The BIG Mac Update

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (00:54):
This is Zodiac Speaking. Hey everyone, welcome back to a
new episode of Zodiac Speaking. I'm one of your hosts,
Mike Morford, and today we are going to have a
very pro Mac my Favorite Suspects discussion. And you know,
for the naysayer, for the Mac haters, you probably want

(01:16):
like this episode because it's gonna be full of MAC
positive stuff. And I figured, since it was gonna be
that kind of episode, I wanted to bring on somebody
who was very helpful and instrumental in finding a lot
of stuff. You know, what I had found originally is
just sort of the typ of Iceberg. There's been a
lot of interesting stuff that has been dug up since then,

(01:37):
a lot of connections that have been made, uh, and
a lot of that's been with the help of people
on Tom Voight's forum Zodiac Killer dot com. And one
of those people I wanted to have on in particular
was Andrew, who is a guest here today. So Andrew,
thank you for coming on and if you will just

(01:57):
introduce yourself to listeners and you know, let them know
how you became interested in this case and eventually interested
in Mac.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Thanks bof So. Yeah, I'm Andrew on Tom voydz Aboard
and I kind of have a background in like academic research,
like sociology and so forth, and I guess I got interested,
like many people when the Fincher film came out. I
think that was two thousand and seven. I was kind
of I kind of became interested in Zodiac around then

(02:28):
and discovered lots of the early forums and spent a
long time reading about different suspects around that time, and
get I think that I kind of never really settled
on a suspect, but was kind of interested in why
people thought Arthur Lee Allen was considered the main suspect,
And for a long time, I guess I was like

(02:51):
figured that the police or they might know something about him.
As a suspect that the public didn't and that that's
perhaps why so many people were figured he was the
like the chief person of interest. But more recently, during
the pandemic, obviously I had a lot of downtime, and
I started reading. I started updating what I knew about

(03:13):
the case, and I was looking on your your forum,
which was still going at the time, and and I
returned to places like Tom's forum as well to update
what I knew about the case. And it was a
kind of it became more clear as well, returning to
the gray Smith book that utterly Allen was and didn't

(03:33):
really fit, you know, many of the descriptions and so forth,
and that whilst it's the yellow book entertaining book, it's
and it's kind of I consider it's glad to be
a well written book. It's quite clear when you revisit it,
after looking at other suspects and looking at the witness
descriptions that gray Smith is somewhat stretching his the descriptions

(03:56):
to fit his su suspect. And I guess it was
during the pandemic that I happened to see you had
you had an original thread on Mac who wasn't named
at the time, and when I first saw Mac, I
actually thought the two the photograph that you had off
him looked like the two sketches, the Buriessa sketch and
the Presidi height sketch. Although we could talk about perhaps

(04:20):
the Burisa sketch later, because I think now you consider
it not perhaps not, perhaps the sunbaths didn't actually see Zodiac,
and there's kind of questions around that, And from from
there I was at that point I kind of like
admired the fact that you'd seemingly had a method to

(04:42):
attack the problem of who Zodiac was like afresh, and
I began like I'd already seen like a Richard Grinnell
had an article on his website about Zodiac perhaps being
on foot and within inch earshot of the payphone when
the operator rang back after the first after the Blue

(05:04):
Rock Springs attack, and that Zodiac had written in one
of the letters. He was surprised, and it was quite
clear that Zodiac is perhaps lying about there being an
eyewitness to him and his car at that point, and
it seems quite a transparent lie, or a kind of
somewhat childish lie in some in some ways, and that
kind of got me more interested in Mac as a

(05:25):
suspect because I think you early on you said that
there weren't many people living in that area, and Mack's
family had this unusual like dual purpose home and business.
I'm very close, very close to that pay phone, and
I guess that's how I got first interested in Mac.
And with the help of others online, I started looking
at the genealogy, and when more articles became available on

(05:49):
newspapers recently, we found a lot more information about Mac
before nineteen sixty eight.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, so that's a pretty good intro. And how you
came on, you know, the scene as far as Mac,
And if you're like me, the more things you found,
the more interesting he became, and hard to dismiss a
lot of that stuff, you know, just for a backstory
for listeners who aren't overly familiar with Mac, I don't
want to go too far off into the weeds. But

(06:19):
you know, I had found him because I had spent
so much time looking for suspects down in Riverside and
trying to connect people from Riverside to the layout and
trying to cross reference who had lived there. And I
found a few people, but none that I thought Zodiac
and then you know, I talked to an investigator who
gave me some advice, and he says, just focus on

(06:41):
the crimes that you know for sure zodiacs. And then
later on, if you find somebody that you think of zodiac,
see if they happened to be from Riverside, but focus
on the crime. So that's what I did. I went
back to the drawing board and said, Okay, the one
thing that really bothered me, and I never could explain
this was that live fourth attack on Darlene Fahren Mike

(07:03):
Mageau Zodiac calls forty minutes later after the shooting from
a phone booth that should have taken like no more
than ten minutes to drive to. So I always said,
why is if he could have gotten away, he could
have been halfway to San Francisco by then, why is
he still hanging out there, risking being seen, risking someone

(07:25):
seeing his car? And then you know, don Na mean,
what if he lived around there and you know, had
gone home, parked his car, changed his clothes, hit his guns,
just anything that was time to the prime, just hit
it all and then decided he wanted to mess with
the police and to you go over to that phone
booth to call and taunt the police. And you know,

(07:50):
when I did research, I looked at every home, every
residence within you know, you know, probably a block of
that phone booth. And you know, I was able to
find just about everybody that lived in those homes and
their family members and just sort of looked who was there.
And I was able to rule some people out based

(08:10):
on you know, they were way too old. You know,
maybe I could you know, they had they were you know,
not the right race, maybe they were some other reason
that I was able to rule them out. But you know,
the one thing I learned early on was that close
to that phone booth, there was not many people that
actually lived in homes near that. So that was the

(08:31):
first interesting thing I found about Mac. And you know
when I started diagnosing, well, he's really trying to sell
this idea that he saw somebody saw him talking on
the phone booth. He's trying to overseell that, in my opinion.
And then you know, if he walked away and started
walking back towards his house, he would have heard that
phone ring, you know. So I started thinking about that

(08:54):
and I said, this is the only guy I can
place like within walking distance easily of that phone booth.
It's with an eyesight of the phone booth, because you
could see from his front door down to that corner
gas station. So Zodiac seems like somebody that would like
to mess with the police and then get his jolly's
watching the police, you know, ambling around looking around for clues,

(09:16):
and he'd probably be excited by that, So, you know,
the proximity was good. It wasn't until I finally found
that first picture mac that he had the crew cutting
glasses as a nineteen sixty three phone booth or excuse me,
nineteen sixty three yearbook photo. And I said, well, he
looks generally like the sketch, but I've seen a thousand

(09:37):
guys that look like the sketch, so I wasn't too
excited by that. I said, the first thing I'm going
to do is I want to send out for some handwriting,
and when the handwriting comes back, I'll no, you know,
hopefully it doesn't look anything like ZODIAX, and then you know,
I could move on or put him on the back burner.
And then once I got that handwriting back, I was like, whoa,
this writing looks a lot like Zodiax and it had

(09:59):
the same slant everything I said. Now I've got to
go a bit further and check him out. And then,
you know, there were a couple of people that helped
me early on, sort of behind the scenes, before Max's
name was even out there. One was Dave r Anchak,
and there were a couple other people, but Dave had
was really good about sort of laying out Max's online presence,

(10:20):
which wasn't extensive, but he found a you know, the
website that his wife and he shared, and that was
on that site where she left that infamous post about
finding Max Code cipher Book in his belongings in the

(10:41):
guilt box, and you know, she had mentioned that he
liked it so much he had that was his second copy.
So right away, I'm like, wait a minute, now, we've
got a guy that likes ciphers that's lived two hundred
and eighty seven feet from that phone booth that looks
like the sketch, you know. And things started falling in
place there, and that's really when I started to slide

(11:01):
down the mac is zodiac there, because things were just
piling up. You know, he everybody likes to discount what
Mike Mageaux said about Zodiac when he saw him, because
he didn't get the best look or it was a
profile for the most part. But the one thing he
said that was very unique was that Zodiac had a

(11:23):
large round face, and sure enough Mac has a large
round face. It's very unique. So, you know, the more
I found, the more I dug. I was able to
find out his height and weight was one hundred ninety
five pounds five foot eight. That's exactly what Majou said.
Majo said that Zodiac was twenty six to thirty. Mac

(11:44):
was twenty fourth time, but he looks a little bit
older than that, so still within the range. So that's
that's sort of how I started sliding down the you know,
the point of no return when one thing started going
adding up and then you know, finding different addresses things
like that, which we can talk about different connections. It
was hard for me to return to you know that

(12:07):
that somebody else was Zodiac at this point, and you know,
along the way, I thought I would find something that
would definitely rule him out. In just the contrary, I
haven't been able to. And then people like yourself keep
finding stuff and throwing it up, and it's like, okay,
it's just one more coincidence he has. He probably has

(12:28):
the most circumstantial case against him as somebody like Arthur
Lee Allen. But we know Arthur Lee Allen wasn't the zodiac.
So if Arthur Lee Allen wasn't, but he had all
that stuff going from, maybe somebody else with a lot
of stuff going from is So that's sort of where
I got connected. And I'd like you to you you're organized,

(12:53):
whereas I'm not. I'd just like this, you know, shoot
from the hip. You have a list of stuff that
you know is worth talking about where discussing. So I'm
gonna let you just sort of be the host here
and just dive right in and we could start talking
about some stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
So so kind of following on from what you were
saying about like a new approach to like the payphone
and so forth. I think that's what was compelling early on,
is that even just before I found out about Mac,
I'd already start to think about whether people had applied
like geoprofiling and so forth, geographic profiling. And I was

(13:28):
very like persuaded by the podcast you did with Lee
Meller where you blind tested Mac, your suspect then called
Mason against Lee Mella's profile, so he did. He did.
He created a profile right that matched very closely with
what we biographically knew about Mac so far. And that
was kind of stunning to me that I knew that

(13:51):
both geographic profiling and criminal psychology had like a predictive
power like that based on the past behavior of serial killers,
and therefore was it kind of it greatly persuaded me,
and that has given me some kind of pointers along

(14:12):
the way about where to look in the archive and
what There's also a kind of unusual family tree to Max,
particularly on Max's father's side, that could be kind of
indicative of some prior issues within the family that we
might come on to talk about later. When we were

(14:33):
discussing events of nineteen sixty eight in particular with Mac
and the potential stressors within his own family. And I
think one of the first things I was able to
find was I had been on Reddit and I was
discussing Mac as a suspect with various people, and there
was a woman on there who kindly let me have

(14:55):
access to her ancestry account, and I was able to
see the entirety Max family. She'd built a very exhaustive
family tree on there, and I'd looked at all of
the family members, including the extended family, and there's a
lot because Max father was adopted by his grandmother and

(15:16):
he was brought up as the brother of his father,
and it's kind of unusual situation, and there were I
think there were ten children in all. So I'd gone,
I'd systematically revisited the family tree multiple times, and about
three months in or so, I visited the branch of

(15:36):
the Wallfinger family, who was Max father's cousin. And what
was interesting is Max father grew up in Montana near Paulson,
in a place called Flathead, and we knew that there
was a kind of Montana connection with the zodiac that
he had mentioned Deer Lodge County, and that's recorded in

(15:57):
the police report from the testimony of Brian Hartnell. And
when I looked this time, there was a new document
attached to no Wolfinger's page, and it was her death certificate.
And some someone from that fact, someone that was like
distantly related to her, had gone to the archive and
photocopied her death certificate for some reason. And what was

(16:21):
striking at the very top on the right, it says
dear Ludge and I later discovered that non A. Wolffinger
was actually it gives the dates for her mission to a.
It was an infirmary within a mental asylum in Montana
in Deo Lodge County, and she was admitted for bronchial
pneumonia and was sick and died during the period from

(16:43):
between like of the Late Buriessa attack and the Presidio
Heights attack. So she was admitted a few days before
the Late Burieressa attack and died shortly after the Presidio
Heights attack. I think I don't have the exact dates
on me. And this also overlapped with an escape from
Deer Lodge Prison, which is only twenty minutes drive from

(17:04):
the hospital. The Montana State Hospital where non and Wallfinger
was an inmate, is recorded as an inmate and the
two prisoners that had escaped from Deer Lodge Prison, which
is the state prison that was seemingly mentioned to Brian
Hartnell by Zodiac and these two prisoners were escaped during

(17:28):
this same period and were recaptured in the nearby town
of Anaconda, which is the county seat of Deer Lodge.
And this kind of puts makes a connection between Mac
and his father and this cousin that died exactly at
this point, and it seemed an incredible coincidence to me

(17:52):
that it was startling.

Speaker 2 (17:53):
Yeah, and let me just interrupt real quick. So for
the listeners out there that may not know exactly what
we're talking about, Zodiac at Lake Barry Essa told Brian
hart Now that he was an escape prisoner from Deer Lodge, Montana,
and that was not known. It hadn't really been reported
in California. That's not in any newspapers, it wasn't on

(18:14):
the news. So for him to say that and for
their actually to have been escape situation and escape prisoners
at that moment in Deer Lodge seemed to be a
connection between Zodiac and Deer Lodge that maybe he didn't,
you know, he didn't think of maybe all these years

(18:34):
later people would be putting two and two together and
maybe comeing to some conclusions, especially since he planned to
kill Brian. So that was a big clue. Since it
hadn't been in the papers, how would Zodiac have known
about that unless he had some kind of connection back
to Deer Lodge in the form of family members. Maybe

(18:54):
he had lived there maybe relatives live there, So that
is is how the Deer Lodge thing becomes important, especially
with Mac.

Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yes, and it's kind of notable that Max's father, Andy
lived on the next door farm to this cousin when
he was growing up. So there's an early census that
shows that they were kind of proximate, and there are
later articles that show them at kind of family events together,
so there is a strong connection. And it seems that

(19:26):
Andy did return to Montana during the sixties for school
reunions and so forth. So it's even though it said
it's a thousand miles away, which makes it even more
remarkable because it's a very unpopulated area of the country
and it's very distance from California.

