Zodiac Killer
A letter postmarked the 29th of January 1974 reached the San Francisco Chronicle and ended with a tally: Me = 37, SFPD = 0. The writer was the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified serial killer who treated the San Francisco Police Department as an opponent in a game.
Police agree on seven victims in four attacks around the San Francisco Bay Area, between December 1968 and October 1969. The killer struck three couples and a cab driver, in Benicia, Vallejo, unincorporated Napa County and the city of San Francisco. Five of the seven died. Two survived. Yet the figure in that 1974 letter was far higher than anything investigators could confirm.
The California Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the city of Vallejo, and the Napa and Solano county sheriffs all still list the case as open. No one has ever been charged.
This documentary follows the questions that never went away. Why did a killer who wanted to stay hidden keep writing to newspapers? What did his coded messages say, and why did some of them stay unreadable for decades? Which unsolved deaths belong to him, and who might he have been?
Betty Lou Jensen, 16, and David Arthur Faraday, 17, were parked on a gravel runoff beside Lake Herman Road on the night of the 20th of December 1968. The spot was a lovers' lane just inside the Benicia city limits. Faraday went to Vallejo High School and Jensen to Hogan High School. He had collected her at 8:30 p.m., and they visited one of her friends before driving out.
Between 11:05 and 11:10 p.m., another car stopped about ten feet from the passenger side of Faraday's. The gunman fired several shots at the car as he walked around to the driver's side. None of them hit the couple. Jensen scrambled out through the passenger door. As Faraday followed, the attacker shot him in the head with a .22-caliber pistol. Jensen ran, and the gunman fired six shots at her back. Only one missed. Police believed the whole attack lasted two to three minutes.
A passing motorist soon spotted the bodies and alerted police. Jensen was already dead. Faraday was still breathing, and he died at the hospital. There were no witnesses and no usable tire or foot prints. The only motive detectives could deduce was a "madman" who wanted to kill. Despite an intense investigation over the following months, no viable suspect emerged.
Darlene Ferrin, 22, was well known in Vallejo because of her job at a local restaurant, and that was where she met Michael Mageau, 19. On the 4th of July 1969, the two went on a date, even though Ferrin was married. After 11:30 p.m., a phone call came to her house. She reached Mageau's home around 11:50 p.m.
The moment they left, the couple noticed a man in a light-colored car following them. Ferrin drove out of Vallejo toward Lake Herman Road. Shortly before midnight she pulled into an empty lot at Blue Rock Springs Park, another lovers' lane just two miles from the first. She parked or stalled about 70 feet from the entrance. A second vehicle stopped roughly 80 feet to their left, and its driver switched off the headlights and sat motionless. Mageau asked who it was. Ferrin told him not to worry. Then the stranger sped away.
He came back five minutes later and parked a few feet from Mageau's side of the car. He walked up shining a flashlight into the window. Believing he was a police officer, the couple rolled the window down. The man said nothing and fired a 9mm pistol into the car. One bullet hit Mageau in the right arm and another hit Ferrin in the neck. Mageau tried to escape, but his door handle was missing or had been removed. The gunman went back to his own car, did something Mageau could not see, then returned and shot each of them twice more. He drove off.
A golf course caretaker heard the shots around 12:10 a.m. Three teenagers drove into the lot, found the wounded pair and got help. Police arrived at 12:20 a.m. Twenty minutes later, Ferrin was pronounced dead. Mageau lived. He described a heavyset white man about 5'8" tall, weighing 195 to 200 pounds, with a large face and curly light brown hair. The man wore dark clothes and no glasses. Soon after 12:40 a.m., the Vallejo Police Department took a call from a payphone two blocks from its headquarters. The caller said: "I want to report a double murder. If you go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park you will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9-millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye."
The authors Michael Kelleher and David Van Nuys suggested that the seven months between the two attacks were a cooling off period, a pause serial killers often take. They also discuss a persistent theory that Ferrin knew her killer. Kelleher and Van Nuys trace it to Robert Graysmith's 1986 book Zodiac, which leaned on interviews with her friends. Mageau gave conflicting accounts. At the hospital he said he did not know the attacker, but at another point he said the man's name was "Richard". Ferrin's sister said one of Darlene's boyfriends was named Richard. Kelleher and Van Nuys also note that Ferrin ignored the mystery driver, and neither she nor Mageau feared him as a stranger might. Ferrin also lived less than two blocks from Jensen, went to Hogan High School, and knew Jensen and Faraday. A photograph shows her with an unknown man who closely resembles the later composite sketch of the Zodiac. In a 2011 episode of America's Most Wanted, police said they believed it was taken in San Francisco in 1966 or 1967. No definitive connection has been proven.
