Episode 668: The Zodiac Killer (Part 2)
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Hey, weirdos. I'm Alayna. I'm Ash. And this is Morbid. ♪

I didn't like the look in your eye when you were saying that at all. Mikey said, nope. Everybody's just shaking their head at me like, no, absolutely not. You went like, like she got low, sort of.

Yeah, I just wanted to be weird about it and I succeeded. Congrats. High five across the room. That was weird. Yeah, I don't know. I'm in a weird mood. Same. Same. Weird day. Yes. You know? Maybe, hold on. Hold on.

Hold on. Everybody sit tight. Just hold on a second. Just pull over, okay? You know what? While she's looking that up, we had our 666th episode recently. 666. The mark of the beast. Wait a second. Oh. Mercury is out of retrograde. Oh.

Doesn't feel that way. I know. Well, we're in the after effects right now. Oh, okay. It got out of... It stopped retrograding. I think that's how you say that, right? On April 7th. Oh. Right now, I think it's April 9th. So we're still feeling the... Yeah, after effects. We're circling the toilet drain here. Sometimes I feel like that's when it's the worst, is the after effects. Yeah. So maybe that's why we feel so weird and why everybody's so annoying. Yeah. It also might just be like facts. Everything's just like... You know when you have that...

That moment where everything just feels like it's taking fucking forever. God. To move forward. Anything. Any answers you need. Anything. You're just like, God. Literally anything. Yeah. It's that. Sorry, I interrupted you. What? Back to the Mark of the Beast. Oh, yeah. Episode.

That was so much fun. It was. It was so much fun. And we had a ghost join us named Nicholas. My special guest, if you will. He was sassy. He was spicy. He was that friend. He called me dull, I think. Well, he was that friend that will be honest with you. And I like that about him. So you agree. You think I'm dull. No, he thought that the tale, like whatever tale I told was dull. He wasn't calling you dull.

Okay. It's not about you, Ash. No, no. But you said that he, you, what was it that you weren't dull or something? I don't know. I can't remember what he said. No, did he compliment at one point and you were like, that's for me? He complimented and I took it. I received that. For you. And then he said something mean and I said, I don't receive that. And you said, return to center. Because I think that I understand Nicholas. Well, he's in your home, so. He is, so I think I vibe with him. Maybe he is.

to us. Maybe. I was going to say maybe he's related to you and then I was like, well, then he would be related to me as well. No, I think we, he was fun. It was fun to have him during the episode. We just put on GhostTube and just kind of like let him chat with us. And I think we have a spooky episode coming up.

Like, you know, one of our, like, spooky insert thing here. Spooky Lucy Goosey. Roads, lakes, schools, graveyards, towns, all that. We're going to do one of those coming up. I think spooky butts probably. Spooky butts I think is where we're going to land on. And during our spooky butts episode, our spooky butts episode,

We're going to have Nicholas come back. We're going to throw on the ghost tube and just let him kind of comment throughout the episode. I hope it's him again. I feel like it will be. Well, when we turned off the episode and we kept doing something, somebody named Jacob came. Yeah, we just got a gaggle of guys just floating around. I don't know how any of us feel about that. Not great. I love Nicholas personally. I love Nicholas, yeah. I feel very connected to him. Jacob, I don't know. We haven't really...

We turned off. We had time to get to know each other. Yeah, we turned it off too soon. Yeah, we did. We said bye. So maybe Jacob will come through. But I think it'll be fun to do for our spooky episodes to have our Pod Lab spirits join us and just kind of comment. Yes. I think hopefully you guys will think that's kind of fun. You can let us know after the episode if you're like, that was not fun. Yeah. Then totally let us know. Yeah. But we figured it would be something fun to add to the episode. I think you'll love it. I think you're going to love it. Personally. I love Nicholas, so...

You know? Ghost Tube's fun, and I think it's for reals. Like, I'm just saying. Yeah. I stand on Ghost Tube. I think it's fun as hell. No matter what it is, it's fun. I agree. Yeah. What's not fun is the Zodiac Killer. No, he's not fun. No. And he's probably dead. I think. Yeah. I would assume. There's a good theory. Oh, okay. I think he died. Oh. Personally. I mean, it makes sense considering the time period. I guess, like...

It's a possibility. Yeah, so it was like... He's dragging his bag of bones around. The late 60s and everybody thought he was 20. So let's do some math. I mean, you say let's. I will not be joining you in that. So it's 2025 minus, we'll just say 1970 for the hell of it. I like that. That was 55 years ago. If you were 20, let's say he was like 25. He could be like 80. Yeah, which is very possible. Yeah, I know 80-year-olds.

Damn. Imagine if the Zodiac Killer is still out. Just imagine if he's just someone's grandpa. Oh, my God. Well, it's like Joseph James D'Angelo. Yeah. He was like in his mid to late 70s when he got caught. Well, that's the thing. Just being a douchebag still. Absolutely. The thing about the Zodiac, though, is like I don't think he would have just gone away because he loved the theater. Yeah.

And the dramatics. And, like, loved even... Even when it seemed as though he stopped killing people, like, they stopped linking crimes to him officially, he was still sending shit in. Yeah. To, like, newspapers and to the police and everything, so... But maybe he's, like, a BTK, but, like, a BTK with restraint. Maybe. You know? Because, like, BTK went away for a long time. Yeah, but then he couldn't help himself. And then he couldn't help himself. But, like, who knows if...

you know, whoever the Zodiac is, if something took precedent, that maybe changed. Maybe. The, uh...

The urge. The urge. Kind of thing. I just, I'm not ruling it out. Like, it's definitely possible. But something about this dude, I feel like he wouldn't be able to resist that urge. And that's just me who has, like, no profiling experience whatsoever. But that's what my gut tells me. Hey, I'm willing to listen to your gut. Thank you. I'll listen to it over here. Thank you. She's trashed, but...

We're working on her. My gut's very loud, and you have to listen to it all the time. That's true. Grumbling over here, so. Even if I don't want to listen to your gut, she's telling me things. Yeah, she's always talking. It's usually just. I know, and it's never, like, I'm never in distress. No, and sometimes it's not even when you're hungry. Yeah, it's just, that's how my gut works. It's just loud. My gut, like, doesn't work. Doing the damn thing. Like, in general, but it works with instinct. Yeah. So that's a little bit about our guts. Yeah.

Now let's get into it. So we're back. We're back, everybody, with part two. We're back. In part one, we went over the first of the attacks, which started with the murders of 17-year-old David Faraday and his girlfriend, Betty Lou Jensen. She was 16 years old, and this was her first boyfriend ever. That broke my heart. Awful. And her first date.

And then we went over the attack zone. Two more couples, 22-year-old Darlene Farron and 19-year-old Mike Majoe. Then lastly, 22-year-old Cecilia Shepard and 20-year-old Brian Hartnell. And if you remember from part one, those last two attacks, both of the men survived. It doesn't actually seem like that was intentional, like on the part of the killer, but, you know, it happened.

And, of course, we got into the theatrics that surround the case as far as the taunting letters to the media, the weird ciphers, the fucking crazy costume that he was wearing with the clip-on sunglasses. So unsettling. I'll never be over the clip-on sunglasses. And the flat top of the head, like the executioner's hood being flat-topped. Something about it. I just don't know. In an executioner's hood.

In and of itself. Horrifying. Yeah. So now let's get into part two, which, as most of us know, unfortunately does not end with the capture of this fool. But luckily, the attack at Lake Berryessa produced more evidence than the first two attacks. Because remember, the first two attacks, there was like nothing to go off of, basically. This gave us a little bit more. But not so luckily, detectives had pretty much exhausted any lead that they had within like two weeks. Yeah.

