I appreciate why you are concerned. But, Tom V. says that Klingel’s PO Box was confirmed on his site, as recently as 2020.

It would take LE about three phone calls the locate the particular Eureka PO Box, because of the postmark on the envelope.

I appreciate why you are concerned. But, Tom V. says that Klingel’s PO Box was confirmed on his site, as recently as 2020.

It would take LE about three phone calls the locate the particular Eureka PO Box, because of the postmark on the envelope.

Which key connected Chester? What number did he use? Are both keys Chesters? And finally, what’s the story behind how two random keys ended up belonging to Chester.

“Tom says” has no value here. Seriously, both facts HAVE TO BE TRUE.
1.The keys are Chester’s and
2. they work in Eureka.
And you’re assuming both right from the start without knowing any history.

If that’s the case, “ I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona…” -GS

I appreciate why you are concerned. But, Tom V. says that Klingel’s PO Box was confirmed on his site, as recently as 2020.

It would take LE about three phone calls the locate the particular Eureka PO Box, because of the postmark on the envelope.

Which key connected Chester? What number did he use? Are both keys Chesters? And finally, what’s the story behind how two random keys ended up belonging to Chester.

“Tom says” has no value here. Seriously, both facts HAVE TO BE TRUE.
1.The keys are Chester’s and
2. they work in Eureka.
And you’re assuming both right from the start without knowing any history.

If that’s the case, “ I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona…” -GS

I am not vouching for Tom’s integrity, etc, but why would he lie about the Chester Klingel stuff? What purpose would it serve? He has a standing suspect in Gaikowski

I appreciate why you are concerned. But, Tom V. says that Klingel’s PO Box was confirmed on his site, as recently as 2020.

It would take LE about three phone calls the locate the particular Eureka PO Box, because of the postmark on the envelope.

Which key connected Chester? What number did he use? Are both keys Chesters? And finally, what’s the story behind how two random keys ended up belonging to Chester.

“Tom says” has no value here. Seriously, both facts HAVE TO BE TRUE.
1.The keys are Chester’s and
2. they work in Eureka.
And you’re assuming both right from the start without knowing any history.

If that’s the case, “ I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona…” -GS

I am not vouching for Tom’s integrity, etc, but why would he lie about the Chester Klingel stuff? What purpose would it serve? He has a standing suspect in Gaikowski

So I wouldn’t say he’s lying. I’d say he hasn’t told the full truth. My guess is by telling the true story about how he connected Chester to the keys he exposes himself to serious criticism. And he doesn’t want to deal with that. Bad for business, bad for image, who knows. But here are the facts:
1. The ONLY way to connect the Eureka card to Chester is via the keys and he made that connection.
2. If he felt confident about his research then there shouldn’t be an issue explaining how he made the connection.
At the very least, he could have answered the questions I have been asking for all along. Ie; which key/keys connected to Chester?, How? Which numbered key/keys worked in Eureka? What number did he decide to use for the keys?

These are basic questions. So We’re all left wondering why not answer them? And I’m left thinking it’s the above answer… Bad research exposing him to serious criticism. Now this story thread (Sam) has gone on too long (and actually it’s gone as far as Tom involving LE) he’s now pot committed not to expose his research flaws. I’ve done a lot of Post office key research and it’s not easy. For starters, in order to confirm either of those keys worked in an Eureka Post Office someone in that Post Office had to confirm it. Usually it’s the Post Master because the others don’t want to have any liability. So, who confirmed the keys worked? A Post Master? Someone else? Did Tom or LE ask? Or did someone only ask if Chester had a POBox there and didn’t confirm the key numbers? This situation is ripe with bad research possibilities.

Some may take this as I’m trying to personally attack Tom. Or that I’m trying to start something. I’m not and have zero interest in that. As I’ve stated earlier, I believe that I have found the location for one of the keys. And for a couple years now I have been trying to disprove a certain suspect as being the zodiac. He lived in that small town of 1300 people where I know a key number worked.
So if Tom knows something about those keys that definitely connects them with Chester… I’d like to know so I can stop wasting my time.

