According to Graysmith the Santa Rosa K-Mart bomb threat happened on May 8, 1970. RG also said that exactly one year earlier that Zodiac had made a previous Santa Rosa bomb threat. This Oct 15 threat may be the closest match to his claim.

Unless something has been misinterpreted here I think it is pretty extraordinary that someone (in Santa Rosa no less) was "hinting" to be Zodiac and threatening school children (let alone a specific school bus bomb) before the Zodiac’s threat was revealed. My skeptical guess I suppose is that we will discover that the full contents of the letter were published earlier.

Someone didn’t want to go to work that day.

Newspapers.com now has the Santa Rosa Press Democrat digitized at their website and can be accessed if you have the premium subscription. If there was a bomb threat at Kmart on May 8 1970 it did not make the news. I tried various search words and looked for the entire year in case Graysmith was mistaken about the date. I suppose it’s possible, though not likely, that the threat was kept out of the news. If the store was evacuated, as Graysmith claims, it’s hard to believe that it would not have made the news. If the threat had occurred when the store was closed it would have been easier to keep quite about the threat.

Using the search words "bomb threat", leaving out Kmart, there were 31 hits. All but one of those hits were regarding bomb threats in locations other than Santa Rosa or Sonoma County. The one bomb threat that was in Santa Rosa was a call made by three junior high school aged girls on October 30 1970 saying there was a bomb at Santa Rosa Junior High School. It was a prank call.

There were seven hits for "bomb threat" in 1969.

January 12 1969 the student body president of Solano Junior College in Vallejo stepped down because he couldn’t take the pressure shortly before a bomb threat was telephoned into the school.

March 10 1969 the Healdsburg school district trustees discussed bomb threat procedures for the school district. There was also another article the following day March 11 1969 that included the same information.

There were three specific bomb threats in Sonoma County in 1969.

MGM manufactured brakes, not rakes!

Not sure if this was posted yet, but here’s details on the 1970 Bomb threat, have not found anything about 1969 yet

Hi Seagull, not sure if you saw this earlier post from Morph, but it seems RG was at least right about the May 8, 1970 kmart threat. Why he stated that there was a threat on the same day a year earlier in Santa Rosa is still a mystery.

Sorry about that, I tried to repost the newspaper article morph put on page 3 of this thread but I must have screwed up. At any rate the article seems like proof of the may 8 1970 threat.

Druzer, you’re correct, I did not see the article that Morf posted. Weird that it only appeared in the Long Beach CA newspaper and not in the local newspaper. I wasn’t able to find it in any other newspapers either.

Well, the Santa Rosa KMart is no more. It was lost to fire this morning. The entire shopping center was lost as well as hundreds of homes and businesses.

Well, the Santa Rosa KMart is no more. It was lost to fire this morning. The entire shopping center was lost as well as hundreds of homes and businesses.

Oh Seagull I read about all those horrible fires in northern california and pray to that you and everyone else
from those areas is ok <3

you guys are certainly having a tough time.
wishing you safe times ahead.

Thanks! I am safe. I moved over to the coast a few years ago but most all of my family still lives in Napa and Sonoma counties. So far so good for all of them but one sister has her car packed and ready to go should she be told to evacuate. There is no containment for any of the fires, they are still in evacuation mode and resources are stretched thin because there are so many fires.

Seagull….I think the row of buildings which includes like a Togos in that complex survived. But for sure that KMart is no more. I drove by that KMart every morning M-F for 18 years, worked up on Fountain Grove. It’s hard to digest. I’ve never seen a firestorm like that in N. Ca….Maybe the Oakland Hills Fire in the early 90’s. And I understand Calistoga got hit hard last night.
Now back to Z and KMart. I recall having a discussion with a group of SR natives one day and they all recalled the bomb threat to KMart when it occurred.

Know families evacuated from their homes & business’s in Santa Rosa, Napa & Clearlake. Know of people on stand by in other towns. Know one family that lost their home & everything they owned. Know of friends family’s that lost their homes.
There’s been reports of people, possibly in a Black Honda in Middletown that started a fire. The people that saw that, stopped & stomped out the fire. In Fairfied, two people were caught starting a fire. They had the same match’s in their pockets, that started the fire next to them & also burnt boots!
Yes, some were from the high winds & PGE power lines. But not in all these towns? If I had to bet money, some were started by arsonist’s. Some of the Fire victims stories are just too too sad!
All caught arsonists should be locked up forever, never to be released!