Not great. No, not great at all. No, not great at all. The witness descriptions and communications with the killer allowed investigators to get some kind of insight into the person that they were looking for. But funny that I was just talking about profiling. At that time, psychological profiling was still years away. It wasn't a thing that was really tapped into yet. And any kind of profile that they developed at that time was really just speculation. Yeah.

For example, a psychiatrist in Napa, quote, suggested that the killer may be psychotic rather than psychopathic.

Thinking that the cipher revealed the Zodiac's delusional thinking. Oh, okay. Now, if you're like me and you found that quote a little bit confusing, according to a quick Google, psychosis, aka being psychotic, is a symptom of mental illness involving a loss of touch with reality. Oh, interesting. But psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by lack of empathy and remorse. Okay. That's the difference between those two things. Yeah. Because when I first read that, I was like, isn't that the same thing? Excuse me? And Google said, no. No.

She sang it to me. She said, nor. She said, nor, girl. So within a matter of a few weeks, all the theories from a ton of sources started to merge into kind of one big theory that created a kind of unofficial and obviously, again, highly speculative profile of the killer. In early October, a reporter from the Sacramento Bee wrote, he's fairly bright, but his spelling and grammar indicate a poor education. This is...

Wow. Oh, the 60s. I don't even know which thing to hit on first. Yeah. To be quite honest. Yeah. Damn.

That was journalism. Yeah, sure was. But like a lot of the theories about the identity and motives of the Zodiac that have come out in, you know, five decades since the first attacks, it's unclear what led reporters and investigators to some of these conclusions and most of them. But while everybody was speculating and piecing together the clues that they did have, the Zodiac was back out on the streets. On the afternoon of October 11th, 29-year-old cab driver Paul Stein got ready to head out for his shift for the night.

Paul was a Ph.D. candidate at San Francisco State College, and he was working as a cab driver just to cover the cost of his education. He was just a few months away from finishing his degree requirements and would have been on track to graduate in January. Not far at all. By 9.30 p.m., Paul had finished his first fare of the night, and he got a notification from the dispatcher about another fare needing to be picked up.

While he was on his way to get this second fare, he stopped to pick up a single passenger, a man who hailed him at the intersection of Mason and Geary Streets. The man asked to be dropped off at Washington and Maple Streets, which was in a pretty wealthy neighborhood in San Francisco, Presidio Heights. So Paul entered the location in the logbook and started the meter and then pulled away from the curb. What happened next is really just based off of speculation based on evidence found at the scene.

Come on.

Nobody was really around to witness the actual shooting itself, but the sound of the gunshot was loud enough to attract the attention of three teenagers who were in an apartment building across the street. And by the time they went to the window to see what the hell was happening, they actually saw the killer move from the back seat to the front passenger seat where it seemed like he was going through Paul's pockets and some kind of robbery. So while one of the kids called the police, the other two went down to a lower floor of the building to try to get a better look at the guy in the cab.

And from their new position, they could see the shooter wiping down the surfaces on the cab with what looked like a cloth. And then he moved Paul's body into an upright position and exited the cab through the passenger door. He wiped down the handle before and after closing it. Once he was outside the car, the shooter walked around to the driver's side, opened the door, and repositioned Paul's body again since it had kind of like slid down when he got down and forward when he got out.

And then after wiping down the inside and outside of that, the driver's side door, the man closed it and just calmly walked away from the scene toward Cherry Street like he was just some normal fucking dude walking down the street after taking a cab. That's fucking creepy. You imagine watching that as a teenager, watching that ever. Like moving this body around? Multiple times. And wiping, ugh, no. Wiping the doors down? No. Like, ugh. I hate it.

So when the witnesses placed a call to the police, for some reason, there was some kind of miscommunication. And for whatever reason, the dispatcher thought that the shooter was a black man and advised responding officers to that detail. As a result, on their way to the scene, those officers drove right past the actual shooter as they traveled down Jackson Street, paying no attention to this white man casually walking away, even though he was the only person in the vicinity of the crime scene at that point.

Oh, come on. How did that happen? How? How did that? Now, was he wearing the outfit?

That I don't know, actually. Do you think because maybe the miscommunication was like the black hood? Possibly. Maybe that was not relayed correctly or it didn't get heard correctly? That is possible. I don't think so, though, because I think that would have been like a major detail that the kids would have called. So maybe straight up racism. It might have been straight up racism. That's probably it. Because it was, again, like late 60s or 70s. Because I don't think he would have been wearing the outfit because I think Paul, like...

That would have been startling. Yeah, it wouldn't have got to the final destination. No, definitely not. Like if he just popped that hood on. Yeah, I think he was just dressed like a man.

And actually, you know what? Yeah. Yeah. No, it does. The more I think about it, yeah. And later on, the teenagers describe him. So, yeah. That makes sense. So, San Francisco police officers Armin Pellicetti and Frank Pita were the first to arrive at the scene. And they found two of the three teenage witnesses just standing near the cab. Just taking the scene in. Jesus. After moving them to a location further from the scene, they took their statements and

which is when they realized that that initial description of the shooter had been wrong, like somehow lost in translation. Palisade quickly radioed dispatch with the update of a corrected description, and that went out to responding officers. But by the time the additional officers got to that area on Jackson Street where they had just passed a white man and like the only fucking man in the vicinity, he was gone.

Damn. Completely gone. So back at the crime scene, Officer Pelissetti approached the cab and looked inside. By that point, Paul's body was again slumped forward, and the officer could see that there was a hole in his head right behind his right ear. Between the injury and the large amount of blood in the front of the cab, it was obvious that Paul had died, unfortunately. Yeah.

In the backseat of the cab, the killer had left a pair of size 7 black leather gloves, which was a noticeably small size for a man at that time. They also found a single 9mm shell casing and 30 fingerprints. Wow. Which, remember, it's a cab, so tons of people. Yeah. But among the fingerprints was one that belonged to Paul Stein and one unidentified print that was streaked with blood, indicating that it most likely belonged to the shooter. Wow.

Pellicetti and the other officers also noticed that Paul's wallet and keys to the cab were missing, which actually at that point did make them think that this was a robbery, that it had gone wrong. So Pellicetti requested an ambulance and additional officers with dogs to comb the area in search of the suspect. And within a few minutes, all seven canine units had responded to the request, along with a ton of San Francisco police officers.

A large number of San Francisco firefighters were also called to the scene so that they could set up their ladders and high-powered lamps to kind of like illuminate the area more. And once they collected all the evidence and removed the body, investigators left the scene still thinking that this was some kind of robbery. Because actually at that point, it was pretty common for cab drivers to get robbed or face some kind of violence like this. So...

Yeah.

This man was described as a white man. So the teenagers had not said to the... Yeah, so that was clearly either just straight up racism or there was some very strange miscommunication happening. I'm leaning towards the former. The racism, yeah. I don't understand how the black man comment was made because all three said he was a white man, 25 to 30 years old, 5'8 or 5'9 inches tall, and weighed about 150 pounds. Yeah.

They said he had red hair. Yeah, definitely. I always wonder how people come up with that. I have no fucking idea. I don't even know how tall I am. I couldn't tell how tall someone is or how much they weigh if you paid me a zillion dollars. No, not at all. I could not. I'd be the worst witness ever. A hundred percent. I also just like remember people looking completely different than they do. I'm not great at that either.

Yeah, this would not be great for me. But they also said he has reddish brown hair, which he wears in a crew cut, and was wearing heavy-rimmed glasses and a navy blue or black jacket at the time of the slaying. Okay. So, not the outfit. No. You're not at your house. You're at a lavish seaside estate. You're not walking the dog. You're hunting for clues in an Agatha Christie mystery. You're not driving to the grocery store. You're driving to the crime scene.

