Has the Zodiac killer mystery been solved again?
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It surprises me that the killer could outlive justice and die taking the secret of his identity with him to the grave but it appears that is what has happened.
I read Graysmith's book though a bit skeptically, assuming there was a lot of ginning up by the author to make for a more compelling read. Skeptical too of the Zodiac's claims — I don't believe he committed all the murders he bragged about.
Nonetheless, I couldn't avoid perceiving a sort of psychological wrangling that the murderer might have gone through. As though after a couple of simple shootings, he decides to up the game and try a stabbing. But it seems as though the awkward stabbing experience chills the killer and he perhaps even has second thoughts...
I confess I am drawn by "Zodiac killer identified" headlines for decades now. At first hoping they were zeroing in on a capture, but later, as it becomes more likely he has died of old age, just out of an old curiosity.
This new suspect is compelling. But the comment about "so many nuts in the 60's" rings true as well. This guy could have just been another nut, but not a murderer.
45% of violent crimes go unsolved (2017)
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Also it is 45% of reported violent crimes. So I would bet even majority of violent crimes is unsolved.
45% is low and rather worrying I must admit.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-r...
Some good side-by-side images.
The most serious claims mostly rely on the daughters' recollection. However, if they can be independently verified, I'd say the case is pretty strong:
* The daughter says he abused her over her dating and drug use. If her recollection can be trusted, that was on the same day as the first murders.
* The father wrote a letter to a zine in response to a guy whose daughter had been exposed to drugs, where he claims that he was in a similar situation once and that some people are no longer alive because of it. He asked the editor of the zine to not print that part, too (He still did). This part doesn't rely on the daughter's memory.
* Putting those two together, it does look an awful lot like he might have been about to kill his daughter, then changed his mind and went out to "get revenge" on some random youths who he felt were the sort responsible for corrupting his daughter instead.
I think this is the strongest part of the evidence, so I'd like to see the true crime nerds engage with that, rather than, say, with the suggestion that he got his symbol from the minutemen group, or any of the more speculative stuff.
Also, there's the bloody fingerprint stuff. It hasn't been checked for this guy yet, but it has apparently been checked and found not to match for the other candidates the true crime nerds have launched over the years; based on that I'd say this one is, presently, at least as good a candidate as those.
Particularly bad are the visual comparisons. What the hell is he looking at? In most cases he is simply wrong and you can see it with your own eyes.
- the sketch of Zodiac has much thinner nose
- the feathered arrows do not match, the feathers are drawn distinctly differently
(Part 2)
- the ampersands don't look the same to me
- the crosshairs absolutely do not match.
It leaves me with the impressions that he has decided Doerr is the Zodiac and will take any bit of evidence and stretch it to fit that notion.
edit: the feathered arrows look more like evidence against the idea he's Zodiac. He drew arrows a different way.
The author making the case is not on trial here. The goal is to look PAST how he "makes himself look" and consider the actual interesting things. The interesting things are, to repeat:
* The guy appears to have indirectly admitted to murdering more than one person, in connection to events "vaguely similar" to the drugging of a child (his own words).
* The circumstances he describes during that admission match up with a domestic violence incident described by his daughter, on the day the first killing happened.
* The guy, unlike all the other proposed candidates, has not been ruled out as a fingerprint match.
You understand how this is more important, right? Your - or the author's - eyeballing of sketches and symbols could easily be wrong, it's low quality evidence either way. Being present in range of the crime scene, at the time of the crime, with killing more than one person and a likely motive admitted to in writing is NOT low quality evidence. That's "oh dear, this needs to be looked into" evidence.
And if your bullet points are the strongest points, those are incredibly weak.
- He says he murdered one or more people, that makes him the Zodiac?
- He had a domestic violence incident the same day of the first Zodiac killing. Okay?
- He hasn't been ruled out as a fingerprint match. So have millions of other people. I haven't been ruled out as fingerprint match either. And I killed several people. (Or did I? Or am I just bullshitting about that?)
Sure, maybe he's the Zodiac. Maybe with further digging someone will find some actual evidence, instead of what has been offered by the author in the Twitter thread. But this is all thin.
Obviously zodiac is not idiot to match those arrows to his normal drawing. Any okay-ish killer would differentiate their handwriting and such symbols.
So if the fingerprints from the military don't match, it doesn't actually eliminate Doerr because we don't know for a fact who the fingerprints from the cab belong to (even if it seems most likely it's from Zodiac). For all we know Zodiac staged the prints in one manner or another.
(a) if it's a match it's him, end of story.
(b) if it's not a match, the possibility remains open: it could still be the case that he is Zodiac, but somebody else left the fingerprints.
But they can very well verify if (a) is the case.
Plus, some of the cleared murders in the past were simply blamed on innocent black men by a racist system. Look at the Innocence Project for examples. We still have a problem with all that, but surely it’s not as bad as it was in the 1970s.
Another contributing factor is that so much forensics and police resources are wasted on victimless drug crimes. It’s an lot easier to bust a corner boy selling drugs than to track down a murderer.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Oakland-Chinese-Ch...
The actual numbers are terrible: for every 100 homicides, 61 percent are cleared, and then 70 percent of those—43 cases—lead to conviction. And this assumes that the correct person is convicted. According to some estimates, four percent of inmates on death row are innocent. Wrongful conviction rates are assumed to be higher for lesser crimes since officials are less rigorous in establishing guilt when capital punishment is not on the table. https://fee.org/articles/most-violent-crimes-in-the-us-go-un...
