Post by vtsquire on Dec 3, 2023 22:41:09 GMT -8
I want to say first and foremost, that the idea(s) below are not entirely of my own invention. They were inspired by previous discussions and observations over the years. My hope, when I first delved into this, is that maybe there was some obfuscated sense in which people were picking up on what the Zodiac was doing... without quite realizing what he was doing. In effect, if I could combine correct observations, perhaps something sensible or helpful might come out on the other side. But I'd really only be able to tell if they were correct if the Zodiac actually did adhere to some strict pattern of behavior.
"You see a little OCD, though with the circles being filled in on the time. You know if you're in a hurry you wouldn't do that. Like, I wouldn't put a dot on the J of v-a-l-l-e-j-o. You know, I wouldn't come back, but then to go out and take the time to put it on the time, it's a little... "
"He was into time. You know, he's continually in.. telling us how far something is, what- how long it's been. He's very specific."
"Except this right here is the only thing that really nails down -with some authenticity, we think- the connection between the pieces."
-Bryan Hartnell and Criminal Profiler Sharon Pagaling Hagan, discussing the car coor from Lake Berryessa, This is the Zodiac Speaking, 2007.
-Back in 2010, a user who went by the name Seagull on Tom Voigt's site observed that the months listed at the end of the Nov 8th letter mapped directly to the diagram at the end of the Nov 9th letter.
-In 2013, another user who went by Ggluckman, observed that mapping the months to the diagram was far more intuitive when viewing the diagram from the back side of the page.
He wrote: You could map the list of months to the X-notches in a much more intuitive fashion: you start by placing Dec at the 12 o’clock position, then proceed in a clockwise direction mapping each month to the hour that corresponds to the month number–i.e.: Jan = 1 o’ clock, Feb = 2 o’clock, March = 3 o’clock, etc. And when you are done, the months from the list would once again be mapped to the X-notches.
Interestingly, what he was discussing has a sense of uniformity with the Bus Bomb Map. The 0,3,6,9 on the cross hairs of the map would fit this description perfectly. I directly applied what Ggluckman and Seagull had been discussing to the bus bomb map itself.
Some considerations had to be made, though. For instance, months are not points, but ranges. Moreover, not every month is the same "size" in range. Some months are 31 days, others are 30 days, February is 28 days. I'm sure you get the idea. I found a wonderful website called o-calendar.com which made my effort to depict a year much easier. Instead of 360 equal increments of degrees, it provided 365 equal increments of days. I added a compass inside of the calendar so I would have a reference by which I could also account for "0 is to be set to Mag N," then I rotated the map to bring the zero written on it 17 degrees eastward.
For added consideration, there are a total of 3 known crucial points on the map as it pertains to this case. The turnout at Lake Herman Road, the intersection of Washington and Cherry, and of course the peak of Mt Diablo. The goal here was to see if I could account for as much of that confirmed data as possible in the simplest way possible. Occam's razor and all that jazz. So, I turned the map 17 degrees clockwise to account for the 17 degrees of eastward declination for that area and time, and what came out of that was... surprising.
LHR aligns with Friday, December 13th 1968. Though this incurs a week of error, I found it interesting that the location of the crime was what could be described as being single increment "off" of the Zodiac's known criminal pattern. He was a weekend offender.
But this was a 100% match. Paul Stine wasn't merely killed on October 11th. He was killed "at" October 11th.
As most understand the case, the Zodiac was generally a scavenger with the exception of the murder of Paul Stine. Seemingly, the result of this effort reflected that. Basically, there is "less precision" where you would expect it, and accuracy where you would expect it, since Stine was baited to a specific location rather than simply stumbled upon by the Zodiac at the scene of the crime. In any case, what appeared to be a near-miss at LHR and a spot-on match for Presidio Heights seemed very promising.
