Not trying to be negative. Just trying to point out the difficulties in proving one name is correct over all the other possibilities.

I agree that it’s possible Z13 needs to be rearranged. Anything’s possible at this point, especially considering the 340’s solution.

But here are just 70,000 names that fit when you allow rearrangements: http://zodiackillerciphers.com/all-name … sorted.txt

If you want to say that "William Lawson" is unique amongst those possibilities, then you’ll have to show that there aren’t any interesting qualities about any of those other names. Whatever criteria you are using to select a name, you will need to apply it to all those others too.

"Lawrence Clein" and "Lawrence Larry" work using anagrams.

Not trying to be negative. Just trying to point out the difficulties in proving one name is correct over all the other possibilities.

I agree that it’s possible Z13 needs to be rearranged. Anything’s possible at this point, especially considering the 340’s solution.

But here are just 70,000 names that fit when you allow rearrangements: http://zodiackillerciphers.com/all-name … sorted.txt

If you want to say that "William Lawson" is unique amongst those possibilities, then you’ll have to show that there aren’t any interesting qualities about any of those other names. Whatever criteria you are using to select a name, you will need to apply it to all those others too.

That’s a very good point. I hadn’t thought about it like that. I believe that I have started to do that by showing his relevance to the zodiac case. Something no other name that fits (without interpretation) can do so far. Question for you. Would overwhelming circumstantial evidence ,in your opinion, be enough to move the mark? Said differently, could an abundance of evidence in support of one person discount the others by default? I guess my question really is, when does “probability” start to matter? How much and what kind of circumstantial evidence would be required for you to believe? Or is finding the killers DNA the only way to solve this cypher for you?

Edit.. after reviewing your message, would it be correct in saying that William Lawson is 1 in 70000 that has a connection to the case through Isobel Watson?

That’s a very good point. I hadn’t thought about it like that. I believe that I have started to do that by showing his relevance to the zodiac case. Something no other name that fits (without interpretation) can do so far. Question for you. Would overwhelming circumstantial evidence ,in your opinion, be enough to move the mark? Said differently, could an abundance of evidence in support of one person discount the others by default? I guess my question really is, when does “probability” start to matter? How much and what kind of circumstantial evidence would be required for you to believe? Or is finding the killers DNA the only way to solve this cypher for you?

I think it really depends on the quality of the evidence. There has to be something that cannot be penetrated by reasonable doubt. A thousand bits of circumstantial evidence might all be vulnerable to reasonable doubt, but one piece of DNA evidence wouldn’t be.

One way I look at it is you can take any two people, let’s call them Bob and Fred. And let’s say you are looking at lists of facts about them. For any pair of facts, let’s say there’s a 0.01% chance that the pair of facts shows an interesting connection (for example, they live in the same area, or have a similar hobby, etc.). That percentage seems very low. But let’s say you can generate 1,000 facts for Bob and 1,000 facts for Fred. Therefore, there are 1,000,000 possible pairs of facts. With a 0.01% chance of a pair of facts showing a connection, that means we can expect around 100 interesting connections between Bob and Fred. Thus we have to be careful about what it means to pile up facts in this way. 100 interesting connections between Bob and Fred do not make them the same person. But this kind of reasoning is often used to establish that someone is Zodiac.

That’s a very good point. I hadn’t thought about it like that. I believe that I have started to do that by showing his relevance to the zodiac case. Something no other name that fits (without interpretation) can do so far. Question for you. Would overwhelming circumstantial evidence ,in your opinion, be enough to move the mark? Said differently, could an abundance of evidence in support of one person discount the others by default? I guess my question really is, when does “probability” start to matter? How much and what kind of circumstantial evidence would be required for you to believe? Or is finding the killers DNA the only way to solve this cypher for you?

I think it really depends on the quality of the evidence. There has to be something that cannot be penetrated by reasonable doubt. A thousand bits of circumstantial evidence might all be vulnerable to reasonable doubt, but one piece of DNA evidence wouldn’t be.

One way I look at it is you can take any two people, let’s call them Bob and Fred. And let’s say you are looking at lists of facts about them. For any pair of facts, let’s say there’s a 0.01% chance that the pair of facts shows an interesting connection (for example, they live in the same area, or have a similar hobby, etc.). That percentage seems very low. But let’s say you can generate 1,000 facts for Bob and 1,000 facts for Fred. Therefore, there are 1,000,000 possible pairs of facts. With a 0.01% chance of a pair of facts showing a connection, that means we can expect around 100 interesting connections between Bob and Fred. Thus we have to be careful about what it means to pile up facts in this way. 100 interesting connections between Bob and Fred do not make them the same person. But this kind of reasoning is often used to establish that someone is Zodiac.

