And so we can safely conclude that if John Chaffin had attempted something as uncharacteristic as dressing up as his father’s ghost and moaning in his brother’s bedroom doorway, James Pinkney Chaffin would not have been convinced. Though his cows, were they in a position to observe, would have been fascinated.
I HAVEN’T SPENT much time in the South, and I didn’t realize how helpful people are there. They help you even if you don’t ask for help. I went to Food Lion yesterday, and the checkout clerk told me my yogurt was on special if I had an MVP card. “Trudy,” he said to the bagger when he found out I didn’t. “Give me your MVP card.” It’s the kind of place where you call a total stranger on the phone, and his wife will say, “Hang on, I’ll go run and see if I can catch him before he goes off on his tractor!” The closest thing to impoliteness that I’ve come across so far has been a license plate holder ordering me to EAT BEEF. Eat beef, please, I chide.
Thanks to southern hospitality and the kindness of strangers, finding the Chaffin wills turned out to be as simple as telephoning the records office. The woman who answered put me through to the clerk of the court, who regularly picks up his phone. The clerk, Ken Boger, said the old records were in the courthouse basement and I could come down any day of the week and he’d help me find them.
Today is that day. I’m meeting a Tennessee-based questioned document examiner and forensic handwriting expert named Grant Sperry. I found Sperry through the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners, of which he’s president. Sperry has been an expert witness in some three hundred federal and state cases, including the Waco mess, where his testimony resulted in the conviction of an assistant U.S. attorney who had denied any knowledge of the pyrotechnic devices used on the compound. Sperry found imprints of his notes about the devices on the page below the page where he’d written them. (Note to the careless: These guys can read the imprints of your writing on a pad as much as ten pages down from the page you wrote on.) Sperry was coming to North Carolina to visit his parents and the Chaffin case intrigued him, so he agreed to help me out for about, oh, 1/100th of what he charges the trial lawyers.
We’re waiting at the metal detector in the front vestibule, along with a pile of Sperry’s equipment. We’ve been here several minutes. After a while, a man in a security uniform spots us. “Ain’t been nobody manning that for two months.” He waves us in.
It’s a busy Monday morning, but Boger gets right up from his desk to take us to the basement. Within five minutes, we’ve got both wills. Sperry sets up a makeshift desk on a stack of boxes full of old case files. Most are boxes designed to hold files, but one says: ORRELLS WHOLE HOG SAUSAGE. Sperry puts on bright blue latex gloves, picks up the wills one at a time, and lays them on a scanner. Now he’ll be able to look at them side by side on his computer screen and line up any two elements he chooses. Since both wills are handwritten, we’d thought that we had two lengthy handwriting samples to compare, but Sperry quickly determines that the body of the first will has been written out by someone other than the signer—presumably a lawyer, for the document is written in standard-issue legalese on legal-sized paper. The second will, he says, is all one handwriting. This one is a curious mixture of legalese and down-home sap, penned on a page from a ruled school tablet:
After reading the 27 Chapter of genesis I James L Chaffin do make my last will and testament and here it is i want after giving my body a desent burial my little property to be equally devided between my four children if they are living at my death both personal and real estate devided equal if not living give share to there children and if she is living you all must take care of your mamy now this is my last will and testament. Wit my hand and seal on other side
Jas L Chaffin
Sperry can tell right away that whoever wrote out the second will wasn’t attempting to copy someone else’s handwriting. The writing is too fluid and relaxed, too swiftly and confidently written to be a forgery. Forged writing is more like drawing, he says. The person moves slowly and deliberately, stopping and starting and sometimes even touching up letters. I read about this in Questioned Documents, a classic in the field, written by the enormously learned and occasionally crabby Albert Osborn. “A genuine writing does not often suggest that the writer is thinking of what he is doing with his pen,” Osborne wrote, “while a dishonest writing, when examined with care, often shows quite conclusively that the writer was thinking of nothing else…. This is another subject beyond the understanding of the stupid observer.” It’s clear the second will was written with a relaxed hand. So either James L. Chaffin wrote the second will, or it was written by someone who wasn’t overly concerned with creating a convincing match for Chaffin’s hand.
Sperry moves on to a comparison of the James L. Chaffin signatures on the two wills. It’s likely that the first will was indeed signed by Chaffin, as there are two witnesses. Sperry’s job now is to see if the writer of the second will, which had no witnesses, is also James L. Chaffin. The task is complicated by the fourteen years that span the two documents. Handwriting—especially signatures—often changes over time.
Nonetheless, Sperry has reached a conclusion. “There’s an old axiom we have,” he says, peeling off his gloves. “You can’t write better than your best.” In other words, I could never do a convincing forgery of my mother’s signature. My mother had beautiful, gliding, even penmanship, and mine has always been rat scrabble. She could forge mine, but not vice versa. Once you reach your “age of graphic maturity”—usually sometime in your teens—you’ve hit the peak of your ability and are unlikely to get much better. If anything, your writing gets worse: Handwriting deteriorates with old age and its decrepitudes—bad vision, stiff fingers, hand tremors.
