REAL OR FAKE?

[Norse]

You guys that keep having a hard time believing established evidence might want to read stuff by Ray Grant. He believes in NONE of it!

http://www.zodiackillerfacts.com/Ray%20Grant.htm

Yes – point taken. Everything can be doubted – and if everything is doubted, we end up with nothing.

But in all fairness...there's a difference between being critical and being paranoid.

Thing is, when it comes to these letters (the '74 batch) we don't know precisely why they were considered fishy in the first place. Well, Exorcist is obvious – but the others aren't. Is it handwriting alone? Perhaps it isn't even that – might be something else, that we don't know about. It might even be that some of these letters were considered, for whatever reason, at one point – and then pretty much dropped. But they have survived nevertheless, as part of the evidence we know about.

Most of Z's “confirmed” letters can be placed in a certain context – or they contain proof of some kind, or they follow immediately on a known crime...and then the printing comes on top of that. There is no reason to doubt those letters – and in my opinion that's the point where critical ends and something else begins.

[morf13]

You guys that keep having a hard time believing established evidence might want to read stuff by Ray Grant. He believes in NONE of it!

http://www.zodiackillerfacts.com/Ray%20Grant.htm

Yes – point taken. Everything can be doubted – and if everything is doubted, we end up with nothing.

But in all fairness...there's a difference between being critical and being paranoid.

Thing is, when it comes to these letters (the '74 batch) we don't know precisely why they were considered fishy in the first place. Well, Exorcist is obvious – but the others aren't. Is it handwriting alone? Perhaps it isn't even that – might be something else, that we don't know about. It might even be that some of these letters were considered, for whatever reason, at one point – and then pretty much dropped. But they have survived nevertheless, as part of the evidence we know about.

Most of Z's “confirmed” letters can be placed in a certain context – or they contain proof of some kind, or they follow immediately on a known crime...and then the printing comes on top of that. There is no reason to doubt those letters – and in my opinion that's the point where critical ends and something else begins.

Yeah, that Exorcist letter to me screams Zodiac. The Capital T followed by lower case h, in the word The, we see the t & h connected at top. matches Z. The i with circle on top of it, the splitting of words, I have no doubt about it being real. You are correct, that's the easiest one.

Let's look at the others.

The Badlands letter has many matches for the Riverside desktop poem. The letter K in first line in word, 'like' is like the K Zodiac used previously. I too think this is a legit Z letter.

The Count Marco letter, not as obvious, but he makes long g & y tails, and drags them under the word to the left as Z did a lot. The issue is, that the letter is so stylistic & artistic, that it almost isn't writing, but you can see the things there, and I think it's Z. As far as one thing specifically, when comparing to my Suspect, Ross Sullivan, the P in the word Phantom matches writing in Ross's SS application. Being I think it likely that Ross was Z, this does not surprise me.


The SLA letter for me is the toughest. I think Trav examine dit and found some things of interest. If I was to choose one of these as not being from Z, I would choose this one, but I leave it to the experts that examined it and found it to be legit.

I think it's cool that they were closely watching & examining their mail all the way up to 1974.

[mike_r]

Hi-

Alan Keel said that there was matching DNA on the two forgeries, one being the 1978 letter and the other is from 1974. The only letter from 1974 that had been known to have been tested as per SFPD's chart of the letters is the Exorcist letter. There is an old article I saw that said that Toschi may have forged the 1978 letter and one other. The one they showed in that article was the Exorcist letter. FWIW

Mike

[morf13]

Hi-

Alan Keel said that there was matching DNA on the two forgeries, one being the 1978 letter and the other is from 1974. The only letter from 1974 that had been known to have been tested as per SFPD's chart of the letters is the Exorcist letter. There is an old article I saw that said that Toschi may have forged the 1978 letter and one other. The one they showed in that article was the Exorcist letter. FWIW

Mike

I highly doubt this one would be the fake, and short of seeing something official in print, would not accept this as a fake

[morf13]

Here's the 1974 SLA envelope, no wonder they spotted it as a Z letter, it wasn't the letter it was the envelope!

[morf13]

The FBI backing up the fact that the Exorcist letter was likely legit

[Tahoe27]

Hi-

Alan Keel said that there was matching DNA on the two forgeries, one being the 1978 letter and the other is from 1974. The only letter from 1974 that had been known to have been tested as per SFPD's chart of the letters is the Exorcist letter. There is an old article I saw that said that Toschi may have forged the 1978 letter and one other. The one they showed in that article was the Exorcist letter. FWIW

Mike

Considering the '78 letter had some scratching their heads, it was obviously a good fake. Someone out there was doing some good faking, that's for sure.

[Norse]

The FBI response is pretty interesting. Let's say that someone carefully copied Z's writing (which was the case with the '78 letter). That's not – say – inconsistent with what the FBI say, or?

Looks like the same hand, but there are problems here – including the quality of the exemplar.

What exactly do they mean by "freely" and "distortion"?

The thing about this DNA/fake conundrum is this: If someone prepared a fake Z letter, would they really come up with something like Red Phantom or SLA?

The only '74 letter which claims (almost explicitly) to be from Z, is Exorcist. The '78 letter is clear about who it's supposed to be from too.

SLA, Phantom and Citizen are very different in that regard. If you prepared any of those as a Zodiac fake, could you realistically count on it being understood as a Z letter? I don't think so.

Well (*cough*) at least not unless you were in a position to make sure it was understood that way.

[jroberson]

I have no idea what you guys are talking about with respect to the 1974 letters and I've never heard that DNA from the 1978 letter was matched to one of the 1974 letters.

I'd be fairly surprised if that were the case considering the 1974 letters are all pretty off the beaten Zodiac path, whereas the 1978 letter is quite clearly far more similar to the Zodiac's original communications, aside from what looks like to me clear evidence it wasn't written fluidly or naturally.



And that FBI profiler made me laugh.

She says: The Zodiac killed on the weekend, thus that means he had a nine-to-five weekday job; he was a loner because he never confessed, which we know because no one has ever claimed he confessed; he spent his weekends driving around, "hunting"; and so on.

Really, how does one get a job as a profiler, because I think more than a few of us could perform the duties of her job. Certainly hardly the level of effort James Brussel applied to profiling George Metesky, the Mad Bomber of Con Ed, and that was decades ago before profiling was as much a supposed "science" as it is now....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Metesky#Profile

[morf13]

If you wanted to fake a Z letter, wouldn't you include double stamps, or cross hair logo, or call yourself Z in the letter? Not one of the 1974 envelopes has double postage.
Not a single one has a crosshair. Not a single one has the word ZODIAC in it. Seems unlikely that anybody would send one of these 1974 letters as a Z copycat with no guarantee they would be connected to Z. I wonder, how possible is it that there was a 1974 Fake Z letter as was told to Mike R, but rather, it's one we have not seen??