Hi,
Been down that road and it a bit confusing. Interesting thing is that for a period of time in 1967, the year AFTER the Bates murder, IIRC Qvale owned the very Tucker car that was owned by Preston Tucker, the originator of the car. However, there is no proof that the car in Riverside was actually a Tucker, except that RG said he could not imagine making that bit of info up (even if he made up other stuff lol) because of how little he knows about cars.
Mike
Good points Mike, I guess it’s safe to assume the original detectives back in 1966 would have pursued that lead as
far as it could go and came up empty.
I think it may have been an attempted rape, the assailant thinking a pocket knife or switch blade
is more than enough to instill fear and forcing her to submit, but she was having none of it and
fought back with everything she had !
People who knew Cheri said she would never have gone down a dark alley with someone she didn’t know.
If someone threatened her with a knife to force her to go with him, isn’t it more likely her resistance would’ve been more immediate, when she was still near her car or on the street, rather than waiting until she had been forced into the alley?
If she knew her attacker, would he rape her at knife point and then let her live, knowing she could easily identify him?
To me these things add up to her knowing her killer, and that he either just wanted to talk with her and things went bad, or that he planned to kill her from the beginning. But I can’t quite see how a stranger could get her into such a secluded place, and I don’t think someone who knew her would rape her and let her live to put him in prison.
But, if it was someone she liked, there would’ve been no need to disable her car first. So that leaves me thinking it could’ve been someone she knew, who was in her circle of acquaintances, or a classmate, not close enough to her (or not confident enough) to simply ask her to talk for a few minutes, but someone who felt they needed a ruse.
I keep thinking Ross Sullivan fits this set of assumptions pretty well. Or someone like him, known to Cheri, but on the periphery.
The author of the "Confession" says at the end of it
Yes I did make that call to you also. It was just a warning.
What did he mean by this?
Ok, but is there any official document that refers this call actually happening after the murder or someone from LE claimed that it did happen?
I think it may have been an attempted rape, the assailant thinking a pocket knife or switch blade
is more than enough to instill fear and forcing her to submit, but she was having none of it and
fought back with everything she had !People who knew Cheri said she would never have gone down a dark alley with someone she didn’t know.
If someone threatened her with a knife to force her to go with him, isn’t it more likely her resistance would’ve been more immediate, when she was still near her car or on the street, rather than waiting until she had been forced into the alley?
If she knew her attacker, would he rape her at knife point and then let her live, knowing she could easily identify him?To me these things add up to her knowing her killer, and that he either just wanted to talk with her and things went bad, or that he planned to kill her from the beginning. But I can’t quite see how a stranger could get her into such a secluded place, and I don’t think someone who knew her would rape her and let her live to put him in prison.
But, if it was someone she liked, there would’ve been no need to disable her car first. So that leaves me thinking it could’ve been someone she knew, who was in her circle of acquaintances, or a classmate, not close enough to her (or not confident enough) to simply ask her to talk for a few minutes, but someone who felt they needed a ruse.
I keep thinking Ross Sullivan fits this set of assumptions pretty well. Or someone like him, known to Cheri, but on the periphery.
I was thinking it could have been someone she knew who was high on drugs (and not thinking rationally) and got the idea in
his head to rape her and then realized it’s a bad idea to sexually assault someone who can ID him by name and then felt the
only option he had at that point was to silence her.
It does seem odd that she would walk into that dark alley with a stranger or with someone she knows, the only thing I can
think of is someone claiming to be an RCC employee (or an actual employee) told her he has a key to one of the vacant
houses and could let her in to use the phone. If that was the case then Ross Sullivan would be a prime suspect for sure !
That’s just it – the knife the assailant carried probably wasn’t carried for the intention of murder, but ultimately become the murder weapon in an unplanned and "spur of the moment" attack by somebody she knew.
So in this scenario the confrontation was planned, thus the disabling of the vehicle, but the murder itself was not, thus the pocket knife.
I get it. It’s not a bad theory and it solves the paradox. But disabling the vehicle… I mean that just seems like an awfully sinister way for a friend, or lover, to foreshadow an argument. As Marshall pointed out, if you are well enough acquainted with someone, you wouldn’t need to disable their car in order to force them to talk to you, would you? But by the same token, a stranger disabling someone’s car at night in a deserted location would not be a good way of ensuring you’d be able to convince them to walk down a dark alley with you. In balance of these two things, Marshall’s reasoning seems marginally more likely.