You know how Zodiac always somehow claims cases that never get solved? This is sort of the letter equivalent of that. Klingel, once found, could have said that he knew exactly who sent the letter and exactly why. Instead, it turns out to be a mystery. That’s one reason it feels so like Zodiac. The fact that there doesn’t appear to be any known explanation for the card is one of the small reasons to regard it as authentic.

save me from reading 200 posts.. did chester still have the keys? or were they missing?

save me from reading 200 posts.. did chester still have the keys? or were they missing?

According to the obituary "Chet’s first wife Yolanda passed away in a car accident. His second marriage was short but his third to Blandina Sarkis added love, happiness, family and great food to his life. He had many good years in Tam Valley, CA, before beginning a farming venture near Turlock, CA. Chet and Blandina bought nut orchards and developed a successful walnut hulling and drying business. After Blandina passed away, the farming project lost appeal. Chet sold the farm and moved to Eureka, CA, where he made new friends".

Blandina passed away on September 9th 1993, so according to the obituary Chet moved to Eureka subsequent to September 9th 1993. Now, it has pointed out that the obituary may be wrong. But if Chester Clark Klingel was living in Eureka in December 1990, why would he choose to bury his wife in Turlock, Ca, which is a 740 mile round trip for Chet to place flowers on his wife’s grave. That alone could suggest he wasn’t living in Eureka in 1990. However, this doesn’t preclude Chester Clark Klingel from owning a PO box in Eureka while living in Turlock. Also, the whole premise of the card was teasing us with a name, which ultimately led to the identification of Chester Clark Kingel. The only meaningful clue in the card was the photocopied keys traced to Klingel, but why did the author choose to photocopy them. Ask Nin from the Zodiac Killer message board, who showed us a very credible reason to the identification of the name "Chester" through the methodology of the photocopying process.

Nin: "Another trivia, Chester Carlson was the inventor of xerography (xerox)". https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/zodiack … t6296.html

Xerox was founded in 1906 in Rochester, New York, as The Haloid Photographic Company. It manufactured photographic paper and equipment. In 1938, Chester Carlson, a physicist working independently, invented a process for printing images using an electrically charged photoconductor-coated metal plate and dry powder "toner". However, it would take more than 20 years of refinement before the first automated machine to make copies was commercialized, using a document feeder, scanning light, and a rotating drum. Chester Floyd Carlson is best known for inventing electrophotography, the process performed today by millions of photocopiers worldwide. Carlson’s process produced a dry copy, as contrasted with the wet copies then produced by the mimeograph process. Carlson’s process was renamed xerography, a term that means "dry writing".

save me from reading 200 posts.. did chester still have the keys? or were they missing?

So to answer your question directly, no one knows. No one knows if he lost those keys or if those keys were even his. Why people are assuming they are his is beyond me. The one guy who does know the story about how he connected Chester to the card is being tight lipped about it.

IMO the Zodiac has always had inside knowledge until just before 1990 when he probably befriended someone who is involved with homicide related stuff in Eureka. Him being into LE means they get along. So he sends the letter indicating Eureka in the hope that the Eureka homicide department would be tied into the Zodiac investigation and that’s his new conduit for details through the 1990s.

(Re-posting to this new board so I can reply to myself…)

Posted by: @TomVoigt

I absolutely believe the Eureka card is authentic, but it hasn’t been officially determined to be authentic. Hence the question marks.

I agree: the Eureka card (henceforth Eureka) is almost certainly by Zodiac. Technical signatures aside, the content is very Zodiac-like, and much too similar to the Sierra postcard (henceforth Sierra) to be a fake; in particular, faking Eureka would require first appreciating the concealed cipher in Sierra. Both cards are minimalistic, with deliberate attention to each element (meaningful postmark, stamp, etc.), and contain a thinly concealed, shifted-alphabet cipher, with a 10-digit key in plain sight. In Sierra, it was the Attention line, while Eureka went a step forward by placing the cipher key directly on two physical keys, concealed only by the photocopy darkness… Whether or not we solve this cipher, its properties are already indicative of Zodiac. In 1990.

