For the past few weeks, I have been weighing the pros and cons of releasing some new information concerning Mr. X.  As usual, my research is the most difficult to deal with because of who Mr. X is and how difficult it is to publicize any specific evidence that would tend to support my case.  I have been thus hamstrung from the start of my research and have had to watch others present their evidence on message boards and websites, while I stand by unable to lay all of my cards on the table.  I have been asked in the past to post my facts on public message boards by people who want to know *everything* that supports the conclusions drawn from those facts.  My answer to them is that this is simply not possible: It is easy for one to ask that they I feed these readers as much information as they desire to satisfy their boundless curiosity, but it is another thing to fulfill those demands.  After all, there is no risk involved for them in reading all of the information about Mr. X that they can get their hands on but there could potentially be grave risk involved to me in posting it, even though it is factual and completely documented.  Therefore, please do not equate my inability to post my evidence with the notion that I have a “weak” circumstantial case.   

This past summer I was informed that Mr. X wanted to meet with me in person in order to dispel once and for all the notion that he is involved in the Zodiac case.  He felt that if we could only meet face to face, he could convince me that I had identified the wrong person of interest, despite the many circumstances that point to him. Out of respect for that offer and especially out of respect for him, I decided to take down this website at that time.  (I did not take this site down because of any overt or perceived “legal threats,” as has been speculated upon by some people, since I have never received any such threats.) I also decided to take him up on his offer to meet face to face.  For one thing, I did not wish him to perceive of me as being someone who hid behind the Internet spouting my ideas from the safety of a computer screen. 

In mid-September 2006, I began to finalize the details of this meeting.  We agreed to meet on September 22, a Friday, but I received an email from Mr. X indicating that he wanted to move the meeting back to the next Wednesday.  Therefore, at his request, we (i.e., Mr. X, me, my colleague Jim and Mr. X’s “second”) met on Wednesday, September 27, 2006. 

Meeting with this gentleman to ask him questions about the case was the last thing I ever set out to do. I feel that by doing so, I stepped over the imaginary line that exists between civilian “researcher” and the police.  However, since 1999, I have been continually rebuffed by law enforcement, which has steadfastly refused to interview Mr. X about the circumstances that swirl around him, despite the fact that since the night of October 11, 1969 the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) apparently possessed some crucial insider’s knowledge about Mr. X of which I was not aware until just recently (and which I now wish to share).  Despite possessing this important and disturbing information, SFPD still refused to meet with Mr. X. 

After SFPD declined to interview Mr. X, I decided to move on to other departments with an interest in the case.  When I approached the Napa District Attorney’s Office in 2000 (at Ed’s suggestion) about interviewing Mr. X, that office at first told me that they were extremely interested in my report.  The D.A.’s Office (in the person of Bill White, Jr., the son of park ranger Bill White, Sr.) went so far as to say that they were taking the Zodiac case out of “cold” status and forming a “task force” between their own office and the Napa County Sheriff’s Office (S.O.) solely to investigate the claims.  Upon hearing this encouraging news, I decided to fly out to Napa, so that Ed and I could meet with them in person.  The detective from the S.O., Joe Steiner, informed us in a face to face meeting in April 2000 that he was not going to interview Mr. X because he “didn’t want to lose his job.”  To say that I was shocked at what he said due to what I had been previously led to believe by the D.A’s office is, of course, an understatement.  Steiner then had a crazy and irresponsible sounding suggestion for me: Why don’t I go out to this man’s house, ring his bell and question Mr. X myself?  I balked at the notion, which I found absurd: I did not feel that it was my place as a civilian to interview this man or anyone else.  Was Steiner serious or was he simply mocking me? I wasn’t sure and do not know the answer to this day. (That brush off is what led me to decide to go with Ed to see Tom Zoellner at the Chronicle later that very same day.  Zoellner subsequently wrote a story about my work in October 2000.  Note: Ed had voluntarily stopped working with me by the time the article was written.) 