So it’s about the quality of the facts? I would imagine some facts would have a higher rating than others? For instance being a male might only be one point whereas a convicted murder might be something higher?

Edit.. after reviewing your message, would it be correct in saying that William Lawson is 1 in 70000 that has a connection to the case through Isobel Watson?

So it’s about the quality of the facts? I would imagine some facts would have a higher rating than others? For instance being a male might only be one point whereas a convicted murder might be something higher?

I don’t see why a Zodiac suspect would necessarily need to have a murder conviction to be a good suspect.
He would, however, have to be male. Or so I’d assume.

Edit.. after reviewing your message, would it be correct in saying that William Lawson is 1 in 70000 that has a connection to the case through Isobel Watson?

I’m not following what you’re saying here.

So it’s about the quality of the facts? I would imagine some facts would have a higher rating than others? For instance being a male might only be one point whereas a convicted murder might be something higher?

I don’t see why a Zodiac suspect would necessarily need to have a murder conviction to be a good suspect.
He would, however, have to be male. Or so I’d assume.

Edit.. after reviewing your message, would it be correct in saying that William Lawson is 1 in 70000 that has a connection to the case through Isobel Watson?

I’m not following what you’re saying here.

Sure, a POI having a conviction for murder would only prove that the individual has the propensity to kill. A fact about an individual that I would think rates higher than just being male. Maybe it’s only a 3 or 4 on a scale thru 10, but it’s definitely not nothing and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Regarding my 1/70000 comment. You gave me a list of 70000 potential names that all fit the z13.
So isn’t his name the only one out of all 70000 right now that can be connected to the zodiac case through Isobel Watson?

And wouldn’t the odds be even greater than 1/70000 because it’s not just names that fit the z13, it’s all names ( let’s say in California at the time) and that fit the z13, and have a connection to the case. Technically wouldn’t that be the more accurate odds then?

So isn’t his name the only one out of all 70000 right now that can be connected to the zodiac case through Isobel Watson?

How could you possibly know that without generating the list of all people associated with Isobel Watson in some way?
Plus, among those 70,000 names are 9 other people with last name Watson.

So isn’t his name the only one out of all 70000 right now that can be connected to the zodiac case through Isobel Watson?

How could you possibly know that without generating the list of all people associated with Isobel Watson in some way?
Plus, among those 70,000 names are 9 other people with last name Watson.

. I assumed that we could take family and friends of Isobel off the list!

So z13 solution never to be solved with a high probability without DNA.

Stop trying folks and redirect your efforts into getting everyone’s DNA on 23 and me. Start with your selves. The killer could be in your family tree. It’s the new way of the world. What did investigators do before DNA? It doesn’t matter…

William Blatty works as an anagram but Zodiac didn’t show quite that level of writing skill. I think an anagram is possible but without a definable system of transposition we could never be certain of the solution. Even a coherent transposition revealing a relevant name may not rise above doubt. I think the Harden’s quick crack of the 408 and the contemporary info in the 340 suggests that Zodiac believed his cipher would be solved. Six months later he may have thought the same of the z13. I don’t think he would provide his real name for this reason but if his ego did drive him to choose to provide it an unverifiable anagram is not out of the question – it’s just a bit of a fruitless endeavour because it can’t be proven. It could be a joke solution like the Melvin Belli one I posted a few pages ago but gibberish is by no means beyond the realms of possibility either.

Hi, I don’t know if this convoluted transposition (below) is a realistic proposal but I think if Zodiac encoded his true identity that he would not present it as a straight forward substitution. If his name had double letters (ie. William) or a 8K8M8 pattern (ie. Solomon) I believe that he would disguise these characteristics, perhaps by shuffling symbols, altering directions, maybe starting in the middle or end, wrap-around, etc.

If he started at the beginning and skipped every other symbol it would be a name of an unmanageable shape. It would have to be A) a three-letter first name (perhaps an abbreviation) that ended in the same letter as his middle initial and that same letter would be the start of the last name (ie. Sal L Lattesmon) or B) a four-letter first name that ended in a double letter and that same letter would start his last name (ie. Russ Summerton). These results are of course underwhelming and I think the method is far too simplistic for an encoder who believed the 340 could be solved without a machine (and three brilliant dudes from the future). It has been frustrating trying to find a common name using this or any other method. I tried an interesting idea presented by BD Holland that moves laterally from the outer symbols towards the middle but it too failed to produce a promising solution.

