Zodiac Letters 2 1969 08 04 Vol. 1. Debut letter tone and writing for print
Zodiac Letters 2_1969_08_04 vol_1_Debut letter tone
and writing for print
1.
Introduction
This opening volume frames the August 4, 1969, so-called
Debut Letter, as a media event engineered for narrative control. Using a CHS
(Contextual–Holistic–Systemic) approach, these following empirical finds will
be demonstrated and discussed over a number of articles:
- Analysis of
tone and content: the
narrative controller as his own playwright director
- Self-reference
of geometry of letter: “3
to 6 in. across” à a validation of Soze’s analysis for the July 31, 1969, letters
(“Writing for print”)
- Rhythmic
pacing of “linguistic outliers.”
Outliers occur at ~15-16-word intervals from word
41 to ~340, then stop. Linear fit
- Edge-zone emptiness.
Zero outliers in 1–40 and 341–414
→ mid-band concentration.
- 63-word glyph-free buffer.
First 63 words contain no glyph
tokens (“+”, “X@”); this is a “word-count ambiguity–free” zone.
- Z408 echo in
prose length.
Removing six “+” glyphs from the 414-word body
yields 408 lexical words, matching Z408’s 408 symbols.
- Z340
alignment (length & symbol logic).
Last outlier: 340 ↔ Z340 total
length; 63-word clean start ↔ 63 original Z340 symbols.
- 74 ↔ 74 structural mirror.
Re-tokenizing Z340 plaintext EVERYONE →
EVERY ONE, WASN’T → WAS NT yields a 74-word mid-band,
matching the Debut Letter’s 74-word edge emptiness (1–40 + 341–414).
Interpretive synthesis
- The Debut
Letter is numerically staged: a 63-word clean buffer, a ~15-word
beat through ~340, and a silent tail.
- Page geometry (“3
to 6 in. across”) is self-referential: 2.95’’ το 6.33’’—the phrase
doubles as a layout cue.
- Prose inherits
cipher metrics: 408 (cleaned word count) ↔ Z408; 63/340 cues ↔ Z340.
- Psycholinguistic
profile: compositor-like planner—numerically orderly, media-aware,
performative; orthography used as self-branding (deliberate
deviance, not inability).
A CHS-assessment is that the Debut Letter
behaves like a designed bridge between Z408 and Z340—its prose carries cipher
metrics in rhythm, layout, and counts. This materially strengthens the
hypothesis that the writer composed under numeric and typographic constraints,
not at random.
In this volume we examine the letter
transcript, tone and “aprox 3 to 6 in. across” attributes.
2.
Letter
scan and transcript
The transcript of the letter is as follows:
Dear Editor
This is the
Zodiac speaking.
In answer to your
asking for more details about the good times I have had in Vallejo, I shall be
very happy to supply even more material. By the way, are the police haveing a
good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up; when they do crack it they
will have me.
On the 4th of
July:
I did not open
the car door, The window was rolled down all ready. The boy was origionaly
sitting in the front seat when I began fireing. When I fired the first shot at
his head, he leaped backwards at the same time thus spoiling my aim. He end-ed
up on the back seat then the floor in back thashing out very violently with his
legs; thats how I shot him in the knee. I did not leave the cene of the
killing with squealling tires + raceing engine as described in the Vallejo
paper,. I drove away quite slowly so as not to draw attention to my car.
The man who told
the police that my car was brown was a negro about 40 – 45 rather shabbly
dressed. I was at this phone booth haveing some fun with the Vallejo cops when
he was walking by. When I hung the phone up the dam X@ thing beganto ring +
that drew his attention to me + my car.
Last Christmass
In that epasode
the police were wondering as to how I could shoot + hit my victoms in the dark.
They did not openly state this, but implied this by say ing it was a well lit
night + I could see the silowets on the horizon. Bull Shit that area is
srounded by high hills + trees. What I did was tape a small pencel flash
light to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, in the centar of the beam of
light if you aim it at a wall or celling you will see a black or darck spot in
the center of the circle of light aprox 3 to 6 in. across. When taped to a gun
barrel, the bullet will strike exactly in the center of the black dot in the
light. All I had to do was spray them as if it was a water hose; there was no
need to use the gun sights. I was not happy to see that I did not get front
page cover-age.
