Someone always misses it. I've basically given up on any sarcasm here because it seems that the "don't let this place turn into Reddit" mantra seems to cultivate a crowd requiring quite a lot of hand-holding through subtext. I maintain that the inane screaming about clickbait is correlated to this.
I feel like at least twice a year, there is some story like "Zodiac Killer Finally Identified" or "DB Cooper Finally Found". And behind these stories is usually just one person or group of people who are presenting their pet theory (which highlighted all facts supporting it, and conveniently brushes aside all facts which don't) and have savy media contacts so are able to get media exposure to help promote what's frequently accompanied by a book they are trying to sell copies of.
I don't know if that's the case here, but this pattern of events has made me just tune out stories like this. I wish media outlets would be more critical.
At least the Zodiac killer is recent enough for uncovering their identity to feel sort of feasible. That said, I personally find the idea of it being Ted Cruz so amusing that I see little reason to amend my head-canon, regardless of evidence presented.
I’m honestly so tired of hearing this lame conspiracy theory/in-joke. It’s so dumb and trollish and barely funny, all it does is give ammo to repubs who think dems are wackadoos. Fellow dems, this ain’t it.
That's cool and all, but I personally enjoy it because of Ted's personality specifically, not his specific political affiliation. And also who cares? It's clearly a joke, one that happens to appeal to my particular sense of humor.
There are oodles of topics that provide plenty of political ammunition, but anybody who takes this one seriously is an idiot.
Sorry, but I just recently watched a crowd of angry trolls sell memes and Internet in-jokes as facts to droves of angry Facebook users, and then they combined forces to elect a fascist. I no longer believe this kind of crap is inconsequential.
Despite knowing it was the same base as canonical, it somehow never occurred to me to spell it that way. Thanks for the heads up, but since google hasn't decided it approves of "headcanon" I was forced to compromise in my correction.
> In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, [Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent] told Fox News.
> "So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."
I want to see the details because there have been some dubious decipherments before that were a real stretch, so I want to see how plausible the ananagram is.
I don't understand, so they have a deciphered letter from zodiac, they removed the individual letters of Gary's name from the message and got a 2nd message? Is that right?
I think that one message could not be fully decoded, there seemed to be some cruft in it. My guess is this cruft was no longer in the decoded message once the letters of his name are removed.
But there's no reasonable motive for the Zodiac Killer to do so. If he wanted to frame Gary Poaste, he would plant evidence that was more obvious. If he wanted to toy with the detectives who were trying to discover his identity though--which is well within the pattern of behavior observed from the Zodiac Killer--this is exactly the sort of thing he would do.
Such an important angle to consider this from. Until there’s a DNA match how do we know the zodiac killer just didn’t use the name of some guy he knew? Especially a seemingly uncommon name (maybe it was common at the time)
If he knew one of their suspects names and decided to fuck with them and throw them off the trail, yes, he would use someone else's name. Your leap to judgement of "it must be Gary" is just as much of a leap as "it might not be" - both rely on "knowing" the Zodiac's motives, which no one does, because he's not been identified.
No but it requires you to know apeace. Could be random letters with usernames - ok. But it's a different story with full names in the 1960s. Could have still just browsed the telephone book, but together with other hints it adds weight to the argument.
I would find evidence of it actually convincing, which you would think would be foregrounded somewhere. And yet, mysteriously, it is not. This suggests that the claim is bullshit.
Stats or it didn't happen. That kind of seemingly incredible coincidence can sometimes just be the mind playing tricks on people who are unaware of how many ways a similar result could have occurred by chance.
That strikes me as a major red flag. With anagrams you can place letters in any order you choose. A lot more cheatable than a consistent cipher solution.
> In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, she told Fox News. "So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."
To me it's pretty coincidental if the letters for this person's full name just happen to be this person who also has other characteristics matching the description including facial scars from one of the police sketches.
#1 This is a pretty big claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And yet there is no evidence.
-or-
#2 It also sounds like they're saying if you remove various letters of the alphabet from a cipher, you can get a readable message. This is not notable.
The facial scars in the sketch vs the photo seem like a huge stretch to me personally. It looks like they were just sketching normal forehead lines. And sketches are not exactly reliable in the first place. It really seems like someone desperately looking for a pattern where there isn't one.
It seems like even the article contradicts what this group says...
> "Our Homicide Cold Case Unit has determined the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in 1966 is not related to the Zodiac killer," the Riverside Police Department's Homicide Cold Case Unit told Fox News.
It seems like the group asked the police department to test the DNA found in the Bates case to confirm it once and for all, but the police department has refused.
So there's probably some internal politics thing going on here.
The FBI says it is related, the local PD says it is not, and to ask the FBI. The local PD is also refusing to do DNA tests which would resolve the issue.
Because if they start doing it, they'll get more requests to do it in the future. And then they'd have to make more process around it and pay people to execute that process, and then they're in the business of selling small bits of criminal evidence to random cranks.
There is probably not an infinite supply of dna evidence, and testing it is destructive. So I can imagine they don’t want to testany plausible theory but save it for when they are really convinced.
It sounds like there's a little bit of presumed Zodiac-Killer DNA on his letters, and there's been some preliminary analysis of it. Hopefully this evidence is suggestive enough to justify a full comparison.
It's actually the same guy! The fox news video started auto-playing and they introduced their first guest as "Casebreakers head Tom Colbert, who IDed hijacker DB Cooper". So, yeah, I think based on that alone this is likely fake news.
