The Zodiac Series - Part 3
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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did, and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Vaborg Thun, and tonight I bring to you the third installment in the Zodiac series.

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Imagine, if you will, dear listener, Los Angeles in 1947. It's the 15th of January. It's just before dawn, and the air is crisp and cold, even if we're in California.

The neighborhood is Leimert Park in the South LA region and consists of Spanish colonial revival homes and neat three-line streets. Today, Leimert Park's demographic is almost 90% African American, but back in 1947, the Leimert Park neighborhood was just developing. It was nothing more than a series of overgrown lots with a scattering of houses.

Now it's solidly middle class, with rows of closed-set houses with manicured lawns. On a clear day, you can see the Hollywood sign in the distance. This early morning, or late night, depending on how you view it, a killer is driving slowly along Norton Avenue, looking for a spot where he can display his handiwork.

He stops the car close to the fire hydrant at 3831 South Norton Avenue and exits the vehicle. In the trunk, wrapped in five-pound bags originally made to contain concrete, lies the mutilated corpse of Elizabeth Short. He unpacks her body parts and arranges them according to his design on the grass next to the sidewalk.

He is quiet and effective, and after just a few minutes he stands up to appreciate his work. Content with how his display looks, he quickly gets in his car and slowly drives away. No one sees him. Most everyone in the neighborhood is fast asleep, and the lighting on the street is dim, so no one would have noticed much if they were awake anyway.

Miss Short's body lies untouched for a few hours. No one knows exactly how many, but the sun rises and shines its light on her naked corpse. A bit further down the road, a mother with a young child approaches. Her name is Betty Bersinger, and holding her hand is her three-year-old daughter.

They both quickly notices something white lying in the grass off to their right, and Betty thinks it's a discarded mannequin doll. They move closer, but when Betty sees what they are looking at is a human body and not a plastic doll, she sternly tells her daughter to turn away.

She takes her hand and they both walk quickly to a nearby house where they get to use their telephone to call the police. The responding detectives were shocked at the apparent heinousness of the crime. The killer had left Elizabeth Short's body lying on its back. She was completely nude and her legs were spread wide apart as to display her vagina as much as possible.

Her arms were raised above her head, as if celebrating or dancing. Elizabeth's body had been cut completely in half between the second and third lumbar vertebrae, thus severing the intestine at the first section of the small intestine. The coroner's report noted very little bruising along the incision line, meaning Elizabeth had been cut in half after death.

She had been thoroughly cleaned, and all of her blood was drained. There were three-inch gashes on each side of her mouth, making her face distort in what is in Scotland known as a Glasgow smile. One of her breasts was slashed open. Rope marks marred her wrists and ankles and a section of flesh

had been removed from her thigh and then inserted into her body via her vagina. Miss Short's uterus was also removed. Her skull was not fractured, but there was noted bruising on the front and right side of her scalp, with a small amount of bleeding in the subarachnoid space on the right side, consistent with blows to the head.

The cause of death was determined to be hemorrhaging from the lacerations to her face and the shock from blows on the side of her head and face. The coroner, Dr. Newbar, noted that Short's anal canal was dilated at 44 mm, suggesting she may have been sodomized and raped. Before she was killed, Short had also been forced to eat feces,

Samples were taken from her body, testing for the presence of sperm, but the results came back negative. This does not mean that her killer did not ejaculate inside her, because he was very thorough in completely cleaning Elizabeth's body, inside and out. No blood or other evidence was found at the scene though, leading police to believe that she was killed and mutilated elsewhere.

Judging from these facts, one can deduce a likely scenario regarding how the killer went about murdering Elizabeth Short. She was found with rope marks on both arms and legs, and thus she was likely strapped to either a bed, secured on the floor, or on a table of some sort. To minimize her movement, she would have been strapped in a spread-eagle position,

also giving the killer maximum access to her body. We know he sliced her body in half after she was dead, but the other injuries were made before death took her. This means the killer took his time torturing her, probably striking her about the head to somewhat subdue what would probably be her very frantic attempts at getting free.

and also in order to force her to eat her own feces. He cut a portion of her flesh from her thigh, knowing full well that such an injury would be extremely painful, but since no vital organs were affected, she would not pass out or die as a result. The flesh he then inserted into her vagina before raping her anally.

Either while raping her or afterwards, he mutilated her one breast and cut a deep gash in her stomach. She would probably be in a state of shock at this point, and the killer might then have decided to finish her off by slicing her cheeks open from each side of her mouth, causing massive blood loss and pain.