In the Chaffin case, the situation is backward—and thus suspicious. The skill level in the signatures on the 1905 will is substantially worse than in the 1919 will. Which doesn’t make sense if it’s the same writer. Sperry pulls up the 1905 signature, written when Chaffin was in his fifties. The letters are awkwardly formed and there are hesitations—not the type of hesitations that suggest forgery, but the type that suggest this person is not a highly skilled penman. That seems likely, given the state of education in Davie County around that time. According to James W. Wall’s History of Davie County, illiteracy was common among rural families in the mid-1800s. In 1860, when James L. Chaffin was fifteen, only 690 of 1,230 school-age boys in Davie County were enrolled in public schools, and the school year was just a few months long (in winter, when the fields lay fallow). Lester says Grandpa Pink only went as far as third grade, and had a total of nine months of schooling. It’s likely his father would have had even less.
“Now look at the later will,” says Sperry. “The letter formations are much more fluid. Look at the fs. How much less awkward they are.” And here Chaffin would have been seventy. “If the J. L. Chaffin signatures on the 1905 will are representative of that particular writer’s skill level, and I see no evidence that they are not, then that writer could not have written the signature on the 1919 will.” It would seem to be a fake.
Sperry also finds some of the language of the second will suspiciously sophisticated for a nearly illiterate farmer. “Wit” is legalese, as is the phrase “both personal and real estate divided equal.”
Sperry highlights a line in the 1919 will. “Look at the wording here,” he says. “He wants his property to be divided between his four children ‘if they are living at my death…and if not living give share to there children…’ Let’s say the 1919 will was forged and backdated by Chaffin’s other sons in an effort to get the land back from Susie Chaffin after Marshall died. We know there was some ill will between her and the other brothers. With that clause in place, she’s technically out of the picture: The will leaves Marshall’s share of the land to their son, not to her. So let’s imagine the scene on the day of the trial. The family goes to lunch—which is a matter of record—and the brothers sit her down and spell it out: ‘We’ve got ten witnesses prepare
d to vouch for this signature. You’ve got your choice, Susie. You can go in there and agree that it’s his handwriting and we’ll cut you a one-fourth share—even though you’re not entitled to it in this new will. Or you can let the jury decide, and risk losing it all.’”
Sperry’s theory makes some sense. And if the forger’s intent was to corner Susie and force her hand—rather than actually convince her of the second will’s authenticity—then the breezy, unconcerned handwriting makes sense. Why bother fooling her, if you’ve got her where you want her?
WHOEVER CHOSE THE epitaph for the gravestone of James L. Chaffin would seem to have had a twinkle in his eye. It says: THY WILL BE DONE. Lester and Ruby Jean and I are out at the Ijames Baptist Church cemetery, visiting the family plots.
Lester has wandered over to the grave marker of a local acquaintance. “He shot hisself on the back porch.” He continues on down the rows, narrating death in the flat, evenly paced tones of a stock report. “There’s that baby died in the four-wheeler accident. And Thom’s son there: struck by lightning on a combine—” Ruby Jean cuts him off. “Look at this, Mary. Man put his two wives on the same tombstone. Wonder how they’d have felt about that!” Three stones down is the grave of one Flossie Gobble. You don’t have to meet some people to know you’d like them, and Flossie Gobble is one of those people.
I tell Lester and Ruby Jean about what the handwriting expert found. I am careful to add that Sperry compared Pink’s signature on the court papers with the questioned James L. Chaffin signature, and it isn’t a match.
“So Grandpa Pink didn’t do it,” says Ruby Jean. She sounds relieved. I don’t add that he must have played some role in the brotherly ruse—unless we buy the scenario of John or Abner Chaffin dressing up in the overcoat and playing ghost.
“Hunh,” says Lester. “Do you feel good about it?”
I tell him I’m not surprised by Sperry’s conclusion about the signatures, but I am disappointed. I would have loved to have evidence, even shaky, nonconclusive evidence, that the ghost of James L. Chaffin was real. Next I relate Sperry’s theory about the brothers confronting Susie Chaffin over lunch. In repeating it, the story sounds hopelessly oversophisticated for a bunch of dirt farmers’ sons. And why would they bother with the ghost, the overcoat, the slip of paper? Why not simply claim to have found the second will in the Bible?
“Well,” says Lester, toeing an upended flower pot. “It’s hard for me or you or anybody else to try to interpret the few facts we’ve got.” I think he means, I wish you and your fancy-pants forensics man would stop trying. But he’s too polite for that.
The car is quiet on the drive back to Mocksville. It’s late on a Saturday afternoon. Families are sitting in kitchens and on porches, trading gossip, shucking corn, shooing flies. Tomorrow the churches will fill with men and women who hold no doubts about the existence of the human soul and its joyous postmortem journey, men and women who could not care less about the hog sausage opinions of a forensic document examiner and a writer from California. To them, these things are simple and certain: The Chaffins are honest folk. The soul is real. Flossie Gobble lives on.
Alas, for me, a belief is not something you are born into or that you simply choose to adopt one day. Belief, for me, calls for plausibility. And so I continue my wanderings. I have one more stop: a research venture taking place at the University of Virginia. I have saved this for last, because it represents what I think is my best chance for a speck of evidence that people leave their bodies when they die.
