It was just before 10:00 pm and on a street near San Francisco’s famous Union Square, the streetlamps bathed the neighborhood in a harsh orange glow. A taxi driver, Paul Stine, 29 years old and moonlighting as a cabbie while he pursued a Doctorate at San Francisco State College, accepted a fare as the back door opened and a passenger entered. The passenger requested to be taken to the intersection of Washington and Maple Streets, a short ride of only 3 miles. Driver Stine set the meter in motion and set out for his passenger’s dropoff location. Less than fifteen minutes later, the taxi slowly cruised through the intersection of Washington and Maple Streets and proceeded one block further west to Washington and Cherry Street… why, we don’t know. Perhaps there wasn’t a safe place to pull over and let the passenger out at the original destination. Or maybe the passenger directed Stine to continue a block further, because there were too many people around who would see what he was about to do.
The cab stopped and the passenger took out a 9 millimeter handgun and shot Paul Stine behind his ear. A group of teenagers across the street heard something, although they would later say they didn’t recall hearing gunshots, and one of them ran inside to call police. The killer reached over the seat, tore loose a piece of the driver’s shirt, freshly soaked with his blood, took his keys, his wallet, and emptied his cash box. One of the eyewitnesses reported seeing the killer wiping down the taxi before he exited the car and walked off into the night, heading north toward Jackson Street and the Presidio.
The man who shot Paul Stine was described in differing terms by various eyewitnesses, but there were details on which they agreed: he was a white man with a crew cut, average height–about 5’8” to 5’10”–glasses with thick black frames, and slightly heavy build.
The killer did not know that two patrol officers were just two blocks away. As they approached the crime scene, one of them saw a man walking east on Jackson Street, illuminated in the headlights of his squad car, and he matched the killer’s description. Unfortunately, the patrolman, Officer Fouke, did not know that because dispatch had given an inexplicably erroneous description of the suspect and the patrol officers thought they were looking for a black man. The suspect disappeared up a stairway into a hedge-lined walk to a streetside residence and the patrolmen continued to the crime scene at Washington and Cherry.
It wasn’t long before they realized their mistake and the police officers who had responded to the scene fanned out in an effort to find the man who had been seen walking away from the scene of the crime.
They would not find him.
Paul Stine would be the serial killer’s last confirmed victim, and only two days later, the killer would send the torn, bloody piece of Paul Stine’s shirt to a local newspaper with a letter, to prove his identity. With the shirt fragment, there was an admission. The killer had been hiding in the darkness of the Presidio that night, watching and listening, just out of sight of the police officers who had canvassed the neighborhood. It was Saturday night, October 11th, 1969, and it was the closest police ever got to capturing a killer who is still unidentified today, The Zodiac.
Tales of True Crime, episode 4
No Address: The Search for the Zodiac Killer
Dahmer, Bundy, Gacy, Berkowitz. The names of history’s most frightening serial killers are well-known — We’ve told their stories thousands of times in an effort to educate ourselves and take proper precautions. Monsters exist, and we must be prepared. Knowing their names gives us some sense of security…
It is the killers whose names we do not know that still inspire the greatest fear. The monster is still out there, unidentified, waiting around a corner, in the bushes… in your closet when you turn out the light.
And of those who remain unidentified, there are probably two names that come to mind more than any other. Jack the Ripper, and The Zodiac.
In the case of Jack the Ripper, we take solace in knowing that the killer, while never having faced justice, long ago passed from this world and will never harm anyone again. The Zodiac however, could still be out there, a lesson we learned when the Golden State Killer was captured at the age of 73 in 2018. The Zodiac’s murders took place less than a decade earlier, and based on descriptions and age estimates of the attacker by those lucky enough to survive, the killer could be long dead, but he could also be a mere 80 years old today, still unidentified, waiting, and gloating, proud to have escaped justice for this long.
