Post by John Reid on Apr 13, 2018 10:34:46 GMT -5
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(see photos here)
Knight-Hood on the Zodiac Killer
In the late 60's and early 70's the Zodiac killer terrorized northern California, killing at least five people and claiming to have killed 37 people in total.
The first killings occurred on Dec 20, 1968, in Vallejo, Ca. Two teen victims were shot and killed while sitting in a parked car in a gravel parking lot, named David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.
The next killings occurred on July 4, 1969, only a few minutes away from the first killings. The killer approached a parked car with a flashlight and shot the two passengers before walking away and then coming back to shoot them again. Despite that, one of the victims survived, Michael Mageau and was able to give a description of the killer. He said he was a white male in his 30's, stocky build, brown hair and a round face.
It was a few weeks later that the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallerjo Times all received identical handwritten letters from someone claiming to be the killer.
The letters included three different codes that the killer claimed would reveal his identity. A couple of days later, The San Francisco Examiner received another letter, in which the killer referred to himself as the Zodiac for the first time, writing “This is Zodiac speaking...”
On Sept 27, 1969, in Napa, Ca, a couple who was having a picnic were approached by a man wearing an executioner style hood with the Zodiac symbol, a circle with a cross through it, on his chest. He tied up his victims and then stabbed them repeatedly with a knife, but once again, one of the victims played dead and survived. Bryan Hartnell was able to give a general description of the killer, of course he was masked but he was said to be stocky in build.
Finally on October 11, 1969, in San Francisco, taxi driver Paul Stein was shot in the head by a passenger. A teenager across the street heard the shot and got a good look at the killer and so did 2 other witnesses.
In the chaos of the situation, the Police dispatcher somehow incorrectly identified the subject as a black male, even though he was described differently, so when two Police officers drove past a stocky, white male, with heavy rimmed glasses a few blocks away from the scene they did not question him since he did not fit the dispatcher's description. They later gave the description a a white, male, 5'10”, 170 lbs, around 40 years old, glasses, reddish hair with a crew cut.
The Zodiac would later mock this interaction in a letter making it likely that the two cops drove right past him. “...PS. 2 cops pulled a goof about 3 minutes after I left the cab.”
A composite sketch down by a police artist is the most famous description of the face of the Zodiac.
On April 20, 1970, a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle included a coded message of the Zodiac's name... ( Included a pic of it as it is impossible to type due to the symbols used)
It was in September of 1970 that I first heard of him. At age 15 I was in a drug store with my mother in Louisville, Ky when I glanced at the magazine rack and there staring back at me from the cover of a magazine called Argosy was a picture of a man wearing a hood, pointing a gun and with a symbol on his chest of a crossed circle. I asked my mother if she would buy it for me. The article told the whole bizarre story and it seemed to me that the world's first masked super-villain had come to life. The article included the cipher and I worked on it for hours every day trying to decode it, because there is nothing too egotistical for a teenager to think. I had one thing on my side though. My older brother was in the Air Force and had a course of breaking codes, so I sent it to him. He gave it to his friends and they too were stumped, so I felt a little better at my failure. I was still writing and drawing my own “Adventures of Night-Rider” comics in my basement and was so obsessed with the Zodiac that he became his main nemesis.
The real Zodiac continued sending letters, but then stopped in 1971, but in 1974, he sent one last letter, in which he claimed to have killed 37 people.
In 2002, the San Francisco police department was able to extract a partial genetic code from a Zodiac letter from saliva on the stamp. (This presumes he did not have someone else lick it)
THE SUSPECTS
The most famous suspect is Arthur Leigh Allen due to the book and later movie titled “Zodiac”. The book was written by Robert Graysmith. The day of the third Zodiac killing at the lake, Allen told his family he was going to that exact location. He came home that evening covered in blood, with a bloody knife in the car. One of his friends claimed he even referred to himself as the Zodiac before the killer publicly did. He also stated that Allen told him he planned on hunting people. When Allen was interviewed, he said his favorite book was “The Most Dangerous Game”, a book about a man who hunts humans. A book referred by the Zodiac in the first letter to the press. He was also wearing a Zodiac brand wristwatch with the very same crossed circle symbol used by the killer. When the police searched his trailer home, they found small dissected animals, bloody knives and sexual devices, but no direct evidence to the murders.
In 1974 Allen was convicted of child molestation and went to jail for 3 years. Coincidentally during that time no more Zodiac letters were received. In 1987 an inmate told Police that Allen admitted to him that he murdered Paul Stein the taxi driver.
Sadly the 2 surviving witnesses went into hiding for decades but eventually Michael Mageau was found and shown a line of of photos. It only took him seconds to identify Arthur Leigh Allen as the man who shot him in 1991. They searched his home again and this time found bomb formulas, constructed bombs and tapes about the Zodiac killer. Sadly he died the very next year in 1992.
That's a lot of circumstantial evidence to be sure, but neither his DNA nor his hand writing matched that of the Zodiac. Now it could be that he had someone else lick the stamp and envelope so that would account for that but he'd have to have had someone else write the letters too. That casts considerable doubt on his case.
