Donald Foster gets it wrong, again and again

     When Donald Foster said that, he had already committed the most outrageous mistake of his comic-opera career as a "literary detective." Apparently Foster thought the world wouldn't find out—but we did.

One by one, Foster's claims proved phony, including his original claim to fame--the identification of an obscure poem as the work of William Shakespeare. Finally, in 2003, Foster renounced the whole idea of relying on computer-generated similarities to identify authorship.

     Foster's credibility first took a body blow from the CBS TV show 48 Hours on April 8, 1999, when itrevealed his mistaken identification of the murderer of child model JonBenet Ramsey. By studying internet postings made by an anonymous "jameson," Foster believed he had unmasked JonBenet's 20-year-old half brother, John Andrew Ramsey, and exposed him as the murderer. Actually, "jameson" was a 48-year-old North Carolina housewife named Sue Bennett.

     Foster's folly was the result of his appetite for fame as a literary gumshoe, whetted by publicity he received for other supposed successes in 1995 and 1996. He saw another opportunity for fame in the notorious Ramsey case, since one of the key mysteries in that Colorado murder is who wrote a ransom note found near the murder scene.

     Foster went online, and soon encountered "jameson," the moderator of an online discussion forum about the Ramsey case. He read hundreds of pages of jameson's online writings. He also exchanged e-mail with the anonymous jameson, and, based on her writing style and jameson's detailed knowledge of the crime, decided jameson was really JonBenet's 20-year-old half brother, John Andrew Ramsey, and that he was probably the killer.

     In a June 10, 1997 letter [see copy below] faxed to literary agent Chris Calhoun of Sterling Lord Literistic, and obtained by Bennett, Foster boasted that he had "solved this Colorado crime," and proposed writing a magazine article about his discovery. "For the past five months, John Andrew Ramsey has cruised from one JonBenet website to another, posting messages under a dozen or more pseudonyms—most often "jams" or "jams jameson," Foster wrote. The fax letter to the literary agent was shown on the CBS 48 Hours program.

     Foster bragged: "It strains credulity that a Shakespeare scholar dwelling in Poughkeepsie should solve this Colorado crime using no other resources than laptop computer and an Internet hookup—but everything about this case is strange."

     So certain was Foster of his identification, he sent a letter eight days later to the slain child's mother, Patsy Ramsey, who was a suspect. Foster told her: "I know you are innocent—know it absolutely and unequivocally. I will stake my professional reputation on it, indeed my faith in humanity." Foster said his analysis of the ransom letter "leads me to believe you did not write it and the police are wasting their time by trying to prove that you did." The purpose of the letter was to offer his services to the Ramseys, but they rejected the offer. (Rocky Mountain News, September 27, 1998).

     Undeterred, Foster was setting up a magazine deal to expose jameson as the murderer of JonBenet, when he got a rude shock. A journalist told him he had met jameson, and she was a middle-aged woman. Foster e-mailed jameson, asking her to call him. Sue Bennett did so on June 25, 1997, and identified herself as jameson. She recollects that Foster wouldn't believe she was jameson or that jameson was not John Andrew. He came up with the theory that she was a relative who was sheltering John Andrew, allowing him to use her computer and e-mail address. Foster mailed Bennett a 3-page certified letter dated June 27, 1997, urging her to come clean and tell him what she knew about John Andrew's alleged part in the murder, citing state laws about being an accessory. It's an extraordinary letter, revealing a mindset that can best be described as delusional.

     It turned out John Andrew Ramsey was in Georgia at the time of the murder and has been publicly cleared of involvement.

     A more humble, or principled, person would have backed off the Ramsey case after such a fiasco. But not Donald Foster. A few months later, he offered himself to the Boulder, Colorado police to do literary analysis of the ransom note, and provided them with a report, this time identifying Patsy Ramsey as the note's author! (Rocky Mountain News, September 26, 1998) Apparently Foster's main finding was that the ransom note had a lot of exclamation points, and Patsy Ramsey sometimes used exclamation points too.

     A storm of controversy erupted when Patsy Ramsey's lawyer releasted Foster's earlier letter, which so passionately claimed he could prove she didn't write the note.

     Former FBI agent Gregg McCrary (a real forensic analyst, unlike Foster) said Foster's decision to work for the Boulder police was "morally indefensible." He added: "You just can't do that. You can't take a stand on one side and then when the other side comes calling, you flip-flop." (Boulder News, October 19, 1998)

     Foster's report was ignored. The Boulder Grand Jury dissolved in 1999 without making an indictment. None of the news commentaries that followed made any mention of Don Foster.

