I would imagine that its not so much the er in one sentence or the I in the next but the slanted words prior to. If he hadn’t have slanted, the whole line, would have looked fine other than that period at the end. The correcting of slant shows he cares about the structure of his writing but apparently not enough to rewrite the whole page. Just for informational purposes, that downward slant, indicates a person with depression and the wide spacing indicates trust issues according to graphology.

Soze

The correcting of slant shows he cares about the structure of his writing but apparently not enough to rewrite the whole page.

Yes, I agree. The phrase "no long" slants downwards and he corrects this by putting "er" back on the line and that coincides with "I". It’s interesting, if more of these instances can be found they could be used to compare to other writings.

I’m not sure if it’s common but I have always favored graph or lined paper and when this structure is missing my writing tends to go all over the place.

It has been suggested that Z may have written at an odd angle, used his less dominant hand, etc. to write his letters.
Not so sure about it myself, but the idea has been out there for a long time.

-glurk

A graphologist who studies handwriting prefers the subject to use unlined paper of good quality medium weight and a pen over a pencil. Some of the reasons for using unlined paper include the study of writing size and slant of their writing. The weight of the paper and pen is for determining pressure. Given the paper, pen use and the correction of slant, i would venture to say that the Zodiac knew "something" of graphology. If he knows something of graphology, then he is probably expecting law enforcement to do a study of his writing and, is probably not writing in a way that’s telling of his character. If I were to study anything of his writing I would look for the writing that slants like above. He corrected. So that writing slant is probably more like his natural writing style. Just an opinion.

Soze

Was struck again, the other day, by a couple of oddities (not just in the BB letter, but this one is very conspicuous and a typical example of the sort of thing I have in mind):

Notice how the capital "I" seems to push up, and distort, the "er" in "longer" (the space between "long" and "er" is also odd, and typical of Z’s style), almost as though "I" was written before "er". Notice the full stop, which is out of place. It looks almost as though the original sentence read: "I shall no long announce to anyone." * He then a) went on to add "when I comitt my murders…" and b) realized that "er" had to be added to "long" (but had to do it in the manner we see because the "I" was already in place).

* I’m not saying this is the case, rather that the full stop seems to indicate it. It can’t actually be the case, since the space between "long" and "announce" would be extreme, even for him. The full stop is interesting at any rate, since it is clearly out of place.

What you have noticed in the letter might be explained by If Zodiac wrote his letters upside down and backwards.

I remember a couple of years ago there was several youtube videos posted by somone, only hand, pen and paper shown, who wrote sentenses from the Zodiac letters upside down, can’t remember if it was also backwards, the person was wearing black gloves. The handwriting was, I would say, near a 100% Zodiac handwriting match.

Maybe someone else remember those youtube videos, maybe someone saved some of them ?

The oddest trait is obviously the spac ing. And it’s odd because it’s so consistent. Same sort of thing, again and again, particularly with the "ing" ending of certain words.

Yes, upside down, odd angles, wrong hand, who knows. The idea that he produced his letters using some sort of "mirror technique" has also been put forth – as has various variations on Graysmith’s projector theory. Probably nothing like that, but there are definitely characteristics of his writing which lend themselves to such theories.

It may be of no importance, but back in the 90s, I found a greeting card whose printed text was a dead ringer for Z’s printing. Makes me wonder if he might not have been employed by a greeting card company–which might help explain his penchant for communicating via greeting cards.

I remember a couple of years ago there was several youtube videos posted by somone, only hand, pen and paper shown, who wrote sentenses from the Zodiac letters upside down, can’t remember if it was also backwards, the person was wearing black gloves. The handwriting was, I would say, near a 100% Zodiac handwriting match.

Maybe someone else remember those youtube videos, maybe someone saved some of them ?

Did a search on Youtube but couldn’t find these kind of videos. I would be interested.

For what it’s worth, Zodiac definitely wrote the usual way, from left to right. You can see darker ink blots where he started letters (especially capitals, and the starting points of the strokes are just as it taught in school). Plus, the beginning of the letter is always neater than the end.

I’ve made different attempts to replicate Z’s handwriting (because it fascinates me to no end). The best results seems to come by tilting the page almost sideways (this will achieve an exaggerated right-leaning slant) and holding the pen loosely.