Posted on 04/30/2009 3:37:53 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A Southern California woman claimed her father was the infamous Zodiac killer who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1960s and 1970s and said she helped him write and mail the letters that earned him the sensational nickname.
Deborah Perez, 47, said Wednesday that she saw a composite sketch of the Zodiac killer in August 2007 and recognized the man as her father, Guy Ward Hendrickson, who died in 1983. She said she had never heard of the Zodiac killer prior to seeing the composite sketch. "He told me he was sick and all I wanted to do was help my dad," said Perez, who came to her conclusion about two years ago. "He kept telling me he was sick and he killed many, many people.
"I had no idea."
The Zodiac killer is believed to have murdered at least five people and possibly as many as 36. He sent letters to local newspapers including The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner that were splashed across the front pages, taunting reporters, police and the public with codes and clues to find his identity.
Nevertheless, his true identity has never been confirmed by police.
Perez said she was 7-years-old when she helped her father write some of the letters.
While speaking to reporters this afternoon in downtown San Francisco, she also claimed to have the glasses belonging to Paul Stine, a San Francisco cab driver the Zodiac killer fatally shot. She said her father took the glasses off of Stine's face and she kept them all these years and only recently realized they belonged to a murder victim and not her father.
Kevin McLean, also in attendance at the news conference, said he worked with attorney Melvin Belli who the Zodiac killer contacted pleading for help. McLean, acting as Perez's spokesperson, said handwriting tests show Perez did write some of the letters, and they hope DNA testing can be done on the glasses believed to belong to Stine. San Francisco police Sgt. Lyn Tomioka said detectives continue to follow leads and treat all claims equally but emphasized there was only one known murder that took place in San Francisco linked to the Zodiac.
McLean said Perez decided to reveal her father's identity in response to a Sacramento man who reportedly claims a relative of his was the Zodiac killer.
So... she didn’t say anything to the authorities earlier because.....?
every couple of years someone claims they are or know who the Zodiac Killer was, who DB Cooper was, and any other high profile unsolved case.
Doesn’t pass the smell test to me. The letters were not composed by a seven year old. They were quite intricate.
Not sure how you can get a reliable DNA sample from a 40-year-old pair of glasses either unless there was blood splattered on them.
I wonder what year the killings stopped.
Could have had his daughter copy what he had written, so it was in his handwriting.
The glasses probably had a ton of blood on them. Last week a show on the Zodiac was on. He stabbed the cab driver multiple times. He had sent apiece of the cab drivers bloody shirt to the cops so they could verify it was him.
My Step Father was the Zodic killer
This guys evidence seems a bit more compelling that a pair of sun glasses, but we shall see.
Had not thought of book deal before!!!
Wow, thanks nick.
Someone wrote a book about the Zodiak killer a few years ago (Zodiak, by Robert Graysmith), which gave a lot of details into the murderer. One of the topics he discussed was the orthography in the letters—they looked handwritten by the same person, but the letters shared too much similarity (i.e. every s looked identical). He speculated that the killer used some sort of stencil to print the letters.
That a 7 year old could make every s, p, and l identical to every other s, p, or l is not believable.
I agree that the evidence in the video is a lot more interesting than the Perez lady. So voluminous that it should be easy for the FBI to determine if it is fake.
That youtube vid was August of 2008. Anyone know whatever was the result?
http://zodiackillertruth.com/hendrickson.htm
[snip] Perez claims that her stepfather, Guy Ward Hendrickson, took her along on at least two of his attacks in the late 1960s... Perez also claims to have a pair of horn-rimmed glasses taken from Stine... Chris Sorensen, the former mayor of Norco, California, calims that Perez told him that she was an illegitimate daughter of President John F. Kennedy, going as far as to describe her memories of the Kennedy compound. Amazingly, Perez, according to Sorensen, also claimed to have been with Bobby Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel —where the New York Senator and Presidential candidate was assassinated. [pnis]
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.