Lake Herman Road
Most agree the first murders that can convincingly be attributed to the Zodiac are the killings of teenagers Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on December 20th, 1968 in Benicia, California. The teenagers had gone to a Christmas concert in an AMC Rambler David Faraday had borrowed from his mother.
The San Francisco Sunday Examiner reported Jensen and Faraday were shot with a small caliber rifle after they parked on Lake Herman Road, a well-known lovers lane. David Faraday had been shot once in the head, and investigators believed Betty Lou Jensen had attempted to flee when she was shot five times in the back. According to the Examiner story, Faraday had exited the car, perhaps when he was ordered out by the killer, and had circled around to the passenger side-door when he was shot. The Examiner story detailed a heel print found behind a brush-shrouded fence encircling a pumphouse which suggested the killer may have hidden there prior to the attack.
Robert Graysmith, a former political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle who would later write two books about the Zodiac case, theorized an alternate series of events which had the killer’s car pulling in beside the teens, and the killer ordering them out of the car. According to Graysmith’s theory, Betty Lou exited the car first, and Faraday was shot as he was exiting, at which point Betty Lou fled and was shot five times in the back approximately 28 feet from the car. The investigation revealed no sign of a sexual assault on Betty Lou.
Just four days after their killing, on Christmas Eve, The Los Angeles Times reported police had questioned more than 40 people, to no avail. David Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, just 16, had been on their first date.
Murder on Another Lover’s Lane
1968 gave way to 1969, and winter surrendered to spring, then summer. For more than six months the killer was quiet, until Independence Day, 1969.
It was just before midnight when Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau, both 19, arrived in Vallejo’s Blue Rock Springs Park, which was only four miles from the site of the Lake Herman Road murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.
Just after they arrived, another car pulled in next to them and parked briefly before leaving. A few minutes later, the car returned, this time parking behind them. The killer exited his vehicle and approached the passenger side of Ferrin’s vehicle, where Mageau was seated. Without a word, the killer shined a flashlight into the car and began firing. He fired five shots, striking both victims, and was about to get in his car and leave when he heard moaning coming from the victim’s car. He returned and fired two more shots into each victim, then left the scene.
Darlene Ferrin would die of her injuries, but Michael Mageau would survive despite gunshot wounds to his face, neck, and knee. He would become the first victim to give a description of the killer — a white man, 26 to 30 years old with curly brown hair, approximately 5’8” and heavyset.
Darlene Ferrin had been a married woman, and according to a story in the July 6th edition of the Oakland Tribune, police questioned her husband but quickly eliminated him as a suspect.
A fact not immediately known to the news media in the days after the attacks at Blue Rock Springs Park was that the killer had mocked police with a phone call only forty minutes after the attack. The call had been placed from a phonebooth about a four minute walk from Darlene Ferrin’s home and only a few blocks from the police station.
The Long Beach Independent Press Telegram reported the caller said, “I killed them. I used a 9 millimeter.” The caller also reportedly took credit for the murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen just before Christmas, then hung up. The proximity of the phonebooth to Ferrin’s home would lead some to believe the killer may have lived in Ferrin’s neighborhood, or knew her in some way.
The call left little doubt that the police were dealing with a serial killer.
Corresponding with a Killer
Less than a month later, the killer, seeking attention and emboldened by his ability to avoid capture, began to taunt the police with letters to the media, and cryptograms, or ciphers, which needed to be decoded.
In a letter to the San Francisco Examiner on July 31st, 1969, the killer wrote:
Dear Editor,
I am the killer of the 2 teenagers last Christmass at Lake Herman & the girl last 4th of July. To prove this I shall state some facts which only I & the police know.
Christmass
- Brand name of ammo – Super X
- 10 shots fired
- Boy was on his back with feet to car
- Girl was lyeing on right side feet to west
4th of July
- Girl was wearing patterned pants
- Boy was also shot in knee
- Ammo was made by Western
Here is a cipher or that is part of one. The other 2 parts are being mailed to the Vallejo Times & San Francisco Chronicle.
