I’m guessing the Belli letter, for one, would have required more than 6 cents postage, due to the weight. The Little List letter might have as well.

That would mean they likely weren’t handed to a clerk and hand cancelled.

On the other hand, it’s possible they were handed to a clerk and the clerk weighed them and they were under the limit (and possibly the clerk themself applied the stamps after determining the weight, which was common).

It would be good to confirm if there were other explanations for the 3 letters not to contain 2-digit codes, besides the explanation of being handed to a clerk and hand-cancelled.

and it is the clerk’s saliva or water from a sponge pad that attached the stamps. So wrong DNA or none.

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.

There is an interview with someone who was driving his girlfriend’s new sportscar. They happened to have parked with the engine still going at the site of the first attack. They were facing the roadway, I believe. A car passed and then backed up. The young man felt concerned and took off. The person in the other car followed. He sped up and the other driver sped up. He at the last minute made a turn and the other vehicle being bigger and bulkier could not make the turn. He said that at that time not many people lived in the area and everyone knew every other person’s car. He didn’t recognise the car. He felt the person following him was not from the area.

I don’t understand this fascination with Rincon. He could have dropped it in any mailbox in the SF area or taken it to any post office. I don’t believe he would know the ins and outs of the postal service. I mean I don’t even know where MY SPC is. Do you know what your SPC is? How would Z?

Again, to summarise.

We have discovered from various sources that all mail across at least four major 3-digit Zip-code regions (940, 941, 943 & 944) were, at the time in question, undoubtedly routinely processed at the SCF for San Francisco. We also know that, barring any exceptional circumstances that we are just now beginning to look at, mail arriving in this way would have been routinely machine-cancelled through the then-in-operation Pitney-Bowes Mk II face cancellers.

Three of the Zodiac letters were not so cancelled, hence we have three exceptions. Why?

The first two of these letters were both cancelled Sunday PM, so whatever the ‘exceptional circumstance’ was in each of these cases, it cannot have involved any form of alternative hand-cancelling at a local post-office. These two, although hand-cancelled, must still have been processed at the SCF.

It has yet to be confirmed (or otherwise), but there is much to point to the SCF for San Francisco having been at Rincon Annex. Note, however, if confirmed as such, it was not just such. It was also a functioning counter post office and, for people aware of it as such, they would have been aware (if true) of it’s SCF status also.

So, were we to ascertain – as we are currently researching – that the ‘exceptional circumstances’ that relate to the three hand-cancelled letters are that these letters were hand-delivered to a mailbox at Rincon Annex outside of counter hours (Sat/Sun), then we would have identified this location as where Zodiac had mailed three of his letters (two with pieces of Stine’s shirt); which may or may not, in turn, suggest that the others that went through the regular processing were mailed from outside San Francisco.

I would therefore argue that the current focus on Rincon Annex/SCF is very much in line with the question posed in the OP:

Do we know where each letter/card/cipher was mailed from? I know they were mailed from the city, but I mean do we know the specific mailbox locations each correspondence was sent?

The only thing is how well known was it to the general public that the Rincon Annex was the sorting centre?

To throw in one more twist, I read in a postal worker’s forum a couple of comments that indicated the automatic machines (nationwide) didn’t operate on Sundays. I may have picked this up out of context, and it may not apply to Rincon Annex in 1969.

Okay, I found one.

The ‘Concerned Citizen’ mailing, in fact.

Postmarked 10 August 1969, PM – a Sunday – and clearly machine-cancelled. (By a Pitney-Bowes Mark II facer-canceller, no less!)

Interesting. Do you have a link for the letter that was enclosed?

Likely, that he wrote that letter at his place of work rather than his home. He read the paper that morning, snuck away during a break and hurriedly wrote the letter on work paper, then mailed it during or after work. The rest were written at home on his own Eaton paper.

Would that timeline make sense?

The Woolworths was on the corner of Powell and Market and a short walk to the Rincon Annex https://www.facebook.com/LostSanFrancis … 84/?type=3
19 minute walk from Woolworths to Rincon Annex

1hr for lunch doesn’t leave much time to cover much ground. What is the postmark on the letter am or pm?

