The Zodiac Killer Case in Northern California

Sam On the night of Friday, December 20, 1968, two high-school students went out on an early date to Lake Herman Road, just inside Benicia, in Solano County. It was a rural stretch known locally as a lovers' lane. They were David Arthur Faraday, 17, of Vallejo High, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, of Hogan High. These were the first killings later tied to the man who would call himself the Zodiac.

Sam They had told Betty Lou's parents they would be home by 11 p.m. They never arrived. Shortly after 11, a passing motorist found them beside Faraday's station wagon. Both had been shot with a .22-caliber weapon. Betty Lou Jensen was already dead. David Faraday was still breathing when help arrived, and he died either on the way to the hospital or at it.

Sam Investigators from the Benicia police and the Solano County Sheriff's Office worked the scene. They found shell casings and little else they could use. There were no clear tire tracks that led anywhere, and there was no identified suspect. The case went cold, and for more than six months nothing further connected to it.

Sam Then, around midnight between July 4 and July 5, 1969, the same pattern returned, about four miles from the first scene. This was Blue Rock Springs Park, in Vallejo. Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22, a Vallejo waitress and a mother, and Michael Renault Mageau, 19, were sitting in Ferrin's car in the parking lot.

Sam A car pulled into the lot, then left. It came back. A man got out and shone a light into Ferrin's car, then opened fire with a 9mm pistol. A 9mm is a larger-caliber handgun than the .22 used on Lake Herman Road. Darlene Ferrin was killed. Michael Mageau was hit several times, and he survived.

Sam Mageau later described the man to police. He said he was a heavyset white man, roughly 5 feet 8 inches tall, with a large face and light brown hair. He was wearing dark clothes and no glasses.

Sam Minutes after 12:40 a.m. on July 5, the Vallejo police switchboard took a call from a pay phone. The caller said he wanted to report a double murder. He directed officers to the park and to a brown car. He said the victims had been shot with a 9-millimeter Luger, a particular make of 9mm pistol. Then he added that he had also killed "those kids last year." He hung up.

Sam That call was the first known claim tying the two attacks together. The wording is preserved in reconstructions drawn from the police record, and multiple outlets covering the case have reported it.

Sam On July 31, 1969, nearly identical letters reached three newspapers: the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. Each one claimed the Lake Herman Road teenagers and the woman killed on the Fourth of July. Each also enclosed one third of a cryptogram, a message written in symbols, 408 of them in all.

Sam The writer said the cipher contained his identity. He demanded that the papers print it on the front page, and he threatened a weekend of killings if they refused. Vallejo Police Chief Jack Stiltz responded publicly. He said the department was not satisfied that the writer was the murderer, and he asked for more proof.

Sam The solution came from outside the police. A Salinas couple, Donald Harden, a schoolteacher, and his wife Bettye, put the three pieces together and solved the combined cipher within about a week. The FBI later corroborated their solution. It is one of the two ciphers in this case that have been solved.

Sam The plaintext named no one. In the writer's own spelling, it began by saying he liked killing people because it was so much fun, more fun than killing wild game, because man is the most dangerous animal of all. It said that when he died he would be reborn in "paradice," and that the people he had killed would become his slaves.

Sam It also said he would not give his name, because the police would try to slow down or stop his collecting of slaves. The last 18 characters of the cipher have never been satisfactorily explained.

Sam On August 4, the Examiner received a follow-up letter. It opened with the line that fixed the name the case has carried ever since: "This is the Zodiac speaking."

Sam The letter also offered a detail about his weapon. He wrote of taping a pencil flashlight to the barrel of his gun.

Sam And from that letter forward, he signed with a symbol: a circle crossed by lines, like the sights of a gun. It would appear on later letters, and, as the next part of the story shows, in other places too.

Sam That is where matters stood through August and into September 1969. There were three letters in the newspapers, a solved cipher that gave no name, a police chief who had asked for more proof, and a signature drawn as a crossed circle. No arrest had been made. The evening of Saturday, September 27, was still ahead.

