Gareth Penn

Is that a fact Zabagliona? Didnt know that.
Seriously. There is no fact about why he choose his victims.
Are you really saying that that is a fact or are you just trying to have another post at your record?
(the system of different grades according to how many post they made sometimes goes terrible wrong.)
If you are serious, you really ahould go back and start reading the whole case from the beginning. Really.
I dont know why on earth you still hang around the Gareth Penn thread.
You made up your mind a long time ago. I read your posts at ZKF so I know where you stand.

Its god to have disagreements. That way we can all move forward with different POI:s.
But its insane to start with telling people this and that is a fact. There is facts. But things about why he choose his victims, why he choose his name, why he choose the locations, why he used a knife, why he used a gun etc is guessing. Theoris and guessing.
You might think you know the Zodiac. I doubt it. You have to know the Zodiac and talk to him to find out what his motives was.
And why he choose his victims and locations and so on and on. And thats a fact.

This is my last post on ZKS, but being the compulsive answerer-of-posts that I am, I'll try to go out the door arguing:

“Ray - you mention that both Darlene and David had the word "Easter" in a morse code version of their name.” Quagmire

Nope! I said that, when the names are converted to Morse code, the word EASTER appears in a redivision of the dots and dashes (but the same sequence, obviously).

‘a morse code version’ suggests that somehow I’m manipulating the sequence, which I’m not. If I convert anyone’s name, including yours and mine, into Morse code (note that the first letter of ‘Morse’ is capitalized, because that’s also someone’s name), I’ll get the same sequence every single time. Okay?

“So are you saying that Zodiac chose his victims by design based on a random word appearing in their names?” Quagmire

Well, the word EASTER is random from their standpoint; it’s not random from his. I suspect he was always looking for victims whose names contained EASTER (that would be about one person in 100), and whose initials were D-F (don’t ask me what the odds of that were, since people actually choose what names they call their children, and don’t normally pay attention to what words appear in the Morse code spelling of those names).

“I see the sense of having secret messages encoded in his letters but wouldn't it be far fetched for a serial killer to "digitize" a series of kids' names . . .” Quagmire

People over at the ZKF board objected to my criticizing the reading comprehension skills of posters there, and yet, I run into the same thing over here. Readers find something to object to in my book, usually from the “common sense” standpoint, but they don’t read the passages (usually directly accompanying those points) where I deal with those possible objections.

I use the word ‘digitize’ because I normally convert letters via Morse code into digits, both because they’re easier to read that way (who reads dots and dashes on a page nowadays?), and because it makes a reading in binary math possible. BUT, when I’m converting letters to letters (as is the case with the word EASTER in the names of the two Vallejo drivers), it’s just a straight Morse code translation. Any telegraph operator from the 19th century could have gotten the same result without even thinking about it.

That’s the point—Morse code is essentially a dead language, which is part of the reason the Zodiac can use it without people being able to understand, even when it’s explained to them. If you get a chance to see the movie, Young Tom Edison, with Mickey Rooney, that’s how they stop the train from going off the cliff at the end—Young Tom sends a Morse code message using the whistle of another locomotive, and his sister translates it on the incoming train and tells the conductor that THE BRIDGE IS OUT just in time for him to pull the cord and stop the train.

“ . . . but wouldn't it be far fetched for a serial killer to "digitize" a series of kids' names (kids who seem to be unknown to him and who have no particular link to him) to find a nonsensical word and then happen to find them both in lovers lanes late at night and shoot them and their partners? I'm guessing he would have had to have known of Darlene Ferrin and followed her at night for some months until the opportunity arose to kill her. If he was this dedicated and this indeed was his design, then do Stine, Shepard, etc have the same links?” Quagmire

OF COURSE it’s far-fetched (use that hyphen, that’s why it’s there)!

That’s the whole point! He’s doing something that’s unprecedented! He’s creating a design, and when you create a design, you select the elements of that design (usually, or you select the relatively random method of someone like Jackson Pollock, but even he had a technique called “The Controlled Drip”). He’s picking the victims, picking the location, and picking the time of death.

EASTER, as I said above, is far from nonsensical within his scheme.

Plus, as I say in the book if you ever bother to actually read it, his schedule and even his list of victims (he does say he has a Little List of victims in The Mikado Letter) was probably flexible. I’m sure he scouted people out, but I’m guessing it always came down to what was available at a particular time.

“How would Z know that Shepard and Hartnell were going to LB, much less know when and where at LB? How could someone believe that the number of stabbings at LB (which Penn got wrong, btw) has something to do with the killer's mother's birthday? That's compelling evidence? How could intelligent people believe this kind of tortured logic? It just never ceases to amaze me.” Rand

Well, I say in the book, in the Lake Berryessa section, that locating Bryan Hartnell and somehow trailing him way out to Lake B does seem problematical to me. But if you see evidence of placing the other victims on the map, you have to assume he was doing the same thing at Lake B. Hugh Penn had access to the state’s motor vehicle data base, so locating Bryan Hartnell’s car wouldn’t have been difficult. You could start trailing him at his house (since you also had access to his driver’s licence information) and then just follow him all day. I would think someone as bright as Bryan Hartnell would probably be aware of people trailing him, but police often use a group approach when they’re following someone (as demonstrated on Dragnet and Adam-12), and the Zodiac, at least operationally, was more than one person. Plus, Bryan was with a girl he liked. That might at least partially explain Z’s predilection for lovers lane couples—they tend to be a little preoccupied.

