Gareth Penn

Appendix 1: one degree of Kevin Bacon


In 1961, Michael Gurewich filed his doctoral dissertation at MIT, an empirical study of social networking. His work provided the basis for a theoretical extrapolation by Manfred Kochen in his Contacts and influences (1978) and the work of Stanley Milgram, who published an influential article in Psychology today titled “The small world problem” (1967). Milgram’s article began the process of popularization of this subject, the final touches to which were supplied by playwright John Guare with his play “Six degrees of separation” (1990; movie version 1993), whence the popular figure of speech. Milgram found that any two people in a population the size of the United States can be connected by a chain of associations having as few as three links; in his book, Kochen reduced that to two.

Social networking theory tells us, in essence, that everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Meryl Streep; most people are not aware of these connections because they don’t look for them. Ignorance of how small the world is socially analogizes ignorance of how small it is environmentally. The latter kind of ignorance has led to predicaments such as global warming; the former has led some people to believe that it is somehow remarkable that I had an affair with a woman whose aunt came across the Zodiac victims at Lake Herman Road and had been a high school classmate of one of them. The woman in question was born and raised in Vallejo, and her parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and at least one sibling that I know of also lived in Vallejo. She had gone to school, K-12, in Vallejo; she worked in Vallejo, and most of her co-workers lived in Vallejo; her husband lived in Vallejo, and his co-workers lived there, too. In the 1960s and 1970s, the population of Vallejo was about 60,000. Since social networking research has established that a chain of associations of as few as two links can connect any two individuals in a population the size of the United States, it is hardly surprising that she had some connection to one or more of the Zodiac victims, four of whom lived in or near Vallejo. Indeed, it would have been surprising if she hadn’t had such a connection.

I can illustrate the implications of social networking theory with examples from my own life. The story of the most spectacular one begins in April 1968, when Mary Ann and I were camping in Yugoslavia. We were trying to make our morning coffee with a cheap little kerosene cooker we had purchased in Athens, and it wasn’t working. An American couple camping nearby offered us the use of their Primus stove, and as we stood around waiting for the water to boil, we introduced ourselves. They, like us, were from the Bay Area; their names were Howell and Joan Breece. As we were waiting for the water to get hot, Joan stared intently at Mary Ann’s feet. Whatever we had been talking about, she suddenly changed the subject, asking Mary Ann if Jamie Robertson had made her sandals. Of course, he had; Robertson was an artisan whom both Joan and Mary Ann knew. In the ensuing conversation, it turned out that the Breeces knew two other people who were associates of mine, neither of whom had any connection to Robertson.

Over the next few decades of our acquaintanceship, I learned that Howell had been born and raised in China as the son of a professor at a missionary college. He had come to the U.S. for the first time at age 17 for a university education. Not long afterward, the Second World War came along, and following that, the Chinese revolution, and he never returned to the land of his birth. During the war, he had been drafted into the Navy, which sent him to a Japanese language institute in Colorado to learn Japanese prior to utilizing him as an intelligence officer (they reasoned that since he spoke Mandarin like a native, he would have little difficulty learning Japanese).

Thirty years after I met the Breeces, I was working as a librarian for the National Marine Fisheries Service at its laboratory in Tiburon, California. I had our journals bound once a year by a bindery in Sonoma owned by one Stewart Hummell. I would box them up and drive them over to Sonoma in the laboratory’s pickup truck, and he would bring them back bound in his station wagon. One time, the effort of schlepping a load of heavy cartons into the building left him bushed (he was in his eighties), and while he was getting his second wind, I struck up a conversation with him. I don’t recall how it got started, but he said something about his past that led me to draw him out about his life. He had been born and raised in China as the son of a professor at a missionary college. He had come to the U.S. just before the Second World War for a university education; because of the war and the subsequent revolution in China, he had never returned. During the war, he had been drafted into the Navy, which — because he spoke Mandarin like a native — had sent him to a Japanese language institute in Colorado before utilizing him as an intelligence officer.

