entropy, Subject: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 4:48 am

Had to think long and hard on how to present this topic and, probably more importantly, whether to bother. One of the most interesting and tantalizing aspects of this case, IMHO, is that there seems to be an overload of meaningful information provided in cipher and symbol form but there are so many things that can be interpreted in so many different ways. We have four different ciphers (three unsolved) and there are even plenty of folks who have found further hidden clews in the 408 cipher. There is the Bus Bomb symbol, Mt. Diablo map, Exorcist symbol and freaky Halloween card symbolism, which have all yielded different interpretations and clews pointing in the direction of different persons of interest.

In checking out Zkiller.com, for instance, there are 22 separate threads speculating about Richard Gaikowski’s identity being indicated in various cipher or symbol forms within Zodiac’s letters. The letters GYKE (a phonetic variation of a nickname used by Gaikowski) appears in the plain text of the 3rd portion of the 3 part cipher (I’ll explain in another post why I actually think this is more compelling than meets the eye…).

Rather than introducing random efforts for bashing, I’d invite anyone to present any cipher/symbol associations with a particular suspect that they feel may have some merit or is at least worthy of consideration and discussion. My hope is that discussion could focus more on the merits or statistical probability of the solutions rather than the perceived worthiness of the person of interest associated. It can be your own solution or one that’s already presented elsewhere.

Any takers? I have a few ideas in mind if nobody wants to go first…

morf13, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 7:54 am

Interesting idea Entropy.

The ciphers are not my strong suit,but I have noticed a couple things about the ‘my name is’ cipher in particular that stands out to me regarding a couple personal suspects I have:

* One suspect I have that went to school with Cheri Bates moved to Napa with his Family in 1968. His DOB is 8/8/48, which lines up perfectly with those circled 8’s well, IF you believe they are circled 8’s. Personally,I think they are likely Taurus symbols,which brings me ti the next thing that stands out about a second classmate of Cheri’s that wound up living in Vallejo…

* This 2nd guy is a Taurus. This suspect’s name has the same letter to symbol frequency as the cipher does, meaning,his First name, middle initial,and last name take up 13 spaces,and uses 8 different letters of the alphabet. The ‘my name is’ cipher is 13 spaces long,and uses 8 different symbols. A perfect match to the frequency in the cipher. I think his name may simply be angrammed in the cipher. But even more interestingly, I think if this guy was Z, he was very lazy choosing the cipher symbols, and mixing up his name. I say this because my suspect’s first name starts with an A,and the cipher starts with an A symbol. My suspect’s last name ends with MAN, and the cipher ends with the symbols NAM. It simply fits very well,maybe too well to be coincidence. He looked alot like the z sketch,and though he was in his early 20’s at the time of the Berryessa attack, he looked to be in his upper 20’s. He was stocky,barrel chested,and sometimes wore glasses. Most interesting of all, he used the address in Vallejo up until 1974,then no longer used it. Thats the same time that the Z letters officially ended. This guy definitely merits a closer look, but he has remained off the grid and off of the internet, and despite multiple efforts,I can not obtain printing samples for him. His Father was in the airforce,which could explain the wingwalkers, and although they never sold their house in Riverside,my suspect’s Dad needed to maintain a residence in the SF bay area due to military work,and this suspect stayed with his Father there sometimes.

In addition, this guy used an address in CLAYTON CA in the late 60s and early 70’s (the same time he used one in Vallejo). The Phillips map arrow sent by Z is pointing directly to the town of CLAYTON,the arrow tip is actually almost landing dead on the word CLAYTON.

If I could get half the stuff on this guy that people have found on other suspects like Gaik, or Llarry Kane, I think we might have a real strong suspect,and he might gather alot of attention in the suspect pool,but I am pretty much on my own and at a dead end. One other point of interest, he wound up getting married in the 70s to a woman that had got divorced in Solano county. The guy she got divorced from had also gone to Ramona HS in Riverside(but was older than Cheri by a few years I think). I cant nail down the constant flow of infobetween this guy and his ties between Riverside & Vallejo.

entropy, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 9:19 am

Great stuff, morf, and thanks for playing along! That’s exactly what I meant in WC’s Kane thread that this kind of speculation can be legitimately used to support a circumstantial case. Sometimes it’s done very badly but there’s nothing wrong with seeking reflections of someone who appears to be an interesting P.O.I. in the more ambiguous aspects of Zodiac communications. It’s speculation by nature, like 95% of everything else we discuss here.

