Gareth Penn

Solar Pons just provided great evidence as to why I don't want to be drawn into debates about Mr. Penn with anonymously-named people who:

1) Know little or nothing about him
2) Aren't interested in learning
3) Or are pushing a pet POI

Solar Pons wrote:

I too do not believe Gareth to be the Zodiac....And we only have Gareth's word for it that he had an affair with Stella. Did he?

Mr. Penn did NOT claim to have had an affair with Stella Borges, but with her niece, Madeleine Borges. He's written this over and over again, in virtually every post Zam made to this board, and in several other places. And yes, I have verified that he had an affair with Madeleine Borges.

Sorry, but this is terribly frustrating and happens repeatedly -- people paying no attention to the topic at hand who either wander in to start an argument or render pointed opinions. It doesn't just happen with Gareth Penn, but with virtually every Zodiac topic. There's no arguing with people like that because they aren't paying attention and they aren't going to.

Zam and Morf have worked very hard to post all Penn's recent writings and get questions to him. The very least people can do is to read that material before commenting or arguing about it.

MikeM wrote:

Solar Pons just provided great evidence as to why I don't want to be drawn into debates about Mr. Penn with anonymously-named people who:
1) Know little or nothing about him
2) Aren't interested in learning
3) Or are pushing a pet POI

I have asked twice now to fill us in about him and tell us why we should care, and all you do is whine that people don't know anything about him and aren't interested in learning.
Ask on my thread about my POI why you should care, and I'll give you more than 50 detailed reasons (which I already posted last week): links directly to Z and his writings. If you want people to care, tell us why already. I always want to find Z, and I'm interested in learning. So enlighten me.

And, btw, my real name is Rand, but what does that tell you? My bio and name are below:

Randall L. Schweller is a full professor of political science at Ohio State University. He is the author of Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton University Press, 2006) and Deadly Imbalances: Tripolarity and Hitler’s Strategy of World Conquest (Columbia University Press, 1998). He has also published many articles in leading journals such as World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, International Security, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Review of International Studies, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, The National Interest, International Theory, and Security Studies. He is currently a member of the editorial boards of International Security, Security Studies, and the Studies in Asian Security series published by Stanford University Press. In 1993, he received a John M. Olin Post-Doctoral Fellowship in National Security at the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University. In 2009, the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations survey of international relations faculty in 10 countries selected Randall Schweller as one of the top 25 scholars who have produced the most interesting scholarship in the area of international relations.


So stop with the "anonymous' stuff unless you want to provide your full name and tell us who you are.

I have to admit, I think it is a fair question to ask.

"What are some of the most interesting things that make Penn or O'Hare good Zodiac suspects?

I don't think we have to know EVERYTHING, but a couple of good tid-bits for folks who don't know much about them would certainly do nothing but help this thread.

If the thread is only for the well-informed, then what's the point of having it? Asking questions gets answers and that is what we are looking for here.


--Solar P is an excellent researcher and I am sure it was a slip of the tongue. And Rand also has put in a lot of time and effort into this case, aside from Troy Houghton. I think everyone here deserves a little respect for all of their efforts, but let's not dismiss anyone because they don't have a degree in anyone's specific Zodiac suspect.

Rand
Read the information.
Make your own conclusions.
Why do you ask the other forum members to fill you in?
Do you feel that it our/their responsibilty to repeat the information over and over?
Thats the reason why they are threads with information that remains there.
For people to read.
I wouldnt read only the last reply regarding Troy and ask why I should bother consider him a suspect.
If I for example should tell you why Penn is intresting I would have to repeat whatever I have read the last couple of years.
And for the rest of us. Never mind Rand unless you actually feel to make a little list about why Penn is intresting.

I do apologize for my slip of the tounge. I am not pushing a pet POI, I am interested in a couple of people but I am in no way oblivious or would be so arrogant as to think that I have it correct ,and outwith the couple of people I am interested in that no other suspects exist.
Point is Gareth is not a good suspect. He does not fit the physical descriptions, two witnesses Fouke and Mageau placed the height at 5ft 8in, Gareth is I have been led to believe 6ft tall. Tell me how he could possibly shrink 4 inches and not have that noticed by anyone. I place common sense above all else and common sense dictates to me that Gareth is a sideshow. As far as so called evidence goes some of the information that is supposed to relate as evidence of his guilt is scraping it at best. Expert Marksman he may be but the Zodiac emptied his gun into terrified teenagers at close range, Stine at close range, Betty Lou was running away he endlessly pumped five bullets into her as she ran. Expert Marksman my backside. Numerology don't even get me started. He knows what a Radian is therefore he is the Zodiac. Arrest all Maths teachers and students as well then as it is a standard measurement used within branches of Mathematics.

Gareth is in Mensa, Gareth likes puzzles and to play games. I play games on my own time that I enjoy not at the expense of bereaved relatives. Darlene and Paul Stine had children that would be able to access boards like this, ditto the friends, brothers sisters and survivors of the Zodiac attacks, not to mention his involvement with the Websters. You do not wish me to comment on G.Penn, no problem.

Dr. Schweller:

My name is Mike Martin. I'm a science journalist and you can visit a place where I collect my stories -- which I've posted numerous times here -- at
http://www.weeklyscientist.com

Maybe you know Jeff Grabmeier in the OSU research communications office. I've worked with him a few times in years past on OSU research stories. I also know him and some of his compadres from the National Association of Science Writers.

Back to your question: I'm a journalist, not a criminologist. I'm not in the business of selling Gareth Penn -- or anyone else -- as a Zodiac POI and not interested in debating the merits of such, especially with non-experts.

I am in the business of paying attention to two kinds of people: sources, like Mr. Penn, the people who knew him, and people who are developing information about him; and experts. There are few, if any, criminological experts on any of these forums.

You're a political scientist, not a criminal profiler. You're certainly welcome to your opinions about Mr. Penn or Troy Houghton as potential Zodiac POIs.

But your opinions in this area are not expert opinions.

Finally, from a general human relations perspective, it's also a fool's errand to debate POIs because the minute you start pushing one, you invite hard feelings from people with their own POI. They are not going to read nor pay any real attention to what you say. They're just going to blast away.

I've seen it happen over and over again.

So far, this forum has stayed away from that kind of enmity, and as a result, the mods and others have developed some great stuff.

Solar Pons wrote:

Point is Gareth is not a good suspect. He does not fit the physical descriptions, two witnesses Fouke and Mageau placed the height at 5ft 8in, Gareth is I have been led to believe 6ft tall. Tell me how he could possibly shrink 4 inches and not have that noticed by anyone.

Whilst I in no way think that Penn was Z and think that Z probably was nearer to 5'8" ish, I wouldn't rule out the possiblity of anyone within a few inches of this. The witness statements do seem to vary and we have descriptions ranging from 5'8" at the lowest up to 6ft at the tallest (6'2" if we include one of the girls at LB). The dodgy guy hanging around LB just before the murders was thought to be about 6ft and Hartnell said he couldn't judge height very well but Z could have been anywhere around 5'8" to 6ft so all witnesses at LB could possibly be talking of a guy near 6ft.

Foukes' first impressions were 5'10" to 6ft and 35-45 years old but the kids stated around 5'8"ish 25-30 - both entirely different descriptions but we're pretty sure it was the same guy. The description on the poster went with the kids' height estimate and Foukes' age estimate - bit of a compromise somewhere?

Mageau said the guy was smaller and beefier than him (Mageau was about 6'2" and extremely skinny) and reported 2 different descriptions - 5'8" to 5'10"ish. As he was sitting in a car with a light in his eyes and only really saw a brief figure at the window, I wouldn't personally be fixing on the lower height estimate as a sure thing.

IHMO, I think we should probably be looking for a slightly chunky guy of about 5'9ish (Larry Kane type build from what I understand) but as the witness statements vary, there were heights of up to 6ft reported and conditions were never really perfect (sitting in a car, 30 ft away in a house, below him on uneven ground, a glimpse in the dark with a light in the face, etc, etc) I would keep an open mind about POIs up to this height. I'd personally be ruling out anyone below 5'8" and over 6ft though.

Thanks for sharing, Mr. Martin. I have never said I was an "expert" criminologist or that what I say has more merit than anyone else. I'm just asking what I perceive to be fair questions that go to the core of this thread about Gareth Penn. That said, I created a new thread for anyone and everyone to post the reasons why their suspect is a good one. I hope you post on it. Best, R

Anyone of you old-timers know anything about Glen Claston?
I´ve read some old posts from Zodiackiller.com.
Is he still around there or what happened?

Azazel wrote:

Anyone of you old-timers know anything about Glen Claston? I´ve read some old posts from Zodiackiller.com. Is he still around there or what happened?

I don't know if Glen is still around, but I can tell you something about him.

He was part of a team of crack cryptographers who worked to decode the famous Voynich Manuscript. In his capacity as a cryptographer, Claston made a prediction several years ago that prompted my interest in him: that Gareth Penn would one day be arrested for the Zodiac crimes.

He was one of an early group of people who found Penn's headlong insertion into the Zodiac investigation very disturbing. Why is this important? As expert criminal profilers will tell you, serial criminals (arsonists, rapists, murderers) often insert themselves into the investigation..

His naming of Mike O'Hare as the Zodiac Killer seemed a mere pretense: A flimsy way to insert himself into the investigation based on nonsensical reasoning. All the books, the constant obsessing: just Mr. Penn, working out his own demons, keeping the case alive in his mind and in his life even as the investigation died off.

Mr. Penn's high-handed tone whenever he wrote was also odd: It was markedly similar to the Zodiac's style.

These were some of the early issues about Gareth Penn that were debated, long before all this other information about him emerged.