To me, this implied that the Zodiac perhaps really did have some sort of psycho fantasy he was trying to live out, grounded in the motion of the planets and stars. The circle calendar is just a short-hand depiction of the Earth's orbit around the sun, after all. So, what about crime scenes which aren't on the map? They just do not seem to follow this pattern. I finally came to the realization that July 5 to September 27 is a little less than a quarter of the year and the pertinent hours of day are little less than a quarter of a day. What do you suppose the chances are that if you looked in the same direction at both times, you'd see the same stars at the same places in the sky despite the fact that stars move about 15 degrees an hour at night and aren't even visible during the day? The discrepancy turned out to be all of 6 minutes, which just might shed some insight as to why the killer felt it necessary to write 6:30 on Bryan Hartnell's car door. In fact, this might even explain why the killer's first iterations of his trademark "keeping score" was to give a chronology of victimizing, rather than a sum total number of victims. Following through, I projected the positions of the stars back to January 1st, to see if a further symmetry in timing appeared there as well. January 1st is obviously a very important date when it comes to counting up time across a year, after all. 12:10 PM is when those stars lined up. Being exactly 12 hours distinguished from BRS, it seems that if the Zodiac's intent at Lake Berryessa was to sort of retro-actively "predict" the time of attack at BRS as some form of calling card or patterned selection for committing crimes, he selected the only time of day which would provide a tangible correlation to both July 5th and January 1st. This idea that the Zodiac followed a cyclic sort of procedure in selecting when and where to commit crimes is supported in all canonical crimes, and from multiple viewpoints.
But... what about radians? If days can be translated to degrees and vice versa, this means a radian equates to 58 days, 2 hours, 11 minutes, 52 seconds. Rewinding the clock from 6:30 PM on Sept 27 1969, you land squarely at 4:18:08PM on July 31st, 1969, the very same day the Zodiac sent out the 408 cipher in 3 parts, all with PM postmarks. All I can say about that is I looked for a radian using the most specific information the killer supplied, and I found one within an extremely small range of tolerance.
But when it came to locating the bomb's intended placement, I realized was going to have to look for something about this case similar in form to what I observed in LHR and PH. I needed a date and I needed a place. I cross referenced all the letters and the areas they were sent from, and I came up with almost nothing. The Halloween card though, that looked promising. On the back, the word "PARADiCE" is written, intersected with the word "SLAVES." Turns out that if you draw out a line across October 27th from Mt Diablo, this line takes you to Paradise Drive in Tiburon, Ca, which is itself written on the map. But this isn't merely direction. This is also distance, so I had something I could test.
Using software called imageJ, I took measurements on the map from Mt Diablo to LHR, from Mt Diablo to PH, and from Mt Diablo to Paradise Dr. I defined the distance from Mt Diablo to LHR as 1, this revealed the distance from MT Diablo to PH as 1.62. In other words, 295 days elapsed = .62 or, 0.00210169491/day. Since Oct 27th is 16 days later (not accounting for year), I should add 0.03362711864 more, which gave a total of 1.65362711864. I then measured the distance to see if it matched my prediction, and it did. I got 1.65. In short, a single linear equation describes all 3 locations and dates that I was now considering. On the map, this means a spiral of sorts intersects all 3 locations, and only the first two (murders) are needed to directly indicate if Paradise Drive truly fits the description that the date suggests in terms of distance. It does.
However, this wasn't quite enough for me. The distances for BRS and LB had not quite been accounted for. I used this lovely page to take screenshots. As before, I measured those distances with imageJ. I added them to my scatter plot, as well as the July 31st 408Cipher since it appears to have some kind of relationship with the Lake Berryessa attack by way of a radian. Unfortunately, I do not know which post office those letters were dropped off at. I used the geographic center of San Francisco as my distance so I could see what that result should look like on average. This is the end result.
As before, there appear be strong geo-temporal relationships between letters and crimes exactly where they should be expected to be.