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Ready to start talking? Get 60% off at Babbel.com slash truecrime. That's B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash truecrime. Babbel.com slash truecrime. Now, it wasn't until two days later, on October 13th, that Paul Stein's murder was linked to the Zodiac.

That afternoon, a letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle containing one single page note written in what was now familiar writing and in a blue felt tipped handwriting of the killer. He said, this is the Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington Street and Maple Street last night. To prove this, here is a bloodstained piece of his shirt, which he did include.

He said, Wow.

What the fuck? I remember hearing that specific line. I do too. I've read that. School children make nice targets. And then he said like come bouncing out of the bus. The little kiddies as they come bouncing out. Like I remember reading that and just being horrified. Sinister. How – exactly. Like sinister and depraved that is. And it's just like –

He starts with couples. Then he targets this cab driver. So that's a complete diversion. And now he's saying, maybe I'll just kill kids now. And now he's going to kids. Right. Like, what the fuck? Nobody's safe. No. Which we're going to get into. Literally nobody's safe. Yeah.

Now, just like the other letters, the latest note was signed simply with those crosshairs, the symbol. And as proof of its authenticity, like I said, the letter writer also included a swatch of fabric ripped from Paul Stein's blood-soaked shirt. Whoa. So he was like, this is me. Yeah. And they also did an analysis of the handwriting, and it concluded that it matched the other letters that the San Francisco area papers had gotten a few months earlier. Mm-hmm.

Police Captain Martin Lee told reporters, there are very strong indications, including the handwriting, that we are dealing with the same person. All of the evidence is pointing toward this. And that inclusion of Paul's gray and white striped shirt was irrefutable proof that the killings were linked. And if the previous attacks were any indication, there was going to be more murders to follow. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And in a city as large as San Francisco, he could have been anywhere. He could have been anyone. Yeah, absolutely. An article from the LA Times read, Yeah.

That's bleak. The way that they wrote back then. Yeah. And I remember that clip. I remember he could be Mrs. So-and-so's boy who never says boo. Yeah. For some reason, that always stuck out to me.

But if we know anything about the 60s and 70s in California, or really anything about the last few episodes of Morbid, we know that Californians had to contend with killers in the past. Yeah. Some of these killers, obviously, like we've talked about, were theatrical and, like, egomaniacal. But the Zodiac wasn't like anything anybody had ever experienced before. Mm-hmm.

Like we were just saying, he changed his method of killing unexpectedly, changed his preferred victims. He performed his attacks and murders with a kind of showiness, too. And a killer with an unpredictable victim pattern hunting the streets of San Francisco was terrifying enough, but this guy's doing it while wearing a fucking executioner's hood. Yeah. Like, that adds to everything. That ups the ante. Yeah, that hits different. Yeah, it definitely does. I can't imagine living in this area at that time. No. No.

Because for me, it's the costume, but also the fact that literally, like I said earlier, no one is safe. Yeah. Couples, cab drivers, kids, and he would just switch at a moment's notice. Mm-hmm.

So in the wake of the most recent letters from the Zodiac, the sheriff's department assigned more than 70 deputies to guard the school buses as they transported children to and from school. It seemed like the killer was expanding his geographic range to a degree, too. So a kind of interagency task force was assembled, which included officers from all local and regional law enforcement agencies.

With the intention of pooling resources and evidence that could lead to an arrest, which is kind of profound because it doesn't happen a lot. Yeah, I know. These agencies work together. No, that's actually the most shocking. And I think it also points to how desperate they were to catch this guy. Almost a year had passed since the Zodiac first struck in Vallejo. And in that time, he had now killed five and seriously wounded two others, again, leaving very little evidence behind and just openly taunting investigators and the public.

But while it seemed like the Zodiac was only just starting his rampage, interestingly, Paul Stein would turn out to be the last victim officially linked to the Zodiac. Interesting. I don't know for sure if Paul really was the Zodiac's last victim, but officially he is. Okay. That being said, a lack of victims didn't mean a lack of attention, and the man known as the Zodiac Killer was about to be elevated to a status that had never been seen before in American history. Hmm.

Within a few days of receiving and publishing the Stein letter, public concern over the threat posed had reached a point where the law enforcement agencies couldn't ignore it. So Chief of Police Martin Lee released an all-points bulletin containing instructions for school bus drivers who might find themselves the target of the killer.

The bulletin read, and this is just, I can't imagine putting my kids on a school bus during this time. Oh, God. It read, What the fuck? Like, what?

What if you can't keep the bus in motion? Have you ever popped a tire? Sometimes you can't keep going. And you want to say like, oh, I would never put my child on the bus. But what else do you do? But some people didn't have a choice. They didn't have any other way to do anything. And it's like, what the fuck? Imagine reading that. And what do you do? Yeah. What do you do?

I would just be like at home. I think I would, I'd probably lose everything. We're all hunkering down and we'll lose everything. Cause that's so scary. Yeah, absolutely it is. Holy shit. And then thinking like these little kids getting on the bus and like, like if that were to happen, the bus driver's just supposed to tell them to lay on the ground. These little kids. Like that's awful. Ugh.

So somehow the notice from Lee did help reassure a lot of the drivers, but he still couldn't help but take a swipe at the killer, the police chief. He referred to the Zodiac as a, quote, clumsy criminal liar and a latent homosexual. Huh. Like, what? What, if anything, indicated his sexual preference? What the fuck did you come up with that? That's...

That's something. Like, really? That's neither here nor there. I just am like, please point to where you found that. Like, what? Point to it. It's just guys being dudes sometimes. Dudes being bros, you know? It's just weird.

You can call that guy a lot of things. To just pull out of thin air and be like, he's a lightened homosexual. He's gay. He's gay and he's pretending he's not. Okay. Alrighty. I don't think that's why we're here, but sounds good. Thanks for being professional about it. Let's focus on the thing that will definitely help us catch him.

Yeah, exactly. I'm also like, yeah, that's good. Needle the crazy man threatening to shoot up a bus full of children. Yeah, and that's the other thing. It's like, oh, yeah, because first of all, we have no fucking clue what his sexual orientation is, nor should it matter. Nope. But also, are we really pretending that straight people don't kill people? More often than not. Are we really pretending that straight men have not conspired?

made up the majority of serial killers in the entire history of the world. Like, are we really pretending that right now? It was just an opportunity to be a douche. Like, okay. Like, I'm not defending the Zodiac by any means here, but that was just stupid. No, of course you're not defending the Zodiac. Jesus Christ. It just doesn't happen.

It's just not helpful. And it doesn't help the public. To catch this person. No. We're looking to catch this person. Give me things that I can see with my eyeballs. Yeah. And witness with my eyeballs. And if you want to needle him, do it in a way to drag him out. Yeah, just be like, say he's fucking pathetic. Right. Say he's a fucking pathetic.

Pathetic loser. Right. Who has nothing else to take control of. So he's taking control of vulnerable people in vulnerable positions. Exactly. There you go. His fuck is easy. Yeah, I just did it.

Ugh. So the California Attorney General, Thomas Lynch, also got involved, acting as a coordinator for various state and local agencies involved in the now-growing manhunt, and he provided updates to the public. In his initial statement, Lynch acknowledged the threat to the public. You couldn't not. Yeah. But assured them that a competent task force was pursuing the killer.

He said, But it's like...

I feel like the odds are actually the opposite at this point if we're actually like being real. If we're like really looking at this. If we're living in a place of reality, I feel like. Because odds are that the Zodiac will strike again because if history has told us anything, he has. Yeah, let's be on alert. Luckily here, it worked out for him. Yeah. This statement. But I was like, what was that based on? Yeah.

