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If you ask a graphologist, one way into the mind of a criminal is through his or her handwriting. The style, size, slant and other characteristics of the letters can reveal personality traits and behavior. Sheila Lowe, author of “Handwriting of the Famous and Infamous,” interpreted the letters written by criminals known for their notorious and sometimes brutal crimes. When their stories made front-page news, the question was asked, “What is that person really like?” For graphologist Sheila Lowe, the answer can sometimes be found in their written messages. Read on to get Sheila’s analysis of Clark Rockefeller, Ted Bundy, Phillip Garrido, Amanda Knox, Bernard Madoff, Timothy McVeigh, Dennis Rader, Susan Smith and Mary Winkler.
Don’t forget to mark your calendar for “The Devil’s Teardrop,” a thrilling movie about a killer who is tracked down by a renowned handwriting analyst. The premiere is August 8 at 8 pm et/5 pm pt on LMN!
By Sheile Lowe
Handwriting Expert
The following few comments should not be considered a complete analysis, but just the highlights of each sample. The samples shown below represent a small part of the larger sample that was used for analysis. All information contained herein is solely for entertainment purposes.
As you look at each of the samples, think of a sheet of paper as an empty room. The way you place the ink on the page symbolizes how you behave when you walk into that room.
Ted Bundy: For a handwriting analyst, Bundy’s handwriting immediately looks problematic. There’s a kind of droopiness in the writing rhythm that is often associated with criminal behavior. What’s even more disturbing is the extremely long lead-in strokes, most obvious at the beginnings of lines. Each of those lead-ins begins with a long, sharp hook, rather like a fishhook. These strokes rise up from beneath, like Jaws breaching the surface of the ocean. Bundy "reeled in" his victims, sometimes playing on their sympathy with a fake cast on his arm to get them to help him, so this is an apt symbol for him. Another noteworthy feature is the way Bundy forms the personal pronoun "I," which has a large, poorly shaped upper loop, but a meager downstroke. In general, the personal pronoun represents the writer’s feelings about himself and about his parents. In this case, it reflects an unrealistic perception of women in general (he grew up believing his mother was his sister), and a missing father or authority figure.
The baseline of the writing (the invisible line it’s written on) wavers all over the place, which indicates moodiness in someone who is easily distracted. The particular way he forms the lower loops of the lowercase letter G is often identified in the handwriting of those who have had trouble dealing with leftover emotional pain from traumatic childhood events. They tend to channel their painful feelings into sneaky, cunning behavior, and in Bundy’s case, of course, far worse. The anger that we see in those fishhooks is acted out against women, who become "stand-ins" for his mother.
Phillip Garrido: The cursive sample was written many years ago (1978), but it’s like a time capsule that offers a unique view of the man he was at that time. The cursive sample is so perfectly "school copybook" that it looks like a font. Some people would call this beautiful writing, but a trained handwriting analyst would disagree. Writing that is so regular and controlled that it looks like a machine wrote it is the product of someone who lives in a virtual pressure cooker. His feelings are kept so tightly under wraps most of the time that when he lets them go, the results can be (and in his case were) horrendous for his victims. In other words, when the inner pressure of rage builds up until it is stronger than the controls he is able to exert over his behavior, this extremely repressed and extremely angry person will erupt, and those close to him who are the weakest will bear the brunt of his rage.
The printed sample, which is current, shows us the man Garrido may have become and may be now. There appear to be many shaky strokes, which sometimes indicates physical problems. The biggest red flag for potential danger in this sample is seen in the lowercase G’s, where the short downstroke ends in a sharp angle. This points to the same intense and suppressed anger toward women that manifested differently in the earlier writing. Interestingly, he begins the M’s with a wavy stroke that is sometimes interpreted as a sense of humor. Some oddly formed letters, such as the K, suggest idiosyncratic thinking. In other words, he doesn’t see the world the way most of us do. The I dots and punctuation appear to be heavy and quite round, which is a sign of persistence that is frequently seen in the handwriting of abusers.
Amanda Knox: Amanda Knox’s handwriting is typical of many contemporary young women. Under normal circumstances, she could be expected to show self-confidence and be ready and willing to do whatever it takes to get her needs met. It must have been impossibly hard for her to believe that she could be in the situation in which she found herself. She rejects being told what to do by anyone else, preferring to listen to her own inner authority, make her own rules. Amanda is not accustomed to feeling self-doubt, so when something big comes up (and what could be bigger than being accused of murder?), it’s especially frightening and makes her doubt her ability to get through it. Everything in her writing is concentrated in one area (called the "middle zone"), so that in the area where there should have been upper and lower loops, they are shrunk virtually to nonexistence. Combined with the narrow margins, this suggests that her focus is on the here and now, and also suggests that she isn’t interested in looking back at what happened, nor does she plan very far ahead.
Many of the letters bump up against each other, which suggests problems in setting social boundaries and also her fear of what is coming up next. There appears to be no room for reflection or perspective, as she is unable to think logically or objectively. The rounded shape of the writing and the close word spacing paint her as someone who craves contact, with little need for privacy or solitude. Whether this is an ongoing part of her personality or brought about by her situation, we can’t know without examining handwriting from prior to the murder.
