Hi-

Well, there is a smoking gun in the case against KQ but it is a smoking behavioral gun that a profiler can appreciate but not many amateurs can.

There was only one Zodiac killer. He exhibited some unique, signature behaviors. When you find the person who exhibited all of Z’s unique behaviors, you have found Z, right?

KQ is the only suspect I know of who can be proven to have done an unusual thing in order to receive public attention on the front pages of two Bay Area newspapers over twenty years before there was a Zodiac killer.

He can be shown to have written a strange letter to the editor of the Chronicle shortly before Z wrote his first letters in 1969.

He wrote to me on Monarch sized paper. Is there even one other suspect who wrote on that type of paper? Not that I am aware of.

He autographed cars in black felt tip pen. Other than the ridiculous argument of people who wrote "Just Married" on cars, I don’t know of another suspect who AUTOGRAPHED cars in felt tip.

The dates of two of the Z murders correspond to the birth and death of his father and mother, respectively.

KQ is the only suspect I know of who could have known what "sla" means, and he said to me in 2006 that it means "kill."

He "just happened" to be on the streets of PH shortly after the Stine murder. AP has changed his story so much that his "alibi" for KQ based on how fast AP walked around the block is a thing of the past.

ALA was a great suspect and lived close to the Vallejo crime scenes. But even he wasn’t accosted by the police after any of the murders. But KQ was.

When I interviewed KQ in 2006 at HIS request to "clear the air" about his involvement in the case, he couldn’t bring himself to tell me the truth and lied to me as to his whereabouts on the night of the Stine murder, as well as about his prior experience with sidearms. Had someone had to handicap what KQ was going to say to me before he and I had that meeting, people wold have said that he is completely innocent and has nothing to hide, so he will tell the truth. Wrong. So now people say that although he lied, he is still innocent. LOL. You can’t win.

Mike

Mike, I was wondering, do you have all your thoughts and information compiled anywhere in one location where it can be read in toto? I believe you once had a web site but I can’t seem to find it now. Anyway interesting stuff. Thanks

When you find the person who exhibited all of Z’s unique behaviors, you have found Z, right?

no offense, but when you’ve found the person who committed five murders you’ve found z. everything else is conjecture.

Norse, since you are the resident expert here on the language, maybe you can clarify.

Generally it seems that certain languages- could be the entire Romance family of languages- have certain pronunciations that seem to stick with a speaker even 50 years down the road. I know that friends of mine who are native Spanish speakers take forever to lose their accents. Something always remains in what someone mentioned as a "sing-song’ sort of cadence in the manner of speaking, but there is also the double rr in Spanish, the "s" sound in German, "r" in Asiatic speakers, etc., that will probably remain with the speaker forever in some form.
I really, honest to god, don’t hear any accent on the video, but I do hear a sort of "sing-song" cadence like I mentioned. There is a rhythmic quality that strikes me as non-American. But its very, very subtle. But I am wondering if there are any sounds that would be found in the Norwegian language that could be comparable to those formerly mentioned pronunciations, something that would betray the speaker in terms of forensic linguistics as a Norwegian native even 70 years down the road? Some languages don’t have that, I reckon, those particular, tough-to-erase-from-your-mindbank sounds. Whereas those Spanish "rr" and those German "zee" for "see" bits are hard to overcome. I am from the South and no matter how many decades I don’t live there, I am sure someone would hear it just by the way I pronounce "in-surance" with a different emphasis. Are there any good "tells" as far as you know in general in Norwegian, or is it sort of more even in that way? I hope I am making sense.

Hey, MM!

I wouldn’t call myself an expert by any stretch – but I do have some knowledge about linguistics/phonology and a particular knowledge of Nordic languages. I think I know what you’re getting at, yes – and the answer is…probably, yes. There would be certain tell-tale remnants in the speech of someone who learned English as a second language. But this depends very much on WHEN the language was learned. KQ was young when his family emigrated – young enough for him to lose most traces of an accent as the years went by. That would be my conclusion anyway.

Secondly, those tell-tale traces would not be as obvious as some of the ones you mention. Norwegian and English are closely related languages. Many English words come from Old Norse. There are very few sounds in the English language which pose a problem for a Norwegian speaker – nothing like the examples you mention from Spanish or German. One possible sound would be the voiced "z", in words like…er…"zodiac" or "zero". A Norwegian might be prone to pronounce such words as "sodiac" and "sero", that is with an unvoiced sound. But this is pretty hard to detect when someone is speaking otherwise fluently and fairly rapidly – and it’s something which would wear off with time.

