Who Wrote the "Ransom Note"

Did Patsy write it? Here's what settled the matter for most Patsy "fans," her sample written with the left hand -- as reproduced and "analyzed" in the ever reliable National Enquirer (right click and select "Open link in new tab" to enlarge):

And yes, superficially (the only way the Enquirer ever treated any topic), the two documents do look somewhat similar overall. But any two documents written in similar styles of "manuscript" printing are likely to contain points of resemblance. To make things easy, the Enquirer blew up comparisons they saw as "an exact match." Well, obviously they are not an exact match. Taking the first comparison, on the word "carefully," the "a"s are obviously very different, so are the "r"s. The "e"s are very different also. The top of the ransom note "f" is rounded while Patsy's is horizontal. Her "u" is a bit lumpy, while the "u" in the note is not. The "l"s in the note touch one another, but Patsy's are parallel. The angle of the lower part of the "y" is clearly very different in both.

Moving to "that," again we see striking differences in all four letters. The only clear similarities I see in any of these blown up comparisons are the "f"s and "i"s in "faction" and the "l" and the first "e" in "letter," though even in these there are very real differences. Nothing is an exact match, far from it. But this is how the editors of the Enquirer saw it, or wanted their readers to see it. And this is in fact what convinced a great many that Patsy must have written it.

With reference to the documents as a whole, one very distinctive feature of the ransom note is the way the words are laid out, with an unusual amount of space between them. Patsy's example is more closely spaced, as is the example we have from John's deposition. It looks to me as though the note might have been copied or even traced from a computer display, since the letters resemble a computer font. This might explain the odd spacing.

It seems clear, also, that Patsy is really struggling to write with her left hand and many letters are distorted or even illegible. I'm wondering whether John was ever asked to supply any left handed exemplars. Of course team Ramsey has been very careful not to release any samples whatever of John's handwriting, so, aside from the brief deposition we've seen, we have  no basis for comparison.

The deposition is useful, however, and, as I've been able to demonstrate in an  earlier post, there are some striking similarities, much closer imo than those in Patsy's example, above. Here once again is my comparison (right click and select "Open link in new tab" to enlarge -- click again to enlarge more):

As I wrote earlier, I do not believe it possible to determine the writer of a deliberately deceptive document by handwriting comparison alone. But for those who are convinced Patsy must have written the note, the above should make them think twice, I would hope. It doesn't prove John wrote the note. But it does demonstrate that Patsy's is not the only hand that resembles it, so it would be a huge mistake to jump to conclusions on that score.

As I see it, the most effective method for determining who wrote the note is not handwriting comparison, or even content analysis, but an analysis of its meaning -- why it was written and what the writer hoped to achieve in writing it. I'll cover this issue in the following post.