The Zodiac

The Zodiac story began on a darkened road near Benicia, California, on the night of December 20, 1968, when a motorist discovered the lifeless bodies of two teenagers at “lovers’ lane” spot. Months later, a gunman attacked a second young couple in a public park miles away, and, after leaving the scene, he traveled to a payphone located just blocks from the Vallejo Police Department and dialed the number of the station. When the police dispatched answered, the caller spoke in a low, monotone voice, as if he were reading from a prepared script.

“I want to report a murder. If you will go one-mile east on Columbus Parkway, you will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a nine-millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye."

Investigators from Vallejo and Benicia realized that they were searching for the same killer and the bold, sinister phone call raised fears that the gunman would strike again. A teenage boy survived the shooting but was unable to help identify any possible suspects.

Twenty-six days later, three envelopes arrived at the offices of three Bay Area newspapers. Each envelope contained a handwritten letter and a piece of a coded message. The writer provided a list of details regarding the two shootings, and explained that the symbols formed a coded message that would reveal his identity. The letter ended with a warning, “If you do not print this cipher by the afternoon of Fry. 1st of Aug. 69, I will go on a kill rampage Fry. night. I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, untill I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.” A crossed – circle symbol had been drawn at the bottom of the page.

Each of the newspapers complied with the demand to publish the cipher, and news of the gunman’s threats created fears that he would strike again. Experts and amateurs scrambled to decode the cipher while investigators sorted through hundreds of tips from helpful citizens. The deciphered message did not reveal the killer’s identity but the words did offer a chilling portrait of the author’s state of mind. “I like killing people because it is so much fun … I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my after life …”

“Dear Editor – This is the Zodiac speaking. In answer to your asking about the good times I have had in Vallejo I shall be very happy to supply even more material.” The writer provided more details about the attacks and then took issue with some factual errors in news reports about his crimes.

Weeks passed and as the manhunt continued, the Zodiac moved north into the Napa Valley and California wine country, where he stabbed a young couple on the banks of Lake Berryessa. A survivor told investigators that the attacker had worn a black, squared hood with a white crossed circle over his chest. To prove he was responsible for the crime, the Zodiac used a black marker to draw a large crossed-circle on the door of Bryan’s car. Below his symbol, the killer listed the dates of the two shootings and added the notation, “Sept 27 69 6:30 by knife.”

At 7:40 pm, the Napa County Police Department received a call placed from a telephone booth located a few blocks away. Officer David Slaight listened as the caller said in a low, monotone voice, “I want to report a murder – no, a double murder. They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karman Ghia.” Slaight asked the man to provide his location, but the voice only grew more distant as the caller replied, “I’m the one who did it.”

Investigators from Napa met with detectives in Vallejo and Benicia and compared notes but were unable to develop any solid leads. The Zodiac may have believed that the three law enforcement agencies were not up to the task and he invited the San Francisco police department to join in the hunt.

Twenty-nine year old cabdriver Paul Stine picked up the Zodiac on the night of October 11, 1969. Stine drove to a destination in a wealthy San Francisco neighborhood where the passenger shot him in the right temple. Fingerprints found inside the cab and on its exterior were photographed and collected. On the driver's side of the vehicle, police found fingerprints which appeared to contain traces of blood. Investigators believed that these fingerprints may have been left by the killer.

Three young witnesses watched the crime in progress from a house directly across the street and contacted police. The descriptions provided by the three young witnesses produced a composite sketch of the man seen exiting Stine’s cab. Police believed that Stine was the victim of a routine robbery until the Zodiac began to send scraps of the cabdriver’s blood soaked shirt to prove they were mistaken.

The letter ended with another terrifying threat of violence. “School children make nice targets I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning just shoot out the frunt tire + pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.” Patrol cars and aircraft followed buses to and from schools and armed officers rode onboard for added protection. The Zodiac then sent another letter along with diagrams of a bomb he intended to plant along bus routes.

The ongoing mystery attracted the customary crackpots, wild tips, false confessions and hoax letters. Infamous defense attorney Melvin Belli entered the story during a televised phone conversation with a man claiming to be the Zodiac. Police traced subsequent calls to Belli’s home and identified the crazed imposter as a patient in a mental hospital. As if to reclaim the publicity, the killer mailed a letter to Belli that included another blood soaked scrap of the cabdriver’s shirt to prove that he was the real Zodiac.

