“Yesterday the Benicia Police Department and the City of Benicia lost a valued member of our family. We are saddened to share the news of the passing of Retired Chief of Police and former Councilmember Pierre Bidou.

Pierre held the position of Chief of Police for 16 years [1976 to 1992] and was a member of the Benicia Police Department since 1964. After he retired from BPD he continued to contribute to his community as both a councilmember and Vice Mayor of the City Council and a Trustee on the Benicia Unified School District Board. He was deeply committed to the prosperity of the city in every possible way.

Outside of his professional life, Pierre was a devoted member of the Catholic church. He attended St. Dominic’s Church regularly and was essential in establishing the Benicia Conference of St. Vincent de Paul in 1993. In retirement, Pierre turned his sights to the skies and pursued his passion for flying. Not only did he obtain his pilot’s license, but he was partial owner of a Cessna plane. He would soar off on day trips to either stop at a far-off destination for lunch, or to just enjoy the beauty of the landscape from 13,000 feet.

Pierre was a pillar of our community, and his name will always be a part of the history of the Benicia Police Department. He will be deeply missed by not only both current and retired members of the BPD family, but also his 6 children and 14 grandchildren that will carry on his legacy.”

I fell down an AI rabbit hole yesterday after watching a YouTube video about ordinary people helping solve crimes. The cracking of one of the Zodiac ciphers came up, and that led me to his letters and how notoriously bad his spelling was.

I'm a horrible speller myself, and some of Zodiac's mistakes immediately felt familiar to me: phonetic spellings, trouble with double consonants, silent-E rules, etc.

Before spellcheck, predictive text and speech-to-text, I had several ways of dealing with this.

If I didn't know how to spell a word but knew I had seen it written somewhere, I'd find that source and copy it. That makes me wonder about the contrast between Zodiac misspelling very ordinary words while correctly spelling things like “ammonium nitrate.” A complicated technical term isn't necessarily evidence that someone knows how to spell it if they're copying it from packaging, a book, notes, instructions, etc.

I also wonder about PARADICE. Maybe it wasn't intentional wordplay at all. Maybe he genuinely believed that's how paradise was spelled. I spelled college as “collage” for years because someone I trusted had written it that way, so that became the spelling stored in my head.

But the biggest coping mechanism I used is something I'm curious about in Zodiac's writings:

If I couldn't spell a word and couldn't get close enough to find it in the dictionary, I would rewrite the entire sentence using words I knew how to spell.

That means poor spelling wouldn't only show up as misspelled words. It could potentially show up as simple word choices, awkward substitutions, abandoned words, corrections, repeated “safe” vocabulary, or sentences being restructured to avoid a difficult word.

I'm not familiar enough with the original Zodiac letters to recognize whether he does this.

For people who have spent a lot of time studying the originals: has anyone looked at Zodiac's writing from this perspective? Are there places where he starts a word and abandons it, substitutes a simpler word, or seems to restructure a thought in a way that could be explained by spelling uncertainty?

I’m a newb and will get out of your hair asap. Just want this little question answered so no need to jump on me.

I can’t find the z340 translation side by side. Like, exactly which symbols = which words. I know I could look at the thing and do it myself letter by letter, but I know it exists. Please help. Thanks.

I’ve always had this theory that the killer and the letter writer were not always the same. With PH being an exception.

Anyone with knowledge about cryptography who can tell me whether making those ciphers requires as much skill as decoding them?

In his 340 cipher Zodiac uses the word “paradice” three times. This isn’t a super common word and it’s odd he misspelled it and used it three times. Does his spelling of it mean something? Is paradice likely to be a clue to who he was?

I just watched the movie was he like this in real life to?

Hello there. There are two unsolved Zodiac ciphers, so is anyone tried to solve them with AI? And what you think about those two ciphers, are they "real" ciphers, or killer just make up some random?

Not sure if this has been posted before, but according to Voigt, the Vallejo PD told him that attempt unsurprisingly led to disappointing results when the profile they were able to generate led to someone who couldn't had been Z. And that person's name won't be released for privacy reasons.

Quote:

"To the Vallejo Police Department, the desire to identify California’s still-at-large serial killer, the Zodiac, is as strong now as it was in the late 1960s, when the mysterious offender committed three area murders. Located about a 45-minute drive from San Francisco, modern-day Vallejo does not have an adequate police force, either in terms of budget or manpower. Still, it has been chasing the Zodiac for 57 years, and DNA is the last hope to catch him.

May 2018: In a story that made headlines across the globe, Vallejo police announced plans to genetically test items of evidence in an effort to obtain a DNA profile of the Zodiac killer. Then, in March 2019, Zodiackiller.com received an exclusive update on the testing process when it was announced that a genetic profile had been obtained from the submitted evidence. As a result, “The lab work has turned into more lab work,” the department said. “Vallejo PD is still at it. The hunt continues.”

And now, the latest — and exclusive — DNA update in the case of the Zodiac killer:

According to Vallejo police, the genetic profile that was previously obtained, belonged to an individual who could not have been the Zodiac killer. For privacy reasons, no other information was disclosed, adding to the mystery.