Anyway, at the same time, he also issued an appeal to the Zodiac, urging the killer to turn himself in. He said he's obviously an intelligent individual. He knows that eventually he'll be taken into custody. So it would be best that he give himself up before tragedy is written in blood. That's the way you go about that. There you go. And it's like, that's the way to go about that. You do have to do a little like complimenting and then you kind of threaten him a little bit. Like, you know what I mean? There's a way to go about it. Mm hmm.

Lynch's assurances were more than just lip service, though, or him trying to simply placate a very increasingly worried public.

In Napa County, the school district's 64 school buses were given armed police escorts every day as they covered roughly 4,000 miles transporting children to 28 different schools. Damn. So they really put in a lot of resources. Yeah. And additionally, a volunteer spotter was added to every school bus and their job was to watch for any unusual activity along the bus route. What a scary job. Yeah, seriously. Yeah.

But the statements and the press coverage of the manhunt prompted a massive public outpouring, and within a few days, the San Francisco police had received hundreds of tips, but none provided any useful information. Hmm.

Among the most bizarre was a call from a man claiming to be the killer and offering a strange offer of surrender, basically. On October 21st, the caller told investigators he wanted them to arrange for a nationally recognized lawyer, F. Lee Bailey, to appear on the local morning show AM San Francisco the next morning. And he said he would call in to discuss a possible surrender. And he said if Bailey's not available, he would settle for California defense attorney Melvin Belli.

who had made a name for himself. He actually represented Lee Harvey Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby, and plenty of other high-profile people. But San Francisco attempted to reach F. Lee Bailey, but when he was unavailable, they contacted Belly, and he happily agreed to appear on the show. A recording of the call was played for Brian Hartnell, who was one of the last victims attacked, in an effort to identify it as the man who had attacked him, but he wasn't able to provide confirmation, unfortunately. Mm-hmm.

So the next morning, host Jim Dunbar, who was joined by Melvin Belli, urged regular listeners not to call in so that the lines would remain completely open for the killer. For nearly an hour, the two men just chatted on air as they waited for this supposed killer to call, who finally called in about 50 minutes into the show. In the clip, Belli can be heard saying, did you hear me? And a disembodied voice replies, yes, I did, and then hangs up the phone.

A few minutes later, the man claiming to be the Zodiac called back and they started a strange conversation where he told Belly to refer to him as Sam. Like the name Sam. Interesting. Yeah.

Throughout the conversation, both Dunbar and Belly tried to get some confirmation that the caller was the man who had called the police the night before, if not the actual killer. But Sam, quote unquote, dodged their questions and just continued insisting that he was the killer. He said, I don't want to give myself up. I want to kill those kids. I'm getting one of my headaches now. I've got to kill. I've got to kill. And this is just in like a morning show. Like, damn, that's the scariest thing ever.

Hello? Literally, hello. After roughly 20 minutes, the caller told Belly, meet me on top of the Fairmont Hotel with nobody else or I'll jump. No, thank you. So Belly refused to meet the man on the roof. Thank you. But he said they ended up agreeing on an alternate location. He was like, I'll meet you somewhere. So they made plans to meet at 1030 a.m., but when Belly arrived at this secret location, there was no one there to meet him.

Huh. He waited until 1115, but when Sam, quote unquote, failed to show up, he just abandoned the plan and left. Okay. Now, that Sam didn't show up at the agreed upon location didn't come as a surprise to a lot of people. Captain Lee, not the below deck star. I knew you were going to say that. The report, an officer, told reporters, I think the caller has a problem, but whether he's involved in the killings, I cannot say. Yeah. So he was like, I think this might just be a sick individual. Yeah.

Makes sense. The dispatcher who had taken the call from the supposed killer the night before listened to the audio from AM San Francisco and was certain that the voice of the caller from the night before was not the same voice that called to speak to Belly. According to the dispatcher, the caller, quote, revealed knowledge about one or more of the five murders charged to the Zodiac that had never been made public. So she was like, the dispatcher said they said that the night before, but they didn't sound like the guy who called in. Yeah.

So whether it was the killer who called or not, the opportunity to continue contact was lost once the show was over. Unfortunately. So after the botched interview on AM San Francisco, the Zodiac went quiet for a few weeks until finally popping back up with a greeting card and yet another cipher sent to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Followed a day later by a rambling seven-page letter known now as the Dripping Pen Card and the Bus Bomb Letter. The Dripping Pen Card. The Dripping Pen Card. Crepey. Very crepey. On the front of the greeting card was an illustration of a wet fountain pen hanging up to dry and pre-printed text that said, Sorry, I haven't written, but I just washed my pen. Wow. Like, what? That's...

I don't know why, but it is. No, I know. I don't like that. It's so fucking creepy, but you can't explain why. Sorry. Sorry. I just washed my pen. Sorry, just washing my pen. Stop. Inside the card contained the pre-printed message, and I can't do a thing with it. No. So the card just said, like, on the front. Just like a goofy-ass card. Sorry, I just washed my pen, and I can't do a thing with it. Nope.

I don't like that at all. What? I don't like it. Into this pre-printed message, the killer added, this is a Zodiac speaking, which is a dumb thing to say because you're not speaking. You're writing. And also, like...

We know. Yeah. Like, you don't need to do that. It doesn't need to be so official. He continued, I though, but it's supposed to say thought, you would need a good laugh before you hear the bad news. You won't get the news for a while yet. P.S. Could you print this new cipher on your front page? I get awfully lonely when I'm ignored. So lonely I could do my thing.

And the... Do my thing? So lonely I could do my thing. Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. And the word thing was written in bold dark letters and underlined six times. Huh. Yeah. Underneath the text, the writer drew the crosshair symbol, of course, with some text beneath that read, Des, like December, July, August, Sept, Oct, equals seven.

So the dates on the bottom were quickly interpreted as a taunt to the police with the killer trying to indicate that he had actually killed seven people, not five. Yeah, that makes sense. According to author Michael Cole, there was a high-profile double murder in San Jose on August 3rd, 1969. Two young women, Deborah Furlong and Kathy Snoozy, were savagely murdered, each being stabbed more than a hundred times. Oh my god.

What? Yeah. Holy shit. And Cole claims there are many who believe these to be the Zodiac's six and seven victims, but there's no evidence conclusively linking him to either murder. Interesting. And actually, several years later, a man named Carl Werner pleaded guilty to the murders of Furlong and Snoozy, as well as a third victim. Oh, okay. Yeah.

Who knows? All right. But the second letter received by the examiner, which was much different than anything the Zodiac had sent before. Among the more obvious differences, according to Cole, was that the previous communication, quote, had been noticeably matter of a fact and somewhat detached. But this letter exhibited a clear sense of palpable hostility, primarily at law enforcement.

Mm-hmm.

The police shall never catch me because I've been too clever for them. If you wonder why I was wiping the cab down, I was leaving fake clues for the police to run all over town with. As one might say, I gave the cops some busy work to keep them happy. Hey, pig, doesn't it rile you up to have your nose rubbed in your boo-boos? If you cops think I'm going to take on a bus in the way I stated I was, you deserve to have holes in your heads. For someone using the term...

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That's upsetting and I don't like it. Like, nothing about that is something I want to be around. No. I don't like that. The fact that he's saying...

I'm going to make them look like routine robberies and accidents and shit so you can't trace them to an actual murder or trace them back to me. It's so scary. It's so scary and it's possible he did that. Well, that's the thing. I'm like, so did you do that? Because remember, like I said, Paul's dad is the last official victim. Yeah. But did he kill, like, who knows how many other people he could have killed and made it look like accidents and robberies. Accidents, robberies.

obviously there's a degree here where people are like, I don't even know that he's that intelligent. Like, look at all the grammatical mistakes he makes. I think those are on purpose. Yeah. Possibly. And it's like, he has gotten away so far, so he does know how to make things look a certain way. You know? Yeah. I mean, he definitely... I think he was capable of making things look like accidents. He's not leaving clues. So it's like he's at the very least capable of doing that. Right. And...

