Zodiackillersite.com

I meant to ask this question when I posted but forgot. I think it is probably an important question to ask in terms of time frame.

Question:


According to the police reports, Faraday was found to still be breathing but died enroute to the hospital. Has anyone checked into how long a person is likely to survive given the wounds Faraday received? Can a time frame be deduced based on how dried the blood may be, etc. Etc. Has that been explored?

Soze

I take it you're after an estimate of how much time would have passed between the impact and the time of death? I think that would be pretty much impossible to tell based on the injury itself unless one had very specific details- but I'm no pathologist. All I know is that a bullet through the head isn't an easy injury to estimate in terms of how long it takes for the victim to die - anything from a few seconds to...well, people can even survive a head shot. The only time estimate I've seen is "minutes" for Faraday, i.e. he died within minutes of being shot.

My guess would be that he must have died very shortly after the ambulance took him away from the scene.

On that note - is there something missing from the LHR police report? I can't seem to find the report of the first reporting officers.

Norse wrote:I take it you're after an estimate of how much time would have passed between the impact and the time of death? I think that would be pretty much impossible to tell based on the injury itself unless one had very specific details- but I'm no pathologist. All I know is that a bullet through the head isn't an easy injury to estimate in terms of how long it takes for the victim to die - anything from a few seconds to...well, people can even survive a head shot. The only time estimate I've seen is "minutes" for Faraday, i.e. he died within minutes of being shot.

My guess would be that he must have died very shortly after the ambulance took him away from the scene.

On that note - is there something missing from the LHR police report? I can't seem to find the report of the first reporting officers.

That's what I am after, yes. I know people have survived a head shot but getting to the hospital in time helped. Faraday was transported fairly quickly I think, or, was he? Do we actually know that? Anyway, I figured mere minutes at most - one or two but I don't have experience in the field.

Soze

Soze wrote:

Norse wrote:
That's what I am after, yes. I know people have survived a head shot but getting to the hospital in time helped. Faraday was transported fairly quickly I think, or, was he? Do we actually know that? Anyway, I figured mere minutes at most - one or two but I don't have experience in the field.

Soze

It's an interesting question. Given that the wound was fatal I too would have thought mere minutes, yes. How long passed between Z leaving the scene and Stella Borges arriving? And secondly how long passed between Borges leaving and the police arriving? I presume the ambulance arrived with the cops. Some time - if not much - would have been spent at the scene before they got DF onto a stretcher and into the ambulance too. And it's clearly stated that he died en route to the hospital, meaning he was still alive when they left.

It would help if I could get my hands on the aforementioned report from the initial responding officers - but I can't seem to find it. It's not among the documents on Voigt's site - and his LHR files amount to fifty pages.

Norse wrote:

Soze wrote:

Norse wrote:
That's what I am after, yes. I know people have survived a head shot but getting to the hospital in time helped. Faraday was transported fairly quickly I think, or, was he? Do we actually know that? Anyway, I figured mere minutes at most - one or two but I don't have experience in the field.

Soze

It's an interesting question. Given that the wound was fatal I too would have thought mere minutes, yes. How long passed between Z leaving the scene and Stella Borges arriving? And secondly how long passed between Borges leaving and the police arriving? I presume the ambulance arrived with the cops. Some time - if not much - would have been spent at the scene before they got DF onto a stretcher and into the ambulance too. And it's clearly stated that he died en route to the hospital, meaning he was still alive when they left.

It would help if I could get my hands on the aforementioned report from the initial responding officers - but I can't seem to find it. It's not among the documents on Voigt's site - and his LHR files amount to fifty pages.

The 1st Officer on site was Pitta, here's his reports

Excellent - thanks morf!

Well, there it is - no mention of exactly when the ambulance arrived. Where would the latter have come from, out of interest? Not the Central Hospital?

We can conclude, at any rate, that DF was alive for slightly longer than just a few minutes, then. The cops arrived at 23:28 and must have spent at least a minute or two assessing the situation before calling the ambulance. Then X more minutes before the latter arrived. Borges discovered the bodies at approx. 23:15. Let's say the shot was fired at 23:12, then. I'd say that we're looking at somewhere north of 25 minutes between impact and time of death. Depends on where the ambulance came from.

I'm struck again by how tight a timetable we're dealing with here. It seems almost impossible that Z could have squeezed in between all this traffic to do his thing. But then again, the actual murders didn't take long. The puzzling part is that much of this traffic would have been impossible to predict. Luck of the Z, one might say.

It might be tempting to buy the idea that he operated on foot (with a getaway car parked somewhere out of sight). But then a certain witness enters the picture as more than a witness - as morf correctly points out. And are we ready for that?

What speaks against the on-foot angle in a general sense is that it seems far more in line with Z's style that he simply cruised the area in his car, knowing about the lover's lane nature of the spot, and that he chanced upon those poor kids at just the right - or rather wrong - time, in just that window he needed to commit the murders and drive off unseen. I have a harder time seeing him lurking in the area on foot, waiting for his chance - the place was practically crawling with hunters and whatnot, something he would have been aware of (he would have to hide from these people, simply put, making his "job" all the more complicated).

While Zodiac took a cab in S.F., he was on foot after the crime.

Well for Pete's sake, I just had a thought which is probably ridiculous BUT do you suppose it would have been possible for him to have taken a cab to a spot somewhere near this location and then walked to the phone booth after the crime? I don't have time to try to check the distance with maps, etc. right now but just wondered if this would be possible after reading the last two comments. If so, then his car could have been parked near the phone booth or he could have lived near it as others have thought.

capricorn wrote:Well for Pete's sake, I just had a thought which is probably ridiculous BUT do you suppose it would have been possible for him to have taken a cab to a spot somewhere near this location and then walked to the phone booth after the crime? I don't have time to try to check the distance with maps, etc. right now but just wondered if this would be possible after reading the last two comments. If so, then his car could have been parked near the phone booth or he could have lived near it as others have thought.

I think you're guilty of a murder mix-up, my friend. No phone call after this one - no credit taken at all until months later.

To pursue the on-foot angle further: Is it conceivable at all that Z could have been on foot without us ending up with having to label a certain witness either a liar or a...Zodiac?

I'm thinking about the times here - how accurate are these? Could it be that the car which was observed by said witness, and which seemingly had to belong to Z, did in fact belong to someone else who just happened to swing by briefly - and who for some reason never came forward afterwards? Clearly a stretch - but is it entirely out of the question?