{CROSSHAIR}
NO
ADDRESS
Figure 1. The three scanned pages of the Debut
letter from ZodiacKiller.com (courtesy of Tom Voigt) [1]-[3]
3.
Tone
and appearance: a focused analysis
This section features a focused, page-informed
analysis of the tone, handwriting, and appearance of the Zodiac’s August 4,
1969 “debut” letter. My observations are visual/linguistic, not a forensic
handwriting opinion.
Self-branding and performance
The opening salutation—“Dear Editor … This
is the Zodiac speaking”—introduces a self-conscious, media-aware persona.
The author writes as a performer addressing an audience, mixing flippant
courtesy with calculated menace. His voice alternates between a smug
playfulness (“tell them to cheer up”) and crude provocation (“Bull
Shit”), revealing a speaker intent on commanding attention rather than
merely communicating information.
Throughout the letter the killer asserts dominance
over the official narrative by supplying scene-specific minutiae—precise
movements of victims, the improvised flashlight-aiming technique, and
corrections of earlier press reports (“I did not leave the cene … with
squealling tires”). This posture of factual superiority constructs a
pedantic narrator who seeks to instruct, correct, and dominate police and
journalists alike.
Punctuation is irregular: stray commas and
periods, an occasional casual semicolon. Misspellings are systematic—haveing,
origionaly, fireing, squealling, raceing, shabbly, epasode, victoms, silowets,
srounded, pencel, celling, darck—forming a consistent orthographic pattern
rather than random error.
All three pages show photocopy artifacts such
as background smudging and tonal mottling. FBI documentation identifies the
stock as Woolworth’s Fifth Avenue.
Page 1
A narrow top margin and uneven left margin
create a dense block of text. The phrase “Dear Editor” introduces the
first appearance of “This is the Zodiac speaking.” Heavy pressure
produces saturated strokes and minor feathering.
Page 2
Capitalized words (“Last Christmass”)
serve as mid-page emphasis resembling a heading. The description of the
pay-phone witness includes a hand-drawn mark within the line (“dam X@ thing”),
illustrating the writer’s tendency to embed graphic symbols in text.
Page 3
The upper two-thirds contain the
flashlight-aiming explanation; below it appears the crosshair emblem followed
by large capitals NO ADDRESS. The final line is executed in heavier,
more deliberate strokes than the body text—possibly an editorial annotation,
though equally consistent with an intentional closing flourish by the killer.
4.
The
authoritarian performance: the killer as a controller of narrative
Phrases such as “On the 4th of July:”
and “Last Christmass” act as pseudo-headings, giving the letter a
quasi-report format that reinforces the author’s claim to authority.
Word spacing tightens near the right margin, and occasional mid-word
compression suggests rapid writing or pressure shifts. Line spacing is minimal,
producing small collisions between descenders and ascenders on adjacent lines.
The encircled-cross emblem varies slightly in
proportion and line weight but retains the same underlying geometry—a
not-quite-circular ring with horizontal and vertical bars extending past the
circumference—serving as the writer’s visual signature.
Across tone, handwriting, and layout, the Debut
Letter projects a meticulously staged performance: a confident
self-presentation underwritten by deliberate stylistic irregularities. The
document’s combination of theatrical diction, patterned misspelling, and visual
idiosyncrasy supports the view of a killer-writer who constructs identity as
spectacle—both taunting and instructing his audience through form as much as
through content.
5.
Aprox
3 to 6 in across
There are three “code-like” inferences in the
Debut letter: two numerical and one glyph-based. It is my intent to make a case
study for the “decoding” of all three, each with its own content and purpose.
In this volume, I address the “aprox 3 to 6 in.
across”.
Within the Debut Letter (August 4 1969),
the writer includes the phrase “aprox 3 to 6 in. across” while
describing the diameter of the crossed-circle symbol (“pencel”).
At this moment, let us not focus on the linguistic outliers present.
When the physical layout of the letter is
measured from the surviving photographic and photocopy evidence, the following
spatial regularities emerge, as shown in Table 1 and depicted in the three
scanned pages shown in Figure 2.
Thus, the horizontal footprint of the letter’s
text block is 3 to 6 inches across, precisely matching the phrase
embedded in the narrative.
