Zodiackillersite.com

I reckon with the wallet he searched for some form of ID to send to the newspapers, but found nothing. There is no evidence he took Paul Stine's driving license and this has never been mentioned in any police report. Had he found a license or some other simple form of ID to send to the San Francisco Chronicle, then the tearing of the shirt would have become superfluous. He then took the wallet because it harbored his fingerprints and it was quicker than wiping it down, which in itself would have created more fingerprints. I doubt very much having just shot a taxicab driver in a built up area, covered in blood and knowing time was a premium, would start carefully tearing a segment of shirt, if he had initially procured sufficient ID from the wallet. I think he did it because he wanted to link himself to the crime and his initial search had failed. The wallet and keys were taken for nothing more than they had been touched by him. He never collected trophies in any of his other crimes, in particular Berryessa despite ample opportunity and the keys and wallet were too bulky for his normal route of correspondence, so removing them from the scene was simply a mundane removal of incriminating evidence, this was a likely course of events.

I agree that he likely took the keys and wallet simply because he had touched them, but I don't think Stine would have been able to drive a cab without legitimate ID.

Certainly Stine's wallet would have contained some form of uniquely-identifying information, ID or not.

Still a pretty good rip of that shirt. Seems a little more practiced to me, but who knows...

Yes – depends what it actually is, I suppose: If he does it to wipe down the cab, then we may regard it as...instinctive, perhaps. Which may, in its turn, point to someone who was used to that sort of thing: A soldier, a medic, something like that.

As others have pointed out, tearing off a piece of shirt in order to wipe down the cab isn't necessarily the most obvious thing to do. He could have used his own clothes for the purpose, one way or another.

If he does it for ID purposes alone, well – that's a bit different, I think. Different sort of...reaction. I agree with jroberson – there would have been something in Stine's wallet which would serve the ID purpose. The tearing of the shirt doesn't seem like a necessary move on his part in that regard.

The only other possibility was the shirt piece with blood on was more of a 'shock and awe' tactic, sorry about the pun.
Using it to wipe the cab down I have never understood, he may as well have used his own shirt or jacket sleeve, as Norse alluded, it's not as though he wasn't covered in blood anyway, he supposedly had Paul Stine's head in his lap.

And yet the kids said they saw him wiping the cab down with a white cloth, IIRC, or at least something that appeared to be a white cloth as seen from their location.

So he didn't use his clothing.

he supposedly had Paul Stine's head in his lap.

I'm not sure how anyone would know that The Zodiac cradled Paul Stine's blood-soaked head in his lap. The kids certainly could not see such a thing from their location. There were no other witnesses.

I don't think The Zodiac would have taken Stine's head into his lap. I think he pushed the man's head and upper body into the seat well while himself sitting on the door-side edge of the cab's right front seat.

It's what I would have done.

He then could have swiveled left to cut the shirt cloth.



This whole narrative of The Zodiac shooting Stine from the front passenger seat and then cradling the dead guy's gushing head inside the cab isn't based on any established fact. It's based on a few lines of testimony from the kids who didn't go into elaborate detail. They never saw the cab arrive, and they never heard the shots AFAIK. They did not see The Zodiac arrive in the front seat and shoot Stine. They simply said that by the time they got to the window, The Zodiac was up front on the passenger side, doing something, after which they claimed he circled the cab, wiping it down. Nowhere in that description is there a depiction of what's been claimed, which is just baseless supposition and speculation.


To this day, no one knows exactly why The Zodiac cut the shirt. To prove he was the killer? Yes. But then there's this: if he cut Paul Stine's shirt and then circled the cab to clean up "clues", why wouldn't he use Stine's shirt? Why would he use his clothing or a perfectly good handkerchief when he had, at that moment, a suitable object that was disposable and likely already soiled with blood? Would you use your clothes when you had in hand a piece of rather useless cloth? I wouldn't. I also don't think the Zodiac was much into other people's blood, which is perhaps why he wore the costume at LB: to keep himself clean of such bodily fluids. Perhaps it started out as a bib and some kind of head covering, like something one would wear during surgery, and then, The Zodiac being The Zodiac, the garb evolved into something a bit more symbolic.

