Patterns formed by murder locations

[Fisherman]

Lynn:

"I'd prefer one who PHYSICALLY correlates with the murder spots. MUCH easier."

Fine by me. Too.

What´ve you got?

The best,
Fisherman

[lynn cates]

physical

Hello Christer. Thanks.

"And then you need to find yourself someone who DOES logically correlate with all the murder spots."

I'd prefer one who PHYSICALLY correlates with the murder spots. MUCH easier.

Cheers.
LC

[Fisherman]

Lynn:

"Possibly. But that depends on whether you seek only one killer."

Mmm. And then you need to find yourself someone who DOES logically correlate with all the murder spots.

Tough work, that.

Sally:

"Please tell me you don't look for a Masonic symbol."

I don´t look for a masonic symbol.

The best,
Fisherman

[RivkahChaya]

Some direct Manson quotes from a late-80s interview he did with Geraldo Rivera:

"I'm Jesus Christ. Whether you want to believe it or not, I don't care."

"I never killed anybody. Anybody that knows anything knows that. I never killed anybody."
RIVERA- "Would they be dead if it wasn't for you?"
"What do you mean? The world wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me! If it wasn't for me you'd all be gone!"

I meant his reference to rising out of the race wars as a messiah, back in the late 1960s. Even then, he was mostly just trash-talking and making up stuff, because he'd talked about race wars on the ranch, but at one point, he'd talked the usual hippie stuff about a "new dawn" where the races got along with each other.

I don't think he believed what he was saying to Geraldo Rivera, either. If he didn't say things like that, he'd stop getting interviewed by TV talk show hosts. He's an attention whore; he gets rewarded for behaving like that. He's also a little guy (he's like 5'2), but most of the other people in prison are afraid of him-- not that I think he's housed in the gen pop, but still, even the other prisoners treat him "special."

I also think when he acted as his own attorney, he knew he'd lose, but he knew he'd probably lose anyway, and he also knew that people acting pro se in death penalty cases get a lot of leeway, so he decided to go out with a bang. The federal government happened to put out the moratorium on the death penalty before his sentence got carried out (I think it was less than two years later), which is how he got his commutation to life.

I was very little, so I don't remember myself, but my friends who are a bit older tell me that one argument people used to use against the moratorium when it was in front of the US supreme court, was that it would apply to Charles Manson.

Anyway, while I think that he is, in common parlance, a "nut job," I don't think he is legally insane, and I think he is perfectly capable of distinguishing fantasy from reality.

In case you didn't know, he didn't really kill the people at Sharon Tate's house as part of some race war. He killed them because he didn't realize that Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski had rented the house. The people he thought still lived there were people he thought had screwed him out of a record contract, and this was not the first time he physically attacked someone he thought had screwed him out of a chance to be a rock star, albeit, the first time, he did it in person.

[Sally]

It IS interesting and sometimes good entertainment to see if we can make the murder spots pattern look like a unicorn, like some starsign or like the outline of Merlin´s hat.
But is it not more useful to see if the murder spots correlate with the paths a suspect would reasonably have moved along...?

Just asking,
Fisherman

You do that, Fisherman? Really?

Please tell me you don't look for a Masonic symbol....

[lynn cates]

still the one?

Hello Christer.

"But is it not more useful to see if the murder spots correlate with the paths a suspect would reasonably have moved along...?"

Possibly. But that depends on whether you seek only one killer.

Cheers.
LC

[Fisherman]

It IS interesting and sometimes good entertainment to see if we can make the murder spots pattern look like a unicorn, like some starsign or like the outline of Merlin´s hat.
But is it not more useful to see if the murder spots correlate with the paths a suspect would reasonably have moved along...?

Just asking,
Fisherman

[kensei]

I'm not really sure what Manson meant by messiah, either. I think he might have been a little closer to the original Jewish meaning, of a military leader, with no special religious status, than a Jesus-like figure. But I also think Manson makes up a lot of stuff as he goes along, just to sound as crazy as possible.

Some direct Manson quotes from a late-80s interview he did with Geraldo Rivera:

"I'm Jesus Christ. Whether you want to believe it or not, I don't care."

"I never killed anybody. Anybody that knows anything knows that. I never killed anybody."
RIVERA- "Would they be dead if it wasn't for you?"
"What do you mean? The world wouldn't be here if it wasn't for me! If it wasn't for me you'd all be gone!"

