ZODIAC CIPHERS
Richard Grinell, Coventry, England
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IT'S ALL IN THE WORDS

8/13/2018

 
PictureLooking east on Springs Road
The best evidence we have in the Zodiac case are not the murders themselves, but the copious letters and cards the killer mailed over many years. They may not have told us who the killer was, however, they can reveal information about the confirmed murderer of five with respect to his use of language - in particular his use of the present and past tense. This was examined in the article 'Zodiac Killer- A Vallejo Resident' which tried to pinpoint the home location of the Zodiac Killer. We attempted to narrow this further by examining his July 5th 1969 payphone call, along with the language he used in the August 4th 1969 'Debut of Zodiac' letter concerning the negro male eyewitness. Although not an exact science, the phone call to police dispatcher Nancy Slover is worth another look.

The murderer of Darlene Ferrin made a phone call 40 minutes after the attack, directing officers from the police station to the parking lot at Blue Rock Springs Park. He made the payphone call from the intersection of Springs Road and Tuolumne Street at 12:40 am, stating "I want to report a double murder. If you will go one mile east...... on Columbus Parkway to the public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9 mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year.... Good-bye". The overriding impression from the use of language adopted in the phone call, is that of a killer seemingly unaware that the crime has already been discovered by responding police officers. The use of the future tense, with respect to police that "will go" and "you will find," suggests that the Zodiac Killer is of the opinion that his deadly deed is not yet known to police at this juncture.

​Bearing in mind his directions are from the police station across the road from the payphone, it could be surmised that the killer has either been somewhere in the vicinity of the payphone or police station for at least 30 minutes, in order for him to have drawn such a conclusion. The only way the murderer could assume nobody had responded to the crime scene from the police station, from which he gave his directions, is by a notable lack of activity in responding police units from this location, This could be in the form of visual confirmation or the audible nature of police sirens. But to know this, he has to be close by - either in his vehicle or residence. We will later give reasons to pour doubt on a killer driving from Blue Rock Springs Park to somewhere close to the payphone or police station, to watch the unfolding activity from the confines of his vehicle. This will further corroborate the likelihood of a killer living extremely close to the intersection of Springs Road and Tuolumne Street, or very close to the police station itself.       

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Click to enter Google maps
The most direct route of travel from the police station to Blue Rock Springs would be to take Solano Avenue to Springs Road and head east to Columbus Parkway. The Zodiac Killer got his distance slightly wrong, but from the perspective of traveling in an easterly direction, he is only 0.4 miles off. His expanded phone call should have read "I want to report a double murder. If you will go 1.4 miles east on Springs Road...... on Columbus Parkway to the public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9 mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year.... Good-bye". This should leave little doubt that the Zodiac Killer was directing officers from the police station east towards the crime scene. But why was the killer under the impression his "double murder" had yet to be discovered? This is where the police reports and crime documentaries come in handy.

Officer Richard Hoffman stated: "I was working as a patrol officer in a juvenile division. It was a plainclothes assignment. I wasn't far away, so I turned around and went back out there (Blue Rock Springs parking lot)". Detective Sergeant Ed Rust stated "My partner and I, John Lynch, who was also a detective sergeant, he was the senior of our team. We worked a late shift, three to midnight, something like that, and I was driving the plainclothes car- we were plainclothes detectives- and we were round the downtown area in Vallejo. It was close to midnight, when we heard reports of a possible shooting at Blue Rock Springs Park over the radio and they had dispatched a patrol car, and I told John "you wanna head out there" and he said "no, it's probably just firecrackers or something". It was actually just after 12:10 am, when Debra, Jerry and Roger had rang in the crime to police dispatcher Nancy Slover. Detective Sergeant Ed Rust continued "So, since I was driving, I started meandering in that direction, and a few minutes later I believe we got another report of shots fired, again at Blue Rock Springs, and the officer Dick Hoffman, patrol officer, got there first and said he had a shooting- two people involved. So then, obviously, I put it in high gear and took off and we got out there pretty quickly".
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These were the first officers at the crime scene - and it's clear they were both plainclothes officers - one responding from close to the crime scene and the other "meandering" towards the crime scene. Both likely inside the radius of the Springs/Tuolumne intersection and the Blue Rock Springs parking lot, before the gravity of the radio dispatch became evident. Was the Zodiac Killer expecting a massive charge of vehicles from the police station from 12:10 am onward - and when nothing happened - he decided to place a phone call at 12:40 am, instructing police to head to the crime scene?

If he had a visual on the police station from 12:10-12:40 am, one could argue he had seen little activity to suggest the police had discovered the crime in the preceding 40 minutes. Thereby explaining his use of the future tense in his directions to police. Dispatcher Nancy Slover would corroborate this lack of activity in the 2007 'This is the Zodiac Speaking' documentary, stating "At 12:10 am, the first call I received, was from a young white woman in her late teens, and she was really agitated, excited or whatever. She reported that there were kids being shot at at Blue Rock Springs. So, I took the call and I gave it to the dispatcher, and I remember her saying "I don't know who I'm gonna send, because I don't have anybody free".

If the Zodiac Killer had driven to Benicia or Napa, and made the phone call from such a place, would he not have just proclaimed the murders as he did at Lake Berryessa seven weeks later, when he used the phrase "I'm the one that did it", rather than "you will find the kids in a brown car". This is not conclusive proof he was close to the Vallejo Police Station in the 30 minutes after the crime, however, the possibility exists, especially when we consider his August 4th 1969 'Debut of Zodiac' letter, in which he tries to sell us a story. 

