I know what you’re saying, but to me the guy’s a psychopath so I’m not giving him credit for logic.

I simply point to the Vallejo Times letter and then back to the correct postage used for Belli letter with the apparent mimicking of lettering.

His use of postage is Reminiscent of bus zoning in my mind, 1 zone local, 2 zones across town and somehow 4 zones to Vallejo.

Or his personality is really childish, 4 stamps makes it go faster.

For me, personally, I keep come round myself to this same word—‘childish’. Not that I necessarily think he was in any real way—that is, in the sense that if you met him in his day-to-day life, I don’t think you’d find him to be childish. But then there is something about his communications that leaves me with the strong feeling he wanted LE to believe he might be.

This comes out particularly strongly in his spelling ‘mistakes’, which I don’t think for one second are actual mistakes, at all. He’d misspell things like ‘Buton’ several times in a letter, but slip up on one occasion in the middle and get it right.

It’s like he’s trying to say “I’m not very educated. I don’t know how to spell things. I don’t know how stamps work.”

Not that I think he was super-intelligent, either. But I do suspect he tried to use this feigned ignorance to throw LE off the scent.

Take the first three letters with the part ciphers. The two to the Chronicle and the Examiner are double stamped. This is him saying “I don’t know exactly what postage you need on a letter.” Then the one to the Vallejo Times-Herald, which was quadruple stamped. “And I’m so stupid, I even think that you need more stamps to go further.”

But then the con is—or the hope is—that this will leave LE thinking this guy probably lives in San Francisco, and thinks you need more stamps to get a letter to Vallejo.

Look beyond this ‘childishness’ and what do you concude?

This guy lives in Vallejo.

For what it’s worth I asked a veteran manager today at my local post office what the procedure would have been in 1969.

He said (with convincing certainty) that today and in 1969 both, a letter mailed at a local post office — even if the letter was addressed to the residence immediately next door to the post office — would still be transported to the central facility for processing.

He confirmed that hand-postmarking occurs at local post offices if a customer delivers the letter directly to the clerk at the window. He said some clerks in that case will hand-postmark automatically, and some won’t, but that they all will if requested by the customer.

Thanks for obtaining and posting this very useful inside information, Xcaliber.

So, unless I’m not thinking it through properly, the implication in the case of the ‘Bus Bomb’ and the ‘Little List’ letters—both of which were cancelled PM on a Sunday—must be that they were, for whatever reason, hand-cancelled at the central facility. As far as my research goes, I think in the States you have to go back as far as something like 1912 to find Sunday-operating PO counters, and then they’d just open for an hour or so.

Here is another possible wrinkle to consider.

Someone may have set the wrong date on the hand-postmark tool.

I believe the dates are set manually by rotating dials on the bottom of the hand tool. If it was a Monday for example, the postal worker could have mistakenly advanced the tool only one day from when it was last used (Saturday) and not the correct two days.

I don’t find it particularly substantial that the little list and bomb letter were hand stamped on a Sunday. To myself it’s more indicative and conclusive of it being processed by a sectional center than not. Experienced human mail processors could probably process thousands of letters a hour and such infrastructure was probably still present and even required to sort thru mail especially on a busy Sunday that’s preparing for weekday deliveries.

The bus bomb letter with its misplaced vertical pm postmark is rather indicative of a rushed worker that missed their first shot.

Do we know when the 3 letters in question were delivered to their recipients?

Let’s pause here for a moment and consider what Soze is saying.

She seems to think that the service codes (1B, 4A, etc.) located on the postmarks are error codes that indicate which head and die needs servicing. Therefore, a postmark without these codes would not indicate that they were hand delivered necessarily, on that the machines they were run through didn’t need any servicing.

I’m still working on verifying this, but I think we need to strongly consider this as a possibility along with hand delivery.

Soze, correct me if I am wrong.

I think a pause is required to first clarify / finalize the original purpose of this thread.

Also Xcalibur,
Belli letter Arrived prior to christmas but was redirected by his maid? and not open until after christmas.
Bus Bomb letter has a SFC article about it on the 12th of November indicating the 11th.
The little list i couldn’t ascertain.

<She seems to think that the service codes (1B, 4A, etc.) located on the postmarks are error codes that indicate which head and die needs servicing. Therefore, a postmark without these codes would not indicate that they were hand delivered necessarily, on that the machines they were run through didn’t need any servicing.>

I’d suggest reading carefully what the two experts said, as well as Shaq’s link to the Pitney Bowles cancelling machine info.

https://www.slideshare.net/bobswansons/facer-cancellers

I suggest checking out this slideshow. It provides excellent information regarding face cancelers and what they describe as "identification codes".

Unless Soze can pop in and provide an explanation for the "error code" theory, I’m beginning to lean away from that.

<Bus Bomb letter has a SFC article about it on the 12th of November indicating the 11th.>

Thanks Simplicity. If the letter arrived on Tuesday the 11th, that means it likely was postmarked on the 10th, a Monday.

So I’m going to stick by my theory that, at least for this letter, the hand stamp date was set incorrectly.

One more thought.

It is highly doubtful that the Zodiac, even on a Monday, if the Sunday hand post-mark-tool dates happened to be wrong, would have handed the letters to a clerk at a post office window.

