In his 2005 autobiography, I Never Look Back, Kjell Qvale shows a photograph on page 66 of a "hill climb" race he organized on Mt. Diablo. He gives the date as being "1949" but provides no other information. As soon as I saw that he had sponsored this event, I knew that the date of the race would turn out to be the same as that of Zodiac's 1970 "Mt. Diablo" letter. But I had a very difficult time determining when the event took place in order to prove the connection betwen the date of the race and that of the letter. In fact, it took me until just recently to determine the date of that race, thanks in part to information I received on this website.
Several weeks ago I received an email from a reader who lived near Mt. Diablo and who described himself as being a "car guy." I thought of asking him if he could determine when this race took place. A few weeks ago, he got back to me with an important lead: He told me that there was an article about the race in the Sunday July 3, 1949 SF Chronicle's "Leisure" section. From there I contacted a friend who had access to to a newspaper archive website and he was able to locate the Table of Contents page for that section. The short blurb describing the Mt. Diablo hill climb race started off with the words, "Last Sunday..." The Sunday prior to July 3rd was June 26th, the same date as Zodiac's Mt. Diablo letter in 1970! I had been proven right!
The date June 26th has a very interesting history in the life of Kjell Qvale. We now know that in 1949 it was the date on which he organized a race on Mt. Diablo. In 1969, it was the date on which his letter to the editor appeared in the Chronicle. This was the same letter that I used to identify him as a suspect in the Zodiac case in 1999. In 1970, there was, of course, the commemoration of this date by Zodiac with his Mt. Diablo letter. By June 1971, Qvale had purchased Jensen Motors in West Bromwich, England. He traveled there and held a press conference about Jensen Motors on June 25th saying that it had become profitable, thus manipulating the media into printing stories the next day. On June 26th, 1971 stories dutifully appeared in the Times of London and the Financial Times, thus commemorating that date once again. Note: JENSEN Motors eerily bore the name of one of Zodiac's first victims, Betty Lou Jensen, who was killed on Lake Herman Road. I do not believe that all of these occurrences of June 26th, alternatively commemorated by Qvale and Zodiac, or the fact that Jensen Motors bore Betty Lou's name to be "mere coincidences." They speak to Qvale's identity as the Zodiac killer.