I think Bryan Hartnell is now saying that he was stabbed six times, not seven. That’s a quibble, since he survived and there’s no record of what his body looked like after the attack. The figure of seven had to have come from an official source, probably the hospital, since it was reported that way at the time. Cecelia Ann Shepard was stabbed ten times, as her autopsy says.

Ordinarily, a reference to his mother wouldn’t figure into the discussion of a serial murderer’s crimes. In this case, I’m saying she was one of the plotters of that series of crimes, so her signature has to appear somewhere.

Rand, where are you going to post when I leave?

What are you going to do with yourself?

“He wouldn't....But, what he WOULD know, is that it was a popular picnicking spot for couples, just like he knew about the lover's lane type spots, just like he knew he would find a cabbie near the theatres...

For all we know, he had already been to Lake B. on several occasions, with no luck finding victim(s)...or the victim "type" he was after...

With Z, finding the victim was all about "hanging out" in the area where he knew a certain "type" of victim would be, rather than going after specific people, I think...” Zabagliona

I actually agree with Zabag here. If I’m right about the overall design, it still would have required a lot of legwork to scout out where certain Zodiac murder candidates tended to hang out. People are more predictable, in terms of where they go, than we usually think. The editor of the Shady Avenue Magazine here in Pittsburgh, Nancy Polinsky, once told me (and also said in an editorial) that she spends all her time in three neighborhoods—Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Oakland. I live in Squirrel Hill (on Shady Avenue!), and work in Oakland, so it might only be two neighborhoods for me.

And if adults are predictable, kids are a lot more so, and usually a lot less aware of who’s hanging out and watching them. I think that’s probably why all his victims are young people. If you watch David Fincher’s movie, you’ll see that Darlene picks up Michael in front of his house, then they go to Mr. Ed’s, and then, when Darlene suggests they go someplace quiet, Michael smiles, because he knows exactly where they’re going. Three locations.

“Exactly!!!!!!! The names of the victims are irrelevant, of course! There is a good chance Z never even knew what they were, as evidenced by him using descriptors like "the kids" or "teenagers" or "the girl" or "the boy" or "the cabbie" to describe his victims...

By irrelevant, I mean that he did not know their names or his victims beforehand, not that the victims themselves are irrelevant, which or course they are not....” Zabagliona

Three people named FERRIN received phone calls following Darlene’s murder, an hour-and-a-half afterward. He shines a flashlight at the couple for some reason, but probably just to make sure Darlene is there. He writes on Bryan Hartnell’s car (granted, it was the only one there besides his own, but the message itself suggests that he planned to leave it ahead of time, and wasn’t just making it up on the spot). And, if you think Z committed the murder in Riverside, he obviously knew which car was Cheri’s.

Well, I think my work is done here.

Adios!

Best of luck Ray, we will leave the thread up for those that are interested in it.

Zamantha wrote:

Gareth gave me permission to share his email:

Dear Zam,

Thank you (I think) for forwarding the sample posts to me. One of the things that dismays me is that they seem to indicate that the two halves of the brain are not communicating with one another. I see a couple of writers questioning whether I graduated from college and another mischaracterizing my employment as a reference librarian (about which more later). These two people need to get together; by cooperating, they could use a logical process called inference to answer at least the first question. Libraries fill reference-librarian slots with candidates who have an MLS or MLIS, which is a postgraduate degree. In other words, to work in such a job, you have to have gotten a diploma in graduate school. And in order to be admitted to graduate school, you have to have an undergraduate degree (usually a BA); this means that you have to graduate from college. Thus, the fact that I was employed in a job requiring a postgraduate degree invites the inference that I have such a degree as well as the undergraduate degree which is its prerequisite. Another poster complains that the University of California will not disclose my records. This person needs to know that Berkeley, like other institutions of higher learning, has a verification office, which is used by prospective employers to verify the degrees claimed by job applicants. They don’t give out records, but they do verify degrees, and if that is what you want to do, then you can make use of that service.

In a spoof of a post from a Dane who goes by the pseudonym “theforeigner,” I suggested a parallel with Albert Camus’ novel L’étranger, saying that “theforeigner” is a translation of that title. To those who object that the novel is titled The stranger, let me point out that étranger means both “foreigner” and “stranger” and that the Oxford Hachette French dictionary gives “foreigner” as the first definition of étranger and étranger as the first definition of of “foreigner.” In “theforeigner”’s country (Denmark), the novel is published as Den fremmede, which means both “the stranger” and “the foreigner.” And for the benefit of those who think that there is a one-to-one relationship between English and foreign-language vocabulary or that book titles are immutable, Camus’ novel is published as The stranger in the U.S.; in the U.K., it appears under the title The outsider.

