Do you know what it is that troubles me most about all of this? It’s that it appears this hoaxer is not the writer of the Confession.
I think if RPD had connected him to the Confession letter as well, I would feel a lot more confident in the reality of all this. I would be more willing to conclude that the entire Riverside letter-writing episode had been the work of a hoax letter writer, one letter writer.
I know some people have been quick to seize upon the idea that this means Zodiac could still have written the Confession and perhaps still be the Bates murder. In this scenario, you have the real Zodiac, in Riverside writing the Confession and/or murdering Bates (by this point, saying “or” creates a comical number of players in this scenario), and inspiring this hoaxer to write a letter that just happens to include the initial of the person they were just inspired by before the real killer has even commenced using that initial. Think about who’s influencing who in this situation, the Zodiac is inspiring the hoaxer.
The alternative to this theory is three letter writers. Three. Both scenarios seem ludicrous. One of them could be true, but it’s one hell of a plot twist.
I mean, is the whole of Riverside really overrun with people writing murder letters? I suppose it could be. If it is, that’s definitely worthy of a second movie.
@replaceablehead Meanwhile, totally independent of this, another individual has written a separate letter, the Confession which also foreshadows the Zodiac letters, but in different ways.
Oh, this right here.
@replaceablehead The writer of the Bates letters – the supposed “troubled teen” – could have easily written the hoax letters independent of and without influence of the Confession letter writer. The letter “Z” (if it even is a ‘z’) at the end of the Bates letters was the only thing connecting the Bates letters to the (future) Zodiac. Now that the ‘z’ is redundant to any discussion, we really are only left with the confession letter.
"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." Albert Einstein
When Jack the Ripper was active:
“During the Autumn of Terror hundreds of letters were sent to the police and local press purporting to be written by the Whitechapel fiend. Most of them were deemed to be fakes written by either newspaper men trying to start a story or fools trying to incite more terror. Many Ripperologists believe them all to be hoaxes. Other experts believe some (specifically the Dear Boss letter, Saucy Jacky postcard, and From Hell letter) are genuine” ( https://www.casebook.org/ripper_letters/)
So it is nothing new for there to be numerous letters sent, both hoax and real. And we know people have confessed to crimes they did not commit, and lied to the police (there is a guy in the JFK lore who is known for this but I cannot remember his name rn, it is not Andrews though) and even in the JFK case there are fake letters and people blaming their father, similar to the Zodiac case (some idea of it can be seen here: https://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/bogus.htm)
So the idea that there weren’t many hoax letters sent to police in both the CJB and Zodiac cases is not really all that far fetched. And the letter at the bottom could be a Z or a mix of other letters. Interestingly it could be an M and an L joined together and I remember being that age and not only me but other people played around with ways to write our initials so they looked “cool.”
And so if there are multiple hoaxers, the probability that one of them writes something that matches a later Z communication increases.
When Jack the Ripper was active:
“During the Autumn of Terror hundreds of letters were sent to the police and local press purporting to be written by the Whitechapel fiend. Most of them were deemed to be fakes written by either newspaper men trying to start a story or fools trying to incite more terror. Many Ripperologists believe them all to be hoaxes. Other experts believe some (specifically the Dear Boss letter, Saucy Jacky postcard, and From Hell letter) are genuine” ( https://www.casebook.org/ripper_letters/)
So it is nothing new for there to be numerous letters sent, both hoax and real. And we know people have confessed to crimes they did not commit, and lied to the police (there is a guy in the JFK lore who is known for this but I cannot remember his name rn, it is not Andrews though) and even in the JFK case there are fake letters and people blaming their father, similar to the Zodiac case (some idea of it can be seen here: https://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/bogus.htm)
So the idea that there weren’t many hoax letters sent to police in both the CJB and Zodiac cases is not really all that far fetched. And the letter at the bottom could be a Z or a mix of other letters. Interestingly it could be an M and an L joined together and I remember being that age and not only me but other people played around with ways to write our initials so they looked “cool.”
And so if there are multiple hoaxers, the probability that one of them writes something that matches a later Z communication increases.
“hundreds of letters”, that’s quite an extraordinary claim, do they have extraordinary evidence to back it up?