Figure 2. The three scanned pages of the Debut
letter from ZodiacKiller.com (courtesy of Tom Voigt) in high resolution, edited
to provide a relative ruler for the horizontal text frame (left-to-right max
span with approximating calculus) [4]-[6]
Table 1. Inch measurements (span across left
and right text edge) for the three pages of the Debut letter (source: Tom
Voigt-published photograph evidence)
|
Metric |
Left
text edge (relative position of ruler) |
Right-most
text edge (relative position of ruler) |
Measured
span (approx. calc.) |
|
Page 1 |
1 inch (relative ruler mark) |
Ends at 7.25 inches (relative ruler mark) |
6.25 inches across |
|
Page 2 |
0.875 inch (relative ruler mark) |
Ends at 7.375 inches (relative ruler mark)
(excess of last two rows; 7.35 inches if excluded or averaged) |
6.5 inches across (max span approx.) |
|
Page 3 |
0.75 inch (relative ruler mark) |
Ends at 7 inches (relative ruler mark) |
6.25 inches across |
|
Shortest message line (“Dear Editor”) |
1 inch (relative ruler mark) |
Ends at 3.6 inches (approx.) |
2.6 inches across |
|
Shortest in-text line (“Last Christmass”) |
1 inch (relative ruler mark) |
Ends at 4.25 inch (relative ruler mark) |
3.25 inches across |
|
Average shortest span (mean low-end) |
2.95 inches across |
||
|
Average max span (mean end-to-end text span) |
6.33 inches across |
||
The numerical description “aprox 3 to 6 in.
across” operates on two simultaneous levels:
- Literal
reference — it
superficially describes the physical diameter of the crosshair symbol.
- Meta-spatial
self-reference — the same
measure defines the letter’s own text frame: a 1-inch left margin,
six inches of written field, and individual line clusters ranging from
roughly three to six inches in width.
This dual meaning implies that the writer was
self-conscious of page geometry—a hallmark of deliberate composition rather
than hurried confession. By embedding his layout dimensions in the prose, he
effectively encodes the page itself as part of the message.
Behavioral and Psycholinguistic Significance
The precision of margins and the mirrored
numerical cue suggest a writer accustomed to measured work—someone who plans
spacing and proportionality, perhaps from drafting, printing, or clerical
backgrounds. The page becomes a designed object, not a casual sheet of
correspondence.
Inserting a measurement that secretly describes
the page’s own dimensions demonstrates meta-awareness and an aesthetic of
hidden order. This aligns with the broader rhythmic regularity already observed
in the linguistic outliers (≈15-word intervals). Both indicate a drive to
impose mathematical coherence on form and content.
“3 to 6” also forms a micro-range within a
longer metric sequence that later culminates in “340”—suggesting that numerical
intervals, spatial units, and cipher lengths were mentally linked in the
offender’s compositional process. The page literally embodies his
numeric thinking.
The “3 to 6 in. across” phrase is best
understood as a self-referential metric: the writer embeds his page
geometry into his prose. This act unites the textual, spatial, and symbolic
layers of the Debut Letter and reinforces a profile of a meticulous,
numerically oriented offender who conceptualized writing as design—an
engineer of words, margins, and meaning alike.
6.
Soze’s
contribution “Writing for Print”: Typesetting as Method — and How It Reinforces
“aprox 3 to 6 in. across”
Soze’s core find
In “Writing for Print” [7], Soze argues
that the July 31, 1969, letters were composed for newspaper reproduction,
with the writer consciously imitating column layout and typesetting decisions. Soze,
ever the meticulous and highly observant researcher, demonstrates this by: (a)
setting up mock broadsheet columns (≈1.83″ width) and (b) showing how the
Zodiac’s deliberate spacing, letter-size shifts, and “errors” operate like a
compositor’s tools—adjusting line breaks and visual justification rather than
reflecting illiteracy.
Key points from Soze’s article:
- The three July
31 letters read like adjacent newspaper columns; the author likely
“did the work for the papers” by structuring text to drop straight into
columnar print.
- Broadsheet
context: Chronicle ≈ 8 columns; Times-Herald ≈ 6; common column width ≈ 11
picas / 1.83″. Soze then mocks up the letters in Times-style fonts to
compare flow.
- “Errors” (e.g.,
Christmass, paterned, cruse, Fry) are shown as
spacing interventions: extra letters, removed letters, bolding,
up-/down-sizing, and widened letter/word gaps to force desired line
breaks—exactly how a typesetter manipulates white space in a composing
stick.