On the subject of the Sunday and Wednesday puzzles and the codicil to the second, I think that “Reginald Graham Wordsworth” is a delightful solution to the Wednesday-puzzle codicil, but I have no idea how the solver arrived at this result or who Reginald Graham Wordsworth is. In other words, I don’t get it. Before anybody expends any more effort on these paltry little puzzles of mine, I would like to invoke the spirit of Robert Hooke, who proposed, a couple of centuries ago, a law of elasticity, which he published as an anagram: CEIIINOSSSTTVV. The only person who can testify as to the content of an anagram is the one who made it. Hooke intended to establish a claim to the principle by publishing it but to withhold the solution until a time that suited him. The Sunday and Wednesday puzzles (plus codicil) have the same purpose; I believe that they are completely unsolvable without knowing the context in which they are set. Here’s a parallel. When playing Trivial Pursuit, don’t read the question and guess the answer; read the answer and try to guess the question. If the answer is “nine,” the question might be “How many Justices are there on the Supreme Court?” or “How many innings are there in a baseball game?” or “What is the cube root of 729?” It is impossible to come up with the right question without a context. In gz4216, I answer a question by pointing out some formal characteristics of the Zodiac’s ciphers which I feel those interested in them ought to be paying attention to. Those who want to learn something would be better advised, in my view, to concentrate on them than on my paltry essays. For the benefit of those who do so, here’s another formal observation about them. The first two ciphers are written in the format of a perfect rectangle conforming to the description n x 17, where 17 = the number of columns and n = the number of rows. The third and fourth ciphers depart from this general description. Since the fourth cipher has a 17-column row followed by a 15-column row, it appears that the times-17 principle is still in effect and that where the third and fourth ciphers depart from the first two is that they are imperfect. There is a general description applying to the third and fourth ciphers that does not apply to the first two, namely that in both cases, the number of cipher symbols used is a cube plus five (13 = the cube of 2 + 5; 32 = the cube of 3 + 5). If students of the Zodiac were to devote more thought to formal aspects of the literature, I feel they would make more progress than what I see in the posts you forward to me from time to time.

Now, about my employment at Solano County Library. The post you sent me appears, on the basis of internal evidence, to be the work product of Mike Martin, and his informant from the distant past appears to be my onetime supervisor Joyce Crooks. Before going any farther, let me fill in some historical background, which I feel is needed to understand the story. Vallejo city librarian Homer Fletcher’s legacy was a new main library built with federal urban renewal funds, at the foot of Georgia Street, to replace the old Carnegie library. It was monumental by comparison with the old building, having about two acres of floor space on three levels. It was planned when the world price of oil was $2 a barrel and building standards called for air-conditioning and heating systems requiring a boiler and a chiller operating simultaneously and no openable windows. What Fletcher did not foresee was the size of the utility bill. He retired just as the building was being completed, and his replacement, Josephine Becker, almost had a heart attack when she saw the PG&E bill, which threatened to break the bank.

Her first reaction was to save money by closing the only branch library, at Springstowne on the other side of the freeway. Interstate 80 bisects Vallejo, and on the east side of I-80, there are only two outposts of city government: a fire station and the Springstowne branch library (which are housed in the same building). There are no city parks east of the freeway; they are all on the west side. When Mrs. Becker proposed closing the branch, incensed east-siders, who wanted to see some evidence of their tax money in their part of town, lit their torches and sharpened the tines of their pitchforks, threatening to storm city hall and get Mrs. Becker fired from her job. She had walked right into a buzz saw. She withdrew the proposal and decided to recoup the money instead by closing the entire bottom level of the main library, requiring the children’s department and audio-visual to move upstairs and share the main reading room with the reference department. Among the facilities closed off to the public by this arrangement was the McCune Room, which housed the local history collection. The collection stayed there, but it was unstaffed and closed to the public except by special arrangement. The east-siders were somewhat appeased, but a simmering hostility toward Mrs. Becker lingered, which caused her to treat every issue related to East Vallejo gingerly. She received a number of complaints about the Springstowne librarian, whose demeanor and conduct indicated to Springstowne patrons that she could not care less about the branch or about them. There were also complaints having to do with hygiene, some of them from staff. Among other things, the current occupant of the job was given to chewing on toothpicks all day long and discarding them everywhere. The person who provided children’s services at Springstowne complained about having to pick up twisted, frayed, saliva-soaked, lipstick-smeared bits of wood from the checkout counter and elsewhere and having to dispose of them.

The writer of the post you sent me says that I was sent to Springstowne “to earn [my] keep.” In fact, Mrs. Becker chose me for the job, as she impressed on me at the time, because I was a relatively new employee and a fresh face who had not antagonized people in that part of town, whom she wanted to reassure that she was not going to close their branch library, and she charged me with getting that message across. In other words, the reason that I went there was political. Then I read that while at Springstowne, I played the “chauvinist” overseeing a “staff of awestruck, attractive young ladies.” In fact, there was only one other library employee at the branch other than myself. I was there for two years. In the first year, my assistant, who provided children’s services such as story hour, was a woman who had been living for a number of years with a POSSLQ and was about thirty years of age. Attractiveness is a subjective criterion, and opinions will differ on this score; but “awestruck” does not describe this person. She had seen and done it all. Her first stop on Monday mornings was the reference department downtown to leaf through PDR to find out what she had been partying on the previous weekend. When she went back downtown to work, she was replaced by a woman a couple of years younger than I who had been married for a dozen years and was a homeowner. She had a zany sense of humor (which I appreciated) and we got along well. Finally, if Joyce Crooks is saying that I was more productive supervising myself than when she was my supervisor, one would have to conclude that she should not have supervised anybody in the first plce. It appears that neither she nor Martin has thought this through.

