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Christmas Time, nineteen sixty eight, All was not calm, All was not bright.
Sorry, could you briefly describe what apparently happened last night? We had a devil homicide that took place out on a county road sometime after eleven o'clock.
Sixteen year old girl and a seventeen year old boy.
How did this incident occur?
Apparently well, they were shot.
Photographer Tom Balmer arrived on the scene.
The night of December twenty was an interesting one. Photographers back then were ambulance chasers. We had radios with the local police and fire frequencies and we followed what was going on. I remember a dispatch to Lake Herman Road in Benetia and they said that there were two victims there and they thought it was a murder suicide. The woman there that was shot was fairly small in size, and they were thinking it was an adult and a child. That was what the original dispatch was, as I recall it.
So I headed out that way. It was dark that night out in the Boonies. There it was along the side.
Of the road.
Who's fairly quiet, no traffic going by, as I recall, really not a sense of place there other than just out in the open. As it turned out, there was one person. His name was David Faraday. He had been shot and his girlfriend, Betty Lujensen, had also been shot. She was dead at the scene and they had taken him by ambulance. He had died en route. The woman's body remained under a blanket, and the investigators came out.
The blanket was between me and the investigators. They lifted the blanket with them behind it and looking, so I never got to see, but I shot a pictures of the investigators looking. The newspaper then ran the pictures on Sunday. The one thing a photographer learns to do right away is go into a work mode. Just start recording and not experiencing. If you started to get emotional over everything you saw, you could never do anything.
Do you have any idea what the possible motive might be for this killing?
We have no motive at this time.
Every time I see the word zodiac, I flashed back for the moment. Wow, I was there. You can say I photographed what then was thought to be the first victims of the Zodiac Killer. That's something that not everybody has done.
The Boogieyman a monster, a scare tactic, a mythical creature dating back to as early as the Middle Ages. If there's one thing I've learned from our first season Atlanta Monster, it's that sometimes there's more fact than fiction to this elusive nightcrawler. After all, what's the difference between the Boogeyman and a rampant killer unidentified after nearly fifty years. The Zodiac Killer is one of the most notorious serial killers to date. He's a dark mark on San Francisco's Era
of Love. He wears his signature on his chest like Superman gone horribly wrong. It's the infamous crosshair symbol, a circle intersected with perpendicular lines. A target. The Boogeyman may not be under your bed, but it can't exist, and even more frighteningly, there's more than one to examine this demon properly. It's important to understand what societal and psychological elements allowed this evil to exist. This is our new
exploration the Zodiac Killer. I'm payin Lindsay. Last year, I worked with the team at how Stuff Works to create Atlanta Monster. Matt Frederick was one of those people. You may remember Matt from last season.
A police officer who didn't know what a railroad trestle was became the Achilles heel of a murder investigation that cost more than nine million dollars.
For any Avid House Stuff Works listeners, you may know Matt from Stuff they Don't want you to know. It's a podcast about conspiracy theories, from the bizarre to the possible. Matt's a questioner and an information junkie. This makes him the perfect person to guide you through this story, presenting the facts and the follies that riddle this case. Take it away, man.
I've been researching unsolved mysteries for over ten years now, separating the truth from the noise. I first became aware of this case in two thousand and seven when David Fincher's film Zodiac was released in theaters. I was hooked and I needed to know more, so I read the book from Robert Graysmith. It's also titled Zodiac. I started scouring websites and message boards, and I quickly realized that
the book and movie had only scratched the surface. The story of the Zodiac is about much more than just a serial killer. It's about a country experiencing tremendous changes. In the late sixties, a perfect storm was brewing and the eye was squarely centered around San Francisco.
The Summer of Love is an expression of this awakening. We call upon the world to help.
Us celebrate the infinite holiness of life.
The Summer of Love is the summer of nineteen sixty seven when something like one hundred thousand young people flock to San Francisco.
This is Peter Richardson. He's a historian and lecturer at San Francisco State University.
They're told not to come by city officials, which is the best way to get people to come, and they do come.
You know, you know, America is so obsessed with bad breath and with underarmed deodorant.
These are the biggest problems in the world.
If you watch television, I think that a generation of kids which says we don't.
Care about your concepts of friendliness is a revolutionary generation.
When the LSC hits the streets, it really kind of changes, kind of morphs into the hippie counterculture that people are so aware it turns San Francisco into kind of a global rock capital.
San Francisco police say that nine persons have been arrested and a narcotics trade on the headquarters of the Grateful Dead, a widely popular singing group.
There are a lot of bands. They're very creative and innovative and influential. What was happening in San Francisco is something much more improvisational, exploratory. It was part of a larger art scene that included psychedelic posters and light shows, and even the hippies didn't realize how many of them there were, and they start getting publicity, national publicity.
Were all children in the nineteen sixties Offense of America, Children of Blood Pole.
The scene kind of unravels fairly quickly. Despite its utopian aspirations. The San Francisco counterculture is surrounded by all these other forms of strife, so it's not a peaceful place to live.
The new Communist campaign in Vietnam continues. Just after midnight their time, a band of Vietcong readers blew up a power installation and attack two police stations in Saigon.