I honestly found it borderline impossible to read or follow. It's a bunch of disjointed speculation and 'did you know you can get any barcode to equal 666'-levels of rambling.
Looking at the press release [1], it still feels relatively circumstantial to me. Not sure that we can deem the Zodiac Killer to be fully identified yet.
It's definitely not nearly as cut and dry as when they identified the Golden State killer.
It doesn't mean "weak". It means "pertaining to circumstances".
Nearly all evidence is circumstantial.
DNA is circumstantial evidence. Fingerprints are circumstantial evidence. A smoking gun is circumstantial evidence.
Trials are based on circumstantial evidence. Hans Reiser was arrested, tried, and convicted of murdering his wife based on nothing but circumstantial evidence that a murder even occurred. They didn't even have her body.
If a lawyer would jump up and shout "Objection, evidence is circumstantial", the judge would look at them and say "Yeah, no shit, what's your actual objection?"
> pointing indirectly towards someone's guilt but not conclusively proving it.
You are correct that within a technical legal context most evidence is circumstantial. But that isnt the only meaning of the word, and indeed, largely not what is meant.
Yes, inferences must be made. But as a lot of those links mention, direct evidence (the other kind of evidence) is often worse as it's usually eyewitness accounts.
Lazy television writers have done us all a disservice by repeated implication that circumstantial evidence isn't good enough.
1. belonging to, consisting in, or dependent on circumstances
2. pertinent but not essential : incidental
The original comment used the word correctly. Because dictionaries describe how people actually speak, not prescribe rules on how to use words. That's why they get updated every so often as word usages change.
But this is a word that has a technical meaning and a colloquial meaning. It doesn’t make sense to apply the colloquial definition when a term is being used in the context of a technical discussion.
In other words, the appropriate definition of a term of art is... circumstantial. ;)
The Cornell Law dictionary that you cited is a good summary of what lawyers and judges are likely to think: Evidence that implies a person committed a crime, (for example, the person was seen running away from the crime scene). There must be a lot of circumstantial evidence accumulated to have real weight. Compare to direct evidence.
Putting aside the very first paragraph ("What they meant is wrong"), this post makes some sound points.
It is also the case that the alleged new evidence for Poste being the killer is, in fact, circumstantial with respect to the issue of who committed the murders in question.
So, returning to that first paragraph, to establish whether what mauze meant is wrong, we must establish both that mauze meant something other than what was written, and that the intended meaning was wrong.
I do not see any conclusive evidence as to what mause meant. Furthermore, bena's reply to mause suggests that the intended meaning was 'weak'. That strikes me as plausible, but as far as I can tell, it would not be an obviously wrong characterization of the new evidence.
Usually when a particular interpretation of a word renders it utterly meaningless then that interpretation is not the correct one.
In particular circumstantial can mean 'pertaining to circumstance' or it can be one of several other meanings derived from the same root. One of which is its noun form "Something incidental to the main subject, but of less importance", which sounds like a more reasonable interpretation. Or it may even be one of those words that only has a particular meaning in a legal context.
People glommed onto the idea of circumstantial meaning weak from police and legal procedurals.
And since we are talking about evidence, we should be using it within the context of evidence. And in that context, some or all of the evidence being circumstantial has no bearing on whether or not it is good evidence.
This isn't a matter of "other meanings [being] derived from the same root". There is no root. It's a misappropriation of a word from lazy television writers.
Other than first-hand knowledge, all evidence is circumstantial.
In response to all your detractors comments:
looking up words in English dictionaries for law jargon is a bad idea, you will get yourself thrown in the dock.
Blacks Law dictionary only.
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE. The term in-
cludes all evidence of indirect nature. Milligan v.
State, 109 Fla. 219, 147 So. 260, 263.
It is direct evidence as to facts deposed to but indirect as
to the factum probandum, Brown v. State, 126 Tex.Cr.R.
449, 72 S.W.2d 269, 270; evidence of facts or circumstances
from which the existence or nonexistence of fact in issue
may be inferred. People v. Steele, 37 N.Y.S.2d 199, 200,
179 Misc. 587; Wolff v. Employers Fire Ins. Co., 282 Ky.
824, 140 S.W.2d 640, 645, 130 A.L.R. 682; Scott v. State,
57 Ga.App. 489, 195 S.E. 923, 924; inferences drawn from
facts proved, Hatfield v. Levy Bros., 18 Ca1.2d 798, 117 P.
2d 841, 845; preponderance of probabilities, Hercules Pow-
der Co., v. Nieratko, 113 N.J.L. 188, 173 A. 606, 610; pro-
cess of decision by which court or jury may reason from
circumstances known or proved, to establish by inference
the principal fact, People v. Taddio, 292 N.Y. 488, 55 N.E.
2d 749, 750.
It means that existence of principal facts is only inferred
from circumstances. Twin City Fire Ins. Co. v. Lonas, 255
Ky. 717, 75 S.W.2d 348, 350.
When the existence of the principal fact is deduced from
evidentiary by a process of probable reasoning, the evi-
dence and proof are said to be presumptive. Best, Pres.
246; Id. 12. All presumptive evidence is circumstantial be-
cause necessarily derived from or made up of circum-
stances, but all circumstantial evidence is not presumptive.
Burrill.
The proof of various facts or circumstances which usual-
ly attend the main fact in dispute, and therefore tend to
prove its existence, or to sustain, by their consistency, the
hypothesis claimed. Or as otherwise defined, it consists in
reasoning from facts which are known or proved to es-
tablish such as are conjectured to exist.