Also, “this study did not include cases of missing persons where no body was found. In all four countries, such cases are usually labelled as a disappeared person, even if the police strongly suspect a homicide. Following other studies (Sturup et al., 2015), because of the unknown nature of these cases (including potential suicides or voluntary disappearances), these cases have not been included in the study. This may have resulted in a general under-count of the total number of homicides, including an under-count of unsolved homicides.”
While this is true, they are two different scenarios.
Clearance rate is generally low. However, if you have a serial killer thsy gains public attention they will dedicate order of magnitude more resources to that case. Frankly, a lot of murders don't even make the news, and many of those don't get very much in the way of resources from police. Then we have the circumstances around each murder. In some places, the people in the neighborhood don't want to get involved and talk. It's also more likely that you leave more evidence if you're committing additonal crimes.
So I agree with both of you - clearance rate is falling and it's less likely to have publicly known serial killers go unsolved.
What the fuck? There's an article, and even more so, a book, about this guy, and nobody bother to do this yet?
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SFPD-allegedly-used-r...
> When the Zodiac killed his last victim, taxi driver Paul Stine, he left behind several bloody fingerprints (which, it should be noted, have never been linked to any of the other suspects). Although the San Francisco Police Department did not respond to numerous requests for comment for this story, it should be a simple matter for someone in the cold case division to pull Doerr’s own prints from the Military Service Records Center and do a comparison.
I mentioned it to show the police in SF evidently have the resources, but their priorities are whack.
If you don't have a DNA sample you're not going to solve a case from that long ago. Eye witness accounts are known to be unreliable, witnesses and detectives dead or suffering from dementia, no camera footage or other electronic trails.
Sure, smart people aren't choosing .22s for combat, but as a purely offensive weapon it can be an option. The military has used supressed Ruger .22s for sentry elimination.
Also her argument abt bow and arrow being a challenge could extend to a small caliber pistol.
While people have the impression that it is for small game, a surprising number of people are in fact murdered with .22. It is effective in the hands of someone that knows how to use it.
That isn't to say this guy knew how to use it, just that there are some people who could use a .22 pistol to great effect. The use of a .22 doesn't preclude competency with firearms.
And weren't they supposedly .22s?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centerfire_ammunition#Advantag...
But they are also not shooting Remington Bucket o' Bullets ammo from Wal-Mart. Premium .22 ammo like Eley, SK, or Lapua is far more consistent.
The other thing is, revolver doesn't leave empty shell around (unless you intentionally throw it away at that place when reloading). Which is good for assassins, but if in this case shell was found (not familiar with the case) then its probably not this.
I don't even know the terminal ballistics, got to be even worse.
Rimfire is also less reliable, although not nearly as unreliable as some people act like.
I wouldn't want to bet my life on it, but I would definitely consider it a viable choice in a scenario where a person is murdering unarmed civilians.
In reverse chronological order:
https://radiopublic.com/otherppl-with-brad-listi-WPBXQ8/s1!1...
https://radiopublic.com/otherppl-with-brad-listi-WPBXQ8/s1!9...
https://radiopublic.com/otherppl-with-brad-listi-WPBXQ8/s1!6...
But I wonder why the writer didn't ask Paul Doerr's daughter for old letters or other hand-written documents, to compare with the ones sent to the papers, known to be written by the real killer.
> Allen again came to police attention in 1971 when his friend Donald Cheney reported to police in Manhattan Beach, California, that Allen had spoken of his desire to kill people, used the name Zodiac, and secured a flashlight to a firearm for visibility at night. According to Cheney, this conversation occurred no later than January 1, 1969.
They never found proof, but I mean, c'mon.
I’m going to go with “no” and cite “the linear flow of time”.
It's interesting that if this Doerr theory is true, that means Zodiac really did resemble pop cultural conceptions of him and other Zodiac-inspired fictional killers: a geek, interested in nerdy fantasy hobbies once considered the province of social misfits. But then again, the occult-steeped tone of the letters and the ciphers themselves already gave that impression.
Is there an abnormally high rate of convicted murderers among game developers? Not AFAIK.
Akron/Cleveland area, 1983 tomaybe '87/'89.
And also an extra - a very definite attempt, in public, too.
Again, I don't know what to say.
The concept that this is bothering to me is weird.
(Yes, some of them worked for Tactical Studies Rules).
OT: thanks (sic) now I'm on a slight bummer.
OT2: No, really "Thanks!" - I have not been moved so much in some time. It's great to have this experience!
Also, the daughter says this would justify her life, which is a baffling statement. A life which apparently included drug problems up until at least 2007.
Sorry, I think the author got baited into a family story he didn't fully work to understand or convey.
Fingerprints should work, someone would just have to check.
She doesn't say it would justify her life. She says it would validate her telling of her life:
“You know, when people ask you what your life was like, and you just don’t know where to start? This validates it"
In other words, it would corroborate the hurt and abuse and bad upbringing she got from her father.
She might even further mean it that it would help explain to others how she turned the way she is, regarding drugs and such: because she was raised by a loonie psychopath murderer.
But it's also perfectly logical for her to just mean that it will validate her telling of her harsh upbringing to something people can immediately grasp the awfulness of.