He hadn’t gotten very far into his biography before I interrupted him. I said that I had a friend whose life had followed a very similar path and wondered if he knew him. “What’s his name?” Mr. Hummell asked. “Howell Breece,” I replied. “Howell Breece!” he exclaimed. “Why, I haven’t seen him since 1944!” I had thought the two of them might have known one another in China. They hadn’t. They had met for the first time at the Japanese language institute, where they were classmates, and they served together in the same office during the war — until 1944, when one or the other was transferred elsewhere. After the war, they had both settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for nearly a half century, until I had my conversation with Mr. Hummell, neither was aware of the other’s presence nearby. (I have a daughter, incidentally, who does not know either Howell Breece or Stewart Hummell and so was inspired by neither of them when she earned a BA in Japanese at the University of Colorado in the successor to the same institute at which they had learned the language.)

I had a friend in graduate school named Dave McCann, who was married to a woman named Feelie Lee. Feelie taught school in South San Francisco, and one of her co-workers was a woman whom both Dave and Fee tried to fix me up with (we were both single). We both resisted, and their matchmaking efforts came to naught. Two years later, when I was in the Army, I returned to the Bay Area on two weeks’ leave. Fee would not let me see Dave, since he was preparing for his PhD orals; he had received a Germanistic Society of America scholarship to the Free University Berlin (I had had the same scholarship, to the same institution, three years earlier, in addition to a Fulbright scholarship), and a friend of theirs in San Francisco was giving them a going-away party. She invited me to the party, where she said I could visit with Dave. I attended the party, and the hostess and I immediately fell head over heels in love with one another (we were married two months later, in the same courthouse where the Timothy McVeigh trial was scheduled to take place thirty years in the future). Naturally, she was the same woman whom Dave and Fee had unsuccessfully tried to fix me up with years before. That is a digression, and I would apologize for it if it weren’t such a good story. The main point is that the purpose of Dave’s coming sojourn in Berlin was to work on his dissertation, whose subject was playwright Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. His research included corresponding with Helene Weigel, Brecht’s widow. I knew Dave McCann, Dave McCann corresponded with Helene Weigel, and Helene Weigel had been married to Bertolt Brecht. There is thus a chain of associations connecting me to Brecht, and there are only two links separating us.

I took two courses at Berkeley from Heinz Politzer, one a Kafka course and the other on the application of Freudian psychology to the study of literature (during the Kafka course, Politzer appeared on an ABC television Sunday-afternoon show called Meet the professor; he took along six of his students to put on a mock Kafka seminar lasting fifteen minutes on national television — I was one of them and another was a young woman whom I married a year later and who is the mother of my daughter who went to the same school in Colorado that Howell Breece and Stewart Hummell attended). Politzer had been a friend and professional associate of Max Brod, and Brod had been a friend and colleague of Franz Kafka. Thus there is a chain of associations linking me to Franz Kafka consisting of only two links: I knew Politzer, Politzer knew Brod, and Brod knew Kafka.

When my mother and I lived in Carmel, California, she became the friend — and after my father went into the Army, the housemate — of a woman named Dorothea Bassett. Dorothea was married to W. K. Bassett, who had edited a left-wing publication titled Pacific weekly in the early 1930s. One of his associates at PW was muckraker Lincoln Steffens (who is best known for a comment on his visit to Russia shortly after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917: “I have been over into the future, and it works”). W. K. also knew Harry Bridges, the head of the International Longshore Workers Union and a long-time member of the Communist Party. I was the son of my mother, she knew Dorothea, Dorothea was married to W. K., and W. K. knew both Steffens and Bridges. Three links each. From his time in the Monterey-Pacific Grove area, my father was acquainted with marine biologist Edward Flanders Ricketts, who was a close friend of John Steinbeck. The chain linking me to Steinbeck has only two links. Dorothea’s son Oliver, who lived with me and my family after his mother’s death, worked as an extra in the movie One-eyed jacks (1961); thus, I am connected by a chain of one link to Marlon Brando, who directed and acted in that movie, and was, if only briefly, Oliver’s employer.

When I was a graduate student at Berkeley in academic year 1963-1965, one of my pals was the late F. Robert Lehmeyer. Bob’s roommate was a history grad student named Bernard Bachrach. For some time, a regular ritual at Bob and Bernie’s apartment was a Sunday-afternoon fan-tan game. One of the regular players was an acquaintance of Bernie’s from the history department, a woman named Nancy Maginnes. Ten years later, Nancy married Henry Kissinger, who was at that time U.S. Secretary of State. I was of course hurt when he did not consult with me about the peace negotiations with North Vietnam and the NLF, but what really stung was that he did not ask me for my opinion about Nixon’s trip to China in 1972, because he and I are connected by a chain of associations made up of one link: I used to play fan-tan with Nancy Maginnes, and she married him. The Wikipedia page on Kissinger shows a photograph of him and Nancy at the Metropolitan Opera in New York; thus there is a possibility that one of them has sat in the same seat I occupied the last time I was there (La forza del destino, 1967 — the lights stayed on that time).