INDIRECT EVIDENCE. Is that which only tends
to establish the issue by proof of various facts
sustaining by their consistency the hypothesis
claimed. It consists of both inferences and pre-
sumptions. Lake County v. Neilon, 44 Or. 14, 74
P. 212, 214.
This is exactly why I want to see more info about the cipher they solved (that and my innate interest in ciphers.) The claim is that when you remove all the letters of his full name, there is a 2nd message hidden there.
This is exactly the sort of thing I would immensely like to get ahold of and apply some stochastic models to, in addition to just knowing more of the specifics.
In any case, if they have truly deciphered a message that implicates him, it would be significantly more than circumstantial.
What really pains me is the paucity of substantial information backing up the claim, that and the story seems to have been broken by TMZ, ugh.
What are the ethics of potentially identifying deceased people as baddies? Unless there is DNA evidence which remains(which I doubt), or they find incontrovertible evidence in his home or something like that(I also doubt), this is just a guess that will drastically affect his probably otherwise-normal family whether the allegations are true or not.
This was the question on my mind as well. The alleged "perp" died in 2018, but I didn't see any mention of the duration of the group's investigation. Did this group identify him as a person of interest before his death? If so, that raises yet more more questions (e.g. no statutory limitation on murder).
> Hans Smits told Fox News he spent 10 years hiding a whistleblower who said he escaped a criminal "posse" headed by Poste. The man, who The Case Breakers only referred to as Wil, told Smits the posse roamed California's High Sierra region and that he was "groomed into a killing machine."
> Smits said he gave Wil financial, logistical and emotional support over the years and moved him around for nearly 10 years in an effort to keep him safe.
> "I'm the one that took him to the FBI office and put him on a train and sent him out of state," Smits said.
The story does not seem to explicitly state Smits is a member of the Case Breakers, but if Smits knows Wil, and Case Breakers only identify the whistleblower as Wil, it seems to imply Smits is a member of Code Breakers.
If that is all true, they were working Poste as a person of interest while he was still alive.
Other ethics include the press now reaching out to the surviving family of this man? "So and so, who call themselves investigators, say your father is the Zodiac Killer! Thoughts?"
Time for another zodiac movie, this time including the subsequent murders and the eventual posthumous uncovering of the murderer. No matter how convincing the evidence it's just not satisfactory that the guy can't be tried.
"For the full story, and more evidence from the Case Breakers, visit"[0]
Can we update the link to just go to the full story rather than the summarized version? (sorry, I know it's kinda "offtopic" but that just bugged me starting to read and just being redirected to another site)
By far the most interesting takeaway from the full FOX news article is that it seems possible that the Zodiac Killer was actually a group of people:
> Hans Smits told Fox News he spent 10 years hiding a whistleblower who said he escaped a criminal "posse" headed by Poste [now identified as the Zodiac]. The man, who The Case Breakers only referred to as Wil, told Smits the posse roamed California's High Sierra region and that he was "groomed into a killing machine."
> In addition, Wil said he witnessed Poste burying murder weapons in the woods, Smits said.
> "They put out several bear caches out there in case something happened," Smits said.
> Smits said he gave Wil financial, logistical and emotional support over the years and moved him around for nearly 10 years in an effort to keep him safe.
> Despite being dead for three years, some people are mysteriously still loyal to him, said Michelle, who also declined to provide her last name.
> "He targeted young men who didn't have a father figure," she said. "It was a posse of three but the one [Poste] did a lot of damage. He still has some kind of control… and he's gone."
One hundred percent. That is something that, to my knowledge, was not known before. If it is indeed true then it would bring some interesting questions along with it.
This part of the article actually made me more skeptical about the rest of the claims. The rest sounds like fairly convincing forensics, but then it veers off into rather outlandish conspiracy territory. And if you look at the earlier article on the "Case Breakers" site, the whole thing appears to have started in conspiracy territory: https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/09/the-last-zodiac-victim/
That's not to say that no such weapons cache exists. I imagine there must be plenty of outlaw-ish people in rural regions with sizable above- and underground collections of firearms. But often their boasts of paramilitary acumen tend to be rather overstated, so claims of a serial killer grooming posthumously loyal killing machines would require rather extraordinary proof.
Other clues include deciphering letters sent by the Zodiac that revealed him as the killer, said Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent who works on cold cases. In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, she told Fox News.
"So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."
I wonder if neuroscience will ever come up with a treatment for serial killers that would cure them of their murderous obsessions.
I believe some serial killers are constantly thinking about murder, while others might have two sides to their personalities that avoid thinking about the other, like a switch.
From what I've seen/read, it seems like many serial killers have a consistent urge/voices telling them/impulse to kill that they are able to resist for a time, lose control, kill, and then repeat the cycle.
I've wondered how many potential serial killers there are out there that will never kill simply because we, as a society, have elevated video games, movies, and adult entertainment to such an extent that killing just isn't as gratifying as blowing time on WoW, Netflix, or PH.
I think the question may not be one of gratification as much as early trauma. The internet has its flaw socially but it has made it hugely easier to be weird and find refuge amongst other like-minded people.
So two new pieces of evidence are offered up by this article, firstly that Zodiac was identified by several witnesses as having a forehead scar, including being drawn on the famous sketch of him, which matches a scar Poste had at the time. Secondly, some sort of new solution to the cipher is possible by omitting Poste's full name in some way.
