The Zodiac

In the 1960's there a serial killer terrorized the San Francisco area. He killed at least seven people and threatened to kill many more. The actual number of his victims is still a mystery. He left cryptic messages for the police and communicated with the major papers. He called police to report his own crimes. He did just about everything possible to get caught leaving a trail of clues that all who worked on his case thought surely would trip him up. He was never identified. This is his story.

It all started on December 20th, 1968 in Solano California. At a little after 11:00 PM a single cars sits in a lover's lane on the outskirts of Vallejo California. Inside are 17 year old David Faraday and 16 year old Betty Lou Jensen. A lone figure approaches the car from the rear. In his hand, a 22 caliber pistol. David Faraday is shot once behind the left ear. Betty Lou runs blind into the night. But she gets only a few feet before she is cut down with five shots. The teenager lies dead where she falls. Faraday is still alive but bleeding badly when a call for help comes across the Vallejo police net.

News photographer Tom Balmer catches it on his police scanner and rolls to the scene. By the time he gets there, it was very, very dark and there was a body on the ground covered by a blanket. The coroner's people arrive, walk over to the body, and remove the blanket. Tom starts taking pictures from a discrete distance. Solano County Sheriff's Detective Russ Butterbock arrives on scene shortly afterwards. He gets into the ambulance right away because the boy was alive and he wanted to see if he could get any information from him. He gets nothing from the boy who is rushed to the hospital and is dead on arrival.

The next morning the town Of Vallejo awakens to pictures of Betty Lou Jensen, her feet sticking out from under a coroner's blanket. In 1968, random murder is not what the town of Vallejo is used to and the first seeds of fear are sown. There was great fear that it might happen again. And sure enough, it did.

On July 4th 1969 in Vallejo California, Vallejo police Detective Ed Rusk is on patrol near Blue Rock Springs around midnight, when he gets a call about shots fired. Rusk races to the lover's lane that lies just minutes from Lake Herman Road. As he approaches he sees a body on the ground. The boy has been shot in the face/neck area and there is blood all over him and the ground and he is moaning. Inside the car, Rusk finds a young woman slumped over the steering wheel near death from multiple times in the back. Rusk tries to talk to her but she is too far gone.

The crime is less than an hour old when the police take a call from a man claiming to be the shooter. He says "There have been to people killed in the park and I also shot those two kids last year". He tauntingly then says "Goodbye". The call is traced to a payphone just blocks from the police department but by the time the police get there the caller is gone, the receiver is hanging off the hook and surprisingly there no fingerprints to be had from the phone itself. Obviously, they are dealing with a diabolical killer who knows how to cover his tracks.

At the scene the victims are Identified as 22 year old Darlene Faron and 19 year old Mike Majoe, two Vallejo kids who were out for a little talk and perhaps some necking. Darlene dies in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Majoe however survives and tells Ed Rusk this story: He claims Darlene picked him up at his house around 11:30. She needed to talk so they went out to the springs. He said they had just been there a very few minutes when he turned the headlights off. She had the radio playing when a car pulled up behind them. A man then got out of the car and approached their car with a flashlight in his hand and says something to the effect that he was a cop. The flashlight floods into the car over the couple and then he hears the muffled reports of shots being fired. He said the person just kept shooting and he is trying to get away by climbing over the seat to the back of the car. He then heard more shot and saw that Darlene was being shot. After shooting Darlene, the shooter walked away from the car and then returned. He reached into the back and shot Majoe two more times, and then shot Darlene two more times.

Majoe gives police a description of the attacker. He is a white man, young, stocky about 5"8' with brown curly hair. Beyond the sketch and the phone call however there is precious little in the way of evidence for police to work with. At the first scene, the killer left 22 caliber shell casings. At the second, 9 mm slugs. In time, both shootings go cold barely making a ripple outside Solano County. That, however would quickly change.

On August 1st 1969 in San Francisco California in the editorial room of the San Francisco Chronicle a curious state of affairs is developing. The board of Editors is on the receiving end of a letter from a man claiming to be the Vallejo killer offering intimate details of the crime as proof. The envelope is double posted and marked "please rush to editor". Inside was a piece of paper with a crossed circle that would later be known as the Zodiac symbol.