My next stop was at the Solano County S.O.  When a young detective there read over my report in early 2001, he was extremely interested in my work and even forwarded it to a retired judge for his opinion (see discussion below).  In fact, the detective wanted to meet with Mr. X to ask him some questions but expressed disappointment with me that Zoellner had alerted Mr. X to my work when he interviewed him for the Chronicle story in 2000.  The detective contacted SFPD as a courtesy to inform them of his intentions to meet with a citizen of the city of San Francisco.  SFPD told the detective from Solano to stay the hell out of San Francisco and away from Mr. X, so he respected their wishes. SFPD politics once again seemed to win out over the legal process. 

Finally, in 2006, after years of frustration from dealing with the police, I received the offer from Mr. X.  In the end, I ended up doing exactly what Joe Steiner had suggested over six years before. 
 

At the beginning of our meeting, I looked Mr. X squarely in the eye and told him that I bore no animosity towards him and that my suspicions were not personal but that they were based on years of factual research.  I pointed to the binder of material that I had previously sent him, which was lying on his desk. I explained that I was simply following a long series of disturbing circumstances, which I had completely documented for him with about seventy exhibits.  (I had sent a complete report to him on my research with supporting documentation prior to the meeting. He therefore had a pretty good idea of what I was going to ask him, as well as ample time to prepare for my questions.  In contrast to the police, who could have walked in and asked questions out of the blue in order to catch him off guard, I felt that it was incumbent upon me to send Mr. X my facts beforehand, if for no other reason that to demonstrate to him that I have been behaving responsibly for the past seven years.) 

As stated above, I was criticized (unfairly, I felt) by the Solano S.O. in 2001 for taking away the “element of surprise” by working with the Chronicle in 2000 and having Zoellner alert Mr. X to my suspicions.  However, I only worked with Zoellner after both SFPD and the Napa S.O. refused to get involved.  I would now anticipate that the police will now probably criticize me for trying to “usurp their role” by interviewing Mr. X myself, etc.  I can only say in my own and Jim’s defense that we did so only after years of frustration with the authorities that have the power, the experience and the mandate to interview suspects refused to do so.  More importantly, they also have the power to follow up and check out the answers that Mr. X gave us, which Jim and I do not possess.  

The meeting itself was very cordial and was conducted as a conversation, not an interrogation.  It was non-confrontational and no voices were ever raised, which is how I think we both wanted it to be.  We simply had an informal “question and answer” session, as I asked prepared questions that I had written on note cards.  (Note: Jim felt that there was an element of planning and “orchestration” to our meeting on Mr. X’s part, on which I won’t elaborate at this point.  I personally had the impression that he had been coached on as least some aspects of our meeting.)  At the end of this meeting, I told Mr. X that I would not continue to post about him on websites and message boards.  I actually walked out wondering if in fact I had the wrong man, since he did not say anything that I perceived at the time as being overtly incriminating.  However, I have since confirmed to the best of my ability to do so that at least part of what he told us appears to conflict with a statement made by a retired SFPD officer about the events of the night of October 11, 1969.  Therefore, since I feel that he apparently did not fulfill the reasonable expectation I had to the facts surrounding the events of that night (after I traveled some 3,000 miles to meet with him at his behest), I have decided to post the information that I shall now present.

One of the first and most important questions I asked Mr. X is where he was on the night of the Stine murder.  He said that he “could not recall” but that he felt that he was “out of the country” in Europe at the time.  I found his inability to recall his whereabouts to be extremely odd given that this was a very famous night in the history of his community and that nearly everyone in San Francisco was impacted by this apparently random murder.  The Stine murder was a shocking crime that would seemingly have made anyone in the city feel that they were a possible target of the killer’s violence in the future.  It also affected the lives of all citizens, since they had to decide if they were going to do something as basic as leaving their homes at night.  Fear swept over the city.  Mr. X said that he traveled extensively at the time but that he could not locate his old passport to prove his whereabouts on that night.  