The police or newspapers have never confirmed the existence a negro male adult reporting his sighting of Zodiac by the Springs and Tuolumne payphone. Therefore, it must be viewed with great suspicion, a killer offering up confirmation that he was in his "brown" vehicle rather than on foot when making the phone call to Nancy Slover. If the Zodiac Killer lived close to the payphone, or close to the police station, he may have naively been expecting some activity in the area of Solano Avenue or Springs Road in the 40 minutes after his crime - particularly in view of increased activity at Blue Rock Springs Park during the July 4th celebrations. He may have expected his crime to have been discovered by now. 

The area of Blue Rock Springs was considerably more rural than it is today. Despite this fact, would it be conceivable that the Zodiac Killer just parked up somewhere before he made the call to police. He couldn't be certain his vehicle wasn't spotted exiting the Blue Rock Springs parking lot. He was wearing only a blue t-shirt during the shooting, and had leaned into Darlene Ferrin's passenger side window and over the front seat, to fire the final shots at Michael Mageau. This would have greatly increased the likelihood of blood transfer to his clothing from the window, passenger seat and interior of the brown Corvair. The lighter the t-shirt, the more evident the transfer would have become. Taking these factors into consideration, not withstanding he was still in possession of the firearm, it may have been extremely foolhardy not to have headed straight for home, before heading back to the payphone.

Was the Zodiac Killer's apparent knowledge of the lack of police activity around the police station, the reason for the language adopted in the phone call to Nancy Slover? Of somebody, who knew more than he should have known. The journey time to the payphone from the parking lot is approximately 10 minutes. So why not just make the phone call at 12:10 am and be done with it. Or had he planned to watch the unfolding action from a vantage point close to the police station in fond anticipation of police "running around town". Unfortunately for Zodiac, the wait was seemingly too long.   

Greg H.
8/14/2018 10:49:32 am

It's interesting to consider, Richard, the agenda, or lack thereof, the killer intended on putting into motion in the aftermath of the crimes. We'll never know, of course, if LHR and the Presidio murders also came with the wish of a footnote phone-call until plans went awry.

I agree with your assessment here about his usage of future tense language as an indicatior of what may have been unfolding before him. I wondered, however, if the resposibility-taking calls are a type of learned behavior that he was emulating from other contemporaries of the time. I would have to check again, but I vaguely recall there was a serial killer in South Carolina in 1968 who was calling the police, bragging and taunting them with tales of his misdeeds. Almost surely these and similar antics can be traced even further back in crime archives and were invented neither by Zodiac nor his arguable influence. My question concerns the degree to which this phone call was premeditated, or did it happen--certainly very possible--in the spur of the moment and as a direct response to his perceived lack of activity post-shooting.

Just ran a quick search about the person I mentioned above, including the wiki link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Roy_Martin). His actions are similar to Zodiac's insofar as the calls he made, specifying the location of his victims. Even if Zodiac didn't know of this man, it was clear there was something in the zeitgeist of the age that compelled sadistic murderers to emboldened themselves by going one step further and seeking smug satisfaction by means of self-promotion through police or media outlets.

Richard
8/15/2018 07:15:43 am

I still strongly believe Greg that a phone call was placed by the killer after LHR, but reported as an accident. I cannot reconcile Pierre Bidou hearing an accident being relayed to him and thinking it's a crank call. Why? Since Stella Medeiros was the only one to report the bodies on the ground via Captain Daniel Pitta, how can that be misconstrued as a crank call. Accident maybe- but this was on official channels. Zodiac reported BRS and LB almost immediately, and PH he had a trick up his sleeve with the shirt. Why was LHR seemingly the exception.
The Zodiac can certainly sell us a story in his letters, but what is more difficult to control is the subtleties of language that leaks into the correspondence. A bit like disappearance cases where the suspect or otherwise refers to the person in the past tense, indicating they know the person id dead. That is why the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle were addressed to in the past tense on July 31st 1969. These 'slip-ups' may be present in his other letters. That is why when he wrote "All I had to do was spray them as if it was a water hose" could have been significant regarding David Faraday being executed from point-blank range. He obviously didn't spray David Faraday, thereby rendering the word "them" of great interest- especially if the murderer of Betty Lou Jensen is writing the letter and he had an accomplice that night. Hence the bullet retrieved from David Faraday not exhibiting right hand twist, like the other bullets tested. There is a danger in reading too far into the choice of wording, but when allied to corroborating material it can build a picture.

BB
8/14/2018 12:58:27 pm

YouTube has a two part video that explains this zeitgeist of the age

Zeitgeist - Religion (and) Zeitgeist - Gods of the zodiac

We are in Pisces, two, doubles, duality, duos, twins, dichotomies etc...

BB
8/23/2018 02:48:29 pm


It bares repeating that proper detective work - done in all sciences and medicine and mechanics are holistic [as when whole entities have an existence other than as the mere sum of their parts.]. And, that science is only correct when it is done completely unbiased and open to all possibilities.

With that being said I just feel like Horan is off limits - I was just wondering if his idea is too taboo to talk about? Because I think he makes a good deal of logical sense here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIf9YRg6XU

This may interest you Richard if you have not seen it already. I thought of you when I first seen it because of the wheel of doom.
340 Cipher cracked with mirror and key
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LI1kL0vTlY

The Zodiac Killer Ed Edwards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xISZ0Ypm_Ko

'It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth"

Sherlock Holmes

http://sherlockholmesquotes.com


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