The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who stalked northern California between December 1968 and October 1969. The case of the "Zodiac killer" is undoubtedly one of the best known, controversial and famous among all the serial killers of the United States. The identity of the murderer is still unknown. As in almost everything, there are of course conspiracy and absurd or poorly objective theories around it, and the case had 2.500 suspects. But the person responsible was never caught, no one was ever tried for the crimes despite the fact that there seemed to be viable suspects and promising evidence. One of the best known features of the Zodiac Killer (name that he awarded himself) was to send several letters to the area's newspaper and to the police department; In these letters he attributed the murder of 37 people, although the police and the FBI only attributed 7 real victims (4 men and 3 women) and 2 survivors, between 16 and 29 years. And for the rest it is believed that he took advantage of unsolved crimes and attributed them and, as he was never caught or interrogated, it was never possible to verify whether they were really his responsibility.
On December 20, 1968, David Arthur Faraday (17 years old) and Betty Lou Jensen (16 years old), a couple of teenagers celebrating their first date, were killed with a firearm on Lake Herman Road, near the city limits of Benicia, California. The young couple had attended a concert and just after 10 p.m. they parked the car in which they were at a crossing of Lake Herman, to kiss, being interrupted by another car that stopped exactly next to them. The perpetrator shot David only once in the head and five times in the back of Betty, who tried to flee. Their bodies were found minutes later by a neighbor. The murderer left no fingerprints, or any trace, and the police could not solve the crime, obtain witnesses and suspects, or even understand the motive of the murder, in the absence of solid clues.
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| David Arthur Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen |
On July 4, 1969, Michael Renault Mageau (19 years old) and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin (22 years old) were in her car, in the parking lot of a golf course in Blue Rocks Springs, just outside the county of Vallejo, when next to them another car parked, whose driver left to return 10 minutes later. Once parked behind them, to prevent them from escaping, the man approached the car and lit them directly in the face with a flashlight to blind them. Then he shot. Both young adults were riddled. An hour after the attack, at 12:40 a.m. on July 5, an unidentified man called the local police, the Vallejo Police Department, to alert them to the incident and acknowledge their responsibility in the attack. And he also confessed to being the murderer of Jensen and Faraday, killed 6 months ago. Thanks to this, the police quickly went to the scene and Michael was able to survive (despite being shot in the face, neck and chest), although Darlene was pronounced dead after arriving at the Kaiser Foundation hospital due to the gunshot wounds by a Luger 9mm pistol. The call had come from a public telephone at a service station, less than a mile from Darlene's house. Despite the call, and the composite sketch made by Michael, the case could not be solved.
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| Michael Renault Mageau and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin |
On August 1, 1969, three letters written by Zodiac arrived at the newsrooms of Vallejo Times Herald, San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner. The letters were almost identical and in them, Zodiac recognized the crimes and included a 360-character cryptogram that supposedly revealed their identity. Zodiac was very clear: either the letters were published on the front page in one or all of the newspapers or that same weekend would kill twelve people. Given the pressure, though eventually the murders were not finally carried out, the letters were placed on the front page of the newspapers.
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| Composite sketch by Michael Renault Mageau |
Three days later, another letter came to the San Francisco Examiner. The letter began with: "Dear editor, this is the Zodiac". The letter had been written in response to Chief Stiltz of Vallejo, who had asked for more details after the previous letter to prove that it was from the murderer of Faraday, Jensen, and Ferrin.
On August 8, 1969, a week after the cryptogram was received, Donald and Bettye Harden, a couple from the city of Salinas, deciphered the cryptogram. In it, however, the identity of the murderer did not appear, and the last eighteen characters could not be deciphered, and still remain undeciphered. The text deciphered by the Hardens said like this (including spelling mistakes):
"I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangeroue anamal of all to kill something gives me the most thrilling experence it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl the best part of it is thae when I die I will be reborn in paradice and the I have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to sloi down or atop my collectiog of slaves for my afterlife ebeorietemethhpiti"
The text was then used by cartoonist Robert Graysmith, in his book "Zodiac", which gave it a historical context, given that he recognized it from the late 19th century thriller "The most dangerous animal" by Gabriel Pombo.