(Just in case Nancy is reading this, I’ll address a remark to her. Nancy, I still remember your talking about how, back in your White Plains days, your mother disapproved of ketchup bottles on the dinner table, and so you kept one on the floor under your chair. When you and Henry got married, I started looking for a silver ketchup dispenser as a wedding present. Thirty-six years later, I’m still looking; please forgive the delay. I mean well.)

On a more poignant and recent note, the Coast Guard was alerted by the cruise ship Statendam to the abandoned 22-foot sailboat Rose about 70 miles northwest of Point Conception (California) on 13 May 2010. A thorough search by air and surface vessels failed to find the missing sailor and owner of the boat, Felix Knauth. Felix was my favorite high school teacher, and the Statendam was the ship I sailed on from New York to Rotterdam in 1962. Around the time that I was taking English and world history from Mr. Knauth, my dentist, Harold Rosenthal, was also lost at sea, not too far from where the Rose was found. Add to the list of my sins that I have transplanted the Bermuda Triangle to the Pacific Ocean.

In 1987, I spent some time on the phone talking to a Boston Herald reporter named Eric Fehrnstrom, with whom I also exchanged some written correspondence; Fehrnstrom wrote an article about a book that I had published that year which covered two pages in the Herald’s issue of 29 October 1987. Recently, Fehrnstrom has worked for both Scott Brown, elected in 2010 to the Senate to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy, and Mitt Romney, who would like to fill a hoped-for vacancy in the White House in 2012 (thus only one link separates me from Brown and Romney). And speaking of Republican politicians, I worked in 1983-1985 for Litigation Support Corporation in San Rafael. LSC had a small staff (about a dozen people), and I rubbed elbows with everybody, including the company president, Harry Dent Jr. Harry Jr.’s father, Harry Sr., was Richard Nixon’s Karl Rove. Thus there is a chain of associations linking me to Richard Nixon having only two links; somebody who is trying to connect me with right-wing politics would have an easy time of it because of my intimate connections to the Nixon administration and the Massachusetts wing of the GOP. These connections are offset politically, however, by my links to the far left (Lincoln Steffens, Harry Bridges, Bertolt Brecht, and John Steinbeck).

When I was in Beverly Hills in the summer of 1981 to confer with the editors of New West about an article I had submitted to the magazine, I made a trip to the men’s room, where I used a urinal abutting the one the magazine’s publisher, William F. Broyles, was using at the moment (Broyles had recently purchased New West from Clay Felker, vide supra). He and I introduced ourselves without shaking hands, which were otherwise engaged, and had a short conversation. A few years later, he wrote the screenplay for Apollo 13, in which the part of Jack Swigert is played by Kevin Bacon. I don’t know for sure that Broyles ever met Bacon, but such a meeting is plausible, and in any case, Bacon recited the dialogue and mimed the actions that Broyles had set forth in his screenplay. Thus I am connected to Kevin Bacon by a chain consisting of only one link. (Come to think of it, my ex-wife’s trust — vide infra — lost some money invested with UBS Financial Services, which had entrusted its funds to Bernard Madoff; Kevin Bacon also lost money to Madoff, so the beneficiaries of the trust — my children — are also connected to Kevin Bacon by a one-link chain, i.e. Madoff, who, as one of my daughters has pointed out, is well-named, since he made off with everybody else’s money.)

These observations are based on a very cursory examination of my life; a really thorough investigation would undoubtedly turn up many more such coincidental and amusing but not significant connections. But anyone ignorant of — or perhaps deliberately ignoring — social networking theory could twist them into a proof of almost any imaginable theory, for instance that my ties to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger involve me in Operation Linebacker, the Christmas 1972 bombing of North Vietnam. The same is true of everybody else on this planet. The reason that most people are unaware of the manifold ways that they are connected to everyone else is that they don’t ask the right questions. If all you ever talk about is baseball or the weather — or true-crime theories — you will never discover how close you are to Meryl Streep (I’m still looking for that one myself).