As exciting as it would be, I always take these claims about famous cases being solved with a grain of salt. It seems they were also denied DNA evidence from another California case, and bringing up excitement about Zodiac might let them press the issue further. The scar I don't think is definitive proof by any means, but if there is some new explanation to one of the ciphers, I would be very interested in seeing it.
Apparently there was also a paint-splattered watch recovered at the Bates killing scene (tied to ZK in 1975 by FBI) and he spent decades as a house painter. There was also a recovered boot print from that scene that apparently was a match to him.
I guess we'll all have to wait for all the true crime podcasts to spill the rest of the beans.
Does anyone else have issues with identifying and describing facial features. I have no problems recognizing people, but there’s no way I can verbalize them on a specific features basis. What kind of disorder do I have?
I remember a podcast (I think it was Every Little Thing) where someone described being a police sketch artist and it very much involved a lot of question asking, a lot of experience with identifying specific traits that stand out, and refining it over time.
Draw a nose, was the bridge wider or thiner? With a lot of experience they seem to be able to get the "right" details close-enough that it can identify say, a large handful of people for whom those that might report them can feel more confident in say, calling the FBI before reporting their uncle.
This casts a wider net than say, directly identifying them, but it helps isolate the possible suspects well enough to be worth doing when you've got nothing else.
I think that's fairly typical for people who aren't used breaking down images into their constituent parts. In the language of computer vision, it would be like saying that our visual cortexes don't need to know how to segment a face into detailed descriptions of eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc., in the same way as it is necessary to be able to segment a wolf from a forest scene.
But it can also be trained. See, e.g., Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
I doubt it’s either of those. I can recognize a person at a distance but ask me to describe if their nose bridge is wider or narrower and I literally wouldn’t be able to tell you unless it’s significantly exaggerated.
The question should be, if shown an example nose drawing could you say whether the bridge should be wider or narrower?
Or if shown two noses with different width bridges, can you point to the one that is closer to being right?
Police sketch artist scenes in movies and TV shows are incredibly abbreviated compared to reality, which often features a lot more iteration and discarded sketches precisely because a lot of people are in the "I'll know it when I see it" group.
i have partial aphantasia (I think) and I am quite good at recognizing faces, but I couldn't necessarily visualize one to describe it if not looking at the face
Unfortunately, "aphantasia" is now labeled as "the inability to voluntarily create a mental picture in your head". That's from Google.
The primary problem with this label is that this could include some people who see involuntary imagery (like people), but don't do what is essentially creative visualization. For those people, they "know" the experience of seeing things in mind.
Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all. For the people I've found with this ability I would say none of them could hear things internally either. Not everyone has the ability to "rehear" things.
I spent a lot of years asking people about how they saw things internally and it just got weirder the more I asked. Eventually, I just decided that everyone thinks differently, with various "side models" that allow them to see, hear, think and even smell things that aren't real.
> Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all.
What about remembering things that you have already seen? Let's say I ask you to watch, for example, the Star Trek TNG opening sequence. Can you "rewatch" it?
I can. I can also sort of picture 'creative' images, to an extent.
However, conjuring up faces of people I've met is pretty difficult. Even my dog, which I find easier than people, can still take different shapes that are not real and I can't 'fix' it until I look at her again. If it is a person that I've only seldom met, I won't be able to recall the face at all, even if I can still recognize the person. It doesn't matter that I met the person a minute ago - if I don't make a very conscious effort to remember, I probably won't recognize them at all (and will definitely not recall the image). If I am under stress, that's even worse.
I've always chalked that up to 'being bad with faces', but there maybe something more at play, it seems.
I've some sort of stock graphics library in my mind.
For example, I cannot visualize the apple I have in my hand, even if I consciously study it for a few minutes and note out the shape and colouration before closing my eyes. However, I can visualize "an apple", I even get a choice between clipart version or realistic stock photo version of a red delicious or an granny smith. I cannot conjure up the faces of people I know, or even my own face, but I can bring up "young adult asian male" "elderly white female" etc.
When I looked up aphantasia, one of the test was "can you visualize waves hitting the beach" and I was wondering if the Toei logo because I can rewatch that anytime I want, but I can't visualize a generic beach with waves.
I've found it challenging to pin down someone about whether they see stuff internally or not. It's as if people who do aren't quite aware of what they are doing is happening, but if they think about it (like breathing) then they are like "oh yeah, I see it!"
Anything "built up" from a mental concept, and seen as an image, would be exactly what I don't do.
Yeah, the answer is always "no I don't see it". That is because I don't build side models in my mind, from thinking mind. While awake, I build ONE model in mind, from what my sensors feed it. When the sensors go dark, I see darkness and hear nothing.
While falling asleep I'm able to have hypnagogic visualizations. I do dream (but can't re-see the dreams) and psychedelics haven't produced anything much in the way of imagery. Maybe sounds and some slight alteration of the model, like movement or some slight color enhancement.
I don't know whether your experience is similar to mine, but I can't visualize faces at all, even of someone I have just been looking at. I have no issues recognizing people or visualizing things other than faces, so neither aphantasia nor prosopagnosia match.
I can’t visualize anything really. It’s like I just think about its shape in an abstract since but I don’t actually visualize anything it’s all words and thoughts in my head, no images.
I heard this very often and am always quite curious about it, as I cant relate. Whenever I imagine something it's a mix of abstract, foggy stuff and vivid clear images. I don't "see" them, I think/dream them like replaying a visual input without involving the eyes.
