Ok I found this quite curious.

For the record I have NOT found a match – All I am presenting here is a hypothesis. It concerns the word "with" on the bottom of the bus bomb letter page with the ingredients list. The TH is very unique and I don’t think I’ve seen Zodiac use it anywhere else. I’ve noted it in the past but it’s came back into play given it’s construction.

On it’s own I would say it’s a mistake. Compared to Manalli there’s a possible reason for it – now that doesn’t restrict it to Manalli, it just happens that Manalli’s writing has the prerequisites for the explanation.

The mistake is that I think Zodiac slipped into cursive here and attempted to correct himself. Which it why we have what we have. You can see where I’ve marked the flow of the t and the h. I think he accidentally used the cross bar on the t and followed it through to the h as he would in cursive and realising that then attempted to add a ‘topper’ crossbar as well onto the t to disguise it. There was no need for that topper and he doesn’t use it anywhere else.

Manalli uses a good variation on his t’s and shown here IMO are the elements in them that are similar to the th on the word ‘with’. The follow through on to an h and that weird topper he uses a lot.

Also I think that’s a 2 stroke k used prior to it.

Manalli or not that little ‘mistake’ may prove important at some point. One last thing – if you’re wondering about the curl on the end of the h – don’t. It’s inconsistent with Zodiacs own h’s but is consistent with construction on some of his other letters. Manalli is the same.

The question mark at the end of Fred’s letter looks quite similar to the question mark at the end of the Badlands letter, i.e. it looks like a "2". Jus’ sayin’.

Ironically that’s one thing that matches the least lol. It may be an anomaly. I have a suspicion that the question mark on the end of the citizen may be a corrected exclamation mark. I’m not 100% sure because I haven’t looked into it but it occurred to me as a possibility while I was looking at it.

I have placed some of Manalli’s questions beside it that are similar but I’ve also included a rather odd exclamation mark that is similar in construction albeit an overall different shape.

While I’m down there at the bottom of the citizen letter here’s a proper Manalli Z compared to the Z in Citizen as opposed to his curley z that looks like a 3. Note the same little tick at the start. That is the strongest similarity. I wouldn’t be sold totally on shape but I’m not unconvinced either – can’t expect a perfect match everytime I guess and this is the only example of that type of Z that we have from Manalli, or Freda or whatever you want to call him lol

Turns out that "th" thing wasn’t the only cursive slip in the bus bomb letter. There’s a + on the left hand side where he slips and joins the descender to the crossbar. Naturally Freddy does the same thing.

I found these two statements to be somewhat comparable. The Use of ‘circle’ and ‘spot’ in reference to light.

Seriously. I can’t even look at Manalli’s writing anymore without finding something.

This shows use of language similar to Zodiac. "Please help me" and also "You will notice "(from the letter concerning the pencel (sic) flashlight).

Those are incidental though. The important bit is that ‘s’ on the end of ‘this’ and ‘was’. I think that’s the only instance that Zodiac does that because when I spotted in Manalli’s writing I immediately knew I’d seen it before and that means I must have made a note of it in my head as unique and therefore something to keep an eye out for.

As I’m sure you all know that I think there is something about Manalli’s writing that I can’t quite put my finger on or at least haven’t found a reasonable way to explain yet.

I look at it on and off and will present more when I can. Even when I look now at it still I keep finding things and it still surprises me and I mean in a spine tingly way. I thought that would have worn off by now but it hasn’t. I couldn’t quite understand why his writing would have so many little things interspersed throughout it and even within those have variations that seem to either match Zodiac’s or appear to be a mirrored version of them.

Then we come to Zodiac’s writing itself. Was it disguised? Well there seem to be suggestions that it may have been but there’s no definitive answer to that. Then there was the suggestion that’s been around for a while now that he copied his writing from different sources. Again no answer or proof either way on that.

Considering these things together an idea occurred to me that might satisfy all of those criteria. It’s probably unlikely but it’s more of a complete idea at least.

He did copy the writing but not from different sources or different people, from himself. He created a chart of characters with variations of certain characters to choose from. Flip this one, mirror that one and have it as a rough reference board to pick n choose from as opposed to tracing them. Kinda like having symbols to choose from for a cipher. It would be a pretty neat way to create a different writing style but still be a style that you can write in because it is still your writing style, kinda. Plus you still have the freedom to vary even more between the reference stage and application so that it retains some fluidity.

It may be convoluted and impractical in practice but it’s how I might approach it, in theory anyway. Whether its right or wrong it gives an explanation, to me at least, of why characters here and there in Manalli’s writing appear in Zodiac’s writing as either damn close, spot on, mirrored or a variation.

EDIT: There is a suggestion of this in Zodiac’s writing itself where he uses variations or even a different style of this like the g or ampersand to name a few.

Good thinking TRAV…Fred’s writing still looks good too, lots of Zodiac’s habits etc visible. Personally, I cant see him tracing his own(or anybody else’s)writing,it would take hours upon hours. I think I could write one letter in my own writing, and one nmy disguised writing and make them different,no tracing at all. Here are two pages I just wrote in less than a minute…..

