In the Coleman case, Leonard, the head of the linguistics program at Hofstra University, on Long Island, was punctilious in his presentation. Relying largely on word choice and spelling, he suggested that the same person had written the threatening e-mails and sprayed the graffiti, and that those specimens bore similarities to Coleman’s prose style.
In preparing his testimony, Leonard consulted with his frequent partner, James Fitzgerald, a retired F.B.I. forensic linguist.
Fitzgerald went on to formalize some of the tools used in forensic linguistics, and started the Communicated Threat Assessment Database. The CTAD is the most comprehensive collection of linguistic patterns in written threats, containing more than a million words and some four