But then you also have to look at it like the Jack the Ripper letters. And you have to say which ones are from him, which ones are copycats, because you know there's always going to be some, you know, level of people who want to get involved with this shit. Oh, yeah. And we'll get into it. There were plenty of letters that were sent that were not from the Zodiac. But this one is talking about the seven victims again. It's talking about wiping down the cab. Wiping down the cab. And there were certain things that were not made. Yeah. That the public was not made aware of. Yeah. Yeah.

So it's interesting. Yeah. But the whole ending of like, if you cops think I'm going to take a bus in the way I stated I was, you deserve to have holes in your heads. Like, whoa. And it's also like,

Why wouldn't we think that? I don't get what your aim is there. Are you trying to say that you do have a victim profile and that's totally against it? So you're dumb for thinking I was serious? Yeah, I mean, I guess. I feel like it's him being like, oh, you just don't get my humor. Maybe. Like to him, that's humor. Maybe, yeah. I mean, because he's a sick individual. Yeah, and I feel like that's him being like,

Like, you don't get my highbrow humor, you know? Like, that feels like that. It does, yeah. Yeah. Well, the letter goes on to describe the killer's new plan, where he would place a bomb described as a, quote, death machine and, quote, my masterpiece on a local bus. Oh. And the letter included a list of components used to create the bomb, as well as a kind of crude diagram and the same blue felt-tip pen used to write the letter.

The letter ended in a postscript instructing the editors to print the diagram of the bomb and on the back final page was a second postscript that said, to prove that I am the Zodiac, ask the Vallejo cop about my electric gun sight, which I used to start my collecting of slaves. It's so weird to me when killers do this. Yeah, like taunt like this. Because it's such, like, it feels like such 12-year-old...

kid behavior to be like ask him ask him yeah like if yeah I did that you know what I mean like it's just like what

It's like in his mind, he's like a supervillain, not a murderer. Yeah. It's like, it's very strange. It's such immature behavior. It is. To be begging for attention for these awful things you have done. Oh, and he keeps doing it. Like it's very acting out, like child acting out in a negative way for any kind of attention. Yes. Situation. So I'm just like, what the, it's so weird when they do this. No, it's bizarre. It's bizarre.

Yeah. Well, six weeks or so later, on December 20th, the one-year anniversary of David Faraday and Betty Jensen's murders, the Zodiac wrote again, this time to Melvin Belly. In the now familiar blue felt-tip pen, in much better handwriting, though, he wrote... And the fact that he writes with blue ink. Yeah. I'm sorry. I hate blue ink. I don't like blue ink either. I get that. Yeah, I get frustrated with blue ink. But he wrote, and again, in much better handwriting. Interesting. Hmm.

He said,

At the moment, the children are safe from the bomb because it is so massive to dig in. Plus the trigger mech requires much work to get it adjusted just right. But if I hold back too long from no nine, I will lose all control of myself. Plus set the bomb up. Please help me. I cannot remain in control for much longer. That one was really hard to read because the grammatical errors are a plenty. Yeah.

The letter was signed with the same crosshairs, now common among all Zodiac letters, and it included another swatch of fabric from Paul Stein's shirt. That's fucked up. Which meant it was an authentic letter. He's like devolving in such a strange way. Yes.

Like they're so different. Like from that one where he's like, oh, I think like shooting the kitties as they bounce out of school will be fun. And then here he's like, I don't want to kill anyone else. I need help. I need help. And you're like, what the fuck? But he's still saying he's making this bomb, but like it's too much work. Yeah. If he can't get help, he's going to use it. He's going to do it. And his first letter that he wrote like a long time ago was like,

how killing people was something he loved to do and it gave him excitement and it was better than sex. But now he doesn't want to. And now here he's like, I don't want to take my ninth and tenth victims. And it's like, what the, what is happening? Yeah. This is some scary, scattered thinking. It is. Whoever this individual was, they were sick.

Scary. And scary. All of the above. Yeah. A few days later, Melvin Belli contacted the Chronicle, who did agree to publish his response to the Zodiac on the front page of the December 28th edition of the paper.

Belli said, you have asked for my help and I promise you I will do everything in my power to provide you with whatever help you may need or want. He offered to meet the killer in a private location of his choosing. But as the days passed without a response, it became clear that the Zodiac had no intention of actually turning himself in or meeting with Belli. You wonder if that was just a ploy to get him to get a response. Yeah. And to get a response that's like,

We'll help you. We'll do whatever you want. You know, like that gives him what he needs. And I think it probably would have made him like laugh, like chuckle. Well, and I think it makes him feel powerful because he just got them all to tuck their tails between their legs and say, which I'm not saying that against them because what else did they, what other choice did they have? Yeah, they're scared that he's going to put a bomb on a boss. Like they're not just going to be like, go fuck yourself. Go kill some kids. Right. They're not going to set him up for that. So it's like, it's not their fault, but that is what he wanted, I think. Yep. I agree. I agree.

After the letter was sent to Belly in late December, communication from the Zodiac ceased for several months until a pair of letters showed up at the offices of the Chronicle in late April, about a week apart. Like the other letters, the latest seemed to be an attempt to manipulate the press into keeping the story alive on the front pages. Because remember, there's no new leads. He hasn't killed anybody that the police can link to him. So this isn't being reported on exactly how it was when it was like when everybody was in the thick of it.

But in these letters, the Zodiac demanded that investigators release, quote, all of the details of his bus bomb threat and called on San Franciscans to wear, to start wearing, quote, some nice Zodiac buttons. Oh, this, he's Delulu in a way that you can't even. And it's just, it's like spiraling out of control. It's,

Power. He's looking for power. He's looking to be in control. That's why he's going to be like, let me see if I can get people to start wearing buttons with my signature, like with my logo there on it. You know what I mean? Like, let me see how far I can flex this power I have over everybody. Just the fact that he thought that people might be willing to do that is so wild. Because he thought if he scared people enough...

That they would think they were safe if they wore those buttons. Like, we're listening to you. We'll do what you say. Right. Because he just saw them bend and say, we'll help you however we can. We'll do whatever you want. What do you want? He says, print it on the front page. They print it on the front page. So he's sitting there going, how far can I take this? I'll get them to wear buttons. So this is power. This is all power. Like, this is such a clear...

case of power trip it is in the worst way possible yeah well the april letters repeated their earlier claims that the killer had developed a massive bomb and was planning to leave it in an undisclosed public location in order to cause now he's at the most damage possible like the previous threats this obviously caused considerable panic among the public but after a few weeks without an evidence any kind of evidence about an actual bomb things slowly started to return to normal

And like the previous letters, the April letters stated that the killer had taken more lives, of course, but the police had yet to catch on. He said, I have killed 10 people to date. It would have been a lot more, except I was swamped out by the rain we had a while back.

The fuck? Like, oh, okay. Oh, cool. More letters followed a few months later. In late June, the editor of the Chronicle received a note along with a new cipher saying, this is the Zodiac speaking. I've become very upset with the people of the San Fran Bay area. They have not complied with my wishes for them to wear some nice crosshair symbols button.

I promised to punish them if they did not comply by annihilating a full school bus. But now school is out for the summer, so I punished them in another way. I shot a man sitting in a parked car with a .38. Oh. Now, this is interesting. Yeah. The note was signed with the usual crosshair symbol, of course, and text indicating that the Zodiac had now killed 12 people and was accompanied by what would be his fourth and final cipher. Okay.

