A magistrate sat in a Delhi court while a man named Chandrakant Jha filled 64 pages with his own handwriting. The pages were not a confession. They were specimens, the raw material a handwriting expert would set beside the letters that had mocked the Delhi Police in 2006 and 2007. When the three murder cases against Jha reached the High Court, the comparison was one of three threads the judges tied together. His lawyers attacked every one of them, the expert’s methods included.
Serial cases attract letters. A killer who writes to the police or the press leaves behind the one piece of evidence that is truly his own, and prosecutors have long known it. What the courts have done with that paper varies enormously. Sometimes an examiner’s opinion carried a conviction. Sometimes an examiner said plainly that there was too little ink on the page to say anything. In a few cases the examination was turned on the police themselves. The eight cases here, from India, Belarus, England, California, Missouri, Georgia and North Carolina, show the range, and in most of them the expert was one strand of a larger rope, not the rope itself.
Chandrakant Jha was a vegetable hawker from rural Bihar who lived and worked in north Delhi. Between October 2006 and May 2007 three young men were killed in the city, and each time handwritten letters in Hindi reached the investigation that taunted the police and read as confessions. Jha was arrested in May 2007, and in January 2013 a Delhi sessions court convicted him of all three murders and of causing evidence of them to disappear. He was sentenced to death twice and to life imprisonment for the rest of his life in the third case. In January 2016 the Delhi High Court upheld every conviction but replaced both death sentences with imprisonment for the rest of his natural life, without remission.
Delhi Police attribute seven killings to him in all, beginning in 1998. Only three were ever proved in court, and one of those three victims has never been identified. The letters were the thread that made the three cases one. A letter linked to the April 2007 case named two police officers, warned that more killings would follow and was signed "CC." A letter in green ink from May 2007 confessed to that killing and two earlier ones and mocked the police for failing to catch the writer. The High Court treated that letter as the link between the cases, though it declined to accept its boast about the number of killings a year as proved.
Handwriting was the last link in the chain, and it was built on paper obtained under supervision. A magistrate oversaw the taking of 64 pages of specimen writing from Jha. A handwriting expert compared them with the letters and concluded that Jha had written the letters. The High Court did not rely on the expert alone. It also weighed what the letters said, which matched what the police knew of the crimes, and it set the handwriting beside the telephone records and the recoveries made on Jha’s information, which it found consistent with one another.
The defense contested almost everything. Its lawyers put it to witness after witness that they were testifying at the investigating officer’s direction. They questioned how Jha had been identified, since no formal identification parade was held, and they challenged the handwriting expert’s methods and the custody of the samples. The prosecution called 47 witnesses in the Anil Mandal case and 61 in the Upender case, among them DNA and handwriting experts. The trial court described the three crimes as following a "definite pattern."
The handwriting evidence returned on appeal in an unusual form. In April 2015 Jha asked the High Court to admit 47 replies he had obtained under the Right to Information Act after his trial, covering subjects such as police deployment records, evidence-room entries and handwriting samples. Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Ashutosh Kumar found most of them repetitive or irrelevant, picked out five that might matter to his defense, and asked the state to answer on those. The final hearing was before Justices Khanna and R.K. Gauba, who delivered three judgments on January 27, 2016. They called the denials in Jha’s own statement "a false denial in the teeth of overwhelming evidence to the contrary." The letters mattered to the sentence as well as to the verdict. The court noted that they were aimed at the police and that in them Jha cast himself as a man who had been harassed and falsely accused, and it weighed that against the brutality of the crimes before it chose a life term over death.
Jha was paroled for 90 days in 2023 and did not return. The Crime Branch arrested him again on January 17, 2025, at Old Delhi Railway Station.
Gennady Mikhasevich was convicted of killings that stretched over 14 years in the Vitebsk region of Soviet Belarus, from 1971 to 1985. In May 1987 a Soviet court found him guilty of the murders of 36 women, with other charges, and sentenced him to death, according to the Belarusian human rights center Viasna. He had confessed to 43 killings. He was a state-farm mechanic, a Communist Party member and a volunteer in the druzhina, the civilian auxiliary that assisted the Soviet police.
Before he was caught, others had been convicted of killings in the series. Viasna’s list of people wrongly convicted of killings in the series runs to 14, and one of them, N. T., was sentenced to death in 1979 and executed in 1980. O. A. was acquitted at his first trial, but the Supreme Court overturned the acquittal and he was sentenced to 15 years. Zerkalo says his false confession followed a forged forensic report and threats. N. T. was rehabilitated after the real killer was caught.
