9. Unidentified Serial Killers - Zodiac Killer
59:45 Share

So I'm going to open this episode with a rhetorical question.

Does this case really need an introduction? Probably not, right? But I can't assume everyone's heard of the Zodiac Killer because Garrett knew nothing about the Zodiac Killer. But the Zodiac Killer is like 20th century's Jack the Ripper. It is perhaps America's greatest unsolved crime mystery. It seems that every couple of years, someone steps forward with a new Zodiac suspect and

Not long ago, it was a group of citizen detectives called the Code Breakers who claimed that they had identified Zodiac as a guy named Gary Post. Now, Gary Post had forehead wrinkles that looked like the Zodiac's. So therefore, he must have been the Zodiac.

And then a few years before that, it was a dead guy named Earl Van Best whom his son had discovered was Zodiac. Last year, actually a writer named Jarrett Koveck stumbled upon what may be the best Zodiac suspect ever developed. And we're going to talk about that later in the episode, but let's begin with an overview of the case.

So the Zodiac Killer was born at approximately 11:20 PM on the night of December 20th, 1968. This is when he pulled up to a gravel turnout off Lake Herman Road where two teenagers were parked in a 61 Rambler.

The man, whose name nobody knows, got out of his car and approached the two teens and then open fired. The girl fled the car through the passenger door and the boy ran out through the driver's side door. The boy was shot in the head at point blank range, immediately falling to the ground. And the girl, as she was running away, was shot in the back five times, also dropping to the ground. The shooter then got back into his car and drove away.

The next car to pass through the area was driven by a woman named Stella who approached the turnout at around 1119. When her headlights caught the two dying teenagers lying motionless and bloody, she floored the accelerator because she had spotted a police cruiser. She honked her horn and flashed her headlights until she got the cop's attention and reported what she'd seen. Now,

Now back at the scene, responding officers and medics found the girl dead and the boy unconscious, but he was still breathing shallow breaths. He was taken to Vallejo General Hospital where he was pronounced dead less than an hour later. The two victims were identified as Betty Lou Jensen, a 16 year old junior at Hogan High School in Vallejo and David Faraday, 17, a popular student and a member of the wrestling team.

They had been out on their first date and tragically the last date either of them would ever have with anyone. Temperatures that night were at the threshold of freezing and the ground was so hard that it was absent of any shoe or tire impressions. The only real evidence the killer left behind were 10 spent bullet casings.

Whoever shot these two young people dead was pretty much a phantom who left no trace of himself and no witnesses. Now months would go by. The investigation ran out of leads and out of steam very quickly and stalled out. And then on July 4th, 1969, it happened again. The same man, the same circumstances, even the same area.

This time, it was 22-year-old Darlene Farron and her friend, 19-year-old Mike Mazzot. Late in the evening after the fireworks display had ended, Mike and Darlene drove to Blue Rock Springs Park and parked Darlene's car in a turnout off Columbus Parkway. As they sat in their car with the radio softly playing, the headlights of another car pulled up into the lot.

Then suddenly that car's headlights went dark and it parked about eight feet away.

and just sat there in silence. The figure behind the wheel blended into the darkness. Mike asked Darlene if she knew who it was in the other car and she said, "Oh, nevermind." The car then drove away. But after five minutes passed, the car returned, this time pulling up behind the couple's car. The driver then exited his car and switched on high powered flashlight. Because of this, Mike believed it was a cop and he and Darlene got their ID cards ready.

But as the man approached and shine the light into the young pair's faces, loud pops began sounding. As Mike and Darlene felt the bullets tear into their bodies, it became clear this man was no cop. At this point, Mike dove into the backseat and flailed about trying to dodge the bullets, vainly within the very tight space that he'd taken cover in. The man kept firing, reaching his gun into the backseat and pumping more bullets into Mike.

And then without a word, the shooter began walking back to his car. But hearing Mike's screams of pain, the man returned and fired four more shots, two into each victim. He then returned to his car again and this time drove away.

A car full of teenagers soon came upon the scene and went to summon help. Both Mike and Darlene were still alive, but they were badly wounded. When help arrived, Mike was writhing in pain on the ground while Darlene sat in the driver's seat, her body stiff, her mind barely conscious. Roughly half an hour later, a telephone call came in to the Vallejo Police Department.

Police dispatcher Nancy took the call. On the other end, a male voice began speaking. I want to report a double murder. Nancy started to reply, but the man kept speaking, his volume increasing until Nancy went silent and just listened.

If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They were shot with a nine millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Nancy again tried to talk, but the man cut her off once more to say in a taunting tone, goodbye. He then hung up.

The call was traced to a payphone at the corner of Springs Road and Tuolumne Street in downtown Vallejo, three miles away from the crime scene. Around the same time the unknown man placed the phone call from the payphone, Darlene Farren was pronounced dead. And then about a half an hour later, the phone rang at Darlene Parent's house. It wasn't someone reporting the news that Darlene had died. That news hadn't reached the family yet.

No, the person on the other end was a heavy breather. They said nothing. Mike would actually go on to survive the shooting, but not without lifelong physical and psychological trauma. Mike had been hardly able to make out the man who shot at them in the dark behind the blinding beam of his flashlight.

