Handwriting Expert USA

Call Directions Website Contact the business

Handwriting Expert USA America's #1 Handwriting Expert for Document examination, forgeries, and questioned handwriting. Forgery detection and expert witness testimony by Bart Baggett.

Top Handwriting Expert and Forensic Document Examiner.

Cleopatra wrote a letter in French.So did Julius Caesar. So did Mary Magdalene. So did Judas. All of them — modern Frenc...
10/14/2026

Cleopatra wrote a letter in French.

So did Julius Caesar. So did Mary Magdalene. So did Judas. All of them — modern French.

A dealer named Denis Vrain-Lucas sold roughly 27,000 of these letters to Michel Chasles, one of France's top mathematicians and a member of the Académie des Sciences. Chasles paid between 140,000 and 150,000 francs. Over eight years, he never questioned the language.

In 1867, Chasles stood up at the Académie and published correspondence proving Pascal had discovered gravitation before Newton. A colleague pointed out that Newton, at the date on the letters, would have been about ten years old.

That was the thread that unraveled it.

When the court sent two experts to examine the collection, they found letters on paper carrying watermarks centuries newer than their supposed authors. Other texts had been copied from printed books from the 1760s.

Vrain-Lucas got two years. He knew one language and one trick, and it worked until someone checked the paper.

I wasn't involved in the Vrain-Lucas case. I missed 1870 by a little bit. But the lesson has outlived everyone in that courtroom. A forger can practice a hand for years. What he can't easily change is what the document is physically made of.

The paper gets a vote. The ink gets a vote. The handwriting gets a vote.

Chasles trusted the story. The paper told a different one.

Bart Baggett
HandwritingExpertUSA.com · bartbaggett.com

10/13/2026

Florida Fraudster Tried to Steal Elvis's Graceland.

This story sounds crazy, but it's true. Somebody actually tried to steal Elvis Presley's famous Graceland mansion using forged documents, a fake $3.8 million loan, and a company that barely existed.

And here's the crazy part. They had the audacity to foreclose in a public court filing.

In 2024, Elvis's granddaughter, Riley Keough, discovered that Graceland was scheduled for a foreclosure auction. The story they weaved was this... her late mother, Lisa Marie Presley, had borrowed $3.8 million and used Graceland as collateral.

There was just one little problem.
Lisa Marie never took out the loan.

Somebody had created the paperwork to make it look like she did. A promissory note, a deed of trust, signatures, and even a notarization. The whole package.

The supposed lender demanded $2.85 million to settle the debt. When she refused to pay, the tried to foreclose on Graceland. Seriously.

A forged document doesn't become authentic just because somebody files it with the government.

The woman behind the scheme was Lisa Jeanine Findley, a Missouri resident who used fake identities to support the fraudulent claim.

Fortunately, Riley Keough challenged the foreclosure, and a judge stopped the auction.

Findley pleaded guilty to federal mail fraud in February 2025 and was sentenced to 57 months in prison.

Nearly five years behind bars for trying to steal the Elvis's castle.

Here's the lesson for attorneys and anyone dealing with disputed documents.

Sometimes one forged signature can threaten an entire inheritance, trigger a lawsuit, or put a famous property into foreclosure.

A signature is evidence. This one was cut-n-pasted. Bad forgery.

Elvis may have left the building, but fortunately, Graceland wasn't going anywhere.

— Bart Baggett

Forensic Document Examiner

If you have a questioned document, call 1-800-980-9030 or visit HandwritingExpertUSA.com.

Did a Hong Kong Billionaire Really Leave $12 Billion to Her Feng Shui Consultant?Nina Wang was often called the richest ...
10/12/2026

Did a Hong Kong Billionaire Really Leave $12 Billion to Her Feng Shui Consultant?

Nina Wang was often called the richest woman in Asia. When she died in Hong Kong on April 3, 2007, two wills surfaced.

Only one of them could be genuine.

The first was dated July 28, 2002. It left her fortune to the Chinachem Charitable Foundation.

The second was dated October 16, 2006. It left everything to one man: her feng shui adviser, Tony Chan Chun-chuen. You read that correctly... her FENG SHUI consultant. He gets a massive inheritance.