(Note: I expected that Mr. X wanted to meet me because he was going to present me with a “bombshell” piece of evidence that would clearly show that he could not be involved in the Zodiac crimes.  In point of fact, he did not offer me one piece of proof of anything he said to me, in contrast to the mountain of exhaustively researched and documented evidence I had provided him.  He could not account even tentatively for his whereabouts for any of the other dates of Zodiac’s crimes, despite the fact that some of the murder dates are tied into holidays, etc.) 

One of the responding officers to the Stine murder scene stated that he walked around the block after that murder in search of the killer.  He walked north on Cherry Street to Jackson Street, which I know is true because Don Fouke stated to me in 2006 that he encountered this officer there when he arrived at that intersection shortly after encountering a man near Jackson Street and Maple Street.  This officer then apparently turned and walked east on Jackson Street.  As he walked east down the south side of Jackson Street and turned the corner going south on Maple Street back towards Washington Street, he encountered a man who was out walking his dog.  (The man was apparently not “walking” the dog at the moment they met but was just standing in the deep shadows of the heavily tree-lined Maple Street.)  This officer spoke to this man as a potential witness, not as a suspect.  And this stands to reason.  After all, like Officer Fouke this officer was looking for a man who had just shot a cabbie and then robbed him of a few dollars.  In stark contrast to the person they were looking for, the man the officer encountered lived nearby, clearly “belonged” in his surroundings, and was dressed differently from the man he was looking for.  He probably also looked differently from the man the kids had described.  Then there was the fact that he was just out walking his dog.  However, the officer also stated that when other people would pass by, he’d excuse himself, talk to them briefly, and then keep coming back to this man. He apparently spent quite a bit of time speaking to this man, checking his ID, etc. If he only considered this man a witness who had obviously not seen anything and had nothing to offer by way of evidence, what was it that kept the officer coming back to him?  What about him or his behavior that night evoked this response from the officer? 

The officer undoubtedly must have asked this man if he had “seen anything strange or ‘supicisous’ (as Zodiac would later write) in the past ten minutes” or so.  The man said that he had not.  This officer, for the record, firmly believes that this man is not in any way involved in the case.  However, what he may not have considered after Zodiac claimed credit for this crime is that he may have chosen to take a victim close to his nearby “base of operations,” go back to that base, clean up, change clothes, and then head back to the crime scene.  What would be more satisfying for someone like Zodiac than to claim his last victim in familiar surroundings with a plan to embarrass the police by becoming “the guy who was just out walking his dog,” then blending into the crowd and watching the police investigation into that crime? 

This officer stated that the man he stopped that night was Mr. X.*

*Although I have been thus far unsuccessful in obtaining any documentation of this encounter, this officer has clearly stated and strongly implied on more than one occasion that the man he encountered was Mr. X.  At one point, he claimed to have read it in a narrative that he found of that night that is in the SFPD files.  I must therefore defer to his recollection of the events and would have to subpoena him to testify about those events if I ever found myself in a courtroom over this point.  As much as I would like to have physical documentation of this encounter in my hands, since I document everything I say about Mr. X, it has not been possible for me to do so in this instance.  I have, to be sure, made every effort possible to confirm this encounter through various means. 

 (Note: In 2004, I was trying to locate Officer Don Fouke.  I called several people with surnames similar to that of the officer referred to above.  He ended up calling me on January 12, 2004.  He told me that Mr. X “had an alibi” and had been “cleared.”  He said that if I “had a source at SFPD” I might learn what this alibi was.  He refused to tell me what the alibi was but seemed to enjoy allowing me to twist in the proverbial wind.  He then wished me “good luck” in my endeavors.  His tone was not as helpful as it was taunting.  He was essentially saying, “I know something you don’t know.” Now I have learned that this alibi apparently revolves around this SFPD officer placing Mr. X on the streets close by one of the murder sites shortly after that crime occurred!  This is hardly the alibi one would presumably wish to have if he looked just like the police sketch from that night and also had a strong circumstantial case pointing at him.  Mr. X, for his part, is eschewing this offer of an alibi from an SFPD officer and placing himself far away from San Francisco on that night.) 