On September 27, 1969, Bryan Calvin Hartnell (20 years old) and Cecilia Ann Shepard (22 years old) were having a snack on the shores of Lake Berryessa, in Napa County, California, on a small island connected by a sandy path to Twin Oak Ridge (currently called the Zodiac island). A man approached them, after hiding behind a tree without Cecilia being able to ascertain his presence, wearing a black executioner's hood with sunglasses over the eye holes and an apron with the zodiac symbol (a circle with two perpendicular lines). The man approached them with a gun in his hand, claiming to be a fugitive convict from Deer Lodge (Montana), where he had killed a guard and stolen a car, and explained that he needed their vehicle to go to Mexico . He also brought with him some plastic strings to hang her clothes, previously cut, and asked Cecilia to tie Bryan before tying herself. The man then checked Bryan's knots and tightened them after discovering that Cecilia had left them loose. Bryan initially thought it was a robbery, but the man took out a knife and stabbed them both, stabbed them and just stopped stabbing Bryan because Cecilia had started screaming too much so she took the worst part. Then he drew the zodiac symbol on Bryan's car door and next he wrote: Vallejo 12-20-68,7-4-69, Sept27-69-6: 30 by knife.
A while later, when he felt out of danger, he called the police to claim his responsibility, at 7.40 a.m. from a public telephone, which was found off-hooked minutes later, in a car wash on Main Street in Napa, 40 km from crime scene. The victims were found alive, and Bryan survived six stabs, but Cecilia Ann died two days later at Queen of Valley Hospital in Napa.
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| Bryan Calvin Hartnell and Cecilia Ann Shepard |
On October 11, 1969, a man boarded Paul Lee Stine's (29-year-old) taxi at the junction of Mason and Geary streets in San Francisco and asked Paul to take him to Maple and Presidio Highs streets. For reasons that remain unknown, Stine drove to a street ahead, Cherry Street, where the man shot him in the head with a 9mm caliber weapon, then took the keys of his car and his wallet, and took off his shirt. He was seen by three teenagers who were on the other side of the street at 9:55 p.m., who called the police while the crime was going on, the young men watched the man cleaning the taxi and then walking a block north.
The police arrived minutes later, and the teenagers testified explaining that the murderer was still nearby, incredibly, the description spoke of "someone with dark skin" and a couple of officers allegedly passed in front of the Zodiac and did not interrogate or detain him, because he was of white skin. Years later it is still a mystery why the confusion, which although it was corrected in minutes, was already too late. However, the Zodiac left no traces on the scene, but on October 14 he wrote a new letter to the press to claim the crime. As proof, it included a piece of the taxi driver's bloody shirt. He had not been "cleaning" the taxi, but cutting his victim's clothing. In addition, he threatened to attack a school bus or shoot in a school area.
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| Paul Lee Stine |
At 2:00 a.m. on October 20, 1969, someone who claimed to be the Zodiac called the Oakland Police Department demanding that one of the two prominent lawyers, F. Lee Bailey or Melvin Belli, appear on the Jim Dunbar's television show of exhibitions table in the morning. Bailey could not attend, but Belli appeared on the show. Dunbar asked viewers to keep the telephone lines open, and then, someone claiming to be the Zodiac called several times and said his name was Sam. Belli agreed to meet him in Daly City, but the suspect never appeared. Police officers who had previously heard the Zodiac heard the voice of "Sam" and concluded that he was not the Zodiac. Subsequent calls that the suspect made to Belli were tracked and it was known they came from Napa State Hospital, where it was learned that "Sam" was a mentally ill patient.
Another letter dated November 8, 1969 again had a cryptogram with 340 characters. A day later, he sent another seven-page letter in which he boasted that two police officers arrested him and talked to him for three minutes, after shooting Stine. Excerpts from these letters, always written by hand, were published on November 12 in the Chronicle.
This cryptogram was never deciphered and many possible solutions were suggested, but they were never accepted, as they moved away from coding conventions.
