From the way the characters were written to the tool used to inscribe them, several mistakes were made by the author of a lead scroll allegedly signed by Mountain Meadows Massacre participant John D. Lee, says a forgery expert.
To verify the authenticity of a sheet of lead inscribed with the date Jan. 11, 1872, the National Park Service hired the two professional document examiners who exposed Utah forger-bomber Mark Hofmann in 1986. Rolled into a cylinder, the leaden letter was discovered Jan. 22 by a volunteer cleaning out Lee's Fort at Lee's Ferry, Ariz., along the Colorado River in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
In blocky, all-capital letters, the inscription claimed early Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Brigham Young ordered the 1857 attack and slaughter of 120 members of an Arkansas wagon train at the height of federal tensions in territorial Utah. Lee was banished by Mormon leaders to the ferry site and was the only participant ever tried and convicted in the mass murder. He was executed by firing squad in 1877 after claiming he was being "sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner."
Exposing the scroll as a fraud had less to do with what the words said than how they were written, said William Flynn of Phoenix, who revealed his findings this week following a meeting of the Southwestern Association of Forensic Document Exam- iners.
His partner in the investigation, George Throckmorton of Salt Lake City, declined to discuss his findings until making a report to the Park Service. But Flynn said the two veteran investigators have concurred privately that the scroll was clearly not written by Lee.
"There was a consistent mistake by whoever did it," said Flynn. Writers of Lee's period were accustomed to using a split pen-point, the nibs of which would spread when writing a vertical character stroke, leaving behind a wide or even double vertical line.
The telltale double-vertical "stress" pattern was common to all of Lee's handwriting, whether he was using a pen, pencil or chipping petroglyphs on a rock canyon wall with a knife blade, said Flynn. But the person who inscribed the lead scroll may have tried too hard to replicate the notorious killer's handwriting.
"The writer used double verticals and double horizontals, which was not consistent with Lee's handwriting patterns," said Flynn, owner of Affiliated Forensic Lab Inc. "If the forger had stopped and just made a single stroke on the horizontal characters, it would have been more consistent."
The mistake was just one of several clues leading Flynn to conclude the scroll was not authentic:
* Photos taken through a microscope show the characters were inscribed using an object with a tip shaped like a pyramid, rather than a sharp or rounded point. Flynn said a modern finishing nail inserted into the depressions "fit perfectly." Small nails with such precisely cut facets on the tips did not exist in the 1870s.
* No historical evidence of Lee writing in block letters exists. LDS Church officials allowed Throckmorton to view and digitally photograph Lee's original diaries now held in church archives, which were then used by the examiners to compare handwriting with the scroll.
* Lee would have no reason to write in all capital letters, since writing in cursive on the malleable lead would not have been difficult, said Flynn.
Both Flynn and Throck- morton are studying the oxidation pattern of the lead, which is suspicious because it is uniformly yellow and orange, even though the sheet was rolled into a scroll when discovered. Flynn will attempt to replicate the oxidation on another lead scroll in his lab, to see if the discoloration is uniform or is banded because of being rolled up.
Glen Canyon National Recreation Area spokeswoman Char Obergh said Tuesday the park was waiting to receive formal reports from Flynn and Throckmorton before deciding what to do with the sheet, whose true author remains a mystery.
Flynn said the similarities with Hofmann's prolific forgeries of documents related to Mormon history crossed his mind during the scroll examination, and he was even more intrigued when he learned police discovered lead sheets at Hofmann's home during their murder investigation in 1986.
"This would certainly be within his capabilities and we know he had similar materials he was playing with at the time," said Flynn. "But I have nothing to go on other than the modus operandi, especially the nature of the document being highly controversial, seems to fit the types of things he did in the past."