I've always had a similar experience to this and also don't believe it is the same thing as either aphantasia or prosopagnosia.
I can consciously imagine things (and people and places) that I'm not seeing right now. I'm not super-great at it, but I can certainly do it. I can also easily and reliably recognize individual people.
But the idea of describing any individual detail of people's appearance even while looking at them (let alone from memory) seems extraordinarily difficult for me, and has since childhood. My stepmother was an artist and would sometimes try to question me about this, suggesting that I could learn to do it but hadn't.
I think I agree with other comments in this thread that conscious awareness of visual details in a scene is a separate skill from any form of recognition or recall -- especially, or most dramatically, for faces, but really for any visual percept as well. Maybe for any sensory perception: for example, I could imagine someone who can recognize individual voices, or musical instruments in a performance in which several different instruments are present, but who can't describe what makes one different from another (perhaps not even at the level of which instrument or voice has a higher-pitched fundamental tone than another's?).
I think I rely a ton on my visual system's chunking and abstraction and usually have little to no conscious awareness of any individual visual detail (especially for faces, but really for anything), unless I make some active effort to bring visual details to consciousness. I remember telling a friend in high school that I usually experienced visual scenes in a kind of wireframe summary by default (although this is just a metaphor, since I don't mean to deny that I noticed colors or textures), which she also found surprising and unfamiliar.
Edit: Like another commenter in this thread, my stepmother often recommended Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to me, so maybe I should work through it and try to develop my ability to notice visual features without interpreting them. :-)
I very much feel this way as well. I've never quite articulated it as well as you have and it has given me some insight into my own behaviors.
I think this is why I'm what is described as a "power gamer". When I play video games I'm always looking for optimal strategies, the most powerful combinations of items and skills, etc. While I definitely can at times enjoy the scenery and graphical beauty of video games, I often feel as if I'm "staring through" the game as presented right into the game as actuality when playing, hardly processing the graphics at all past being some kind of representation of the game itself.
I feel the same way. I know there are purported to be disorders that affect the ability to recognize different faces, but I have to ask myself whether or not I’m much worse than the average, or if everyone is bad at it and I’m just more aware of that. Study after study since the 1960s has all but proven that humans just aren’t good at this and eyewitness testimony is very often wrong, yet we still insist that we “know what we saw.”
This isn't an activity many people have to do often (verbally classifying facial features), so it isn't that surprising to me that untrained people have difficulty with it. Obviously I don't know your specific experience, but I'd think your experience is the norm rather than the exception.
In my mind, it's similar to musicians training solfege or chemists training in verbally classifying a smell: it aids both their understanding and their skill. It absolutely blew my mind to have a perfumist friend of mine describe smells to me as we were walking through the city. I'd never have guessed the depth and complexity of olfactory sensations that us humans are capable of with the right training.
> The guy REALLY looks like the police sketches too.
Am I the only one who can see one wears glasses the other does not?
You can't get a bigger difference.
Either the police sketch should be thrown out, if the witness makes a mistake about the glasses.
Or the suspect wasn't wearing them in his photo. In which case it needs to be mentioned, with a functioning 4th Estate the news should ask and hopefully answer obvious questions.
(And in non-movies serial killers don't wear disguises, although this currently seems more reality TV)
The police sketch is from a 2 children that watched from across the street at night. I have never believed the sketch is accurate. The sketch also shows a skinnier person but everyone described him as a bit overweight.
The "investigators" mentioned are The Case Breakers, described (on their website) as "The elite team that's solving our greatest mysteries". No mention of their actual credentials or accomplishments.
The full quotation from the page you linked to is,
“So the Zodiac actually emerged some months after the song was finished – but, as we’ll see, Garcia immediately made the connection between the killer and the song in live shows that October, when Zodiac frenzy gripped San Francisco. (He was recording pedal steel in the studio for CS&N on October 24; and on October 26 he mentions the Zodiac and “paranoid fantasies” onstage; so his memory of driving home in fear seems to be quite literal.)”
Is a song, especially a Dead song, finished when the pen leaves the paper?
I'll need some more evidence to believe it. They're strongly citing the "scars" on his forehead which, to my eye, look a lot like the wrinkles on anyone's forehead.
Yes, but these photos are so low resolution that it’s not clear they’re exactly matching here, either. And it’s not clear that a police sketch has accurate forehead wrinkles. I could not describe my wife’s forehead wrinkles to a sketch artist, for example.
Is anyone familiar with Robert Graysmith's books on the Zodiac Killer? The Fincher film "Zodiac" is based on Graysmith's research/obsession. I don't think the film mentions anyone named Poste at all. I'm wondering if he ever came across Graysmith's radar.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadIt would appear not.
Usually I'm pretty decent at picking up sarcasm over the internet, but not today it turns out.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[1] https://www.tedcruzforhumanpresident.com/
I don't know if that's the case here, but this pattern of events has made me just tune out stories like this. I wish media outlets would be more critical.
That's a mystery long solved, friend[0].
[0] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Sebastian#History
One of the best, among many, of the series.
There are oodles of topics that provide plenty of political ammunition, but anybody who takes this one seriously is an idiot.
https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1337480518074503170?s=20
https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1408133090397114375?s=20
The phrase you're thinking of is "headcanon" (cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/canon), although "head cannon" evokes a much funnier mental image.
> In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, [Jen Bucholtz, a former Army counterintelligence agent] told Fox News.
> "So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."
Here is the Case Breaker's blog announcement[1]. And here is a press release from them with some details of their work[2].