The best description he could offer was the man was heavyset with a large round face, about five feet, eight inches tall with short, curly, light brown hair. The San Francisco papers, the Chronicle and the Examiner had barely taken notice of these cases in Vallejo. It received limited coverage, relegated to the ninth page or the 24th page, and it

at least one person in the Bay Area community was displeased that this wasn't getting front page coverage because this was all about to change. On August 1st, 1969, in the story of the Zodiac, a letter arrived in the mailroom of the San Francisco Chronicle. It was a letter with the words, please rush to editor on the envelope.

written in blue ink with no return address. A letter that otherwise appeared ordinary. That was until it was opened. It began. Dear Editor, This is the murderer of the two teenagers last Christmas at Lake Herman and the girl on the 4th of July near the golf course in Vallejo. To prove I killed them, I shall state some facts which only I and the police know.

He then went on to provide details about the Faraday and Jensen murders. The brand of ammunition he used, the number of shots fired, the positions of the bodies. He then did the same thing for the 4th of July murders. The girl was wearing patterned slacks, he wrote. The boy was also shot in the knee. Brand name of ammo was Western. And these were in fact details that hadn't been released to the media before.

The writer also included a cipher, a message that was written in code, and he insisted that the Chronicle publish it, promising that the cipher contained his identity.

And then he ended his letter with a terrifying threat. Quote, if you do not print this cipher by the afternoon of Fry 1st of August 69, I will go on a kill rampage Fry night. I will cruise around all weekend killing lone people in the night, then move on to kill again until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend. The letter was then signed with a symbol.

a circle with two intersecting lines cutting through it, like the crosshairs on a gun sight. And if you want to see what this symbol kind of looked like, go ahead and just look at the G in our logo. On the same day that the letter came in, nearly identical handwritten letters were also received by the Vallejo Times Herald and the San Francisco Examiner. Each of the three letters contained part of the cipher.

The following day, after some debate on whether or not to publish any part of the anonymous confession letter, the Chronicle ran an article about it and included the piece they received of the cipher. The day after that, on August 3rd, the Examiner published all three parts of the letter. And then, on August 4th, another letter was mailed, handwritten in blue ink, clearly written by the same man.

Dear editor, it began just like the previous trio of letters. But then the first line of the letter would create the character that would live in infamy. It was, quote, this is the Zodiac speaking. This was giving birth to the trade name and successfully branding himself, though it would take a while for the press to run with it.

For the rest of 1969, most news outlets were referring to him as the cipher killer. His letter, which is known among zodiologists, yes, that's what the Zodiac Killer experts are called, this second letter is generally referred to as the debut of Zodiac Letter for shorthand.

And it was signed, as were most of the many letters going forward, with the trademark circle with the crosshairs through it. The debut of Zodiac Letter went on to say, In answer to your asking for more details about the good times I have had in Vallejo, I shall be very happy to supply even more material. By the way, are the police having a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do crack it, they will have me.

Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be a lie. On August 3rd, a couple reading the newspaper sat down with the cipher and decided to try and crack it together. It was Donald Harden, a school teacher, and his wife Pamela. They were at their kitchen table and within a matter of three or four days, together, they had solved it.

The Decoded Cipher read as follows, quote,

It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is that when I die, I will be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife. And then the remaining 19 characters were just a nonsensical jumble of letters that seemed like leftovers in the cipher.

The Hardens sent in their solution to the Chronicle and it was verified correct by their editors as well as the Vallejo Police Department. So this would emerge as the first major development in the Zodiac case. And it was cracked by amateurs, citizens,

which would set the tone for the Zodiac investigation for decades to come. So on the same day it was announced that the cipher had been cracked, an unknown individual sent a letter addressed to Sergeant John Lynch of the Vallejo Police Department saying,

It was a letter that was postmarked August 10th, so it would have already been known that the cipher had been cracked. Yet the author of the letters seemed to be offering his own contribution, providing a partial solution to a cipher that had already been solved. It was a solution that was mostly correct, but then contained errors that could only have been deliberate. Perhaps to make it appear that the writer of the letter was just doing guesswork?

accompanying this solution was a typewritten letter read as follows, quote, Dear Sergeant Lynch, I hope the enclosed key will prove to be beneficial to you in connection with the cipher letter writer. Working puzzles, cryptograms, and word puzzles is one of my pleasures. Please forgive the absence of my signature or name as I do not wish to have my name in the papers. And it could be mentioned by a slip of the tongue. And then it's signed, with best wishes, Concerned Citizen.

This communication was odd enough that it was saved and later sent to the FBI for latent fingerprint analysis. But weeks passed without any additional letters from the man now calling himself the Zodiac. And then...

On the afternoon of September 27th, Brian Hartnell, a 20-year-old pre-law student at Pacific Union College, and his girlfriend, 22-year-old Cecilia Shepard, were relaxing on a blanket on the shores of a lake in Napa County when Brian heard some rustling off in the distance. Brian wasn't wearing his glasses at the time. He was relaxing on his back, so he asked Cecilia to see what the deal was.

Some distance away, Cecilia saw a man walking in their direction. "'Is he alone?' Brian asked. "'Yeah,' she told him. Though they were all alone at the lake with no one else around except now this guy, Cecilia didn't seem to think much of it until the man disappeared behind a tree."

Brian thought that perhaps the man was just urinating, but then the man emerged from behind the tree a minute or so later wearing a ceremonial black executioner's hood with a circle and crosshair symbol on it.

