In the late 1960s and early 1970s, one man terrorized the San Francisco area of California through letters, postcards, and murder. This is the wild tale of The Zodiac.
On the evening of December 20th, 1968, Betty-Lou Jensen (16) and David Faraday (17) were on a first date. They were parked on a lovers’ lane on Lake Herman Road, just inside the Benicia city limits when a car pulled up alongside them.
The man in the car ordered them to get out. Betty Lou got out first, followed by David. Thinking they were being robbed, the teens simply wanted to comply. But things took a turn when the man pulled out a gun.
The man proceeded to shoot David in head, and then gunned down Betty Lou as she tried to run away, shooting her five times in the back. Afterwards, the killer got back in his car, and drove away.
Around 11PM that night, Stella Borges found the bodies, and alerted the Solano County Sheriff’s Department. Few leads developed from the investigation.
Months later, on July 5th, 1969, Darlene Ferrin (22) and Mike Mageau (19) were parked in Darlene’s car at the Blue Rock Springs Golf Club in Vallejo, California. Just like the murders of David and Betty Lou, a car pulled up behind them.
A man got out of the car, and approached the passenger side. He was carrying a flashlight, and a 9mm Luger. After using the flashlight to blind the couple, the man shot at them five times. The killer then walked away, but returned when he heard Mike moan. He shot both Darlene and Mike twice more before returning to his car and driving away.
Less than an hour later, Vallejo Police Department received a phone call reporting the crime. The man claimed to have been the killer. He also went on to claim: “I also killed those kids last year.”
The caller went on to give police the location of Darlene and Mike’s shooting. The call was traced to a phone booth with was just a few blocks from Darlene’s home, and only a few blocks away from the police station.
That phone call would spark a years-long taunting communicative relationship between the killer, the police, and the public. The killer would go on to send cryptic messages, and taunts, whenever he damn well pleased.
When officers arrived at the Blue Rock Springs Golf Club, Darlene was pronounced dead, but Mike managed to survive.
Mike went on to describe his attacker as “a 26-to-30-year-old, 195-to-200 pound, or possibly even more, 5-foot-8-inch while mae with short, light brown curly hair.” It was the first real concrete description police had of the killer.
In August of 1969, the Vallejo Times Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Francisco Examiner each received nearly identical letters. In the letters, the writer took credit for the shootings at Lake Herman Road, and Blue Rock Springs Golf Club. Each letter also included one part of a 408-symbol cryptogram. The killer claimed that if the code could be cracked, it would reveal his identity.
Along with the general spookiness of the letters, they came with a warning. The killer wanted each publication to publish the letters on the front page of their papers, or he would: “cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kil again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.”
The Chronicle didn’t publish the entire letter, just the cryptogram, on Page 4. It did, however, come with an article quoting Vallejo Police Chief Jack E. Stiltz as saying he didn’t believe the letters came from the real killer. And despite not following the killer’s rules, no killings occurred.
On August 4th, 1969, the killer finally had a name. In a letter to The San Francisco Examiner, the killer opened by saying: “This is the Zodiac speaking”, thus naming himself. It seeme as though he’d read Mr. Stiltz’s statement, and was deeply unhappy. In order to prove himself, this letter included details that hadn’t been made public knowledge. It was also signed off with a crosshairs symbol, resembling the sight on a rifle.
Four days later, Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, California, had managed to crack the cryptogram. With all its misspellings and gramatical errors, it read as follows:
“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 aftertlife ebeorietemethhpiti.”
Those last 18 letters have never been solved.
On September 27th, 1969, Cecilia Shepard (22) and Bryan Hartnell (20) were having a picnic at Lake Berryessa in Napa County.
A man described as about 5’11’’, weighing more than 170 pounds, with greasy brown hair approached the couple. He was wearing “a black executioner’s-type hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eye-holes and a bib-like device on his chest that had a white three-by-three inch cross-circle symbol”. As the man approached, he pulled out a gun.
He told the couple that he was an escaped convict, and that he was robbing them for money so that he could flee the authorities. He pulled out pre-cut lengths of plastic clothesline, and demanded that Cecilia tie Bryan up. Then, the man tied her up, and checked on Bryan’s bonds, tightening them when he found that Cecilia hadn’t tied them tight enough for his liking.