Speaker 2 (19:43):
And I see, I don't know what you think, but
this is what I think. I I theorized. I don't
know how any proof of this. It is just a theory.
I theori is that Max's parents were maybe talking with
each other or talking directly to him, and they mentioned, oh,
cousin so and so is not doing so well. She's
in Deer Lodge in an institution, dying of pneumonia. Oh

(20:06):
and by the way, we had these two escape prisoners.
Did you hear about that? I can see Mac either
talking to his parents directly getting this information or listening
to them talking to their family members back back in Montana,
and all of a sudden, loan behold, he really, you know,
he drops his clue at Lake Baryessa and brings up

(20:30):
Deer Lodge just in passing because it's a good cover
story to say I'm an escape prisoner from Deer Lodge,
because he had just heard about that from his parents,
and it didn't mean anything. Police had never been able
to put that together with it with anything. It didn't
lead anywhere. Those prisoners were obviously apprehended. They weren't Zodiac.

(20:50):
But I think it's a slip you know, And it's
a direct tie between Mac and his family to Deer Lodge.
And when Zodiac said that that story wasn't known to
people in California, just because it wasn't on the California radar,
didn't make the news there. So I think it's a
big clue in a big slip up on Zodiac's part.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
Yeah, And people can go and check the new newspapers
to shut and it shows that it wasn't reported and
it certainly wasn't reported in the Bay Area. And what
I mean, I kind of see it as what they
call a tip of the tongue confession. Is that what's
interesting if you read the police report is that Brian
asks about the prison escape twice. He kind of presses

(21:33):
Zodiac on it, and it's, you know, it speaks well
to Brian in some sense that he was trying to
get the upper hand in the conversation and he kind
of forces Zodiac to repeat his story. And obviously Zodiac
is trying to maneuver them into a position where he
can tie them up or they tie each other up,
And in order to be convincing, maybe he drew on

(21:57):
his recent, you know, his recent memory of this conversation
with his parents, and to make it more plausible, he
makes it he draws on a real event. And this
is why I also have a further kind of theory
around this, is that people often wonder why the Paul
Stein murder is so different to the prior pattern and

(22:19):
why it cursed so soon after Lake berry Ess. And
what's notable about Lake Bearessa is that Zodiac never writes
a letter about Lake berri Essa. He writes on the
car door. He never again references the attack on Brian
and Cecilia, and I have a feeling that he became
paranoid and upset that he perhaps made this slip up,
and this perhaps provoked him to make a more sensational

(22:44):
attack in San Francisco to draw the heat away from himself,
because that the Deer Lodge detail was not printed in
the paper at the time and was only printed a
couple of years later when a journalist returned to the
Zodiac story, maybe in like seventy one, seventy two or
something like that, they printed the newspaper he might be

(23:04):
from Colorado or from Deer Lodge, Montana, which was like
the conflicting accounts from various but in the in the
sign police report it says Deo Lodge, Montana.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Yeah, And for the listeners, just a clarify again. In
speaking with the police, Brian couldn't recall the exact name
of the town. He thought it might be Fern Lodge
or Deer Lodge. There's a Fern Lodge in Colorado. But
the key difference is there was no prison escape at
the time. There was a prison escape in Montana at
the time, So that's the key difference between the two,

(23:36):
making it most likely that he's talking about Deer Lodge.
But that's a very interesting theory. If Mac realized that
he left someone alive and he was Zodiac at Lake
barri Essa and he says, oh shit, I've left my
I gave him a clue. I mentioned Deer Lodge. Maybe
he was afraid that that might somehow come back to
him and he didn't want to write a letter taking

(23:59):
credit for it.

Speaker 3 (24:00):
Yeah, and this is what I think is interesting. If
it had made it the detail had made it into
the papers, perhaps Max's parents would have read that and
that would have been somewhat of give it a tell tale, right.
What is interesting is Max's dad, in the early sixties
or mid sixties, he had written to the vale Are
Times Herald to correct a fact about anaconda in a

(24:23):
near Deer Lodge. There was a question about a chimney
that's the tallest in America or something like that, and
he corrected a fact, So it kind of shows that
he knew about the area. So that was another thing
that connects the family to that specific location.

Speaker 2 (24:41):
So very interesting.

Speaker 3 (24:42):
Yeah, and there's a kind of there's a kind of
question around Mac and why Zodiac perhaps used the phone
at the car wash in Napa after the attack, when
I read the other day that Zodiac passed something like
thirteen phone boxes on the way and never chose to

(25:02):
use the one at Napa. And there's an interesting fact
that Max's friend said that he was very involved with
a kind of a fraternal civic organization called the Kiwanes,
which is a kind of connected with the Freemasons, I believe,
and the Kiwanis were having an opening event in five
minutes from the car wash that started at seven pm

(25:25):
that evening. So there's a kind of question if Mack
was highly involved with the Kiwanes in Vallejo, would he
have tended this event. So that's that's another kind of
thing that I think perhaps his possibility, although perhaps hard to.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Prove, very interesting though, and maybe it If he goes
to that event, it sort of gives him an alibi, Hey,
I was a napper because I was at the thing,
even though it was you know, it may have been
after the times might not have lined up, but it
would still at least give him a reason to be
going to Napa. And if anybody ever found out he
was there, he would say that's what it was. That's

(26:01):
very interesting.

Speaker 3 (26:02):
Yeah, because people at the event may just remember his
face there. It's kind of interesting in the newspapers as well.
It's discussed a number of times that week. And the
event started at six, but I think the band and
the dinner only started at seven, So there's this kind
of perhaps applausible alibi being fabricated there.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
You know, I've been trying to keep up too with
everything that you found, because a lot of this stuff
you've found since I originally brought Mac forward. But you
do have quite a list of interesting things. What else
do you have on the list?

Speaker 3 (26:44):
When I first started talking to you about Mac, I
was kind of still tied up in like the kind
of mythology of Zodiac, and you were much more strict
about like times and locations and placing Mac where we
have like definite evidence about the Zodiac. And you gave
me a couple of like hints about things you're interested in,
and you said you thought that there was a baseball

(27:07):
connection for zodiac and that I then, obviously there's two
letters or threats that relate to Zodiac from nineteen seventy
I believe one was the ed Salmina death threat, and
the other was the Taggart family had received two based

(27:28):
Oakland baseball tickets as a gift from Zodiac. And obviously
these are unconfirmed and we've never seen the kind of
notes in those in those and we have some information
about them. So I started to look at the newspapers
to see if I could if I could find anything
that connected Mac to either of these people or where

(27:48):
they lived, for instance. And the first was like the
Ed Salmina death threat, and this occurred during the period
that Mack was a tower guard at Vackerville, California medical
facility where he had started at nineteen seventy one, or
as a tower guard, and this was a surprise. This

(28:10):
was a surprising thing to his friends that he had
become a corrections officer. And what's interesting is that Ed
Salmina received a death threat purportedly from the Zodiac, which
we've never directly seen, but it warned him not to
leave the house on Saturday afternoons, which was the remainder
of the season. And you can kind of count this

(28:31):
forward from the threat that the actual this kind of
semi professional baseball season that the Novato Nicks played in.
This ends exactly when the zodiac says that, you know,
when he says that Ed Salmina shouldn't leave the house
on Saturday afternoons. And what was interesting to me is

(28:53):
that I could find like a record in the newspaper
of the Novato Knicks playing throughout that season, and they
actually played baseball match at Vacaville CMF CMF where Mac worked,
and they played against the prisoner team, beating them twelve zero.
And that's that's just only a few days before Ed
Salmina got a death threat. So there's kind of question

(29:15):
was Mac on duty at that time and someone else
found a clipping And I'm not sure exactly sure if
it's from the same match or for another match in
the season, but Ed Salmina was known to go on
to the pitch and remonstrate with the umpire and apparently
caused a near riot at the prison when he did so.
Obviously like the prisoners were not happy that their team
was losing so badly, and that that again was like

(29:37):
a remarkable find. I thought it was like perhaps a
letter that we're not sure about and we haven't seen,
but we are reading on Richard's site about it. We know,
like a fair number of the details and the content
of the message and the time. The timing seems exactly
right to me, and.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
It's seems interesting.

Speaker 3 (29:57):
Yeah, And it seems like a if this is the case,
that Max sent this threat, perhaps he was perturbed by
this near riot event, Perhaps perhaps it panicked him and
as a kind of form of vindictiveness or revenge, And
it seems like a very petty form of revenge in
some ways. And perhaps if Mac is Zodiac and then

(30:17):
it perhaps speaks to his personality that he he then
threatens ed Salmina, who it seems from the newspapers was
a very popular person in you know, in and around
in and around Novotto where he comes from.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
M refresh my memory, do you know, did the letter
come before he was playing Vacaville or right after they
had played Vacaville?

Speaker 3 (30:42):
Right after? I believe. I think there's a gap of
like two or three days Max. I thought it was
a week, and it's actually closer than that when I
last checked.

Speaker 2 (30:52):
Okay, so the timing is again, the timing and the
connections to Vacaville prison all of a sudden, you know,
it's just another thing that how many coincidences can there
be for for Mac, you know, and that makes me
think of the Taggarts living. Uh. You know, they moved

(31:14):
to Vacaville after they got these tickets supposedly from Zodiac,
and somehow Mac moves three hundred feet from them in Vacaville,
you know, later on and again that could be the
biggest coincidence in the world. But again it's just Mac
is full of coincidences, you know, right down to his
dad winding up with the same phone number of a

(31:36):
friend in Darlene Farren's book. And and another thing, you know,
Max's wife told us that he around the time of
the Zodiac murders, he had been working in Contra Costa
County and what's the name of the town specifically, I forget, Yeah,
in the Walnut Creek area, And lo and behold, there's

(31:59):
a prison. Seems there's a teacher who's somebody tries to
poison him, and he gets a threatening let from a
threatening letter from somebody saying they're Zodiac, and he's in
that area where Mac is supposedly working. And this is
real poison. This isn't somebody trying to scare him. This
turned out to be poison. Wasn't a prank that somebody

(32:22):
is playing on him. Somebody tried to murder this teacher
because there was poison in there. And interesting enough, his
wife said that Mac worked at a hardware store, and
you could get that kind of poison at a hardware store.
So just again another threat from somebody claiming to be Zodiac.
Could have been a copycat, we don't know, but it
just so happens to be in an area where his

(32:45):
own wife said that he was working during the Zodia crime.
So it's just it's just one coincidence after another with Mac.

Speaker 3 (32:54):
Yeah, like they bound. And that's what's surprising. I think
you mentioned earlier that as we progressed looking at Mac,
I think you and I both thought that with chance
upon something that would discount him as a suspect, and
it's gone in the opposite direction. The kind of mystery
is deepened by the coincidences. And I am at the

(33:15):
stage where I have no doubt that if he would
if these circumstantials were shining to law enforcement at the time,
then they likely would look to him as a suspect
very heavily.

Speaker 2 (33:25):
Oh yeah, and it's hard to go back, you know,
doing all this stuff fifty years later and then go
back in time and say, look, you know, if they had,
they probably wouldn't be able to do what we're able
to do with the help of the Internet and go
back and sort of reverse engineering this stuff. But I
think he definitely would have been looked at. And you know,
another interesting thing, speaking of proximity and him being close

(33:50):
to stuff. You know, Zodiac references the murder of Richard
Radatch and we happen to find a unaddressed for Mac
Andrew in San Francisco, a stone's throw from the relitive shooting.
It's just it's just odd how these things just keep

(34:12):
coming up and Mac is somehow either close proximity wise
or has some connection. You know, it just it win.
Does it end?

Speaker 3 (34:23):
Yeah, And this kind of it makes you. It's made
me realize certainly that proximity is half half the issue.
And along those lines, what's interesting is that we're starting
through these like newspaper archives and so forth, is we've
found found people in max extended social network that are

(34:44):
very close to some of these people, and that perhaps
gives you some insight into what is going on with
MacAfee is Zobiak, which is what I believe, and the
fact that you then wonder if he wants to cause
some sort of effect in his social circle, perhaps hear
the gossip back from his parents about what's going on

(35:05):
with Zodiac. Because for instance, and this is a good example,
we talked about how the Taggart family received a gift
of baseball tickets, the Oakland A's tickets while they were
living at Rolling Drive in North Falleho and they presume
they seemingly received a gift and a note from Zodiac.

(35:26):
And this is also a kind of strange thing because
when you look at the newspaper articles, this is in
response seemingly in response to an event of a child
going missing at a little league and some little league
baseball players, which I would say included the Tagget's family's
son who was kind of very big into little league,

(35:46):
they were enlisted to help find this child, who was
later found. So the child was missing for twenty four
hours or something like that and was later found not
to be missing, but was in Oakland with relatives. But
what's interesting is that Zodiac responds to this and before
the article is in the papers, he has sent this
gift to the Taggets. So what was there thereafter. Interesting,

(36:08):
I was kind of looking into who lived near the Taggets,
and I knew that you had looked at who had
owned properties nearby. But what I astonished me was that
opposite the Taggets lived this guy called John D. Hickey
and he was like a de Malay brother of Mac,
and he was a master Master d Malay. If people

(36:30):
don't know what the d mala are, they're like a
kind of youth component of the Freemasons. Uh. And you
had your father had to be a master mason in
order to be a de Mala. So he was very
like Mac. He was in the same de Mala cohort
as Mac, and he had been the d Malay Master
of the year before Mac. And so they were very

(36:51):
They were very similar in their kind of upbringing and
this kind of social status. And Uh. John Hickey's mother
UH was very close with max mother. And it turns
out that John Hickey lives exactly opposite the Taggets at
the time that the zodiac threatless uh received so and

(37:14):
what's interesting as well is that John Hickey's mother and
max mother both ran rummage sales at Max House, and
some of them with the Valleto little league.

Speaker 2 (37:25):
It's just one more, one more interesting thing in a
bunch of coincidence, is one thing that you found recently? Yeah,
you know, I had always been looking for some kind
of connection from from mac to the Gilbert and Sullivan
the Mercado, and was disappointed that I never found anything.
But you found something interesting not long ago, or you know,

(37:47):
in that stratusphere. Tell us about that.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
Yeah, So, like what's been really handy?

Speaker 2 (37:53):
Is it?

