Non-Redacted Zodiac Killer Profile Part II: He’s dead, Jim

Lake Berryessa Zodiac crime scene

Even the most experienced and highly trained criminal profilers acknowledge that profiling is more art than science. This is another way of saying that when you try to apply the generalizations of psychology to specific unknown individuals, it is utterly impossible to control for even a fraction of the variables that affect behavior. Any profiler who doesn’t acknowledge this is just a quack. I base this view primarily on my innate skepticism of most things; I performed no searches of the legitimate literature on the topic. If someone would like to argue the point, I encourage it.


Zodiac is dead. If you cling to the hope that he’s alive and you might be the person who catches him, I suggest that you get comfortable in your mom’s moldy basement, stock up on ganja and DiGiorno, and get a new keyboard to replace that one with the overused CAPS LOCK key. If I have a few spare minutes, I’ll look for you on the various
fora every December 20 and see what you’re up to.
As I possibly described in part one of the profile, Zodiac is rumored to have had ties to a PETA precursor group somewhere in the high wheat country of western Kansas, perhaps very close to the small town of Holcomb. I got my start on the path to this tentative conclusion when I discovered a previously overlooked piece of evidence: Zodiac’s right Wing Walker shoe. I am not currently prepared to explain the circumstances of this discovery, as it may have been found on federal BLM land, but the shoe has been examined and authenticated by somebody in some agency someplace.  Please remember that many to most of the statements herein are complete dreck. Zodiac was possibly terrified of small insects as a child. It has been suggested that it may have been the sight of scurrying creatures small enough to chew on his eardrums that did more than anything else to steer him toward his eventual fate. Each of his thumbs had a highly flexible metacarpal phalangeal joint. He ventured into two-bit seedy dives in the worst part of every town he passed through in order to hone his fighting skills. It was in one such place that he almost met his doom when the bartender shot at him point-blank with an old 10 gauge his grandpa had used to hunt geese out of season on Suisun Bay. The gun misfired.

A possible former Zodiac haunt in an undisclosed location

Secret place in Rio Vista, thought by some to have an undefined role in the etiology of Zodiac's mental pathology

There are tantalizing hints of Zodiac’s passage in the dry summer of 1960 through many places around the arid southwest. In Needles, California, which sits across the mighty Colorado from Arizona, there was later discovered, carved in the riverbank silt at the spot made famous by Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” a symbol eerily similar to the one Zodiac scrawled on his letters to Bay Area newspapers (and on the door of Bryan Hartnell’s Karmann Ghia).

This is rumored in many zones to be a former Zodiac hideout/staging headquarters.

If the Zodiac murders were happening now, who would the killer be? These crimes are to be treated here—in order to free our minds from the the stultifying atmosphere created by the anti-think mass media/politico-corporate complex—as a scourge of the current day, and we examine the characteristics that may lead us to Zodiac. He’s your neighbor, the friendly guy who’s always willing to help you unload large pieces of furniture but who invariably lets you know that he has a better way to do it.  He’s your other neighbor–the guy who refuses to talk to anyone and takes his solitary meals in the backyard under an old mulberry tree, cradling a varmint gun in his lap in case the squirrels or pigeons bother him. He works at a mini market and buys all the Penthouse and Hustler magazines before they go on the rack. His job involves, as I said before, long-distance driving, usually along deserted roads across the high desert. Last year he tried to prospect for a local second-tier 1% motorcycle club. He didn’t make it, of course, but he still uses the slang he picked up, and this bothers some people. He is the proprietor of a bait shop near Steamboat Slough and he refuses to sell jumbo minnows to any customer who does not first promise to render each of them unconscious with ice water before running a gleaming 1/0 hook through its lips. He is a five foot-six vice principal of the old school who calls everyone “slacker.” He gave up trying to grow hair years ago, and now shines his pale, globe-like head with ski wax. He wears Pendleton® shirts hanging out with only the top button fastened because he once read a book about the history of Los Angeles gangs. He’s your podiatrist, and he’s angry whether you know it or not.