When enough blood was spilled, he then clubbed her head to cause unconsciousness and proceeded to drain her body of all blood. When the body was empty of blood, he cut her in two, cleaned it, and prepared her for transport.

Newspaper reporters helped obtain Short's fingerprints, which were then sent to the FBI in Washington, D.C., and, thanks to an underage drinking arrest in Santa Barbara and an Army base mailroom job application, she was identified quickly. When a photograph of the 22-year-old beauty was released to the press, Short became a media sensation.

Her exotic nickname, which she was given thanks to her raven-colored hair and penchant for wearing black, only fueled the media frenzy. Upon seeing her picture in the paper, an acquaintance named Robert Red Manley came forward saying that

On the 9th of January, Elizabeth had asked him to take her to the Biltmore to meet her sister from Berkeley, whom she was going to move in with. Walter first helped her check her luggage at the bus station, and then drove her to her hotel. He left her in the Biltmore lobby at 6.30pm. According to hotel employees...

Elizabeth subsequently paced the lobby for several hours before departing. What happened from that time to when her body was found six days later is a mystery. Walter was initially considered a suspect in the murder, but was absolved after passing a lie detector test.

In a very odd twist, on the 24th of January, a package was mailed to the Los Angeles Examiner containing several of Short's belongings, including photographs, her birth certificate, her social security card, and her address book. On the packet was glued by using newspaper clippings the following words, Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers.

Here is Dahlia's belongs. Letter to follow. Gasoline had been used to wipe the package clean of any identifying fingerprints. Then, the following day, Elizabeth's purse and one high heel were found in a dumpster a few miles from where her body was dropped.

On the 26th of January, another letter was received by the examiner, this time handwritten, which read, Here it is. Turning in Wed, Jan 29, 10 a.m. Had my fun at police. Black Dahlia Avenger. End quote. The letter also named a location at which the supposed killer would turn himself in.

Police waited at the location on the morning of the 29th of January, but the alleged killer did not appear. Instead, at 1 p.m., the examiner officers received another cut-and-pasted letter, which read, Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified.

And while more than 30 people supposedly confessed to the crime, it was never solved. The case of the Black Dahlia murder remains open to this day. So, dear listener, you might wonder why your humble host spends time exploring a single murder, albeit a very gruesome one.

simply to advance the theory that the Black Dahlia killer was none other than the Zodiac killer, perhaps his very first murder. I am not alone in this thinking, and this third episode in the Zodiac series will be dedicated to the remaining main Zodiac suspects.

And we begin with Dr. George Hill Hodel Jr. George Hill Hodel Jr. was born on the 10th of October 1907 and raised in Pasadena, California. His parents, George Hodel Sr. and Esther Hodel, were of Russian Jewish ancestry.

Their only son, he was well-educated and probably a certified genius, scoring 186 on an early IQ test. He was also a musical prodigy, playing solo piano concerts at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium at a very young age. Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff traveled to his grandparents' house to hear the boy play.

As an adult, Hodel moved in affluent Los Angeles society and was a friend of people such as photographer Man Ray and film director John Huston. Hodel had a son named Steve, and when Hodel died in 1999, Steve found himself sorting through his father's belongings.

Though Steve's father, George Hodel, loomed large throughout his early childhood, their relationship had always been strained. George was a grandiose doctor, with a distant personality who abandoned the family shortly after Steve's ninth birthday, eventually moving far away to the Philippines. As he went through his father's possessions, Steve found a photo album tucked away in a box.

It was small enough to fit in his palm, and bound in wood, feeling like a voyeur. He perused it. It was filled with the usual pictures, his mom, dad, and brothers, as well as portraits of the family taken by the world-famous surrealist artist Man Ray. But, towards the back, something caught his eye. Two pictures of a young woman.

Her eyes cast downward with curly, deep black hair. Steve still doesn't know why he had the idea, but as he looked at the images, he thought to himself, my God, that looks like the Black Dahlia.

In just over 23 years, Steve had diligently risen through the ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department, establishing a reputation as an unfaltering homicide detective. So, like any good cop, Steve started digging, and the details began to add up.

Crime scene photos show that Short had been given a hemicorporectomy, a procedure that slices the body beneath the lumbar spine, the only spot where the body can be severed in half without breaking bone. It was taught in the 1930s, when George had been in medical school.

The letters sent to the press and police from the Black Dahlia Avenger, a man claiming to be Short's killer, also bore a chilling resemblance to his dad's handwriting. Cataloging evidence has been Steve's life for the last 15 years, during which the quest to connect his father to Short's murder consumed his life.

