Seagull – you’re a fiend in human form!
To decode this, you need to get a copy of Sydney Omarr’s book "Thought Dial". Probably. Do you think sneaky Omarr was trying to up his sales figures?
I suspect so. Profiting from murder? Really? Yes, you betcha.

From what I’ve seen of the book, it’s kind-of sorta like the decoder ring DIck Tracy thing, the Thought Dial. It’s a rinky-dink thing where you can swing the hand round to point to different numbers, and each number also has a symbol against it. Coooool.

Having found the cover of the book on Amazon, I can tell you that the symbols in the column correspond with these numbers, I believe:

7 8 11 5 – 1 5 3 6
3 7 – 2 6
2 5 3 3 8

Unless my eyesight is failing.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thought-Dial-Sy … 0879801646
How exciting.
They don’t make much sense as letters of the alphabet, do they? (Where A=1 B=2 and so on.) What a bore.
I’ve read on another web site that 1 – Sun, 5 – Venus (or something) and etc.
If you take the initial letters of each symbol name – well, that doesn’t work either.

Why? Because Sydney’s system is a based on – brace yourself – some clever numerology-type stuff. (And I wish I’d known that first. I’d have gone outside and thrown myself under a bus).

In this video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrQS6WYC80w – which I recommend you do NOT watch – a creepy guy who sounds like a laconic Vincent Price flips through the book, talks about how useful it is, shows us his messy room, and lights upon a couple of pages which scare me.
One page says something like "…. add the first three numbers together, unless they’re 11 or 22".
OMG.

If there’s another chapter giving the numerological way of turning those numbers into alphas, I didn’t see it anywhere on line, and I got bored and gave up.
Of course if someone wants to employ brain power or ZKD to generate a solution, using the other tit-bit in the column – the guy who Zodiac is supposed to contact is a helpful Leo (possibly a cop or public defender or lawyer) – then hurrah for them – I shall applaud their efforts loudly.
I’m off to bed!
Oh! 3 = a nice common vowel of course. Well, probably. Unless it’s divided by 2 and multiplied by 12 only on a Tuesday.

Smithy your post made me laugh, hard! I am absolutely delighted to have caused you so much grief.

When I first looked at the code I thought immediately the last five symbols spelled Belli and he is a Leo born July 29 but then I couldn’t get any further. You certainly got much further along with the Thought Dial which I didn’t even give a thought to for some reason. Numerology does send some people completely up the wall. I can’t say that I believe in it and I don’t think you have to to try to solve a code. You just need to know how it works.

1 = A J S
2 = B K T
3 = C L U
4 = D M V
5 = E N W
6 = F O X
7 = G P Y
8 = H Q Z
9 = I R

Numerology is suppose take letters and break them down to numbers and then keep adding the numbers together until you end up with a single digit. It’s not suppose to work the other way around, turning numbers into letters. The numbers 11 and 22 are special and not to be added together to make a single digit. I don’t recall what they mean, it’s been a long time since I was a hippie chick.

The numbers that you have come up with don’t make sense to me except for the last five which do translate to BELLI.

I need to amend, my eyesight sucks. Since that’s an 8 and not a 9 at the end, like I originally thought, the last five symbols translate to BELL and then either H, Q or Z at the end.

D., the error was of course mine, not yours!
Yes, that’s a 9 on the end – and so an "I", culled from your extraordinary hippie-chick numerology grid.
Last word Belli? Makes sense.
I take my hat off to you!
I shall go back around and check my matching of numbers to symbols.
(*Note to self, do not stay up until 3 o’clock in the morning looking at stuff…..!)

Hmmm. So, with fresher eyes this morning:

7 9 11 5 – 1 5 3 6
3 7 – 2 6
2 5 3 3 9

Am I right about the spacing? That it’s a message of 4 words of 4, 4, 2, 2 and 5 letters?

G I * E
P R * N
Y W

A E C F
J N L O
S W U X

C G – B F
L P – K O
U Y – T X

GIVE SELF UP TO BELLI would certainly seem to fit. How very banal!
I strongly suspect he didn’t decode it.
Well done D., darn clever of ya.

I’m slightly disturbed by how closely Sydney Omarr resembles the Stine composite sketches, at least in that bottom right photo in which he threatens us about how "his works can change your life".

I’m going with:

YOUR PERP
IS ME
OMARR

Even screws up the double letter combination in his own last name…

I’m going to have to agree with smithy on this one. I’ve made an image, please click it to embiggen.

Start with the "GIVE SELF UP TO BELLI" plaintext, write the A=1, B=2, etc… numbers below, and add them up until you get single digits:

7945 1536 37 26 25339

Then draw the symbols from Omarr’s "Thought Dial." I used an astrological font in my image, so the symbols are rendered slightly differently, but they are the same symbols. It was the closest font I could quickly find.