In 1969, Robert Graysmith is editorial cartoonist for the paper. Along with the symbol, the killer send all kinds of threats and claims that if they don't print this in the paper he is going to go on a killing rampage. It was later learned that these same claims were sent to other papers throughout the city. There are codes in the letters made up of eight symbols down and seventeen across. The killer claims that if deciphered, the code will reveal his identity.

At first no one could break the ciphers, including the FBI, but finally a high school teacher in California sat down with his wife over the weekend and broke the code. Working at their kitchen table Donald and Betty Harden unlock the secrets of the cyphers. They did it deciding that this guy was so egotistical that the first letter is going to be "I". So he plugged in the "I" all the way through. Next he realizes that the word "kill" is going to be in the code so he looks for double symbols coming after the letter "I". So he then plugs in "L" throughout the code. From there and in short order the code comes apart. The code reveals not the killer's name but his motive for killing.

Basically the motive for the killings was the fact that the Zodiac just liked it because it was the most dangerous game in the world. The newspaper articles are the first move in the most dangerous game of serial murder played by the man who would soon be known to the world as the Zodiac.

On September 27, 1969 in Napa California a picnic lunch is laid out in the twilight hours on shore at Lake Marissa. Nearby, the picnickers struggle to stay alive. Each has been bound hand and foot and stabbed repeatedly. Out on the Lake a fisherman hears the couples cries and summons police. Sargent Ken Narlow from the Napa Valley police department responds. The victims are taken to the hospital and Ken rushes there as well to get their statements. Meanwhile a little over an hour after the attack Napa Valley police officer Dave Slaight takes an astonishing phone call.

After answering the call, the caller says he wants to report a double murder and claims he is the one who did it. So the police send officers around town to see if they could find someone using a public payphone. A local reporter for the media finds a payphone with the phone off the hook right in downtown Napa. The phone booth is less than five blocks from Napa police station. Forensics dusts for prints and comes away with a palm print.

Back at the hospital the victims are identified as 22 year old Cecilia Sheppard, never regains consciousness and dies from 10 stab wounds to the back and chest, and her companion 22 year old Brian Hartnell survives with an amazing story. He said Cecilia was kind of startled at a man standing over there and he's staring at us. Brian calms her down but in a little while she hears another noise and the man then comes up from behind a tree and he's wearing a mask.

The man who approaches them is about 5' 10" and is wearing gloves and carrying a glove in one hand and a long bayonet style knife in the other. Over his head the man has a long exectioner's style hood. On his chest is a crossed circle, the sign of the Zodiac. The masked man uses precut lengths of rope to bind his victims then he pulls out the knife. Then he supposedly said well you know I am going to have to kill you at which time Brian responds by saying kill me first because I couldn't stand to see Celia hurt.

After talking with Brian Sgt. Narlow realizes he is not dealing with your run of the mill murderer. Clues left at the crime scene underscore this point. Scrawled on the side of Brian Harnells Volkswagen is a message for police from a man who now calls himself the Zodiac. The message has the sign of the Zodiac and the dates of the first two crimes in Vallejo and the last attack with the words "by knife" under the date. Naturally this draws immediate attention from the police. This message leaves no doubt that he is responsible for all three attacks and wants everyone to know it.

His next attack ups the anti even further. The known as the Zodiac turns up in the big city. On October 11th, 1969 in San Francisco California at a little before 10:00 PM cabby Paul Stein picks up a fare in front of the Saint Francis Hotel and takes a 10 minute drive to the big money neighborhoods of Presidio Heights. The fare directs Stien to stop at the corner of Washington and Cherry streets. He then puts a 9 mm pistol to the cabby's head and pulls the trigger. Across the street and up a flight of stairs, a teenage girl happens to look out the window.

She sees a man get out of the cab and begin to wipe down the outside of the vehicle. After a bit he walks down cherry Street towards 1800 acres of park known as the Presidio. The teen's brother picks up the phone and calls police. Detective Armond Palisetti gets the call. He approaches the cab and sees that Paul Stein is dead with blood everywhere. Palisetti takes down a description of the shooter, a white male, with redish hair and a crew cut, about 5'10".

In the moments after the attack, one patrol comes across such a man fitting the suspects general description walking away from the shooting. The patrolman asks the man if he had seen anything suspicious walking in the area. The man replies that he just saw a man run into the Presidio. The patrol lets the man go. It will be debated for years whether the patrolman was actually talking to the Zodiac but Detective Palisetti doesn't think so because the man reportedly didn't have any blood on him. Nevertheless it will be debated for years.

