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Post by Graveyardbride on Dec 20, 2013 19:14:04 GMT -5
December 20, 1968: Death on a Lonely RoadOn the night of Friday, December 20, 1968, 17-year-old David Faraday, Eagle Scout and member of the high school wrestling team, arrived at the home of his new girlfriend, Betty Lou Jensen, age 16, in the small northern California city of Benicia. The teenagers had met two weeks earlier while attending a church function and it was love at first sight. As the youngsters departed for a high school Christmas concert in Vallejo, on what was to be their first official date, David promised Mr. and Mrs. Jensen he would return with their daughter by no later than 11 p.m. The proud parents watched as Betty Lou and her new suitor climbed into the Rambler station wagon that belonged to David’s mother and drove away.
Eleven o’clock came and went and Betty Lou’s parents were peeved their daughter’s new boyfriend had not kept his word and wondered what sort of story the teens would concoct.
In the meantime, Mrs. Manuel Borges, traveling along a darkened stretch of Lake Herman Road (pictured above), saw what appeared to be two bodies lying on the ground in a well-known “lover’s lane” spot and stopped to investigate. Two teenagers, a boy and girl, had been shot.
When sheriff’s deputies arrived, they discovered Betty Lou’s body several feet from the car and an autopsy would later reveal she had been shot five times in the back, indicating she was attempting to get away. David was lying next to the car. Though he had been shot in the head, he was still breathing, but died en route to the hospital. Footprints indicated Faraday had gotten out of the station wagon and walked around to the passenger side and four cartridge casings from a small caliber weapon were found near the vehicle. A deep heel-print was also discovered in the brush, which would have been the only place a sniper could have hidden in the rolling farmland country.
Witnesses had observed the teens huddled close together in the front seat of the Rambler around 10:15, but that was what teens did when they parked in out-of-the-way places. Bill Crow and his girlfriend were parked in the same area around 45 minutes earlier, but when a white Chevrolet drove past, then stopped and backed up, Crow and his companion became frightened and sped away in the opposite direction. The Chevy turned around and followed them, but was unable to keep up after Crow made a sharp right turn at an intersection. Two hunters also reported seeing a white Chevrolet parked at a gravel turnaround on Lake Herman Road, but did not see a driver inside the vehicle.
The killing of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen is considered by most to be the first of what would come to be known as “The Zodiac” murders. But there are others who believe Zodiac’s first victim was Cheri Jo Bates, a college student in Riverside, California, who was killed outside her school’s library on the night before Halloween in 1966. There were reports of a white male driving an old car in the location at the time of Ms. Bates’s murder and police discovered a man’s watch at the scene. A month after the attack, a letter allegedly written by the killer was received by a local newspaper and months after that, letters were sent to the news media, the police and the victim’s father, all with the same chilling message: “Bates had to die. There will be more.”
On Friday, July 4, 1969, Mike Megeau and Darlene Ferrin, a young Vallejo couple, were attacked and Ferrin died at the scene. Three area newspapers received letters allegedly written by the killer containing details of the crime. He also wrote a cipher (coded message), sending one part to each of the papers. In his letter, he said if the papers did not print the cipher in its entirety, he would kill again. The letters also featured a strange symbol – a circle with two intersecting lines running through it – which became the Zodiac’s calling card. Just six days after the cipher was published, it was cracked by a high school teacher and his wife in Salinas, but the code did not contain the killer’s identity as the writer had claimed. Nevertheless, it did provide some disturbing insights into his personality. “I like killing people because it is so much fun,” the message read in part and also indicated the killer believed those he killed would be his slaves in the afterlife.
On the night of Saturday, September 27, 1969, the Zodiac Killer struck again, choosing yet another young couple in a remote area. But this time, instead of shooting his victims, he repeatedly stabbed Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard. Hartnell survived the attack, but Shepard died two days later. The assailant left a message on the car door, which included the dates of two earlier assaults.
