Post by kg on Mar 4, 2019 19:17:06 GMT
Aug 23, 2018 20:38:11 GMT rkz said:
For one thing, we don't know if the Danville papers have ANYTHING to do with JJD. There are advocates for JJD's involvement and there are people who think he had nothing to do with them. I can't speak for anyone else, but I myself think that either JJD planted them at the getaway scene as a diversion; or they have nothing to do with the case. I usually tend to favor the latter position.
But the fact is: if you base ANY theory about JJD's personality or his criminal life on the material in the Danville papers, you are quite likely barking up a wrong tree. There is no confirmation from LE that the papers are the work of JJD, therefore we do not know if the handwriting on those papers comes from JJD.
Consequently, if you are basing your theory that Z and EAR are the same person based on superficial handwriting similarities between Z's letters and the Danville papers, then you are basing your theory on things that may not have anything to do with JJD. Which means that your theory might be very off-base. If your *starting point* is that Z and JJD are the same, then you will begin to fit the evidence to the theory. This approach is the polar opposite of how good investigative work should be done. And frankly, before JJD was captured people were speculating about his personality grounded in what is in the Danville papers and it turned out that too, was the wrong tree to bark up. JJD was not a construction worker or in real estate, as those theories based on the papers claimed, in particular the map.
Also, LE doesn't actually know for certain that the Bates murder was the work of Z. So there are two sets of written works that are not confirmed to be from Z or EAR...and you're basing your comparison between the two on those written works. Surely you can see the problem with this.
I have been researching and reading about Z ever since 1988, when I was 13 and became obsessed with the case. In that time I have seen theory after theory about Z's handwriting, and all of those theories in aggregate have led me to believe that very little of use can come from studying the handwriting and looking for similarities between Z and other people. If it was an ample field for speculation for a long time, it also certainly never led to any capture. I don't like the practice of using handwriting to identify an individual via comparison with another individual - people can vary their handwriting and if the ONLY similarity between two people is their handwriting then I feel there needs to be a more airtight criteria for identification. Just matching two individual's handwriting isn't enough to make a case, much less win one.
I have seen COUNTLESS examples of innocent persons' handwriting that looked *exactly* - I mean EXACTLY - like Zodiac's. Z's block printing, it turns out, is simply not singular enough to be unique to Z. Which means that it's a very inconsistent metric to base an analysis on, IMO.
These kinds of "matches" are kind of like all of those myriad so-called solutions to the 340. Every week some joker on Voigt's board says he's got THE DEFINITIVE SOLUTION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! to the cipher and every single time it's incorrect. But try convincing the people who put forth those solutions. My opinion is that most of them are mired in the sunk-cost fallacy: they've invested so much time and effort and brainpower to come up with that solution that it *has* to be right, and they get defensive when you bring up mitigating factors.
Also - Z's handwriting style varied across time. The Melvin Belli letter, for instance, featured very rigid, very straight printing and the letters didn't lean. Many of Z's other letters, however, feature printing that is slanted right, sometimes to an extreme degree. There are certain consistent identifiers, like Z's odd lower-case "k". But the fact that Z's handwriting was subject to changes provides another challenge: which letters do you use to match handwriting between Z and other POIs?
In terms of the differences between Z and JJD, the first is that the MOs in both cases are starkly disparate. Z attacked couples in cars or out in the open. The only time he committed a crime in an enclosed space is when he shot Paul Stine in Stine's cab. EAR, on the other hand, attacked single people and couples in their own homes. Even the attacks where JJD assaulted someone outdoors, the crime scenes were always near the victim's house or at least *A* house. He never attacked in lover's lanes, unlike Z.
EAR was a fetish burglar who graduated to greater offenses. Z had no known history of burglary.
Z taunted the police with letters detailing his crimes and bragging about his exploits. He claimed murders he didn't commit and generally wrote WAY more correspondence than he committed grave crimes; it seems in retrospect that psychologically Z found more satisfaction in the writing of letters than he did in murder. EAR, on the other hand, carried on no known correspondence with police. We don't know if "Excitement's Crave" was his (probably not, based on what we now know about JJD), and we don't know if the Danville papers are his. In any event, JJD did not share Z's habit of constantly writing and taunting the police via letters sent to newspapers.