Bernard Madoff: In this case, only a signature was available for analysis, which limits our ability to see into his personality. Still, that makes sense in light of what we are able to see. In this sample, the top signature is Bernie’s. His signature is an illegible scrawl that goes around in circles; there’s absolutely no way to figure out what it says, even when we know. We see this type of illegibility in the person who, when you quote him from a previous conversation, says, "Oh, that’s not what I meant." He always leaves himself room to weasel out of a commitment by making his communications ambiguous. The long, heavy downstroke, which we can only guess must be the M in his last name, has aggressive, angry energy in the way it slashes to the right and below the printed baseline. Because we write to communicate, an illegible signature often points to hostility — one who fails to make an effort to be clear in his written communications shows a lack of consideration for the reader. 
Timothy McVeigh: McVeigh’s handwriting is unusual in its extreme left slant, which is fairly rare, combined with extremely wide word spacing. These characteristics demonstrate a sense of isolation and attest to someone who wants to be seen as coolly indifferent, as having no emotions. He undoubtedly believed that to show emotion is to be weak, and weakness, to someone like this, would be unacceptable. Especially with this extremely simplified style of printing, it would be impossible to become emotionally close to him. The strong degree to which the letters slant to the left shows a tremendous degree of self-control. He dealt with his feelings by intellectualizing them, thinking them through, which felt safer than actually feeling them. He preferred to deal with facts and data rather than raw human emotions. Being around less-inhibited people who show what is inside them would be very uncomfortable for him.
This handwriting is reminiscent of a slingshot with the sling pulled back as far as it will go. Once the sling is released, the projectile would be explosive in its power. His bombing of the Murrah Building is horribly emblematic of that power. McVeigh’s signature is made up of a few illegible strokes that reveal little, except to confirm his need for distance from others, his feelings of isolation and his desire to remain apart. No one would ever really know him, even after years of acquaintance. The final statement he wrote just before his death shows even greater control than the earlier one. He never had an opportunity to release those strong emotions again.
Dennis Rader: His feelings of personal inferiority are obvious in the very small, printed writing with its variable letter size and extremely wavy baseline. Inside, he believes he doesn’t deserve to take up much space in the world, and it feels to him as if everything is just too big a challenge to be able to overcome. He finds it hard to take on new things, as he can’t decide whether to do this or that, go here or there. He is not lacking in intelligence, only in its practical application. He’d often rather just give up, even though it means failing. And every time he fails, he feels worse about himself, more inadequate than ever, and his anxiety increases. It may have been his ability to focus closely on what he is interested in that helped him in selecting victims and planning and then carrying out his evil acts. Rader’s signature is quite different from the body of his handwriting, with large capital letters that tower over the small letters. This need to appear taller than he really feels was demonstrated in his overpowering, torturing and killing so many people.
Clark Rockefeller: Unfortunately, this sample is a poor copy. Assuming that the block-printed writing on the form was done by the police detective, and that only the signature belongs to the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller, there’s not much to work with. However, we can see the bloated capital letter at the beginning of the signature, which we assume is the R in "Rockefeller." In general, the capital letters, especially in a signature, represent the writer’s ideal image — what he would like to be — while the small letters indicate how he really feels about himself. So, when someone signs with massively large capitals that are disproportionate to the small letters, we can theorize that they have created big ideals to live up to; that they are looking for bigger and better things in life. The rest of the signature is illegible, which says he doesn’t want to be seen for who he really is. The O in "Rockefeller" appears to have double loops, which is a sign of someone who won’t, or can’t, talk about emotional issues or experiences — they get locked up in his throat and he just can’t get them out. If certain other characteristics are also present, it is sometimes a sign of a liar, but in this case we don’t have any other writing to back up that assumption. The signature fades off into a wiggly line, symbolic of the way this individual wiggled out of the many tight spots he put himself in.
Susan Smith: There are some similarities between Susan Smith’s writing and that of Amanda Knox. Both are rounded in form and are concentrated mainly in the middle zone. However, some individual characteristics in Smith’s handwriting are different and noteworthy: She crosses the lowercase letter T so low on the stem, and bends it to such a degree, that the crossbar sits on the baseline. It also stays on the left of the T stem, rather than crossing through it. This habit has been identified in the handwriting of "professional victims" who set themselves up for punishment. It also signals profound depression — as if she doesn’t even have the energy to lift the T-bar to its proper place on the stem. The letters bump up against each other, again like Knox, which suggests a lack of social boundaries. This feature is sometimes seen in people who are thinking about suicide.
Mary Winkler: There are sudden wide spaces between words that, if you follow some of them down the page, create patterns like a river of space. These signify an inner split between her thinking and her emotions, which is confirmed by the back-and-forth slant and baseline — unsure of which way to go, what to do, what path to choose. Of course, the emotional content must have had some effect on her writing, but it would not be surprising if this were her normal mode of communication. The lowercase G’s and Y’s are missing lower loops, with some of them simple downstrokes and others curved to the left, like a cradle. The significance of these downstrokes is that in this sample, they suggest a lack of emotional and sexual fulfillment.
The lively, rhythmic signature has a friendly, happy-go-lucky appearance, definitely not what the body of writing shows. Remember, the signature is just the outer appearance, like the cover on a book — it may not tell the truth.
