Any truth to this?

[entropy Profile]

Paul Avery, in his 10/18/69 SF Chronicle article, calling Z a "clumsy criminal" after the Stine murder, makes this claim about Z's stabbing at Lake Berryessa.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... N85FJ1.DTL

"The knife fell again and again and formed the mysterious symbol -- like the crosshairs of a gun sight -- that has come to be Zodiac's hallmark."

Sloppy reporting or was Z really trying to stab his own symbol into the backs of Hartnell or Shepard?

[FoolsGold Profile]

Didn't happen. Perhaps Avery meant something else, or perhaps he was just fibbing. In any case, even without photos of the stab wounds, cutting the Zodiac symbol on Hartnell's back would require more than six puncture marks, and Shepard tossed around far too much for the Zodiac to perform a crude and bloody zodiac tattoo, even with ten wounds.

It's just not true.

[Michael Butterfield Profile]

FG is right-- it's not true, and it's obviously not true. Remember, this claim was made by the same person who wrote the article with the title "ZODIAC SAYS HE KILLED S.F. OFFICER" when he knew that the Zodiac never made such a claim. Graysmith simply repeated this myth as if it were fact and that is the only reason that this myth still persists today. What I find so troubling is the idea that people ever believed this in the first place as it's obviously nonsense.

Perhaps there was a legitimate reason for confusion on this issue years ago but the facts are readily available to anyone who takes the time to look at the report on the autopsy of Cecelia Shepard. And, both Bryan Hartnell and Ken Narlow told me that this story was pure nonsense.

[entropy Profile]

Thanks, folks.

I guess I was curious because Avery seemed to be basing the rest of the article on police sources. Was Z's "stabbing his symbol into the victims' back" something speculated by LE or pure sensationalism on the part of Avery? It's hard to tell what type of pattern that the stab wounds inflicted in the autopsy report would have made and I doubt it would even have been possible to stab any recognizable pattern into a struggling victim.

As for Avery's claim of Z implicitly claiming the murder of Sgt. Radetich, I agree that the headline is irresponsible. We've been through the debate about the likelihood of Z implying responsibility. I still think it's likely, personally, but Mike is absolutely correct that there was never anything close to an admission of responsibility, which Avery's headline implies.

[FoolsGold Profile]

Well, I'm still confused, but not about what Avery wrote.

According to the autopsy report, both 'slash-like incisions' and 'incisions' were found on the body. So, how many actual potentially fatal stab wounds did Shepard suffer? I've heard anywhere from ten to twenty-three, and I was under the impression ten is the correct number.

Here's what I get from the AR:

1. A back-stab, 1.7 cm deep into a rib.

2. A back-stab, 1.2 cm deep into a rib.

3. A stab near the right iliac crest, 2cm deep.

4. A stab near the left arm, on the back, 1.9cm deep.

5. A bruise associated with the above.

6. Defensive wound on the right hand.

7. Two "drain tubes".

8. A 10 inch incision into the ribs.

9. A stab into the chest wall, 4cm deep.

10. A 10 inch incision near the umbilicus.

11. A 1.5 inch incision near the umbilicus.

12. A 12 cm long tear in the rectus muscle.

13. Two 1.5 inch wide incisions in the femoral area.

14. Two 1 inch incisions, one near the left ankle the other near the right.

15. A 4 inch 'slash' in the left arm (unknown depth).

16. Sutured defect in the ribs.

17. 2.5 Inch sutured defect in the ribs.

18. Suture defect in the diaphragm.

19. A 3cm tear in the left lung's lobe.

20. 4 cm incision in the right lobe. Hemorrhage. Edema.

21. Nick to right lobe of liver.

22. Increased blow flow to the brain, a softening of the brain tissue and a flattening of the cerebral surfaces.

So, I'm getting ten, maybe eleven significant 'incisions'.

The other remark I would like to make concerns the final diagnoses. Apparently, even if Shepard had recovered physically from the blood loss and the wounds, she would've suffered from severe brain damage, which is naturally to be expected from numerous exsanguinating 'incisions'.

[DebS Profile Website]

Paul Avery, in his 10/18/69 SF Chronicle article, calling Z a "clumsy criminal" after the Stine murder, makes this claim about Z's stabbing at Lake Berryessa.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... N85FJ1.DTL

"The knife fell again and again and formed the mysterious symbol -- like the crosshairs of a gun sight -- that has come to be Zodiac's hallmark."

Sloppy reporting or was Z really trying to stab his own symbol into the backs of Hartnell or Shepard?

Entropy, in the Napa Register Tuesday Sept. 30, 1969 reporter L. Pierce Carson wrote Miss Shepard had been stabbed with a "long thin knife" as she lay bound with pieces of plastic clothesline on a blanket at the lake shore. The killer plunged the sharp dagger into her back numerous times, and when she turned over as a reflex to the excruciating pain, the psychopath knifed her once in each breast, once in the groin and once in the abdomen- forming the pattern of a cross.

