Hi everyone. All the victims were white. Maybe he hated whites, maybe he had a split race, three, four races. IDK? Just throwing that out there.
ugh…no. based on all witness descriptions, even his writings, Don’t think so.
It would be easy to make fun of this one, but I’ll go ahead and give a serious answer.
It just doesn’t work that way. The ideological killer might target a specific group of people say based on race, but those kind of people tend to be part of a larger group organization and so it’s difficult to really say whether they had a psychological compulsion to kill, or whether murder was just part of their "lifestyle" and not an act of personal fulfillment/enjoyment.
The former type tend to be antisocial and unstable so they don’t do very well in groups. I think we are to assume that applies to Zodiac, at least in his crimes. It may be possible for a lone killer who is motivated by thrills and/or sexual tendencies to choose victims based on race, but it’s very rare. For such a killer to be a person of color who targets white people just because they are white….if there were such a case, I think it would be like a one time thing. I don’t know of any such case.
The crime novel idea of like "I was dumped by a brunette girl with a bob haircut and a blue dress, and so now I need to kill every brunette bob hair blue dress I see." There’s some truth to that, but even that is a stretch most of the time. Most killers like that target people that they feel comfortable being around.
I kind of doubt that Zodiac even targeted young couples. I think his choice of victims was entirely based on location. He was going after people that were vulnerable in an isolated area because those people made easy targets and he felt comfortable that he could make a quick getaway and unnoticed. I think it was just happenstance that young couples were the kind of people who went to such locations.
Like Zodiac’s contemporary, SF’s David Carpenter the Trailside Killer. he was called that because he attacked woman hikers. Yeah, it was sexual, but his victims didn’t fit any real pattern based on the way that they looked. It was primarily based on location as part of his MO.
I think too, you’d see more hatred for the victims in his writing.
“…they may be dealing with one or more ersatz Zodiacs–other psychotics eager to get into the act, or perhaps even other murderers eager to lay their crimes at the real Zodiac’s doorstep.“ L.A. Times, 1969
I did once ponder if the Lake Berryessa costume was a sort of anti-KKK costume. Instead of being a white hooded outfit with 2 eye holes and a Celtic cross design it was a black version of the same and he tied up two white kids with a rope.
It did seem to fit in with some of Gaik’s writings for the Good Times where he seemed to sympathise with the plight of black people. I’m sure none of this even entered Z’s mind though.
He hated society at large. Nothing racial or political about it. Attacking couples and writing taunting letters to the police and press like he did were all actions stemming from feelings of exclusion and inferiority. If we were to treat this case as though we were looking for Mark David Chapman instead of Robert Lee Yates, we’d probably be a lot closer to finding him.
"There are such devils."
-The Pledge
Right on thanks a lot for your info.
Zclues, here’s an older thread I posted on this same topic…
Hi everyone. All the victims were white. Maybe he hated whites, maybe he had a split race, three, four races. IDK? Just throwing that out there.
Makes you wonder if he was part Native American.
I think his victims were targets of opportunity. They could have been purple and it wouldn’t have made a difference.