So a lot of people think that the line about the man being shot in his car with a .38 was a reference to the June 19th death of 25-year-old San Francisco police officer. I looked up his name. I'm not positive. There's a few different pronunciations. But I think the best one is Richard Raddick. Okay. Right? Yeah. So...

Around 5.30 a.m., this officer was sitting in his car and had started writing a parking ticket for a vehicle parked in front of him. Sorry, parked in front of a hydrant when an unknown assailant approached him from behind and fired three shots through the driver's side window. Yeah. Yeah.

It is worth noting, though, when referencing the first five murders in his letters, the Zodiac offered some form of evidence that validated his claims. Like an unpublished detail or, in the case of Paul Stein's murder, a piece of physical evidence.

But the claims made in the letter since Paul Stein's death didn't include any verifications. And he probably could have, he very likely did learn about them through the press. Oh, so there you go. Yeah. But still, the letters are believed to have been sent by the Zodiac himself. Okay. So who knows? It's possible. Two more letters were sent that year, one to the Chronicle on October 5th and another to Chronicle writer Paul Avery directly on October 27th.

Like the others, these letters seemed to be an attempt to keep the story on the front page as a power move since it had started to be replaced by other, more pressing matters. The difference in the case of the October 27th letter, though, was that it was one of the rare instances where the killer addressed a single person. The only other time he had really done that was when it was Melvin Belly. Oh, yeah, yeah.

In this case, the killer sent a Halloween card to Avery, who had done the bulk of the reporting on the Zodiac for the Chronicle and made a vague threat on his life. But in an interview, Paul Avery said, I'm really not scared. I've needled him in some of my stories. Maybe that's why you wrote me. I love that. He's just like, whatever. He's like, I'm not afraid. That's fine. I'd be fucking terrified. I'd needle terrified. Damn.

Five months after Avery received the Halloween card threatening his life, the editor of the Los Angeles Time received its first letter from the killer. In the latest letter, the killer noted the number of victims was now 17.

So he's going up like exponentially. I was just going to say that was a jump. And he said, the reason that I'm writing to the Times is this. They don't bury me on the back pages like some of the others. Wow. He used this as an opportunity, obviously, to declare a higher victim number. Of course. It was mostly yet another letter taunting the police who had failed to make any significant progress on the case. He said, like I've always said, I'm crack proof. If the blue meanies...

Ew. I hate that that's, like, what he's claiming this is for. It's so gross. To go from boo-boos to blue meanies...

I'm like, you were calling them pigs at one point. Like, that's rude and, like, shitty. Now you're saying blue meanies? He feels like he has, like, and I'm by no means armchair diagnosing anybody. I'm just saying in these letters, it seems like there's different personalities coming through. No, I completely agree. Like, some of them are much, like, the one pleading for help. Yeah. Please stop. And then the next one is like, it's better than sex. And then there's one that's just like, my boo.

And then the other one's like, blue meanies, pigs. Like, it's just like, what? It's various different tones. It feels like there's very different people coming through here, but the same person. Yeah, there's some kind of like mood disorder. Something going on here. But after sending the letter to the LA Times, the Zodiac went quiet for almost three years until the Chronicle received what would prove to be the final communication from the Zodiac himself on January 29th, 1974. Wow.

In his latest communication postmarked from Santa Clara County, the Zodiac gave no indication of why he'd gone silent for such a long period of time, which is interesting and we'll touch on it later. But instead, he offered only three thoughts. He said, I saw and think The Exorcist was the best satirical comedy I've ever seen. Signed yours truly. He plunged himself into the billowy wave and echo aroused from the suicider's grove. Tit willow, tit willow, tit willow.

P.S. If I do not see the note in your paper, I will do something nasty, which you know I'm capable of doing. Wow. So now he's just like, I'll just do something. He's like, I'll do something nasty. You know I will. I'm like, is that where Beetlejuice got it? Oh, maybe. Is that where The Exorcist? And it gets funnier every time I've seen it. Maybe. Yeah.

Good call. As soon as I heard that, I was like, Beetlejuice? What? Oh, shit. That's creepy. Yeah. I hate that. Because, I mean, that's exactly what he says, essentially. It is. Yeah. Well, that makes him even scarier, Beetlejuice. I know. I'm like, oh, God. In small script on the bottom right corner of the page, he included me 37, SFPD 0, like San Francisco Police Department. So now he's claiming he's killed 37 people.

I mean, and at this point, though, too, it's like, who knows? He might have. Yeah. Additionally, the signature on the letter wasn't the actual recognizable crosshair symbol this time. A series of strange markings that looked like maybe Chinese or Japanese writing, but they've never been identified as any known language. Scary. Yeah.

What is probably the most noticeable and unusual about the final Zodiac letter isn't the missing signature, but the lack of any real substance. Because in the past, the letters sent by the killer were sent to claim one of his murders, to talk to police or...

you know, give the press some kind of fucking puzzle to solve. But here he just makes a snarky joke about The Exorcist, which had been released in theaters a couple months earlier. And then he just quotes line from the Rodgers and Hammerstein play, The Mikado, and makes what feels like we were just saying is like a pretty vague threat of violence just for the hell of it. Yeah, just to do it. Yeah. But the letter has been analyzed thoroughly and it is believed by law enforcement officials to be authentic. I wonder why. Like, what about that feels authentic? I don't know if it was like...

Maybe the blue felt pen or something. Maybe, because I'm like, are you guys sure? I know that one I'm not positive about, especially the fact that it didn't have the crosshair symbol. Well, that's what I'm like, this feels very Jack the Ripper-y where it's like, yeah, it's totally a real one. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about that. Well, and I don't know, I mean, like obviously handwriting analysis is a real thing, but it's also like a tricky science. Yeah, it can definitely be tricky. I don't know.

Interesting. Yeah.

So who the fuck was this guy? Yeah. We got to talk about it. We do. So obviously a lot of the Zodiac story is, you know, result of the media attention, the public fascination that surrounded the case. But at the same time, there's also a massive and very long ranging investigation there. There was that went on behind the scenes. Countless law enforcement officers from local cops to FBI all work together to try to stop him.

Their efforts obviously didn't make it into the endless stream of press coverage because there wasn't a lot to say beyond we don't really have much to go on, but we're trying. When you don't want to be like, here's what they're doing to catch him. Because he's just going to be like, cool. First, they started here. Then they went here.

And like we know, he had left some evidence behind at the crime scene and he provided some clues throughout everything that he was doing. But they never got any major, major breaks in the case. But there were actually at least 13 other murders where the Zodiac was briefly considered a suspect. It's just that they could never be confidently connected. He could never confidently be connected to the case. Which is what he wanted. Yep.

And while it's true that there were never any major breaks in the case, like I just said, there have been close to 2,500 suspects over the course of the case. That's horrible. Which is wild. That's pretty terrible. Yeah, over 2,500 in general, with at least a handful of them being considered by investigators to be serious. Wow. Yeah.

Last year, "Law & Crime" brought you the trial that captivated the nation. She's accused of hitting her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe, with her car. Karen Reid is arrested and charged with second-degree murder. The six-week trial resulted in anything but resolution. We continue to find ourselves at an impasse.

I'm declaring a mistrial in this case. But now the case is back in the spotlight. And one question still lingers. Did Karen Reid kill John O'Keefe? The evidence is overwhelming that Karen Reid is innocent. How does it feel to be a cop killer, Karen? I'm Kristen Thorne, investigative reporter with Law & Crime and host of the podcast, Karen, The Retrial.

This isn't just a retrial. It's a second chance at the truth. I have nothing to hide. My life is in the balance and it shouldn't be. I just want people to go back to who the victim is in this. It's not her. Listen to episodes of Karen, the retrial, exclusively and ad-free on Wondery Plus. But with a suspect list so long and one that includes a number of actually high-profile killers like Ted Kaczynski and Charles Manson...