Then the author takes me to task for claiming to have “directed” the McCune Room. This just after having quoted me as saying that I was “in charge of” it. Note to posters: if you want to fault me for something that you have quoted me as saying, be sure to falsify the quote first so that it jibes with what you are faulting me for. Joyce Crooks herself put me in charge of the McCune Room, giving me one of the three keys to it. The other two were held by the county librarian (by this time, Vallejo City Library had merged with Solano County) and the janitor. In a pinch, the janitor could open up the room, but most of the time, it was my responsibility to accompany patrons to the McCune Room to use the local history collection. This arrangement was required because the McCune Room had been unstaffed and locked up because of the utility bill problem (see above).

The poster/Martin asserts that I worked on TIMES 17 during the 1970s and that I did so at work, on company time. Like so much else of Martin’s work product, this is a blend of a microscopic amount of truth and a whopping amount of malicious fabrication. The truth is that I did work on a book in the 1970s, but it wasn’t TIMES 17. Its working title was In vivo veritas, and its subject was a biologist named Ted Walker, whom I had met while on an eight-day whale-watching cruise from San Diego to San Ignacio Lagoon, Baja California, in February 1977. Little Brown showed some interest in it but failed to follow through, and the project fizzled. Crooks was indeed annoyed by the book’s impact on my work, but not because I was writing at work. In the summer of 1977, I asked to be reduced to a half-time employee so that I would have time to work on this project, and Mrs. Becker agreed to my request. Over the next six months, Crooks was hard pressed to provide desk coverage; she couldn’t find anybody who wanted a permanent half-time job, and she was reduced to hiring substitutes ad hoc, and sometimes the people who did substitute work were not available. Eventually, she prevailed on Mrs. Becker to put me back on full-time. The only time my work on this book ever intruded on my job was an occasion when an editor at Little Brown called me at home and was referred to my work number by my wife, so he called me at the library, and I confess to having spent ten minutes of company time talking to him.

Elsewhere, I have admitted to having had an extramarital affair with a co-worker, who is probably the inspiration for the “awestruck, attractive young ladies” this author mentions. She was young, and she was attractive, but again, “awestruck” doesn’t fit, since (to provide her with a pseudonym) XYZ had an irreverent attitude toward authority and was particularly contemptuous of Joyce Crooks, whom she despised. I don’t mean to stereotype anybody when I say this, but Crooks was a particularly combative lesbian of the sort who hates men. She resented the presence of male employees on her staff, and she made life difficult for both of us. I cannot suppress a “That’s rich!” when reading that she characterizes me as a wolf preying on innocent young girls. The library employed a few teenage girls, students from the community college, as part-time shelvers, and Crooks was unable to conceal her lecherous inclinations toward them; she fawned over them and addressed them with smarmy pet names. She did, however, draw the line at drooling on them. As a manager, she was volatile and irrational. There were many times when the air around her fairly crackled with tension. She was a prodigious absentee; she overdrew her sick leave and contrived lengthy shopping trips in the East Bay so that she could stay in Berkeley and spare herself the commute to Vallejo. XYZ told me that she had had a conversation with Crooks in the staff lunch room in which Crooks asserted, with all the assurance of someone who has read something written on the firmament in mile-high letters by an angel with a flaming sword, that men cannot satisfy women sexually. XYZ got the feeling that Crooks was hitting on her and flippantly retorted that she ought to try sleeping with me. She knew how much Crooks and I loathed one another and thought this would be a suitable comeuppance. I am sure that Crooks found the suggestion just as revolting as I would have found it had our positions been reversed. I complained about her twice to administration, which took my side both times. Everybody heaved a sigh of relief when Crooks moved on to a job with Alameda County. It didn’t take long for reports from down south to filter through the grapevine about how ticked off her co-workers there were because of her absenteeism. I could go on and on; anyway, this is the person who, in collaboration with Mike Martin (whose work product would be greatly improved by telling the truth now and then) is trying to blacken my name.

I get the general impression from these posts that the reason Zodiac websites are so unproductive is that the people who frequent them become so absorbed in what Bill Clinton calls the politics of personal destruction that they lose sight of their original objective. It seems to me that the best way to get at the subject is through the letters written by the Zodiac and that everybody is doing it the wrong way. The situation is not unlike that of someone who receives a letter written in Lithuanian and insists on reading it as if it were misspelled English, then persists in doing so for forty years, expressing his exasperation every now and then over not finding anything of value in it. It seems to me that the sensible thing to do is either a) learn to read Lithuanian; or b) find someone who knows Lithuanian and can translate it. I have suggested elsewhere, and have put on a demonstration or two to prove it, that the Zodiac is concealing meaning by writing in Morse Code. I have several other proofs of this to offer if anybody is interested. Another aspect of his peculiar means of self-expression is that he writes two-dimensionally. Edwin Abbott’s book Flatland takes place in a world inhabited by two-dimensional (flat) beings. At one point in the story, the Flatlanders are visited by a sphere, a denizen of a three-dimensional world called Spaceland. The sphere tries in vain to explain what Spaceland is like, using ingenious demonstrations as well as verbal descriptions, but the Flatlanders lack the perspective of the z-axis and so cannot grasp what the sphere is saying. This is a similar situation. Everyday language is one-dimensional, and if someone tries to communicate with you two-dimensionally, you will either have to change your viewpoint or give up trying to understand him.

