Commentary vol. 1: The Joost Name and the Cartography of Power

 

Commentary_vol_1_The Joost Name and the Cartography of Power

With this post I am opening a new section of the site — Commentary — a space for reflection and interpretation rather than primary analysis. Unlike the Crimes, Ciphers, or Letters pages, these essays will not aim to prove or disprove a specific event but to discuss the broader historical, linguistic, and infrastructural frameworks that surround the Zodiac material.

The first commentary arises from Tom Voigt’s October 17, 2025, release of Paul Avery’s private communique to Sherwood Morrill, written on 17 November 1969, in which the Chronicle reporter referred to a “Joost suspect.” [1]

The note, unpublished for more than half a century, has reignited debate on the message board of ZodiacKiller.com on Tapatalk [2]. Many commenters have tried to determine which individual Avery might have meant, often listing living members of the Joost family or their descendants.

My own approach is different. I am less interested in naming a single Joost than in asking what that surname represented inside San Francisco’s civic architecture — and why it already occupied a position in my research long before the new disclosure appeared, even more so appearing in many different streams of my research. The internal flow of reasoning follows the CHS-data-driven model I have been developing in the context of this case: (1) What does it say? (2) What does it mean?

 

Four paths that led to Joost

Before the Avery memorandum surfaced, the Joost name had appeared repeatedly — and independently — in my work.

1. The Z32 Map and the Twin Peaks line.

While studying the June 1970 “Button” letter and map cipher, I traced the angular bearing from Mount Diablo through the intersection of Market and 19th Street, where the street’s parabolic curve mirrors the dish shape of a modern antenna. That projection continues directly to the site of the Sutro Mansion, today the Sutro Television Tower [3].

Archival engineering data confirm what radio specialists know: Mount Diablo and the Sutro summit share a genuine line-of-sight transmission corridor, one reason the ridge became San Francisco’s broadcast center. The cipher’s geometry thus replicates, consciously or not, the same physical path later used to move radio and television signal across the Bay Area [4].

2. Infrastructure and civic engineering.

The Twin Peaks sector holds both the Miller–Joost residence and the Joost Wells, founded by 19th-century developer Behrend Joost, whose grading and transit projects shaped the city’s topography [5]. The Miller-Joost residence stands at the intersection of Market and 19^th street, an area noted during my mapping of a “beam link” from Mt Diablo to the Twin Peaks/Sutro TV tower area. The physical shape of the intersection immediately caught my attention, alongside the specific grid north angle with reference to Mt Diablo (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Miller-Joost residence. Blue dot on the right marks the Dawn Bellet residence

In 1912 hydrologist John Ripley Freeman, acting for Spring Valley Water Company and PG & E, documented the purchase of those Joost wells by the municipal system in the same report that advanced the Hetch Hetchy and Lake Spaulding projects.

The Lake Spaulding Dam marks the civic water project that serves as a landmark for the area of the Donna Lass retrieved skull (1986; identified December 2023), an alleged and possible victim of the same offender as the canonical murders.

Through Freeman, the Schussler–Sutro–Joost network extended into the hydraulic empire that financed San Francisco’s growth — and eventually the corridor of dams, arsenals, and energy plants that frame the Zodiac timeline from Lake Herman Road to Lake Berryessa (see Figures 2 and 3).

The 1912 Freeman report is in the context of the Hetch Hetchy “affair”, a decades-long chain of events that has been discussed by tour-de-force researcher Soze as relevant to the case; I am in total agreement. Motivated by Soze, I learnt more.

Figure 2. Front cover of the 1912 Freeman report

Figure 3. John Ripley Freeman records the June 25, 1912, purchase of the Joost Wells by the Spring Valley Water Co (Herman Schussler liaison)

3. Residential adjacency and artistic lineage.

Across from the Miller–Joost property stood 4108 Nineteenth Street, occupied successively by Otto Hagel (the Baden-Württemberg photographer associated with Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange) [6], by Martha Schroder (widow of the Hanoverian-born Frederich Reinhold Schroeder), and later by Dawn Joy Bellett, a person with  relation to the lineage claimed by a killer who went by the identity of  “Edward Wayne Edwards” (among others) and who alleged personal association (and admiration) with the killer both in interview and in his book.

The address therefore bridges three worlds — documentary art, German-technical immigration, and post-war criminal orbit — and physically connects the Hagel–Haas–Stern southern-German cluster of Union Square commerce with the Joost–Schroeder northern-German cluster of Twin Peaks infrastructure.

On December 2024, I expounded publicly on a panel discussion about the reference index of these socially conscious photographers in the context of this case, concerning the Monticello Dam, the Benicia Arsenal area and Humble Oil.