Less than a month after Blue Rock Springs, three newspaper offices received envelopes from the man who had phoned Vallejo police.
On the 1st of August 1969, the Vallejo Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner each received a nearly identical letter. It began, "I am the killer of the 2 teenagers last Christmass at Lake Herman & the girl last the 4th of July." The letters were full of misspellings. They gave police the first firm link between the two attacks in Vallejo.
Each envelope held a different piece of a cryptogram, and together the pieces formed a 408-symbol cipher known as Z408. The writer demanded that the codes run on every paper's front page. Otherwise, he threatened, he would "cruise 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 printed its third of the cipher in the edition of the 2nd of August. Vallejo Police Chief Jack E. Stiltz told reporters, "We're not satisfied that the letter was written by the murderer," and asked the writer for more facts.
The writer obliged. On the 4th of August 1969, the Examiner received a longer letter that opened, "Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking." It was the first time he used that name. He supplied close detail on how he shot Michael Mageau and described the golf course caretaker. About Lake Herman Road, he revealed that he had taped a flashlight to his gun so he could aim in the dark. He also pointed back to the cipher: "when they do crack it they will have me".
Both the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency tried to break Z408. Instead, on the 5th of August, a couple in Salinas named Donald and Bettye Harden solved it. Neither was a cryptologist. Bettye guessed that the word "kill" would appear, and that guess gave them a foothold.
The message did not name him. It opened with the line "I like killing people because it is so much fun" and, with its many misspellings, referred to Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Most Dangerous Game". The writer explained that killing was a way of collecting slaves for his afterlife. A psychiatrist at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, asked by Vallejo police to read it, concluded the author felt omnipotent. He described the writer as "someone you would expect to be brooding and isolated". He also guessed that the praise of murder over sex could be "an expression of inadequacy".
Over the next five years the Zodiac sent more than twenty letters to newspapers, to police, to the Chronicle writer Paul Avery and to the attorney Melvin Belli. He signed all of them with a symbol resembling the crosshairs of a gunsight. Four of the mailings carried cryptograms. They were postmarked in San Francisco and Pleasanton.
Seven weeks after the Examiner letter, the writer stopped mailing and showed himself to two picnickers, wearing a hood.
At 4:00 p.m. on the 27th of September 1969, the Pacific Union College students Bryan Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Shepard, 22, were picnicking at Lake Berryessa. They sat on a small island joined by a sand spit to Twin Oak Ridge. At some point Shepard noticed a man watching them. He stepped out from behind a tree wearing a black executioner's hood with clip-on sunglasses, and a bib marked with a white symbol about 3 by 3 inches. He held a gun that Hartnell took to be a .45. He claimed he had escaped from jail after killing a guard and needed their car and money to reach Mexico.
He had Shepard tie Hartnell's hands with precut lengths of plastic clothesline, then tightened the bonds himself because her knots were too loose. Hartnell still thought it was a robbery when the man drew a knife and stabbed both of them. Hartnell took six wounds and Shepard ten.
The attacker walked 500 yards to Knoxville Road, leaving footprints for investigators. On the door of Hartnell's car he drew his symbol with a black felt-tip pen and wrote beneath it. A fisherman and his son heard the screams and went for help. Meanwhile Hartnell used his teeth to loosen Shepard's ropes, and she freed him. Two park rangers tended to the couple until an ambulance came. Napa County deputies Dave Collins and Ray Land answered the call. Shepard was conscious and gave a detailed description. She slipped into a coma on the way to the hospital in Napa and died on the 29th of September at Queen of the Valley Hospital. Hartnell survived and told his story to the press.
Several people had noticed a strange man at the lake earlier that day. A dentist and his son saw a heavyset man watching them from a distance before he hurried off. Around 2:50 p.m., three women noticed a man as they stopped on the way to the lake, and again later while they sunbathed. Since they may have seen him without the hood, they worked with Napa Valley Register photographer Robert McKenzie on a composite sketch, using an Identi-Kit facial compositing device. The man was about 6 feet tall and weighed about 200 pounds, matching what Shepard and Hartnell said. Napa County detective Ken Narlow took the case from the start and kept working on it until he retired in 1987.