It brought him back to Los Angeles, where he now spends his days in a modest apartment, documenting his father's supposed criminal past, in a snowballing body of work including four books, a play, and a frequently updated blog.

And though his first book, Black Dahlia Avenger, The True Story, is little more than hundreds of pages of evidence listed chronologically like a cop's case log, it made the New York Times bestseller list after it was released in 2003. A physically imposing man, Hodel is tall and broad, with a dusting of white hair,

and a gentle demeanor, like Santa Claus, vibrating on a darker frequency. And after sixteen years immersed in Dahlia lore, the smallest details are ingrained in Steve's mind. He's like a pit bull, his brother Kelly Hodel says. Once he gets his teeth into something, he doesn't let go.

Steve began investigating his father with the deliberate fastidiousness of the good cop he'd always been. He surveyed the case from scratch, digging through witness interviews and newspaper archives. He filed a Freedom of Information Act to retrieve the FBI files on the murder and other information the Bureau had collected on his father.

A handwriting expert determined that there was a strong likelihood that his father's handwriting matched the script on some of the notes the killer sent to the LAPD. But the results were inconclusive. In the archives of UCLA, Steve found a folder containing receipts for contracting work on his childhood home.

One of the receipts showed a purchase a few days before Short's murder of ten five-pound bags of concrete, the same size and brand found near Short's body that police believe her killer used to carry her. In 2001, after two years of researching the case full-time, Odell turned to Stephen Kaye,

an acquaintance who worked in the Los Angeles County District's Attorney's Office. Hodel still wasn't sure he could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that his father was the Black Dahlia killer, but he was convinced his investigation had unearthed enough new material to justify a fresh new look from law enforcement officials.

Kay, an assistant district attorney at the time, agreed to review Steve's work. Six weeks later, Kay responded with a glowing letter. I quote, "'Thanks to some great detective work by his courageous son Steve, the name of Dr. George Hodel will live in infamy,' wrote Kay, who added that if George were still alive,

He would file two charges of murder against him. Steve Lopez, a columnist at the Los Angeles Times, received a copy of Steve's book and decided to write about it. While fact-checking his column, Lopez asked the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office for more information on the murder.

The DA's office complied, and Lopez received access to a file that Lt. Frank Jemison, one of the original officers investigating Short's murder, had left behind in a safe in the basement in the district attorney's office.

The file contained an assortment of photographs, newspaper clippings and several hundred pages of typed interview notes, pixelated with age, compiled by Jemison. Buried in the notes is the bombshell that Steve had been hoping for. The Los Angeles Police Department was focused on six suspects in the Black Dahlia investigation, and George Hodel was on the list.

And then there is the transcript of the period in 1950 when the police were bugging George Hodel's home. Most of the transcript is dull. Hodel has sex. He berates his secretary. He talks about money problems. But on the 19th of February, 1950, there's a haunting exchange. 8.25 p.m. Woman screamed. Woman screamed again.

It should be noted the woman not heard before the scream. Later in the day, Hodel talks to a confidant. Realize there was nothing I could do. Put a pillow over her head and cover her with a blanket. Get a taxi. Expired 1259. They thought there was something fishy. Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Killed her.

The surveillance continues, routinely, but for one telling moment. Supposing I did kill the black Dahlia? They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead. End quote. In his son's estimation, it's George's relationship with the surrealist photographer Man Ray that helped propel Short's murder.

Two of Man Ray's photographs, Le Amoureux and Minotaur, do bear a chilling resemblance to Short's mutilated body, especially Minotaur, which portrays a naked female torso, arms raised above its head.

Short's body, Steve argues, was George's way of emulating his friend's surrealism, allowing him to build what Steve calls a masterpiece, a crime so shocking and horrible it would endure, be immortalized through the annals of crime law. Steve says that for him, the Black Dahlia case is like a loose thread in a sweater,

You tug on it gently, thinking you've come to the end, and it continues to unravel. There has never been a comfortable end point to conclude his investigation. Each piece of evidence leads to another, in turn leading to another crime. All told, Steve believes he's located a trail that connects his father to dozens of murders stretching across California.

Details from murders in Los Angeles led Steve to a string of murders in Chicago, which then led him to Manila and the slaying of a 28-year-old woman named Lucila Lalu, whose dismembered body had been found situated oddly just like Short's. Her body was found scattered about a half mile from his father's home along a street

and the street was named Zodiac. In 2009, Steve Hodel's book, Most Evil, Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel, was published.

