I could see one of the attacks being committed by someone else playing the Zodiac card to take attention away from themselves. Or, the Agatha Christie ABC Murders scenario…one target, but many victims to take away a direct connection to a closer individual.

We know there were hundreds if not thousands of fake letters (I believe it was Toschi who said thousands)…lots of kooks out there.

Can you though? or should the term be ‘imagine’ rather than ‘see’. I’m not just arguing semantics here, your post has me wondering about the mechanics and processes involved. In fact reading through people’s thoughts on this thread has me wondering the same. By that slightly vague phrasing I mean our thought processes. Our imaginings.

Why do we do that? or rather why do we do that with this case?

Personally I believe it’s because we fall for Z’s original and painfully simple idea. To sow confusion. I think we also miss it sometimes too, or fail to take it into account. Mike K said to me a few years back there’s a lot of noise surrounding this case and I suggested to him at the time that it may be because Z intended that and started it.

I call it simple but of course, as we all know, nothing remains that way once other people get involved. For me personally I can see that reflected in Z’s ‘reactions’. It’s like he’s trying to maintain control over his creation without appearing to be doing that. He want’s the attention, he wants the credit but it’s a fine line, as he must have realised, between control and chaos. He wants to keep the game going but I think even he was realizing that it wouldn’t be maintainable.

It’s tricky to look at this case and not get caught up in it. Maybe we have to though to work through it all. Perhaps Z even left us a prophetic message in the Halloween card he sent to Paul Avery. Sometimes it’s hard to "See the tree when too many eyes make it a wood".

Food for thought, traveller.

I believe there are two main reasons why the Z case still fascinates us. Firstly, he wasn’t a typical serial killer. There is something decidedly strange about the whole case as far as the murders themselves go. They don’t seem to fit, really, regardless of what category you try to place them in. Secondly, there is something genuinely inscrutable about the letters he sent. There are aspects of these letters which seems to blatantly contradict the idea of a clever, devious writer whose main purpose was to confuse and taunt the authorities. Just as there are aspects which quite clearly contradict the idea of a crazy simpleton whose main trait, all things said and done, was his baffling and enduring luck.

How did rg happen to pick four crimes that fit the same power assertive profile and that he knew would not be solved individually lest his hoax go poof?
Kevin Fagan saw nothing in keith powers’ tenure to suggest he would invent trip sheet. And who would think of inventing this notion and why? What purpose did it serve powers? How did horan learn what rg’s days off were in 1969?

Yeah, this was a weird one. How did that guy "convert" Smithy and whatever happened to him?

The biggest hole is obviously that cartoonish character who happened to appear at LB. Or rather, he isn’t a hole as such – but the combination of him AND the writing on the car door is a bit much, I think.

In order for the hoax theory to work one must either accept an immense coincidence – or go to work on B. Hartnell’s statement(s). The real problem here is the Zodiac symbol on the attacker’s costume. Without that he’s "just" a homicidal freak in some sort of executioner’s garb.

To me the most obvious weakness of the theory itself – disregarding the details, such as LB – is that is presupposes an LE representative as the hoaxer/letter writer. For my money it’s just too far fetched. You don’t need a rational motive, by all means – the whole thing is crazy to begin with – but the likelihood of an LE representative being a complete loon is far less obvious than him being a crook. And as I see it he’d have to be a loon – because there is no rational motive here. If Snook did it, then Snook was nuts – there really is no other explanation, is there? Provide me with a reason why a crook, who happened to be an LE representative, would want to create a "Zodiac" persona in order to cover up…something…and I might just, possibly, be willing to listen.

It’s worse than that. The hoax theory rests on two possibilities: either the caller at BRS was the killer or he was not. If he was the killer, then he implicated himself in murders he did not commit to throw LE off the scent of the motive for the murder he just committed, without knowing whether or not LE would discover the motive and identify him. That make no sense. Alternatively, if he was not the BRS killer, he had to learn of the murders, think to link them to the LHR murders, think to prank call the police, and execute his plan in about 30 minutes. That’s a tight time window to learn of the murder and hatch the scheme to link the BRS killing with the LHR murders. And… he would have no idea that the BRS murders would not be solved in short order. The latter scenario is far more remarkable than the former. Horan assumes the latter, which is far less defensible because of the tight time window and the lack of an apparent motive. Not to mention, a false report to police is, in itself, a crime.

"Ouroboros mindmeld" is my new favorite phrase!