The killer then drove 27 miles to a car wash in downtown Napa. At 7:40 p.m. he called the Napa County Sheriff's Department from a payphone and asked to "report a murder , no, a double murder". He left the receiver hanging. A few minutes later, KVON radio reporter Pat Stanley found the phone off the hook, a few blocks from the sheriff's office. Detectives lifted a wet palm print from it, but they never matched it to anyone.
Around 9:40 p.m. on the 11th of October 1969, a cab driven by the doctoral student Paul Stine, 29, picked up a fare in downtown San Francisco. The passenger named a destination in Presidio Heights. At Washington and Maple streets, he asked to go one more block. At Washington and Cherry, around 9:55 p.m., he shot Stine in the head and took his wallet and car keys.
Three teenagers watched from a house directly across the street, and streetlight lit the killer's face. They saw him wipe down the cab and search through Stine's clothing. He left two partial fingerprints from his right hand. While he worked, the teenagers phoned the San Francisco Police Department. They described a "husky" white man in a "dark or black jacket". The dispatcher mistakenly broadcast that the suspect was Black.
Two minutes after that call, two patrol officers heard the radio dispatch. Nearby, they met a white man in dark clothes walking north toward the Presidio army base. They pulled up and asked if he had seen anything suspicious. He said he had seen someone waving a gun and heading east, and the officers drove on. The Zodiac later claimed he was that man. By the time police reached the cab, Stine was declared dead, and the killer had probably left by car.
Police first assumed the killing was part of a robbery. Then, on the 13th of October, the Chronicle received a bloody piece of Stine's shirt. The accompanying letter bragged about the murder and claimed the writer had secretly watched police search for him. It also threatened to shoot a tire on a school bus and kill the children as they got out. Police artists drew composites from the teenagers' accounts. The two patrol officers realized their encounter might have been with the killer, and they helped produce a sketch too.
Detectives Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi were assigned. Toschi ended up working alone and filled eight filing cabinets with potential suspects. In 1976 he told the Associated Press that the letters were an "ego game". "He's a weekend killer," he said, and he guessed the man lived in the Bay Area, held a menial job and was better educated than his misspellings suggested.
After seven years on the case, Toschi began sending anonymous letters praising his own work to Chronicle columnist Armistead Maupin. In 1978 he was removed from the case and demoted to pawn shop detail. He later expressed regret for the hoax. That same year Maupin received a purported Zodiac letter, but the San Francisco police concluded Toschi had not written it.
On the 22nd of October 1969, a mental patient named Eric Weill fooled attorney Melvin Belli on KGO-TV's A.M. San Francisco. Using the name "Sam", Weill said he could not reveal himself for fear of execution. He arranged to meet Belli on Mission Street in Daly City and never appeared. Investigators concluded he was not the Zodiac.
On the 8th of November 1969, the Zodiac mailed the Chronicle a card carrying a 340-character cryptogram, Z340. It stayed unsolved for 51 years. One cryptologist ranked the Zodiac's unsolved ciphers second only to the Voynich manuscript. On the 5th of December 2020, an international team of private citizens finally cracked it: the American software engineer David Oranchak, the Australian mathematician Sam Blake and the Belgian programmer Jarl Van Eycke. Van Eycke's program, AZdecrypt, tested 650,000 possible solutions before producing the best key. The FBI's Cryptographic and Racketeering Records Unit verified the result and found no further clue to his identity.
The decoded message denied that the Zodiac was the "Sam" from television. It also said he feared no gas chamber "because it will send me to paradice all the sooner." The next day, the 9th of November, he mailed the Chronicle a seven-page letter with a diagram of a bomb meant for a school bus. He boasted that police would never catch him because "I have been too clever for them". On the 20th of December, a year after the first murders, he wrote Belli: "Please help me I am drownding...I can not remain in control for much longer."
A letter postmarked the 20th of April 1970 began, "My name is, ", followed by a 13-character cipher, Z13. The cryptologist Craig P. Bauer proposed the solution "Alfred E. Neuman", the mascot of Mad magazine. Ryan Garlick, a University of North Texas computer science professor, applied the Z340 key and got "Dr. Eat a Torpedo". He thinks it insulted D. C. B. Marsh, then president of the American Cryptogram Association, who had publicly dared the Zodiac to spell out his name in code. In the same letter, the Zodiac denied bombing a San Francisco police station in Golden Gate Park. He added a score line, " = 10, SFPD = 0."