Disabling the car… it’s just seems so very sinister and very… predatory! That’s the word I’m searching for, it’s "predatory". Think about it, an angry lover might go to their ex’s house with a gun, and they might say "I just wanted to talk", maybe that’s just in the movies, but the point is there are other more emotional ways of initiating a confrontation. Disabling the car, on the other hand, is just so scheming and cold, like a predator. I’m speculating, but it just seems more the actions of someone who is out do something really bad that they have planned.
That’s just it – the knife the assailant carried probably wasn’t carried for the intention of murder, but ultimately become the murder weapon in an unplanned and "spur of the moment" attack by somebody she knew.
So in this scenario the confrontation was planned, thus the disabling of the vehicle, but the murder itself was not, thus the pocket knife.
I get it. It’s not a bad theory and it solves the paradox. But disabling the vehicle… I mean that just seems like an awfully sinister way for a friend, or lover, to foreshadow an argument. As Marshall pointed out, if you are well enough acquainted with someone, you wouldn’t need to disable their car in order to force them to talk to you, would you? But by the same token, a stranger disabling someone’s car at night in a deserted location would not be a good way of ensuring you’d be able to convince them to walk down a dark alley with you. In balance of these two things, Marshall’s reasoning seems marginally more likely.
Disabling the car… it’s just seems so very sinister and very… predatory! That’s the word I’m searching for, it’s "predatory". Think about it, an angry lover might go to their ex’s house with a gun, and they might say "I just wanted to talk", maybe that’s just in the movies, but the point is there are other more emotional ways of initiating a confrontation. Disabling the car, on the other hand, is just so scheming and cold, like a predator. I’m speculating, but it just seems more the actions of someone who is out do something really bad that they have planned.
Let me make this clearly I am not advocating this theory but :-
If as speculated her attack was spontaneous and not pre-planned, and possibly with somebody she knew and thus went willingly with, could the disabling of her car have happened after the attack. We know from evidence that her attacker left heading in the general direction of where her car was parked. Could the car have been disabled as they made their way back to their vehicle. This could help to explain a number of things:- Nobody saw her having car trouble, nobody saw anybody working on her car, the reason her car was unlocked when everybody who knew her said she would never leave it unlocked as she was so proud of it. Also it would give the impression that the attack was planned and not spur of the moment
If you look at photo’s of the library from that time there is no way that she was in that library from opening to closing and could not be seen, it was just too small and open. So if we assume that the confession letter was from her attacker we could definitely make the argument that the line about disabling the battery and waiting for her in the library is simply false. We know she was at the library when it opened and this is backed up the fact that 3 books were checked out by her. There were people in the vicinity of her car from a long period of time after the libraries opening and nobody saw either her or anybody around her car. The letter says they followed her after about 2 minutes, so we have 2 minutes when she was trying to start her car but failing, again though we have no witnesses attesting to this. This would have taken place early in evening, shortly after the libraries opening as this was the only time she was definitively seen there. Also would she have spent 2 minutes attempting to get the car to start ? Possibly, but one would have thought that when she couldn’t have initially started the car she would have gone back to library for help. Why then would she have accepted help for a total stranger ?
The Letter also implies that this was a pre-meditated attack and the disabling of the car seems to back this up. The writer even goes to great lengths to try to create both the impression that he had know CJB for a long time (date in high school) and that he was from the area (Dark alley, Babysitter etc.) and yet he finishes with the the line "I am stalking your girls now". In my mind this line sits at odds with the local claims, it’s seems odd, i’ve always taken it as "your" (Riverside) and "now" girls as in I’ve done this before elsewhere but I am now stalking in this area now.
I don’t know if that’s it, but there is something goofy about the timeline in conjunction with the ploy of disabling the car. Most time of deaths put her 9:30-10:30 which means she hung around for a good bit of time after the library closed at 9. Why would she be there that late? Yet, it’s the only circumstance that makes sense with the car disabling ploy – that the killer disabled the car around 9:15 – 10:15. It would be hard to premeditate her murder not knowing exactly when she would leave or if she could easily find other help to deal with the car.
I think he decided to kill her around 8:30 – 9 and was so boiling with rage he overestimated her ability to fight back. He didn’t have enough time and a clear head to be better equipped.
The 10.30 murder time was ascertained by two different witnesses. One looked at the time, the other knew the time as is was during a program they were watching, so the clocks changing could not have meant they made a mistake.
