Hi-

If the Badlands letter is legit, what do you think then? I’ve always viewed this letter with its five syllable words to be a "f%^k you" that Z wrote to his pursuers, to show them he was not some illiterate. However, my mind was poisoned by Alan Keel, who said there is a 1974 forgery I’ve yet to track down. So you may have to hope that this is the one!

Mike

I have to say, from my own perspectives, that the badlands letter/postcard has been pivotal. It sometimes frustrated me but in the end it proved to be a major focus to work out from. I believe it’s from Zodiac and from my own perspective again, I think it found itself in the place it now inhabits because it fills in gaps, in style. This is just my working experience with it. Not only do I feel that in itself it contains many correct hallmarks but it also contains hallmarks from the other Zodiac missives even back to the desk poem.

Some of the letters we look at are tricky. God knows, I change my mind every five minutes on some of them but that’s a good thing, I would be more worried if we just accepted everything at face value.

Eventually though we will have to move on and make the terrifying decision as to what letters are real. That has always been a motivation for myself. My little way of helping I guess, to assist in that decision.

That makes it all seem so cut ‘n dried but it isn’t. I have to get my hands dirty and be exposed to the same doubts we all have. The one thing that does strike me though is WHY is it so tricky? I personally think this is because of how Zodiac operated. I believe he deliberately worked in the field of confusion and used this technique on many levels. So in that respect and regarding this thread I think we have to factor that in as a very real possibility for explaining the so termed spelling mistakes.

Then we have the other side of the coin. What if they are separate to his subterfuge? What if they are an inherent trait? We aren’t sure though and does that bring us back to deliberate confusion? Is he being slippy or are we being slippy in our own thinking on his behalf?

Answers on a postcard with double postage please. lol

Hi-

If the Badlands letter is legit, what do you think then? I’ve always viewed this letter with its five syllable words to be a "f%^k you" that Z wrote to his pursuers, to show them he was not some illiterate. However, my mind was poisoned by Alan Keel, who said there is a 1974 forgery I’ve yet to track down. So you may have to hope that this is the one!

Mike

Mike – easy. Easy! I think Mr Keel was wrong.
Next!

It’s strange how the letters seem to use the same sort of odd spellings as displayed by Officer Richard Hoffman.

This theme got me thinking. Last week I was sending some pages from my PhD work to my professor so that he can read them and comment on them and as he sent them back with good advice and comments, he also noted that I always spell some English words incorrectly, like: disappears (which I usually wrote as dissapears) and together (which all my life I have been writing as togeather), and few others. The thing is, English is not my native language and even tho I’ve studied it in school for years and even tho I need to use it in my scientific research and in my work, both in written and verbal form, some things I can’t get into my mind (like I have to think a lot to decide in which cases to use "then" and when to use "than"). If the spelling mistakes that Zodiac made were not intentional, then maybe, just maybe, English wasn’t his native language (especially when I look how many words that should end with -ing he is writing as ending with -eing). Just thinking out loud

This theme got me thinking. Last week I was sending some pages from my PhD work to my professor so that he can read them and comment on them and as he sent them back with good advice and comments, he also noted that I always spell some English words incorrectly, like: disappears (which I usually wrote as dissapears) and together (which all my life I have been writing as togeather), and few others. The thing is, English is not my native language and even tho I’ve studied it in school for years and even tho I need to use it in my scientific research and in my work, both in written and verbal form, some things I can’t get into my mind (like I have to think a lot to decide in which cases to use "then" and when to use "than"). If the spelling mistakes that Zodiac made were not intentional, then maybe, just maybe, English wasn’t his native language (especially when I look how many words that should end with -ing he is writing as ending with -eing). Just thinking out loud

English is my native language and I sometimes struggle with certain words and letter combinations, I think we all do. Maybe it’s the nature and intricacy of the language itself. It is, I believe, purported to be one of the hardest languages to learn because of all it’s little nuances. In that respect I’m not sure we can nail down Zodiac’s dalliances to being caused by non-native learning but certainly something to consider. I have to say though, that your own little language faux pas made me smile Zazu. Despite being wrong they are quite intuitive, almost to the point that I have to stop looking at them lest I start using them myself lol. I could probably go and look but please, forgive me for not being aware, what is your own native tongue?