So-called experts have been repeating the claim for years that the Zodiac case received “hundreds of fake letters”, so where are they? Were they filtered out due to being obvious fakes? Letters like the S.L.A and Red Phantom were kept and released despite not even having the Zodiac’s name, or logo on them, yet we’re asked to believe that hundreds of others were discarded? Due to what? Seeming less likely than the Red Phantom letter?
Maybe many were kept but just withheld. We do see possible references to unreleased letters in the FBI file, but not many. If hundreds of possible hoax letters had simply been withheld, we would expect to see constant mention of many unreleased letters all throughout the FBI files, yet we don’t. From time to time we hear a rumor of an unreleased letter. You’d think we would hear a lot more rumors about unreleased letters if hundreds of them had been withheld. In 53 years no police agency or journalist has ever made any reference to a large cache of unreleased letters.
Clearly dubious letters were kept, yet 98% of the letters received were apparently thrown out. These claims of “hundreds” don’t seem to jibe with the physical evidence. Also, why doesn’t this occur in other cases? If the Ripperologist and Zodiac experts are right, shouldn’t this happen in a lot of other cases? Shouldn’t proof of this widespread phenomenon be readily available? If well-known serial murder cases commonly receive large numbers of hoax letters, it should be easy to demonstrate and discussed regularly.
Many of the same experts claim that letter-writing among killers is uncommon. Yet in my own research, I have been struck by the number of proven letters from killers that I have seen. I’ve seen plenty of hoaxes too, but never a case that received “hundreds” of hoax letters.
I know of no serious scientific attempt to quantify how common letters are in serial murder cases, or how common hoax letters are in serial murder cases. Based on my own years of reading serial murder cases, I would say it’s quite low, although I do read about far more cases where the killer sends a letter than a hoaxer. Maybe I’m just reading the wrong cases, but I don’t know where all these “hundreds” of hoax letters are hiding. Hundreds of hoax letters received in only a few months would possibly even defy other existing crime statistics. I’m not sure any crimes happen at that rate. Why isn’t a rich person robbed “hundreds” of times every autumn? I’m not a statistician, and obviously, it would be enormously complex to figure out, but I would speculate that there is no crime that happens in the concentrations being claimed.
There is very little hard evidence either way. I would speculate there is something wrong with those kind of numbers. I think maybe it starts out that the police are getting flooded with tips, tips I acknowledge come by the hundreds, some of those tips may be letters, an exhausted cop working that case might be inclined to speak hyperbolically about the number of hoax letters received.
It’s all speculation. I agree, a hoax is not so very unlikely. But I’m not convinced it’s very likely either. I don’t know, a whole lot of dubious claims if you ask me.
“hundreds of letters”, that’s quite an extraordinary claim, do they have extraordinary evidence to back it up?
“The corpus consists of 209 texts and 17,463 word tokens. The average length of a text in the corpus is of eighty-three tokens (min = 7, max = 648, SD = 67.4).” – https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/33/3/621/4824843?login=true (via BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-42901781) – Scroll down to section entitled “2 Data”
“hundreds of letters”, that’s quite an extraordinary claim, do they have extraordinary evidence to back it up?
“The corpus consists of 209 texts and 17,463 word tokens. The average length of a text in the corpus is of eighty-three tokens (min = 7, max = 648, SD = 67.4).” – https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/33/3/621/4824843?login=true (via BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-42901781) – Scroll down to section entitled “2 Data”
Thank you, this is a very interesting study.
Allow me to put my grumpy and unreasonable hat on for a moment.
I’d have to examine the collection of letters to see what we’re dealing with in terms of quality. I think it demonstrates that if a case gets enough news coverage it can attract a lot of hoax letters.
I still think that statements like “hundreds” of hoax letters are highly misleading. It took a full decade for the most famous case in history to attract 209 hoax letters at a time in history when letter writing was virtually the only means of long-distance communication. I don’t think this is the image a reasonable person would conjure up when told that “hundreds” of letters were received.
Oddly, as the study notes, 62% of the hoax letters were received in the first two months, with the remaining 79 trickling in over the rest of the decade. I suppose 130 letters is “a hundred”, it’s still not “hundreds”. I’d be interested to go through the corpus in detail.