Carson did not say the exact same thing as Avery did in his article 19 days later but it's darned close and Carson wrote his article first. Perhaps Avery got his inspiration from the Napa Register reporter. Neither of the newspaper accounts are an honest portrayal of the facts, IMO.

[entropy Profile]

Ah... thanks, Deb. You may well be right about that.

Avery's assertion (and that of the Napa Register) is probably total B.S. but we'll probably never know since the task would be virtually impossible on a struggling victim. It's probably just an example of a rumor created and fostered by the media.

[Michael Butterfield Profile]

We all know how important an honest portrayal of facts is to some people...

This is just another example of the problem which plagues this case-- people just say and write things without getting their facts straight and then these statements become part of the history and perceived as fact by the uninformed. Case in point: Claiming that the Haight-Ashbury switchboard was actually the "Good Times" switchboard when, in fact, it wasn't. The person who made this claim never bothered to check the facts first and, instead of checking the facts which would have proven him wrong, he posted his claim as it if it were fact. Then, after the facts were presented which proved that this claim was wrong, the person still insists he was right rather than simply admit that he jumped to conclusions and spread a falsehood.

This is a very serious problem in the Zodiac case, and it happens all the time. In the UNSOLVED MYSTERIES segment on the Zodiac/Unabomber theory, Michael Rustigan, a San Francisco State University criminologist, dismissed the theory saying that Ted Kaczynski was "a man of numbers" but not the kind of numbers that interested the Zodiac. To back up his assessment, Rustigan stated that the Zodiac was interested in astrology and the "ray-dee-ons," and that this interest was in no way similar the kinds of numbers which interested Kaczynski. Now, Rustigan is a respected professor, and he was even on the government's Unabomber task force of consultants, and he knew that he was going to appear on national television to offer his educated and informed opinion on the Zodiac/Unabomber theory. Did Rustigan prepare? Did he make sure that he knew what he was talking about before he appeared on the show and made that absurd statement? No. The Zodiac mentioned "radians" which are angles used in higher forms of mathematics. Ted Kaczynski was a mathematician focused on higher forms of mathematics. This means that the Zodiac and Ted Kaczynski were interested in the same exact kind of numbers, and this means that Rustigan was not only wrong but offering his erroneous conclusion as a fact presented by an informed expert.

Paul Avery was a reporter who worked for a newspaper which was happy to distort the facts in order to sell papers. That said, Paul Avery was not the obsessive loser as portrayed in the film ZODIAC. The film portrays Avery as obsessed with the case to the point of personal destruction which simply wasn't true. And, the film says that Avery wrote the Department of Justice and asked to be put in charge of the Zodiac case which isn't true, either. More importantly, the producers and writer of ZODIAC knew, for a fact, that this wasn't true but put this in the movie anyway because it suited their purposes-- purposes which had absolutely nothing to do with telling the truth. And THAT is the problem with this case-- most people who are writing about it have very little interest in the truth and, unfortunately, what they write not only goes uncorrected but is circulated for eternity.

Even if Paul Avery got his information from another newspaper article the truth is that he didn't bother to check his facts before he wrote his story, which was typical of Avery and the sensational Chronicle at the time. The claim that Shepard was stabbed in the shape of the cross was obviously nonsense and Avery should have noticed that. If he had any interest in the facts and he did have police sources, he could simply have asked someone if this was true before printing this claim. Yet, he didn't do so, and he just wrote that claim as if it were fact, proving that his concern was writing a sensational story and getting the facts right was not important at all. Again, this is why you got other articles from Avery which claimed that the Zodiac said he killed Radetich when Avery and the Chronicle knew that wasn't true.

NOTE: I just thought I would mention that all of this is really unfair, as the time to correct Avery's mistake was on October 19, 1969. To do so now, all these years later, is unfair and just proves that people are desperately grasping at straws to discredit Avery...

[entropy Profile]

Appreciate your attention to detail, Mike. It may actually be quite unfair to Paul Avery to call him on a few misperceptions of a case with so many gray areas but I certainly understand your point.

As an ironic aside, I'm pretty sure that the whole idea of the "I'm not Avery" buttons was inspired by my own POI's similar button campaign in San Francisco a few years earlier. Not relevant. Just cool Zynchronicity.

[Michael Butterfield Profile]

It may actually be quite unfair to Paul Avery to call him on a few misperceptions of a case with so many gray areas but I certainly understand your point.

Entropy, you didn't do anything wrong, and there's nothing wrong with correcting the factual errors, distortions or outright lies of others. I was just making a little joke about the blatant hypocrisy and ridiculous (anti-) logic of others on that issue...