I mean you don’t need any intellectual capacity at all to know that shooting a man dead in the centre of a street at a time of night and then decide to hang around the scene having a great time trying to make the cab look a bit cleaner and remove any prints, common sense and instinct alone should be screaming "GO! RUN….Get as far away from here as you can as quickly as possible." Consequences for being caught there at the cab? Hydrogen Cyanide Gas suffocation in Cali’s death chamber. Noting to worry about really. No urgent need to pay attention to this possibility, is there? Plus, the police are half a block away and closing leaving you only one possible escape route that enables you to be out of sight and that is through the Cherry entrance and into the Presidio. Zodiac? Elects to ignore in favour of the police riddled streets!

Genius!

I will now stop posting or someone may complain and i’ll get arrested by the Mod Meanies!

I didn’t take offense to your sarcastic undertone. I still don’t buy what you’re saying either. I don’t think that Z shot a man in a suburban street and stuck around because he was stupid. I think it had more to do with audacity and the thrill of the risk. I also don’t think it was just dumb luck that he got away that night. I think he felt crackproof, and for good reason. A reason we’re still trying to figure out. The fact is that yes, it’s true, if the dispatcher said "white male" that night, the case would be solved. However, the mistake was corrected shortly after, and if Z wasn’t very clever, he would have been caught once LE knew who they were after. Also, Chappie, you’re saying that Z looked very conspicuous walking away when Fouke spotted him, I disagree. Putting your head down and walking toward a house isn’t that conspicuous to me. Besides, we’re just going on Fouke’s word, which, as we all know, is dubious.

The way I look at it is that there’s no way that someone could be as bold as Z and not get away with it unless he was extremely clever. There is a piece of the puzzle that we don’t know, something that gave him the confidence to do what he did and pull it off.

Instead of going out of your way to argue Z’s stupidity, why not ask yourself why the dispatcher said black male that night, or why the kids, or no one for that matter, heard a gunshot, why wasn’t Z soaked in blood, why, if there were so many witnesses that night, and a composite they could all agree looked similar to the man they saw, does he continue to evade capture.

Hi-

A funny story about handwriting. A few years ago, an SFPD Inspector I know was telling me about a document examiner related to the case who was asked to settle an issue relating to a handwritten will from a guy in Massachusetts. As he examined the will, he noticed something like 19 of the 26 or so traits in the handwriting of the Zodiac killer. This was by pure happenstance, since the case was not related to the Zodiac case.

They did some research and sure enough this guy had lived in the Bay Area at the right time. For the record, I believe he was a gay man. This expert took the handwriting samples to the next forensics conference and without saying what it was related to, asked if the handwriting by the guy matched samples the expert lifted some some of the Z letters. 90% of the people raised their hands in agreement. He then said that the handwriting was related to the Z case. Nobody raised their hands.

The reason is that handwriting experts make their living by never being proven wrong. If they are wrong in a high profile case, that tarnishes their reputation and will make them less desirable and marketable as an expert in court. So nobody was willing to go out on a limb and say the guy was Z despite the close handwriting match.

So if you think the Z case will be solved on handwriting alone, you’re probably wrong.

Mike

I like this story.

Hi-

What is also interesting in asking if Z was able to successfully disguise his writing is that after over forty long years, is it possible that not even one time Z wrote something in his natural writing that fell into the hands of (or was even seen by) someone who had seen the Z handwriting and could have recognized that three-stroke letter k?

I don’t know how you quantify that but if his handwriting was such a dead giveaway, why didn’t it ever give him away?

Mike

This is fascinating to me. Actually, when you think about it, I don’t think it was all that hard for Z to disguise his handwriting and do it consistently. He would not have wanted anyone such as an employer, family member or friend to recognize it. He was organized so all he would have had to do is design his own fake handwriting style (much as there are different printing fonts to choose from these days when typing).

He must have spent a long time working on those codes so why not a fake printing style? He could have just made a chart for himself to refer to similar to the way letters were posted in classrooms all over when Z would have been starting school (Aa, Bb, Cc, etc.).

