Okay, let's unpack this. I want you to close
your eyes for a second. Imagine it's the late
1960s. You're in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Now, we all have this cultural image of that
time, right? Flower crowns, Haight -Ashbury,
the Summer of Love. The golden era of peace and
expansion. That's the postcard version. Exactly,
the postcard version. But if you actually dig
into the source material we have in front of
us today, the reality on the ground... It was
shifting into something much, much colder. It
was a very specific type of curdling. I mean,
that optimism was fading and fast. How so? Well,
you had the Manson murders happening down south
in 69, which sent this shockwave of fear through
California. You had the Altamont concert disaster
just on the horizon. There was a fog rolling
in, you know. both literally and metaphorically.
The whole atmosphere was turning paranoid. Deeply
paranoid. And walking right out of that fog is
a figure who I think really defines that paranoia.
We're talking about the Zodiac Killer. Now, I
know what you're thinking. You've probably seen
the David Fincher movie. Which is a masterpiece,
by the way. An absolute masterpiece. And we'll
definitely get to that. Or, you know, maybe you've
just seen the memes on the internet. Right. But
our mission today is a little different. We aren't
here to just retell the campfire story. We have
a massive dossier in front of us. Police reports,
ballistic analysis, transcriptions of the letters,
the complete timeline of the investigation. We're
treating this as a case study because the Zodiac
isn't just a slasher villain. He is, and I think
you could argue this pretty strongly, the first
modern serial killer to truly understand branding.
Branding. That's a chilling way to put it. But
it's true. He didn't just kill. He launched a
media campaign. That's exactly. So today we're
going to look at the canonical crimes, the ones
the police actually agree on. And we're going
to contrast that with the myth that's built up
around him. We're going to look at the ciphers,
some of which took, what, 51 years to finally
craft? 51 years. An incredible amount of time.
And I have to admit that puzzle aspect of the
case is what usually hooks people. It hooked
me. It feels like a game he designed for everyone
to play. And see. That's the trap. That's exactly
what he wanted. He wanted to gamify murder. He
wanted us to get so obsessed with the puzzles
that we'd sort of ignore the bodies. Right. But
my role here is to keep pulling us back to the
reality of it. This wasn't a game for the victims
or their families. It was an absolute tragedy.
He manipulated the press to amplify his own power.
But underneath all the ciphers and that cool
spooky symbol, there was just a pathetic. brutal
man with a gun. A really important distinction
to make. So let's start with the hard numbers,
because even that is just a mess of misinformation.
It really is. If you read the Zodiac's final
scorecard, he claimed to have killed 37 people.
That is a staggeringly high number for a serial
killer. It is. But let's be clear. There is absolutely
zero evidence to support a number anywhere near
that high. So it's just bluster. It's bluster.
If we look at the canonical attacks and what
we mean by that. are the crimes where law enforcement
agencies in Benicia, Vallejo, Napa, and San Francisco
all agree, yes, this is the same perpetrator.
We're looking at exactly four events. There's
four attacks. Four attacks. They involve seven
victims, five of those people were killed, and
two miraculously survived. And the timeline for
those attacks is surprisingly compressed, isn't
it? We tend to think of the Zodiac as this figure
who haunted California for a decade. Right, like
he was a permanent fixture. But the actual spree
of violence, the core attacks, they lasted less
than a year. Less than a year. It all happens
between December 1968 and October 1969. That's
it, 10 months. 10 months of brutal violence,
followed by years and years of psychological
terrorism conducted through the mail. Okay, so
let's go back to night one, December 20th, 1968,
Lake Herman Road. This is in Venetia. Now, to
really understand this first crime, you have
to understand the geography. Lake Herman Road
is this winding, dark, two -lane stretch of road.
It connects Benicia to Vallejo. And there's nothing
out there. Nothing. No streetlights. It's surrounded
by these rolling hills. It is exactly the kind
of place that local teenagers go to be alone.
A classic lover's lane. Precisely. It's a Friday
night. It's freezing cold. Out temperatures were
in the low 20s. So the ground was hard as a rock.
And we have two high school students, David Arthur
Faraday, who was 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, who
was 16. And the source material we have notes
this was actually their first official date,
right? It was their first date. They had promised
Betty Lou's parents they'd be home by 11 .00
p .m. They went and visited a friend, they grabbed
a bite to eat, and then they drove out to this
gravel turnout near a water pumping station.