Having both distance and direction provided a point of origin from which to begin a search for any relevant landscape or features which might coincide with the killer's claims of a Bus Bomb. I allowed 1 degree of freedom in angle so as to allow a small margin of human error while preserving the idea of specificity. I applied an equal allowable variation of distance to develop a circled area to search, and I got a hit!
For the sake of discussion, Paradise Drive was and remains a public school-bus route. As marked above, I found a place called "the little school," which was first established in 1964. It shares a parking lot with a Lutheran Church which bears a large circled-cross at the top. Strictly speaking, this place aligns with October 26th.
The terrain and orientation of the street appear to bear similarity to the depictions drawn by the killer regarding the bus bomb. One street over is a court which shares a name with a prominent landmark at Lake Berryessa (Turtle Rock). It has a historically empty lot, number 14 (reference the Halloween card). Immediately to the west of that is a neighborhood of streets which have a naming convention in common with that of the planets. Venus, Mercury, Juno...
Taken as a whole, this seems to imply that the known crimes were not random acts of violence. Rather, the indiscriminate nature of the crimes would be owed to the idea that it was never about the confirmed victims in the first place. Their primary function was to satisfy the killer's need insofar as setting the stage for a culminating act of violence. Moreover, the insistence of inches and radians may be a deceptive manner of alluding to a number of days. It may be altogether un-necessary to solve the cipher to arrive at the bomb's location. The primary strength of this approach seems to lie in the fact that it correlates confirmed Zodiac activity (as opposed to speculative) to Mount Diablo via the use of Magnetic North by simply applying an abstract representation of time which we definitely know the killer himself used at one point.
I combed through 13 additional suspected Zodiac crimes that cover all the popular names and a little more. The only crimes I was able to identify which would be indicated by this approach is the murders of Fermin Rodruguez and Enedine Molina. The catch here is that they were killed 2 years before the 1969 phillips map was produced, not to say another version did not exist. Enedine's husband went in for questioning and was released. No clue what happened to him after that.
Everything I did here can be replicated using photopea, a days-elapsed calculator, in-the-sky, o-calendar, imageJ, scatterplot maker, and of course Google Maps.
Edit: I tried to bold and underline links, but it turned out to look like a hot mess so I decided to quit fucking with it.
edited again: Included pictures in the body of the post, re-worded a couple things and added a couple of thoughts.
"You see a little OCD, though with the circles being filled in on the time. You know if you're in a hurry you wouldn't do that. Like, I wouldn't put a dot on the J of v-a-l-l-e-j-o. You know, I wouldn't come back, but then to go out and take the time to put it on the time, it's a little... "
"He was into time. You know, he's continually in.. telling us how far something is, what- how long it's been. He's very specific."
"Except this right here is the only thing that really nails down -with some authenticity, we think- the connection between the pieces."
-Bryan Hartnell and Criminal Profiler Sharon Pagaling Hagan, discussing the car coor from Lake Berryessa, This is the Zodiac Speaking, 2007.
-Back in 2010, a user who went by the name Seagull on Tom Voigt's site observed that the months listed at the end of the Nov 8th letter mapped directly to the diagram at the end of the Nov 9th letter.
-In 2013, another user who went by Ggluckman, observed that mapping the months to the diagram was far more intuitive when viewing the diagram from the back side of the page.
He wrote: You could map the list of months to the X-notches in a much more intuitive fashion: you start by placing Dec at the 12 o’clock position, then proceed in a clockwise direction mapping each month to the hour that corresponds to the month number–i.e.: Jan = 1 o’ clock, Feb = 2 o’clock, March = 3 o’clock, etc. And when you are done, the months from the list would once again be mapped to the X-notches.
Interestingly, what he was discussing has a sense of uniformity with the Bus Bomb Map. The 0,3,6,9 on the cross hairs of the map would fit this description perfectly. I directly applied what Ggluckman and Seagull had been discussing to the bus bomb map itself.
