Zodiac Killer
The Zodiac killer coined his name in a series of taunting letters he sent to the press. His letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers), three of which have yet to be solved.
The Zodiac murdered victims in 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" but re-opened it some time before March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo as well as in Napa and Solano Counties. The California Department of Justice has maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.
Victims
Confirmed
Although the Zodiac claimed in letters to newspapers that he murdered 37 people, 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 20 December 1968, on Lake Herman Road, within the city limits of Benicia.
Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22: shot on 4 July 1969, in the parking lot at the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course on the outskirts of Vallejo.
Ferrin was pronounced dead-on-arrival at Kaiser Foundation Hospital, while Mageau survived.
Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22: stabbed on 27 September 1969 at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Hartnell survived six stab wounds to the back, but Shepard died of her injuries two days later.
Paul Lee Stine, 29: shot and killed on 11 October 1969, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood in San Francisco.
Suspected
Of the following popular suspected victims, none have been confirmed:
Cheri Jo Bates, 18: Stabbed to death and nearly decapitated on October 30, 1966, at Riverside Community College in Riverside.
Bates' possible connection to the Zodiac only came to light 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, 1963, at a beach near Lompoc. Edwards and Domingos were named as possible Zodiac victims because of specific similarities between their attack and the Zodiac's attack at Lake Berryessa six years later.
Kathleen Johns, 22: Allegedly abducted on March 22, 1970, on Highway 132 by I-580, 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 some three hours.
Donna Lass, 25: Last seen September 6, 1970, in Stateline, Nevada. Instead, they visited a friend and stopped at a local restaurant, then drove out Lake Herman Road.
Faraday parked his mother's Rambler in a gravel turnout, which was a well-known lovers' lane.
Shortly after 11 p.m., another car pulled into the turnout and parked beside them. When Faraday was halfway out, the man shot Faraday in the head.
The man then drove off.
Their bodies were found minutes later by Stella Borges, who lived nearby. The Solano County Sheriff's Department investigated the crime but no leads developed.
Blue Rock Springs
Some time around midnight on July 4–July 5, 1969, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau drove to the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course in Vallejo, four miles from the Lake Herman Road murder site, and parked.
While they sat in Ferrin's car, another car drove into the lot and parked beside them. He first shone the light in their eyes to blind them, then shot both of them 3 times and began to return to his car.
When Mageau moaned in pain, the driver returned and shot them both 2 more times. 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
The solution to Zodiac's 408-symbol cipher. The meaning, if any, of the final eighteen letters has not been determined.
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. The killer demanded they be printed on each paper's front page or he would "cruse 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.
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.
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. The hooded man claimed to be an escaped convict from Deer Lodge, Montana, where he killed a guard and stole a car, and explained that he needed their car and money to go to Mexico.
Napa County Sheriff's deputies Dave Collins and Ray Land were the first law enforcement officers to arrive at the scene of the assault. Cecelia Shepard was conscious when Collins arrived and gave him a detailed description of the attacker. Shepard lapsed into a coma during transport to the hospital and never regained consciousness.
When the officers reached Cherry, Fouke was informed by Officer Pellisetti that they were in fact looking for a white suspect; Fouke realized that they must have passed the killer. Fouke concluded that the Zodiac had resumed his original route and escaped into the Presidio, so they entered the base to look for the killer, but he had vanished. The killer was estimated to be 35–45 years of age. Detectives Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi were assigned to the case.
When the driver stopped at an intersection, the man told Johns that he was going to kill her and then throw the baby out after her. Most claim he threatened to kill her and her daughter while driving them around, but at least one police report disputes that. Johns' account to Paul Avery of the Chronicle indicates her abductor left his car and searched for her in the dark with a flashlight; however, in one report she made to the police, she stated he did not leave the vehicle. Some accounts state Johns' vehicle was moved, then torched, while others contend it was located where she'd left it. The various discrepancies among Johns' accounts over the years have led many researchers to question whether she was an actual Zodiac victim.
Further communications
The Zodiac continued to communicate with authorities for the remainder of 1970 via letters and greeting cards to the press.
N." The letter also included a 32-letter cipher that the killer claimed would, in conjunction with the code, lead to the location of a bomb he had buried and set to go off in the autumn. The killer had signed the note with " = 12, SFPD = 0."
In a letter to the Chronicle postmarked July 24, 1970, the Zodiac took credit for Kathleen Johns' abduction, four months after the incident.
In his July 26, 1970 letter, the Zodiac paraphrased a song from The Mikado, adding his own lyrics about making a "little list" of the ways he planned to torture his "slaves" in "paradice." The letter was signed with a large, exaggerated cross circle symbol and a new score: " = 13, SFPD = 0." A final note at the bottom of the letter stated, "P.S.
The threat was taken seriously and received a front-page story on the Chronicle. Soon after, Avery received an anonymous letter alerting him to the similarities between the Zodiac's activities and the unsolved murder of Cheri Jo Bates, which had occurred four years earlier at the city college in Riverside in the Greater Los Angeles Area, more than 400 miles south of San Francisco. He reported his findings in the Chronicle on November 16, 1970.
On October 30, 1966, 18-year-old Bates spent the evening at the campus library annex until it closed at 9 p.m. A man's Timex watch with a torn wristband was found nearby. The watch had stopped at 12:24, but police believe the attack occurred much earlier. The police also discovered the prints of a military-style shoe.
The Confession
A month later, on November 29, 1966, nearly identical typewritten letters were mailed to the Riverside police and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, titled "The Confession".
In it, he credited the police instead of Avery for discovering his "Riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there".
The connection between Cheri Jo Bates, Riverside, and the Zodiac remains uncertain. Paul Avery and the Riverside Police Department maintains that the Bates homicide was not committed by the Zodiac, but did concede some of the Bates letters may have been his work to falsely claim credit.
Lake Tahoe
On March 22, 1971, a postcard to the Chronicle addressed to "Paul Averly" and believed to be from the Zodiac—appeared to take credit for the disappearance of Donna Lass on September 6, 1970. Made from a collage of advertisements and magazine lettering, it featured a scene from an ad for Forest Pines condominiums and the text "Sierra Club," "Sought Victim 12," "peek through the pines," "pass Lake Tahoe areas," and "around in the snow." Zodiac's cross circle symbol was in the place of the usual return address.
Lass was a nurse at the Sahara Tahoe hotel and casino.
on September 6, treating her last patient at 1:40 a.m., 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 soiled with dirt. Her car was found at her apartment complex, and her apartment was spotless. Later that day both her employer and her landlord received phone calls from an unknown male who falsely claimed Lass had to leave town due to a family emergency. The police and sheriff's office initially treated Lass' disappearance as a missing persons investigation, suspecting she simply left on her own. Lass was never found. The letter included a snippet of verse from The Mikado and an unusual symbol at the bottom that has remained unexplained by researchers.
He died in 1992 from kidney failure before this was possible. In 2002, DNA samples taken from saliva on the Zodiac's stamps and envelopes were compared with Arthur Leigh Allen's DNA, and that of a former close friend, Don Cheney, who first suspected him as the Zodiac Killer.