There are a lot of things about Lake Berryessa that are very much not like Zodiac, but again, I don’t classify it as a "hoax".

Yup that’s true. Or at least I can easily accept that. That there are a lot of things that appear un-Zodiac like.

The thing is though, that may not necessarily be true. That’s why I’ve been ‘debating’ the aspects of it and on the issue of the 3 girls. I believe it was Zodiac and in that respect I’m quite keen to see what comes out of that and what we can perhaps ‘get our heads around’. I think sometimes we need to discuss things for something to occur to us, to maybe see things in a slightly clearer light.

T, as you say above, "not like Zodiac" but what can we be sure is? You give the examples of the letters he sent detailing BRS and then LHR. Notice the order. The LHR letter was in response to the newspapers asking him for more details. In essence, prove it. We can’t be certain but he had to be asked for those details and, possibly because it was at the start of his Zodiac campaign, he felt it prudent to comply. If he hadn’t been asked would he have sent the details or would he have left it as the almost ‘mentioned in passing’ reference in the phonecall he made after BRS?

Variation is something that he seems to like to employ. Look at the ‘progression’ of his letters. Yes they start off with details and written proof but then he starts with the ‘victim count’ and doesn’t elaborate on them much further than that. Even at the start of the ‘bus bomb letter’ he kicks off with a proposed variation list. So in that respect is LB really out of character? If anything PH is the one that is more different and so he gets pretty solid proof for that one. Quite possibly anticipating the doubt if he didn’t. Up until that point it had been 2 victims per attack, a male and a female at LHR, BRS and LB.

Then we get the ciphers, the bomb, the map and even after vanishing for a few years, the letters written in varied styles. Taking all that into account as a behavior then LB really doesn’t seem out of place at all.

Even the Halloween Card does it with the 4 methods listed and … while we’re on it, "By Knife" – that was withheld on the images released of the car door, wasn’t it? I ask because I can’t remember if we decided that it had indeed remained secret or if it was made public prior to the Halloween Card being received. Obviously if it hadn’t then not only does it validate the HC (I think it’s him anyway) but it also adds another level of confirmation to LB being him.

I think sometimes we need to step back when it comes to Z and see the bigger picture because it seems quite plausible that if he had definable MO it was confusion and misdirection even when he admitted to things. Read my strapline, it seems terribly and spookily relevant. Was he?, is he? what’s true, what isn’t? Was he too clever after all? or just ‘hard to define’ lucky?

To quote Paul Avery’s character in Fincher’s Zodiac. "You can’t think of this case in normal police terms". There is a pattern but I suspect it is bigger, spread over many years and more modular than we remember to remember.

Tahoe27 wrote: Lake Berryessa—NOTHING, not one mention in his later letters. Some would say proof is on the car door, but what about his bragging rights…his rubbing it in? It was the most brazen, gruesome attack and we get nothing from the man who loves to tell us all about his murders and his diabolical ways. Not in one letter do we get anything that was said about Bryan or Cecelia, their conversation, how scared Cecelia was, his personal experience of that crime–how easy it was, tying them up, how he got away with it.

This is very true, but the 340 Cipher has yet to be decoded. This may yet change things, and he does mention the month of September at the foot of the Dripping Pen Card.

My opinion on the 340 seems to change as frequently as my opinion on Beryessa…

But right now I’m – almost – convinced that nothing will ever be revealed in the 340, for the very simple reason that it’s either a complete smoke screen or a complete screw-up on Z’s part. What do we positively know about Z, the cipher master? That he constructed a fairly basic cipher which was cracked easily enough by a couple of amateurs. Is it plausible, based on this, that he was capable of constructing a vastly better, more intricate cipher? I don’t know.

What is the simplest and safest way to create an unbreakable cipher which – seemingly – affirms that you’re a genius beyond the reach of the stupid cops?

That may be the case, but if the cipher was unsolvable or a smokescreen, there would be no need for the correction on line 6.
The correction it has said by people is a double bluff, to make people believe it was real, when it wasn’t, but the fun is creating a cipher that people can decipher if they find the right key. The fun you would get by a complete fake cipher would be very short lived. The diversity of 63 symbols and certain patterns within the cipher, suggest a logical solution.

That may be the case, but if the cipher was unsolvable or a smokescreen, there would be no need for the correction on line 6.
The correction it has said by people is a double bluff, to make people believe it was real, when it wasn’t, but the fun is creating a cipher that people can decipher if they find the right key. The fun you would get by a complete fake cipher would be very short lived. The diversity of 63 symbols and certain patterns within the cipher, suggest a logical solution.

Good point – I concede it.

But that still leaves my second possibility – which is that the 340 is, simply, faulty. Z tried to construct a cipher along the general lines of the first one, but he slipped along the way – what made a cipher in his mind is in fact just a meaningless shambles, because the plain text doesn’t correspond to the encrypted one in a logical way.

Another theory of mine, as I’ve stated elsewhere, is that Z inserted a coherent message – using a basic substitution cipher – in a mess of noise: there is an encrypted, meaningful communication there, but it’s surrounded by gibberish. Which is easy to do – but extremely hard to decipher.