Speaker 3 (37:53):
In the sixties, if you're a member of any kind
of youth group or fraternal organization, the news of that
organization would be printed like weekly. So we have many
mentions of mac In and Irat working with the Demala,
and then we have all the people listed alongside him,
who is friends and colleagues, I guess. And one of

(38:14):
these fellow Demalay was a guy called Bob Kurtz. And
Bob not only was a rainbow bow, which was like
a position within the de Malay that you dema had
a kind of a like a female contingent called the
Rainbow Girls. And this becomes important later because David Faraday's

(38:36):
sister was a rainbow girl.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
And this was as was Betty Lou Jensen wasn't she.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
She was actually like a Pithian sister. Okay, Okay, so
there's there's some there's some connection there. Yeah. And so
this guy Bob Kurtz, who was from Benetia, but he
was part of the Vallejo Demalay. It seems h he
played Coco the Executioner, which is one of the lead
roles in the Mikado and Coco the Executioner people have

(39:05):
long talked about in relation to the Zodiac because it's
this kind of executioner figure who's kind of got this
kind of he writes the little list that Zodiac later mentions.
And this was a play put on at Vallejo High
School in nineteen sixty five, and Mack has seemingly left
in nineteen sixty four to go to Vallejo College, so

(39:25):
this guy's one year behind him. And this guy, Bob
ur Kurtz is mentioned alongside Mac in many of the
newspapers and Max friends, and he's also mentioned alongside this
a girl called Rona di Carmichael, who's notable because she's
actually in Darlene's address book under a phone number that

(39:45):
Max father uses from about nineteen seventy two onwards and
it's inexplicable to us why Max Max father Andy ends
up with this phone number and uses it throughout the
seventies so astonishingly. Someone on Tom's board had memorized the

(40:05):
number from Darlene's phone book and seeing an advert with
Max's dad's number, and said, I recognized that number, and
that was just another shocker.

Speaker 2 (40:16):
I thought, it's just super fascinating, and it's not you know,
it's not easy to explain. I don't know. I'm trying
to think back to, you know, when I was a
teenager back in the eighties, and if you switched the
phone number, maybe it's still the same case today. If
you switched the phone number, you didn't want a phone
number anymore, somebody moving to the area would be assigned

(40:37):
the new phone number might be the phone number that
you just had. But if somehow, some way Mac Max's
dad got Carmichael's old phone number, that would just be
like a huge coincidence, you know. And I had wondered
if somehow, and I wasn't able to find any of
this out, but I had wondered if somehow that house

(41:01):
that they lived in, they were living there, maybe Max
dad owned it and the phone went with the house,
and when they moved out, because they did move out,
if he started using that phone number once they moved out,
took that phone number over, So I was always wondering
if it had already been tied to Max Dad they

(41:24):
were living there, running it, whatever the case was, They
move out, and he now gets the phone number back.
So you know, it's just astonishing that now you have
you know, you've got Max Dad using a phone number
of a girl in Darlne Fern's address book. You've got
this guy that Mac obviously knows and it's probably friendly

(41:46):
with or at least you know, interacts with, that's playing
somebody in the Marchado that Zodiac is later referencing, and
you've got this girl run a car listed right alongside him.
You can really see how small the circle is. And

(42:06):
and you know there's one other one, and I'm sure
we'll get into too, is the Donna Lass connection.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Yeah. So this is another proximity kind of discovery. Is
that I believe someone called Jibber Jabba on Tom Voyd's forum.
He was investigating something separate and found a connection to Mac.
There was a business next to six two three Tola
May which is the home and office of Mac and

(42:36):
his family, and there's the business was called Pysante Music
and it was a I believe they sold jukeboxes or
something like that, coin operated machines and it a licensed
music And working at this location was a woman called
Donna Leelas who worked as a receptionist or secretary there

(42:58):
and she was married to the cousin of Donna Lass
who went missing and who was associated. She went missing
in Lake Tahoe and she remains recently found and it
was a kind of a discovery last year. This Donna
Lass in Lake Tahoe was married was the cousin of
this Wayne Lass, who was married to Donna Lee Lass,

(43:21):
who worked next door to Mac, and so they there
seems to be some connection there. And this Plesante Music
was owned by a guy called Harry Polycar who was
on the blook. He was actually on the board of
Blue Rock Springs Golf Club, which I thought was notable.
And his son, Raymond Polycar, actually carried Betty Lee Jensen's

(43:41):
coffin at the funeral. And we know that there was
interaction between the two families because I think Harry Pollcard's
son hosted a fundraiser at Max Max Home or some
of the you know, there's extra rooms and storage space there,
but he hosted some kind of youth fundraiser in the

(44:03):
early seventies there, so showing their families interacted. So again
it's kind of questionable whether Mac is intervening in the
donal Last case to create some kind of gossip or
stir amongst his family and friends so that he can
kind of bathe in it. That would be that would
speak to us like that would be a very similar

(44:23):
motivation to what we see with the Zodiac and as
a kind of attention seeking.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, and it's you know, I I had always wondered
long before ever of her, Mac, why would I didn't
think Zodiac was responsible for kidnapping Donald Lass, but he
had to have picked her for some reason to have
hinted that he had killed. And I always wondered why her,
because she wasn't from Valo. If it was a case

(44:47):
in Valo, then you could see him taking responsibility for it,
whereas last was outside of Balleo. And I forget how
far the distance is. I think it's a couple of hours.
I may be wrong, but it's not. It's not really
close to Leo. So for for him to just pick
that case randomly, for Zodiac to do that, you know,
to me, I felt there was some other reason he

(45:09):
didn't just read about her case out of all the
missing people. Because there's a lot of women murdered in
California and missing. Why would he pick her out of
all of them to latch onto? And I think now
it's because he's right next door to this music place
where they're undoubtedly talking about the case. Maybe they've even
got flyers up in there, you know, just can we

(45:30):
put some flyers up in there? And they, you know,
the owner says, sure, you know your cousins, your your
husband's cousin's missing. Let's let's try and help find her.
So I have no doubt that Mac living next door
or his parents would have heard about that and been
talking about it. And he says, hmm, let me talk.
Let me pretend that I abducted this Donal Lass. So

(45:52):
it gives a connection again. It's like it's like the
Deer Lodge thing. Zodiac not anywhere near your lodge, is
bringing up der Lodge, and Donald Lass is nowhere near Valo.
Yet Zodiac is cleaning responsibility for her, so he had
to have chosen her for some reason if he didn't
really abduct her, chosen her case. And I think it's

(46:15):
it's a clearer possibility that it's because they're talking about
this right next door to his house, and he would
know about the case as I'm sure.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
Yeah, I mean, I think it perhaps speaks to Zodiac's
motivation then, because many people have remarked that he wasn't
you know, he only had it was only average as
as a killer, right, he left many survivors, and well
he was about fifty to fifty, right, And then there

(46:47):
are a lot of women who were abducted in Contra
Costa in this period who some people have suspected Zodiac
for but I haven't. I tend not to think that
it's related to Zodiac. So the question is why does
he intervene in the Donald last case? And that maybe
gives us some potential leads for the future, like did
what you know, if we want to know what the

(47:08):
connection is to, like Daniel Williams, who Zodiac purportedly like
are poisoned, Is it because there's some kind of oblique connection,
family connection to someone who lives nearby or something like that?
Is Zodiac's primary motivation that he wants to like kind
of smugly hit other people talking about him. And and

(47:32):
what's notable about Max home is it's also this kind
of sit this kind of social hub for various organizations
his parents and he is involved with, So he would
it's a good it's a good place to find out
gossip and information, and it might be a good place
to track how the case is going from. If his

(47:54):
parents are in contact with they're very socially engaged. That's
what I noticed.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
Yeah, and one one interesting to another coincidence, Well two
of them. Let me let me say them before I
forget about them, because I think they're important, you know.
Zodiac in his August sixty nine letter writes at the
bottom of the paper, no address in big bull letters
with the crosshair symbol. It's like to me, I knew

(48:26):
again even before I ever found Mac. That's a hint
of some kind. Why is he saying no address? Well,
do we know about Mac. He's bouncing back and forth
from his parents to Chico to go to college, and
he's back and forth, showing up for weddings in Vallejo,
showing up for holidays and along those lines lo and behold,
he comes home for the weekend on the first you know,

(48:49):
zodiac murder. Lake Herman Road says he came home that weekend.
So here we have Mac showing up in town and
the first zodiac murder happens. Another outstanding coincidence.

Speaker 3 (49:00):
Yeah, And that he returns home several hours after the
attack according to his parents, which is I mean, there's
some other discrepancies in that news article where they announce
his return to falleh And it's also kind of notable
his parents have at least one other property in Foralleho

(49:22):
want this sandy Beach property that's a shackdown by the
by Mayor Island, and it's that and they seeming they're
seemingly connected to other properties. So you know, it wouldn't
be unimaginable that he Mac come home early, hide at
another property so and then return in the morning.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Yeah, Or it's a case of maybe you know, his
parents are older, maybe they went to betterally because a
lot of older people go to bed early. He comes
home at midnight after the Lake Homan Lakemans and they're
asleep already, and you know they wake up the next
morning he's there and they're like, oh, he came home overnight,
so to them, it's Saturday. So the paper saying he

(50:06):
came home on Saturday doesn't mean he wasn't on Lake
Herman Road at you know, eleven thirty the night before.

Speaker 3 (50:14):
Yeah, and it's it's kind of they actually say they're
busy with Christmas parties all week, so you know, they
maybe they've been drinking, maybe they'll outlay, who knows. And
it's kind of the other discrepancy there that I mentioned
is that he was supposedly enrolled in a master's course
in Chico, but we have conflicting reports about that. A

(50:35):
friend of his says that he was working an insurance
job in Chico that he failed at and had to
return to the Bay, and his wife had never heard
of him returning to Chico, and he simply never completed
that degree, so we want to it's kind of curious
that his parents announced that he's studying in Chica at
this point, and it also had his draft permanently deferred

(50:58):
and he didn't get a student to firm, which to
my mind, means that he wasn't enrolled in Chico if
that was the case.

Speaker 2 (51:06):
And as as much as stuff as we've been able
to find and piece together. You know, Unfortunately, it seems
like the crucial time. You know, we know he was
in South Dakota at college for a portion in nineteen
sixty eight. You know, we know he's back and forth
between Valeo and Chico, but then during the heart of
the Zodiac crimes, there really were mac drops from sight

(51:30):
and we don't there's nothing verifiable on him anywhere, you know,
besides an occasional wedding mension or something like that. There's
we don't have any hard evidence what he's doing during
that time. And that's the time when his friends are
all leaving, they're all gone, he's sort of alone. This
is the time his wife claims he was working back
and forth in Contra Costa. So you know, there's that's

(51:54):
the void of time where we don't have a lot,
and it would be very helpful to have something from
this time. And and you know, I've even offered rewards
to people on you know, Facebook, I'm on Twitter. Anybody
that knew Matt come forward with audio or a video
of him from that time, you know, I would pay

(52:16):
them for verifiable information or even more handwriting. And I've
never been able to get anyone to do that, which
which is another strange thing in itself. You know, it's
it's almost like Mac dies in. All the audio, video
pictures of him, even any written documents all disappear. I

(52:37):
forget what story his wife told us on on the forum,
but I just found that awfully strained. It's almost like
he was, you know, erased or hidden. And I'm not
implying that they knew something was shady about him. I
I it's just it's just strange. And even even going

(52:58):
back to her explanation, I think her website that she's
the one that bought that zodiac book because he didn't
want you for some reason. I don't remember what the
detail was, but he wanted her to go out by
the book, almost like he didn't want a record of
him buying a zodiac book or a safer book. So
there's all these little things that, you know, one or

(53:19):
two things you can write off as coincidence, but for me,
there's just too many things. And the more you look,
the more more things you keep finding.

Speaker 3 (53:30):
Yeah, I mean, it's almost notable that Matt goes dark
exactly at this point when the first murder occurs. That's
the last mention of in the newspapers till nineteen seventy two,
I believe. So it's almost the period that his parents write.
The newspapers about him, and his progress are like consistently
up until about nineteen sixty eight, and after that we

(53:53):
almost know almost nothing. His wife told us she was
quite distinct. Actually, she said that he lived in Vallejo
and worked in Contra Costa. Originally I thought it was
either or, but again she was vague and didn't know
the entire details, and phoned a friend of his and
was Actually she was quite upset that the friend told
her a different story of him doing this insurance job.

(54:16):
And other than appearing at several there was quite a
number of his friends were married that year, nearly all
of them. I think there's even six weddings or something
like that, and he's listed in many of them. But
other than those mentions, we don't know where he is
or what he's doing. Maybe his social Security would turn
up something like some kind of employment.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Oh yeah, his wife would have to get that. It
has to be like a close relative to somebody directly
that could get that. She could get that information and maybe,
you know, lay something out there that would somehow absolve
him or rate him off as a suspect, But you
know that's up to her. But that would give a
complete record of everywhere here replayed paid taxes into every

(55:01):
job you ever had the name of it. We would
have a lot more details, but I'm sure she's never
going to, you know, be one to help us find
more stuff that makes her makes her husband look more
like he could be the zodiac.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
Yeah, we actually fad. We actually found Mac requesting an
apartment in Chico in May nineteen sixty eight, and so
he's seemingly headed to this master's in Chico that his
parents have earlier announced. And it seems he went to
South Dakota in early sixty eight to improve his grades,

(55:37):
perhaps so he can get on this masters and then
it doesn't. It seemingly doesn't happen because he's never acquires
that degree, and so there's a series of perhaps failures
in his life at this time that we can somewhat
speculate about. He he goes to move to Chico, and
his parents seemingly think he's studying in Chico, but his

(56:00):
draft records show that he was not registered as a student.
So is there a deception going on. Has he failed
to get onto the masters, has he not told his
parents or are his parents grant? Are his parents embarrassed
at this failure somehow? And are they providing some kind
of cloak of impunity like they to keep up appearances?

(56:21):
Maybe you know, he's not mentioned in the papers. We
don't know what he's up to. Are the parents. Have
the parents like doing something to kind of save face.
It's unclear because that they certainly don't communicate many of
these facts to his future wife.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
Sure, And to be fair to her, yeah, she didn't
know him until nineteen seventy four, So anything she knows,
she knows secondhand what she was told or what Mack
told her, or maybe some kind of documents that she found,
like she supplied his South Dakota information for the for

(57:00):
the school that he was at that at that point.
But that's all she has, is what she knows from
secondhand information because she didn't know Mac during that time.
And so I'm not accusing her of covering for him.
She just didn't know him, and whatever she knows, she
knows second hand.

