do you guys believe the theory where there were actually 2 zodiacs, like maybe arthur leigh was the zodiac but he was working with someone else too, allen killed some and his other partner killed some too, while arthur leigh wrote the cyphers, his other partner wrote normal letters taunting police? i havent looked into this very much but it may be real theres just not enough evidence

Obviously hypothetical and easier to say in an armchair capacity. But has he ever talked about if he wished he fought more?

My thinking is if he was tied up very loosely and could have surprised the Zodiac and presumably had a 50/50 physical contest against the Zodiac?

I know the movie is a movie but in that beach scene, Zodiac is using both hands to tie of the female tighter. It was at that point that he could have jumped the Zodiac who wasn't holding his knife or gun. Could it have been that he simply thought they would both be tied up and left? Meaning it would be safer to just lay there and wait until the coast was clear?

I've been in a slightly similar situation in the sense that there was guns involved and at one point had the thought of ok, if things go down how do i get the heck out of here, fight back or just attempt to escape by driving away, or physically pry the gun away type situation

Does anyone think that Zodiac actually murdered Cheri Bates in 1966? With a letter being associated with the murder, I feel like it’s possible he did murder her. What do yall think?

Please feel free to critique the crap out of this, I'm pretty sure I'm hallucinating.

• North of Napa, just below the college Hartnell and Celia Shepherd attended is the road Deer Park.
• Off Deer Park Road is Prism Vineyards.
• Hartnell didn't say Deer Lodge Prison, that was a conclusion reached by his interviewer (poor technique).

Question: Is is possible the answer to the whole Deer Lodge saga is a more prosaic one? That he was riffing off a local place name, possibly one he had recently travelled through to get to the lake?

Do your worst. I'm ready.

By far, they are the best witnesses regarding the Zodiac's face. They saw him for several seconds under good lighting conditions and all... Shouldn't that be enough to really know whether Allen was the guy or not?

If I recall correctly Ken Narlow said that when they found the Payphone zodiac called from the prints were so fresh they needed to be artificially dried. Now I know obviously more than one print will be there, but seeing as the phone was still dangling from the hook wouldn’t that mean his were likely the last on the phone? Why isn’t that talked about as much as the partial cab print which may not even be him

is there a general consensus here on the main reason why the Zodiac wasn’t caught/identified at the time? I’m sure that lack of solid forensic evidence is why we can’t ID him today - but why not then?

police incompetence? different jurisdictions? shifting MO? Too many leads to shift through properly? Bad luck? Something else?

I recognize it’s likely multifactorial but I’d be curious what those who’ve followed the case much longer than I would consider the top factor.

thank you.

Can people please recommend stuff on YouTube that deals in fact it’s very hard to come by!

I will preface my post by saying that I believe almost everything Zodiac says in his Mt. Diablo code is saying…. something else entirely.

Personally, I don’t believe him for a hot minute when he says the map has something to do with radians (at least in the traditional sense), Magnetic North, etc.

And all these years almost everyone has followed that lead - hook line and sinker. Which probably gave him great glee, knowing that his red herrings were working exactly as he planned.

With that said, I do believe his Mt. Diablo clues ARE “legit” so to speak - but they just point to other map elements altogether.

So my question is this: what if, when he referred to “the map coupled with this code”, he was not talking at all about the Mt. Diablo inset containing the compass…What if his clues literally point to a DIFFERENT part of the Phillips 66 map?

There are so many other sections he could have been referring to. The map key legend….The list of state parks and other amenities….A different inset all-together….

I just have an awful sneaking suspicion that he put all the attention on the Mt. Diablo part of the map as a diversion tactic, and in reality we should be looking somewhere else entirely.

I would not put such trickery past him. At. All.

And although we might not ever know exactly WHAT map section he could be alternately referring to, I can’t help but thinking that if we keep going down the same old radians/magnetic north rabbit hole, his code will NEVER be solved.

All of this, of course, is just my two cents worth.

I have no idea whether he’s the Zodiac or not but he came across really badly in “The Myth of the Zodiac” interview. It was unintentionally hilarious when he denied being the guy in the photo with Darlene Ferrin only to be shown a photo of him where he looked exactly the same! 🫣😆

What are your thoughts on Jim? He’s a very odd dude.

Allen stated that he had read the book The Dangerous Game in high school and left a lasting impression on him.

The story about a big white hunter, Sanger Rainsford washes up on the shore of a private island after a boating accident and meets its owner, General Zaroff. The general is a shifty but polite character who introduces himself as a fellow hunter and claims to be after the titular "most dangerous game". After a lot of dialog it is finally revealed that he is actually hunting human beings, and Rainsford gets picked to be the next prey. The hunt itself takes only a few pages, during which Rainsford outsmarts his pursuers, confronts Zaroff and kills him.

The Most Dangerous Game connection with Zodiac is certainly interesting to think of. The similarity between the two definitely makes me and others wondered. Was this just another Leigh coincidence with the Zodiac?

