Reddit reviews The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father . . . and Finding the Zodiac Killer

“I think Don Cheney just falls under the same conspiracy umbrella that Gareth Penn fell under.”

First of all, Don Cheney was one person, and he was accusing one person, so he wouldn’t fit under a conspiracy umbrella. If you’re saying that Cheney is an example of an accuser who then becomes the accused, presumably because he was thereby calling attention to himself, that would make him more similar to Gareth Penn.

“Gareth Penn wrote a book in 1981 that publicly accused professor Michael O'Hare of Berkley as the Zodiac.”

Gareth Penn self-published TIMES 17 in 1987. It is, however, true that he first accused Michael O’Hare of being the Zodiac, in conversations with the FBI, in 1981. And O’Hare wasn’t at Cal-Berkeley in 1981. I don’t have O’Hare’s current resume in front of me, but he was an assistant professor at MIT from 1971 to 1979, then worked for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 1979 to 1981, and then was a lecturer in public policy at the JFK School at Harvard from 1981 until 1991. He sold his house in Brookline and bought a house in Berkeley Heights in the summer of 1991 and was a lecturer at the Goldman School that fall.

“For those unfamilar with the Radian Theory, he theorized that the Zodiac made the Mt. Diablo letter to hint to us that he was using the murder sites to make a geographical pattern as a sort of murder art project.”

Mike Butterfield demonstrates this on the CASE REOPENED TV program in 1999:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gsk67

Discussion of the Radian Theory begins at 35:30 of the video.

“Once he brought this theory to the surface, some people started thinking maybe Gareth Penn was a suspect.”

I began publicly accusing Gareth in 1990. Chris Farmer of OPORD did it in 2004. The late Glen Claston did it on Tom Voigt’s Original Archived Message board circa 2000.

http://ciphermysteries.com/2014/07/20/obituary-timothy-rayhel-glen-claston-1957-2014

That’s three people. There may be a You Tube video that also accuses Gareth.

“He started to stack things against himself when people viewed him with a conspiratory eye:”

The only person I’m aware of who thinks Gareth was involved in a conspiracy is me. The others who accused him believed he was the Zodiac Killer all by himself.

“he was former military, most specifically set in the "expert" class of marksman with a rifle;”

Okay, but the only murder event that suggests significant expertise with firearms is Lake Herman Road, and that not so much because of the accuracy as the knowledge of how to attach a flashlight or penlight to a gun barrel and have everything work.

“his father was a cryptographer during WWII;”

Hugh Penn was in the Army Air Corps in WWII; I’m sure he did cryptography but I’m not certain what level of expertise that would require, since they wouldn’t exactly have been working on Enigma or JN-25. What’s more interesting about Hugh Penn is that he was a statistician for the California Highway Patrol and then for the CA Attorney General’s Office. This means at least two things:

1. he had an insider’s familiarity with police procedure; and
   
2. he had access to the state driver’s license and vehicle registration records, which would have come in handy if you were targeting specific individuals. If I had access to the PA DMV database, for example, I could quite easily recreate The ABC Murders of Agatha Christie.
   
   “he was born in 1941, so he fit the age description given at the first murders (25-35 years of age, he was 27 in 1968);”
   
   But Gareth, who is tall and thin and apparently wore a beard circa 1969, doesn’t fit the physical description. Plus he was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma during the time of the Cheri Bates murder. Mike Morford brings this up every time he tries to debate me, oblivious to the fact that I’m not saying Gareth was the Zodiac trigger man.
   
   “Zodiac specifically mentioning radians in the Bus Bomb letter.”
   
   He mentions them in the “Mikado” or “Little List” letter of July 26, 1970.
   
   “Some people felt Gareth Penn was "nudging people" in a "if you aren't smart enough to solve it, let me subtly give you hints" kind of way.”
   
   Well, no one would have been smart enough to figure out the scenario as presented in TIMES 17 (and then in my own books). The Zodiac conspirators realized that a PR Man would be necessary if they wanted to pursue a back-and-forth “game” with the police and public. It wasn’t as if Gareth were rolling his eyes at our stupidity; it’s that they realized from the very beginning that the Zodiac Project was at least a Saturday New York Times crossword (not a Monday).
   
   “I think when someone says enough things about the Zodiac, who would also fit in the age range and rough geographical location of the murders, that they too become implicated as the Zodiac solely because the American public is easily suspicious when given a good story.”
   
   Well, I fit in the age range (I’m five months older than David Faraday), and I’ve been yelling my head off about the Zodiac Killer since 1985, and yet I’ve only been accused by anonymous people heckling me on message boards.
   
   I think people tend to react positively to Gareth being accused because Gareth’s blown a lot of people off. While I don’t mind this, they hate Gareth for the wrong reason.
   
   It’s a little like Tom Voigt. The documentation on his website is state-of-the-art. And Voigt has bankrupted himself in the process of pursuing the case, so you can’t accuse him of being in it for the money. But because Tom’s such a fucking jerk—and that’s also been documented—people hate his guts and tend to dismiss everything he says. Voigt wrote what I consider to be the definitive book review of Gary Stewart’s book (scroll down to the sixth review on the page):
   
   https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Animal-All-Searching-ebook/product-reviews/B00FJ3AD2I/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_paging_btm_3?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&filterByStar=one_star&pageNumber=3