Less than a month later, on Saturday, October 11, 1969, taxi driver Paul Stine, age 29, was shot in the head at point-blank range in the Presidio Heights area of San Francisco. The man’s wallet and keys were taken and a large portion of his shirt was carefully torn off. The weapon was determined to be a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, not the same as that used in the July 4 shootings. Following the assault, three witnesses observed a man casually walking north on Cherry Street, a man described as a stocky white male, age 25 to 30, 5'8" to 5'9", with reddish-brown hair worn in a crew cut and wearing heavy-rimmed glasses and dark clothing. From these descriptions, a sketch of the killer was created and widely-distributed.
Then the killings stopped, or at least they stopped in California.
Because the Zodiac killer has never been definitively identified, he has been the subject of much discussion and speculation. Numerous books have been written on the Zodiac Killer with authors providing a bevy of possible suspects. Proposed suspects include Bruce Davis, a follower of Charles Manson, and Michael O’Hare, a Harvard-educated professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Arthur Leigh Allen was a popular candidate after being identified by Hartnell and Mageau as their attacker, but later DNA testing failed to link him to the crimes.
In 2007, a man named Dennis Kaufman claimed his stepfather, Jack Tarrance, was the Zodiac. Kaufman turned several items over to the FBI, including a hood similar to the one worn by the Zodiac, but DNA analysis conducted by the FBI was inconclusive.
In 2009, Deborah Perez claimed her father, Guy Ward Hendrickson, was the Zodiac. However, she also allegedly claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of John F. Kennedy, so her claims were dismissed as unlikely. Also in 2009, an episode of the History Channel’s MysteryQuest suggested newspaper editor Richard Gaikowski could be the Zodiac. During the time of the murders, Gaikowski worked for Good Times, a San Francisco counterculture newspaper and he resembled the composite sketch. Additionally, a Vallejo police dispatcher, who was contacted by the Zodiac shortly after one of the attacks, identified a recording of Gaikowski’s voice as being the same as the Zodiac’s. Although circumstantial evidence is strong, it cannot definitively connect Gaikowski to the murders.
On February 19, 2011, America’s Most Wanted featured the Zodiac Killer and a picture has recently surfaced of known Zodiac victim Darlene Ferrin and a man who closely resembles the composite sketch. Police believe the photo was taken in San Francisco in the summer of 1966 or 1967, but it is suspected the man in the photo is James Phillips, Ms. Ferrin’s ex-husband.
Former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty in his 2012 book, The Zodiac Killer Cover-up: The Silenced Badge, argues the Zodiac killer is a 91-year-old Solano County man whom he calls “George Russell Tucker.” Using a group of retired law enforcement officers called the Mandamus Seven, Lafferty discovered both Tucker and a coverup explaining the reason he was not pursued. Lafferty claims he met the man at a rest stop in Vallejo in 1970 when the suspect parked close to Lafferty’s patrol car. “I looked into a quivering, snarling face like I was looking into the face of death,” Lafferty recalled during an interview. “It scared the hell out of me.” Lafferty and his collaborators insist the man they called George Russell Tucker was known to be a regular at the Vallejo restaurant where one of the victims, Darlene Ferrin, worked; that a car resembling Tucker’s was seen around Ferrin’s house in the weeks before the killing, and strange graffiti markings were discovered around Tucker’s home in Cordelia, California. Lafferty also says Tucker’s real name was spelled out in one of the cryptograms the Zodiac Killer sent to the media. He maintains powerful individuals in Solano County thwarted the case, among them a judge who was having an affair with the suspect’s wife – an affair that may have prompted the murder spree in the first place. “As God is my witness, my partners and I have always tried to share our material and our case with the proper authorities, but in the past 40 years, the latter have ignored and stymied and stonewalled us again and again,” Lafferty writes. The man identified as “Tucker” died in February 2012 and is not considered a suspect by law enforcement agencies.