The follow-up investigation examined the possibility that Hodel had also committed crimes outside of Los Angeles in the Lipstick Murders in Chicago, the Jigsaw Murder in the Philippines, and in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1968-1970, possibly reinventing and calling himself Zodiac.

31 modus operandi and crime signatures were presented, along with a question document experts, that's QDE, testimony that the George Hodel and Zodiac handwriting samples were written by one and the same person.

California Department of Justice conducted their own independent handwriting examination, and while the results were not 100% positive, their QDE expert stated, I am unable to eliminate George Hodel as Zodiac. I would request additional samples of his lowercase handwriting. Unfortunately, lowercase handwriting samples are currently non-existent.

The investigative sequel, while not claiming case solved, did request that law enforcement obtain and compare DNA samples. As of 2015, no confirmed Zodiac DNA exists that can be compared with Hodel's known DNA.

In September 2015, a six-year-old follow-up called Most Evil 2, presenting the follow-up investigation and decryption of the 1970 Zodiac Cipher, in which the San Francisco serial killer reveals his true identity, was published.

The new investigation offered additional allegations that link George Hodel to the San Francisco Bay Area Zodiac murders and presented evidence that Hodel was, in fact, the writer of the legitimate 1970 Zodiac-coded cipher mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle and turned over to SFPD.

The solution and cracking of the cipher was performed by M. Eve Person, a high school teacher in Paris. According to Person, George Hodel, using Ogham, an ancient Celtic tree alphabet, signed his real name Hodel, placing it both as the return address on the envelope and as a signatory inside the card, which read

You ache to know my name, dot dot dot. I'll clue you in, dot dot dot. The code had remained undeciphered for 45 years, but the evidence is not forensic in nature, and the California authorities still lists the Zodiac as an unsolved crime case.

The Serial Killer Podcast would probably be able to do a great deal of episodes regarding speculation regarding the identity of the Zodiac Killer. There is a plethora of material online, dozens of books, hundreds of pages of official FBI documents, and a very active subreddit on Reddit dedicated to solving the case. However,

In my humble opinion, this case will not be conclusively solved until a DNA match is procured. And there is still hope this can occur. I also am not a fan, on this podcast, of extensive speculation. As you, dear listener, hopefully have noticed, I prefer to stick as much as possible into

to known facts regarding who the killer was, what he did, and how. Therefore, I am not going to spend a lot of time discussing wild conjecture about the Zodiac Killer being the devil, an extraterrestrial, Ted Cruz, a Manson family member, L. Ron Hubbard, or the Unabomber.

In addition to Ed Edwards and George Hodel Jr., there are three very plausible suspects that I would be amiss in not presenting to you. So, next in line is the curious case of Earl Van Best Jr. Gary Stewart wrote a book titled The Most Dangerous Animal of All.

With co-author Susan Mustafa, Stewart described the search for his biological father, Earl Van Best Jr., and his eventual conclusion that the same man was also the Zodiac Killer. In the book's introduction, Stewart wrote that he conducted 12 years of research and intended to leave no doubt as to the identity of the Zodiac.

Part 1 of the book included approximately 130 pages devoted to the life of Earl Van Best. At the age of 28, Best married 14-year-old Judy Chandler. Best was eventually arrested on statutory rape charges and was sent to prison. Articles about Best and Chandler appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper

and they called the story the Ice Cream Romance, because Best and Chandler met in an ice cream parlor. Chandler gave birth to Gary Stewart, and joined Best after his release from prison. However, she later took then four-year-old Gary, and left Best to escape the abusive relationship.

Decades later, Stewart watched a television show about the unsolved mystery and realized that Best somehow resembled the police sketch of the Zodiac suspect. Stewart and Mustafa suggested the link between Best and famed Chronicle writer Paul Avery.

You might recognize the Avery name from the first installment of the Zodiac series, as well as in the excellent David Fincher film, Zodiac. According to the book, Avery authored a series of articles about the so-called ice cream romance, and Best was somehow offended. Best, as the Zodiac, then sent a threatening Halloween card to Avery.

However, Stuart and Mustafa presented no evidence that Avery was the author, and other information indicated that Avery did not write the ice cream articles.

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For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.

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Visit BetterHelp.com slash SerialKiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash SerialKiller. The authors claim that Van Best's name appeared in the Zodiac's ciphers. The book presented a photograph of the Zodiac's first cipher and the symbol surrounding the word Best in the deciphered text.

