Foreword: The Second Power

Gareth Penn: The Second Power

The following is reproduced from Gareth Penn's latest work, a 60-page booklet entitled The Second Power: A Mathematical Analysis of the Letters Attributed to the Zodiac Murderer. The text lives up to its wordy title; densely packed with diagrams and explanations of binary code, cartesian coordinates, and reformatted Zodiac letters, The Second Power may at first glance seem impenetrable to the novice, as was 1987's TIMES 17. Over ten years later, Penn still adheres to his suspect, Harvard-educated career academic Michael Henry O'Hare, but his examination of both O'Hare's and the Zodiac's writings has progressed to almost a quantum level. Where TIMES 17 provided a theory as to who committed the murders, The Second Power provides one as to why -- as many of us are aware, people don't just decide to embark on a gigantic, muderous, multi-media art project. Let the reader beware: this is PG-13 stuff; explicit and chilling as the origins of recognized serial killers often are.

Those familiar with Penn's corpus are aware that he sometimes misses the forest for the trees; he is so wrapped up in the mathematics of the case that he practically ignores the conventional evidence that has arisen in the past fifteen years. Notable are his contradictory theories regarding the watch found at the Riverside crime scene: in TIMES 17, when he'd heard that the time shown was 12:22, he determined that the time was purposely selected to reflect the digital spelling of a word. In The Second Power, written under the mistaken impression that the time shown was 12:24, he delivers another explanation, this one regarding the angles formed by the hour and minute hands. It becomes readily apparent that in almost 20 years of Zodiac research, Penn has never actually looked at a photo of the watch, which clearly shows it stopped at 12:23. This is only one of such blunders.

Nonetheless, Penn's discovery of the Vallejo-Diablo-San Francisco radian was a major contribution to the research of the case. No account of the murders or their context can be complete without recognizing it. The unconventional approach was the first breakthrough in the unconventional case in ten years, and remains so over a dozen years later. While this site does not propose any particular suspect, it is almost impossible for the novice to find Penn's work anywhere else, so it is presented here as a counterbalance to the ubiquitous Robert Graysmith.

Click here for recent developments on The Second Power.

Back
To
Index