SCHOLAR FINDS UNLIKELY FAME AS LANGUAGE DETECTIVE

By Amanda Beeler
Tribune Staff Writer
April 19, 1999

Uncommon word usage, unusual punctuation and repeated misspellings might be the sign of a bad writer to some, but in Donald Foster's eyes they are dead giveaways that help solve linguistic puzzles.

A Shakespearean and Renaissance literature professor at Vassar College, Foster has gained unlikely fame as the man who fingered Newsweek columnist Joe Klein as the author of the novel "Primary Colors" and helped bolster the FBI's conclusion that Theodore Kaczynski wrote certain incriminating documents, including the published manifesto, in the Unabomber case.

His role as a sought-after expert in attributing authorship to anonymous works grew out of his scholarly pursuits. He gained worldwide attention in 1995 for having ascribed to Shakespeare an anonymously written 17th Century poem that eulogized a murdered man.

The 48-year-old professor, who says he never intended to become a specialist in textual attribution, described the exploits that have carried him far from the classroom in a lecture Saturday night at the Chicago Vassar Club's 1999 Scholarship Benefit at the Arts Club.

No two people have the same vocabulary or writing style, Foster said, describing individuals as prisoners of their own language.

"As a result, when given an anonymous document, and comprehensive text samples with which to compare it, I can usually locate the nameless author--not because I'm so clever but because a writer's use of language is as distinctive, as inimitable, as unique, as one's DNA," he said.

Foster says his expertise as a detective began when he was a graduate student in the 1980s and was able to identify the authors of anonymous critiques of his Ph.D. dissertation, which centered on the elegy.

A product of the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Foster now receives 40 to 50 requests a week for assistance in identifying suspects or authors and has consulted on such high profile cases as the JonBenet Ramsey murder in Boulder, Colo., and bombings at the Atlanta Olympics and a Birmingham abortion clinic that authorities believe are linked.

Though he is frequently referred to as an expert in computers and handwriting, Foster is quick to point out he is neither.

"There is no magic in my attribution work and no computer wizardry," Foster, a balding, bespectacled man who frequently refers to himself as an absent-minded professor, told the crowd of almost 200 Saturday.

The computer, which he uses frequently for word searches, allows him to do what the human brain cannot: read up to 1 billion words in the time it takes an individual to read a sentence.

And while he might look at the handwriting in a document, Foster is interested in the words themselves: how sentences are put together and what words and phrases a writer uses.

"When I finished ("Primary Colors"), I didn't know what happened in it, but I knew the language," he said.

Foster researched the Bill Clinton roman a clef at the behest of New York Magazine. He says he started by jotting down unusual words in "Primary Colors" and then searching via computer for similarities in blocks of texts written by people suspected of being the author.

"All of us have access to a lot more words than we use in our writing," Foster said. "We have words that are part of our repertoire."

Alarms went off when the computer scanned Klein's Newsweek columns, Foster said. Both Klein and the novel's anonymous author favored adjectives such as "lugubrious" and "puckish" and an Internet search of some coinages, like "tarmac-hopping," were found only in a column by Klein and in "Primary Colors."

But Foster's public discovery was tarnished when Klein flatly denied the attribution.

Saturday evening, Foster imitated Dan Rather on the CBS Evening News reporting that a Vassar College professor had risked his professional reputation by declaring that Klein was the book's author.

"It was not a good moment. Or week. Or semester," Foster said.

By the time Klein admitted penning the book six months later, Foster was too exhausted to toot his own horn.

Foster's temporary discrediting by Klein had a ripple effect in the esoteric world of Elizabethan literature. Many academicians who had earlier supported Foster's declaration that Shakespeare had written "A Funeral Elegy in Memory of the Late Virtuous Master William Peter" did some quick back-pedaling.

At present, while the elegy has been published in several new Shakespeare anthologies, its status as a work of the Bard is still controversial. Even anthology editors who recommended that the funeral poem be included in the books, don't believe the writing is Shakespeare's.

"There is a massive dispute over whether the elegy is really by Shakespeare and the majority of Shakespeareans feel it probably is not," said Jean Howard, an English professor at Columbia University and one of four editors of The Norton Shakespeare.

But Howard wanted the elegy included in the Norton anthology as an example of how attribution studies are performed.

Shakespeareans read the funeral poem with a shock of recognition and dismay over the similarities to Shakespeare, Foster said.

Foster, who admits the funeral poem is rather dull and, if indeed Shakespeare's, doesn't add much to the canon of the playwright's work, had never sought publicity for his attribution.

But six years after his dissertation, "Elegy by W.S.: A Study in Attribution," was published, Shakespeareans organized a discussion of the elegy at a Modern Language Association convention in Chicago in 1995.

"Suddenly it was big news," he said, of the poem he discovered while a student at the University of California-Santa Barbara. "It was big news because it was Shakespeare, not because it's a great poem."

It is Foster's investigation of the not-so-witty poem written to eulogize a man murdered almost 400 years ago that led to his work investigating modern-day crimes.

He is one of the few people to perform such detailed, technically-based comparisons of written documents, according to James Fitzgerald, a supervisory special agent for the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes.

"Years ago we mostly only compared (documents) by handwriting or by the typewriter keystrokes," said Fitzgerald, a profiler in the department made famous by the movie "Silence of the Lambs." "Now you'll see that along with more content analysis, statement analysis and behavioral analysis of written work."

Fitzgerald first met Foster after the professor was asked by Theodore Kaczynski's lawyers to help rebut the FBI's analysis of writings that led to the search warrant for Kaczynski's Montana cabin. Foster thought the FBI's analysis was thorough and eventually filed a declaration supporting the affidavit.

"Very few of us are aware that we repeat what we read," Foster said. "If a person is reading a lot of detective fiction or watching sports broadcasts, the language creeps into the prose."

In Kaczynski's case, Foster was able to identify source material from specific out-of-print books and issues of Scientific American that he subsequently learned had been found in Kaczynski's cabin.

Later this month, Foster will travel to FBI offices in Quantico, Va., to teach bureau agents how he does his work. In September he will travel to Ontario to consult with the Ontario Provincial Police, who are establishing a computer database of language and words commonly found in threatening documents. The database is similar in concept to SHAXICON, a computer database Foster is developing containing words and phrases from Elizabethan and Jacobean literature. The database not only helps determine attribution, but can be used to trace source material and identify collaborative works.

Completing SHAXICON as well as a collection of early women writers are projects Foster hopes to tackle in the future instead of paging through police documents and anonymous notes.

"This is not something I want to be doing for the rest of my life," he said his police work.

While Foster is happy that he is no longer known simply as "that `Primary Colors' guy," being in the spotlight has forced him to develop a thick skin.

A recent CBS "48 Hours" broadcast on the JonBenet Ramsey case implied that Foster had identified the wrong killer after reading passages on an Internet chat site that he thought might have been written by JonBenet's brother. The postings had been made by a woman with no connection to the case.

Foster cannot comment on the investigation, but said he stands by the statements he has made for the record in the case.

"Don't believe everything you read in the paper," Foster warned the Arts Club audience.