     And what was Foster's own response to the CBS 48 Hours expose of his mistake? In a letter to 48 Hours, he said he had "just been speculating." (Transcript, 48 Hours, April 8, 1999)

     Sue Bennett, the on-line "jameson" who helped blow Foster's cover, made this comment to a reporter: "He wants to be known as the pioneer in the field, but I think he's a charlatan, out to make a name for himself."

     Foster's fallibility may have been a surprise to the general public, who had been hearing extravagant praise of Foster since 1996 for his supposed triumphs in unmasking the author of Primary Colors and identifying Theodore Kaczynski as author of the Unabomber Manifesto. But it was no surprise to Shakespearean scholars when their colleague Professor Foster crashed and burned. His dishonesty, arrogance, and lack of integrity had been well known since Foster made his first claim to fame—the identification of an obscure Elizabethan funeral elegy as the work of none other than William Shakespeare.

     The poem in question, Funeral Elegy for William Peter, dated 1612, was signed only by printed initials. Foster claimed Shakespeare probably wrote it, pointing to verbal quirks like the frequency of certain words, choice of rhymes, pattern of word length, and so on.

     Foster published a book on his theory in 1989, but it attracted little attention until 1995, when Foster pushed his theory at a scholarly conference, and The New York Times covered it on the front page. Suddenly, Donald Foster and the obscure poem were world news. And Donald Foster, whose regular job was teaching freshman English at Vassar, tasted notoriety, and liked it.

     Foster bragged that he was the first scholar in this century to have uncovered a genuine new work by Shakespeare. The story was dressed in the trappings of high technology, because Foster used computers for tasks like counting how often a word was used. Appropriately dazzled, some American editors accepted Foster's claim, and included Funeral Elegy in new collections of Shakespeare's works.

     But Shakespearean scholars all over the world reacted with horror, scorn, and hard evidence to the contrary. They pointed out that Funeral Elegy flunked all the standard tests for Shakespearean authorship, and that Foster could make his claim only by inventing new tests.

     And more: Funeral Elegy is a terrible poem, and it's impossible to believe Shakespeare would write anything so bad at the pinnacle of his career. In fact, the author of the Elegy apologizes in the poem for his poor literary skills. The style is distinctly unShakespearean. It's unlikely Shakespeare would write a tribute to an obscure youth whom he didn't know, and, if he had done so, the youth's relatives would have made sure the famous playwright's name would have been spelled out in full, not just abbreviated by initials. The attack from academia went on and on.

     "Mr. Foster seems to have missed one critical step," wrote critic Stephen Wigler. "He forgot to read the poem." (Baltimore Sun, April 8, 1996)

     But it was Shakespearean scholar MacDonald P. Jackson who deconstructed Foster on Foster's own terms. In previous writings, noted Jackson, Foster had identified nine common words in Shakespeare's known works which always appeared at the same average frequency. But in analyzing Funeral Elegy, Foster chose to test for only five of those words. When Jackson ran the test for the other four words, the Elegy flunked. (Lingua franca, July, 1998).

     Behavior like this prompted Shakespearean scholar Brian Vickers to write that Foster is "guilty not only of arrogance but of pervasive dishonesty." (London Times Literary Supplement, April 12, 1996)

     Vickers showed that Foster's earlier work actually pointed to a school headmaster named Simon Wastell as author of the elegy. But, "no kudos attaches to identifying an obscure headmaster with the authorship of anything, while identifying Shakespeare's hand would be the great prize," wrote Vickers, neatly pinpointing Foster's motives.

     Vickers added: "That Foster misapplied his data is clear, but, even if he had been scrupulous in weighing unfavourable evidence, the value of such data is still questionable. The fact that a computer analysis shows that two roughly contemporary texts share a certain stylistic or grammatical feature only means that they share it with an as yet unknown number of other texts in that period."

     Vickers hits the nail on the head. There is no unique "fingerprint" in someone's literary style. The way we write changes constantly, varies through imitation of others, and is shared with countless other people. Claiming "proof" of anything based on a single, small sample of writing is just silly.

Foster struck back. According to an article in Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, Spring, 1996, "Foster...accused Vickers of 'advanc[ing] his case with an inattention to facts that would not be tolerated in an undergraduate student.'"