Wang knew better than most what a disputed will could do. She had spent years in Hong Kong's courts herself, defending a will left by her husband, Teddy Wang, who was kidnapped in 1990 and never seen again. She won that fight in 2005. Two years later, her own estate was in the same position.

At the civil trial in 2009, both sides called handwriting experts.

On February 2, 2010, Mr Justice Johnson Lam of the Court of First Instance ruled for the foundation. He found Chan's evidence untruthful and unreliable. According to news reports of the judgment, he described the 2006 signature as a highly skilled simulation.

That phrase matters.

A highly skilled simulation is not a shaky tracing or an obvious copy. It is careful, practiced work that looks right at a glance. It can resemble the genuine signature closely enough that the real question is not what it looks like, but how it was made.

Chan appealed. The Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal in 2011, and on October 24, 2011, the Court of Final Appeal refused him leave to go further.

Then the case became criminal.

On July 4, 2013, a jury convicted Chan of forgery and of using a false instrument. The next day he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. A later appeal was refused in 2015.

I wasn't involved in the Wang case. But it makes a point that applies to contested signatures generally.

A good forgery isn't supposed to look like a forgery. If it did, nobody would need an examiner.

So a signature that looks clean and consistent doesn't settle anything. It raises the next questions. How was it written? At what speed? With what pressure and line quality? And how does it compare with genuine signatures written in the ordinary course of that person's life?

Those questions are what separate an impression from an examination.

In the Wang case, the signature looked right.
The court found it wasn't hers.

I guess he forgot to paint his door red or sleep facing North on the night of that judgment.

Apparently, his feng shui was better than his forgery skills.

Bart Baggett
bartbaggett.com

10/09/2026

The oldest functioning courthouse in America is in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I just testified in a handwriting forgery case inside it.

Daniel Webster and Samuel Adams tried cases in the same courtroom. That is quite a list of lawyers to follow.

My work takes me from historic courtrooms to trials as far as the Grand Bahamas — wherever a signature or document needs examining.

Think you have a forged signature? Call our office.

📞 1-800-980-9030
HandwritingExpertUSA.com

10/09/2026

A few months ago, I found myself in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to testify in a handwriting forgery case. The courthouse turned out to be almost as interesting as the case.

The Superior Courthouse in Newburyport is considered the oldest functioning courthouse in the United States. Daniel Webster argued cases there. So did Samuel Adams.

That is quite a list of lawyers to follow.

And then there was me — walking into the same building more than two centuries later to talk about whether a mortgage document was authentic. There was something about that I enjoyed.

Generations of lawyers, judges, and jurors have walked through those doors carrying some version of the same problem: two people disagree about what happened. Both may be absolutely certain. Eventually, somebody has to look at the evidence.

My job is narrower than deciding who's a good person. I examine the handwriting, examine the documents, look at the evidence, and explain what I found clearly enough that a judge or jury can understand it.

Sometimes the stakes are surprisingly high. Last month, I worked on a handwriting matter where a man was facing a three-to-four-year sentence.

My work takes me from historic courtrooms like Newburyport to trials as far as the Grand Bahamas. The places change. The technology changes. But the underlying questions really haven't changed much.

What happened? What can be proven? And what does the evidence actually show?

That is still the interesting part of this work — going wherever the documents take me and helping a court get a little closer to the truth.

📞 1-800-980-9030
HandwritingExpertUSA.com

10/08/2026

The handwriting expert nearest you might not be the right expert.

If you're dealing with a forgery or something headed to court, don't just search for the closest “handwriting expert.”

Look for a forensic document examiner—and ask some questions.

How many times have you gone to court?
What's your training?
How long have you been doing this?
Has a judge ever found you not qualified?
Can I see your CV?

About half of our cases are handled using high-resolution scans and PDF files without ever meeting the client face-to-face.

But if the original document itself needs to be examined, that's different. Sometimes I need to travel and put that document under a microscope.

The question isn't just: Who's near me?

It's: What does my case actually require?

📞 1-800-980-9030
HandwritingExpertUSA.com

In 1992, a Liverpool man turned up with what looked like Jack the Ripper's confession.It was written in a genuine Victor...
10/07/2026

In 1992, a Liverpool man turned up with what looked like Jack the Ripper's confession.