My latest letter from Gareth Penn. I explained that I'm still gathering questions for him. SO, please gang, help me out on this one, a few more good questions are needed.
********************************


Deer Zamantha,


It’s good to hear from you. I think Jan is weary of being the middleman and would be glad to get back to her pre-Debra Perez life. Did she send you the comic book page? In 1993, Mike Butterfield produced an entire comic book in which he "identifies" — in a slapstick manner — the Zodiac as Michael O’Hare. I don’t have any idea what he thinks now, but I felt it was time for The Adventures of Dan and Harold to come back to haunt him.


The Universal Life Church was founded in the late 1960s by Kirby Hensley, an illiterate truck driver in Modesto. He found that the Constitutional prohibition of the establishment of religion also made it impossible for the government to define what religion is. Whereas most religions have a defined ritual and creed, the Universal Life Church has neither, and ULC ministers can do anything they feel like doing, including the ordination of other ministers. I have ordained a few hundred ULC ministers myself and performed a half-dozen weddings. The Reverend Kirby published a long-playing record (are you old enough to remember photograph records?) titled "Holy Smoke!" in which he sets forth his religious belief: "Heaven is when I have what I want, and Hell is when I don't." He was a very funny guy and laid them in the aisles when 60 Minutes did a segment on the ULC way back when. I am unaware of the crossed circle symbol having any connection to the ULC. The same symbol is used in so many different contexts that you can use it to prove anything. It’s found on benchmarks (this is why it is the trademark of the Benchmark Paper Products Company). It is used in the Rand-McNally Commercial Atlas of the U.S. to mark disincorporated areas. Intelligence analysts in the Strategic Air Command used it to mark targets in the USSR for thermonuclear destruction. Printers use it as a "registration mark" to align color separations (you will find it printed on the tabs under the lids of many pasteboard boxes containing consumer products such as toothpaste and breakfast cereal). It's used in sheet music as a coda-mark. It was used by medieval alchemists to denote subacetate of copper, and it is used by astronomers as a shorthand for the planet Earth. I could go on and on, but my favorite is that it is the ancient Sumerian ideogram for the word "sheep." It has been used at one time or another by so many different kinds of people for so many different purposes that, if you use it as evidence answering the question "Who is the Zodiac?", you can prove just about any theory. "Subzero"'s interpretation appears to be based on the fact that the Zodiac abducted Kathleen Johns near Modesto and that Kirby Hensley also lived there. But I would guess that there is also a Dairy Queen in Modesto.

By my count, we’re nine questions shy of the total of fifty. Do you want to waste one on subzero?


Yours,


Gareth


PS: If we get a couple of good questions more, I'll discount the "Coke or Pepsi?" question and the one about my weekend pass from Fort Dix. That would give us eleven.

there is no dairy queen in modesto it is in turlock calman oh by the way i once was a modesto truck driver but i always read a thousand words a minute if i like what i am reading. its funny how penn thinks he is smarter than everyone because of his formal education, while he was forming opinions about zodiac other people like myself were surviving tooth and nail from the zodiacs grip and speaking of deborah and her assumed real dad here is a letter sent to jfk's brother ted in 1968..............calman



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More answered questions:
You stated you did not know the bathroom wall message I made reference to in the murder of Joan Webster. The Beverly Times reported in 1990 that the police had found a “Zodiac-style circle and cross symbol and a Zodiac-style cipher” inscribed on a bathroom wall at Harvard in 1983, predicting that Webster’s body would be found near Peabody or Lynn.

Was this cipher solved, and if so, what does it say? If it wasn’t solved, how can it predict anything? If it was solved, does it actually say that her body would be found “near Peabody or Lynn”? What do “Zodiac-style” and “near” mean? Does “near” mean within a tenth of a mile? Ten miles? Does this cipher specifically name Joan Webster, or has some policeman or journalist interpreted it to mean that? And giving the location as “near” one of two different towns hardly qualifies as a prediction. It would be interesting to see both the cipher and the solution, and this item doesn’t give us either one. Just as anybody can speak for Suzy Jones in the archetypal bathroom wall inscription, anybody can draw a crossed circle on the wall, too.

Of course this could have been a hoax. But if we think of a killer perhaps not too familiar with greater Boston, driving around at night with a body, dumping it an open area, then looking at a map, he might well be a few miles off on where he dumped the body. In that respect, this message could well be from the killer, and then it is a question of was the killer a Zodiac copycat or the Zodiac?

A Zodiac copycat would presumably have done things the way the Zodiac was known to, for instance, walking up to a victim or victims sitting in a car and blazing away with a pistol, then driving off, or hiring a cab and shooting the driver from behind. Joan Webster’s murderer went to the trouble of digging a grave and concealing her body well enough that it wasn’t found until eight and a half years later. A Zodiac copycat wouldn’t have done that, because the Zodiac never buried any of his California victims. Then he distributed two of the three items she had had in her possession in widely separated locations where they were certain to be found, the purse in a marsh frequented by weekend clam diggers, and the suitcase in a rental storage locker at the Greyhound bus station. He went to some trouble to do these things, and he must have had some reason for doing them. You say that he “dumped” the body, but he didn’t. He buried it. He could have just driven into the same area where he buried her, dumped the body, the purse, the suitcase, and the tote bag out of his car and skedaddled. Instead, he lingered to dig a grave, exposing himself to discovery by staying longer than he needed to, and then made two other stops to dispose of Webster’s effects, exposing himself to discovery by keeping incriminating evidence in his possession longer than he needed to. There had to be some kind of payoff for the extra trouble and risk. The assumption that he was unfamiliar with the Boston area requires a further assumption — that he was from out of town. The logical principle called Occam’s Razor tells us that the best theory is the one requiring the smallest number of assumptions. I think there’s at least one too many here. It would be simpler to say that the murderer knew what he was doing and that the bathroom-wall inscriber didn’t. In other words, they’re two different people.

Since it is an unfortunate fact that every year there are numerous murders of young women, what leads you to think Joan Webster was killed by the Zodiac?

Let me digress back to 1966. The Zodiac murdered Cheri Jo Bates in October 1966, and then a month later, mailed letters to the Riverside newspaper and police (both postmarked the same day). The only other Riverside event that can be dated was a mailing on 30 April 1967 of three letters, one to the newspaper, one to the police, and one to the victim’s father. First-class postage was four cents; the author put two four-cent stamps on all three envelopes. That was the last that was heard from him in Southern California. Then in December 1968, he surfaced in the Bay Area, killing two teenagers. Another attempted double murder followed on 4 July 1969 (one victim survived). At the end of July, he mailed three letters to as many different newspapers. First-class postage had gone up to six cents. He put two six-cent stamps on two of these envelopes and four on the third.

It was not until November 1970 that it became known that the same person who called himself the Zodiac in the Bay Area had also committed the murder in Riverside. While he had written at some length about his Bay Area crimes and had gone to some lengths to authenticate himself as their author (e.g. enclosing blood-soaked snippets of cloth from a victim’s shirt in his letters), he said nothing overt about the Riverside murder until after the revelation of November 1970. Then he took credit for it in a letter to the Los Angeles Times postmarked in March 1971. I am prepared to demonstrate that far from keeping silent about the Riverside murder, he had been chattering about it for nearly two years — but doing so nonverbally. For one thing, in each setting, Riverside and the Bay Area, the third event in the series of events consists of mailing three letters on the same day with excess postage. The nonverbal statement made by the July 1969 mailing, which repeated the pattern exhibited in Riverside, can be translated as follows: “The same person who has been committing these crimes in the Bay Area also committed the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside.”

A number of subsequent mailings in the Bay Area featured excess postage. The prevailing pattern was two six-cent stamps. In a June 1970 mailing, he enclosed a Phillips 66 map. In both cases, he is referring to the year in which he committed his first murder. The two six-cent stamps express the number 66, as does the map. All of his Bay Area letters were postmarked in San Francisco, until 15 March 1971, when he wrote the Los Angeles Times Letter, taking credit for the Riverside murder; it was postmarked in Pleasanton, whose ZIP Code is 94566. All of these 66-references are nonverbal expressions referring to the year 1966.

Let’s go back to Riverside yet again. The third event is the mailing of 30 April 1967. Two of the letters read, in full: “Bates had to die. There will be more.” The other one reads, also in full: “She had to die. There will be more.” Here’s what I think is a very interesting question, and I am baffled by the fact that nobody but me is asking it: why does the author replace the proper noun “Bates,” used in two letters, with the pronoun “she” in the third? Speaking of thirds, the Zodiac used a variety of weapons. He used a .22-caliber firearm in one case, a 9mm pistol in two others, and murdered two women with a knife. In both cases, the knife murders took place on dates expressing a third, 30 October and 27 September (10/30 and 9/27 both = 1/3). Two of the three July 1969 letters are franked with two stamps and the remaining third with four. Here’s what I’m driving at: two thirds of the April 1967 letters use the victim’s name, two thirds of the July 1969 letters are franked differently, and the dates of the knife murders are two thirds. The firearm-murders are similarly divided into two thirds, one third: two committed with the 9mm weapon and one with the .22-caliber. (I can’t resist pointing out that the word GUN in Morse Code, 110 001 10, is base-two 198, and that the calibers of the Zodiac’s two guns, multiplied together, spell GUN in Morse Code: 22 x 9 = 198, or 22 x 9 = GUN.)

For the next digression, I won’t go all the way back to 1966 but to October 1969, when the Zodiac threatened to attack a school bus. In five subsequent letters mailed over the next eight months, he reiterated his bus-attack threat, begged for help in overcoming his compulsion to attack buses, reiterated the bus-attack threat again, offered to forego attacking buses if Bay Area residents would wear Zodiac buttons, and finally renounced his threat on the grounds that summer vacation had set in. I think it‘s clear that the threat was never seriously meant, but he did succeed in keeping the word “bus” prominent for eight months.