On the 28th of April, he mailed the Chronicle a greeting card threatening to use his bus bomb. He wanted the paper to write about it, and he wanted people to wear "some nice Zodiac butons". When no one did, he grew upset. His letter postmarked the 26th of June 1970 contained a Phillips 66 roadmap of the Bay Area. On it, Mount Diablo was marked as a compass rose, with the cardinal points labeled 0, 3, 6 and 9. The letter ended with a 32-character cipher, Z32. He said the map and cipher showed where he buried a bomb. No bomb was found. In 1981, Gareth Penn noticed that when the map was divided as the Zodiac hinted, three attacks lined up along one radian. Oranchak says that because Z13 and Z32 are so short, it is nearly impossible to know whether any proposed solution is right.
On the 26th of July 1970, the Zodiac sent the Chronicle a parody of "As Some Day It May Happen (I Have a Little List)" from The Mikado, with his own lyrics about victims. He signed with a big symbol and a new score: " = 13, SFPD = 0". On the 27th of October, Paul Avery received a Halloween card reading, "Peek-a-boo, you are doomed." The Chronicle ran it on the front page. Avery refused police protection and began carrying a pistol. His colleagues wore buttons saying "I Am Not Avery".
In a letter to the Los Angeles Times postmarked the 13th of March 1971, he taunted police and claimed 17 victims. He wrote, "I am crack proof." Zodiac expert Tom Voigt thinks the Pleasanton postmark was a joke about an unpleasant letter coming from a town called "Pleasanton". Then came almost three years of silence. In January 1974, a letter to the Chronicle praised The Exorcist (1973) as "the best that I have ever seen." It quoted part of the "Tit-willow Song" from The Mikado and carried an unexplained symbol at the bottom. The psychiatrist David Van Nuys speculated that the Zodiac stopped killing because he had multiple personality disorder, which can ease over time.
On the 11th of April 1962, the body of cab driver Raymond Davis, 29, was found in St. Malo, a gated community in Oceanside, California. A man had phoned police two days before to promise a crime they would never figure out. Days afterward, a caller said he had killed the cab driver and would go after a bus driver next. Police started putting armed guards on buses. In 2019, Kristi Hawthorne, director of the Oceanside Historical Society, found the story while researching St. Malo. She noted parallels to the Zodiac: a wealthy neighborhood, a victim aged 29 as Paul Stine was, .22-caliber ammunition, and the taunts and bus threats. She took her findings to Oceanside police, who opened an inquiry.
On the 4th of June 1963, Robert Domingos, 18, and his fiancée Linda Edwards, 17, were shot dead on a beach in Gaviota State Park, west of Santa Barbara. They had skipped school for Senior Ditch Day. Police believed the killer tried to tie them with precut rope, as at Lake Berryessa, and shot them as they fled. Winchester Western Super X bullets matched the Zodiac's ammunition. In 1972, Santa Barbara County Sheriff John Carpenter said there was "a high degree of probability" that the Zodiac was responsible.
On the 5th of February 1964, newlyweds Johnny Ray Swindle and Joyce Ann Swindle, both 19, were shot on Ocean Beach in San Diego. A sniper fired from a cliff, then shot each of them once in the head at close range. Johnny was shot behind the ear, as in some Zodiac murders. The killer took Joyce's necklace and Johnny's wallet and Timex watch, the same brand as one found at the Cheri Jo Bates scene.
On the 30th of October 1966, Cheri Jo Bates, 18, was killed after leaving the library annex at Riverside City College. Her Volkswagen's distributor cap wires had been pulled out. A month later, nearly identical typewritten letters titled "The Confession" reached Riverside police and the Riverside Press-Enterprise. In December, a poem was found carved into a library desk. California document examiner Sherwood Morrill said the Zodiac wrote it. In 1971 the Zodiac wrote to the Los Angeles Times that police had found his "Riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones". His part in the killing remains unconfirmed.
On the night of the 22nd of March 1970, Kathleen Johns, 22, was driving to Petaluma with her 10-month-old daughter when a man flagged her down about a loose wheel. After he fixed it, the wheel fell off. He offered her a ride, then kept her captive for two hours, telling her, "you know I'm going to kill you". She escaped into an irrigation ditch with her baby. When she saw the Wanted poster from Stine's murder, she said, "Oh my god...that's him". In July, the Zodiac wrote of a woman and her baby on his "little list".
San Francisco police Sergeant Richard Radetich, 25, was shot through his squad car window on the 19th of June 1970. A week later, the Zodiac claimed to have shot a man in a parked car with a .38. Police never found direct evidence. The nurse Donna Lass, 25, vanished from Stateline, Nevada, on the 6th of September 1970. A skull found near Emigrant Gap in 1986 was identified as hers by DNA profiling in 2023.