When I asked Mr. X why an SFPD officer would say that he encountered him on Maple Street after the Stine murder, he stated that he had no idea.  Mr. X stated that he “only walked a dog twice in his life” and that he rarely (or maybe he said “never”) walked around his own neighborhood. (Therefore, he would probably not be easily recognizable by the Stine witnesses, who lived on the next street, as someone they normally saw out and about in their neighborhood, as has been implied many times on public message boards.) Not too long ago, this officer mentioned Mr. X by name to someone as being the person he stopped that night.  He just recently strongly inferred it to another person, so I am quite confident (90%, if not 100%) that his memory of that night is accurate and that Mr. X is the man he stopped.  After he took down the man’s particulars (name and address, etc.), the patrolman apparently handed the matter over to the detectives (probably Insp. Armstrong but possibly Insp. Toschi) for them to do with what they saw fit. 

The Stine eyewitnesses stated that about half an hour after the murder took place, the police asked “them” (i.e., him or her or a combination thereof) to try to ID a man who had also been out walking his dog. The man was in the back of a squad car and was brought close to the residence of the witnesses for them to look at.  I do not know that this was the same man who was interviewed by the patrolman but I sense that it was the man that the officer had stopped on Maple Street right after the Stine murder. (I personally know of nobody else who may have been stopped while walking a dog that night.  However, I clearly cannot rule out this possibility, since I do not have access to SFPD’s files.)  The witness(es) failed to ID him.  However, this man would have had the advantage of having gone back to his base, taken off the dark colored parka that he had worn, changed clothes, cleaned up, removed his “descise,” and evolved into the “guy who is just out walking his dog.”  Also, SFPD apparently poisoned the mind of the witness(es) by actually telling them that the man in the car had been out walking his dog!  This fact combined with the fact that he probably looked differently and was obviously someone who belonged in the neighborhood (otherwise he would not be out walking a dog!) would have prejudiced these youthful witnesses in favor of saying that the man in the squad car was not the man who had shot the cab driver. 

The patrolman himself apparently does not know if the man that was taken to the eyewitnesses is the same man that he had stopped earlier.  Once he handed the information over to the detective in charge of the investigation, his job was complete.  He was apparently unaware as of the summer of 2006 that someone had been placed in a car and taken to the witnesses a short time later.  (One has to surmise that this mystery dog walker at least resembled the man they were looking for, as described by these witnesses.  Otherwise, why would the detective even bother to have the eyewitness(es) look at him?)   

I feel that there should be what is known as a “Field Investigation” card or a police report on file at SFPD that would tell us who the man that was stopped by the SFPD officer was (as well as who the “dog walker” was that was shown to the eyewitnesses).  Also, the officer who is now making the statements about stopping Mr. X indicated that he had confirmed the identity of this man over the years.  He also recently confirmed that he had called me to speak about the “alibi.”  He had apparently revisited the encounter over time as he moved up the ranks at the department.  The patrolman, to be fair to him, stated that he has “cleared” this man since that time and even went so far as to provide him with an “alibi”.  However, that is not the question here.   

The question in my mind is why Mr. X invited me out to SF to dispel once and for all the thought that he is involved in the Zodiac case and then apparently (assuming that the patrolman’s account is correct) gave me a version of the events of October 11, 1969 that is not consistent with what this officer is saying on this important issue.  An SFPD patrolman places him on Maple Street and Jackson Street shortly after the murder took place, which is thousands of miles from where Mr. X told me he believed he was.  While memories most definitely do fade over time, we have to ask ourselves just which memories fade and which represent things we’ll never forget as long as we live.  I feel that even after thirty-seven years, a law abiding citizen who was not accustomed to encounters with law enforcement would have to very vividly recall a) being accosted by an SFPD officer on the night of the only Zodiac murder to take place in San Francisco and then b) possibly being placed in the back of a police squad car and looked at by eyewitnesses.  

In 2001, ABC News told me that they could not place Mr. X outside of San Francisco for any of the dates of the Zodiac crimes.  I do not know if they would stand by that statement today.  However, it certainly seems to once again throw more doubt on the story Mr. X told me of being in Europe on the night of the Stine murder.

