Paging Deborah Perez…

Hi-

….This letter, like the 1978 letter, bridged a long gap in "Z communications" and came on the heels of a huge event in the Zebra case. While Z may have had a motive to keep his name in the news after the Zebra murders, so too may someone who had his own vested interest in keeping the story on the front pages have had a motive to forge this letter.

Mike

Whoever it was who forged the ’78 letter did a fine job. To this day there are those who doubt it. Someone had knowledge of not only writing style, but tone, etc. It could very well be this same person had these same skills in ’74. It is almost too perfectly laid out. I’m also reconsidering the Citizen letter.

FWIW the Citizen letter troubled me in the past. At times it still does but I can’t ignore the similarities between it and the other material. It started with it and the desk but has since expanded out to include what I consider to be striking similarities to the Marco and the John’s letter. I personally don’t feel that the similarities are due to copying. I mean they can’t be because we are looking at different stylings but yet they still have common and quite widespread similarities.

We all look at things differently and if I’m being honest I didn’t have to do any of the comparisons to know what I was seeing. The reason I did though was to try and show what I was seeing and also to try and see what other’s were getting confused about. I now believe from this experience that Sherwood Morrill was an incredibly talented individual. You see, we can only see what we see because he saw it first and not without good reason IMO. I have worked under some incredibly talented designers and art directors. I’ve watched them and learned from them, seen their weaknesses and their strength’s but each had a core talent albeit not the same as each other. There have been times in my life when it’s been my privilege to see them shine and do extraodinary things in their field. I have come to feel the same way about Sherwood but we expect that people with talent should be "on" all of the time. The irony, possibly, is why we even think like that but we do, if you stop to pause and consider your own lives. We all have off days or weeks or months or years. His comments about the ’78 letter perplex me for now but I have no problem with assuming that he was wrong but that doesn’t (for me) take away from the work he had done previously when he was actually involved in the case.

I see talent there, not just someone that was capable of performing a job through experience. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t just take Morrill’s conclusion’s at face value but I have, drawing on my own experience, come to see a brilliance to this man’s work and that’s probably been a driving force for me in doing the comparisons I have done.

The ’78 letter bothers me. I really should look more closely at it but IIRC from looking at in the past it ‘should’ be a forgery. It doesn’t ‘feel’ right to me from a graphic POV. Now, that being said, I don’t trust Zodiac to not have produced it. For me he showed his hand, literally, in penning letters in differing styles. In that respect I can’t consider it to be outside of his remit to submit his own hoaxes, which again, possibly ironically, would make them not hoaxes or, at the very least, real hoaxes.

Not really sure why I just wrote all that lol but I think I just wanted to share my own feelings on the handwriting, or some of, the handwriting issues surrounding this case. Took so long I kept forgetting what post I was replying to lol.

Hi-

The Citizen letter is on a post card. It would therefore not have DNA, since there is no stamp. So if Keel knows what he is talking about, some other 1974 letter is the forgery. Maybe he is wrong or confused. I have no way of knowing.

Mike

Hi-

A female is an interesting possibility. In 2002, the producer from ABC told me that a guy had come forward during their investigation and said that his sister, a feminist, had written the Count Marco letter. Don’t know if that is true or not, just what the guy said.

Mike

That doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the DNA from the "proven" forgery ’78 letter also proved a letter from ’74 E.G., The Exorcist, to be forged, that would mean that they both had matching DNA. Nowhere does it indicate that is the case, since we know that they compared other people’s DNA against the sample obtained, presumably from that same Exorcist letter, without the assumption that it was a forgery. Even if you accept that the samples were combined or otherwise contaminated to produce a non suspect match, it doesn’t make sense why they would test it in the first place. To catch the forgery letter writer knowing he was not the killer? Why would they care about that 40 years later? And we have received no information that any other letters tested positive for DNA samples.

I had always assumed that the ’78 letter was concluded to be forged precisely because it was NOT a match to the Exorcist letter. I don’t want to accuse Keel of being wrong or giving incorrect information, but a simple confusion about which way the ’78 letter was concluded to be fake makes the most logical sense, IMO.

I don’t really see how police withholding the knowledge that the palm print is NOT Zodiacs will help them with anything. If some nut confesses how likely is it that he will base the testimony on the palm print? Since they can just be compare against his prints and they won’t match. It saves them a little bit of time, but not anything that will actually help them catch the killer.

Hi Duck-

Maybe you can call Keel and ask him what he meant. He doesn’t return my calls anymore.

The DNA they have does not come from any one letter. Maybe you missed that bit of info after Debbie Perez came forward. I had Fagan contact his sources at SFPD and ask what they meant when they said the DNA "may not be reliable" in 2009. Fagan said that there are so few cells on the letters that in order to even do PCR in 2002 they had to combine samples from multiple letters. Bad lab technique. That is where they think the contaminant DNA came from.

From my dealings with SFPD I do not believe they think they have Z’s DNA. I know more about what is going on but promised not to tell. I have a good contact there but…he has never addressed either the second forgery or anything about a DMV letter. But I keep trying. and I reached out to yet another source in SF government the other day about the issues of the "second forgery" and the DMV letter. We’ll see….

I think that the police would view a hold back as a good thing because it helps the investigation.

Mike

Haha, yeah I have the feeling he wouldn’t want to return my calls either.

I know that you are just reporting what you heard in good faith and want to get to the bottom of it. Like many of the things we’ve heard, I have to scratch my head, and say, "huh?" It’s nice that anyone wants to talk to anyone of us at all and keep us in the loop, but it would be nice to get a straight story sometime too.