The main giveaway would indeed be the intonation, the sing-song quality, as you mention. But this is something which will definitely wear off – and probably be lost altogether after a few years when the subject is a young person who isn’t only more apt at learning the language but also more keen to fit in and to emulate the speech of his new compatriots.

since you guys mentioned it..what about old germanic or norse runes being key to the code (is that what you guys are thinking? and I dont see much of a comparison with those symbols to Z)..wonder if X had any contact with hitler’s bunch during the war..if X was the Z he might have supported those crazies as many in norway did (sadly they are still having issues with stasi after all these years)..just drivel and uselessness i know….

since you guys mentioned it..what about old germanic or norse runes being key to the code (is that what you guys are thinking? and I dont see much of a comparison with those symbols to Z)..wonder if X had any contact with hitler’s bunch during the war..if X was the Z he might have supported those crazies as many in norway did (sadly they are still having issues with stasi after all these years)..just drivel and uselessness i know….

I personally don’t think Z’s unsolved ciphers are all that complicated – and I kind of doubt that he used Old Norse for the plain text (though I entertained that theory at one point) or had any intimate knowledge of runes. Just my opinion.

As for KQ, he wasn’t in Norway during WW2 – his family emigrated in the 20s, I think. KQ served in the US military (not sure which branch).

Norse, since you are the resident expert here on the language, maybe you can clarify.

Generally it seems that certain languages- could be the entire Romance family of languages- have certain pronunciations that seem to stick with a speaker even 50 years down the road. I know that friends of mine who are native Spanish speakers take forever to lose their accents. Something always remains in what someone mentioned as a "sing-song’ sort of cadence in the manner of speaking, but there is also the double rr in Spanish, the "s" sound in German, "r" in Asiatic speakers, etc., that will probably remain with the speaker forever in some form.
I really, honest to god, don’t hear any accent on the video, but I do hear a sort of "sing-song" cadence like I mentioned. There is a rhythmic quality that strikes me as non-American. But its very, very subtle. But I am wondering if there are any sounds that would be found in the Norwegian language that could be comparable to those formerly mentioned pronunciations, something that would betray the speaker in terms of forensic linguistics as a Norwegian native even 70 years down the road? Some languages don’t have that, I reckon, those particular, tough-to-erase-from-your-mindbank sounds. Whereas those Spanish "rr" and those German "zee" for "see" bits are hard to overcome. I am from the South and no matter how many decades I don’t live there, I am sure someone would hear it just by the way I pronounce "in-surance" with a different emphasis. Are there any good "tells" as far as you know in general in Norwegian, or is it sort of more even in that way? I hope I am making sense.

Hey, MM!

I wouldn’t call myself an expert by any stretch – but I do have some knowledge about linguistics/phonology and a particular knowledge of Nordic languages. I think I know what you’re getting at, yes – and the answer is…probably, yes. There would be certain tell-tale remnants in the speech of someone who learned English as a second language. But this depends very much on WHEN the language was learned. KQ was young when his family emigrated – young enough for him to lose most traces of an accent as the years went by. That would be my conclusion anyway.

Secondly, those tell-tale traces would not be as obvious as some of the ones you mention. Norwegian and English are closely related languages. Many English words come from Old Norse. There are very few sounds in the English language which pose a problem for a Norwegian speaker – nothing like the examples you mention from Spanish or German. One possible sound would be the voiced "z", in words like…er…"zodiac" or "zero". A Norwegian might be prone to pronounce such words as "sodiac" and "sero", that is with an unvoiced sound. But this is pretty hard to detect when someone is speaking otherwise fluently and fairly rapidly – and it’s something which would wear off with time.

The main giveaway would indeed be the intonation, the sing-song quality, as you mention. But this is something which will definitely wear off – and probably be lost altogether after a few years when the subject is a young person who isn’t only more apt at learning the language but also more keen to fit in and to emulate the speech of his new compatriots.

AH Thanks for clarifying that Norse.
And lets not forget that he was pretty much past middle age when these crimes occurred- and 91 I believe when he died. And if there are no built-in tells to the language its probably superfluous in terms of tracking that to what Bryan Hartnell heard or Nancy Stover, who, sadly, as we know, is no longer here.

the case distorts how one looks at the evidence- its prismatic.

i completely agree. it’s like having 100 puzzle pieces for a 50 piece puzzle – you start trying to fit things into a narrative but unfortunately it’s all too easy to pick and choose which pieces fit which narrative. i think it would be a productive exercise from a personal standpoint to start by going through all of the evidence and saying outright ‘these are the things i think are connected to the zodiac killings, and these are the things i think are hoaxes/not connected/errors/etc’ then going forward sticking to that framework. we’re all guilty of it – i don’t generally think the riverside poem is z-related, but give me a theory with that at the center and suddenly it’s "well….maybe it is" – and it clouds a systematic approach to eliminating suspects and scenarios. on this web site alone there are what, fifty, maybe sixty suspects? that means it’s likely that 59 innocent people are being looked at as potential zodiac killers. i’m not dogging the efforts of those involved (myself included) just saying the reality is most of what we’re doing is reacting to an ever-changing quantity of information which, as you said, distorts how one looks at the evidence.