I'd really like to see this in action, but it seems like they haven't published it yet. Am I missing it?
[1] https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/09/the-last-zodiac-victim/
[2] https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...
I would find evidence of it actually convincing, which you would think would be foregrounded somewhere. And yet, mysteriously, it is not. This suggests that the claim is bullshit.
That strikes me as a major red flag. With anagrams you can place letters in any order you choose. A lot more cheatable than a consistent cipher solution.
Are anagrams typical of zodiac findings?
> In one note, the letters of Poste's full name were removed to reveal an alternate message, she told Fox News. "So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."
To me it's pretty coincidental if the letters for this person's full name just happen to be this person who also has other characteristics matching the description including facial scars from one of the police sketches.
-or-
#2 It also sounds like they're saying if you remove various letters of the alphabet from a cipher, you can get a readable message. This is not notable.
> "Our Homicide Cold Case Unit has determined the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in 1966 is not related to the Zodiac killer," the Riverside Police Department's Homicide Cold Case Unit told Fox News.
So there's probably some internal politics thing going on here.
Yeah, mean ol' law enforcement, refusing to do DNA tests for any crank mystery squad solving team that demands them.
https://medium.com/@charlierusso23/why-has-dna-evidence-not-...
Holy shit! That made my day. I'm assuming he's saving the big reveal that he's bagged Bigfoot for Christmas.
https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...
They haven't actually solved anything.
It's definitely not nearly as cut and dry as when they identified the Golden State killer.
[1]: https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...
It doesn't mean "weak". It means "pertaining to circumstances".
Nearly all evidence is circumstantial.
DNA is circumstantial evidence. Fingerprints are circumstantial evidence. A smoking gun is circumstantial evidence.
Trials are based on circumstantial evidence. Hans Reiser was arrested, tried, and convicted of murdering his wife based on nothing but circumstantial evidence that a murder even occurred. They didn't even have her body.
If a lawyer would jump up and shout "Objection, evidence is circumstantial", the judge would look at them and say "Yeah, no shit, what's your actual objection?"
> pointing indirectly towards someone's guilt but not conclusively proving it.
You are correct that within a technical legal context most evidence is circumstantial. But that isnt the only meaning of the word, and indeed, largely not what is meant.
I can consult Merriam Webster, which agrees with what I said. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/circumstantial%20...
Or Britannica
https://www.britannica.com/topic/circumstantial-evidence
Or Cornell
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/circumstantial_evidence
Or basically any single law firm or courthouse
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/defense/legal-defenses/circumst...
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/circumst...
https://www.nycourts.gov/judges/cji/1-General/CJI2d.Circumst...
Yes, inferences must be made. But as a lot of those links mention, direct evidence (the other kind of evidence) is often worse as it's usually eyewitness accounts.
Lazy television writers have done us all a disservice by repeated implication that circumstantial evidence isn't good enough.
1. belonging to, consisting in, or dependent on circumstances
2. pertinent but not essential : incidental
The original comment used the word correctly. Because dictionaries describe how people actually speak, not prescribe rules on how to use words. That's why they get updated every so often as word usages change.
To counter that point, "circumstantial" has a legal meaning that does not change as easily.
A lot of words have specific meanings, yet we don't complain and cite dictionary definitions when people use the word "or" as exclusive-or.
In other words, the appropriate definition of a term of art is... circumstantial. ;)
It is also the case that the alleged new evidence for Poste being the killer is, in fact, circumstantial with respect to the issue of who committed the murders in question.
So, returning to that first paragraph, to establish whether what mauze meant is wrong, we must establish both that mauze meant something other than what was written, and that the intended meaning was wrong.
I do not see any conclusive evidence as to what mause meant. Furthermore, bena's reply to mause suggests that the intended meaning was 'weak'. That strikes me as plausible, but as far as I can tell, it would not be an obviously wrong characterization of the new evidence.
In particular circumstantial can mean 'pertaining to circumstance' or it can be one of several other meanings derived from the same root. One of which is its noun form "Something incidental to the main subject, but of less importance", which sounds like a more reasonable interpretation. Or it may even be one of those words that only has a particular meaning in a legal context.
And since we are talking about evidence, we should be using it within the context of evidence. And in that context, some or all of the evidence being circumstantial has no bearing on whether or not it is good evidence.
This isn't a matter of "other meanings [being] derived from the same root". There is no root. It's a misappropriation of a word from lazy television writers.
> literally hearsay
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE. The term in- cludes all evidence of indirect nature. Milligan v. State, 109 Fla. 219, 147 So. 260, 263. It is direct evidence as to facts deposed to but indirect as to the factum probandum, Brown v. State, 126 Tex.Cr.R. 449, 72 S.W.2d 269, 270; evidence of facts or circumstances from which the existence or nonexistence of fact in issue may be inferred. People v. Steele, 37 N.Y.S.2d 199, 200, 179 Misc. 587; Wolff v. Employers Fire Ins. Co., 282 Ky. 824, 140 S.W.2d 640, 645, 130 A.L.R. 682; Scott v. State, 57 Ga.App. 489, 195 S.E. 923, 924; inferences drawn from facts proved, Hatfield v. Levy Bros., 18 Ca1.2d 798, 117 P. 2d 841, 845; preponderance of probabilities, Hercules Pow- der Co., v. Nieratko, 113 N.J.L. 188, 173 A. 606, 610; pro- cess of decision by which court or jury may reason from circumstances known or proved, to establish by inference the principal fact, People v. Taddio, 292 N.Y. 488, 55 N.E. 2d 749, 750. It means that existence of principal facts is only inferred from circumstances. Twin City Fire Ins. Co. v. Lonas, 255 Ky. 717, 75 S.W.2d 348, 350. When the existence of the principal fact is deduced from evidentiary by a process of probable reasoning, the evi- dence and proof are said to be presumptive. Best, Pres. 246; Id. 12. All presumptive evidence is circumstantial be- cause necessarily derived from or made up of circum- stances, but all circumstantial evidence is not presumptive. Burrill. The proof of various facts or circumstances which usual- ly attend the main fact in dispute, and therefore tend to prove its existence, or to sustain, by their consistency, the hypothesis claimed. Or as otherwise defined, it consists in reasoning from facts which are known or proved to es- tablish such as are conjectured to exist.