Khys you have access to the RCC archives and have seen the photos of the library at that time and how small it was ? 60ish people did not see her after 6.15 even though a number of them knew her. The following her out statement is obviously complete BS as if it were the case this could only have been when the library was still open and we know this is not the case due to her time of death. Following this logic it also shows that her attacker did not either know what time the library closed, lied or did not write the letter.
The 10.30 murder time was ascertained by two different witnesses. One looked at the time, the other knew the time as is was during a program they were watching, so the clocks changing could not have meant they made a mistake.
Khys you have access to the RCC archives and have seen the photos of the library at that time and how small it was ? 60ish people did not see her after 6.15 even though a number of them knew her. The following her out statement is obviously complete BS as if it were the case this could only have been when the library was still open and we know this is not the case due to her time of death. Following this logic it also shows that her attacker did not either know what time the library closed, lied or did not write the letter.
Yeah, good points, and all up I think he lied. He’s writing some kind of dreamy pseudo-fiction of the attack, if indeed the letter writer was the killer.
If it was Ross Sullivan (and not saying it for sure is), though, there is a possibility she was in the Harvard Annex working on her paper and then the Confession letter could be somewhat accurate. He disables the car while she’s working late in there. He would have had to let her in there. It would somewhat explain why she went back to the alley, thinking he was gonna let her in the annex to use the phone there.
Let me make this clearly I am not advocating this theory but :-
If as speculated her attack was spontaneous and not pre-planned, and possibly with somebody she knew and thus went willingly with, could the disabling of her car have happened after the attack.
Some reasons I don’t think the killer would have done that:
1. He had to have a fair amount of blood on him, so does he just want to get out of there ASAP, or does he want to stand in the street, working on her car?
2. The most concentrated amount of blood would’ve been on his strong hand (the hand which would’ve been working that small knife.) If the blade did indeed break while he was using it, it may very well have cut him, producing his own blood in addition to hers. Does he want to work on her distributor with blood on his strong hand, which may also be cut and bleeding?
3. What purpose would it serve? As it was, it could’ve been a random killer. By disabling her car after the fact, it means the killer knew her. If the killer was, in fact, some random guy, how would he know which car was hers?
If there was no blood on Cheri’s car and especially under the hood, then i don’t think this scenario is likely or perhaps even possible.
The 10.30 murder time was ascertained by two different witnesses. One looked at the time, the other knew the time as is was during a program they were watching, so the clocks changing could not have meant they made a mistake.
Khys you have access to the RCC archives and have seen the photos of the library at that time and how small it was ? 60ish people did not see her after 6.15 even though a number of them knew her. The following her out statement is obviously complete BS as if it were the case this could only have been when the library was still open and we know this is not the case due to her time of death. Following this logic it also shows that her attacker did not either know what time the library closed, lied or did not write the letter.
Yeah, good points, and all up I think he lied. He’s writing some kind of dreamy pseudo-fiction of the attack, if indeed the letter writer was the killer.
If it was Ross Sullivan (and not saying it for sure is), though, there is a possibility she was in the Harvard Annex working on her paper and then the Confession letter could be somewhat accurate. He disables the car while she’s working late in there. He would have had to let her in there. It would somewhat explain why she went back to the alley, thinking he was gonna let her in the annex to use the phone there.
That’s what I was thinking, If it was Ross Sullivan he could have told her he only has a key to the back door of the annex.
(because he was a low level employee of the library and didn’t have a key to the front door) That seems like the only
reason she would walk back there by her own free will even if she knew the perp well.
All fair points but lets put the "when the car" issue aside for a moment. To Recap:-
We know that she was at the Library at around 6.15 as she was seen both driving nearby and by a fellow student writing in her spiral notebook (Which I have always wondered was it found and if not could the 3 letters have been written using pages from it). We also have the four witnesses who saw her arrive and were in the vicinity of her car from 6.15 to 7.15. So it could not have been touched until 7.15pm at the earliest. Yes ?
We can also summarize that her car did not move from the moment she parked it (6.15ish) until it was found the next day on Terracina. Which means wherever she was she went on foot whether that was the Library or elsewhere. She was seen in the Library initially but from 6.30pm up to 65 people did not see her again. Using occam’s razor we could say that chances are she was not in the Library later than 6.30pm. ?
But her car did not move so if she wasn’t in the Library she was obviously somewhere else. Her car stayed parked so she did not go somewhere in it and come back. Also if she left the Library at 6.30ish she did not head towards her car either as the four witnesses were next to it for 45 minutes after this and they did not report seeing her again, thus meaning that she did not go on Terracina ?