(black doesn't show blood, by the way)



Regardless, I surmise then that whether or not he cut the shirt for proof of his involvement or to clean himself and the cab, or even both, he likely used the shirt to wipe the cab.

As for rending the shirt...to say that he used the keys is imo rather unlikely. We know the Zodiac carried a knife at Berryessa, and it is unlikely he would have approached the Stine scene without some kind of cutting blade. He was that ilk of a person. Could he have cut the shirt with a key? Possibly. Keys are often sharp in places and one doesn't need a perfect blade to get a running tear on cloth. But we know The Zodiac was into knives, so it is more likely to me that he approached the scene equipped with one, simply because he was a murderous brute with little disinclination for sharp blades.

He could have easily carried a small knife, sure - a pocket knife of some kind. A certain generation, including perfectly non-murderous people, used to carry knives per default, one could say. My grandfather, for instance, never went anywhere without a pocket knife – and my dad is the same, only these days he can't travel with his trusty knife anymore, because of heightened airport security and whatnot.

Even if he had no knife, Z could have gotten a tear going easily enough just using his teeth. As mentioned before, Stine's shirt was very tear-able.

I agree that Z would have used the shirt piece for the clean-up job once he had it – but the question still remains whether it was torn off for this purpose or not. An argument can be made for it not being the most obvious solution to the problem – at least not for a certain kind of person. For someone with previous experience, however, it might be.

Lastly, we probably shouldn't underestimate the “shock and awe” factor suggested by UKS. Once he got THAT idea, the shirt business would have appealed to him, I think – regardless of more practical concerns.

Apparently, Bates' killer came equipped with a utility knife as well, and as you say, back then many if not most men carried one, especially in an area saturated with military men and endless nature such as 1960s Bay Area California.

As for the shock and awe....I'm not sure.

It certainly played well for him to send bloody scraps of a dead man's shirt to the press and public. The thing is, was that part of his planned calculation, or merely an incidental result of needing the cloth for more mundane activities, like cleaning head wound blood spray from his face and glasses (assuming he was wearing them)?

If he came unprepared for the blood spatter, he may have found himself splattered with blood, with no real way to eliminate it. The jacket he was wearing may have been synthetic, and thus far less absorbent than a natural cloth fabric (such as the shirt Stine was possibly wearing).

I think it's a fair debate either way, and we'll probably never know, barring some unreleased forensic evidence, such as fabric analysis indicating, say, scissor cuts on Stine's shirt, which would in fact indicate premeditation.

one obvious reason i can think for him to premeditate taking a souvenir is he was at the point of competing with himself when it comes to the media. the papers were getting hoax letters, hoax calls, etc so he moved into a situation where it would have been harder and harder to write something and have it make it through the vetting process. we assume he took stine's key and wallet - the keys obviously couldn't have been easily mailed in an envelope and maybe the wallet didn't have enough in it other than stine's license, or maybe he was thinking of an article of clothing the whole time because he could use as many scraps as he wanted as a vip pass through the newspaper mailrooms and editors' desks when he wanted to communicate.

i don't buy the arguments that stine's shirt was solely to wipe down the cab. we know he was wearing a jacket. synthetic or not it would have worked fine to smudge prints and in any case would have been a better option, given the preciously small window of time he had, versus wasting that time tearing out a section of a dead guy's shirt. it just seems like the time spent moving the body, further covering yourself in blood, further adding fingerprints to the car, etc doesn't seem like an economical use of resources.

Well, it's true that a synthetic fabric would smear prints, but we don't know if The Zodiac was showered with fresh blood, which he would not have wanted to smear. That's where the absorbency of Stine' shirt comes in.


I do think though The Zodiac felt more compelled to authenticate himself with Stine's shirt, given the recorded fiasco with Belli and the call-in from the mental patient.