I realize that the reaction of some people will be to say that it is not at all newsworthy that Mr. X was out walking near the Stine murder scene, since he had strong ties to this area.  That may well be the case.  However, it should be recalled that Mr. X, by his own admission, only walked a dog “twice in his life” and rarely, if ever, even walked around his own neighborhood.  Therefore, having Mr. X on foot in Presidio Heights was a rare event on any night of the year, let alone on the night that Stine was killed--and just shortly after that event occurred.   

In addition, Mr. X has at the very least one of the strongest circumstantial cases against him of any person in the investigation.  He is also a dead ringer for the sketch of the man who had just committed the Stine murder right down to the color of his hair at the time.  In light of these facts, I think that his presence on the streets of Presidio Heights right after the Zodiac crime is of potentially great significance and should cause law enforcement to take a very hard look at my factual case and at Mr. X himself. 

You can name all the main suspects in the Zodiac case: Arthur Leigh Allen, Larry Kane, Bruce Davis, Ted K., Rick Marshall, MOH, etc.  However, of the entire group and including the other 2,500 suspects in the case, Mr. X is the only one that can be placed by the police on the streets in the vicinity of one of Zodiac’s crime scenes immediately after the crime took place.  Arthur Leigh Allen can’t be placed at Lake Berryessa on the day of the attack there, since he did not receive a speeding ticket (or any other ticket for that matter).  If one of these individuals had been placed near one of the Zodiac crime scenes shortly after one of the murders, it would obviously be a cause for law enforcement to get its radar up about this individual. 
 

I started with an abstract idea that was based on Zodiac’s known behavior and made no prejudicial assumptions as to who Zodiac may have been (i.e., that he had to be a “known criminal,” had to have a police record, had to be in the military, would be the “weirdest acting” guy in Lake Tahoe, etc.).  I explained my ideas for prospecting the “Letters to the Editor” section of the newspapers for a new person of interest to a second party, namely Ed.  He then went to the newspaper archives clear on the other side of the country to carry out my research as my proxy. (I therefore, as I stated in the previous section, was totally “blind” as to which letter or letters would be selected as a result of my idea.) Miraculously, Ed pulled only one letter from all of the letters sent to the Editor in the newspapers of that era.  He did not pull a hundred, ten or even two of them, just one. That one letter led to a person who was a dead ringer for the SFPD police sketch of Zodiac; it led to a person with the strongest circumstantial case ever developed against any individual in the case including Arthur Leigh Allen, and ultimately it led to the one man who was accosted and detained by the police after one of the Zodiac murders.  I therefore feel that the authorities should at least consider that what I have uncovered is more than just a long string of “innocent coincidences.” 

[Note: In making my claim of having the strongest circumstantial case of any of those that exist in the Zodiac investigation, I am referring to this episode: In early 2001, the Solano County SO asked a retired (and now deceased) Superior Court judge from Solano County, who was highly respected by his peers and the law enforcement community of Northern California, the Hon. Eric Uldall, to review my circumstantial case in early 2001.  The judge had been interested in the Zodiac case since 1970.  He was familiar with all of the prime suspects and had kept in touch with the case over the years by participating in a periodic discussion group with three other former law enforcement and military people.  He told me that he began reviewing my material at 10 PM one night and by the time he looked up, it was 2 AM.  He concluded that Mr. X was the only true prime suspect he had ever seen in the entire history of the Zodiac investigation.  He stated that were Mr. X an “ordinary citizen,” my circumstantial case alone would have been enough for this judge, a former prosecutor who had also served as a jurist on capital punishment cases, to use before a grand jury to get an indictment.  No other suspect, including Arthur Leigh Allen, was ever indicted in the Zodiac case, nor has any other suspect ever had a case against him that rose to the level of proof that would have warranted the issuance of an indictment.  Judge Rick remained supportive of my work until his untimely death in March 2006.] 

