doranchak wrote:How does the presence of mistakes/misspellings prove that they are intentional?
I don't think the letter E and the letter F are as easily mistaken as you state, nor do I think the other symbols are as easily and frequently confused as to lead to so many encipherment or transcription errors.
I'm not claiming the number of spelling errors is absolute proof of anything. But I am ssaying for me that one or two, or even three, spelling errors would be more believable as encipherment or transcription errors. When you're talking about 10 spelling errors to me that makes it lean more towards intentional.
Also the Zodiac letters themselves are filled with spelling errors. I don't know if this topic has been previously discussed at this forum . But I've seen analysis of it that notes how many words of medium and even hard difficulty are spelled correctly by the Zodiac, but often simple words are spelled wrong, sometimes extremely wrong
The pattern of misspellings in the letters strikes me as very likely intentional. To me it speaks to the writer trying to disguise his education and to make himself seem dumber.
I think overall the Zodiac odiac comes across as fairly intelligent. Not only did he commit several murders and get away with it, he created codes that have defied the efforts of the FBI, police and amateurs to break them. His letters are otherwise articulate, intelligent and convey information in an organized fashion.
The presence of 10 spelling errors in The fairly short 408 code comes across to me as being that all or the majority were intentional spelling errors, designed to increase the difficulty of solution and/or disguise the education and literacy of the creator. Like almost every other element of the Zodiac odiac case, it could be debated, with some good points made on both sides.
That both Zodiac and Kaczynski likely created codes that used intentional spelling errors to increase difficulty of solution, and both sent letters to authorities that used intentional spelling errors to deceive about their education and literacy, they both created elaborate codes that could not be broken by the FBI, they both wrote letters to newspapers threatening to kill innocents unless their words were published in the paper. are just more examples of things they had in common.
Even to the point that they both replace a constant with a vowel. But I wouldn't say those examples above are the most important similarities. Equally or more important is that both seem obsessed with couples, couples that were engaged in or about to engage in sexual activity and both exhibited a desire to kill such couples.
Zodiac by going to lovers lanes, stalking couples and attacking them. Kaczynski by noting in his diary that while on the U of M campus the sound of couples next door in the room to his making love drove him crazy, and he included couples and promiscuous men and women on his list of people that he really hated and thought that he could now really kill, in September of 1966.
Both left crossed lines inside circles at crime scenes, that also conveyed the information of the type of weapon used and took credit for previous crimes.
Of next importance I'd site the 26 words and even multi word phrases that both zodiac and Kaczynski used. And then I would say the items found in Ted's cabin, which are exactly the items you would theorize would be found in Zodiac's cabin: A handmade black hood with rectangular eye slits,. .22 Winchester Super X ammo, a weapon with a flashlight attached to the barrel, etc., and many of the other things that I have covered in a different topic thread.
Posted: Wed Aug 29, 2018 3:14 pm