INDIRECT EVIDENCE. Is that which only tends to establish the issue by proof of various facts sustaining by their consistency the hypothesis claimed. It consists of both inferences and pre- sumptions. Lake County v. Neilon, 44 Or. 14, 74 P. 212, 214.
This is exactly the sort of thing I would immensely like to get ahold of and apply some stochastic models to, in addition to just knowing more of the specifics.
In any case, if they have truly deciphered a message that implicates him, it would be significantly more than circumstantial.
What really pains me is the paucity of substantial information backing up the claim, that and the story seems to have been broken by TMZ, ugh.
> Hans Smits told Fox News he spent 10 years hiding a whistleblower who said he escaped a criminal "posse" headed by Poste. The man, who The Case Breakers only referred to as Wil, told Smits the posse roamed California's High Sierra region and that he was "groomed into a killing machine."
> Smits said he gave Wil financial, logistical and emotional support over the years and moved him around for nearly 10 years in an effort to keep him safe.
> "I'm the one that took him to the FBI office and put him on a train and sent him out of state," Smits said.
The story does not seem to explicitly state Smits is a member of the Case Breakers, but if Smits knows Wil, and Case Breakers only identify the whistleblower as Wil, it seems to imply Smits is a member of Code Breakers.
If that is all true, they were working Poste as a person of interest while he was still alive.
Other ethics include the press now reaching out to the surviving family of this man? "So and so, who call themselves investigators, say your father is the Zodiac Killer! Thoughts?"
Are there rules around this crap?
Where did he come from and what is supposed to be his motive?
Of course, this was back in the time when creating attractive codewords for dangerous criminals was the norm.
Who's to say that the coded messages sent to newspapers weren't actually meant for other people involved in the activity?
They paint it as him being the primary one doing the bad things with the others as just lookouts/help w/ hiding evidence.
Can we update the link to just go to the full story rather than the summarized version? (sorry, I know it's kinda "offtopic" but that just bugged me starting to read and just being redirected to another site)
[0] https://www.foxnews.com/us/cold-case-zodiac-killer-identifie...
> Hans Smits told Fox News he spent 10 years hiding a whistleblower who said he escaped a criminal "posse" headed by Poste [now identified as the Zodiac]. The man, who The Case Breakers only referred to as Wil, told Smits the posse roamed California's High Sierra region and that he was "groomed into a killing machine."
> In addition, Wil said he witnessed Poste burying murder weapons in the woods, Smits said.
> "They put out several bear caches out there in case something happened," Smits said.
> Smits said he gave Wil financial, logistical and emotional support over the years and moved him around for nearly 10 years in an effort to keep him safe.
> Despite being dead for three years, some people are mysteriously still loyal to him, said Michelle, who also declined to provide her last name.
> "He targeted young men who didn't have a father figure," she said. "It was a posse of three but the one [Poste] did a lot of damage. He still has some kind of control… and he's gone."
That's not to say that no such weapons cache exists. I imagine there must be plenty of outlaw-ish people in rural regions with sizable above- and underground collections of firearms. But often their boasts of paramilitary acumen tend to be rather overstated, so claims of a serial killer grooming posthumously loyal killing machines would require rather extraordinary proof.
https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/10/cold-case-team-says-zodi...
https://thecasebreakers.org/2021/09/the-last-zodiac-victim/
Press release #1: https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...
"So you've got to know Gary's full name in order to decipher these anagrams," Bucholtz said. "I just don't think there's any other way anybody would have figured it out."
I'd love to see that evidence.
I believe some serial killers are constantly thinking about murder, while others might have two sides to their personalities that avoid thinking about the other, like a switch.
Serial killers don't come from nowhere
As exciting as it would be, I always take these claims about famous cases being solved with a grain of salt. It seems they were also denied DNA evidence from another California case, and bringing up excitement about Zodiac might let them press the issue further. The scar I don't think is definitive proof by any means, but if there is some new explanation to one of the ciphers, I would be very interested in seeing it.
I guess we'll all have to wait for all the true crime podcasts to spill the rest of the beans.
https://twitter.com/Q_Review/status/1445837540620218369
Draw a nose, was the bridge wider or thiner? With a lot of experience they seem to be able to get the "right" details close-enough that it can identify say, a large handful of people for whom those that might report them can feel more confident in say, calling the FBI before reporting their uncle.
This casts a wider net than say, directly identifying them, but it helps isolate the possible suspects well enough to be worth doing when you've got nothing else.
But it can also be trained. See, e.g., Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
Or if shown two noses with different width bridges, can you point to the one that is closer to being right?