In such shifted-alphabet ciphers, the message M is usually encoded as the initials I of the text words. The ten-digit key in Eureka is more efficient than Sierra’s mapping of ten letters onto ten other letters. Thus, in Eureka, M should be offset by the key K, in an alphabet where the cipher letter “A” is aligned to translate into some reference (AKA shift) message letter s, which is sometimes (like in Sierra) shifted mid-sentence by a control word or number. Zodiac liked to reverse words, so the final message is probably partly or fully in reverse. In Eureka, he apparently also inverted the +M+K alphabet into -M-K, as often done in historical ciphers. Thus, for instance, text initials I=”AABCC ZZYXX” would be shifted (respectively and cyclically) by a key K=“10001 01234” and a reference letter s=”v” into “uvuts wvvvu”, reversed to give the final message M=“uvvvw stuvu”. This is a classic technique, covered in the first chapters of most introductory books. The space I introduced here between the two five-letter strings is meaningless, and simply represents the cipher key being written on two physical keys.

As in Sierra, the challenge in solving Eureka is to identify the actual message words and their correct order. A message of ten characters is too long to hide in its entirety in an unmodified purchased card. One would need to add some control words, and make at least minor corrections to the choice and number of text words, even if the key is fully controlled (and key control in Eureka is limited, as each key digit spans only 0..9 rather than the 0..25 range needed to utilize the full alphabet). So, the message, or at least part of it, is most likely on the envelope, where there is some ordered structure and the author could introduce some changes and control words. In principle, the author could also use words or objects in the card itself and in the attached photocopy, but that would be much more ambiguous than the envelope.

One natural (albeit non-unique) ten-word choice would then be “Greetings” (stamp), “Editor”, “San”, “Francisco”, “Chronicle”, and after a break for the number “901” (which might encode s or, like in Sierra, an s transition), also “Mission”, “Street”, “San”, “Francisco”, “California”. The resulting initials, I=“GESFC MSSFC”, are then shifted by the key digits K=”79408 58351”. I don’t know yet how s is encoded, but it’s easy to check all 26 options. Without reversal, we get 26 gibberish pairs, “nnevq jafqx” (for s=”a”), ”oofwr kbgry” (for s=”b”), etc. But we didn’t really expect to get a non-reversed solution so easily.

Note that as the key is fixed (unlike in homophonic ciphers), the probability of getting any meaningful word here just by chance is tiny, even with 26 different choices of s, so any sensible word emerging would have been very interesting. The probability of a random string being not only meaningful, but also from the Zodiac vocabulary, is ridiculously small. We can easily quantify this in terms of likelihood or p-value, if needed.

After solution reversal, 25 choices give the expected utter gibberish. But the specific choice s=”v” yields the interesting string M=“slave lqzii”. Although this is not quite right, and I don’t know yet how to explain this choice of s, the result looks like a promising step in the right direction. Because again: getting any word, not to mention a Zodiac power-word like “slave”, is extremely unlikely to occur by chance. This “slave” arises from the second part of the address (“Mission Street San Francisco California”), combined with the second physical key (58351). The first physical key number 79408 seems reliable, so my above choice of the first five initials is probably incorrect. And there may well be a different choice of s for each physical key, perhaps signaled by “901”. It would take some effort to correct the problem, but ultimately, a cipher with a known fixed key is much easier to solve, and far less ambiguous, than a homophonic cipher of comparable length.

Notice that for the above mechanism to make sense, Zodiac had to either determine the digits on the key himself, or have access to a huge selection of keys to choose from. Incidentally, if the “qz” should actually be “xv”, then we get “slave lxvii”, the latter string being a natural way to express a sinister body count of 67, but I doubt this is the right direction.

The Eureka card seems sufficiently authentic to deserve the Zodiac treatment: assume it was him; what would we do in his place; every puzzle element is deliberate; double meanings everywhere; etc.

In the past, Zodiac added the Mission St. address mainly when it served a purpose as a puzzle piece. The street number in Eureka breaks the stamp+address text into 5+5 words, so it appears deliberate and strengthens the initials I=“GESFC MSSFC” or some variation thereof.