The symbols V and E are substituted for the letters B and E in the deciphered text. In Stuart's illustration, the two lines of symbols above the word best are highlighted to emphasis the letters J and R. According to Stuart, this configuration implied the name of his father, Earl Van Best Jr.,

This strained interpretation was hardly conclusive, and relied on the assumption that Zodiac intended for his name to be noticed in both the original symbols and deciphered text together at the same time. The initials were not in the proper order, and the lines contained in the letters J and R were not the same as the line which contained the letters V and E.

Stewart and Mustafa further claimed that another zodiac cipher implicated Best. The still unsolved cipher contained 13 symbols. The name Earl Van Best Jr. contained 13 letters. Stewart viewed this as more than coincidence and posted this quote-unquote evidence on his website.

However, he did not provide any reason to believe that the 13 symbols actually represented the letters in the van Best name. Like other Zodiac theorists, Stuart simply assumed a connection which favored his pre-selected conclusion.

Other theorists noted that the Zodiac's first cipher contained 18 symbols of apparent gibberish, which could somehow contain the killer's identity. Infamous Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was identified as a potential Zodiac suspect at one time, and the name Theodore J. Kaczynski contains 18 letters. The same method could be used to find a match to many other names.

According to the book, Susan Mustafa's literary agent found Best's name in the Zodiac's so-called 340 cipher. He located a backward letter B and then began looking for the other letters, eventually discovering the entire name Earl Van Best Jr. The literary agent used a series of unidentified symbols to form the word Jr.,

Stewart and Mustafa assured readers that the agent tried to repeat the same results with other names, but failed. This cipher solution may have seemed compelling. The methods used to achieve the results were designed to favor the desired outcome.

Mustafa's literary agent simply assigned his own predetermined letters of the alphabet to his chosen symbols in the Zodiac's 340 cipher. This solution also assumed that a triangle symbol in the cipher represented the letter A, that a half-filled circle represented the letter E, that an I symbol represented the letter L,

and that the V symbol in the cipher represented the letter U. Without these assumptions, the literary agent could not construct Best's name. The agent wanted to find Best's name, and then made his own assumptions in order to find Best's name.

No one else would have any reason to look for Best's name in the cipher, and no one would make the same assumptions while attempting to solve the cipher. According to the logic used by Stewart and the literary agent, the Zodiac's cipher could only be solved by someone who already knew the identity of the Zodiac Killer.

As such, Stewart, Mustafa and a literary agent offered no legitimate reason to believe that their methods were sound, other than the fact that those methods achieved the desired results. Gary Stewart's book offered the only direct evidence said to link Earl Van Best Jr. to the Zodiac crimes.

On page 329, Stuart and co-author Susan Mustafa stated that Lieutenant Bob Garrett examined the fingerprints found at the scene of the Zodiac's last known crime, the killing of cab driver Paul Stein in San Francisco. Garrett stated that he could not make a positive match between the possible Zodiac fingerprints and the fingerprints of Earl Van Best.

Instead, Garrett provided a visual comparison for Stuart and Mustafa, which showed a possible Zodiac fingerprint and Best's fingerprints. According to Stuart and Mustafa, both fingerprints showed what appeared to be a scar,

However, Garrett was forced to reverse the Zodiac fingerprint in order to align the possible scar on the correct side in order to match the same possible scar on the best fingerprint. Stewart and Mustafa believed that the aligned scars on both fingerprints served as compelling evidence that Best killed Paul Stein.

A report written by SFPD Inspector William Hamlet described the fingerprints found at crime scene as follows. All of the latent prints in our case were obtained from a taxi cab. The latent prints that show traces of blood are believed to be prints of the suspect.

The latent prints from a right front door handle are also believed to be prints of the suspect. These prints are circled with a red pen. The other latent prints, many of which are very good prints, may or may not be the prints of the suspect in this case."

The fingerprint isolated and compared by Stewart, Mustafa and Garrett was not among those latent fingerprints which were circled in red, as stated in the SFPD report. The fingerprint was found at a crime scene, but no one knew if that fingerprint actually belonged to the killer.

Further, the only way to link Earl Van Best to the crime relied on assuming that the print was left by the killer and then reversing the image of that print. As a further stretch, the assumption that the print was valid and the reversal of the image did not produce any match between the fingerprints found at crime scene and Best's fingerprints.

The reversal only changed the placement and alignment of a line, which may or may not be a scar. The faint line, which appears to run through the fingerprint in question, could have been produced by some feature or indentation on the surface of the cub where the print was obtained.

