At the bottom of the stack of papers, he found what he was looking for: an approximately five-and-a-half-by-nine-inch page of bonded stationery, slightly yellow in color, with a typewritten message below which were handwritten sentences in ink. The note appeared to be original and not photocopied or reproduced. The ink handwriting also appeared to be original. No wonder the copy of the anonymous note was not to be found among Van Helden’s papers filed with the State Department of Criminal Investigation—because it had been here all these years in his private collection!
At the top of the note was typed the German word Abschrift （copy）。 That would support the theory that it was the copy Otto had made. Otto’s native language was German, and it would have been natural for him to use the German word for “copy.” The remainder of the typewritten text was in Dutch. There was handwriting on the note, and Maarten identified it as his father’s. He agreed to lend the Cold Case Team the Abschrift note, as Vince came to call it, for forensic testing. Vince wanted to confirm that the note was typed by Otto Frank and that the handwriting was indeed Van Helden’s.
Vince decided to contact one of his former colleagues from the FBI laboratory, and together they worked through all available tests that might help extract the maximum information. Unfortunately, many of them would have destructive side effects, and Vince hesitated to conduct any test that could alter the note. Testing for fingerprints was a possibility, but because the dusting or cyanoacrylate （superglue） process can cause extreme discoloration, it was ruled out. He then turned to forensic expert Detective Carina van Leeuwen. Together they concluded that the examination of the note would require a two-pronged approach: a scientific examination and a linguistic analysis.
Not trusting the mail with such a potentially historic document, Maarten drove to Amsterdam with his sister and personally handed the note to Vince and Brendan. They were asked if they recognized the cursive handwriting on the note to be that of their father. Both agreed that it was.
For a scientific opinion, Vince contacted a Dutch handwriting expert, Wil Fagel, now retired from the Netherlands Forensic Institute. He asked them to obtain exemplars, copies of the detective’s handwriting, from Maarten, who still had several of his father’s handwritten letters. Fagel compared that handwriting to the Abschrift note and concluded that the handwriting on both was the same.1 （By coincidence, Fagel’s department at the Netherlands Forensic Institute examined Anne Frank’s diary for authentication of her handwriting in the mid-1980s. The results of the examination were published in the NIOD critical edition of the diary and refuted all claims that the diary was not written by Anne Frank.）2
It was essential to determine when the Abschrift note was written. Radiocarbon dating would probably determine how old the paper was, though not the writing on it, but it would require cutting off a piece of the note. Vince noticed that there were two punch holes on the left side of the note, one of which actually cut through a portion of the handwriting. He phoned Maarten van Helden, who explained that he’d punched holes in all the documents to store them in a binder. Vince wondered if the hole-punch device he’d used had a compartment to catch the punched-out rounds. Had Maarten ever emptied the compartment? No? Soon the office mail room delivered a bulging envelope. When it was opened, about a thousand punched-out rounds spilled out.
Vince and Brendan examined all of them on a retina screen. After several hours they were able to select fifteen possible matches on the basis of color but could not find any punched-out rounds with the ink handwriting, nor could they say definitively that any of them exactly fit the holes in the note.
Meanwhile, Vince and Brendan hoped that an examination of the note’s typeface might confirm its author and date. They contacted the international typeface expert Bernhard Haas, the son of the author of the Haas Atlas, the definitive guide to identifying typefaces. In typewriter terminology, document typeface describes the image left on paper after the striker bar has hit the ink ribbon. （In the age of computers and inkjet printers, typeface examination is a lost art, and the team was lucky to find Haas.） They briefed Haas on the investigation and informed him that they suspected the Abschrift note might have been produced by Otto Frank. Haas said that he would need either the typewriter Otto used or several original documents that Otto was known to have typed on his typewriter. The team did not hold out hope of obtaining Otto’s typewriter, since it was likely under the control of the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel, Switzerland, a group that had been unhelpful so far. The obvious solution was to turn to one of Otto’s regular correspondents.