Nachtsider, it’s possible Stine was Z’s way of balancing the books. Don’t think Stine was spur of moment though. He must have had some kind of escape plan, either a place to go or more likely a car waiting, to get away that night. The couples in lover’s lanes and stine have obe thing in common, besides being students, they make easy targets. I wonder if that had more to do with it.

Chappie, Z kept on going with his letter writing campaign long after he announced he would no longer announce his murders. Maybe he started to get more of a thrill from the letters than from killing.

I can see how the Stine murder would make him wake up to the risk he was taking, but do you ever wonder why, if he felf so close to being captured, did he mail the letter taking credit for Stine, included it with Stine’s shirt, to prove it, implicating himself, even though he knew he had been seen by police and nearly apprehended. Wouldn’t it make more sense to keep the police thinking it was a random murder or robbery/murder? I guess he couldn’t resist rubbing it in the cops’ noses, how they almost had him, how they let the biggest fish in the pond go.

If he wanted easy targets, Joe, I say he could have gone for hookers, winos or homeless people. Those are arguably even more of doozies than necking couples.

I agree that he had some sort of escape plan at PH (his car, yes), but I don’t see this as being incompatible with the notion that Paul was a spur of the moment target. He could have had the escape plan in place for a planned murder at the lovers’ lane area, then used it to get away after the unplanned shooting of Paul.

As for your last point, I think it goes to show that this fella could not kill someone and keep quiet about it. Which only strengthens my belief that there were no more murders after PH.

If he wanted easy targets, Joe, I say he could have gone for hookers, winos or homeless people. Those are arguably even more of doozies than necking couples.

Unfortunately, many don’t give a shit about those people. Certainly shock factor was part of it. Scaring the public. I don’t think killing hookers, winos or homeless would have had the same result….sad to say.

Couples in isolated places are simply easy targets, as is a cab driver.

Yes. I don’t think it has to be more complicated than this. Everything points to Z choosing his victims based on location more than anything else. Ease of access, to put it brutally simple. Isolated spots, element of surprise, defenseless victims, good chance of a clean getaway. These are common factors in all his killings. Stine represents a step up in terms of risk, but much of the same is present here as well. Z probably regarded it as fairly safe to kill a cab driver at night in an affluent part of town – but it became more messy than he had anticipated.

And so he retired – because he realized that if he kept on killing people he’d get caught sooner rather than later. It was a matter of coincidence that he wasn’t apprehended that night in Presidio Heights. It sounds absurd given what we’re talking about, but he may have sobered up, so to speak, after the close encounter with the cops in SF.

Well, it’s a possibility. He may have gone on to continue his "career" anonymously, as he threatened to do in the letters, but I somehow doubt that.

I think there were a few parts to his motive.

First I think is was psychological issues.

Second, since, I believe a lot of the victims or at least their names and places the crimes occurred were known in advance—Zodiac wanted to play a game and show his intelligence. Simple as that.

And that brings me back to psychological issues.

I would like to posit that the Zodiac was greatly influenced by Fritz Lang and Lang’s wife, Thea Von Harbou, and in particular the novels/movies "M" and "Metropolis". From Wikipedia:

A group of children are playing an elimination game in the courtyard of an apartment building in Berlin[5] using a chant about a child murderer. A woman sets the table for dinner, waiting for her daughter to come home from school. A wanted poster warns of a serial killer preying on children, as anxious parents wait outside a school.

Little Elsie Beckmann leaves school, bouncing a ball on her way home. She is approached by Hans Beckert, who is whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. He offers to buy her a balloon from a blind street-vendor. He walks and talks with her. Elsie’s place at the dinner table remains empty, her ball is shown rolling away across a patch of grass, and her balloon is lost in the telephone lines overhead.

In the wake of Elsie’s death, Beckert sends an angry letter about his crimes to the newspapers, from which the police extract clues using the new techniques of fingerprinting and handwriting analysis. Under mounting pressure from city leaders, the police work around the clock. Inspector Karl Lohmann instructs his men to intensify their search and to check the records of recently released psychiatric patients to look for those with a history of violence against children. They stage frequent raids to question known criminals, disrupting underworld business so badly that Der Schränker ("The Safecracker") calls a meeting of the city’s criminal bosses. They decide to organize their own manhunt, using beggars to watch and guard the children.

