Many people have asked the obvious question of why did the Zodiac Killer make the effort of obtaining a second Halloween card to painstakingly cut out the skeleton from this card to paste onto the October 27th 1970 card we are all familiar with? Thanks to the great work of SmallOrbit from the Reddit platform, we now know the identity of that second Halloween card. The Zodiac Killer would also cut out a rectangular section from around the eyes of a young girl from the inner portion of this second card, to affix onto the skeleton in the appropriate place. It appears as though a additional skeleton was pivotal to the choice of the Zodiac Killer once his October 27th 1970 Halloween card was opened. It may also be significant that he took the time to add the eyes of a female to the skeleton he pasted on his card inner. Bearing in mind that the Zodiac Killer was now claiming a fourteenth victim - and Donna Lass is the only victim he has ever claimed between July 26th 1970 and October 27th 1970 - we could be forgiven for believing the skeleton with the female eyes was meant to be Donna Lass. The thirteen eyes (representing thirteen souls) looking at the latest Zodiac victim in skeletonized form.

This 1970 greeting card, and the Pines postcard on March 22nd 1971, were the only two mailings by the Zodiac Killer to San Francisco Chronicle journalist, Paul Avery. The Pines postcard, with its "Lake Tahoe" reference and punch-hole, is widely believed to be referencing the burial site of Donna Lass. It's almost as though the Zodiac Killer was directing Paul Avery and law enforcement to the remains of Donna Lass on March 22nd 1971, who he had implied was his fourteenth victim by addressing Paul Avery five months earlier. If the Zodiac Killer was claiming Donna Lass as somebody he murdered in the Pines postcard on March 22nd 1971 - and he only raised his victim count by one between July 26th 1970 and October 27th 1970 - then the Halloween card's fourteenth victim had to be Donna Lass, who disappeared between these dates on September 6th 1970. There really isn't any other option.​

Having fashioned thirteen "floating eyes" on the Halloween card inner to possibly represent his previous victims, it may have necessitated the adding of female eyes to the skeleton's skull to represent his current victim. With the choice of a skeleton being representative of the time elapsed between September 6th 1970 and October 27th 1970, and the probability that Donna Lass had been buried in a shallow grave somewhere around Lake Tahoe, unlike his previous victims, who were discovered at the site they were murdered. It's possible that the choice of skeleton was indicative of Zodiac's lack of faith in law enforcement to find Donna Lass in the next few months, until such time he provided additional clues to the police to aid in the discovery of her body (such as the Pines postcard). But why would the Zodiac Killer choose to bury his latest victim, something he had never done before?

​Maybe because of his fascination with puzzles, having previously given us a code and map on June 26th 1970, in which he claimed to have buried a bomb somewhere in northern California. Then followed this up on July 26th 1970 by giving us the phrase "The Mt. Diablo Code concerns Radians & # inches along the radians", to further help pinpoint its location. If the Bay Area murderer was prepared to play games with a bomb, why wouldn't he play games with a body? This isn't beyond comprehension, because he mailed the cryptic Pines postcard on March 22nd 1971 with a punch-hole and associated directional markers, such as "pass Lake Tahoe areas", "Sierra Club" and "around in the snow". These were obvious location points designed to direct law enforcement to a specific area beyond the lake. In 2024, I used the punch-hole and the directional aids on the Pines postcard to identify an area by Chubb Lake and Yuba Gap, just 1,000 meters from where the partial remains of Donna Lass had been discovered in 1986 (but not identified until 2023). The punch-hole sat over the remains of Donna Lass.

It was also interesting that the Zodiac Killer had chosen a 1962 UX48 Abraham Lincoln postal card on March 22nd 1971, lacking postage and issued nine years before this mailing. So was the Abraham Lincoln card chosen for a specific reason? I noticed that the address side of the postcard had the crosshairs and "Zodiac" around the punch-hole, with the upper point of the crosshairs touching the letter "D", which was the first initial of "Donna". Across from this was the "Abraham Lincoln" stamp with the initials "A" and "L". If the punch-hole represented the burial location of Donna, then this could have been fashioned to read "D .A. L" or Donna Ann Lass. The front of the postcard pointing to her name, and the reverse side pointing to her burial location.  ​

Therefore, we have two cards, both addressed to Paul Avery in the space of five months. The Pines postcard appeared like a cryptic puzzle giving us clues to the name and burial location of Donna Lass, with the October 27th 1970 Halloween card only increasing the victim count by one since July 26th 1970, spanning the period that Donna Ann Lass was last seen at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel & Casino. A Halloween card, in which the Zodiac Killer went to great pains to add a second skeleton with female eyes to the card inner.

But what would be the point of burying Donna Lass and playing this quite extraordinary game of "hide and seek" with her body? Even if law enforcement had identified the general area of a possible burial site from the Pines postcard directions, there would be no guarantee they would find the specific location of her body after months or years had elapsed. I wonder if her burial site had been marked by the signature of Zodiac. On something like a heavy rock, that would stand the test of time? Although this may seem unlikely, it falls a long way short of impossible. 