Here’s an interesting story for those not familiar with it:

http://www.tabloidcolumn.com/btk-puzzle.html

It’s Chapter 8 of the "BTK Story" sent by Dennis Rader in 2004 at the beginning of his return of BTK taunting campaign and long before his eventual arrest. It was sent to his local news organization in Wichita and promptly confiscated by Wichita P.D., who shared it with a few select people but refused to release it to the public despite the fact that much of it had been gleaned and analyzed from a TV news screen capture. WPD concluded that it was a simple word jumble of no help to the BTK investigation. End of story…

Most of the found words were indeed just random words relating to BTK’s activities ("victim", "fantasies") and methods of operation ("follow", "fakeid" etc.). After Rader’s arrest, however, the puzzle seemed to appear a bit more interesting since it included hidden items such as "DRADER" (not highlighted in the picture), "6220" (Rader’s street address), "PRAYER" (Rader was president of his Lutheran church), "LOST PET" (Rader worked as an compliance control officer rounding up lost pets among other things) and some possible clues about the specific fake IDs he used to access people’s homes.

Would this have helped anyone recognize Dennis Rader as a BTK person of interest? Probably not in itself but if someone had already had suspicions about him and happened to notice his jumbled name and street address in the puzzle?…

My thought is that the Zodiac ciphers and symbols are probably a bit more inscrutable and are unlikely to give any direct hint toward Zodiac’s identity but that SOMETHING about his identity is probably reflected in them (i.e. if we ever identify who the guy is, some of this stuff just might make sense in the context of his real of imagined persona).

entropy, Subject: Gyke in the 408 cipher   Mon Mar 04, 2013 11:32 am

FYI… I realized that I had already posted about why the appearance of "GYKE" in the 408 cipher seemed a bit more compelling to me than at first glance. I’m not necessarily endorsing the idea or Gaikowski as a suspect but I think it’s a good example for this discussion and a much better than average ghost sighting.

http://www.zodiackiller.com/ChronicleCipher.html

The appearance of "GYKE" in the cipher wouldn’t have meant anything for someone viewing the cipher randomly (just as "DRADER" in the BTK puzzle would appear meaningless) but does stand out as one of only a few runs of four consecutive alphabetic symbols (excluding reversed or otherwise altered letters) and there are no other legitimate "words" that can be read in the text of the cipher. The point about Gaikowski never using the specific moniker "Gyke" is well-taken. It’s not a word and he never used that particular spelling- only the phonetic equivalent of "Gaik" in his writings that anyone has ever discovered. Keep in mind, however, that Zodiac would have had some discretion with symbols selected and demonstrated apparent willingness to throw in "teasers" like ZODAIK and GOD in the 340 cipher by selectively choosing his symbols.

http://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com … 408-cipher

I think the observations included in the above thread are a little bit sloppy actually but the point was that Zodiac seemed to abandon his sequencing of symbols standing for the letters S & E right at the point where "GYKE" appears in the last part of the cipher and "GYKE" appears at the very point of the solution where Zodiac is explaining why he WON’T give us his name in the cipher. The question becomes whether Zodiac may have intentionally changed his substitution sequencing in order to throw this tidbit in as a hidden clew.

Compelling :sunny: :cheers: or crap? :silent: :confused: :no: :sleep:

AK Wilks, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 11:44 am

On the anagram for KANE NAM appearing in the My Name Is Code, Welsh Chappie said "But some i believe just try so hard to come up with something else because they don’t want to accept the anagram for what it is and who it seemingly points to."

1. Problem is you can create 100 or more anagrams (Doranchak?) based on those letters. And how about other people named Kane, or Mank, or Mane, or Mann, or Man, or Kame, or the other names that can be created by anagrams? If the crosshar is D, now we hundreds more that can be created, as you say, DEAN, DANE, etc. The three 8’s create 24 as Morf noted, but reverse 24 to 42 and you have the year TK was born. Ted was a Gemini, but born on 5/22, the cusp of Tauras.

2. Proponets of Gaikowski point to GYKE in the cipher, though he actually used GAIK and never GYKE, and there are numerous claims for Allen, Marshall and every other suspect.

What do you think of what follows? Not just 4 letters of a name, like KANE or GYKE, but a whole name. Does THEO and KACZYNSKI occur by chance? If so, then KANE or GYKE could be chance as well.

This is the unsolved Zodiac 340 Code as it appeared in newspapers. I think there is a logic to a code maker putting his first name on the first line, middle initial on the middle of the middle line and last name on the last line or two.

You can see that the letters to make THEO (or even THEODOR) appear on the first line, J is on the middle of the middle line and KACZYNSKI on the last two lines, or KAZINSKI on the last line alone.

And here is a close up on the last two lines.

The letters are there – KAC ZYN SKI.

Or KAZINSKI on just the last line.

