“Not the Zodiac Killer”
The latest issue of the Washington Monthly features an article about Michael O’Hare’s niggling frustration at being the Zodiac Killer suspect of a lone nut. It’s right here. His complete denial is seen here:
I don’t want to be cute about the murders, which not only left victims and grieving relatives in their wake, but also frightened a lot of people, and frustrated California and Massachusetts law enforcement. So, for the record: I am not the Zodiac killer, had absolutely nothing to do with those (or any other) murders. As far as I know, I wasn’t even in California when any of them happened. Similarly, I had nothing to do with the death of Joan Webster, a Boston college student whose murder Penn has also tried to pin on me. A note to Zodiac hobbyists and Penn aficionados: Please don’t bother parsing the foregoing for cleverly worded nondenials and numerological incriminating clues; if you don’t like my choice of words, feel free to make up other language that you would take as a flat, comprehensive, unqualified denial, and assume I said that. What follows will tell you nothing at all about Zodiac or Webster; it’s a personal history of being struck by low-voltage lightning out of a clear blue sky.
Sounds good. BUT…
Take out the print copy of this Washington Monthly article. Start from the bottom, and go up. Every sixth line, go backward from right to left and pick out the sixth letter. Now arrange these letters in rows of sixes. There’s nothing terribly esoteric about this pattern — it’s the typical “Mark of the Beast Six Six Six”. Next, start from the top and do the mirror image: sixth row, sixth letter from the left to the right, new row of sixes.
What you want to do now is pick out the letters diagonally downward from left to right, zig-zagging your wayback right to left than left to right to the bottom. Now, do the same with the mirror image — diagonally zig-zagging your way from the bottom, right to left, left to right, and etc.
Next, go to the third row of letters, and go downward, picking out every third letter. And then, from the fouth row (or, third row from the right), go upward, every third letter again.
What you will find is a Zorastrian Myth — numerous misspellings for reasons that are unclear at this time — perhaps the encrypted code was hastily written. It’s also a little unclear if it’s the fifth item on this list or the sixth — applying new vowels and cutting off some constanants to this message is a little bit random. But nonetheless the message would appear to contradict the flat out denial, or at least open up the suggestion that he knows something, or… something.