Thanks, Nachtsider. I don’t think I knew this.

Trav, where do you want me to meet you with my shovel? :bounce:

Hehehe, Actually I wonder where he is buried. Must read back.

In the meantime, here’s how the car door is proceeding. It’s probably been the least forthcoming regarding matches but then it is a different set of conditions we’re looking at here. There are certain thing’s like the p in sept that I don’t think Zodiac himself used again or before. Still it’s not bad. 6:30 is pretty much bang on, even down to the angle of the colon and the the larger dot at the bottom.

The other variations I have left in as well and will no doubt add more but probably not too much. As it is I was limited by this one anyway as it was mostly numbers and there far less of those to work from. Having said that I can still see matches in angles and of course even distorted width’s with the like of the 6:30. Even the variation matches in the way the 6’s were made.

The ‘e’ on knife is unique to the car door, as are quite a few of the characters, but even at that I’m pretty sure I can affect a shape match to one of Manalli’s ‘e’s’. As it stands at the moment I have tried to stick to straight comparisons so nothing has been stretched or rotated and it’s like for like ie if it’s a 1 it’s matched with a 1, not an i or lower case l for example. I say this because I could compare Manalli’s z’s to the 2’s for a better visual match to show that he can, and has, created that shape on paper but to be honest I’d rather not. All the comp’s so far have been ‘pure’ as I call them, like for like and no distortion other than minor, proportional, re-sizing.

I have found way too many striking similarities in so many aspects of this guy’s writing, even down to habits that I have only touched on with regards the mirror thing, there are other shared habits. Simply put, I just keep finding thing’s that rule the handwriting in rather than out and I wish I knew either way but I’m not an expert but not a novice either. I’ve spent enough years crafting typefaces and trying to untangle french curves to know shape and form matches when I see them and this guy’s writing is riddled with them.

Geat work as usual TRAV…. The many, many similarities outscore any differences in my opinion.

Thanks Morf,

Yup, that’s how I feel about it, it’s ‘drownding’ in similarities right across the board.

EDIT: Some additions to this one.

Manalli’s punctuation compared to Zodiac’s. Manalli’s is on the right and below.

Here’s a nifty little habit I hadn’t spotted before. It’s shared by both Manalli and Zodiac but even on it’s own merit it’s something to be on the look out for with any POI’s writing.

Zodiac and Manalli both alternate between 2 styles of lowercase e. One has a follow through and one doesn’t and they both do it within words that have more than one and also words with just one so a word might end with a follow through e or a non follow through e.

Thought I’d have a go at some close up work and was in the middle of doing a comp for one of the lines of the Stine letter – lot’s of p’s and d’s and c’s and e’s to compare, a nice spread of character usage.

Now. Of course it was going well enough, you know Freddie, never a dull moment then I saw this. For a moment I though ok, wait, maybe I’ve just seen it somewhere else because I did, I saw it in the Stine letter but I hadn’t just seen it there, I’d seen it on the first page of Manalli’s writing as well.

Say hello to my little friend – the double dot.

EDIT: larger

Another great find TRAV,does Manalli do it more than once? Does Zodiac?

Yes.

Thanks, folks. I’m not trying to cheat by just reading the cliff notes but it was just a bit daunting to try and figure out how this guy came to everyone’s attention. Sounds interesting…

It does seem daunting with that many pages in the thread but I went back earlier myself and started skimming through from page 1. Even just skimming you get a feel for how much ‘stuff’ this thread generated from literary connections to films. You also get a feel for how the ‘stuff’ just seemed to keep presenting itself.

Looking again at the writing I still find myself wondering about it. When I look at the early comps I totally understand why Tahoe and Pat and maybe a few other couldn’t see what the hell fuss was. They aren’t very well explained and I’m not sure they could have been at the time. I used words like line up and similar too without really explaining in detail what that meant. Not sure I was able too.

I look back at it now and see things that I would say aren’t matches and probably thought weren’t matches at the time but that is in regard to the characters themselves but there was and is (I think) something else happening here. The so called similarities were more than likely, in those respects, concerning other factors such as spacing and the relation of space around the characters and words to other instances of space usage and angles of certain strokes.

When Morf first sent a writing sample from Seagull I thought – Nahhhhh. I still think that in regard how it looks compared to Zodiac’s writing – it doesn’t look like it. There was ‘something’ about it though. I think that something was all the little similarities that I’ve presented. Perhaps when taken as a whole, these little similarities amount to what you could term an over-all ‘feel’. It’s this ‘feel’ that I chased in regards Manalli’s writing. I wanted to find out what it was and why I couldn’t ignore it.