Hi-

If the Badlands letter is legit, what do you think then? I’ve always viewed this letter with its five syllable words to be a "f%^k you" that Z wrote to his pursuers, to show them he was not some illiterate. However, my mind was poisoned by Alan Keel, who said there is a 1974 forgery I’ve yet to track down. So you may have to hope that this is the one!

Mike

I dunno, Mike. I’ve never been crazy about the Citizen letter but you make a good case for the Exorcist letter being suspect. The "big words" in the Citizen letter like "justifiable" and "consternation" are actually fairly easy to spell phonetically and the writer does screw up two words in the very first sentence. Again, I’m not questioning Z’s vocabulary or intelligence- just his ability to distinguish certain spelling rules when options are phonetically equivalent.

English is my native language and I sometimes struggle with certain words and letter combinations, I think we all do. Maybe it’s the nature and intricacy of the language itself. It is, I believe, purported to be one of the hardest languages to learn because of all it’s little nuances. In that respect I’m not sure we can nail down Zodiac’s dalliances to being caused by non-native learning but certainly something to consider. I have to say though, that your own little language faux pas made me smile Zazu. Despite being wrong they are quite intuitive, almost to the point that I have to stop looking at them lest I start using them myself lol. I could probably go and look but please, forgive me for not being aware, what is your own native tongue?

No, of course that can’t be a reason to come to a conclusion about one’s nationality and it wasn’t my intention to make such an assumption. As I said, this topic just made me think about language structures and mistakes we make while using it. My native language is Latvian (here are something more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvian_language because I always doubt anyone would know anything about it).

I am just returning from commenting on a post by Quicktrader about a mangled phrase from the Little List. That thread and this one are one the same broad topic of mistakes made by the Zodiac Killer, and that got me thinking…

Let us suppose, for a minute that all–or at least the majority–of Z’s mistakes were deliberate. I mean, let us take it as our working hypothesis.

In that case, what might be impressive, in my opinion, is how good a job he has done. Would you not say that he must have almost studied the variety of mistake that people make?

For example, I was thinking about the lists of spelling mistakes provided earlier on this thread. Are they not a very exact sample of textbook mistakes?

I am not claiming that Z did deliberately make his mistakes on purpose, but IF he did, would we not have to say that he did an ultra-thorough job of deciding which mistakes to include?

G

Earlier in this thread it was said:

Very good topic, but personally, I think his misspellings are done on purpose.

Perhaps they were on purpose, perhaps not, but aren’t they interesting in any case.

What sort of person makes a careful study of how words are often misspelled, and then uses that information to misspell
words in his own writings? A very careful and meticulous person, I would say!

Or maybe Zodiac just suffered from dysgraphia?

-glurk

Earlier in this thread it was said:

Very good topic, but personally, I think his misspellings are done on purpose.

Perhaps they were on purpose, perhaps not, but aren’t they interesting in any case.

What sort of person makes a careful study of how words are often misspelled, and then uses that information to misspell
words in his own writings? A very careful and meticulous person, I would say!

Or maybe Zodiac just suffered from dysgraphia?

-glurk

Awww how cute. You built that up so well only for it to turn out to not be that interesting after all. Lol. You know of course I’m just messing with ya and it doesn’t really need ‘splaining. More for other’s benefit.

I could go for the dysgraphia thing except that it seems to be saying that it is also linked physically. Muscle memory. That sounds quite powerful to me and I’m not sure it would allow for subtle variations. It seems like more of a pronounced and locked in ‘thing’. Since I believe that Zodiac wrote letters in different styles I have to assume and don’t see evidence of, any physical impairment regarding writing.

So, back to what you first said. That, I find interesting.