The police discover two clues corresponding to the killer’s letter in Beckert’s rented rooms. They wait there to arrest him.

Beckert sees a young girl in the reflection of a shop window. Following her, he is thwarted when the girl meets her mother. When he encounters another young girl, he succeeds in befriending her, but the blind beggar recognizes his whistling. The blind man tells one of his friends, who tails the killer with assistance from other beggars he alerts along the way. Afraid of losing him, one young man chalks a large M (for Mörder, meaning "murderer" in German) on his hand, pretends to trip and bumps into Beckert, marking the back of his clothing.

The beggars close in. When Beckert finally realizes he is being followed, he hides inside a large office building just before the workers leave for the evening. The beggars call Der Schränker, and a team of criminals arrives. They tie up and torture a guard for information. After capturing the remaining watchmen, they systematically search the building from coal cellar to attic, finally catching Beckert. When a watchman manages to trip the silent alarm, the crooks narrowly escape with their prisoner before the police arrive. One, however, is captured and eventually tricked into revealing the purpose of the break-in (nothing was stolen) and where Beckert would be taken.

The criminals drag Beckert to an abandoned distillery to face a kangaroo court. He finds a large, silent crowd awaiting him. Beckert is given a "lawyer", who gamely argues in his defense but fails to win any sympathy from the "jury". Beckert delivers an impassioned monologue, saying that his urges compel him to commit murders that he later regrets, while the other criminals present break the law by choice. His "lawyer" points out that the presiding "judge" is himself wanted on three counts of totschlag (a form of homicide under German law). Beckert pleads to be handed over to the police, asking, "Who knows what it’s like to be me?" Just as the enraged mob is about to kill him, the police arrive to arrest both Beckert and the criminals.

As the real trial passes, five judges prepare to pass judgment on Beckert. Before the sentence is announced, the shot cuts to three of the victims’ mothers crying. Elsie’s mother says no sentence would bring back the dead children, and "One has to keep closer watch over the children." The screen goes black as she adds, "All of you."[6]

There are thousands of possible motives. Every time a new suspect pops up, there are probably a dozen or more motives that the person could have had that pop up as well.

San Francisco in 1969 had so much going on. More than pretty much every other city in the U.S. That makes it damn near impossible to nail down a motive. For me personally, I have been reading a lot about the Minutemen the last several months and I think they had several great motives. They claimed that if Bob DePugh went to prison that they would assassinate some public figure (I forget who). DePugh was sentenced to prison, so there is the revenge factor. If they really did have something to do with the assassinations of JFK and MLK Jr., then they had to have had protection from some form of law enforcement or government. In 1968 they were planning on taking down the government and also starting a race war in California. There are members of and associates of the group that could have had motives as well, but I will not get into all of that.

Basically, my point is that there are limitless ways to look at the motive angle, and most of them make sense for specific suspects.

No matter how you look at it, at the core it’s about power and control for the zodiac. Probably as he progressed, he found he got more of a feeling of power from the letters than from killing. But yeah, who knows?

Agreed. But why did he feel the need for power and to be in control? I would bet money that he came from either a strict household or a family that ignored him completely and/or treated him like dirt.

Whatever the motive behind Z’s crimes, it doesn’t make sense for him to just decide in Nov of 1969 that "I will no longer announce to anyone when I commit my murders…"

Good point… which brings up the question… what happened in Nov. 1969? IF the Zodiac crimes were somehow used as a cover for something else, did that something else come to an end or no longer need Zodiac’s media attention to draw away from whatever it was?

Hi-

FWIW, a professional profiler who is considered among the world’s elite told me in 2004 that Z was killing for the motive of power. If you want to size up that profiler, who is one of the three co-founders of the prestigious Vidocq Society of Philadelphia and is called the "living Sherlock Holmes," you can read 2010 book, The Murder Room. He will also be giving his opinion of a suspect this evening on "The Hunt" with John Walsh, CNN. I happened to see him in the trailer for that show the other day…

Mike

The very best motive of a homicide is that someone simply wanted to ELIMINATE his victims. How rare is it, that someone just kills for fun…(I don’t like Mondays, even she had a different reason..). It’s hard to believe that Z sort of ‘liked’ to kill, imo. Hunting, ok. Thrill, ok. But is it enough to start killing someone? IMO it’s not, although he pretends so..

