Hello, Longtime lurker, first time poster.
Building upon AK Wilks, Mark Hewitt and others. The ‘t’ of Sept, above the ‘k’ in knife sent me down a path looking for what other information did Theodore John Kaczynski (TJK) leave on the door? Granted I am looking at the evidence with a TJK bias, and I could be seeing only what I want to see, but I believe the clues are there.
If TJK is Zodiac, I think he did almost everything by design with careful planning. The common spelling errors, alignments of words etc. These are not mistakes, but finely crafted clues. I believe the Lake Berryessa car door may provide some easily found answers.
TJK’s DOB is 5-22-1942
Let’s start with the most obvious, his year of birth = 42.
Why did Zodiac write ‘Sept’ as a word instead of numbers as he had in the 2 lines above? So he could align the ‘t’ of Sept, above the ‘k’ in knife. ‘Sept’ also allows him to align the day of 27 with the year of 69, on both the top and right side. Logically you would not mix these two disparate values, years and days, unless you wanted to highlight something. TJK liked ‘corners’ in his messages, here we have one with the 69 and 27. Subtract 69-27, you get 42 in two directions, Ted’s year of birth.
If you subtract the 12-7 in the lines above ‘Sept’ you get 12-7=5, if you add 12+7=19. Now we have 5 = May, and 19, the century of his birth.
‘Vallejo’? Why write this one location, and leave out Benicia and Lake Berryessa? V is the 22nd letter in the alphabet, that gives you the day of his birth.
TJK was a Gemini, and seemed to like double letters, double murders, double meanings and ‘mirrored pairs’ as I like to call them. For example, ‘by’ is the first word in the confession letter, and ‘by’ shows up repeatedly across many communications. ‘b’ and ‘y’ are both the 2nd letter from their end of the alphabet (‘mirrored pairs’), from this you can get 22. My birthdate is the 11th. 11th has always been my favorite number, and holds special meaning too me. Maybe 22 means something special to Ted also?
Putting this all together, and with a little imagination, we have Ted’s birthday of 5-22-1942 mixed in with the dates and words written on the door.
Why 6:30? It is debatable if this was even the correct time of the crime? If we read backwards horizontally, we get 0,3,6,9 (9 from the ‘Sept’ year of 69). Where do we see 0,3,6,9 again regarding Zodiac?
The Mt. Diablo map. Follow the numbers around the compass and we see 9 points west, directly at Berkeley, CA where Ted had lived and taught at UC Berkeley.
Thanks
I suppose that since Zodiac did send coded messages to newspapers the idea that he hid other coded messages in his writings has a strong inherent likelihood.
But on the most basic level this message contains every numeral except the number five. I don’t even have to begin analyzing those numbers to realize that this means I can already make any combination of numbers imaginable in a very small number of steps.
The fact that Ted K is supposed to have liked corners, and mirrors does very little to make this arrangement of numbers any less arbitrary.
It’s likely there are other clues and messages hidden in the Zodiacs writing and I don’t have a problem with using more amateurish techniques to solve them, but this is waaay too arbitrary.
I find it interesting that the use of the word "Sept" enables the numbers to add up to 33, which matches Gaikowski’s age in 1969. "MasterofthePanFlute" also sounds a bit like Doug Oswell — I remember a comment by him about flute playing on Tom’s archived forum.
Sorry I did not respond to this earlier, but I just didn’t see it. I think it lays out a fairly compelling argument about a possible cryptic clue.
Drew I would say in order to show this is just a random coincidence, you would need to use the same methods as MOTPF and come up with two numbers on the car door, next to each other, one subtracted (or added to) the other, that produce the year, month and day of the birthdate of RG, Allen, Kane or another suspect.
I have also been interested in the car door, because it is another clue to Z’s interest in numbers, math and geometry – geography.
This was mentioned by the original poster. On the map, Z does not use N, E,S, W, but instead 0, 3, 6 and 9. And the west line points directly to the then home of TJK, the University of California at Berkeley.
And just as there is a 0, 3, 6,9 on the map, it is also present on the car door.
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Just my 2 cents but as a French native, it always struck me that he wrote "Sept" and not "Sept." as would look like the short version of "September". Why? Because "sept" means "seven" in French.
69 – 6:30 – ‘Time’ on car door could have a double meaning, a time and a date.
On 6~30~69 TJK resigned from Berkeley per the LA Times.
