Bryan Hartnell & Cecelia Shepard

Case background and investigation

On the afternoon of Saturday, September 27, 1969, Bryan Calvin Hartnell, a 20-year-old student at Pacific Union College, and his friend Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22, drove to Lake Berryessa in Napa County, California. They settled on a quiet stretch of shoreline, a small peninsula reached by a sand spit.

In the early evening a man approached them. According to accounts based on Hartnell's statements, he wore a black executioner-style hood with clip-on sunglasses and a white crossed-circle emblem on the front of his costume, and he carried a gun and a long knife. The man said he was an escaped prisoner and indicated that he meant to rob them. The two were bound with lengths of white plastic clothesline.

Instead of leaving, he stabbed both of them. Hartnell was stabbed six times in the back and Shepard ten times. The attacker then walked back to the road, where Hartnell's white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia was parked, and wrote on the door with a marker: a crossed circle, the word Vallejo, the dates 12-20-68 and 7-4-69, which correspond to two earlier shootings, and the line 'Sept 27-69-6:30 by knife.'

At 7:40 p.m. a man telephoned the Napa Police Department from a pay phone in downtown Napa. According to published transcripts of the call, he said he wanted to report a double murder, gave the location and a description of the car, and said he was the one who had done it. The call was traced to the phone booth, where prints were recovered. Emergency help reached the lakeshore that evening, and both victims were taken to Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa.

Shepard lapsed into a coma and died on September 29, 1969. Hartnell recovered and gave detectives a detailed statement. Footprints at the scene indicated a heavy man wearing size 10 1/2 boots. The Napa County Sheriff's Office led the investigation, with Detective Sergeant Kenneth Narlow in charge.

The attack is counted among the confirmed crimes of the Zodiac, who in a letter of October 13, 1969 claimed the killing of a San Francisco cab driver and who continued to write to newspapers. No one has been charged in any of the attacks. According to Wikipedia's summary, the case remains open with agencies including the Napa County Sheriff's Office, the California Department of Justice and the FBI.