Personally I rather see a type of guy being frustrated and lacking of emotional and social capabilities, who – what sort ever of – had a problem with those people. Sexually motivated – no. Sexually frustrated – yes. Jealousness? My personal favorite motive..ideal for lover’s lane killings.

– Jealous about CJB (she was killed in an alley where military guys used to hang out, also wasn’t there an argument seen before?)
– Jealous about Cecile Shepard vs. Bryan Hartnell, with Cecilie Shepard’s ties to Riverside
– Betty Lou Jensen vs. Mike Mageau
– Darlene Ferrin, possibly reporting the murder she had seen to the news (or jealous about ‘Warren’ viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1297)
– Possibly Kathleen Johns (jealous about whom?)
– Paul Stine (hate killing? Knew too much?)

Overall I believe that it is likely that Z’s killings were not like e.g. the Zebra killings but rather personally motivated against the victims.

QT

The very best motive of a homicide is that someone simply wanted to ELIMINATE his victims. How rare is it, that someone just kills for fun…(I don’t like Mondays, even she had a different reason..). It’s hard to believe that Z sort of ‘liked’ to kill, imo. Hunting, ok. Thrill, ok. But is it enough to start killing someone? IMO it’s not, although he pretends so..

Personally I rather see a type of guy being frustrated and lacking of emotional and social capabilities, who – what sort ever of – had a problem with those people. Sexually motivated – no. Sexually frustrated – yes. Jealousness? My personal favorite motive..ideal for lover’s lane killings.

– Jealous about CJB (she was killed in an alley where military guys used to hang out, also wasn’t there an argument seen before?)
– Jealous about Cecile Shepard vs. Bryan Hartnell, with Cecilie Shepard’s ties to Riverside
– Betty Lou Jensen vs. Mike Mageau
– Darlene Ferrin, possibly reporting the murder she had seen to the news (or jealous about ‘Warren’ viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1297)
– Possibly Kathleen Johns (jealous about whom?)
– Paul Stine (hate killing? Knew too much?)

Overall I believe that it is likely that Z’s killings were not like e.g. the Zebra killings but rather personally motivated against the victims.

QT

Everything points to them being about fun. It’s a power trip. The murders are random in the sense that he didn’t know his victims, with the possible exception of Bates. Sometimes, like Morf, I wonder if the murders were a secondary thrill, and the real thrill came from taunting and terrorising the bay area.

The lack of any obvious sexual or ritualistic components to the killings could certainly suggest that they were, so to speak, secondary in nature – means to an end, and that end was terror, notoriety, power games, call it what you will.

The obvious exception here is – yet again – Lake B. Knife, costume, ferocious stabbing. And no taunting/boasting by letter(s) subsequently.

I’m starting to think there is something to the jilted lover aspect. Bates, Jensen, Ferrin, and Sheppard all had a jilted lover or lovers harassing/ stalking them. There are other easy targets besides couples in lovers’ lanes, but that was where he was drawn. Stine, of course, being the anomaly.

Hey Soze, I don’t see how you can say that when there was such an established pattern before Stine. So he deviates, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t motivated by jealousy or insecurity when it came to the opposite sex.

I’m currently taking Criminal Justice courses.

I like this statement in our textbook and it rings very true of Zodiac, imo:

"The acts of serial killers are typically considered in discussions of homicides, and, indeed, the very term used to describe this group of offenders focuses on the killing part of the crime. However, to the perpetrator, the actual homicide is more of an incidental event.

These killers are often quite intelligent and very much in touch with reality, which partially explains their success in eluding capture. When interviewing serial killers, any attempts to evoke sympathy for the victims will be futile. Appeals to their ego, on the other hand, may succeed."

There is also a statement under about burglary and robberies which seemed right up Zodiac’s alley. I will see if I can find it.