The fourth prosecution expert witness was Patricia Smith. She held a degree in dental surgery from the London Hospital Medical College, had studied physical anthropology at the University of Chicago—one of the world’s leading schools in that discipline—and was professor of dental morphology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Unlike Altman, she not only compared facial harmony and disharmony, she
Step by step, Smith took the court through a fourteen-feature comparison of the 1942 Trawniki photo and a current video-derived photo of Demjanjuk entering the courtroom. To demonstrate “concordance” or matching, Smith used an overlay of each of the fourteen enlarged features from the two photos, projected on a courtroom screen.
Like Altman, Smith concluded that the 1942 photo on the Trawniki card was without a shadow of doubt that of John Demjanjuk.
The final prosecution expert witness was Tony Cantu, a paper and ink specialist with a doctorate in chemical physics from the University of Texas. Cantu’s U.S. government career was as colorful as it was checkered. He began as a forensic scientist at the Justice Department, advanced to a document-dating specialist at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and ended up paper-chasing forgers for the FBI and the Treasury Department. In all, Cantu had conducted more than ten thousand investigations involving paper and ink.
Cantu tested the six different inks used to make the card signatures, translator notes, typewriter letter impressions, and seal impressions. Employing a hypodermic needle with the tip converted into a boring tool, Cantu extracted two or three samples from each of the six inks and subjected them to chemical analysis. Cantu also analyzed the Trawniki card paper fibers, looking for two ingredients that would definitively date the paper after World War II—glass, which was introduced around 1950, and synthetic fibers, first introduced around 1953.
Cantu concluded:
• None of the inks on the card was manufactured after 1941.
• The unbleached pulp and groundwood in the card fibers were consistent with paper available in 1942. None of the fibers contained any materials that suggested the paper was manufactured after 1942.
• The purple ink that the Russian translator used to write his translation of the card was available from 1941 up to 1948.
There was little that defense attorneys O’Connor and Gill could do in their cross-examination of the prosecution’s five expert witnesses except challenge their credentials in an attempt to destroy their credibility; argue that their conclusions were subjective and, therefore, unscientific and suspect; and label their conclusions invalid because their analyses were superficial:
• Amnon Bezaleli had no academic or technical training in forgery identification. Most of his work dealt with alleged forged contemporary drivers’ licenses. His experience, therefore, was narrow, limited, and irrelevant to the examination of the Trawniki card. And because there were several key tests Bezaleli did not perform, his conclusion that the card was authentic was invalid.
• Gideon Epstein’s analysis was so superficial that he didn’t bother to analyze the three numerals Teufel had allegedly written on the card. Nor did he bother to count the number of ink colors or the number of Germans who wrote on the card. Nor did he analyze the ink found in the perforation holes. Nor did he measure and compare the signature strokes on the card with the strokes of Streibel and Teufel in the proven signatures. Epstein’s conclusion that the card was authentic, therefore, was based on a sloppy and incomplete examination.
• Reinhardt Altman’s analysis was based on the science of anthropology, but the technician had no training in the field. His conclusions were nothing more than voodoo conjury; his montages were merely optical illusions and “trix-mixes.” Every conclusion Altman drew was unscientific and completely subjective.
• Patricia Smith admitted that there were differences in the facial features she compared. Those differences invalidated her conclusions about authenticity.
O’Connor and Gill couldn’t touch Tony Cantu. The prosecution rested.
At this point in the trial, the Demjanjuk family knew that the defense was in deep trouble. Historians seemingly had proved that John Demjanjuk could not have been in Chelm when he said he was because the Germans had long since evacuated the camp; and they seemingly had proved also that Demjanjuk could not have been part of Vlasov’s army when he said he was because the army didn’t exist at that time. The Treblinka survivors were unflinching in their identification of John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible. And the prosecution’s argument favoring the authenticity of the Trawniki card was formidable and almost overwhelming.
But the prosecution had a weakness that did not go unnoticed. The Treblinka survivors were old and too sure of themselves. Israelis were beginning to doubt. Amir Shaviv, the legal correspondent for Israeli television, who kept his fingers on the pulse of the trial, voiced that doubt with precision and eloquence.
“It is very frustrating that after five months of hard work by the prosecution,” he said in a telecast, “we still cannot stand up and say, without a shred of doubt: ‘John Demjanjuk, you are Ivan the Terrible.’ What is even more frustrating is that I would like to be able to hate John Demjanjuk, but I can’t, because I am not certain that he is Ivan. And I would like to be able to pity John Demjanjuk—this old man all alone in a cell, far from home, away from his family—but I can’t, because I am not sure that he is
Unfortunately for the Demjanjuk family, Amir Shaviv would not decide the fate of John Demjanjuk. Judges Dorner, Tal, and Levin would. And as the family saw it, the defense had failed to sow a doubt in the bench. Someone was to blame, and that someone was Mark O’Connor.
The family decided to pressure Demjanjuk into firing O’Connor. But that would leave the defense leaderless and in the lurch just days before it must mount its counterattack.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Mark O’Connor was more than a lawyer whom the Demjanjuk family hired to defend their husband and father. He was a supportive and understanding friend who had hung in there with them for five turbulent, frightening years. But the list of gripes against O’Connor was long and growing, and sacking him was no spur-of-the-moment decision. It was months in the making.
At the end of April 1987, more than two months after the trial had begun and just before the prosecution was about to present its five expert witnesses, John Demjanjuk Jr., or “Johnnie,” as everyone called him, returned to Jerusalem from an extended visit in Cleveland with his mother, his sisters, Lydia and Irene, and Irene’s husband, Ed Nishnic, who controlled the Demjanjuk Defense Fund purse strings. Johnnie immediately called Yoram Sheftel and asked him to come to his hotel. It was urgent.
Johnnie got right to the point. “Ed and I spent a lot of time in Cleveland discussing what’s going on,” he told Sheftel. “And we reached the conclusion that O’Connor is not living up to our expectation. His performance is flawed, and as a result, the defense is in a very bad position.”
It was much worse than flawed. According to Sheftel, the defense
The admission shocked Sheftel. The defense was coming down to the wire and it had no strategy or counterattack. Realizing he had said too much, O’Connor asked Sheftel not to tell the family. Sheftel agreed. Johnnie’s message from Cleveland changed his mind.
When Sheftel told Johnnie what O’Connor had admitted, Johnnie wasn’t surprised. He had attended much of the trial and saw for himself how O’Connor’s cross-examinations seemed rambling and pointless. Johnnie told Sheftel that his brother-in-law Ed would be calling the next day, and he wanted Sheftel to level with Ed, to tell it like it was, to hold nothing back. This was no time to be kind or forgiving.
The next day, Sheftel laid it out for Ed, chapter and verse:
O’Connor was so autocratic that Sheftel and Gill would only learn about defense motions and concessions when Judge Levin announced his rulings on them in the courtroom.
O’Connor never presented his co-counsels with an overall defense strategy because he didn’t have one. He