12
Six Feet Over
A computer stands by on an operating room ceiling, awaiting near-death experiencers
ON THE FAR WALL of an operating room in the University of Virginia Hospital is an enormous photograph of an alpine meadow. The sky and grass are the vivid, lit-up blues and greens of travel posters and ads for allergy drugs, and wildflowers are thick as snow. The beautiful scenery is intended to calm the surgical patients who come here. In the case of a patient I’ll call Wes, the flowers have their work cut out for them. Wes is about to be momentarily—ever so briefly—almost killed.
The operation is a defibrillator insertion. Defibrillators are most recognizable as those electrified paddles you see being slapped on patients’ chests during cardiac arrest scenes on ER. Nowadays they make defibrillators the size of cell phones and—if you’re prone to dangerous heart arrhythmias—sew them right inside the chest.
The almost-killing is being done to test Wes’s newly implanted defibrillator. An electrical charge will hit his heart at the crest of a specific EKG peak, derailing the beat and rendering the organ a quivering (fibrillating) lump of tissue incapable of pumping blood. With no oxygen being delivered to his brain, Wes will be clinically dead within seconds. (As long as a heart begins beating again within about four minutes, no permanent brain damage occurs.) It’s then up to Wes’s new defibrillator to jump-start the beat. Patients like Wes are ideal subjects for a study of near-death experiences.
Outside of the alpine panorama, Room 1 is a fairly standard operating room. There is the operating table, bulky and complicated. There is the towering bank of cardiac monitors, the anesthesiologist’s station, the whiteboard on the wall (“21 Days to National Nurses Week!”). You would have to be looking carefully to notice anything out of the ordinary. It’s up near the ceiling. Taped to the top of the highest monitor is an open laptop computer, as if perhaps they’d run out of study carrels over at the science library and were packing the students in wherever they could fit them. The computer belongs to Professor Bruce Greyson, who works a few blocks away, in the university’s Department of Psychiatric Medicine.
Greyson has been studying near-death experiences (referred to by those who study them as NDEs) for twenty-nine years. It is difficult to sum up the NDE in a sentence. On a very nuts-and-bolts level, it’s an experience in which a person who came close to dying recalls having been someplace other than blacked out inside his or her body. Some recall traveling no farther than the ceiling, rising away from themselves like a pocket of hot air; others remember hurtling through a sort of tunnel, often toward an all-encompassing light and sometimes toward family or friends* who have died. Patients who recall hovering near the ceiling sometimes report having watched their operation or resuscitation from above. Though their descriptions can be remarkably detailed and accurate (more on this later), some people argue that the patients might have been extrapolating from things they heard or felt, or unconsciously incorporating memories of TV medical dramas or previous hospital visits.
Greyson is trying to find out: Were they up there or not? In a study begun in early 2004, he hopes to interview eighty defibrillator insertion patients just after they come out of anesthesia. If they mention a near-death experience that included an out-of-body experience, he will ask them to describe everything they saw from up above. Appearing on Greyson’s flat-open laptop during the operations is one of twelve images, in one of five colors, randomly selected by a computer program. The objects depicted are simple and familiar—a frog, a plane, a leaf, a doll. They are brightly colored and animated to help attract the patient’s eye (or whatever it is you use to see when you’ve left your visual cortex behind). It’s an ingenious setup: Since the laptop’s screen faces the ceiling, the images can’t be seen from below.
I rarely get excited about parapsychology experiments, but if this one produces even a single person who accurately describes the image, I’ll be up there on the ceiling, too. So far, none of the subjects interviewed has reported any type of near-death experience. Working against Greyson is the cocktail of anesthesia used on the patients; it includes a drug that interferes with their memory of anything they might experience (pain, fear, a field trip to heaven) while they’re under. “Though if the consciousness is leaving the brain, then would memory matter?” mused Greyson as we walked here today. He shrugged. “I don’t know.” In a similar study four years back—done at Southampton General Hospital in England by cardiologist Sam Parni
a and neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick—only four of sixty-three cardiac arrest survivors interviewed recalled a near-death experience and none reported seeing things from an out-of-body perspective.
Greyson is working in tandem with a team of UVA cardiologists led by Paul Mounsey. (Mounsey declined to speak with me.) Interestingly, cardiologists—not parapsychologists—have published some of the most widely read studies on near-death experiences. A notable example was the study by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, published in the Lancet in 2001. His primary aim was simple, if ambitious: to find out what causes the near-death experience.
Theories abound. Oxygen deprivation and the drugs used in anesthesia are commonly suggested, and indeed, both drugs and lack of oxygen can trigger elements of the near-death experience—including the tunnel and the light and the out-of-body experience—when death is not near. (Pot, hash, LSD, ketamine, mescaline, and fighter pilot training blackouts have all been known to induce NDE-like experiences.) Intense stress or emotional states have been cited, as have endorphins and seizures. And then there’s the theory Greyson is testing for: the preposterous, marvelous, mind-whirling possibility that the patient’s consciousness somehow exits, and operates independently of, his body.