In his 2013 book, Strange Mysteries, British author Tom Slemen explores the possibility that Zodiac lived near the scene of his last known crime – the murder of cab-driver Paul Stine in the Presidio Heights section of San Francisco – and hints at a British connection.
Author: Graveyardbride.
Sources: Zodiac by Robert Graysmith; Time; The San Francisco Chronicle; CrimeStories; and The Zodiac Killer Cover-up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon Lafferty.
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Post by jason on Dec 23, 2013 17:16:37 GMT -5
In either the first group, or second group, we had a long discussion about The Zodiac and there was a theory that he left California and started killing somewhere in the Midwest. I tried to find that conversation, but because Yahoo has screwed up everything, if it was in the second group, I couldn't find it. Alex-the-Ass and his cohorts deleted the first group, so if it was in that one, it's gone, but I thought it was in the second group. Does anyone remember that conversation?
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Post by Sam on Dec 24, 2013 4:47:00 GMT -5
I remember it and I'm almost certain that it was in the 2nd group, but I couldn't find it either. You're right, you can't find anything in Yahoo groups now that they've changed everything.
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Post by natalie on Dec 27, 2013 21:24:17 GMT -5
It must have come about after I joined, as I do not recall any group discussions about Zodiac on the old Yahoo group. If anyone can dig it up and provide a link or paste the information in here, it'd be great. I don't know much about Zodiac and would be interested in reading more, seeing others' theories as to who he was, and any other discussions that may have taken place.
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Post by steve on Dec 28, 2013 16:41:27 GMT -5
I joined the group called Mysteries Unsolved Resurrected, which I think was the second group, and I would have remembered a discussion about the Zodiac. I've always been interested in the Zodiac because when I was a kid, we had some neighbors who were related to one of his victims and lived in California when he was killing people.
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Post by steve on Nov 30, 2018 15:46:08 GMT -5
What happened to the DNA testing of The Zodiac Killer? I think it was last spring that there was something in the news saying that the testing would be finished in a few weeks.
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Post by pat on Nov 30, 2018 19:14:56 GMT -5
What happened to the DNA testing of The Zodiac Killer? I think it was last spring that there was something in the news saying that the testing would be finished in a few weeks. |
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Post by Kate on Dec 1, 2018 18:32:39 GMT -5
It kind of makes you wonder if maybe the Zodiac is (or was) someone no one suspected and those in charge aren't releasing it to protect someone, or maybe his family. |
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Post by Graveyardbride on Dec 15, 2018 10:39:51 GMT -5
50 Years Since First Zodiac KillingsNext Thursday, December 20, it will be 50 years since a killer with a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol sneaked up on two high school students parked on a windswept lover’s lane in Benicia, California. Shot down as they scrambled in terror to get away, the young couple died in a spray of gunfire, leaving an unusually messy crime scene. The killing of David Faraday, 17, and his 16-year-old date, Betty Lou Jensen, marked the beginning of what became the twisted legend of the Zodiac Killer. By the time he was done, five additional Bay Area victims would be shot or stabbed – three of them died and two others were scarred for life. Although the carnage spanned less than a year, The Zodiac earned his place in serial killer history, though he was never caught.
Considering the homicidal tumult of the 1960s and 70s, the number of his victims was actually somewhat low. Charles Manson was instrumental in the murders of eight individuals. Ted Bundy killed 30-something women and girls; the Zebra Killers, a group of black Muslims, murdered at least 15 innocent white people. Unhinged San Francisco preacher Jim Jones ordered the deaths of in excess of 900 people in Jonestown, Guyana.