I am attaching four exhibits to illustrate this. All four are excerpts from Zodiac texts from which I have omitted all non-alphanumeric symbols (spaces, ampersands, and punctuation marks). The texts are also formatted the same way as the author’s ciphers, as 17-column rectangles. The first exhibit is taken from “THE CONFESSION,” postmarked in Riverside on 29 November 1966. The author purports to have murdered a woman named Bates with a knife on the previous 30 October, a date written numerically as 10/30. The name BATES appears once in the text and KNIFE twice. I have highlighted BATES and the first KNIFE. The column marked by BATES and the row marked by KNIFE intersect at position #1030 (the 1030th alphanumeric character of the text). In other words, BATES and KNIFE define a point expressing the date on which someone named Bates was murdered with a knife. The second exhibit is excerpted from the letter mailed to the San Francisco Examiner on 1 August 1969. I have highlighted the place name VALLEJO and the phrase 4TH OF JULY. If the Arabic 4 = the fourth of July, and if each subsequent character = one day, then the next fourth of July (i.e. 4TH OF JULY + 365) = the highlighted letter I in Row 37. These two consecutive fourth of Julys intersect at the name of a community in which the author committed a murder on the fourth of July. The third example is excerpted from the letter to the San Francisco Chronicle postmarked on 26 July 1970. It contains four instances of the string PI, of which the first two are highlighted here. PI is, of course, the name of a natural number written with the Greek letter π and approximating 3.14…. PI and PI intersect at position #314. The fourth example is from the letter sent to the Chronicle on 31 July 1969 covering one third of the first cipher. The other two thirds are covered by letters addressed to other newspapers. Each of the other two cover letters contains one instance of END, as part of the word WEEKEND. This letter contains three ENDs. The two surplus ENDs intersect at the end of the text. In short, two things can define a third by intersection: victim and weapon define the date on which the victim was murdered with that weapon, two iterations of a date define the place where the author committed a crime on that date, the verbal form of a number defines a position expressing the same number in numerical form, or two repetitions of a word denoting a thing can define the thing itself. These are examples of two-dimensional effects that are format-dependent. Another way of expressing things in two-D is found in Row 31 of the first example, where we find the first instance in the Zodiac literature of PI (in STUPID). It is conventional to identify grid points by row and column number, in that order. In this manner, the position of PI is expressed as 31, 4 (π = 3.14…).

I think that if people would tear themselves away from trashing me for a few minutes and consider these examples, they might get an idea about how to spend their time more productively than is currently the case. I anticipate that this will never happen, but I want it never to be said of me that I didn’t try.

Yours,

Gareth

Attachment:

Ray Grant wrote:

This is my last post on ZKS, but being the compulsive answerer-of-posts that I am, I'll try to go out the door arguing:

“Ray - you mention that both Darlene and David had the word "Easter" in a morse code version of their name.” Quagmire

Nope! I said that, when the names are converted to Morse code, the word EASTER appears in a redivision of the dots and dashes (but the same sequence, obviously).

‘a morse code version’ suggests that somehow I’m manipulating the sequence, which I’m not. If I convert anyone’s name, including yours and mine, into Morse code (note that the first letter of ‘Morse’ is capitalized, because that’s also someone’s name), I’ll get the same sequence every single time. Okay?

“So are you saying that Zodiac chose his victims by design based on a random word appearing in their names?” Quagmire

Well, the word EASTER is random from their standpoint; it’s not random from his. I suspect he was always looking for victims whose names contained EASTER (that would be about one person in 100), and whose initials were D-F (don’t ask me what the odds of that were, since people actually choose what names they call their children, and don’t normally pay attention to what words appear in the Morse code spelling of those names).

“I see the sense of having secret messages encoded in his letters but wouldn't it be far fetched for a serial killer to "digitize" a series of kids' names . . .” Quagmire

People over at the ZKF board objected to my criticizing the reading comprehension skills of posters there, and yet, I run into the same thing over here. Readers find something to object to in my book, usually from the “common sense” standpoint, but they don’t read the passages (usually directly accompanying those points) where I deal with those possible objections.

I use the word ‘digitize’ because I normally convert letters via Morse code into digits, both because they’re easier to read that way (who reads dots and dashes on a page nowadays?), and because it makes a reading in binary math possible. BUT, when I’m converting letters to letters (as is the case with the word EASTER in the names of the two Vallejo drivers), it’s just a straight Morse code translation. Any telegraph operator from the 19th century could have gotten the same result without even thinking about it.

