Did the Zodiac Killer leave a message within a message?

My brief appearance in the new Peacock docuseries, "Myth of the Zodiac Killer"

#cryptography #zodiackiller #truecrime

[decodr-ring]

Are misspellings waymarkers for finding a cipher? I found three interesting misspellings in Kathleen Johns Letter dated July 24, 1970 that indicate gematria was one of the cipher techniques used by The Zodiac.

My interest in ciphers, lead me to a site that has all of the letters attributed to the Zodiac Killer. It's a fact that he made several substitution ciphers to be published in newspapers around San Francisco and Vallejo in the 1960's and 1970's. He also wrote plain text letters.

Various people have analyzed the letters of the Zodiac. Investigator have long remarked about the Zodiac's numerous misspellings and puns and verse mimicking the form of the Mikado, but I could not find if gematria had been used to analyze those letters.

Kathleen Johns Letter has 11 lines of handwritten text in very poor penmanship.

Line 8 has two words "couple hours" misspelled as "coupple howers".

The misspelled words "coupple" and "howers" have three cipher matches in the four base gematria ciphers (Ordinal, Reduction, Reverse ordinal, Reverse Reduction).

"coupple" = 88, 34, 101, 29.
"howers" = 88, 34, 74, 29.

The 6th line also has the word: "woman" misspelled as "woeman".

"woeman" = 71, 26, 91, 28.

I searched the Gematria Connections Database and found the word "temple" has four ciphers matching with the misspelled word "woeman".

"temple" = 71, 26, 91, 28.

The word "temple" does not appear in the Kathleen Johns letter. It's worth noting that "temple" and "woeman" are an exact match in the four base gematria ciphers and that type of exact match is very very rare, and I usually only see it in anagrams and palindromic words, which have all the same letters.

My proposal is that "coupple" and "howers" is one item of evidence that The Zodiac understood gematria as a cipher technique. A counter argument to that idea is that the word "woeman", although interesting in gematria, could also be a pun incorporating "woe" into the word "woman". Some of the misspellings appear to be waymarkers for a clue, and also in the context of that era, there were no spellchecking programs, so he probably did make blunders with his spelling without any intentional meaning as a cipher.

The meaning of the cipher in the Kathleen Johns Letter is open for speculation. I've noticed that number 88 is used in several esoteric contexts, and it might be used like a graffiti tag or a team identifier.

Cheers

[crazymonkey]

David's done so much good work related to the Zodiac killer. I'm glad he's been invited onto a documentary. I hope they paid him well!

[OfficeHyena]

Also fell asleep to that first voice many times

[RandallHiggins]

I think he was just beginning to experiment with sending letters and encoding. He wasn’t sure how much effort he wanted to put into it so he did a simple substitution to test the reactions.

[smacksalad]

Is it October yet? Can I watch Fincher's Zodiac again yet without it being a bit weird? :)

[mrmojorisen]

Vai demorar aqui no Brasil :(, parabéns Dave!!!