Nevertheless, there was something different about The Zodiac: He sent a flurry of taunting letters and cryptograms to The Chronicle and others. “This is the Zodiac speaking” was his opening and the missives were often signed with a rifle-sight crosshairs symbol. He claimed to love killing because “man is the most dangerous game” and once threatened to massacre a dozen people if The Chronicle didn’t print his message. The paper published the letter. The Zodiac also threatened to assault a school bus by shooting out the front tire so he could “pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”
Fifty years later, with the case still unsolved, the Zodiac Killer’s death crusade is perhaps the most infamous murder mystery in America. “There have been a lot of terrible crimes in the city, but nothing ever quite like the Zodiac case,” said San Francisco Police Homicide Inspector Gianrico Pierucci, who investigated the case for several years before retiring last year. “It was crazier than hell. There are thousands of potential suspects and lots of evidence and it’s a tough one. Nobody ever even got arrested. He’s our Jack the Ripper. It’s been 50 years, and all we have is two sketches of a white male with glasses?” he concluded in exasperation. “Very frustrating.”
Like the Zodiac, London’s Ripper had five confirmed kills within the space of one year in 1888, sent taunting letters to local newspapers and never was caught. The havoc he wreaked had the same sort of effect on the population that the Zodiac did 80 years later.
The Zodiac’s murders and taunts terrified people across Northern California from 1968 to 70. His crimes inspired the 1971 Dirty Harry movie and spawned generations of amateur sleuths around the world who have named hundreds of suspects they believe are absolutely, without question, the killer. Meanwhile, the authorities have named one suspect: convicted child molester Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo. Allen owned boots identical to those worn by the Zodiac and said in an interview once that his favorite short story was “The Most Dangerous Game,” which the killer had referenced in one of his letters. He was picked out in a photo lineup many years after the attacks by one of the Zodiac’s surviving victims. He also wore a watch with the Zodiac’s crosshairs symbol on it, reportedly partially confessed to a friend interviewed by investigators – and was fingered as the culprit in former Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith’s authoritative 2002 book, Zodiac Unmasked.
Allen died of a heart attack in 1992 at the age of 58 before detectives could gather enough evidence to charge him. Ever since, police from Napa, Solano and San Francisco counties, where the killings occurred, have pored over every clue they have filed in teeming storage boxes and closets, not to mention the streams of tips that still come in. San Francisco alone has about 30 boxes of evidence, including the blood-spattered door of the taxi in which the Zodiac shot his last victim, cab driver Paul Stine, 29, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood on October 11, 1969. Other departments also have car parts from the murder scenes and plastic rope the Zodiac used to tie up victims.
Between the first murders in Benicia and the Stine killing, there were two additional Zodiac attacks on dating couples: In July 1969 in Vallejo, he shot Michael Mageau, 19, and Darlene Ferrin, 22; and in September 1969 at Lake Berryessa, he stabbed Cecelia Shepard, 22, and Bryan Hartnell, 20. Mageau and Hartnell both survived and provided descriptions of the killer. Over the years, they have rarely spoken of the Zodiac in public.
The investigators working the case today would not speak on the record for this article. A few who worked it in the past, however, still refuse to give up on the idea the killer will be identified some day. If the perpetrator turns out to be someone other than Allen and is still alive, he likely would be in his mid-80s or 90s, given he was described at the time as appearing to be 35- to 40-years-old. “I can’t help but believe he is somewhere in our files, that the answers are in there somewhere,” insisted long-retired San Francisco Homicide Inspector Frank Falzon, one of the earliest investigators on the case. “With all these different law enforcement agencies, it’s got to be solved someday.”
In 1974, well after he killed his last victim, the Zodiac was still sending letters to the Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Vallejo Times-Herald, ultimately claiming 37 victims. Investigators have confirmed the aforementioned five killings only and the two survivors.
For many years, the most hopeful new direction in the case has been DNA testing – the science that cracked the decades-old Golden State Killer case earlier this year. Investigators in that case turned to genealogical sites to match a profile to an ex-police officer who now faces 13 counts of murder and 13 more of rape.