Now at long last I’m ready to answer your question. Joan Webster’s murderer created three finds: one that would take years to discover, if ever, and two which were certain to be discovered, i.e. two thirds. One of those finds was at a bus station. He must have known that when the rental on the storage locker expired, Greyhound employees would open it and try to determine ownership of its contents, and he must have known that there was something in or on Joan Webster’s suitcase that would identify it as her property: a luggage tag or an inscribed book, for instance. That finding would link her murder with the bus-theme. What is Zodiac-like about this crime is not the kind of victim or the murder weapon, and it is definitely not the bathroom-wall inscription, but the nonverbal communication. The murderer expresses “bus” and “two thirds” without saying them, doing the same thing the Zodiac did when he made his second three-letter mailing in July 1969, saying this time: “The person who killed Joan Webster is the same one who murdered the people in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968-1969 and called himself ‘the Zodiac.’” Both are examples of nonverbal, wordless, communication. He is someone who has, as one writer on the subject of visual arts education describes himself, freed himself from the verbal trap of understanding only words. Have we done the same?

My final question is if you are aware that Ms. Webster, being killed on November 28, 1981, was murdered on the 12th anniversary of the murder of another East Coast graduate student Betsy Aardsma at the Penn State library on November 28, 1969, and the 15th anniversary of the mailing of the confession letter in another college library murder, that of probable Zodiac victim Cheri Jo Bates.

“THE CONFESSION” was postmarked on 29 November 1966. 28 November 1981 was fifteen full years, as the IRS and Social Security Administration reckon time, but it wasn’t the anniversary. As to the Aardsma murder, which is new to me, let me point out that there are two kinds of coincidences, the kind that happen spontaneously, and those that happen because somebody made them happen. I suggest that the Aardsma murder belongs in the first category, rather like the death of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both of whom died on the Fourth of July 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the date on which they had both signed the Declaration of Independence. An example of the second kind is the bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City on the second anniversary of the Branch Davidian disaster. In addition to being a contrived coincidence, it is another example of nonverbal communication. If Timothy McVeigh had made good his escape, he might have written an anonymous letter to the New York Times explaining that the Oklahoma City bombing was revenge for Waco. But he didn’t need to. Plenty of people got the point anyway. All he had to do was light the fuse and let the calendar do his talking for him. Cheri Jo Bates is a definite, not a probable, Zodiac victim.

Note to the person with the “Coke or Pepsi?” question. I do have a sense of humor, and I think the question is funny but, under the circumstances, frivolous. I set a limit on the number of questions I would field because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this, and a frivolous question accomplishes nothing while reducing the number left. The head of the Kwik-E-Mart tells Homer Simpson, “I will answer three questions, and then you must go.” Homer replies, “You’re the head of the Kwik-E-Mart? You? Really?” Don’t emulate Homer.

I wonder about your corporation Zodiac Associates Inc. (If that was the company name.) Were you planning on making a movie? And in that case can you tell me a little bit (or a big bit) about that script? What would have been different in comparison to for example Zodiac (2007)? I guess for starters you wouldn´t have selected Arthur Leigh Allen as the Zodiac.

I published an article on this subject in the November 1981 issue of California magazine, which had changed its name from New West the month before. It was hardly out before I started getting offers for the film rights, which was the last thing I expected. I turned down cash offers, deciding instead to throw in with partners whose objective was to produce a screenplay because one of them, an entertainment lawyer in Connecticut, had been a prosecutor and saw that the value of the property would be enhanced by the acquisition of evidence supporting my theory, which seemed to me to be an excellent idea. He accordingly retained the services of a private investigator who discovered some very interesting information (reported in TIMES 17). The screenplay, written by my other partner, was optioned by a producer who had one movie on his résumé. He agreed to an option price of $1500 but couldn’t come up with the full amount, so my partner in Connecticut, who handled the business end, accepted $1000 for a six-month option. At renewal time six months later, the producer said he wanted to renew but couldn’t raise the money. At that point, the project died. The partnership lingered on, on paper, until July 1987, when our contract expired. I have always thought of this project as an intellectual one having more to do with semiotics than with homicide, as a subject for a Nova special and not a thriller; so I was dismayed when I got a copy of the screenplay and found that it contained, among other things, a car chase. I can’t give you any more specifics because I haven’t read it in a quarter century and have just lent it to my cousin. Back in my youth, it was illegal to sell colored margarine (it looks unappetizing without the yellow coloring, and the dairy lobby got these laws passed to make it difficult for margarine to compete with butter). You had to buy the coloring separately and mix it in. In the 1950s, they marketed margarine in a plastic bag with a small bulb of coloring inside. You would squash the bulb, releasing the coloring, then knead the bag until it was all mixed in. My family used to take a bag of margarine along to the drive-in and pass it around during the movie, everybody taking a turn at kneading it. I would envision a Zodiac movie as a drive-in movie sing-along with a bouncing ball spelling out base-two numbers while the viewers take turns squeezing plastic margarine bags. But I have no sense at all of movie-making; I know a good movie when I see one, but I couldn’t make one to save my life.

I would like you to know that I admire your writing. I have read TIMES 17 and enjoyed it very much. I spoke to you on the phone in 1990 about my Z suspect, and found that you was adamant about your views. I feel as strongly about my suspect as you do about yours. That is to be expected when one gets hooked on the person they have spent so much time investigating. I have been told that you have written something else using the name Mike Revnec. I would like to buy that book as well, if it is a book. I have also read your magazine article (California, 1981). I do believe that you have received phone calls from Zodiac, and would like to know if you have recorded any of those phone calls? If not, could you share what was said in those calls?

Thank you for the compliment. It is always gratifying to know that something I have written has been useful, thought-provoking, or esthetically pleasing. In TIMES 17, I disclosed my correspondence with Michael O’Hare. Recently, O’Hare has transmitted part or all of that correspondence to Christopher Farmer to use on his website, whose purpose is to persuade the world that I am the Zodiac murderer. Mike Revnec is a pseudonym I used to sign a letter or postcard to O’Hare (I forget which) a quarter-century or more ago. Farmer cites it as an example of my dishonesty, since, he says only a dishonest person would use a pseudonym. The catalogue of dishonest persons would thus include Voltaire, Mark Twain, Sting, the majority of movie actors, and the people who frequent Farmer’s website, most or all of whom use pseudonyms when they trash me for being so dishonest as to use a pseudonym. (If I had the imaginative powers to invent people like this, I would be a best-selling novelist; but then it’s been said that the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.) By May 1981, O’Hare knew that I was the author of the correspondence he was receiving, so he wasn’t fooled by the Mike Revnec pseudonym. He also knew that it was actually not a pseudonym at all but my real name, since MIKE REVNEC (Morse 11 00 101 0 010 0 0001 10 0 1010) is a digital redivision of GARETH PENN (110 01 010 0 1 0000 0110 0 10 10). The source of the phone calls I referred to is disputed, since Alan Cabal has claimed that he was the one who was calling me. However, Cabal was not even aware of my existence and by his own admission did not become interested in this subject until after he had read my California magazine article, in an appendix to which these one-ring hangup calls were first reported. In other words, I was getting them, without discussing them publicly, before Cabal ever entered the picture. I recorded them in the sense that I wrote times and dates (many of them are reported in TIMES 17). With a small handful of exceptions, nothing was said in these calls, of which I received a few thousand over a ten-year period between 1981 and roughly 1991. I don’t have any sound recordings.

Did you ever go off base on weekends when you were at Fort Dix, and if so, where did you go?

This question is off-topic, but I thank you for it, because it provides an opportunity for me to tell one of my favorite war stories. I went through Basic Combat Training at Fort Dix, and trainees are not permitted, with very few exceptions, to go off base. Fort Dix, like Fort Ord in California, had been closed for basic training during the winter because both installations had experienced a high incidence of meningitis during winter training. The demands of the Vietnam War caused the Army to reverse this policy, and I was in the first group of trainees to go through BCT at Fort Dix during the meningitis season. Meningococcal meningitis is transmitted through the respiratory tract, and its initial symptoms are indistinguishable from those of head colds. Because fifty-man platoons were housed in squad bays designed for thirty and packed together in close contact in trucks when on field exercises, everybody had URI of one kind or another.

I completed the Trainfire (marksmanship) program with a test in which I got a score of 60 out of 84 possible, which earned me an Expert badge. Everyone who got an Expert badge was rewarded with a weekend pass (“weekend” in Army usage means the period beginning at 1200 hours on Saturday and ending at 1800 hours on Sunday). I had been hanging out with a trainee named Chuck; we were drawn together because we were the only individuals, probably in the entire corps of trainees, who had master’s degrees (mine from Berkeley, his from Rutgers). Chuck also made Expert, and since I was from California and had no place to go on this pass, he suggested that we throw in together. I knew a couple of female graduate students at Yale, so I suggested that we go to New Haven and look them up. We found another pair of trainees who had just gotten Expert badges and who were from Connecticut. One of them had a car parked in Wrightstown (Fort Dix’s satellite town), and we hitched a ride with them. We were all coughing and sneezing, and we kept the windows rolled up the whole time we were in the car together because of the weather.

The two Connecticut GIs dropped us off in New Haven and we made an appointment to meet them at a Thruway offramp the next afternoon to carpool back to Fort Dix. Chuck and I bought a fifth of Cutty Sark and went to look up the girls. The evening didn’t last long. We had one drink and tried to have a good time, but we were so sick, the evening was doomed, so we took our leave and checked into a hotel. The next morning, the sun was shining through a clear blue sky, and New Haven was covered with glistening white snow. It was a beautiful morning, and I suggested to Chuck that we go out and find a nice restaurant and have a sumptuous, leisurely, civilian breakfast, where we could drink good (i.e. non-military) coffee and do the New York Times crossword puzzle. Chuck said that he couldn’t go, because he had a splitting headache. He bade me go and have a good time and to bring back a bottle of aspirin.

