No no no Trav I won’t allow you to throw showers of praise in my direction for such a masterpiece, I will not accept any awards for excellence from anyone either.
I know what your thinking Trav, " That is simply outstanding! This Welsh guy is simply a genius despite his constant confusing whether and weather like a dyslexic idiot.

You don’t need to be literate when you can create works of art like the above exhibit. Hehe

I plan to barge into SFPD office HQ next week and ask them to please put this poster up and inform them that if they refuse than… "School children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning." That’s as far as I got last time before I was shot with a taser gun and pepper sprayed. Very unreasonable people in my opinion.

Zam…. On a serious point though, I obviously did the ‘poster’ as I was bored and for a bit of fun. But it is actually based on facts as we know them in the case and descriptions.

Well there is no question that if Zodiac is still breathing somewhere that it may still be possible to match a print or maybe even DNA. In the past several years or so there have been so so many criminals brought to justice for crimes

WC, I must stress, in my view, it is possible, just possible that Z, or the person who referred to self as Z, is "still breathing". Possible, not unquestionable. I tend toward a very sanguine view of scientific razzmatazz applied to criminal forensics: DNA, fingerprints, and the like, are like bulk of scientific findings, approximations, never ever conclusive- yet, can often lead to surprising, and never considered pathways (think of the phenomenon of superconductivity-no one saw that coming–more relevant- consider, too the most recent documentary on the Memphis Three, with the genetic material recovered from the ligature found upon one of the victims.

Always a joy, to chat with U , WC: and don’t let anyone rag on you for your distinct orthography–Dickens could not spell worth a damn too! Best, Tristanbird.

LE need to make some sort of public service announcement that concealing the fact that your relative is a killer is obstruction of justice and makes you just as bad as your relative is.

Well there is no question that if Zodiac is still breathing somewhere that it may still be possible to match a print or maybe even DNA. In the past several years or so there have been so so many criminals brought to justice for crimes

"WC, I must stress, in my view, it is possible, just possible that Z, or the person who referred to self as Z, is "still breathing".

TristnBird, I wouldn’t disagree at all with it remaining highly possible. I have said before that I hope he hasn’t gone off to his afterlife in ‘Paradice’ because the second he does, the 1000 questions we all have can never be answered. The case could still be solved with a DNA match for example so that still is one hope we have. But if he’s deceased at the time we match citizen x’s DNA with Zodiac’s then arresting him and bringing him in for questioning will be fairly difficult if he’s been 6 foot under for several years lol.

LE need to make some sort of public service announcement that concealing the fact that your relative is a killer is obstruction of justice and makes you just as bad as your relative is.

In a way though Nach, you have to think of it from their point of view. Let’s say Zodiac dies on Monday Night and Tuesday morning his brother finds Stine’s ID, Blood stained shirt piece and a other items and he walks into SFPD Headquarters with them, he may be scared the Police will try charging him as the Zodiac? I mean from SFPD point, it may be strange that this man is coming forward to point the finger at his brother who died last week and all he can hope to gain is completely destroy his beloved brothers name and blacken his own forever as ‘the brother of the Zodiac’. As a relative discovering these items, you’d likely have 1000 questions racing through your mind. What if someone planted them there the day after his death to frame him? What if Zodiac blackmailed him to hide the items? What if what if what if… As silly as it sounds to us to say these things would be issues, if you were in Zodiac’s family members position discovering such incriminating items 101 things would be racing through your mind and you’d have to weight what you have to gain against what you could and will lose if you went public.

Is the Zodiac Killer still alive?

This is a particularly interesting topic in that there is no strong evidence, to my knowledge, to establish firmly whether Z is still alive, or whether he is dead. That said, although there may be a shortage of concrete evidence, it may be possible to address the question with a probability argument, using techniques similar to what the insurance people use. Using "life tables" and some simple calculations, we can calculate a probability as to whether Z is alive or dead. The following link provides an example of a life table and explains how to use it: http://homepage.cs.uri.edu/courses/spri … udents.ppt

Using the linked document, it is easy to calculate some probabilities for Z being either alive or dead, especially given that we know he was alive in the early- and, presumably, mid-70’s. We would have to calculate a range of probabilities to account for the fact that we don’t know Z’s exact age during his heyday. And it has probably occurred to you that the likelihood may vary somewhat with some of our other assumptions. For example, if we consider it likely that Z did send the 1990 Christmas card, then the odds of him being alive today, seem to go up, but those who don’t believe the Christmas card was legit, or those who are agnostic on the point, would likely consider that inadmissible.

Just for the record, when I did my calculation using the life table from the linked document awhile back, I think I arrived at a range somewhere between 27 to 40% probability that Z was alive. I won’t say what my assumptions were–because I no longer remember–but no matter, you can do your own calculations. A range of 27 to 40 is not insignificant, but it does also imply there is a much greater than 50% chance that Z is dead.

So the question now becomes, given this probabilistic perspective, what should Z-researchers believe?

Any thoughts?