Zam*

Not sure if this was posted yet, but here’s details on the 1970 Bomb threat, have not found anything about 1969 yet

Hi Seagull, not sure if you saw this earlier post from Morph, but it seems RG was at least right about the May 8, 1970 kmart threat. Why he stated that there was a threat on the same day a year earlier in Santa Rosa is still a mystery.

If it was true ( And I believe it was) that Zodiac made a bomb threat on May 8th 69 and again May 8th 70 , he also sent a letter on May 8th 1974 the "Badlands letter". Some of us have noticed that Zodiac favored the number 3, the three May 8th letters makes sense to me. Was he drawing attention to that date which ironically I believe was Jim Phillips birthday? Perhaps setting him up as a suspect? Also the three 8’s in the my name cypher. 8th letter of the alphabet "H".

I was living in Napa when the bomb threats and picking off the kiddies came out. My children took the bus to school ,it was a scary time. So scary that I moved from Napa by Nov.1970. For a few months I wasn’t bothered by the odd phone calls I had been receiving back in Napa. They started again after I moved, the heavy breathing saying nothing. My car constantly tampered with. I had no idea who it was, I don’t think I was thinking it could be Zodiac?

Lets not forget that LE felt that Zodiac was committing his crimes to get front page news, believe it or not some information was suppressed because if that. To this day when a call is made by someone claiming to be Zodiac and telling the police where he has left a body, it isn’t put in the news paper. Partly because it is believed to be a hoax by some in LE but not all, even though the body was where the caller said it was.

This may or may not be of interest,but at the time I thought it was. I was looking at a suspect who was a professor at a collage in Santa Rosa in the early 70’s, he was from NY.middle aged. He was going through a nasty divorce and had young teen children. The divorce papers showed the bills that he was told to pay. They were car payments, child support and a bill to" K-Mart". Back then the wife got everything and the husband got all of the bills. I knew about the K-Mart bomb threat, so when I saw K-Mart in the papers it caught my attention.

https://www.zodiacciphers.com/zodiac-news/proof-october-15th-1969-santa-rosa-caller-was-the-zodiac-killer

It is the earliest one we know about although seldom discussed or noted.

On October 21st 1969, the San Francisco Chronicle released an article entitled Fear Rides the Yellow Bus, stating “A climate of fear hangs over the Napa Valley. The fear is over “Zodiac” and his terrifying boast to “wipe out a school bus”. No one takes the threat lightly, Zodiac has already struck here. The task of trying to insure the safety of 10,000 youngsters who ride the Napa Valley Unified School District is immense. The district encompasses an area of Southern Napa County of 229 square miles. Sixty-four bright yellow buses travel the county roadways each day – often into areas where houses are a couple of miles apart. The vehicles go a total of 4,000 miles daily in and from elementary schools, three junior highs and one senior high school. Even before starting on its routes each vehicle has undergone a thorough check to make sure a bomb isn’t aboard. Someone hinting he might be Zodiac has telephoned such a threat in Santa Rosa. The man responsible for the safety of the students who ride the buses is Fred Sowash, the district’s transportation director. Since last Wednesday, when he learned of Zodiac’s threat, Sowash has been devoting 18 to 20 hours a day to blunt it”.

From RG’s site.

This article was released on Tuesday, October 21st 1969, indicating that the threat Fred Sowash was aware of last Wednesday, must have been delivered by the man claiming to be the Zodiac Killer on October 15th 1969 at the latest. The telephone threat could conceivably have been delivered as early as October 14th 1969, the day before the October 15th 1969 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which first reported a connection between the Paul Stine murder and the Zodiac Killer. But crucially, the October 15th 1969 Chronicle article withheld the threat of “School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out”, for fear of stateside panic. This meant that any telephone caller to Santa Rosa Police Department on October 15th 1969 threatening to blow up a school bus and kill schoolchildren, gave this information over the phone before any threat on schoolchildren was ever released in the newspapers. This caller effectively pre-empted the last paragraph of the Stine letter in absence of its contents being published. This almost certainly means, that the telephone caller claiming to be the Zodiac Killer on October 15th 1969, was the Zodiac Killer. He not only threatened schoolchildren before the full Stine letter contents were made public, but he threatened the use of a bomb to attack a school bus, twenty-five days before the Bus Bomb letter was postmarked.

