A good post for sure,thanks Tahoe!

Did Z’s quirk of over postage and prefrence for Roosevelt stamps leak in the media during the letter campaign? When were the envelopes showed to the public?

The only envelopes I see shown in the papers were:

The Belli Letter envelope was published on 12/28/69.

On 12/16/70 there was a copy of one of the Riverside envelopes from ’66 published and the Nov. 8, 1969 envelope of Zodiac’s to the S.F. Chronicle.

–On that note, I never read about Zodiac’s continued use and apparent favoritism of the Roosevelt stamps.

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Link to S.F. newspapers: http://zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=110&t=1193

Link to L.A. newspapers: http://zodiackillersite.com/viewtopic.php?f=94&t=134

has anyone checked to see if the roosevelt stamps all came from the same stamp book? it should be possible to compare how they’re torn to see if they match up like a puzzle. sorry if this has been covered, i’m still wading through a lot of stuff.

Don’t they pre perforate the stamps in the book? Do they really come on a single sheet that you have to cut yourself?

Don’t they pre perforate the stamps in the book? Do they really come on a single sheet that you have to cut yourself?

i was asking based on matching the perforation or tear patterns to the extent possible with the scans of envelopes we have.

Yeah, but my point is that those stamps are produced in a factory on huge sheets and then cut into the books and individual pieces, so the perforations would be performed by a press and they would be identical for the entire batch that was produced. There would be no way to see if posted stamps on letters came from the same book or not. Unless they were torn out individually and not pre perforated.

I don’t really know, I just don’t see why they wouldn’t do that.

i’m not sure where we are disagreeing, so let me try again –

this is the roosevelt stamp. you can see the perforation at the top and bottom. you can also see that the tear marks on the perforation (where this individual stamp was removed from the rest on its page) isn’t perfect (for example, there’s a little extra on the top left corner that would match up to a little less on the bottom left corner of the stamp above it). you could probably take each individual stamp on a page and put them back together in their original order, like a jigsaw puzzle, based on the particulars of the perforation tear marks. this is especially so if someone were hasty in tearing off a stamp – you might see a corner that was torn in removing the stamp from the page that would match up to another stamp that had an extra part of a corner, etc.

i was questioning whether the roosevelt stamps we see on the zodiac envelopes could be proven to come from the same book of stamps, i.e. he perhaps bought a book of twenty stamps on two pages, and we could match up the stamps on different envelopes based on how they were torn out of the book, to show they were from the same book. if this were possible we could authenticate zodiac letters with roosevelt stamps based on them coming specifically from the same book of stamps. however i realize that the quality of the envelope scans we have probably makes this impossible, however LE should have been able to do so, i just don’t know that they did.

masootz-

Just a note – those stamps (as you pictured above) – didn’t come from a book of stamps, but from a roll of them. Which was actually totally common at that time. If you went to a post office and wanted 20 stamps, they would pull and count 20 off of the roll, tear them off, and hand them to you.

Commemorative and collectors stamps have long been available, but it has always seemed to me that the ones that Zodiac used were just the same ones that any post office in the entire USA would give someone (at that time) if they just went in and bought some stamps. The MOST common ones.

-glurk

i was questioning whether the roosevelt stamps we see on the zodiac envelopes could be proven to come from the same book of stamps, i.e. he perhaps bought a book of twenty stamps on two pages, and we could match up the stamps on different envelopes based on how they were torn out of the book, to show they were from the same book. if this were possible we could authenticate zodiac letters with roosevelt stamps based on them coming specifically from the same book of stamps. however i realize that the quality of the envelope scans we have probably makes this impossible, however LE should have been able to do so, i just don’t know that they did.

I get what you’re saying, masootz, whether they’re from a book or a roll (and yes, these were from a roll). And as you said, the scans are not nearly good enough to make any reasonable determination one way or another. Whether or not LE took the time to examine the stamps that closely is unknown, however, I think they’ve got a pretty good handle on which letters (affixed with that particular stamp) came from Zodiac. I don’t really think it matters if the stamps came from the same roll or not.

glurk and up2something – thanks, i didn’t realize they were a roll. i still think it could be possible to match up stamps from the same roll however it’s likely a moot point as we don’t have any envelopes that are clear enough to make such matches. i appreciate your thoughts.

Do we think it’s a coincidence (he’s forensically aware – as mentioned by the Riverside cops back there in ’66 – he knows different disguise techniques for his writing, he knew about a sputum test) that he seems to have been savvy about the stamps?

These came in books too. How do we know it was a roll? Just curious…

http://www.ebay.com/itm/USPS-Scott-1284 … 4d0b776175

Do we think it’s a coincidence (he’s forensically aware – as mentioned by the Riverside cops back there in ’66 – he knows different disguise techniques for his writing, he knew about a sputum test) that he seems to have been savvy about the stamps?

But wasn’t he..ugh…not savvy about them since he used the wrong postage? Unless double stamps were part of his signature, he didn’t need to do that.

Masootz, I understand what you are saying. What I’m saying is that I don’t believe there would be a significant variation in the stamp perforations, because of the way that they are made, to make a match between them.

Now if he hastily tore them to produce specific and distinguishable signs…well, wouldn’t you still only be able to tell theoretically stamps that were adjacent to each other? If he didn’t use adjacent stamps, then they would not match, because there would be nothing to match them too unless we had all of the stamps from the same roll or book.

It’s a good idea of some out of the box thinking, but I don’t know how plausible it would be to test it. For police, I would imagine that they had no interest in trying to do anything like that for the sake of timeliness.