More letters contained more threats, bomb diagrams and coded messages. The Zodiac also announced his intention to change his way of collecting “slaves for the afterlife” by staging his crimes to appear to be “routine robberies, killings of anger and a few fake accidents.” Letters soon featured a box score which credited the Zodiac with an increasing number of victims followed by the notation “SFPD = 0” and the taunt, “I hope you have fun trying to figgure out who I killed.”

Given the killer’s apparent freedom to do as he pleased, one particular passage was difficult to refute. “The police shall never catch me because I have been too clever for them.” The failure to catch the Zodiac was a constant source of embarrassment for his chosen nemesis, the San Francisco police department. Each new letter became a liability as the psychotic pen pal wrote, “Hey blue pig, doesn’t it rile you to have your nose rubbed in your boo-boos?” and, “I have grown rather angry with the police for their telling lies about me.”

The Zodiac also demanded that the people of the Bay Area wear “some nice Zodiac buttons” bearing his chosen symbol, the crossed circle. When the public did not comply with his wishes, he wrote that he had “punished” them “by shooting a man sitting in a parked car.”

Press reports linked the Zodiac to many other unsolved crimes, including the March 1970 abduction of a young woman who told authorities that she had accepted a ride from a mysterious stranger who resembled the Zodiac, but the man had turned menacing and threatened her life and she managed to escape by jumping from the man’s car. The Zodiac later claimed that he was responsible for the failed abduction in a subsequent letter.

Reporter Paul Avery received a Halloween card from his new, "secret pal," the Zodiac. Avery later learned of a possible link between the Bay Area killer and the unsolved murder of a young girl in Southern California several years earlier. Handwriting analysis indicated that the Zodiac had been responsible for several letters and notes mailed to the police, a local newspaper, and the father of the victim. In a letter mailed to The Los Angeles Times, the Zodiac wrote that he was impressed by the police work which had linked him to the other case, but he claimed that there were still more victims yet to be found. Tired of playing with his apparently inferior pursuers, he challenged them and wrote, “If the Blue Meannies are evere going to catch me they had best get off their fat asses + do something.”

Correspondence from the killer ceased and the trail of the killer grew cold by the summer of 1971. The killer vanished. Headlines such as "Cops No Closer to Zodiac’s Identity" and occasional articles reporting tenuous links to other unsolved cases kept the story alive over the years. The Zodiac crimes grew into local legend, and, the ghost of the killer became a modern boogeyman in the serial killer pop culture phenomenon of the late 1970s.

Almost a decade after the first brutal shootings along Lake Herman Road, Robert Graysmith, a cartoonist employed at The San Francisco Chronicle, was at work on his own book about the Zodiac case. After conferring with a San Francisco police Inspector, the celebrity cop in charge of the investigation, Graysmith had developed his own theories as well as a suspect. When a new “Zodiac” letter arrived at The Chronicle and mentioned the Inspector by name, rumors spread that the publicity-conscious cop had forged the letter. The subsequent media scandal caused great embarrassment for the San Francisco police department. Several experts deemed the new letter a forgery and officials reassigned the celebrity Inspector to the Pawn Shop Detail.

Fear struck again in the early 1990s when a man claiming to be the Zodiac surfaced with a series of shootings and letters in New York City. Police eventually captured the first “copycat killer” in history after he had terrorized the citizens of the East Coast for more than four years. Due to the renewed interest in the original case, the Zodiac was still good for ratings.

In 1990, an aging career criminal contacted the Vallejo police department in hopes of trading information for a deal to avoid a thirty-year prison sentence. In exchange for his total freedom, the helpful felon was willing to testify that Arthur Leigh Allen had accurately predicted that the Zodiac would kill a cabdriver in San Francisco. The informant had a history of antagonism with the suspect that dated back decades when a fistfight between the two men resulted in their arrests. Police declined the offer of a deal, but Allen soon became the subject of a new investigation. Information later surfaced that the police department had purchased dozens of copies of the Graysmith’s book as a factual reference.

