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Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

I find this quite convincing:

> In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, [Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent] told Fox News.

> "So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."

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This would indeed be convincing, but I can't seem to find any further information on it.

Here is the Case Breaker's blog announcement[1]. And here is a press release from them with some details of their work[2].

I'd really like to see this in action, but it seems like they haven't published it yet. Am I missing it?

[1] https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/09/the-last-zodiac-victim/

[2] https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...

I'm missing something here. I could create a coded message that required apeace to decipher. That doesn't necessarily mean that I'm you.

But there's no reasonable motive for the Zodiac Killer to do so. If he wanted to frame Gary Poaste, he would plant evidence that was more obvious. If he wanted to toy with the detectives who were trying to discover his identity though--which is well within the pattern of behavior observed from the Zodiac Killer--this is exactly the sort of thing he would do.

If he knew one of their suspects names and decided to fuck with them and throw them off the trail, yes, he would use someone else's name. Your leap to judgement of "it must be Gary" is just as much of a leap as "it might not be" - both rely on "knowing" the Zodiac's motives, which no one does, because he's not been identified.

Such an important angle to consider this from. Until there’s a DNA match how do we know the zodiac killer just didn’t use the name of some guy he knew? Especially a seemingly uncommon name (maybe it was common at the time)

No but it requires you to know apeace. Could be random letters with usernames - ok. But it's a different story with full names in the 1960s. Could have still just browsed the telephone book, but together with other hints it adds weight to the argument.

> I find this quite convincing

I would find evidence of it actually convincing, which you would think would be foregrounded somewhere. And yet, mysteriously, it is not. This suggests that the claim is bullshit.

I want to see the details because there have been some dubious decipherments before that were a real stretch, so I want to see how plausible the ananagram is.

I don't understand, so they have a deciphered letter from zodiac, they removed the individual letters of Gary's name from the message and got a 2nd message? Is that right?

I think that one message could not be fully decoded, there seemed to be some cruft in it. My guess is this cruft was no longer in the decoded message once the letters of his name are removed.

Stats or it didn't happen. That kind of seemingly incredible coincidence can sometimes just be the mind playing tricks on people who are unaware of how many ways a similar result could have occurred by chance.

> anagrams

That strikes me as a major red flag. With anagrams you can place letters in any order you choose. A lot more cheatable than a consistent cipher solution.

Are anagrams typical of zodiac findings?

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