Do I still believe that Mr. X is a viable "person of interest" in the Zodiac crimes? Definitely. Can I make a believable case for this? Yes.

I was going to write out a laundry list of facts to support my contention. However, I think that only four elements are necessary to prove this point:

1) Mr. X was, in the 1960s, despite all the protestations to the contrary that have surfaced since my site was launched, a dead ringer for the "Revised" SFPD sketch. When he slicked his hair back and put on a pair of his horn-rimmed glasses, the resemblance is undeniable. Anyone who would still argue this point has to explain why the best eyewitnesses in the case called the resemblance as "striking", "remarkable" and even "extraordinary". In addition, Officer Don Fouke stated that the man he saw that night, who was almost assuredly the killer based on both his description and that of the kids in Presidio Heights, had a more receding hairline than is depicted in the sketches. As evidenced by comparing a 1971 photo of Mr. X with one from about 1965 and allowing for aging, one can extrapolate that he also had a hairline that was more receding than is depicted in the police sketch at the time of the Stine murder. (I do not possess a verified 1969 photo of Mr. X).

The changes that took place between the "Original" and "Revised" sketches make that sketch look even more like Mr. X. This includes the squarer jaw, the full lower lip/thin upper lip and the receding hairline.

2) Mr. X had, both before and after the Zodiac era, an unusual and distinctive manner of speaking. A writer said that his "conversational pace is leisurely...even slow" in one article and another said it was "well-modulated, like an announcer on a classical-music station" in another. (The year 1969 falls between the dates of the two articles in question.) Zodiac was described as having a similar manner of speaking. Despite protestations to the contrary by some people, the Napa SO did, in part, rule out a suspect because he "had a definite, very fast manner of speaking which was completely opposed to the victim's statement concerning the suspect's voice" (Napa SO Supplementary Crime Report, page 13). It does not matter how Mr. X spoke in 2000 or 2001. At the time of the Zodiac crimes in 1969...

3) The thing that has always intrigued me about Mr. X is his unusual behavior. If we set aside behavioral profiling for the moment (which seems to rule Mr. X out as a suspect out of hand because of "who he is") and take a "nuts and bolts" look what types of behavior defined Zodiac, there are the following: A) attention-seeking on a grand scale, B) extreme aloofness, the sense that he was superior to and better than everyone else (which profilers would undoubtedly say had to be "compensatory for feelings of inadequacy", etc., when there is no proof that this absolutely has to be the case in every instance), C) a huge ego, D) narcissism and E) the desire to terrorize the people of the SF Bay Area.

I can prove through articles that were written about Mr. X for over a span of thirty years that he possessed each and every one of these traits long before there was a Zodiac killer. It is simply amazing to read an article about his business in which the author feels compelled to go off on a tangent and include such things as a discussion of Mr. X's extreme aloofness and how he makes people "go through the proper channels" just to speak to him. Mr. X clearly has always seen himself as being better than everyone else. The article also indicates that this aloofness and apparent superiority complex were nothing new for him: He had been this way all of his life even before he was wealthy. (I am sure that a lot of people in Presidio Heights are aloof and feel superior to "common" people. However, this man seems to take the aloofness and feelings of superiority to a level so striking and starkly evident that it is deemed to be worth writing about.)

However, the key behavior that seemed to set Zodiac apart from other criminals was his unquenchable and undeniable thirst for publicity and widespread public attention for his crimes and letters. This behavior seems to define both Zodiac and Mr. X. Years before the Zodiac crimes took place, Mr. X surely set himself apart from all of his neighbors in the San Francisco Bay Area (and even the country) as someone with a bizarre need for public attention, as well as, given the context of what he did at the time, the desire to terrorize the people of the entire San Francisco Bay Area (and even, one could rationally argue, the entire country!). The front-page coverage in a large-circulation area newspaper that Mr. X got for his unusual claims was befitting the coverage that Zodiac himself demanded in the 1960s and 1970s.

4) The dates on which the first three Zodiac attacks took place coincide with important milestone dates in Mr. X’s life (and those of his parents) and are almost assuredly not simply coincidental, as some people have tried to imply. The final murder took place within walking distance from his home.

Zodiac’s first attack took place on December 20, 1968. Mr X’s mother died on December 20, 19XX.

Zodiac’s second attack took place on July 5, 1969. A very bizarre attention seeking event in Mr. X’s life took place on July 5, 19XX and predated the Z crimes by many, many years.

Zodiac’s third attack took place on September 27, 1969. Mr. X’s father was born on September 27, 18XX.

