Odd question, but does anyone know if any of the letters had a scent to them at all? Paper being a fibrous material should pick up some smell of surroundings at some point. I wonder if any type of scent analysis has been done on the confirmed letters….
Pretty sure the ninhydrin ruined any and all scents, and after forty something years of storage and being vigorously handled by half the people of planet earth, no scent would remain, and even so, you’d have to pretty much destroy the letters to get a gas spectrometry reading, which still wouldn’t tell you much if anything about odor molecules, unless the letters had been bathed in a very unique odor-inducing chemical, which would be apparent without the GSM.
If Zodiac were a smoker, chances are pretty good the letters would have smelled like cigarettes at the time they were opened.
One of my recent textbooks I rent through the mail reeked of cigarette smoke.
So…at the time, a possible chance of some scent, but nothing was ever mentioned.
“…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