But on June 12, 2002, Foster admitted in a posting to a Shakespeare internet discussion group that his claim was false--Funeral Elegy was indeed not written by William Shakespeare but instead by John Ford. Typically, Foster made no apologies for his 13-year-old fraud and his insulting denunciations of his critics. Instead, he proclaimed that his willingness to admit error showed he was a "scholar." (New York Times, June 20, 2002)

These disasters apparently inspired a rare moment of honesty in Foster. In an interview in 2003, Foster said he had become "skeptical" of the use of computer-generated findings in determining authorship. "He even doubts computer-generated evidence he used in his own dissertation," said the Santa Barbara News-Press (August 11, 2003).

But as long as gullible reporters were willing to listen to him, Foster continued to leap for the headlines and continued to make a fool of himself. After the anthrax letter scare in 2001, Foster jumped on the anti-Islamic bandwagon and told the Associated Press that the "letter writer might speak Arabic or Persian" and that the "text could suggest someone who does not know how to abbreviate words in English and it also could indicate the author is not used to writing left to right." [www.courttv.com/assault_on_america/1109_sleugh_ap.html] But after the FBI declared their main suspect was Steven Hatfill, an American former biowarfare scientist, Foster shamelessly contradicted himself and told BBC he had determined that the text pointed to "a senior scientist from within America's biological-defence community." [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2196008/stm]

Foster's Exaggerated Claims

     How did such a liar ever get his name into the rolodex of the nation's press? It's a case study in self-promotion.

Before his Shakespeare claim was disproven, Foster milked it for all it was worth. After it hit the news in 1995, New York Magazine asked Foster to apply textual analysis to find out who wrote Primary Colors, a controversial best seller whose author was listed only as "Anonymous."

     Joe Klein, a well-known political columnist, was widely thought to be "Anonymous." "Klein was mentioned as a suspect in the very first story about "Primary Colors…" (Washington Post, July 17, 1996) Shortly after the book was published, David Kusnet, Clinton's chief speechwriter during the 1992 election, wrote an article in the Baltimore Sun saying Joe Klein was probably the author, because only Klein had the necessary background in New York and Boston politics. (Baltimore Sun, February 11, 1996)

     Foster simply jumped on the bandwagon. Identifying Klein as "Anonymous" presented the easiest task imaginable for a "literary detective." Primary Colors was an entire 507-page book, giving a huge sample of Anonymous's stylistic preferences. And Joe Klein's known writings provided an even larger sample—two published books and countless articles. It was easy to find similarities—Foster focused on a list of adverbs used by both Klein and Anonymous.

     Even so, Foster showed uncertainty. Although the New York Magazine editor inserted into Foster's article the claim, "Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors," Foster himself admitted, "I think it's quite possible there are two people involved in the book." (Washington Post, July 17, 1996)

     Klein continued to deny authorship. "Unaccustomed to dealing with authors in a position to issue denials and unable to reconcile the vehemence of Klein's protests with his own methodology, Foster backed off a bit, suggesting that Klein might have had some help in writing Primary Colors." (New York Times, November 19, 1997)

     What forced Joe Klein to admit authorship, six months later, wasn't Donald Foster's stylistic commentary, but old-fashioned handwriting analysis. An early manuscript copy of Primary Color, containing brief snatches of handwriting on several pages, was discovered at a booksellers. A top handwriting analyst, Maureen Casey Owens, compared the handwriting to samples of Joe Klein's, and concluded "the two samples of handwriting are absolutely consistent throughout."(Washington Post, July 17, 1996)

     Only then did Joe Klein admit he was "Anonymous."

     Besides Primary Colors, the other achievement which is constantly attributed to Foster is fingering Theodore Kaczynski as writer of the Unabomber Manifesto. Actually, Foster played no role in identifying Kaczynski as the author. Kaczynski's own brother, David, had recognized the published manifesto as Theodore's work, and tipped off the FBI. Kaczynski had been arrested, his cabin searched, and overwhelming evidence found of Kaczynski's guilt.

     Desperate for any grounds for a defense, Kaczynski's lawyers asked Foster if he could dispute the FBI's identification of their client as the author. (New York Times, November 19, 1997) Foster, not being a total fool, declined to do so. Instead, he provided the FBI with a written declaration supporting the government's case. He never appeared as a witness.

     Despite his negligible role in both the Primary Colors and Unabomber affairs, Foster took credit for them whenever he could. For example, he introduced himself to jameson on May 22, 1997 in an e-mail which said: "I'm the Vassar prof. who identified Joe Klein as the author of the best seller Primary Colors 'by Anonymous' just three weeks after the book was published and six months before Klein confessed; I'm currently serving as an expert witness in the unabom case."