I want you to print this cipher on the front page by Friday afternoon, August 1, 1969. If you do not print this cipher, I will go on a kill rampage Friday night. This will last the whole weekend, I will cruise around killing people who are alone at night until Sunday night or until I kill a dozen people.
There were possible clues in the letter’s misspellings, such as the killer’s tendency to spell Christmas with two S’s at the end, and the word ‘until’ with two L’s.
The newspapers to which the killer wrote, published his letters, accompanied by their own stories and, in conjunction with police, cryptograms of their own containing messages to the killer. They urged the killer to continue his correspondence and offer more details. He was playing a dangerous game, taking a chance at getting caught by continuing with his taunts, and the authorities wanted to keep it going.
In response, the killer, who had up until that point been referred to as a mysterious killer, or sometimes the “Mad Killer” wrote another letter and gave himself the name we know today. He wrote:
Dear Editor
This is the Zodiac speaking. In answer to your asking for more details about the good times I have had in Vallejo, I shall be very happy to supply even more material. By the way, are the police having a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up; when they do crack it they will have me.
On the 4th of July:
I did not open the car door, The window was rolled down all ready. The boy was originally sitting in the front seat when I began firing. When I fired the first shot at his head, he leaped backwards at the same time thus spoiling my aim. He ended up on the back seat then the floor in back thrashing out very violently with his legs; that’s how I shot him in the knee. I did not leave the scene of the killing with squealing tires & racing engine as described in the Vallejo paper. I drove away quite slowly so as not to draw attention to my car. The man who told the police that my car was brown was a negro about 40 to 45 rather shabbily dressed. I was at this phone booth having some fun with the Vallejo cops when he was walking by. When I hung the phone up the damn thing began to ring & that drew his attention to me and my car.
Last Christmass
In that episode the police were wondering as to how I could shoot & hit my victims in the dark. They did not openly state this, but implied this by saying it was a well lit night & I could see the silhouettes on the horizon. Bullshit that area is surrounded by high hills & trees. What I did was tape a small pencil flashlight to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, in the center of the beam of light if you aim it at a wall or ceiling you will see a black or dark spot in the center of the circle of light about 3 to 6 inches across. When taped to a gun barrel, the bullet will strike exactly in the center of the black dot in the light. All I had to do was spray them as if it was a water hose; there was no need to use the gun sights. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page coverage.
The letter was signed with what would become The Zodiac’s signature… a circle bisected with a cross, a symbol that resembled the crosshairs of a gun sight, and the words NO ADDRESS.
The Zodiac claimed when police were able to decode his cipher, his name would be in the message. It wasn’t.
According to the Palm Springs Desert Sun, August 13th, 1969, a history teacher at an area high school, Donald Harden, and his wife Bettye, were the first to decode the Zodiac’s first three-part cipher, despite a weeklong effort by Navy and FBI code breakers.
The cipher, lightly edited for clarity, read as follows:
I like killing people because it is so much fun. it is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all. to kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. the best part of it is that when I die I will be reborn in paradise and the [people] I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
At the end of the cipher was an extra sequence of 18 letters which could not be deciphered. Many have speculated it is the Zodiac’s real name, but the code of the final sequence has never been broken.
Lake Berryessa
On September 27th, 1969, The Zodiac struck again. As the Long Beach Independent Press Telegram reported in October of that year, Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard, students at Pacific Union College, were picnicking at Lake Berryessa in Napa County.
Hartnell would later recount to the Oakland Tribune how the couple had noticed a man walking along the beach behind them.
“I heard some footsteps behind me and I knew someone was walking along the shoreline.”
Cecelia Shepard watched the man as he came closer. “She was concerned a bit,” Hartnell said, “So I told her to tell me if he kept coming.”
He did keep coming, then, stepped behind a tree and disappeared from view. Imagine your horror if you found yourself in Hartnell and Shepard’s shoes, and after observing a man acting suspiciously, he reappeared from behind a tree wearing a black executioner’s-style hood and a bib-type garment with an ominous gun-sight symbol on the chest.
