Zodiac called Santa Rosa PD threatening school kids

[BDHOLLAND]

Source is here. PROOF: OCTOBER 15TH 1969 SANTA ROSA CALLER WAS THE ZODIAC KILLER

1969

October 13th - Zodiac postmarked letter threatens kids. It contains a bloody shirt piece.

This is the Zodiac speaking.

I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington St & Maple St last night, to prove this here is a blood stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the north bay area.

The S.F. Police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcicles seeing who could make the most noise. The car drivers should have just parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover.

School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.

October 14th/15th (latest), Fred Sowash of Santa Rosa is made aware of a threat to school kids because of threats made by phone call to SRPD.

October 15th, SF Chronicle publishes a partial of the Oct 13th letter with the threats to school children redacted.

Next page here.


October 21st, Paul Avery through the SF Chronicle reveals
the Zodiac threatened kids on school buses.

(News-clipping done by Tahoe27).

So the Santa Rosa phone caller had inside knowledge and at a very early date.

It seems also clear that officials were buying time and setting up security for school bus trips between the 13th and the 21st.

We know there was a media blackout operated between SFPD and the media on some Zodiac communications. The bus bomb letter was postmarked 10th of November. Bill Armstrong talks about the media blackout in this KPIX News report:

Why is the threat to San Francisco insufficient? Santa Rosa is small potatoes compared to San Francisco, yet he wants a smaller city included. Why not Richmond? Berkeley? Oakland? San Jose? Why does he need to go all the way to Santa Rosa (and bypass San Rafael) for example?

Deductions:

1. Either the caller suspected or had inside knowledge that his 13th October communication was not expanding outside of San Francisco to other school districts. That was not good enough for his terrorist tactics.
   
   
2. The caller wanted Santa Rosa specifically to be included in his terrorist tactics. We don't know about any calls to any other smaller cities.
   
   
3. Why not just mention it in the October 13th letter? That's the problem he was faced with. He wants to include Santa Rosa in his threats that San Francisco will receive but he doesn't want to explicitly state so. Instead he phones it into SRPD. Why not just write that? What's wrong with writing down Santa Rosa? He has no problem naming places in his other communications outside of San Francisco such as Vallejo. He even has no problem indicating Riverside in a letter communication. He wrote on the car door at Lake Berryessa. Yet he won't write about Santa Rosa.

Draw your own conclusions. Here are mine.

 

[CaMan60]

If the zodiac was playing a game of Chess with us.
This topic is about the letter of October 13 1969
And like we read the 3 topics and paragraph,s start with.
1) I am the murderer of the taxi driver
2) The S.F. police could have caught me
3) School children make nice targets
This was written right after this crime on October 11. The next day the story would be in the papers. We can see a sample of the Printed Story on zodiackillerfacts website under Zodiac Crimes.San Fran, October 11 1969 attack. Zoom in to the picture banner at the top, and read the newspaper story.
It states the witness,s were Youngsters. They did give a witness report at the time and place of the crime. No doubt the zodiac read this story.
His reaction to the youngsters was a knee-jerk reaction to target School children and because he was upset, by this news made the threat. Thankfully it was just a bluff.
The letter was post marked October 13 1969 and it "shall" be interesting to see where it was dropped off.
When looking at the big picture. If we were...focusing
In a game of Chess, we see the zodiac, has Castled himself.

 

[Richard]

It is likely that the killer of the taxi driver was bold and confident up to a point, and that was when he realized that the police were almost immediately on to him. He may have seen the children in the window and suspected that they had called the police.

The fact that he was able to escape police attention was due to "luck", as he was seen by police in a patrol car, but disregarded as he did not fit the broadcast description.

His narrow escape was likely something that caused him to be more cautious in the following days, but eventually he became more bold because he thought that he was uncatchable.

He may have been trying to misdirect the investigation by his mention of a school bus attack, and possible connection to Santa Rosa.

 

[BDHOLLAND]

The original needs a little modification but it still holds true and no the full contents don't appear to have been published earlier. There was a leak at some point before the 21st and it has been identified as well as the leaker.

Zodiac Historical Newspaper Archive -- Download Center

Archive Story 3 (Oct. 17, 1969 / Elyria (OH) Chronicle-Telegram / 517 KB)

Archive Story 4 (Oct. 17, 1969 / Edwardsville (IL) Intelligencer / 480 KB)

Archive Story 5 (Oct. 17, 1969 / Fond du Lac (WI) Commonwealth Reporter / 351 KB)

Archive Story 6 (Oct. 17, 1969 / Frederick (MD) News / 394 KB)

These articles on the 17th actually tell you their sources and the dates those leaks happened on. So you have the leak/scoop identified in them prior to Avery's 21st Fear rides the Yellow Bus.

On the 16th bus drivers had been given special instructions to keep moving in the events of an attack. On the same day Detective Martin Lee (SFPD) revealed the Zodiac threat.

On the 17th the Napa Valley Register actually said there had been a leak and that it occurred from San Francisco. So that seems to indicate the information on 16th.

Fred Sowash had that information at least day before any of that on the 15th because SRPD had been called by someone (Zodiac is more likely as we shall see) with that information on the 14th/15th. They had kept that quiet which explains why the other papers hadn't picked up on it from Santa Rosa. Otherwise it would have appeared before the 17th. It didn't even appear in the Santa Rosa's Press Democrat.

So it still looks good for the hypothesis the SRPD was called on the 14th/15th was the Zodiac with inside knowledge.

There was leak, but after the 15th.

The Napa Valley Register 16th article doesn't say bus or school children were threatened.

It says "A note was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday and laid claim to all murders and threatened to strike (page 13) again. San Francisco police inspectors deleted the last partition of his latest note as they were afraid it would frighten the public."

So there you have it. The newspapers only knew something was deleted that could frighten the public. They didn't know what it was.

It hasn't been demonstrated the press knew about a threat to school kids on buses before the call to the SRPD on the 14th/15th threatening school kids on buses. That points to inside information from the caller that was not released to the press or public.

So the conclusion it is the Zodiac unless someone can prove the specific threat to kids on school buses was leaked prior to the 16th. Basically it requires an additional leak prior to this leak.

 

[Richard]

An alternate possible theory might be that the Zodiac killer may have been in some way associated with the SF police, or had a close contact with someone on the force who had that inside information.

 

[BDHOLLAND]

Bus Driver Claims Someone Shot At School Bus - Bay Area Television Archive

A rather attentive sleuth showed me this old news footage of a Santa Rosa bus driver who claimed her bus was shot at.

SRPD remained skeptical because there was no physical evidence.

There was K-Mart bomb threat there the next year. Consistent with the Zodiac and the hypothesis he moved to terrorizing Santa Rosa coinciding with the Santa Rosa Hitchhiker Murders.

An alternate possible theory might be that the Zodiac killer may have been in some way associated with the SF police, or had a close contact with someone on the force who had that inside information.

You can bet that being associated with LE is exactly where the Zodiac will be. Pretending to be a cop-hater, ex-con, and terrorist is the exact opposite of what he is in day-to-day life.