Exactly! But in 1974 Zodiac was claiming 37 victims. The alleged Monster of Florence, on the other hand, seems to indicate 72 already before the 1974 murder in this letter, so there is an obvious discrepancy.

Then we have the word “may”. Interestingly, the same envelope contains the term “may” again, but this time translated into Italian.

Can you spot it?

That would be the address line “via maggio 35.” 🤔

Ok! Now you have a clue on the envelope, very much in Zodiac style, with the word “may / maggio” and two numbers that need to interact with each other: 72 and 35.

At this point, you practically have all the elements needed to reach the solution. 😀 

Well, of course:

72 - 35 = 37

Bingo! Pretty crazy, right?

Well, interesting, certainly, and worthy of note. From a personal point of view, however, I don’t feel inclined to give the observation any particular significance as of yet, on just this account.

Firstly, we have to consider whether there is any freedom afforded to the compositor as to the values involved. Certainly, on the assumption that it was always the intention that the letter was going to be addressed to Vagheggi, and given that his work address was at Via Maggio 35, then this particular datum is fixed. As to the 72, this clearly functions as a year in the table and is correctly ordered there. Since it doesn’t relate to any canonical killing, there is thus some apparent freedom in this case in being able to choose a year that gives the correct sum and place it accordingly. But, for that to be possible, we have to exclude the year 72 from having any fixed relevance of its own, and I don’t see that we have done that yet.

One consideration that stands out to me, but which cannot be in any sense immediately supported, is the idea that the sender of this letter was just as likely someone other than the offender himself, someone rather in the vein of Gareth Penn in relation to the Zodiac case; someone attempting to convey some forced theory, or theories, of their own regarding the murders. The overall focus of the communication derives jointly from astrological and palmistry origins and suggests the production of someone with strong interests in these areas. The astrological element, in particular, brings with it the notion of horoscopes and we might suggest that the inclusion of “ME 72 may” is nothing more than the introduction of his or her own birth horoscope into the overall history, but for what reason I wouldn’t be able to guess.

Yes, I agree: taken on its own, this could certainly just be a coincidence, and I wouldn’t give it too much weight at this stage. Still, I find the connection between “ME 72”, “may/Maggio”, and the 35 in the address rather curious, especially since 72 − 35 gives us 37.

For now, I’d simply keep it as an interesting observation without pushing it any further. Let’s see what else is hiding in this damn letter!

Another small suggestion, this time not my own. In the letter to Paolo Vagheggi there is a drawing of the lines of a palm, used almost like a map: the intersections of the lines mark the locations of the double murders. The sheet is even labelled “dx hand”. In Italian, “dx” is a common abbreviation for “destra” (“right”), so the note explicitly identifies it as the right hand.

This rather curiously recalls something Zodiac had already done. In the 1970 Halloween Card, Zodiac wrote the number 14 directly on the right hand of the skeleton, together with the well-known “4-TEEN”, generally interpreted as a reference to his claimed victim count.

So in both cases we have a right hand being used as a graphic element associated with murders and a numerical count.

Of course, this is not evidence of a connection, but as a graphic and conceptual parallel it is certainly suggestive.

Coming to the matrix of signs reproduced as in the original artefact, there are in fact a number of very prominent features of what we are presented with here that are quite telling in some way.

Firstly, for the chosen five celestial bodies, the data produces sign associations that involve only 9 of the 12 zodiacal signs. It is apparent to casual inspection that nowhere in this matrix do we find the correct symbol for any of Capricorn, Aquarius or Pisces. This could, of course, be merely an incidental observation, but the fact that these very three signs join together into one whole quarter section of the zodiac, with no omissions occurring elsewhere, suggests we might look a little deeper.

The fact that the Sun never falls into one of these signs is not remarkable, and derives from the fact that the Sun’s position in the zodiac is fully governed by seasonal factors and no killings took place in the relevant quarter of any given year. That Mercury and Venus might equally manage to evade this quadrant region is likewise explicable, since on account of their being inferior planets they never visually wander too far from the Sun and thus their locations depend upon where the Sun is.

