Beverley East | |
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| Born | 31 May 1953 |
| Education | Westminster Kingsway College; College of Distributive Trades |
| Occupation(s) | QDE, author |
| Website | http://www.suspectsignatures.com/ |
Beverley East (born 31 May 1953) is a leading expert in the field of handwriting analysis, a court-qualified forensic document examiner and author. She works in her home city of Washington, DC, and in Jamaica.
Though born in Kingston, Jamaica, East attended Westminster Kingsway College in London, graduating with A-levels in English Language, Literature and German and O-levels in British Economic and Social History, German, Italian, English Literature and Language, Sociology
East attended the College of Distributive Trades in London and earned a degree in CAM Dip (Marketing, PR and Advertising).
She began studying graphology at the International Graphoanalysis Society and was certified in 1989. She earned her Master's in Graphoanalysis from the International Graphoanalysis Society. In 1993, she became a Certified Questioned Document Examiner (QDE) for the National Bureau of Questioned Document Examiners in New York, NY.
East trained and apprenticed in Forensic Document Examination by Felix Klein (1911–1994), the founder of the National Society for Graphology and the founder of the National Bureau of Document Examiners. [1]
She authenticated handwriting on the labels of 1,700-item butterfly collection assembled by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace for the then-owner of the collection, attorney Robert Haggestad, who purchased the collection for $600. Haggestad asked East to authenticate the handwriting, which she did. The collection was later purchased by the Smithsonian for a substantial sum ($4.5 million). [2] [3]
East was the handwriting expert in the 2012 court case of the Jamaican Stone Crusher Gang, where police fabricated witness statements against members. Accused gang members were later released because of the evidence being false. [4] [5]
East has also been asked by the media to comment on the handwriting of news worthy events. In 1998, "The Reliable Source", a respected column in The Washington Post , asked her to review Monica Lewinsky’s handwriting. East was also asked to comment on handwriting samples from the anthrax mailings case for a National Geographic Channel documentary. [6]
In addition to being a leading authority in handwriting analysis, East is an author. In June 2014, she was named by Ebony magazine as one of "six Caribbean writers you should take some time to discover" (alongside Mervyn Morris, Andrea Stuart, Ann-Margaret Lim, Roland Watson-Grant, and Tiphanie Yanique, [7] [8] who were attending the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica). her first book, Finding Mr. Write: A New Slant on Selecting the Perfect Mate (2000), became a bestseller after it received major media coverage, including East being interviewed by Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America . [9]
East was awarded the Flori Roberts – Ladies First Trailblazer award in 2002, for being the first woman of colour to be qualified to and practice graphology and QDE. [10]
East was awarded the Forerunner Award from the Institute of Caribbean Studies in November 2015 in Washington D.C. [ citation needed ]
A signature is a handwritten depiction of someone's name, nickname, or even a simple "X" or other mark that a person writes on documents as a proof of identity and intent. The writer of a signature is a signatory or signer. Similar to a handwritten signature, a signature work describes the work as readily identifying its creator. A signature may be confused with an autograph, which is chiefly an artistic signature. This can lead to confusion when people have both an autograph and signature and as such some people in the public eye keep their signatures private whilst fully publishing their autograph.
Graphology is the analysis of handwriting with attempt to determine someone's personality traits. No scientific evidence exists to support graphology, and it is generally considered a pseudoscience or scientifically questionable practice. However, it has historically been considered legitimate for use in some court cases. The term is sometimes incorrectly used to refer to forensic document examination, due to the fact that aspects of the latter dealing with the examination of handwritten documents are occasionally referred to as graphanalysis.
The Hitler Diaries were a series of sixty volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler, but forged by Konrad Kujau between 1981 and 1983. The diaries were purchased in 1983 for 9.3 million Deutsche Marks by the West German news magazine Stern, which sold serialisation rights to several news organisations. One of the publications involved was The Sunday Times, who asked their independent director, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, to authenticate the diaries; he did so, pronouncing them genuine. At the press conference to announce the publication, Trevor-Roper announced that on reflection he had changed his mind, and other historians also raised questions concerning their validity. Rigorous forensic analysis, which had not been performed previously, quickly confirmed that the diaries were fakes.
Donald Wayne Foster was a professor of English at Vassar College in New York. He is now retired. He is known for his work dealing with various issues of Shakespearean authorship through textual analysis. He has also applied these techniques in attempting to uncover mysterious authors of some high-profile contemporary texts. As several of these were in the context of criminal investigations, Foster was sometimes labeled a "forensic linguist". He has been inactive in this arena, however, since Condé Nast settled a defamation lawsuit brought against one of his publications for an undisclosed sum in 2007.
In forensic science, questioned document examination (QDE) is the examination of documents potentially disputed in a court of law. Its primary purpose is to provide evidence about a suspicious or questionable document using scientific processes and methods. Evidence might include alterations, the chain of possession, damage to the document, forgery, origin, authenticity, or other questions that come up when a document is challenged in court.
