The Robison family murders are the number 2 most likely unverified Zodiac attack after Cheri Jo. Change my mind.

I looked at this case about a year ago, and I was intrigued by the name "Zodius", but ultimately I was unimpressed. Now, thanks to AK Wilks, my eyes have been opened, not to Ted, I’m not going there, but to this being a better Zodiac crime than you don’t remember.

It seems I didn’t look far enough into it and I wonder if others have made the same mistake? I had a fundamental misunderstanding about what had occurred regarding the tipster’s letter and after having this understanding corrected, by AK Wilks, I now find the case far more compelling. More compelling in fact than any other possible Zodiac attack, with the exception of Bates.

Looking only at the evidence available, on paper, to me it looks a lot better than Domigos Edwards, or Ray Davis, and a damn sight better than any of the others.

So I’m wondering why there’s so little love for this case?

I’ll explain my misunderstanding of the case, as I think it may be part of the reason others have dismissed it. The case has been discussed on various threads, but in many of these threads a key detail is often obscured.
Most discussions of the topic talk about how the police received a letter from a tipster, who wrote that they had information that they would reveal, if a classified ad, containing a cryptic message, was placed in the paper. Part of the message contained the name, or moniker, "Zodius". At the time it seemed curious, but police get loads of weird tips, so really I wasn’t all that impressed.

The problem is, that’s not what happened according to a reporter. The police are quoted as saying that the letter from the tipster already contained information about the killing, information interesting enough to make police place the personal ad twice. AK Wilks has intimated that he has reason to believe the information provided to police, prior to any ads being placed, was of a nature only the killer would know. I would love to hear more about AK Wilks source, but I’m prepared to believe it, since the quote in the newspaper below seems to support this belief.

I don’t know about you, but I think that makes all the difference in the world. There is a big difference between a tip asking for a cryptic message to be published and a tip containing information about the murder and then saying more will be given, if the newspaper publishes the cryptic message. Do you see the difference? In the first scenario it could be any hoaxer, in the second it’s probably the killer, and not just any killer, a very familiar one. It shows that this tipster was either the killer, or someone very close to them and I think if you read the subtext you’d have to agree that it probably wasn’t his wife. Only the killer would behave like such a jackass in not just handing over all the information. What good would the cryptic classified ad do for an innocent informer?

Notice I haven’t mentioned the ammo being the same, or the stacking of bodies. I don’t consider those things to be in the same league as the other evidence. Zodiac can buy whatever ammo he likes. What I consider special is the moniker and the penchant for cryptic messages in newspapers.

When all we have in a case is ammo and MO, I can understand relying on those factors to inform our opinions, but to my mind evidence like a similar moniker and the writing of cryptic letters for publishing in a newspaper, just dwarfs these forms of evidence. I don’t care if he beat them to death with a rubber duck if he called himself Zodius .

We don’t say about the Stine case, "well, he had a piece of Stine’s shirt, buuuut it’s not a .22 calibre, sooooo I guess it’s a hoaxer?".

The other striking part of the story is the report that a suspicious stranger by the name of Roebert called in the days prior to the attack and spoke in a distinctly "robotic" voice. This is in the police report and it seems it was an outstanding detail, since great pains are gone to to describe it’s distinctive character.

According to Scientific American, there are between 25 and 50 serial killers who are active in the United States at any given time. Of those 50, how many of them do you think would be using a moniker that contained the letters "Zodic"? Could be more than one, but I don’t like those odds.

People talk so enthusiastically about other cases simply because they happened at around the right period, in the right location and have a vaguely similar MO. I get looking in the Zodiacs backyard, but this case gets dismissed despite having circumstances that trivialize concerns over MO, and location.

I know AK Wilks and others have written a lot about this already and I’m not trying to repeat those threads. I wanted to start a thread that looked at this case, but also as a larger conversation about how we go ranking evidence and comparing cases.

I dismissed this case because it seemed superficially absurd, I mean Michigan, a whole family, some random tipster, some knock off Zodius? If it was our Z, why didn’t he just go the whole hog and call himself "Zodiac", what’s with cheap knock-off? But that was before I understood just how likely it is Zodius was the killer and that he, the killer, wrote a letter to police asking them to publish a cryptic message in the newspaper. I don’t think that should even be call a coincidence, it’s more accurate to say that it is favourably comparible to the Zodiac. Coincidence implies luck, or chance. This isn’t chance, it’s just flat out really really similar, but not quite the same. That’s something else.

Basically you have three reasonable options:

1) The whole thing is a prankster. The letter to the police didn’t actually contain sensitive information. Since we don’t have the letter, we can’t assess the accuracy of the newspaper report. Forum members who claim the letter contained information only the killer could know are speculating.

2) The newspaper report is probably accurate and the subtext does imply the information received by police was likely from the killer, but there was simply two killers operating around the same time with a similar name.

3) The newspaper report is probably accurate and the subtext does imply the information received by police was likely from the killer. The killer called themselves Zodius. The Zodius killer asked that a cryptic message be placed in the newspaper. The Zodius killer is likely The Zodiac killer.

I’d love to hear what people think about the coincidences and how this stacks in comparison to coincidences in the other cases.