Back at the crime scene Paul Stien is pronounced dead. In his cab is a 9mm shell casing from the slug that took his life. And the best piece of evidence to date; fingerprints left in blood most certainly left by the Zodiac. Detectives believe Paul Stein's killer has made his mistake and his capture is just a matter of time. Three days later another letter arrives at the Chronicle and San Francisco Detectives realize that Paul Steins killer is not just another pretty face.

The letter is from the Zodiac and is written in blue felt tip pen. It is double stamped and the return address is replaced with the now all too familiar sign of the Zodiac. The first line reads "This is the Zodiac speaking". He goes on to describe the murder scene of Paul Stein. More chilling then the letters detail is what accompanies it... Pieces of Paul Stein's bloody shirt. This makes it crystal clear that the person writing the letter is the murderer.

In the letter Zodiac taunts police. He writes "San Francisco could have caught me last night if they had searched to park properly instead of holding road races with the motorcycles seeing who could make the most noise". Then Zodiac shares his plans for the future increasing the quotient of terror exponentially. He says he is going to shoot school children. "I'm going to shoot them as they come bounding off the bus" and "I think I will wipe out a whole busload some morning. It would be easy. Just shoot out the front tire and pick them off as the get off the bus".

Later on he sends the police diagrams of bombs. When the police check out their feasibility with the FBI they are found to be sound working plans for a working homemade bomb. With the Stien murder and all the letters Zodiac is finally where he wants to be. Holding a major American city under his thumb. Mel Nicholai is a special agent with the California Department of Justice. He says that the city had to take the threats of the Zodiac seriously and as such they set up police cruisers to follow school buses and small fixed wing aircraft following them.

It is absolutely incredible the amount of time and effort San Francisco put into trying to protect it's citizens against one man's rampage. With confirmed Zodiac attacks in Vallejo, Napa, and now San Francisco the chase is on. An army of Detectives swarm around San Francisco trying to turn up leads wherever they can in hopes of maybe making themselves a career. Now all of these individual police stations, including Riverside and Oakland which eventually get into the act, are competing against one another rather than working as a cohesive unit and sharing information.

In hopes of heading off such problems, Mel Nicholai holds a meeting to form the official Zodiac task force. They set up a war room where hopefully Detectives will share information and not step on each other's toes in the process. The task force focuses on it's best leads; The bloody fingerprint found on Paul Steins cab and the letters most likely written by the killer's own hand. A hand writing analysis reveals that the letter formation is rather childish and unskilled.

Detectives shuffle through hundreds of fingerprint cards and field thousands of calls from an anxious public. While the task force struggles with the day to day tasks of 3 X 5 cards of possible suspects, ruling each out through either handwriting analysis or fingerprints, Zodiac writes even more letter to newspapers reveling in his new found status as a celebrity. In one greeting card sent to the Chronicle, Zodiac demands that the people of San Francisco start wearing Zodiac buttons. He writes "Everyone else has these buttons like the peace symbol. Well it would cheer me up considerably if I saw a lot of people wearing my button.

In a second letter the Zodiac writes " The bomb is set up like this" and then includes a schematic of a working homemade bomb. He ends with "I hope you have fun trying to figure out who all I have killed". He called this game a game of outdoor chess with the police. Most feel that it was his increasing notoriety is what is driving his rampage. Zodiac even corresponds with San Francisco's rich and famous. Prominent among them is famed San Francisco Attorney Melvin Belli who receives a letter with a scrape of Stein's shirt in it.

Eventually, however, the Zodiac decides to stop writing letters and begin killing again. On the 22nd of March 1970 Kathleen Johns and her daughter travel the highway 65 miles southeast of San Francisco. A car pulls along side and motions to Johns who pulls over. The driver tells Johns there is something wrong with her tire and he is willing to fix it. She accepts the stranger's kindness and the man begins changing her tire. After finishing she gets back into her car and drives a couple of feet and the tire comes off.