This is obviously the zodiac symbol. He was also brandishing a gun pointed right at the young couple. Oh, Celia said, he's got a gun. They asked the hooded man what he wanted. Now take it easy, the stranger said. All I want is your money. There's nothing to worry about. He repeated again. All I want is your money.

Brian, at this point, tried to reassure the hooded man that he was more than willing to cooperate. He told them that he'd read about the criminal mind and he wanted to help him in any way he could. No strings attached, he said, even though he only had 75 cents on him at the moment. That doesn't matter, the man replied, his voice slightly muffled through his hood. Every little bit helps. I'm on my way to Mexico, the man explained. I escaped from Deer Lodge Prison in Montana. I killed a guard while getting out, so don't go playing hero on me.

Now I need some money to get down to Mexico, he said. Brian told the man he was welcome to what little money he had and he can get even more if need be. He asked the man if he'd take a personal check. The man declined. Brian asked if there was anything else he needed. Yes, the man said. One more thing. I want your car keys. My car is hot.

Brian couldn't remember where he put them. And at that point, the man in the hood told Brian, "I want the girl to tie you up. I'd feel much better if you were tied up." He pulled some nylon clothesline from his back pocket and handed it to Cecilia, who was beginning to tremble in fear. Brian tried to get the man to keep talking, but he was mostly silent as Cecilia then took the rope and began tying Brian's hands.

Brian then whispered to Cecilia that he thought he could get the man's gun from him and asked her if she minded. But Cecilia told him not to. She was too afraid. Once Cecilia was done, the man holstered his gun and walked behind Brian to inspect. He found that Cecilia had tied Brian's hands pretty loosely. I mean, go figure. So he tightened the bindings and then tied Cecilia up.

Brian could tell by the way the man's voice now sounded and from the way it felt when he was being tied that the man was very nervous. He too seemed to be trembling. And once both Brian and Cecilia were bound, lying on their stomachs on the blanket, Brian asked the hooded man if his gun was really loaded. The man removed the clip to show him the gun was fully loaded.

The man then reholstered his gun and Brian turned to Cecilia and began speaking before suddenly feeling searing pain in his back, accompanied by a metallic chomping sound. The man had begun stabbing him in his back. Brian cried out in pain while Cecilia watched, tied up, screaming in horror. The man then stood upright, moved over to Cecilia and began plunging his knife into her as she tried to turn to avoid it.

The knife entered multiple parts of Cecilia's body as both she and Brian lay helpless in the eerie late afternoon. In the middle of this chaos, the man stabbed Cecilia at least 10 times and when he was done, the man walked away and disappeared just as casually as he'd appeared.

Brian and Cecilia then began trying to get loose. Cecilia was in tremendous pain, but she was lucid. There was a boat that kept circling the lake and both of them called out and the boat approached the shore, turning off its motor. And the people on the boat just stood and watched for about 15 minutes, but they didn't communicate back or do anything. The two finally managed to get their hands free, but Cecilia was in too much pain to move. Brian and Cecilia were trying to get loose, but they couldn't.

Brian began the thousand foot trek from the blanket where they were stabbed to the roadside of Knoxville Road. Though it was less than a fifth of a mile away, the journey felt like it took forever. And on the way, Brian passed out twice and thought,

he wouldn't survive long enough to reach civilization, but he eventually did make it and he flagged down park ranger Dennis Land, who called for help and then accompanied Brian back to the site where Cecilia was still conscious, but had bled out significantly.

Sometimes after a particularly long day, I love to play games on my phone to get my mind off things and one game I have been loving is June's Journey. June's Journey is a hidden object mystery mobile game that puts your detective skills to the test. You play as June Parker and investigate beautifully detailed scenes of the 1920s while uncovering the mystery of her sister's murder. With hundreds of mind-teasing puzzles, the next clue is always within reach.

Every new scene and chapter leads to more juicy secrets and clues being revealed about this mysterious murder that brings out the detective in everyone. Plus, you get to chat and play with or against other players by joining a detective club. You'll even get the chance to play in a detective league to put your skills to the test.

I have always loved good scavenger hunts and puzzles, and of course, we all know I love a good murder mystery, and this is just the perfect marriage of the two. Right now, I'm on Chapter 2. I have been trying so hard not to use the lightbulb feature to help me search for clues. I seriously look forward to playing it every night. Discover your inner detective when you download June's Journey for free today on iOS and Android.

Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out. That's how it was for me. So I cleared out my cabinet and reset my health with CBD from CB Distillery. And it has been a real change. Now, CB Distillery's targeted formulations are made from the highest quality clean ingredients,

No fluff, no fillers, just pure, effective CBD solutions designed to help support your health. In two non-clinical surveys, 81% of customers experienced more calm, 80% said CBD helped with pain after physical activity, and an impressive 8%.

90% said they slept better with CBD. And you guys, I have taken CBD to help me sleep and I always zonk out so fast and have such a restful night's sleep. Those nights that I'm tossing and turning, I always reach for my CBD. So if you struggle with a health concern and haven't found relief, make the change like I did to CB distillery. And with over

2 million customers and a solid 100% money back guarantee, CB Distillery is the source to trust. I have a 20% discount to get you started.

Visit CBDistillery.com and use code DARK for 20% off, you guys. If you wanted to give CBD a try, go to CBDistillery.com, code DARK. CBDistillery.com, use code DARK. All right, let's get back to the episode. After authorities arrived at the scene, they found that Brian's white Volkswagen was parked where they left it.

and drawn on the passenger door was a circle with crosshairs through it, and the following text, Vallejo 1220-68-7469, September 27th, 69, 630, by knife.

