MENTORS LED THE WAY

by Joelle Steele

I am a mostly self-taught, court-certified expert in analyzing and comparing faces in photographs and detecting forgery in handwriting. At the age of 14, I began reading books about graphology, but quickly abandoned all the interpretive stuff, and turned instead to document examination. Ten years later, I began studying the comparisons of faces and ears to authenticate identities of people in photographs. I practiced diligently.

But in my earlier days, I needed input about the best ways to make or interpret my analyses of handwriting and faces/ears. So, I turned to experts for their help. This was not always easy, but a few people along the way were more than happy to oblige.

The first expert who helped me was Al Iannarelli. Back in 1949, he had developed a forensic method of ear analysis for the purpose of identifying people, originally military personnel who could not be identified by their fingerprints. His system is still used by law enforcement forensics experts today. He was not the first to notice the uniqueness of ears, but his predecessors, such as Alphonse Bertillon, failed to develop the sophisticated system of identification that Al did.

In the early 1970s, a friend’s husband, a San Francisco police officer, told me about Al who was revising an earlier edition of his “Ear Identification” book. Al had told him he could give me a typed manuscript of the book. So, I read it and a few years later contacted him with some questions. Al was always very helpful to me, making suggestions, sharing anecdotal material, etc. And after many years of ear discussions, we decided to co-write a new and somewhat expanded “Ear Identification” book because there were some aspects of his older books that were outdated, others that were based on his small studies, and the Internet was full of photographs to study ear pattern heredity to see if his theories were accurate. Unfortunately, Al passed away in late 2015. Since I had already written my part of the new book, I added additional information, with a mention of Al’s methods, and published “The External Ear” in 2018.

The second expert I consulted was Mr. Hamilton, a handwriting expert, who also collected and sold autographs. It was 1979, and I had been working in the publishing industry for several years (and still do), and he had also worked in that industry, so we connected because of that mutual interest as well as our interest in forgery. I was going to be in New York to visit a friend and I arranged to go at a time when he could see me. My friend lived a few blocks from the Museum of Modern Art, and Hamilton’s shop/office was not too far from there, as I recall.

Hamilton was a big influence on my forgery detection career. He enjoyed talking about handwriting and forgery. He spent about four hours with me, during which he showed me lots of examples of forgeries he had discovered and how he arrived at his conclusions. We talked at length about whether comparing handwriting could be done the way I was doing it, which involved sizing letters to evaluate their spacing and the proportions of upper and lower case letters in signatures and in the body of a written document. He thought that in certain circumstances it could be helpful, so I have used it successfully over the years. He was quite an interesting character and he answered all my questions.

The third expert who helped me was Dr. Farkâs, a surgeon in Toronto who wrote “Anthropometry of the Head and Face in Medicine” and co-wrote “Anthropometric Facial Proportions in Medicine.” I didn’t learn until much later that he was a real pioneer in craniofacial anthropometry. When I finally managed to get in touch with him it was 1982 and I was going to be passing through Toronto a few months later. He agreed to see me, and I took him to lunch in “Old Toronto.”

There, Dr. Farkâs taught me how to measure faces and calculate the proportions more accurately. And when I reminded him that I was comparing faces in photos, he told me how to size the irises as a stable reference. Back then, I had to do this using photocopy machines that could reduce or enlarge images, so it was very hard to get the eyes sized exactly. But today, with the help of Photoshop, that task is very simple and far more accurate.

Expert number four was a forensic anthropologist who was based in Oklahoma. I had been trying to connect with him for more than a year, but he seemed to always be traveling somewhere. Finally, I was going to deliver a presentation in Tulsa in late October of 1985 during one of my lecture circuits. He was in town and was willing to meet with me. I drove to a small town near Oklahoma City and we met at a café where we discussed more things than I can begin to remember about identification methods. He was very pleasant, helpful, and even entertaining. He answered all my questions very thoroughly as I furiously took notes! At the time he was authenticating the identity of Nazi fugitive Josef Mengele, and six years earlier, my first client for face identification had been a Nazi hunter with a dozen or so photographs of suspected Nazi war criminals. I had made a positive identification of two of them using both faces and ears.

Now that I’m an expert with 40+ years of experience, I have given interviews, written books, and shared numerous articles in an attempt to teach others what experts taught me. This has not helped educate all the non-experts who continue to use less-than-accurate methods, but hopefully a few new experts will learn what I did from my mentors.