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Post by galaxie500 on May 11, 2020 16:18:42 GMT -8
one more thing - on Kaye's draft registration form, he listed his employer as Beckman & Pransky. a quick google search yields the following description: “Al Beckman and Johnny Pransky had something like a repertory theater going in the (Catskills) Mountains, making a circuit of different hotels. They placed weekly entertainment at each hotel: one night a concert, the next night a variety show, the next night a play, then a guest and staff show (…) Like traveling vaudeville, it moved from the Morningside to the Commodore to the Stevensville, and so on. " Harvey Hines noted in his report that prior to entering the United States Naval Reserve, Kane worked as a master of ceremonies for several night clubs and hotels. I would assume this is what he was referring to.
edit 2024: responding to deleted post.
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Post by ophion1031 on May 18, 2020 2:56:11 GMT -8
WOW!! Very interesting! The "master of ceremonies" is something I don't believe I knew about before.
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Post by galaxie500 on May 19, 2020 7:07:30 GMT -8
WOW!! Very interesting! The "master of ceremonies" is something I don't believe I knew about before. Beckman and Pransky were a fairly prestigious enterprise, so he must have been pretty well known on the circuit. so far, this is the only contemporaneous reference that I've been able to find -
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Post by galaxie500 on May 19, 2020 7:22:01 GMT -8
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Post by ophion1031 on May 23, 2020 19:42:59 GMT -8
I notice he said the word Zodiac haha. I wonder how badly his speech was affected by the accident he had years later. Very cool to hear his voice though!
Thanks for posting those!
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Post by galaxie500 on Jun 1, 2020 21:21:48 GMT -8
I notice he said the word Zodiac haha. I wonder how badly his speech was affected by the accident he had years later. Very cool to hear his voice though! Thanks for posting those! --followed by a reference to "fiendish, diabolical" tortures. With respect to the accident, reporter Rider McDowell spoke to Kane in the early '90's and had this to say regarding his voice - "I locate Kane’s unlisted number and manage to engage him in a phone conversation over some gauzy premise. I record my conversation with the glib, rather agreeable Kane, noting rather remarkably the presence of the subtlest stutter. I play a section of the conversation along with equal sections of two other male voices of the same age, for Hartnell over the phone. He replies: “The third voice (Kane’s), his speech pattern is certainly consistent with the voice I heard, although it’s been too long to be certain.” "and his voice was so…it had this Brooklyn accent, this New York accent, and it seemed to me that that would have been noticeable in either the phone calls to the cops or at Lake Berryessa. (Narration: But Rider says one time he played a recording of Kane’s voice to Bryan Hartnell, the survivor of the Lake Berryessa stabbing.) He said there were similarities to it because there was a little bit of a hiccup. Kane, he didn’t stutter, but there was kind of a pause.” I think a far greater impediment to Kane's candidature is his accent. It seems like it would be difficult to hide that - although, granted, he was only 19 when the recordings were made.
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Post by ophion1031 on Jun 7, 2020 23:42:54 GMT -8
So Rider McDowell contacted Kane thinking he was Zodiac? Interesting comments by Hartnell in regards to hearing Kane's voice.
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Post by ophion1031 on Jun 8, 2020 0:03:17 GMT -8
The B looks a like the number 13, similar to the Bates letters.
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Post by galaxie500 on Jun 12, 2020 19:23:10 GMT -8
I don't really see any resemblance between Kane's handwriting and that of the Zodiac, but some of the misspellings certainly made me raise an eyebrow. His misspellings (save for one) don't appear to have been phonetic in nature and there are a few letter omissions (or repetitions, conversely)/transpositions in there. Also, given the inconsistency of his misspellings (examples: misspells thought as 'thougt' but ostensibly had no problem spelling the word "straight"; misspells off as "of" and then uses the correct spelling later in the same paragraph; spells "undernourished", "beneficial", and "field" correctly but transposes the e and i in fiendish), I have to wonder if Kane didn't have a mild case of dyslexia. on another note - Tom Voigt just published this recording to his youtube channel, no source or context provided. I have to admit I'm a little annoyed.