One of the questions Mr. X and his “second” had for me was if I had an open mind to the possibility that he is not involved.  I told him that I did.  It is possible that Mr. X is just the unfortunate victim of one of the most staggering sets of circumstances ever to single out an innocent man in the Zodiac case.  He could be an innocent man who was also just in the wrong place at the wrong time after the Stine murder and was therefore encountered by an SFPD patrolman by sheer chance/bad luck.  However, keep in mind that he was also a dead ringer for the SFPD sketch that was produced that night, right down to having the same hair color as described for the man in the wanted poster sketch. 

The case against Arthur Leigh Allen pales in comparison to the circumstantial case against Mr. X.  Was Mr. X untruthful with me and Jim because he has something to hide?  Is Mr. X involved, alone or in a partnership with someone else (i.e., a “folie à deux” ), in the Zodiac case?  Or is he innocent and “just happened” to be out walking his dog in the shadows on Maple Street after the Stine murder, despite his protestations to the contrary?  Was he being untruthful with me as to his potential whereabouts overseas on the night of the Stine murder, but doing so in order simply to protect his image as an innocent man and not to cover up any guilt associated with the Zodiac case?  Is he trying to conceal some secret in his private life that does not include being involved in the Zodiac case?  I do not know.  I only know the facts, and those facts, including the one that states that Mr. X was accosted by Officer Pelissetti, clearly state that it is time for either law enforcement or the press to take my work seriously again, at least until such time as a comprehensive investigation, one that should have taken place when I first came forward to SFPD in 1999, can be conducted into my claims.  I am looking for someone to either prove conclusively that I am right or prove conclusively that I am wrong, taking into account all of the possibilities that might exist in the case.

ABC had consistently told me how compelling my research was right up until their 2002 show.  After the ABC show, the producer, who had implied for over a year that I was onto something new and important, told me that the DNA proved something he had actually believed all along: That when a circumstantial case is put to the test by physical evidence, it inevitably falls apart.  My case and my personal credibility definitely took a severe blow on that show.  However, since that time, I have been able to pick myself up off of the ground, dust myself off, and now I can name Mr. X as being the only known person of interest in the case ever to be accosted by a police officer after any of the Zodiac murders.  Maybe this face to face encounter with a patrolman is what stopped Zodiac’s lethal career; an incident like this could easily have frightened him and made him reassess how he wanted to terrorize the populace of the Bay Area.  However, for reasons I won’t get into because they are so tenuous and subjective, this retired SFPD officer (and presumably SFPD itself) uses this encounter as an “alibi” that proves that Mr. X is not the Zodiac!  I feel that this is an unfair situation that fails (for one thing) to take into account all the possibilities for someone’s involvement in the crimes.  Were Arthur Leigh Allen or any other Zodiac suspect stopped by SFPD or another one of the jurisdictions after any of the Zodiac murders, a piece of news like this coming to light in 2006 would be considered a major break in the case.  For me, it appears to date to be yet another “innocent coincidence” that is simply shrugged off by SFPD. 

In late 2002, Inspector Dave Toschi read over my report and asked me if I was a person who was “easily discouraged.”  I told him that I was not, even after the ABC show and its DNA.  He told me, without elaboration, “never to give up” on my research.  I have to wonder if he was aware of this encounter between Mr. X and one of the patrolmen on the Stine scene on that night in 1969 but chose not to tell me about it.  After all, it occurred at his crime scene and he was one of the two lead detectives. 

It is disheartening to know that in 1999, when I first came forward to SFPD, they almost certainly knew that they had information in their files that told them that I had uncovered circumstances that pointed to a man who had come to their attention previously.  And he had come to their attention in an important way, by being stopped by one of their own patrolmen right after the Stine murder.  In 1999, Lt. Tom Bruton did not indicate to me and Ed that Mr. X’s name had ever come to the attention of SFPD with respect to the case.  Is there no record of this encounter by one of their officers in their files?!  If not, why not?   

