Tahoe Stated…

"Or, the tires tracks 20 feet behind Bryan’s car weren’t left by the attacker’s car.
The report never states there were prints found between both cars. I find it odd there would be prints to Bryan’s car, but none in the 20 feet to the alleged POI’s car."

I recall it was one of the cops who was up with Bryan’s car, I think it was Collins, but not sure who states they followed the footprints
from the passenger front door of Bryan’s car and it led them to where a car would have been parked some 20′ behind Bryan’s car. I have always thought that dirt would be so hard packed it would be very difficult to pick up on footprints, but I guess they didn’t have a problem with it.

I think a reasonable consistancy in height and obviously the same shoe size matters a lot more than weight and hair in determining Z as the lone guy responsible for all the murders. I read somewhere that a person holding a weapon looks a lot bigger and taller than they actually are. Think that could explain height differentials between Hartnell and PH witnesses? Doesn’t explain Mageau, who saw him holding a gun and put him around the same height as Fouke. Maybe wielding a knife makes you look taller than holding a gun…

Btw, I’m also pretty certain Z wasn’t Dick Van Dyke.

Hi Foreigner,

What I am saying is that if someone were from Norway and saw a car that he had imported bearing a combination of Norse words on it, he may have identified with that case in several ways. And Z was all about cars, wasn’t he? Maybe that explains why he wrote on it.

Mike

Tahoe Stated…

"Or, the tires tracks 20 feet behind Bryan’s car weren’t left by the attacker’s car.
The report never states there were prints found between both cars. I find it odd there would be prints to Bryan’s car, but none in the 20 feet to the alleged POI’s car."

I recall it was one of the cops who was up with Bryan’s car, I think it was Collins, but not sure who states they followed the footprints
from the passenger front door of Bryan’s car and it led them to where a car would have been parked some 20′ behind Bryan’s car. I have always thought that dirt would be so hard packed it would be very difficult to pick up on footprints, but I guess they didn’t have a problem with it.

No-one states they followed the footprints to "where a car would have been parked" in any document I’ve read that’s in the public domain, B60’s.

Smithy….

I went through every Police Report ever released, FBI Files and Ca DOJ files and didn’t find it there. I got it from somewhere, I’ll just have to find where. Without Wing Walker foot prints leading to/from suspects car (what they thought was where suspect parked), then all that suspect car work would have been bogus, based on nothing. I’ll keep looking.
Cops make mistakes, no doubt. We know that while they interviewed all 3 gals the following morning, they never thought to take them back to the beach site and locate exactly where they saw the perv watching them, then look for Wing Walker prints. then they’d have a definite connection, but that wasn’t done.

Tahoe Stated…

"Or, the tires tracks 20 feet behind Bryan’s car weren’t left by the attacker’s car.
The report never states there were prints found between both cars. I find it odd there would be prints to Bryan’s car, but none in the 20 feet to the alleged POI’s car."

I recall it was one of the cops who was up with Bryan’s car, I think it was Collins, but not sure who states they followed the footprints
from the passenger front door of Bryan’s car and it led them to where a car would have been parked some 20′ behind Bryan’s car. I have always thought that dirt would be so hard packed it would be very difficult to pick up on footprints, but I guess they didn’t have a problem with it.

No-one states they followed the footprints to "where a car would have been parked" in any document I’ve read that’s in the public domain, B60’s.

Smithy….

I went through every Police Report ever released, FBI Files and Ca DOJ files and didn’t find it there. I got it from somewhere, I’ll just have to find where. Without Wing Walker foot prints leading to/from suspects car (what they thought was where suspect parked), then all that suspect car work would have been bogus, based on nothing. I’ll keep looking.
Cops make mistakes, no doubt. We know that while they interviewed all 3 gals the following morning, they never thought to take them back to the beach site and locate exactly where they saw the perv watching them, then look for Wing Walker prints. then they’d have a definite connection, but that wasn’t done.

I think they simply took note of those tracks on the CHANCE it was the guys car, because if they could find him and his car, they could place him at the scene of the crime.

Unless someone saw the man in the hood enter that car at that location or there were prints leading up to it, I have always stated there was no proof that was the attackers car.