Zodiac didn’t use the zip code 94103 in the past, so it seems deliberate. Maybe he just meant to draw attention to the importance of the five digits on each physical key. The fixed zip itself is unlikely to be useful as part of the key, as Zodiac apparently did not allow himself to choose five corresponding message letters freely (address initials do not offer sufficient flexibility for a key that cannot be varied).

Zodiac puzzles are self-contained, so he would have provided the non-trivial shift letter s in addition to the key. We expect the value of s to present on the envelope or photocopy. No letter appears to be singled out, so he probably used a number between 1 and 26. The numbers in the address and zip do not offer a unique choice, so consider the photocopy.

All elements in the photocopy are probably meaningful. I don’t understand the pen magnet/light (unless a reference to Zodiac’s gun flashlight), but the chain should serve some purpose. Zodiac could control the number of visible beads, so that could be a clue.

There are 22 visible beads, corresponding to s= “v”, as we anticipated. These beads are a characteristic Zodiac clue: noticeable when no longer needed… At least the above “slave” derivation is now even more robust. (Although getting “slave” with a fixed key was already as unique as ciphers get.)

The same s=”v” now seems more likely to apply also to the second half of the cipher, I=”GESFC” (or similar) with K=79408 (or 79468, as Tahoe once claimed, giving “slave lkzii” when applying the same mechanism to both keys). It is unlike Zodiac to repeat the exact same mechanism twice, with no letter swap or similar trick. Any ideas?

OK, I’m done, and it turned out to be the other way around:

The K1=79408 cipher is the simpler of the two, with no key inversion, using just the trivial (standard) alignment s1=”a”.

The K2=58351 cipher is more difficult, with key inversion and a shift s2=”v” (hinted by 22 chain beads), giving M2=“slave”.

The message was indeed concealed in the initials of the address line, but without the stamp (“Greetings” is not part of the cipher, as I suspected earlier). And the street number 901 indeed breaks the text into two five-word strings to match the two keys, as shown below.  

Bottom line: I can prove that this Eureka card is indeed Zodiac’s work, and that he used it to claim a female victim in 1990, at a very high confidence level.

Zodiac’s puzzles were meticulously planned and precisely executed, unlike his messy letters and amateur homophonic ciphers. As demonstrated earlier (recap1, recap2), redundant letters, irregular capitalization, unexpected underlines, etc. – were all deliberate in his puzzles. Now, the handwriting on the envelope is consistent with the canonical Zodiac letters, but there is something strange about one of the ‘t’s; look carefully:

The two ‘t’s in “Street” are consistent with previous Zodiac texts, but the ‘t’ in “Editor” is not. Zodiac almost always placed the horizontal line in his ‘t’ well above the center of the vertical line, and in rare cases (when the writing became rushed, which is not the case here), right at its middle. But I never saw him writing the horizontal line below the center of the vertical line, as he did in “Editor”. So, why is this ‘t’ so strange?

Because it is not a ‘t’, but rather a plus sign – a classic Zodiac-style trick, and one of the giveaways that prove that this card is his work. This plus sign effectively splits “Editor” into “Edi+or”. So, finally, we have the correct initials and keys: I1=“EOSFC” for K1=79408, and I2=“MSSFC” for K2=58351.  

The final message is in reverse, as we expected, and so is the alphabet, like in many but not all classic ciphers (note that the concealed cipher in the Sierra postcard did not reverse the alphabet). The first part of the cipher is standard: M1=-I1+K1 with no shift, i.e. “A” aligns with s1=”a” before the key is applied. The second part, which we happened to solve earlier, inverted the key, giving M2=-I2-K2 with an additional shift, aligning “A” with s2=”v” (which Zodiac expected us to infer from the 22 chain beads), resulting in the message M2=“slave”.

(Again: if you think that this “slave” could have been an unintentional random string, at least when we had to scan all 26 alternative s2 values before identifying the chain clue, then you probably never worked with fixed-key ciphers. Just try it! Such an exercise should be more convincing than me computing probabilities and deriving p-values. This is a classic shifted-alphabet cipher, discussed in the first chapters of introductory books.)

