Today's visit to Lake Herman Road

[ace ventura]

Pulling up 5 inches away is a commonly practiced robbery technic
you can not pull away quickly or you might hit the car and when it stops and the doors are even a gun is pointed at you .
the victim may think the person is a bad driver or knows them .
others in the lot may think it is two people who know each other talking

I have had it pulled on me
AAAAlll RRRiiightyy TTThen

[onewhoknows]

There is always the possibility that more than one person arrived to kill that night.
I'm not hearing much about footprints, and there are no tire tracks. 22 degrees outside and dark.
The timeline must look something like this.
Yours leave at 11:13 kids seen alive (Yours say more like 11:20)
Hunters leave 11:14 after the Yours, no report on kids, no other car now
Zodiac comes in and kills the kids 11:15 (How many minutes does it take to discharge that many shots?)
Owens drives by, no dead bodies, but no body seen, 11:16 sees 2nd car did he miss the bodies on the ground?
Borges drives by sees dead bodies 11:17 no other car
Virtually all these people report being there at 11:15 including the Zodiac Killer.


This all seems rather impossible.

[Craigfitzer]

The timing is very odd.

[morf13]

There is always the possibility that more than one person arrived to kill that night.
I'm not hearing much about footprints, and there are no tire tracks. 22 degrees outside and dark.
The timeline must look something like this.
Yours leave at 11:13 kids seen alive (Yours say more like 11:20)
Hunters leave 11:14 after the Yours, no report on kids, no other car now
Zodiac comes in and kills the kids 11:15 (How many minutes does it take to discharge that many shots?)
Owens drives by, no dead bodies, but no body seen, 11:16 sees 2nd car did he miss the bodies on the ground?
Borges drives by sees dead bodies 11:17 no other car
Virtually all these people report being there at 11:15 including the Zodiac Killer.


This all seems rather impossible.

The Yours were definitely out of there BEFORE the hunters left, and before Owen got there,their clock was several minutes fast so they were there earlier then they thought. The hunters were there aprox 5 minutes after the Yours left, then they too left the area, before Owen. Owen arrived soon after the hunters left and claims he saw a 2nd car there and no bodies...if he missed Betty's body as close as it was to the road, he shouldnt have had a driver's license due to poor eyesight, hard to miss her body, and Borges saw both bodies immediately.

What can we take from this? Simple- The Yours were gone by the time Zodiac parked, as were the hunters. The only person to be there at the time Zodiac was there was Owen, it's cut & dry. You either believe his statements to police or you do not believe them. Personally, I am skeptical of him, but hey such is life

[Craigfitzer]

Can I have a reminder on what direction the Borges were driving? Towards Benicia? That's why both Bodies were in View?

[Seagull]

Yes, she was driving towards Benicia to pick up her grandson from the movie theater in Benicia.

[onewhoknows]

Wow, look how close the killings were to being eye witnessed by several parties.
How could Zodiac know that hunters were to come up out of the field and leave by Lake Herman Road.
Or that the Yours would be checking the pipes that night.
Or that folks driving by might see him.
How could he know to strike after all those folks left?
And before others arrived?
If we believe Owens then we believe Zodiac came in a car.
I still can't figure out how Zodiac did the killings in 1 or 2 minutes.

[Wolf 49]

WARNING: I can ramble when I'm just thinking aloud at the keyboard. Apologies all around, in advance.....

This crime scene and the timeline defy all belief... or else we just haven't put the puzzle pieces together correctly. Either someone is lying--and I know Owen has become a popular candidate for the Pants On Fire award-- or someone got their statement horribly wrong or Zodiac got insanely, cosmically lucky on this first effort. (That last possibility might be the reason he ducked and hid for seven months afterward. Maybe the guy really did have his balls out in the wind and just barely managed to slip away, sufficiently scaring him enough for him to shutter his act for a while.)

Think about the randomness of it, and then try to marry that to the insanely lucky timeline/escape.... If we accept hat he just got lucky and happened upon a parked car that fit what he wanted--a young couple alone on a country road in dark of night--then look at what had to happen for it to be just that random and successful: 1) He had to be on the right road at exactly the right time (late night, no moonlight on Dec. 20, 1968, etc.) in order to avoid detection by random eyewitnesses, in a vast public place that made it impossible for him to control for isolation (as opposed to murdering someone in the bathroom of your basement apartment, where you can control for isolation); 2) He had to pull into that parking area at the precise interval--and we mean PRECISE--between exiting witnesses and arriving witnesses, managing to COMPLETELY escape detection by ANY of them; 3) He had to arrive undetected, assess the situation, carry out the (incredibly efficient) double assault, and exit, all in the span of about what, 3-5 minutes, generously?; 4) He had to be away from the scene sufficiently far enough that none of the approaching vehicles got even a whiff of his presence anywhere on that road--which, again, was a pitch-black road that would have been illuminated by his headlights.

There is luck, guys and gals, and then there is impossible luck. What are the odds that he pulled off that crime under those circumstances? One in ten thousand? It doesn't make an ounce of sense (which doesn't mean it didn't happen, I know. One in ten thousand is still one in ten thousand. There is that 'one' ....) But let's take the "what is more likely?" approach. What is more likely, that a) a killer gets impossibly lucky on his first time out (at least in the Bay Area for all we know) and happens to randomly come across his ideal set of victims, or b) what we've outlined is all wrong, and we need to look for a different scenario...?

Doesn't it seem as if he had to have scoured that road for hours, or something near that length of time, driving back and forth looking at cars parked there, waiting until exactly the right car with the right couple showed up? You might guess he followed them from town, but that doesn't seem likely, since the Rambler was seen there all by its lonesome, apparently. (Or he could have followed them, passed them by once they parked, and then he parked in a field nearby, scouting the place and waiting until the coast seemed clearest.) Zodiac's track record shows too much organization and pre-planning to allow for the inference that he just happened upon these unfortunate kids. You ask yourself: How many weekend nights did he spend cruising that stretch of road waiting for the right car to park there? Then you ask, wouldn't that just frustrate a guy who is anxious to start "collecting slaves for the after-life"? Or, did he just pick Dec. 20, 1968 because it was a moonless Friday night, park in a field, sit int he bushes, and reconnoiter that one spot, hoping a fly got tangled in the web?

Again, I ramble.....

[onewhoknows]

It would appear more like a deliberate attack, complete with preparation for the killing and stalking. This is an intended event.
Which goes back to victimology. Was Zodiac a boyfriend acquaintance of Miss Betty Lou?

[regret]

We assume a female love interest but David is one of two guys he managed to off, and didn't he basically take his ball and go home when it was suggested he was gay? I have no idea where I'm going with this other than to say we ought not assume anything about his proclivities.