It looks like a change of style with ‘can’t do a thing with it’ but I am not a handwriting expert by any means or a linguist. I do listen to what they have to say though. So I am willing to accept their views over mine.
If the author of the Halloween card wasn’t the Zodiac, then we would have to assume he either accidentally mimicked the 340 cipher or discovered its constituent parts, when nobody else had by October 27th 1970. The sheer fact Paradice and Slaves can be found in a cross formation and bisects the cipher both horizontally and vertically through both mid-sections (17X17), with "by" in all four quadrants, along with knife, gun, fire and rope present in the correct quadrants, takes some explaining. To me, this suggests that the author of the Halloween card had intricate knowledge of the 340 cipher workings, plus the introduction of possibly "death" and crude design on the December 16th 1969 Fairfield letter, also mimicking the Halloween card and Tim Holt comic book. Either the author of the Halloween card accidentally created these connections, or discovered something nobody else could, or he was the Zodiac Killer. That design on the Halloween card, I suggest, wasn’t created for no reason. It had purpose.
So, if the Halloween card author created the 340 with the "Des, July, Aug, Sept, Oct = 7", then he was responsible for the "This is the Zodiac speaking up to the end of Oct I have killed 7 people" in the Bus Bomb letter. We know the 340 and Bus Bomb letter were the same author – and with the Bus Bomb letter came a shirt piece. So by extension, the author of the Halloween card was the murderer of Paul Stine, and hence the October 13th 1969 and Melvin Belli letters, which also contained a shirt piece. It boils down to whether you believe the hoaxer of the Halloween card, was also the Lake Berryessa perpetrator, and knew the "by knife" attribution on the car door, and was responsible for these two events only, while simultaneously had decoded a portion of the 340 cipher, or just happened to fluke the following formation.
I am sure some people will state the following formation of paradice and slaves mimicking the Halloween card formation was sheer accident. I don’t buy that assertion, especially when we look at the "sorry no cipher" design, and the cross and 13 punchholes on the October 5th 1970 communication, just prior to the Halloween card.
Here is a light hearted explanation I did "off the cuff" on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Mi9DYQfgYIf you don’t buy the connections, then all the above is irrelevant.
Thanks Richard, very interesting, as all your posts are. I viewed the video you made as well. I’m not sure if your observations were intended by Z, or the result of letter frequency.
Please look at my attached 340.
I find the word FIRE cleanly in 3 quadrants, and if we use your overlay to allow "<" to stand for "E", as it does in your solve in the word PARADICE, then it’s in all four. Requisite letters in red.
To make the word ROPE, we just need to add the "O" and "P", since we already have the "R" and "E" from FIRE. Again, we have our word, ROPE cleanly in 3 quadrants, and the fourth if we can call "<" our "E". These letters are in green.
GUN can be found in 3 quadrants, and almost the lower right one too, but for an absent "N". Letters in Minnesota Vikings purple.
KNIFE requires the words FIRE plus "K" and "N". This word can be found cleanly in 2 quadrants, and also a third, if we use "<" for our "E". It would also be in the lower right quadrant, but for the missing "N". These letters in burgundy.
So when you say: The sheer fact Paradice and Slaves can be found in a cross formation and bisects the cipher both horizontally and vertically through both mid-sections (17X17), with "by" in all four quadrants, along with knife, gun, fire and rope present in the correct quadrants, takes some explaining, the fact is, these words are all in multiple quadrants. This leads me to believe there’s randomness to it, rather than Z thinking: "I’ll put the KNIFE up here, the ROPE goes down here…" etc. Also the fact there are multiples of some of the requisite letters in some of the quadrants, which also adds ambiguity.
Also, while the "BY" in each quadrant is interesting, it requires a little stretching:
B, backwards Y
B, backwards Y
backwards Y, B
correct Y, B
So I’m not necessarily challenging your entire premise, just specifically your assertion that the weapons appear in the correct quadrants relative to the Halloween card.
Now, if he’d put an "N" in the lower right quadrant, and a clean "E" in the upper right, it would have given us each method of murder in each quadrant, which I think would have been extremely compelling support for your general theory. But, he didn’t do that. Almost, but not quite.
Very simply. I think zodiac ‘slips’ into his more natural and casual handwriting sometimes towards the later half of his written pieces.
I think he also gets excited and races his writing more as he witnesses his acts clearly written down and recorded in back and white. It makes the acts more real or something those lines.
I want to believe the whole Paradise/slaves explanation of the cipher, but how do we get around the fact that at best there’s really only p-dice going vertically. Nothing horizontally looks anything like "slaves".
