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The evidence against Kjell Qvale is truly overwhelming.  The dates of the crimes and letters is just one example.

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For example, the date of the first Zodiac murder was December 20, 1968.  Qvale's mother died on December 20, 1939.

The date of the Lake Berryessa attack was September 27, 1969.  Qvale's father was born on September 27, 1887.

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But there is more: Zodiac asked that his first public appearance in the local papers should take place on August 1, 1969.  Qvale received his first public attention in the San Francisco Chronicle on August 1, 1948.

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Qvale's letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle that I used to identify him as a suspect was published on June 26, 1969.   A year to the day later, on June 26, 1970, the Zodiac sent his Mt. Diablo letter.   A year to the day after that, in June 1971, Qvale traveled to England and held a press conference about Jensen Motors, a company that he had purchased in April 1970 that bore the name of one of the victims at Lake Herman Road (the killer's first attack).  This news conference occurred on June 25, 1971.  The next day both the Times of London and the Financial Times carried stories on the news conference on June 26, 1971.  Thus, both Qvale and Zodiac alternated for three years commemorating the same date of June 26th!

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After I published my book on the case in May 2021, I learned more about the date June 26th that makes this date truly remarkable.  In his autobiography, I Never Look Back, Qvale shows two photographs of a "hill climb race" that he sponsored up the side of Mt. Diablo, a mountain in the Bay Area that Zodiac would later make famous.  He does not give the reader the date of the race or even its year.  A reader of my site named Dave Agazzi contacted me and told me that the race was covered in the July 3, 1949 combined Sunday edition of the Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner.  The race had, according to the article, had occurred "the week before."  Exactly one week prior to July 3rd was June 26, 1949.  In other words, both Qvale and Zodiac had associated themselves with Mt. Diablo (Zodiac with his June 26, 1970 "Mt. Diablo letter") on the same date twenty-one years apart, that being June 26th!​

 

But this now created a problem for me.  I had thought that the June 26, 1969 publication date of Qvale's letter to the editor of the Chronicle was the beginning of the three commemorations of that date by both Qvale and Zodiac from 1969-71 (see discussion above). Now there was another June 26th date that preceded the 1969 letter to the editor by exactly 20 years.  So the question now became, How did Qvale manage to get the Chronicle to publish his letter on the date he obviously wanted of June 26, 1969?  The answer lies in Qvale's strong apparent ties to the newspaper.  It can be proven that Qvale knew both the famed columnist Herb Caen and also Count Marco, to whom Zodiac sent his last letter in July 1974.  Qvale also probably knew the upper management of the paper from his years in the Bohemian Club, an organization that was heavily populated by members of the press.  THerefore, Qvale was likely able to influence the date on which his letter was published by the paper.

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I therefore believe that far from being the first date in the sequence that went from 1969-71, the date of Qvale's letter to the editor of the Chronicle, June 26, 1969, was yet another commemoration of the date twenty years earlier, June 26, 1949, when Qvale held his "hill climb race" on the mountain he shared with the Zodiac killer, Mt. Diablo.

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