Your assessment of Horan is accurate. He and others such as Grant seem to have a similar approach of creating hyper-elaborate circumstantial scenarios, then greeting you with hostility as soon as you try to point out any problems. And I think many of the problems boil down to a sort of "God of the Gaps" fallacy. In this fallacy, the absence of rational explanations is proof of God’s existence. Horan, Grant, and others see the absence of rational explanations as proof of a conspiracy’s existence.

Well said. At least Horan is not accusing otherwise upstanding citizens of multiple murders. Grant fancies himself as a the savior of greater Boston by stopping the Terminus Event. I wonder whether or not he really believes that or not. If so, I do feel for him. Not only is his whole theory so convoluted and lacking in supporting evidence, the premise is insane as well… if four people set out to create a multi-decade art project (one is which no one can actually view or admire or even discover, except Ray Grant), why would they abandon the project wholesale because one date was missed? Why not just perform the Terminus Event on another day? And… concedes that the same conspirators altered the Project at BRS, so why wouldn’t they do it again?

As to Horan, he has no coherent hoax theory. One minute Hal Snook is the architect. Then, it’s Graysmith. Later, it must be Keith Power or some other reporter. He’s posited crazy theories that the police needed a reason for overtime because of an impending strike. He has said that the Zodiac was a creation of the newspapers to sell subscriptions. He claims that Snook just wanted to alert someone in the CIA to the corruption of the Bay Area Police. He can’t keep his story straight. He just Gish gallops until his listeners forget what claims he actually made.

As to Horan, he has no coherent hoax theory. One minute Hal Snook is the architect. Then, it’s Graysmith. Later, it must be Keith Power or some other reporter. He’s posited crazy theories that the police needed a reason for overtime because of an impending strike. He has said that the Zodiac was a creation of the newspapers to sell subscriptions. He claims that Snook just wanted to alert someone in the CIA to the corruption of the Bay Area Police. He can’t keep his story straight. He just Gish gallops until his listeners forget what claims he actually made.

Yet his theory is STILL more plausible than 98% of the theories posited here over the history of this site…including many proffered by many of this sites "Illuminati".

How screwed up is that?

As to Horan, he has no coherent hoax theory. One minute Hal Snook is the architect. Then, it’s Graysmith. Later, it must be Keith Power or some other reporter. He’s posited crazy theories that the police needed a reason for overtime because of an impending strike. He has said that the Zodiac was a creation of the newspapers to sell subscriptions. He claims that Snook just wanted to alert someone in the CIA to the corruption of the Bay Area Police. He can’t keep his story straight. He just Gish gallops until his listeners forget what claims he actually made.

Yet his theory is STILL more plausible than 98% of the theories posited here over the history of this site…including many proffered by many of this sites "Illuminati".

How screwed up is that?

I think that is for a couple of reasons, though. One is that we don’t want to imagine that a killer can so brazenly taunt police and victims’ families and get away with it. The other reason is that it is very difficult to solve murders where victims are chosen at random. A third reason is that some explanation, even a bad one, often sits better than no explanation at all. One of the things Horan tried to do in his scholarly work is to tie the phenomenon of the Boston Stranger (as a made-up killer, who in his opinion and that of others was a composite of several murderers and copycats) to the Zodiac by making the Zodiac out to be the West Coast’s version of the Boston Strangler. The implication being that the newspapers either made up the killer or were more than willing to be complicit in the "hoax" to sell newspapers. It’s not a bad theory, but it ignores many facts to the contrary.

At least Horan is not accusing otherwise upstanding citizens of multiple murders.

But wouldn’t that apply to pretty much every serial killer in history?

If you take away the murders, or the rapes in the cases of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, what you usually have left is an upstanding citizen.

Ted Bundy was a trusted aide to the governor of Washington.

John Wayne Gacy had his picture taken with Rosalynn Carter.

Dennis Rader was president of his church council.

Isn’t being an otherwise upstanding citizen what usually keeps people like Zodiac from getting caught?

At least Horan is not accusing otherwise upstanding citizens of multiple murders.

But wouldn’t that apply to pretty much every serial killer in history?

If you take away the murders, or the rapes in the cases of Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, what you usually have left is an upstanding citizen.

Ted Bundy was a trusted aide to the governor of Washington.

John Wayne Gacy had his picture taken with Rosalynn Carter.

Dennis Rader was president of his church council.

Isn’t being an otherwise upstanding citizen what usually keeps people like Zodiac from getting caught?