The cipher? A seperate topic I think. My take? I dont know.

1. Hartnell said the man had a unique way of talking, a slow drawn out speech pattern. Nancy Slover described it as deliberate, monotone, as if reading from a script.
Yet the voice was described by Hartnell and Officer Slaight as young, possibly a student. Slover’s guy…not so.
Irrelevant, methinks. Some people like to think Nancy Slover could remember perfectly the exact timbre of her phone callers voice and the way he spoke, 40+ years later. She couldn’t (in fact) recall the exact things he said just a few days later for her report! Let’s just discount this stuff, huh?

2. The writing on the car door is a good match.
I agree., but I think handwriting has been proven to be a lot like the composite. It fits lots of folks.
I think it’s a good match too. Is it possible that the guy who killed Cecelia wasn’t the guy who wrote on the door? Yes, that’s possible.

3. But the biggest clue of all, was the Napa receiver was off the hook, the Zodiac had learnt from his mistake at Blue Rock Springs Park, when it rang and alerted the passer by to him + his car, and he wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.
Could be, or could be this guy just left it off the hook.
More researched is required, here, before we can believe that phone DID ring after BRS, and that’s not just the stuff of legend. Even if it did though, yes, could be that this guy left the phone off the hook. SInce the fact that it WAS off the hook was what drew the cops to find it…..

4 He said at the foot of ‘The Debut of Zodiac Letter’ on August 4th " I was not happy to see that I did not get front page coverage". So what better way to dress up in a dramatic costume and write on the car door in reaction, whether or not he had left somebody alive.
But, if he killed them, there was no one to tell about his dramatic costume. And why didn’t he jump all over this? This was his most gruesome, yet fails to ever bring it up? Not only that–Zodiac later claims an AUGUST kill, yet this is not written on the door.
I agree, T., the fact that this crime doesn’t get mentioned is very, very odd. Do you think he wrote about it, and that letter’s been surpressed, or lost? Or….?

5. Copycat killers are rare and attempting to murder two people in cold blood at 6.30pm, just to imitate another killer in the relevant timeline is highly unlikely.
I’m not sure what 6:30 has to do with anything. I think it’s more of making Zodiac look guilty of the crime and not himself.
Copycat crimes – and murders – aren’t that rare. I think the inference here is that 6:30 in the evening is early, it’s still light, and that it’s a dangerous crime to commit, then. That’s true. What "timeline" does the crime emulate, though? None at all. It’s an entirely different MO! If you were going to emulate LHR and BRS wouldn’t you shoot a couple in the dark of night? Would you put on a hood and stab them (to death) in early eveing in a public place? Be seen stalking girls around the lake shore first? (Probably.) Well, no, I don’t think so. It’s quite a different beast here, I think. Not one that was concerned about copycatting very closely, either, since he knew the way he liked his own fun….

6. Napa is a near direct route back to the Vallejo/Benicia area.
And the many other bay area cities…not to mention the mental hospital in Napa.
Everywhere is on a direct route to somewhere…..

7. If the Zodiac had not sent the swatch of Paul Stine’s shirt, people would have said the MO was not the Zodiac’s also and we may still even debating this 45 years later.
So true. That is, imo, why he did what he did. To prove he was the killer.
I am still debating whether that was also "The Zodiac". I’m debating everything. Sorry!

Smithy:

Point 2: It looks like a good match. And it was confirmed to BE a match by LE. That has to count for something. But I agree that this handwriting business is a bit – I don’t know…it’s not a fingerprint, let’s put it like that. Still, what one could argue here is that the writing is similar enough to make it likely that if the person who wrote it was NOT the same man who killed the other known Zodiac victims, then this person tried to emulate the writing of the Zodiac killer (the latter being known at the time and published in the papers).*

* And this may in turn be said to be…let’s say more indicative of a "hoax" than of an isolated, unrelated killer who has nothing to do with the other crimes in the series.

Point 4: Agreed. It is odd. Remarkable, even. He throws in a remark about killing some people in the "north bay area", which could be a reference to Beryessa. But that’s it. He doesn’t go into details at all. And given the nature of the crime – the whole scene he effectively staged and played out – it does strike me as odd that he didn’t milk it further in any known communication.

Point 5: Agreed. The time of day is what it is – and has to be. He attacked at a spot that would’ve been deserted later in the evening. He couldn’t have waited around till nightfall before he struck – people don’t go on "picnics" after dark.

N., that’s all good. We’re both right, it’s all very odd.

Re: handwriting similarities…. it amuses me to think that the killer hung on the door handle of that Kharmann ghia as the dusk fell, forging a message he’d been practising at for a few weeks, to ensure it looked like the stuff he’d read in the papers. Hell of a forging job, I think.
You reckon he was referring to a piece of paper to make sure he got it right? Rubbing some stuff off as he went along, when he got the "f" wrong? That last "e" at the wrong angle?
Re: LE confirmed similiarities and what that counts for – well, I suppose we can pick and choose. People tend to!
Our friend Sherwood Morrill was convinced the ’78 letter was genuine, it’s been said….