Druzer nailed it on September 26th 2017, stating “According to Graysmith the Santa Rosa K-Mart bomb threat happened on May 8, 1970. RG also said that exactly one year earlier that Zodiac had made a previous Santa Rosa bomb threat. This Oct 15 threat may be the closest match to his claim. Unless something has been misinterpreted here I think it is pretty extraordinary that someone (in Santa Rosa no less) was “hinting” to be Zodiac and threatening school children (let alone a specific school bus bomb) before the Zodiac’s threat was revealed. My skeptical guess, I suppose, is that we will discover that the full contents of the letter were published earlier”. Druzer2017

This needs a little modification but it still holds true and no the full contents don’t appear to have been published earlier.

https://www.zodiackiller.com/newspaper_archive_index.html

Archive Story 3      (Oct. 17, 1969 / Elyria (OH) Chronicle-Telegram / 517 KB)

Archive Story 4      (Oct. 17, 1969 / Edwardsville (IL) Intelligencer / 480 KB)

Archive Story 5      (Oct. 17, 1969 / Fond du Lac (WI) Commonwealth Reporter / 351 KB)

Archive Story 6      (Oct. 17, 1969 / Frederick (MD) News / 394 KB)

These articles on the 17th actually tell you their sources and the dates those leaks happened on. So you have the leak/scoop identified in them prior to Avery’s 21st Fear rides the Yellow Bus.

On the 16th bus drivers had been given special instructions to keep moving in the events of an attack. On the same day Detective Martin Lee (SFPD) revealed the Zodiac threat.

On the 17th the Napa Valley Register actually said there had been a leak and that it occurred from San Francisco. So that seems to indicate the information on 16th.

Fred Sowash had that information at least day before any of that on the 15th because SRPD had been called by someone (Zodiac is more likely as we shall see) with that information on the 14th/15th. They had kept that quiet which explains why the other papers hadn’t picked up on it from Santa Rosa. Otherwise it would have appeared before the 17th. It didn’t even appear in the Santa Rosa’s Press Democrat.

So it still looks good for the hypothesis the SRPD was called on the 14th/15th was the Zodiac with inside knowledge.

There was leak, but after the 15th.

The Napa Valley Register 16th article doesn’t say bus or school children were threatened.

It says “A note was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday and laid claim to all murders and threatened to strike (page 13) again. San Francisco police inspectors deleted the last partition of his latest note as they were afraid it would frighten the public.”

So there you have it. The newspapers only knew something was deleted that could frighten the public. They didn’t know what it was.

It hasn’t been demonstrated the press knew about a threat to school kids on buses before the call to the SRPD on the 14th/15th threatening school kids on buses. That points to inside information from the caller that was not released to the press or public.

So the conclusion it is the Zodiac unless someone can prove the specific threat to kids on school buses was leaked prior to the 16th.

So why the Zodiac called SRPD requires an explanation.

Why is the threat to San Francisco insufficient? Santa Rosa is small potatoes compared to San Francisco, yet he wants a smaller city included. Why not Richmond? Berkeley? Oakland? San Jose? Why does he need to go all the way to Santa Rosa (and bypass San Rafael) for example?

1. Either the caller suspected or had inside knowledge that his 13th October communication was not expanding outside of San Francisco to other school districts. That was not good enough for his terrorist tactics.

2. The caller wanted Santa Rosa specifically to be included in his terrorist tactics. We don’t know about any calls to any other smaller cities.

3. Why not just mention it in the October 13th letter? That’s the problem he was faced with. He wants to include Santa Rosa in his threats that San Francisco will receive but he doesn’t want to explicitly state so. Instead he phones it into SRPD. Why not just write that? What’s wrong with writing down Santa Rosa? He has no problem naming places in his other communications outside of San Francisco such as Vallejo. He even has no problem indicating Riverside in a letter communication. He wrote on the car door at Lake Berryessa. Yet he won’t write about Santa Rosa.

Does it not suggest that he knew San Francisco was actively preparing in silence to defend it’s school kids from his threats and that the satellite cities around were not concerning themselves with it? That this is what he had to ‘correct’?

Posted by: @bdholland

Why is the threat to San Francisco insufficient?

I think you have already answered this. He saw that the police did not let the press print his threat on the morning of the 15th so he promptly called in another – this time to somewhere that hadn’t yet adopted a silence policy. Santa Rosa was far enough to show that no one was out of his reach but close enough that they would know it was him. Perhaps he just closed his eyes and placed a finger randomly on his Phillips 66.