The Car Door

[smithy]

Not just a strong resemblance In My Honest Opinion. That doors got a colon with open dots in it - like the 2nd letter which hadn't been published. Pretty damned prescient, if it wasn't the same guy who wrote that letter who wrote on the door. (And also right in line with the textbook I posted about on "How to Discise yer Handwritting" by some guy that LE would have have been reading. I rote that on anuther thread.)

$64k yes. Why not write a note and bring it with you?
Why not write a letter afterward? Why write on the door? Unanswerable, of course.

BTW I love your "he was consistently inconsistent" logic - it reminds me of the quote in the newspaper of the time from that police officer.... "His pattern is - there is no pattern!" I always find that entertaining.

He was consistently inconstently tall then short then fat then thin. And brown/blond/dark haired (when not gray rust coloured at the back - but could that have been blood?) - but definitely curly. He used different MO's and different weapons each time, damn him.
And I'm still trying to figure out how his feet were a couple of sizes smaller in Riverside than in Berryessa, damnit.

[Norse]

Last one's no mystery, Smithy.

He...didn't do it.

Height and weight? Well. I don't know. If the witness descriptions are spot on we may have a problem. If they're not...

Hartnell actually goes from 5 '8 to over six feet in one and the same statement, if memory serves. Both MM and the Stine witnesses have him at 5 '8. They all agree he wasn't thin - seemingly. I read somewhere that most people are better at estimating weight than height. It has something to do with comparing the subject to yourself. Both Hartnell and MM were very tall. Generally this tends to influence your perception negatively - so they say. The teens in PH were young (not good - the ability to judge height tends to get better with experience). If Hartnell's max assessment is off (he was a poor judge of height according to himself and he viewed the subject from a position on the ground, looking up at him) the discrepancies aren't terrible. Fouke at 5 '10, the kids and MM at 5 '8, Hartnell all over the place.

He wasn't terribly tall and he certainly doesn't appear to have been skinny. That's the gist of it.

Hair color? He was seen at night and Hartnell only, sort of, glimpsed his hair behind the hood and suggested his hair was greasy (could have been sweaty - would have been hot under that hood).

Brownish, possibly with a red tint - could have been dark blonde with a reddish tint...something along those lines. Nobody stands out in the crowd and claims he had a pink mohawk, after all.

[Tahoe27]

Certainly. And that is precisely what he did - if he wasn't Z. It's also what Z did if he was...Z.

Er, yes.

My question is this, though: Why did the copycat opt to write on the car door (in a fashion which undoubtedly bears some resemblance, arguably a strong one, to Z's known writing) rather than sending a letter. The former wasn't known as a Z trait. The latter was.

Z could have decided to write on the car door for all sorts of reasons. He was a crazy and somewhat inconsistent fellow. A copycat, however, is more likely to actually copy what is known about the killer he seeks to...copy, rather than invent a brand new thing.

I guess what I am saying is maybe this person wasn't trying to be a "copy-cat"...just trying to pin this one attack of his on Zodiac. Writing letters is a whole other ballgame. He didn't need to continue--he thought he pretty much covered it.

I don't think Zodiac was that inconsistent. The witnesses maybe, but not his crimes--LB aside. He shot and bailed.

[Norse]

I guess what I am saying is maybe this person wasn't trying to be a "copy-cat"...just trying to pin this one attack of his on Zodiac. Writing letters is a whole other ballgame. He didn't need to continue--he thought he pretty much covered it.

I don't think Zodiac was that inconsistent. The witnesses maybe, but not his crimes--LB aside. He shot and bailed.

Yes, that's possible. It raises plenty of questions and problems, though. What was his motive? Did he know the victims? Why the costume? Isn't the whole approach very outlandish for someone who "just" wanted to get rid of either BH or CS or both?

I'm not dismissing it. LB is odd whichever way you look at it - and I'm not 100% convinced about anything.

[Tahoe27]

Maybe the guy was just a nut.

In the LB police reports one of the doctors at Napa State mentioned one of their patients having been given a weekend pass. He mentions this person was capable of committing such a crime. --Nice of them to give him an outside pass.

While certainly they looked at this person, my point is that sometimes people are just insane.

I only post this stuff to show there is probable cause that someone else COULD be responsible. Food for thought.

[Norse]

Absolutely, Tahoe - I get that. And I agree with the approach - it's a good thing to speculate and consider all kinds of possibilities when it is within reason. And it IS within reason that LB wasn't a Z crime.

One thing we do know...is that whoever did it was a nut!

[Norse]

To finish my own speculation, some further thoughts, particularly about the costume:

Poss. killer 1: The copycat. I maintain that his main motivation would have been to copy Z's work. That is what a copycat does. The costume was not associated with Z until after Berryessa. If a copycat was the killer, he invented this elaborate costume all by himself for unknown reasons, which is an obvious deviation from what you'd expect a copycat to do.