It was the same man who had killed David and Betty Lou Jensen, killed Darlene Farron and wounded Mike. The man who was writing letters to the press. The man who was now calling himself the Zodiac.

At 7.40 p.m. that evening, approximately an hour and a half after the lake stabbings, a phone call was placed to the Napa police, and the man on the other end said to the dispatcher, quote, I want to report a murder. No, he corrected himself, a double murder. They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen.

Where are you now? Asked the dispatch officer. And then, in a much lower tone, almost menacing, the man intoned, I'm the one that did it.

Then he stopped speaking. The dispatcher could hear the phone was still off the hook. He heard voices in the background faintly, the sound of cars passing, but the man was no longer on the line. The operator told police that the call had come from a payphone near the Napa car wash, some 20 miles south of the lake, going toward Vallejo. At the scene, authorities found the phone receiver still dangling off the hook as the caller had left it.

The receiver was dusted for prints and several clear latents were lifted. Prints that remain to this day unidentified. The killer, as he had with Mike, did not expect this male victim, Brian, to live because he reported his crime as a double murder. So if he did not expect to leave surviving witnesses, then why did he wear the hood?

It was obviously for his own gratification. He was acting out a fantasy, a role play, if you will, which is consistent with him dubbing himself the Zodiac and sending a cipher, which seemed to be obviously referencing the most dangerous game, the famous adventure story by Richard Connell about a big game hunter who decides to begin hunting humans.

But other than the writing on the car door, there had been no further communication from the so-called cipher killer since August 4th, since that debut of Zodiac Letter. Brian Hartnell slowly recovered from his wounds during this time, but Cecilia Shepard hadn't been as lucky. She died from her wounds two days after the attack. If only they'd gotten help sooner, she may have survived, but she had just lost too much blood.

Two weeks went by from the date of the lake attack. It was Saturday night, October 11th. A 29-year-old taxi driver named Paul Stein picked up a man from the corner of Mason Street and Jerry Street in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. The passenger gives his destination as Washington and Maple in the neighborhood of Presidio Heights.

But for whatever reason, when Stein approached this intersection, he drove one block further to the corner of Washington and Cherry. And at this point, the passenger in the back seat then shot Paul Stein in the head at Point Blake Range. Some teenagers looking out the second story window of their house actually saw what happened next, but it was from a distance. They

They saw the man enter the front passenger door of the cab and appear to struggle with or take something from the driver. It looked like maybe he was going through the cabbie's pockets. The teens believed they were witnessing an assault or a robbery and they called emergency dispatch to report it. They gave a description of the man, a white male in his early 40s wearing eyeglasses with reddish blonde hair and a crew cut and dark clothes.

As police cruisers made their way to the scene, they passed a white male around 40 years old with blondish hair and a crew cut, but they didn't stop him. And why didn't they stop him? Because the initial description that went out told police to be on the lookout for a black male. Once that description was corrected, the man with the crew cut was nowhere to be seen.

At the corner of Washington and Maple, they found Paul Stein's lifeless body hanging out of the cab. A piece of his shirt appeared to have been cut away with a pair of scissors. The taxi cab was processed for fingerprints and multiple unidentified latent prints were found, including one near the door handle in Paul Stein's blood. So that fingerprint had to be that of his killer.

A few days later, a letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle, postmarked October 13th, two days after Paul Stein's murder. The envelope bore the now familiar handwriting in the now characteristic blue ink, and again the words, Please Rush to Editor.

Inside was a letter from the man now calling himself the Zodiac, claiming credit for the murder of Paul Stein, a murder that otherwise would never have been connected to the two incidents in Vallejo or the stabbing at the lake, which itself wouldn't have been connected to the Vallejo killings had Zodiac not written on the car door and had Brian Hartnell not survived to provide a description of the hood.

And inside the latest letter was a bloody piece of Paul Stein's shirt, proving his responsibility for the murder. The author also taunted that the police could have caught him if they, quote, had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcycles, seeing who could make the most noise. He continues on, the car drivers should have just parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover, he gloated.

He then ended his letter with a chilling threat. Quote, school children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire and then pick off the kitties as they come bouncing out. If his objective was to sow panic in the Bay Area community, it worked. This was a man who had killed five people and was getting bolder with each crime.

and a man with a name whose letters came taunting to police. So who's to say he wasn't capable of delivering on his threat?

On October 22nd, 11 days after Paul Signs murder, the Oakland Police Department received a 2:00 AM phone call from a man claiming to be the Zodiac Killer. And he was making demands. They were that one of two men, either Melvin Belli or F Lee Bailey, these were two of the country's most famous defense attorneys, both of whom lived in San Francisco at this time,

that either of them appear on a local TV chat show called the Jim Dunbar Show, which was set to air live later that evening. So he says, you need to get one of these two guys on the show tonight. The man claiming to be the Zodiac said his name was Sam and agreed that he would call into the show and talk to either one of these guys on air, provided that the call was not traced. Police started to scramble and Melvin Belly was contacted and agreed to make the appearance.

And that night, as the show went live, the man called in just as he said he would. Sam, or the Zodiac, sounded like a disturbed individual and claimed he had suffered blackouts and brownouts and headaches and he killed people. He had multiple personalities living inside of him.