More evidence seems to lead away from it than to it. Not a "certainty", imo.

I went back through TV’s site for the origin of the footprints leading from Bryan’s car to Z’s suspected car. After hours of reading through countless board messages I found what I think was the origin.
A long time board poster had posted that they received a police report from another well known Z sleuth, and that the report details the footprints that were found that led to Z’s suspected car from Bryan’s car. Another long time poster shortly thereafter asks the one who claimed to have this report to please post the report. I kept reading through the following messages, including many from the person who had stated they have this report in their possession, they never addressed the issue again, as far as I could see. So no report was ever posted on what seemed to be a reliable claim.
That was the first mention I could find where there was supposed evidence that LE found footprints leading from Bryan’s car to Z’s suspected car. There’s a ton more pages on the thread to go through so its possible that the board poster at some did post the report later on. But if no one else can recall seeing it then that tells me probably not.
Bryan makes a statement in the video that as they were driving on Knoxville Rd. a turnout had a car already parked in it, so they kept going until they found an empty turnout. Could that turnout have been the one directly south of where Bryan did park? there was a gate at that turnout. Cecilia first sees Z over on Mckenzie Point which is directly down from the gated turnout. So absent of footprints tying Z’s car to Bryan’s car, we have footprints leading up the trail to Bryan’s car, and footprints leading back down the path from Bryan’s car. Then Z would walk back down the trail turn right and head back to where he perhaps did park, about a 1/4 mile south of where Bryan had parked.

I wonder in the unsolved ciphers are written in Norse.

Could be – certainly. There are several Norse connections in the Z case – and the possibility of the cipher’s plain text being Norse was one of the first "theories" I had when I began to take an interest in this.

One thing worth mentioning, however, is that there’s no reason to assume a Norwegian who was born in the 20th century would be very familiar with Old Norse. The latter differs greatly from modern Norwegian. The modern language which resembles Old Norse the most is easily Icelandic – not any of the Scandinavian languages.

That said, a Norwegian would arguably be more likely to know some Old Norse (to this day the language features, albeit very superficially, on the curriculum of Norwegian high school students) than most others. And, again arguably, a Norwegian might be more inclined to take an interest in Old Norse matters than, say, a Frenchman or an Australian.

But the level of familiarity required to produce a whole text in Old Norse is not something an average Norwegian would have obtained simply by virtue of his or her nationality – no more than an Italian would be capable of writing classical Latin with ease.

Hi-

Well, a "Thing" was a gathering of men who made laws and meted out punishment in Viking days. Sort of like the "judge, jury and executioner" concept from "The Mikado." Notably, "Thing" has a capital T, and if you look closely, Z changed the word on the card from a lower case "T" to a capital letter.

If you look in a Norwegian dictionary, "karmann" means "man." The point is, it is a Norwegian/Norse word.

I’ll let you look up "basement" or "cellar" in a Norwegian dictionary.

Mike

This is certainly interesting – especially the capital T.

In modern Norwegian "ting" can mean both an assembly or a parliament (the Norse "thing") and…a thing (an object, that is).

Basement, yes – heh. That’s a good one. Playing around with it some more…if you separate the two syllables in "kjeller" (basement) you get "Kjell er…" which translates as "Kjell is…"

Theforeigner has already cleared up the Karmann business – but I agree with you that a Norwegian would probably find that word striking if he or she stopped to ponder. "Kar" would normally be less formal than "mann", both words meaning a male person, simply put. Sort of like "Chapman" in English – or rather "guyman" or "manguy", since the "compound" itself isn’t actually a word.

…and to conclude the lingo speculations: Qvale is just a fancy way of spelling "Kvale" (which is the more authentic form). "Kval" can mean several things, "whale" for instance – but also "agony", "pain", "suffering". To subject someone to "kval(er)" means to make them suffer. This as a matter of curiosity – he didn’t choose his own name, presumably! And it’s a common surname in Norway – many forms of it are to be found, and the etymology may have nothing to do with the more gruesome meaning of "kval": it could just as well be an old term for a landscape feature of some sort; many Norwegian surnames derive from such – remove the "k" and you have "val(e)", which could be both a battlefield and a valley (same as the English "vale").

Right, enough of that!

