Both men had by now acquired copies of the revised 1986 edition of Todd Axelrod’s book Collecting Historical Documents, and on page 198 they found the text of what claimed to be ‘an unpublished poem, handwritten by Massachusetts poetess Emily Dickinson,’ neatly framed and illustrated with the famous daguerreotype of the poet. The print was in a minuscule font, too small to read with the naked eye, but under magnification it became clear that this was the poem Lombardo had bought at Sotheby’s.
The discovery was important because it established a detailed provenance for the poem. It showed that Axelrod had not just recently acquired it from someone else but had bought it sometime in the mid-1980s, not long before Hofmann was convicted of murder. He still had it at the end of the eighties when Brent Ashworth, who had already been offered the poem by Hofmann for $10,000, saw it for sale in one of Axelrod’s galleries. And it was still in Axelrod’s hands in 1994, when Tammy Kahrs contacted Franklin.
On August 4 Lombardo called the illustrious auction house on Madison Avenue to say that, given the numerous suspicions surrounding the poem, it was now their responsibility to prove its authenticity. The Marsha Malinowksi Lombardo reached by phone that day was not the breezily cheerful woman he had spoken to six weeks earlier. Her voice was shaky, and when Lombardo mentioned Hofmann, she grew defensive. There was, she said, ‘absolutely no question’ of the poem’s authenticity. She also insisted that several experts had studied the poem, among them a well-known expert on forgery, Kenneth Rendell.
Later that day Lombardo spoke to ‘Special Agent Kiffer.’ Unlike Malinowski, Kiffer was calm and reassuring. He insisted that Sotheby’s guarantees what it sells. When Lombardo raised his suspicions about Hofmann, Kiffer sought to placate him by explaining that, before he became a forger, Hofmann had been a legitimate dealer of historical documents. Kiffer did not mention Rendell, but he did say that ‘ten to fifteen’ manuscript experts had examined the poem.
The mention of Kenneth Rendell was reassuring. A tough, ambitious man, with showrooms on New York’s Madison Avenue and in Newton, Massachusetts, Rendell has built one of America’s most successful historical manuscripts businesses. His flair for self-promotion and his immense experience have made him the dealer of choice for some of the richest collectors in the world. Among them is Bill Gates, for whom Rendell is building one of the world’s most important collections of historical documents. When Gates bought Leonardo da Vinci’s celebrated notebook, the Codex Leicester, for $30.8 million in 1994, it was Rendell who was bidding for him. Rendell is also an acknowledged expert on forgery. His book Forging History is a classic. He has also testified in numerous high-profile cases. Indeed, it was Rendell who exposed another celebrated forgery case, the Hitler Diaries, and his testimony at Hofmann’s preliminary hearing in 1986 was crucial in establishing a motive for the two murders. Rendell was away in the South Pacific when Lombardo called, but his office in Boston said they would be happy to forward him a fax. A fax came back from Tahiti saying that he had declined to authenticate the poem for Sotheby’s. Later it would become clear that not only had Rendell never authenticated the poem, he had never even seen it.
Kiffer also told Lombardo that he had consulted a woman named Jennifer Larson about two questionable documents in the catalog for the May 1997 sale, which took place one month before the Dickinson poem was auctioned. Larson is a respected rare books dealer and former chairperson of the Ethics Committee of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America. Since the late eighties she has also devoted herself to researching Hofmann’s non-Mormon forgeries to prevent his fakes from contaminating the trade she loves. According to Kiffer, Larson had not raised any concerns about the Dickinson manuscript. Of course. He had never asked her about it.
Lombardo tried to locate Larson in San Francisco, where she ran a store called Yuerba Buena books. She had moved. He made a follow-up call to the Gallery of History, in Las Vegas. Initially, Gareth Williams had told him that the poem had come from a dealer in California who had died. Now he claimed that he was ‘not familiar’ with a Dickinson poem at all. When Lombardo asked to speak to Tammy Kahrs, the archivist who had faxed Ralph Franklin the poem in 1994, Williams said she was dead.
A few days later, Williams called back, this time in an agitated mood. He said that maybe the Gallery of History had had a Dickinson poem, but he could not recall the details. He also made it clear that Lombardo’s inquiries were not welcome. When Lombardo asked him to check back through the records for any information about the poem’s provenance, Williams told him that he could not. The computers were down.
The next piece in the puzzle fell into place when Lombardo reached Jennifer Larson at her new home in Rochester, New York. The documentation she faxed Lombardo – documentation that she could have made available to Sotheby’s, if they had asked – was enough to make any reputable dealer not want to touch the Dickinson poem. Included in it was a copy of Hofmann’s travel records, which the police had put together for the trial. These placed Hofmann in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1983 and 1984. Perhaps Hofmann had traveled to Cambridge to visit the Houghton Library at Harvard, which holds the largest number of Dickinson manuscripts.
Larson also told Lombardo that she had spoken to a TV reporter from Salt Lake City named Con Psarris, who had made a number of programs about Hofmann’s forgeries. In October 1990, while researching a possible Emily Dickinson connection, he had sent Hofmann the text of the poem that had appeared in Axelrod’s book, querying whether it was a forgery. The poem began ‘That God cannot be understood,’ but Psarras had slightly misquoted the remainder of the poem. Hofmann had replied from his jail cell with the pedantry of a university professor. ‘The E. Dickinson item referred to is a forgery,’ he wrote via his lawyer, Ron Yengich. He then wrote out the authoritative version of the text, emending several points of punctuation and capitalization. It was the poem Daniel Lombardo had bought at Sotheby’s.
The evidence against the poem began look compelling, if not complete, but Lombardo had to be sure. He contacted Robert Backman, a clinical graphologist with twenty years of experience with the Department of Defense (during World War II he worked on forgeries that appeared as propaganda). Backman came to Amherst to examine the poem. One of the things that made it so hard to prove either way was that the poem was written in pencil. Ink can be subjected to cyclotron tests and chemical analyses. But there are no forensic tests for pencil.
The pencil was first developed in the Renaissance, when artists began to use styluses made of silver or lead for ruling lines or drawing. The first mention of the lead pencil as we know it today came in a treatise on fossils published in England in 1565. A year earlier, in the village of Borrowdale, in Cumbria, a violent storm had uprooted a giant oak tree. Beneath it was found a vast deposit of almost pure graphite, and the pencil was born. At first, sticks of graphite were simply inserted in a wooden sheath. But by the middle of the next century these crudely made wooden pencils had been replaced by pencils made of ground graphite dust mixed with adhesives. Later, clay was added and the pencil leads were fired in kilns to increase their hardness and uniformity. Apart from manufacturing improvements the only development since then has been the introduction of the mechanical pencil in 1822. As a result it is almost impossible to date documents written in pencil.
Backman knew this. Even the phrase ‘Aunt Emily,’ which had been written in a different hand, on the back of the manuscript, in red indelible pencil – and not, as Sotheby’s listed it in their catalog, in red ink – appeared to be authentic. Like Franklin and Lombardo before him he concluded that the paper was right. The handwriting also appeared to be genuine. But when Lombardo told him that the document had once been in the hands of Mark