In 1976, Detective Toschi said, "We know for sure he killed at least six." Robert Graysmith estimated 49 victims.
In 2002, Cydne Holt of the San Francisco police crime lab developed a partial DNA profile from saliva on stamps and envelopes of the Zodiac's letters, for the ABC News program Primetime Thursday. It did not match Arthur Leigh Allen. Tom Voigt noted that the material came from the front of a stamp and could belong to someone else. In April 2004 the department marked the case inactive. By March 2007 it was reactivated. In 2018, Vallejo police tried GEDmatch without definitive results. Voigt claims the case is no longer being investigated as of 2025.
In 2009, The Guardian reported that San Francisco police had looked at about 2,500 suspects, and only half a dozen looked credible. Richard Grinell, who runs the website Zodiac Ciphers, said in 2022 that perhaps 50 or 100 suspects get named every year.
Police have named only one: Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992. Allen denied being the Zodiac. Police interviewed him early on and served several search warrants over twenty years. In 2007, Graysmith said several detectives considered Allen the most likely suspect. In 2010, Dave Toschi said that all the evidence against him turned out to be negative. Other names widely considered include Earl Van Best Jr., Gary Francis Poste, Giuseppe Bevilacqua, Lawrence Kane, Paul Doerr, Richard Gaikowski, Richard Marshall and Ross Sullivan.
In 2020, the Chronicle called the case the most famous unsolved murder case in American history. Enthusiasts dubbed "Zodiologists" hold informal annual meetings. Robert Graysmith, who worked at the Chronicle as a cartoonist while the Zodiac wrote to the paper, published the influential book Zodiac in 1986. In it he called Allen "Robert Hall Starr" to avoid litigation. In 2002, he wrote directly about Allen in Zodiac Unmasked. Since 2013, accusing United States Senator Ted Cruz of being the Zodiac has been an Internet meme. Heriberto Seda in New York City and Shinichiro Azuma in Japan both called themselves the Zodiac.
On the 19th of April 1971, the film The Zodiac Killer premiered at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco. Director Tom Hanson meant it as a trap. Viewers completed the sentence "I think the Zodiac kills because..." for a chance to win a Kawasaki motorcycle, and the surveys were secretly compared with the Zodiac's handwriting. Volunteers once held a suspect before releasing him for lack of evidence.
The Zodiac inspired the villain Scorpio in Dirty Harry (1971) and John Doe in Seven (1995). David Fincher, who directed Seven, grew up in the Bay Area during the killings. His film Zodiac (2007) follows Graysmith and Paul Avery over 23 years. It points toward Allen and drew fresh public interest to the case.
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Common questions
Who was the Zodiac Killer?
The Zodiac Killer is an unidentified serial killer who murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. The only man police ever named as a suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen, who died in 1992 and denied being the Zodiac.
How many people did the Zodiac Killer kill?
Police attribute seven victims in four attacks to the Zodiac Killer, and five of them died. The Zodiac claimed 37 victims in a letter postmarked the 29th of January 1974, but there is no consensus on the true number.
Where did the Zodiac Killer attack?
The Zodiac Killer attacked at Lake Herman Road in Benicia, at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, at Lake Berryessa in Napa County and in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. The attacks took place between the 20th of December 1968 and the 11th of October 1969.
Was the Zodiac Killer's Z340 cipher ever solved?
Yes, the Z340 cipher was decoded on the 5th of December 2020 by David Oranchak, Sam Blake and Jarl Van Eycke after 51 years. The FBI verified the decryption, which gave no further clues to the Zodiac's identity.
Which Zodiac Killer ciphers remain unsolved?
The Z13 and Z32 ciphers remain unsolved. Z408 was cracked in 1969 by Donald and Bettye Harden, and Z340 was cracked in 2020. According to David Oranchak, the Z13 and Z32 are so short that it is practically impossible to tell whether a proposed solution is correct.
Is the Zodiac Killer case still open?
Yes, the California Department of Justice, the FBI, the city of Vallejo and the Napa and Solano county sheriffs list the case as open. The San Francisco Police Department marked it inactive in April 2004 and later reactivated it.
Why did the Zodiac Killer write letters to newspapers?
The Zodiac Killer took credit for the murders, described details known only to police and threatened more violence if the letters were not printed. He mailed more than twenty letters between 1969 and 1974 and signed them with a crosshair-like symbol.
All sources
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