For two years (and possibly longer according to some researchers), the San Francisco, California, area was stalked by by an enigmatic serial killer who called himself “The Zodiac.” To this day, the extent of his murderous rampage remains the source of great speculation... as do the strange symbols, ciphers and happenstance that surrounded his activities, disguised his identity and baffled the authorities.

Traditionally, the first murders attributed to the Zodiac killer occurred on December 20th, 1968, when two teenagers named David Faraday and Bettilou Jensen were gunned down in the Vallejo Hills overlooking the city. Faraday took a bullet to the head while Jensen took five to the back as she attempted to flee from the killer. It's now believed by some researchers, however, that the killer's first victim was a pretty college student named Cheri Jo Bates who was stabbed to death walking home from the library over two years before the Faraday-Jensen murder.

The Bates' murder established several of the killer's hallmarks, but these traits would only become apparent as the body count mounted. Among these was the Zodiac's preference for killing his young victims at close-range, either with a handgun or a knife. Footprints made by combat-style boots established what appeared to be an unmistakable connection between the killer and some form of military training. Automobiles played a major role in nearly all the deaths. Bates' car had been deliberately disabled by the killer, which forced her to walk home on foot and ultimately to her demise. Curiously, there was no sign that Bates had been sexually assaulted. Unlike other serial killers, the Zodiac was unique in that he rarely molested his victims. Finally, Bates' murder was followed by a taunting letter sent to a local newspaper, in this case the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Received exactly six months after the young woman was slain, the letter was scrawled in a childish script and read simply:

“BATES HAD TO DIE. THERE WILL BE MORE.”

Six more to be certain... perhaps even more than that depending on whose interpretation of the evidence you believe. But the most intriguing aspect of the Zodiac murders were other strange occult-like elements that continue to baffle police and researchers to this day. Most notably were the strange ciphers he often scrawled on his correspondences with the media, some of which are still unsolved.

The first cipher was mailed in three parts to San Francisco area newspapers on July 31, 1969. The ciphers, written in a crude handwriting similar to the Bates' letter, were a combination of Arabic and Greek letters, astrological and numerical symbols. To verify the letters' authenticity, the author provided specific details about the type of ammunition he used to kill his latest victim, 22-year old Darlene Ferrin, and badly injure her boyfriend, 18-year old Mike Mageau. The Ferrin-Mageau attack had occurred almost two months prior to the receipt of the ciphers.

The newspapers sent all three parts of the cipher to the cryptographers at the Mare Island Naval Yard. Although the military personnel were convinced that the code was a simple substitution cipher, they were unable to crack it. The ciphers were made public and the mystery was finally solved by a local high school teacher named Donald Hardin who looked for groups of symbols representing the word “kill.” The final chilling message read:

“I like killing people because it is so much more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous of all to kill. Something gives me the most thrilling experence [sic]. It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is that when I [unintelligible symbols] I will be reborn in paradice [sic] and all the [sic] I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting [unintelligible symbols] slaves for my afterlife...”

A flurry of media attention that followed the publication of the three-part cipher ultimately resulted in over a thousand phone calls being placed to the San Francisco Police Department. The killer seemed to revel in the attention and just a few days later he sent another letter to the San Francisco Examiner in which he named himself for the first time.

“This is the Zodiac speaking...” he wrote. “...are the police haveing [sic] a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up; when they do crack it they will have me.”

Although the three-part cipher was invaluable to assessing the Zodiac's modus operandi, it did little to actually identify the killer himself. The attacks continued the following month when 20-year old Bryan Hartnell and 22-year old Cecelia Shepard were stabbed while having a picnic on the bank of Lake Berryessa, about 13 miles (21 kilometers) outside of Vallejo. Hartnell survived the assault and gave police their first eyewitness account of the suspect.

Hartnell told authorities that the couple had chosen a secluded spot to picnic when Shepard noticed a a stocky man walking casually toward them. The man disappeared for a moment behind a small stand of trees and when he reemerged he was wearing a black hood that draped over his shoulders and down his chest. The hood was decorated with a white cross in a circle – a symbol that would become yet another enigmatic calling card of the Zodiac killer. The hooded suspect held the couple at gun point and explained calmly that he was an escaped convict and just needed their money and car so he could flee to Mexico.

