Some will go to great extents to try and prove they are right despite being B*tch slapped by reality.

Yeah, like Gyke’s passport info!

The observer effect is one of the most interesting phenomena I studied in quantum mechanics. The actual measurement itself influences the result which forms part of Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. Like measuring a cue ball with a cue by touching it but when you touch it you influence it. This actually results in only being able to obtain either it’s velocity or location, not both which you need for trajectory. That’s how much even measuring some things can influence them.

Once you understand that you don’t escape your own bias in any of these matters you stop claiming to be an observer just looking in. There is no such thing which is demonstrated by the fact even just observers can introduce their own bias.

What often is perceived as a neutral position is often not one. Many positions may seem that way but on closer inspection they usually haven’t escaped their own bias either.

Calling someone biased doesn’t make you immune it. Saying you understand bias doesn’t make you immune to it either.

Also bias isn’t fatal to an argument. It’s just a bias. The argument can still be very much true. We eliminate bias to improve their accuracy. They can still turned out to be right.

Everybody can be biased, but some less than others. Can a person who has a suspect approach the subject of geographical profiling from the standpoint of neutrality. When Kim Rossmo analyzed the Zodiac crimes through the Rigel software, along with commuter routes, the least effort principle, buffer zones, mental mapping, phone calls and communications, he arrived at an unbiased conclusion. Now ask somebody whose suspect lived in San Francisco, Vallejo, Napa, Berkeley or Sacramento to use geographical profiling to arrive at a home location for the Zodiac Killer during his crimes. It would be no surprise, that they would all have made up their mind before they began, and arrived at the home location of their respective suspects. When you have a suspect in your head, you analyze every crime through the lens of your suspect – and therefore colours your judgment to the many facets of that crime. Everybody is biased to a certain extent, but having a prime suspect in the Zodiac case is not beneficial to approaching the case and remaining as neutral as possible.

The tendency is to weave the evidence towards your suspect, invariably never away. When something doesn’t fit, it’s either ignored, or a smattering of mental juggling is employed.

Everybody can be biased, but some less than others. Can a person who has a suspect approach the subject of geographical profiling from the standpoint of neutrality. When Kim Rossmo analyzed the Zodiac crimes through the Rigel software, along with commuter routes, the least effort principle, buffer zones, mental mapping, phone calls and communications, he arrived at an unbiased conclusion. Now ask somebody whose suspect lived in San Francisco, Vallejo, Napa, Berkeley or Sacramento to use geographical profiling to arrive at a home location for the Zodiac Killer during his crimes. It would be no surprise, that they would all have made up their mind before they began, and arrived at the home location of their respective suspects. When you have a suspect in your head, you analyze every crime through the lens of your suspect – and therefore colours your judgment to the many facets of that crime. Everybody is biased to a certain extent, but having a prime suspect in the Zodiac case is not beneficial to approaching the case and remaining as neutral as possible.

The tendency is to weave the evidence towards your suspect, invariably never away. When something doesn’t fit, it’s either ignored, or a smattering of mental juggling is employed.

Did Rossmo say these areas are the Zodiac’s home one time? I think today he would have modified a lot. I think he has leaned away from the X marks the spot idea and instead it’s just an area of possible relevance to the case. Which basically means if you have a list of people to go through save yourself some time, money and logistics by applying the geoprofile to see if it helps.

Commuter and Marauder model based on Canter & Larkin " Circle Hypothesis " adapted from Petherick, W. (2009). Serial Crime: Theoretical and Practical Issues in Behavioral Profiling (2nd ed.). Burlington, MA: Elsevier Academic Press. Used with the authorization of Wayne Petherick.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio … l_behavior

Zodiac drives a car.

Would this make you think again about some things?

If Rossmo has modified his analysis, it has been done through the progression of models in geographic profiling, not because he has a prime suspect.
https://www.zodiacciphers.com/zodiac-ne … r-commuter

Anyway let’s actually look at Rossmo.

https://geographicprofiler.com/crimes/zodiac-killer

Go to the lower hot zone first. The red diagonal line. What you see are several noteworthy places. The first is Mare Island Navel Shipyard is in the hot zone. The second is the Crockett Hills Regional Parks. However what also stands out is that you have a major highway bisecting both places. The i-80 which also features in plenty of other serial killer models and we know they used that i-80. JJD is was one of them. Auburn into Sacramento.

That i-80 bisecting the hot zone is no small thing. The offender we know drives a car and right there we have a major highway. The i-80 makes access to those hot zones extremely easy as well as the other areas except for Lake Berryessa/Napa.

