Zodiac Killer

What the record shows

The Zodiac Killer is the unidentified person responsible for a series of attacks in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. Five people were killed and two survived in four attacks in Benicia, Vallejo, Napa County and San Francisco. The attacker wrote to Bay Area newspapers under the name Zodiac, enclosed coded messages, and in a January 1974 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle claimed 37 victims. No one has ever been charged. The FBI's San Francisco field office said in December 2020 that the case remains an ongoing investigation, and the Wikipedia article records that the City of Vallejo and the Napa and Solano county sheriffs also list it as open.

The first confirmed attack came on December 20, 1968, when David Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, were shot with a .22-caliber pistol beside Lake Herman Road near Benicia. Shortly after midnight on July 5, 1969, Darlene Ferrin, 22, and Michael Mageau, 19, were shot in a parked car at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo; Ferrin died and Mageau survived. According to the Wikipedia article, a man then telephoned Vallejo police to report the shooting and claim the Lake Herman Road murders.

On August 1, 1969, three letters arrived at the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner, each carrying a third of a 408-character cipher. A Salinas couple, Donald and Bettye Harden, solved it within days; it contained no name. On September 27, 1969, a hooded man stabbed Bryan Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Shepard, 22, at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Hartnell survived and Shepard died two days later. On October 11, 1969, cab driver Paul Stine, 29, was shot in Presidio Heights, San Francisco, the last killing conclusively linked to the series. A letter to the Chronicle afterward enclosed a piece of Stine's shirt, and a 340-character cipher followed on November 8, 1969.

Inspectors Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi led the San Francisco investigation, while Vallejo police and the Napa and Solano county sheriffs handled the other attacks. Letters claiming to be from Zodiac continued into 1974, including the Chronicle letter of January 29, 1974 that ends "Me - 37, SFPD - 0," as transcribed on Wikisource. Police never confirmed any killings beyond the five.

The only person publicly named by police was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former schoolteacher from Vallejo. A Vallejo police captain named him as that department's suspect, according to a CNN interview with San Francisco inspector Kelly Carroll in October 2002. Vallejo police interviewed Allen in 1971 and served a search warrant on his home in February 1991, according to the Wikipedia article on Allen. He denied involvement, was never charged, and died on August 26, 1992. In October 2002, ABC News reported that SFPD crime lab supervisor Cydne Holt had recovered a partial DNA profile from a stamp on the envelope of the November 8, 1969 card, and that Allen's DNA did not match. Carroll told CNN the result "effectively clears him." The partial profile was too limited to identify anyone.

The San Francisco Police Department marked the case inactive in April 2004 and reactivated it in March 2007. In 2018, Vallejo police attempted investigative genetic genealogy on letter envelopes without definitive results, according to the Wikipedia article. On December 5, 2020, the 340 cipher was solved by David Oranchak of the United States, Sam Blake of Australia and Jarl Van Eycke of Belgium. The FBI confirmed the solution and said, as reported by KTVU and Global News, that the case "remains an ongoing investigation for the FBI San Francisco division and our local law enforcement partners." The decoded message, which begins "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me," does not name the writer. Two shorter ciphers from 1970 remain unsolved.

Because the Zodiac has never been identified, nothing is known of the person's background. Other cases have been linked to the series, including the 1966 murder of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside and the 1970 abduction of Kathleen Johns near Patterson, but none has been confirmed by police. Several groups have announced identifications over the decades; none has been accepted by any investigating agency.