No offense but it looks like a straight line 1 to me. Doesn’t have that slant that a 7 would have.

Soze

Yes, I’m not suggesting a new theory here. I agree that it looks more like a 1 than a 7, but I find it helpful sometimes to think outside the box occasionally. Either way, even if it was mailed from some location within Inner Richmond, it is still remarkable close to the PS murder site.

Almost makes you wonder if he was spending the weekend in SF. I have heard that the actual location that Paul Stine picked up Zodiac was in front of the Westin San Fransico Hotel. Maybe he rented a room there that weekend, got picked up in front of the hotel, drove to PH and shot him, then fled before taking another cab back to the hotel where he penned the letter before returning the next day to the crime scene to mail it.

No offense but it looks like a straight line 1 to me. Doesn’t have that slant that a 7 would have.

Soze

Yes, I’m not suggesting a new theory here. I agree that it looks more like a 1 than a 7, but I find it helpful sometimes to think outside the box occasionally. Either way, even if it was mailed from some location within Inner Richmond, it is still remarkable close to the PS murder site.

Almost makes you wonder if he was spending the weekend in SF. I have heard that the actual location that Paul Stine picked up Zodiac was in front of the Westin San Fransico Hotel. Maybe he rented a room there that weekend, got picked up in front of the hotel, drove to PH and shot him, then fled before taking another cab back to the hotel where he penned the letter before returning the next day to the crime scene to mail it.

Isn’t it also close to the original call Stine was heading to when he picked up Z? I wonder sometimes if Z didn’t already know about the call and was waiting for a cab to head towards that direction. I’m thinking in terms of the Z possibly knowing the people Stine was originally to pick up. I could be wrong. For years my focus was the letters and NOT the details of each crime.

Soze

There has been a lot of discussion on Tom’s site re: whether Z knew Stine beforehand especially as it relates to Gaikowski.

I’m less inclined to believe this, just as I don’t believe Darlene F and Z knew each other either.

The human mind loves patterns. We are hard-wired to make sense of things. When someone kills another person, we first look to see how those two people were connected. It’s natural for people to want to connect the dots so to speak with Z and his victims.

I think what’s most terrifying about Z is that his crimes were completely random, nonsensical, and impersonal.

A couple points:

The (likely) mailing from an inner Richmond district standing mailbox was not only relatively close to the Stine scene, but also would be in the neighborhood of the SFPD precinct that was working the case (where Toschi, Pelissetti, Fouke etc were based).

(The precinct – on 6th Avenue – was also 3 1/2 blocks from the reportedly original Stine destination of 9th Ave and Anza.)

Not sure that neighborhood mail boxes back then fed into a central processing station. My guess is the letter would have been postmarked at the local post office, which in this case was on 9th Avenue and Clement — 4 1/2 blocks from the SFPD precinct.

Also: Neighborhood freestanding mailboxes rarely if ever included Sunday pickups. And the boxes sometimes had only one weekday pickup time. Even if this box did have a morning and afternoon pickup, it would be likely that by the time the clerk got around to it, it would have been Monday afternoon, and the letter received the PM stamp regardless of when it was picked up from the freestanding box.

That would mean: The letter could have been mailed as early as Saturday night (despite the ‘last night’ language in the letter). Under that scenario, the killer would be mailing it a few hours after the crime, right in the face of the cops working the case at the precinct nearby.

Richmond? Makes me think of Harvey Colliver.

Different places.

There’s the City of Richmond, which is next to Berkeley — and then there is the Richmond District of San Francisco.

Different places.

There’s the City of Richmond, which is next to Berkeley — and then there is the Richmond District of San Francisco.

Ah.

The postmark shows Inner Richmond. Did it come from a street level box, handed to the postman as he went from home to home collecting and depositing mail, dropped off at the local post office or left in his own mailbox with the flag up? No way anyone can say for certain. All anyone can do is humor themselves in that regard. I do however think its safe to say that no one would be humoring themselves if they said the envelope wasmy given to a postman in person or mailed from the Z’sbown mailbox.

Regular post offices do have the ability to cancel stamps. The only cancel they have is the round section you see with city, state, zip and date. They dab the stamp on an ink pad and then stamp the stamp. There is nothing else to the cancel like those squiggly lines we see on the envelope. It is used, for the most part, to cancel every stamp on an envelope or package that has excessive postage. Once the stamps are cancelled the envelope or package makes its way to its destination as-is. All other mail pieces make its way to a sectional center to be cancelled. A sectional center is a network hub that routes mail between the individual post offices in the city and to other sectional centers abroad. The envelope the Stine letter was mailed in was picked up (somewhere in Inner Richmond), transported to a sectional in San Francisco, canceled on a machine and then, rerouted to its destination. At no time did an individual post office cancel that letter.

As far as the times I listed it is USPS standard operating procedure. That letter was in a sectional between 12 and 5 pm based on the pm mark. What isn’t known, is at what time local offices, stopped bagging mail for delivery to a sectional center for the a.m., p.m. and -pm cancellations. I hope you dig for it and find it because I haven’t been able to find it. I do think it would be nice to narrow him down to a particular time of the morning.

Soze

Soze, thanks for this clarification – that the letter was machine-cancelled at a sectional center.

That would make it even more likely that a letter picked up from a freestanding neighborhood box on a Monday, either in the morning or afternoon — would receive a PM stamp.

(The Richmond district was predominantly multi-family housing, bisected by two commercial streets, Clement and Geary. Technically, a mailbox in the inner Richmond could have been as close as 4 blocks from the Stine scene.)

Based upon the fact that two letters were intercepted at public dropboxes prior by the letter carriers, I think it’s safe to assume that most, if not all, letters were mailed in this fashion. That’s really the point of this thread: to see if we can identify exactly where those mailings were done to try and create some geographical profile.

So far, based on rather incomplete info, it appears as if the letters were mailed in the northeastern section of San Francisco with two hotspots being along Route 1 (19th Ave) and one other along Route 101.

Fascinating info and work guys. Well done and thanks for sharing.

So far, based on rather incomplete info, it appears as if the letters were mailed in the northeastern section of San Francisco with two hotspots being along Route 1 (19th Ave) and one other along Route 101.

Stine’s school, San Francisco State, is located on the west side of 19th Avenue. I’ve always had a suspicion that Stine knew Zodiac.

I tried the best I can. Please feel free to amend

Thanks, Cragle! This great!

I can’t speak for the others, but the 1A and 1B would be Central and Inner Richmond respectively.

4 would refer to Twin Peaks West area that includes Balboa Terrance and City College which we already have evidence of.

I believe the others: 85, 89, 940, 913, etc. refer to processing centers rather than neighborhoods which, if accurate, would make nailing down the location of the letter drop far more difficult.

Interesting that not a single (That we know of) was from around the immediate Vallejo area.

Even before the Stine attack he was posting from the SF Richmond area, so one must assume that he would’ve had to have a reason to be there. Especially when you consider that the first letters were postmarked on a weekday (Thursday PM) from the central Richmond area.