Another real possible suspect named by retired Police officer Harvey Hines, who believes Lawrence “Kane” Kaye is the Zodiac. The letters “K-a-n-e” can be extracted from the “My name is...” cipher. The Zodiac's victim Darlene Ferrin had a sister who claimed that Kane followed and harassed Darlene in the weeks leading up to her murder. Also Dan Fouke, one of the cops who saw the Zodiac's face said Kane was the best likeness of the man he saw that day. Kane also lived near the victims or near the locations of their deaths. Kane moved to Lake Tahoe in 1970 and that year possible Zodiac victim named Donna Lass disappeared. She worked at the same hotel as Kane. In 1970 Kathleen Johns and her baby were tricked into taking a ride from a man who claimed he was the Zodiac and was going to kill her and toss her baby out the window. She jumped from the car with her baby and survived and managed to get away. The Zodiac confirmed this in one of his letters which reads...”So now I have a little list, starting with the woeman (misspelled) and her baby that I gave a rather interesting ride...” Kathleen picked out Kane's photo as the man in the car. Kane does resemble the sketch of the Zodiac but his handwriting is not a match, nor is his DNA
My next 3 favorites are all people who claim their father's were the Zodiac killer, none despite all of their circumstantial evidence are taken seriously by the police, but here they are.
Gary Stuart believes that his own father Earl Van Best Jr was the Zodiac killer. He does bear a striking resemblance to the composite sketch and more interestingly his name is the only one that contains the very same number of letters as the “My name is...” cipher. He is not heavy set though as most witnesses claimed. Gary Stuart wanted to have his father's DNA tested against that of the Zodiac's but the request was refused by the Police. Such tests are expensive and the police had no evidence to really go on so his claim is ignored.
Another son who thinks his father was the Zodiac is Stephen Hodel whose father George Hill Hodel was the number one suspect of the infamous “Black Dahlia” murder case, but they had not enough evidence to charge him for that. The D.A. Has Hodel on tape stating “Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They can't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead. They may have figured it out. Killed her? Maybe I did kill my secretary.”
But his son Stephen Hodel in his 2009 book, “Most Evil; Avenger, Zodiac and the further serial murders of Dr. George Hodel Jr”, claims that George Hodel not only killed the Black Dahlia and sent the infamous “Avenger” letters in 1947, but that he may have been the real “Lipstick killer” on the 1940's in Chicago, and the “Jigsaw murders” in the Philippines also in the 40's and in the 60's became the Zodiac killer in California. George Hodel did purchase the Souden house in Hollywood where it was determined that Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia” had been tortured, murdered and cut in half before being taken to the alley where her body was found. One handwriting expert stated that Hodel's handwriting is identical to the Zodiac's. This was later disputed by another handwriting expert who said it was inconclusive but even he could not rule it out
The Zodiac code was first broken by high school teacher M.Yves Person and his wife using “Ogham” an ancient Celtic alphabet and stated that the Zodiac used the name Hodel on both the return address on the envelope and so the famous “my name is...” cipher.
A police sketch of Hodel also bears a resemblance to that of the composite police sketch of the Zodiac. His DNA also has not been compared to the Zodiac's because the police do not take his son's claim seriously.
Finally we come to Jack Tarrance, Dennis Kaufman claims that his late step father Jack Tarrance was the Zodiac killer. Kaufman states that Tarrance is a dead ringer for the composite sketch of the Zodiac and that is undeniably true. He also produced a stash of circumstantial evidence including a roll of film depicting possible victims and most interesting an actual Zodiac costume he found hidden rolled up inside an amplifyer. In 2007 The Discovery Channel in a documentary had a document examiner take a look at Jack Tarrance's handwriting and compare it with the Zodiac and it was concluded that it was a match based on many many reasons.
Both Jack and the Zodiac used similar poetic styles to their writing. Both could write in straight lines on unlined paper. The Zodiac used a blue felt tip pen and that was the favorite writing instrument of Jack Tarrance. Most interesting was the common mistakes used by both like making two words out of one or one word out of two (wannbe for instance) Putting double letters where none should exist or leaving out double letters where they should. The actual letters looked very very similar.
Law enforcement completely dismissed Kaufman's evidence because Kaufman himself was very eccentric and tried to blame Tarrance for every murder from the Black Dahlia to Jon Benet Ramsey. So because of that he lost credibility in their eyes. They dismissed the document expert's opinion about the writing simply because they thought Kaufman was a nutcase. Even if he is eccentric this does not make him wrong about Tarrance being the Zodiac. As an artist myself I can see that Jack Tarrance more than anyone else looks like the composite drawing of the Zodiac. The police dismissed the costume found out of hand as being “too crude” to match the one described, but they never saw it so that is simply opinion.
Jack Tarrance died in 2006, but had previously spent time as a serviceman in the navy and air force, which ties in with the military boots worn by the killer in the Lake Berryessa attack. He was also a radio operator and that provided him with the opportunity to learn coding.
The FBI later performed DNA and handwriting analysis in 2010, but the tests were deemed inconclusive, neither ruling his in or out as a suspect
So I took a look at the “My name is....” cipher once again to see if I could get a match for Jack Tarrance. The cipher consists of 13 characters, 5 of which are symbols. The first symbol is the famous Zodiac symbol of the circle with the cross hairs, the next three look very much like the astrological symbol of Taurus and the last is an upside down astrological symbol of Aries. Aries goes from March 20-April 20. April 20th is the date the paper received the “My name is...” cipher. So if we eliminate the zodiac symbols that leaves 8 actual letters. “Tarrance” contains 8 letters. The Zodiac was famous for substituting one letter for another and often multiple others in his codes.
So it is quite possible that Tarrance is the name spelled out in the “My name is...” cipher. That plus the costume found, plus the striking resemblance he bears to the composite drawing of the Zodiac, plus the similarities in his handwriting and the fact that his DNA could not be ruled out leads me to conclude that Jack Tarrance was the Zodiac.
Just my 2 cents of course. Who do you think he was?
