Zodiac Killer Essay

Joe Neithardt
12/7/16
Introduction to Cryptology
Dr. Bready
The Zodiac Killer
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a string of mysterious murders shook the area of northern California and baffled both local and federal law enforcement for ensuing decades. The killings were carried out by an individual who began calling himself the “Zodiac” in a taunting letter to law enforcement after one of his killings. To this day, the case of the Zodiac is still unsolved and many are still attempting to figure out who the infamous perpetrator was.
There were a total of five confirmed murders with the possibility of up to an additional thirty two victims. The first two victims were a young couple, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, who were gunned down in a lover’s lane on Lake Herman Road in the city of Benicia, on December 20th,

1968. The bodies of both victims were found in a timely manner according to law enforcement but there no leads as to who would commit such a horrendous act. The next attack would not occur for nearly seven months.
On July 4th, 1969, in the Blue Rocks Spring Park in the city of Vallejo, another young couple, Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin, were gunned down in their car and left to be found by authorities. Mageau survived but Ferrin succumbed to her wounds and was later pronounced dead. While this incident occurred only about four miles from the Lake Herman Road attack, the police had no attainable leads until the following day when a man called the Vallejo Police Department and confessed to the murders of Faraday, Jensen, and Ferrin before disconnecting the call and completely disappearing.
Less than a month later on August 1st, The San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, and Vallejo Times Herald each received a letter containing strange symbols. The letters were each a third of a much larger cipher that would be solved exactly one week later by two schoolteachers. The day before the cipher was solved, the San Francisco Examiner received a letter containing explicit details about the previous attacks that only law enforcement would know for certain. It was in this letter that the killer had formally referred to himself as the Zodiac.
The two schoolteachers who deciphered the message, Donald and Bettye Harden, used a system of frequency analysis and guess-and-check to eventually uncover a message detailing the Zodiac’s love of killing and his desire to collect slaves for some afterlife type purpose. The entire cipher was four hundred and eight characters long and used a total of fifty four different symbols to represent the various letters of the English alphabet. The deciphered message was rife with misspelled words that Polito (2014) has described as being “Socratically satirical” in that they appear to make him sound unintelligent when in reality they were actually clever distractions (p. 2).
Roughly one month later on September 27th, 1969, another young couple, Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard fell victim to the Zodiac at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Both victims were hogtied, stabbed with a hunter’s type knife, and left to die. Fortunately, Hartnell survived his wounds and would go on to provide details about the Zodiac, who was wearing an elaborate costume that included a large knife which was strapped to his body. Again, the Zodiac would wait almost a whole month before picking his next target, the taxi driver Paul Stine.
Stine was a fairly young taxicab driver who picked up a fare on the night of October 11th, 1969, and was shot through the back of head with a nine millimeter handgun when he had brought that fare to the designated location. Nearby teenagers observed the aftermath which included the killer stealing from the Stine’s body and wiping any and all prints from the car. Initially, law enforcement did not believe this to be the work of the Zodiac because Paul Stine was by himself and not with a female. Up until that point, Zodiac had a habit of targeting couples in isolated areas like lovers lanes.
Three days later, the San Francisco Chronicle received another Zodiac letter but this time there was a swatch of Stine’s bloodied shirt as proof of Zodiac’s involvement in this murder. In one of the ensuing letters that was received on November 9th of that year, Zodiac specifically admitted that he was in the immediate area on the night of Stine’s murder and that two policemen had stopped to take note of him standing in a dark area but did not make him come into the light to be interviewed. Interestingly enough, an all-points-bulletin (APB) was put out over the police radio that specifically stated that the suspect was a black male. The man standing in the dark area that night, the Zodiac killer himself, was a white male. The APB was corrected later that night and those two police officers would eventually report their observations and help to form the first composite sketch of the Zodiac.
Graysmith (1986), who at the time was doing his own private investigation into the case of the Zodiac, took particular interest in the incorrect APB and criticized the San Francisco Police Department for indirectly preventing the capture of the notorious serial killer. To this day it is still widely believed that if that APB had been correct in the first place, the Zodiac would have been caught that night and his reign of terror would have been formally ended. Unfortunately, the Zodiac would continue to be a nuisance to authorities for another two years before finally going silent for about three years. During those two years, Zodiac sent numerous taunting letters to law enforcement as well as two ciphers, which have yet to be solved even to this very day.
The final authentic Zodiac letter was received on January 29th, 1974, in which he provided a cursory movie review and a total tally of his alleged kill count. There were suspicious letters after the January 29th letter, but they could not be verified as the handwriting did not match the handwriting of previous letters. Law enforcement had been actively investigating the Zodiac case for as long as they knew about him but were unable to come up with enough evidence to convict a single person.
Graysmith (1986) brought forward all relevant information that he had been gathering since the first Zodiac letter to suggest that a man, whom he referred to as Robert Hall Starr, was the actual Zodiac. Starr was described as being anti-social and having a deep distaste for women which would manifest in aggravated violence against his female victims. The fact that Starr owned a Zodiac brand watch, used a typewriter which matched the type that was used for several of the letters, and allegedly told one of his friends that he would go out and kill young couples and then call himself the Zodiac were heavily emphasized.
Later, Graysmith (2002) formally confirmed that Robert Hall Starr was simply an alias for the man named Arthur Leigh Allen, a convicted child molester and favorite suspect of numerous police departments.

Graysmith provided additional details that would suggest that Allen was indeed the Zodiac such as his excessive collection of Zodiac paraphernalia and recipes for bombs that matched the recipe that was sent to one of the newspapers in 1969. The problem with all of the evidence present was that it was entirely circumstantial. There was no smoking gun that could definitively put Allen away.
In 1991, Michael Mageau was contacted by law enforcement to speak about the July 4th attack and to identify the Zodiac from a picture lineup. Interestingly enough, Mageau, who was attacked roughly twenty years earlier, picked Allen out of that lineup within thirty seconds (p. 322). Allen unfortunately died of natural causes about a year later before the police could formally prosecute him and officially close the Zodiac case once and for all. To this day, Allen is considered by many to be the best and only relevant suspect in the case of the Zodiac

killer.

References
Graysmith, R. (1987). Zodiac. New York: Berkley Books.
Graysmith, R. (2002). Zodiac: Unmasked. New York: Berkley Books.
Moore, J. (2016, March 17). More Evidence Ted Cruz Might Be the Zodiac Killer. GQ Magazine.
Polito, T. (2014, August 9). Final Eighteen Letters of the Zodiac Killer’s 408 Cipher Solved ... and his Identity Revealed.
Voigt, T. (1998, December 5). Zodiac Killer. Retrieved from ZodiacKiller.com: http://www.zodiackiller.com/