the ammunition used and left no doubt that he was the gunman. Each letter also contained a third of a sheet of paper covered with a strange code. The killer demanded that the papers print this on the front page otherwise, the writer said, he would go on “killing lone people in the night”. The letter was signed with another cipher—a circle with a cross inside it which looked ominously like a gunsight. All three newspapers complied and the full text of the coded message was sent to Mare Island Naval Yard where cryptographers tried to crack it. Although it was a simple substitution code, the US Navy’s experts could not break it. But Dale Harden, a teacher at Alisal High School, Salinas, could. He had the simple idea of looking for a group of ciphers that might spell the word “kill”. He found them and, after ten hours’ intense work, he and his wife decoded the whole of the message.
It read: “I like killing people because it is so much more fun than killing wild game in the forrest [sic] because man is the most dangerous of all to kill…” The killer went on to boast that he had already murdered five people in the San Francisco Bay area. He said that when he was born again in paradise, his victims would be his slaves.
The killer’s cryptic message brought with it a tidal wave of information from the public. Over a thousand calls were received by the police. None of them led anywhere. So the killer volunteered more help. This time he gave them a name—or, at least, a nickname that would attract the attention of the headline writers. He wrote again to the newspapers, beginning: “DEAR EDITOR, THIS IS ZODIAC SPEAKING…” Again he gave details of the slaying of Darlene Ferrin that only the killer could have known. But although this increased the killer’s publicity profile, the police were no nearer to catching him.
On 27 September 1969, 20-year-old Bryan Hartnell and 22-year-old Cecelia Ann Shepard—both students at the Seventh Day Adventist’s Pacific Union College nearby—went for a picnic on the shores of Lake Berryessa, some 13 miles north of Vallejo. It was a warm day. They had finished eating and were lying on a blanket kissing at around 4.30 p.m. when they noticed a man coming across the clearing towards them. He was stocky and had brown hair. He disappeared for a moment into a copse. When he emerged he was wearing a mask and carrying a gun. As he came closer, Bryan Hartnell saw that the mask had a symbol on it. It was a circle with a white cross in it. The man was not particularly threatening in his manner. His voice was soft.
“I want your money and your car keys,” he said.
Bryan Hartnell explained that he only had 76 cents, but the hooded man was welcome to that. The gunman then began to chat. He explained that he was an escaped convict and that he was going to have to tie them up. He had some clothes-line with him and got Cecelia to tie up Bryan. Then he tied Cecelia up himself.
The gunman talked some more then calmly announced: “I am going to have to stab you people.”
Bryan Hartnell begged to be stabbed first.
“I couldn’t bear to see her stabbed,” he said.
The gunman calmly agreed, sank to his knees and stabbed Hartnell in the back repeatedly with a hunting knife. Hartnell was dizzy and sick, but still conscious when the masked man turned his attention to Cecelia. He was calm at first, but after the first stab he seemed to go berserk. He plunged the hunting knife into her defenceless body again and again, while she twisted and turned frantically under him in a futile attempt to escape the blows. When she finally lay still, the man grew calm again. He got up and walked over to their car. He pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and drew something on the door. Then he walked away.
A fisherman heard their screams and came running. Bryan and Cecelia were both still alive. The Napa Valley Police were already on their way, alerted by an anonymous phone call. A gruff man’s voice had said: “I want to report a double murder.”
He gave a precise location for where the bodies were to be found, then left the phone hanging.
Cecelia Shepard was in a coma when the police arrived. She died two days later in hospital without regaining consciousness. Bryan Hartnell recovered slowly and was able to give a full description of their attacker. But the police had already guessed who he was. The sign he had drawn on the door of their car was a circle with a cross in it. The police found the phone that the man with the gruff voice had left hanging. It was in a call box less than six blocks from the headquarters of the Napa Valley Police Department. And there managed to get three good fingerprints off it. Unfortunately, there was no match on record.
Two weeks after the stabbing, on 11 October 1969, a 14-year-old girl was looking out of the window of her home in San Francisco and witnessed a crime in progress. A cab was parked on the corner of Washington and Cherry Streets and a stocky man, in the front passenger seat, was going through the pockets of the driver. She called her brothers over to watch what was happening. The man got out of the taxi, leaving the cab driver slumped across the seat. He wiped the door handle with a piece of cloth, then walked off in a northerly direction. The children called the police, but they did not give their evidence clearly enough. The telephone operator who took the call, logged at 10 p.m., noted that the suspect was an “NMA”—negro male adult. An all-points bulletin was put out and a patrolman actually stopped a stocky man nearby and asked whether he had seen anything unusual. But as he was white, the police officer let him go.
Later a stocky man was seen running into the nearby Presidio—a military compound that contains housing and a park area. The floodlights were switched on and the area was searched by patrolmen with dogs. In the cab, the police found the taxi-driver, 29-year-old Paul Stine, dead from a gunshot wound to the head. The motive, they thought, was robbery.
Then, three days later, the
THIS IS THE ZODIAC SPEAKING. I AM THE MURDERER OF THE TAXI DRIVER OVER BY WASHINGTON ST AND MAPLE ST [sic] LAST NIGHT, TO PROVE IT HERE IS A BLOOD STAINED PIECE OF HIS SHIRT.
San Francisco criminologists managed to match the piece of cloth in the letter exactly with the shirt of the murdered taxi driver. The bullet that had killed Stine was a. 22 and fired from the same gun that had been used in the murder of Bettilou Jensen and David Faraday.
The letter went on to say:
I AM THE SAME MAN WHO DID IN THE PEOPLE IN THE NORTH BAY AREA.
THE S.F. POLICE COULD HAVE CAUGHT ME LAST NIGHT,
it taunted, concluding,
SCHOOL CHILDREN MAKE NICE TARGETS. I THINK I SHALL WIPE OUT A SCHOOL BUS SOME MORNING. JUST SHOOT OUT THE TYRES AND THEN PICK OFF ALL THE KIDDIES AS THEY COME BOUNCING OUT.
The letter was signed with a circle with a cross in it.
The description given by the children and the policeman who had stopped a stocky white male leaving the scene of the crime matched those given by Darlene Ferrin’s babysitter, Mike Mageau and Bryan Hartnell. A new composite of the Zodiac killer was drawn up and issued to the public by San Francisco Chief of Police Thomas J. Cahill. It showed a white male, 35 to 45 years old with short brown hair, possibly with a red tint. He was around five feet eight inches tall, heavily built and wore glasses. The wanted poster was plastered around town.
But the Zodiac killer’s appetite for publicity seems to have been endless. At 2 a.m. on 22 October 1969, 11 days after the murder of Paul Stine, a man with a gruff voice called the police department in Oakland, which is just across the bay from San Francisco. He introduced himself as the Zodiac and said: “I want to get in touch with F. Lee Bailey. If you can’t come up with Bailey, I’ll settle for Mel Belli. I want one or other of them to appear on the Channel 7 talk show. I’ll make contact by telephone.”
The men he was asking for were the two top criminal lawyers in America. F. Lee Bailey has been seen more recently defending O.J. Simpson. But he was not available on such short notice and Melvin Belli agreed to appear on the Jim Dunbar talk show at 6.30 the next morning. The show’s ratings soared as people throughout the Bay area got up the next morning and tuned in. At around 7.20 a man called in and told Belli that he was the Zodiac, though he preferred to be called Sam. He said: “I’m sick. I have headaches.”
But the two police switchboard operators who talked to the Zodiac when he reported the murders said his voice was that of an older man. The mystery caller was eventually traced to Napa State Hospital and proved to be a mental patient.
