I wonder how some of these people wound up listed as victims in the book?

Absolutely no idea, Morf. Aside from the murder of Cheri Jo, who could or could not be a Zodiac victim, Zodiac attacked couples with the exception of Paul Stine a solo male.

Yet all the other possible victims Graysmith came up with are solo females. The exception there being two of the SRHM victims, Sterling and Weber and victims Fechtel and Shaine, two females that had been together.

is it possible that this is an early victim of the series of single femaile murders (Vasquez, Quilantang, Gidley, Thomas, …) in SF:

http://www.zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=381

??

Same basic MO: abducted from SF, (Derrick "was not sexually molested"), found partially clothed/nude, strangled, dumped in a public spot.
Victim: Young? Dark hair (parted?)?

Absolutely no idea, Morf. Aside from the murder of Cheri Jo, who could or could not be a Zodiac victim, Zodiac attacked couples with the exception of Paul Stine a solo male.

Yet all the other possible victims Graysmith came up with are solo females. The exception there being two of the SRHM victims, Sterling and Weber and victims Fechtel and Shaine, two females that had been together.

If I had to guess it probably stems from Zodiac’s first three letters where he threatens at the end

"I will cruse around and pick of all stray people or coupples that are alone",
"I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night"
and "I will cruse around killing people who are alone at night"

So it would seem that killing people on their own was not outside of his thinking or his MO. It’s just that he clocked up more couples and maybe discovered he preferred that.

That is logical Trav but Graysmith did not name any solo guys as victims and there were some at the time whose murders have never been solved.

That is logical Trav but Graysmith did not name any solo guys as victims and there were some at the time whose murders have never been solved.

Ah yes. Now that is a good point. Maybe it’s a default thing. A lot of people seem to look for, or focus on, female victims. I would include myself in that. I don’t think about lone male victims. By that I mean I don’t think I’ve sat down and searched for that niche in relation to this case which is weird but I think that may be a side effect of Z’s intention in having a slightly undefined MO. There’s also the theories floating around that Z was more focused on killing the females and the males were just dispatched (or not) to get them out of the way so I guess, with that thinking being around it would be reasonable to assume that females would be his preference for lone victims – which is completely the opposite of the reality of his only lone victim (that we know of).

I think it’s been further complicated with the emergence / existence of the various types of serial killers perhaps causing people to subconsciously assume that a serial killer attacking men might be homosexual. This is down to profiling whereby it is believed that killers kill within their own peer group whether that covers race or sexual preference etc etc. I don’t know if that still holds true or not but I would say it has certainly left us with a bias or prejudice regarding how we look at things.

We should have a thread on unsolved lone male murders from the time. I’m sure someone has listed them but I like the idea of them being listed separately.

Thanks Deb for the clarification of the point, that I missed lol.

That is logical Trav but Graysmith did not name any solo guys as victims and there were some at the time whose murders have never been solved.

Ah yes. Now that is a good point. Maybe it’s a default thing. A lot of people seem to look for, or focus on, female victims. I would include myself in that. I don’t think about lone male victims. By that I mean I don’t think I’ve sat down and searched for that niche in relation to this case which is weird but I think that may be a side effect of Z’s intention in having a slightly undefined MO. There’s also the theories floating around that Z was more focused on killing the females and the males were just dispatched (or not) to get them out of the way so I guess, with that thinking being around it would be reasonable to assume that females would be his preference for lone victims – which is completely the opposite of the reality of his only lone victim (that we know of).

I think it’s been further complicated with the emergence / existence of the various types of serial killers perhaps causing people to subconsciously assume that a serial killer attacking men might be homosexual. This is down to profiling whereby it is believed that killers kill within their own peer group whether that covers race or sexual preference etc etc. I don’t know if that still holds true or not but I would say it has certainly left us with a bias or prejudice regarding how we look at things.

We should have a thread on unsolved lone male murders from the time. I’m sure someone has listed them but I like the idea of them being listed separately.

Thanks Deb for the clarification of the point, that I missed lol.

The statistics (compiled by the FBI, Dep’t of Justice, etc. thru the mid-80s, after which, gang and drug-related violence became a significant factor in the counts) are something like 80% of homicide victims are male and 20% are female.

Of the female victims, the majority are murdered by husbands/intimates/friends/acquaintances, something like 70%+ versus 30% murdered by strangers (some of which would be serial killers). For the male victims, the "intimate/stranger" ratio was always higher, but has gone up in the last few decades (about 50/50 — again, ostensibly due to gang/drug-violence, etc.)

Of serial killer victims, which is a tiny fraction of overall homicides, 30% of the victims are males and 70% are females.

I’m reciting this all from memory, so please take the above with a grain of salt. There’s also obviously a large margin of error in all the stats accounting for "who" committed the murder as about 40% of homicides are unsolved.

Nonetheless, I agree that there’s an extraordinarily high number of females listed as "possible victims". Especially, when of the confirmed Z-crimes, there’s actually more males (4) than females (3).