- Soze’s article
walks through historic hand composition → Linotype/Monotype
practice to show how wedge/blank spacing and character widths control the
end of each line.
How this dovetails with the “aprox 3 to 6 in.
across” finding
My measurement shows the Debut Letter is
physically framed as a 6-inch-wide text field (a mean high-end “max text
span” of ≈ 6.3’’ neatly converging to 6’’ if page-2 outliers are absorbed via
averaging), with the shortest internal lines (a mean low-end of “Dear Editor”
and “Last Christmass”) running ≈ 3″—i.e., the letter’s body consistently sits “
aprox 3 to 6 in. across.” The phrase “aprox 3 to 6 in. across” is therefore
self-referential: it purports to describe the symbol but also encodes
the page’s own writing span.
Soze’s analysis gives us the mechanism
behind that self-reference:
- If the writer
is thinking like a compositor, he is managing line length
and white-space consciously. My measured 3–6″ span is exactly the
kind of target band a typesetter-mind would maintain to keep lines
visually stable—whether in a mock column (Soze’s broadsheet lens) or in a
letter-sized page (my margin-to-margin layout).
- Soze’s
demonstration that the author adds/removes letters and widens/tightens
spacing to control where words fall on a line aligns with my
observation that the letter behaves like designed typography—and
that the phrase “aprox 3 to 6 in. across” is effectively a layout
annotation baked into the prose.
Integrative conclusion
Soze’s typesetting model shows that the
Zodiac’s July 31 letters were engineered for print geometry—with spelling and
spacing used as tools to hit visual targets line-by-line. This independently
supports my Debut letter result: the phrase “aprox 3 to 6 in. across” is not
only a symbol measurement but a self-referential cue to the page’s 3–6″ writing
band, confirming a writer who composes as a compositor—a designer of margins
and rhythm as much as words.
7.
The
linguistic outliers – Aprox and Pencel: en route to vol. 2
The density of involved work in all areas of
the finds presented in the first page of this volume dictates a segmentation of
the analytical presentation into multiple articles that will span the entirety
of what the Debut letter has to offer as relates to the killer’s semiotics and
the technical instrumentation he employed to conceal a pace and a mechanism to
this writing.
At this point, I will provide the epilogue to
this first volume by giving a glimpse into what is to come on vol. 2: the
linguistic outliers.
Aprox
Beginning with the “aprox” found in the “3 to 6
in. across” phrase I discussed, at first it seems to be a miss-spelling of
“approx.” in proper English. However, a search [8] identifies “aprox” as
Lexicon-proper in Portuguese: an abbreviation of aproximadamente, the Portuguese adverb for
approximately [9].
Aside from the killer’s manipulative cross-lingual
technique, there are practical issues connected to this outlier since the
person who found the victims’ bodies at Lake Herman Road was a member of a
Portuguese-originating family, and more specifically from the Azores islands.
In fact, both the analytical research that me and fellow researcher
GorillaTrain have conducted demonstrates a high density of Azores/Portuguese
immigrants into the broader “ranch area” historically associated with the
region of the first canonical murder.
Pencel
The second linguistic outlier associated with the
inches measurement is “pencel”: the very object of description as the circle
with the black dot in the center: the notorious “flash light”.
From Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and
Criseyde: Book V [10], the text reads:
And after this the storie telleth
us
That she hym yaf the fair e baye
stede,
The which he ones wan of Troilus;
And ek a broche (and that was litel
nede)
That Troilus was, she yaf this
Diomede.
And ek, the bet from sorwe him to
releve,
She made hym were a pencel of hire
sleve.
In [11] we can trace the historical definition
of “pencel”:
pencel (plural pencels)
Historical references are provided [11]:
- 1483, Richard III,
“(letter to Piers Courteis)”, in Letters of the Kings of England[1], published 1846, page 153:
[…] forty trumpet banners of
sarsenet; seven hundred and forty pensills; three hundred and
fifty pensills of tarter; four standards of sarsenet with
boars; […]
- 1786, Francis Grose, A Treatise on
Ancient Armour and Weapons, page 47:
Lances were ornamented with a banderole near the point, which gave them a
handsome appearance, these were also called pencells.