Thanks. I like that analogy of the puzzle pieces- it is SO true.

I have been reading a book lately called "The Black Swan- the Impact of the Highly Improbable" and I think I am gonna take something away with me about Z from that book. I think if anyone has signed up to these forums we can all safely state that we have had moments of real obsession, sometimes near-torturous handwringing wondering WHO- I know I have. And the fact is that Z is something of a real one-off. As I have said probably before, people like Dahmer and Gacy and Ted Bundy are as common as dirt, compared to Z. He really is unique- a black swan. It makes it harder to pin him down, but I do think that Mike has probably gotten closer than anyone in terms of sketching him out. I still think those codes are crackable. And I think that regardless of what they actually SAY, I think-completely conjecture, of course-that the chances of it being in another language are probably quite high. There is uniformity in 16 0r 17 of the lines (I am referring to the 340 cipher). It LOOKS like something is going on there. Its not THAT random. So if it has n’t been solved in nigh 50 years there is a reason- and maybe that reason is that it is in another language.
But again, conjecture.

Hi-

KQ’s mother died on December 20, 1939. His father was born on September 27, 1887. On July 5, 1947, KQ claimed he not only saw flying saucers over Auburn, CA but that he knew that they were space crafts. Nobody else at the time (only two weeks after the term "flying saucer" was created) was venturing such a guess, civilians or scientists. His story appeared on the frunt page of the SF Examiner on July 8th). Attention seeking on a grand scale. On October 11, 1958, KQ ran his first race car at the Riverside International Speedway.

Anyone see a pattern here?

Before you start pointing out that Z always claimed that the BRS crime took place on the 4th of July as a way of discrediting this pattern of dates, remember that there is a precedent for Z relating his crimes to the nearest holiday. The "Christmass" murders took place five days before Christmas…just as the July 4th crime took place just after midnight on July 5th.

Mike

Interesting dates, for sure. I’m not certain that we can speak of a pattern, however. If the key is "close to a holiday", then a few minutes past midnight on July 5 is completely different from five days before Christmas(s). The first is obviously as close as you can get, the second isn’t really striking at all. And there doesn’t seem to be anything similar going on with either LB or PH – which is a problem if we’re looking for a definite pattern.

If KQ was Z then he did strike on certain dates that would have been significant to him for personal reasons (dates of birth and death). The question is how does this fit the profile? If we presuppose – as you do, Mike – that Z/KQ was a power assertive personality, how does this jibe with the dates in question? Seems to me that a killer who opts to strike on the birthday and the date of death of his parents has…something going on which goes well beyond being power assertive.

I’m not saying A and B are mutually exclusive – just that some of these dates obviously mean a great deal if we assume that KQ was Z.

Hi-

Zodiac said he was leaving clues to his identity. Those clues do not have to be overt,
like saying "My name is." Clues to your identity can take many shapes. The Zodiac murder dates look
to be completely random until you look at them through
the filter of KQ’s life. Now they seem to say. ‘This is when my mother died.
This is when my father was born. This is when i first sought
attention from the public on a grand scale like I would as Z over twenty years later," etc.
You can quibble about July 4th vs. July 5th, but to do that is to ignore the other dates that match exactly. The overall pattern can’t be denied–as Richard Walter and Vince Repetto apparently realize.

The power comes from essentially telling everyone who you are not only in your letters but by the dates of the murders and plenty of other things…and having nobody figure out who you are (for thirty years, anyway). The dates could not be used to identify Z. They only begin to make sense once you have ID’ed him by another means.

Mike

It’s interesting that Kjell’s father passed away in November 1970 — the beginning (or near the beginning) of the 5-month gap between the Halloween card and the Times letter. I wonder if anything of significance occurred during the 4-month gap between the Belli letter and the "name" cipher…?

Hi-

KQ’s mother died on December 20, 1939. His father was born on September 27, 1887. On July 5, 1947, KQ claimed he not only saw flying saucers over Auburn, CA but that he knew that they were space crafts. Nobody else at the time (only two weeks after the term "flying saucer" was created) was venturing such a guess, civilians or scientists. His story appeared on the frunt page of the SF Examiner on July 8th). Attention seeking on a grand scale. On October 11, 1958, KQ ran his first race car at the Riverside International Speedway.