Kaczynski loved to play games with his name and hide it in things. He once wrote a musical composition (he played trombone, like the character in The Mikado) and told a friend he had "the 18 letters in his name" hid in the composition by putting one letter in the last line in each part. I can see him coming up with the name "The Zodiac" out of the letters in his name, and getting a thrill out of seeing his name on the front page of the paper, hidden in plain sight in the Zodiac code.

I admit I used to be am amazed by his name appearing in the code, and amazed that more people aren’t amazed. :scratch:

But when you get into anagrams I think we all start to see ghosts in the machine. We see what we want to see.

AK Wilks, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 11:59 am

Great stuff, morf, and thanks for playing along! That’s exactly what I meant in WC’s Kane thread that this kind of speculation can be legitimately used to support a circumstantial case. Sometimes it’s done very badly but there’s nothing wrong with seeking reflections of someone who appears to be an interesting P.O.I. in the more ambiguous aspects of Zodiac communications. It’s speculation by nature, like 95% of everything else we discuss here.

Here’s an interesting story for those not familiar with it:

http://www.tabloidcolumn.com/btk-puzzle.html

It’s Chapter 8 of the "BTK Story" sent by Dennis Rader in 2004 at the beginning of his return of BTK taunting campaign and long before his eventual arrest. It was sent to his local news organization in Wichita and promptly confiscated by Wichita P.D., who shared it with a few select people but refused to release it to the public despite the fact that much of it had been gleaned and analyzed from a TV news screen capture. WPD concluded that it was a simple word jumble of no help to the BTK investigation. End of story…

Most of the found words were indeed just random words relating to BTK’s activities ("victim", "fantasies") and methods of operation ("follow", "fakeid" etc.). After Rader’s arrest, however, the puzzle seemed to appear a bit more interesting since it included hidden items such as "DRADER" (not highlighted in the picture), "6220" (Rader’s street address), "PRAYER" (Rader was president of his Lutheran church), "LOST PET" (Rader worked as an compliance control officer rounding up lost pets among other things) and some possible clues about the specific fake IDs he used to access people’s homes.

Would this have helped anyone recognize Dennis Rader as a BTK person of interest? Probably not in itself but if someone had already had suspicions about him and happened to notice his jumbled name and street address in the puzzle?…

My thought is that the Zodiac ciphers and symbols are probably a bit more inscrutable and are unlikely to give any direct hint toward Zodiac’s identity but that SOMETHING about his identity is probably reflected in them (i.e. if we ever identify who the guy is, some of this stuff just might make sense in the context of his real of imagined persona).

AK WILKS: This is a first stage solution to the Zodiac 340. I do not know the exact origin of this version, but I think it seems to be largely what is in the 1979 FBI file, which is almost certainly the version done by Robert Graysmith, before he destroys it with his nonsense baby talk gibberish "final solution".

I think Kite and some others on the old ZK board then worked on this Graysmith version.

I do think this is the correct FIRST STAGE solution to the 340.

Nobody – not Graysmith or anyone at the ZK board – ever noticed or found or claimed the words that I mark here. Like BOMBS and LIST appearing diagonally. Two key Zodiac words – what are the odds that happens by coincidence? Then there other words noticed by Kite and myself. Forms of restraints like BARS and LEASH.

I then think this first stage solution needs a Caesar Code analysis with the 0-3-6-9 shift values that Zodiac kept giving us as clues. But that is a seperate topic.

I find it highly unlikely these words all appear by mere chance. They cannot be fabrications or forces by Graysmith because he never noticed them. So either all these happen by chance – doubtful – or they were placed there by Zodiac and this is a correct first stage solution. Or I am seeing ghosts in the machine.

entropy, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 12:20 pm

Great points, AK.

I think Ted is really an interesting person related to this discussion for a bunch of reasons. There’s no question that he had the raw intelligence to not only create the Zodiac ciphers but to create clews that might both point to his identity and obscure the view at the same time. The fact that he was known to do so and enjoyed games of literary deception is a definite plus for him as a suspect, IMHO. I totally get why Ted is so compelling for lots of folks on a psychological level.

On the flip side, I sometimes wonder whether his level of intelligence may be used to justify extremely elaborate solutions with many, many degrees of freedom. What is the statistical probability that those last two lines contain his uncommon last name? I honestly have no freaking idea but really appreciate that you and doranchak can discuss it with such courtesy and open-mindedness. That’s exactly what I was hoping for in this thread.