I like this one. The old six degrees of Kevin Bacon, to play that game do you actually have to know the person or just have met them?
If you only have to have met them then through extremely lousy navigation one day whilst doing a Security stint at Greenock, myself and a couple of the guards were allowed on board the QE2 for fifteen minutes for a peek, got lost near the Lido, asked some cabin crew, found the stairs (lovely paintings on easels on the stairs btw) sauntered around the shop area (all closed) and bumped into Buzz Aldrin and his wife who were on board for a lecture (nearly everyone else we met was English), it was only for 5 minutes but they were lovely. Given that Buzz has probably met a helluva lot of people on the planet (and the Moon ) would I win?

An intelligent essay by Penn, it not only refutes the stupidity of the Farmer accusations, it also refutes his own prior accusations against MOH!

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. haha.. Just saying....

Azazel wrote:

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. haha.. Just saying....

There is absolutely nothing (imo) that rings "Zodiac" in his writings. So if Penn is "the devil", it is a great trick!

Well, not in the text posted by Zam at least. I´ve seen other writings.
And he might not be involved, thats right. But he might as well be.
Or someone else on this board. Or he might have died many years before.
I understand people getting tired of Cels "Now its finished. Everyone can go home. Shows over. They got him"..
That way is making people dont even want to bother considering GP as a suspect.
That and the fact that many people have been banned after arguments with Farmer.
Perhaps eccentric, but considering the years and time invested on Penns part writing and researching O´Hare and to that starting Zodiac Assosiates or whatever the company name was raises the question why he havent even bother to join a forum. Everyone seems to know each other around the forum regardless of the Nicknames.
Many people have invested years in this case. And I for one feel the addiction that it brings.
Perhaps I need to go to rehab. Any Zodiacrehabcenters around?
Mr Penn should join the forum instead of sending a 4 part letter. He could have said it in one line. Coincidence could be coincidence. Or however that word is spelled..

I didn't mean to dismiss anyone elses feelings they may have in regards to their own theories of Penn being Zodiac. You certainly have that right. I have read enough about Penn to draw my own conclusions. But they are just that...mine.

I popped over to Opord to see if the letter was posted and found they are now discussing the nurse from Fairfield who was recently murdered and found near LB--AS A POSSIBLE ZODIAC CRIME. The whacky stuff some come up with....makes me feel as if those same types of conclusions were put into the Penn part of it. I think so.

For more on the topic of Gareth Penn, please see:

The Raymond Grant Books
https://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com/zodiac-books-f38/the-raymond-grant-books-t262.htm

MikeM wrote:

For more on the topic of Gareth Penn, please see:

The Raymond Grant Books
https://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com/zodiac-books-f38/the-raymond-grant-books-t262.htm

Hi Mike

I´m looking SO much forward to read your comming posts on the Raymond Grant book:)

Splendid Mike. I´ll enjoy reading this one.

Thanks Mike M., appreciate the great information. Look forward to reading everything.
Here's the next phase of Gareth Penn's Letter to us, the Zodiac Community. Please read, and give us your thoughts. I'm with Azazel on this one, I want more... I find it very addictive, so yes... I also need Zrehab "Hello my name is Zam* and I'm a Zlcoholic".


Appendix 2: the lawsuit


For reasons that I cannot fathom, my involvement in a lawsuit in 1995-1997 fascinates true-crime buffs hard-wired into the Matrix, er, Internet. I don’t understand why it has become an issue, but since it has, here are the facts for the record.

My ex-wife Mary Ann died of cancer in 1991, nine years after we separated and eight years after we were formally divorced. She was impecunious when alive, but death made her a millionaire. She had the house she and I had built (which her estate eventually sold for $635,000), and she had $400,000 worth of life insurance. Mortgage insurance paid off the house, so her estate had a pre-tax value of just over a million dollars. She wrote an elaborate will in dozens of pages establishing a living trust, and she appointed her sister, Lorna Winterrowd, to be the trustee. Our two children were the main beneficiaries.

Both California state law and the terms of the trust required the trustee to render a financial accounting to the beneficiaries at least once a year. The first three years of the life of the trust went by without any accounting. I consulted counsel and was advised to file a lawsuit immediately to force her to account for her stewardship. I could not do so in my own right, since I did not have standing. My son could, but my daughter could not, because she was still a minor. I obtained her consent to act as her guardian ad litem, and my son and I jointly filed a lawsuit seeking removal of the trustee and payment of any damages that might have resulted from mis-, mal-, or nonfeasance. The proceeding went on for over two years, during which time my daughter turned eighteen; at that point, I dropped out of the lawsuit, and she took it over, seeing it through to the settlement conference which concluded the suit.

