A handwriting expert, who now disagrees with two other analysts and his own earlier opinion, said Friday certain disputed pages in the Book of Mormon and a novel by a 19th-century minister-novelist were written by "different authors."

The four-page finding of Howard Doulder, submitted Sept. 15 but made known only Friday, appears to throw doubt upon the claims of three South California researchers who hired the handwriting experts.

The researchers say Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith incorporated 12 pages from a novel by the Rev. Solomon Spalding into a book said to have been translated from golden plates in the late 1820s and considered sacred by the world's 3.4 million Mormons.

Doulder, of Garden Grove, said that his first report, in which he tentatively assigned both manuscripts to Spalding's hand, was based on similarities found in an examination of only photocopies of the original documents.

"I now attribute these similarities to the writing style of that century," he said in the final report.

Doulder, formerly supervisor of the U.S. Treasury Department's Crime Laboratory in Chicago, said he had since examined originals of the Spalding novel in the Oberlin College library and the Book of Mormon pages, assigned by Mormons to an "unknown scribe," at Mormon headquarters in Salt Lake City.

"I have found writing and letter dissimilarity that are unexplainable and are not attributed to individual writing variation of the same writer," Doulder told The Times, quoting from his report to researchers Wayne Cowdrey, 31, of Orange and Donald Scales, 27, and Howard A. Davis, 33, both of Torrance.

The two other handwriting analysts, William Kaye and Henry Silver, both of the Los Angeles area, released reports earlier in the controversy in which they said that the 12 pages of "First Nephi" in the Book of Mormon were penned by Spalding. Spalding died in 1816, 10 years before the Mormon Church founder said he discovered the book written in Egyptian hieroglyphics on tablets buried in a hillside.

But those reports were also based on copies, rather than original documents. Silver later backed out of the case, saying he had been misquoted by the press and that information he submitted had been "misused."

Kaye, after examining the original documents at Oberlin and Salt Lake, reported Sept 7 that a comparison "shows unquestionably" that the materials were "executed by the same person."

Doulder said he personally submitted his final report to researcher Cowdrey on Sept. 15.

But Cowdrey, in a phone interview Friday, said he had not seen Doulder's report. He and Davis both deferred comment to Gretchen Passantino, secretary to Walter Martin, head of the Christian Research Institute. Martin helped finance the handwriting investigation.

The Anaheim-based institute is involved in defending conservative Christianity against what it considers cults and followers of the occult.

Miss Passantino said the researchers' book, "Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?" would be off the press in about three weeks and would include Doulder's second report.

"Though the handwriting analysis is an integral part' of the book," she said, "their theory isn't made or broken by the handwriting."

Davis, saying he had been told "not to say anything now" about Doulder's report, added: "I kind of expected he (Doulder) would go negative on the thing because there have been so many death threats."

Asked if his life had been threatened during his investigation of the Mormon manuscripts, Doulder replied: "Not at all."

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has not employed handwriting experts of its own in the case. But in August, church officials released what they called "conclusive evidence" rebutting the researchers' charges. Church historian Dean C. Jessee issued photocopy samples of documents along with detailed comparisons of letters of the alphabet.

Melvin A. Jensen, communications coordinator for the Southern California area of the Mormon Church, said Friday that the difference between the opinions of Doulder and Kaye did not surprise him.

"When I observed them separately studying the original documents in the church archives in Salt Lake City," he said, "I noted that they used different equipment, techniques and methods. Handwriting analysis is not an exact science. It is a subjective study and can be influenced by personal attitudes."