Typewriter whisperer who played bit part in 2004 election
Peter V. Tytell, whose knowledge of the intricacies of typewriters, shaped amid the Olivettis, Underwoods and Royals of his parents’ renowned repair shop in New York, led him to a career as a forensic document examiner and a small part in the 2004 presidential campaign, died Aug. 11 at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.
His sister, Pamela Tytell, said the cause was pleural mesothelioma.
Mr. Tytell’s vast expertise in typewriter, paper and handwriting analysis was sought by prosecutors, public defenders, banks, insurance companies and crime laboratories to help resolve disputes over the authenticity of documents.
“Peter could look at one character in a typewritten document, and he’d know which machine it was made by,” said Samiah Ibrahim, manager of forensic document examination at the Canada Border Services Agency. “The thing about Peter was his recall. He had all these images in his head.”
One of his most famous cases involved the superscript “th.”
In 2004, the midweek edition of “60 Minutes” reported that President George W. Bush had received special treatment while serving in the Texas Air National Guard in the early 1970s. The segment, which aired during Mr. Bush’s re-election campaign against Sen. John
Kerry, used memorandums said to be from the files of Mr. Bush’s squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, to make its case.
After the documents’ authenticity came into question, CBS convened an independent panel to investigate why the segment had been produced and aired so hastily and asked Mr. Tytell to examine four documents.
Mr. Tytell told the panel that the superscript “th” in the documents could not have been made by the Olympia manual typewriter used in the early 1970s by the Texas Air National Guard. The “th” of the Olympia was underlined and did not rise above the adjacent characters, unlike the “th” in the documents featured in the “60 Minutes” segment. That, plus the proportional spacing and a typeface that closely resembled Times New Roman in Microsoft Word, led him to conclude that the documents were probably created on a computer unavailable in the early ’70s.
Soon after the panel delivered its findings in early 2005, CBS fired a producer and three executives for their role in the segment.
In another high-profile case, Mr. Tytell was asked in 2011 by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to examine a two-page workfor-hire contract that Paul Ceglia, a wood-pellets salesman, said entitled him to a substantial stake in the social media giant, which he sought in a federal lawsuit.
Using the tools of his craft
— among them hand magnifiers, a stereoscopic microscope, ultraviolet lamps and precision measuring devices — Mr. Tytell demonstrated that the contract showed unusual differences between the typefaces and spacing from one page to the other, suggesting that they had been prepared at different times. He also concluded that attempts had been made to age the pages artificially.
A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2014 on the grounds that the contract was a forgery.
Peter Van Tytell was born Aug. 13, 1945, in Manhattan and raised in the Bronx. His parents, Martin and Pearl (Kessler) Tytell, rented, repaired and restored typewriters in a shop on Fulton Street in Manhattan whose customers included broadcasters David Brinkley and Andy Rooney and writers Richard Condon and Dorothy Parker. Mr. Tytell’s mother also started a forensic documentation examination business.
Young Peter was attracted to the typewriters.
“When he was a young boy, his parents used to take him to the office with them on the weekend,” Tikva Tytell, his wife, said in an email. “His father gave him a can with typewriter parts and he would play with them. He knew how to fix and restore typewriters from an early age.”
By the time he was 11, he was helping out with the forensic work.
In the late 1960s, he left New York for two years to work as a roadie for the Steve Miller Band, Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead.
He returned to New York in 1970, rejoined his parents’ shop, opened his own forensic business and earned a bachelor’s degree from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Mr. Tytell became known as a charismatic investigator and mentor. In 2017, he won the Albert S. Osborn Award for distinguished service from the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners.
In 1997, he was hired by a law firm representing Bahrain in a long-running legal battle with Qatar at the International Court of Justice at The Hague over the possession of islands in the Persian Gulf.
While browsing a gift shop at The Hague, he noticed that a collection of floral-motif Latin seals from the ’80s bore a close resemblance to the seals used on documents, said to be decades old, that Qatar had submitted in the dispute. Further examination proved the newer seals had been placed on reused documents from the Ottoman Empire to create the forgeries.
Qatar withdrew the documents in 1998. And in 2001, the court ruled that the Hawar Islands, the largest of those in dispute, would stay with Bahrain.
In addition to his wife and sister, Mr. Tytell is survived by his mother. His father died in 2008, seven years after the family’s 66-year-old typewriter shop closed.