So then my question is, how can we take any of the letters seriously?

Details about the crime only the killer could know? Ok that must be a real letter from Z.

Piece of Stines shirt? Ok that has to be a letter from Z.

The rest? No idea

Hi-

Well, if you talk to QD experts, they will tell you that it is not possible to forge the letters. But they have turf to protect, don’t they? I do know that there are allegedly over twenty unique characteristics attributed to Z’s writing. (I do not know what they are, though, although the "three stroke k" and "checkmark r" are likely among them!) Richard Walter, the profiler I work with, pointed out that it is very unusual to use handwriting to solve a serial killer case. Usually you use a profile and then build a case against someone who fits that profile.

The fallacy of using handwriting lies in something like this: It seems very likely that the Pennington ad was the basis for the Avery Halloween card. In that ad, Pennington used a three stroke letter "k." Did Z get that letter from that ad? He seemed to have copied the "little eyes" and the "peek-a-boo" from the ad in the Halloween card. So if Z got the unusual "k" from that letter and never made it in real life, that means tons of suspects were excluded because of a contrived letter that the killer did not even use in his own handwriting. Shimoda in one of the Z shows on Tom’s composite tape said that what he focused on in analyzing the writing of potential suspects was that "k." The potentially contrived letter was the first thing he looked for!

Mike

^^And while I know many don’t agree with me, I don’t think it was Zodiac who sent the HC card. IF that was a fake, it opens up a whole other can-of-worms when it comes to the Zodiac case. Which is why, danmyers22, I completely agree with you.

They picked and chose which ones were most likely to be Zodiac’s based off of (various) professional opinions, of which some of them disagreed. IMO, fakers helped Zodiac…if even unintentionally.

Here’s the excerpt from LL’s book with Keel’s answering machine message. I’M assuming Keel said "doesn’t," but given his other strange comments, maybe he did contradict himself again.

Yah…like that message helps anyone. lol So it didn’t match, but Toschi admitted writing it? Huh?

The Exorcist letter was published in an article by Paul Avery on January 31. 1974. There was a photo of the actual letter. It’s obvious whoever wrote the 1978 letter used the Exorcist letter since those two are very similar. So…was it the same faker? I have never seen another Zodiac letter like the Exorcist letter. It is unique, but damn, that’s a tough one as the ’78 looks so contrived. Below is an article written by Maupin–this is where I got the comparison.

Oddly, the envelope was more convincing. Makes me wonder what happened when the forger sat down to write the actual letter… (apologies to whoever first posted this)

Envelopes that had previously appeared in the papers (bottom envelope, the Dripping Pen Card, from Avery’s Riverside piece):

Hi-

It is indeed interesting that…

"At no time was it explicitly stated that Toschi was suspected of writing the Zodiac letter, but the implication could not be missed, especially when it was announced that two handwriting experts were checking Toschi’s hand against not just the questioned April document but also the heretofore accepted "Exorcist" letter of January 1974." (from Jake Wark’s old site)  

…and that Keel told both me and Lyndon at different times that the DNA between the 1978 letter and one of the 1974 letters, both considered FORGERIES by SFPD, matched each other AND that by the time Keel left SFPD before Holt took over the only 1974 letter to have been tested, as I previously pointed out, was the Exorcist letter. "Coincidence? Do the math." (Oops, quoting the wild eyed guy from Fincher’s movie.) Funny that they zeroed in on the Exorcist letter as a potential second forgery as far back as 1978. It also appears in Maupin’s article in this thread.

Mike

Hi-

It is indeed interesting that…

"At no time was it explicitly stated that Toschi was suspected of writing the Zodiac letter, but the implication could not be missed, especially when it was announced that two handwriting experts were checking Toschi’s hand against not just the questioned April document but also the heretofore accepted "Exorcist" letter of January 1974." (from Jake Wark’s old site)  

…and that Keel told both me and Lyndon at different times that the DNA between the 1978 letter and one of the 1974 letters, both considered FORGERIES by SFPD, matched each other AND that by the time Keel left SFPD before Holt took over the only 1974 letter to have been tested, as I previously pointed out, was the Exorcist letter. "Coincidence? Do the math." (Oops, quoting the wild eyed guy from Fincher’s movie.) Funny that they zeroed in on the Exorcist letter as a potential second forgery as far back as 1978. It also appears in Maupin’s article in this thread.

Mike

Mike,
Thanks, you probably posted this before but it’s new to me. Recently in the Manalli thread we were discussing similarities to Fred’s writing and Z’s. If the Exorcist letter is discarded as a forgery, we also have to throw out from that discussion:

1. Use of the somewhat unusual word "satirical"
2. Split of "something" into two words. (I think, in Exorcist, "him self" is split to indicate the cadence of the poem.)

Also, the updated "score" of 37… Z’s victim claim gets rolled back to 17+

To me, all of the 1974 letters have a different style, subject matter, and tone than the early confirmed Z letters… Does anyone know, is there serious consideration by LE that genuine Z letters MAY have actually stopped after the Times letter on 3/13/1971, or maybe even before that?

I’m wondering if Z may have been cleared in error because he was in prison during that time, or had some other alibi when those letters were mailed… For that matter, conceivably, he may have been dead as early as ’71.

According to Lafferty, SFPD kept the palm prints from the Exorcist letter a secret until Allen was cleared in 2001. (Ken Narlow — and a lot of other people, obviously — would have liked to know if they matched the phone booth print from Napa.)

Subsequently, none of the press coverage of Toschi mentions the prints. Yet, logically… one would presume that SFPD checked them out. They just didn’t reveal the information to the public.

So… IF Toschi wrote the Exorcist letter AND he was crazy enough to not wear gloves, SFPD could have known this well before the advent of DNA testing. Just another thing to file in the "What the heck?" folder, I guess.