But after examining doenetwork case # 454umoh closely, after discovering the name of Joseph Chandler buried in the story of another mysterious killer from history, it is hard to not wonder if perhaps the Zodiac's final vanishing didn't ultimately take him to Ohio.
If he didn't, in the end, turn the same kind of gun he'd used on those innocent young adults in California all those years ago on his own head, and do what serial killers tend to want to do the most - take control.
Psychological profiling says it's atypical for serial killers to commit suicide, and that's true...but when they do, another component of many serial killers makeups should be taken into account. Their need for domination, manipulation, and control.
Say the man calling himself Joseph Newton Chandler sat in that Ohio apartment in the summer of 2002 surrounded by memories of emptiness. His final truth was embodied in the still air of his apartment. In the absence of human voices. Say he could feel, that he knew a slow death was being born in the depths of his colon, as the medical examiner later discovered.
All his years of cleverness, of dark victories over those who would have him rotting in prison on the west coast, meaningless now that he was alone. Unknown.
If he was the Zodiac, then his last act was the most moral of his life.
His last act embodied the spiritual fate of the serial killer. The Hollow Man.
T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men", part 1, written in 1925:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellarShape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Article comments
1 - Embersage
Steve, As usual I am impressed with your work. Your right about the fact that we have been discussing Dennis Rader's obsession with the Zodiac Killer. I have been working along side you as well as the others on these cases for a while now. We may never know the face behind the mask. Yet he has left us with some answers, as Rader tried to do. Hiding them in puzzles and codes. We may never have all the answers to who and why. Yet we will keep on searching. For in knowledge there is power.
2 - kat self
I have been blogging on crime rant.com. I have compiled a massive file linking B.T.K. tot the unsolved Zodiac murders. I have uncovered interesting tibits such as a Zodiac letter and a map made by B.T.K. both sighed with the initals r.H. and a Japanese connection on two Zodiac writings. There's plenty of more solid connections too. I'd like to see B.T.K. prosecuted for all his crimes. I'd like to blog with like minded researchers.