-glurk

Nailed it! Good work as usual, gentlemen. I realize this is a dumb old astrologer sending a message to Zodiac but did anyone really believe that this type of secret message to a communicating serial killer (or whatever we consider Z to be) would actually stimulate a response? I understand LE trying this to foster communication but has it ever actually WORKED in any other case?

The timing of the whole Belli business is interesting, of course, because SOMEONE called Oakland P.D. and asked Belli or F. Lee Bailey to appear on the Dunbar show on 10/22/69 and then someone who was not Zodiac responded to the invitation to call in. Zodiac himself then responded with a public cry for help to Belli on 12/20/69 (whether it’s considered sincere or not…). Mike Butterfield’s history of this whole fiasco is great read, IMHO:

http://www.zodiackillerfacts.com/belli.htm

It honestly makes me wonder if the Belli letter wasn’t a sort of parody of this whole ridiculous scenario (police call, phone call from a Zodiac wannabe, famous astrologer pleading with him to surrender to Belli). In other words, Zodiac may have just picked up and played on this public fiasco involving his possible surrender to a famous S.F. lawyer to build on his own notoriety by attaching himself to one of the most bombastic personalities in San Francisco at the time. He might have even visited Belli’s home to verify the idea that he was obsessively stalking Belli.

http://mk-zodiac.com/1228.html

Of course, Z could have actually been infatuated by Belli and dying to confess, but somehow I can’t help but wonder whether this whole episode wasn’t orchestrated (or at least fostered) purposely by Zodiac and that would really up his level of sophistication in my book.

Thanks glurk, that’s a splendid graphic; how I loathe numerology!

FWIW, personally I think once again the news media enjoyed making a couple of bucks out of the notoriety of the Evil Zodiac Killer; a few more copies of the Tatler were sold, Omarr plugged his book, Belli got a mention as the Best Lawyer Available (and how he must have loved the phonecall from Omarr, asking to run his name in a cipher huh?), and of course the guy who wrote letters and made up the ciphers got his kicks and jollies. Everybody wins. Except the victims and their familes. A very great shame.

Thanks glurk, that’s a splendid graphic; how I loathe numerology!

FWIW, personally I think once again the news media enjoyed making a couple of bucks out of the notoriety of the Evil Zodiac Killer; a few more copies of the Tatler were sold, Omarr plugged his book, Belli got a mention as the Best Lawyer Available (and how he must have loved the phonecall from Omarr, asking to run his name in a cipher huh?), and of course the guy who wrote letters and made up the ciphers got his kicks and jollies. Everybody wins. Except the victims and their familes. A very great shame.

What I really wonder here, smithy, is whether Zodiac wasn’t seeking to make a couple of bucks out of the notoriety of Belli and what that says about him, his political leanings, his psychology, his relationship with the media yadayadayada. Was Zodiac a kindred spirit of Belli as the shameless self-promoter or diametrically opposed to that? Or did he just want top-notch legal representation when he eventually confessed? I’m honestly a lot more interested in Zodiac’s perspective on this whole interaction than Belli’s or how the media portrayed it.

E., well, that rather depends on who you think wrote the letters, no?

I agree with Entropy as to how Zodiac may have perceived all the notoriety that was afforded him and his reaction to it all. Did Zodiac play to the different facets of the notoriety in subsequent letters? We do know that he played off different events current at that time. His mention of "buttons" which were popular, his threat of a bomb when there were countless numbers of bombings across the US, his mention of murders outside of the canonical murders attributed to him ie: the police station bombing and the murder of Richard Radetich etc.

FWIW here is an article written when Sydney Omarr died in 2003.

Funny how Z seemed to be a bastion of ego and have such disdain for ego at the same time, IMHO. Sidney Omarr and Belli would have been objects of ridicule, IMO, based on their publicly presented egos just as some of the Manson family’s victims would have been in the minds of the Manson family at the time, IMHO. That’s not to say that the Manson family was bereft of ego- they just didn’t like the brand of ego that their victims displayed. Sidney Omarr might have added an extra consonant to boost ego just as Emmett Grogan added a consonant to destroy his. It’s a really subtle difference but it was a really important difference at the time, IMHO. Zodiac seemed to be conflicted between building up and destroying his own ego during his letter writing campaign. That’s a fundamental signature to me and why a lot of us intuit Z being influenced by the SF counterculture. Zodiac buttons? That’s how we advertise our own intentions by advertising ourselves through buttons. How about some nice Zodiac buttons?

Hi,

checked out the cipher (ABCD EDFG FA HG HDFFB) as shown in the ‘Tattler’. Please note that the editor explicitly refers to ‘instructions’ made by him and also mentions a name being part of the cipher.