It's completely isolated. They probably felt
invisible out there. You'd think so. But they
weren't. So what happens? Around 11 .10 p .m.,
a passing motorist notices their car, a Rambler
station wagon. Then, just moments later, another
car pulls into the turnout. Okay. Now, typically
in these situations, you know, if a car pulls
up to a lover's lane, the couple usually just
leaves to avoid the awkwardness. But the second
car, it pulls up right alongside them. It basically
blocks them in. And this is where the forensic
reconstruction gets just terrifying. He doesn't,
like, snipe them from the bushes or something.
No, no. He gets out of his car and walks right
up to them. Oh, wow. He's using a .22 caliber
semi -automatic pistol. And the first thing he
does is fire into the rear right wheel well of
their car, and then he shoots out the rear window.
He is aggressively, violently forcing them out
of the vehicle. So it's just panic, absolute
chaos in the pitch dark. Total chaos. David Faraday
is in the driver's seat. He opens his door, maybe
to surrender, maybe to try and confront the attacker.
We'll never know. But as he's stepping out of
the car, the killer shoots him point blank in
the head. And he falls right there. Right there
by the wheel. And Betty Lou. She sees this happen.
She opens the passenger door and she just runs
for it. She sprints across the gravel turnout
trying to get to the road. The killer tracks
her. He fires five shots into her back as she's
fleeing. Does she? Does she get away? No. All
five shots hit her. She falls about 28 feet from
the car. And here's the detail that tells us
this wasn't just a robbery gone wrong. Nothing
was taken. Nothing at all. He didn't check their
pockets for a wallet. He didn't sexually assault
Betty Lou. He just got back in his car and drove
off into the night. It's an execution, plain
and simple. And at this point, nobody knows the
Zodiac exists, the name, the symbol, none of
it. The police must have been completely baffled.
They were completely in the dark. The Solano
County Sheriff's Office investigated it as maybe
a drug deal gone bad or a jealous ex -boyfriend.
They were looking for a rational motive. They
had no idea they were dealing with a stranger
-on -stranger thrill kill. And so the case goes
cold almost immediately. Immediately. For nearly
seven months, there's just silence. And then
we get to Independence Day, 1969. We're technically
the early hours of July 5th. Exactly. We're at
Blue Rock Springs Park. Now, geographically,
this is really important. It's only about four
miles away from the Lake Herman Road site. So
it's his hunting ground. It seems to be. It's
another secluded spot, this time in Vallejo.
And we have another couple, Darlene Farron, 22,
and Michael Mago, 19. Right. Darlene is a waitress.
She's really popular, knows a lot of people in
town. Michael is her friend. They park their
car in the lot around midnight. It had been busy
earlier with people watching fireworks, but by
now it's completely deserted. And then it happens
again. A car pulls in. A car pulls into the lot,
sits there for a moment with its lights off,
and then it just tears away. That's strange.
It's like he was scouting them, checking to see
if there were any witnesses. Or maybe psyching
himself up. We don't know. But about five minutes
later, the same car comes back. He parks directly
behind them. And to the left, once again, blocking
them in. He gets out. But this time, he has a
prop. What kind of prop? A high -powered flashlight.
He shines it right in their eyes. He keeps it
trained directly on their faces. Now, you have
to think about the psychology of that. Michael
Mago later said he thought it was a police officer.
You know, a cop come and check on some kids in
a parked car. So they aren't panicked yet. They
think it's official. Not yet. Michael actually
reaches for his ID. He starts to roll down the
window to say, everything is okay, officer. Without
saying a single word, the man walks right up
to the passenger side window and just opens fire.
And he's upgraded his weapon. He has. He's using
a 9mm Luger this time. Much more power than the
.22. He fires five shots into the car. Both Darlene
and Michael are hit multiple times. The killer
starts to walk away. But then, he hears Michael
moaning in pain. Oh, this is the part that just,
it turns my stomach. He hears that they aren't
dead. Michael was trying to scramble into the
backseat, trying to hide. The killer hears this
sound, turns around, walks calmly back to the
car, and fires two more shots into each of them.
He wants to make sure he's finishing the job.
Absolutely clinical. But Michael McGough survives.