I see your point. What none of those cases have in common with Zodiac is someone accusing them with very limited evidence. Bundy was identified by a woman he attempted to kidnap, which is far better evidence than we have in the Zodiac case. Rader was identified by DNA, although the church floppy disk is what first put police on his trail. Cosby and Weinstein were accused by multiple victims. I don’t know much about Gacy. With Zodiac, we have people making accusations, in the case of Ray Grant, against upstanding citizens with virtually no evidence to back up the allegations but some binary or morse code that spells out O’Hare’s name or SSN or whatever. The evidence used to impugn Kjell Qvale was better than what was adduced against Penn & O’Hare, but still lacking. It certainly was not sufficient to even open an investigation against him. What ties any alleged Zodiac suspect (Gaikowski, Kane, Sullivan, ALA, Marshall, Qvale) to any crime scene or any victim? Nothing. The alleged "circumstantial cases" are merely the Olympic Games of Speculation. And Zodiac researchers across the board have earned their fair share of medals therein.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

Hasn’t O’Hare been listed as a Zodiac suspect going back to the very first message boards on the Internet?

Here’s an example:

http://www.zodiackiller.com/messageboard/messages/17/99.html?98876949 6″> https://web.archive.org/web/20020414135 … ?988769496

I don’t see any binary or Morse code mentioned on that thread.

Correct me if I’m wrong.

Hasn’t O’Hare been listed as a Zodiac suspect going back to the very first message boards on the Internet?

Here’s an example:

http://www.zodiackiller.com/messageboard/messages/17/99.html?98876949 6″> https://web.archive.org/web/20020414135 … ?988769496

I don’t see any binary or Morse code mentioned on that thread.

O’Hare was first identified as a suspect in Gareth Penn’s book Times 17 in 1981. Read his book for a sampling of the weak case against O’Hare. It’s full of codes that allegedly serve as signals or clues from O’Hare that he is the Zodiac. Even if it were true that O’Hare committed every murder, based on Penn’s evidence, there is no way to verify that O’Hare is the Zodiac. My larger point is that no one can adduce one shred of evidence to tie any alleged Zodiac suspect to a crime scene. The closest anyone has come is Mike Rodelli. And I will give him credit for his case against Qvale, which has some merits. But even he fails to put Qvale at the corner of Washington & Cherry Streets because Lindsey Robbins did not identify Qvale as the guy he saw in 1969. Robbins went into what Rodelli (through Jim Dean) describes as a disassociative state when he saw Qvale’s photo from the 60s. Whatever that means, it is NOT an identification. Without that, all you have is a composite that looks somewhat like what Qvale looked in 1969 and lots of coincidences that could make Qvale the Zodiac or could mean nothing at all. And that is the best it gets. There is no case against any other suspect that even comes remotely close to Rodelli’s case against Qvale. And, yet Rodelli’s case is insufficient to prompt LE to even speak to Qvale. Think about that. The best case ever made against the Zodiac can’t meet the lowest bar of probable cause.

“My larger point is that no one can adduce one shred of evidence to tie any alleged Zodiac suspect to a crime scene . . . Think about that. The best case ever made against the Zodiac can’t meet the lowest bar of probable cause.”

This supposedly larger point can be paraphrased as follows:

“The crimes weren’t solved right away by conventional police work.”

Because if they’d had a suspect they could place at the crime scene, and they’d had probable cause, say to search his residence such that they found Paul Stine’s wallet and car keys there, or just book him such that they matched his fingerprints to the latents left in blood on the cab, the case would have been solved more than 50 years ago, and you wouldn’t be posting on a Zodiac Killer message board, and I wouldn’t be typing this reply to your post.

So we’re talking about a parallel universe that the two of us don’t live in.

To cite an example of what did happen, they followed up on Qvale to the extent of asking the witnesses if they could identify him, and taking his fingerprints to see if they were consistent with the latents that were left (they weren’t).

Now let’s move forward 50 years and imagine that some man develops Alzheimer’s disease and after he’s put in a nursing home, his wife opens his safe deposit box and finds Paul Stine’s wallet, and when she turns the wallet in, eventually the police come and ask where he got the wallet, and since she doesn’t know, they set about trying to establish his whereabouts on October 11, 1969. Maybe they find that he lived on Jackson Street. Maybe they find that he has a massive collection of cryptography books. Maybe they find that his handwriting resembles that of the Zodiac Killer.

