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The Zodiac Killer was the nickname of a serial killer, who found his victims in and around San Francisco, California in the late 1960s. His identity remains unknown. He first came to police attention following the apparently random killing of Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on December 20, 1968 near Vallejo, California. This double homicide was followed by the murder of Darlene Ferrin and near-fatal shooting of Michael Mageau in the early morning hours of July 5, 1969 also near Vallejo. Within hours, an anonymous man called police and claimed he was the person responsible for both crimes. A masked man on September 27 stabbed Bryan Hartnell and Cecila Shepherd on the shores of Lake Beryessa, then wrote a message on Hartnell's car door referring to the two earlier killings. On October 11 of the same year, Paul Stine was killed with a gun while driving a taxi cab on a San Francisco street.
Between the attacks, on July 31, three area newspapers received an anonymous letter from the man responsible for these attacks, which included details that police had not released. The writer demanded that the newspapers publish a three-part cipher on the front page of their newspapers, which he had enclosed in his letters. Although professional codebreakers failed to decrypt this message, a pair of amateurs-- Donald Gene Harden, a high school teacher from north Salinas, and his wife-- succeeded in reading the message, which had been encrypted in a homophonic cipher.
The Vallejo Times-Herald, suspicious that these letters had come from a hoaxer, asked for more unpublicized details on the first two murders, to which the serial killer responded on August 7 with a letter beginning "This is the Zodiac speaking", and supplying the details. He began all of his further letters with this phrase, and referred to himself either by that name, or with a symbol created from a circle with a cross drawn over it.
Two days after Stine's murder, the Zodiac killer sent a letter to the San Francisco Examiner with a piece of Stine's blood-stained shirt, addressed with only the paper's name and the note "Please rush to editor". The Examiner received a greeting card and another cipher from the Zodiac Killer, with a statement that appeared to mean he had killed seven people previousl. He made this claim clear in a seven-page diatribe that arrived the next day, and which included threats of killing people with a bomb, and of killing a school bus full of children. As a result of this threat, and its repetition in later letters, school busses were staffed with armed guards for several months.
An anonymous tip led police to an earlier murder by the Zodiac Killer, that of Cheri Jo Bates on the Riverside Community College campus around midnight on October 30, 1966 (about 60 miles outside of Los Angeles). Research in the investigator's files uncovered four different letters sent to the police, a local newspaper, and Bates' father by the killer, as well as a poem carved into a library desktop with a ballpoint pen. In response to news reports about the earlier death, the Los Angeles Times received a letter from the Zodiac Killer acknowledging he had killed Bates, while at the same time claiming he had killed 17 people.
The hallmark of this case were the letters, 21 in all, that the Zodiac Killer sent as late as April 24, 1978. Written in a distinctive print handwriting with misspellings, they taunted the San Francisco Police Department to catch him, sometimes offering clues as to where he had buried his victims, or to his identity. Many were signed with the symbol created from a circle and cross. The total number of the Zodiac Killer's victims is not known. Robert Graysmith lists 49 names in his book, including the eight definite victims.
Robert Graysmith's books have been far and away the most popular of the books written about Zodiac. Graysmith professes that the killer was one Arthur Lee Allen who passed away in 1992. Allen denied his guilt in interviews but there was much circumstantial evidence against him. Michael Mageau, the only person ever to get a glimpse of the killer's face, said that Allen was the man who shot him. On the day of the lake attacks on Hartnell and Shepherd, Allen told his family he was going scuba diving. They said he came home with blood on his clothes and a bloody knife in the backseat of his car. Allen had told several people before the murders that he was going to kill "a bunch of people" and call himself the Zodiac. Police found dead animals and clippings of the Zodiac crimes in Allen's home. However, modern DNA and fingerprint analysis of the letters could not definitively match Allen, so the case remains open. And most Zodiac sleuths agree that even if Allen wasn't the Zodiac Killer, he certainly makes for an interesting subject. |
Zodiac
By Robert Graysmith
"SHE WAS YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL BUT NOW SHE IS BATTERED AND DEAD. SHE IS NOT THE FIRST AND SHE WILL NOT BE THE LAST." Few cases in the history of true crime are as colorful and intriguing as that of Zodiac, the bizarre gunman in an executioner's hood who hunted the streets of San Francisco in the late 1960s and sent dozens of taunting letters to the police. Robert Graysmith provides ample details about the police investigation, including the full text and photos of most of the letters. Zodiac is an excellent starting point not only for the casual reader, but also for those interested in retracing the author's steps in order to pursue their own ideas about who the killer may have been. This book has been praised by the San Francisco Chronicle, the very paper in which the Zodiac's eerie messages and cryptograms were published: "Graysmith's taut narrative brings the horror back with jolt upon jolt."