Please feel free to summarize anything related to the other ciphers and symbols that you find compelling for Ted. Aside from your Caesar shift-related solution to the 32-symbol cipher, I recall Doug Oswell presenting a possible solution (or comparison, at least) to work in one of his mathematics dissertations. Found it interesting at the time but I’m not sure where to find it now.

entropy, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 12:36 pm

Anyone recall any other suspect-related solutions for the Exorcist letter symbol? I’ve seen a lot of really cool attempts, some of which were pretty compelling, but these are the only two I could think of which implicate specific suspects (and proving definitively that Arthur Leigh Allen and Richard Gaikowski were both the Zodiac Killer)…

http://www.zodiackiller.com/AllenFile.html

AK Wilks, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 1:06 pm

Entropy – Is that what you meant? I do find it very interesting, but for many it falls into the grey area.

Top: ZODIAC MY NAME IS CODE
Bottom:KACZYNSKI PHD DISSERTATION SYMBOLS

Doug Oswell paraphrased:

Each has the letter "A", two of the letter "M", two of the letter "N", and at least one of the letter"K". The cursive symbol looking like a cursive lower case "L" is similar to the inverted Aries symbol, while the symbol for infinity which appears four times matches in concept and meaning the circled "8" ‘s in the code.

entropy, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 1:14 pm

Yup. Thanks, AK. I don’t think it was really presented as a "solution" but rather as a comparison. Pretty cool though…

Drew, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 2:48 pm

"TO EZ" has always intrigued me since it brackets GYKE when read backwards. Another more recent discovery by Judith on zkiller.com is "R JOZEF" connecting to GYKE. Jozef would be the Polish spelling of Richard’s middle name. It has to be pointed out, however, that the "R" is backwards and the "O" is a square. But I think it’s still interesting that it connects to GYKE.

Quicktrader, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 2:55 pm

Entropy – Is that what you meant? I do find it very interesting, but for many it falls into the grey area.

Top: ZODIAC MY NAME IS CODE
Bottom:KACZYNSKI PHD DISSERTATION SYMBOLS

Doug Oswell paraphrased:

Each has the letter "A", two of the letter "M", two of the letter "N", and at least one of the letter"K". The cursive symbol looking like a cursive lower case "L" is similar to the inverted Aries symbol, while the symbol for infinity which appears four times matches in concept and meaning the circled "8" ‘s in the code.

Think TED was nuts, no idea how many people he had killed, but his dissertation symbols are quite normal stuff.

QT

AK Wilks, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Mon Mar 04, 2013 10:48 pm

Top: ZODIAC MY NAME IS CODE
Bottom:KACZYNSKI PHD DISSERTATION SYMBOLS

Think TED was nuts, no idea how many people he had killed, but his dissertation symbols are quite normal stuff.

QT

Normal yes but very odd that the 1967 phd formula line so strongly matches the 1970 Zodiac Code.

1967 Kaczynski Phd/1970 Zodiac Code

A/AA

KK/K

MM/MM

NN/NN

^^/^

8888/888

C C/+E

DREW – It is interesting, but for me the weakness is Gaikiowski never called himself GYKE or ever wrote that down. And like KANE it is only four letters.

Jem, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Tue Mar 05, 2013 2:54 am

The cross-hair represents D in the Z408 and first appears in the word "DANGEROUE". The word is divided between lines so that DAN appears at the end of one line. Anyone got a POI named Dan? How about a POI whose mentor of sorts had that name? That’s Fred M.!

morf13, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Tue Mar 05, 2013 6:41 am

The cross-hair represents D in the Z408 and first appears in the word "DANGEROUE". The word is divided between lines so that DAN appears at the end of one line. Anyone got a POI named Dan? How about a POI whose mentor of sorts had that name? That’s Fred M.!

Lets do another 50+ pages on Fred M….one of my faves

Jem, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Wed Mar 06, 2013 2:43 am

Lets do another 50+ pages on Fred M….one of my faves

Absolutely! Freddy could definitely use more scrutiny!

patinky, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Wed Mar 06, 2013 11:47 am

Interesting idea Entropy. <snip>

* One suspect I have that went to school with Cheri Bates moved to Napa with his Family in 1968. His DOB is 8/8/68, which lines up perfectly with those circled 8’s well, IF you believe they are circled 8’s. <snip>

Morf, is the birthdate a typo or I am still not awake yet?

morf13, Subject: Re: Ghosts in the Machine: Suspect clews in cipher/symbol form   Wed Mar 06, 2013 11:59 am

Interesting idea Entropy. <snip>

* One suspect I have that went to school with Cheri Bates moved to Napa with his Family in 1968. His DOB is 8/8/68, which lines up perfectly with those circled 8’s well, IF you believe they are circled 8’s. <snip>

Morf, is the birthdate a typo or I am still not awake yet?

I must be the one half asleep,it was 8/8/48