After being royally insulted by Glurk in my PM box I want to add that the dysgraphia idea should not be discounted. I trust glurk’s opinion and as such I cannot just simply wipe that off the table. Point being that glurk reiterated that he thinks dysgraphia is a real possibility and that got my attention, properly. So look into it.

Geeze, I sound so pompous sometimes. Soz, it’s just default mode for typing. I don’t actually sound like this in real life … or are I? lol.

Glurk BTW, apart from being the man behind ZDK has ‘thee’ coolest real name out of anyone I have ever known. Sorry dude, don’t mean to embarrass you but it could be a TV show title.

What sort of person makes a careful study of how words are often misspelled, and then uses that information to misspell
words in his own writings? A very careful and meticulous person, I would say!

Hmmm, like a proof reader, or editor, or someone in publishing perhaps?

What sort of person makes a careful study of how words are often misspelled, and then uses that information to misspell
words in his own writings? A very careful and meticulous person, I would say!

Hmmm, like a proof reader, or editor, or someone in publishing perhaps?

If you were a teacher and one of your students consistently submitted papers with the same types of common spelling errors would you likely conclude that:

a. He’s doing it on purpose by carefully studying common types of spelling errors and using them consistently through many grade levels to appear less intelligent?

OR

b. He needs more help in learning these common spelling rules?

It’s not a precise analogy because Zodiac might have a genuine reason for deception but I somehow doubt appearing stupid was a way he would have chosen to deceive. I’ve mentioned before that a lot of folks spent lots of time parsing BTK’s spelling and grammar errors for hidden meanings because… well, BTK was a criminal mastermind and carefully orchestrated everything he did and said… until we actually met him that is.

I guess I’m just arguing for Occam’s Razor here and suggesting that when people make the same types of mistakes over and over again, it’s usually because they don’t know how to do something properly.

entropy-

I agree with you 100%. We should look at what is most likely.

Option 1 — Zodiac carefully studied misspellings that he wanted to intentionally use, and then wrote his letters in small text, hastily, and managed to use all of the poor spellings that he had practiced.

Option 2 — Zodiac wrote his letters in small text, hastily, and had many misspellings because he suffered from dysgraphia, and was poor at spelling.

To me, Occam’s razor and all, of course option 2 is the more likely. I think the Wikipedia article on dysgraphia sounds JUST LIKE Zodiac, btw:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia

-glurk

Yeah, dysgraphia certainly seems to fit although Z doesn’t seem to have much difficulty writing legibly (most of the time) and his grammar is pretty good for the most part. I imagine it’s kind of a continuum like autism so I doubt he would have been considered to have a learning disability based on that alone. You bring up a good point, glurk, about the "hastily written" part. To me, there is nothing contrived about Z’s handwriting, at least in the early letters. It’s written very freely, almost sloppily and it’s difficult for me to imagine him carefully thinking about specific spelling rules to screw up while writing that way.

Again, plenty of good points to be made on both sides. It’s just one of those topics I’ve felt pretty strongly about for a long time. Good topic, good discussion.

I also agree that it is more likely that Z had real difficulties with spelling. Haste is the key to that judgment, as Glurk points out. His handwriting reflects a hasty style that would (I think) require a great deal of overlearning to manage a lot of deliberate errors without causing noticeable disruptions in style.

On another note, I would like to point out (in my pedantic way) that, Occam’s Razor is a principle that guides us in how to organize imcomplete information and gives us hints as to how to apply our resources in interpreting that information, strictly speaking, it does not tell us the probability of any given interpretation. In some cases, such as when dealing with and adversarial situation, where one party is seeking to confound the other, it can be questionable, because the opponent will often seek to do the least probable thing, so lower probability events have a paradoxical tendency to increase in probability.

As for its value as a guide in the use of resources, one must consider that the time and mental resources of a lone theorist is different from the available time and resources of a theorist community.

All this is my very pendantic and long-winded way of saying that we should still encourage exploration of the possibility that the spelling errors may have been intentional to one degree or another.

Regards,

G

P.S.: We should also consider the possibility that Z wrote his messages on his iPhone, then transcribed them, spelling errors and all, to paper.