Miraculously. He's shot in the jaw, the leg,
the shoulder. It's an incredible story of survival.
And because he lives, we get our very first description
of the Zodiac. What does he say he looked like?
He describes a white man, heavyset. Beefy was
the word he used. Roughly 5 '8", maybe 200 pounds,
a large face. But interestingly, Michael was
adamant about one thing. The man was not wearing
glasses. Which is a huge detail because it completely
contradicts the famous composite sketch that
we all know. The one from the Stein murder. We'll
definitely get to that discrepancy. But yeah,
this first description is very different. The
attack itself is horrific, but what happens 40
minutes later, that's what changes this from
just a murder case into a full -blown phenomenon.
The phone call. This is the turning point for
the entire case. The killer drives a few blocks
to a payphone at the intersection of Tuolumne
and Springs Road. And this payphone is practically
within sight of the Vallejo Police Department.
That is incredibly brazen. The audacity. It's
pure arrogance. He dials the police chief directly.
The call is answered by a dispatcher named Nancy
Slover. She later described his voice as completely
monotone. She said it sounded like he was reading
from a script or maybe like he'd rehearsed it
in the mirror over and over. And what does he
say? He says, and this is a direct quote, I want
to report a double murder. If you will go one
mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park,
you will find the kids in a brown car. And then
he connects the dots for them. He says, I also
killed those kids last year. Goodbye. Wow. So
he confesses. to the Lake Herman Road murderers,
he's officially claiming credit. He's doing more
than just claiming credit. He's taking ownership
of the entire investigation. He's telling the
police, you didn't catch me last time, and I'm
literally handing you this one on a silver platter,
and you still won't catch me. It's an act of
extreme ego. Before we move on from this attack,
we have to address the Darlene Farron connection
theory. Right. Because if you look at the pop
culture versions of this story, especially Robert
Graysmith's book, there is this whole narrative
that Darlene actually knew the killer. That he
was a stalker named Richard? We have to be very,
very careful with that theory. The stalker theory
is incredibly compelling for a movie script because
it gives the killer a personal motive, right?
It makes it about obsession, not just random
violence. It gives it a why. Exactly. But if
you look at the cold, hard facts in the dossier,
the evidence for it is very, very thin. Michael
Mago's story changed over the years. At the scene,
he was clear he didn't know the man. It was only
years later that he started remembering these
details about a Richard. And the Zodiac himself,
in all his letters, he never mentioned her name,
did he? Never once. In his letters, he refers
to her simply as the girl. It's so dismissive.
It's impersonal. If this was a crime of passion
or some deep obsession with her specifically,
you'd expect him to focus on her identity to
name her. But to him, she seems to have been
just another prop in his grand terror campaign.
OK, so we have two attacks, both at night, both
targeting couples in cars, both with guns. But
then comes September 27, 1969. Lake Berryessa.
And this, this is where the nightmare just shifts
gears completely. It breaks every single pattern
he had established. First, it's in broad daylight,
late afternoon. Not night. No. Second, it's not
in a city or on a roadside turnout. It's at a
remote recreational lake up in Napa County. And
third, the costume. The costume is the single
most theatrical, terrifying detail in this entire
case. I want you to describe it for the listeners
because it sounds like something straight out
of a comic book. It's completely absurd, which
somehow makes it even scarier. One of the victims,
Brian Hartnell, he survived and he described
a man stepping out from behind a tree. He's wearing
a black executioner's hood. It's square on top
that drapes all the way down to his waist. Unbelievable.
And it has clip -on sunglasses sewn over the
eye holes. And the symbol. He's wearing the symbol.
Right on his chest, there is a white bib, kind
of like a tabard, with a white circle and a cross
woven into it. The Zodiac symbol. He's wearing
his own logo. He is literally branding himself
in person. He's become his own mascot. He's holding
a gun, but he also has a long knife in a sheath
on his belt. The victims are Brian Hartnell,
who's 20. and Cecilia Shepard, who's 22. They're
just college students, picnicking on a small
peninsula by the lake. They see this figure approaching
them. Do they try to run? I mean, what do you
do? He's on them too fast. He points the gun.
But then, he starts a conversation. And this
is totally unique to this attack. He starts telling
them a story. Story? He says, I'm an escaped
convict from a prison in Montana. I killed a
guard and I need your car and your money to get
to Mexico. But why lie? He's going to kill them
anyway. Why create this elaborate backstory about
being an escaped convict? It's a control tactic.