Speaker 3 (57:18):
Yeah, And I mean to be fair to her that
I think she was honest as she could be. She
provided certain documentation and handwriting startuples. She clearly doesn't think
he's anything to do with his zodiac, but there are
there does seem to be a discrepancy between what she
was told and what other people were told. And it's

(57:38):
curious to me why it's so mysterious this period, And
I wonder if he's moving around. Perhaps he moves to
San Francisco, near to the Radatich shooting because he gets
a new job. She seems to think that he was
either working at ACE Hardware, which didn't have many branches
in Contracosta at the time, Martinez was the first one,

(58:01):
which which is where there's a zodiac threat, and there
were none in San Francisco. But she also says that
he worked in an insurance shop, but had no idea
that he was working up in Chico at that time,
which is something a friend told her when she questioned
him about it.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
And that's the problem, and you're trying to piece together
something like this, you don't have much solid to go on.
You're going on second hand information and you don't know
how accurate is you know, you can't really if you
had an address or name in the business or something
specific that would give you a good starting point, but
it's hard to piece all that together. Then the next

(58:39):
time where Mac really has a solid timeline is nineteen
seventy one. That's when he takes that job with the state,
and what happens to Zodiac during that time. That's the
last time he writes a confirm letter, So the timeline
there is interesting. And then when does Zodiac start writing

(58:59):
again seventy four. What happens to Mac He meets his
wife and gets engaged rather quickly, and you get this
sporadic few letters in nineteen seventy four. Then Zodiac doesn't
write again, you know, any confirmed letters. And what happens
to Mac at that time He marries his wife at
that time, So everything is just perfectly lining up again

(59:23):
with Mac timeline wise, with these major events in his
life and with Zodiacs writing letters or not writing letters.
And then when all of a sudden there's a possible
Zodiac correspondence from Eureka, California, which is nowhere near Valeo.
That's another situation. That's what two three hours away, I think,

(59:47):
But all of a sudden there's a possible Zodiac letter
in nineteen ninety from Eureka and Lo and behold Mac
owned property in that area, which is nowhere close to Valeo.
So that's what makes it so strange that zodiacs possibly
turning up in Eureka and maxis Hoo happens to own property.

(01:00:07):
It's it's almost like this is from a book that
I wrote, that the details are just so bizarre. You
you couldn't think that so many things could line up.

Speaker 3 (01:00:18):
Yeah, I mean, there's some of these biographical facts kind
of dovetail quite nicely with the timeline. And that's what's
remarkable is that we keep this keeps getting confirmed. The
more we find out, is there there are more and
more things that tally with what we know about the
zodiac communications, even though some of them in the seventi
late seventies are questioned. I mean, what I find interesting about,

(01:00:40):
for example, the sl A letter, which I know some
people discount. The SLA was actually formed in Vakaville CMF,
and there's some controversy around this group as to whether
there was involvement between the CIA and the format of
this group and whether that need that required the collusion

(01:01:05):
of people working at Vacaville CMF. Because there's questions around
the leader de Freeze, how he escaped, and many thought
the group was suspicious about the group and felt that
there was some kind of honeypot to mop up radicals
in the Bay. So even though Patty Hurst was sorry,
is it Patty Hurst?

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
She was?

Speaker 3 (01:01:25):
Yeah, Patricia kidnapped by the SLA in the early seventies.
There's some suspicion that she was actually a member of
the group already. And what is odd is that was
that was the the kidnapping. In fact, Patty Hurst is
the thing that propels the SLA into the national consciousness
because she was the daughter of Randolph Hurst, who is

(01:01:47):
the owner of, like I believe, all the big newspapers
in San Francisco, for example. But if they had had
some prior history in the Bay. Their safehouse was exposed
in Concord, which is not far from Vacaville, a few
months before the house kidnapping, and it was believed the
group was already formed within the prison at the time.

(01:02:07):
Mac was working there, so it would be on his way.
I would say, mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
And then her case was making headlines and he brought
Zodiac didn't want to be outshine by that, so that
would have also been another reason to write and come
out of the would work and not be forgotten about.
We've touched on a number of things as far as coincidence.

(01:02:34):
Well one more. They keep popping into my head. I
can't even keepdraging them all. The Alamo Drive connection. You know,
here's Lyndon Lafferty has a suspect who supposedly that he
in his mind had terrorized a woman that lived on
Alamo Drive and as an Almo driver Alamo Road I

(01:02:55):
can't remember. But and you know here this this is
a teacher that's getting these threatening letters and getting these
mysterious phone calls. Somebody's harassing her, not you know, they're
hanging up instead of talking. She's getting letters, threatening letters.
And come to find out, Mac is associated with an

(01:03:18):
address that's less than three hundred feet from her apartment.
So it's just another astonishing you know, here, here's a
zodiac connection, possible zodiac connection at least zodiac in the
Zodia sphere where Mac just happens to be, you know,
within a stone's throat of this woman's house. And then

(01:03:44):
you know there's even there's little things you can really
start reaching for. Star I mean these things just jump
out at you, but there's other things you can look
at and question, is that something like you know, way
back in I think it was nineteen sixty nine or seventy,
there was a possible Zodiac unconfirmed Zodiac letter from Fairfield,
and you know they it mentions that he was going

(01:04:05):
to quote unquote go for the government life and which
most people take to mean that he was going to
get a job working for the government or the state
or something like that. And you know, maybe mac did
apply during that time, during the zodiac years, and it
took him, you know, because sometimes they have hiring freezers

(01:04:26):
or they don't have openings, and all of a sudden,
you know, he applies and then they finally get one
in nineteen seventy or whatever it is, nineteen seventy one,
and he goes to work for the state. And maybe
that was a letter from him, if he wrote that
letter and he had had applied to work for the state,
and that was another hint that he threw out possibly

(01:04:48):
in that letter. There's just so many things you can
look at and possibly tie to him, and again we
can't prove that, but it's just an interesting thing looking
back when you know his career. We don't know, you know,
I should point out the listeners. We always mentioned he's
a prison guard. He worked for the state as a
prison guard, but he may not have started out as

(01:05:10):
a prison guard. He could have worked at some other
capacity for the state and then transferred to the prison system.
So I think people always assume that he definitely was
a prison guard his entire time working for the state,
But you know, without having any firm paper or it's
hard to say for sure.

Speaker 3 (01:05:28):
Well, I mean, the only thing we know about his
employment prior to that was that he is listed in
the nineteen seventy two Falleho directory as a laborer, and
that's a kind of catchual job description, So he could
have been working at the state, or it could just
mean his job at ACE.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
Yeah. And what wasn't there something and maybe you found
this there maybe somebody else that I can't remember. Wasn't
there evidence that he had pastored his family member to
get him a job in the prison system.

Speaker 3 (01:05:55):
Yeah, and this actually connects to one of the zabiakvations.
So originally, when you were looking into the Taggarts, I
noticed that there was a neighbor called Rosalie Ashbau, and
she worked for a woman called Jene Kotwitz, who was
a realtor who was also a chairperson of the Slano
Property Apartment Owners Association, as was Max's father at a

(01:06:18):
certain point. And in max father's retirement article, he's Mac
and Jean Kowitz are photographed together with her husband who
worked at Vakabal CMF. And Max's wife had said that
he'd been given her family in to the job, which
just means a family connection. So this woman that lived

(01:06:40):
next to the Taggarts worked for the person that likely
got Mac the job. So again there's a there's a
close connection there.

Speaker 2 (01:06:47):
Hmm. It's just anotherother coincidence. So we've we've talked about
a number of things that make mag look strong that
he could be the Zodiac. I want to talk about
some negative some things that I mostly hear online from
from the naysayers of Mac, And then maybe I want
to ask you too about are there any things about

(01:07:09):
him that you don't They don't line up with your
your estimate of who Zodiac was. But you know, the
two most common things I hear and you probably would
agree with me or Max's ears are too big and
his feet are too small. I mean, it's just so
Mac has some some ears that in certain pictures they

(01:07:31):
don't know, especially the ones with the longer hair. And
then also maybe if he doesn't have the glasses on,
maybe the glasses made them stick out of further. I
don't know, but what we know about Zodiac is that
he sometimes wore glasses and sometimes didn't. Matt, you know,

(01:07:53):
Mike Mijeaux said Zodi didn't have any glasses on. And
you know, obviously the kids that saw him in San
Francisco said he did glasses on. Well, we've seen pictures
with Mac having glasses on without sometimes his ears are
not protruding. But the big difference is, you know that sketch,
that infamous SFPD sketch based on the kids in San
Francisco they saw him from fifty feet away at night.

(01:08:17):
I don't care how good your I say it is.
And if you have common sense, you know that you're
not going to get every detail right about somebody from
fifty feet away at night. It's not like they're sitting
there in a chair posing for a painting or a
picture and you can get every little detail perfect. You know,
somebody's nose shaped, lip shape, your size, those kinds of

(01:08:40):
things you're not gonna be able to get most of
the time detailed, one hundred percent accurate. So to me,
I don't even care about his ears, you know, because
we have the one sketch, and because his ears look
bigger than that sketch, people are like, oh, can't bet him,
his ears are too big. And the second thing is
the shoe size. Now I don't know what max shoe

(01:09:00):
size is. We had know what his wife told us,
but to be fair and not accusing her of anything,
she has been off on certain details before, so I
you know she's gone by memory. So could she have
misremembered his shoe size. It's not written in stone that

(01:09:21):
that's what his shoe size was, but you know, she
said she would She say was seven and a half
and at one point he went up to an eight
and a half.

Speaker 3 (01:09:31):
Maybe maybe his feet got wider as he got older,
but yeah, yeah, provocatively, I would say, she only has
his word for it.

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
Yeah, and and and or memory. And to be honest
with me, I don't I don't know my wife shoe
size is, and she probably doesn't know what mine is,
So asking her what his shoe size was way back then.
I mean it's and and boots. I wear a different
sized boot than I wear sneaker. I wear a bigger
boot than I do a sneaker. So all of a sudden,
if he was really an eight and a half, maybe

(01:10:00):
depending on these boots that he's got, maybe he's moving
up to a ten and a half. So, you know,
the shoe size and the foot, you know, the ear
size of the two things that always drive me wild
because it's like the only thing the naysayers have that
they can throw up and there's nothing solid to confirm,
you know, that the the sketch was accurate or or

(01:10:23):
what his shoe size was, So you know, I still
leave that open. But the one thing about Mac, and
I'll say this and then I'm gonna ask you what
you're thinking that doesn't line up, Well, there's a couple
of things that doesn't line up with my guess of
who Zodiac was before I ever found Mac. I always
thought Zodiac would have mailed letters to newspapers and used

(01:10:45):
his real name before he became Zodiac, and then probably
wouldn't want to use his name anymore once he was Zodiac.
But I always felt if you went back, you could
look and find somebody who is maybe writing a lot
of letters to the editor but not themselves Zodiac, but
using their name. There's no letters that we can really
find with Mac. No letter writing that we can that

(01:11:07):
we can pinpoint, which is you know we you know
you pointed out his dad has written letters, his wife
wrote a letter, but never Mac directly that we know
of that one that he used his name, and so
I thought, you know, that would be something in Zodiac's
background if he ever was revealed. So that's the only

(01:11:27):
thing that makes me say that doesn't line up with
what I thought Zodiac would be when it comes to Mac.
What anything that gives you pause or makes you think
maybe you know it doesn't line up with with Mac
as far as what you thought Zodiac would be.

Speaker 3 (01:11:44):
Yeah, I think when I first starts looking into Mac,
I think, like you, I thought there would be some
connection to places like Riverside, and we've found nothing, although
those are non non canonical, And the other place I'm
like super curious about is Albany and New York. We've
not found any connection to Mac there. I think the

(01:12:07):
in terms of the appearance, I think he's kind of
a good fit for I think there was someone on
your perhaps choice or someone made a spreadsheet of all
the Zodiac descriptions so that you could lay them all
alongside each other, and Mac pretty much fit fitted the
most common descriptions. Oh yeah, I think it's only the
some bathas that mentioned that mentioned the ears of their

(01:12:28):
person of interest and the some bay this story man
with small ears, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:12:33):
The and and to be fair too, that's been an
ongoing debate for years as to whether that was Zodiac
or not. I don't think it was. I mean, for one,
they said he was very muscular, in good shape, He
was toler he was over six feet tall, maybe as
much as what six foot two I think muscular. And

(01:12:53):
then the description from part now is you know he's
in Zodiac. Is heavy set, his bellies like hanging over
his belt?

Speaker 3 (01:13:03):
Yeah, slightly, yes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
And then and then if you believe the dentist's son
saw Zodiac, who I interviewed, he said that the guy
he saw that I think was probably Zodiac was having
trouble navigating because he looked like he was out of
shape and he was heavy set, couldn't really, you know,
walk through the woods. Very good and was having a

(01:13:27):
hard time getting through that terrain because he looked out
of shape. So to me, I think it's pretty clear
that they're likely two different people. Although you know, the
the the sketches of the guy at like Barry Essa
does have a general resemblance to Mac, especially of him

(01:13:47):
without the glasses on, so you could see where Mac
does look a little bit like that sketch too, Although
I personally believe that wasn't Zodiac, but everybody's you know,
sort of you know, one way or the other there
in one camp to the other, whether it was Zodiac
or not.

Speaker 3 (01:14:03):
Yeah, So like we have photos of Mac with both
of those haircuts, that's kind of notable. And with regard
to the dentist's son, he was saying that the person
he saw at a time very close to the attack
was having trouble to traversing the terrain and seemed like
he didn't belong there. And notably, Mac had a big
scar on his one of his knees, as noted in

(01:14:23):
his draft report a draft evaluation, and his wife said
he never played youth sports, so I don't know if
he had a problem with mobility or asthma or something
like that. But it sounds like someone having trouble traversing
the hillside, sounds like someone who's not used to doing so.

(01:14:44):
And it's kind of notable. It's always been notable to
me that Zodiac always used cars to make his attacks,
and he didn't go on except the Presidio Heights when
when he likely had a car nearby. Yeah, and we
know that Zodiac didn't run at the at that location.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
Mm hmm. And that's you know, we know he walked.
And and again we can get into the whole debate
whether Falk actually saw Zodiac or not, and if he did,
what actually happened during that interaction. I'm sort of up
in the air because I find it hard to believe
that he would fail to report that until you know,
after weeks later, when an article appears in the paper,

(01:15:23):
that's when he decides he's gonna write this scratch about
what he saw. So I have a you know, a
hard time saying, you know, believing that he saw him.
I'm still sort of on the fences to whether he
actually saw him at all. But you know, we do
know that Zodick was on foot leaving that crime scene,
and who knows, maybe maybe he had as you mentioned

(01:15:44):
a car, maybe he had access to an apartment or
something like that, or he was going to go hide out.
I do find interesting. You know, we can debate why
he killed Paul Stein, but one thing that I was
always interested in is why that address at Washington and Maple,
Why did he send him there? And to me, I

(01:16:07):
always hoped I would find somebody connected to Mac that
lived around that intersection, because you know, if you wanted
to freak somebody out that you weren't, you know, fond of,
maybe somebody that your your family's not fond of, you
could scare them by having a Zodia attack in front
of their house. And you know, I've never found anybody

(01:16:30):
with a known connection at that intersection to Mac, but
it would certainly be interesting if there was somebody there
that Zodiac wanted to frighten. And what better way did
they do it than shoot somebody in front of their house.

