Zodiac investigation
Twenty-five students — 19 of them women — sit at circular tables in Room 231 of Pitt’s Lawrence Hall on Nov. 30.
They are excited to learn if Ms. Dresbold holds any hope for them to further investigate the Zodiac, the subject of numerous books and several movies including the 2007 eponymousnamed film starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr.
Students have laptops open in front of them that they use for taking notes, conducting Google searches and using social media to expand upon what Ms. Dresbold tells them. They use computers so much in their work that they are momentarily flummoxed when Ms. Dresbold asks them to take out a piece of paper for an exercise.
“Every little thing you put in your writing says something about you,” says Ms. Dresbold, who is known for her work with Pittsburgh and other local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and her book “Sex, Lies and Handwriting,” which includes her analysis of handwriting in the JonBenet Ramsey, Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper cases, among others.
Using a large projection screen, she points to similarities between the Zodiac Killer’s handwriting and that of the California man — dots above “i’s” that aren’t filled in and squeezed “o’s”; odd spacing and “d’s” leaning to the right; similar “p’s” and weirdly shaped “g’s”; misspellings and “t’s” curved at the bottom.
“There are a lot of things that are pretty unusual,” she told the group. “I was kind of shocked. I was not expecting this.
“Do we have an exact match? No. But I really wonder why so many things are similar. I think there’s too much to not take it seriously,” says Ms. Dresbold, who said she needs more of the father’s samples to conduct a complete analysis.
Mr. Freeman said in an interview that he plans to contact a California police laboratory “and share what information we have and to see if there is anything they want us to do and anything they’ll do.”
He was surprised to learn while researching the case that thousands of people had said over more than four decades that they know the Zodiac Killer’s identity.
“I was thinking, ‘Is this one of those thousands?’ and then Michelle comes up with this information. We’re compelled to move forward and try to get DNA. It’s high on our agenda [this] semester.”
Club president Alexandra Morgan, 20, a sophomore from Mechanicsburg, Cumberland County, agreed; “We definitely have a lot of work [this] semester, so I’m looking forward to it.”
The Zodiac Killer’s case came to the club because a Downtown woman had been looking for a handwriting expert and found Ms. Dresbold. The woman told her this tale:
She and her boyfriend last year had visited her father in northern California, where he also had lived at the time of the Zodiac killings. One night, he disappeared for six hours, returning in the early morning hours. Carrying a whiskey bottle, he woke the couple and oddly began quizzing them on what they knew about serial killers and asked them to name one that had never been caught.
His demeanor was so strange, so dark, so off, his daughter thought. Chillingly, she learned there had been a murder during the time her father was out. The woman began investigating unsolved serial killings in the area and came upon the Zodiac Killer case. Fearing her father was the serial killer, she gave Ms. Dresbold a 2015 Christmas card with her father’s handwriting for comparison.
Ms. Dresbold gets similar requests about 10 times a year from people who mistakenly think a relative is a killer and want her to profile their writing. But this was different.
“The punctuation, spacing, strange letter formation, the angles — I was pretty taken aback by [the comparison],” she said in an interview. “I really think the authorities should follow up on this man.”
How the club evolved
While investigating such a sensational case is exciting, the club has its roots in empathy.
In the summer of 2015, Pitt student Nicole Coons of Harrisburg saw an attendant at a tennis club putting up a missing person poster for Kortne Stouffer, who was 21 when she vanished three years earlier.
Ms. Coons, who plans to go to law school when she graduates this year, talked to the attendant who was a childhood friend of Ms. Stouffer. Moved by the baffling disappearance of someone near her age, she began researching the case and struck upon the idea of creating a cold case club in which “a lot of students look at it to try to catch something police officers might have missed.”
Ms. Coons, 21, presented her idea to her friend and fellow Pitt student Hannah Eisenhart, 22,