Back to this particular crime and the time of day – why attack there at all?
If you’re a copycat, why not wait until dark – somewhere else. Was the location "special" to this attacker? Why?
If you’re the Evil Zodiac Killer – why the tremendous variation in MO at the Lake?
It’s all just a tiny wee bit fishy. (No pun intended.)

My friend Trav says somewhere around here "It’s not a Sherlock Holmes novel" – and he’s right. It’s more like a farce. Or True Crime fiction……

Back to this particular crime and the time of day – why attack there at all?
If you’re a copycat, why not wait until dark – somewhere else. Was the location "special" to this attacker? Why?
If you’re the Evil Zodiac Killer – why the tremendous variation in MO at the Lake?
It’s all just a tiny wee bit fishy. (No pun intended.)

My friend Trav says somewhere around here "It’s not a Sherlock Holmes novel" – and he’s right. It’s more like a farce. Or True Crime fiction……

I could talk at length about the writing on the door and ‘we’ have but It’s the questions you just asked (above) that I found interesting because there might be an answer.

This has possibly been said before by someone. Apologies if so but as I was reading your questions, presented almost rhetorically it occurred to me that you might have answered the riddle.

Copycats.

No, not a rabid gang of random imitators but rather the actual Zodiac’s concern about them. It’s not just that he’s altering his apparent MO in an attempt to not get caught, although it certainly serves that purpose, but that he might also be doing it to avoid being copied. He did seem rather particular about that, didn’t he? "I hope you don’t think it was me that …". Even pre-empting being mis-attributed to crimes that weren’t his and thus loosing control of his own little game by it becoming too big for him.

You are quite right smithy, it was ‘opposites’ day in Z-land. Compared to the two previous. On the surface at least. Then he wears his own advertising and signs autographs (so to speak). He wants it on one level to be different but then he brands the event and follows previous MO procedures – No & type of victims, phonecall after he’s left the area to admit responsibility and give details and directions. The car door is his letter in this instance and that’s why I think he didn’t write about it again, he’s already done that. I believe that LE provided him the opportunity to give a ‘nod’ to it on the HC by not releasing the ‘by knife’ but that’s about it.

I suspect though that he was maybe afterwards thinking he might be at risk of being hoisted by his own petard. Trying to do too much. Avoid being caught, avoid being copied, avoid not being believed. Perhaps ironically the existence of this thread and Mr Horan’s theory might even support that. Rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater though he overcomes this potential problem in his next attack with less deniable proof.

So that’s my theory. He changed the details but the approach and MO remained relatively unaltered. Not just to confuse the cops but also any would-be, wannabe Z’s. This was his game and he’d spent years cultivating it and growing it so he wanted to protect it from ‘any’ interference.

… an afterthought.

Perhaps a question to consider as well. I always found it odd that when he ‘owned’ up to Riverside he said he had to give ‘the cops’ credit. Begrudgingly of course. I’ve never considered that they were attributable for that though. That was Avery. In the ‘Bus bomb’ letter he writes the he has ‘grown rather angry with the police for telling lies about me’ Again though, we aren’t sure what he means there, unless we change police to Avery. Does it make sense then? He’s quite particular about getting his credit and or point across that he won’t even give anyone any limelight by referring to them directly. He doesn’t even refer to his victims by name.

Trav – my questions weren’t rhetorical – I really am as dumb as they make me appear; I dont know the answers.

Re: your post:
He changed his MO at Berryessa so that he couldn’t be imitated?
He didn’t write a letter ‘cos the door says it all?
Well, I don’t know! Ha!

Pretty sure Mr Horan wouldn’t want his theories to support that conclusion, mind you.

lol. No, I took them as rhetorical though for the purpose of holding on to my own fleeting thoughts while I was typing them.

As to your other points, I don’t know either. I was hypothesizing out loud as to why he did what he did and at that point in his ‘campaign’. I was also musing, again out loud, on how, if these were indeed his motives, Mr Horan may have come to arrive at his own theory.

I was being duplo-matic.

Have you listened to this yet?
It’s a larf. It’ll let you know where Mr Horan’s coming from – probably. Maybe!
http://raasnio.com/GenerationWhyPodcast … ller-hoax/

Lots more empty claims by Horan.

Anybody want to make a list on mistakes and errors he passed along to the host?

I will start- He claims Gordon Spence was a cop, who had an affair with Darlene, and ran off to join the Navy to get away from her. That’s not true, he was NOT a cop.

Anybody want to make a list on mistakes and errors he passed along to the host?

I will start- He claims Gordon Spence was a cop, who had an affair with Darlene, and ran off to join the Navy to get away from her. That’s not true, he was NOT a cop.

This is how bad information gets spread.

With a little effort, he could very easily find out the name of the cop who dated Darlene. It’s all over the internet. All he read was "Gordon" and ran with it.

I truly wish people would do better research.