Speaker 3 (01:16:46):
Yeah, I mean that's something we've not really found any
connection other than Chester Klingle works not far from there,
a few blocks below, and I think he worked there
during the Zodiact period that they five Minus insurance firm,
and Mac may have had an insurance job at some point.
And the other thing that that is kind of more

(01:17:08):
tenuous is his dad actually ran a grocery business maybe
about a mile or three quarter a mile away in
the forties, and that's the only that's the closest stuff
being able to get. Yeah, there's there's nothing too compelling there.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:17:24):
And his dad and I forget the address, but his
dad lived in San Francisco before he ever got married
to Max's mom, but I don't remember, or was it
the mom that lived there, I can't remember, But there
was some kind of connection to San Francisco not far
from there, but it was way before Mac was even born.
So again, unless there's some hidden connection there, some kind

(01:17:49):
of you know, reason he would have to be there,
maybe like the Napa car watch. Maybe something was going
on there that Mac would have had an excuse to
attend that night or something. You know. It's just one
of those things that you have to choco off as
you know, having to dig more up on. One thing

(01:18:11):
I did want to do is touch on some comments
from the forum.

Speaker 3 (01:18:18):
I actually have something to say about the boots and
more detail of Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:18:20):
Let's let's hear that before we jump into comments.

Speaker 3 (01:18:23):
Because obviously the boots often comes up on the forum
as a way of discrediting Mac as a suspect. His
wife says that around that time she thinks he was
seven and a half in a shoe a US US
sizes the slightly different to UK sizes, So I had
to get used to that when I was researching so
what I work with a guy called Chris Hall quite

(01:18:45):
often on discord. We looked very intensively at the shoes
and we're kind of able to challenge mythbust around that
what's generically called wing Walker boots, which were really just
Vietnam era chuck a boot. It had an anti static
and anti slip soul, so it's a generic name, not

(01:19:06):
the actual brand name. But you can go and find
these boots very easily on eBay. So we started sending
messages to sellers and got them to measure at the
outside soul length and we found that inside there's only
a three quarter in this difference between a seven and
a half and a ten and a half, which is
what was the ten and a half is what's presumed

(01:19:28):
to be worn at Lake Perriesa. So that's not so
that's not so far. If you wore some thick socks perhaps,
but it's the outside of the boot that is more
striking in a way because they had these Avon made souls,
and you can go and find boots on eBay with
this soul. They're exactly from this period. So the outsoul length,

(01:19:49):
it's even less distance I believe on the outsoul between
those two sizes. And we actually found someone selling a
size seven with an Avon soul and it was only
three quarters of an inch shorter than that the the
boots found at Lake Berriesa. So she said he was
seven and a half and I think at eight was

(01:20:11):
eleven and three quarters inches on the outside. So and
I believe the soul at Lake Barrister isn't exactly twelve
inches When you look at it measured, it's slightly short
than twelve inches, so it may not have been on
a tenn and a half. That they're incredibly alike on
the outside soul length and we're only talking a maximum

(01:20:31):
of three quarters of an inch.

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
It's interesting and you know, again you'd sound like a
big difference if Max is seven and a half. Can
you hear these ten and a half wing walker? Well,
you're like, oh, he can't be the guy. It's three
inches difference. But when you get into somebody trying a
bud on and putting their foot in there, maybe that
little bit of a bigger size felt comfortable, more easy

(01:20:54):
to walk in, and all of a sudden, that gap
you're mentioning, maybe he is able to wear that size boot.

Speaker 3 (01:21:01):
Yeah, because if you've got wide feet, for example, you
may have to. Yeah, I have to say size seven
and a half. Even if they had half sizes, I
don't know. It's extremely rare. There's a kind of bell
curve of foot sizes and it's like one of the rarest.
So it would be very distinguishing to have small feet.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:20):
Perhaps so perhaps to cover his truck, so to.

Speaker 2 (01:21:22):
Speak, we're a bigger boot. We just don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:21:25):
But yeah, it's not as significant as people make out.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
Yeah, and it's not the same as you know, it's
not irrefutable evidence in any fashion, that's for sure. And
that reminds me too. You know, some other people have said, oh,
well Max left handed and Zodiac was right handed. Well,
we don't know that. You know, there's never been any
kind of document that I've ever seen that mentioned what

(01:21:50):
they thought Zodiac's hand he was writing with. And you know,
Matt could be ambidextros. Either way, it doesn't matter, but
there's no conclusive evidence what hand Zodiac wrote with. And
you know, people also point out, well, he had his
holster on his right side at Lake Barryessa and his

(01:22:10):
knife on his left side, and so therefore, you know,
somebody that shoots a gun is going to shoot with
their strong dominant hand, which is usually the case. Most
people will shoot with their dominant hand. But I go
back to, well, what if his intention wasn't to shoot them,
what if it was to stab them all along and
he wanted to use that knife. Well, he's got the

(01:22:30):
knife on his dominant hand. So you know, we found
the one picture. Mac doesn't have anything on one side
on his right side, on his left side, excuse me,
but his cell phone is on his right side, and
he didn't have anything on his other side. His wife
said maybe he had a What did she say? I
think she said he had a pocket knife on that
side in that photo. But there is no pocket knife

(01:22:53):
in that photo. There's nothing there. But on the other
side you have the cell phone on his right side.
So why would a left hand person have their cell
phone on their right hand side. That tells me that
he's either ambedextrius or he's capable of doing a lot
of stuff with his right hand, because I would never
put myself on my left side because I'm right handed.

(01:23:17):
Most people are the same, So you know that that's
some interesting stuff to consider when you're talking about Mac. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:23:24):
I mean, we know that he ticked his boxes on
his Social Security application backwards, which it usually indicates left handed.
But I know my grandmother was a left handed naturally,
and she's taught by nuns and they forced her to
write with her right hand so she could write with both.

Speaker 2 (01:23:39):
That was very common back in that error to force
people to do right handed. So Mac may have been
the same thing. He may have been forced at times
to write right handed or was able to do stuff
right handed, but I don't think it. Unfortunately, doesn't solve
anything one way or another. We don't have any official
confirmation of what hand Zodick was, so when he.

Speaker 3 (01:23:59):
Wrote that's the question that drives Drews a mad that
he thinks endlessly about.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):
Yeah. Yeah, So let's let's get some of these questions
and comments from people in the forum here and here's
the Milaniy zodiac. He says, and this is a guy
that's not fond of Mac. So he's got a few
things here, but I'm going to use his verst so
negatives for Mac. His age doesn't align with the best

(01:24:26):
witness in this case, the best witnesses in this case,
the San Francisco witnesses, So that's a loaded statement, that's
his opinion. He says that they're the best witnesses in
this case because they were fifty feet away at night.
I don't agree with him, because Matt Mike Migeau was
two to three feet from him and got a very

(01:24:48):
good look at his face, even if it was not
a direct on look, he felt strong enough he could
identify him again if he saw him. And the one
distinct thing he said was he had a large round face,
which we know matc has an unusually large round face.
So I, in my opinion, Migeau is just a good witness,

(01:25:09):
if not better than them, because he's two to three
feet away and they're fifty feet away, so you know,
you know, it's a loaded negative here according to Leaney
zodiac because he says that the best witnesses in this
case are the San Francisco witnesses.

Speaker 3 (01:25:26):
I thought these were these were good questions. And the
age question. We have to remember that the kids that
witnessed him at Passidicar Heights that they they put his
age up by ten years in the second for the
second sketch, So there was clearly some debate amongst the
children about how old this guy was. And children aren't

(01:25:47):
always the best judges of the age of adults.

Speaker 2 (01:25:52):
Not only I mean, and if you look through some
of the yearbooks from that time period, you can laugh
all day because the picture is funny. There's seven teen
year old seniors that look like they're forty years old
in some of their pictures. So you know, I could
easily see somebody thinking Mac was older than he was.

Speaker 3 (01:26:09):
And that's and I read this thing about eyewitnessed descriptions
on the internet somewhere, and it was saying that we
often make age judgments based on people's clothing. And we've
found photos of Mac where everyone is wearing the kind
of tight fitting clothes of the sixties, like young people
wore tight clothes. They've all got their shirts belts over,

(01:26:30):
their shirts tucked in, and their belts, they've all got
flat stomachs because they're all nineteen. Mac is wearing like
seemingly wearing army surplus hand me downs. That and we
know that Zodiak wore pleated pants which are from the fifties,
not the sixties. They were out of fashion by the sixties,
So is he wearing older clothing. Perhaps doesn't care about
his appearance so much, because this is something Brian also

(01:26:53):
picked up on, is that he thought he was kind
of low class because of the way he talked and
his appearance seems a bit slovenly. So we've got a
photo Mac with all his Kowani's buddies, and Mac is
seemingly he's got a belly, and he's wearing clothes that
perhaps a generation older.

Speaker 2 (01:27:14):
Yeah, it's interesting, And who knows. Maybe it's because you know,
when they saw him, he was out right doing whatever
he's doing, fishing or whatever reason he had to be
out there, you know, besides killing somebody and at Lake
Berry as a maybe he was wearing his not his
best clothes because he didn't want to get him dirty
or messed up or whatever it could be. But yeah,

(01:27:34):
that's that's a very good point. Now. He also says
here zodiacal was left hand when it pears, Zerdich was
very handed. We already went over that we don't have
a picture of Mac from nineteen sixty nine compared to
the sketch. Well, we have one from sixty eight, which
is pretty darn close. And then what's the next one

(01:27:55):
nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 3 (01:27:57):
And he's put on considerable weight in the seventy two plus,
and I wonder whether that's on purpose.

Speaker 2 (01:28:02):
Yeah, And that's the thing. The million dollar question is
what was his hairstyle like in nineteen sixty nine. I'm
waiting for somebody to dig up a photo someplace in
nineteen sixty nine during the Zodiac crimes of Mac. That
would be great to see and see if he's got
you know, is he does he have a crew cut?
Is he is it longer? Because Hartnell said that Zodiac's

(01:28:27):
hairs his hair was greasy and sweaty, hanging through the eyehole.
So which is interesting because if you look at that
picture of Mac, the one where he's not wearing glasses
and he's got the longer hair, you can see how
his hair hangs down. And I think there's even a
picture with glasses where it hangs down like that.

Speaker 3 (01:28:46):
Yeah, he's got like a wave it seems yes, And
Mike says curly or wavy hair, I forget the yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:28:55):
And it's you could see if that hair got wet,
it would hang down across his eyes if it got
wet out of place. So that part interests me. And
then next time Zodiac shows up, he's got a crew cut.
So I wonder if you know somehow he got a
haircut right after the Lake Berius attack just because he
had loved witnesses and somebody else might have seen him.

(01:29:16):
So that was interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:29:19):
It's greats some distance. We don't know if he was
like laboring at that time, so he may have lost
weight since the first like, but it's a short amount
of time to lose weight. So I'm not so keen
on the idea that he changed his parents radically other
than having a haircut.

Speaker 2 (01:29:33):
Yeah. Well, and you know, I'll give you an example
just as a comparison. So the Golden State Killer Joseph D'Angelo,
he was attacking people nineteen seventy four. In the nineteen
seventy five as the Visalia Ransacker. He was very heavy set,
noticeably heavy set, slow, and they have a sketch of him.

(01:29:59):
He's he's a big guy, and he looks like somebody
that's out of shape. When the when he started attacking
as the East Area rapist in nineteen seventy six, so
a year a year and a half later, he looks
dramatically different. He's athletic, he's thin, he's toned, so much

(01:30:21):
so that they didn't know that whether these two guys
were the same. Even though there was a lot of
common similarities between them, their physical appearance was so different.
So I don't doubt that, you know, Mac or Zodiac.
If Mac wasn't Daic, but whoever Zodi was, I don't
doubt that they could suddenly change their appearance one way
or the other, putting on weight, taking off weight, changing

(01:30:41):
their hair. And it seems like they would want to
do that stuff to, you know, because they're they're worried
about being identified.

Speaker 3 (01:30:50):
Yeah, and we have a photo of Mac with that
Kreu cut, and that's a very you know, that's the resemblance.
I've shown it to people have no interest in this,
yeh case, and they immediately say, yeah, that's that's good enough.

Speaker 2 (01:31:10):
What's some of the others. Zodiac seems to have gone
east from Lake Herman Road, where as Mac lived west.
And I'm trying to I don't have the map pulled
up in front of me to know whether he's right.
I thought Lake Herman Road was north. Yeah, I guess
he's saying that.

Speaker 3 (01:31:30):
Well, now you can kind of do a loop back
through the south of Leo if you go to Benicia. Maybe,
but there's there's a variety of the directions you could
could head back to town.

Speaker 2 (01:31:41):
Yeah. And and and we talked about this too on
the the one where I had the Zodiac profiler, Doug McGregor,
h you know, you it's typical that these guys start
out where they're comfortable close to home, and then they
start stretching out from there and going further and further away.

(01:32:04):
And maybe that's what we see with Zodiac, you know,
because you've got Lake Herman Road, and you've got what
two and a half miles away is Blue Rock Springs.
Then all of a sudden it's Napa, then it's San Francisco. So,
you know, I've always thought whether Zodiac was Mac or
somebody else, that Zodiac lived in Vallejo close to those

(01:32:24):
first two crime scenes. So and it's hard to say,
you know what would cause him to move those move
out further. But obviously, you know, maybe it's risky. The
longer you're you're at home close to home, the more
chance or somebody's gonna recognize you're gonna get caught.

Speaker 3 (01:32:47):
Yeah, because I mean he's a kind of blitz style attacker.
So he's not hanging around long enough for people to
spot him in the first two attacks, but he's running
a risk of people identifying his car perhaps or something
else seeing him coming.

Speaker 2 (01:33:01):
Absolutely absolutely, and then if they know him, you know,
if he's going in and out a lot on these
weekend there's a chance somebody's going run into him. Because
we mentioned how many people he knew through you know,
these different clubs he was in and stuff like that,
somebody might recognize him and that would be a problem.
And then his next thing, he is do you really
think a twenty four year old could have written so

(01:33:22):
many communications to the pressing gotten away with this. Well
we know that Mac read detective magazines and things like that,
so he probably had a good understanding that Hey, all
I've got to do is were gloves not leave fingerprints,
And you know, if I can do all that I'll
be okay with it and I won't get caught. But
he didn't know that pom prints. Zodiac didn't he left

(01:33:45):
the pomp print on a letter. He left the bloody
print on the cab if we believe that's Zodiac. So
it's not like whoever Zodiac was was a master criminal.
He made mistakes. He he was seen by witnesses and
came within a minute or two of being arrested for

(01:34:06):
killing stein At. He was impulsive too, because at Lake
Herman Road, suspect James Owen, if you believe his statement,
says that he drove by and didn't see anybody enter
around one of the cars that we know with Zodiacs,
and then seconds down the road he heard a gunshot.
So that means that whoever Zodiac was was impulsive and

(01:34:28):
out of control enough that despite a car just passing
them by could have seen him or identified his car's
He didn't abort the mission. He said, I'm still going
to kill this young couple here. So to me, it
seems like it's definitely possible that this could have been
a younger guy, somebody Max's age. Because it wasn't a
master criminal. It's not like some older master criminal that

(01:34:50):
knew when he was doing he made mistakes and he
was just very lucky.

