SF Chronicle Aug 3, 1978 April 1978 Letter Fake

By August 1978 the letter that Det. Toschi was accused of writing was declared a fake by three document examiners, Sherwood Morrill was the only one to insist that the letter was truely from Zodiac.

Good stuff, Seagull. So Zodiac appears to have used the same set of stationery (or at least the same brand and size) for all of his confirmed letters? Interesting... I never knew that. Obviously, "having access to Zodiac letters" is pretty meaningless since it narrows the field down to anyone who has read the SF Chronicle. The response from Morrill is rather bothersome. "I'm no longer going to look at anything from SFPD". He sounds bitter, perhaps because of his opinions always being questioned. I don't know about this one but he honestly lost my trust with the desk poem.

Just in my opinion, I have always felt Morrill to be unreliable. "The man who never saw a Zodiac letter he didn't like." From the article above, he saw a photocopy?!? of a letter and called it authentic.

So, and asking an honest question - I don't know the answer - Was there ever a time that Morrill looked at a "supposed/questioned" Zodiac letter and said it was NOT authentic? I can't think of one. But I may be wrong.

-glurk

Gluck how do you know he didn't rule out dozens of fakes? There are a handful of questionable letters right here on this site

To be fair to Morrill he was retired and probably sick of the whole thing. His words would seem to indicate that and even though the article states that he 'certified' the letter, that's surely not possible because he was retired. He could give an opinion and based on seeing a photocopy he probably just said, "yeah sure, that looks like our guy's writing" - which it did.

It was a photocopy so I doubt he did much more than look at it. Even Shimoda authenticated it based on a photocopy but then revised his opinion on seeing the real thing.

I understand what you're saying though Glurk. Is there anything that Morrill didn't like? well, as Morf says, there was probably hundreds of things he didn't like and some he did and had to investigate to find out they were no use. We just don't get to see them and to be honest, I'm glad, otherwise we would have to be wading through them and examining them.

Whilst working on various handwriting examples I have seen, time and time again, a commonality between the pieces authenticated by Morrill and these similarities were not always, at first, apparent. Because of this I feel pretty confident in his assessments despite the flip-flopping, by a few examiners, on this '78 letter. I think he looked at it as a favor and then once things started getting heated around it, distanced himself, probably off the back of comments about his involvement at all.

I always liked Sherwood Morrill , and I´m sure he dismissed a LOT of fake letters due to that it apparently is a fact that he " cleared nearly 9,000 (Zodiac) suspects".
He also seem to have had ONE single suspect, based on handwriting, I sure would like to know WHO that was and WHY he didn´t share who it was??? Must have been a heavy burden reason...

In Sherwood Morrill's obituary in the Sacramento Bee (3-23-1988, p. C2),there were some interesting tidbits, it said:

"Among his most famous cases was the Zodiac killer, in which Mr. Morrill cleared nearly 9,000 suspects. Although he said he was able to narrow the number of suspects down to one, he never publicly or privately named the person, family members said. "

Sherwood Morrill died at the age of 73 on 3-19-1988.