Mikhasevich then tried to steer the investigation. He wrote an anonymous letter to the regional newspaper Vitebsky Rabochy in the name of the "Patriots of Vitebsk," Zerkalo reported. The letter went to the KGB. A Major Shvachko asked his superiors for help and went to Mechislav Grib, the head of the regional police. What caught Grib’s attention, he said, was not the tone of the letter but the fact that it named the exact place where a crime had been committed. Someone who knew a detail like that was either a witness or the person responsible.
The investigators decided to compare the handwriting of the men of the region with the letter. Grib put the number of samples at 600,000. When the first checks had been made, Zerkalo reported, Grib asked for more, from the office of the state farm and from the technical school in Gorodok where Mikhasevich had studied. The graphologists confirmed a match. Grib placed the arrest on a Sunday in November 1985, just after that confirmation, and said that Mikhasevich offered no resistance and then confessed.
Viasna calls the evidence conclusive and lists the handwriting, his blood group, his accurate knowledge of the places involved and belongings of the victims. Other accounts give a different sample count and a different month for the arrest than Grib does. Viasna reports the death sentence of May 19, 1987, and says the execution took place on January 19, 1988.
The Hull case reverses the usual story. Between 1973 and 1979 eleven fires in and around Hull killed 26 people, and all but one were first recorded as accidents. In 1980 a 19-year-old who called himself Bruce Lee confessed to the single fire that had plainly been set on purpose, one in December 1979 that killed three brothers, and then to ten others. At Leeds Crown Court on January 20, 1981, he pleaded guilty to 26 counts of manslaughter on the ground of diminished responsibility and 11 counts of arson, and he was ordered to be detained in a secure hospital without limit of time. Every case against him rested on what he had said.
Because the statements were the case, their paper became the question. After his conviction he wrote that he had set "some of the fires but not all of them." In December 1983 the Court of Appeal quashed one count of arson and 11 of manslaughter for the Hessle fire after finding weaknesses in the scientific evidence about it. The rest stood.
On October 24, 2019, the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the remaining convictions to the Court of Appeal. It cited four grounds, one of them a document examiner’s evidence on the written statements. The others were psychological and forensic linguistic evidence on the reliability of his confessions, failures to follow the Judges' Rules and the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in his interviews, and expert evidence on the causes of the fires.
The court heard four kinds of fresh evidence. A forensic linguist, Professor Coulthard, found that parts of the statements answered questions, although the officer who took them, Sagar, had told the 1983 court that they were written down from dictation with "no questions and answers." A document examiner using electrostatic detection found that two pages of the statement of June 6 and 7, 1980, two pages of a statement of June 27 and four pages of one of June 30 had been rewritten, although Sagar had said any changes were initialed on the face of the documents. Two psychologists described Lee as vulnerable, suggestible and compliant; one accepted that he could not say the confessions were false. Fire experts for each side produced five joint reports, and for most of the fires they could not exclude an accident.
The court weighed this with care and gave the examiner’s finding little. The linguistic evidence showed how the account had been recorded, it said, not that false details had been put into it by questioning. The rewritten passages had not changed the sense of what he said and appeared to add detail, and nothing improper had been shown in the rewriting. On February 8, 2022, the Court of Appeal (Fulford LJ, Hilliard J and Lord Hughes) quashed the convictions for two further fires and upheld the rest as safe. The court found that he could not have set those two fires. It upheld the others because he had pleaded guilty in open court with legal advice. Twelve manslaughter convictions stand. As of February 2022 he was reported to be held in a secure mental hospital.
The electrostatic work did not free Lee. What it did was show that the statements had been revised after they were taken, and it left the Court of Appeal to decide whether that mattered.
Cary Stayner was a maintenance worker at a motel in El Portal, just outside Yosemite National Park. In February 1999 three guests there, Carole Sund, her daughter Juli, 15, and Silvina Pelosso, 16, were killed. For five months the FBI and local agencies pursued the case, and most of their attention fell on other men. Stayner had been interviewed once, as a possible witness, and was not treated as a suspect.