The Killian documents controversy involved six documents containing allegations about President George W. Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972–73, allegedly typed in 1973. Dan Rather presented four of these documents as authentic in a 60 Minutes II broadcast aired by CBS on September 8, 2004, less than two months before the 2004 presidential election, but it was later found that CBS had failed to authenticate them. Several typewriter and typography experts soon concluded that they were forgeries. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Burkett provided the documents to CBS, but he claims to have burned the originals after faxing them copies.
Jean "Binta" Breeze MBE was a Jamaican dub poet and storyteller, acknowledged as the first woman to write and perform dub poetry. She worked also as a theatre director, choreographer, actor, and teacher. She performed her work around the world, in the Caribbean, North America, Europe, South-East Asia, and Africa, and has been called "one of the most important, influential performance poets of recent years".
Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine.
Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer, whose career spans four decades. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, serving in the role until 2020.
Bessie Virginia Blount, also known as Bessie Blount Griffin, was a writer, nurse, physical therapist, inventor and forensic scientist.
Ebony G. Patterson is a Jamaican-born visual artist and educator. She is known for her large and colorful tapestries created out of various materials such as, glitter, sequins, fabric, toys, beads, faux flowers, jewelry, and other embellishments. Her "Gangstas for Life series" of dancehall portraits, and her garden-inspired installations.
Bruce Edwards Ivins was an American microbiologist, vaccinologist, senior biodefense researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the person suspected by the FBI of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Ivins died on July 29, 2008, of an overdose of acetaminophen (Tylenol) in a suicide after learning that criminal charges were likely to be filed against him by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for an alleged criminal connection to the attacks.
The 2001 anthrax attacks, also known as Amerithrax, occurred in the United States over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001, one week after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, killing five people and infecting 17 others. According to the FBI, the ensuing investigation became "one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement".
David Patrick Rowe was a Jamaican-American lawyer, professor, media commentator, corruption watchdog, Commonwealth Caribbean country risk analyst and pioneer in the area of transnational law. He has spent most of his career as a litigator in Florida, along with serving as an adjunct professor at the University of Miami School of Law since 1989. He is one of the world's leading voices on the law of the Commonwealth Caribbean and the political economy of the wider Caribbean region, and his scholarly work and quotations have appeared in periodicals around the world. He is also frequently used as a media consultant with international publications, including the Miami Herald and The New York Times, among others.
Sharon Hay-Webster is a Jamaican politician. She was a member of the House of Representatives of the Parliament of Jamaica from 1997 to 2012, representing the People's National Party. She came to international attention after the 2004 Haitian coup d'état, when she escorted Jean-Bertrand Aristide from his temporary exile in the Central African Republic to Jamaica at the invitation of then-Prime Minister of Jamaica P. J. Patterson.
Andrea Stuart is a Barbadian-British historian and writer, who was raised in the Caribbean and the US and now lives in the UK. Her biography of Josephine Bonaparte, entitled The Rose of Martinique, won the Enid McLeod Literary Prize in 2004. Although her three published books so far have been non-fiction, she has spoken of working on a novel set in the 18th century.
Verene Albertha Shepherd is a Jamaican academic who is a professor of social history at the University of the West Indies in Mona. She is the director of the university's Institute for Gender and Development Studies, and specialises in Jamaican social history and diaspora studies. She has published prolifically in journals and books on topics including Jamaican economic history during slavery, the Indian experience in Jamaica, migration and diasporas and Caribbean women's history, and is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.
Jacqueline Bishop is a writer, visual artist and photographer from Jamaica, who now lives in New York City, where she is a professor at the School of Liberal Studies at New York University (NYU). She is the founder of Calabash, an online journal of Caribbean art and letters, housed at NYU, and also writes for the Huffington Post and the Jamaica Observer Arts Magazine. In 2016 her book The Gymnast and Other Positions won the nonfiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Anne Walmsley is a British-born editor, scholar, critic and author, notable as a specialist in Caribbean art and literature, whose career spans five decades. She is widely recognised for her work as Longman's Caribbean publisher, and for Caribbean books that she authored and edited. Her pioneering school anthology, The Sun's Eye: West Indian Writing for Young Readers (1968), drew on her use of local literary material while teaching in Jamaica. A participant in and chronicler of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Walmsley is also the author of The Caribbean Artists Movement: A Literary and Cultural History, 1966–1971 (1992) and Art in the Caribbean (2010). She lives in London.
Joanne C. Hillhouse is a creative writer, journalist, producer and educator from Antigua and Barbuda. Her writing encompasses novels, short stories, poetry and children's books, and she has contributed to many publications in the Caribbean region as well as internationally, among them the anthologies Pepperpot (2014) and New Daughters of Africa (2019). Hillhouse's books include the poetry collection On Becoming (2003), the novellas The Boy from Willow Bend (2003) and Dancing Nude in the Moonlight (2004), the children's books Fish Outta Water and With Grace, the novel Oh Gad! (2012), and the young adult novel Musical Youth (2014), which was runner-up for the Burt Award for Caribbean Literature. She was named by Literary Hub as one of "10 Female Caribbean Authors You Should Know". An advocate for the development of the arts in Antigua and Barbuda, she founded the Wadadli Youth Pen Prize in 2004.
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