Writing Penn's writing, mostly focused on the Zodiac case, was largely published in
The Ecphorizer, the newsletter of the San Francisco chapter of
Mensa International, which had a peak readership of 700 and was published between 1981 and 1995 A 1972 piece he wrote while attending UC Berkeley,
Gottfried von Strassburg and the Invisible Art was published in the peer-reviewed journal of Germanic studies Colloquia Germanica. The piece is a reflection on the legend of
Tristan, a 12th-century hero of
Celtic folklore. Penn says his father, Hugh Scott Penn, who had been a
U.S. Army cryptographer during
World War II, introduced him to the
Zodiac case while he was working for the
California Department of Justice.
Zodiac Killer Gareth Penn started writing about the Zodiac case in a 1981 article for
California Magazine entitled
Portrait of the Artist as a Mass Murderer. In
Portrait, Penn theorized that the Zodiac crime scenes were selected by the killer in order to create a geometric shape over the surface of the
San Francisco Bay Area as a sort of "murderous art project." Part of Penn's commentary about that theory included the observation that, "Other artists had sought to remove their work from the ordinary human perspective. Zodiac trumped them all." Penn then spent the better part of two decades publicly accusing University of California, Berkeley public policy professor Michael O'Hare of the Zodiac murders.
Accusation against Michael O'Hare Starting around 1981, Penn began publicly accusing
University of California, Berkeley public policy professor Michael O'Hare of the Zodiac murders in amateur newsletters and self-published books. Penn openly accused O'Hare on at least two occasions. The basis for these accusations was Penn's cryptographic analysis of a Zodiac letter, which he claimed yielded the name "Mike O." He also accused O'Hare of the murder of Joan Webster, a graduate architecture student at Harvard who disappeared in 1981 and whose remains were found near Boston in 1990. Penn argued that a "geometric design" yielded similarities between the Webster murder and the Zodiac killings in California. On that basis, he accused O'Hare of murdering Webster. O'Hare denied being involved in any murder, and has written about his strange experience. O'Hare filed an FBI complaint against Penn and in May 1981, the Bureau investigated Penn for possible extortion. According to FBI memos, an agent "contacted Penn by telephone and told him that if he was responsible for the correspondence to [O'Hare] he should immediately cease and desist, pointing out that it could jeopardize any investigation and he could possibly be subject to both civil and criminal penalties." In a May 1981 meeting with FBI agents, Penn "freely admitted sending material to [O'Hare] but stated he had no intent to extort anything. ==Cryptography blog==