On March 24, 1999, an agent at the FBI’s Modesto office received a letter containing a hand-drawn map of a spot at Don Pedro Reservoir. Stayner’s right thumbprint was later identified on the stamp. Juli Sund’s death came to light in Tuolumne County the next day. He was arrested in Wilton, Sacramento County, on July 24, 1999, after the July killing of Joie Armstrong, a park instructor, and he confessed to all four deaths. He pleaded guilty to Armstrong’s murder in federal court on September 13, 2000, and received life without parole. In August 2002 a Santa Clara County jury convicted him of first-degree murder, with other charges, and the court sentenced him to death and a consecutive term of 45 years.
At the state trial the defense conceded the killings and argued for second-degree murder, so the handwriting was a small matter. It is the part that shows how little an examiner can sometimes say. According to the California Supreme Court’s account of the trial, an FBI fingerprint examiner testified that latent prints gathered in the investigation did not belong to Stayner, and a document examiner said there was too little handwriting in the letter to say whether he wrote it. The defense had conceded the killings, and the jury convicted him.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment on April 30, 2026. He was reported to be held at Pelican Bay State Prison as of May 28, 2026.
Charles Chitat Ng was convicted in February 1999 of the murders of 11 people in Calaveras County, California, in 1984 and 1985. The prosecution’s case tied him to Leonard Lake, who was never tried, and a good part of it concerned paper. Dennis Goza, the owner of a San Francisco moving company, received a letter that seemed to be from Clifford Peranteau, saying he had a new job, a new home and a new girlfriend. It was typed on a typewriter later traced to the Wilseyville property, and a police investigator testified that Lake had forged it. A check on the account of Kathleen Allen, dated May 2, 1985, was made out to Randy Jacobson, a man investigators later linked to Lake, and a handwriting expert testified that Lake had probably written it and signed her name.
The documents pointed at Lake, not at Ng. Letters and a check in the names of the dead were, on the state’s evidence, the work of a man who never stood trial, and the jury convicted Ng on the whole of the case. Ng was sentenced to death on June 30, 1999. The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in its entirety on July 28, 2022. His present place of custody has not been reported.
Faye Copeland was 69 when a jury in Chillicothe, Missouri, convicted her in November 1990 of five counts of first-degree murder. The dead were five transient men who had come to work for her husband, Ray, on the couple’s farm near Mooresville, in Livingston County. Prosecutors said the men had been used in a cattle-buying fraud. There was no evidence that Faye Copeland killed anyone with her own hands. The state’s case was that she was an accomplice, and the jury agreed.
The paper trail was hers. Officers recovered notes in her handwriting with the banking details of two of the recruits and the name and license number of the woman who had driven a man who escaped back to the farm. A list of names in her handwriting, each marked either "back" or with an X, was kept in a camera case. Three of the dead men’s names carried an X, according to the Supreme Court of Missouri. The Eighth Circuit called the list perhaps the strongest evidence against her. In closing the prosecutor told the jury that X marks the spot; the defense objected in part, and the judge sustained the objection as a statement of personal opinion. On appeal the state court held that the inference, that the men marked with an X were dead, was a fair one to draw.
A handwriting expert did the other work. Letters and notes she sent to Ray in jail were used at trial, after jail staff opened them under a card she signed at booking agreeing that her mail could be opened. In one she wrote that once the search warrant expired, things would cool down. A handwriting expert matched one letter, which the sheriff had copied, to samples of her writing.
The Associated Press reported in 2003 that twelve names on the list had X marks beside them, that five of those men had died, and that prosecutors believed three other men had also been killed. No other deaths were charged. The list was never put to a court as proof of more than the five.
The jury recommended death on four counts and life without parole on one. A federal court upheld the convictions but vacated the death sentences in 1999, and the Eighth Circuit affirmed that ruling on November 30, 2000. She was sentenced to life without parole in 2001. In 1999 a congressman, Kenny Hulshof, said the list showed she was more of an accomplice than she claimed. She had a stroke on August 10, 2002, was paroled on medical grounds, and died in a nursing home in December 2003, aged 82.
Anjette Lyles was a Macon restaurant owner whose trial in the fall of 1958 drew reporters from across Georgia and beyond. A Bibb County jury convicted her of murdering her daughter, Marcia Elaine Lyles, who was nine, with arsenic. The jury did not recommend mercy, and she was sentenced to die in the electric chair. The Supreme Court of Georgia upheld the verdict in July 1959.