That’s the point—Morse code is essentially a dead language, which is part of the reason the Zodiac can use it without people being able to understand, even when it’s explained to them. If you get a chance to see the movie, Young Tom Edison, with Mickey Rooney, that’s how they stop the train from going off the cliff at the end—Young Tom sends a Morse code message using the whistle of another locomotive, and his sister translates it on the incoming train and tells the conductor that THE BRIDGE IS OUT just in time for him to pull the cord and stop the train.

“ . . . but wouldn't it be far fetched for a serial killer to "digitize" a series of kids' names (kids who seem to be unknown to him and who have no particular link to him) to find a nonsensical word and then happen to find them both in lovers lanes late at night and shoot them and their partners? I'm guessing he would have had to have known of Darlene Ferrin and followed her at night for some months until the opportunity arose to kill her. If he was this dedicated and this indeed was his design, then do Stine, Shepard, etc have the same links?” Quagmire

OF COURSE it’s far-fetched (use that hyphen, that’s why it’s there)!

That’s the whole point! He’s doing something that’s unprecedented! He’s creating a design, and when you create a design, you select the elements of that design (usually, or you select the relatively random method of someone like Jackson Pollock, but even he had a technique called “The Controlled Drip”). He’s picking the victims, picking the location, and picking the time of death.

EASTER, as I said above, is far from nonsensical within his scheme.

Plus, as I say in the book if you ever bother to actually read it, his schedule and even his list of victims (he does say he has a Little List of victims in The Mikado Letter) was probably flexible. I’m sure he scouted people out, but I’m guessing it always came down to what was available at a particular time.

“How would Z know that Shepard and Hartnell were going to LB, much less know when and where at LB? How could someone believe that the number of stabbings at LB (which Penn got wrong, btw) has something to do with the killer's mother's birthday? That's compelling evidence? How could intelligent people believe this kind of tortured logic? It just never ceases to amaze me.” Rand

Well, I say in the book, in the Lake Berryessa section, that locating Bryan Hartnell and somehow trailing him way out to Lake B does seem problematical to me. But if you see evidence of placing the other victims on the map, you have to assume he was doing the same thing at Lake B. Hugh Penn had access to the state’s motor vehicle data base, so locating Bryan Hartnell’s car wouldn’t have been difficult. You could start trailing him at his house (since you also had access to his driver’s licence information) and then just follow him all day. I would think someone as bright as Bryan Hartnell would probably be aware of people trailing him, but police often use a group approach when they’re following someone (as demonstrated on Dragnet and Adam-12), and the Zodiac, at least operationally, was more than one person. Plus, Bryan was with a girl he liked. That might at least partially explain Z’s predilection for lovers lane couples—they tend to be a little preoccupied.

I think Bryan Hartnell is now saying that he was stabbed six times, not seven. That’s a quibble, since he survived and there’s no record of what his body looked like after the attack. The figure of seven had to have come from an official source, probably the hospital, since it was reported that way at the time. Cecelia Ann Shepard was stabbed ten times, as her autopsy says.

Ordinarily, a reference to his mother wouldn’t figure into the discussion of a serial murderer’s crimes. In this case, I’m saying she was one of the plotters of that series of crimes, so her signature has to appear somewhere.

Rand, where are you going to post when I leave?

What are you going to do with yourself?

“He wouldn't....But, what he WOULD know, is that it was a popular picnicking spot for couples, just like he knew about the lover's lane type spots, just like he knew he would find a cabbie near the theatres...

For all we know, he had already been to Lake B. on several occasions, with no luck finding victim(s)...or the victim "type" he was after...

With Z, finding the victim was all about "hanging out" in the area where he knew a certain "type" of victim would be, rather than going after specific people, I think...” Zabagliona

I actually agree with Zabag here. If I’m right about the overall design, it still would have required a lot of legwork to scout out where certain Zodiac murder candidates tended to hang out. People are more predictable, in terms of where they go, than we usually think. The editor of the Shady Avenue Magazine here in Pittsburgh, Nancy Polinsky, once told me (and also said in an editorial) that she spends all her time in three neighborhoods—Shadyside, Squirrel Hill, and Oakland. I live in Squirrel Hill (on Shady Avenue!), and work in Oakland, so it might only be two neighborhoods for me.

And if adults are predictable, kids are a lot more so, and usually a lot less aware of who’s hanging out and watching them. I think that’s probably why all his victims are young people. If you watch David Fincher’s movie, you’ll see that Darlene picks up Michael in front of his house, then they go to Mr. Ed’s, and then, when Darlene suggests they go someplace quiet, Michael smiles, because he knows exactly where they’re going. Three locations.

“Exactly!!!!!!! The names of the victims are irrelevant, of course! There is a good chance Z never even knew what they were, as evidenced by him using descriptors like "the kids" or "teenagers" or "the girl" or "the boy" or "the cabbie" to describe his victims...

By irrelevant, I mean that he did not know their names or his victims beforehand, not that the victims themselves are irrelevant, which or course they are not....” Zabagliona

Three people named FERRIN received phone calls following Darlene’s murder, an hour-and-a-half afterward. He shines a flashlight at the couple for some reason, but probably just to make sure Darlene is there. He writes on Bryan Hartnell’s car (granted, it was the only one there besides his own, but the message itself suggests that he planned to leave it ahead of time, and wasn’t just making it up on the spot). And, if you think Z committed the murder in Riverside, he obviously knew which car was Cheri’s.