But in any case, it’s not as if no one shot Paul Stine that night just because we haven’t arrested anyone for the crime. Someone was inside his cab and did shoot him in the head. Which means, obviously, that a potential suspect was in the vicinity of the crime scene, but it appears unlikely after 50 years that his presence there can be established beyond a reasonable doubt. So one logical approach is to start with a suspect that one can make a circumstantial case against, and see if he can be eliminated conventionally.

For example, since I believe the latents are the killer’s, I also believe Kjell Qvale is eliminated by his prints being mutually exclusive with them. But I respect Mike Rodelli and I certainly can’t say with absolute 100% certainty that the latents are Zodiac latents.

I do think the suggestion that the first obligation of anyone offering a circumstantial case is to put the suspect at the crime scene is specious reasoning. There have been serial killers who deliberately varied their venues—Ted Bundy comes immediately to mind—so as to avoid having their crimes grouped into a recognizable pattern. There are also many examples of people committing individual murders who would subsequently use the “window of opportunity” argument, that they didn’t have the time necessary to get to the murder scene and then back to their homes or places of business. If you can eliminate a suspect geographically, fine, but don’t tell me a given suspect couldn’t have committed a crime because there’s no evidence that puts him there positively. A better question is: Can you eliminate him?

“O’Hare was first identified as a suspect in Gareth Penn’s book Times 17 in 1981.”

Times 17 wasn’t published until 1987; prior to that, although Penn was contacting police agencies and reporters about O’Hare, his accusation wasn’t public in any way that O’Hare could have taken legal action about.

“Read his book for a sampling of the weak case against O’Hare.”

But Penn’s point isn’t that there’s a conventionally circumstantial case to be made against O’Hare. It’s that O’Hare behaves in a manner that’s consistent with the way many serial killers behave, which is to say, incongruously, and inconsistent with the way an upstanding citizen would behave. The very fact that O’Hare wrote a Washington Monthly aritcle entitled, Confessions of a Non-Serial Killer, is an admission that most people would have sued their accuser and taken other steps to establish their innocence. In other words, O’Hare is essentially saying, Look at me, I’m acting inappropriately! And his audience is eating it up.

Ted Bundy wasn’t caught in the act of killing a victim. He was surprised while trolling a neighborhood and didn’t immediately pull over when police started chasing him. He was arrested for being in possession of burglary tools. Police also noticed that Bundy had removed the passenger side front seat of his VW Beetle. This was consistent with the description of the car Carol DaRonch’s abductor was driving, and Ted was identified by her and two other people. But being in possession of burglary tools, and removing the passenger side front seat of your car, aren’t the same things as committing serial murder.

Peter Sutcliffe wasn’t arrested while he was trying to kill someone; he was arrested because he was driving a van that had stolen plates.

Dennis Rader got caught because he sent a floppy disc to police that was then traced back to his church, of all places.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bx2ZxP … J3ajA/edit

On page 259 of Times 17, Gareth Penn demonstrates that Michael O’Hare created an artificial angle of 117 degrees—the longitude of Riverside, California and the first three digits of O’Hare’s SSN—in his March 1967 Progressive Architecture article, Wind Whistles Through MIT Tower.

Many years later, while living in Brookline, Massachusetts, O’Hare owned a van with the license plate

1360 SP

Although the plate looks as if it was issued at random, it wasn’t. O’Hare requested the vanity plate. He did this despite a comment he made in his Washington Monthly article:

Assuming a friend from college was trying to get me to play some sort of puzzle game—a recreation for which I have no patience—I threw them in a drawer, a little guilty that he was going to all this trouble.

If you go to the trouble of requesting a license plate—and I assume paying the fee for getting a vanity plate—that reads 1360 SP, it’s fair to say you have patience for some sort of puzzle game.

While creating an artificial angle on a photo for a magazine article and requesting an odd set of numbers and letters for your license plate aren’t crimes, they do resemble things the Zodiac Killer did during his crime spree in California, including creating an odd angle (at the foot of the Exorcist Letter) and an odd sequence of letters and numbers (in the Zodiac ciphers). People do all sorts of odd things, but professors in public policy at Harvard and then Cal-Berkeley usually don’t do things that are otherwise inexplicable, at least not if they want to continue to appear upstanding.

As the link above to the Original Archived Message Board on ZodiacKiller.com suggests, there are many more examples of Michael O’Hare doing things that don’t make any sense. He has openly lied and contradicted himself on a number of occasions, just as Gareth Penn has. But he’s protected by the same belief that initially protected Ted Kaczynski from all but two members of the FBI Task Force: if he went to Harvard and he taught at Cal-Berkeley, he can’t possibly be a serial killer.