I did so, and when I returned, Chuck was still in bed. He was babbling incoherently, his eyes were bloodshot, and he had a fever. He did not respond to me when I spoke to him. I pinched and slapped him. I yelled at him, but he continued babbling incoherently. I hauled him out of bed and propped him up as I lugged him over to the dormer window. I opened it and gathered a handful of snow from the roof and rubbed it on his face, thinking naïvely that it might revive him. He freed himself from my grasp, reeled around the room, knocking over the furniture, and collapsed into bed again.

I was in a panic. I had to get back to Fort Dix, and I did not see how I could do that with him in tow, since he was in no condition to travel. I couldn’t leave him; I was responsible for him. I called the desk and asked them to summon a doctor. Eventually, a doctor showed up, toting a little black bag. He looked Chuck over and asked me, “What were you boys drinking last night?” I said we had had one shot of Cutty Sark each. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what you were drinking, but this boy was drinking some real bad hooch. He has the worst hangover I have ever seen.” I argued with him. This was not a hangover; Chuck was comatose, and what little he had drunk wasn’t “hooch.” Through a combination of persuasion and bullying, I managed to get him to call an ambulance. I spent an hour pacing up and down in a waiting room at Grace New Haven Hospital like an expectant father. Then a doctor emerged from a door and told me that they had taken a sample of Chuck’s spinal fluid and found that he had meningitis. He was concerned about me and the two other GIs who had driven up to Connecticut together. He told me to keep my rendezvous with them and to bring them back to Grace New Haven. He would call our company to tell them that we were not returning, but that we would be held overnight for observation at the hospital while they pumped us full of antibiotics.

I met up with the others and brought them back to the hospital. While I was gone, they had X-rayed Chuck’s head and found that he had a fractured sinus. That must have been the source of the infection. He was not infectious, so we could return to Fort Dix after all. One of the Connecticut GIs said, “Doc, when you thought Chuck was infectious, you called the company and said we weren’t coming back. Now that you know he isn’t, is there any reason why you have to tell them any different?” The doctor thought a moment, then got the point, smiled, and said, “No. Have a good time!” One of my other companions had a brother who lived in Manhattan. He called him and arranged for us to crash with him. When we arrived, the brother gave us a key to his apartment, and we went out to tour the bars on the lower West Side.

In one bar, there was a guy wearing a cable-knit sweater standing at the bar. He had a gorgeous blonde draped all over him. We sat down at a table and ordered a round of drinks. We were in uniform, but our uniforms had no unit patches, no stripes, and no ribbons, and our hair was a quarter-inch long. We were obviously recruits. When we had finished our first round of drinks, a second one appeared out of nowhere. The server told us that it was a treat from the fellow in the cable-knit sweater. We waved at him and shouted a thank-you, and he waved back. He extricated himself from the blonde and came over to our table. He asked if he might join us, and we invited him to sit down. He said that he couldn’t help but notice that we were raw recruits who had no business being in a bar on the lower West Side in Manhattan on a Sunday evening — or anywhere else, for that matter. He was, he explained, a member of the Military Police assigned to the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and as an MP, he had an eye for such things. He had bought us the drinks because he wanted to get an invite to sit down and talk to us to find out how we had managed to do what we were doing, as well as to congratulate us for having found a way to fuck the Army. He had a good laugh when we told our story, and then he returned to the blonde, but not before he had treated us to a second round.

We were de facto AWOL but de jure “absent sick,” since we had a medical excuse, and we prolonged this dubious status as long as we could, putting off our departure the next morning in such a way that we would arrive too late for training, which consisted at that time of crawling around in cold wet sand all day. I was a squad leader, and so I stood formation in the right-hand file. At formation the next morning, I overheard two trainees in X-Ray Company whispering about the meningitis case in Whisky Company. One trainee was trying to tell the other who it was who had gotten ill. Every description he tried failed to make a connection in his interlocutor’s mind. Finally, he said it was “the black kid” in the fourth platoon. Now the other trainee knew who he was talking about. I was astonished. It had never occurred to me, in the several weeks that I had known Chuck Washington, that he was African-American. If you had asked me to describe him, I would have said that he was the only other trainee in Whisky Company who had an MA. Now I understood the contemptuous and contemptible behavior of the doctor in New Haven; Chuck was a “boy” not deserving of medical treatment because he was black.

I had leave between BCT and Advanced Individual Training at Fort Sill, and the first thing I did with my leave was to return to New Haven to visit Chuck in the hospital. He was recovering and was fortunate not to be dead, blind, deaf, or crippled by his infection. His only deficit was the loss of all memory of what had happened between the time he got into the car to drive to New Haven and when he woke up in the hospital two weeks later. He asked me how our date with the girls had turned out. He seemed to want to hear that we had scored with them. This was my opportunity, probably the only one I would ever have, to implant a false memory in someone else’s mind, and I blew it. I told Chuck that the game had been called on account of rain. His look of disappointment is the last image of him that I have in my memory.

Basic training was interrupted by a one-week hiatus at Christmastime. All trainees were expected to go home during this period. Since I was at home 3000 miles away, I chose to stay on base. I had to move into another barracks with other refuseniks, and I spent the week doing guard duty at a branch PX, four hours on, eight hours off, around the clock. I walked my post from midnight until four a.m., my M-14, loaded with live ammunition, shouldered as I walked my post through the snow in twenty-degree temperatures, mentally reciting every poem, mentally singing every song I knew, to help the time go by.

That is what I did with my time off-base at Fort Dix.

Would you be willing to take your knowledge of the Zodiac case as well as mathematics and use it to look at other possible Zodiac suspects? We know that you have a favorite suspect, but it would really be of assistance to us and many others if you could, just temporarily, use your expertise to look at some other suspects that we can agree upon with you. Please note that we are not asking you to endorse another suspect or to abandon your suspect. Rather, we are asking for your help in analyzing some other individuals who also merit consideration. No hay que poner todos los huevos en una sola canasta...

You don’t need my help; you can do it yourself. Take a sample of texts published under the name of your suspect and digitize those texts, writing all numbers in base-two and transcribing all Roman-letter text into Morse Code, using 1 for dash and 0 for dot. Do the same with the Zodiac texts. Now, using an application such as Word, you can search all those texts for digital redivisions. Word’s search-and-replace feature will find all instances of any redivision in seconds; it will take only a little longer for you to locate those redivisions in the literal text. Having located them, where do they stand in relation to one another? What kind of relationships do they express? And if there is a consistent relationship-pattern in the texts written by the suspect, does it match another consistent pattern found in the Zodiac texts? If you consistently find the same patterns, expressed the same way, using the same vocabulary, in both the suspect’s and the Zodiac’s texts, then you may have established that the suspect and the Zodiac are the same person. Comparative methodology such as this was used to determine the authorship of the novel Primary colors a few years ago, and statistics journals occasionally publish peer-reviewed articles examining authorship questions (e.g. Ronald Thisted and Bradley Efron, “Did Shakespeare write a newly-discovered poem?” Biometrika 74,3:445-455, 1987). Textual comparison was long used by the intelligence community to determine authorship of intercepts of radio broadcasts originating in Soviet-bloc countries. It’s an established and respectable technique. At the risk of being thought pedantic, “Don’t put your all your eggs in one basket” is not a Spanish proverb; it’s English. Many people believe it is Spanish because Bartlett’s familiar quotations cites Peter Motteux’s translation of Don Quixote (1701): “’tis the part of a wise man to…not venture all his Eggs in one Basket.” The corresponding passage in Cervantes: “…de sabios es…no aventurarse todo en un día” (wise men don’t risk everything on one day). Motteux routinely replaces Spanish proverbial expressions with English proverbial expressions, not always successfully.

You state that you never met, corresponded with, or had any sort of encounter with Dr. O'Hare before you concluded that he and only he was the Zodiac killer. What was the single turning point that has continued to convince you beyond a reasonable doubt that he and only he could have committed these crimes?

Pardon me for what may seem like niggling, but a turning point cannot continue. Once it has come and gone, it can’t be repeated. What continues is the acquisition of knowledge, insights, and perspective that broadens and deepens an opinion or conviction. Here’s an example. Timothy McVeigh was not arrested for the Oklahoma City bombing; he was arrested for possessing an illegal firearm. He wasn’t stopped by the police for possessing an illegal firearm; he was stopped for driving a car without a license plate. The turning point that brought him to the attention of the authorities was a minor technical infraction. Over the next few days, evidence accrued connecting him with the bombing. Identification and prosecution of a criminal results, from time to time, from an event that simply draws attention to an individual, and that event does not necessarily have to involve illegal behavior. I knew there was something unusual about Michael O’Hare and his family when I came across an entry on his mother in a biographical directory. She was married to his father from 1938 until his death in 1981, but in this entry, the only thing she indicated about her husband was that she had one — she described herself only as married — but she named her son with his full name, including the middle name. There was a story there; I didn’t know what it was, but there it was. Investigative work paid for by my business partner (see above) resulted in the acquisition of handwriting samples that showed rather idiosyncratic traits that matched traits of the Zodiac’s. His employer’s personnel records showed that he had been assigned to their San Francisco branch office to do planning work on a vacation home project that was subsequently depicted on a Zodiac postcard. And a current biobibliography, written after O’Hare became aware that I had named him as the Zodiac, omitted two years of his employment with that employer (1969-1970) in which a majority of Zodiac events had taken place. His doctoral dissertation (1973) and a journal article he had written (1969) indicated, however, that he had been employed by the same employer in the years he was now omitting from his résumé. Falsification of a résumé is not a crime, but when a résumé conflicts with other documents published by the same person at another time, one may be justified in wondering what his motive was in creating the conflict. Subsequent comparison of Zodiac documents and O’Hare documents (as described in answer to a previous question) going all the way back to 1961 elicited voluminous, consistent, and pervasive agreement between the two bodies of literature. I’ll give you an example; but first a note on Zodiac usage. Zodiac documents contain calendars. A landmark or two is created using a date or some other information pinpointing a particular day. Other dates can be established by their relationship to a landmark, counting each alphanumeric character as one day. For instance, the Hole Card, postmarked 6 October 1970, is the only Zodiac text dated by the author (“Oct. 5, 1970”). Subsequently, he refers to the police as “pig cops.” The PI of PIG is the only one of its kind in this text. If the O of OCT 5 = 5 October, and if each subsequent character = one day, then PI = 14 March, a date written numerically as 3/14 (π = 3.14…).

