Satoru C. "John" Shimoda was the 15th President of the American Society of Questioned Document Examiners. |
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Mr. Shimoda was born in Oregon in 1919. During World War II, he served in the highly decorated 442nd Infantry Regiment, which was made up almost entirely of second-generation Japanese soldiers.
After the war, he worked in Army counter-intelligence and later as a criminal investigator. Mr. Shimoda began his questioned document examination career in the U.S. Army Crime Laboratory in the 1950's. He also trained with Albert D. Osborn and Frank Murphy. Upon retirement from the Army, he became the Assistant Director of the United States Postal Inspection Service Western Region Crime Laboratory and was later appointed as Director of the laboratory. Among his many major cases was the famous San Francisco "Zodiac" case. He retired in 1999 after 32 years with the postal laboratory. |
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Mr. Shimoda was a Life Member of the ASQDE.
He was one of the first Diplomates of the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners. He was a Retired Fellow of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and was also a Life Member of the California Division of the International Association for Identification. In 2007, John Shimoda received the Albert S. Osborn Award of Excellence in recognition of his distinguished career and the many contributions he made to both the ASQDE and the profession as a whole. Mr. Shimoda passed away in 2020, just a few months after his 100th birthday. Derived in part from "Satoru C. 'John' Shimoda: The 2007 Albert S. Osborn Award Recipient," by Robert J. Muehlberger and Frank E. Franck, published in The Society News, November 2007, and "Crimelab Sleuth Turns in His Badge After 55 Years of Service," by Sharon Green Patton, published in the March/April 2000 issue of Postal Life magazine. |