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Post by ophion1031 on Jun 13, 2020 23:36:40 GMT -8
How did Voit get his hands on it? I wonder why he would even post that, considering he thinks Kane is a horrible suspect.
I don't see any similarities with Kane's handwriting and the Zodiac letters, but that B kinda stuck out to me. The way he wrote it looks similar, but the Bates letters are far more sloppy. Yeah, some of the spelling errors are a bit strange. And so is the way he writes the letter S.
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Post by galaxie500 on Jun 14, 2020 8:58:35 GMT -8
How did Voit get his hands on it? I wonder why he would even post that, considering he thinks Kane is a horrible suspect. I don't see any similarities with Kane's handwriting and the Zodiac letters, but that B kinda stuck out to me. The way he wrote it looks similar, but the Bates letters are far more sloppy. Yeah, some of the spelling errors are a bit strange. And so is the way he writes the letter S. I "went public" with the recordings a couple of days ago. From there, I would infer that somebody emailed it to him, as somebody using the same hosting service that zodiackiller.com is hosted on D/L'd the file directly from my site. I don't have a problem with that (though it does strike me as being more than a little underhanded), but I do think Rex Strother deserves some credit. Edit: Aside from not acknowledging his source or providing any additional context, he also got the date of the recording wrong. Regarding the Bates letters...I also see some similarities in the letter T. Attachments:
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Post by ophion1031 on Jun 14, 2020 22:58:15 GMT -8
Ya know, Tom is a total douchebag and I really can't stand the guy, but I never thought he would post anything without giving the proper credit those those that found the material.
I did not notice the similarities in the letter T, but do now that you pointed it out. Overall I don't see Kane's writing matching that of the Zodiac letters, but I wouldn't be surprised if a handwriting expert said that it matches the Bates letters. Especially when you consider that the Bates letters were written 20 years later and Kane had a significant brain injury between the two.
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Post by galaxie500 on Jun 19, 2020 19:46:30 GMT -8
How did Voit get his hands on it? I wonder why he would even post that, considering he thinks Kane is a horrible suspect. and I would assume that was his motivation in posting it. see his recent comment on the matter: "I believe both Kane's voice and his handwriting are enough to conclusively rule him out as being the Zodiac."
whatever my feelings toward Tom, I have to say that I agree with him in this case. still...kind of infuriating that he presented this information as though it were a "zodiackiller.com" exclusive.
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Post by ophion1031 on Jun 21, 2020 1:28:36 GMT -8
Yeah I wouldn't be too happy with him if I were you... I don't think it should rule Kane out though. This was 20+ years before the Zodiac killings and he suffered a severe brain injury in between... I never believed that the killer wrote the letters anyways. His voice though, I dunno... I'm not completely sold on the killer making the phone calls either. It would make sense that the killer would have a "partner" doing those things.
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Post by galaxie500 on Jun 24, 2020 19:20:52 GMT -8
Yeah I wouldn't be too happy with him if I were you... I don't think it should rule Kane out though. This was 20+ years before the Zodiac killings and he suffered a severe brain injury in between... I never believed that the killer wrote the letters anyways. His voice though, I dunno... I'm not completely sold on the killer making the phone calls either. It would make sense that the killer would have a "partner" doing those things. Here's a sample of Kane's handwriting from the late 1970's. Excepting a few minor variations, I think it's generally consistent with the examples above. On the other hand, the handwriting on his social security form looks a little different from the other samples:
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Post by ophion1031 on Jul 6, 2020 1:10:22 GMT -8
All those years apart and he still prints in all caps. I would assume that is how he always wrote. And there really are no similarities, or very few if any, to the Zodiac letters. The Bates letters, maybe.
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Post by galaxie500 on Dec 30, 2020 9:04:18 GMT -8
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