Sam The afternoon of Saturday, September 27, 1969, was at Lake Berryessa, in Napa County. Two Pacific Union College students, Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22, were picnicking on a peninsula at the lake. A man came out of the trees. He wore a black executioner's hood, clip-on sunglasses, and a white crossed-circle symbol on his chest.

Sam He carried a gun. He told them he was an escaped prisoner who needed money and a car to get to Mexico. Then he bound them with precut lengths of plastic clothesline. After that, he stabbed them both.

Sam Bryan Hartnell was stabbed six times, and he lived. Cecelia Shepard was stabbed ten times. She died two days later, on Monday, September 29, at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa.

Sam Before he left, the attacker used a black felt-tip pen to write on the door of Hartnell's white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. He drew the crossed-circle symbol, and under it wrote: "Vallejo," then "12-20-68," then "7-4-69," then "Sept 27-69-6:30," and finally "by knife." Those were the dates of the Lake Herman Road killings, the Blue Rock Springs shooting, and this attack. A document examiner with the California Department of Justice later concluded that the handwriting matched the letters.

Sam At 7:40 that evening, a man called the Napa police from a pay phone at a car wash on Main Street. He said he wanted to report a murder, then corrected himself: a double murder. He described the car and gave the location, near park headquarters. When he was asked where he was, he said he was the one who did it.

Sam Police lifted a palm print from the phone's receiver. It was smudged in the lifting, and it lost its value as evidence. Napa County detective Ken Narlow worked the Berryessa case from the start until his retirement in 1987.

Sam Two weeks later, on Saturday, October 11, 1969, the story moved to San Francisco. Paul Lee Stine, 29, was a graduate student who drove a Yellow Cab at night. Near Union Square, in accounts that place the hail around Mason and Geary, he picked up a fare. The passenger asked to go to Washington and Maple, in Presidio Heights.

Sam The cab stopped one block farther west, at Washington and Cherry, at about 9:55 p.m. The passenger shot Stine once in the head with a 9mm. It was not the same gun used at Blue Rock Springs. The man took Stine's wallet and keys, and he cut away a bloodied piece of Stine's shirt.

Sam Three teenagers were watching from a house across the street, and they called it in. They described a white man, stocky, with a reddish or light crew cut, glasses and a dark jacket. He was walking north on Cherry Street, toward the Presidio.

Sam The dispatcher's broadcast got the description wrong. It described a Black suspect. Patrol officers Donald Fouke and Eric Zelms passed a white man matching the teenagers' description on Jackson Street, and they did not stop him. Fouke later said the man told them he had seen someone with a gun going the other way.

Sam By the time the description was corrected, the man was gone. Police searched the park, with dogs, and found nothing. Homicide inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong took the case. Paul Stine was the only confirmed victim killed inside San Francisco.

Sam The letter postmarked October 13 reached the Chronicle with a bloodstained swatch of Stine's shirt inside. It claimed the taxi murder along with the attacks in the North Bay. It ridiculed the police search of the park. Then it added a new threat. Schoolchildren, the writer said, made nice targets, and he thought he would wipe out a school bus some morning by shooting out a tire and then shooting the children as they came out.

Sam Once the threat became public, school buses in the Napa Valley ran with armed escorts. The shirt piece matched Stine's, and the letter is treated as authentic.

Sam On October 22, a man claiming to be the Zodiac called a KGO television program hosted by Jim Dunbar. The attorney Melvin Belli was in the studio. The caller said he did not want to go to the gas chamber. He had promised to appear, and he did not. Police concluded the caller was not the killer.

Sam On November 8, the Chronicle received a greeting card containing a cipher of 340 characters, later called Z340, along with another piece of Stine's shirt. The next day, November 9, came a long letter. In it, the writer claimed seven victims by the end of October. That is two more than police have ever confirmed. He said future murders would look like robberies, anger killings or accidents. He described being questioned by two officers after the Stine shooting.

Sam The same letter held a diagram and a parts list for a roadside bomb, which he said could be used against a school bus. He wrote that police would not know whether the device was already in place or stored in his basement. No such attack happened.

Sam The next letter came on December 20, the anniversary of the first murders on Lake Herman Road. It was addressed to Melvin Belli, and it enclosed yet another piece of Stine's shirt. It included the line "Please help me I am drownding." Police called that letter authentic.