The discovery process resulted in a mind-boggling array of misbehavior and neglect on the trustee’s part. Here’s a partial list:


1) The principal asset of the estate, the house, had been left uninsured against fire for three years; if it had burned down, the beneficiaries would have lost most of their inheritance. The trustee took out a fire insurance policy only after legal proceedings were begun.


2) Mary Ann had provided for a half-dozen small bequests to various individuals. The trustee had not paid any of them, saying that she had not been able to locate the recipients. Some of them were listed in the local telephone directory, and all but one of the rest could have been found simply by asking the beneficiaries, who knew their whereabouts. She made these payments only after the lawsuit was filed.


3) Mary Ann’s will had directed the trustee to cremate her remains and inurn the ashes at Tulocay Cemetery in Napa. She was cremated in Chicago, where she died, but her ashes resided for over three years in a tool shed in Napa, California. The trustee did not see to her inurnment until after the lawsuit was filed.


4) The trustee had deposited $250,000 of trust funds in a non-interest-bearing checking account and left it there for three years. If she had invested it in a certificate of deposit, the trust would have been enriched by somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000; as it was, it lost value to inflation. She finally invested the money in securities, but only after the lawsuit had started.


5) Mary Ann died with $120,000 in personal debt, of which $100,000 was from a line of credit secured by the house; the rest was credit card debt. The trustee put off paying these obligations for a year, although she had the funds to do so, incurring around $6000 in unnecessary finance charges, which came out of the beneficiaries’ pockets.


6) The trustee did not file an inheritance tax return until after the lawsuit was filed, more than three years after it was due. This exposed the trust to a 25% penalty and three years’ worth of interest payable to the IRS both on principal and penalty.


7) The only investment the trustee had made with trust money prior to the filing of the lawsuit was a loan to the father of a friend of hers. He had approached the trust for a loan because he could not obtain a loan from a bank, since he was not creditworthy. The loan was made at a very low interest rate and was secured by a second mortgage on the borrower’s condominium. Second mortgages are not a fiduciary-quality investment, due to their high risk to the lender, and the trustee would have been removed by a judge for this action alone if the case had come to trial. She called in the loan and terminated the second mortgage only after the lawsuit was filed.


The trustee hired an unlicensed and unbonded handyman to fix up the house preparatory to renting or selling it. She did not entertain bids and so had no legal hold over the workman. She couldn’t even take administrative action against his license, since he didn’t have one. Her arrangement with him was open-ended; she simply told him to do whatever he felt like doing and to send her the bill. He spent more money fixing up the house than I had spent building it from the ground up. When the work was done, she did not put the house on the market. It earned no income for the estate for over two years after having been refurbished. Under the pressure of a lawsuit, she rented it out for $650 a month, arguing, when challenged, that that was the going rate for a three-bedroom, two-bath house on a ten-acre lot with a fifty-mile view within commuting distance of San Francisco. Under even more pressure from the lawsuit, she finally turned the property over to a management company, which immediately rented it out for twice as much as what she had claimed was the going rate.


9) Under the terms of the trust, the trustee was obliged to provide financial support to the beneficiaries if they were enrolled in college. When my son was in college, he was frequently months in arrears on his rent because the trustee couldn’t be bothered to write him a check; after the lawsuit was filed, she did not respond to such requests from my daughter, now in college, unless they were addressed to her attorney, and even then, she dragged her feet.


10) The trustee treated the trust account as her own, writing checks on it to pay for her personal expenses. At the low end, she wrote checks drawn on the trust account to pay for a college transcript ($10) and a GRE report ($14) so that she could apply to UCLA to enroll in its MBA program. At the high end, she wrote a check for $32,500 to Mission Viejo Imports, a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Mission Viejo, California, using my children’s money to buy herself a luxury automobile.