The theory of Zodiac still being alive is, in my personal opinion, best argued for by the fact that nothing has ever been found in way of unarguable evidence linking Citizen A to Zodiac such as Paul Stine’s licence. If we believe Zodiac really was so desperate for attention and loved the fact he was not caught and ‘crack-proof’ then we may have every reason and expectation that on his death bed there would come one final Claim of ‘My Name is..’ or at least maybe expect a letter to remain in the hands of a attorney with the comment "It is the wish of the client that this sealed envelope remain sealed until client is deceased" or something along those lines. And if we assume Karma decided to pay him a visit and a school bus that he once declared ‘a nice target’ had been responsible for mowing him down and killing him instantly, then in that scenario of Zodiac being unexpectedly fast-tracked to ‘Paradice’ then surely assuming he still had Paul’s licence, the Berryessa hood and whatever else in his home/among his belongings somewhere then surely they would have been discovered?

If we believe Zodiac really was so desperate for attention and loved the fact he was not caught and ‘crack-proof’ then we may have every reason and expectation that on his death bed there would come one final Claim of ‘My Name is..’ or at least maybe expect a letter to remain in the hands of a attorney with the comment "It is the wish of the client that this sealed envelope remain sealed until client is deceased" or something along those lines.

Unless, of course, his mindset changed.

If he turned over a new leaf, chances are that none of the trophies remain.

I wonder what the average lifespan for serial murderers is?

I would assume that living such a stressful and dangerous "lifestyle" coupled with a potential for abnormal mental condition would decrease the lifespan.

Biomedically speaking, there’s no reason why Zodiac shouldn’t still be alive today. People routinely live well into their seventies and beyond, even the mentally ill.

… If we believe Zodiac really was so desperate for attention and loved the fact he was not caught and ‘crack-proof’ then we may have every reason and expectation that on his death bed there would come one final Claim of ‘My Name is..’ or at least maybe expect a letter to remain in the hands of a attorney with the comment "It is the wish of the client that this sealed envelope remain sealed until client is deceased" or something along those lines.

If we believe that Zodiac was so desperate for attention …

… we would need to account for the fact that he has been very quiet for the last several decades.

While there have been possible communications over the past 40+ years, there has been nothing proven and so insistently demanding of our attention as there was during the years between ’68 and ’74. In other words, Z went quiet. What’s more, there was even an unaccounted for quiet period between ‘his communiques of 71 and ’74.

This could suggest could be taken to suggest many things, but in the context of the assumption that Z has been alive and in decent health, it strongly suggests that Z may not be so desperate for attention as many would suppose.

While I see much value in taking it as a working hypothesis that Z is still alive, I cannot agree that it follows from Z’s putative desperation for attention.

Although on the one hand, it seems perfectly evident that Z had a strong need for attention–a need that drove his behavior during his heyday–if we are to suppose that Z is still alive and well, then we must acknowledge to ourselves that that particular trait does not conform to a uni-dimensional model: somehow the Zodiac Killer manages to contain–or restrain, or divert–his presumed need for attention, or perhaps he has found a new outlet, or perhaps he has outgrown the need. Either way, the only conclusion we can safely come to, if we assume Z is still alive, is that he is more complex than we sometimes give him credit for being.

And maybe that is one reason he has been so hard to catch.

Regards,

G

If we believe that Zodiac was so desperate for attention …

… we would need to account for the fact that he has been very quiet for the last several decades.

Could be he knew technology was getting the better of him and he better just shut the hell up.

My Dad is 71..he’s active, healthy and very much on the internet, so anything is possible with Zodiac. I just don’t think, today anyway, that he would post threatening stuff as the Zodiac killer. Innuendos maybe, but even that would be risky, imo. I think he’d be smarter than that….maybe…

I wonder what the average lifespan for serial murderers is?

I would assume that living such a stressful and dangerous "lifestyle" coupled with a potential for abnormal mental condition would decrease the lifespan.

Well if Ted Bundy is the man to use as a basis for answering such questions then we can say that serials will likely be, like Ted, so desperate and determined to escape teir confinement in prison that they successfully escape…twice. Not to regain their freedom, that’s not what Bundy was consumed with being deprived of, he escaped twice with no intension of laying low and flying under the radar of LE. He escaped for one reason and one reason only, to kill and kill again, such was his compulsion!

Then after being captured and then recaptured once more, will decide to allow his ego to decide for him that he must take centre stage and represent himself and appoint himself as defence attorney and cross examine the witnesses and relive every murder in gory detail which results in his being rewarded with an appointment with the Electric Chair.

… If we believe Zodiac really was so desperate for attention and loved the fact he was not caught and ‘crack-proof’ then we may have every reason and expectation that on his death bed there would come one final Claim of ‘My Name is..’ or at least maybe expect a letter to remain in the hands of a attorney with the comment "It is the wish of the client that this sealed envelope remain sealed until client is deceased" or something along those lines.

"If we believe that Zodiac was so desperate for attention …

… we would need to account for the fact that he has been very quiet for the last several decades."

That’s exactly why I have a hard time believing the seemingly desperate need to feature in the pages of the press being genuinely motivating the man to commit his crimes. I have been dubious of the whole ‘murders being about the attention and publicity’ thing for a while now because someone who keeps insisting on threat of murder that this letter over here appear in the paper and that cipher over there be the front page feature and failure to comply will result in a kill rampage, bomb detonation and any number of other specific threats to all of a sudden declaring that "I will no longger announce when I commit my murders" which he keeps his word in regards to not announcing them. It almost seems as if the whole persona of the Zodiac and his motives of attention may have been a tactic designed and instigated for one purpose alone and that purpose being to divert the attention and suspicion of the real motive and links by seeming to appear totally random crimes by a maniac serial killer.