Zodiac’s last murder, while it did not take place on an important date in his life that I know of, was committed within two blocks of his home. In addition, the killer was confronted by the police while walking in the direction of Mr. X’s home.

Some people have tried to attribute the above dates to nothing more than mere coincidence. However, they are only aware of the earliest version of my work. Consider the following facts:

Mr. X’s letter to the editor which singled him out as a suspect was published on June 26, 1969. A year to the day later, Zodiac himself commemorated this date with a letter that he postmarked on June 26, 1970. A year to the day later, Mr, X personally orchestrated not one but two newspaper articles. This was on June 26, 1971. (These articles were based on information about a company of his that he released the day before, presumably with the knowledge that the papers would print the information the following day.) The company that he used was one that he had purchased in early 1970. This company, remarkably, bore the name of one of Zodiac’s victims.

Therefore, there is more than just "coincidence" or, as some like to say, "zynchronicity" involved here because not only is Mr. X personally orchestrating the timing of the 1971 articles but he is also using a company with he bought after the Zodiac murders that bears the name of one of Zodiac’s victims. The date commemoration pattern shown here involves a period of three years, during which both Mr. X and Zodiac alternate in the commemoration the exact same date. Mr. X set the date with his letter to the editor. Zodiac then commemorated that date the next year. Then Mr. X completed the trilogy with his commemoration in 1971.

The dates are, I submit, not merely the product of coincidence. Rather they may represent very chilling clues. And there are more of them than I can go into here.

I truly believe that for any other person, any other suspect in the Zodiac case, the list provided above would be sufficient to get the police to conduct a serious investigation of this man. But sadly, unless the mindset of law enforcement changes and they show some courage and insight, instead of living by their "police politics as usual" policy, this will not get anyone to take a serious look at Mr. X, nor speak to his family and friends to develop leads, etc. (i.e,, conduct an investigation).

I would also be interested in knowing why it is that when Robert Graysmith writes a rambling and repetitive "true crime" story "unmasking" Arthur Leigh Allen as the Zodiac killer, despite the fact that Allen had already been eliminated against the hand printing, the fingerprints, the best eyewitnesses in the case and the so-called "Zodiac DNA", it gets made into a book. (See a new thread on Graysmith and his intriguing methodologies in my "Forum" section.)

When George Bawart of the Vallejo Police Department (VPD) still pursued Art Allen in the early 1990's, despite knowing that he was eliminated against the writing and fingerprints in 1972, he is portrayed in Graysmith's book and in the A&E show on the case from 2003 as a "bulldog" of a detective: a determined man who never gives up in pursuit of a criminal. Despite the evidence exonerating Allen, Bawart's "gut instincts" told him that there was more to the Allen story than the physical evidence could seemingly tell him. Therefore, he kept pressing on in search of the truth, etc. This ultimately led him (or someone else from VPD) to show Allen's photo to the Stine eyewitnesses, who flatly and unequivocally stated that Allen was not the man that they saw that night. (That fact was not included for some reason in Zodiac Unmasked.)

However, when I present what many people familiar with my work feel is the single strongest and most specific circumstantial case against any individual in the history of the investigation and express and opinion that there are more problems with the physical evidence (which has never pointed positively in any direction) than the amazing, unexpected and compelling eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence (which seems to point at one man), I am ignored by the police and asked to provide even more proof. The reason for this is simple: I have always been held to a much more demanding set of standards than anyone else who has a suspect in this case. As an example of this, in addition to proving that Mr. X may have been involved in the case, someone asked me to specifically explain just how and why a "man like Mr.X" would become the Zodiac killer in the first place. In contrast, nobody ever asked "why" Art Allen, Davis, Kane, or anyone else would have become the Zodiac killer; it is simply understood that whatever Zodiac's motives were-attention-seeking, taunting the police, etc.-those would also, by definition, have been a suspect like Allen's (or Davis' or Kane's) own motives, as well. The incredible irony is, as detailed above, that Mr. X had been demonstrating very Zodiac-like behavior all of his life, behavior that cannot be proven for Art Allen or anyone else! And yet, I am the one who must constantly justify my suspicions.

My answer to those would ask me why Mr. X would become Zodiac is this: It is the exact same set of motives that would have driven Allen, Davis, Kane or any other suspect. What would apply to any other would-be Zodiac applies equally to Mr. X. There is no need for "special circumstances" to explain why Mr. X might be Zodiac. That type of question exposes the underlying prejudice that people have against my research due to the fact that Mr. X is wealthy, lives in a mansion and, in the minds of many people, just "should not", by definition, be the Zodiac killer.