Go to the northern hot zone and what do you see? Basically between Lynch Canyon Open Space… and what happens to be bisecting them yet again? The i-80.

What this looks like is someone using the i-80 as a means to radiate out when they hit Vallejo. Both lower and upper hot spots have the i-80 bisecting them.

I made a mistake with EARONS not seeing this when it was happening there somewhat also. I thought he was be living in beneath the Citris Heights area. He wasn’t. He was in Auburn for the EAR crimes but had such a big ego he moved to Citrus Heights eventually.

I would think the Zodiac would have done something similar. Had places near the crime scenes so he could re-live them.

At the risk of repeating myself I worked with Richard Walter one of the creators of the field of Behavioral profiling and a highly respected member of that community. When I asked him about geographical profiling he told me that zodiac was too smart to be caught by such a technique and that he inherently would not have murdered in a pattern that would lend itself to that type of analysis. This is not me trying to twist behavioral profiling to suit my needs. This is simply what mr. Walter told me several years ago.

The one dissenting vote I have is that geographical profiling does not take into account the fact that there are 2 separate sets of data points for the Zodiac :case:the murder sites and the letter mailing sites. Like I said recently I would be more prone to travel somewhere far away from my house for my first murder in order to ensure anonymity and less prone to want to drive a long distance just to mail a letter.

Let’s say zodiac wasn’t famous for killing people but only from mailing threatening letters that were so shocking that we remember these letters to this day. Geographical profiling would surely indicate the Zodiac lived somewhere in San Francisco. So there are actually two zodiacs, one that seemed to have lived in Solano County and one who seemed to live in San Francisco. That’s the problem I have personally with Geographic profiling

I don’t think the Zodiac was that smart. Geoprofiling was developed from the mid-80s and around the late 80s start of the 90s was used more. This is several decades after the Zodiac. If he avoided the geoprofile it was because he was exploiting cross-jurisdiction issues. However that can still create patterns. In fact it is the whole ‘avoiding’ aspect that makes it’s valid. Sorry I just don’t see how he was able to think that far ahead. If he is forensically aware then cross-jurisdiction exploitation may be how he avoid some things. I mean hitting on Mare Island is no small thing when it comes to the geoprofile and this case.

WARNING: THERE ARE MAJOR SPOILERS IN THIS POST, SO BE FOREWARNED

The more I read and think about this book the more angry I get. It’s impossible to express your opinion of this book without talking about its substance, which I’ve been careful not to discuss so as to not create spoilers. But I decided to give my opinion of the book, which requires me getting into its conclusions and nuts and bolts.

There’s something very disturbing to me about an author who claims to have solved the 340 and goes into great detail about the mechanics of the way the Harden’s solved the 408 and then just presents a key that comes out of nowhere. Because keys that come out of nowhere can be created from whole cloth. And the more I thought about this the angrier I became and the more I came to question the authors motives. Because the only way to verify the key is valid it’s a know how it was derived. I’m not going to get into the logistics of it but you could inject certain phrases and things you want to say into a solution and then go backwards and make the key say those things and then with the extra characters you have you can just fill in letters that you need as you go along.

The message again is somewhat of a garble, not nice, neat sentences. It’s a shame that Zodiac would make someone do all that work and not come up with something that is not as aesthetically pleasing as the solution to the 408. What’s more is that the author requires you to take his word for a lot of transposition and "peeking under" the ciphertext and looking for less, all of which are subjective manipulations. He also restructures the code based on a very flimsy premise.

The author spends all of his time leading you through the various twists and turns of a solution but puts no effort into saying, for example, why the Zodiac symbol represents the word "the." Now it just so happens that in his solution to the 13cc he needs the word "the," so all of a sudden the Zodiac symbol took on the word "the." Is that why it means "the," because it was forced in and then retrofitted to work in the 340? I don’t know. But he should be able to tell us.

The other thing is that he says the letters i and T are interchangeable and it just so happens that he needs for that to be so in order to get a "certain word" to appear twice. So that’s very convenient. And I and I are the only bits of ciphertext that can have two possible solutions, and it just so happens that is the character that he needed in order to have the two iterations of that "one word."

My final criticism is that he goes through an awful lot of work to develop two suspects, neither one of whom is very likely to have been Zodiac. And in order to shore up his solution he conveniently forgot to tell you that William Crow had repudiated his 1968 account of there being two people in the car because again, the two people in the car suit his needs in his ultimate solution.

The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with him about is that R is a very likely suspect to have killed Cheri Jo Bates. However because of profiling considerations the person who killed Cheri Jo Bates is a very unlikely candidate to have been the zodiac.