If such a record exists, SFPD apparently failed to ask if there may be something to my circumstantial case. After all, based on my ideas, Ed had picked a very small needle out of a very large haystack of letters to the editor.  SFPD certainly did not see the need to question this man in 1999 and later even discouraged another jurisdiction with a valid interest in the case from doing so.  By doing this and by discouraging the Solano SO in 2001, they permitted the burden of interviewing Mr. X to fall onto the shoulders of a pair of civilians who, among other things, have neither the mandate nor the ability to check out Mr. X’s answers to many of the questions we asked. The police, on the other hand, do have that ability. 

The police officer who made the stop in 1969 is now, in my opinion, almost hopelessly biased against my work.  That is because he has a vested interest in my being wrong: If I am right, I would prove that he, not Officer Don Fouke, spoke to the Zodiac killer on the night of the Stine murder--but let him slip away.  And now this officer defends Mr. X’s innocence, instead of asking that his department take an objective look at my facts, facts which come from a carefully documented circumstantial case that he did not possess in 1969.   

In my opinion, the San Francisco Police Department represents the single biggest obstacle in getting to the truth about who the Zodiac killer was.  SFPD has clearly shown that it is not up to the task of investigating the Zodiac mystery and has no desire to solve its most famous cold case.  As proof, the department closed down its investigation in April 2004 before analyzing all of the Zodiac evidence for DNA. 

It is well known that SFPD is a political and image-conscious department that has consistently dismissed both me and my research since I first approached them in 1999.  I went to both SFPD and the Napa S.O. in good faith as a very naïve “amateur researcher” who expected their help in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Mr. X is a politically powerful figure in San Francisco and in the Bay Area in general.  It is therefore my opinion that a department that is outside of the sphere of political influence of “San Francisco City and County” should take on the investigation into why Mr. X is not being truthful about his whereabouts on one of the most famous and memorable nights in the history of his city.  Ideally, the California DOJ should now get involved and take over not only the investigation into my own claims but into the entire Zodiac case in general.  It should also take custody of all of the physical evidence from SFPD, which is (in the opinion of one of its own former Inspectors) playing political games with it, and have that evidence analyzed for DNA. 

In 2002, ABC News told me confidentially that SFPD did not want the Zodiac case ever to see the light of day in a courtroom. This is something that should be seriously considered when looking at SFPD’s track record in investigating (and closing its files on) the case.  What better way for that to come to pass than to control the evidence and then not develop a clearly viable piece of DNA that might lead to a suspect (unless forced to do so by media pressure)? SFPD may be waiting until enough time has passed so that Zodiac, whoever he may be, is good and dead before they tackle the issue of who he was.  To give you an idea of their potential exposure, if I am right in my theory on Zodiac’s identity, one if its officers not only may have detained and spoken to the fugitive on the night of the Stine murder and subsequently let him go, but he is also giving him an alibi in 2007! 

We all have heard from grade school on that “justice is blind” and that everyone is supposed to be “equal under the law.”  However, from my own experiences I know that such is definitely not the case, at least insofar as the case of the Zodiac killer is concerned.  When a sheriff’s officer has to say that he of afraid of losing his job simply by performing it, something is wrong with the system.  When SFPD tells another jurisdiction with a legitimate interest in a case not to interview a suspect, something is wrong with the system.  When SFPD has knowledge of a previous encounter between its department and Mr. X and does not interview him, something is wrong with the system.   I feel strongly that Mr. X should be entitled to the presumption of innocence by law enforcement and the full protection of his constitutional rights.  However, by the same token, I believe that he should also be treated as anyone else, such as Arthur Leigh Allen or Larry Kane was treated, and be interviewed by law enforcement, instead of having that role forced upon civilians for political reasons.  I conducted an interview with Mr. X at his request and have uncovered what seems to be a troubling inconsistency in the story he told me, as compared to what I have been led to believe to be the facts of the case.  It is now up to law enforcement (and hopefully the DOJ) to investigate my claims and see why his story is not consistent with the facts surrounding the night of the Stine murder as described by someone from SFPD who was there.  Then and only then can we begin to get to the truth.