In 1969, racial prejudice may have led to SFPD's Dispatch getting the description of Paul Stine's murderer wrong. Since 1999, a very different type of prejudice that is equally as powerful may be keeping people from seeing the truth about who Zodiac may really have been.

Am I absolutely positive that Mr. X is the Zodiac killer? No. However, I do feel strongly that whoever Zodiac was, he had some association with Mr. X's home.

Points associated with Mr. X's home:

• It is a home that offers a commanding view of the Stine search area, which the Zodiac killer described in his letters to the press.
• The home is only a short walk from Zodiac's original cab destination of Washington and Maple Streets. In contrast to Cherry Street, where it is an uphill walk to Jackson Street, the walk from Maple Street to Jackson is steeply downhill and closer to Mr. X's home. A person committing a crime at the intersection of Washington and Maple Streets would arrive at Mr. X's home in a very short time.
• The location of the home fits the verbal description given of Zodiac's "hiding place" on the night of the Stine manhunt.
• Don Fouke saw the Zodiac killer walk into a home that lies between the crime scene and this property on the night of the Stine murder. In short, the killer was headed in the direction of Mr. X’s home after the Stine murder.
• A man who wrote a very unusual letter to the editor of the Chronicle lived there.
• The Zodiac murders occurred on dates that were important in the life of the man who lives there, as well as in the lives of his parents.
• The man who lived there played a three-year date commemoration "game" with Zodiac from 1969 to 1971. He even used the name of a company that he purchased after the Zodiac murders which bore the name of one of Zodiac’s victims to play this little game.
• The man who lived there is a dead ringer for the "Revised" sketch and has the more receding hairline that Zodiac was described as having by Officer Fouke.
• The man who lived there and his siblings had the same reddish-brown hair that the eyewitnesses described for Zodiac. This is the same color hair that was found on the back of a stamp on the Stine letter in 1996 by SFPD. (Is it just another "innocent coincidence" that Mr. X and the Zodiac killer are dead ringers for each other and that they both have a very similar hair color?)
• The man who lived there wrote to me in 1999 on the same unusual stationery that Zodiac used-Monarch sized paper.
• The man who lived there was in Riverside, CA the weekend that Cheri Jo Bates was murdered (i.e., October 30, 1966) and had an excellent reason to return there for the weekend of April 30, 1967, when the "Bates had to die" letters were mailed.
• The man who lives there can be proven to have shared Zodiac's "core behaviors" in 1969, including a bizarre stab at widespread public attention that he made a long time before there ever was a Zodiac killer. This event could be a "precursor" event that points out Mr. X as someone who shared Zodiac’s overwhelming need for public attention..

For the reasons cited above, I want to say that every time I do try to get past Mr. X and imagine someone else as the Zodiac killer, I keep coming back to this list. It is most of all the behavior...those disturbing "core behaviors", particularly the bizarre attention-seeking that Mr. X most definitely has in common with the Zodiac killer. Is it possible for someone to have looked just like Mr. X, to have shared his odd attention-seeking and other Zodiac-like behaviors, and to have "just happened" to have disappeared close to his property after the Stine murder?

Sure it is. However, the odds of that seem pretty small to me.

I feel that if Mr. X were anyone else, the police would now descend on him and ask him some very tough questions, given the description of the killer by Officer Fouke and the other eyewitnesses from the night of the Stine murder. They would want to know where he was the night that the Zodiac killer came calling in Presidio Heights, which every resident living in the area from that time should recall very clearly. Was he home that night? If not, where was he? What proof is there, if any, other than possible statements from family members, for his alibi? If he was home, what did he hear? What did he see? Did he have any enemies, disgruntled ex-employees or former business partners, etc., who looked, spoke and behaved just like him? Was he framed, like in the movies? (If so, how can he explain the date commemoration "game" between himself and Zodiac from 1969 to 1971?) What can his family, friends, employees and business associates tell them about Mr. X? Why can a former business associate (whose name I would gladly share with the police, so that they could follow up on this lead) place Mr. X in Riverside on the weekend of the Bates murder in 1966? Was Mr. X also there in April 1967, given that I found evidence that he had a good reason to be there at that time, too? Was someone in his entourage the Zodiac killer? Why does the case seem to follow him around and lead almost right to his front door? Is it just a coincidence that Mr. X wrote to me on Monarch sized stationery in 1999? Why does a color photo of him and his brothers from 1971 show that they all had the same reddish-brown hair that was described for the Zodiac killer...and that was found on the back of a postage stamp from the Stine letter?