It's brilliant in a sick way. If he just comes
up and starts shooting, they might scatter. They
might fight back. But if he says, I just want
your car. They're much more likely to cooperate.
Yeah. He needs them compliant for what he's about
to do. So they believe him. They do. He instructs
Cecilia to tie Brian up using some plastic clothesline
that he brought with him. Then he checks her
knots, says they're too loose, and he ties Cecilia
up himself. Brian Hartnell survived this, and
his account is just fascinating. He actually
tried to talk to the guy, didn't he? Brian was
studying pre -law at the time. He was incredibly
calm under the circumstances. He tried to reason
with the man. He asked him questions like, is
your gun loaded? He thought if he could just
keep the guy talking, maybe they'd lose their
car and their money, but they'd keep their lives.
But once they were both hogtied, face down on
the ground, the tone changed. The whole dynamic
shifted. The killer stops talking. The performance
is over. The performance is over. He puts the
gun away. He draws the knife. The violence here
is so distinct from the shootings. Shooting is
distant. Stabbing is horribly intimate and brutal.
And he attacks them both. He stabs Brian six
times in the back. He stabs Cecilia ten times.
It's a frenzy. It is. Cecilia was fighting back.
She was rolling around screaming. Brian just
played dead. The killer eventually stopped, wiped
the knife on his pants, and just calmly walked
back up the hill. But he didn't just leave. He
left a calling card, a receipt. This is one of
the most chilling pieces of physical evidence
we have in the entire case. Yeah. He walks over
to Brian Hartnell's car, which was white Karmann
Ghia. He takes out a black felt -tip pen. And
on the passenger door, he writes a list. A list
of his crimes. It's unbelievable. He writes Vallejo,
then the dates 12 -20 -68 -7 -4 -69, and then
the new one, Sep 27 -69 -6 .38. And then he adds
the method. By knife. By knife. He's categorizing
his own work. He's keeping a ledger. And he calls
this one in, too. Once again, he calls it in.
He drives 27 miles to a car wash in the town
of Napa. He finds a pay phone. He tells the operator,
I want to report a murder. No, a double murder.
And he just sets the phone down off the hook
and walks away. They found a palm print on that
phone, didn't they? A key piece of evidence.
They did. But it was smeared. It's never been
enough for a definitive match, though it has
been used over the years to rule certain suspects
out. Cecilia Shepard tragically died two days
later in the hospital. But Brian Hartnell survived
to describe the costume and the voice. So now
the police in Napa, Vallejo, and Benicia, they
all realize they're hunting the same man. The
panic is spreading across the whole Bay Area.
And the killer knows it. He thrives on it. He
decides to escalate again. He moves from the
secluded rural areas, the lover's lanes, right
into the dense urban center of it all. He goes
to San Francisco. October 11, 1969, Presidio
Heights. This is a wealthy, quiet, residential
neighborhood. The complete opposite of a lover's
lane. That's right. He hails a yellow cab driven
by a man named Paul Lee Stein, who is 29. He
gets in and directs him to the corner of Washington
and Cherry Streets. When the cab stops, the Zodiac
shoots Stein once in the head, point blank, behind
the right ear. And to any passerby, this would
just look like a robbery, a cabbie getting held
up. And he deliberately staged it that way. He
took Stein's wallet and his keys. But then he
did something that confused investigators at
first. He took a piece of Paul Stein. shirt.
He actually tore it off the body. He carefully
tore a large rectangular section from the back
of the shirt, which was of course soaked in blood.
He folded it up neatly and took it with him.
This wasn't a robbery trophy. This was going
to be his proof. This knight is so famous in
the Zodiac lore for the what if, because the
Zodiac was seen, he was almost caught. So close.
He was seen by three teenagers in a house right
across the street. They were watching from a
second story window. They saw him in the cab.
They saw him wiping down the dashboard and the
door handle with a cloth, trying to remove his
prints. They called the police while he was still
there. And the police were just minutes away.
Seconds away. But a tragic, catastrophic error
occurred in the dispatch center. The teenagers
described a white male suspect. But for some
reason, the dispatcher put out an alert for a
black male suspect. That is an unbelievable mistake.