Poss. killer 2: Someone who wanted to pin the murders on Z. This person would have been less of a nut than the copycat. Chances are he knew either BH or CS - or both. The latter begs many questions. Who was the target? It seems highly improbable that he targeted both. BH and CS ran into each other earlier that day, they had history but were not a couple at the time and their decision to drive to Berryessa was pretty much spur of the moment. All in all, their presence, together, at Beryessa is largely happenstance and would have been virtually impossible to predict for a killer. It stands to reason, then, that our man intended to kill one of them, not both. Which begs another question: Why attack the target when he or she was with someone else, which is both messier and riskier than going for a lone target?

Lastly, the costume. In order to incriminate Z the costume is superfluous. A) The killer intended to link the murders to Z by writing on the car door, which is sufficient (albeit a novel idea, not associated with Z, but that's another debate). B) He intended to kill both targets, so unless a witness happened to see him in the act, the costume would have been useless as a means to incriminate Z (who was not known to wear a costume anyway). As a means to hide his identity the costume is overkill to the point of being ludicrous. A ski mask would have sufficed.

Poss. killer 3: The Zodiac killer. Why did he wear the costume? We don't know. But we do know it bears his symbol. We also know there's a direct link between this costume - which appears to be some sort of executioner's garb - to a Z trait which became known later, namely his penchant for quoting the Mikado. He may have thought of himself as an executioner. As a sheer means to hide his identity the costume makes no sense for any of the possible killers. It's clearly far too elaborate to be a mere disguise. For Z, however, the costume may have served him well as a disguise AND as part of some sort of ritual he was performing, according to the twisted ideas in his own mind. This latter double function only works for Z, not for any of the others. Unless we are to believe that the copycat coincidentally shared Z's particular pathology - and that beggars belief. The killer intended to kill both BH and CS. The costume may have served to hide his face, yes, but its nature (it's elaborateness, its similarity to an executioner's hood) would have served the killer alone. That last detail makes no sense in the context of a copycat, nor in the context of a killer who wanted to pin the thing on Z. It makes perfect sense if Z was the killer, though.

[smithy]

Ah-ha Norse!
He Did Not Do It But He Wrote Letters About It To The Police And Newspapers As If He Actually Had.
If you want an MO then by cracky there's one.

T. - "LB aside he shot and bailed" - leaving behind different calibre shells and witnesses who gave us very varied descriptions. Some thinNER, some fatTER. (Sorry about that, no he was never described as thin. I expect he would have been eventually though, had he kept writing.......).

Berryessa is certainly different. Strange. I have to concur with the idea that the guy who dressed in a hood and got close-in with a knife at the lake that day was a complete fruit-loop. He was close to being off the scale of operable in normal society. It's not a regular thing to do, that. It's the kind of attack you'd expect from some who was properly out to lunch. Schizophrenic, maybe.
Say - they weren't covering up a screw-up in who they let out of the Napa Facility for the day were they, by writing on the door? Naaaa, that's silly.

[Tahoe27]

Ted Bundy was a nut and he functioned quite well in society. One can be quite brilliant and still be one can short of a six-pack. (or maybe two or three)

[Norse]

Ah-ha Norse!
He Did Not Do It But He Wrote Letters About It To The Police And Newspapers As If He Actually Had.

Hmm. Possibly - he did that, possibly. Then again maybe he didn't - maybe he just confirmed what LE seemed to think at the time when his "activity" in Riverside became public knowledge. He did like to confuse 'em, after all. And, strictly speaking, both scenarios work in that regard.

As for the escaped loon...well, there's that damn costume again. It's not any old costume, it's HIS costume, the character from the papers. Only it isn't - because nobody knows anything about it until after the attack. There's a problem here, I think. A huge one. The killer, whoever he was, put some effort into making that costume. It was significant - to him. That's a reasonable assumption, I think. It's an executioner's outfit. It ties in nicely with the Mikado.

Is the link between the Mikado (Z) and the costume (not made by Z but by someone else, who never wrote letters quoting the Mikado, but did use Z's symbol) coincidental? I find that hard to believe, I must say.

Consider the following:

NN attacks at Berryessa wearing an elaborate costume with Z's symbol on it. The costume isn't associated with Z (as far as our man knows) but the symbol is. He is partly emulating Z, partly improvising. Using a knife where Z used guns, writing on car doors where Z wrote letters. He then disappears (as far as we know), never to attack anyone in the same fashion again (as far as we know).

The "real" Z, the man responsible for LHR and BRS then goes on to kill Paul Stine. Without mentioning Berryessa. Makes sense if he didn't do it. If it weren't for the fact that he - clearly - was a man who cared about his reputation and his "trademark". He wanted people to wear Z buttons (in fact he seemed obsessed with the idea of Z buttons). Did he not mind the imposter at Berryessa - an imposter who sported an executioner's outfit with HIS symbol on it? Maybe not. He was nuts, after all, so who knows? Maybe he simply was inspired by it, thought it was a great addition to the persona, and then went on to quote the Mikado and play up the executioner angle. Maybe. I'm inclined to think that there's a more likely explanation for all of this, though.