Yes,I know, both letters look like a serial killer’s handwriting , but one of them is in my natural everyday writing, and one is in my ‘hidden’ writing that I accomplished by holding the pen in a different way in my fingers. There may be some similarity, butI think anybody would agree, there certainly is not any direct match that screams out that I wrote both letters. I think the same is true of Manalli’s writing

The Saga Continues.

Here I have taken 4 Zodiac Letters. The Stine letter and the Belli letter as they had pieces of Paul stine’s Shirt, then two contentious ones, the Badlands card and one of the Bates letters and the car door. No real reason, just wanted a nice spread.

I took the Stine letter first and compiled a lower case alphabet from its character and tried to keep them typically zodiac ones as we know them. I then did the same for the other 3 letters.

So, four lowercase alphabets written by Zodiac. Four distinct styles that work as an alphabet in flow and form.

Now …

To Manalli.

I have approx 36 pages of written material in the form of letters covering the 60’s – mid 70’s.(Thanks to Seagull). I then opened a file and set about looking for a match to that first ‘a’ then ‘b’ and so on for that first alphabet. Going through every page sometimes 8-10 times over as I kept finding better matches for previous alphabets as I worked on the current one.

There is of course the car door and the Bates letter which were too short to provide an alphabet. So they were just matched as is.

I want to point out that the Zodiac alphabets have not been altered. They have been cut n pasted straight in and and only sized as a whole once complete. There has been no flipping, turning, skewing applied to the individual characters. Their size proportions to each other are the same as they were to each other in the letter.

The same has been done with the Manalli alphabets except that these characters have been picked from a larger source over many pages and spanning many years in some cases so minor individual sizing was necessary to ensure ease of comparison. There was hardly any needed though. Again it was minor re-sizing, not turning or compressing, nuttin.

The writing’s we have are 99% cursive. So every single character has been pulled from a sea of cursive with all of Zodiacs alphabets interspersed and mixed up in it.

Out of 36 pages, Manalli’s writing was able to provide (in my strong estimation) 3 alphabets to match the styles of of the Zodiac’s 3 alphabets and also have a high degree of visually matching characters within those alphabets.

The car door’s being a bit annoying so it’s just rough work at the minute but once I concentrate solely on it the others will get even better through finding better characters as will it.

This stuff now isn’t even finished and there’s lots more to come and to be pulled onto a larger picture. Look forward to your comments.

UPDATED LARGE PIC

Here’s the mirror-ish thing. Get you head’s around this one, not sure I’ve seen this before in anyone’s writing.

Update on previous stuff.

Morf mentioned his stuff coming to 30 page so far. You could also fill that with this stuff. There’s so many similarities at every level. I’m gonna try and get the energy to now to look at the little matching mistakes which I think are very very significant. This stuff has taken over 20 hours so far but the variations and style matches are phenomenal and deserve that much attention.

Like Patinky, I too am trying to keep an open mind and am quite prepared to be amazed that people can have all these similarities and not be the same handwriting.

I have made a small collage of some of Manalli’s letters and some random words to show you the style variations and what these similarities were taken from.

Some of the alphabets that have been presented already have also been improved.

Yeah I know.

This guy doesn’t seem to fit. Maybe that’s what makes it intriguing. All I can do is work through the handwriting. I couldn’t even being to try and explain the appearance aspects.

More stuff. Regarding the mirror effect – it’s not strictly mirroring but that’s what I ‘m calling it. Zodiac does it too.

Spotted this by accident. Look at the W’s here. The are the same but they aren’t. They are both drawn in the same direction but they are opposites of each other in shape. Small loop to big loop on one then big loop to small loop on the other. So weird. That’s another oddity shared. That ‘s’ one was BTW – That is the only place Zodiac uses it on that one page of the bus bomb letter. Manalli uses it aout 3 times in all his pages and I have the exact match for it – will post in another post though as it’s part of similar things.

That’s what I was working on when I spotted the w’s.

EDIT: Actually I’ve just realized it’s weirder than that. The w thing occurs on the two words that are unique in zodiacs writing because of that ‘th’ and
that ‘s’ – Manalli does both. :affraid:

Ok here’s a preview. (Work in progress)

I saw a better ‘th’ so those are just placements. The ‘s is the one I was looking for, the others are placements. Manlli’s t’s match a variation of Zodiac’s ampersand or +. The ‘O’ on Manalli’s one matches Zodiac’s weird ‘open’ ampersand but again in a reversed, mirror way. There is another of Manalli’s ‘t’s’ that match Zodiac usual ampersand exactly, still looking for it again though and then on to O’s and zeros, I think there may be a reversal of direction on both accounts for these.

Actually just found previous work on the ‘th’

There’s maybe more detail here that’s being lost in the posting. Here’s a blow up of a section of the last bates letter. The letter writer suddenly uses an upper case R with a little tick at the start.

Manalli’s example doesn’t but I’ve used it because the shape is closer. Does that bother me? No – look at the other examples of Manalli’s R’s below it – bingo. His writing has been like this all along. Dead end, then a door opens.

These are whole word lifts to compare characters, spacing and overall form. I had to stop.

I could re-create exactly with individual characters barre the extremely flourished letters.

Stunned, again.