The Moon and Mars have to be considered differently, however, since the first moves wholly circumterrestrially, whilst Mars, as a superior planet, can likewise take up any position relative to the Sun in the sky. With a sidereal period of 687 days, there was every possibility over the full extent of the crime period for it to appear in any sign.

Secondly, if we consider more closely the three absent signs, we notice that astrologically Saturn has rulership over Capricorn and Aquarius, whilst Jupiter likewise has rulership over Pisces. And, for whatever reason, the table similarly leaves both Jupiter and Saturn wholly out of account, together with their three associated signs.

In fact, this clear separation of what’s in and what’s not would be watertight if it weren’t for just one anomaly: there is just the one appearance of the sign Sagittarius which, like Pisces, is ruled over by Jupiter. Every other aspect fits what would appear to be a very tight constructional model, and it would seem likely that whatever astrological point is being made here it relates specifically to a perceived predominance of influence of the classical celestial bodies up to Mars only, and to the near perfect exclusion of that of the two largest planets and their familial signs.

Posted by: @shaqmeister

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Every other aspect fits what would appear to be a very tight constructional model, and it would seem likely that whatever astrological point is being made here it relates specifically to a perceived predominance of influence of the classical celestial bodies up to Mars only, and to the near perfect exclusion of that of the two largest planets and their familial signs.

And just to be clear as to what is being noted here, the observation is not one that can be written off as that Jupiter and Saturn and their ruling houses were simply being ignored or overlooked. Rather, we have here the seed of some astrological accounting of the killings that it was evidently the intension of the compiler to highlight and convey.

Again, this to me bears all the hallmarks of a production by someone wanting to present some personal theory about the crimes as a series, rather than any communication of the killer himself.

Do we know if any photographic representation of the Della Monica envelope had been in circulation at the time that this letter was composed? You have noted some close similarities in the precise cutout sizing between the two envelopes. To me, this seems like something that would not present any importance to the killer mailing a second letter, but to someone wanting to copy the broad composition of the original envelope, this is precisely the kind of otherwise irrelevant detail that we might find duplicated.

According to other researchers who have worked on the case, the photograph of the envelope sent to Silvia Della Monica does not appear to have been published in newspapers before the Vagheggi letter of 1988. I personally have not carried out a systematic review of the press from that period, so I cannot guarantee this with absolute certainty, but so far I have not found any contemporary photographic reproduction of the envelope: the press described its existence and the address made from newspaper cuttings, but does not seem to have shown the actual image.

As for the Vagheggi envelope, V. Vecchione has carried out, and is still carrying out, very interesting work on the newspaper cuttings themselves, trying to identify them one by one and trace them back to their original sources.

In this case the analysis has been more difficult because Vecchione does not have access to the reverse side of the cuttings. The person who made the Vagheggi envelope appears to have used a different type of glue from that used on the Della Monica envelope, making it much harder to remove the fragments without damaging them and therefore to inspect their backs.

She has nevertheless managed to trace at least part of the material back to Il Venerdì di Repubblica, initially through recognisable typographic elements associated with the publication, and later by identifying some of the individual cuttings.

Some of these are particularly suggestive. For example, the “Z” in FIRENZE appears to have been taken from a Harley-Davidson advertisement for the “California” model. Another even more curious case concerns the group of letters “GHE”: because they were cut out as a single fragment, it was possible to trace them back to the original word, “rughe” (“wrinkles”), from the title of an article dealing precisely with wrinkles in relation to the signs of the zodiac.

Posted by: @lendor-77

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According to other researchers who have worked on the case, the photograph of the envelope sent to Silvia Della Monica does not appear to have been published in newspapers before the Vagheggi letter of 1988. I personally have not carried out a systematic review of the press from that period, so I cannot guarantee this with absolute certainty, but so far I have not found any contemporary photographic reproduction of the envelope: the press described its existence and the address made from newspaper cuttings, but does not seem to have shown the actual image.

This is also my own conclusion after some extensive searching. Had any such image been available, I believe it would have been used for the 1987 show “Telefono Giallo” di Corrado Augeas on Il Mostro. Instead, for their reconstruction we get only a poor recreation of the envelope based on the very minimal descriptions available in the press.