It changed history. Two SFPD officers, Don Fook
and Eric Zelms, were responding to the call.
As they're driving toward the scene, they see
a white man walking away. He matched the description
of the Zodiac, perfectly stocky, kind of a rolling
gate, but the radio just said blackmail. So they
drove right past it. They slowed down, maybe
even exchanged a glance, and just let him go.
Officer Fuki realized this later, didn't he?
He did. He said the man looked down as their
car passed, then turned up a walkway to a house
as if he lived there, just to melt into the shadows.
If they had stopped him, Paul Stein's bloody
shirt was in his pocket. The murder weapon was
likely in his waistband. The entire reign of
terror would have ended right there on Jackson
Street. And the Zodiac knew it. He mocked them
for it later in a letter. He did. He wrote about
the cops pulling a goof. He even claimed he actually
spoke to them, though Officer Fuki always denied
that they exchanged words. But the point is,
he slipped through the net. And that brings us
to the end of the canonical murders. But in a
way, that's just the beginning of the Zodiac
persona, because now the violence moves off the
streets and onto the page. The pen becomes mightier
than the sword or the gun in this case. We have
to talk about the correspondence. This is where
he differentiates himself from any other killer
in history. He'd sent his first batch of letters
back in August, demanding they be printed on
the front page. But after the Stein murder, the
letters become his primary weapon. Let's go to
August 4th, 1969. The debut of the name. He writes
a letter to the San Francisco Examiner and it
starts. Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking.
It's such a theatrical opening. It sounds like
the intro to an old timey radio drama. It creates
a brand instantly. He isn't just a killer. He
is an entity, a personality. And in these letters,
he lays out his supposed motive. He claims he
is collecting slaves for the afterlife. Right.
He writes, when I die, I will be reborn in paradise
and all that I have killed will become my slaves.
Paradise, spelled P -A -R -A -D -I -C -E. The
misspellings are a huge point of debate, aren't
they? Was he genuinely uneducated, or was he
faking it, doing it on purpose to look more deranged
or to throw people off? That is the million -dollar
question. I mean, if you look at the dossier,
Detective Dave Tosche, the famous SFPV inspector,
the inspiration for Steve McQueen's character
in Bullet, he was convinced the Zodiac was actually
quite intelligent. Really? Oh, yeah. He uses
words like promenading. He references Gilbert
and Sullivan operas like the Mikado. He clearly
understands geometry and maps. The misspellings
feel. They feel like a disguise, like a deliberate
affectation. Let's talk about the proof. After
the Stein murder, people were saying, OK, maybe
this letter writer is just a crank, just some
guy taking credit. So he proved them wrong in
the most gruesome way possible. He sent a letter
to the San Francisco Chronicle that contained
a piece of Paul Stein's bloody shirt. He sent
another piece to the famous attorney Melvin Bell.
He kind of has a cry for help. Can you even imagine
opening your mail and finding that? A piece of
a murdered man's bloody shirt. It was undeniable
verification. It was his way of saying, I am
the one who killed the cab driver. I have the
blood on my hands and here it is. And then. The
threats just escalated. He stopped talking about
shooting couples in cars and started talking
about mass casualties. The school bus bomb, this
is the one that really terrified the entire Bay
Area. He sent a diagram, a detailed hand -drawn
schematic of a roadside bomb. He claimed he could
detonate it as a school bus passed by. And he
wrote in what is maybe his most monstrous sentence,
just shoot out the front tire and then pick off
the kiddies as they come bouncing out. It's just...
It's purely monstrous. It created absolute panic.
For months, police cars had to escort school
buses on their routes. They had helicopters flying
over bus roads. He held the entire school system
hostage without ever having to plant a single
device. It was pure psychological terrorism by
letter. And he was keeping score. At the bottom
of so many of the letters, he'd draw a little
box score. Zodiac NT number. SFPD equals zero.
And the numbers just kept climbing. Ten. 12,
17, eventually all the way up to 37. He was almost
certainly taking credit for random murders he
was just reading about in the paper, just to
puff up his own score. Which brings us to the
thing that really cemented his legacy in a way
that, you know, even the murders didn't. The
ciphers. The puzzles. With cryptograms. There
were four main ones that he sent. Let's start
with the first one, the Z -408. This was the
big one, sent in three separate parts to three
different newspapers. And if you look at it...
