https://twitter.com/thepaulofhaynes/status/15729051635848355...
Some good side-by-side images.
Some good side-by-side images.
The most serious claims mostly rely on the daughters' recollection. However, if they can be independently verified, I'd say the case is pretty strong:
* The daughter says he abused her over her dating and drug use. If her recollection can be trusted, that was on the same day as the first murders.
* The father wrote a letter to a zine in response to a guy whose daughter had been exposed to drugs, where he claims that he was in a similar situation once and that some people are no longer alive because of it. He asked the editor of the zine to not print that part, too (He still did). This part doesn't rely on the daughter's memory.
* Putting those two together, it does look an awful lot like he might have been about to kill his daughter, then changed his mind and went out to "get revenge" on some random youths who he felt were the sort responsible for corrupting his daughter instead.
I think this is the strongest part of the evidence, so I'd like to see the true crime nerds engage with that, rather than, say, with the suggestion that he got his symbol from the minutemen group, or any of the more speculative stuff.
Also, there's the bloody fingerprint stuff. It hasn't been checked for this guy yet, but it has apparently been checked and found not to match for the other candidates the true crime nerds have launched over the years; based on that I'd say this one is, presently, at least as good a candidate as those.
Particularly bad are the visual comparisons. What the hell is he looking at? In most cases he is simply wrong and you can see it with your own eyes.
- the sketch of Zodiac has much thinner nose
- the feathered arrows do not match, the feathers are drawn distinctly differently
(Part 2)
- the ampersands don't look the same to me
- the crosshairs absolutely do not match.
It leaves me with the impressions that he has decided Doerr is the Zodiac and will take any bit of evidence and stretch it to fit that notion.
edit: the feathered arrows look more like evidence against the idea he's Zodiac. He drew arrows a different way.
The author making the case is not on trial here. The goal is to look PAST how he "makes himself look" and consider the actual interesting things. The interesting things are, to repeat:
* The guy appears to have indirectly admitted to murdering more than one person, in connection to events "vaguely similar" to the drugging of a child (his own words).
* The circumstances he describes during that admission match up with a domestic violence incident described by his daughter, on the day the first killing happened.
* The guy, unlike all the other proposed candidates, has not been ruled out as a fingerprint match.
You understand how this is more important, right? Your - or the author's - eyeballing of sketches and symbols could easily be wrong, it's low quality evidence either way. Being present in range of the crime scene, at the time of the crime, with killing more than one person and a likely motive admitted to in writing is NOT low quality evidence. That's "oh dear, this needs to be looked into" evidence.
And if your bullet points are the strongest points, those are incredibly weak.
- He says he murdered one or more people, that makes him the Zodiac?
- He had a domestic violence incident the same day of the first Zodiac killing. Okay?
- He hasn't been ruled out as a fingerprint match. So have millions of other people. I haven't been ruled out as fingerprint match either. And I killed several people. (Or did I? Or am I just bullshitting about that?)
Sure, maybe he's the Zodiac. Maybe with further digging someone will find some actual evidence, instead of what has been offered by the author in the Twitter thread. But this is all thin.
Obviously zodiac is not idiot to match those arrows to his normal drawing. Any okay-ish killer would differentiate their handwriting and such symbols.