she used her ampersands quite extensively through her writing, so every fifth, sixth line would have an ampersand on it, in her known handwriting, where richard always used the a-n-d for the verbiage and. kittel also noticed that nancy and richard made their capital i differently. richard used one down stroke like a 1, whereas nancy used a down stroke and then a cross at the top and bottom. she was willing to take a lot more time in executing them than richard was. their lowercase fs were different as well. richard used a clockwise motion coming down from the top of the f down to the bottom. he would swing off in a clockwise motion to finish off the lower loop of the f, whereas nancy always came down and went counterclockwise to finish off the f. kittel concluded richard wrote the diary entries about nancy s brother, bill.
Her family strongly suspected richard was the killer since they knew he was having an affair with another woman. i did not poison my wife, nancy dillard lyon, nor did i have anything to do with her tragic death. so there was no shortage of suspects. who sent the wine to nancy s home? who sent the threatening letter? why did nancy accuse her brother of sexual abuse, and would he kill to keep her quiet? and was nancy planning to divorce her husband? in the event that this case becomes a murder charge, this will be an honest to goodness perry mason-style whodunit.
but the owner of the company listed on the receipt told prosecutors all they needed to know. did you sell her these chemicals? no, i didn t. is this a receipt? do you sell chemicals? no, i don t. is this your receipt from your business? no, it s a forgery. it s not mine. investigators also discovered that arsenic was not shipped to the lyons home. it was shipped to a post office box richard opened. there is no reason for the world to have a post office box opened for him to get this arsenic. if everything is completely legitimate, why aren t you having it delivered at home or where you work? because it s a nefarious reason of having it delivered to a post office box. in the hospital before she died, nancy lyon told her doctor about a suspicious incident that occurred several months earlier. she said, well, at one time when they were separated, they had gone to the movies together. and richard had gone and got her
the manner of death was ruled a homicide, but questions remained. investigators discovered a receipt among nancy s papers, a receipt for arsenic. nancy s husband, richard, said she bought the poison to kill a colony of fire ants in their yard. and friends also revealed nancy had been depressed over the past year. she discovered her husband was having an affair and the couple briefly separated. richard had met another woman. and she felt he was going through a mid-life crisis. so, she said at first, her take was, hey, i m going to stay patient. i m going to get some counseling because she was just devastated, really. i wouldn t discount a woman making herself ill or even taking something to make herself ill to get the attention of her husband. yet, medical experts were skeptical that nancy committed suicide.
Written by nancy, investigators sent the diary to a forensic document examiner, hartford kittel. handwriting examination s based upon two distinct facts no two people write exactly alike. within the writing of a single individual, there is normal variation. it s this normal variation that we associate or we don t associate with the questioned writing. surprisingly, nancy and richard s handwriting looked strikingly similar. friends said this was intentional. while in college, nancy had written some of richard s research papers, and she mimicked his writing. kittel first looked at known handwriting samples from both nancy and richard. despite their similarities, there were differences.