More of Gareth Penn's answers:
In 1994, Michael O’Hare published, on the website of the Goldman School of Public Policy, a paper titled “Reflections on trust and confidence.” Here is one paragraph from that paper. I have omitted all spaces and marks of punctuation.

WHATTHISLASTEXAMPLESUGGESTSTOMEISTHATTHEKEYIDEAUNDERLYINGTRUSTANDCONFIDENCEININSTITUTIONSISNOTSOMUCHTHEIRVALUESORGOALSNORTHEIRCOMPETENCEBUTTHEIRPREDICTABILITYWHENAWILDEYEDCHARACTERWITHAPISTOLSAYSHEWILLSHOOTUSIFWEDONTHANDOVEROURCARKEYSWEKNOWTHATHISINTERESTSAREVERYPOORLYALIGNEDWITHOUROWNWEMAYALSOTHINKHISAIMPOORANDHISSELFCONTROLRATHERLABILENEVERTHELESSWEACTPRECISELYASWEWOULDIFOURMOTHERSAIDLENDMEYOURCARDEARIWANTTOSHOPFORYOURBIRTHDAYPRESENT

First, I would like to bring to your attention that this passage contains two redivisions of FOUR (ER OUR, [I]F OUR; F = Morse 0010, ER = 0 010) and one redivision of FATHER (LRATHER; F = 0010, LR = 0100 010). If the B of BIRTHDAY = the author’s birthday (22 January), then the FOURs fall on the fourth of July and the fourth of December. FATHER begins on 16 October, the author’s father’s birthday. I pointed out in TIMES 17 that on the date of the Lake Berryessa murder (27 September 1969), Michael O’Hare’s age in days was 9745, the digital spelling of TIMES 17 (1 00 11 0 000 10001 = 9745). This appeared significant in part because the Zodiac’s ciphers are written in a rectangular format with the general formula n x 17. In that murder, the Zodiac used a knife. This text contains two digital redivisions of KNIFE (101 10 00 0010 0): GGESTS (110 110 0 000 1 000) and YWHENA (1011 011 0000 0 10 01). The difference between GGESTS and YWHENA is 136 characters, the product of the operation 8 x 17. Meanwhile, on the literal level, we find “When a wild-eyed character with a pistol says he will shoot us if we don’t hand over our car keys,” a reference to the same murder. The Lake Berryessa incident began when the criminal pointed a pistol at the victims and demanded their car keys. For the purpose of comparison, here is a passage from “THE CONFESSION,” written by the murderer of Cheri Jo Bates:

MAYBESHEWILLBETHEBEAUTIFULBLONDTHATBABYSITSNEARTHELITTLESTOREANDWALKSDOWNTHEDARKALLEYEACHEVENINGABOUTSEVENORMAYBESHEWILLBETHESHAPELYBLUEEYEDBROWNETTTHATSAIDNOWHENIASKEDHERFORADATEINHIGHSCHOOL

This passage contains the only two KNIFE-redivisions in the text, YSITS (1011 000 00 1 000) and OWHENI (111 011 0000 0 10 00). The difference between them is 119 characters, the product of 7 x 17. Here is a further example, published over Michael O’Hare’s name — by his father — in 1961:

FORMALRECOGNITIONOFTHEANNIVERSARYISBEINGMADEBYTHEDEDICATIONOFTHECALBRAITHPERRYRODGERSSKYWAYANDBYTHEPUBLICATIONOFTHISBOOKITISSURPRISINGTHATCALBRAITHPERRYRODGERSFIRSTISLESSREMEMBEREDTHANOTHERCOMPARABLEEVENTSTHELAYINGOFAMERICASFIRSTTRANSCONTINENTALRAILROADFOREXAMPLEORMAGELLANSCIRCUMNAVIGATIONOFTHEWORLDPERHAPSTHEFRANKCOMMERCIALISMOFTHEFLIGHTONWHICHTHESPONSORSSPENT180000TOMAKETHETRIPPOSSIBLEINRETURNFORTHEPUBLICITYITGAVETHEIRSOFTDRINKVINFIZMAYHAVEBEEN

The entire text contains three KNIFE-redivisions. The first two are YISB (1011 00 000 1000) and YHAV (1011 0000 01 0001). The difference between the two is 408 characters (24 x 17).

These are just a couple of hundreds of examples. This isn’t not just scratching the surface; it isn’t even rubbing it with a soft cloth.

Do you or did you ever know a Dr. Pessis, and what was the nature of your relationship with him? Do you know if Dr. O'Hare was friends with or ever visited Mr. Pessis?



Girard Pessis was my upstairs neighbor when I lived at 2804 Webster Street in Berkeley (fall 1968-summer 1969). He and I rubbed one another the wrong way, and he was probably not sad to see me go when Mary Ann and I moved to the house on Lincoln Street. I remember only one of our disagreements specifically. Ronald Reagan had ordered the National Guard to occupy Berkeley, and in addition to a large number of rifle-toting military personnel on the ground, we had a National Guard helicopter hovering over campus for hours on end. One day, I ran into Girard on the front stoop of the house we shared, from where we could see the helicopter buzzing around. He asked me what they could possibly use the helicopter for. I believe he thought it was a rhetorical question. I didn’t think it was. I said that they would use it to drop tear gas on the university campus. He snorted contemptuously, seizing on the opportunity, I believe, to make me out to be an idiot. Why would anybody be so stupid as to spray tear gas on an institution of higher learning from a military helicopter? His tone of voice indicated that he thought his question was unanswerable. I had a different perspective, having recently spent two years studying the military from the inside. I said that the reason they were going to drop tear gas was that they couldn’t drop napalm. His look said it all. I was the stupidest person he had ever had the misfortune to meet. He didn’t call me “stupid” to my face, but he might as well have. The next day, I ran into him again as I was leaving the house and he was returning from campus. He was coughing and sneezing, and his eyes were runny, because he had been standing right under the helicopter when the crew released the first batch of tear gas. He didn’t speak to me but pushed past me into the house. I think he was less annoyed by the tear gas than he was by my having been proven right. A few years ago, I googled him in an idle moment to see what he was up to, and found him listed as an attendee at a reunion of the Bronx High School for Science class of 1960. He was a high school classmate of O’Hare’s. I never saw him again after we left Webster Street. We could hear merriment upstairs from time to time when he and his wife entertained guests at dinner, and I have wondered if Michael O’Hare, who was commuting occasionally to California in the 1960s, was one of them.

Ask him if he see's the irony in boasting about his norse literature studies an the contents of the SLA letter...ask him if its deliberate or completely coincidental the way he keeps tying himself to the case..

I have done some editing of other questions, but I think this one deserves to be reproduced verbatim. When I commented in TIMES 17 on the SLA Letter, I mentioned the fact that I have studied Old Norse; at the risk of being seen as a braggart, let me expand on that. I have taken every unit of instruction in Old Norse offered at the University of California and the Free University Berlin. The only reason I brought it up was that the Zodiac refers to the Old Norse verb slá and says that it means “to kill,” and he’s wrong. It means “to beat, to strike.” I brought up my background in this subject in order to establish my qualifications for saying so.

Questioner, meet me at Camera 3. Sir, would you be happier if I had written, “I don’t know anything about Old Norse, but slá doesn’t mean ‘to kill’”? If I had, wouldn’t you be deriding me now for uttering an opinion about something I know nothing about? When you say that I keep “tying” myself to this case, do you mean that by admitting to being schooled in a dead language, I am providing evidence that I wrote a letter in which a word from that language is wrongly defined? If I had written the letter, don’t you think I would have gotten it right? And if I were simply trying to create suspicion that I had written the letter (without having done so), why would I disagree with the author about what that word means? Don’t you think that if I were the author of this letter, or if I were trying to create the impression that I were, I would agree with him instead of contradicting him? I don’t think you’ve thought this through. Maybe it’s just me, but it appears to me that when a letter from a felon contains a foreign-language word and he defines it the wrong way, comment to that effect is called for, because it may tell us something about him. Until I pointed out the discrepancy, no one else had, including the police and Bob Graysmith. The fact that he cites the word and defines it wrongly permits the inference that he got his blend of information and misinformation by consulting an English-language dictionary giving slá as a cognate of English “slay” without defining it and that he wrongly inferred that the two must mean the same thing. I identified the dictionaries available on the reference shelves of public libraries that might have been the basis of his misunderstanding and pointed out that they are hardly the kind of dictionary that an uneducated person would consult. Murray Miron’s psychological profile of the Zodiac, excerpted by Graysmith, describes him as having “no more than a high school education.” The error involving the Old Norse verb contradicts Miron’s profile; it seems obvious to me that the Zodiac is an educated man who hasn’t studied Old Norse. Are you saying that it is somehow undemocratic for people who have specialized knowledge to make use of it? Or are you saying that it’s all right to use it, but not to establish your qualifications for doing so for fear of hurting the feelings of those who don’t? If I’ve hurt your feelings, I apologize.