The Zodiac approached the young couple, displayed a gun, and told a strange, almost corny tale about being an escaped prisoner who had killed a prison guard and stolen a car. The masked man demanded money and Hartnell, in an attempt to keep the situation calm, made a joke about having less than 75 cents.
“I tried to keep the conversation as light as possible, but he still wanted to tie us up,” Hartnell said, and thinking it was only a robbery, they complied.
“He put the gun away and I was relieved,” Hartnell said, “Then I turned over and faced the ground and waited for what would happen next.”
“Then he started stabbing without a word of warning or anything.”
The killer savagely stabbed Bryan Hartnell six times and Cecelia Shepard ten times with a twelve-inch hunting knife. Hartnell would later say he never lost consciousness, but that it was about five minutes before he realized the killer was gone.
He immediately went to work untying one of Cecelia Shepard’s wrists with his teeth and, bleeding profusely but still conscious, they began calling for help from passing boaters.
The killer ventured to Knoxville Road, where Hartnell’s car was parked, and on the driver’s side door, he scrawled a message in felt tip pen: Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27–69–6:30/by knife. Beneath, he left his calling card… the gun-sight signature… a circle bisected by a cross. When the police discovered the markings on the car door later, it would leave no doubt that the Zodiac was responsible for the attacks on Jensen and Faraday, Ferrin and Mageau, and now Hartnell and Shepard.
A passing boater, suspicious of what was happening, waited offshore for about 15 minutes before deciding that Hartnell and Shepard’s calls for help were genuine. He summoned the park rangers who called for police and an ambulance.
In the meantime, the killer was making his getaway, but he was bold enough to stop at a payphone and, again, taunt the authorities with a phone call.
“I want to report a murder. No. A double murder. They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Kharmann-Gia.”
“And I’m the one that did it.”
The killer didn’t hang up the phone, choosing instead to leave it hanging from the payphone in the booth as he departed, the connection still live.
Pat Stanley, at the time News Director for KVON radio, recalled in a 2007 piece for the Napa Valley Register:
The Napa County Sheriff’s Department wanted to find the phone, and fast, so virtually any official with a radio was asked to help.
This reporter jumped into action. After a brief stop at the Sheriff’s Department, I drove north on Main Street. Driving past a car wash and the historic Sam Key Laundry Building, I spotted a pay phone, but thought the call must have come from closer to the lake, nearly 30 miles away. At the last second, though, I swerved my car toward the phone booth and was shocked to find the receiver off the hook. Could this be the phone, I wondered?
I used my own two-way [to] radio back to KVON where I instructed the on-duty deejay to call police. They, in turn, told me not to move until officers arrived.
Suddenly I wondered… if this was the phone, could the attacker still be in the area, perhaps watching me?
It was a great relief when officers arrived and had me slowly back away so as not to disturb potential evidence.
It was the phone.
Napa County Sheriff’s Deputies had arrived at the crime scene and Cecelia Shepard was still conscious but the ride to Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa was more than 25 miles. Shepard lost consciousness on the ride and died two days later at the hospital. Hartnell survived his wounds and would give his account of the attacks to law enforcement and the media.
The Zodiac Changes Methods
That brings us back to where we began. Fourteen days after the Lake Berryessa attacks, the Zodiac murdered Paul Stine in his taxi in the Presidio Heights neighborhood in San Francisco. The suspect was seen leaving the scene by two teenage boys, ages 13 and 14, and they described his as a white man, crew cut, thick frame glasses, wearing a blue windbreaker-style jacket with elastic cuffs, brown pants, and dark shoes. He was likely also covered in Paul Stine’s blood.