Well, I think my work is done here.

Adios!

At Ray's request, he has "retired" from this forum ( and other Z forums I suspect). I will honor his request, and delete his membership. But once again, I will leave his posts up for those that are interested.

Did he give a reason?

Guest wrote:

Rand, where are you going to post when I leave? What are you going to do with yourself?

Well, let's see, Ray. I've made about 4 posts here and 360 on the Troy Houghton thread. Hmmmmm. I wonder what the answer to this question will be. Hmmmmmm. What will I do with myself? Not to mention that I'm writing a book on the future of world politics based on my recent National Interest article, and I'm a full professor, and I was recently ranked 23rd in my field, and have to give talks at Columbia and MIT next month on my work. Hmmmm. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself if I can't write an occasional post about Gareth Penn. Good question, Ray. With you gone, my life is going to be completely empty. I think I'll go cry in the corner.

Let's be nice. I personally think Ray was way off base in his theories, and maybe "talked down to" those of us with IQ's not as high as his.. , but he was a nice enough guy. Anyhow, he has moved on, and we should too.

The reason he gave was that he was a "compulsive replier" (as he put it) to the questions asked of him. He would get tied up answering questions and not be able to work on his book, or so he claimed. So in the interest of the book, he felt it best to move on. Personally, I think it had more to do with the questions regarding some inaccuracies of his findings, posed by members here, and on another forum, but thats just a guess.

Well, Ray certainly posted some interesting comments and theories but I for one do not think he was thick skinned enough to deal with the relevant questions that arose here and I think you need that if you are going to have such a strong, single-minded opinion of who the Zodiac was and what the method was to his madness. Also, if you are going to write a book entitled Zodiac Murders Solved or words to that effect then you have to be able to stand up and take the questions especially when your theories involve mathematical numerology which is sketchy at best and the method keeps being changed in order to fit each suspect.

I still don't see how Zodiac "digitized" (I'm using that word because it seems that saying that he converted their names into a version of morse-code obviously upset Ray) Darlene Ferrin and David Faraday's name to come up with the word Easter and used this as his master plan to select victims. He apparently conveniently forgot about this plan when going after all the other victims as unless I am missing something, their names do not "digitize" to create the word Easter. Maybe that doesn't matter though, if the next victim is attacked on a day that is similar to a birthday belonging to Zodiac's dad? Or that the victim after this drives a cab and Zodiac's dad's mate took a ride in a cab once.

If every victim's name could be proved to be re-divided to create the word ZODIAC or PARADICE or something equally relevant in Morse code then I for one would have thought "Wow, Ray you might have found something really important here". However, his theory seems to have fallen apart after the Vallejo murders and we can't get any more answers because Ray has talked down to us like little kids and run away with his tail between his legs rather than own up and say "OK you've raised some very valid points guys - I might need to work some more on this theory."

Perhaps I should write a book on a theory that Z actually chose his successfully killed canonical victims based on their initials sounding similar - DF, DF, CS and PS. We can discount MM and BH because Z obviously didn't kill them. BLJ doesn't fit but that's because Z thought she was Darlene Ferrin (DF) anyway. Which is obviously why he brought a big flashlight next time to make sure it was Darlene that he was shooting...

Giggidy.

Haha Quagmire, thanks for the morning laugh :-) I thought Ray was interesting enough, in the beginning. And I'm open minded enough to hear any theory, but....... After awhile it
just seemed kinda out there. I also noticed the couple times he was in Chat that he spoke to the guys but overlooked the females....I found that odd. Also, Bullit has not been back since
the Ray Stay, can someone please let him know that he can return now :-)

OK, back to the Penn Thread. This is the Penn Thread, an I've been working hard at getting the info for us from Penn. So please go back a couple posts and return
to Penn Land, OK..................
Also, any thoughts on why Penn is writing us now? And what is his real message?

Perhaps that we are still to dumb to solve his riddles? haha..

[quote=""]

[i

OK, so,

If the Confession letter is formatted in 17 columns (matching the ciphers) without any punctuation, the B in Bates ends up in column 10, row 30. She was murdered on 10/30. This is one of Penn's more basic, easy to understand works, I think, and it's notable. If intentional, what it would mean is the perp purposely wrote out the confession letter to have BATES land in that spot, I guess by writing the word BATES, or the sentence that contains BATES, and then filling in the rest of the sentences above it, plus the Title and the 'By', to come up with the correct spacing. Following that, the punctuation was added, along with the rest of the letter, using the same method to get KNIFE where it is.

Possible? What to you think? What would be the point, with the deed already done?

It should be mentioned that Ray asked for the chat time to be changed to discuss his theory, Morf did so, then Ray did not show up!

Every time I have tried to read Penn - or Grant or Farmer - I get lost. When I try to sum up what I have read, it just doesn't make sense. Just too many assupmtions, speculations, guesses asserted as facts, numerology and pure BS.