The hint, ‘an ingenious code similar to the one I am dispatching through these pages’ might lead to the conclusion that we should check out not only this page of the Tattler..

Assuming it may (or may not) be a simple substitution cipher (please..no anagramming or numerology..) the cipher was checked against a huge data base of approx. 300k words of the English language.

In fact, it is not so hard to ‘crack’ or at least understand the cipher’s structure (for substitution):

One double letter exists in the fourth word, therefore this one must be either a vowel or a consonant.

Assuming it to be a vowel, the double letter must be an ‘E’ or an ‘O’ as there do not exist any words with e.g. double ‘I’. Double ‘E’ can be ruled out quickly, as it is leading to an E?-bigram, the first of the two two-letter-words. Only ‘EX’ might be an appropriate bigram starting with ‘E’, leading to the first word of the cipher starting with ‘X’, too – a dead end. Double ‘O’, however, leads to either ON, OR or OF as being the first digram.

This leads to the first word starting either with N, R or F and the last word to be similar to e.g. BLOOD. ND??, RD??, FD??, however, won’t be a very good start for the first word, so it must be another one (approx. 70 words known to me with the ??OO? structure). All those end with one of those letters: DFKLMNPRSTZ and could imo only L be a good second consonant after the first N, R or F, leading to NL (fail) RL (fail) or FL (ok), eg. the word FLAG. This helps us with the last word of the cipher, leading to a XXOOL structure, so we may take one of the following words: drool, shool, snool, spool, stool (if existing at all). We end up with the second bigram, which in four cases starts with an S (‘so’) or a D (‘do’). In any case we are lost in a homophone (instead of a substitution) cipher, with two symbols representing the letter O, wrong way. Nevertheless, we end up with ‘SHOO’ being the second word (..) and the best we can get out of it is FLIR SHOO OF DO DROOL or FLIR SHOO OF SO DROOL, all not very satisfying.

And so on and so forth..a very good help is the vowel-consonant-analysis: If the double letter is a consonant (not O nor E), the symbol previous to the double letter must be a vowel.

Therefore, the last letter of the first word must be a vowel, too. And so must be the first letter of the first word, as there is no bigram without either a vowel or a consonant (and the first bigram in fact starts with the same letter as the double letter does, therefore the other letter of the bigram must be a vowel). This hwoever leads to the first word starting and ending with a vowel (including the vowel-like letter ‘Y’), e.g. ARMY or EASY.

All those, however, lead to a dead end, too: Words ending with Y won’t work with e.g. double consonents in the fourth word, e.g. ?YMMA or ?YMMD. Others however could work, e.g. ECHO could be combined with ECHO HOME ME ?? ?OMMC. However there is no ?OMMC word either (possibly an institution’s abbreviation might work out).

Most of the possibilities of letter combination can be eliminated through the bigrams, e.g. as there may be a bigram ending with P (e.g. ‘up’), however not starting (no bigram with P?).

Overall, instead of finding e.g. 400,000 possibilities left over (e.g. in the Taman Shud or comparable ciphers), this one can – with some hours of work – be reduced to zero possibilities left over. None of them working with English words, therefore also none with any meaning in it.

It should be considered which instruction was sent together with the cipher, as it may be another type of coding. Second abbreviations or names make the cipher way harder and could offer additional possibilites (above those 300k words).

BELLI, for example, leads to the first bigram starting with ‘L’. This however could be a dead end, if not the first bigram was e.g. an abbreviation, e.g. ‘LA’ for Los Angeles. A dead end, as the first word then would be AI?E.

In such a case, the only known ‘solution’ might be AIDE RELY LA BY BELLI, which is not such a bad one (as there is no other solution left over at all).

However there is a problem with that solution: The editor clearly states, that the person known to both of them (obviously the editor had taken a name of which he must have known that Z – unidentified – was in contact with him), is in fact a ‘Leo’.

But Melvin Belli was not a Leo.

So there are a few possibilities left over:

1. The name in the cipher is either written on another position, e.g. the first word, preferrably another name but Belli’s.
2. The whole cipher is fiction and just a trick by police to get resonance from the public & possibly Z
3. The cipher was encoded in a non-substitution cipher way, e.g. Vigenere (no need to do so, imo)

Imo there is no way solving this cipher in a substitutional way without knowing the name used in it (well, the editor had mentioned that only he and Z knows..). It is a huge difference if the word MIKE or JOHN or TOMMY had been used in the cipher, all of it opening different possible solutions for the cipher.

To get this confirmed, you may want to try to crack the cipher through a decrypto tool such as Cryptool or WinDecrypto…however, they won’t find any solution either.

Also the ‘Peggy’ name, placed on the top right corner of the newspaper, although matching the structure of the last cipher word won’t work..it leads to the second bigram starting with ‘P’..

Update, in fact he uses Bell’s name on the same page:

QT