Hacker News Reader

Comment by isleyaardvark | Hacker News Reader

The circumstantial evidence is pretty bad for this case, I made it to part 2 of his threads and I'm no longer interested in what he has to say. When you put forward tons of weak evidence, that doesn't make you look more correct, it makes you look desperate.

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.

View on HN

You did exactly the thing I asked you to NOT do. You hammer at the weakest evidence like a defense lawyer, instead of looking at the strongest evidence as someone looking for the truth should do.

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.

No, I refuse. It's not my job to wade through a bunch of, not just weak evidence, but some absolute baloney. He said multiple things that are simply false and can be verified with my own eyes.

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.

> evidence against the idea he's Zodiac

Obviously zodiac is not idiot to match those arrows to his normal drawing. Any okay-ish killer would differentiate their handwriting and such symbols.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com