So the man offers to drive her somewhere where she can get help. As soon as he gets going he pulls off the highway and for the next hour threatens to kill her and her child. The man is a stocky white man who talks in a monotone telling Johns her is going to kill her and then throw the baby out after her. Finally the driver comes to a freeway and begins to turn the wrong way onto the freeway. He slows just enough for her to grab her baby and leap out of the car. She runs into a field and throws herself face down over her baby. He's coming through the field with his lights on. Just then a truck comes around the bend and illuminates the scene so he takes off.

A driver passing by takes Johns to the local police station where she identifies the sketch of the Zodiac as her attacker. In July the Chronicle receives another letter verified by hand writing experts as coming from the Zodiac. In the letter the author writes about giving a woman and her baby an interesting ride for a couple of hours on evening a few months back. John's encounter is the last verified sighting of the Zodiac. In subsequent letters he hints that he might go silent and continue to kill without any letters.

Zodiac's last known letter is received in January 1974. In it he the killer praises a newly released film called the Exorcist. He also gives the police a final body count.. 37 people killed to date. That number is debated to this day as no one really knows. After this final letter he makes good on his promise and disappears. Detectives already have a line on a man they believe to be a good suspect. A man who lives in a trailer and has a collection of small dead animals.

On the same day the first attack takes place in 1969 a 36 year old man named Arthur Lee Alan tells family members he is going scuba diving at the same lake. When he returns he is covered in blood with a bloody knife in the front seat of his car. A tip is phoned into police to take a look at Arthur Lee Alan. George Bawart is a detective with the Vallejo PD. He says that a Detective interviewed him and says he told everyone he was going scuba diving but instead he went to the ocean seaside and I met up with some folks down there and I cut up their chicken for them and we had a barbeque. He claims the blood on him is chicken blood. Alan's story about chicken blood buys him some time.

Two years later however Alan's name resurfaces. A friend named Don Chaney claims Alan called himself the Zodiac before the term became so notorious. With Chaney's information in hand Detective's question Alan for a second time. The first word's out of Alan's mouth are "The Dangerous Game". This is a movie about a guy named Zodiac who dresses similarly to the Zodiac. The phrase "most Dangerous Game" appears in code in the original cipher. Now Alan really has the police's attention and the parallels between Alan and the Zodiac do not stop there. He just happens to be wearing a Zodiac watch
complete with the circle and cross in it.

In the role of Serial killer, Arthur Lee Alan is right out of central casting. A white male, early 30's, a love for guns, and a loner with an IQ near genius level. Based on Chaney's information Detectives execute a search warrant on Alan's trailer home. Inside they find further evidence of a disturbed mind. Small animals dissected and stored in a freezer. Knives covered in blood and sexual devices. All of it ties in with the larger profile developed. None of it however provides a specific link between any of the Zodiac killings and Alan.

Detectives ask Alan for a set of fingerprints hoping they might find a match to the set pulled off Paul Stein's taxi cab. However the prints don't match. Next they want to do a handwriting analysis. So they have prepared sheets and they give him the right kind of felt tip pen to use. They have him print with both his left and right hand. Again, no match. By the spring of 1973, forensics seems to clear Alan as a suspect. Detective Bawart, however is not convinced.

In 1974, Arthur is convicted on a charge of child molestation. He spends almost three years in custody and during that time there are no known Zodiac killings nor letters. Another bizarre coincidence. Alan is released in August of 1977. About six months later another letter appears from the Zodiac saying "I am back". Yet another strange coincidence. Coupled with his own statements and lifestyle he his now the front runner of Zodiac suspects. With no print match or other forensic evidence linking him to any of the Zodiac killings, the investigation loses steam. The Zodiac killings stop, as far as the police know, and the case goes cold.

Thirteen years later, Ralph Spinelle sits in a San Jose Jail cell and sweats. A two time loser he is looking at 30 years for a string of armed robberies. Anxious to make a deal he calls in a cop and whispers the magic word "Zodiac". Spinelle's story begins in 1969. He owned a strip club in Northern California. Arthur Alan wanted a job as Spinelle's muscle. Spinelle was not interested. Alan supposedly said I will prove my worth to you as I am going to do something pretty big tomorrow. The next day Paul Stein was killed in San Francisco.

Spinelle's story lights a fire under Detective Bawart. He decides to take a final shot at the case. He tracks down the only man to have seen the Zodiac unmasked, Mike Majoe, the man Zodiac shot four times in 1969 but failed to kill. He presents Majoe with a photo lineup. Among them is a photograph of Arthur Lee Alan. He immediately picks Alan out and said that was the man who shot him. Spinelle's story and Majoe's ID provide probable cause for yet another search of Alan's trailer. He finds formulas for bombs and some already built. He also finds tons of tapes regarding the Zodiac. The items are interesting but not enough to warrant an arrest.