San Francisco Police Patrolman Don Fouke would write a report detailing his near-miss with the suspect. Lightly edited for clarity, it read as follows:
I respectfully wish to report, that while responding to the area of Cherry and Washington Streets a suspect fitting the description of the Zodiac killer was observed walking in an easterly direction on Jackson street and then turn north on Maple Street. This subject was not stopped as the description received from communications was that of a negro male. When the right description was broadcast reporting officer informed communications that a possible suspect has been seen going north on Maple Street into the Presidio, the area of Julius Kahn playground and a search was started which had negative results.
Officer Fouke’s physical description of the suspect largely matched the description given by the teenage witnesses at the scene, and also extended to his demeanor:
Subject at no time appeared to be in a hurry, walked with a shuffling lope, slightly bent forward, head down. The subject’s general appearance to classify him as a group would be that he might be of Welsh ancestry.
Police reports detail the search that followed the near-miss with the subject as extensive, with squad cars, motorcycle and dog units participating in the search.
Two nights later, on October 13th, 1969, The Zodiac sent another letter to the San Francisco Chronicle:
This is the Zodiac Speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington Street and Maple Street last night. To prove this here is a blood-stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the North Bay area.
The San Francisco Police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcycles seeing who could make the most noise. The car drivers should have just parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover.
If the killer was telling the truth, he was hiding in the darkness, watching as the police searched for him.
Many believe the attack on cab driver Paul Stine was an attempt by the killer to change his methods. Up until that point he had been a lovers lane murderer in the same vein as the Phantom Killer of 1946 in Texarkana. The change of tactics may have been intended to confuse authorities, make his crimes less predictable and inspire terror. And if it was his intention to inspire terror, that’s what the Zodiac did with the closing paragraph in his letter to the Chronicle.
Schoolchildren make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.
The Zodiac never made good on his threat to take out a school bus, but he did incite panic in the masses with the bluff. Law enforcement spent months escorting school buses in California. Busing companies issued strict instructions to their drivers: if a tire should go flat, drivers were instructed to keep the bus moving at all costs until they could radio for a police escort. The killer who found media attention so pleasing must have enjoyed it very much.
The Zodiac Disappears
The killer who called himself The Zodiac has never been identified, and the story of his deeds goes much deeper than the story I’ve told you here. There are theories that the Zodiac started his sick career long before the killings of Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, with the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in 1966 at Riverside Community College. And there is substantial evidence that The Zodiac continued to be active after the murder of Paul Stine. Someone claiming to be the killer threatened to blow up a school bus with a bomb. A San Bernardino resident claimed to have been abducted by The Zodiac during a road trip to visit her mother. Journalist Paul Avery, who covered the Zodiac case extensively, occasionally received correspondence from someone claiming to be The Zodiac. Many of those communications were taken seriously and deemed authentic through handwriting analysis.
You can go as deep as you like into the crimes of The Zodiac with a simple internet search.
It should be noted, however, after the Paul Stine murder, the investigation into The Zodiac took something of a tabloid turn. The crimes of the madman had so captured the public’s imagination that hoaxes started becoming a regular occurrence and sensationalism became the order of the day. Fake letters and media coverage of dubious validity. There was a TV talk show appearance in which a man claiming to be The Zodiac called-in to talk live with the hosts on-air, a call later deemed to be from an incarcerated mental patient. Talk show hosts and newspaper editors believed they could drive ratings and sales with stories about The Zodiac at every opportunity. It soon became difficult to tell fact from fiction.
Eventually, correspondence from The Zodiac tailed off, and despite boxes of physical evidence… crime scene reports, finger prints, a palm print from the dangling payphone receiver discovered after the Lake Berryessa attacks, and reams of letters to the local media, the leads dried up. The killer who called himself The Zodiac vanished.
That’s not to say there weren’t suspects.