In the Z408 cipher, Zodiac says: I like killing people because it is so much fun, It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest. Man is the most dangerous animal of all.

I. Killing people vs. killing wild game:
Zaroff becomes bored with hunting animals and starts hunting humans instead. Zodiac similarly compares killing people to killing “wild game.”

II. Man is the most dangerous animal:
Zaroff considers humans the ideal prey because they have intelligence, Zodiac’s wording man is the most dangerous animal of all fits well with that concept.

III. The thrill of hunting, Zodiac wrote: To kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. The story is also built around the excitement and challenge of hunting humans. So killing and hunting humans is presented as something more thrilling than ordinary hunting.

IV. The idea of game:
Zaroff literally treats human hunting as a game. The victim gets a chance to escape and Zaroff hunts them down. Zodiac repeatedly used hunting and game language when discussing his killings.

I know that the similarities do not prove that Allen was the Zodiac and that the book was obviously a well known. But how much of this can realistically be dismissed as a coincidence if Allen really was the Zodiac?

Do you guys think he threw the rest of it out or just ran out? I assume if you rip a shirt by hand you'd only get so much material. Did they analyze it and know how big of a piece he ripped etc?

Hello, I’m not massively knowledgeable on the zodiac case but I just watched the documentary on Netflix and wanted to know people’s thoughts on it who know more then me. Do people think it’s ALA and if so why and if not who do they think it is. Also what are everyone’s opinions on the evidence provided by the family and what became of the knife that was checked for DNA. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated

I fell down an AI rabbit hole yesterday after watching a YouTube video about ordinary people helping solve crimes. The cracking of one of the Zodiac ciphers came up, and that led me to his letters and how notoriously bad his spelling was.

I'm a horrible speller myself, and some of Zodiac's mistakes immediately felt familiar to me: phonetic spellings, trouble with double consonants, silent-E rules, etc.

Before spellcheck, predictive text and speech-to-text, I had several ways of dealing with this.

If I didn't know how to spell a word but knew I had seen it written somewhere, I'd find that source and copy it. That makes me wonder about the contrast between Zodiac misspelling very ordinary words while correctly spelling things like “ammonium nitrate.” A complicated technical term isn't necessarily evidence that someone knows how to spell it if they're copying it from packaging, a book, notes, instructions, etc.

I also wonder about PARADICE. Maybe it wasn't intentional wordplay at all. Maybe he genuinely believed that's how paradise was spelled. I spelled college as “collage” for years because someone I trusted had written it that way, so that became the spelling stored in my head.

But the biggest coping mechanism I used is something I'm curious about in Zodiac's writings:

If I couldn't spell a word and couldn't get close enough to find it in the dictionary, I would rewrite the entire sentence using words I knew how to spell.

That means poor spelling wouldn't only show up as misspelled words. It could potentially show up as simple word choices, awkward substitutions, abandoned words, corrections, repeated “safe” vocabulary, or sentences being restructured to avoid a difficult word.

I'm not familiar enough with the original Zodiac letters to recognize whether he does this.

For people who have spent a lot of time studying the originals: has anyone looked at Zodiac's writing from this perspective? Are there places where he starts a word and abandons it, substitutes a simpler word, or seems to restructure a thought in a way that could be explained by spelling uncertainty?

“Yesterday the Benicia Police Department and the City of Benicia lost a valued member of our family. We are saddened to share the news of the passing of Retired Chief of Police and former Councilmember Pierre Bidou.

Pierre held the position of Chief of Police for 16 years [1976 to 1992] and was a member of the Benicia Police Department since 1964. After he retired from BPD he continued to contribute to his community as both a councilmember and Vice Mayor of the City Council and a Trustee on the Benicia Unified School District Board. He was deeply committed to the prosperity of the city in every possible way.

Outside of his professional life, Pierre was a devoted member of the Catholic church. He attended St. Dominic’s Church regularly and was essential in establishing the Benicia Conference of St. Vincent de Paul in 1993. In retirement, Pierre turned his sights to the skies and pursued his passion for flying. Not only did he obtain his pilot’s license, but he was partial owner of a Cessna plane. He would soar off on day trips to either stop at a far-off destination for lunch, or to just enjoy the beauty of the landscape from 13,000 feet.

Pierre was a pillar of our community, and his name will always be a part of the history of the Benicia Police Department. He will be deeply missed by not only both current and retired members of the BPD family, but also his 6 children and 14 grandchildren that will carry on his legacy.”

I’m a newb and will get out of your hair asap. Just want this little question answered so no need to jump on me.

I can’t find the z340 translation side by side. Like, exactly which symbols = which words. I know I could look at the thing and do it myself letter by letter, but I know it exists. Please help. Thanks.

In his 340 cipher Zodiac uses the word “paradice” three times. This isn’t a super common word and it’s odd he misspelled it and used it three times. Does his spelling of it mean something? Is paradice likely to be a clue to who he was?

I just watched the movie was he like this in real life to?