The methods used to achieve the favorable results were unreliable and self-serving. Stuart and Mustafa had no reason to believe that experienced police officers had somehow reversed the fingerprint. The authors simply assumed that such a reversal had occurred and then reversed the image to suit their needs.

The fingerprint evidence did not link Earl Van Best to the murder of Paul Stein. Stuart and Mustafa also consulted document examiner Mike Vaxhall.

Vaxhall initially thought the evidence was not sufficient to reach a conclusion. However, he quickly changed his mind and concluded that Earl Van Best Jr. had written the Zodiac letters.

Waxhull stated, Waxhull was not hesitant in his conclusion. He even published his own book with a title that left no room for doubt, The End of the Zodiac Mystery.

In his book, Vaxhall described his methods and the handwriting samples used in his examination. Vaxhall wrote that the only writing from Van Best on the first and the third marriage certificates was his signature. Regarding the second marriage certificate, Judith had attested that Van Best completed all the information except the witness's signatures, including her printed name.

Waxhull then explained that he had only four documents for comparison, three of them containing only Van Best's signatures. The fourth document was the marriage certificate reportedly completed by Van Best himself. The marriage certificate was included in the photograph section of Stuart's book, but the image was very small.

At least four different photograph exhibits of handwriting comparisons between Zodiac's writing and Best's writing cited this marriage certificate as evidence. According to Vaxhall, Judy Chandler claimed that Earl Van Best completed and signed the marriage certificate shortly after the publication of Stewart's book,

Zodiac theorist Mike Rodelli reported that he had contacted the church where Stewart's parents had married. According to a church source, the writing on the marriage certificate was that of Reverend Edward Filker, the man who had presided over the marriage ceremony of Earl Van Best and Judy Chandler.

Other samples of Filger's writing on other marriage certificates were remarkably similar to the writing on Best's marriage certificate. Vaxhall claimed that the writing on the marriage certificate was that of the Zodiac Killer. According to Vaxhall's conclusion, Reverend Filger was then suddenly the man behind the Zodiac letters.

Waxholt's conclusion that Best had written the Zodiac letters relied heavily on the assumption that Best was responsible for the writing on the marriage certificate, and any conclusion based on that mistaken assumption could not be valid. The removal of the Best-Chandler marriage certificate from the known writing samples of Earl Van Best Jr.,

left Vaxel with only three signatures to compare to the Zodiac's writing. Therefore, certain letters of the alphabet were not available in the best signatures to compare with the same letters which appeared in the Zodiac writings. Three signatures were not sufficient to form a valid conclusion. The only remaining evidence, said to link best to the Zodiac crimes,

seem to be little more than five trivial points. 1. Best somewhat resembled the composite sketch of the Zodiac. 2. Best was reportedly in California during the time of the Zodiac crimes. 3. Best had some interest in ciphers when he was younger.

4. Best allegedly knew a Satanist and allegedly played music with a murderer. 5. Best was an immoral person who may have committed crimes. This list was not conclusive or compelling. Similar lists could be said to implicate other suspects.

Stewart's self-serving cipher solutions, creative fingerprint claims, and invalid handwriting analysis were easily debunked, leaving only the trivia to justify the ongoing accusation that Earl Van Best Jr. was the Zodiac Killer.

Contrary to his boasts during the CNN interview, Gary Stewart did not present any credible evidence to indicate that his father was the Zodiac. Before we move on to our most famous Zodiac suspect, we need to pause and have a closer look

and one of the more unknown, but perhaps most interesting, of all the Zodiac suspects, Lawrence Kane. Lawrence Kane was born on the 26th of April, 1924, and died on the 20th of May, 2010.

Since he was born in 1924, that would make him 23 years old at the time of the Black Dahlia murder. At the time, he had recently been discharged from the US Army, having served in World War II, and thus was more than capable of violence. However, Kane's case rests mostly on the disappearance of Donna Lass.

last seen at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel on the 6th of September 1970, on account of the fact he worked in the same building. As the avid listener may remember, one of the later letters sent from the Zodiac featured a postcard with a picture of the Sierra Club on the shores of Lake Tahoe.

One person who was convinced of Kane's guilt in the killings was that of Harvey Hines, a retired law enforcement officer who noted a close comparison between the Zodiac letters and Lawrence Kane's handwriting, as well as a whole host of circumstantial evidence he has compiled down the years.