Beyond the idea of creating busy work, the intention of this cipher remains a mystery. Encoding a flippant joke like "sorry no name cops" or "Alfred E Neuman" wouldn’t be much fun unless it was solved and as soon as it was the story would be over and every one would know that he was not crackproof and it would imply that there was no useful solution to the 340. If he primarily wanted to waste time then gibberish likely makes more sense than a solvable joke. He clearly had no reason other than ego-boosting to give his name in any form but I keep torturing myself with it because you know everyone needs a hobby.

The other day I may have had a minor success. I tried skipping every 3 symbols, moving backwards from symbol 11 (the second N) and I actually discovered a quite common name. I don’t have a suspect by this name or any other but as the transposition includes a repeating bigram (MN) which allows for names like Richard and Donald to emerge I thought the method was worth sharing.

Thanks for reading!

Posted by: @egg

1- There are 13 symbols, with A as the first and M as the last. This fits with the first half of the alphabet; there are 13 letters, A is the first, M is the last. AbcdefghijklM

This is very interesting and caught my attention. 

I’m going to spitball some ideas here.  Please don’t take it too seriously

There has been some discussion that this could be a Vigenere cipher, which is basically just a coordinate system for Caesar cyphers.  Obviously, if this is a homophonic substitution like the others then it’s not solvable.  However, if it’s a vigenere, then what are the odds of it being bookended by corresponding letters in the alphabet? 

Like, I know this will sound stupid, but let’s say he was encrypting the actual alphabet from A to M using a key that was also the alphabet except A to F. 

In other words, what if he was encrypting the alphabet….using a smaller piece of the alphabet?  His key would be half the size of his cipher….almost.  It would be n=(13/2)-1/2 characters long.  In other words, 6.  So the last letter of the cipher would be encoded using a caesar shift of 0, so it would be M.

If he was using a string of letters from the alphabet as his key, then any repeating symbols would tell you exactly how far across the alphabet he had travelled in selecting his substitution.  Consequently, even if you didn’t know what letter he was decoding with the (8) symbol, you would know how far apart each letter he was ACTUALLY substituting would be in the alphabet.  That is, of course, only if you know his cipher alphabet.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting this.  It is utterly stupid.  It’s a thought experiment.  I do not have any belief that what just described has happened, but it’s got me thinking about coordinates.

If you create a set of the first 13 letters of the alphabet, and you assign each letter a coordinate value from 1-13, then there are no two letters in that set that you can add together that will exceed the number 26, incidentally the total length of the English alphabet.

Moreover, the maximum possible length of his cipher alphabet, if it is a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, is 26, and the maximum number of substitutions he could pull from that alphabet is 13.  If there’s no Vigenere silliness afoot, then his actual alphabet is 8 symbols.  If he’s using some Vigenere nonsense, then it could be the full 13.

I have no idea what to make of these thoughts, and they’re probably wrong, but I did try and subtract the alphabetic symbols in the cipher from the English alphabet from A-M just to see what would happen.  [attached]

What you get is almost symmetrical around the midpoint of the cipher, but at either end you don’t get a perfect reflection.  You do, however, get the same values concentrated at either end (if you ignore the sign and take absolute value).  You get 0, 3 and 11.  Then you get two 5s on either side of the middle symbol (n=7). 

What this means other than the substitutions at either end of the cipher are kind of acting the same way relative to the corresponding position in the alphabet, I’m sure I don’t know.  Again, just spitballing (also primes don’t matter for a set this close to the origin.  half the numbers from 0-13 are prime)

The best I can figure is that MAYBE there is some kind of logic encoded into the cipher that gives a hint as to either its substitution method, transposition method or both.  Otherwise, like good luck, man.  Better hope there are no nulls.

I showed this 8 years ago Teg. Now do the same thing by putting ZODIAC under the near Zodiac on the bottom line of the 340 and see what you get. (000888).

Posted by: @richard-grinell

I showed this 8 years ago Teg.

Ah jeez, I’m a little behind here I’ll shut up

@tegean No I don’t mind. Keep looking, you might find a way to move it on to the next level. I got the symmetrical pattern like you, but unfortunately couldn’t find any purpose in the numbers – if indeed any was meant