That’s great Morf. I hope you can draw him out and learn more. It’s rare to find a friend of Manalli’s.

Echoed.

Fred’s Sister contacted me asking to hear from Anybody who knew Fred during the late 60;s or early to mid 70’s. She reiterated her position that she would give DNA in either the SRHM case or Zodiac case to help weed out any involvement by Fred

Wow DNA would be huge although I’m skeptical of any real Zodiac DNA being on file. But if Fred was the partner, maybe HIS DNA is what they have.

Galaxie posted a Jan. 1957 newspaper article on my sire recently that mentions an assault charge on Manalli. He would have been late into his college days or maybe just out of college. I’m on my phone so I can’t post a link. Maybe Fred’s sister can shed some light on this incident? I think it was assault with intent to commit a lewd act is what the article said. Would that be like sexual assault?

Can you post the link when you can?

Here it is: http://zodiackiller.forumotion.com/t38- … nalli#1608

Thanks for finding that Doranchak!

Fred graduated from college June 1957.

The newspaper article is dated Jan. 29, 1957 while he was still in college.

Hmm, interesting

Thanks doranchak. Sorry I am not sure how to post links from my phone and haven’t had access to a computer in a while.

Anyways, is there any way to find out details on the incident? You’d think he would have had trouble getting a teaching job with something like that on his record.

Sorry to jump in late here…just trying to grasp this.

Reading up on Richard Anderson and thoughts of him being involved.

So, what is the consensus here? Is it being suggested he and Fred were involved in the SRHM’s together? It seems it is also being suggested they were behind the Zodiac murders as well. Very different murders, so that throws me for a loop.

Sorry to jump in late here…just trying to grasp this.

Reading up on Richard Anderson and thoughts of him being involved.

So, what is the consensus here? Is it being suggested he and Fred were involved in the SRHM’s together? It seems it is also being suggested they were behind the Zodiac murders as well. Very different murders, so that throws me for a loop.

Well, here’s my Fred Manalli theory, and I invite everyone to punch holes in it because I’m not 100% sold on it myself…

Suppose Fred Manalli, in 1968, has fantasies of murder but not the courage to actually do it. But, he’s a writer, and he’s writing morbid stuff about his fantasies. The goal of every writer, both professional and amateur, is to be read. The larger the audience, the better. So, Fred finds some person, or persons, who will do the killing, either a friend or someone who needs some cash, and hires them. The killer gets to choose his target, the timing, the weapon, etc. to maximize the chance for success. Since there is apparently no motive, and no connection between the killer and victims, it’s relatively safe.

Whether all the victims die doesn’t matter so much, as long as the killer cannot be identified, and even if witnesses get a look at him, all the better, since Fred was quite tall and the hitters weren’t.

Fred starts his Z letter writing campaign and gets what every writer dreams of, a huge following, with his letters published and commented on in multiple newspapers. He gets to be a modern day Jack The Ripper, basking in all that fame and notoriety, all the while remaining invisible to LE. He writes the 408 and sends it to three different newspapers, to maximize exposure and to get the public interested in his game, by involving them in trying to solve the cipher. Later he’ll write the 340 which may not even be solvable because he knows by that time people will assume it is solvable and will continue to work on it, possibly forever.

As a side note, Fred is dead and there are lots of people still working on the 340, so he does, if he was Writer Z, have slaves in his afterlife.

Two big questions people have about Z are, why did he stop killing and taking credit after 1969, and why did he stop writing sometime after 1974?

Maybe the hitter in PH decided his escape had been too close a call, and it was time to disappear to another part of the country. Maybe Fred was concerned that with the sketch out there, the guy might get caught and turn him in. Or, maybe Fred was just ready to graduate to a new level of killing, this time involving himself in the actual crimes, and thus combining his murderous fantasies with sexual ones. In any case, the Z killings stopped, and then, a couple years later, the SRHM killings began. Remember Z’s promise to continue killing but no longer take credit?

This could also explain why the SRHM and Z killings were so different. In one, we have a hitman just killing for money. Fred would’ve gotten no gratification from the killer’s actions, had there been a sexual component. In the other, we have Fred actually living out his various fantasies through personal, up close involvement.

And the confirmed Z letters end in 1974, after the SRHM killings stop. At that point, perhaps Fred is out of the murder business (or maybe on to some other variation) and in August of 1976 he crosses a centerline and dies in a car accident. It wasn’t the other driver who caused the accident – it was Fred, which leaves open the possibility of suicide (while possibly taking another victim in the process – he didn’t slam into a tree for example.)

All speculation of course, but here’s what I find somewhat compelling:

1. The handwriting is the closest to Z we’ve seen. This alone means nothing, if it was all we had. But combine it with the following:
2. The style of writing. Best example that sticks in my head is the way Fred and Z arch the word "public." Also the punctuation, use of semi colons, dashes before numbers, splitting of the word "some thing" and so on.
3. The choice of words, like the frequent use of "shall." But most compelling is the use of non-words, like "whatshisname." How uncommon is that?
4. Fred was fascinated by murder, suicide, and such topics. How many people are in that group, interested enough about it to actually write about it? We aren’t just talking about a guy who’s writing style resembles that of Zodiac, in Fred we have a guy with murderous tendencies that he himself describes, with writing amazingly similar, in so many aspects, to Z.