Put Farmer, Penn and Ray together, add a little Monty Pyhton and this is what you get -

"Zodiac has six letters, Oswald also has six letters? Conicidence? Hardly. Zodiac mentioned books. Where are books kept? A library. Where did Penn work? A library. What is library in binary code, in reverse alphabet? HIRE. Take away the I for HIRE and add an A and O and what do you have? OHARE! How much clearer could it be? Oh you say OHARE was in Harvard during all of the Zodiac murders? Of course he was. What better cover could he have. That is where O'Hare's 65 year old mother and Penn's cop father come in. Add CS + BH and it =3.14. Times that by 17, remove 567 becuase that was a trick to lead us astray, and you have have OHARE in binary Chinese. Can't you pea brains understand that. Look up what Berryessa means. What does that mean? What did I mean when I said that? What did I mean when I say "mean"? And what do I mean by wasting your time like this?"

AK Wilks well done that man

AK Wilks wrote:

It should be mentioned that Ray asked for the chat time to be changed to discuss his theory, Morf did so, then Ray did not show up!

Every time I have tried to read Penn - or Grant or Farmer - I get lost. When I try to sum up what I have read, it just doesn't make sense. Just too many assupmtions, speculations, guesses asserted as facts, numerology and pure BS.

Put Farmer, Penn and Ray together, add a little Monty Pyhton and this is what you get -

"Zodiac has six letters, Oswald also has six letters? Conicidence? Hardly. Zodiac mentioned books. Where are books kept? A library. Where did Penn work? A library. What is library in binary code, in reverse alphabet? HIRE. Take away the I for HIRE and add an A and O and what do you have? OHARE! How much clearer could it be? Oh you say OHARE was in Harvard during all of the Zodiac murders? Of course he was. What better cover could he have. That is where O'Hare's 65 year old mother and Penn's cop father come in. Add CS + BH and it =3.14. Times that by 17, remove 567 becuase that was a trick to lead us astray, and you have have OHARE in binary Chinese. Can't you pea brains understand that. Look up what Berryessa means. What does that mean? What did I mean when I said that? What did I mean when I say "mean"? And what do I mean by wasting your time like this?"

Not sure how many of you guys would remember it, but this reminds me of the 70's TV comedy "Soap". Confused? You will be after this week's episode of S(OPORD)...

OPORD makes both Penn and Grant look like Sherlock Holmes!

Some members here used to work over at OPORD, and when they pointed out some key errors Farmer made, he did not respond well.

Farmer takes the cake for most confused and complicated Zodiac theory. Now he apparently has added Little Debbie's step dad into the mix with Penn.

Quag--too funny. I do remember! Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BHQT3Omqtw

***

Zam--I would love to give you/Penn a very intelligent reply to his letters to you, but I don't have one. I just don't know what to say. I feel if I question anything I might be answered with a reply that would make me feel like a big dumbie. And since I think what I think, it's better to not say anything at all.

As I have said before, you are doing great work with this and communicating with Penn is a good thing for many interested in him. I wish I could think of some brilliant comment to send his way.

Ok, more correspondence from Gareth Penn: I will have Azazel download and post the two attachments that were also sent. ONLY those interested please reply...as some of
us are truly interested in what Gareth is saying. Much Thankz, Zam*
***********************************************************************************************************************************************

This is a partial response to the questions you sent me recently. The author asserts confidently that UC Berkeley has no record of any degrees awarded to me. I have just gotten off the phone with Frances at the Office of the Registrar at Berkeley, who informs me that the Registrar's Office's records indeed reflect the award to me of a BA (6/7/62), an MA (6/10/65), and an MLS (9/19/72). She goes on to say that UC has a contractor handling verification, at www.studentclearinghouse.org, and that anybody who wants to obtain the same information can point his or her browser to that URL. Shirley at Berkeley's School of Information Science tells me that the same information is reflected in an on-campus database called CADS. But just to make sure that no doubts linger in the mind of anyone, I attach copies of my diplomas for the aforementioned degrees. Also attached is a partial graduate transcript reflecting the BA and MA degrees (the transcript was issued in July 1972 and so does not reflect the MLS, which came two months later). For good measure, I attach a copy of my GRE report with the annotation that the "G" stands for "graduate," and for even better measure, I attach a copy of notification of my PhD orals. I came out of this examination empty-handed, but I think it must be obvious that I would not have received this notification if I had not had an MA. And in lieu of chopped nuts sprinkled on top, I attach three pages from my Studienbuch (Free University Berlin, 1962-1963). The correspondent's confident assertion is contradicted by UC Berkeley and by the record. One would have to conclude that he or she is either incompetent or mendacious. Perhaps he or she can suggest a third possibility; I can't see one. Skipping over the other questions, to which I will return presently, I would like to go to what the correspondent appears to see as the central issue: the pasta machine which my ex-wife mentions in a letter addressed to her attorney in 1983. Is the correspondent suggesting that this noodle-making apparatus was used as a murder weapon? What relevance does it have to anything? What next, the color of my socks? Finally, don't these folks have anything better to do with their time?

NB: some attachments with the following e-mail.

Sorry about the size of the pictures. Dont know what the problem is. At least its there now.

Azazel wrote:

Sorry about the size of the pictures. Dont know what the problem is. At least its there now.

Is Penn cool with us posting this stuff?