It just looks like a wall of gibberish. It's
full of Greek symbols, weather icons, Morse code
dots, Navy semaphore flags. The FBI's crypto
unit couldn't crack it. The CIA couldn't crack
it. The NSA couldn't crack it. So who did? Who
broke it? A high school history teacher from
Salinas, California, named Donald Harden and
his wife, Betty. They were sitting at their breakfast
table with a newspaper. I love that. A couple
of amateurs beat all the pros at the national
security agencies. How on earth did they do it?
Well, it was a homophonic substitution cipher.
That's a fancy way of saying he used symbols
to replace letters of the alphabet. But he made
it tricky. He used multiple different symbols
for common letters like E and T, so you couldn't
just count the frequency of the symbols to figure
it out. So how'd they find a way in? It was Betty
who had the brilliant insight. She said, This
guy is a complete egomaniac. He's going to talk
about killing. Look for the word kill. They looked
for a pattern of double letters, like the double
L in kill. Exactly. They found a four -symbol
pattern that repeated. They guessed it might
be K -I -L -L. They plugged in those letters,
and from there, the whole lock just clicked open.
And the message was? I like killing people because
it is so much fun. It went on to talk about man
being the most dangerous animal and reference
to the short story, The Most Dangerous Game.
But the one thing everyone wanted, his name.
It wasn't there. No. He taunted them about it.
The message ended. I will not give you my name
because you will try to slow down or atop my
collectiag of slaves. More of those deliberate
misspellings. So that one was solved in a matter
of days. But then he sent the Z340. Ah, the masterpiece.
His magnum opus of code. Sent November 8, 1969.
340 characters. A much tighter, more complex
grid. This one went unsolved for 51 years. 51
years. I mean, just think about that. The entire
original investigation went cold. DNA technology
was invented. The internet was born. And this
single piece of paper just sat there, completely
unread. Until December of 2020. And again, it
wasn't the FBI who finally cracked it. It was
an international team of civilians. An American
software engineer named David Orenchak, an Australian
mathematician named Sam Blake, and a Belgian
programmer, Arl van Eyck. And they used modern
computing power, right? They did. They used a
program called AZD Crypt. They ran, I think,
something like 650 ,000 different simulations,
trying every possible way of reading the grid.
They finally realized the Zodiac didn't just
swap symbols for letters. He scrambled the reading
order. You had to read it diagonally, then shift
down one row, then over two columns. It was incredibly
complex. And after 51 years, the secret message
was? It was. Well, from an investigative standpoint,
it was a bit of a letdown. No name, no confession.
It basically said, I hope you're having lots
of fan in trying to catch me. I am not afraid
of the gas chamber because it will send me to
paradise all the sooner. But it did prove he
was still watching the news coverage because
he mentioned a TV show, didn't he? He did. A
few weeks before he sent that cipher. A man claiming
to be the Zodiac had called in to a local TV
show called AM San Francisco. The cipher message
explicitly says, that wasn't me on the TV show.
So it proves he was obsessively monitoring his
own media coverage. What about the unsolved ones?
There's the really short one, the Z13. That's
the one that haunts everyone. It starts with
the text, my name is Till. followed by 13 symbols.
The problem here is pure mathematics. A 13 -symbol
cipher is just too short to verify a unique solution.
You could force almost any name to fit. What
do people think it says? Oh, the theories are
all over the place. Some think it's a joke, that
it decrypts to Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine.
Others think it's a real name. But unless we
find the original key he used, it's functionally
unsolvable. And then there was the map, the map
puzzle. Right. He sent a map of the San Francisco
Bay Area centered on Mount Diablo. He drew his
crosshair symbol over the peak and told police
to set the map to magnetic north. He claimed
that this would show where a bomb was buried.
Did they find a bomb? No bomb was ever found.
But investigators later realized something very
curious. If you place a compass on the peak of
Mount Diablo on that map, the locations of his
first two attacks align along a specific radian
angle. A radian? That suggests some kind of technical
knowledge. It implies he knew the difference
between magnetic north and true north. Maybe
he had military training, maybe surveying or
engineering experience. It was another tantalizing
but ultimately frustrating clue. Okay, so we
have the canonical crimes, the letters, the ciphers.