These calls eventually were traced back to a psychiatrist patient named Eric Wheel, who was officially cleared of having been the Zodiac. So this was all just a crank call. But you can see just how desperate police were to take this seriously. It soon emerged in the press that the Zodiac killer had been directly observed by multiple eyewitnesses, including the cop who drove past him.

A composite sketch was published based on both witness accounts, and it was also revealed that they believed they had the killer's fingerprints.

Two more communications from the Zodiac then followed after these things were revealed. They were postmarked November 8th and 9th, respectively. The November 8th mailing was a greeting card with another cipher enclosed. That cipher became known as the Z340 cipher. And this cryptogram would not be cracked for another 51 years. But more on that later.

The November 9th mailing was a rambling six-page letter in which the Zodiac outlines his plan to blow up a school bus using a sunlight-activated bomb hidden underground somewhere. He even included a hand-drawn diagram which revealed at least some rudimentary knowledge of drafting. But also, the Zodiac addressed some of the things reported in the press, and this is key. He wrote: "1. I do look like the description 'passed out only when I do my thing.'

The rest of the time, I look entirely different. I shall not tell you what my disguise consists of when I kill. Two, as of yet, I have left no fingerprints behind me, contrary to what the police say. In my killings, I wear transparent fingertip guards. All it is is two coats of airplane cement coated on my fingertips. Quite unnoticeable and very effective. Three, my killing tools have been, quote, "botten"

That's his word, not mine. I'm just quoting the letter. And his letters, by the way, were full of misspellings and grammatical errors that most analysts believe were deliberate and not accidental. But either way, his letter continues. "...my killing tools have been bought in through the mail order outfits before the ban went into effect."

except one and it was bought out of state. Now the ban he's referring to was a 1968 prohibition on unlicensed mail order guns. So you really have to wonder if this guy is trying not to get caught, which despite whatever game he's playing, he doesn't want to get caught. That much is inarguable. Then why is he revealing the tricks of his trade?

I think what he's really revealing here by offering this much inside information is that the composite sketch is in fact a really good likeliness of him. That he realizes he did in fact leave fingerprints behind and

and that his firearms were purchased legally and may be traceable. This was classic misdirection in a tactic to try and get the police off his trail. He was nervous. He was very nervous and was now trying to correct the record with a bunch of BS. In fact, the personality of the Zodiac is a constructed personality. Very little, if anything, that the Zodiac is writing has any basis in his actual identity.

Just like the first cipher, once it was cracked, it revealed absolutely nothing about him, even though that's what he promised.

assume that what he wrote in his bus bomb letter is also a lie? He looks very similar to the composite and he doesn't wear these transparent fingertip guards. He very nearly got caught after killing Paul Stein and if the wrong description advising of a blackmail hadn't gone out and the initial bolo had been correct the Zodiac killer probably would have been arrested on the evening of October 11th just after shooting Paul Stein and we probably wouldn't even be talking about him now.

There wouldn't be a dozen or more Zodiac Killer websites. There wouldn't have been a feature film. The Zodiac Killer would have become something closer to a footnote rather than this mythical figure he's grown into. And despite that myth, the myth of his brilliance, which was a myth that the Zodiac himself created and the press had...

boughten right into, the Zodiac was in fact a brazen and clumsy criminal who could have and should have been caught in 1969. And it's telling that after nearly getting caught, Paul Stein was Zodiac's last known victim. From that point forward, Zodiac stuck to letter writing. After his bus bomb letter, the Zodiac would send about a dozen more correspondences all the way through 1974 when the last known letter was sent.

His letters were full of rambling nonsense intended to be interpreted as clues and cryptic reveals. When in fact they were as empty and arbitrary as the text in his cipher. And that Z340 cipher, the one that remained uncracked for over 50 years, we talked about a little earlier. It was finally solved in 2020 by a trio of code breakers.

David Orenchak, a software developer and zodiologist based in the United States, Sam Blake, a mathematician in Australia, and Jarl, a programmer out of Belgium. With the help of a code-breaking software application, the Z340 was finally cracked and the solution was verified and accepted by the FBI.

And here's what that decoded message said. I hope you're having lots of fun and trying to catch me. That wasn't me on the TV show, which brings up a point about me. I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradise.

So they are afraid of death. I am not afraid because I know that my new life will be an easy one in paradise. So after literally 50 years, nothing new was gleaned from this long, uncracked cipher.

Except that Zodiac, as it was already known, had been following the news coverage of his crimes. And he acknowledged that it wasn't him who called into the Jim Dunbar show. And this cipher didn't remain on crack for 50 plus years because Zodiac was a brilliant cipher maker. It's just the opposite. He cleared

He clearly intended for the Z340 cipher to be cracked way sooner than it was because its message is inconsequential. But he was such an amateur cryptographer, barely competent at it, that his ciphers were hard to crack because they were so poorly constructed. There were four ciphers in all and two of them remain uncracked.

One of them, included in a letter mailed on April 20th, 1970, promises to reveal his name just like he'd promised in his first cipher. We know this because it's preceded by the words, my name is. And that cipher is only 13 characters long, which makes it virtually uncrackable. A

A cipher requires a certain number of characters in order for patterns to be visible and for the cipher to be crackable. The other Zodiac cipher that remains uncracked is a 32-character cipher that appears at the end of a letter sent in on June 26, 1970, in which Zodiac complains that no one in the Bay Area had followed a suggestion he offered in an earlier letter.

that everyone in the region begins wearing buttons with his zodiac symbol on it. In the letter, he includes a map with a symbol drawn onto it, promising that the map, coupled with the cipher, will lead to the location of his buried school bus bomb.