Speaker 3 (01:34:54):
Yeah, he made a serious of mistakes that could have
ended his serial killer career very early earlier. And it's
I think that their their style of I mean, in
the for the pattern established in the first three murders
is a kind of lover's lane type murderer. And they
I read there's a guy called Dr Dr Don Tennyson.

(01:35:17):
He's an ancestor of one of the suspects in the
Texakana Phantom Killer murders Moonlight murders, and he drew on
this report at the time by psychologists who said that
lovers lane killers tended to live at home with their parents.
And what's interesting is that they pick couple. These are

(01:35:38):
usually younger offenders, and that they pick couples because they
symbolize the tension between the parents at home. So I'd
say that the Zodiac murders favor a younger suspect, and
Mac would be quite good age to fit with that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:55):
And and along those lines, we listed different uh I
forget if it was your or somebody else. And I
responded listed a bunch of different serial killers who started
out in their load to mid twenties. So Mac was
certainly within the age of many serial killers starting out
in their twenties. Definitely not too young from that standpoint.

(01:36:15):
And his next comments were about Count Marco in his letters.
Why would Mac refer to himself as Red Phantom, the
same name he used in letters to Count Marco from
nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty nine where he signed
off happily married and Chicago. Neither of these seem to
be pointed to Max. So a couple things he's assuming here.

(01:36:39):
He says the same name used okay, same name used okay.
So I thought he was saying it was clearly the
same author that sent both of those letters. Yeah, so
you know, we don't know. Again, we don't know everything
about Mac. We don't know why he would have used
Count Marco or Red Phantom in his letters. I don't

(01:37:00):
know why Zodiac did that, whoever Zodiac was, whether it's
Mac or somebody else, we can't know everything about that.
You know, there's it could have been just something he
saw in the newspaper, something he read in a comic book.
Who knows. I mean, so, it's kind of hard unless
you determine that person is and they're alive, you can
ask them right now. It's just pure speculation, and I

(01:37:23):
don't know why he would have used that word about you.
What do you think?

Speaker 3 (01:37:28):
I think there's some kind of interesting aspects of the
Count Marcolet could be that Zodiac is testing the newspapers
to see if his handwriting is still detectable when he
disguised it, because there's a slight embellishments on the handwriting.
But despite that show that moral thought it was the
Zodiac can. Marco visited Valaa quite a number of times

(01:37:49):
and there's articles in the Valaia Times Herald to throughout
the sixties and he was often received by like navy
wives clubs or like women associate with the Rotary Club
and stuff, and I think they kind of got a
thrill out of him being this kind of heel type character.
And I wonder whether Zodiac feels some kind of jealousy

(01:38:11):
because of that. He's cant. Marc is also a persona
that's invented. He's clearly you know, he's not a real person.
And what's odd about the Red Phantom letter is that
the one that Zodiac is seemingly replying to was a
syndicated letter that had been published numerous times in different
places in the United States throughout the sixties, and I

(01:38:33):
think there's even one from the fifties. So the count
Marco's column was recycling old letters or perhaps inventing the
letters themselves, just because it was a way of promoting
these appearances that he did. So I wonder if there's
got some kind of a bit like Herbcane zodiac is
for some reason addressing these kind of famous people because

(01:38:54):
he wants to kind of he's jealous of their kind
of notoriety.

Speaker 2 (01:39:00):
Yeah, it could certainly be. And that's the tough thing
without knowing. If this person was alive and they got caught,
you could ask them, hey, why did you do X,
Y and Z. But right now we're all just guessing.
So then he closes with let me see it almost
closed here. He says, my theory of the forty minute

(01:39:23):
window could certainly fit MAC, but it could also fit
someone else. It's not exclusive to him. Let me just
to get away right to contact the call, it's not
exclusive the MAC. If if it was such a remote location,

(01:39:44):
so they made calls near police stations, which this phone
booth was, meaning he didn't have to live near it,
he just had to be familiar with it. Again, it's
that it's just a theory of mine that if you've
just killed a couple or thought you could kill both
of them, and you could have in that forty minutes,

(01:40:06):
you could have been halfway to San Francisco, made a
clean escape and gotten away. Why would you risk driving
around hanging around this town on a quiet holiday night
where there's no traffic, where you're gonna be easy to
spot if a police car drives down the street or
somebody happens to see you, you're gonna stand out like
a sore thumb. So why would he risk making that call? There?

(01:40:29):
To me, the most obvious thing that explains the missing time,
because you'd have to assume that if Zodiac was from
out of town and not somebody right from there, that
he hung out in his car and his chilled there
in that spot for a good thirty minutes, it doesn't
make sense. It's too risky. So you know, to me,

(01:40:51):
the clear, the clear possibility is that he definitely stashed
his gun, which we talked about earlier, got rid of
his clothes, got rid of his car, and the whole
idea that he was trying to sell the police so
hard on that mystery witness is the thing that really

(01:41:12):
makes me scream. He was on foot, and some people
have said, well, Arthur Lely Allen looked close to that
phone booth, not three hundred feet away, maybe three blocks away.
But you know, I challenge anybody to find more. If
anybody finds more people that are three hundred feet from
that phone booth, I'll gladly look at them to the
same with the same glasses I've already looked. I already

(01:41:35):
know there wasn't anybody else close to that phone booth
that was living there that is as compelling. And then
you know, matches everything else we've talked about.

Speaker 3 (01:41:43):
Yeah, I mean the timeline fits pretty well for that theory.
Like really is, if you account for taking time to
go back home, stash the weapon, take take a sho
make get rid of gung powder, rescue for example, he
might know about those things and it makes sense not

(01:42:04):
to use the phone at home, but go If you
are attention seeking.

Speaker 2 (01:42:09):
Then wise we all know that.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
And what's really interesting about the Okay, so I'll kind
of go on a little bit of a diversion when
the first murders Lake Come and Road of David Faraday
and Betsy lou Jensen. The story is in the newspapers
maybe for about five or six weeks, and by mid
jull January there's barely any mention of the Zodiac. Well
he's not known as Zodiac, but there's barely mentioned that

(01:42:34):
that murder anymore. There's a few fundraisers later in the
year for the couple, but it goes out of the
headlines very quickly. So with a second attack, he's obviously
planning how to reenact that buzz that he created the
first time, but extend it. And I think like using
a phone box opposite your house so that you can

(01:42:56):
see the police buzzing all over. It would give you
a very particular thrill if you were the Zodiac, and
it would also disturb all the neighbors, because if you
look about all of the people in Max's dad's retirement
notice had businesses all in a line that face that
phone booth, there's about three or four people who own

(01:43:17):
realty firms that face, and all of those people will
be talking about it. And I think that that's why
it matters to That's why it matters to maca Zodiac
to use that phone, and possibly he is surprised and
didn't know that they could track the number so quickly
or call back, and that was a gap in his knowledge.

Speaker 2 (01:43:37):
I think, yeah, absolutely, And it just again I go
back to the hall over selling of the car. My
car was this color. It's almost like he's trying to
force that down the police throat. So they're like, oh,
we're never going to catch this guy, and we know
he's got a round car. It just seemed like he's

(01:43:58):
trying to throw them off too much, that over song
on that.

Speaker 3 (01:44:01):
Yeah, So the oversell, to my mind, is because Mike
Moujaux possibly misidentifies the color of the car and he
wants to reinforce that wrong description. Yeah, that would make sense.
I mean it feels like a bit of a childlike
a lie to me when you read it, And surely
the police didn't believe it when they read it.

Speaker 2 (01:44:21):
Yeah, And but maybe the color didn't even matter. Maybe
it's the fact he's jamming down in his throat that
he had a car of any color. And then so
they're like, oh, you know, he could be anywhere by now,
And meanwhile, he was never in a car you know,
because you know, what a perfect way to throw the

(01:44:43):
police off if you could and make them think, Okay,
we're never going to find this guy. All we know is,
you know, he had a car, but we don't have
any witnesses. So so he closes out here with if
Mac was Zodiac and was motivated because he couldn't get dates,

(01:45:06):
why would he choose to kill Stein in the middle
of an urban area he was not familiar with. So,
you know, people have debated this for a long time.
It's such a change in the pattern. The first three
attacks are all on couples, romantic like situations. They're in
lonely spots, all by themselves, and it's very unique that

(01:45:26):
he kills Stein in such a way. I'd be, you know,
just throwing out a theory if if I had explained
why he would kill Stein, or why Zodiac, if it
wasn't Mac would kill Stein. You know, I think it
could have been for the the attention that killing somebody
in San Francisco could could bring. Or again I go

(01:45:49):
back to, is there somebody in that area where the
Stein was directed to that Zodiac wanted to shock and
horrify for some reason, and what better way to do
that than kill somebody in in front of their house.
So you know, that would just be pure speculation as

(01:46:10):
to why that would happen. But that's a debate that's
been going on forever as to why Stein broke the
pattern of the first three attacks.

Speaker 3 (01:46:20):
Yeah, I mean, I think personally, I take what Lee
Mella says about the zodiac quite seriously that he may
be skitzotypal, which is like it's a personality style rather
than a mental illness, and it's kind of often it
often presents alongside narcissism, it's not always, and people with

(01:46:43):
this disorder or it's personality disorder, they are often very secretive,
which is something we know about Mac. And I think
that the couple's aspect fits quite closely with schitzotype or
schizoy personality disorder, because there a general like disdain for

(01:47:04):
entering into relationships. And it could be that Max friends
all getting married and there's a familial expectation that he
ought to as well, and this is a kind of
form of acting out against the whole kind of institution
of marriage and the possibility that he must have to
become intimate with someone. And this might change over time.
It's not unknown for people with this style to actually

(01:47:26):
get married, but it causes them a great amount of stress,
and this may not be apparent to people around them.
So if the first murders were all couples, which is
a seemingly a distinct pattern. We discuss earlier how the
lake Bury SA murder and perhaps the potential slipper out

(01:47:47):
about deer Lodge caused Zodiact to panic and in I
think a very short amount of time was it. I
can't remember if it's ten days between them all, two week,
two weeks. He enacts this second murder of Paul Stein,
which seemingly breaks the pattern, and Paul Stein is like
a kind of target of convenience in some there's a

(01:48:07):
special word for it within criminal psychology, where it's he
just happens to randomly pick up the zodiac and he's
seemingly not targeted in any other sense. It's the location
that seemingly important is easy to get away from, and
I wouldn't be surprised if there was an anti police motive,
like he is definitely very close to where there's some

(01:48:28):
patrol cars, and there's the mayor's mansion and so forth,
and this could be the location could be the symbolic target.
Fuke and Zelm's responded very quickly to the attack.

Speaker 2 (01:48:43):
M And the issue is again, we're you know, just urizing,
you know. And I think his point about like he's
attacking young people because he couldn't get dates, well, that
was That's something that people have said about Zodiac for years.

(01:49:05):
A lot of experts thought that was a driving, motivating factor.
I just happened to find Mac, and sure enough, he
didn't date. It's not like I forced a square hole
into a round peg or vice versa. It's you know,
I didn't say, let me find a guy that can't
date and his friends are all getting married. He just

(01:49:26):
happened to find Mac. And then the more we looked
into him, the more it was easy to see that
he didn't date or get married and didn't have his
first relationship until even his wife. So he just happens
to line up with what many people, many experts have
thought for years was a motivating factor, that he was
targeting people that he coveted, that were in situations that

(01:49:46):
maybe he you know, he was lonely, wanted a companionship
and couldn't have it, or or maybe to your point,
the narcissist point where he didn't want to be with
anybody and sort of resisted it. But it didn't look normal,
you know, because all his friends are running off getting
married and here he is not.

Speaker 3 (01:50:05):
Yeah, I mean, if he was seriously depressed, for example,
he may be angry that other people are happy and that,
like you say, he's coveting what they have, but resents
the fact that he hasn't. He may feel entitled to
it in this in cell type manner. And it may
be like later when he is married. What I found
notable is and perhaps betrays something, is his wife said

(01:50:28):
that his parents introduced them, like through the lodge where
his wife was very active. So even in that situation,
he's kind of not selecting the partner necessarily. It may
be convenient because he's the zodiac to them get married.

Speaker 2 (01:50:47):
Yeah, and you know, so we know that a lot
of these serial killer guys like to camouflage. They like
to fit in with society. Don't want to stand out
like the troll monster under the bridge, because then people
will know, hey, that's the scary guy right there, that's
the killer. You know, especially back then if you were

(01:51:09):
on your own at a certain age, because back then,
people got married when they were like right out of
high school. They were like eighteen years old. So if
you're in your mid twenties and all your friends are
married and you're the quote unquote oddball that doesn't date,
isn't married, you're gonna start drawing attention to yourself and

(01:51:30):
that you might not want, especially if you're the Zodiac,
you don't want that attention. You want to fit in,
you want to be normal. So maybe he has this
this opportunity when he's introduced to his future wife. And
I don't know enough about, like, you know, people with
that kind of mind, if they're psychotic, or they're narcissists,

(01:51:54):
whatever it may be. I don't know if they can
ever truly you know, change and say hey I've been
saved and and believe it didn't really mean it. But
it seems like at least from you know, the letter,
that one letter that we had of him that he
wrote with the Bible verse in it, that he wrote

(01:52:15):
to his wife, it seems like he legitimately cared for
her a lot. And you know, again, unless it's just
a complete lie, so maybe he had changed. I don't know.
I don't know enough to I'm not enough of an
expert to know if those people can really change and
feel love or maybe be born again as he appears

(01:52:41):
to have been.