But he claimed 37 victims. Who else is on that
unconfirmed list? This is where it gets really
murky. This is the unconfirmed list. Once the
Zodiac became a media celebrity, basically every
unsolved murder in California from that era got
looked at through a Zodiac lens. And the Riverside
case is the biggest one. Cherry Jo Bates. 1966.
This is two years before the official start of
the canonical murders. Sherry Jo was a college
student in Riverside who was found brutally stabbed
to death in an alleyway near her library. And
the details of that case are just eerily similar
to Zodiac. Incredibly so. A confession letter,
typed, was sent to the press and police, taking
credit. A macabre poem was found carved into
a library desk where she studied, talking about
being sick of living, going to die. The handwriting
on the desk looks disturbingly like the Zodiac's.
The whole tone feels like him. Did the Zodiac
himself ever claim it? He did. In a 1971 letter,
he wrote to the press and essentially credited
the police for finally finding his Riverside
activity. But, and this is a huge catch. In the
2000s, DNA was recovered from under Sherry Jo
Bates' fingernails. It didn't match the partial
DNA profiles we have from the Zodiac letters.
So was he just taking credit for another killer's
work to boost his score? It's very, very possible.
It's one of the great debates in this case. What
about the abduction of Kathleen Johns? This one
is terrifying to me because she spent hours with
him. March of 1970. She's driving on Highway
132 at night with her infant daughter in the
car. A man in another car starts honking and
flashing his lights at her, signals that her
back wheel is loose and wobbling. The good Samaritan
trap. The oldest trick in the book. She pulls
over. He gets out, pretends to tighten the lug
nuts, and sends her on her way. A few miles down
the road, the wheel falls completely off. He
had sabotaged it. And then he just happens to
drive up behind her. offers her a ride to the
nearest service station. She gets in with her
baby. But he doesn't take her to a station. He
just starts driving her around these dark, deserted
back roads for nearly two hours. Two hours in
a car with a killer? What did they even talk
about? She said he was silent for long, long
stretches. Then he would just turn to her and
say, very calmly, you know I'm going to kill
you, don't you? And then just keep driving in
silence. That is pure psychological torture.
Absolutely. Eventually, she saw a chance at a
stop sign. She grabbed her baby. threw open the
door and jumped out, hiding in a ditch. He drove
off. When she finally got to a police station,
she saw the composite sketch of the Zodiac suspect
from the Stein murder and reportedly screamed,
that's the man. So we have a profile. We have
descriptions from survivors. We have handwriting.
We have DNA, albeit partial. We have to talk
about the suspects. Police investigated, what,
2 ,500 people? But there is one name that just
eclipses all the others. Arthur Lee Allen. If
you've seen the movie, if you've read any book
on the case, he's the guy. Why was he such a
prime suspect? Circumstantially, he is a perfect
fit. I mean, perfect. He lived in Vallejo, minutes
away from the first two murder sites. He was
a convicted child molester, so he had a documented
criminal history. He's known to be smart, but
also very weird and had an unhealthy obsession
with his mother. And then there's the watch.
The watch. This is the detail that convinced
Robert Graysmith, the author of Zodiac. Alan
wore a Zodiac brand wristwatch. The logo on the
face of the watch is a circle with a crosshairs
over it, the Zodiac symbol. I mean, that feels
way too on the nose to be a coincidence. And
it just keeps going. A friend of Alan's, a man
named Don Chaney, went to the police and told
them that Alan had talked about hunting people
with a gun and a knife. that he wanted to attach
a flashlight to the barrel of his gun, just like
the killer did at Blue Rock Springs, and that
he would call himself Zodiac. This was before
the killings even started. Allegedly, yes. So
you have the name, the symbol, the location,
the specific weapon modification. On paper, it
looks like a complete slam dunk. But we are here
for the deep dive. Does the forensic evidence
actually hold up? And this is the great tragedy
of the Zodiac investigation. It doesn't match.
None of it. What do you mean? Arthur Lee Allen's
fingerprints. didn't match the prints found on
Paul Stein's cab or on the Napa payphone. The
top handwriting experts, including the best at
the FBI and the U .S. Postal Service, all concluded
that Allen's writing was definitively not the
Zodiac's. And what about the DNA? In 2002, they
developed a partial DNA profile from saliva found
on a stamp from a Zodiac letter. It did not match
Arthur Lee Allen. Now, people will argue, well,
maybe he had someone else lick the stamps for
him, or maybe the DNA profile was contaminated.