It was written in a genuine Victorian album with roughly the first twenty pages torn out, and signed in the name of James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant who died in 1889.

A signed confession to one of the most famous unsolved murder cases in history. Warner Books scheduled it for October 1993, with a first printing reported at 200,000 copies.

Then it was tested.

The ink chemistry didn't settle anything. One analysis found nothing that ruled out a Victorian date. Other tests contradicted each other. People are still arguing about it.

The handwriting was simpler. Document examiners compared the diary with two things Maybrick certainly wrote: his will and his marriage register. Neither one matched.

After an independent investigation, including a report by historical documents dealer Kenneth Rendell, Warner cancelled the American edition before it shipped. No court ever ruled on the diary, and a small group still argues it's genuine. But the comparison itself was direct.

I wasn't involved in the Maybrick case. It shows the order of operations in document work: the dramatic exhibit gets the attention, but the known writing is what you measure it against.

Chemistry can tell you what a document is made of.
Comparison tells you who made it.

Bart Baggett
bartbaggett.com

10/06/2026

Can Attorneys Lie in Court?

Here's something people don't always realize about civil court:

Witnesses take an oath before they testify. Lawyers don't.

That doesn't mean attorneys are free to lie. Lawyers have professional rules and obligations they have to follow.

But witnesses are the ones sitting on the stand, under oath, answering questions about what they know.

That's an important distinction.

If you've never been on the witness stand, know this going in: it can be a tricky and precarious place to be.

You're under oath. Your answers are being questioned. And your words matter.

I've spent a lot of time on the witness stand as an expert witness. When I'm there, my job is to answer the questions and stand behind my opinion.

The witness stand isn't the place to create a better story.

It's the place where your testimony gets tested.

📞 1-800-980-9030
HandwritingExpertUSA.com · bartbaggett.com

10/06/2026

Can attorneys lie in court?

Here's the difference most people miss. Witnesses are sworn in before they testify. Lawyers aren't testifying, so they don't take that same oath in the courtroom.

That doesn't give attorneys permission to lie. They still answer to professional rules and obligations.

But the person in the witness box is the one under oath. As an expert witness, I've sat there many times. It's a precarious place to be, and your words matter.

📞 1-800-980-9030
HandwritingExpertUSA.com · bartbaggett.com

In February 1920, a woman was pulled from Berlin's Landwehr Canal. She had no papers and would not say who she was. She ...
10/05/2026

In February 1920, a woman was pulled from Berlin's Landwehr Canal. She had no papers and would not say who she was. She spent two years in an asylum registered as "Miss Unknown."

Then she said she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar of Russia.

The lawsuit that followed ran for decades and became the longest in German history.

And the evidence that sounded strongest was the handwriting.

Dr. Minna Becker compared more than a hundred samples and told the court she had never seen two sets of writing with so many concordant signs that belonged to two different people. Her conclusion was categorical: identical. A court-appointed anthropologist compared facial photographs and agreed. Later, an ear comparison agreed too.

Three kinds of expert comparison, all pointing the same direction.

Then, in 1994, mitochondrial DNA excluded her from the Romanov maternal line and matched her to the family of a Polish factory worker.

I wasn't involved in the Anderson case. It is a useful reminder of what certainty can and can't tell you.

Handwriting and physical comparisons had pointed toward Anastasia. Decades later, DNA pointed somewhere else. Certainty does not make an opinion stronger than the evidence it rests on.

If you ever hear a categorical conclusion, ask what it rests on. A conclusion drawn from limited exemplars is a conclusion about the exemplars, not about the person.

That is the lesson of a woman in a Berlin canal.

Bart Baggett
bartbaggett.com

Address

15233 Ventura Boulevard
Sherman Oaks, CA
91403

Opening Hours

Monday 11am - 8pm
Tuesday 11am - 8pm
Wednesday 11am - 8pm
Thursday 11am - 8pm
Friday 11am - 8pm
Saturday 11:15am - 6am

Telephone

+13235449277

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Handwriting Expert USA posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Handwriting Expert USA:

Shortcuts

Share

Category