The Zodiac Killer

The Zodiac Killer

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The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. The Zodiac killer's identity remains unknown. The Zodiac killer coined the name "Zodiac" in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers), three of which have yet to be solved. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women, between the ages of 16 and 29, were targeted. Numerous suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced.
In April 2004, the San Francisco Police Department marked the case "inactive", yet re-opened the case at some point prior to March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo as well as in Napa Counties and Solano Counties.The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.


Victims


Confirmed victims
Although the Zodiac claimed 37 murders in letters to newspapers, investigators agree on only seven confirmed victims, two of whom survived. They are:

David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16: shot and killed on December 20, 1968, on Lake Herman Road, within the city limits of Benicia.

Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22: shot on July 4, 1969, in the parking lot of Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo. While Mageau survived the attack, Ferrin was pronounced dead-on-arrival at Kaiser Foundation Hospital.

Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22: stabbed on September 27, 1969 at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Hartnell survived six stab wounds to the back, but Shepard died as a result of her injuries on September 29, 1969.

Paul Lee Stine, 29: shot and killed on October 11, 1969, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood in San Francisco.

Suspected victims
The following murder victims are suspected to be victims of Zodiac, though none have been confirmed:

Cheri Jo Bates, 18: stabbed to death and nearly decapitated on October 30, 1966, at Riverside City College in Riverside.
Bates' possible connection to the Zodiac only appeared four years after her murder when San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery received a tip regarding similarities between the Zodiac killings and the circumstances surrounding Bates' death.

Robert Domingos, 18, and Linda Edwards, 17: shot and killed on June 4, 1966, on a beach near Lompoc. Edwards and Domingos were identified as possible Zodiac victims because of specific similarities between their attack and the Zodiac's attack at Lake Berryessa six years later.

Donna Lass, 25: last seen September 6, 1970, in Stateline, Nevada. A postcard with an advertisement from Forest Pines condominiums (near Incline Village at Lake Tahoe) pasted on the back was received at the Chronicle on 22 March 1971, and has been interpreted as the Zodiac claiming Lass' disappearance as a victim. No evidence has been uncovered to definitively connect Donna Lass' disappearance with the Zodiac Killer.

There is also a suspected third escapee from the Zodiac Killer:

Kathleen Johns, 22: allegedly abducted on March 22, 1970, on Highway 132 near I-580, in an area west of Modesto. Johns escaped from the car of a man who drove her, and her infant daughter, around in the area between Stockton and Patterson for approximately three hours.

Timeline
Lake Herman Road attack

The first murders widely attributed to the Zodiac Killer were the shootings of high school students Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on December 20, 1968, on Lake Herman Road, just inside Benicia city limits.
The couple were on their first date and planned to attend a Christmas concert at Hogan High about three blocks from Jensen's home. The couple, instead, visited a friend before stopping at a local restaurant, and then driving out on Lake Herman Road. At about 10:15 p.m., Faraday parked his mother's Rambler in a gravel turnout, which was a well-known lovers' lane.
Shortly after 11:00 p.m., their bodies were found by Stella Borges, who lived nearby. The Solano County Sheriff's Department investigated the crime but no leads developed.
Utilizing available forensic data, Robert Graysmith postulated that another car pulled into the turnout, just prior to 11:00 and parked beside the couple. The killer apparently exited the second car and walked toward the Rambler, possibly ordering the couple out of the Rambler. Jensen appeared to have exited the car first, yet when Faraday was halfway out, the killer apparently shot Faraday in the head. Fleeing from the killer, Jensen was gunned down twenty-eight feet from the car with five shots through her back. The killer then drove off.


Blue Rock Springs attack

Just before midnight on July 4, 1969, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau drove into the Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, four miles from the Lake Herman Road murder site, and parked. While the couple sat in Ferrin's car, a second car drove into the lot and parked alongside them, almost immediately driving away. Returning about 10 minutes later, this second car parked behind them. The driver of the second car then exited the vehicle, approaching the passenger side door of Ferrin's car, carrying a flashlight and a 9 mm Luger. First, the killer directed the flashlight into Mageau's and Ferrin's eyes, before shooting each of the victims 3 times. When Mageau moaned in pain, the killer returned and shot each victim 2 more times before driving off.
On July 5, 1969, at 12:40 a.m., a man phoned the Vallejo Police Department to report and claim responsibility for the attack. He also took credit for the murders of Jensen and Faraday six-and-a-half months earlier. The police traced the call to a phone booth at a gas station at Springs Road and Tuolumne, about three-tenths of a mile from Ferrin's home and only a few blocks from the Vallejo Police Department.
Ferrin was pronounced dead at the hospital. Mageau survived the attack despite being shot in the face, neck, and chest.