“Even if it were true that O’Hare committed every murder, based on Penn’s evidence, there is no way to verify that O’Hare is the Zodiac.”

If the Presidio Heights latents are those of the Zodiac Killer, as I believe they are, and O’Hare’s prints are not mutually exclusive with them, together with his odd behavior, that would be enough for me to file charges if I were a prosecutor. Certainly a print/latent match, or at least lack of elimination, would be enough to obtain discovery for things like safe deposit boxes.

Cold Facts, regarding the fingerprints, if O’Hare’s prints matched the latents on the cab, all that would prove is that O’Hare touched the cab at some point. It would not prove that he was Stine’s killer. You would still need a witness to put him at the crime scene because the police cannot say that the killer left those prints. I agree that a fingerprint match would give police a good reason to investigate O’Hare.

O’Hare tells you why he never sued his accusers: he had no damages. He would get $1 if he won his case, after he paid all of his own attorney’s fees and costs, which would likely amount to in excess of $100k or more. Why would he do that?

Trying to link O’Hare’s vanity plate to the Zodiac crimes is laughable. It doesn’t prove anything. No prosecutor would offer that fact as evidence.

O’Hare doesn’t act at all like a serial killer. Is he out stalking victims (that is how Bundy was caught, initially)? He writes articles… that someone later scrutinizes to find some angle in a picture consistent with an angle relative to Mt. Diablo and the Riverside crime scene (which is a disputed Zodiac murder). That’s not evidence of anything but an overactive imagination….and the fact that the angle in O’Hare’s article matches the angle of the Riverside crime scene can be pure coincidence. Would you try to solve other murders on that basis? No, of course not. Why not? Because the angle concept only came from Gareth Penn. And he offers no reason why he is correct. The Zodiac never stated that his crime scenes would form a radian angle relative to Mt. Diablo. He said that the Mt. Diablo map and his code would reveal the location of his bus bomb. Now, it is possible that O’Hare is the Zodiac. But other than bald-faced speculation, there is no evidence to suggest that he is.

A circumstantial case is great when the killer has a conventional motive for killing a victim. In a stranger on stranger murder, you need hard evidence to tie a killer to the crime. In your example, the hard evidence would be someone found with Stine’s wallet and keys. Even a dementia patient with an album of Zodiac articles would be very strong evidence of guilt. I don’t know that it would be enough for a conviction by itself, though.

I don’t think a circumstantial case could ever identify the Zodiac because circumstantial evidence is mostly inclusive, not exclusive. A circumstantial case would demonstrate that a given person could be the killer. The hard evidence (DNA, fingerprints, definitive eyewitness ID) provides evidence to the exclusion of other suspects. That is what is lacking in the Zodiac case.

“Cold Facts, regarding the fingerprints, if O’Hare’s prints matched the latents on the cab, all that would prove is that O’Hare touched the cab at some point. It would not prove that he was Stine’s killer. You would still need a witness to put him at the crime scene because the police cannot say that the killer left those prints. I agree that a fingerprint match would give police a good reason to investigate O’Hare.”

According to several sources including the relatively recent Søren Korsgaard book, AMERICA’S JACK THE RIPPER, SFPD generally and the late Dave Toschi specifically believed the latents left in blood on the driver’s side are Zodiac prints. A match or finding the prints mutually inclusive would at the very least force O’Hare to explain how his prints got there. But O’Hare would then have a much bigger problem than just having to explain how his prints got there, since O’Hare has been a Zodiac suspect online since the Internet went up, and the Washington Monthly published his article denying involvement in the Zodiac crimes in its May/June 2009 edition. So if you’re saying that O’Hare could then say, “Well okay I rode in Stine’s cab that night but I didn’t kill him,” I’m calling BS on that.

“O’Hare tells you why he never sued his accusers: he had no damages. He would get $1 if he won his case, after he paid all of his own attorney’s fees and costs, which would likely amount to in excess of $100k or more. Why would he do that?”

Accusation of a felony is presumed to be damaging in most states. Accusation of being the most notorious uncaught serial killer of the 20th century by books which are sent to all your colleagues at the JFK School at Harvard would probably not be judged a frivolous lawsuit. And O’Hare wouldn’t necessarily have to sue for damages; he could get a court order to have his accuser(s) cease and desist. What O’Hare never mentions in his article is that the downside of taking legal action is that it opens him up to discovery. Kjell Qvale forced Mike Rodelli’s server to take his website down after Rodelli mentioned his name on it. If you’re telling me that cost Qvale in excess of $100k or more, I’m calling BS on that. But Qvale did then voluntarily submit his fingerprints for comparison, since at that point Rodelli could force him to do so.