I knew virtually nothing about E other than his name before I read this book. He’s being touted as the "second Zodiac" because he was a lover’s lane killer. It’s the same old trope that one lover’s lane killer is like any other lover’s lane killer. But that is not true. Just like Zodiac and the Monster of Florence do not share anything even close to the same behavioral profile, E, who raped at least one of his female victims, does not fit the non-sexual power killer profile of the Zodiac Killer.

Now I warned people at the beginning of this thread that they were spoilers in here and if you’re familiar with the book you know why I said that. I’m not revealing what I have in order to rain on the author’s parade; rather it is simply impossible to substantively review his book without critiquing his conclusions. I sincerely hope that no one who hasn’t read the book read this post because it’s not my intention to deprive you of the right to read the book and decide for yourself.

When I asked him about geographical profiling he told me that zodiac was too smart to be caught by such a technique and that he inherently would not have murdered in a pattern that would lend itself to that type of analysis.g

Ted K. would travel hundreds of miles to San Fran to mail bombs. But mailing bombs (his murder weapon) and getting caught is much more risky if you do it local. Zodiac mailing letters (much less riskier) from a mailbox in San Fran and Zodiac living there would not surprise me.

Also interesting is Ted K. (it seems) felt comfortable going back to a place near where he lived at one time to mail his murder weapons. As we know he once taught at Berkeley right across the bay.

Zodiac could have had relatives in the Vallejo area or once lived there before moving to San Fran. To a point he felt comfortable starting his murder spree in that area. Much like Ted K. felt comfortable traveling to near the place the he used to live to mail his murder weapons.

GSK would travel several miles from where he worked and lived to ransack/kill.

Also interesting (in his first mailings) is Zodiac using 4 stamps on the out of town letter to Vallejo vs the 2 Stamps on the local letters to the Exam and Chron in his first mailings. One stamp would have been adequate for all 3 mailings.

I guess I’m lazier than Ted K LOL. If I lived in SF I would probably be willing to travel somewhere far away like Vallejo to kill people so that the murderers would be less likely to be traced back to me. However, I doubt that if I lived in Vallejo I would drive into San Francisco every damn time I needed to mail a letter (unless of course I worked there). Although I do have to admit the traffic was a lot lighter from Vallejo to San Francisco in those days.

Hi,

I am going to say it again. Richard Walter feels that Z was inherently too smart to create a pattern in his crimes that could be traced using the then unknown (i.e., 1969) technique of geographical profiling. Mr. Walter KNOWS that the technique did not exist in 1969. He is not stupid. And he is not saying that Z predicted it. It is that Z was INHERENTLY too smart to leave any such pattern.

Mike

I don’t think the Zodiac was a fool, but he wasn’t the genius he is portrayed as. He should have been caught at Presidio Heights barring incompetence. If Kjell Qvale was Zodiac, then it was pretty dumb to have passed by (or been stopped) by Donald Fouke, head straight home, then immediately return to the same intersection with his dog a matter of minutes later. Somebody who was inherently too smart to be ensnared by geographic profiling (or a pattern of murder), certainly should have remembered where he was minutes earlier. Especially when Donald Fouke had described the killer down to his tan engineering boots.

Richard I’m going to answer you even though I thought you would have figured this out for yourself by now. Zodiac walked away from the crime scene. He didn’t run. Therefore he apparently didn’t think that anyone had seen him, as amazing as that may be. Rebecca Robbins said that she never saw the man look up at their house or look at her in the window, as unexpected as that may be.

So zodiac didn’t know he was seen by anyone in and around the cab. Don’t believe it? Zodiac then saw a police car approaching him from the front and did not take any evasive action when he saw the lights coming from the distance. He wasn’t worried about the police. Then the police slow down take a look at him and keep driving. What would your conclusion be Richard? That’s just reinforcement of the fact that nobody had seen him and that the police were not looking for someone who looked like him. So now tell me why Qvale, who didn’t think he was seen at the crime scene, who casually walked down Jackson Street, allowed a police car to approach him from the front without taking any evasive action and then for good measure, the police slow down and take a good look at him but keep going. Why would he not have come back onto the street? You’re trying to hit me with dumb things and they’re not working. Of course Qvale would have come back on the street. He didn’t think anybody has seen him or was looking for him.

And because I know where the next blow is coming from, Qvale was chronologically 50 years old that night but right up until the time he died he always looked much younger than he was. Don’t tell us that he was older than the guy Pelissetti was looking for because Pelissetti had to be talking about chronological age not the way KQ appeared. And I know that is a fact but I can’t tell you why right now. But it is. So while Qvale may have been older than the age range in the wanted poster, he didn’t look older than the age range in the wanted poster.