The Zodiac case, however, is more complicated. The letters and the few possible shreds of DNA evidence were handled extensively by detectives and others long before anyone knew DNA analysis was possible. The Zodiac also was apparently very careful about minimizing helpful clues in the form of saliva, fingerprints or blood. Accordingly, many investigators believe the chance of a useful hit turning up in the profiles is slim at best. One police source who couldn’t speak publicly observed, “With the Golden State Killer, they had a full strand of DNA. Not Zodiac. We have crumbs, and not good ones.
“I think the hunt for DNA is an illusion, a dog-and-pony show,” said Mike Rodelli, who wrote the 2017 book The Hunt for Zodiac after 20 years of research. He doesn’t believe Allen is the killer, but rather a deceased San Francisco businessman. “The evidence is way too old and over-handled,” he claimed.
Tom Voigt, another private sleuth who has researched the case for decades, disagrees. “The only thing that could solve it is the DNA – and that could happen tomorrow,” he insisted. “He could be drinking coffee next to you, he could be sitting at the bus stop. Or he could be dead. But absolutely, it will be solved.” Voigt maintains the exhaustively-researched Zodiackiller.com site. His top suspect: Richard Joseph Gaikowski, a Martinez newspaperman who died in 2004.
Of all the Zodiac evidence, the three items seized upon most by detectives and amateur sleuths are the handwritten letters, the ciphers and the sketches generated by the two survivors. But all are so open to interpretation that new tips are received by investigators and The Chronicle every month or so from people claiming to have solved the case. Among the many theories: The Zodiac was the Unabomber, a gang of demented cops, the crazy uncle upstairs, the edgy neighbor and so on. Dozens insist the killer was their father. But except for one long cipher sent in pieces to The Chronicle, Examiner and Vallejo papers in 1969, no detectives have been able to confirm a translation of the killer’s cryptograms, a crazy quilt of letters and symbols laid out in straight lines. The one that was solved – by a Salinas schoolteacher and his wife – offered little beyond the boast, “I like killing because it is so much fun.” The rest, according to FBI code experts, appear to be gibberish.
The killer’s handwriting also is easy to match to numerous individuals because it is in such a simple hand and the artist’s rendering depicts the typical early-1960s fellow with a crewcut and horn-rimmed glasses. In the minds of many, this leaves the lone named suspect – Allen of Vallejo – as the mostly likely guy. “I believe he did it, no doubt. There are just way too many coincidences that make way too much sense,” insisted John Henslin of Texas, who was a friend of victim Betty Lou Jensen – and whose sister, Sharon Stutsman of Nevada, was Jensen’s best friend. “Him murdering our friend ruined Christmas for all of us for life. Every year, every anniversary, we remember that killing all over again.”
In an email, Stutsman, who is ill and cannot speak clearly, fondly remembered Jensen as an “artist in every way ... funny, always happy.” Her father worked at the same Vallejo school district where Allen was employed as a janitor and Henslin recalled that the family thought “he was creepy.”
This is an impression shared by former KTVU-TV crime reporter Rita Williams, the last person known to have interviewed Allen, shortly before he died, at the suspect’s home in Vallejo. Williams said that although Allen denied being the Zodiac, he fit the murderer’s profile in many ways. Following the interview, Allen wrote Williams a letter containing a hand-written “Z” identical to the Z on a widely-publicized letter that some believe the Zodiac sent in 1967 to the father of an unconfirmed Riverside victim, before the Bay Area killings began. The poor grammar in the letter Williams received was similar to that of the Zodiac. “I remember him showing me tons of things on his shelves, and so many looked like clues,” Williams recalled. “It was almost like a game with him ... eerie. I said to the cameraman when we got into our car afterward: ‘We just talked to the Zodiac.’”Sources: Kevan Fagan, The San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 2018; Tom Voigt, Zodiackiller.com; and Zodiac by Robert Graysmith.Illustration: Robert Graysmith, The Chronicle, 1969.
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