On the night of March 22, 1970, Kathleen Johns (22 years old) was in her car from San Bernardino to Petaluma to visit her mother. Seven months pregnant, she was also carrying her 10-month-old daughter. As she headed toward Highway 132 near Modesto, California, a car behind her began to blow the horn and turn the lights on and off; She left the road and stopped. The man in the car also stopped behind her, telling her that her right rear tire was reeling, and offered to tighten the nuts. After finishing the maneuver, the man walked away and when Johns started the march, the tire broke away from the car. The man stopped, backed away and offered to drive them to the next gas station for help. She and her daughter got in the car. They passed several service stations but the man did not stop. For about three hours he took them to different places on the streets of Tracy, and when she asked him why he didn't stop, he avoided the answer. When the man stopped at an intersection, Johns jumped out of the car along with his daughter and hid in a field. The man got out of the car to look for them, but when a truck driver arrived on the scene, Johns´s kidnapper escaped. Johns asked for help traveling to the police station located in Patterson. While presenting her complaint to the sergeant of service, she noticed the presence of the identikit of the murderer of Paul Stine and recognized him as the attacker of her and her daughter. Her car was later found on fire and broken.
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| Kathleen Johms |
However, there are many inconsistencies in the kidnapping of Kathleen Johns, since her statements are contradictory in some respects, and do not coincide with the statements of some witnesses. Due to all these discrepancies, the investigators questioned whether she was indeed a victim of the Zodiac.
Detective Jack Mulanax resumed the case of Michael and Darlene in the 70s, and it was this investigator who let Robert Graysmith, the cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, read the case files, Robert then published the book "Zodiac" 17 years after the crimes. This book details that the Zodiac could be a regular customer of Terry's Waffle House, where Darlene was a waitress, and also theorized about a possible blackmail to Darlene or an excessive admiration of the Zodiac towards her. There the author points to one of the main suspects, Arthur Leigh Allen, nicknamed "Lee", who was an alleged acquaintance of Darlene and her husband. This theory was later refuted several times, by the sayings of the husband, who was alive, however he never wanted to go out in the media. In return, the author of the book received mysterious calls during the late night for years, prior to the publication of the book when he was investigating, joining pieces of the different investigations of the police of different locations, and after publishing it, he only stopped receiving the calls after the death of Allen, in 1992. It was also Robert Graysmith who, passionate about the case, snooping at desks and in the archives to put together his own investigation, came to find a piece of information that escaped from police and journalists: Why the killer chose the name of Zodiac. According to Robert, Zodiac was a watch brand that the killer probably used, and his signature, a circle crossed by two perpendicular lines, was part of the brand's logo. In addition the symbol indicated precision, right on the target, so the circle and the cross could also be the mouth of a weapon, and its peephole.
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| Robert Graysmith |
Some crimes appeared belatedly, such as that of Cheri Jo Bates (18 years old), almost beheaded on October 30, 1966 in Riverside, California, which reporter Paul Avery connected, by his similarities, with the Zodiac killer. But he could not prove it. On October 27, 1970, Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (who had been covering the Zodiac case) received a Halloween postcard signed with a letter Z and its symbol. Written by hand on the back of the card, was found the annotation: "Peek-a-boo, you are doomed", the threat was taken seriously and the story received front page in the Chronicle. Shortly thereafter, Avery received an anonymous letter alerting him to the similarities between the activities of the Zodiac and the unsolved crime of Cheri Jo Bates, which occurred four years earlier at the College of Riverside. California in the Los Angeles area, more than 400 miles south from San Francisco. Paul reported his findings in the Chronicle on November 16, 1970.
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| Cheri Jo Bates |
On March 13, 1971, almost four months after the first article on Cheri was published (by Paul Avery), the Zodiac sent a letter to the Los Angeles Times, in which he granted the merit to the police instead of Avery For the discovery of their "activity in Riverside, but they are only finding the easy ones, there is a terribly greater amount behind".
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| Paul Avery |
The connection between Cheri Jo Bates, from Riverside, and the Zodiac is uncertain. The Riverside Police Department argues that the murder of Bates was not committed by the Zodiac, but they grant authenticity to some letters that are possibly his work claiming falsely adjudicating the authorship of the act.
On March 22, 1971, a postcard was sent to the Chronicle also addressed to Paul Avery, allegedly from the Zodiac, apparently claiming the disappearance of Donna Lass (25 years old) in South Lake Tahoe, California, on September 26, 1970. Made from a collage of advertisements and magazine letters depicted a scene from a pine forest and the text "Sierra Club / looking for victim 12 / The look through the pines / step areas of Lake Tahoe / around in the snow". The zodiac symbol, the crossed circle, was in the space for the sender's address.