Anyone see a pattern here?

You are wandering into "pure coincidence" territory here. As in, you have to definitively exclude the possibility that significant dates match due to random chance. What are the odds that KQ’s personally significant dates would match 4 of Zodiac’s personally significant dates? How low do those odds have to be to prove they aren’t coincidence?

We can try the 5% rule. If the chances are less than 5%, then maybe the matching of dates was by design.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment. How many dates do you think are personally significant to the Zodiac killer? Let’s say there are 10 such dates. They would include crime dates and perhaps other notable events known only to the killer.

There are a number of dates that are personally significant to KQ. Birth dates, death dates, notable life events, and so on. How many of those dates are needed for there to be more than a 5% chance that they match at least 4 of the 10 Zodiac dates purely by chance?

(Warning: Math)

If p is at least 5% then we are not confident the dates match up by design.
Thus we want (N choose 4)*((10/365)^4) >= 0.05

That works out to about 40 dates.

Conclusion: You only need to find 40 dates significant to KQ for there to be a 5% chance that they match 4 of Zodiac’s dates purely by accident. You could pick from KQ’s kids’ birthdays, his parent’s birthdays, birth and death dates of his relatives, accomplishments in his life, etc. etc. It does not take long to find enough dates.

For comparison, let’s say there are 20 significant Zodiac dates instead of 10. In this case, you’d only need to find about 20 dates significant to KQ before you can’t escape the shadow of a doubt.

Now let’s look at the other part of your claim, where 2 Zodiac dates fall within 5 days of a major holiday.

(Warning: Math)

A random date has a (11/365) chance of falling within 5 days of Christmas, and a (11/365) chance of falling within 5 days of Independence Day. So the random date has a 2*11/365 = 6% chance of falling within one of two major holidays.
If you pick two random dates, the chance that they BOTH fall within 5 days of 2 holidays is: 6% * 6% = 0.36%.
If we have 4 Zodiac crime dates to pick from, there are 6 different ways to pick two of them. So the chance that 2 of the 4 crime dates fall within 2 holidays is: 6 * 0.36% = 2.16%.
But we haven’t considered other major holidays. What if we included Halloween and Thanksgiving?
After doing the math, the chance that two of four Zodiac crime dates both fall within one of four possible holidays is: 6*((44/365)^2) = 8.7%

8.77% is high enough for this to be purely coincidental. It gets worse if you include more crime dates.

So again, we have not escaped the shadow of a doubt.

Also, someone please check my math for mistakes!

Hi-

But let’s look at it this way: There were only four Zodiac murder dates. KQ only had two parents and one date matches each. (There were only three "parent dates" in 1968-9, since KQ’s father was still alive.) We won’t even get into the possible Freudian significance of killing on dates related to your parents. He behaved like Z for the first time only once in 1947. He ran his first car at Riverside, which just happened to tie into the Z case, only once. There is an interesting date related to his birthday but I won’t get into that right now. And there are other dates, like June 26th and November 20th, that relate to a letter and an interesting article related to the Z case.

And let me say this about July 4-5. Let’s say that you found a suspect who was born on the 4th of July and married on December 25th. If you dared to say that he matches Z dates because Z said something about Christmas and the 4th of July, people here would shout you down as being full of BS because Z actually killed on December 20th and July 5th. So you can’t win. I stand by the fact that whatever he said about July 4th, Z waited until July 5th to pull the trigger and that date matches KQ’s UFO sighting. December 20th is an exact match.

And this is not my only evidence. KQ is also the only suspect I’ve ever heard of who ever touched a piece of Monarch sized paper. He also lived two blocks from one of the crime scenes (ALA didn’t live that close to any of the Vallejo crime scenes; the IHOP was not a crime scene). He was the only person ever to be named as a suspect who was spoken to by the police near a Zodiac crime scene after one of the murders.

That is still only a fraction of my evidence. There is even more date related evidence.

Mike

Part of the problem here is that we cannot possibly know in what way these dates would have been significant to a possible killer. They’re very different on the face of it. Birthday of a parent is completely different from the date of a bizarre event in the life of KQ.

To put it flippantly: Was the BRS attack a "commemoration" of the UFO business? That seems incredible to me. To kill on the birthday of a parent makes sense – that is, it makes sense that this combination (birthday of parent + murder) would carry some meaning to a crazy killer. The other combination does not make sense in the same way. Was the UFO business the birth of Z in some sense, the emergence of KQ as a pathological attention seeker? Was it this "genesis" he paid some sort of homage to many years later when he attacked DF and MM? It seems like a stretch to me – and it would need further explanation to be readily acceptable.

Just my take on it.