He also claims in the letter that he had shot a man sitting in a parked car using a .38 caliber pistol. Now, some believe he was referring to Officer Richard of the San Francisco Police Department who was shot to death on the morning of June 19th, 1970, around four in the morning while sitting in his police cruiser and writing a citation. His murder was actually never solved, but it's just as likely Zodiac read about the shooting in the newspaper and decided to take credit for it.

his letters, the Zodiac would often take credit for other crimes. But some of these crimes were later solved, revealing that the Zodiac was simply taking credit for that which wasn't his. However, there was one earlier murder down in the city of Riverside in 1966 that because of its circumstances, police were looking at it as a possible early murder committed by the Zodiac. The victim's name was Sherry Jo Bates.

She was 18 years old, a freshman at Riverside City College. She had been up late studying at the campus library and had just walked out into the parking lot where she found her Volkswagen Beetle wouldn't start. And what happened immediately afterward is unknown. The next time anyone saw Sherry Jo Bates, it was at 628 the following morning. That would be Halloween day. She had been stabbed to death and left in a gravel path between two vacant houses, just a block or two away from the library.

It was found that the reason her beetle wouldn't start was that the ignition coil wire and distributor had been deliberately disabled. One student claimed she had observed a young man around 19 or 20 years old lurking in the shadows across the street with his eyes locked on Sherry's car. Sherry had put up a valiant struggle and had also been kicked in the head and had cuts all over her body, including having her throat slashed.

It was that and two knife wounds to the chest that had been fatal. A month after her murder, two typewritten letters were sent, one to the Riverside Police Department and the other to the Riverside Press Enterprise. The letters were titled with the header, The Confession.

and were mostly identical in their content, which was she was young and beautiful, but now she is battered and dead. She's not the first and she will not be the last. I lay awake at night thinking about my next victim. Maybe she will be the beautiful blonde that babysits near the little store and walks down the dark alley each evening about seven. Or maybe she will be the shapely blue eyed brunette that said no when I asked her for a date in high school.

But maybe it will not be either. But I shall cut off her female parts and deposit them for the whole city to see. So don't make it easy for me. Keep your sisters, daughters, and wives off the streets and alleys. Miss Bates was stupid. She went to the slaughter like a lamb. She did not put up a struggle, which was not true, by the way. We know that she put up a hell of a struggle. It says, but I did. It was a ball. I first pulled the middle wire from the distributor. Then I waited for her in the library and followed her out after about two minutes.

The battery must have been about dead by then. I then offered to help. She was then very willing to talk to me. I told her that my car was down the street and that I would give her a lift home. When we were away from the library walking, I said it was about time. She asked me, about time for what?

I said it was about time for her to die. I grabbed her around the neck with my hand over her mouth and my other hand with a small knife at her throat. She went very willingly. Her breast felt warm and very firm under my hands, but only one thing was on my mind, making her pay for the brush-offs that she had given me during the years prior. She died hard. She squirmed and shook as I choked her. Her lips twitched. She let out a scream once I kicked her in the head to shut her up.

Okay, Dr. Seuss. And then that's where the letter ends. And then the foreshadowing.

And the following April, three additional letters were sent to the Riverside Police Department, to the Riverside Press Enterprise, and to Joseph Bates, the father of Sherry Jo Bates, the victim. These letters were signed with a strange symbol that looked like a number two. I guess it could have been a Z. And also both letters contained more postage than was necessary, which was a hallmark of the Zodiac's mailings.

So on the basis of these letters, some believed the Zodiac might have been responsible for this murder and also may have come from the Riverside area.

And after this began receiving press coverage, Zodiac was quick to claim credit for it. In a March 13th, 1971 letter to the Los Angeles Times, the Zodiac mentioned, I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my Riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones. There are a hell of a lot more down there. So going back to Sherry Jo Bates, the Riverside police no longer believe that her murder has any connection to Zodiac.

And a couple of years ago, they extracted DNA from the stamps used on the handwritten Bates had to die notes. Those were the second ones he sent and identified the writer via forensic genealogy. That man, now a senior citizen, admitted to writing the letters claiming that he had some psychological problems at the time, but that he actually had nothing to do with Sherry's murder. And somehow they were able to rule him out.

It's believed that there was DNA developed from hair and other material found on Sherry, though this has never been verified by the Riverside Police Department.

So if those handwritten letters were ruled a hoax, then that makes everything about them and their link to Zodiac, the Z-like symbol used as a signature and the double postage, purely coincidental. The last confirmed Zodiac letters were received in 1974, in January of 1974. This was after nearly three years without a Zodiac letter.

the Zodiac sent a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle reporting that the movie, "The Exorcist" was quote, "The best satirical comedy," end quote, that he had ever seen. And he warned that if he didn't see the letter in the paper, he would do something nasty, signing off with a strange symbol and a scorecard boasting 37 kills. And the last confirmed Zodiac correspondence wasn't in fact even written in the Zodiac character.

but it's been linked to him by its tone and its handwriting. The letter, which I referenced in our last binge drop about the Adam Walsh case, mostly focuses on the 1973 movie Badlands, which was loosely based on the real life murder spree of Charles Starkweather and his lover slash accomplice, Carol. The letter reads, sirs, again, we talked about this. We got a lot of comments that meant this could just mean men and

and not Sears, but either way it goes on. I would like to express my consternation concerning your poor taste and lack of sympathy for the public by your running of the ads for the movie Badlands featuring the blurb quote, in 1959, most people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people. In light of recent events, this kind of murder glorification can only be deplorable at best.