Donna Lass was a nurse at the Sahara Tahoe hotel and casino, worked until 2:00 am, on September 26, and was not seen leaving her office. The next morning, her work uniform and shoes were found in a paper bag in her office, inexplicably dirty. Her car was found in the apartment complex and the flat where she lived was clean. After that day, both her boss and her landlord received phone calls from a stranger who falsely claimed that Donna had to leave the city due to a family emergency. Police and local Sheriffs initially treated Donna's disappearance as a simple case of missing person investigation, suspecting that she had simply left. Donna Lass was never found.
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| Donna Lass |
Later, the Zodiac would send letters asking people to wear pins with his logo. In one of those letters, he claimed that he had shot a man in a car parked with a 38 mm pistol. It is believed that he refers to the murder of Sergeant Richard Radetich, which occurred on June 12, when he was making a traffic ticket, when he was shot with a 38 mm pistol. However, despite the fact that it is a crime of the thousands that have not been resolved in the United States, the San Francisco police deny that the Zodiac was involved in this crime.
A letter from April 24, 1978, one of the last (if not the last one), is also a matter of debate. They attributed it to policeman Dave Toschi just because it looked like the one in charge of the Stine murder case had written to the renowned San Francisco author Armistead Maupin. However, the policeman was free of charges although the authenticity of the letter was questioned.
The last supposed contact of the Zodiac was found on March 3, 2003, but it was a postcard sealed in 1990 in Eureka (California) that had been overlapped in the photo archives. It had a photocopy of 2 keys of the postal service and a Zodiac fingerprint, but it was declared not authentic. Although not all experts agreed on that point.
Without evidence, without solid witnesses and with a lot of questions, morale and hopes of catching the murderer were scarce among police forces, however some indications pointed to the main suspect, and for some, the culprit: Arthur Leigh Allen. Denounced by a friend, and arrested, he said that "the bloody knives I had in my car on the day of the double attack on Lake Berryessa I used to kill chickens". Allen (1933-1992) was a school teacher. He taught in Vallejo, one of the three cities where the crimes of Zodiac took place. In 1975 he was convicted of sexual abuse of minors and pedophilia. In his house he had weapons and explosives. However, all possible evidence (DNA, writing features, fingerprints) that were taken were considered circumstantial and no relationship could be established with any of the Zodiac crimes.
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| Arthur Leigh Allen |
The police had a composite sketch of the murderer, his fingerprints and countless clues detached from his letters. In spite of everything, they could not track him.
The Zodiac continued to claim murders and mock the police for years. In 1974, he suddenly stopped. Before disappearing, in all his messages and letters a total of 37 deaths had been claimed, although only 5 were confirmed in 7 attacks: David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, Darlene Ferrin, Cecilia Shepard and Paul Lee Stine.
The California police and the media have collected clues and speculated on the identity of the murderer for decades. Many theories about his identity have been developed, including Arthur Leigh Allen, Lawrence "Kane" Kaye (identified by the sister of one of the victims due to his resemblance to the composite sketch), Earl Van Best (identified by his son in a book), Richard Gaikowski, who is believed to be the Zodiac killer by the shape of the face in the drawing, by wearing glasses and by his voice. Also, in one of the coded letters one can clearly read the word “Gyke”, which used to be one of the diminutives for Gaikowski. Given the latter, the only evidence of his defense was that in a letter sent to his partner it is said at the end "Gaik". According to the British newspaper "Daily Star", in a note dated February 6, 2016, the US police have finally managed to unmask the sadly famous criminal, identifying him as Dennis Rader, already sentenced to life imprisonment for other crimes and known as the "BTK Killer"(Bind, Torture, Kill), because he tied, tortured and then killed his victims. But this was later denied by official sources.
In 2004, San Francisco police determined the case as inactive, after the last two investigators in the case sent the letters for the first DNA tests. These tests gave a partial genetic profile that completely ruled out Arthur Leigh Allen and then Mike Rodelli, a businessman who lived near the scene of Paul Stine's crime.
But in 2007 the case was reopened by press pressure. As of today the case remains open in other jurisdictions.
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