Most of us have probably tried different writing styles and printing styles, especially when we were younger. I know I would often daydream and practice writing "backhanded" just to see if I could when I was in high school on rare occasions. Most of us could probably easily copy Z’s individual letters to form a chart as they are really basic.

I do tend to think his misspellings were done intentionally as well but that the slant, rhythm and other factors involved in the writings were his own natural style.

He could have consistently printed using all caps when he was writing on his job or to family and friends and the odds of anyoonne connecting him to the printed writings would be slim to none at that time in all likelihood assuming those persons were following Z on the news. If anyone close to him saw the wanted poster and saw a resemblance, it probably would have been very easy for him to point out that there are so many people who looked like it as we ourselves have seen. It is amazing how many men look like the poster and many of them resemble each other but when taken as a whole, many of them look nothing alike.

I’ll say this, for what it’s worth: I’ve seen samples of dozens of Z suspects that look pretty close, sort of, to the confirmed Z letters. Someone even posted a sample of Bob Dylan’s handwriting that looked pretty good! So, as far as shaping individual letters is concerned, at least, I think Z had a fairly generic sort of style – nothing that really screams out at you.

That said from a purely amateur standpoint, mind you. What would catch the eye of a real handwriting expert is, of course, a very different matter.

I know little about hand writing analysis .
I saw this site which talks of writing analysis of the top serial killers , Z included and decided to post a link, maybe some have not heard of it.
http://www.annakoren.com/handwriting-an … llers.html

Instead of going out of your way to argue Z’s stupidity, why not ask yourself why the dispatcher said black male that night, or why the kids, or no one for that matter, heard a gunshot, why wasn’t Z soaked in blood, why, if there were so many witnesses that night, and a composite they could all agree looked similar to the man they saw, does he continue to evade capture.

"Instead of going out of your way to argue Z’s stupidity, why not ask yourself why the dispatcher said black male that night." Ok, good idea!

**Why did the dispatcher say NMA that night I wonder? Hmm, Don’t know!" ** There.

In reality though I have, of course, brought that point up many times and suggest that there never was an incorrect NMA description given over the air by an incompetent dispatcher and that the Black Male incorrect broadcast may simply have been something they came up with after Zodiac had publically slated them with his ‘PS – 2 cops pulled a goof’ reveal. Before Zodiac wrote that very damaging information to the Chronicle, no mention had been made anywhere in any reports of the description being incorrectly given as NMA just the same as there was no mention of any white suspect on Jackson St until, yet again, Zodiac himself announces it and only then does Fouke send the memo describing the encounter.

The NMA, Negro Male Adult description broadcast error was something I believe they invented in response to Zodiac bragging about having been stopped by cops on Jackson Street and in response they, knowing how damaging it will be to admit allowing a white male to walk away if your aware the suspect himself is white, came up with an excuse for allowing the white male to walk off.

Anyway, I believe the topic is Zodiac’s handwriting?

What probably happened was this.

The kids said "He’s got a black jacket on."

The dispatcher heard it as "He’s got black skin" or "He’s black".

What probably happened was this.

The kids said "He’s got a black jacket on."

The dispatcher heard it as "He’s got black skin" or "He’s black".

Maybe the witness is colour blind and gave the description to a hearing impaired 911 operator.

Maybe he asked the eight year old "Can you give me a description of the assailant?" And the kid replied "Sure. Kjell Qvale" Lol.

The dispatcher almost certainly wouldn’t have used the words "black" or "white". My feeling has always been that when the call came in from the kids, the dispatcher hastily scribbled down their description which would have included "WMA". I think then when relaying the description to the available officers, the dispatcher misread his notes and dictated them as "NMA".

My upper case N’s and W’s look almost exactly the same and if the dispatcher was rushing to take down the description and then relay all the information quickly to an officer then this would have been a really easy mistake to make.

Why are people discussing the black/white suspect issue on Stine’s killer, in this thread?

This thread is about the Zodiac killers handwriting