Skip two hours (9.30pm) and we have a Man smoking in the direct vicinity of where her body was found seen by a witness walking along Terracina. So from this we can conclude two things. Firstly she had not been attacked yet as there was a person where the crime occurred as judging from the previous posts the killer would not have hung around after the attack? Secondly this witness did not report seeing Cheri trying to start her car. The point is if she left the Library at closing, 9pm, her car was mere minutes away, it would not have taken her 30 minutes to discover that it would not start. (This again add’s weight to the argument that she was not in the Library).
On the other hand it would also lead one to believe that at this point her car had already been tampered with. The man waiting in an unlit alley, possibly looking out for her returning to her vehicle. Yet despite this the attack did not happen until around 10.30pm as ascertained from two different witnesses who heard a scream. Again adding even more credence to her not leaving the library at closing time as this was 90 minutes after.
Evidence from the scene shows blood leading back to Terracina and a car was heard starting so again it is safe to assume that the killer had parked on Terracina.
It is worth noting that at the time of the attack it was possible to park and was used for parking a mere few feet from where her body was found
Good sum up.
This is back tracking a moment but a feature that makes the Confession letter more likely to be Zodiac to me is the teasing “By _______ “ put at the top. He had to go out of his way to put that in. Zodiac loves formatting and teasingly puts blanks/symbols/cyphers where formatting in other communications would indicate a name.
All fair points but lets put the "when the car" issue aside for a moment. To Recap:-
We know that she was at the Library at around 6.15 as she was seen both driving nearby and by a fellow student writing in her spiral notebook (Which I have always wondered was it found and if not could the 3 letters have been written using pages from it). We also have the four witnesses who saw her arrive and were in the vicinity of her car from 6.15 to 7.15. So it could not have been touched until 7.15pm at the earliest. Yes ?
We can also summarize that her car did not move from the moment she parked it (6.15ish) until it was found the next day on Terracina. Which means wherever she was she went on foot whether that was the Library or elsewhere. She was seen in the Library initially but from 6.30pm up to 65 people did not see her again. Using occam’s razor we could say that chances are she was not in the Library later than 6.30pm. ?
But her car did not move so if she wasn’t in the Library she was obviously somewhere else. Her car stayed parked so she did not go somewhere in it and come back. Also if she left the Library at 6.30ish she did not head towards her car either as the four witnesses were next to it for 45 minutes after this and they did not report seeing her again, thus meaning that she did not go on Terracina ?
Skip two hours (9.30pm) and we have a Man smoking in the direct vicinity of where her body was found seen by a witness walking along Terracina. So from this we can conclude two things. Firstly she had not been attacked yet as there was a person where the crime occurred as judging from the previous posts the killer would not have hung around after the attack? Secondly this witness did not report seeing Cheri trying to start her car. The point is if she left the Library at closing, 9pm, her car was mere minutes away, it would not have taken her 30 minutes to discover that it would not start. (This again add’s weight to the argument that she was not in the Library).
On the other hand it would also lead one to believe that at this point her car had already been tampered with. The man waiting in an unlit alley, possibly looking out for her returning to her vehicle. Yet despite this the attack did not happen until around 10.30pm as ascertained from two different witnesses who heard a scream. Again adding even more credence to her not leaving the library at closing time as this was 90 minutes after.
Evidence from the scene shows blood leading back to Terracina and a car was heard starting so again it is safe to assume that the killer had parked on Terracina.
It is worth noting that at the time of the attack it was possible to park and was used for parking a mere few feet from where her body was found
Excellent points Cragle, This case is so damned confusing and baffling it seems there isn’t a single scenario we can
come up with that makes everything add up !
Maybe that’s what makes this case so mysterious and compelling.
Who is to say that Cheri wasn’t already on the ground at 9:30 p.m.? I dont mean to say that she was already dead but perhaps unconscious. Without looking back over the confession letter for, a precise statement, the killer talked about his getting ahold of her, kicking her in the head and then slicing her throat. Kicking her in the head then moving to slicing her throat suggests a period of time between actions. The amount of time being anyone’s guess. So maybe, when the woman passed by and saw a man smoking a cigarette, maybe Cheri was already on the ground at this time. There is a slight upward angle to the driveway (seen in photo with cop car), cheri would have been ground level, it was dark and the man could have been standing more or less in front of her body smoking the cigarette and wondering what to do. How much is this woman really seeing? Maybe it’s about this time when cheri starts to wake up so he kicks her in the head to shut her up. More time elapses, she wakes up, screams and then he kills her at about the time everyone claims to hear a scream.