Here are the certainties for me:

No fingerprint matches: Police and FBI have no conclusive proof of matching prints either from the crime scene’s or the letters.

DNA: In my mind this is a big non-issue. The question as to whether there actually is DNA evidence related to this case is suspect. It has been mentioned that DNA was recovered but only yielded an incomplete panel. While it is possible to rule a suspect out, a partial panel would never make it past a grand jury and would be completely dismissed.

No ballistic matches: Although police had a fairly certain idea of the types of guns used, they openly admitted that they had doubts as to whether they could match bullets to weapon even if the guns were recovered.

Police work seems sloppy and disjointed:

The only thing linking the murders together were the letters:
There is no proof what so ever that the same person killed the victims in this case. The only thing that LE feels sure about is that at least some of the letters written were from the same person.

After years of studying this case it appears to me now that what occurred was in fact the perfect storm. I don’t think the separate murder cases were related. I think a different individual committed the crimes and for different reasons. Take for example the DF – MM case. Definitely something more than a random joy killing there. Wrong place at the wrong time – I highly doubt it – way to much background noise with the two victims.
CS – BH. Clearly a case of wrong place, wrong time. I mean a Zodiac suit – that just screams copycat to me.

The Stine killing – simply unrelated. Your average run of the mill,
big city, robbery murder.

I am not trying to come off as being cold and callus towards the victims in this case however I feel like the letters written to the Chronicle and others is the only thing that has kept this series of events in the public eye for so many years. I also think that the two are mutually exclusive. I don’t think the letter writer was the killer(s). I do think the writer was the Zodiac. I have a fairly good idea of who I think the letter writer was – I will keep it at that.

In closing these are my opinions only and are not meant to discount or ridicule the opinions of others.

Hey Talon, just wondering how you explain the swatches of Stine’s shirt and the writing on the car door at LB? Sounds to me like you’re leaning toward a Z hoax theory.

Hi Joe,
Of course you are correct on that point, unless the writer had access at the crime scene, or that he actually started his killing with PS. Highly unlikely, but possible.
The two previous cases just don’t seem to connect for me. As stated, DF had a lot of baggage. MM was no saint either, however, I feel he might have just chosen the wrong night to be with D.

The whole LB incident makes no sense to me.
Daylight killing, costume. Why no mention of the costume in the letters following the murder?
BH’s extremely strange demeanor in the video interviews following his bazaar experience that afternoon. I am not implying that he had any link in this. I simply feel his responses were odd…

Talon:

I agree completely regarding your assessment of the physical evidence in the case. The only possible caveat here, for me, is that LE could, conceivably, be holding back something. I wouldn’t rule that out completely – and I’ve talked to several researchers and case experts who are or this opinion – well, sort of: they have been met with ambiguous answers from LE representatives who have been asked about this. A small, possible X factor, at least.

I don’t agree that there is no connection between the killer(s) and the letter writer, however. Until I see some hard evidence to the contrary I think the most reasonable assumption remains that it was one and the same person who committed the murders and wrote the letters (some of the letters are rightly disputed – but that is another matter).

Question: without revealing who your suspect is, do you believe that this letter writer was, in a word, insane? Or do you believe the person who perpetrated the hoax had a rational motive?

Tahoe Stated…

"Or, the tires tracks 20 feet behind Bryan’s car weren’t left by the attacker’s car.
The report never states there were prints found between both cars. I find it odd there would be prints to Bryan’s car, but none in the 20 feet to the alleged POI’s car."

I recall it was one of the cops who was up with Bryan’s car, I think it was Collins, but not sure who states they followed the footprints
from the passenger front door of Bryan’s car and it led them to where a car would have been parked some 20′ behind Bryan’s car. I have always thought that dirt would be so hard packed it would be very difficult to pick up on footprints, but I guess they didn’t have a problem with it.

Wasn’t it a record low temperature? I find it hard to imagine anyone would have left footprints that night, on that hard, frozen ground. Was Collins’s handwriting ever tested? (I don’t think he was the Zodiac, and I am not accusing him of anything.) Just asking.

The LB attack was September 27th, still summer. The ground was not frozen. The ground was frozen at the December 20th 1968 attack on David Faraday and Betty Jensen.