I am not a PDI (dunno what I am anymore) but if she didn't write the note I would say that it was someone who tried to make it look like she did (practice note).
Yeah, I'd be surprised if there was any intent to try to implicate Patsy by the RN author, just a lucky coincidence.
I really question just how accurate the 'expert' analysis of handwriting really is. I can see a lot of it is based on probability and similarity, but I think it's a very subjective science. My own handwriting is an example. I was raised in a different country to Patsy, but probably around the same era. At school we learned a 'new' type of 'running writing' (the first year to do so), called "Modified Cursive" that my parents and older siblings thought of as 'joined printing'.
As I got older (high school) and was free to express my own style, it became very 'embelished'. It must have been the fashion then, as quite a few of my friends adopted a similar style, with curls and twists on the y and g and large decorated capitals. This has settled into a simpler style in adulthood, but it is still quite distinctive. I have two types of writing, my 'Sunday best' 'Dear.... Hope you have a very happy Birthday' as above - well formed even letters even slope, and my 'everyday' - 'Gone to a meeting. Dinner's in the oven' - untidy, slope mixed, no embelishment. I do wonder what an expert would make of these two styles and if they would believe they were even written by the same person. My son's usual writing is very similar to my everyday style.
On the other hand, I can remember someone who was educated at around the same time as me, but a long way from my home town, who later came to work at the same place (different department). She once wrote a note for the front door 'closed for....... holidays' which my work colleagues firmly believed had been written by me (in the same style) and even I had to admit was very similar.
I too went to 'college', but not the same as Patsy which I think we would call 'University'. It was a full time 12 month Stenography (shorthand and typing) course, where we were taught letter writing, punctuation, indenting paragraphs, sentence construction etc, and the same types of things that apparently were part of a Journalism Degree in the USA.
When years later, I later went to work for a large Corporation, there was a uniform (and more modern) 'Corporate Style' of letter, memo and diary note writing that ALL staff were required to adopt. So despite what I learned at school and college, after 12 years working there, I still use the same 'Corporate Style' today, both in typed and handwritten correspondence.
So, while I agree with much of the analysis, there is no flexibility or allowance for people to change style. A person raised in the same era as Patsy could have very similar style. There was an obvious effort to disguise the writing. What a tragedy if this just happened to 'look' like it was Patsy's writing!!
I ask again - If Patsy did not write the RN, who would you then suspect?
