Paul Stine

Case background and investigation

Paul Lee Stine was 29 years old, a doctoral student who drove a taxi in San Francisco to support himself and his wife, according to Wikipedia's articles on Stine and on the Zodiac case. On the evening of Saturday, October 11, 1969, he picked up a passenger downtown. Case researchers at ZodiacKillerFacts.com and ZodiacKiller.com place the pickup near Mason and Geary streets, with a stated destination of Washington and Maple streets in the Presidio Heights neighborhood.

The cab stopped one block farther west, at Washington and Cherry streets. At about 9:55 p.m. the passenger shot Stine once in the head with a handgun, which ZodiacKiller.com describes as a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. The passenger took Stine's wallet and car keys and tore away a large section of his shirt. Three teenagers in a house across the street watched the man handle the driver's body and wipe down parts of the cab, and they called the San Francisco Police Department.

According to Wikipedia's account, the description broadcast to officers mistakenly identified the suspect as a Black man, although the witnesses had described a husky white man. Two patrol officers responding to the call passed a white man in dark clothing walking toward the Presidio and did not detain him. The teenagers later helped police prepare a composite sketch, and a revised version drew on the recollections of the patrol officers. Investigators also recovered partial fingerprints from the cab that they believed had been left by the killer's right hand.

The shooting was first treated as a robbery that ended in murder. That changed after October 13, 1969, when a letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in which the writer, calling himself the Zodiac, claimed responsibility and enclosed a piece of Stine's bloodstained shirt as proof. The same letter threatened an attack on a school bus. The killing was thereby linked to the series of earlier attacks in the San Francisco Bay Area that had begun in December 1968.

Inspectors Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi led the San Francisco investigation. Toschi worked the case for years and was removed from it in 1978, according to Wikipedia. In 2002 a partial DNA profile was developed from material beneath a stamp on one of the Zodiac letters; as the law-enforcement publication Police1 notes, a partial profile can help include or exclude a suspect but cannot by itself identify a person, and it is not certain that the material came from the killer.

Police1 describes Stine's death as the last murder definitively attributed to the Zodiac. No one has been charged in his death or in any of the other Zodiac attacks, and the case remains open. No arrest, charge or official identification was found in sources checked through September 2026.