The Zodiac Killer

On the evening of December 20, 1968, two teenagers on their first date drove out to a lonely spot on Lake Herman Road, just outside the city of Vallejo, California, about thirty miles northeast of San Francisco. It was a known lovers’ lane, a gravel turnout beside a pumping station, in the dark hills above the bay.

David Faraday was seventeen, an Eagle Scout and a good student. Betty Lou Jensen was sixteen. They had planned to go to a Christmas concert at Betty Lou’s high school, then stopped by a friend’s house, then went for a drive.

At about 11 p.m., someone pulled up beside David’s car and opened fire. Both teenagers were killed.

It was the first confirmed attack by the man who would come to be known as the Zodiac. He would kill at least five people, wound two others, and terrorize the San Francisco Bay Area for years, taunting the police and the public with letters, cryptograms and threats. He was never caught.

Blue Rock Springs

Just before midnight on July 4, 1969, a twenty-two-year-old waitress named Darlene Ferrin and a nineteen-year-old friend, Michael Mageau, were sitting in Darlene’s car in a parking lot at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, about four miles from Lake Herman Road.

A car pulled up behind them. A man got out, walked up to the car with a bright flashlight, and began shooting. Darlene was killed. Michael Mageau was shot several times but survived.

About forty minutes later, a man called the Vallejo police department from a pay phone. In a calm voice, he reported the shooting, gave the location, and said he had also killed “those kids last year.” Then he said, “Goodbye,” and hung up.

The Letters

On August 1, 1969, three Bay Area newspapers — the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times-Herald — each received a letter from the killer. Each letter included details about the two attacks that only the killer could have known. And each included one-third of a cryptogram — a coded message made of strange symbols. The writer demanded that the newspapers print the cryptogram on their front pages, or he would go on a killing spree.

The newspapers published it. Within about a week, a schoolteacher and his wife in Salinas, Donald and Bettye Harden, cracked the code. The message was a chilling boast about killing people because it was more fun than hunting animals, and said that the victims would become the killer’s slaves in the afterlife. It did not reveal his name.

In another letter that month, the killer gave himself a name. It began: “This is the Zodiac speaking.”

Lake Berryessa

On September 27, 1969, two college students, Bryan Hartnell, twenty, and Cecelia Shepard, twenty-two, were picnicking on the shore of Lake Berryessa, in Napa County, northeast of San Francisco.

A man approached them wearing a black executioner-style hood with a white circle-and-cross symbol on the chest — the Zodiac’s signature mark. He carried a gun. He told them he was an escaped convict who needed their car and money. He had them tie each other up. Then he attacked them with a knife.

Cecelia Shepard died two days later. Bryan Hartnell survived.

Before leaving, the attacker wrote on the door of Hartnell’s car the dates of the earlier attacks and the date of this one, beneath the circle-and-cross symbol. Then he called the Napa County sheriff’s office to report the crime.

Presidio Heights

On October 11, 1969, in San Francisco, a cab driver named Paul Stine picked up a passenger in Union Square. The passenger asked to be taken to the wealthy Presidio Heights neighborhood. At the corner of Washington and Cherry streets, the passenger shot Paul Stine in the head, killing him. He then took Stine’s wallet and car keys, and tore off a piece of his bloody shirt.

Teenagers in a house across the street saw part of the crime and called the police. Two officers responding to the call passed a man walking along the street a block away, but they had been told to look for a Black suspect, and the man was white. They didn’t stop him. Investigators later came to believe that man was the Zodiac.

A few days later, the Chronicle received a letter with a piece of Paul Stine’s bloody shirt enclosed, proving that the writer was the killer. In the letter, he threatened to shoot out the tires of a school bus and kill the children as they came out.

The Taunts

The Zodiac continued to send letters for years — to newspapers, to a lawyer, to the police. He claimed responsibility for many more killings than the five that police could confirm, at one point claiming thirty-seven victims. He sent greeting cards, more cryptograms, and drawings. He made threats. Some letters seemed designed simply to frighten the public and mock the police.

His last confirmed letter was sent in 1974. Then he fell silent.

The Suspects

Investigators looked at thousands of possible suspects.

The most famous was a man named Arthur Leigh Allen, a former schoolteacher from Vallejo, who was investigated several times in the 1970s and 1990s. Some circumstantial evidence pointed toward him, and some investigators were convinced of his guilt. But his handwriting didn’t match the Zodiac letters, and his fingerprints and DNA did not match the evidence. He died in 1992, never charged.

Many other suspects have been proposed over the years, by investigators, writers and amateur sleuths, but none has ever been proven.

The Cipher

In 1969, the Zodiac sent a second, longer cryptogram, containing 340 characters. For fifty-one years, no one could solve it.

In December 2020, a team of three amateur codebreakers — an American software developer, an Australian mathematician and a Belgian computer programmer — announced that they had finally cracked it. The FBI confirmed their solution. The message was another taunt, saying that the writer hoped the public was having fun trying to catch him, and that he was not afraid of the gas chamber. Like the first, it did not reveal his name.