On October 6th 1970, the Zodiac Killer mailed the 13-Hole postcard with the number 13 on the card, so why didn't the Zodiac Killer raise his victim count to fourteen here, if indeed, he was the murderer of Donna Lass on September 6th 1970? It is possible he wasn't ready to yet lay claim to this murder for any number of reasons, but could have pasted the phrase "Fk I'm crackproof" to indicate he had now achieved "Fourteen kills" (or "Fourteen killed") as another cryptic clue. The use of fourteen within this card could have begun the theme of "fourteen", which continued in the Halloween card three weeks later by way of "14" and "4-TEEN". The Halloween card symbol on the envelope and card inner also appeared to have the letter "F" in its design, so the Zodiac may have replaced "Fourteen killed" with "Zodiac Fourteen".

However, this doesn't change the fact that the Zodiac Killer, according to most researchers, was claiming the murder of Donna Lass on March 22nd 1971, and his victim count only increased by one between July 26th 1970 and October 27th 1970. Therefore, the Zodiac Killer, by mailing the Pines postcard on March 22nd 1971, has left us with the inevitable conclusion that the Halloween card must have been claiming Donna Lass as victim number fourteen. This being the case, are we to conclude that the skeleton he pasted onto the Halloween card inner, was the imagery of his misdeeds near Yuba Gap in Placer County? 

It appears as though the Confession letter on November 29th 1966 primarily focused on attractive women, who "crazed " the author enough to want to kill them. The typed letter began "She was young and beautiful. But now she is battered and dead. She is not the first and she will not be the last. I lay awake nights thinking about my next victom. Maybe she will be the beautiful blond that babysits near the little store and walks down the dark alley each evening about seven. Or maybe she will be the shapely blue eyed brunett that said xxx no when I asked her for a date in high school".

After discovering that the phrase "man is the most dangerous animal of all" from the Zodiac Killer's 408 cipher was uttered by Merian C. Cooper, the associate producer of "The Most Dangerous Game" movie in 1932, which could only reasonably have been found by diligently trawling through microfiche reels from newspapers of the day, I wanted to see if the author of the Confession letter employed the same technique. By finding a commonality of approach between the 408 cipher and Confession letter authors, it may shed light on the idea of one mind and one person responsible for the communications in 1966 and 1969. This is the first step in determining whether the Zodiac Killer was responsible for "riverside activity" or "riverside murder".

I then looked at the seemingly contrived section of the Confession letter where it stated "I said it was about time. She asked me "about time for what". I said it was about time for her to die". After dropping the phrase "it was about time for her to die" into a newspaper archive search, I was surprised to receive a hit from 1888 (the year of "Jack the Ripper"), bearing in mind that the Confession letter author appeared to mimic the language of a recent newspaper article on November 24th 1966, mentioning Cheri Jo Bates and invoking the name of "Jack the Ripper". The two phrases of "man is the most dangerous animal of all" and "it was about time for her to die", I could only find in newspaper articles dated 1932 and 1888 respectively, despite searching 331 years of newspaper archives.  

​If the author was searching the archives in 1966 for Jack the Ripper related material to insert into the Confession letter, I needed to know if anything other than "it was about time for her to die" could be found to bolster the argument for this hypothesis. Although the following isn't compelling, it does provide a possible second layer to consider. I focused in on another section of the Confession letter where the author typed "I am not sick. I am insane", which seemed an unnecessary addition to the story. However, I was unable to find this exact quote from 1690 to 2021 in the Genealogy Bank archives.

​So I refined the search to "Jack the Ripper" and "I am insane", hoping to find these two sections of text within one newspaper story. The search was successful, when I found several large articles in 1927 detailing the horrible mutilations of "Jack the Ripper", The newspapers stated "Nothing the London monster did exceeded the wanton devilishness the murders of half a dozen New York children by "rippers" whose crimes have stirred the city during the past fifteen years" (see below). This was a promising find, but I needed more.

​The Nathan Swartz murder of Julia Connors had some of the features of Riverside, in that he wrote a Confession letter, told of being crazed by the beautiful make-up of women, stabbed a young girl to death, articulated a "two minutes" window, and stated that "I am guilty. I am insane". The Confession letter author at Riverside mentioned that they would "cut off her female parts and deposit them for the whole city to see" in "Jack the Ripper" style, only five days after a newspaper article mentioning Cheri Jo Bates and "Jack the Ripper". We also have the phrase "it was about time for her to die", found in a newspaper article entitled "The Sturdy Beggar"​ from 1888 (the year of "Jack the Ripper"), in which a women was threatened by a man motioning towards a potential knife in his pocket. And finally, the Nathan Swartz story was embedded within a comprehensive "Jack the Ripper" newspaper article from 1927. It may be nothing, but it could be something.   

CONNECTING RIVERSIDE TO THE ZODIAC USING JACK THE RIPPER [IN 7 PARTS]