I’d be curious to know what it would take for you to conclude that Michael O’Hare is not the Zodiac. You have mentioned fingerprints and the IAFIS database. If Michael O’Hare were to submit his fingerprints (or perhaps he has already done so), would that do it? How about DNA?

Are you bargaining? If so, whom do you represent? And what makes you think that he — perhaps — has? I gather from the ”perhaps” qualifier that you don’t know.











Do you have any solutions or partial solutions of any of the unsolved Zodiac ciphers that you could share?

I published a digital solution to the 340-character cipher in TIMES 17 that appears to be serviceable. But I think that the formal, nonverbal aspects of the ciphers have been completely overlooked and deserve to be set forth. The first two are presented as perfect rectangles having the general formula n x 17 where n = the number of rows. The third cipher is written in only thirteen characters, which appears to be a departure from this formula, but the fourth is written as an imperfect rectangle conforming to the formula, since it has seventeen symbols in the first row and fifteen in the second. Given that ciphers ##1, 2, and 4 follow the formula, I think we are justified in describing #3 as another imperfect example of the same format.

The Zodiac uses both the crossed circle and the letter Z as signatures. There is at least one crossed circle in each of the four ciphers, and the first two also employ Z as a symbol. The first cipher has four crossed circles and nine Zs, while the second has nine crossed circles and four Zs. This is a manifestation of the organizing principle of symmetry. Symmetry is expressed by the third and fourth ciphers in this manner: the third cipher is written in thirteen symbols, a prime number, while the crossed circle is symbol #4, a power of two; in the fourth cipher, the crossed circle is #29, a prime number, while the total number of symbols is thirty-two, a power of two.

The first crossed circle in #1 is symbol #100. The first in #2 is symbol #49. The only crossed circle in #3 is symbol #4. Three in a row, all perfect squares. The square roots of these numbers, 10, 7, and 2, respectively, replicate the word DEATH written in Morse Code and read as a base-two number (DEATH = 100 0 01 1 0000 = 1072). Each of the symbols used in the third cipher appears in at least one of the other ciphers, with the exception of the Arabic 8 inscribed in a circle. That symbol is unique to this cipher. It appears as symbols ##5, 7, 9. There are three of these eights. If I asked you how much three eights are, you would probably answer twenty-four, since 3 x 8 = 24. Of course, that is a right answer. But there may be another right answer. What if I asked you not how much three eights are where “eight” is a number but where “eight” is a word? You would have to find some way to transform “eight” into a number in order to multiply it by three. If you write EIGHT in Morse Code, using 1 for dash and 0 for dot, you get this: 0 00 110 0000 1, base-two 193. Now, if EIGHT = 193, then how much are three eights? You would answer 579 (3 x 193 = 579). Note that this result matches the symbol-numbers of the three eight-ball symbols. The message, as I read it, can be expressed as “If you want to read what I have written, make use of Morse Code written in the form of base-two number.” In TIMES 17, I pointed out that the 390 letters of English and eighteen of gibberish in the first cipher express the proportions of the integer and fraction parts of the natural number π (390 = 3 x 130, 18 = 0.14159… x 130).

There’s quite a lot that can be said about the ciphers without eliciting an English text from them. Since a lot of people have expended an enormous amount of effort on eliciting English over the last forty years without producing a credible result, we might conclude that they aren’t ciphers in the conventional sense at all and that their nonverbal content (see above) is all there is. The format alone provides some information. For instance, the general formula n x 17 expresses the phrase TIMES 17, which, when read digitally (1 00 11 0 000 10001) is base-two 9745, the date of Michael O’Hare’s mother’s 38th birthday and his age in days on the day of the Lake Berryessa murder. The third cipher falls between two ciphers written as perfect n x 17 rectangles and the fourth, which is an incomplete exemplar of the same format (17 symbols in the first row and 15 in the second). Let’s assume, for the sake of argument anyway, that the third cipher also conforms to the n x 17 formula. The smallest perfect rectangle conforming to that formula would be 1 x 17. This cipher is 13/17 of that. The fraction 13/17 written to the base two is 0.110000111…, which expresses the monogram M (11) H (0000) O (111).

By the way, all of the Zodiac’s handwritten letters are executed in blue ink. The word BLUE in Morse Code (1000 0100 001 0) is a redivision of BASE 2 (1000 01 000 0 10). Blue writing is base-two writing. This information is conveyed by a color — i.e. nonverbally.

These questions all come from one person, so I’ll count them as one against the total of fifty (this makes, by my count, forty-two):


Do you have any photos of Michael O´Hare? Yes, one of them published in TIMES 17. Are you still working on finding evidence against O`Hare? Not of the conventional kind. Is there any evidence that O’Hare was on the same flight as Joan Webster? Eastern Airlines expended thousands of dollars’ worth of personnel and computer time on retrieval of information about the passengers on her flight. There is no connection between any of those passengers and any theory concerning her fate. Is there some particular reason for which you will not join a Zodiac website? See above. I´ve read a lot of the information on the Web about you. I understand that a lot is fabrication. That’s the understatement of this century and the last one, too. I can relate to the information relating to your childhood, but you seem to had it even worse. I would take everything you read about me with a large grain of salt. Mike Martin introduced himself to me by saying that he was working on an article for The Atlantic Monthly, which turned out to be a lie, and he has described my mother as a “regular” contributor to The New Yorker, whose online index indicates that she sold them only one poem in her lifetime. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think once in a lifetime is the same thing as “regular.” Those are just two examples. Mr. Martin has a tenuous relationship with both the truth and the English language. If he had in fact been writing for The Atlantic Monthly, his product would have been subjected to fact-checking by the magazine and much of it would have fallen by the wayside; by self-publishing on the Web, he can say anything he likes, factual or otherwise. My childhood took place under difficult conditions, starting with the Second World War; but on balance, I was a happy kid. What has had the greatest influence on you, for instance, books that you have read? My mother had the greatest influence on me when I was little (among other things, she was my teacher in first grade.) I had an inspiring teacher in high school named Felix Knauth, crippled by polio as a child, who was the first to scale El Capitan in Yosemite, who sailed a 32-foot boat across the Atlantic, and who went on to direct the Peace Corps program in Somalia. I learned a lot in his classes, but was, I think, most impressed by the way he elicited thoughtful, intelligent, and insightful contributions from the near-dropouts, juvenile delinquents, and boys whose highest aspiration was to work in an automobile repair shop. (This experience proved useful to me in the Army, when I had to spend a lot of what would otherwise have been my free time teaching trigonometry to trainees whose IQ scores were in the mid-sixties.) His example also suggested to me that if you set your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. My math teachers were wonderful and memorable; a belated shout-out and thank-you to Mr. Hines, Mr. Foskett and Mr. Broido! In high school, my favorite authors were Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson, and I was exposed to all manner of influences at Berkeley and Berlin. Highlights include Peter Odegaard’s course on American government and Aldo Scaglione’s on the Divine Comedy. The most memorable undergraduate course I took was in the anthropology department, on the subject of law in pre-industrial societies, taught by Laura Nader (Ralph’s sister). I have lived and traveled in foreign countries and have learned a lot from immersing myself in cultures different from the one I was raised in. I have had a variety of jobs and have learned something from every one of them, from doing economic research for a settlement firm to gathering oceanographic data aboard a NOAA research vessel. The last fourteen years of my employment were spent working with wildlife biologists, from which I have emerged with a mind expanded by an introduction to the issues involved in ecology and evolutionary biology. There is something to be learned from everything you do and from everybody you know.



Any comment on these Vallejo High School graduates? Bob Tarbox (1944), Barbara Jane Parkin (1949), Lyndon Lafferty (1950), James Owen (1950), Arthur Leigh Allen (1951), Ted Kidder (1955), Les Lunblad Jr. (1956), William “Bill” Leigh (1957), Ron Allen (1957), George Bawart (1957), Carmela Leigh (1958), Ralph Spinelli (1959), Roy Conway (1959), Ed Rust (1959), Howard “Buzz” Gordon (1960), “Arthur” Dean Ferrin (1962), David Faraday (1969)

One of them (Faraday) is a Zodiac murder victim. Ferrin is probably related to another victim, Darlene Ferrin. Arthur Leigh Allen was a career suspect in this case who was ruled out, posthumously, by DNA comparison. I believe Les Lunblad was a Vallejo police official, but as to the rest, I don’t know the first thing about them. My wife taught at Continuation High School in Vallejo in 1968-1970, and after a three-year hiatus during which she worked for VUSD as a management consultant, she returned to the classroom in the fall of 1973, teaching eighth-grade English at Solano Junior HS until her death in 1991. I knew only one of her students, an emotionally needy boy who clung to her as a kind of substitute mother and visited us at home from time to time over a period of several years. He enlisted in the Air Force and wound up guarding missile silos in North Dakota. I don’t know if he went to Vallejo HS after junior high school. That’s about all the light I can shed on your question.

You deny knowing Ray Grant, and yet, his book features several apparent missives from yourself, complete with hard-to-duplicate characteristic Gareth Penn high-handed tone (bordering on superciliousness). Let’s assume he’s a genius at faking your unique voice. But the book also contains pictures of you and Diane Merrill, apparently from Asilomar. How on earth did the clown get his grubby mitts on your family photos?

