Forensic linguists, who knew?
From The Dial, November 21:
Can a Comma Solve a Crime?
On the evening of October 16, 1984, the body of four-year-old Grégory Villemin was pulled out of the Vologne river in Eastern France. The little boy had disappeared from the front garden of his home in Lépanges-sur-Vologne earlier that afternoon. His mother had searched desperately all over the small village, but nobody had seen him.
It quickly became clear that his death wasn’t a tragic accident. The boy’s hands and feet had been tied with string, and the family had received several threatening letters and voicemails before he disappeared. The following day, another letter was sent to the boy’s father, Jean-Marie Villemin. “I hope you will die of grief, boss,” it read in messy, joined-up handwriting. “Your money will not bring your son back. This is my revenge, you bastard.”
It was the beginning of what would become France’s best-known unsolved murder case. The case has been reopened several times, and multiple suspects have been arrested. Grégory’s mother, Christine, was charged with the crime and briefly jailed but later acquitted. Jean-Marie also served prison time after he shot dead his cousin Bernard Laroche, who had emerged as a prime suspect. The investigating judge, Jean-Michel Lambert, who was assigned the case at age 32 and made critical mistakes early in the investigation, killed himself in 2017.
In France, the use of stylometry — the study of variations in literary styles — has largely been confined to academic circles. The Grégory case is the first time it has been applied in a major criminal investigation.
More than three decades after Grégory’s murder, police brought in a team of Swiss linguists from a company called OrphAnalytics to examine the letters and their use of vocabulary, spelling and sentence structure. Their report, submitted in 2020, and part of which was leaked to the press, pointed to Grégory’s great-aunt, Jacqueline Jacob. The results echoed earlier handwriting and linguistic analysis that had led to Jacob and her husband’s arrest in 2017. (The couple was freed later that year over procedural issues.)
While the new evidence has not yet been presented in court, some believe it could help to solve the case that has haunted an entire generation. It has also shone a spotlight on the little-known field of forensic linguistics. In France, the use of stylometry — the study of variations in literary styles — has largely been confined to academic circles. The Grégory case is the first time it has been applied in a major criminal investigation....
....MUCH MORE
Bringing to mind the introduction to an April 2023 post:
When first I saw that Niall Ferguson had set himself in business as a consulting historian (shades of Sherlock) I thought "How do you hustle up business?":
INT. Corridors of Power - MorningPresident: So gentlemen we are agreed?General: Ma'am, I'm still not sure. I think we better ask an historianBut the trans-Atlantic scholar seems to be doing quite well for himself. Here he is at Bloomberg Opinion, April 9....