Some considerations had to be made, though. For instance, months are not points, but ranges. Moreover, not every month is the same "size" in range. Some months are 31 days, others are 30 days, February is 28 days. I'm sure you get the idea. I found a wonderful website called o-calendar.com which made my effort to depict a year much easier. Instead of 360 equal increments of degrees, it provided 365 equal increments of days. I added a compass inside of the calendar so I would have a reference by which I could also account for "0 is to be set to Mag N," then I rotated the map to bring the zero written on it 17 degrees eastward.
For added consideration, there are a total of 3 known crucial points on the map as it pertains to this case. The turnout at Lake Herman Road, the intersection of Washington and Cherry, and of course the peak of Mt Diablo. The goal here was to see if I could account for as much of that confirmed data as possible in the simplest way possible. Occam's razor and all that jazz. So, I turned the map 17 degrees clockwise to account for the 17 degrees of eastward declination for that area and time, and what came out of that was... surprising.
LHR aligns with Friday, December 13th 1968. Though this incurs a week of error, I found it interesting that the location of the crime was what could be described as being single increment "off" of the Zodiac's known criminal pattern. He was a weekend offender.
But this was a 100% match. Paul Stine wasn't merely killed on October 11th. He was killed "at" October 11th.
As most understand the case, the Zodiac was generally a scavenger with the exception of the murder of Paul Stine. Seemingly, the result of this effort reflected that. Basically, there is "less precision" where you would expect it, and accuracy where you would expect it, since Stine was baited to a specific location rather than simply stumbled upon by the Zodiac at the scene of the crime. In any case, what appeared to be a near-miss at LHR and a spot-on match for Presidio Heights seemed very promising.
To me, this implied that the Zodiac perhaps really did have some sort of psycho fantasy he was trying to live out, grounded in the motion of the planets and stars. The circle calendar is just a short-hand depiction of the Earth's orbit around the sun, after all. So, what about crime scenes which aren't on the map? They just do not seem to follow this pattern. I finally came to the realization that July 5 to September 27 is a little less than a quarter of the year and the pertinent hours of day are little less than a quarter of a day. What do you suppose the chances are that if you looked in the same direction at both times, you'd see the same stars at the same places in the sky despite the fact that stars move about 15 degrees an hour at night and aren't even visible during the day? The discrepancy turned out to be all of 6 minutes, which just might shed some insight as to why the killer felt it necessary to write 6:30 on Bryan Hartnell's car door. In fact, this might even explain why the killer's first iterations of his trademark "keeping score" was to give a chronology of victimizing, rather than a sum total number of victims. Following through, I projected the positions of the stars back to January 1st, to see if a further symmetry in timing appeared there as well. January 1st is obviously a very important date when it comes to counting up time across a year, after all. 12:10 PM is when those stars lined up. Being exactly 12 hours distinguished from BRS, it seems that if the Zodiac's intent at Lake Berryessa was to sort of retro-actively "predict" the time of attack at BRS as some form of calling card or patterned selection for committing crimes, he selected the only time of day which would provide a tangible correlation to both July 5th and January 1st. This idea that the Zodiac followed a cyclic sort of procedure in selecting when and where to commit crimes is supported in all canonical crimes, and from multiple viewpoints.
But... what about radians? If days can be translated to degrees and vice versa, this means a radian equates to 58 days, 2 hours, 11 minutes, 52 seconds. Rewinding the clock from 6:30 PM on Sept 27 1969, you land squarely at 4:18:08PM on July 31st, 1969, the very same day the Zodiac sent out the 408 cipher in 3 parts, all with PM postmarks. All I can say about that is I looked for a radian using the most specific information the killer supplied, and I found one within an extremely small range of tolerance.
But when it came to locating the bomb's intended placement, I realized was going to have to look for something about this case similar in form to what I observed in LHR and PH. I needed a date and I needed a place. I cross referenced all the letters and the areas they were sent from, and I came up with almost nothing. The Halloween card though, that looked promising. On the back, the word "PARADiCE" is written, intersected with the word "SLAVES." Turns out that if you draw out a line across October 27th from Mt Diablo, this line takes you to Paradise Drive in Tiburon, Ca, which is itself written on the map. But this isn't merely direction. This is also distance, so I had something I could test.