- 1833, "T. S.", Letter to the
Editor, Hugh James Rose, Samuel Roffey Maitland (editors), The
British Magazine and Monthly Register of Religious and Ecclesiastical
Information, Volume 4, page 20:
The preceding extracts shew that, in some
instances, each of the Judas torches was ornamented with three pencels,
or little banners, fixed upon as many small spears; […] .
- 2003, D. Vance Smith, Arts of
Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary, page 181:
A "pencel" is a small
banner usually assigned to squires, […] But Launfal's characteristically
ingenious use of the pencel makes it an object that
participates in two distinct systems of registration: the fine, small object
that is the sign of amorous devotion in a chivalric context and the somewhat
ambiguous index of armigerous status.
- 2011, Thomas Penn, Winter King,
Penguin, published 2012, page 86:
Inside Worcester Cathedral, the coffin was
transferred to its hearse, a vast, storeyed, wooden structure, painted black
and adorned with heraldic escutcheons, badged pennants or ‘pencels’,
silk standards of St George, banners of the royal arms of England and Spain,
and of Arthur's various titles, from Wales to Ponthieu in Normandy.
Chaucer provides an interesting co-existence of
"pencel" and "ek". For my notes in the importance of
"MAN" and "EK" from a runic perspective on the Z13 please
read [12].
Chaucer’s phrase is also included in the book "Astronomical
Lore in Chaucer" by Florence M. Grimm [13].
Florence M. Grimm’s 1919 monograph Astronomical
Lore in Chaucer remains a foundational study in medieval cosmological symbolism
and linguistic astronomy. Originally published as part of the University of
Nebraska Studies in Language, Literature and Criticism, the work examines
how Geoffrey Chaucer employed the sky—not merely as poetic ornament, but as a
structured system of knowledge. Grimm situates Chaucer within the late-medieval
worldview, when astronomia and astrologia were not distinct
disciplines but two facets of the same intellectual enterprise: the physical
observation of the heavens intertwined with the interpretation of celestial
influence.
The study unfolds systematically. Its opening
chapters, “Astronomy in the Middle Ages” and “Chaucer’s Scientific Knowledge,”
outline how Chaucer’s understanding of planetary motion, zodiacal timing, and
calendar reckoning was both practical and literate. Grimm argues that Chaucer’s
astronomical precision—seen in works like A Treatise on the Astrolabe, The
Knight’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde—demonstrates a writer
conversant with technical detail rather than an author repeating inherited
allegory.
Subsequent sections on “Chaucer’s Cosmology”
and “Astrological Lore” catalogue specific references to planets, signs, and
celestial spheres, showing how the poet embedded cosmological mechanics into
his narrative rhythm. Chaucer’s cosmos, Grimm concludes, is not a metaphorical
backdrop but a textual architecture calibrated on Ptolemaic principles.
What makes Grimm’s work enduringly relevant to
modern semiotic or cryptologic studies—including analyses such as the Zodiac
letters—is her insistence that symbolic and astronomical structures can coexist
as dual codes: literal description and esoteric commentary operating in the
same textual space. Her view anticipates later structuralist approaches to
hidden systems of meaning, where numeric rhythm, lexical repetition, and
celestial reference merge into deliberate authorial patterning. In this sense, Astronomical
Lore in Chaucer provides a valuable precedent for reading historical
texts—whether medieval poetry or twentieth-century ciphered correspondence—as
organized linguistic fields governed by internal cosmologies of order and
intent.
And thus – onwards to Volume 2: the linguistic
outliers.
SDS
October 9, 2025
References
[1] https://www.zodiackiller.com/ZLetter1.html.
[2] https://www.zodiackiller.com/ZLetter2.html.
[3] https://www.zodiackiller.com/ZLetter3.html.
[4] https://zodiackiller.com/DOZ1HR.html
[5] https://zodiackiller.com/DOZ2HR.html
[6] https://zodiackiller.com/DOZ3HR.html
[7] https://zodiackillerletters.blogspot.com/2025/05/writing-for-print.html
[8] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aprox.
[9] Dicionario da Real Academia Galega (in Galician), A Coruña: Royal Galician Academy, 2012–2025
[10] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43939/troilus-and-criseyde-book-v
[11] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pencel
[12] https://zodiacresearch.blogspot.com/2025/07/canonical-cipher-3-z13-vol2-runic-and.html
[13]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Astronomical-Chaucer-Florence-Marie-Grimm/dp/102326093X.
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