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Zodiac Unmasked:
The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killer Revealed
By Robert Graysmith
Graysmith was employed at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1968, when the serial killer known as Zodiac began methodically brutalizing and murdering random victims across California. Zodiac, who was something of an egomaniac, communicated with authorities via the Chronicle. In addition to gloating over the inability of law enforcement to capture him, he would often describe how he intended to kill his next victim or would recount in chilling detail the last moments of someone he had savagely slain. At least 37 gruesome murders were attributed to him in the state of California; however, competing investigations (because the murders happened in several different counties) and other mishaps led to his consistent evasion of authorities. In this excellent study of the case, Graysmith provides never-before-published photos, a complete reproduction of the Zodiac letters, and a scary and disturbing account of pure evil. Libraries with a readership interested in true-crime tales will definitely want to stock up on this probable best-seller from the author of the widely read Zodiac (1986), which was his first book on the subject. Now readers can learn all that he has learned in investigating the case further, including the chief suspect.
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"This Is the Zodiac Speaking":
Into the Mind of a Serial Killer
By Michael D. Kelleher, David Van Nuys
Over 30 years later, the Zodiac killings remain unsolved. The authors analyze the Zodiac's crimes and supply psychological insight to his letters providing a glimpse into the mind of a mysterious murderer. This joint venture with David Van Nuys, Ph.D. is a must-have for any serious researcher. The book paints a picture of an exceptionally cold-hearted killer whose propensity for violence was surpassed only by his incredible ability to play the media and to constantly adapt and evolve, a tactic that allowed him to stay several steps ahead of the police at all times. The authors stick to the known facts of the case and don't repeat the glaring mistakes that other authors and researchers have made in this case (such as focusing on a single suspect or claiming to have "solved" the Zodiac murders). Scholarly, well-written and highly recommended!
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Suspect Zero
By Michael D. Kelleher
In the late sixties, a serial killer calling himself the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area, committing brutal, random attacks, and bragging about them in letters to the San Francisco Chronicle. In Santa Rosa, fifty miles to the north, investigators Manny Bruin and Mick Millian were asked to tail potential suspect Byron Avion, an odd, portly man admittedly obsessed with the Zodiac. He had other eccentricities as well, not the least of which was his large collection of cardboard boxes, carefully stacked and tied shut with white nylon rope. But peculiar habits do not a criminal make – that is, not until the bodies of young female hitchhikers began appearing in ditches, tied up with white nylon rope. That and a dozen other connections convinced Bruin and Millian that Avion was the Highway 101 Murderer, a Zodiac-style killer who prowled the Santa Rosa area. Despite the connections, a decade-long investigation was unable to connect Avion to the crimes, or connect Zodiac to the northern murders. Bruin and Millian eventually became so frustrated that they dubbed Avion "Suspect Zero," and hoped for something to break the case open. When that break finally came, it re-wrote the book on homicide investigations and forever changed the direction of each man’s life.
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Case Reopened: The Zodiac with Lawrence Block
VHS
"He's playing a game, isn't he? And so far, he's winning."
-Author Lawrence Block on the Zodiac
In the late 60's and early 70's the serial killer who called himself "Zodiac" terrorized the citizens of Northern California with a series of seemingly random yet methodically planned murders. As brilliant as he was evil, the Zodiac taunted police and the media with dozens of letters and cryptograms that gave clues to, but never revealed, his identity.Who was the Zodiac? Was he an evil genius who planned his murders to create a coded pattern of numbers and angles? Or was he the stereotype of the serial killer we see in books and movies? The killing suddenly stopped in the mid 1970's - is he still out there somewhere? Lawrence Block, Edgar Award-winning author and best-selling crime fiction writer, proposes a new and interesting twist to the case of the Zodiac. A brave new genre in storytelling, Case Reopened fuses history, mystery and scientific research by enlisting the greatest minds in crime fiction to re-examine some of our most notorious unsolved crimes.
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The Zodiac
DVD
THE ZODIAC takes a different look at the famous Zodiac Killer case from other screen treatments of the murders. More than a simple crime story, the film is an emotional thriller focusing on the murders' impact on victims, their families and the wider community. The film follows a police detective (Justin Chambers) and his son (Rory Culkin) who become obsessed with the murders and endanger their family in the process.
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Sleep My Little Dead:
The True Story of the Zodiac Killer
By Kieran Crowley
Twenty-two-year-old Eddie Seda lived with his mother and sister in an apartment in Brooklyn. He had no job, no wife, no girlfriend, no friends. He was desperate to become somebody important. The person he chose to "be" was the infamous Zodiac killer who haunted San Francisco during the late 1960s. Between 1990 and 1995 Seda shot nine people in a pattern according to their zodiac signs, sent cryptic messages to the New York Post in a style imitating the original Zodiac, and then finally, in 1996, staged a fierce firefight with the police after barricading himself in the apartment. Kieran Crowley, who covered this "New York Zodiac" as a reporter for the Post, has a lively, dramatic style that is well-suited to his fictionalized accounts of Seda's inner thoughts and private rituals.
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