But every single time they tried to pin hard,
objective science on Allen, it failed. Dave Toshi,
the lead SFPD investigator, he struggled with
this until the day he died, didn't he? He did.
He famously said something like, he looks like
a good suspect on paper, but all the physical
evidence is negative. And the fear is, if it
wasn't Arthur Lee Allen, then the real Zodiac
got away completely because for 30 years, everyone
was looking at Allen. There are other suspects,
of course. The community of amateur sleuths,
the zodiologists, they love to debate this stuff.
It's a cottage industry, a whole subculture.
There's Richard Gajkowski, who was a newspaper
editor at the time. There's Gary Francis, a poster
group called the Case Breakers, recently claimed
scars on his forehead match the composite sketch.
But law enforcement has never officially validated
any of these other suspects. It's so frustrating.
We have modern forensic genealogy now. We caught
the Golden State Killer by checking his distant
cousin's DNA on ancestry websites. Why hasn't
that worked here? They tried. In 2018, the Vallejo
Police Department sent the envelope evidence
to a private lab. They wanted to do exactly that.
But the samples are over 50 years old. They're
incredibly degraded. And we don't even know for
sure if the Zodiac ever licked the stamps himself.
He might have used a wet sponge or water. If
there's no usable DNA on the envelope, there's
no genealogy match to be made. Let's talk about
the legacy, because in a strange and very dark
way, the Zodiac achieved his goal. He wanted
to be immortal, and he is. He absolutely created
the archetype of the modern media -savvy serial
killer. Before him, you just had Mad Men. He
made murder a multimedia performance. He directly
inspired the villain Scorpio in the Clint Eastwood
movie Dirty Harry. He completely changed how
the press covers crime. Dodie Harry came out
in 1971. The Zodiac was potentially still active
then. Oh, yeah. Can you imagine sitting in a
theater in San Francisco, watching a movie about
a killer who is directly based on you while you're
still at large? There was even a low -budget
B -movie called The Zodiac Killer, where the
director actually set a trap in the theater,
hoping the real killer would be so arrogant he'd
show up to the premiere. Unbelievable. And today
we have the memes, the endless internet jokes
about Ted Cruz being the Zodiac. Which is funny.
On one level, but it also shows how the figure
has morphed from a genuinely terrifying murderer
into a kind of a caricature, a pop culture bogeyman.
And when that happens, we lose sight of Betty
Lou Jensen running for her life in the dark.
We lose sight of Paul Stein bleeding out in his
cab for a few dollars and a piece of his shirt.
So where does that leave us today? Is the case
technically still open? In Napa County and Riverside
County, yes, it's still an open cold case. SFPD
officially marked it inactive in 2004. But then
they quietly reopened it in 2006. But realistically,
unless a deathbed confession surfaces somewhere,
or some pristine, perfectly preserved DNA sample
is found in an old evidence locker, this case
will likely remain unsolved forever. The letters
and ciphers? They just stopped coming around
1974. Why? Why did he stop? And that's the final
mystery, isn't it? Serial killers don't usually
just retire. They get caught, they get incarcerated
for something else, or they die. Or maybe they
just get bored. It's a possibility. In one of
his very last confirmed letters from 1974, he
wrote a review of the movie The Exorcist, calling
it the best satirical comedy that I have ever
seen. The tone was so relaxed, almost nonchalant.
Maybe he felt he had won the game. Maybe the
fear he created wasn't feeding his ego anymore.
That is a genuinely terrifying thought, that
he could have just stopped. He could have just
melted back into society and been the quiet old
man at the grocery store for the next 30 years.
And he took the secret of his name to the grave
with him. The final score he ever posted was,
And as of today, for the police, that zero is
still on the board. And that void, that complete
lack of a face of a resolution, is what keeps
us all so obsessed. If you want to try your hand
at the unsolved Z13 cipher or look at the Mount
Diablo map, all the resources are out there online.
But be warned, thousands and thousands of people
have gone down that rabbit hole and never found
the bottom. Question the narrative. Look at the
primary sources for yourself. And most importantly,
remember the victims. Thanks for listening to
this deep dive. Stay curious. And stay safe.