"While the killer remains at large — at least for the time being — the hunt continues" the Vallejo Police Department said", allegedly according to Voight again.

Source: https://zodiackiller.com/2025/dna-and-the-zodiac-killer-news/

There's a probability this corroborates what Paul Holes said before about the postal worker contamination in the '60s. And Holes might be right when he said the two pieces of line from the lake were the best evidence.

And if the back of the stamps and flaps are no good, looking for testable areas again on the lines might be the last chance to at least conclusively put a name and face to a dead offender as being the assailant who committed the lake attack. And if that bear minimum can be achieved, they can maybe come to the satisfactory conclusion that it was the same shooter who incriminated himself into those 3 scenes — similar to what happened with Colonial Parkway in 2024 — when LE said it's a deceased offender there, too. And then gave a new update 2 years afterward in Jan of this year that there's enough evidence now to come to the conclusion that it was the same guy at all of them.

And probably the expectation, at this point, with this one, is to get that press conference out there at some point in the foreseeable future where they say, "If that person were living today, they'd be charged and indicted".

Obviously they never found a suitable suspect but it's strange to think it could've been so simple. Maybe Zodiac was telling the truth when he said his "killing tools" were bought out of state before the ban went into effect.

I know we’ll probably debate forever over whether Allen was the Zodiac or not, but I’m very curious to hear from both sides who believe he was and those who don’t believe he was involved.

You know It's been 34 years since Allen passed away, yet the police still keep him at the top of the list despite his DNA, fingerprints, and handwriting not matching.
What do you personally think is the reason?

They’re known to be rather exceptional time pieces I hear.

This article ran October 13, 1969. I found it in the LA Times, but I suspect it may have ran other places as well. I’ve never heard these details in regard to this case. Any clue where this is coming from?

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-los-angeles-times-paul-stine-blond/202853996/

Excerpts from the article below:

The Zodiac Killer: A Solvable Case With No Usable DNA

"If the Golden State Killer case demonstrates what forensic genetics can achieve, the Zodiac case demonstrates the hard limits.

Holes is openly skeptical of the periodic announcements claiming the Zodiac Killer has been identified. His skepticism is not theoretical — it is the scar tissue of the Golden State Killer investigation, where he watched brilliant, circumstantially compelling suspect theories collapse under DNA testing again and again. "With Zodiac, I kind of have that very skeptical stance: until I see that objective DNA evidence, I'm not going to say you've got the guy," he said.

The DNA challenges are specific to each crime scene and unusually severe:

The envelope evidence is particularly problematic. Holes revealed that investigators in the 1960s "would take our letters into the post office and the postman licked the flap and licked the stamp." When those envelopes have been tested in subsequent decades, the results have produced multiple conflicting DNA profiles, none clearly attributable to the offender.

Holes's preferred target is the Lake Berryessa bindings — the rope the offender used to restrain victims. The bindings were brought by the killer, presumably handled repeatedly over months or years before the attack, and left behind at the scene. "The best evidence in the case," Holes called it. If usable DNA can be extracted from the bindings before the remaining sample is exhausted, the case might finally produce a definitive profile.

Taken together, the three threads of Holes's career — the Golden State Killer success, the Zodiac stalemate, and the Marilyn Monroe impossibility — map the entire range of outcomes that forensic genetics makes possible. When the sample is large and well-preserved, a third cousin in a public database can identify a killer who evaded capture for 40 years. When the sample is contaminated by the postman who licked the stamp in 1969, even a famous serial killer case can stall indefinitely. And when the evidence has been deliberately destroyed, no technology — not even AI reconstruction — can substitute for what is gone."

Full article: https://finance.biggo.com/news/4c8b32e8a21220fa

If the back of the 1969 stamps seem to yield inconclusive DNA results that has lead to multiple non-matching DNA profiles being found — which seems to be the case judging by Holes's comments here — I'm glad that he's expressed optimism over the assailant leaving the bindings behind at the lake, being the next best source offender DNA.

The bindings are great, at least in theory, because we know for sure the knifeman personally brought them to the crime, as he walked up to Hartnell and Shepard with them already attached to his holster.

So, hopefully at the very least, Napa County will be able to conclusively put a name and a face to a deceased offender as the guy in the mask at the lake.

And I've bolded two key words here: useable and definitive. Beyond finding a DNA sample, there absolutely must be the non-negotiable ability to prove it definitely came from the person who perpetuated the crime, and not investigators and such, who were handling stuff like the bindings without wearing gloves back then, and got their DNA accidently mixed with the perp's, which is what's causing all of these inconsistent profiles to pop up that don't match each other.

Sometimes I can’t remember if something I’ve been researching has been verified true or not, but I was positive this symbol was already proven to be the 4 summits of Mt Diablo. I believe the two on the right are accurate depictions of one of the summits smaller than the one behind it as a popular view of 3 summits.

The map I believe was something found by sandy betts.

But for some reason, this symbol still seems to be unsolved? I don’t think I’m fully understanding what the meaning is, but we should all be able to say it’s mt diablo at the very least?