I do not deny knowing Ray Grant. I was asked, “Why didn’t you ever sue your friend Ray?”, and I responded, “I don’t have a friend named Ray, nor do I know anyone, even casually, with that name. The last Ray I can remember having known…” (see above). You will note that I was not asked if I knew Ray Grant; I was asked why I wasn’t suing my “friend Ray [no surname]” It’s important, when you hold someone responsible for something he has said, that you quote what he actually said and not something that you have fabricated. I do not, in fact, have a friend named Ray, I do not currently know anyone with that name, and until you jogged my memory, I did not recall Ray Grant (you will note that I did not categorically deny ever having known anyone named “Ray” other than the ones I cited; I wrote “The last Ray I can remember”). Ray Grant is just one of hundreds of people with whom I corresponded a quarter century ago, most of whose names I have not retained. I would not characterize him as a “friend.” He presented to me a convoluted theory about the Zodiac’s use of firearms, apparently seeking my endorsement. I didn’t agree with him and told him so. He seemed to feel that he was entitled to my endorsement and became very bitter and accusatory. I haven’t read anything he has had to say since then and so have no idea what his current theories are. I gather from what you say that he has spent the last quarter century pouting. Now that he knows that I haven’t been paying attention to his slandering of me, he will probably pout even more. I regret that you feel that I am high-handed and supercilious, but I got the feeling that he felt the same way about me simply because I didn’t buy his theory. I don’t remember specifically, but I may have sent him those photos back in the days before I turned him into an implacable foe by having the temerity to disagree with him. Apparently, some people believe that because all men are created equal, the same is true of all theories, and I suspect that by not applying the principles of Jeffersonian democracy to other people’s ideas, you run the risk of being called “high-handed” and “supercilious.”

TIMES 17 has, since its publication in 1987, caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth online and elsewhere. If you had it all to do over again, would you go back in time and, in lieu of the current dead end relationship, start a rock band with Michael O’Hare, and call yourselves The Zodiac Killers?

I forget who it was who said that the purpose of the Church is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. After my piece on Grant Mahony was published in The Ecphorizer, I heard from several readers who said that it had made them think differently about their lives. That’s the highest compliment anyone could pay me, and it almost makes up for not being paid for writing the article. If TIMES 17 has made people think differently about how they see things, then it has accomplished something important. If the gospel of Matthew is anything to go by, wailing and gnashing of teeth are activities characteristic of those inhabiting the outer darkness and the furnace of fire. Kirby J. Hensley, the founder of the Universal Life Church, summed up his religious belief with these words: “Heaven is when you’ve got what you want and Hell is when you don’t.” I would guess that you are talking about people who haven’t gotten what they want, whatever that may be. I quit taking piano lessons about the same time I dropped out of the Boy Scouts and stopped going to church; hormonal changes may have been responsible. Since then, I have been a consumer of music and have never had the ambition of being a performer.

You say, “You name a coincidence, and I can top it.” Okay, let's put that to the test. Ray Grant insists, in his book, that Donna Lass is a Zodiac victim. In fact, he calls the Donna Lass murder the Zodiac's “signature” crime, because she's a “secret” victim whose death nonetheless bears all the odd eccentricities of the more familiar Zodiac events. Ray Grant also calls you a conspirator in the Zodiac murders. During your time in Mensa, your contact number was (415) 499-0670. Donna Lass disappeared from the Sahara Hotel in Stateline, Nevada on Sunday, September 6, 1970. The last five digits of your contact number are another way of writing that date. Top that coincidence.

I imagine that by applying Mr. Grant’s intellectual standards, you could prove that every unsolved murder committed west of the Rocky Mountains since the California Gold Rush is a Zodiac crime. I’m relieved to know that I have been demoted to the status of conspirator; I was getting lonely up there at the top all by myself. By the way, does Mr. Grant also name the person with whom I am supposed to have conspired? You can’t be a conspirator all by yourself. The phone number you refer to was originally Diane’s. She and I became an item in 1982, and when I suggested that she change the number, she declined because she had bought a quantity of business cards and didn’t want to replace them. It became my phone number in 1982, twelve years after Donna Lass disappeared. I didn’t choose it, and I acquired it after the fact. As to your challenge, the first four digits of that number express the date 9 April 1990 (4/9/90); on that date, a roadside bomb, not unlike the one described in two Zodiac letters, killed four British soldiers in Northern Ireland as they drove past in a jeep (what would we do without the New York Times index?) To my mind, the simultaneous deaths of Jefferson and Adams on the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is a coincidence that cannot be topped.

As always, thank you very much for taking and answering questions. It is troubling, though, that you're consistently non-forthcoming about your Vallejo activities — which, it turns out, form a volume all their own. As you know, I’ve also been troubled by your Expert Army rifle marksmanship vs. how you spun Mike O'Hare’s less-expert Harvard Rifle Team membership. For him, it was evidence of guilt. But for you — well…just more of that Internet sleuth nonsense, I suppose.

You’re welcome. I’ll be as forthcoming about my “Vallejo activities” as possible. My wife got a job in that city in 1968, and in 1972, I followed suit. I worked there for just under seven years, resigning in August 1979. I resided there for five months in 1973. I had an affair with a Vallejo resident in 1978-1979, and my daughter was born at Kaiser Vallejo (Kaiser had only a clinic in Napa, where I lived). I knew a few people who lived in Vallejo, which is not out of the ordinary, considering that my wife and I both worked there. Between my return to the Bay Area in the summer of 1968 and my first day at work in Vallejo (October 1972), I lived, worked, and studied in Berkeley. During that time, my wife and I initiated a social relationship with only one of her co-workers, a woman who taught in Vallejo but lived in San Francisco. Otherwise, we socialized with the friends we had had pre-1968; they lived in the East Bay, San Francisco, and Marin. I can’t comment on your “volume” without knowing what the details are. I would note, however, that those who assert that Barack Obama was not born in the United States also claim to have voluminous evidence, and that the Bush administration also claimed to have voluminous evidence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein. This question comes to me anonymously, so I don’t know who you are, let alone what troubles you. I have no idea of what kind of scores Michael O’Hare got in competition, but my score of 60/84 in the Trainfire test means that I hit 71% of my targets (between two thirds and three quarters). The Zodiac shot five people, four of them at point-blank range, so a lot of marksmanship skill was not called for. The fact that O’Hare had familiarity with and owned firearms seems to me to be more significant than his target-shooting scores; as I believe I mention in TIMES 17, private investigator Whit Caldwell discovered a Massachusetts firearms permit issued to him in 1960 for the purchase of a .22-caliber rifle, the same kind of firearm used at Lake Herman Road. He is documented, in other words, as being in possession of the same kind of firearm as used by the Zodiac. If you check my documentation, all you will find is a report filed with the ATF in, I think, 1979 or so for a twelve-gauge shotgun which I purchased from Montgomery Ward. As far as I know, no Zodiac victim was murdered with a shotgun or an M-14 rifle, and I did not own the M-14 that was temporarily issued to me at Fort Dix; I had to turn it in when I cleared post.

Here’s a footnote on Trainfire. The test is administered on a course along which the trainee walks. Every now and then, a target in the shape of a human silhouette pops up at a range varying from 25 to 1000 meters, and the trainee has a second or so to get off a shot. A sensor detects hits on the target, and if it is hit, it drops back down. When a target drops, the scorer gives the trainee a point. Before the test, my platoon sergeant impressed on us the importance of aiming low; a bullet that hits the dirt as far as a few yards in front of the target will throw up a spray of dirt and rocks that strike the target and activate the sensor, causing the target to drop and earning the trainee one point. I got credit for every one of my 1000-meter targets and missed most of the 25-meter targets; I did pretty well at the targets at intermediate range, so I’m not a bad shot, but I think the discrepancy between the 25-meter and 1000-meter targets indicates that my platoon sergeant was right.

And here’s another footnote, this one on Vallejo. I am baffled by the widespread assumption that that city was the center of the universe for the Zodiac. Of all events (murders and mailings), 68% took place in San Francisco and only 9% in or near Vallejo. The Zodiac’s supposed familiarity with Vallejo is belied by a number of indications, of which I will mention just one here. In the letter of 9 November 1969, he suggests that the reader ask “the Vallejo cop” about his “electric gun sight,” apparently referring to the flashlight taped to the barrel of the firearm as an aiming device (discussed in his letter to the Examiner of 1 August 1969) and used in the murders at Lake Herman Road. Lake Herman Road is not in Vallejo; in 1968, it was unincorporated. But every house on Lake Herman Road had a Benicia mailing address, and police service was provided to the area by Benicia PD. Since then, it has been incorporated into Benicia. You would think that someone who was intimately familiar with Vallejo would know where the city limits were. Such a person would presumably have written “ask the Benicia cop.”

Do you regret having made an accusation against someone which in turn has apparently caused you to be scrutinized, and would you do the same thing again?

I don’t mind being scrutinized; what bothers me is the liberties that some people take with the facts. Please forgive what may seem like a digression, but I would like to answer the second part of your question with an example from the earth sciences. In 1912, a geophysicist named Alfred Wegener published a new theory describing a phenomenon he called “continental drift.” Wegener’s theory was supported by considerable evidence, but he could not explain the mechanism that caused the phenomenon. Not only did the scientific community not accept continental drift; there was even a conference convened for the sole purpose of soliciting papers refuting Wegener. Wegener stuck to his guns and died in 1930 without seeing continental drift accepted. In the 1960s, evidence obtained from the floor of the mid-Atlantic provided an explanation of the mechanism involved in continental drift, and the scientific consensus reversed itself. I hope that I am not perceived as “high-handed” or “supercilious” by comparing myself with my betters, but Wegener provides an example, I think, that everyone would do well to follow.

What are your thoughts on the “FL + 4 dots” symbol on the Zodiac´s Hallowe’en Card?