Once Hartnell and Shepard were tied up with lengths of clothesline, the man announced calmly: “I am going to have to stab you people.”

He produced a hunting knife and proceeded to slash both victims. As with his earlier attacks, the focus of his rage appeared to be directed toward the woman, with Shepard taking twice as many blows to the chest and back as Hartnell. As the couple lay bleeding and moaning on the ground, the hooded man walked to their car and drew the cross-within-a-circle symbol on the door, along with the dates of the Faraday-Jensen and Ferrin-Mageau attacks.

The attack at Lake Berryessa established one firm fact about the Zodiac... he was brazen and relished taunting the police and the public with his mystifying codes and symbols.

Another murder, this time of 29-year old taxi drive Paul Stine, occurred two weeks later. Again the attack was bold, occurring on a Saturday evening in a busy residential neighborhood. This time there were multiple eyewitnesses, including a 14-year old girl who watched the entire murder from the window of her home. But due to police mistakes (such as the dispatcher erroneously identifying the suspect as a black male) and dumb luck which helped the killer lead the cops astray, even when they stopped to interrogate him on the street, the Zodiac remained at large.

Although the Stine murder produced better composite drawings of the suspect, there was still no definitive link between the Zodiac and his real identity. In desperation, some of the authorities began to look more closely at the ciphers and strange patterns that seemed to surround the killings. For example, the police noticed a connection between the killer and water. Not only did all of most crime scenes have water names (Lake Herman Road, Blue Rock Springs Park, Lake Berryessa), but the Zodiac frequently made water references in his letters. In one letter, the Zodiac lamented that his body count would have been higher had he not been “swamped by the rain we had a while back.” The police interpreted this as meaning that the killer lived in a low-lying area, one that was possibly prone to flooding.

Additional footprints (most of which indicated that the Zodiac wore combat-style boots) ciphers and maps mailed into the media and the police again alluded to some connection between the murderer and the military. Was he a veteran? Did he study cryptography in the service? Also, the killer frequently mentioned movies and theater in his letters and had a penchant for depictions of other serial killers (including Nebraskan killer Charles Starkweather) and occult activity. In a letter dated January 29, 1974, the killer wrote: “I saw & think 'The Exorcist' was the best saterical comidy [both sic] that I have ever seen.” A letter from later that same year, but which is not positively attributed to the Zodiac, was curiously signed “The Red Phantom.” This appears to be a reference to a cloaked and skeletal character from a silent 1907 film entitled EL SPECTRO ROJO. The arcane nature of this last reference had some authorities reexamining the significance of the Zodiac's cross-within-a-circle monogram. What was first thought to be a stylized gun sight was now suggested to be a symbol used by movie house projectionists. Was this the Zodiac's profession... or was he just a movie buff who found his inspiration in the murderous rampages of fictional characters?

After the Stine murder, the Zodiac's luck appeared to thin. Other potential victims escaped his wrath, although their testimony to the police still did nothing to nab the killer once and for all. Although the killer's alleged correspondences with the media and police continued into the middle part of the decade, the last attack that seems to fit the Zodiac's style occurred in March 1970, almost six months after the Stine slaying. The victims, a woman and her infant daughter, escaped abduction by the killer when they bailed out of his car and hid in a drainage ditch. The woman later identified the Zodiac as her captor when she saw his composite drawing tacked to a police station wall.

Over the years, about half a dozen men have been connected to the Zodiac killings, including infamous “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski. The primary suspect, however, still remains an elementary school teacher named Arthur Leigh Allen. Despite voluminous circumstantial evidence that connected Allen to all the Zodiac victims, the police were never able to establish a solid enough link to make an arrest. [You can read more about Arthur Leigh Allen on the Zodiackiller.com website.] Even DNA testing conducted in the early 1990s proved useless. If Allen was the killer, he cheated the authorities one last time when he died of natural causes on August 26, 1992. The San Francisco Police Department now considers the Zodiac case closed and only private researchers keep the spirit of the killer from resting.

[This information was originally transmitted as an enewsletter on January 20, 2007.]