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Michael Henry O'Hare
Gareth Penn's accused Harvard-educated architect Michael O'Hare,a professor at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, of being the Zodiac Killer. Penn linked the name "Mike O" to the Zodiac murders as early as 1981 in articles for the Mensa Ecphorizer.
Penn also accused O'Hare of the murder of Harvard co-ed Joan Webster a graduate architecture student who disappeared in 1981 but whose skeleton was found and identified in 1990. In the early 1980s, Penn discussed the Joan Webster murder, substituting the pseudonym "Jane Brewster" for the victim in the Mensa Ecphorizer. In the article, Penn tied a "geometric design" to the Webster murder that would later recall his "radian theory" about the Zodiac.
In contrast, Prosecutor Timothy M. Burke pointed to Leonard "The Quahog" Paradiso as the perpetrator of the Joan Webster murder.
O'Hare's grandmother, Kate Richards O'Hare, was one of America's leading socialist agitators in the early part of the 20th century. O'Hare's grandfather, Francis P. "Frank" O'Hare was a leading activist in his own right. A Teamster newspaper referred to Frank O'Hare as "one of the truly great men of St. Louis--possibly the ONLY one."
Kate O'Hare divorced Frank P. O'Hare in 1928, eventually marrying San Francisco attorney Charles C. Cunningham in San Jose. In 1939-40 she was assistant director of the California Department of Penology. She died in Benicia, California, on January 10, 1948.
O'Hare's father, Eugene O'Hare, was born in Oklahoma. He married noted sculptor Berta Margoulies, O'Hare's mother. He also wrote several how-to books. - Source: Wikipedia
Authoring an article in the May/June 2009 edition of the Washington Monthly, O'hare comes forward with his rebuttal of Penn's claims. The article, entitled "Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer," details O'Hare's years of unsolicited contact with Penn, who ironically taunted O'Hare with cryptic letters, postcards, and even phone calls.
An excerpt from the article:I have a recurrent mental image of Penn (whom, to my knowledge, I’ve never met). He’s seated cross-legged on the floor surrounded by an enormous collection of Lego pieces, each one a fact either about me or about the Zodiac/Webster crimes. Hour after hour, day after day, he assembles an amazing structure, but the pieces from the two batches don’t fit together properly, so he relabels something that looks useful, or whittles a new piece from scratch into the shape he needs.
Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer, Conspiracy theories are all fun and games until you become the subject of one. By Michael O’Hare