Using software called imageJ, I took measurements on the map from Mt Diablo to LHR, from Mt Diablo to PH, and from Mt Diablo to Paradise Dr. I defined the distance from Mt Diablo to LHR as 1, this revealed the distance from MT Diablo to PH as 1.62. In other words, 295 days elapsed = .62 or, 0.00210169491/day. Since Oct 27th is 16 days later (not accounting for year), I should add 0.03362711864 more, which gave a total of 1.65362711864. I then measured the distance to see if it matched my prediction, and it did. I got 1.65. In short, a single linear equation describes all 3 locations and dates that I was now considering. On the map, this means a spiral of sorts intersects all 3 locations, and only the first two (murders) are needed to directly indicate if Paradise Drive truly fits the description that the date suggests in terms of distance. It does.
However, this wasn't quite enough for me. The distances for BRS and LB had not quite been accounted for. I used this lovely page to take screenshots. As before, I measured those distances with imageJ. I added them to my scatter plot, as well as the July 31st 408Cipher since it appears to have some kind of relationship with the Lake Berryessa attack by way of a radian. Unfortunately, I do not know which post office those letters were dropped off at. I used the geographic center of San Francisco as my distance so I could see what that result should look like on average. This is the end result.
As before, there appear be strong geo-temporal relationships between letters and crimes exactly where they should be expected to be.
Having both distance and direction provided a point of origin from which to begin a search for any relevant landscape or features which might coincide with the killer's claims of a Bus Bomb. I allowed 1 degree of freedom in angle so as to allow a small margin of human error while preserving the idea of specificity. I applied an equal allowable variation of distance to develop a circled area to search, and I got a hit!
For the sake of discussion, Paradise Drive was and remains a public school-bus route. As marked above, I found a place called "the little school," which was first established in 1964. It shares a parking lot with a Lutheran Church which bears a large circled-cross at the top. Strictly speaking, this place aligns with October 26th.
The terrain and orientation of the street appear to bear similarity to the depictions drawn by the killer regarding the bus bomb. One street over is a court which shares a name with a prominent landmark at Lake Berryessa (Turtle Rock). It has a historically empty lot, number 14 (reference the Halloween card). Immediately to the west of that is a neighborhood of streets which have a naming convention in common with that of the planets. Venus, Mercury, Juno...
Taken as a whole, this seems to imply that the known crimes were not random acts of violence. Rather, the indiscriminate nature of the crimes would be owed to the idea that it was never about the confirmed victims in the first place. Their primary function was to satisfy the killer's need insofar as setting the stage for a culminating act of violence. Moreover, the insistence of inches and radians may be a deceptive manner of alluding to a number of days. It may be altogether un-necessary to solve the cipher to arrive at the bomb's location. The primary strength of this approach seems to lie in the fact that it correlates confirmed Zodiac activity (as opposed to speculative) to Mount Diablo via the use of Magnetic North by simply applying an abstract representation of time which we definitely know the killer himself used at one point.
I combed through 13 additional suspected Zodiac crimes that cover all the popular names and a little more. The only crimes I was able to identify which would be indicated by this approach is the murders of Fermin Rodruguez and Enedine Molina. The catch here is that they were killed 2 years before the 1969 phillips map was produced, not to say another version did not exist. Enedine's husband went in for questioning and was released. No clue what happened to him after that.
Everything I did here can be replicated using photopea, a days-elapsed calculator, in-the-sky, o-calendar, imageJ, scatterplot maker, and of course Google Maps.
Edit: I tried to bold and underline links, but it turned out to look like a hot mess so I decided to quit fucking with it.
edited again: Included pictures in the body of the post, re-worded a couple things and added a couple of thoughts.