Sam Letters continued through the following year. On April 20, 1970, a letter to the Chronicle carried a cipher of just 13 characters, beginning with the words "My name is," and another bus-bomb diagram. On June 26 came a second short cipher, 32 characters long, often read as a map code for a bomb site. It was sent with a Phillips 66 map of the Bay Area. Neither has been solved in a way investigators accept. Both are too short for a single unique solution.

Sam Between those two letters sits an incident that remains in dispute. Near Highway 132, west of Modesto, Kathleen Johns, 22, was traveling with her infant daughter. She reported that a man flagged her down, loosened a wheel of her car, and then drove her around for more than an hour before she escaped with the child. At the Patterson police station she pointed at the Zodiac wanted poster and said that was the man. Her car was later found burned.

Sam On July 24, a letter claimed the writer had given a woman and her baby "a rather intersting ride" and had burned the car. But police reports from that night do not record the threats she later described, and researchers have long called the file inconsistent. The incident is not one of the four attacks police officially attribute to the killer. In 1992, Johns identified a different man, Lawrence Kane, from a photo lineup. That identification is also disputed.

Sam A Halloween card that October was addressed to Paul Avery, the Chronicle reporter who had been covering the case. It was read as a threat against him.

Sam In March 1971, a letter reached the Los Angeles Times. It claimed the murder of Cheri Jo Bates, killed in Riverside in 1966, and raised the writer's count. Police have never agreed that Bates was a Zodiac victim. Riverside investigators later developed DNA from a stamp on a confession letter in that case and identified a man who admitted writing it. The department has said it is focused on solving her murder rather than treating it as part of this series. The link remains unproven.

Sam Then came a long silence. The Chronicle received a letter postmarked January 29, 1974. It praised the film The Exorcist and quoted a scrap of Gilbert and Sullivan. It closed with a tally: "Me - 37 / SFPD - 0." The Associated Press, reporting the letter's arrival, said the writer claimed 37 killings since 1966. Police have never accepted that number. The confirmed dead remain five, and the confirmed wounded who lived are two.

Sam The last item in this stretch arrived in 1978. It was a letter to the Chronicle that mentioned Inspector Toschi and the columnist Herb Caen. It is disputed. Some examiners have called it genuine, and others have not. Across all the years, the Chronicle counts 22 known communications, 17 of them sent to the paper, while noting that the later items are not uniformly accepted.

Sam After the letters stopped, the case sat with four separate agencies. Benicia police and the Solano County Sheriff's Office had Lake Herman Road. Vallejo police had Blue Rock Springs. The Napa County Sheriff's Office had Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco police had the killing of Paul Stine. Coordination between them was uneven. The California Department of Justice assigned an agent, Mel Nicolai, to pass information from one agency to the next.

Sam The FBI examined handwriting, fingerprints taken from the letters, and the ciphers. But the murders were state crimes, so the bureau did not hold the case. There has never been an arrest, a charge or a trial. California has no statute of limitations on murder, which means the files can stay open indefinitely.

Sam On the San Francisco side, the public face of the case was Inspector Dave Toschi, working with Bill Armstrong, from the Stine murder until 1978. Toschi later estimated he had spoken to about 5,000 people. In 1976 he sent anonymous notes praising his own work to Armistead Maupin, a writer at the Chronicle.

Sam When that came out in 1978, Toschi was taken off the case and moved to robbery. He admitted writing the notes and called them foolish. He denied writing any Zodiac letter, and he was later cleared of forging the disputed 1978 communication. He retired in 1985. Dave Toschi died in San Francisco on January 6, 2018, at the age of 86. The New York Times and the Chronicle both reported his death and his removal from the case.

Sam Police also worked from composite sketches, drawn from the Stine witnesses and from Officer Fouke. They show a white man in his thirties or early forties, heavyset, with a crew cut and glasses. The survivors' descriptions from Vallejo and Berryessa do not line up perfectly with that sketch, or with each other. The killer's own letters claimed he used disguises.