As it stand now, this culminated in the last series of comps taking examples of Zodiac’s letters (including the Bates stuff) and creating an alphabet from them. Then taking Manalli’s writings and producing what I considered to be the closest matches that I could find and compiling a comparative alphabet.

This may have been the answer I was looking for. What was it about this guy’s writing that I was finding interesting. It was, for me, that taking a broad spectrum of Zodiac’s writing including disputed ones such as the Bates stuff and then being able to reproduce pretty similar alphabets for them all from one source. I found this quite compelling but I still don’t know why lol. It probably answers what it was that I found interesting but beyond that I don’t really know what it says. This may be possible to do with another POI’s writing if there are enough exemplars to work from.

I’m not finished with his writing yet. There are still things to look at and I will probably review what I have presented here and look at it again with slightly fresher eyes. If just to satisfy myself.

A note about where all this handwriting came from. In 2010 I found that a Professor Daniel Curley of the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana had his papers archived at the university after his death. Looking through the materials in his archive I saw that there were boxes that contained correspondence with Fred Manalli. I contacted the university and purchased copies of everything that was available involving Manalli. It turned out to be 160+ pages of letters between Manalli and Curley. The bulk of the material was written by Manalli as Curley’s letters were somewhat shorter. The correspondence spanned from 1959 until Manalli’s death in 1976.

When I purchased the materials I had to sign a copyright agreement that said I would not reproduce the material in whole. It is alright, however, to post portions of the material. If necessary I can go back and ask for permission to post all the material.

Once I read the letters I contacted the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office and told them I had the letters. The sheriff’s office was not aware that the letters existed probably because Curley died a few years after Manalli and it was a while longer before Curley’s papers were archived. I asked the sheriff’s office if they would like copies, they said yes and I sent them copies of everything I had.

Since then, I eventually shared the letters with Morf and Trav who saw way more in the letters than I did.

Just to add this as I’ve just found it.

.

You can’t make this stuff up! Look at the odd breaks in the word, that’s incredible! The fact that both Manalli and z do it in the same spots in the same words is crazy and simply unexplained!

Trav, lets do another 50 pages on Manalli!

We can already see how Zodiac and Manalli share some of the same writing traits & habits including splitting up or spacing the same words in the same spot.

I went thru the various zodiac letters and pulled out many words that zodiac split up,or spaced and am putting the list below(sure I missed some). We can then go back and look thru all of Manalli’s writing to see how many of the same words he spaced or split up.

Nig ht (night) 10/13/69
Caug ht (caught) 10/13/69
Boun cing (bouncing)
La ug h (laugh) 11/8/69
Aw fully (awfully) 11/8/69 contains a half w
C h ange (change) 11/9/69
Com itt (commit) 11/9/69
Un noticible (noticeable) 11/9/69
Ef ect ive (effective) 11/9/69
Ef ect (effect) 11/9/69
Leav ing (leaving) 11/9/69
Cruz ing (cruising) 11/9/69
Walk ing (walking) 11/9/69
Act ing (acting) 11/9/69
Card board (cardboard) 11/9/69
Extre a mly (extremely) 11/9/69
M uch (much) 12/20/69
My self (myself) 12/20/69
Consider bly (considerably) 4/28/70
“others will hang by their thumbs” 7/26/70..Manalli wrote "hang by your thumbs"
Nuc ences 7/26/70
Un com prom ise ing (uncompromising) 7/26/70
Wachama call it (wachamacallit) 7/26/70
Whats his name (whatshisname) 7/26/70
Plung ed (plunged) 1/29/74
Tru ley (truly) 1/29/74
Some thing (something) 1/29/74
Zodiac wrote ‘saterical’ in his 1/29/74 letter. Manalli used the word ‘satirical’

One thing I notice,and it’s been mentioned before, Zodiac has a habit of splitting up or spacing words with multiple syllables… extreamely, bouncing,someone etc. But one other thing I noticed in the list above, he seemed to split up a lot of words that were one syllable words, after the letter G. NIG HT, CAUG HT, PLUNG ED, etc

Good idea.

There is also ‘with in’ from the bus bomb letter as in ‘never came with in 2 blocks of me’. Just mentioning that as I was looking at something Smithy sent me and that stuck in my mind as a distinctive split.

We will take a look and see what we can find

Any luck with this little project TRAV? Find any words that Manalli splits up or breaks up like Zodiac does?

Any luck with this little project TRAV? Find any words that Manalli splits up or breaks up like Zodiac does?

I went through once but I have to say, beyond the few examples we already found, nope. Will have to go through them all a few times to be sure but nothing notable yet.

I am going to take another look too