I wonder how famous the Bates case was? The Ripper case was a media frenzy.
Now I’ll take my grumpy and unreasonable hat off.
This study does strongly support the idea that multiple hoax letters are quite plausible. I concede the point. It’s looking like RPD will turn out to be right.
After reading through much of these posts (phew…), I have come to the conclusion that we are way more analytical than the general public of whom that press release was intended.
WE seek a more clear statement, but the RPD isn’t obligated to be more clear. They told us what they want to share with us. They are telling us the three letters weren’t from Cheri’s killer and to them, that is all we need to know.
You can take it from them they did their due diligence, or not.
I think they are up to something else. Why share this news at all? They’ve never been much for sharing with the public and most people aren’t even aware of those letters. I have to wonder why they feel this is press-release worthy? What are they up to??
“…they may be dealing with one or more ersatz Zodiacs–other psychotics eager to get into the act, or perhaps even other murderers eager to lay their crimes at the real Zodiac’s doorstep.“ L.A. Times, 1969
The title of this thread is a joke:
In 2016, some weirdo sending a computer typed letter. RPD identifying him – according to this particular 2016 letter – ruling him out as a suspect.
Interpretation: The letters being a hoax because the guy said so..
Are you guys kidding or am I missing something?? There is no proof at all that this weirdo had ever sent those (early) letters, is there? Just a 2016 weirdo was ‘ruled out’; thus this guy being completely (!) unrelated to the case?
The letters are rock solid consistent with the case, regardless those weirdo’s claims, imo. No proof the weirdo ever wrote them. So why the heck should they be a ‘hoax’??
I bet my five cents it was some guy from the forum, one of the CJB / Z connection deniers; all of it despite Z having admitted to his Riverside activities plenty of decades ago.
Well, at least RPD does genealogy, after all.
QT
*ZODIACHRONOLOGY*
After reading through much of these posts (phew…), I have come to the conclusion that we are way more analytical than the general public of whom that press release was intended.
WE seek a more clear statement, but the RPD isn’t obligated to be more clear. They told us what they want to share with us. They are telling us the three letters weren’t from Cheri’s killer and to them, that is all we need to know.
You can take it from them they did their due diligence, or not.
I think they are up to something else. Why share this news at all? They’ve never been much for sharing with the public and most people aren’t even aware of those letters. I have to wonder why they feel this is press-release worthy? What are they up to??
The first time I read it my brain just filled in the gaps using context. I accepted it too. I thought “well here is a police agency and they would surely be able to establish the facts”. It wasn’t until I saw the reaction from others on Tom’s forum, and went back and reread it and realized what a total abortion of subject and independent pronouns it was, that I started to have serious doubts. I mean it is pretty badly written, by even the most lax standards.
Also, I’m not at all sure it wasn’t directed primarily at the online sleuth community. The letter makes specific reference to the online speculation very early on. And I just can’t think for the life of me who else would be following this case. I actually got a slightly patronizing tone from it, as if they were trying to dismissively imply the Bates connection had originated in online forums.
@quicktrader we don’t know what the RPD did to prove he hoaxes the letters. They don’t say. We can’t assume they just “took his word for it”.
That said, I would like more details from them.
“Murder will out, this my conclusion.”
– Geoffrey Chaucer
At face value, the primary purpose of the release is to announce the reward money. So far, so good.
What we then have is some background/historical references for context – only, the “context” given is clumsy and incoherent.
It also happens to reference a fairly newsworthy, and apparently never-before known, piece of information regarding three key pieces of evidence that have forever linked CJB to the Zodiac (or vice versa.)
None of this means there has to be any hidden agenda or conspiracy by RPD. Nor does it necessarily change RPD’s stance on either case. It’s just business as usual for them.
It’s the news of the potential hoax, and the ramifications of this on the Zodiac case, which demands attention and warrants further explanation.
IMO, of course.
"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." Albert Einstein
At face value, the primary purpose of the release is to announce the reward money. So far, so good.
Perhaps the RPD are using the tactic of “teasing the line” a bit. If they think someone local still has information to provide, a PR tactic like this can sometimes shake that person(s) out from the woodwork.
That was too much!