Perhaps the best-known suspect was a man named Arthur Leigh Allen. About ten days after the attacks on Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard at Lake Berryessa, police interviewed Arthur Leigh Allen. He had been in the area the same day and claimed to have been scuba diving. He wore a Zodiac-brand wristwatch. The emblem on the watch was a circle bisected by a cross. He lived and worked just minutes away from Darlene Ferrin, the victim in the Blue Rock Springs attack, where the post-crime phone call was made from a payphone near her home. Allen was a convicted sex offender. He was sometimes described by acquaintances as being angry at women and never married.
Circumstantial evidence notwithstanding, none of the physical evidence ever matched Allen. His fingerprints and palm prints didn’t match. His handwriting didn’t match. Arthur Leigh Allen didn’t wear glasses. When he had hair it was black, not brown, and at the time of the Lake Berryessa attacks, a police detective who interviewed Allen said he was bald. DNA evidence gathered from one of the Zodiac’s letters was tested in 2002 using the technology of the day and yielded a partial DNA profile. Authorities concluded it was not a match for Allen. Even if it had been, Arthur Leigh Allen would have escaped justice. He had died of a heart attack in his home in Vallejo ten years earlier, in 1992.
There were other suspects over the years, many of whom were named by their own family members or friends. A retired military man. A blue collar worker with a brain disorder due to a car accident. A newspaper editor. A merchant mariner. Even a member of the Manson Family.
None were ever conclusively connected to The Zodiac murders.
And there are so many questions left unanswered… nobody truly knows why the killer called himself the Zodiac. There are theories that he timed his attacks to coincide with astronomical events. Nobody knows for sure what the Zodiac’s symbol actually means… most describe it as resembling the crosshairs of a gun-sight, but others claim it is a Celtic rune, and there are other theories too. And there are those who claim the prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, was not excluded by physical evidence… that his DNA didn’t match because he had others lick stamps and envelopes for him… that his handwriting didn’t match because he was ambidextrous and would sometimes write with his non-dominant hand… again, it’s all available with a simple internet search for anyone who wants to go deep.
Where does that leave the status of the investigation into The Zodiac?
Even five years ago, I would have said the hope for resolution in the Zodiac case was dim. But that was five years ago.
Today, the entire field of forensic criminology has been upended when it comes to cold cases thanks to an incredibly promising new technique — genetic genealogy, a tactic by which law enforcement can upload DNA from an unknown suspect to a public genealogy database, search for ancestors with matching DNA, then identify the perpetrator by building out a family tree until they find a suspect that lived in the right place, matched the description of the suspect, etc…
The tactic has been used hundreds of times already with amazing success, bringing to justice killers nationwide, including Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer who terrorized northern California for more than a decade.
In 1967 a 20 year old Seattle woman, Susan Galvin, was found raped and strangled in a parking garage elevator. In 2019, police identified her killer… Frank Wypych a former military man from Seattle who died in 1987. To date, it is the oldest, coldest case to be solved by genetic genealogy — 52 years after the crime.
In May of 2018, Vallejo police said they were beginning a new effort to analyze the Zodiac’s DNA, to include an effort at genetic genealogy. Although the statement from Vallejo police said they expected results in a couple of weeks, there has been no word of results so far. We shouldn’t be discouraged, though. The effort to identify the Golden State Killer through genetic genealogy took more than a year and a similar effort to identify the Zodiac could take even longer. And if Seattle authorities can identify a killer 52 years after the fact, there’s still hope for the Zodiac case.
I believe we may be lucky enough to hear about a resolution to this case any day. First, we’ll hear an announcement from the Vallejo police about an upcoming press conference. Then, we’ll find out they’ve finally, after more than half a century, identified the monster who terrorized Northern California in the late 60s. And if we’re really lucky, he’ll still be alive, and we’ll get to see him in cuffs, to face justice for the evil deeds he’s done. The search for the Zodiac is not yet over.
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[music] Shores of Avalon, Killers, Echoes of Time, Symmetry, Fire Prelude, Interloper and Cryptic Sorrow by Kevin McCleod, Incompetech.com, Creative Commons License via FilmMusic.io
Feature Photo by Alex Powell via Pexels.com