11) The trustee, facing a lawsuit seeking to remove her from office and to require her to pay damages for losses the trust incurred through her stewardship (or lack thereof), retained legal counsel, which she paid for with trust money. In all, she spent another $30,000 of the beneficiaries’ money to this end. What she obtained with it was a torrent of letters written by her attorney (Larry Bemis, Newport Beach) accusing me of all manner of crimes and misdemeanors and asserting that his client had done nothing wrong or out of the ordinary. (My standards for slander were set by this episode, in which I was the target of $30,000 worth of the professionally written sort. The sophomoric kind written by amateurs proves once again that you get what you pay for.)


12) The trustee did all of these things (or left them undone, as the case may be) while paying herself fees out of the trust for managing it. If she had been removed by the court, she would have been ordered to repay these fees as well as the money she had spent on legal defense, since she did not perform the services she was paying herself for, and because of her mal-, mis-, and nonfeasance, she was not justified in spending trust funds to defend herself against a lawsuit seeking her removal.


The purpose of Bemis’s attacks on me was to drive a wedge between me and my children, particularly my daughter. For her part, Lorna flew my daughter down to Southern California and bought her hundreds of dollars worth of clothing at the mall. Since there was no way for them to deal with the substance of the complaint, their plan was to alienate my daughter from me and curry favor with her so that when she came of age, she would take sides with her aunt and drop the lawsuit. The plan didn’t work, and not long after her eighteenth birthday, Lorna chose to settle. As noted above, I did not participate in this part of the process, having been superseded by my daughter. The judge to whom the case was assigned participated in the settlement proceedings, observing aloud that there was little to distinguish the trustee from an ordinary embezzler; he estimated that if the case were to go to trial, he would probably assess damages of at least $45,000 and possibly as much as $60,000. The trustee settled for resigning, appointing a successor of the beneficiaries’ choosing, and paying them damages of $15,000. What I find particularly galling about this episode is that when Lorna and her mother were left destitute by her father’s death in 1973, Mary Ann and I contributed financially to Lorna’s support; half of that money came from me. I put food on her table when she was a teenager.

Likewise, I've enjoyed reading Mr. Penn's new letter and thanks for taking the time to post it.

And please thank Bently for having the foresight to buy these Raymond Grant books. He's asked me, several times, to post the information online after I read them (something I hadn't originally planned to do).

Thanks Bentley. I
And I was going to send you a mail about the books Mike.
I´ve been wondering about the part "The case against Hugh Penn" mostly. And the other parts almost as much haha.
What made Raymond consider making a chapter about the East Area Rapist profiler Hugh Penn. For that is the case right? (Yeah the case about the case...)
By the way I really like your "With Malice Aforethought".

Janice —

Here's something else for your to pass along. The attachment is a photograph of me taken in 1969. Several witnesses who saw the Zodiac in that year (on 4 July and 11 October) described him as clean-shaven. As you can see, I wore a beard in those days.

Gareth

PS: I mentioned in the biometrics section of D550 that I wear a size 12 shoe. Z. left a shoe print at Lake Berryessa, size 10-1/2.

Hi-

The interesting part of the photo is that GP had a classic "widow's peak" in those days. Fouke uses the phrase "widow's peak" to describe Z's hairline, but after hashing it out with him recently, what he really means is "receding hairline." GP did not have a "receding hairline" in this photo. Unless he was a James Dean fan from "Giant," this appears to rule him out.

Mike

Bottom line is, I dont think Penn ever weighed more than 165 lbs, at least I have never seen him in a photo weigh more. Most accounts of Z have him stocky, around 200 lbs. Also, if you believe NAPA PD's findings of the boot print at Berryessa, their findings also seem to place Z around 200 lbs

Azazel wrote:

I´ve been wondering about the part "The case against Hugh Penn" mostly. What made Raymond consider making a chapter about the East Area Rapist profiler Hugh Penn.

The case against Hugh Penn is actually Appendix #4 in the longest of Raymond Grant's three books, The Zodiac Murders: Solved Though I will get to it more extensively, Grant knew that Hugh Scott Penn was Gareth Penn's natural-birth father, and that they were close. The case against Hugh Penn asks a common-sense question -- what characteristics about Hugh Penn might his son have picked up and later used in the commission of the Zodiac crimes? Grant lists several, including Hugh Penn's extensive training in cryptography and his official position as a U.S. Army Intelligence Cryptographer during WWII.

One caution on the subject of this thread: Folks shouldn't jump to conclusions about anything they can't verify, with other eyewitnesses, the written record, or some basis of fact other than Mr. Penn. Though I don't want to address his recent communications until I've seen them in their entirety, living eyewitnesses who knew him during the 1968-72 time frame have a different recall of certain facts than he does. The written record also tells a different story in several places.