His alleged involvement in the abduction of Kathleen Jones, who had her car disabled by an unknown assailant on the 22nd of March 1970, and was driven around under duress for a period of time before she managed to escape with her infant daughter across a field. She later identified her attacker as

as the same man portrayed in a composite sketch from the Presidio Hayts murder, which hung on the wall of the police station in Paterson. According to Harvey Hines, Kathleen Johns in 1992 claimed her assailant that night was none other than Lawrence Kane, chosen from a six-picture lineup.

Pam Huckabee, the sister of Darlene Ferrin, who tragically died at Blue Rock Springs Park, stated that Kane had been trailing her sister in the run-up to that fateful night on the 4th of July, 1969. Lawrence Kane, it was claimed, lived at 217 Eddy Street at the time of the Paul Stein murder.

This location is less than a quarter of a mile from the Mason and Geary intersection, the presumed pick-up point of Zodiac on the 11th of October, 1969. Donna Lass moved to Lake Tahoe in June of 1970, as did Lawrence Kane, and both ended up working at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel.

Donna Ann Lass worked as a private nurse prior to traveling to San Francisco and setting up residence in Balboa Street before commencing her duties as a staff nurse at the Lettman General Hospital in the Presidio, the last direction the Zodiac Killer was seen traveling after the murder of Paul Stein.

Her employment at the Letterman General Hospital, however, was short-lived, spanning February 1970 to May 1970, before she took a job at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel and Casino on the 6th of June 1970.

She initially moved in with a couple, Larry and Anne Lowe, before renting her own apartment at the 3893 Pioneer Trail at the beginning of September. Six days later, she would go missing. Lawrence Kane's address in South Lake Tahoe was 408 McFall Way, Round Hill Village, Zephyr Cove, Nevada.

There are a lot more circumstantial elements drawing Larry Kane into the fold of the known credible suspects list, but this does not make Lawrence Kane the Zodiac. It simply makes him a suspect worthy of consideration.

On the 20th of April 1970, a cipher was mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle bearing 13 characters, known as the My Name Is letter or 13 symbol cipher. Harvey Hines is convinced he has decoded it to reveal the name Kane, clearly evident on the left-hand portion of the cipher.

The three eights added up, he surmised, was the killer's birth year. Lawrence Kane was born on the 26th of April 1924. However, this is a simplistic solution that could never be proven or disproven. And so, we come to our final suspect. Perhaps the most famous one. The man with the Zodiac brand wristwatch.

The man heavily featured and indicated in David Fincher's movie, and the man with arguably the most circumstantial evidence linked to the Zodiac case. I am, of course, talking about none other than Arthur Lee Allen. Allen was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on the 18th of December, 1933.

He grew up in Vallejo, California, and graduated from Vallejo High School in 1950. He received an Associate of Arts degree from Vallejo College in 1957. After graduating, he joined the Navy, but was dishonorably discharged in 1958. He also lost his job as an elementary school teacher in 1968 for molesting school children.

In 1974, he was arrested for molesting children and served his sentence at Atascadero State Hospital until 1977. So, we know Alan was a convicted criminal and one who did not care too much about other people's feelings considering he had raped and molested young children.

Alan also had ties to Riverside, where the first suspected Zodiac murder took place. This assumes that Sherry Jo Bates was a Zodiac victim, which I am quite sure she was. Vallejo, where the first double attack took place, was home territory for Alan, since he was born there and lived there as an adult.

What's more is that Allen had been reported in the vicinity of the Lake Berryessa attack against Hartnell and Shepard on the 27th of September 1969. However, he described himself scuba diving at Salt Point on the day of the attacks.

In addition to Riverside, Vallejo and Barriessa, Alan owned a trailer in Santa Rosa and could possibly have been connected to murders there. Aside from the evidence placing him at the scene of the crimes, a more compelling reason to suspect Alan is his conversation with Don Chaney regarding Alan writing a novel.

Chaney, being interviewed by police, told how Allen had presented the following ideas for a book. 1. He would like to kill couples at random. 2. He would taunt the police with letters detailing his crimes. 3. He would sign the letters with a cross-circle symbol from his watch. 4. He would call himself Zodiac. 5.

He would wear makeup to change his appearance. Six. He would attach a flashlight to the barrel of his gun in order to shoot at night. Seven. He would fool women into stopping their cars in rural areas by claiming they had problems with their tires, then loosen their lug nuts and eventually take them captive. If you've listened to previous episodes,

you will recognize these points as quintessential Zodiac. In addition, Alan owned and proudly wore a Zodiac brand wristwatch that had the symbol of a circle overlaid by a cross as a logo. Finally, Alan is the only suspect to be positively identified by a surviving Zodiac victim.

