The New Yorker Special Reprint

DEPT. OF LINGUISTICS or a chip of paint from a crime scene, sur- mises the unlikeliest facts, and presents them to the authorities as incontrovertible WORDS ON TRIAL evidence. If “forensic linguist” brings to mind a verbal specialist who plucks slivers Can linguists solve crimes that stump the police? of meaning from old letters and segments of audiotape before announcing that the BY JACK HITT perpetrator is, say, a middle-aged insurance salesman from Philadelphia, that’s not far n the early weeks of 2009, Chris Cole- The police quickly came to suspect from the truth. In the Coleman case, man began telling friends and associ- Coleman himself. A long trail of text Leonard, the head of the linguistics pro- atesI in Columbia, Illinois, that he was messages on his phone made it clear that gram at Hofstra University, on Long Is- worried about the safety of his family. He he was having an affair with a cocktail land, was punctilious in his presentation. had been receiving death threats from an waitress. And if Coleman had left Sheri Relying largely on word choice and spell- online stalker, and the e-mails had begun he would have risked losing his salary of ing, he suggested that the same person had to mention his wife, Sheri, and his sons, a hundred thousand dollars a year. Meyer written the threatening e-mails and Garret and Gavin, who were nine and maintained a strict no-divorce policy sprayed the graffiti, and that those speci- eleven. Coleman asked his neighbor across among her employees, in keeping with mens bore similarities to Coleman’s prose the street, a police officer, to train a secu- her understanding of Scripture. In Febru- style. rity camera on the front of his house. ary, Sheri had told a friend that she was In preparing his testimony, Leonard Coleman understood surveillance afraid of her husband and “said that if consulted with his frequent partner, better than most. He worked as the secu- anything happened to her, Chris did it,” James Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. foren- rity chief for Joyce Meyer, whose cable the friend testified. sic linguist. Fitzgerald brought the field television program, “Enjoying Everyday Still, Coleman maintained his inno- to prominence in 1996 with his work in Life,” is at the center of an evangelical cence, and the evidence against him was the case of the Unabomber, who had empire estimated to be worth more than circumstantial. His DNA was not found sent a series of letter bombs to profes- a hundred million dollars a year; it in- anywhere that would connect him directly sors over several years. Fitzgerald had cludes a radio program, self-help and to the crime. At the trial last spring, nearly successfully urged the F.B.I. to publish children’s books, CDs, podcasts, overseas forty witnesses and evidentiary specialists the Unabomber’s “manifesto”—a ram- missions, and motivational conventions. took the stand. The modern science of fo- bling thirty-five-thousand-word decla- Initially, the threats focussed on Meyer, rensics has spawned numerous specialties ration of the perpetrator’s philosophy. warning that if she didn’t quit preaching and subspecialties, including forensic Many people called the Bureau to say she’d pay the price, but the stalker soon branches of dentistry, anthropology, sculpt- they recognized the writing style. By turned his wrath on Coleman and his ing, and even entomology (interpreting the analyzing syntax, word choice, and family. One note to Sheri read “Fuck you! presence of certain insects to fix the time other linguistic patterns, Fitzgerald nar- Deny your God publicly or else!” An- of death). At the trial, experts could show rowed down the range of possible au- other read “Time is running out for you that some of the threatening e-mails had thors and finally linked the manifesto to and your family.” been sent from Coleman’s computer, but the writings of Ted Kaczynski, a reclu- On May 5th, Coleman left his home they couldn’t prove that it hadn’t been sive former mathematician. For instance, early to work out at the gym. Afterward, hacked. They could tell the jury that Cole- the bomber’s use of the terms “broad” when he called his wife and got no answer, man had purchased a can of red spray paint and “negro,” for women and African- he asked his neighbor the policeman to months before, but they couldn’t link Americans, enabled Fitzgerald roughly check on her. The officer found a horrify- Coleman to the can used in the crime. To- to calculate his age. Both Kaczynski and ing scene. Red graffiti—“Fuck you” and ward the end of the trial, prosecutors asked the Unabomber also showed a prefer- “U have paid!”