Trav, you are amazing.

Impressive work, Trav! Is your "author" anyone we might be familiar with? Or is he a new ingredient added to the mix?

Your comparisons Trav are always interesting to look at. I know my doubts have been annoying to some…probably most.

I do believe the good copy-cats are going to show those similiarites. Some probably even traced…or it wouldn’t be so hard to tell the difference. There is nothing anyone can say to convince me the Pines card is legit.

I’m not big on these picture series, as for me, they are hard to correlate together.

I always like to see your work and what I’m getting at is after you’re finished do you have a plan to compile it all together into one document? You also might think about submitting this for some sort of thesis, because I know you’ve put a hell of a lot of work into these comparisons.

Good Work Trav, the color enhancement really showcases the similarity

Impressive work, Trav! Is your "author" anyone we might be familiar with? Or is he a new ingredient added to the mix?

Yes, it’s Zodiac. Now that doesn’t really affect the work here because all I am doing or attempting to do is bring some transparency as to why we have the letters we have. Why they were singled out in the first place.

The Marco and Citizen letters are very important. Not least because they are so contentious. I see people comment all the time that the Marco letter can’t be Zodiac because it looks nothing like his writing. That is correct, it doesn’t but I can see what I consider to be evidence that he wrote it. Those two letters were sent exactly 2 months apart to the day. In and of themselves they could look much different and that’s what troubles me. You see I think it’s the same person so the problem I now have is that where I had previously considered the Citizen letter to be just that, a letter just written normally with possibly a few character variations. I’m now not so sure if any of it is real. The writer is quite obviously capable of style changes if he is indeed the same person who wrote those letters. So, if he’s capable of that what else could he have been up to in regards the rest of the letters.

This started as a look at just the Marco letter but I quickly started seeing the things I’ve already posted in relation to the Citizen letter. There are other very good ‘matches’ in the other Zodiac letters that are also in the Marco letter so it’s not just tying it to the Citizen letter. Those I will show soon hopefully.

Your comparisons Trav are always interesting to look at. I know my doubts have been annoying to some…probably most.

I do believe the good copy-cats are going to show those similiarites. Some probably even traced…or it wouldn’t be so hard to tell the difference. There is nothing anyone can say to convince me the Pines card is legit.

Yeah to be honest there’s really not much to work with on the Pines card but I have spotted a few things, probably nothing shocking but I’ll need to wait and see how it falls into the bigger picture.

I can understand your copycat angle for things like the Pines card and HC I’m not sure though how that would fit with the Citizen Letter and Marco letter. These weren’t Zodiac communications as such so why would a copycat write them with underlying traits of Zodiac’s writing habits and in two different styles?

Now, that being said, the ‘stuff’ that I will present down the line might throw out something that screams copycat and if it does shout because I’m not necessarily looking for it. I’m just trying to investigate what’s there and not always make sense of it

I’m not big on these picture series, as for me, they are hard to correlate together.

I always like to see your work and what I’m getting at is after you’re finished do you have a plan to compile it all together into one document? You also might think about submitting this for some sort of thesis, because I know you’ve put a hell of a lot of work into these comparisons.

Not a bad idea. I think it was in the back of mind somewhere and this ‘little’ exercise might well double up as the start point for it. I know what you are saying about the information being hard to correlate. That image with all the characters in it doesn’t really mean anything yet but hopefully it will. It’s a layout starting point and there are things in it that I will highlight and discuss later.

I’m just dumping stuff out there for now because there’s quite a few things going on that are intertwined. On one hand I’m looking at the letters from a comparison point of view and that’s going to be arduous enough because I think I might need to compare each letter to every other piece of written evidence and do that for all of them.

There is also the aspect of character selection. There is something ‘weird’ going on and I’m not sure exactly what it means but it is there. He appears to use a rotating system of characters for some of his letters (as in the letters in the words). It’s averaging out roughly at about 3. So say for example, within a letter (the whole page) he would use 3 different n’s. He doesn’t do it for all the characters but he does seem to have his favourites.

I just don’t know if it means anything yet. I spotted if quite a while back in his lowercase e’s. I’d mentioned it recently over on WC’s thread Zodiac’s Point. He alternates between follow through and terminated in them and sometimes in the same word. I had put it down to a writing trait and nothing more but now I’m not so sure. The whole thing could be a writing trait as opposed to some method of construction for the purpose of disguise.