Aside from the exposure risk factor, the basic reason being the clerk would not have processed the letters without zip codes in the addresses. If the clerk were to process them, he would have manually added the zip code at the end of the address.

So I believe we can put to rest any scenario, for all the letters, other than them being processed at the central facility.

So I’m going to stick by my theory that, at least for this letter, the hand stamp date was set incorrectly.

I had another look and a bit of a think you might be correct.

Suppose to be on a pause but that 1 stamp little list letter is calling, thoughts?

Edited: i think we should wait for Soze and others.

Let’s pause here for a moment and consider what Soze is saying.

She seems to think that the service codes (1B, 4A, etc.) located on the postmarks are error codes that indicate which head and die needs servicing. Therefore, a postmark without these codes would not indicate that they were hand delivered necessarily, on that the machines they were run through didn’t need any servicing.

I’m still working on verifying this, but I think we need to strongly consider this as a possibility along with hand delivery.

Soze, correct me if I am wrong.

The evidence amassed so far says clearly absolutely not:

• p.32: comparison of postmarks of 1969 from various States across the US, illustrating the code use was ubiquitous and standardised at the time.[/*:m:14g4zb4d]
• p.33: report from historian at Postmark Museum, clarifying the codes "are machine numbers, indicating which machine in the San Francisco post office, and which of two or four cancelling dies within the machine, cancelled the letter. 2B means machine 2, die B."[/*:m:14g4zb4d]
• p.37: report from President of the International Machine Cancellation Society confirming "The numbers on the Zodiac letters referred to the head used in which machine. Each head contained two dies, either A or B," and identifying the machine used to achieve this as a "Pitney-Bowes Mark II" face canceller.[/*:m:14g4zb4d]
• p. 39: comparison of example postmarks containing number/letter codes and examples which don’t, clearly demonstrating multiple, and standardised, differences of head used in the two cases.[/*:m:14g4zb4d]
• p.39: link to article describing the regular operation (non-error) of the Pitney-Bowes Mark II face canceller, confirming that "The canceller parts of the machine were identified by a number followed by a letter within the dater."[/*:m:14g4zb4d]
• p.40: positions/orientations of postmarks on the three letters that don’t show a code, together with duplication on single letters, showing clearly that these were applied by hand.[/*:m:14g4zb4d][/list:u:14g4zb4d]

(Apologies if I’ve missed some.)

To even think about wanting to challenge this evidence – and having first searched the internet for the relevant postmark images – you’d have to then give a rationale as to how it could be that all of the Pitney-Bowes face cancellers were all of the time in an error state. Not to mention the implausibility of the proportion of Zodiac letters (all bar 3) that somehow just happened to run into P-B II’s that were broken, and how the ones that (apparently) weren’t broken managed to stamp multiple postmarks in randomised orientations in a very ‘human’ fashion.

We need to move on from this.

“This isn’t right! It’s not even wrong!”—Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958)

 

Let’s pause here for a moment and consider what Soze is saying.

She seems to think that the service codes (1B, 4A, etc.) located on the postmarks are error codes that indicate which head and die needs servicing. Therefore, a postmark without these codes would not indicate that they were hand delivered necessarily, on that the machines they were run through didn’t need any servicing.

I’m still working on verifying this, but I think we need to strongly consider this as a possibility along with hand delivery.

Soze, correct me if I am wrong.

The evidence amassed so far says clearly absolutely not:

• p.32: comparison of postmarks of 1969 from various States across the US, illustrating the code use was ubiquitous and standardised at the time.[/*:m:mkj8eych]
• p.33: report from historian at Postmark Museum, clarifying the codes "are machine numbers, indicating which machine in the San Francisco post office, and which of two or four cancelling dies within the machine, cancelled the letter. 2B means machine 2, die B."[/*:m:mkj8eych]
• p.37: report from President of the International Machine Cancellation Society confirming "The numbers on the Zodiac letters referred to the head used in which machine. Each head contained two dies, either A or B," and identifying the machine used to achieve this as a "Pitney-Bowes Mark II" face canceller.[/*:m:mkj8eych]
• p. 39: comparison of example postmarks containing number/letter codes and examples which don’t, clearly demonstrating multiple, and standardised, differences of head used in the two cases.[/*:m:mkj8eych]
• p.39: link to article describing the regular operation (non-error) of the Pitney-Bowes Mark II face canceller, confirming that "The canceller parts of the machine were identified by a number followed by a letter within the dater."[/*:m:mkj8eych]
• p.40: positions/orientations of postmarks on the three letters that don’t show a code, together with duplication on single letters, showing clearly that these were applied by hand.[/*:m:mkj8eych][/list:u:mkj8eych]

(Apologies if I’ve missed some.)

To even think about wanting to challenge this evidence – and having first searched the internet for the relevant postmark images – you’d have to then give a rationale as to how it could be that all of the Pitney-Bowes face cancellers were all of the time in an error state. Not to mention the implausibility of the proportion of Zodiac letters (all bar 3) that somehow just happened to run into P-B II’s that were broken, and how the ones that (apparently) weren’t broken managed to stamp multiple postmarks in randomised orientations in a very ‘human’ fashion.

We need to move on from this.

This is a fair summation, but I would still like to hear from Soze point of view.

Regardless, I don’t see how any of this information is relevant to the original aim of this thread which was to try and pin point where Zodiac mailed his letters from.