It would be pretty impossible for us to sit here and go through every single suspect. Yeah. So we're going to get into the three most popular suspects. Just kidding. We're going to sit down and we're going to go through 2,500 of the suspects. Okay. Are you sitting down? Does anybody have to go to the bathroom? The next three years of Morbid is going to be just dedicated to suspects of the Zodiac. Okay. So today we're going to... Can you imagine? Yeah.

Alright, so the first one is Richard Gajkowski. When the Zodiac murders started, he was living in the San Francisco area. He had been living there for about six years. And he was working as the editor at the popular newspaper Good Times. Good Times. Good Times, man. He would have been within a short distance of two of the Zodiac crime scenes, which were the Lake Herman Road and the Blue Rock Springs attacks. He does bear a resemblance to the sketches of the Zodiac released in the press.

And all of the evidence against him is circumstantial, but some of it is pretty compelling. So when Mike Majoe gave his statement to the police after his attack, he mentioned that he had actually been chased by one of Darlene's former boyfriends just before they were assaulted that night. Huh. Yeah.

He said, I thought he drove off and drove away, but he came back later and shot us. So he really thought it was that person. And he does resemble the sketch. He does. He very much does. And Mike continued, she told me it was a friend of hers and he was just jealous. She mentioned his name and she referred to him as Richard.

And later, Darlene Farron's sister, Diane, claimed her sister did in fact have a former boyfriend named Richard who was a journalist. Oh. So those two things link up. Interesting. Now, another circumstantial piece of evidence. Nancy Slover, I think it is, a former police dispatcher who took the call from the Zodiac after the Farron murder, after Darlene's murder, said,

She listened to a tape of Gajkowski's voice in 2009, and she was very confident that it was the same voice she heard on the night of the murder. Interesting. She said, I listened to the voice of Richard, and I felt shock and deja vu. In my opinion, he was the same person I listened to in July of 1969. Wow. This one, this next one creeps me out. It will give you the chills.

Paul Stein, the young cab driver who was murdered, his sister claimed that a man resembling Gajkowski was at her brother's funeral, but she had no idea, like she had no way of knowing who he was at the time. Oh, shit. But then later when it was brought to her attention, she was like, oh, I saw somebody that looked just like that.

Well, and if you look at the police sketch, like look at the composite and you look at there's like a picture of Gajkowski where he's making the exact same face as the composite. Because in the composite, the like the one where the mouth is closed, he's doing almost like a little like, hmm. Like a smirk. Like a sneer. Yeah. Almost, but it's like very subtle. There's a picture where he's doing the same thing with his mouth. Hold on, I'm looking. And the eyebrows are very similar. Like they're that low set eyebrow.

And he's got the same glasses. He does have the same glasses. Even the hairline is the same. Yeah. And like the narrowness of the forehead. Yeah. Like the hairline and everything. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. Even the lips look very similar. Yeah, the lips and the way he does that little slight sneer with his lips. It's pretty compelling. It is pretty compelling. That picture is at least. It is. It is.

Well, in the last big piece of circumstantial evidence against him, a lot of his coworkers at good times found him to be pretty strange. And in 1971, they actually filed paperwork to have him involuntarily committed to the Napa State Mental Hospital. Whoa. And there he was diagnosed with an undisclosed mental illness. But that hospitalization would have coincided with the drop off in communication from the Zodiac in 1971. Wow.

Okay. And remember, when he came back, he didn't say shit all about where he had been, like when they got the next letter.

So that's interesting. That's a compelling one. That's interesting. He was investigated by the FBI after Darlene Ferren's murder, but told investigators that he was out of the country at the time, which effectively ruled him out as a suspect. But according to amateur investigator Tom Voight, Gajkowski had actually lost his passport just before the murders, so it wouldn't have been possible for him to leave the country. Oh my guys. Yeah. I love it.

This one seems like A-plus. It seems very compelling. And Voight alleges that the FBI never bothered to follow up on Gajkowski's alibi, but if they had, they wouldn't have ruled him out. Hey, FBI, what the fuck? Honestly. And after being released from the Napa State Hospital, Gajkowski went back to San Francisco where he just opened a small movie theater in a store and managed a few local punk bands. Whoa. Which is just wild. While also advocating for progressive political issues.

So maybe he did get some kind of treatment that helped him in the hospital and maybe, like obviously speculating here, but maybe received ongoing treatment that got him in check. But he did pass away in 2004. And at least one former co-worker has been very vocal about him being the Zodiac, but he's never been seriously investigated by law enforcement. That's wild. Yeah. That's wild. If anyone that you know, like if

If you think someone's the Zodiac, you know a wild ass person. Yeah, that's the thing. I can't imagine one of my friends being like, I think that you might be a notorious serial killer. Yeah, like if somebody thinks that, then like you've really done some stuff. Yeah.

You really showed your ass in that relationship. I love that phrase. I think that phrase is so funny. I mean, it is a perfect description. It is. Yeah. I think he's very compelling. I do too. But our next one is Gary Francis Post. In 2021, an independent group of retired investigators known as the Case Breakers, which I love. That's amazing. It reminds me of in Yellow Jackets. Yeah, that's funny.

I was thinking of, I almost said it. Like the web sleuths? Yes. Well, they identified Gary Francis Post as the man who was most likely to have been the Zodiac Killer. He was a former member of the U.S. Air Force, and he had a very long history of very violent behavior, including a history of domestic violence. He lived within a 15-minute drive of several crime scenes while the murders were taking place.

And like Richard Geikowski, the case against Post is built entirely on circumstantial evidence and has been refuted by the FBI. But he remains a popular suspect with the casebreakers and just people who enjoy true crime in general. According to the group casebreakers, photos showed Mr. Post with supposed scars on his forehead that they believed matched marks shown on a police sketch of the Zodiac Killer. And that's among a handful of facts related to physical evidence that they believe makes him a strong suspect.

Others include the fact that a size 10 military boot military style boot print was discovered at one of the crime scenes. And that was similar to the style of boots that he was known to have worn at the time. So that's interesting. OK. Also, a Timex watch band was discovered at one of the crime scenes, which investigators believe was purchased at a military base around the mid to late 60s, which is when he would have been in the military.

Perhaps maybe the most important, at least as far as the case breakers are concerned, is his supposed link to the murder of Sherry Jo Bates, an 18-year-old girl who was killed in Riverside in 1966. That fall, she started her first year at Riverside Community College, and the last time she was seen was when she was studying at the library on the night of October 30th.

Wow. Yeah.

At some point in the life of the Zodiac case, Sherry Jo Bates was considered actually to be one of the victims linked to the Zodiac. Oh. And the case breakers believed that Post was responsible for her death. Interesting. Given the link between her murder and the Zodiac and his history of violent behavior and enthusiasm for guns and military propaganda, they think he's the best suspect. Yeah.

Okay. But despite their enthusiasm, investigators on the Zodiac case completely reject their theory, and they ruled him out completely as a suspect. Huh. Yeah. In 2021, a spokesperson for the Riverside Police said, in 2016, investigators received an anonymous letter from a person admitting the handwritten letter sent to our department months after Sherry Jo Bates was murdered was written as a sick joke and that he was not the Zodiac killer. That's fucked up. That's not any kind of joke. That's ridiculous. No.

Riverside police officer Ryan Railsback went a step further when he told ABC News, So he was like, it's not this guy. We looked at him. That one doesn't compel me any further. No, I feel the same way.