Speaker 3 (01:52:42):
I mean, I've thought a little bit about this, and
I think they're kind of being born again. That is
another tick in Max Favors as perhaps one of the best, better, better,
or best subject suspects, is that what's really clear is
is that if we mackis Zodiac, he's probably going to
remain a manipulative person, but perhaps a passive person. And

(01:53:05):
this surprises some people that serial killers can be passive,
Like we know that in his relationship, is it who
was the Green River guy Gary Ridgeway. Yeah, Ridgeway was
actually the passive partner in that relationship, and he loved
his wife, by it seeming seemingly clear that was that

(01:53:27):
was like a real marriage. But he also did things
that he The fantasy of some serial killers is to
bring their kind of criminal activities and their real life
as close as possible, and he is kind of morbid
that he would take his wife out to near where
the bodies were dumped and have sex with that, and

(01:53:48):
in a way, it was to show that he was
in control, even if she was the dominant partner. So
sometimes people can be shy, passive and they're actually a
serial killer and no one is kind of you know,
it's not clear, and you know, we can never really
know what goes on inside someone's relationship, but there is
evidence that some serial killers get married and use their

(01:54:09):
partner as a shield. And maybe Mac was having some
problems around nineteen seventy seven seventy eight, his wife writes
this strange letter about her husband not getting enough credit
for being on the pistol team at the prison. And
he also becomes born again in nineteen seventy eight, and

(01:54:30):
she was reluctant by her account, and some people have
noted that can often be a manipulative thing to cement
to cement loyalty within the relationship through like returning to
the church, for example. And it could be that this
is just another persona that Mac is developing. You know,
he had tried the Zodiac persona it failed, and then

(01:54:53):
in the late by becoming a corrections officer, he's trying
to be a law man and an upstanding person and
maybe this is just another personality style personally, you know,
another public image that he's trying out and.

Speaker 2 (01:55:08):
We get we and and somebody talked about this. I
think we posted about this the other day. Somebody has
gone back and forth the A lot of times prison
guard jobs are as a result of somebody that tries
to get in regular law enforcement and can't for whatever reason,
whether it's physical, whether it's mental, whether it's whatever it is.
So you know, maybe he tried to get into law

(01:55:31):
enforcement where some of his friends worked, couldn't do it
and had to take this this prison job. And I
think that, you know, sort of strengthened this that need
to fit in. And we could speculate on why he
wouldn't have made it as a as a police recruit,

(01:55:52):
whether it's due to physical ailments of some sort, or
maybe there was something in his mental evaluation. And I
don't know. Again, it's just me speculating, but it's certainly interesting.
And there's been you know, there's been serial killers that
have been had jobs as police officers, have had jobs

(01:56:15):
as directions officers, have been married. I mean, you can
name any number of serial killers. Some people say, well,
he had a successful marriage to his wife, and you
know these kind of guys can never get married. Well
that's just not true. There's serial killers nothing right that
have been married.

Speaker 3 (01:56:33):
Yeah, absolutely, And I think when you find that there
are serial killers that are like kind of more intelligent
and stuff, they actually better at camouflaging and they know
that there's certain trains they can't show others. And I
kind of think that there's a kind of fair possibility
that he was rejected from the police. I mean there
were friends of his joined the police force or went

(01:56:55):
to Vietnam, and he was unable to meet the requirement
for the draft, possibly for personality reasons, it could be
for minor physical problems, but he was given like a
one y. He was put in the one y category,
which is like you're not medically unfit. But often people
were deemed like to be the wrong personality to be

(01:57:16):
in the military, like if you were unmotivated, for example.
And we know in this like his friend says that
he was a mediocre student. That doesn't mean he's not intelligent.
That means he perhaps doesn't think it's worth the effort.
So his parents seem to be pushing him to go
for higher level degrees and he's unable to complete them

(01:57:38):
for one reason or another, and perhaps institutional life as
a corrections officer suited him because it gave him a
framework of discipline and he becomes a different person.

Speaker 2 (01:57:48):
Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting to think about. I mean,
and he did have a lot of college over the years.
Yeah for what his job in helm, you know, it's
just a I don't know. And what was his sergeant
I think he was by the time he retired. It's
not like he was some high up in the prison

(01:58:10):
system and all this college had got him to climb
way up some ladders. So I kind of it's interesting.
I was. There's been serial killers like Ted Bundy's one,
even Joseph de'angelo that would use their college training to
either hide what they were doing or to help explain
why they didn't have a steady job, or why they

(01:58:33):
weren't married and living off on their own and still
with their parents because they're going to school and they
used that school that schooling is just a way to
stall and have something covering what they're actually doing. And
again I can't prove that's the case with Mac, but
he had a lot of college for some for a
job that really probably didn't require So I always thought

(01:58:58):
that was interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:58:59):
Yeah, it's like that is adult heard is being deferred,
and maybe it was a difficult, difficult this transitional because
his friends said that he was a bit immature, and
maybe he was finding a transition to adulthood difficult. We
know that some serial killers are kind of day dreamers,
like Dharma was a schizoid, and we know that Dennis

(01:59:19):
Rader he lost his job possibly because he's fantasizing too
much and it was a surprise. So sometimes when people
have these like difficult moments in their lives, it's these
like your you have this theory of like stressors and
we can not stressful times in Max's lives, particularly around
nineteen sixty eight. And I think there's another interesting aspect

(01:59:42):
to him becoming a corrections officer. He gets to guard
the prisoners. I mean, it is the last person you
would imagine to be a serial killer, and at the
same time, it's a kind of position of dominance over them,
like he's the best if that's the case, and he's
there with like his cousin talks about Manson being one
of the prisoners and meeting Manson and how it's like

(02:00:02):
it's actually in his cousin's obituary as if this is
like we've met someone famous, And I mean there's Kemper,
was there Wan is it? Juan Corona who's killed a
lot of people, and this guy Carl Werner, who was
actually someone that Zodiac tried to claim the murders of.
And I was thinking as well about this being born

(02:00:23):
again in nineteen seventy seven, is people are only born
again because they want to atone for something and or
they have been alcoholic, for example. But what's interesting is
that if something prisoners often do, if they're seeking parole
and to convince the parole board, they've turned to leaf,

(02:00:43):
right m hm. And I think that maybe that is
behavior he saw in the prison.

Speaker 2 (02:00:48):
You know, yeah, that's a good, good point. And you know,
to come to the figure, you made me think of
something else. Stretchers, he has this change of life. Nineteen
seventy seven, nineteen seventy eight, what happened that year? The
first possible Zodiac letter in four years now, I personally
don't think that nineteen seventy eight letter is from Zodiac,

(02:01:10):
but if it turned out that it was from him,
you know, it would just be another thing that lines
up with this Stretcher in Max's life.

Speaker 3 (02:01:19):
I feel that in Max's life there is something going
on in seventy seven seventy eight. There's a lot of
changes happening at CFF. There's numerous scandals that are coming
to fruition. There was corruption at the prison. There were
women officers coming into the prison to work the first time,
and people in his union objected, and so there was
And at some point he goes to work somewhere else,

(02:01:41):
doesn't he So you know, was his you know was
there some was he going to get moved? Was his
wife saying I'm not happy to pay he You've got
to shape up. And then he decides to become born
again because he's like, will this marriage? We haven't had children,
will this marriage last. There's a number of things that
could be happening at this point where he's feeling less
than comfortable. And the other thing that's notable before we

(02:02:02):
know the exact date he was born again because his
wife blogged about it, and it's very close to the
tenure anniversary of the first murder. It's on the twenty
fourth of December nineteen seventy eight, I believe, and perhaps
he is reflecting on his life. And what is kind

(02:02:23):
of notable to me is that it's Also, four days
after John Wayne Gacy, they're stopped pulling bodies out of
his house and it's on the TV nationally. So is
he thinking this could happen to me?

Speaker 2 (02:02:36):
Yeah? Yeah, that's a good point. And maybe if he
legitimately changed or felt he had changed or wanted to change,
maybe he's really happy to have found his wife and
she changed him for the better. Maybe that was the
reason he needed to say, Hey, let me do a

(02:02:57):
reset here and see if I can start over. And
you know, it's fascinating to think about now. PC ninety
nine hundred here said, speaking of stressors, if mac was
the events and stressors of sixty eight were critical, you

(02:03:19):
talked about that as as were the apparently stabilizing influences
of seventy one seventy two. Absolutely, and can you go
over a more detailed timeline of these years, which I
think we did pretty well, So I think we got there.
And also he talked about are there ways to get
access to additional college, medical employment so security records that

(02:03:40):
can be pursued. Yes, for the most part, if I
haven't gotten them already, the only other person that can
probably get them is Max's wife, And I want to say,
you know I've said it. Want to say again, I
don't think Max's wife knew he was the Zodiac killer

(02:04:02):
and covered it up. Again, she didn't know him back then.
The Zodiac crimes were pretty much done and he had
written his last letter almost by the time they met.
But you know, I don't think she would hurry to
hand stuff over that's going to make him look more guilty.
On the flip side, I think if she had something
where she could come back and slap it down and say, hey,

(02:04:24):
this proves he was in the Zodiac, I think we
would have seen that from her, And I don't think
she's in a hurry to give us anything else that's
going to make Mac look more guilty. But she could
get a number of different things that could help give
us more information about Mac, especially the social security records.

(02:04:44):
There's going to be a list of every job he
ever paid taxes into and what their name was, where
they were located, that kind of thing. She could get
all that and put that out there, But I don't
think she'll and I've said it, I posted it on
the form the other day. She's welcome to come on
this podcast and talk with me anytime. I don't think
she's going to deck me up on that, but she's
welcome to and you know, I would definitely have a

(02:05:05):
conversation with her, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Speaker 3 (02:05:09):
Yeah, I mean, it's completely understandable. And perhaps there's already
guilt because they had these online blogs and so forth,
from which we gleaned a lot of information that were public,
but perhaps she never anticipated any of this. Equally, I
don't think I think that she was in the dark.
I personally think machizodiac, but I think there is more

(02:05:32):
stuff out there, and continually surprised when I think we've
exhausted it, we find new stuff. I'm surprised how much
we know about Mac because there are some people who
are kind of peripheral to the case. I look up
and you can find maybe them in one directory and
their date of birth, and there's very little they have
more information about most people. There's a lot about Mac,
and maybe some employment records will come to light or

(02:05:55):
someone knew him. There is a slight problem with people
his age as kind of reaching the end of their
lives now. So often we would go to reach out
to people that we've discovered, we knew him at the time,
and the unfortunately passed away, particularly since twenty twenty when
there was a pandemic and a lot of these people
were older. So but I'm still hopeful that we'll find

(02:06:17):
some additional information the timeline. There's a guy, I mean,
I should thank everyone that has helped me, because not
all of these discoveries my own. I kind of I'll
just give them a shout out. Essa Berry. Michael cris Cross,
who's very good on the timeline, has mostly blocked most
of it in for us, so we kind of know
where Mac is when during during this like during the

(02:06:39):
kind of noted events of his life, but not the
zodiac period. And there was a guy called Gorilla Train
who actually like wrote newspapers dot Com to get them
to put the Vale of Papers online and they did
that actually within a few months, and that was really
helpful because most of this comes from that. Mister Sean's
and other people on the Mac thread have been super helpful.

Speaker 2 (02:06:58):
Yeah, there's a lot of really good people on there
that are, you know, helping to see if they can
dig anything up. And again, if if we find something
one day that could positively rule Mac out, that would
be great. I'm not you know, I could be wrong.
I believe one hundred percent that macazotic. But it tells
somebody brings something forward. You know that that proves me wrong.

(02:07:21):
Then you know I'm happy to I'm happy to have
a conversation or debate with them about Mac. And I'm
happy also to see that the trolling has stopped a lot.
There's no trolling, there's no arguing, even if they don't
believe macizodea act. There there's some civility, which I greatly appreciate.
So so I wanted to get to a couple more

(02:07:44):
comments before we close out here. Let me see here,
here's one scary Gary. I want to say. I think
Mac is a strong suspect and has things that line
up for me, But there is a negative for me.
It doesn't appearod an interest in writing journalism newspapers, which
we talked about that earlier. So I was surprised too

(02:08:04):
that there's nothing that we know of. Do we have
newspaper clip things Mac himself wrote in to give his
opinion on a matter we don't know of anything. Did
you have the person of someone that had to always
prove he was the smartest an opinion mattered more than
anyone else. I think that gets to the narcissist point,

(02:08:24):
because sometimes the secret narcissist will they'll give you like
a like a I don't even know how to describe it.
You know, when you're around them, they give you like
a They're not always vocal. They'll give you little jabs
here and there about how they were right and you

(02:08:46):
were wrong, or how they were wrong in a situation
or something like that. It's not always blatantly open and
not knowing Mac obviously not interacting with him. I can't
say if he was like that, I don't know, you know.
And again, he had friends. It wasn't like he was
anti social and he was the loner that never had

(02:09:08):
a friend. We know he did. Some of those friends
admitted that they thought it was a little bit odd,
but they still liked him, and they weren't obviously, they
didn't think he was a killer, someone that would be
a serial killer. They weren't freaked out enough to not
hang out with him or live with him in their
college home. So, you know, nobody said I think he

(02:09:28):
was a serial killer. It's not like I found somebody
that said, oh, I can't believe he's the Zodiac. It
doesn't shock me. There was none of that. So if
you know, again, it's not always blatant. It's not always
out there in your face that you're so strange and
scary that you set off all these alarms for people.
It's not always like that.

Speaker 3 (02:09:51):
Yeah, I mean, we have had reports about Max's personality
back from people. His wife and his friend both said
that he had secrets or sec creative which might lend
it to this kind of personalitally style, like this kind
of covert narcist. But we do have a couple there's
a couple of instances where there is writing to the papers.

(02:10:11):
For example, when his wife writes the papers on behalf
of the pistol team that he's on. She neglects to
mention him by name, but gives her name, but the
tone of the letter is incredibly aggrieved that they haven't
received recognition for this like achievement. And there's a lie here.
There's a kind of lie here, and it's not his
wife is lying. There was a big article about the

(02:10:34):
pistol team a couple of years before, so she says
they've never received any recognition, and that's actually not true.
And if someone was, like to say, a covert narcist,
they may get manipulate someone or create a mood that
someone else in their life attempts to resolve for them
and perhaps get you know, picks up on. And there

(02:10:58):
is that. There's another writing instance that I think connected
to Mac anecdotally from his wife is that when they
were living I can't remember if this was in Oregon
or somewhere else, they were going for brunch and as
she relates the story, they went to park and someone
was parked badly, and she went to go to the

(02:11:18):
restaurant and when she met Mack by the door, he
told her that he would like to get thousands of
cards printed up or hundreds of like little note cards
that he could stick on the cars of bad drivers,
telling them off. And I thought that was kind of
I think you went you went to lie Mella to
discuss that. It seems Zodiac like this anonymous like addressing

(02:11:44):
people anonymously in this in this kind of kind of
aggrieved yet kind of righteous manner. It seems an odd
way of communicating because it's indirect And if anything about
Zodiac is that he communicated very indirectly.