The truth is out there and whether he knows it or not, Mr. X may hold the key to the entire Zodiac case. The only question is whether law enforcement has the guts to go after the tough answers that civilians like me cannot possibly hope to get to.

There are many hundreds and thousands of people who will eventually be proven wrong about suspicions that they have had about one suspect or another since 1969, assuming that Zodiac is one day identified. If I do eventually become one of these people, I at least feel that I had solid, factual reasons for my incorrect suspicions. I certainly did not invent my suspicions from thin air. In fact, it is my opinion that the case that swirls around Mr. X is not only the single best circumstantial case that has ever been amassed against any individual in the Zodiac case, but that it also dwarfs the case against Arthur Leigh Allen, the "suspect of suspects" in the case. Allen is the man who was "unmasked" as being the Zodiac killer in 2002 and who was (and undoubtedly continues to be) the prime suspect of many people, despite the fact that the best eyewitnesses in the case have stated flatly that he was not the man that they saw kill Paul Stine.

If Mr. X is proven not to have been the Zodiac killer, I hope that he will at least try to understand that he and I were both victimized by one of the most amazing series of innocent coincidences ever to swirl around an innocent man in the Zodiac case. He also has to realize that if his date commemoration "game" with Zodiac is just a coincidence, it is an utterly amazing one that has also victimized both of us. I cannot change the facts that surround him anymore than I can explain away the similarities between Mr. X and the Zodiac killer.

If I am mistaken in my beliefs as to who the Zodiac killer was, beliefs which are based solely on the facts that I have uncovered since 1999, then I am simply wrong. But there is one thing that I know for certain no matter what happens: I will be no more wrong than anyone else was if the Zodiac killer is eventually identified and it is not Mr. X (or someone who had some association with his home either in or before 1969).

It is time now for the foot-dragging and the police politics to stop and for law enforcement to investigate both vigorously and aggressively my case, as they would any other viable circumstantial case against an individual. I have always equated the Zodiac investigation to a football game. It is reasonable for law enforcement to ask a civilian researcher to run the ball down to the five-yard line by putting together a viable circumstantial case for them. However, it is their job to pick up the ball and run it into the end zone. I feel that law enforcement, through their unwillingness to exhaustively investigate my claims, has demanded that I pick up the ball and run it into the end zone for them. This is an unreasonable and outrageous demand to make of a civilian (especially one from the other side of the country), since I have no badge and no ability to question the people who need to be interviewed as pointedly and specifically as they can. In short, my civilian associates and I cannot continue to be compelled through SFPD's inertia to do the job for which law enforcement is specifically entrusted and empowered.

When the FBI files on the case were first put online in about 1999, it became obvious from reading them that law enforcement in 1969 had immediately drawn an opinion as to who the Zodiac killer was. From the documents that were made available to the public, which gave us a glimpse at how law enforcement was thinking in those days, we can see that pretty much everyone thought that Zodiac had to be a known murderer, criminal, pimp, mental patient, former (or current) member of the military or, especially, a former member of the military who had spent in a mental hospital. However, from our perspective today, we now know that Zodiac was a completely unique individual whose motives for murder were definitely not those of the average criminal. In short, we should not allow ourselves to be constrained in 2004 by the preconceptions that permeated this investigation a generation ago.

The closest we have seen to the Zodiac killer in the history of crime is the BTK killer, who was obviously a cheap copycat of the real thing. Contrary to how people generally perceive him, Zodiac may not have been "a serial killer who craved public attention". Rather Zodiac may have been playing a game that nobody else ever had imagined. Given what we know about him, Zodiac may have been a man who had an unnatural thirst for public attention first, and who was eventually willing to make society pay the ultimate price for him to receive his full measure of it. If that is the case, then Mr. X makes for a great suspect in the Zodiac case.

The facts presented on this site make it clear that the time has come for law enforcement in the Bay Area to ask some serious questions of Mr. X and all those around him. Given the testimony of Don Fouke and the eyewitnesses at Washington and Cherry, one thing is clear: Mr. X is either a prime suspect or a prime witness in this case. There is simply no denying that now. We need to see if by investigating Mr. X the truth about the case of the Zodiac killer can be uncovered once and for all no matter where it may lie. There are, after all, many people who need to get the closure that has eluded them for some thirty-five years.