[RivkahChaya]

He did say something in one letter about radian angles and, I think, in another, superimposed crosses over his crossed circle symbol which corresponded to murder sites. These have been deemed significant by some but I don't know enough about Zodiac to offer a worthwhile opinion. Seemed persuasive in the documentary I watched but who knows...

Best wishes,
Steve.

You are right. I think at the time police thought it would lead them to other bodies of earlier victims, and maybe close some missing persons cases. It didn't.

But you are right that he did that. It added information to the "profile" (that word wasn't in use at the time) that he had experience with navigation or cartography (the police were pretty sure he'd been in the military). Whatever the coordinates were, they were real places, and they were reasonably local, but I think the conclusion was that they were meant to send the police on a snipe hunt. However, I think they did patrol those places for a while.

Someone tried to interpret them cryptographically, to see if they would serve as a key for one of the undeciphered cryptograms, but nothing came of that, either.

The Zodiac was a terrorist in the original sense of the word, and keeping people guessing over which threats were real and which weren't was part of the game for him.

[RivkahChaya]

Well, Richard Ramirez the Night Stalker was killing for the glory of Satan, and Charles Manson was trying to start a race war from which he would arise as the Messiah... but neither of them placed their crimes on the map in any kind of pattern.

I forgot about Ramirez-- but to address that, I'm not sure I actually believe it, because he said a lot of really whacked out things between his arrest and his trial that seemed like a set up for an insanity plea.

I'm not really sure what Manson meant by messiah, either. I think he might have been a little closer to the original Jewish meaning, of a military leader, with no special religious status, than a Jesus-like figure. But I also think Manson makes up a lot of stuff as he goes along, just to sound as crazy as possible.

[Steven Russell]

[quote=RivkahChaya;238219]
Now, I'm not sure I believe the locations were meaningful, just because I think the Zodiac would have said something-- there might be a line in one of the letters about the police not connecting all the dots, or something.
[quote]

He did say something in one letter about radian angles and, I think, in another, superimposed crosses over his crossed circle symbol which corresponded to murder sites. These have been deemed significant by some but I don't know enough about Zodiac to offer a worthwhile opinion. Seemed persuasive in the documentary I watched but who knows...

Best wishes,
Steve.

[kensei]

The only other sort of killer who would do such a thing would be some sort of religious zealot, conducting a ritual, but I think they exist only in fiction.

Well, Richard Ramirez the Night Stalker was killing for the glory of Satan, and Charles Manson was trying to start a race war from which he would arise as the Messiah... but neither of them placed their crimes on the map in any kind of pattern.

[moonbegger]

Hello all ,

The same question was posed in the Telegraph, Oct 3rd 1888 ..

SIR - In examining the chart representing the locality of the Whitechapel murders, published in your issue of to-day, it is curious to observe that lines drawn through the spots where the murders were committed assume the exact form of a dagger, the hilt and blade of which pass through the scenes of the sixth, second, first, and third murders, the extremities of the guard making the fourth and fifth. Further, the spot where the portion of the apron belonging to the victim of the Mitre-square tragedy was picked up lies in the imaginary line which forms the hilt of the dagger. Can this possibly afford a clue to the position of the next atrocity? - I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

moonbegger

[RivkahChaya]

Hello Raven. I tend to agree with you about its being nonsense. I tried connecting the dots once and was quite certain I saw an extended middle finger.

A sign?

Cheers.
LC

+1


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[RivkahChaya]

\However, I did see an interesting programme about the Zodiac recently which was quite persuasive in suggesting that locations were chosen deliberately to form specific patterns and angles. It was suggested that when one particular location needed to be marked, Zodiac simply hired a cab, gave the cabbie the required location, and killed and left him on that spot.

The Zodiac is a special case. His entire motive was to terrorize a city. He got his kicks in seeing the panic the next day, and reading about himself in the papers. He not only wrote letters to the police (which matched writing left at the crime scenes), but sent cryptograms to newspapers to publish, for readers to try to decipher.

Now, I'm not sure I believe the locations were meaningful, just because I think the Zodiac would have said something-- there might be a line in one of the letters about the police not connecting all the dots, or something.

But Zodiac is the type of killer to do such a thing-- he'd do it just to keep people reading and studying him.

Unless we want to theorize that JTR was a terrorist, which is possible, but I don't think likely, then I don't think we should be looking for shapes in the push pins.

The only other sort of killer who would do such a thing would be some sort of religious zealot, conducting a ritual, but I think they exist only in fiction.