Speaker 2 (02:12:04):
Yeah, And that's a great example too. I had forgotten
about that. It is, you know, I think people are
always looking for somebody that has a sign on their
house with flashing lights saying I am the Zodiac that
scares their neighbors, and nobody's everybody's afraid to go by

(02:12:25):
the house. And the guy was always so strange, and
he was never married, and everybody's looking for some strange,
scary guy that sets off these giant signals that he's
a serial killer. And most serial killers are not like that.
They are trying to fit in the best they can,
even if they may know that they're not like everybody else,

(02:12:46):
They're trying to make themselves look like everybody else. So,
you know, I think that's right in that scene, that
same ving.

Speaker 3 (02:12:55):
Yeah, And it's also why I think the suspects with
the criminal history have less chance of being said yet,
because someone who's conspicuous has a criminal record, they would
have they would have been investigated by now. And I
think it's going to be mac fits well because it's
someone who's inconspicuous and and in the background, for for instance,

(02:13:18):
somewhat there was a guy I used to work with
on the forum called Will and He contacted everyone from
max yearbook who was still in maxiear, who was still alive,
and he only got a handful of replies. And the
people that did reply said, I remember his name, but
I can't place him, Like people knew who he was,
but they couldn't tell you anything about him exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:13:40):
I got the same responses. You know, it's you know,
it's funny and I don't know three off track, but
it's funny to think about all these people, all these
years later getting contacted about Mac and then saying, why
why are multiple people contacting me about this guy? Asking
me if I remember him?

Speaker 3 (02:13:57):
Well? What was funny? In that instance, he got one
substantial reply from a guy that got caught shooting out
the windows of a flour meal with Mac. It was
Mac's idea and they went to shoot at this mill
and they got caught by the police, and thereafter their
friendship kind of drifted apart. But this guy was a
he didn't think Mack could be Zodiac. And it was

(02:14:18):
funny because Will didn't mention that he was investigating Zodiac.
He he just wants to ask about Mac, and this
guy goes, it's funny, I've kind of guessed that you're
inquiring about Zodiac because I too, coming from Valeo, are
highly highly interested in the.

Speaker 2 (02:14:36):
WOW.

Speaker 3 (02:14:37):
So at the same time he didn't think Mac was Zodiac.
He thought he was like totally twigged what he was
being asked about.

Speaker 2 (02:14:45):
Interesting, that's that's funny. And you know, again, I go
back to some of these people that are getting in
contact with about macll these years later, they got to
be wondering, why are these people reaching out to be
asking you about this guy out of the blow And
you know, to that, I think someplace out there, somebody
may have something important that would help us more with

(02:15:09):
the Mac mystery. Whether it's photos of him, audios or
audio or video of him would be the holy Grail
because you could hear hear his this, you know, his
talking mostly maybe see his walking, his mannerism. Somebody like
Brian Hartnell, I mean, Brian Hartnell is really the only
person now left on the face of the earth that

(02:15:30):
could really shine some good light on on like Max's
body language and hearing his voice. He would know better
than anybody if if Mac could be Zodiac, and if
he passes away, he's got to be what seventy five
or something I'm guessing, uh, seventy seventy five. You know,

(02:15:52):
if he passes away, there's literally nobody left on the
face of the earth that we know for certain has
heard Zodiac's voice. So, I mean, how hard would it
be to to solve the case at that point, you know?

Speaker 3 (02:16:06):
I mean, hopefully there's going to be some other way
of solving it. It could be that he remains the
one of the best suspects for ever if there's no
forensic resolution. I mean, there were three, there's two ear
witnesses that Nasci Slavers obviously passed away. It was notable
to me that Max's wife became very irritated when we

(02:16:27):
asked the Master what his voice was like. Mm hmm, yeah,
it told us to pound sound like.

Speaker 2 (02:16:33):
Just and and again. I go back to I just
find it strange that all the existing audio, video, photos,
all that stuff of Mac have somehow miraculously disappeared. I
just again, if my wife, if somebody now again, if

(02:16:54):
she was mad and somebody accused me of being circle,
and my wife might tell them to screw off, you're
not getting shit. I mean, but to say I think
she would say that, I don't think she'd say, well,
all that stuff has disappeared and been erased and deleted
and thrown away and burned. So it was a little
bit of a different response if Kim just told us
to screw off and pound the sand right from the beginning,

(02:17:16):
but to be giving of some information. But then say,
all these photos, videos and audios and stuff, they don't
exist anymore. You know, I just find that strange. You know, again,
I'm not accusing her relying. I'm just I find it strange.
It's if it's true, I find it strange. If it's
not true, why would somebody not be telling the truth

(02:17:38):
about it? So either way, I find it very strange.

Speaker 3 (02:17:41):
I mean, it's altogether strange that, according to her, his
dad went on a tear as she describes it, which
I believe me is getting excessively angry or drunk and
destroyed all the family memorabilia, including pick up all these
photos of quilts that his mom had made and child
like things to do with charter that Mac owned. And

(02:18:05):
that seems to be suggests that there's a problem within
the family. Perhaps he was prone to anger the father
that could have be expressed through Mac. That kind of
could be one of the motivating factors if that's the case,
because that sounds unusual to me. And on the question
of the voice, And I was looking in the newspapers

(02:18:27):
the other day and Kathleen John's actually made a report
about the voice of the person that doctor and saying
that they had a soft monotone, which is I didn't
know that that had been reported at all. Maybe there
is a connection there.

Speaker 2 (02:18:42):
And you know, it's again the whole you know, the
dad going ballistic and getting rid of everything in some
kind of angry thing is one thing. But do you
mean to tell me that after how many years were
they married nineteen seventy four to two thousand and four,

(02:19:03):
that thirty years? My math is terrible.

Speaker 3 (02:19:06):
Did he die in two thousand and four.

Speaker 2 (02:19:08):
That's twourteen, so it's forty years. Yeah, So you mean
to tell me forty years together? She doesn't have any
audio tapes or videotapes of them. I find that's strange,
especially because back in the eighties and then probably in
the nineties, everybody had a camcorder and stuff, and you
just mean to tell me there's none of that stuff around.

(02:19:29):
I just I don't know. I just it's it's strange.
For me hearing that, and it doesn't make sense one
way or the other. If it's true or whether it's
not true, it doesn't it's strange.

Speaker 3 (02:19:40):
I mean I could see him being videoed for things
like instructional stuff at work. Oh yeah, absolutely, constructor like yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:19:50):
That's the thing is there's some kind of piece of
videotape out there of him talking anywhere. Instructional video is
a good thing be interviewed for something the fishing video.
I hope that you know that fishing video he had
a pardon that maybe he was talking on at some
place or he.

Speaker 3 (02:20:11):
Was the cameraman and so his net. He wasn't in
front of the camera. And he was also into photography,
and I wonder if that is something to do with
if you're always behind the camera, you never often photographer.
I've noticed this with photographers. They don't like being photographs sometimes.

Speaker 2 (02:20:26):
M h. And that is there something more sinister to
is that just a personal quirk or something? But so
before we wrap up, you know, is there anything major
that we missed? And then going forward, what kind of
stuff are you going to be looking to find?

Speaker 3 (02:20:45):
Still, well, there is still stuff discover in terms of
the like his social circles. I mean, more recently we
found that he has this tenuous connection to the Farren family.
He was actually in a cub Scout group with the
far And brothers and the den mother and father of
that group were Paul Farrin's parents, so he would have

(02:21:05):
known them. And that's what I'm always between. Are the
victims entirely symbolic or is there some kind of connection somehow.
So we're going to I think we're going to keep
at like looking at newspaper stuff. Chris Halo I work with.
He's quite good at like reaching out to people. We

(02:21:25):
don't often have success when we email people, but when
we find someone new that Mac is closely associated with,
we at least try and send them an email and
explain why. I mean, it's always a kind of questionable
whether people think we're cranks just contact them out the blue. Yeah, yeah,
maybe we'll just hit on someone. I think there's more

(02:21:47):
stuff to discover, and there may even be more revelations
about Zodiac in the future, because there's certainly held back
information that may we've had. We've had a few things lately,
like the kind of the DNA of the Riverside hoaster
and stuff like that. So there's you know, there's new
things can be revealed it all the time, and that
might set us off on a new line of investigation.

Speaker 2 (02:22:09):
Well, I've and just to update you, I've had some
nothing or shattering. I've had some contact with SFPD with MAC. Nothing. Again,
they didn't provide any new information, just said, you know,

(02:22:31):
sending what you got and you know that kind of thing,
and no comments about checking prints for MAC or anything. Now,
back then, back in nineteen seventy one when he joined,
when he started working for the state, things weren't computerized.
They weren't digitized. You know, if somebody if he gave prints,

(02:22:53):
for example, due to a background check, those things are
in a fold or someplace, in a lock or someplace
most likely unless they've somehow been digitized. But is I
highly doubt that. But there could be a personnel file
someplace with MAX you know, full resume application prints, things
like that out there that can be discovered because if

(02:23:17):
they've never been digitized, like you know, how would they
ever compare MAX prints to the Stein prints. So I'm
thinking something like that, a real golden piece of evidence
could be out there someplace that could exclude mac if
it doesn't match the cab print, for example. And then

(02:23:38):
there's also the possibility that you know, sometimes in medical procedures,
especially people that have had cancer and stuff, they've had
different procedures done biopsies, right, Yeah, there can be biopsies
of things that are stored, that are frozen, that aren't
disposed of, and one day that could you know, be

(02:23:58):
used for DNA or eventually. And I'm sort of getting
nervous about this because I don't think it'd be taking
this long. But if there's a chance of doing genealogy
using DNA left behind on the letters of the ropes
or any of that stuff, I think they would have
done that by now. And I mean that can be
nervous that's taking this long.

Speaker 3 (02:24:20):
Yeah, I mean there could be a forensic problem. They
have to find an inventive or creative way to attack,
and it could be expense if that's the other problem
is cost. Yeah. I think that they have recently solved
some older murders, and I've seen some as late as

(02:24:40):
fifty years ago, so there's always hope. And they have
still have some stuff in like considerable stuff in evidence,
including the cab.

Speaker 2 (02:24:48):
Apparently I go back to the whole thing that San Francisco,
especially San Francisco, will California in general, so overrun with crime,
fresh crimes, or understaffed. They're under budget. I mean they're
over budget. They I think they have such a hard
time with the current caseload of crimes that they're not

(02:25:11):
worried about something from fifty plus years ago that the
person's likely dead. They're not gonna Yeah, you know, I
don't think solving the Zodiac case, although we all wanted
to be solved, I don't think that's first on their
list when they can solve things that are fresher. So,
you know, my hope is that one day somebody does

(02:25:32):
it just to maybe just to brag and say, hey,
we're the police department that solved this infinitous Zodiac case.
I'm hoping that somebody takes the reins and decides that
they're going to try and do it once and for all.
But you know, right now, they have the technology to
do to extracting a profiles, sometimes even from a rootless hair.

(02:25:54):
So if Zodiac left the hair and an envelope, or
left the hair on one of those bindings that he handled,
anything like that, even something along those lines, it might
one day lead to Genie orderly solving the case.

Speaker 3 (02:26:06):
Yeah. I mean I even saw a ten thousand year
piece of old piece of wood, which they have non
destructive processes now and I don't know if they use
like microwaves or something like that. They investigated the DNA
structure that was in beded soaked into the wood, so
they have ways of Like people are always worried would
they destroy the evidence by testing it, And I think
they're kind of passed that now, but there, you know,

(02:26:29):
there may be there may be like hell back stuff
and someone just has to be has to have the
wherewithal to do it. I mean, in other cases that older,
it's often the families of the victims that push for
further testing. Yeah, that might be difficult in this case
because of you know that as people get older and stuff,
there's there's less and less people that kind of to

(02:26:50):
kind of represent the victims anymore.

Speaker 2 (02:26:52):
That's true. And hopefully, again, if if DNA one they
solve this case and they hold a press conference and
say they say we've solved this case and this is
the person that Zodiac, I will one hundred percent accept
the outcome. Although I'm confident they'll say Mac's name at
the press conference. But I again, whoever's name they say,
I will one hundred percent accept that. I think there's

(02:27:14):
some people that have written books and been very vocal
and gone on TV claiming the Hoosadac is. They're going
to have some bruised egos that might push back and
say maybe something like, oh, they there was a two
man team, or they messed it up and it really
wasn't this person. I think there's people that will still
think their their suspect was Zodiac, even if they'd turned

(02:27:36):
out not to.

Speaker 3 (02:27:37):
Be, of course, And I think there's there's specific things
about this case that make it very different to other cases.
It's taken on the character of a kind of mystery,
like the Bigfoot or something like that, and people tend
to treat it like that. There's some people get upset
that it's it could be solved, I think. And what's
been interesting looking into Mac more than any other suspect,

(02:27:59):
it's it's demystified aspects of the case. For me, I'm
not that invested in the kind of mythology of Zodiac,
whereas I used to like look into all the symbolism
and so forth. I'm still interested in those aspects of
the case, but they're very much secondary to the high
They're the how, why and where kind of aspects that
Mac brings up.

Speaker 2 (02:28:19):
There's plenty of that to look into, so I don't
think you're going to have any end inside of stuff
you can keep digging into. And I appreciate you all
the help you've given, because again, what I found was
just the tip of the iceberg. You know, since I
came forward with Max's name, it's just been all kinds
of things and I hope, I hope it keeps trending
in the direction so we can find more about him.

(02:28:41):
And you know, thanks for digging, and you know, continue
to do what you do, and I appreciate you coming on.

Speaker 3 (02:28:48):
Yeah, and thanks for inviting me on, and thanks again
to everyone that's helped me. I've got another guy called Krasdol.
He's been He's actually doesn't favor Mac, but he's been
sending me tons of things that I was never able
to find. So I'd like to think of when it's
me as well, then finds feeing me.

Speaker 2 (02:29:03):
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Zodiac Speaking.
Please make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you're
listening now so you don't miss a single episode. New
episodes of Zodiac Speaking will there every other Saturday. If
you want to follow or interact with us on social media,
we'd love to hear from you. You can find Zodiac
Speaking on Twitter with a handle at podcast Zodiac, or

(02:29:26):
you can search Facebook for Zodiac Speaking podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:29:29):
And don't forget. You can get plenty of Zodiac details
twenty four to seven by visiting my site at zodiacsiphers
dot com.

Speaker 2 (02:29:38):
If you'd like to help more people find Zodiac Speaking,
please take a moment to rate the show and leave
a review of it on your favorite podcast player or app.
On behalf of Rich, This is Mike Morford and i'd
like to say thanks again for listening and we'll see
you on the next episode of Zodiac Speaking,

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