The prosecution also led evidence about three earlier deaths, those of her first husband, her second husband and her first husband’s mother. The death of her second husband, Joe Neal Gabbert, mattered in two ways. Witnesses testified that he too had died of arsenic poisoning. And among the documents the state put in evidence was a letter to the Veterans Administration, dated June 21, 1955, that purported to be written and signed by Joe Neal Gabbert. As the Supreme Court summarized the evidence, this document and others were forgeries made by the accused.
Two documents tied to the mother-in-law were part of the case. One was an instrument dated September 2, 1957, which purported to be signed by Mrs. Ben F. Lyles, Sr., and which directed that a payment be delivered to the defendant. The other was a photostatic copy of a will said to be hers. WMAZ reported that prosecutors argued the signature on the will had been forged. The court wrote that there was evidence the documents "were not only forgeries but forged by the accused." A handwriting expert testified about forged signatures, WMAZ reported, and canceled checks, some dated after Marcia’s death, came into evidence.
Justice Candler, writing for the court, held that the documents were relevant because there was evidence she had forged them. On the earlier deaths the court relied on Georgia decisions allowing proof of other crimes when they show a plan, scheme or motive, and held that each death had come from the same uncommon poison and had brought the defendant money. The court acknowledged that the case against her was circumstantial but held that it authorized the verdict. Presiding Justice Wyatt dissented from the rulings on the earlier deaths and on the documents. No trial of Lyles over the deaths of her husbands or her mother-in-law has been reported. After a sanity board found her insane she was sent to Central State Hospital in Milledgeville, where she died in 1977, and the death sentence was never carried out.
Blanche Taylor Moore has been under sentence of death in North Carolina since November 16, 1990. A Forsyth County jury found that she killed Raymond Reid, a store manager who had been her companion for years, by giving him arsenic over many months in 1986. In October 2026, at 93, she was still listed by the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction as an active inmate on death row. She has always said she is innocent.
A letter signed with a man’s name, which claimed responsibility for the poisonings, became part of the case against her. WTVD reported that a state examiner ruled out the man named in it as the writer with 99 percent certainty. She has always denied writing it.
The cases do not line up behind a single lesson. In Delhi, handwriting was one of three links the High Court said fit together. In Vitebsk, a letter and a very large sample drawn from a whole population of men produced a name, and the confession followed. In Hull, the examination of statements showed rewriting that the judges held did not change their sense. In California, one examiner said there was too little handwriting to speak and another that the prints were not the defendant’s, and the jury convicted a man whose lawyers had conceded the killings. In Missouri a plain list in a woman’s hand carried more weight than any opinion about it. Where the paper spoke clearly, the courts used it; where it could not, they looked elsewhere.
• 1971 to 1985: Mikhasevich’s killings in the Vitebsk region, according to Viasna.
• 1979: N. T. sentenced to death; executed in 1980.
• January 20, 1981: Bruce Lee pleads guilty at Leeds Crown Court to 26 counts of manslaughter and 11 of arson.
• December 1983: Court of Appeal quashes the Hessle convictions.
• 1985: Mikhasevich arrested, in November by Grib’s account, after graphologists confirm the Vitebsky Rabochy letter match.
• May 19, 1987: Mikhasevich sentenced to death (Viasna).
• January 19, 1988: Mikhasevich executed, per Viasna.
• November 10, 1990: Faye Copeland convicted; death sentences later vacated (1999).
• November 16, 1990: Moore’s judgment of death entered.
• October 1958: Anjette Lyles convicted; Georgia Supreme Court affirms July 8, 1959.
• February 24, 1999: Charles Ng convicted of 11 murders; sentenced June 30, 1999.
• March 24, 1999: anonymous letter with map reaches the FBI in Modesto in the Stayner case.
• September 13, 2000: Stayner pleads guilty in federal court to the murder of Joie Armstrong.
• August 2002: Santa Clara County jury convicts Stayner of three murders.
• 2002: Faye Copeland paroled on medical grounds; dies December 2003.
• 2007 to 2013: Jha arrested May 2007; convicted January 2013.
• January 27, 2016: Delhi High Court upholds Jha’s convictions and commutes both death sentences.
• October 24, 2019: Criminal Cases Review Commission refers the Hull convictions to the Court of Appeal.
• February 8, 2022: Court of Appeal quashes two more Hull fire convictions and upholds the rest.
• July 28, 2022: California Supreme Court affirms Ng’s judgment.
• January 17, 2025: Jha rearrested in Delhi.
• April 30, 2026: California Supreme Court affirms Stayner’s judgment.