The first part of the resulting message, which is trivial after identifying the “Edi+or” trick, is M1=“femme”. Finally, the entire cipher message is M=M1+M2=“Femme Slave”. We see that this concealed cipher is a Zodiac-style claim of a female victim. Forging the card would require an appreciation for the solutions of several Zodiac puzzles and the concealed cipher in the Sierra postcard (which were unavailable in 1990) and some Zodiac-style originality.

Some card element/s – red envelope, Eureka, Groucho snowman + rabbit picture, pen magnet/light – must be clues to identify the specific murder case. Does anyone know of a female murder case circa 1990, which could match one or more of these elements? Zodiac did not bother with distractions in his other puzzles, so the pen is the most likely clue.

Edited for clarity.

The pen should identify the victim. The card was postmarked in December 1990 with its “Femme slave” concealed cipher. If you think that it wasn’t Zodiac, then it was someone as clever and malevolent. If you think that I’m wrong about the presence and solution of the cipher, consult any cryptanalyst or even a scientist who can estimate the p-value. 

Zodiac puzzles were so efficient, that the pen light/magnet is undoubtedly a deliberate clue. It may belong to the victim or be used to identify her, the region, etc. Zodiac liked elusive clues, so a clever double meaning is likely, but perhaps we don’t need it to identify the victim.

I think that brubaker was mostly correct about the text on the pen:

Posted by: @brubaker

Whether this is an authentic Zodiac communication or not, it would be nice to understand it a bit better.

Did “Sam” indicate what the cylindrical object on the key chain is, or what the text on that object says? This would help to confirm that he was indeed the owner of the keys.

It looks like the area code begins with 70 (probably 707), and my best guess for the next three numbers is 329 or 529. The prefix 329 is associated today with the Sebastopol/Santa Rosa area, and 529 is found in Petaluma phone numbers. In any case, I am pretty sure the middle number is “2” (only number with a flat bottom), and today there are no Eureka, CA prefixes with “2” in this position. I’m not sure whether this was the case in 1990. The last four numbers look like 6814 or 6844.

 

 

On the top side, I see 70(7)-326… rather than 70(7)-(3/5)29…, but that is also a Santa Rosa number. On the side, I see “Buying…” or something similar. The black structure in the white blob may be a cat (rotate +70 deg) or sunglasses (rotate -20 deg) logo, but that’s a Rorschach.

So, was there a strange unsolved murder of a female near Santa Rosa in December 1990? We can’t exclude the end of the month, when Zodiac was most active; e.g., he mailed Belli on December 20, 1969.

Yes, and SRPD cold murder cases appear to be rare. Lona Robertson (recent article – slide 22, Video) was 32 years old when she was last seen alive, on December 20, 1990, getting into a car with someone she seemed to know. Her body was found on January 1, 1991, off Los Alamos road; she died of a gunshot wound to her head. Her purse was found thrown to the side of nearby Sonoma Mountain road on December 27, 1990. (A claim that she disappeared on December 29 seems incorrect.)

An expert may extract more information from the pen, but perhaps locals could identify it or its significance with what we already have.

Edited to clarify the date mix-up by SRPD.

Im horrible at photoshop, but cleaning it up just a bit shows two different cuts of the keys. Maybe find someone who had these two different PO boxes in Eureka, or in the areas of interest. It seems like this was discussed somewhere.

Posted by: @alphadeltarho

Im horrible at photoshop, but cleaning it up just a bit shows two different cuts of the keys. Maybe find someone who had these two different PO boxes in Eureka, or in the areas of interest. It seems like this was discussed somewhere.

 

 

 eureka-modified.jpg

We already know the key numbers, and PO box tracing was discussed earlier in this very thread. Note that Zodiac had to use these specific key numbers, as they uniquely translate the SF Chronicle address into “Femme slave”. (He did have a little bit of freedom; e.g., he could have offset the shift s and replaced the 58351 key by 47240 or 69462, but that’s it.) The primary role of the keys must have been the cipher, and he could have made them or collected them from different areas over a long time. Using the keys simultaneously both as cipher keys and as additional leads is unlikely, although not impossible for Zodiac. Therefore, I think we exhausted the keys, and it’s time to focus on the pen. In any case, I think Zodiac was way too clever to have the keys trace back anywhere near him.