The second investigation failed to produce any evidence to implicate Allen, but searches of the suspect’s Vallejo home led to a media circus and a spotlight on the accused man. Allen professed his innocence during interviews with reporters and even appeared on a segment of the tabloid television program A CURRENT AFFAIR.

In the spring of 1992, freelance writer Rider McDowell interviewed Allen in his home while researching an article for The San Francisco Chronicle. McDowell described the ill and aging suspect as disarmingly friendly and wrote that Allen had "acknowledged that he had spent time in jail and gotten away with 'a lot of bad things', but he denied any involvement in the Zodiac case." Allen told McDowell, "It wasn't me...and that's the truth. And if people want to believe it was me, well, that's their problem. I was cleared on every angle, including the handwriting tests. Plus, I don't look anything like the guy." Reporter Rita Williams repeatedly asked Allen if he was the Zodiac and whether he was ready to confess. Allen declared in obvious frustration, “I’m not the damn Zodiac.”

The Zodiac story found its way to the Internet, where websites featured updates on the case, police files, and crime scene photographs, as well as public message board debates regarding the various suspects and theories. Publicity surrounding one website devoted to suspect Arthur Leigh Allen inspired Graysmith to write a sequel to his first work titled ZODIAC UNMASKED. The second book offered little more than another highly fictionalized account of the case as well as many unsubstantiated or factually inaccurate claims concerning the evidence said to connect Allen to the Zodiac crimes.

In April 2004, the San Francisco Police Department made a stunning announcement. "The case is being placed inactive," said San Francisco police Lt. John Hennessey, head of the department's homicide unit. "Given the pressure of our existing caseload and the amount of cases that remain open at this time, we need to be most efficient at using our resources."

Ken Narlow was still waiting for the story to end. "As time goes by, I have my doubts that the Zodiac is still alive. But I still think the case can be solved. That will happen only when some citizen remembers something and comes forth. I really wanted to solve that case before I retired. I will never give up hope," he said.

Under the title “SFPD Not Thrilled About Spotlight on Zodiac,” San Francisco Examiner columnist Ken Garcia wrote, “It’s been nearly four decades since the last murder. The case has officially been listed as inactive. And yet the public fascination with the “Zodiac” killer seems to just grow with time, a true story that has expanded into urban myth. And now the movie … Up until a few years ago, police were getting calls on the Zodiac on almost a daily basis, but it took so much time and attention away from ongoing homicide cases that they put it on the inactive list until the day they get a lead that might actually go somewhere. But they were definitely hoping it wouldn’t go to Hollywood, backed by a marketing campaign. It’s a legend in the (movie-) making.”

Meanwhile, the real Zodiac story marched on. Preparing for an article about the release of the new film, employees at The San Francisco Chronicle discovered what appeared to be a long forgotten communication from the elusive pen pal. Postmarked in Eureka, California in December 1990, the red envelope was overlooked amid the many hoax letters and forgeries that plagued the newspaper after the release of Graysmith’s first book and the sensational media coverage surrounding the crimes of a “Zodiac copycat” killer in New York. If the card was an authentic Zodiac communication, the killer was still alive as late as 1990, still taunting, and still at large more than sixteen years after his brief appearance in 1974.

Addressed to The Chronicle in pencil and with an eerily familiar style, the envelope bore a 25-cent stamp that depicted a Christmas tree and contained a holiday greeting card. On the front of the card, a Snowman wearing a Groucho Mark nose, moustache and glasses stands in a snowstorm as a small rabbit watches. The text of the card was reminiscent of the Zodiac’s Halloween card to reporter Paul Avery more than twenty years earlier.

FROM YOUR SECRET PAL.

CAN’T GUESS WHO I AM YET?

WELL LOOK INSIDE AND YOU’LL FIND OUT…

The inside of the card read:

…THAT I’M GONNA KEEP YOU GUESSIN!

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, ANYWAY

The Zodiac remains the most elusive ghost in the history of American serial murder. While some believe that the killer died long ago or is locked away somewhere in a prison cell, others believe that he is still out there, watching the world keep his story alive, enjoying his infamy, and waiting to write an ending as shocking as his unforgettable crimes.