October 4, 2015
Los Angeles, California
The below article, “The Zodiac murders: Part 2” appeared in this morning’s London Sunday Times in the senior writer, Matt Rudd’s, “Crime Scenes” column. (Part 1, backgrounding the Zodiac crimes published the previous Sunday, September 27, 2015.)
Matt asks:
“Could it be that the Zodiac killer of the 1960s and the Black Dahlia Killer of the 1940s were one and the same person? And could that one and the same person have been George Hill Hodel, a Californian doctor…?”
Matt Rudd’s
Crime Scenes
Case No. 8
The Zodiac murders: Part 2
Last week on Crime Scene…
Could it be that the Zodiac killer of the 1960s and the Black Dahlia Killer of the 1940s were one and the same person? And could that one and the same person have been George Hill Hodel, a Californian doctor who was always in the right-ish place at the right-ish time?
Steve Hodel, son of our potential prime suspect, has linked his father to 25 serial crimes between 1943 and 1969, but the evidence has always been circumstantial. Now he thinks an email he received from a Frenchman might be the final piece of the jigsaw.
“Dear Sir,” wrote the Frenchman. “Have you ever noticed that Zodiac’s signature was a compound of two Ogham letters”? The letter on the left side is for ‘H’ and the letter on the right side is for ‘L’.
Hodel had never noticed.
On October 27, 1970, the Zodiac sent a Halloween card to Paul Avery, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. “You ache to know my name and so I’ll clue you in,” he wrote, before finishing with his cryptic signature.
Hodel Junior used the ancient Ogham alphabet to crack the Zodiac’s signature. The upside-down L on the left is Ogham for H. The two dots in the middle represent O, the F on the right is D, the four dots together spell E, and the F on the right again, but backwards, is an L.
“The decryption is perfect,” says Hodel in his new book, Most Evil II. “No letters have been added or omitted. Convinced that his high genius insulated him from detection, George Hill Hodel signed his real name.”
Convinced?
Well, it’s not slam dunk. Why can’t they just test the DNA?
“It’s problematic,” says Hodel. “Law enforcement say that they do not have any confirmed Zodiac DNA. I do not want them comparing and eliminating George Hodel’s DNA to a sample that may or may not belong to Zodiac. That’s police procedure 101.”
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P.S.
Happy October 4th birthday to my brother, Kelvin. (Kelly) For one month a year, as “Irish Twins” we get to be the same age. Then, I fall back into my position as the older. But, “wiser”?—highly doubtful.
The post U.K. Sunday Times Matt Rudd’s “Crimes Scenes” – The Zodiac Murders Part 2- Columnist Asks, “Could the 1940s Black Dahlia Avenger and the 1960s Zodiac be the same person–Dr. George Hill Hodel? appeared first on Steve Hodel.