Last night, before hitting the hay, I was going over one of my theories about the stippled dots that appear under the 6 exclamation marks on the Dripping Pen letter.

Mike Rodelli noticed that these dots seem to form a pattern of either 2-3-1 dots, or 1-3-2 dots, depending on how you oeient the page. He theorized–and I supect he was right–that this may have foreshadowed the Kathleen Johns kidnapping on highway 132. As I think about it today, I might suggest that the location was intended to indicate which orientation was correct, since a choice would logically necessary.

For some time, I have been wondering what the deeper significance of the number 132 might be. I have reasons for linking it to the Phillips 66 map, but the fact that it is was delivered the same message that included the 340 cipher got me wondering if it might be just as easily be a decryption clue.

Then I remembered an email I got from Mike R in which he showed that Z had provided clues that indicated the correct order of the 408 cipher. I got wondering if the (presumed) 1-3-2 reference might be intended to indicate that the 340 cipher should be split in three and reordered.

Of course, that doesn’t seem right since 340 is not even divisble by 3, and anyway, I suspect Dave O’s decryption tools would have blasted through that minor encumbrance.

Then it occurred to me that maybe it was a transposition clue.

One transposition operation that I could immediately think of would be to take the normal order of characters and, thinking of them in groups of 3, swap the second and third positions so that ABC becomes ACB, repeating the pattern for the whole cipher, then apply your regular decryption techniques. (Of course, the total number of characters still isn’t evenly divisible by 3, but it may not matter if the last several characters are filler, as appeared to be the case with the 408.)

I can think of one or two other transposition operations that might be suggested by the 1-3-2 / 2-3-1 pattern, but this seemed like the most obvious. Not sure if anything like it has been tried before. If it has, my apologies for wasting your time. Somehow, I get the impression tha this 1-3-2 clue has been given very little attention by Z-researchers, but I suspect that it is an important clue to decipher if there is to be any hope of decrypting the 340 cypher and the Map Code.

If anybody else has ideas about significance of the 1-3-2 clue (or 2-3-1 clue, if you prefer), please post them here.

Thanks,

G

P.S.: BTW, here is a link to my extremely verbose previous thoughts on the subject: http://anotherdamnzodiackillertheory.wo … mt-diablo/