Portfolio Weekly
Handwriting Expert Works on JonBenet Ramsey Case
Portfolio Weekly, November 11-17, 1997
After being beaten nearly to death in the dorm corridor of
a boarding school, Cina Wong hoped her nightmare was over.
But several weeks later, she began to receive death threats
from the girls who had attacked her.
The headmaster promised that her assailants would be apprehended
and punished with the help of handwriting experts. It was
then that the spunky 15-year-old determined her career path.
“I decided I would follow this profession [analyzing handwriting],”
she says, “to help other people in similar situations.”
Wong is now officially titled a “Questioned Document Examiner,”
a court-qualified, board-certified handwriting expert. She
inspects various documents and testifies in court as to their
authenticity for David Liebman & Associates, one of only
200 privately run handwriting analysis houses in the nation.
In her eight years in the profession, Wong has worked on hundreds
of cases involving questionable documents. They’ve ranged
from family squabbles to neighborhood disputes – and murder
investigations.
In one Richmond case, the parents of four children passed
away. After some time, a handwritten will was found. It claimed
that everything was left to one son, a son who was neither
very bright nor very adept at forgery.
Another person’s handwriting gave him away in a Portsmouth
case. But this time the writing instruments included a key.
One neighbor didn’t like another so he scratched obscenities
into his enemy’s new black Mercedes and wrote nasty letters
to the man. Generally it would be hard to determine who had
defaced the car, but Wong was able to prove that the vandal
and the letter writer were the same person.
While most people haven’t heard about these two cases, just
about everyone knows about the JonBenet Ramsey murder case.
Wong and Leibman were recently hired by a national newspaper
to analyze new samples of Patsy Ramsey’s handwriting. The
team compared the samples to the ransom note published in
newspapers and are waiting for the findings to be published
before they’ll discuss them.
In addition to analyzing handwriting, Wong can also examine
graffiti, typewriting, disappearing inks, watermarks, check
and credit card fraud, embezzlement and contracts.
Whatever challenges cases bring, she loves her work. Plus,
she’s confident in her job security: “This is one business
that improves even more when the economy suffers,” she quips.
So if we slip into a recession, look out, Cina Wong is watching.
-Jennifer Bradner
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