Police sketch artist scenes in movies and TV shows are incredibly abbreviated compared to reality, which often features a lot more iteration and discarded sketches precisely because a lot of people are in the "I'll know it when I see it" group.
The primary problem with this label is that this could include some people who see involuntary imagery (like people), but don't do what is essentially creative visualization. For those people, they "know" the experience of seeing things in mind.
Then there are the rest of us "aphants" that don't ever see images internally, at all. For the people I've found with this ability I would say none of them could hear things internally either. Not everyone has the ability to "rehear" things.
I spent a lot of years asking people about how they saw things internally and it just got weirder the more I asked. Eventually, I just decided that everyone thinks differently, with various "side models" that allow them to see, hear, think and even smell things that aren't real.
What about remembering things that you have already seen? Let's say I ask you to watch, for example, the Star Trek TNG opening sequence. Can you "rewatch" it?
I can. I can also sort of picture 'creative' images, to an extent.
However, conjuring up faces of people I've met is pretty difficult. Even my dog, which I find easier than people, can still take different shapes that are not real and I can't 'fix' it until I look at her again. If it is a person that I've only seldom met, I won't be able to recall the face at all, even if I can still recognize the person. It doesn't matter that I met the person a minute ago - if I don't make a very conscious effort to remember, I probably won't recognize them at all (and will definitely not recall the image). If I am under stress, that's even worse.
I've always chalked that up to 'being bad with faces', but there maybe something more at play, it seems.
For example, I cannot visualize the apple I have in my hand, even if I consciously study it for a few minutes and note out the shape and colouration before closing my eyes. However, I can visualize "an apple", I even get a choice between clipart version or realistic stock photo version of a red delicious or an granny smith. I cannot conjure up the faces of people I know, or even my own face, but I can bring up "young adult asian male" "elderly white female" etc.
When I looked up aphantasia, one of the test was "can you visualize waves hitting the beach" and I was wondering if the Toei logo because I can rewatch that anytime I want, but I can't visualize a generic beach with waves.
Anything "built up" from a mental concept, and seen as an image, would be exactly what I don't do.
While falling asleep I'm able to have hypnagogic visualizations. I do dream (but can't re-see the dreams) and psychedelics haven't produced anything much in the way of imagery. Maybe sounds and some slight alteration of the model, like movement or some slight color enhancement.
I can consciously imagine things (and people and places) that I'm not seeing right now. I'm not super-great at it, but I can certainly do it. I can also easily and reliably recognize individual people.
But the idea of describing any individual detail of people's appearance even while looking at them (let alone from memory) seems extraordinarily difficult for me, and has since childhood. My stepmother was an artist and would sometimes try to question me about this, suggesting that I could learn to do it but hadn't.
I think I agree with other comments in this thread that conscious awareness of visual details in a scene is a separate skill from any form of recognition or recall -- especially, or most dramatically, for faces, but really for any visual percept as well. Maybe for any sensory perception: for example, I could imagine someone who can recognize individual voices, or musical instruments in a performance in which several different instruments are present, but who can't describe what makes one different from another (perhaps not even at the level of which instrument or voice has a higher-pitched fundamental tone than another's?).
I think I rely a ton on my visual system's chunking and abstraction and usually have little to no conscious awareness of any individual visual detail (especially for faces, but really for anything), unless I make some active effort to bring visual details to consciousness. I remember telling a friend in high school that I usually experienced visual scenes in a kind of wireframe summary by default (although this is just a metaphor, since I don't mean to deny that I noticed colors or textures), which she also found surprising and unfamiliar.
Edit: Like another commenter in this thread, my stepmother often recommended Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to me, so maybe I should work through it and try to develop my ability to notice visual features without interpreting them. :-)
I think this is why I'm what is described as a "power gamer". When I play video games I'm always looking for optimal strategies, the most powerful combinations of items and skills, etc. While I definitely can at times enjoy the scenery and graphical beauty of video games, I often feel as if I'm "staring through" the game as presented right into the game as actuality when playing, hardly processing the graphics at all past being some kind of representation of the game itself.
I can really relate to this. Thnx.
I mean, they've got 2 eyes, a nose, lips, that's the best I could do :D
In my mind, it's similar to musicians training solfege or chemists training in verbally classifying a smell: it aids both their understanding and their skill. It absolutely blew my mind to have a perfumist friend of mine describe smells to me as we were walking through the city. I'd never have guessed the depth and complexity of olfactory sensations that us humans are capable of with the right training.
Am I the only one who can see one wears glasses the other does not?
You can't get a bigger difference.
Either the police sketch should be thrown out, if the witness makes a mistake about the glasses.
Or the suspect wasn't wearing them in his photo. In which case it needs to be mentioned, with a functioning 4th Estate the news should ask and hopefully answer obvious questions.
(And in non-movies serial killers don't wear disguises, although this currently seems more reality TV)
;)
https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.114.250/g9q.07b.myftpuplo...
"So the Zodiac actually emerged some months after the song was finished"
Story behind the song "Dire Wolf" http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2012/10/dire-wolf-1969.html
“So the Zodiac actually emerged some months after the song was finished – but, as we’ll see, Garcia immediately made the connection between the killer and the song in live shows that October, when Zodiac frenzy gripped San Francisco. (He was recording pedal steel in the studio for CS&N on October 24; and on October 26 he mentions the Zodiac and “paranoid fantasies” onstage; so his memory of driving home in fear seems to be quite literal.)”
Is a song, especially a Dead song, finished when the pen leaves the paper?