He interviews Alan and finds him anything but informative. Word of the search warrant leaks and locale media swarm Alan's home. Reporter Rita Williams scores an exclusive interview with Alan. The interview takes place in Alan's basement and lasts more than an hour. The suspect talks a lot but says very little other than to deny that he is the Zodiac. He did say that there is a Zodiac killer out there and he is having a good laugh right now. He also said we may never know who the Zodiac is unless he confesses. Arthur Alan's guilt or innocence hangs in the balance as Detectives return to the most intriguing clues in the case; The letters he sent to the public. For nearly forty years he has provided insight into the mind of a serial killer. Now with the advent of DNA, cold case Detectives hope to answer the Alan question once and for all.

In August 1992 Detective Bawart gets a phone call from another Detective who asks him if he is still looking at Arthur Lee Alan as a suspect in the Zodiac case. When Detective Bawart says yes the Detective tell him he has bad news that he is in Alan's home and he is dead on the floor. Before his body is committed to the ground Detective Bawart orders an autopsy. Samples of Alan's brain are saved for future testing in case a Detective ever run across a sample of the Zodiac's DNA.

Eight years later in San Francisco, Kelly Carroll is a homicide Detective with the San Francisco police Department. Like everyone else in the department he is familiar with the Legend of the Zodiac. The case is reopened in 2000 and assigned to an active homicide team. Carroll pulls the case files and quickly realizes his best chance of success lies with forensics. He reasons that while fingerprints were know about in the late 60's and early 70's DNA was not and he doubts that the Zodiac would not have taken any precautions against disguising it.

But before any analysis can take place a threshold must be done that is which of the 20 letters the Zodiac sent can be confirmed authenticated. Susan Morton is a forensics document examiner with the San Francisco PD. After careful consideration she determines that the letter after the murder of Paul Stein containing the piece his shirt had to be from the Zodiac. She is able to confirm that at least five of the Zodiac letters are authentic. Now the scientific testing can begin.

When the Zodiac mailed the letter he presumably licked the stamp and therefore left his DNA behind. In October of 2002 San Francisco Police lab provides the answer. A partial genetic profile is retrieved from the glue of the stamp from one of the authenticated Zodiac letters. Similar to a partial fingerprint, a partial profile is not enough to identify a particular person but it is enough to eliminate suspects. Kelly Carroll begins with Aurthur Lee Alan and his frozen sample of brain tissue. The results: No match.

Detective Carroll is not yet done with Arthur Lee Alan. In the world of fingerprints the latest technology is called "the writer's palm". This is something else that the writer would probably not be aware of and therefore not try to disguise. The Zodiac's letters are tested for palm prints and one is discovered in his last authenticated letter, the so called "Exorcist" letter mailed in 1974. The print was compared to the palm print of Arthur Lee Alan and that too fails to provide a match. So I guess Arthur was right when he said the Zodiac was laughing when the police were spending all their time on him.

While all the forensics seem to clear Aurthur Lee Alan as a suspect in the Zodiac case which frustrates Detectives to no end but lends yet another layer of intrigue to a case and a killer that has the world fascinated. There are websites dedicated to the case and people are coming out of the woodwork claiming to know who the Zodiac was. Recently a guy from California said he found a hood, complete with the Zodiac sign in hidden in his attic and belonging to his stepfather. The FBI agreed to do forensics on it but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Much like the other high profile cases that have gone unsolved such as The Black Dahlia, Jimmy Hoffa, and Jon Benet Ramsey the Zodiac case will go down in history as one of the great mysteries in life. And it really should be no surprise. Approximately 30% of homicides go unsolved every year although unsolved serial murder cases are more rare there are at least 35 serial murders out in the US on any given day. There are currently three working the east coast right now that have gone unsolved for the past 20 years. That's not the way the Detectives want it but those are the facts of life..

The Zodiac was obviously a psychopath. He killed randomly without regard to the age or gender of his victims. There seemed to be no pattern, or at least not much of one. It was the world series of homicide cases.. and the police lost.. badly.