Sam The only person police ever publicly named as a suspect was Arthur Leigh Allen. He was a Vallejo resident, a former elementary-school teacher and later a convicted child molester. He died in 1992, at 58. In 1971, a former friend, Don Cheney, told police that Allen had talked, before any letters appeared, about killing couples, writing to the papers, signing with a crossed circle, and calling himself Zodiac. Cheney said Allen had also talked about shooting children off a school bus.

Sam Allen owned a Zodiac-brand Sea Wolf watch, whose logo resembled the killer's symbol. He was said to have been near Lake Berryessa. In 1991, Michael Mageau, the Blue Rock Springs survivor, picked Allen from a photo lineup as the man who shot him. Vallejo police searched Allen's property more than once, and after his death they still called him their suspect.

Sam The forensics went the other way. His fingerprints did not match prints from Stine's cab or from the letters. Handwriting examiners, including a longtime Department of Justice examiner, said his writing did not match the Zodiac's. In October 2002, the San Francisco crime lab compared a partial DNA profile from a Zodiac stamp and envelope with tissue from Allen's autopsy. Inspectors Kelly Carroll and Michael Maloney told the Chronicle and other papers that Allen did not match.

Sam Vallejo police said the result did not fully eliminate him, because the DNA might not be the killer's. A later claim, attributed to the lab scientist, held that the sample came from the outside of a stamp rather than from saliva under it. The implications of that claim are disputed. Allen was never charged. Kevin Fagan, a Chronicle reporter, has said Allen remains in his view, and in the view of some former investigators, the strongest named suspect. That is an opinion, not a finding.

Sam Other names have surfaced. San Francisco police have said they looked at on the order of 2,500 people. In 2021, a private group called the Case Breakers said the killer was Gary Francis Poste, a house painter who died in 2018. The FBI's public response was that the case remained open and there was no new information to report. Law enforcement did not adopt the claim. Theories linking the case to the 1947 Black Dahlia murder have been rejected by investigators who have spoken on the record.

Sam Two earlier crimes are sometimes proposed. Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards were shot on a Santa Barbara County beach on June 4, 1963. Cheri Jo Bates was stabbed in Riverside on October 30, 1966. Neither is part of the official series, and no agency has confirmed either as a Zodiac crime.

Sam Then, on December 5, 2020, came a break in the ciphers. A private team submitted a solution to the 340-character cipher, the one mailed to the Chronicle in November of the year of the Stine shooting. The team was David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Sam Blake, an applied mathematician in Australia, and Jarl Van Eycke, a programmer in Belgium. The FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit verified the solution.

Sam The text, in the writer's spelling, says he hopes they are having lots of fun trying to catch him. It says the caller on the television show was not him. It says he is not afraid of the gas chamber, because it will send him to "paradice" sooner, now that he has enough slaves to work for him. The two short ciphers, the 13-character and the 32-character, remain unsolved.

Sam Today, no one has been arrested or convicted. The confirmed toll is five dead and two wounded, in four attacks between December 20, 1968, and October 11 of the following year, in Benicia, Vallejo, Napa County and San Francisco. The figure of 37 is the writer's own claim, not a police number.

Sam San Francisco police marked their Stine file inactive in 2004 and had reopened it by 2007. The FBI, Vallejo police, the Napa and Solano sheriff's offices and the California Department of Justice have all described their files as open. In October 2021, the FBI said the case remained open and there was no new information to report.

Sam Partial DNA from the letters has not been enough for a database hit, or for the kind of genealogy identification that named the Golden State Killer. Whether usable DNA still exists on the shirt pieces, the envelopes or other evidence is a question the agencies have not answered in public.

Sam Five people were killed. Betty Lou Jensen. David Faraday. Darlene Ferrin. Cecelia Shepard. Paul Stine. Michael Mageau and Bryan Hartnell survived their attacks. Their names are what the open file still carries.

Sam A note before I go. This show is AI-generated, and the voice you are hearing is synthetic. The facts come from the sources I'll name now, whose authors are not affiliated with this show. The next episode arrives next week.

Sam Everything today came from reporting and records by the San Francisco Chronicle, History.com, SFGate, Wikipedia, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, KQED, Britannica, and zodiackiller.com.