     For years, the media would fall prey to Foster's self-promotion, wildly exaggerating his accomplishments. Example: "Foster, a Vassar College professor, helped police identify Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber by analyzing the Unabomber Manifesto. He also proved that reporter Joe Klein wrote Primary Colors, a book by 'Anonymous.' (Rocky Mountain News, September 26, 1998)

     Foster continued looking for controversial cases to jump into. He found one in Northern California--the unsolved Judi Bari car bombing of 1990. A group of Bari's enemies was trying to discredit her belief that she was attacked because of her Earth First! leadership. They especially wanted to defend one of their own group, Irv Sutley, who was accused by Bari of being a police agent prior to the bombing. Sutley's group enlisted Foster to try to concoct a counter-theory—that Bari's ex-husband bombed her for personal reasons.

     Bari had refuted this suggestion in her book, Timber Wars, stating she got on well with her ex-husband, and he had no motive to attack her. Furthermore, said Bari, the bomb's timing mechanism proved it was placed while she was in Oakland, where the bomb exploded, and her ex-husband was known to have been home in Redwood Valley, 100 miles away. (Timber Wars, 1994, p. 139)

     Facts were no obstacle for Foster. He agreed to a sham experiment. Foster allowed Bari's enemies to select a pool of alleged writings ("the Flatland archive") from a small number of people associated in some way with Bari. These writings were given to Foster to "analyze," apparently with the author of each sample identified by name, thereby by violating the most basic "double-blind" rule for scientific testing. They also inundated Foster with slanders and innuendos against ex-husband Mike Sweeney, and made it abundantly clear what result they were hoping for.

Foster played his part. In an article for an obscure conspiracy-theory magazine, he dismissed Bari as "a virtual case study in political paranoia," suggesting she "may have been involved" in an earlier bombing, and listed a few supposed similarities between her ex-husband's writing and an anonymous letter taking credit for the bombing. The similarities were all common English usage, like using "that" instead of "which." (Flatland magazine, February 1999)

Foster did admit that "There is, of course, no guarantee the Flatland archive includes writing by the actual bomber of Judi Bari." When challenged later, Foster refused to give any details on what similarities he allegedly found in the writing styles, or what source documents he was analyzing. Finally, he admitted in an email on May 11, 2000 that the supposed link to Sweeney's writing was "inconclusive."    

He believed Patsy innocent, then tied her to ransom note

By Lisa Levitt Ryckman
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

A linguistics scholar who told Boulder police that Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note had first offered his services to the Ramseys because of his strong belief in her innocence.

"I know that you are innocent -- know it, absolutely and unequivocally," Donald Foster wrote in a June 18, 1997, letter to Patsy Ramsey, mother of the slain 6-year-old JonBenet.

"I would stake my professional reputation on it -- indeed, my faith in humanity."

Steve Thomas, a former lead detective in the case, cites Foster's analysis as key evidence in his claim that Patsy Ramsey wrote the three-page ransom note left in the Ramsey home on Dec. 26, 1996.

Thomas details his accusations against Patsy Ramsey in his book, JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, due out today.

"I finally heard the magic words while seated in the book-lined office of Don Foster, an Elizabethan scholar and professor at Vassar College in upstate New York, who just happened to be a hell of a linguistic detective," Thomas writes.

"'Steve,' said Foster, 'I believe I am going to conclude the ransom note was the work of a single individual: Patsy Ramsey."'

But in his 1997 letter to Patsy Ramsey, Foster told her, "I believe you were an ideal mother, wise, protective, caring and truly devoted." He goes on to offer his services to help prove Patsy Ramsey's innocence.

Neither Foster nor Thomas could be reached for comment.

Although Thomas mentions Foster's letter to Patsy Ramsey in his book, the document goes into far greater detail than the author suggests. The Ramseys' attorney, Lin Wood, provided Foster's letter to the Denver Rocky Mountain News on Monday.

The Ramseys have denied involvement in JonBenet's death. They did not accept Foster's offer of help, and he eventually did some analysis for District Attorney Alex Hunter and the Boulder police.

Among Thomas' reasons for concluding that Patsy Ramsey wrote the note:

In 1997 Donald Foster faxed a letter to Patsy Ramsey. A copy of that fax was obtained from http://www.jameson245.com/April00.htm
Here it is: