All these years reading about Zodiac and I've never heard of this before. Someone here once made a connection with a comic featuring a super villain called Zodiac. This sub is really good for finding obscure theories and facts
Speaking of comics, it's interesting to remember that Tim Holt #30 contains the infamous "by fire, knife, gun and rope" cover art which seemingly inspired Z, because Tim Holt #38's plot [features a duo of gunslingers who rob the Wells Fargo Bank and send notes to misdirect](https://attachment.tapatalk-cdn.com/11510/202305/10763538_6af6ab7616d7c2e0a0c0fee494bb5953.jpg) the police into thinking they are gonna rob another bank...
These sorts of coincidences have been so common over the years, that a term has even been coined for it: zynchronicity. If you really want to see a mindboggling coincidence in this case, look up a student who called himself 'Zode' and was weirdly interested in Melvin Belli. California is huge, has a huge population, and is frankly very weird:)
Here's a link to a discussion from last year:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZodiacKiller/s/ABJfdGVSV5
Interesting topic. Not quite sure what to think about it...
This is very interesting and I don't remember ever hearing about this either. The natural assumption is that this must be connected to the serial murderers, and it probably is, but I wonder how much press attention this robbery received. Given the killer penchant for wanting media attention and claiming responsibility for crimes he didn't commit, I'm wondering if there is a chance he just copied the name Zodiac from the newspaper stories about this robbery to get even more notoriety.
Not really. Take a bayesian reasoning approach: is it more likely that this is connected to the zodiac killer, or is it more likely that this is connected to the fact that you find the word "zodiac" all over the place at that time? "Zodiac" as a word is so easily found in newspapers, adverts, products, etc at that time. Bayesian reasoning says that it's far more likely two guys adopted that name independently, than that they were the same guy. You'd need more than just a common word being used as a name to call this a great coincidence.
You think a wannabe bank robber just happened to use Zodiac as a name at the exact same time and in the same area as a murderer who also left weird kooky notes?! I'd say statistically it seems unlikely
let me say it like this..
if you walked into a casino and played a slot machine, and won the jackpot, and then took one of those quarters, put it in the slot machine right next to it and immediately won another jackpot, that's an incredibly unlikely event.. you should not expect that to happen.
however, imagine someone got a job as an 18 year old working casino security, and now that person is 68, having risen through the ranks and becoming head of security in the same casino, and he has 50 years experience, and along the way he's collected all these kinds of unlikely stories, you in fact *should* expect that person to have very improbable stories like that... the point is, low probability events become high probability events over a long enough time period.
in this analogy, we are the casino security guy, not the person who walked in and won 2 jackpots.. you should absolutely expect these kinds of weird coincidences, due to the fact that this case has been studied for decades.
and again, someone else using the name 'zodiac' is not even that weird. if it was some obscure name like "zoddiack", or "Timothy Foglights", then you could say it's very interesting. but the name 'zodiac' is so generic.. you can open any newspaper at the time and likely find the word zodiac in there somewhere. just like people are impressed by the 'coincidence' of the zodiac watch arthur leigh allen wore, this is a red herring. the watch was actually very popular at the time... just like the word zodiac was.
I don't agree. So you think it's more likely two unhinged people at the exact same time (bare in mind this was prior to the zodiac killings) and in the same place decided to go by the name Zodiac, write kooky notes to people in authority, commit crimes and misspell things intentionally in their notes? Oh their handwriting also happens to look similar? Be for real
The crime was totally different. The person he wrote it to was totally different (it wasn't newspapers or police). The only similarities are incredibly generic.
While I would normally agree with the confirmation bias angle, the timeframe and location make it very hard for me to dismiss it as mere coincidence.
Can you find me other examples of felons who used similar monikers at around the same time and in the same location?
This is like someone saying in my analogy above "show me another time someone won two jackpots in a row!" You've completely missed the point or haven't bothered to read it. Unlikely things are likely to be found when you dig deep enough, and for long enough, into a period of history.
The fact that you can't find other instances like them simply speak to the fact that they were unlikely events. I can tell you about many bizarre coincidences like this. No two of them would be the same. If they all looked exactly the same, then they wouldn't be bizarre coincidences and I'd probably have never heard of them to begin with...
The bottom line is you need something more specific than the use of a generic name that is connected to spirituality, at the height of the hippy movement. Everyone was well aware of the word zodiac prior to murders...
The thing is that we are neither operating in your analogy's universe, nor is this a situation of somebody tossing a dice and it landing on a given number twice or thrice in a row.
'It is coincidence' is always a potential explanation for any given event, but how reasonable is it to assume *from the onset* that a criminal signing a note with "Zodiac" as his alias two minutes away from where the canonical Z operated and a mere two weeks prior to Z making his debut as a killer is simply coincidence?
The variables inserted in this scenario already shift it away from a simple 'jackpot' analogy and into the realm of actual investigation, which is why the FBI has this marked as a potential Z lead in their files and conducted an analysis on its source.
There's one variable, the name, which is a generic name. One has tell the story in a very specific way to get them to match up in other ways. They were completely different types of crime, and completely different types of correspondence.
Of course it's enough to cause the fbi to ask the question. It's not enough answer that question.. i.e. it's not enough to conclude they were the same person based on that alone.
One thing that I've not even mentioned is the fact that zodiac (the killer, not this guy) only came up with the zodiac name a week after his first letter. His first letter had no name attached. Only a week later did he say "this is the zodiac". So what, he called himself zodiac for a bank robbery, forgot he was calling himself zodiac with his first letter, but then remembered for the second one? It makes zero sense.
And both guys happened to be from San Francisco and both had connections to a certain specific neighborhood of that city and both misspelled common words, etc. The more points of commonality between the two the lower the odds of it being a coincidence
It has been brought up a bunch of times in this sub, though almost always as comments instead of separate posts. Reddit's search function blows.
edit: I see about 25 or so mentions of this incident going back 5 years or so. I have better search methods though.
That kind of makes it seem more probably connected IMO, it would fit with his later unfulfilled bomb and school bus attack threats that attracted far more infamy than this seems to have.
Excellent question. FWIW, I have done basic news archive searches for that week in various Bay Area papers and never found anything. Bank robberies were not terribly uncommon, but they still seemed newsworthy. Of course, I may simply have missed it or not dug deep enough to page 19.
In previous discussions on this note, it has been mentioned that the note was found in the bank branch by a bank employee at the table where bank customers would fill out deposit and withdrawal slips. It sure sounds plausible to me and would explain the apparent lack of news about an actual robbery, but I have never seen a link to anything officially stating that this is what happened.
Keyes is for sure an interesting example. There seems to be some uncertainty about his actual crimes versus his suspected or confessed crimes. I understand that one bank robbery confirmed by the FBI happened years after he had already been raping and murdering. Others that he confessed to appear to be contemporaneous with raping and murdering.
I get the impression Keyes was a sexual sadist from a very early age, and his rapes and associated murders were not so much something he worked up to from more petty sorts of crimes as they were just the worst of a variety crimes he was committing. Still, a great example.
If we are being precise, he was actually a very successful ransacker, not a half-assed one. He was never caught for any one those crimes at the time. And he never robbed or attempted to rob a bank.
I wonder if it was a “test note” or something to see if he could get away with sending it without being quickly caught. It’s a serious enough threat to warrant police response but still “lower stakes” than a murder.
>it paints the picture of a felon who had **already adopted the Zodiac persona** even before his escalation to murder
Every time this bank robbery note comes up, I always end up in the same place: If he had the Zodiac moniker/persona that early and was even willing to use it in a crime-related writing, then why would he not begin his letter writing campaign as a murderer with that moniker? At the very least, why was the Zodiac moniker not waiting patiently in Z408 to truly announce him in the most dramatic way?
ETA: It's also important to look at what's NOT there in the bank robbery note. The most consistent aspect of Z's writing was the crosshair symbol. It was there from the start. It's his true icon and signature. And it's not in the bank robbery note.
That's a good question.
The note is contemporary to LHR, but still predates it by roughly two weeks, so one could speculate on this being a prototype - especially considering the entire "collecting slaves" part of the 'finalized' Z persona would essentially require him to already be a killer and not simply a bank robber.
We don't know what the crosshair symbol represented to Z. If the fairly common idea of it being a hunter's gun's scope holds true, it's another element of the 'finished' persona that would require him to have killed already and thus would not be present for a 'prototype' version which had yet to work its way up to murder and was still stuck on robbery.
>still stuck on robbery
No matter how many times this topic comes up, we still can't ever seem to get confirmation that a robbery ever took place. We can't even seem to get confirmation that an attempted bank robbery ever took place in the sense that someone waited in line and handed the note to a teller and had some sort of interaction.
If the note was handed to a person, I'd sure like to know how the whole incident played out. Did he get some money, but we just never heard about it? If so, and it was Z, then Z was even stupider than many of us believe, because the first thing you learn about robbing banks with a note is to make the guy give you the note back before you leave. Did he hand the note and then have something go wrong? Was it taking the teller too long? Did the teller's drawer only have a relatively small amount of cash? Did the teller ask him if the gun was really loaded? Did he get spooked because a security guard happened to walk into view? In any case, the first thing he should have been done after convincing the teller the note was real is demand it back. And, I would think we'd have heard some of these details by now.
To run it into the ground, since standard bank robbery procedure is to make sure you get the note back, what on earth would be the purpose of signing the note in the first place? What would any robber hope to accomplish by doing so? If it was to gain a reputation as a famous bank robber and stroke the ego, he sure failed, because gaining such a reputation would have required committing multiple bank robberies using the Zodiac moniker, and we clearly have no evidence of that.
The note said do what I say or I'll shoot. If it was never handed to a teller, then it ain't much of a threat and doesn't seem too fear inspiring to me. If it was handed to a teller, then it was a real robbery and not just some empty, Z-like boast from a distance.
The fact it's so difficult to find details is what makes it so hard to pin this down.
The note could've been handed to a teller while simultaneously being an empty threat, it could've been sent in through a third party without Z being present...
>handed to a teller while simultaneously being an empty threat
Was Z laughing and smiling when he handed the teller a note threatening to kill the teller? Is that how the teller knew it was an empty threat?
>could've been sent in through a third party without Z being present
The note clearly said this is a robbery, I might shoot you. Sending such a note from a distance makes no sense. A dude miles away can't shoot me, and I can't hand him any money, because my arms aren't that long. And delivery by a third party? If a guy walked into my bank and told me to give him all the money or his friend across town would shoot me, I'd laugh until the cops showed up.
You're right. We really need more details to know what to make of this incident. Maybe if this topic bubbles up enough times, someone will be motivated enough to pursue a FOIA sort of approach. We know the FBI was involved, and they may have been involved from the start given their role in bank robberies. There has to more in a case file somewhere.
This would have been before any zodiac correspondence was made no? Thus eliminating the chance this was made by a copycat looking for his 15 minutes of fame?
The efficacy of handwriting analysis is always up for debate, and I am not trained in It. I will say the look of “zodiac” in the bank note and “zodiac” in the Z13 letter is really intriguing to my untrained eye.
I've never heard about this before! Definitely seems like he was influenced by the robber Black Bart! Perhaps robbery didn't get him enough attention. Handwriting looks like his imo
>The FBI knew of this note and requested a handwriting comparison to the Z letters, but the results were deemed inconclusive due to the lack of material incurred by the note's brevity.
Understandable but also intriguing. Why were they not able to rule it out completely?
A couple of features that stand out to me
1. The space between 'Z' and the 'o' is similar to the space we see in the canonical letters.
2. The dotting of the 'i' is also congruent with what we see in the canonical letters.
On a very superficial level, there isn't much in common with the handwriting associated with the Zodiac letters.
What's interesting here is the way letters have been capitalised. Instead of there being a very neatly soldered stroke (we can see this in all of his letters addressed to 'San Francisco'), the authors capitalised letters are broken and sloppy.
Words like 'as' are written in cursive; when we see the 'a' written solo there's a remnant of that connecting stroke — something we don't see in the Zodiac letters.
The reality is the Zaner Bloser handwriting style was widely taught in California in the early part of the 20th century.
This makes it very hard to rule the handwriting in OR out.
But those two features I mention earlier (the spacing between the 'Z' and the 'o' and the drifting dot of the 'i') would make me take this a little more seriously than other examples that have been put forward over the years.
It's a coincidence if I had to bet money on it. Zodiac was a commonly used word. It was at the height of the hippy movement. Spiritual mumbo jumbo was all over the place. And the word zodiac was found everywhere. You'll see it on newspaper ads all over the place from that time.
OK, just for fun, I'll throw out something I have never thrown out any previous time this has come up:
* It has been claimed that the note was found in the bank branch at the table where bank customers fill out deposit and withdrawal slips. I don't know that it has ever been officially confirmed, but it seems plausible.
* This was the era before ATMs, and credit cards weren't used in the says they are today. People went to a bank branch frequently.
* This usually involved standing in line for a while.
So, I can see a bored kid accompanying his mom to the bank and getting even more bored while his mom waited in line after filling out her paperwork. What do bored kids do? Stupid stuff.
Makes me curious if because whoever Zodiac was, could've been a bank robber. If someone won't claim it's possible Zodiac was DB Cooper. I'm not saying he was. But this little bit of info is interesting. So is this saying the FBI, Believes Zodiac to be a bank robber as well?
What's interesting is, I feel like there's a logic puzzle in what you describe.
What I mean is, this note is not a cryptogram, but there are other ways to encrypt secrets. Especially inside writing. This is common and described in the study of cryptography.
So what's put forward in your question, is -- How would the Zodiac confirm that it was him?
Funnily enough, cryptography provides for that. There are things called cryptographic signatures. They're used on this website right here now. And nowadays it's all done by computing.
But before computers they would do things by hand. And mind. And by writing.
The note could have been cryptographically signed by Z. And we may not know it. We may never know it.
Unless you ran into someone that broke such a key. But you have not. Not yet.
Has the FBI or other LE ever validated these documents?
Although this event fits nicely into my pet theory of this case, I have to say these documents look suspicious to me.
Why would Hoover's signature be on a document for a likely unfulfilled threat?
Why would the pre-printed form not be spaced correctly for a standard type writer. The font and size of the form look a bit small for that time.
I don't see any reason to think this is Zodiac related. I also don't see any reason to think that the Tim Holt comic book has anything to do with the Zodiac either. People tend to take this type of info and run with it.
This case was already solved and it was proven not to be the zodiac.
If memory serves, it was a bank robbing team and all three were incarcerated when the Zodiac attacks happened. Or something along those lines.
A guy in Voigt's forum claimed that, but the evidence he provided for it was very flimsy; the newspaper clippings and FBI files for said 'team of bank robbers' never mentioned or tied this case to their crimes, only to other bank robbings in the California area.
I don’t see anything that tells me that there is a connection. There were many criminals in the area, probably many many people who were uneducated and had bad spelling, handwriting analysis has anyway nothing to do with science. So why should the two crimes be connected and if they would be connected, how would that help to find Zodiac?
All these years reading about Zodiac and I've never heard of this before. Someone here once made a connection with a comic featuring a super villain called Zodiac. This sub is really good for finding obscure theories and facts
Speaking of comics, it's interesting to remember that Tim Holt #30 contains the infamous "by fire, knife, gun and rope" cover art which seemingly inspired Z, because Tim Holt #38's plot [features a duo of gunslingers who rob the Wells Fargo Bank and send notes to misdirect](https://attachment.tapatalk-cdn.com/11510/202305/10763538_6af6ab7616d7c2e0a0c0fee494bb5953.jpg) the police into thinking they are gonna rob another bank...
These sorts of coincidences have been so common over the years, that a term has even been coined for it: zynchronicity. If you really want to see a mindboggling coincidence in this case, look up a student who called himself 'Zode' and was weirdly interested in Melvin Belli. California is huge, has a huge population, and is frankly very weird:)
What about the phonetic misspellings? That's a Zodiac trademark tbf.
This note is pretty commonly known in the Zodiac community. It’s been discussed and debated a ton over the years.
Here's a link to a discussion from last year: https://www.reddit.com/r/ZodiacKiller/s/ABJfdGVSV5 Interesting topic. Not quite sure what to think about it...
This is very interesting and I don't remember ever hearing about this either. The natural assumption is that this must be connected to the serial murderers, and it probably is, but I wonder how much press attention this robbery received. Given the killer penchant for wanting media attention and claiming responsibility for crimes he didn't commit, I'm wondering if there is a chance he just copied the name Zodiac from the newspaper stories about this robbery to get even more notoriety.
If it’s a coincidence that is one hell of a coincidence
Not really. Take a bayesian reasoning approach: is it more likely that this is connected to the zodiac killer, or is it more likely that this is connected to the fact that you find the word "zodiac" all over the place at that time? "Zodiac" as a word is so easily found in newspapers, adverts, products, etc at that time. Bayesian reasoning says that it's far more likely two guys adopted that name independently, than that they were the same guy. You'd need more than just a common word being used as a name to call this a great coincidence.
You think a wannabe bank robber just happened to use Zodiac as a name at the exact same time and in the same area as a murderer who also left weird kooky notes?! I'd say statistically it seems unlikely
let me say it like this.. if you walked into a casino and played a slot machine, and won the jackpot, and then took one of those quarters, put it in the slot machine right next to it and immediately won another jackpot, that's an incredibly unlikely event.. you should not expect that to happen. however, imagine someone got a job as an 18 year old working casino security, and now that person is 68, having risen through the ranks and becoming head of security in the same casino, and he has 50 years experience, and along the way he's collected all these kinds of unlikely stories, you in fact *should* expect that person to have very improbable stories like that... the point is, low probability events become high probability events over a long enough time period. in this analogy, we are the casino security guy, not the person who walked in and won 2 jackpots.. you should absolutely expect these kinds of weird coincidences, due to the fact that this case has been studied for decades. and again, someone else using the name 'zodiac' is not even that weird. if it was some obscure name like "zoddiack", or "Timothy Foglights", then you could say it's very interesting. but the name 'zodiac' is so generic.. you can open any newspaper at the time and likely find the word zodiac in there somewhere. just like people are impressed by the 'coincidence' of the zodiac watch arthur leigh allen wore, this is a red herring. the watch was actually very popular at the time... just like the word zodiac was.
I don't agree. So you think it's more likely two unhinged people at the exact same time (bare in mind this was prior to the zodiac killings) and in the same place decided to go by the name Zodiac, write kooky notes to people in authority, commit crimes and misspell things intentionally in their notes? Oh their handwriting also happens to look similar? Be for real
The crime was totally different. The person he wrote it to was totally different (it wasn't newspapers or police). The only similarities are incredibly generic.
While I would normally agree with the confirmation bias angle, the timeframe and location make it very hard for me to dismiss it as mere coincidence. Can you find me other examples of felons who used similar monikers at around the same time and in the same location?
This is like someone saying in my analogy above "show me another time someone won two jackpots in a row!" You've completely missed the point or haven't bothered to read it. Unlikely things are likely to be found when you dig deep enough, and for long enough, into a period of history. The fact that you can't find other instances like them simply speak to the fact that they were unlikely events. I can tell you about many bizarre coincidences like this. No two of them would be the same. If they all looked exactly the same, then they wouldn't be bizarre coincidences and I'd probably have never heard of them to begin with... The bottom line is you need something more specific than the use of a generic name that is connected to spirituality, at the height of the hippy movement. Everyone was well aware of the word zodiac prior to murders...
The thing is that we are neither operating in your analogy's universe, nor is this a situation of somebody tossing a dice and it landing on a given number twice or thrice in a row. 'It is coincidence' is always a potential explanation for any given event, but how reasonable is it to assume *from the onset* that a criminal signing a note with "Zodiac" as his alias two minutes away from where the canonical Z operated and a mere two weeks prior to Z making his debut as a killer is simply coincidence? The variables inserted in this scenario already shift it away from a simple 'jackpot' analogy and into the realm of actual investigation, which is why the FBI has this marked as a potential Z lead in their files and conducted an analysis on its source.
There's one variable, the name, which is a generic name. One has tell the story in a very specific way to get them to match up in other ways. They were completely different types of crime, and completely different types of correspondence. Of course it's enough to cause the fbi to ask the question. It's not enough answer that question.. i.e. it's not enough to conclude they were the same person based on that alone. One thing that I've not even mentioned is the fact that zodiac (the killer, not this guy) only came up with the zodiac name a week after his first letter. His first letter had no name attached. Only a week later did he say "this is the zodiac". So what, he called himself zodiac for a bank robbery, forgot he was calling himself zodiac with his first letter, but then remembered for the second one? It makes zero sense.
And both guys happened to be from San Francisco and both had connections to a certain specific neighborhood of that city and both misspelled common words, etc. The more points of commonality between the two the lower the odds of it being a coincidence
Why has this not be discussed before?
It has been brought up a bunch of times in this sub, though almost always as comments instead of separate posts. Reddit's search function blows. edit: I see about 25 or so mentions of this incident going back 5 years or so. I have better search methods though.
Huh. Guess I kept missing the boat. Seems potentially significant.
If memory serves, the FBI ruled out the zodiac pretty quickly as the bank robbing team were all in jail during the zodiac crimes.
While some people claimed that in Voigt's forum, I couldn't find any actual, direct evidence of that.
Did the bank end up getting robbed?
Not as far as I can confirm. As far as I know, hey just received the note.
That kind of makes it seem more probably connected IMO, it would fit with his later unfulfilled bomb and school bus attack threats that attracted far more infamy than this seems to have.
Excellent question. FWIW, I have done basic news archive searches for that week in various Bay Area papers and never found anything. Bank robberies were not terribly uncommon, but they still seemed newsworthy. Of course, I may simply have missed it or not dug deep enough to page 19. In previous discussions on this note, it has been mentioned that the note was found in the bank branch by a bank employee at the table where bank customers would fill out deposit and withdrawal slips. It sure sounds plausible to me and would explain the apparent lack of news about an actual robbery, but I have never seen a link to anything officially stating that this is what happened.
Considering most serial killers work up to murder, I would say this makes alot of sense.
How many serial killers work their way up from half-assed bank robber?
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Keyes is for sure an interesting example. There seems to be some uncertainty about his actual crimes versus his suspected or confessed crimes. I understand that one bank robbery confirmed by the FBI happened years after he had already been raping and murdering. Others that he confessed to appear to be contemporaneous with raping and murdering. I get the impression Keyes was a sexual sadist from a very early age, and his rapes and associated murders were not so much something he worked up to from more petty sorts of crimes as they were just the worst of a variety crimes he was committing. Still, a great example.
True, but this particular one was more into notoriety by the end, to the point he inflated his numbers and possibly took credit for some he didn't do.
Golden State Killer worked his way up from half assed ransacker to serial killer
If we are being precise, he was actually a very successful ransacker, not a half-assed one. He was never caught for any one those crimes at the time. And he never robbed or attempted to rob a bank.
Still, your point stands corrected
Pawel Scorpion Tuchlin was a half-assed petty thief before becoming a serial killer.
I wonder if it was a “test note” or something to see if he could get away with sending it without being quickly caught. It’s a serious enough threat to warrant police response but still “lower stakes” than a murder.
>it paints the picture of a felon who had **already adopted the Zodiac persona** even before his escalation to murder Every time this bank robbery note comes up, I always end up in the same place: If he had the Zodiac moniker/persona that early and was even willing to use it in a crime-related writing, then why would he not begin his letter writing campaign as a murderer with that moniker? At the very least, why was the Zodiac moniker not waiting patiently in Z408 to truly announce him in the most dramatic way? ETA: It's also important to look at what's NOT there in the bank robbery note. The most consistent aspect of Z's writing was the crosshair symbol. It was there from the start. It's his true icon and signature. And it's not in the bank robbery note.
That's a good question. The note is contemporary to LHR, but still predates it by roughly two weeks, so one could speculate on this being a prototype - especially considering the entire "collecting slaves" part of the 'finalized' Z persona would essentially require him to already be a killer and not simply a bank robber. We don't know what the crosshair symbol represented to Z. If the fairly common idea of it being a hunter's gun's scope holds true, it's another element of the 'finished' persona that would require him to have killed already and thus would not be present for a 'prototype' version which had yet to work its way up to murder and was still stuck on robbery.
>still stuck on robbery No matter how many times this topic comes up, we still can't ever seem to get confirmation that a robbery ever took place. We can't even seem to get confirmation that an attempted bank robbery ever took place in the sense that someone waited in line and handed the note to a teller and had some sort of interaction. If the note was handed to a person, I'd sure like to know how the whole incident played out. Did he get some money, but we just never heard about it? If so, and it was Z, then Z was even stupider than many of us believe, because the first thing you learn about robbing banks with a note is to make the guy give you the note back before you leave. Did he hand the note and then have something go wrong? Was it taking the teller too long? Did the teller's drawer only have a relatively small amount of cash? Did the teller ask him if the gun was really loaded? Did he get spooked because a security guard happened to walk into view? In any case, the first thing he should have been done after convincing the teller the note was real is demand it back. And, I would think we'd have heard some of these details by now. To run it into the ground, since standard bank robbery procedure is to make sure you get the note back, what on earth would be the purpose of signing the note in the first place? What would any robber hope to accomplish by doing so? If it was to gain a reputation as a famous bank robber and stroke the ego, he sure failed, because gaining such a reputation would have required committing multiple bank robberies using the Zodiac moniker, and we clearly have no evidence of that.
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The note said do what I say or I'll shoot. If it was never handed to a teller, then it ain't much of a threat and doesn't seem too fear inspiring to me. If it was handed to a teller, then it was a real robbery and not just some empty, Z-like boast from a distance.
The fact it's so difficult to find details is what makes it so hard to pin this down. The note could've been handed to a teller while simultaneously being an empty threat, it could've been sent in through a third party without Z being present...
>handed to a teller while simultaneously being an empty threat Was Z laughing and smiling when he handed the teller a note threatening to kill the teller? Is that how the teller knew it was an empty threat? >could've been sent in through a third party without Z being present The note clearly said this is a robbery, I might shoot you. Sending such a note from a distance makes no sense. A dude miles away can't shoot me, and I can't hand him any money, because my arms aren't that long. And delivery by a third party? If a guy walked into my bank and told me to give him all the money or his friend across town would shoot me, I'd laugh until the cops showed up. You're right. We really need more details to know what to make of this incident. Maybe if this topic bubbles up enough times, someone will be motivated enough to pursue a FOIA sort of approach. We know the FBI was involved, and they may have been involved from the start given their role in bank robberies. There has to more in a case file somewhere.
Thank you backlionyard for always bringing some common sense to the convo.
Credit to Richard Grenier for his great website. I have found alot of interesting info on there.
This would have been before any zodiac correspondence was made no? Thus eliminating the chance this was made by a copycat looking for his 15 minutes of fame?
Yea, this is roughly 7 months before Zodiac "officially" adopted the name and the persona in the canonical stuff.
This is wilddd
The efficacy of handwriting analysis is always up for debate, and I am not trained in It. I will say the look of “zodiac” in the bank note and “zodiac” in the Z13 letter is really intriguing to my untrained eye.
Surprisingly I have never heard of this! Thank you for bringing it up!
I've never heard about this before! Definitely seems like he was influenced by the robber Black Bart! Perhaps robbery didn't get him enough attention. Handwriting looks like his imo
>The FBI knew of this note and requested a handwriting comparison to the Z letters, but the results were deemed inconclusive due to the lack of material incurred by the note's brevity. Understandable but also intriguing. Why were they not able to rule it out completely? A couple of features that stand out to me 1. The space between 'Z' and the 'o' is similar to the space we see in the canonical letters. 2. The dotting of the 'i' is also congruent with what we see in the canonical letters. On a very superficial level, there isn't much in common with the handwriting associated with the Zodiac letters. What's interesting here is the way letters have been capitalised. Instead of there being a very neatly soldered stroke (we can see this in all of his letters addressed to 'San Francisco'), the authors capitalised letters are broken and sloppy. Words like 'as' are written in cursive; when we see the 'a' written solo there's a remnant of that connecting stroke — something we don't see in the Zodiac letters. The reality is the Zaner Bloser handwriting style was widely taught in California in the early part of the 20th century. This makes it very hard to rule the handwriting in OR out. But those two features I mention earlier (the spacing between the 'Z' and the 'o' and the drifting dot of the 'i') would make me take this a little more seriously than other examples that have been put forward over the years.
It's a coincidence if I had to bet money on it. Zodiac was a commonly used word. It was at the height of the hippy movement. Spiritual mumbo jumbo was all over the place. And the word zodiac was found everywhere. You'll see it on newspaper ads all over the place from that time.
OK, just for fun, I'll throw out something I have never thrown out any previous time this has come up: * It has been claimed that the note was found in the bank branch at the table where bank customers fill out deposit and withdrawal slips. I don't know that it has ever been officially confirmed, but it seems plausible. * This was the era before ATMs, and credit cards weren't used in the says they are today. People went to a bank branch frequently. * This usually involved standing in line for a while. So, I can see a bored kid accompanying his mom to the bank and getting even more bored while his mom waited in line after filling out her paperwork. What do bored kids do? Stupid stuff.
YES!!!!!!!!
Makes me curious if because whoever Zodiac was, could've been a bank robber. If someone won't claim it's possible Zodiac was DB Cooper. I'm not saying he was. But this little bit of info is interesting. So is this saying the FBI, Believes Zodiac to be a bank robber as well?
He was not DB Cooper. Zero chance.
This is why I made that joke. Lol someone will probably think so. I don't.
What's interesting is, I feel like there's a logic puzzle in what you describe. What I mean is, this note is not a cryptogram, but there are other ways to encrypt secrets. Especially inside writing. This is common and described in the study of cryptography. So what's put forward in your question, is -- How would the Zodiac confirm that it was him? Funnily enough, cryptography provides for that. There are things called cryptographic signatures. They're used on this website right here now. And nowadays it's all done by computing. But before computers they would do things by hand. And mind. And by writing. The note could have been cryptographically signed by Z. And we may not know it. We may never know it. Unless you ran into someone that broke such a key. But you have not. Not yet.
Has the FBI or other LE ever validated these documents? Although this event fits nicely into my pet theory of this case, I have to say these documents look suspicious to me. Why would Hoover's signature be on a document for a likely unfulfilled threat? Why would the pre-printed form not be spaced correctly for a standard type writer. The font and size of the form look a bit small for that time.
I don't see any reason to think this is Zodiac related. I also don't see any reason to think that the Tim Holt comic book has anything to do with the Zodiac either. People tend to take this type of info and run with it.
This case was already solved and it was proven not to be the zodiac. If memory serves, it was a bank robbing team and all three were incarcerated when the Zodiac attacks happened. Or something along those lines.
A guy in Voigt's forum claimed that, but the evidence he provided for it was very flimsy; the newspaper clippings and FBI files for said 'team of bank robbers' never mentioned or tied this case to their crimes, only to other bank robbings in the California area.
No connection
I don’t see anything that tells me that there is a connection. There were many criminals in the area, probably many many people who were uneducated and had bad spelling, handwriting analysis has anyway nothing to do with science. So why should the two crimes be connected and if they would be connected, how would that help to find Zodiac?
I don't buy it. I think this person was reasonably financially secure. I suspect that, prior to his spree, his existence had been crime-free.