The Zodiac letters begin

On August 1, 1969, three letters prepared by the killer were received at the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner. The nearly identical letters took credit for the shootings at Lake Herman Road and Blue Rock Springs. Each letter also included one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram which the killer claimed contained his identity. The killer demanded they be printed on each paper's front page or he would "cruse [sic] 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 Chronicle published its third of the cryptogram on page four of the next day's edition. An article printed alongside the code quoted Vallejo Police Chief Jack E. Stiltz as saying "We're not satisfied that the letter was written by the murderer" and requested the writer send a second letter with more facts to prove his identity. The threatened murders did not happen, and all three parts were eventually published.
On August 7, 1969, another letter was received at the San Francisco Examiner with the salutation "Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking". It was the first time the killer had referred to himself with this name. The letter was in response to Chief Stiltz asking him to provide more details to prove he killed Faraday, Jensen and Ferrin. In it, the Zodiac included details about the murders which had not been released to the public as well as a message to the police that when they cracked his code "they will have me".
On August 8, 1969, Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, California, cracked the 408-symbol cryptogram. No name appears in the decoded text.


Lake Berryessa Attack

On September 27, 1969, Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard were picnicking at Lake Berryessa on a small island connected by a sand spit to Twin Oak Ridge. A man approached them 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 3"x3" cross-circle symbol on it. He approached them with a gun which Hartnell believed to be a .45. The hooded man claimed to be an escaped convict from Deer Lodge, Montana; where he killed a guard and stole a car, explaining that he needed their car and money to go to Mexico. He had brought precut lengths of plastic clothesline and told Shepard to tie up Hartnell, before he tied her up. The killer checked, and tightened, Hartnell's bonds after discovering Shepard had bound Hartnell's hands loosely. Hartnell initially believed it to be a weird robbery, but the man drew a knife and stabbed them both repeatedly. The killer then hiked 500 yards back up to Knoxville Road, drew the cross-circle symbol on Hartnell's car door with a black felt-tip pen, and wrote beneath it: "Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27-69-6:30/by knife."
At 7:40 p.m., the killer called the Napa County Sheriff's office from a pay telephone to report his crime. The phone was found, still off the hook, minutes later at the Napa Car Wash on Main Street in Napa by KVON radio reporter Pat Stanley, only a few blocks from the sheriff's office, yet 27 miles from the crime scene. Detectives were able to lift a still-wet palm print from the telephone but were never able to match it to any suspect.
After hearing their screams for help, a man and his son who were fishing in a nearby cove discovered the victims and summoned help by contacting park rangers. Napa County Sheriff's deputies Dave Collins and Ray Land were the first law enforcement officers to arrive at the crime scene. Cecelia Shepard was conscious when Collins arrived, providing him with a detailed description of the attacker. Hartnell and Shepard were taken to Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa by ambulance. Shepard lapsed into a coma during transport to the hospital and never regained consciousness. She died two days later, but Hartnell survived to recount his tale to the press. Napa County Sheriff Detective Ken Narlow, who was assigned to the case from the outset, worked on solving the crime until his retirement from the department in 1987.

Presidio Heights attack


On October 11, 1969, a man entered the cab driven by Paul Stine at the intersection of Mason and Geary Streets in San Francisco requesting to be taken to Washington and Maple Streets in Presidio Heights. For reasons unknown, Stine drove one block past Maple to Cherry Street; this passenger then shot Stine once in the head with a 9 mm, took Stine's wallet, car keys, and tore away a section of Stine's bloodstained shirt tail. He was observed by three teenagers across the street at 9:55 p.m., who called the police while the crime was in progress. They observed the man wiping the cab down before walking away towards the Presidio, one block to the north.
Two blocks from the crime scene, Officer Don Fouke, responding to the call, observed a white man walking along the sidewalk stepping onto a stairway leading up to the front yard of one of the homes on the north side of the street; the encounter lasted only five to ten seconds. The radio dispatcher had alerted to be on the lookout for a black suspect, so they drove past him without stopping; the mix-up in descriptions remains unexplained to this day. A search ensued, but no possible suspects were found. The three teen witnesses worked with a police artist to prepare a composite sketch of Stine's killer; then, a few days later, this police artist returned, working with the witnesses to prepare a second composite sketch of the killer.
Detectives Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi were assigned to the case.

The San Francisco Police Department investigated an estimated 2,500 suspects over a period of years.

Prime suspect
Arthur Leigh Allen

Arthur Leigh Allen was the prime suspect in the Zodiac murders and the only suspect served search warrants by police. He was never charged with any Zodiac-related crime, and his fingerprints did not match those left by the killer of taxi cab driver Paul Stine. In 1992, twenty-three years after the shootings, survivor Michael Mageau identified Allen as the man who shot him, from a photo lineup of 1968 driver's license photos. Allen, who suffered from diabetes, died in 1992 from kidney failure. In 2002, DNA samples taken from saliva on the Zodiac's stamps and envelopes were compared with the DNA of Arthur Leigh Allen, and the DNA of a former close friend of Allen named Don Cheney, who first identified Allen as the Zodiac Killer. Allen and Cheney were ruled out as the contributors of the DNA, though it cannot be stated definitively that it is DNA from the Zodiac on the envelopes.