Returning to the actual time of Zodiac’s activities, if you will consult any 60′s era gas station map you will discover—with the aid of a ruler and pencil—that the driving distance from North M and Vine in Needles to the summit of Mt. Diablo is 555 miles.  If you add that to the 111 miles from Washington and Cherry Streets in San Francisco to an unspecified spot alongside US 50 west of Cameron Park, you get 666 miles. These are possibly coincidences, but as hardwired pattern-seekers, you want to accept it, so I suggest that you do.

The gravel turn-out at the Lake Herman Road Zodiac crime scene.

We could, under some circumstances, know incontrovertibly that Zodiac can definitely be placed in the Bay Area by 1961, perhaps. Legends of possibly unexplained phenomena involving gravitational anomalies, mysterious ice blue (or white or gray or silver or pearl-colored) pursuit cars skulking along dark roads, as well as several nearly-confirmed disappearances within a 50 mile radius of Samuel P. Taylor State Park from January 1955 to July 1967 tend to support this contention. This kind of behavior, according to several persons identifying themselves as experts, often escalates to homicide. That these incidents occurred within a nearly 8,000 square mile area over a twelve and-a-half year time frame just about nails it down. Additionally, the socio-chronological progression along a vaguely described continuum of moral permissiveness in that era set the stage for all kinds of undifferentiated behavioral permutations. The time was ripe, and by the end of this period, Zodiac was ready to take his twisted games to the ultimate level.

© Pseudocognitive

Profiling the Zodiac Killer

I was recently asked by an unknown character to profile Zodiac; specifically, I was asked what I thought Zodiac's work background might have been. Having absolutely no formal training (but being a semi-frequent viewer of “Criminal Minds” and other entertaining yet unrealistic cop dramas), I naturally agreed to render my opinion. This analysis (although it is a complete fabrication) is at least as accurate as something that any other untrained person could come up with, so I feel vindicated already.

Zodiac could have been rejected for employment by the Montana Dept. of Corrections due to unknown factors and creeping suspicions still not spoken of by anyone in hushed tones, not even the regulars of the the Death-Delay Club near Missoula. He could’ve always wanted to be a correctional officer at Deer Lodge, and the rejection was rumored to have been a precipitating factor in his crimes. Long hours spent hauling bleating sheep to the rendering plant while listening to Jim Eason on the radio fueled his addiction to driving and forged in him a  mental connection between piloting a vehicle and causing death.  This was back in the celluloid age, of course, and his skill set reflected the times. He was an avid student of football strategy and was the first high school coach to pioneer the West Coast Offense, decades before anyone ever heard of Bill Walsh or his brother Joe. The warm smell of colitas did nothing to allay his suspicions that he was the beast and that steely knives would one day be driven home decisively. For this reason, he took up the cudgel and the mace and the longbow. I am certain there is some possibility  that he used his considerable skills in Kyūdō to fish for carp in his estranged father’s pond under the cover of darkness and that this had very little to do with the eventual death of his father at the hands of a vagrant at N. Houston and Main in Dallas. It is also possibly likely that the Panamint Mountains held great allure for him or that he once coveted the jar that held the head of the legendary outlaw Joaquin Murrieta, shot by Harry Love. Knots were not his thing especially. He mastered only the half-hitch and balked at the granny.  He was ambidextrous and ate beans from a can, worried open with a key to an old Karmann Ghia and time, lots and lots of time. He worked in highway construction and event planning and was, for a fortnight, a renowned surgeon who specialized in the excision of pilonidal cysts from the backsides of worthless hate-mongers. In short, as many others have previously concluded, he could have been anything or nothing or even an expert cartographer or USDA inspector or an organic bull testicle trader.  Or maybe he was just a guy who built jet boats in his garage next door. The possibilities are not endless, but almost.

© Pseudocognitive