The couple believed that they were about to be robbed and left alone. But then the man pulled out a knife, and stabbed them both repeatedly.
Then, the man hiked up to Knoxville Road, drew the Zodiac’s crosshairs symbol, and then walked back to Bryan’s car. Once there, with a black pen, the man wrote: “Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27 – 69 – 6:30/by knife.”
The killer left the couple for dead, and proceeded to call the Napa County Sheriff’s Office from a payphone. The man claimed he wished to report a murder. “No,” he said, “a double murder”. The man claimed responsibility for the attack. When the call was traced, it was found to have from from a payphone near a car wash, close tot he Sheriff’s office.
When detectives arrived at the scene, they were able to find a boot print, and lift a still wet palm print from the phone. They’ve never been able to match it.
Both Cecilia and Bryan were still alive when investigators found them. Cecilia succumbed to her wounds on route to the hospital, but Bryan survived. Bryan gave police a description of the hood/bib ensemble worn by the killer – the second best description of the Zodiac killer.
On October 11th, 1969, the Zodiac struck again.
Paul Stine was running his cab, when he picked up a male passenger. The man shot Paul in the head, stole his wallet, car keys, and then took sections of his bloodied shirt. He then proceeded to wipe the cab down.
Some teens had witnessed the murder, and reported it immediately. They described the murderer as a white man around 25 t0 30 years old, wearing glasses and hair cut in a crew cut.
Patrol officers spotted a man matching that description shortly after, but they let him go. The dispatcher had mistakenly identified the killer as a Black man. The officers let the white man they stopped leave. The Zodiac had narrowly avoided capture.
On October 13th, the Zodiac wrote a letter to the Chronicle wherein he took responsibility for Paul Stine’s death. The letter contained a piece of his shirt.
The letter also stated that he wanted one of two prominent lawyers to appear on the show AM San Francisco. If they didn’t, he threatened to target a school bus full of children. The letter read, in part: “School children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”
One of the lawyers went on the show, not wanting to take the risk, and appealed to the viewers to keep the lines open so taht the Zodiac could get through. And he did. Several times.
The man on the line claimed that his name was Sam, and he agreed to meet with the lawyer in Daly City the next day. The lawyer made the meeting. The Zodiac did not.
On November 8th, 1969, the Zodiac mailed another cryptogram to newspapers, but this one has never been decoded. The next day, he mailed a 7-page letter stating that two policeman had stopped him and spoken to him after he’d murdered Paul Stine, and they let him go. He took great pleasure in taunting the police for their incompetence.
On December 20th, 1969 – one year to the day after the murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen – the Zodiac mailed a letter to the lawyer who had appeared on AM San Francisco. The letter contained another piece of Paul’s bloddy shirt. Zodiac claimed he wanted this lawyer to represent him.
After this, the Zodiac slowed his onslaught of communication. Until March 22nd, 1970.
Kathleen Johns, who was 7 months pregnant, was driving from San Bernardino to Petaluma to visit her mother with her 10-month-old daughter. While driving, a car behind her started honking at her and flashing its headlights. Thinking something was wrong, Kathleen pulled over.
The car parked behind her, and a man got out, approached her driver’s side, and informed her that he’d seen her rear wheel wobbling. He offered to tighten it for her. She accepted. When the man was done, he got in his car and left. When Kathleen attempted to continue her drive, her wheel immediately came right off the car.
At this point, the man came back, and offered her a ride to the nearest gas station. Packing up her infant daughter, Kathleen accepted the ride.
Kathleen grew extremely concerned when the man drove past several service stations, but never pulled into them. Every time she tried to ask why he wasn’t stopping, the man changed the subject. When he pulled to a stop at an intersection, Kathleen, holding her daughter, jumped out of the car and fled into a field to hide.
As she hid, she heard the man search for her. He made promises that he wouldn’t hurt her, but she didn’t believe him. When finding her proved impossible, the man got back in his car and took off. Kathleen proceeded to hitchhike a ride to the police station in Patterson.