I published an interpretation in TIMES 17; I read it as the base-two number 331 (10100101). The phrase THE END in Morse Code (1 0000 0 0 10 100) is base-two 2068, a compound of “twenty” (20) and NINE (10 00 10 0 = 68). If “29” can be read as a paraphrase of “the end,” then ”331” can be read as a further paraphrase of the same thing, since an angle of 29° = an angle of 331°.

What are your thoughts on the Zodiac’s costume that he wore at Lake Beryessa? Why do you think he chose to wear it?

When you multiply or divide a base-ten number by ten or any power of ten, the only change in the number is the position of the decimal point. 123 x 10 = 1230; 123/10 = 12.3. The digits and the sequence in which they appear are unchanged. The same thing is true of base-two numbers; when multiplied or divided by two or any power of two, the initial sequence is preserved. 11001010 x 10 = 110010100; 11001010/10 = 1100101.0, for instance. The word HOOD written as a base-two number (by way of Morse Code) is 0000 111 111 100. The leading zeros are not significant, and if the meaning is being concealed by redivision (shifting the decimal point or multiplying by a power of two), the following zeros may not be, either. What we are left with is 1111111, base-two 127, a redivision of MOM (11 111 11). I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it, but I’m inclined to read it that way.

Do you believe that Zodiac choose the dates or time of his murders for some specific reason, and if you do, what reason?

The ciphers express the theme “times 17” in the general formula for their format, rectangles of a varying number of rows with a constant number of columns: n x 17, where n = the number of rows. The first of these ciphers was enclosed with letters postmarked on 31 July 1969 and the second with a commercial greeting card postmarked on 8 November 1969. The difference in time between the two ciphers is 100 days, the square of ten. The difference in time between the Riverside murder and Lake Herman Road is 782 days; between Lake Herman Road and Blue Rock Springs, 196; between Blue Rock Springs and Lake Berryessa, 85; and between Lake Berryessa and Presidio Heights, 14. 782 and 85 are both products of the operation n x 17 (46 x 17, 5 x 17); 196 is the square of 14, and conversely, 14 is the square root of 196. As mentioned in TIMES 17, Michael O’Hare’s age in days on the date of the Lake Berryessa murder was 9745, the digital spelling of TIMES 17 (1 00 11 0 000 10001 = 9745). I believe that date was the linchpin of the entire chronological scheme. By the way, the murder of Joan Webster in Boston took place 5508 days following the Riverside murder. 5508 is the product of the operation 324 x 17, 324 being another perfect square (18 x 18 = 324).

Posted by D550 at 9:34 AM
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Very interesting....a detailed assortment of complete truth and utter fiction...

Zamantha, you are amazing!!

I have these questions, but since I have already asked some, please take from those who have not yet asked anything first, and don't even use these, or if someone who has not yet asked a question wants to take one of these and rework it, feel free!!

Does Mr. Penn think that the Zodiac exhibited signs of severe mental illness as a young child, or was his disturbance more likely brought about as the result of a later life experience, such as PTSD from previous military combat experience, for example? Is it possible that in addition to what appears to be a full blown case of Narcissistic Peronality Disorder, that Z may also have had Asperger's syndrome (the odd gait, and the odd choirce of vocabulary/spelling in his latters as well as the unusual/monotone prosody in his phone calls, the obsession with esoteric topics such as the Lord High Executioner in the Mikado), as in some ways the Zodiac seems to be highly intelligent, and in other areas (social skills, etc.), he appears to be utterly lacking (and in his case also deviant)...It is very unusual for persons with Asperger's to commit crimes, eapecially ones so horrific as this, and I am NOT suggesting that most persons with Asperger's are like the Zodiac. However, what I am suggesting is that the Zodiac was really a "mixed bag" psychiatrically, possibly a combination of paranoid personality disorder, NPD, Asperger's, antisocial PD, etc., and I would like for Mr. Penn to speculate on what he thinks may have happened to Z for him to end up withis wa, or if he thinks that Z was just "born into" all of this, or if it is a combination of the two (the most likely choice)...

Does Mr. Penn think that the Zodiac could have originally been born/educated overseas, and came to the US later in life? The reason I am asking this is not only because of his distinctly UK/Australian or even Canadian word choices/linguistics (e.g., "Happy Christmas", Salt Beef, Clews, the adjective "nice"), also products/items he mentions (e.g., Deep Heat, which is only sold in the UK and Australia, for example), but also it is fascinating to me, given the unusual creature the Zodiac surely was/is, that no sibling or teacher, or relative has ever come forward to say...."Gee, this guy sounds a lot like..."....Since the Zodiac case was not so well known abroad in the 1960's and 70's, is it possible that he was not American-born and came over later (say in his late teens early 20's)...perhaps then the monotone voice he used on the phone/speaking to victims was also a way to cover his accent...??

Does Mr. Penn think the Zodiac was trained in mechanical drawing, drafting, and/or graphic arts of any kind, or as an electronics technician, either in the military or as a civilian? Some supporting reasons for this question are that the printing in his letters, when he was in a "less frenzied" state, seems to be a consistent sans serif font often used in drafting/architectural lettering bac jin the 1960's/70's etc. Also, his "bus bomb" diagrams show the crown of the road with sloping sides, which most people would not think to put in a simple drawing...Also, Does Mr. Penn think the whole "bus bomb" affair really was a dud, because my understanding of the bus bomb "diagram and formula" tells me this would not work in actual fact...

Mr. Penn continuously shows he doesn't have a lot of knowledge about the Zodiac case. It is proven over and over again in his posts.

What he does know a lot about is math and manipulating numbers. We don't even know Zodiac had ANYTHING to do with Donna. The victim count the person claims doesn't even mesh.
We don't know Zodiac killed Cheri Jo. There isn't 100% proof Zodiac wrote a lot of the stuff he is saying Zodiac did--then arriving to conclusions with this stuff. UGH>.
Yes, LHR is not Benicia's jurisdiction. It was Solano County--and their offices were in Vallejo. "Vallejo Cop". VHS students went to that spot for driver's ed. I could see it being mistaken for Vallejo.

I hardly feel he is worthy of many questions about the case in general.

For those of you who think Penn was involved....have at it.

Thanks Zamantha...you have been awesome!!!!

Over and out.

PS---I like Homer. And I doubt Zamantha would have wasted a question on that if there were 50. God forbid a 51.

Can we ask him if he thinks Zodiac has/had OCD???

Can I just chuck in a tuppence here. Zab mentioned the Happy Christmas. I have never in my life been wished Happy Christmas by anyone. We use Merry over here just the same as you guys would in the States. We do have on our cards (probably you guys do as well) Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. He could be just mixing the saying up.
I also don't see much to suggest to me that he had a British upbringing or that there is anything particularly British in anything he says. He may have watched old British movies perhaps war films re the salt beef but I view him as American as apple pie.
Also he makes nods towards the Ripper letters if anything, and I think they are believed to be Irish influenced in Grammer, certainly spelling they would use at the time for someone probably not well educated (no proof the actual Ripper wrote those anyway.)
God this format is annoying lol.

I think he must have had a few Ripper books in his posession. We have the brutal murders, the canonical 5, the letters (including the sending of the bloody kidney/Stine shirt),the 'Ripper' even sent a postcard and even different police jurisdictions City of London Police and the Met.

SP--I've got some Ripper stuff.

https://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com/zodiac-cipher-discussion-general-discussion-f7/my-name-isjack-the-ripper-t313.htm

Cheers Tahoe, might dust off the old Ripper books tomorrow, see what else pops up Really good observations BTW esp the date Sept 27.

tahoe27 wrote:

Mr. Penn continuously shows he doesn't have a lot of knowledge about the Zodiac case. It is proven over and over again in his posts. I hardly feel he is worthy of many questions about the case in general.

For those of you who think Penn was involved....have at it. Over and out.

Yes -- Please! Over and out!

I get so damned tired of hearing the opinions of people who don't know a damned thing about a topic, but feel the need to interrupt with their anonymous, uninformed, high-handed opinions. Do any of you -- Solar Pons, Tahoe, etc. -- stop to think for one minute that all you're doing is discouraging Mr. Penn from taking these questions? From answering them?

Gareth Penn is one of the most unusual and infamous people ever associated with this case, and certainly one of the longest-running (30 years). He's also one of the most difficult to pin down, so when the moderators take the time and effort to work with him to answer questions, it means something.

We're not here to read post after post about what anonymous no-names think about this topic. You've said it once and we've read it. Please -- move on and let the rest of us who are actually interested in all Zam's hard work read what Mr. Penn has to say without the constant bullshit and trivial interruptions!

I agree. Simple rules. If not intresting- then move on.
We can make a new thread called Things im not intrested in at all.
For anyone that feel the need to comment on something that doesnt seem to be intresting enough to even mention.

Play nice everyone!

I'm TOTALLY interested in every word Penn has to say. I spent a whole year on The Opord, when it was going good. And when there was some
really good information on the Forum, prior to all the bannings and then post erases. i know alot of the Penn theory inside and out. So, Let's keep this on track, as there are a few of us here that
truly need to understand all this for perhaps closure.... Or to continue to dig and look more. I do know Mike M. has put hours and hours of time into this
POI, so let's pull together and look at everything.
Thanks, Zam*

I thought all opinions were welcome here and that rudeness was not. Have the rules changed or something?

Mike M's telling people to get out of the thread and insulting people by calling them no-names, etc. is NOT what this board was supposed to be about.

There seems to be some walking on egg shells around here regarding Penn and I don't see why. He is a big boy and has spent the past twenty-plus years having some people disagree with his theories and conclusions. I seriously doubt he will be upset that some people at this board disagree with him or question his expertise. That all comes with the territory.