The image with all the characters roughly shows this as I have separated the characters into their own groupings according to the variations employed. You can see that he does it in both the Citizen letter and the Marco letter. That’s mostly the purpose of that, not so much to show similarities between characters because he uses different characters.

I’m trying to wrap my head (unsuccessfully)around Zodiac’s thinking and ability( to disguise handwriting) with regard to these letters versus the known/signed ones.

Option 1. The signed ones are Z’s natural hand and he has attempted to disguise these as Z is no more.
Option 2. The signed ones and the Count Marco are contrived and the Citizen letter is closest to his natural hand.
Option 3. All are unnatural hand
Option 4.The signed ones are Z’s natural hand/or not and he has altered style with a double bluff in mind…..he knows there’s enough to connect him even though he has altered style.

Other things to keepin mind

1. Z was very big into proving and going to great lengths, that he was responsible for various murders, however, when it came to LB, he seemed content to let the handwriting be the proof. What does this tell us?

2.While many would argue the claim of a disguise at SF was after the fact nonsense…he did show and demonstrate a healthy anti detection awareness in may areas.
Would such a person not alter handwriting?

Apologies…having posted that I’m not sure if it isn’t drifting off topic a little. If so, would a moderator please delete or move and I can take it up elsewhere

Apologies…having posted that I’m not sure if it isn’t drifting off topic a little. If so, would a moderator please delete or move and I can take it up elsewhere

I’m happy enough with it. The points are relevant and they are the same questions that I am wondering.

I thought I had more stuff done lol.

Here’s a look at the h’s in the Citizen and Marco letters. I have split them into 3 groups and I believe these grouping exist. You may look at some and think oh that looks like the others only slightly different, a normal writing variation. I wondered that at first as well. Especially when it comes to the higher frequency letters like the a’s. I thought I was just seeing something that wasn’t there after a while but I think it is. The a’s may not even apply but I will be looking at every character. As I said before though I don’t think he does it with every character but he does do it. Actually scrap that lol, he does do it with the a’s.

So, here’s the lowercase h’s. Marco in red and Citizen in black. Again this isn’t about matching these characters to each other. I already believe they are by the same person so in that respect it’s the differences that are actually interesting, for a change. Even in the differences though there’s a pattern. This average of 3 variations per character that he decides to alter. Once I disassembled the characters out from each letter and started grouping according to their own kind this pattern started to emerge.

Where I have written ‘not directly comparable’ means that those h’s aren’t the same as the ones in the other letter. A commonality in style though does occur in the last set.

He even corrects one of them which is interesting because either way it was an h so why bother? It’s in set one which I could have split into two groups but I don’t want it to get too complicated. That’s why I say an average of 3 some could be 2 or 4 or even 5 but there are some that are most definitely 3. Some may be, and probably are, variations within the groups. A sort of ambiguous blending of styles so where they are close enough to each other I’ve just kept them as one grouping.

Trav,

I’m looking at the Count Marco letter for that "corrected h" and can’t find it. Am I going blind or is there a high resolution copy somewhere that I’ve missed?

Just an aside,have you ever done such comparisons between the Citizen letter and the other "normal" Z letters?

Trav,

I’m looking at the Count Marco letter for that "corrected h" and can’t find it. Am I going blind or is there a high resolution copy somewhere that I’ve missed?

Just an aside,have you ever done such comparisons between the Citizen letter and the other "normal" Z letters?

It’s the h in ‘meanwhile’.

As for comparing the citizen letter to the other zodiac letters, no, not yet but I will be as this thread progresses. I’ve seen things, enough things to convince me it’s him but there’s other stuff going on in that letter as well. I have compared it to the desk poem though. viewtopic.php?f=80&t=397. As I have started this the Marco and citizen it should be no surprise that I’m finding elements in the Marco letter that correlate to the desk and to pretty much everything else. It’s a real mix but I think I can make some sense of it. I start to look at one thing then I have to go through all the written material to find the pattern and it’s there, it’s just that there’s a lot of them.

Then after all that I’ll have to take a step back and think and probably do more work. It’s called the ‘big one’ for good reason, everything we think he ever wrote is involved.