As she was giving the officers her statement, she saw the composite sketch that the witnesses of Paul Stine’s murder had provided. She immediately recognized the man in the sketch as the man who had abducted her. That man was the Zodiac.
Police kept watch over her as they searched for her car. When they finally found it, it has been gutted and torched.
On April 20th, 1970, Zodiac sent letters hoping that the residents of San Francisco would wear buttons with his crosshairs symbol.
On June 26th, 1970, two months later, Zodiac expressed his regret that people weren’t wearing his buttons. In this letter, he also claimed to have shot a man in a parked car. In theory, police believed that this could refer to the shooting of a sergeant who had been sitting in his car writing a parking ticken when he was shot in the head. This murder remains unsolved.
Throughout most of the early 70s, Zodiac sent out diagrams, maps, and bits and pieces of things – all claiming to lead police to him, if they could decipher the bits and pieces. In July, he took credit for the abduction of Kathleen Johns.
In October, Zodiac sent a Halloween card, which had 13 holds punched through the top, and was written in letters cut out and glued from an edition of the Chronicle. The card was signed off with the Zodiac’s crosshairs symbol, written absurdly large, and in blood.
Around this same time, Chronicle journalist Paul Avery, who was known for covering the Zodiac investigation, received a Halloween card stating “Peek a boo you’re doomed”. The threat was deemed legitimate, and the card was taken into custody.
A little while later, an anonymous letter arrived pointing out the similarities between the Zodiac’s killings, and the unsolved murder of Cheri Jo Bates. (I will be covering this in my next post.)
The Zodiac sent a note in March of 1971 stating that each person he killed meant: “the more slaves I will collect for my afterlife”. After that, the Zodiac went silent.
On January 29th, 1974, the Zodiac sent a note that said: “Me – 37, SFPD – 0”. The 0 was done to look like his crosshairs symbol. That year, more letters and cards arrived, but nothing of note.
In the end, the Zodiac claimed he’d taken 37 lives. But no victims have been linked to the Zodiac since Paul Stine’s murder in 1969.
Over the years of the investigation – which waxed and waned – over 2500 suspects were considered. At one point, even Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was a suspect, though he was quickly dismissed.
Robert Graysmith, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Zodiac, believes wholeheartedly that the Zodiac is a man by the name of Arthur Leigh Allen.
Arthur Leigh Allen was interviewed early on in the investigation, and was the subject of several search warrants over 20 years. He was described as the most likely suspect, though most of the evidence against him is circumstantial. Allen was not a squeaky clean person, but he was dismissed as the Zodiac in 2010. They found that his fingerprints did not match prints taken from Paul Stine’s taxi, and his DNA didn’t match the sample they had pulled from the stamps on correspondence sent from Zodiac.
In 2014, a new suspect was reported as a likely candidate for the Zodiac.
In 2001, Louis Joseph Myers was a dying man, and apparently confessed to a friend that he was the Zodiac. He requested that his friend go to police upon his death. The police didn’t quite take the deathbed confession seriously.
However, there are some compelling connections. Myers had gone to high school with David and Betty Lou, and he worked at the same restaurant as Darlene. He also owned the same style military boot that matched the boot print found at the Lake Berryessa crime scene.
During Zodiac’s hiatus in correspondence, from 1971 to 1973, Myers was stationed overseas with the military. Myers also confessed to his friend that he targeted couples because he was jealous after a nasty breakup.
While entirely circumstantial, it is rather compelling.
As with most suspects in the investigation, a lot of them are circumstantial at best.
As of 2018, the Vallejo Police Department announced plans to submit evidence for an up-to-date DNA test. While they are hopeful, no results have been reported yet.
California has seen its fair share of terror and horror. But few are as elusive as The Zodiac.
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Sources:
Why The Zodiac Killer Has Never Been Identified – Sara Kettler – Biography
Zodiac Killer – Movie, Letters, and Suspects – Biography
The Zodiac Killer has been a mystery for 50 years – But one man thinks he’s solved it – Adrian Horton – The Guardian
And That’s Why We Drink podcast – Episode 86 – The Haunted Doll Market and 420 Zodiac
Zodiac Killer Wikipedia page