For instance, I've asked about his appearance, wondering whether or not he wore a beard, wondering why a young man described to me as "extremely handsome" with an eye for "all the pretty young things" would cover up his handsome face with a beard.

Recently, I interviewed a woman who worked with him ca 1969-71. "Gareth looked like a surfer-dude version of Lord Byron," she told me. "Strikingly handsome, poetic, and charming."

Lord Byron didn't wear a beard. So I asked.

"Did Gareth wear a beard?" I asked. "Do you remember him wearing a beard?"

"Once or twice," she told me. "But mostly, the Gareth I remember was clean shaven."

I find him curious. In the past some of his writings were like playin with our head. Times 17 seemed Z like. It was like he was
trying to draw attention to himself. As to say haha... I'm the Z and you can't even catch me now. I'm NOT saying he is the Z, but he seemed to say he was. Now this letter he sent to The Z Community, like he wants us to know he is NOT the Z. I find it curious and I would like to know as much as possible.
As far as the beard, I've seen guys grow them in and shave them off...in no time at all. And his weight, we've talked about that before. It's perception, to one person he could look big to another smaller. The composite "might" be close but I do NOT go by it
completely. I try to keep an open mind on all these POI's.
Looking forward to hearing the whole story, Mike M is going to present for us. So glad for that, and glad our Bentley picked up the Raymond Grant Books for Mike M.
Sometimes I think IF he isn't the Z, he was privy to some good Z information.
This will be a good Z week on this forum.....tell me more..

Zamantha wrote:

Sometimes I think IF he isn't the Z, he was privy to some good Z information.

Yes, like the blood stained prints on the cab dashboard he mentioned. He went on to say he had a pal in the SFPD lab at the time, wonder what else he might know and share at this point.

Mike M, thanks for coming on board, obviously the Grant books ended up in the right hands.

And Zam, a photo of Penn circa 1969, great work! Looks like the beginnings of the same beard and weird combover style as in his other photo.

I'm thinkin we all put our all into this. Read and Ponder. AND them maybe we can all put our heads together. Compile a list
of questions and we could hopefully get them off to him for straight ? answers. It's worth a try!??
I mean even IF he was just privy to info. I would like to know more about that, right??

Solar Pons wrote:

The only thing that interests me in this Penn/O'hare saga is that so many people can not see how he actually came up with O'Hare's name. When looking over the Crime of the Century notes lately I was struck by something. In amongst the notes it states that O'Hare was at Harvard, I had read this before, it states that he attended the JFK School of Government at Harvard, that was the part I did not know. Remember Tahoe's observation about the watch and the Phillips 66 Cipher the Omega sign and the JFK backwards.

The only other place I have seen JFK in association with anyone it is 'The Unmentionable' who apparently , according to the Opord site at the time attended the JFK School of Special Warfare apparently. (the last two weeks of Green Beret training happens in Pineland, The peoples Republic of Pineland, in an exersize known as Robin Sage. Opposing forces come from Opforland, just thought I'd throw this in there.)

There are so links between JFK's assassination and Troy Houghton and the Minutemen, I don't know where to begin. Let me just post this first page from the June 1966 Look Magazine article:




Here is Tahoe's handiwork on the Diablo Code. JFK is backwards, and the Omega sign appeared on the back of the Zodiac Omega watch, I believe. Watch clue for MINUTEman?



Regarding the topic at hand, it's just Penn being Penn. He wasn't Z, so what he says or people say about him is of no interest to me. But that's my opinion, of course.

Rand I posted that on March 17th, you didn't join the board until April, I wish I did have the advantage of being able to see into the future for then I would get those darn lottery numbers ka ching . I doubt it would take Gareth longer than a few days to grow that beard in. Shave it off, grow it back, nice and trimmed though.

Sorry Solar Pons, I didn't notice the date of the post. Never mind...

That's allright mate, no worries

I shall add that the picture of Gareth as compared to the composite appears to have no lines between the eyes or lines on the forehead, he looks very fresh faced indeed. He also has a pair of quite full lips IMO, not what I would describe as 'thin lips' the description we usually see. From the kids and Fouke's descriptions they don't describe him pulling an angry face as though he were in a rage thus forcing lines to appear. He has smooth features.