Thank you, Peter. The only reason I'm really hesitant to come out and say that I believe it was Gaikowski is based on the fact that after Paul Stine was shot on October 11, 1969 the killer reportedly fled through the Presidio, a park in northern San Fran, and down Jackson Street and was actually believed to had been stopped by two members of SFPD who were responding to the call of the shooting of Stine. They observed a white man walking along the sidewalk step onto a stairway leading to the front yard of one of the homes two blocks from the crime scene. Since the initial report from dispatch was that a black male was responsible for the shooting, the officers drove past the man without stopping. It is believed by many that man was the Zodiac. In November of '69 the Zodiac mailed a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle actually claiming to have been stopped by two police officers just minutes after he had shot Stine and when asked if he had seen anything, he replied, "Yeah. A man just ran into the Presidio." It gets hazy from there. It was later reported that the officers, Don Fouke and Eric Zelms, who claimed to had seen the suspect, did indeed stop to ask him if he had seen anything suspicious as the Zodiac had mentioned in the letter, as to which the man simply responded "no". At the time both Fouke and Zelms claimed to had never stopped to ask the man anything. I'm not sure what the final word is on that now. Eric Zelms was killed in the line of duty of January 1, 1970. After the death of Zelms, his wife claimed that her husband had told her that he and Fouke had in fact stopped the killer and spoken to him "face to face", at which time he calmly answered their questions and was then released. One thing is for certain, someone was spotted just blocks from the scene three minutes after the shooting. I personally believe the two officers stopped him and let him walk. But it wasn't really their fault. After all, they were supposed to be looking for a black male. Plus, having stopped the Zodiac and then letting him go doesn't look that good on a resume. So why admit to it? Perhaps no one would have ever known had the Zodiac himself not mentioned it in that letter. My point about Gaikowski is that when law enforcement did finally get around to questioning him in 1986 about the murders, I never heard anything about Fouke being asked to ID him as the man they had stopped and questioned that night when responding to the Stine call. Though, at that point in time they were still claiming to have not stopped the suspect at all, which is probably bogus. If Don Fouke had been shown a photo of Gaikowski and definitively recognized him as the man they had stopped and questioned on the evening of October 11, 1969, it could have possibly solved the case right then and there. Sadly, no such luck.