In 1992, surviving victim Mike Majot picked Alan out of a police lineup. There is also forensic evidence pointing an arrow at Alan, unlike many other suspects. Alan had ten and a half size shoes, the exact same size as the footprints left at one of the Zodiac crime scene. And, as an added curiosity,

Your humble host also has ten and a half size shoes. Considering all of this, one would think it odd that Alan was never arrested for the Zodiac killings. But this is the danger of trying to make evidence fit a preconceived conclusion, instead of the other way around.

Because even though there is a lot of evidence linking Allen to the Zodiac case, there are equally, if not more, evidence to the contrary. His fingerprints, DNA, and handwriting did not match Zodiac's. It's not certain that the DNA or fingerprints were actually Zodiac's, but it did not match the samples the police had.

The famous sketch of Zodiac, the one showing a rather slender man with a close-cropped hair and glasses, was not a particularly good match for Allen. Even in 1969, his face was much fuller. Generally speaking, Allen was taller and heavier than descriptions of Zodiac. Zodiac was generally described as 5'9 or 5'10 and 160 to 200 pounds.

Kathleen Johns put him at 5'9 and 160 to 170 pounds. Allen, back in 1971, was 6 feet and 250 pounds. The Napa County Sheriff's Department did estimate Zodiac at 225 pounds, in my opinion. The most damning evidence is that he was definitely not Kathleen Johns' abductor.

She identified her abductor as Zodiac immediately upon seeing the police sketch and, in 1992, picked Lawrence Kane from a 16-photograph lineup which included Allen's picture. She had spent at least 90 minutes in a car with Zodiac and had had the best look at him of anyone. Zodiac later bragged about the abduction in a letter to the Chronicle.

Allen is also not known to have any connection to the Lake Tahoe area where Donna Lass disappeared. Zodiac did take credit for this, and Lawrence Kane was living in Lake Tahoe at the time and worked in the same complex as Lass. When confronted by police in 1971 and interviewed by Armstrong and Tosche,

He was very polite and respectful and indeed was somewhat overly helpful. In his letters, at least Zodiac was openly contemptuous and directly hostile of the police. Finally, Alan was left-handed. The Blue Rock Springs attack, the Lake Berryessa attack and the murder of Paul Stein were all carried out by an attacker using his right hand.

When Kathleen Jones' abductor approached her car, carrying a tire iron, it was carried in his right hand as well. When Alan was in elementary school, teachers apparently tried to force him to write right-handed, so he may have been able to at least print right-handed, but handwriting samples were taken using both of his hands. Neither matched.

And so, we arrive at the end of the Zodiac Killer case. During three episodes, I have presented you the facts of the known and suspected Zodiac murders, and together we have delved into details into who the most plausible suspects were. To recap, I have covered Ed Edwards, Dr. George Hill Hodel Jr.,

Earl Van Best Jr., Lawrence Kane, and Arthur Lee Allen as plausible suspects. There are other suspects I could have covered, such as Richard Gajkowski, Guy Hendrickson, Gareth Penn, Bruce Davis, and Rick Marshall. However, none of these suspects can be tied to the case

other than by highly unreliable sources and very speculative circumstantial evidence. For example, Rick Marshall was a suspect because his friends reported he had acted strange and had similar qualities as the Zodiac Killer, which is rather ridiculous since no one knows who the Zodiac was,

and thus no one would know what qualities he possessed as a person outside of letter writing and serial murder. In conclusion, I do not know who the Zodiac was, but I do think that out of the five suspects I have presented to you, Dr. George Hill Hodel Jr. is the one I lean towards. Not necessarily because there is good evidence against him,

but because of his personality and the similarity of the Black Dahlia murder scene with the Man Ray photographs he was a big fan of. In addition to the two pieces I referred to at the beginning of this episode, there exists a Man Ray photograph of a young woman with dark hair, full lips, and an arm stretched above her head. Across her mouth is a hard black shadow.

forming a line from the corner of her mouth to the end of her cheek, very similar to the wound inflicted upon Elizabeth Short. Also, I encourage everyone to visit George Hodel's house in California. It looks like something out of a weird dreamscape, and the entrance resembles a gaping maw. Apart from this,

Hodel actually looks quite like the Zodiac sketch, and we know both Hodel and Zodiac was extremely intelligent men. The Zodiac even frequently bragged about his superior intellect. Finally, Hodel would have been exactly 60 when the Zodiac murder started, and exactly 40 when Short was murdered.

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