the questions in it had been answered falsely.”
This time, Hale had produced a creditor’s note to prove that he
was owed money by Roan. The debt that Hale had originally
claimed—$10,000 or $12,000—had grown inexplicably to $25,000,
the exact amount of the insurance policy. The creditor’s note was
purportedly signed by Roan and was dated “Jany, 1921”; this was
important, because it indicated that the note predated efforts to
obtain the insurance, giving legitimacy to Hale’s claim.
Handwriting and document analysis were emerging tools in the
field of criminal investigation. Although many people greeted the
new forensic sciences with reverence, attributing to them a godlike
power, they were often susceptible to human error. In 1894, the
French criminologist Bertillon had helped to wrongfully convict
Alfred Dreyfus of treason, having presented a wildly incorrect
handwriting analysis. But when applied carefully and discreetly,
document and handwriting analysis could be helpful. In the
infamous Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb murder case, in 1924,
investigators had correctly detected similarities between Leopold’s
typed school notes and the typed ransom note.
Agents working on Roan’s murder case later showed the
creditor’s note to an analyst at the Treasury Department, who was
known as the “Examiner of Questioned Documents.” He detected
that the date initially typed on the document had said “June,” and
that someone had then carefully rubbed out the u and the e.
“Photographs taken by means of slanting light show clearly the
roughening and raising of the fibres of the paper about the date
due to mechanical erasure,” the examiner wrote. He determined