Not that glorification of violence was ever justifiable. It went on, why don't you show some concern for public sensibilities and cut the ad? And then it signed a citizen.

So what was the purpose of this letter, of any of the Zodiac's letters? The most logical explanation is that Zodiac was a powerless man hungry for power and attention. Going out and committing murder was too risky. He'd almost gotten caught, and I think that spooked him for good. So the next best thing was the letter writing, which had already kind of paid off. Seeing his work in the Bay Area's largest newspaper publications getting front-page press was

The content wasn't so much the point. The mere fact that there was content from the Zodiac, regardless of what it said, gave him doses of his narcissistic supply, much like social media, like Instagram, where content is created for content's sake. Zodiac was creating content for content's sake.

And part of the game for Zodiologists and anyone with their own theories is to try and figure out what the meaning behind the content is. But I have to say, what if there really is no meaning? What if there's just nothing to decipher? Everything about the Zodiac's personality, his words, reveal him to be an extraordinarily shallow individual, whoever he is.

Who is he or was he? That's the main game for not just Zodiologist, but for Zodiac. I think Zodiac reveled in being a phantom killer like the kind he read about in fiction. He was creating a real world mystery to which only he knew the solution.

So who are some of the Zodiac suspects who have surfaced over the years? The most notable and one of the earliest was a man named Arthur Lee Allen. Now, Allen first came to the attention of investigators when a friend of his, possibly an estranged friend named Don, went to police to share his suspicions that Allen might be the Zodiac.

According to Don, Arthur Lee Allen told him of his plans to write a novel based around a fantasy he had where he would call himself the Zodiac and begin hunting humans, killing random couples.

He said the Zodiac would send letters to newspapers and the police boasting of his crimes, and he would sign them with a circle and crosshair symbol. So this conversation supposedly took place at the beginning of 1969, before the second shootings, and that's before the Zodiac began even sending letters.

Allen, who was 35 years old in 1969, had been fired from his job as school teacher a year earlier for allegedly molesting a boy. Allen was questioned by police in 1971, and during the interview, he had let it slip that he had bloody knives in his car, and this was the day of the lake attack.

He claimed he had used those knives to kill a chicken. They also noticed he was wearing a Zodiac brand watch, whose brand symbol was the same circle and crosshair as the Zodiac used. Arthur Lee Allen also had the same shoe size as the Zodiac. This was a 10.5 and the same physical build as the Zodiac. Although Allen was six foot two, which is several inches taller than the Zodiac was estimated to be. And he was bald.

The man seen on the evening of the Stein murder was described by multiple witnesses as having a crew cut with reddish blonde hair. A cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle named Robert became obsessed with the Zodiac, which eventually became his career. He wrote a book about the case in 1986 in which he named Arthur Lee Allen as the Zodiac, though he did use a pseudonym for him in the book.

And the 2007 movie Zodiac leans into this theory. However, Arthur Lee Allen's fingerprints did not match any of the Zodiac latent prints that were found. And his DNA profile did not match the partial DNA profile that were developed from the Zodiac's letters.

Another suspect was a man named Rick Marshall, who was a cinema projectionist in San Francisco at a silent movie theater called The Avenue. He'd become a suspect in the mid-1970s after allegedly making incriminating statements over amateur radio. Some believe his handwriting matches that of the Zodiac, as does his physical appearance.

And his cinema was screaming a silent film called The Red Phantom around the time a letter was sent to the Chronicle that was believed to be suspicious and possibly from the Zodiac, a letter that had been signed, The Red Phantom.

A number of people in recent years have come forward with claims that their fathers or stepfathers were the Zodiac. And in 2009, a former attorney named Robert, who had been disbarred in the mid-70s, took out a full-page ad in the Vallejo Times-Herald declaring that Arthur Lee Allen, who had spent the rest of his life under the cloud of Zodiac, was innocent because a man who wasn't Allen had come to him in the mid-1970s and asked for a consultation.

He then confessed that he was the Zodiac Killer. The man, a merchant mariner, described his crimes in such detail that the attorney claimed he was satisfied the man was telling the truth. According to him, the man was considering turning himself in and asked him what the potential consequences might be. He then left the attorney's office and he was never seen again. Now, the attorney couldn't ever remember this man's name and the claim has never been verified.

Again, another thing was at the beginning of the pandemic, the writer Jarrett Kovac began writing a book about 1960s counterculture that morphed into a book about the Zodiac Killer. That book is called Motor Spirits, The Long Hunt for the Zodiac. And in it, Kovac wanted to retell the story of the Zodiac from the beginning, pre-Gray Smith, entirely through contemporary news coverage and police files.

So he wasn't using anything as a source that was dated later than the period Zodiac was active. After his

After he'd finished writing Motor Spirit, he was having a conversation with a friend speculating that Zodiac must have been a comic collector. The reasoning for this is that one of Zodiac's correspondences was a Halloween card set on October 27th, 1970, which said with the words, paradise and slaves crisscrossing each other and four phrases written in the quadrants said by fire, by gun, by rope and by knife.