Z made sure not to hang on to more than a few consistent MO points across his crime spree; he attacked with a multitude of methods: gun to the back of the head, stabbing victims while they're tied up, shooting into parked cars. EAR, on the other hand, had a consistent MO and stuck to it most of the time, though he obviously switched from raping and burglarizing to killing when the circumstances called for it.
We now know that JJD was the Visalia Ransacker. The Ransacker's "career" seemingly began in 1974. In 1974, newspapers in SF received letters from Z. Nothing's impossible, but the likelihood of some overlap between Z's correspondence with authorities and the VR's sprees in Exeter and Visalia seems remote to me. The Z letters were almost all mailed from SF with the exception of one mailed from Riverside. Was JJD traveling from Exeter to the Bay Area just to mail letters?
None of the Z composites look like JJD or any of the EAR composites.
What connection does JJD have to Vallejo? Can he ever be placed there?
Did JJD ever express an interest in Gilbert and Sullivan? Was he a vocal fan of "The Exorcist" or "Badlands?" How about "The Most Dangerous Game?"
Did JJD ever express an interest in bomb-making? Was he trained in how to make or defuse bombs while in the Navy? Could he have actually created and planted the bomb that Z drew diagrams of? We don't know any of the details of JJD's knowledge of these kinds of activities, so it's too early to say.
If Z was EAR, how come Z never raped any of his female victims?
How come EAR never said anything about "Slaves in paradice" or gathering victims for the afterlife? Why was he so silent towards the police? Z, being the self-inflated braggart that his letters reveal him to be, probably wouldn't have been able to keep his mouth/pen shut/dry crowing to the media and LE that he was the indefatigable and infamous East Area Rapist.
Did JJD ever wear glasses?
I posted this earlier this year: The murder of Paul Stine sticks out the most to me as being very un-EAR like. Z killed Stine randomly, using a gun stuck into the back of Stine's head, while Stine was driving a cab. There is nothing in JJD's criminal history that would point toward a murder of this type - there was no sexual component to the Stine murder, no woman was involved, no rape occurred, and the murder didn't occur in the victim's home. The dissimilarities between Z and EAR in this particular murder are hard to overlook.
The nature of JJD's crimes was sexual; Z's murders and letters, however, point more toward someone with a grudge against authority than someone killing for sexual reasons.
Wouldn't a simpler explanation for "the strange change in writing style" be that Z and EAR are different people? Your theory here violates the Occam's Razor rule. Always look for a simpler, more rational explanation, because typically reality is much more prosaic than fiction. The rare times when something near-miraculous occurs, unfortunately, lead people to believe that near-miracles are commonplace or at least much more probable than before that event occurred. I really feel like JJD's capture is one of those events. Because the EAR story is so outlandishly weird and JJD's capture after 40+ years is such a bolt from the blue, we kind of expect all the other aspects of the case to be just as crazy and compelling. But what if they're not? What if the rest of the case is....kinda boring?
It seems like there are some people in the EAR community who'd prefer that the truth read like a thrilling crime novel - and are disappointed that JJD is such a shlub, such a nothing. They wanted Hannibal Lecter and they got some dumpy old ex-cop instead. You can tell that some of us are disappointed because the *mystery* of the case is over - and they crave more mystery! Therefore they look for that dimension to the case in places where it probably isn't there. I feel like connecting Z and EAR is one of those instances where people would *prefer* that reality be more like a crime or mystery novel, or like a slasher film or something. There's a psychological need to hang on to the mysterious aspects of this case after the mystery's been solved, because the mystery is what was so compelling about this case in the first place.
Another thing to note is that for about 35 years, LE did not see any evidentiary value in those papers. It was Paul Holes and MM who made claims that those papers were vital clues in 2012-13. Before that time, they were just seen as incidental to the case. I tend to think LE had it right the first time. As wonderful as Paul Holes is, he's been wrong a lot.
JJD is not the Zodiac but Kevin Coe is a prime suspect. I also have cause to believe he is D.B. Cooper and if you want to know why I would be happy to share that.
what are you talking about