What sets the Z case apart, mostly, is all the writings. Why would a murderer put so much effort in writing about his crimes? Well, that’s just it. Fred was an actual writer, with murder among his most favorite (obsessive) topics. If Gaik is a suspect because he was a writer, Fred should be a suspect about a thousand times stronger because he was writing about Z related stuff, and his writing is a near perfect match to Z in about every aspect you can come up with.

And, he was later considered a strong murder suspect in the SRHM case. This is all the more significant because, as far as I know (and I could be wrong,) it had nothing to do with tying him to the Zodiac case and the writings. Independent from Z, Fred Manalli was under strong suspicion for being a mass murderer.

Just for fun…

Ok Marshall…you totally lost me since I don’t think the Halloween card was from Zodiac.

All kidding aside, I just don’t see what others see when it comes to Manalli’s handwriting. Some of the comparisons, well, I scratch my head. While some are spot on (this has happened with many suspect’s writing–Ted K’s is still the best, imo) some of it is way off. There are things that jump out, certainly, such as the word "whatshisname", but that is a actually an abbreviation for "what’s his name" –it has been around since the 17th century (yes, I googled it ).

I really don’t see him being involved in the SRHM’s and being involved with Zodiac as well.

He looks nothing like anyone ever described, so a helper has to be put into the scenario to make it plausible. Yes, there is Richard Anderson (R.A.) who was a suspect in the SRHM’s (and committed suicide) so that becomes interesting when one considers the "Deep Real Estate" ad, but again, it takes us back to partners (3) in Zodiac crimes…with a SRHM twist. It is complete guess work when it comes to Richard and Fred.

It’s just that SO much has to be speculated to come up with this theory. It’s interesting to read about, sure, but it’s like an intriguing novel…almost too manufactured to be true.

That said, Manalli is an interesting character…for sure. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he were guilty of something.

Most of what we have on Manalli is handwriting. Kind of strange because that is what is lacking for many of the suspects. The content of what Manalli has written certainly is provoking, though. The places he has lived are also intriguing, San Francisco, Sonoma County and Lake Tahoe. We have not connected him to Riverside but that’s not something that would rule him out for me. He worked at San Quentin Prison where he could have learned a few things from the prisoners. There’s a lot going for him but physically he does not match the description of Zodiac so much assuming that the Zodiac descriptions are close to what he really looks like.

Seagull, do you know when he worked at the prison? And, a general question, are there public records of the names of the prisoners who were at San Quentin at that time, who were released between about 1968 and 1972?

We know Fred was writing and reading about murder. If he’s working in a prison, wouldn’t it be possible (or likely) that he’d find it interesting to have conversations with actual murderers? And maybe strike up a friendship with one or two of them?

Just thinking. If I have a Manalli dream tonight I’ll just ask him directly.

On Fred’s military discharge that you posted, it says he was honorably discharged on September 30, 1963, and that he had 4 more years of reserve duty to fulfill. On his death certificate I believe it said he’d been a resident of Sonoma the past 13 years (he died in August 1976.) So that would mean, according to that document, he lived in Sonoma from his discharge in 1963 until his death, but you also said he lived in San Francisco and Tahoe. Would it be possible for you to construct a timeline on Fred for what you’ve found regarding where he lived and his employment?

Thanks so much. Fred’s so interesting because his writings are practically an admission that he either is, or wants to be, a killer.

Fred started working at San Quentin in 1961 and worked there until he got his masters degree from San Francisco State College (now called University of California San Francisco). That is posted here in the last post-

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=364

When Manalli was in Tahoe and the other places in Northern California it was during fire season in the summers between the school year’s. Manalli and his wife were fire spotters for the Department of Forestry. Read the whole thread in the above link, it’s not perfect but there are some dates. A lot of that stuff was transferred over from our previous board which had an extremely long thread on Manalli. I’ve forgotten about half of the information, unfortunately.

Here’s a link to that-

http://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com … ed-manalli

Apologies to whomever this offends, but this new theory of Manalli as a hitman-hiring, letter writing "Zodiac" who graduates to hands-on fun as the SRHM is a bridge too far IMO. It’s exceedingly difficult to believe that a guy like Fred, whose chief complaint in his surviving correspondence is a lack of money, would be extravagant enough to farm out his early, hands-off kills to the world’s worst hitman before going on to commit a series of rapes and manual strangulations. The signatures are way too different and to buy the link would require a leap of logic that ignores, among other things, that the guy who wrote the letters was scrawling graffiti on Bryant Hartnell’s car door while his would-be victims were escaping their bonds a bit farther up the hill.

You’d think if two guys were involved here, one of whom was presumably a genius, they’d at least have gotten it right. They didn’t. No, the Zodiac was one guy and whatever his complicity in the Santa Rosa murders may have been, Manalli probably wasn’t him.