“Trying to link O’Hare’s vanity plate to the Zodiac crimes is laughable. It doesn’t prove anything. No prosecutor would offer that fact as evidence.”

You just cited O’Hare’s Washington Monthly article. O’Hare went to the trouble of ordering, from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, a vanity plate for his van that read 1360 SP. And yet, in his article, O’Hare says

Assuming a friend from college was trying to get me to play some sort of puzzle game—a recreation for which I have no patience—I threw them in a drawer, a little guilty that he was going to all this trouble.

Arguing that O’Hare’s vanity plate doesn’t prove anything is laughable. It proves, at the very least, that the picture of himself that he presents in that article isn’t true. If you order a vanity plate that reads 1360 SP, you’re definitely playing some sort of puzzle game.

When Ted Bundy was found to have removed the front passenger seat from his VW Beetle, it didn’t prove, by itself, that he attempted the abduction of Carol DaRonch. And I don’t have the transcript from that trial, but I suspect the prosecutor did mention that fact as evidence, because it fit the picture he was trying to present. The picture of himself that O’Hare presents in that article is false on a number of counts, the vanity plate being one example. 


“O’Hare doesn’t act at all like a serial killer. Is he out stalking victims (that is how Bundy was caught, initially)?”

Bundy was sitting in his car. The police ended up having two things on him: 1, he fled when they tried to flag him down; and 2, he was in possession of what were termed burglary tools, which were various items like a ski mask and ice pick in a box in his trunk. If Bundy had simply relaxed and spoken with the cop who pulled up behind him, he could almost certainly have talked his way out of the situation.

“He writes articles… that someone later scrutinizes to find some angle in a picture . . . But other than bald-faced speculation, there is no evidence to suggest that he is.”

I love how you’re so vague about inconvenient details, but a real stickler for the practical application of the law.

The picture of the MIT Tower model in the Progressive Architecture article isn’t bald-faced speculation. It’s a doctored photo, period. That much was admitted by the editor of the magazine when the photo was shown to her. Regardless of what the intent of the ruse was, it was definitely an intentional ruse.

You have characterized Michael O’Hare, on this thread, as an upstanding citizen.

Why would an otherwise upstanding citizen with nothing to hide deliberately doctor a photo in a scholarly magazine?

Why would an otherwise upstanding citizen with nothing to hide deliberately request a vanity plate that reads 1360 SP?

A scholarly article in an architectural magazine and a license plate on a van are both forms of public media. What’s unusual, in these O’Hare examples, is that people looking at the photo would assume it’s not doctored, and people looking at the license plate would assume it was issued at random. If the Zodiac Killer rented a billboard and put a cipher up on it, posters on Zodiac forums would be all over it. Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to them that one can also hide in plain sight, and present information about oneself with impunity because it doesn’t look like self-identification.

We just had a major media event in the Zodiac Killer case, where a cipher that remained unsolved for 51 years was cracked through an extremely convoluted process that involved hundreds of thousands of transpositions, multiple steps, software designed for no other application than the solving of that particular cipher, and massive massaging of the result so it fit their preconceptions . . . and posters on Zodiac message boards have unanimously demanded that the three solvers be awarded some sort of Nobel prize.

In the meantime, a suspect featured for decades on Zodiac forums engages in incongruous behavior similar to that of the writer of the cipher, and the same posters suddenly demand forensic airtightness. You’re right: it’s laughable, but not for the reason you think.



You seem to think I’m disagreeing with you about the difficulty of getting a conviction in this case; I’m not. Even if SFPD can demonstrate the steps it took to preserve the latents (as covered in the Korsgaard book), as Graysmith pointed out, they have 8 points on 2 fingers, which is subject to an expert’s “opinion.” And possession of the Stine souvenirs is transferable—someone could mail them to me tomorrow, and I might have to explain to the police how I got them.

By posting on these forums, we’re presenting arguments in the court of public opinion. GSK was a major media cold case while it was unsolved; now there doesn’t seem to be much interest in it, even though the ultimate result was a prosecution and plea deal. The significance of the Zodiac Killer case, 50 years after the events, will likely be informational rather than legal, in the end.