So the FBI and the Riverside police and me and Elena might have ruled Gary Post out as a Zodiac suspect, but the case breakers remain committed to their belief that he is the guy. In an interview with Post's former neighbor, referred only to as Gwenny, the woman told the reporters he, meaning Gary, lived a double life. As I'm an adult thinking back, it all kind of makes sense now. At the time when I was a teenager, I didn't put two and two together until I got older. It hit me full blown that Gary's the Zodiac.

I, one of my, this case is so wild because it's so different from any other case where people just confidently indict people to be the Zodiac. It's like that guy over there. In this case, they're literally like, yeah, it just fucking hit me like a ton of bricks that, um.

Gary over there is the Zodiac. And it's just like, you literally can't say that. You can't do that. That is quite an indictment, ma'am. You just can't. Like, that's like, my neighbor's annoying. The Zodiac. The Zodiac. It's just like...

And just to be like, I never thought about it before, but now that the case breaker said it, Zodiac. Tap, tap. Period. That guy's the Zodiac. And it's just like, you literally can't do that. That's lawless. But it's just, this is the only, this is the case that that really happens so often and has happened for decades. For decades, people have not just been like, oh, I think...

This person should be looked at as the Zodiac. People are like, that is the Zodiac killer. Definitively. That man right there is the Zodiac killer. It's wild. It's...

fascinating to watch it is it's also scary it's very scary humans do crazy shit we're wildin well this next one and last one that we'll talk about is also very interesting the uh geikowski suspect is so far he's my guy he's strong post not so much this one back to strong okay this is arthur lee allen

So Gajkowski and Post may top the list of amateur investigators, but as far as the members of the actual Zodiac Task Force were concerned, the most compelling suspect and the only person to ever be publicly identified by investigators was former elementary school teacher Arthur Lee Allen.

I hate that. Yeah, I hate that he was an elementary school teacher. Yeah, I hate that a lot. He served in the U.S. Navy and he was honorably discharged in 1959. And two years later, in 1961, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, found work as a teacher, until he was fired in 1968 when a student made accusations of sexual misconduct.

Oh. Weirdly, he was generally well-liked, but a lot of people in later years did find him to be strange. Okay. And later, friends and neighbors would find similarities between the things that the Zodiac wrote in letters and comments made by Alan over the years. Just like the way he spoke and certain things he would say.

It should also be said that Allen was the number one suspect for the lead detective on the case, who was Dave Toshi, and also a former San Francisco Chronicle writer, Robert Graysmith, who covered the case extensively for the paper. He also believed that this was like the number one guy. In a 2007 interview, Graysmith said, Dave and George Bayward of the Vallejo Police, they're convinced the Zodiac is Arthur Lee Allen.

And Graysmith and others who believe that Alan was the killer are not just speculating. They do cite some pretty compelling evidence.

On the day of the attack at Lake Berryessa, Arthur Lee Allen was known to be only one of nine people to visit the lake that day. Wow. That's compelling. Yeah. Also on that same day, a Vallejo police officer pulled him over for speeding that afternoon, like the same day as the attack at the lake. And when the officer looked in the back of Allen's car, he discovered a bloody hunting knife, which Allen said he used to kill chickens. Oh.

Oh. Yup. Before the killing started, Allen frequently bragged to his friends that he was, quote, going to hunt couples at night, send letters to the press, and call himself Zodiac before any of this happened. I mean, whoa. Allen's co-worker, Don Chaney, told police about these statements and voluntarily took and passed a polygraph. Wow. Yeah.

In 1971, Cheney reported Allen to the police after he made several alarming statements indicating a, quote, desire to commit violence, some of which, like, some of the things he was saying were similar to statements made in the Zodiac letters. He said, quote, that phrase about picking the little darlings off, I remembered that, and that's what forced me to go to the police. Wow, this is compelling. Compelling, right? Yeah.

After their interview with Chaney in 1971, police actually interviewed Allen a number of times and they searched his home where they discovered hunting knives inside as well as a freezer of dead hamsters, squirrels, and birds. Dead hamsters? I don't know, man. But yeah.

And in 1991, they searched his home again, and this time they found, quote, some writings, some pipe bombs, and some illegal weapons. Oh. Yeah. Vallejo Police Captain Roy Conway told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1992, none of it was sufficient to make an arrest for him being the Zodiac. Huh. Yeah.

Now, in 2002, DNA and fingerprint analysis was conducted comparing Alan's DNA and fingerprints to those found on the Zodiac letters, and they were not a match, which ruled him out as a suspect. But I don't know.

I don't know. This one's weird. Yeah. Despite that finding, in 2018, Vallejo police detective Terry Poser told reporters, Guys. Yeah.

Now, in 2004, the case was officially made inactive by higher-ups at the San Francisco Police Department. They explained that their caseload required them to just set aside some older unsolved cases. It makes sense. But in 2007, the case was reopened when investigators wanted to do additional DNA testing. And in 2018, after the capture of Joseph James D.

James D'Angelo, the Golden State Killer, using familiar DNA testing. Another profile was put together actually using the DNA from samples from the Zodiac letters, but the results were inconclusive. Of course they were. Yeah. But as of now, the case does remain open with the FBI. Holy shit. And that is the infamous Zodiac case. I... Gajkowski is still my... is the one that hits...

Gajkowski hits really, really hard. Yeah. He's up there. Especially the fact that he was like involuntarily put in a hospital. And it lines up with the timing. Because there is some mental illness in that, in those letters. Absolutely. Very evident. The number one thing for me, or the number, like tied for number one pieces of evidence against Arthur Lee Allen are the fact that he was at Lake Berryessa that day. And only one of nine people. Yeah.

And then the fact that he got pulled over that afternoon and had a bloody hunting knife. Yeah, that's pretty wild. Like... He doesn't look like the sketch. I know. And well, in Richard Gajkowski, like... He literally looks identical to him. He looks exactly like the sketch. Not that I'm just going off the sketch. No, you can't just go off that. But when you go, when you have all those other circumstantial pieces of evidence that we talked about, and then he looks like the sketch. Then he also looks exactly like it. It's like, hmm. Yeah. That's...

That is interesting. It's so interesting, too. Like, it's so weird because you hear, like, Zodiac, and in your mind you're like, he killed, like, so many people. Yeah. But there's only, and it's awful, but there's only five that are confirmed. You just wonder how many people he actually killed. Yeah, because he claimed, like, somewhere in the 30s. Yeah, I think it ended up being, like, 37, something like that. And it's like...

How many people weren't connected? That's the thing. And again, like, the police came out and said themselves there were cases that were considered, but they just couldn't conclusively rank them. It's just, like, scary. Yeah. Freaks you out. Yeah. It's a very wild, very interesting case. I feel like they can solve it, though. I mean, they solved the Golden State Killer case after how many years? Nope. Like, you always say, a cold case is never cold. Never cold. Yeah. Just gotta warm it up a little. Just thaw it out. Yeah. You know.

So thaw that out, guys. Yeah. And we hope you keep listening. We hope you keep it weird. But not to worry that we don't solve the Zodiac Killer case because can you fucking imagine if that's solved within our lifetimes? Let's go. It'd be crazy. Let's do it. Oh, goodness. Oh, goodness.

If you like Morbid, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst turned spy novelist. And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist. And together we're the hosts of The Rest is Classified, where we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies. This week, we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden and how he orchestrated the

biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American and British history. Snowden revealed that the American government was mass collecting data on its own citizens, and it was really the first time that Americans and so many others around the world understood the extent of the US government's mass surveillance. That's right, it's a story I covered at the time, and it also really gets to wider questions about what

privacy means, how technology has changed our lives, and what the government and companies can do with data we might have thought was private. And we'll take you through the whole story from Snowden's early career in the CIA and the NSA to his life in exile in Russia. So to hear more, search for The Rest is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.