Useful Enemies

“I should have been more careful and qualified my statement,” Robertson said, clearly embarrassed.

“You acted against a basic principle of your profession?”

“Yes,” Robertson said, quickly adding, “in this one example.”

Shaked saved the best until last. Robertson testified that she found two different inks in the seal over the Trawniki card photo, which led her to conclude that there were two different seals, suggesting forgery. Her conclusions were based on her analysis of the seal ink on a sophisticated visual spectral comparator (VSC) provided by the Israeli police laboratory. It was the same instrument Bezaleli had used to prove that there was only one ink present in the stamp on the photo.

Under cross-examination, Robertson admitted that she had had problems operating the VSC. She could manipulate a few of the controls but could not manage the scanner’s critical color filter system, which was necessary to accurately measure the luminescence contained in the ink. One kind of luminescence meant one ink. Two kinds meant two inks.

Shaked called for another VSC analysis of the seal, this time in court. Bezaleli operated the scanner, projecting images onto the courtroom screen. With the proper use of the filters, it became clear that there was only one kind of luminescence… one ink.

Visibly shaken and emotionally exhausted, Edna Robertson stepped off the witness stand. The next day, she told the press: “They have humiliated me in front of the whole world. My career has been destroyed. From now on they will laugh at me in every court.”

The second defense witness was William A. Flynn, chief document examiner in the Arizona Department of Public Safety Crime Laboratory. Trained both by the Pennsylvania State Police and the FBI, he was a certified forensics document examiner and forgery expert like Gideon Epstein. And although he had only an associate’s degree, he made up for his lack of academic credentials with experience. Over his twenty years as a “questioned document” examiner, he had analyzed more than fifteen thousand alleged forgeries.

Flynn had a bias that he honestly admitted to the court. The discoveries of the Mormon Salamander Letters in the United States and the “Hitler Diaries” in Germany in the early 1980s had turned Flynn into a cautious and conservative document examiner. Initially, both documents were declared authentic by handwriting experts, only to be declared forgeries later by forensic scientists who had analyzed the ink and paper the forger used to create his documents. It was Flynn himself who had proven conclusively that the Mormon letters were forged, based on a sophisticated ink comparison analysis.

Before Salamander and the Hitler Diaries, Flynn had been willing to pronounce a document definitely genuine or definitely not genuine. After Salamander and the Diaries, Flynn added a third category—cannot tell. Flynn’s cautious distinction did not make the defense clap for joy. What it needed at this point were definitive, not tentative, conclusions from Flynn, whose testimony was supposed to be the defense’s answer to Amnon Bezaleli’s and Gideon Epstein’s conclusions about the authenticity of the three Trawniki card signatures.

Flynn cautiously concluded:

• Streibel’s signature fell in the cannot tell category.

• Teufel’s signature was only possibly genuine because his handwriting was “erratic” and, therefore, easy to forge.

• Even John Demjanjuk himself probably would be unable to say with certainty that the signature made forty years ago was his own. Therefore, it was highly unlikely that Demjanjuk’s name appearing on the card was executed by John Demjanjuk.

Judge Levin observed that the expert witnesses the court had heard so far seemed to agree on facts, but disagreed on what to make of them. “Is it possible,” Levin asked Flynn, “that there might be a difference of opinion… with regard to the interpretation attached to these findings?”

“Yes,” Flynn said, sounding like a witness for the prosecution.

In preparation for his testimony, Flynn had personally forged Streibel’s and Teufel’s signatures to demonstrate to the court how easy it was to re-create them. He also produced a very clever photomontage of himself in an SS uniform.

Shaked objected. Flynn’s forgery skills were not on trial; the Trawniki signatures were, he argued.

“Objection sustained,” Levin ruled. “The entire matter is irrelevant to this trial.”

Sheftel was disappointed and angry. He thought that Flynn was going to declare Demjanjuk’s signature a forgery and the Trawniki card a fake. Flynn did neither. And now his nemesis, Judge Levin, had tossed out Flynn’s important demonstration, blocking a major line of defense questioning. Sheftel would have none of it.

“Under these circumstances,” Sheftel told Levin, “we waive [Flynn’s] testimony and request that it be struck in its entirety from the record.”

Both the court and the prosecution were momentarily stunned by the totally unexpected response to Levin’s ruling.

“What’s your position,” Levin asked Shaked.

“We definitely have much to question [the witness] about in cross-examination,” Shaked said, “and we insist on our right to do so.”

Flynn had his own surprise waiting for the court. He refused to submit to a cross-examination, because, he told the court, Nishnic, who had hired him to testify for the defense, forbade him to do so. Nishnic had threatened to sue him if he submitted to a cross-examination.

At this point, Judge Levin was more than irritated. He didn’t relish being challenged by an American moneybag. Ruling that Nishnic’s threat was witness intimidation, he ordered the police to investigate Nishnic for possible criminal obstruction of justice. Then he ordered Flynn to answer Shaked’s cross-examination questions under penalty of contempt of court.

Shaked conducted a clever and devastating bait-and-trap cross-examination. Although Flynn never really called the Trawniki card a forgery as the defense had expected and paid him to do, he had cautiously implied it. To make his trap work, Shaked had to do what Sheftel couldn’t do—get Flynn to commit to a forgery conclusion.

“How can you come to the inference that it must have been forged?” Shaked innocently asked Flynn.

“My position is,” Flynn explained, “we cannot tell positively if Teufel and Streibel are genuine or not, and the Demjanjuk signature—in my opinion—is forged…. And since [the Trawniki card] was in the hands of the KGB, they would be a likely candidate.”

Flynn had finally used the F-word. Shaked was now ready to bait the trap. A few weeks before the trial, and after he had studied the original Trawniki card, Flynn talked about the Demjanjuk case at a forensic document seminar in Palm Springs, California. Shaked had obtained a transcript of Flynn’s comments and read aloud from it:

“I have examined the card firsthand for three days… microscopically, and there’s nothing about the card that I can see that would not have passed muster.”

“I don’t remember my exact words,” Flynn said. “I don’t think I said that.”

Shaked then sprung the trap. He played a tape recording of Flynn’s seminar remarks. The click of the machine at the end of the recording echoed through the courtroom with dramatic finality.

William Flynn’s own words had just made his entire direct testimony worthless.

• • •

The third defense witness was Yasser Iscan, the defense’s answer to Patricia Smith, who had made morphological comparisons based on photomontages of facial features such as nose, ears, and chin. A professor of forensic anthropology and a consultant to medical examiners in Florida, Iscan out-credentialed Patricia Smith, who did not have a degree in anthropology. His job as an expert defense witness was to either destroy Smith’s credibility or to cast serious doubts about her final conclusion: The photo on the Trawniki card was definitely that of John Demjanjuk.

Like Flynn, Iscan had a bias. He told the court that the photo super-imposition technique used by Smith was “essentially worthless,” and he set out to prove his point by replaying and reanalyzing Smith’s seven-minute video demonstration for the bench.

As the video played, Iscan pointed out what he considered to be imperfect photo matchings, or areas where two images did not appear to coincide. Iscan also pointed out to the court where Smith’s photomontages appeared to be too dark or too fuzzy to warrant a positive conclusion.