4. Genealogical echo.

The surname Joost / Jost / Johst recurs within the ancestry of Paul Lee Stine, the Presidio Heights victim whose final route crossed from the Union Square financial core to the Washington-and-Maple elevation first developed by the Russell and Joost families. Even at the level of lineage, the name threads the case.

When Tom Voigt released Avery’s note about a “Joost suspect,” I recognized not an anomaly, but the re-emergence of a pattern already woven through four corridors of evidence — linguistic, geographic, genealogical, and infrastructural. Before I proceed further, I am compelled to acknowledge Tom Voigt’s significant contribution and comment that he is not only the original provider of all case-related documentation that has allowed public civilian research to even exist, but that he continues to disclose significant information that matters.

Why the name matters

Within San Francisco history, Joost is more than a family name. It is shorthand for a form of civic authority — the power to control elevation, flow, and access. Through Schussler’s Spring Valley Water Company, Freeman’s PG & E dams, and Sutro’s mining tunnels, that authority extended from water into capital, from capital into signal. The very ridgeline that carried hydraulic pressure in the nineteenth century later carried broadcast energy in the twentieth, and the same families—Joost, Schussler, Sutro, Schroeder—appear at both ends of the spectrum.

This continuum forms what might be called the broadcasting of power: the conversion of topography into communication, of geography into narrative.

My recent study From Mason and Geary to Washington and Maple [7] traced how the Zodiac’s final confirmed route mirrors this grammar of control — from the Union Square banks and hotels of the Haas–Wells Fargo line to the residential elevations once managed by Joost, Sutro and Russell.

The recently disclosed name of Joost has been traced multi-fold by my civilian research based on avenues that have already linked Joost as a civic water works landmark along with other case-relevant names —Freeman, Schussler, Hagel, Sutro— that fill in the technical scaffolding of that same structure, showing how the city’s waterworks, its broadcast towers, and its press empires (Examiner, Chronicle, alongside Times-Herald) all rise from the same ground, a ground that the killer seems to have challenged in predatory, homicidal steps.

 

Against personal speculation: an ethical and pragmatic direction

Because the Joost surname is still carried by living descendants, this commentary offers no allegation of criminal conduct. The current temptation to identify “which Joost” Avery meant risks a sensationalism that obscures structural truth. This is not an allegation against fellow, eager researchers, but a warning of an unsteady territory. This is where ethical prudence and strategic research efficiency converge. Because the more responsible – and even pragmatic - question is what Joost means: a cipher for the intertwined histories of transit, hydraulics, communication, and finance—the very systems that the Zodiac mimicked when he turned the city itself into a coded map. In that context, the CHS data-driven model identifies Joost like all the other names in the “cartography of finance”: lineages despised and targeted by the killer.

 

Closing reflection: the way onwards

The Avery disclosure is important not because it names a forgotten suspect but because it re-introduces the civic vocabulary of power.

It reminds us that behind each letter, each crime, and each block of the city lies a deeper grid—one of water, capital, and signal—upon which the events were staged.
From the Joost Wells to the Sutro Tower, from the tunnels of Schussler to the transmitters that crown them, the same geography of control persists.

The Joost lineage, already embedded in San Francisco’s infrastructure and now re-emerging in Avery’s private communication, forms part of that enduring network.

This first Commentary is offered not as speculation but as orientation: an attempt to chart how language, lineage, and communication intersect along the beam that runs from Mount Diablo to Twin Peaks, across Mason and Geary, Washington and Maple, and through the still-unsolved grammar of the Zodiac system.

Paul Avery was experienced and bold: the killer “acknowledged” this by targeting Avery, even openly threatening him with the notorious Halloween Card. Avery stayed the course, with resilience. This latest disclosure carries his mark; this post commenting on this disclosure is dedicated to him. The timing is fitting; here and now – to act by researching; to resolve, by thinking. Critically, analytically, efficiently: from disclosure to closure.

SDS

October 27, 2025

55^th year since the sending of the Halloween Card

 

References

[1] https://zodiackiller.com/2025/paul-averys-secret-suspect/

[2] https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/zodiackillerfr/suspect-joost-t11747.html

[3] https://www.kqed.org/arts/13919589/haunted-mansion-sutro-tower-kgo-television

[4] https://explore.sutrotower.com/tour/history/site

[5] https://www.foundsf.org/Father_of_Southwest_San_Francisco_Behrend_Joost_(1845-1917)

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Hagel

[7] https://zodiacresearch.blogspot.com/2025/10/canonical-crime-4-ph-vol1-from-mason.html