Academy of Art University is just in that area.

Posted by: @richard-grinell

Good. So what’s the game plan at this point?

Soze

I think we agree that the Zip/postal codes are now correct ?

We still are unsure what the letter after the postal Zone denotes ?

The ones that confuse me are the 6’s, if they are Postboxes as believed, how does an outgoing letter have this postmark. I know this side of the pond that PO Boxes are only used for incoming mail ? You can not send an item from a PO Box, is this the same in US, or would a business who used a PO Bo’s outgoing mail be also stamped with a 6 ?

The letters with 4/6’s were all posted from a relatively small area in SF so it would logical to assume that Z had some sort of affiliation with the Rincon area. Also this would explain how the 2nd letter as Richard believed was hand delivered to the paper.

Personally I still believe that he drove to the Richmond area and then commuted into the Rincon area via the street car.

I’m going to look into which letters were sent from where to see if there is anything interesting, (i.e. these hand delivered letter was obviously rushed to paper as a directly reply to LE stating that they needed more info from Z to prove that he was the murderer). Are there any other examples where this takes place ?

Also PG&E needs a closer look as there seems to be quite a few coincidences with Z.

Lastly the hand cancellations on the letters, the writing on the envelope of both of these was so different than usual and the fact they were hand cancelled leads me to believe that they were posted at an actual Post Office and not a mailbox ?

What’s your thoughts on what needs to be looked at Soze ?

The letters denote districts. Here is a complete map (scroll to bottom of page)

http://www.sforelo.com/neighborhoods.html

1a Central Richmond
1b Inner Richmond
1c Jordan Park, Laurel Heights
1d Lake
1e Outer Richmond
1f Sea Cliff
1g Lone Mountain
2a Golden Gate Heights
2b Outer Parkside
2c Outer Sunset
2d Parkside
2e Central Sunset
2f Inner Sunset
2g Inner Parkside
3a Lake Shore
3b Merced Heights
3c Pine Lake Park
3d Stonestown
3e Lakeside
3f Merced Manor
3g Ingleside Heights
3h Ingleside
3j Oceanview
4a Balboa Terrace
4b Diamond Heights
4c Forest Hills
4d Forest Knolls
4e Ingleside Terrace
4f Midtown Terrace
4g St. Francis Wood
4h Miraloma Park
4j Forest Hill Extension
4k Sherwood Forest
4m Monterey Heights
4n Mount Davidson Manor
4p Westwood Highlands
4r Westwood Park
4s Sunnyside
4t West Portal
5a Glen Park
5b Haight Ashbury
5c Noe Valley
5d Twin Peaks
5e Cole Valley/Parnassus Heights
5f Buena Vista Park/Asbury Heights
5g Corona Heights
5h Clarendon Heights
5j Duboce Triangle
5k Eureka Valley, Dolores Heights
5m Mission Dolores
6a Anza Vista
6b Hayes Valley
6c Lower Pacific Heights
6d Western Addition
6e Alamo Square
6f North Panhandle
7a Marina
7b Pacific Heights
7c Presidio Heights
7d Cow Hollow
8a Downtown
8b Financial District
8c Nob Hill
8d North Beach
8e Russian Hill
8f Van Ness, Civic Center
8g Telegraph Hill
8h North Waterfront
8j Tenderloin
9a Bernal Heights
9c Inner Mission
9d Mission Bay
9e Potrero Hill
9f South of Market
9g Yerba Buena
9h South Beach
9j Central Waterfront/Dogpatch
10a Bayview
10b Crocker Amazon
10c Excelsior
10d Outer Mission
10e Visitacion Valley
10f Portola
10g Silver Terrace
10h Mission Terrace
10j Hunter’s Point
10k Bayview Heights
10m Candlestick Point
10n Little Hollywood

Interested in the Duboce Triangle as new Z suspect lived on Duboce in 1971. Interested in this mailbox discussion but have to catch up. Also interested in Soze’s theory of bus bomb diagram actually being a map of that area. (If anyone can get me in touch with Soze please do)

We’ve determined that the codes on the postmarks are a dead end. They refer to the machine that processed them in the post office and have no connection at all to where they were mailed from.