Now, this is very similar to a concept seen on the cover of issue number 30 of a comic book called Tim Holt, published in June 1952. The cover features the hero tied to a chair and a will of death on stage behind him. And the phrases visible on the will of death are death by gun, death by knife, death by fire and death by rope.

Jarrett's friend suggested that Zodiac, if he were a comic collector, which was actually a rare breed in 1970, may have been a describer to fanzines, and given his penchant for writing letters to the editor, he probably wrote into fanzine at some point.

So Jarrett went to Google and typed fanzines Vallejo and the first result was the January 1970 issue of a fantasy fanzine called Tight Beam. And looking through the letters written in by readers, Jarrett found an interesting submission on the 12th page.

It was from a man named Paul Dorr, whose return address was a PO box in Vallejo, California. It said, "The postal rates never stop increasing. I hear they will rise again. We should all use only one cent stamps on our letters.

That is a protest the post office will notice when they must start hand-canceling all the mail. He goes on to dive more into the weeds on the U.S. mail, but the timing of this was interesting because only a few weeks before this fanzine was published, the Zodiac had sent a letter to attorney Melvin Belli mocking him for the Jim Dunbar show debacle. And on the envelope, Zodiac's postage consisted of six one-cent stamps.

This together with the writing style of this letter from Paul Dorr was interesting to Kopeck. He decided to try to uncover more about Dorr for the purpose of ruling him out. But what he ended up with was finding a mountain of circumstantial evidence and hardly a single exculpatory or eliminating factor. It was all enough to spawn a second and very different Zodiac book, which he titled How to Find Zodiac.

And in that book, he catalogs everything that helps make Paul Dorr perhaps the strongest Zodiac suspect anyone has ever put forth. Quebec found literally hundreds of letters to fanzines and letters to the editor Dorr had written throughout his life. Dorr was born in 1927 and died in 2007, only five months after the Zodiac movie premiered. He had been writing letters to the editor. And when I say to the editor, I mean editor of...

anything to newspapers, hobby magazines, and eventually fanzine. And in the 1960s, he began making his own zines with a mimeograph machine. In one of his zines, he describes the formula for a homemade bomb, which is almost identical to a formula that Zodiac provided in one of his letters. And this was a type of bomb that wasn't widely known about at the time.

In a letter he wrote in 1974 to a zine called Green Egg, Doar alluded to having killed people before. Doar was 42 years old in 1969, which is consistent with the age of the man described by witnesses at the Paul Steen scene. He was also heavyset at the time, and he really does resemble the composite sketch. Doar was into role-playing and fantasy. He liked to attend renaissance fairs, which is the kind of place an executioner's hood would blend right in.

In his zines, Dor draws diagrams that look very similar in style to Zodiac's bus bomb diagrams. In fact, the Zodiac in one instance draws a feathered directional arrow while all his other arrows are standard and Dor exhibits this same quirk. He draws a feathered arrow in one of his diagrams where normal arrows are also present. And...

Paul Doerr was into cryptography and made his own ciphers for one of his zines, a hobbit zine called Hobbitilia. No joke. Doerr also put out a zine dedicated to filk music, which is a kind of nerd folk that connected to the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fan communities. And in the 1960s, a sizable number of filk songs were based on tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas, which is another little connection.

And Kovac found out that Doar had attended a fair in 1968 where there were two such performances of Philk's songs based on Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Doar's writing also contains many stylistic similarities to Zodiac, including frequent use of the ampersand in place of the word and, and they both formed the ampersand in the same way. Doar often will list things ending the list with E-T-C, just like Zodiac had done in multiple letters.

And in terms of handwriting, Zodiac always wrote in standard print and Dore almost never writes in standard print, only cursive. So if the Zodiac were to have, say, wanted to write in a way that was natural and unrecognizable, he may have chosen print if he in fact was someone who wrote almost exclusively in cursive. And both Dore and Zodiac also like to occasionally dot their eyes with open circles instead of dots.

Doar was also on the mailing list for the Minuteman, a far-right extremist group who sent out anonymous mailings with a circle and crosshair symbol on it. Kovac uncovered a lot more, and I would encourage you to read both Motor Spirit and How to Find Zodiac for the full story. These may very well be the most important books ever written about the Zodiac Killer. Paul Doar's daughter, Gloria, actually bought Kovac's How to Find Zodiac herself because she was planning on suing Jarrett.

But by the time she finished the book, she herself was convinced that her father was the Zodiac killer. There was an article about this in Los Angeles Magazine late last year. Paul Doerr is the kind of suspect where I hope the San Francisco Police Department are aware of him and are working to obtain his fingerprints from the military archive. Because Zodiac, though he has remained unidentified for 54 years, remains a solvable case if they've got fingerprints.

fingerprints that undoubtedly are probably the Zodiac's. I mean, fingerprints left in the blood of Paul Steen on the victim's taxi cab, which were checked against everyone else who was at the crime scene and everyone was cleared. So it's really the fingerprints that it all comes down to. I think honestly, I could do a whole season of episodes about the Zodiac killer. I really haven't even scratched the surface here.

But there's so much that's already been written and recorded and filmed about the Zodiac. And in Kovacs books and in the other resources I cited for today's episode, you can really do a deep dive into the rabbit hole, the kind you might not emerge from for a very long time. So proceed at your own risk, lest you become a Zodiologist. That's the end of our unsolved serial killers cases. And we will see you next time with another mini series.