—was scrawled on the walls for the testimony of Robert Leonard, a ence for dozens of unusual words and ex- and on the sheets of the beds in which practitioner of one of the lesser-known pressions, such as “chimerical,” “anomic,” Sheri, Gavin, and Garret lay strangled to subspecialties: forensic linguistics. and “cool-headed logicians,” as well as death. A back window was open, suggest- These days, the word “forensic” conjures the less familiar version of the cliché ing that someone had entered the house an image of a technician on a “C.S.I.” epi- “You can’t eat your cake and have it too.” out of view of the camera. sode who delicately retrieves a single hair A judge ruled that the linguistic evidence the new yorker special reprint 1 was strong enough to prompt him to mate mechanics worked out during the in the Courtroom.” Shuy is now eighty- issue a search warrant for Kaczynski’s Pliocene era. And context is crucial; when one years old and lives in Montana. cabin in Montana; what was found there we try to record a conversation, we are When I asked him to describe the ori- put him in prison for life. capturing only part of the gestalt of that gins of forensic linguistics, he referred Fitzgerald went on to formalize some of moment. What might appear to be a solid me to an Old Testament story. After a the tools used in forensic linguistics, and audio recording can easily morph into an confusing battle with the Ephraimites, started the Communicated Threat Assess- acoustic Rorschach test. The plot of “The the Gileadites were able to identify the ment Database. The CTAD is the most Conversation,” Francis Ford Coppola’s enemy by asking them each to pro- comprehensive collection of linguistic patterns in written threats, containing more than a million words and some four thousand “criminally oriented communica- tions.” At the Coleman trial, Leonard noted that many of the killer’s spray- painted sentences began with the word “fuck,” as did the e-mails and letters— usage that at first might seem common. But he explained that a CTAD search showed that only 0.8 per cent of threatening notes used “fuck” as the first word in a sentence. In addition, both the graffiti and the threatening notes relied on two ob- scenities, “fuck” and “bitch,” to the exclu- sion of all others. Leonard went on to compare the graffiti with two hundred and twenty-one e-mails known to have been written by Coleman. He noted that the shorthand “U” for “you” is often found in cell-phone text messages but rarely in e-mails. Both the killer and Coleman used “U” in e-mails. Coleman also consis- tently put the apostrophe of a contraction in the wrong place—“doesnt’ ” and “cant’ ”—as did the killer. Leonard’s testimony was disputed in the courtroom, but, in a case with no physical evidence firmly linking Coleman to the crime, Leonard’s words—and Coleman’s—took A suspect’s conversations and writings can be analyzed for patterns and peculiarities. on added weight. After a day of delibera- tions, the jury found Coleman guilty, which made him eligible for the death classic film, turns on this very point: the nounce the Hebrew word “shibboleth.” penalty; the judge sentenced Coleman to protagonist spends the entire movie mis- If they pronounced the first syllable in three life terms in prison. hearing a tiny clip of audiotape. Such er- the Ephraimic dialect, “sib,” instead of in rors and misunderstandings pervade our the Gilead dialect, “shib,” they were ost people assume that meaning lives, in ways that modern language detec- killed. According to Judges 12:6, some is embedded in the words they tives are only beginning to make clear. forty-two thousand Ephraimites failed speak.M But, according to forensic linguists, The pioneer of forensic linguistics is that first linguistic test. meaning is far more vaporous, teased into widely considered to be Roger Shuy, a The field’s more recent origins might existence through vocalized puffs of air, retired Georgetown University profes- be traced to an airplane flight in 1979, hand gestures, body tilts, dancing eye- sor and the author of such fundamental when Shuy found himself sitting next to brows, and nuanced nostril flares. The textbooks as “Language Crimes: The a lawyer. By the end of the flight, Shuy transmission of meaning still involves pri- Use and Abuse of Language Evidence had a recommendation as an expert wit- TIMOTHY GOODMAN the new yorker special reprint 2 ness in his first murder case. Since then, known as the “tree belt,” “tree lawn,” or ing forensic linguists into groundbreak- he’s been involved in numerous cases in “sidewalk buffer”—is called the “devil’s ing territory. Others, including Butters, which forensic analysis revealed how strip” only in Akron, Ohio.

Load more