It's a really kind of heady mix. By the end of the nineteen sixties, there's a larger backdrop of real problems political violence against to emerge.
Doctor Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
And that segues into what author David Talbat calls the season of the Witch, where you get the Zodiac Killer.
It would sound like a cliche Hollywood script if it weren't true. A serial killer stalking victims, taunting police, even keeping bloody mementos from his slayings, and boasting about his deeds to the news media.
The randomness and the tone of the Zodiac Killer was very, very traveling for people. We think of the Zodiac crimes as being urban crimes, an associated with San Francisco, but most of the confirmed killings actually happen farther north, pretty far out there, and I think that adds to the creepiness. The places are so isolated, and there is a kind of theme in American cinema history where they really crazy
stuff happens out in the country. It's in these isolated places that you really have to worry.
This case begins on December twentieth, nineteen sixty eight, on Lake Herman Road in Benetia, California.
My name is Lorraine de Grot, I living NAPA from Valeo. That was Christmas vacation and we had a rally on Friday where you know, everybody joined in the big auditorium and it was a rally. We set together, and when we walked home, I said bye, and she said I remember. She said, Okay, I'll see you next year, and I go, oh, yeah, I'll see you next year. And that was the last time that I spoke or saw Betty Lou.
David and Betty Lou were high school students. They met at a church function and were smitten with one another.
This is Michael Butterfield. He's been researching this case for over a decade and he's one of the people who knows this story best.
Within two weeks they were on their way to becoming a couple. David Faraday was a young, intelligent, very civic minded individual, cared about other people, was well liked, good student. Betty Lou Jensen was a very popular student, had many friends. She was also a very talented artist. When David Faraday asked her out. That was to be their first date together and her first date totally. That night, they promised Betty Lou's parents that they would be home by eleven PM.
They did not go home by eleven pm. At some point, the two of them wound up on Lake Herman Road, which is a kind of dark and isolated area that's known as a lover's lane spot. Another vehicle pulled up into the area. We don't know for sure what happened after that because there are no witnesses, but the person got out of the car. There were some shots fired
into the vehicle. David and Betty Lou escaped out of the passenger side of the Rambler station wagon, but David Faraday was shot at almost point blank range in the head. Betty Lou Jensen appeared to have run away, and at that point the killer shot at her at least five times, hitting her in the back. Shortly after that, a driver was passing through and saw the bodies laying on the ground, drove into town, notified the police, and then the police
came on the crime scene. There was no discernible motive, no personal animosity, no rape, no robbery or anything like that. They're investigating people involved in the victim's backgrounds. People may have had a grudge, career criminals, the so called usual suspects, but none of that was working.
This is a yearbook. This is very special to me because it's got Betty Lou in it. Bottom right, that's Betty Lou. I hold this just dear to my heart. I just think it's terrible. I've never been a situation where you knew somebody and they got killed. You know, it stayed with me.
After a period of months had gone by. It was a cold case. The absence of any discernible motive made it vertually impossible to keep investigating it. Serial killers were not a national phenomenon back in the nineteen sixties. The term serial killer did not even exist in popular language. Most law enforcement agencies were not experienced in investigating serial homicides.
I'm so consumed to this day about Zodiac. I don't think he'll ever be caught. My ears just pop up if I hear the name Zodiac.
They were used to dealing with a killer who commits a crime for a traditional motive and who could be tracked down through traditional investigation. When you have someone who commits a bunch of murders for no apparent reason. Innocent people minding their own business out on a date. That's bad enough. But when a person brags about it, wants to taunt you, and threatens going to happen again, that's a whole other level of terror.
The search goes on in San Francisco for the man known as the Zodiac Killer.
Zodiac rags.
He's killed seven people, he tossed the police for not finding him, and he says he will do his thing again.
We have reason to believe that he's a maniac.
Who is the Zodiac?
And chheer is he?
The story that you hear about the Zodiac case is not the real story, and as you examine the facts, that story starts to disintegrate, and behind it is this other story. When I was twelve years old living in Phoenix, Arizona, I worked as a paperboy in my neighborhood. I was rolling the newspapers every morning and seeing stories about the Atlanta child murderer and all kinds of things. So I was already following true crime even as a young child.
Around that time, another twelve year old paper boy was abducted and apparently murdered in our neighborhood. That was the first time that I ever really realized that there were people out there that wanted to kill you. Here in Phoenix, they stopped the paper boys. That's when your newspaper started being delivered by an adult in a van who was throwing a paper out the window. And it woke me up. And so that was the end of innocence in my
life in many ways. But it really wasn't until the nineteen nineties that I started doing what you might call legitimate research.
And with all of this research, Michael created a massive online archive dedicated to the Zodiac case. It's called Zodiac Killer facts dot com.
Gathering all the police reports I could, the FBI files and everything, and then interviewing those who were involved in the case, the original investigators, surviving victims, some of the witnesses, suspects, and the people who accused them and their families, and so over a period of years, I built up a database,
you might say, of information. I've devoted my website to spreading information for people who are out there just like I was years ago, struggling to find something and not being sure what's true and what isn't true, what's fact and fiction. I try to devote my research and make some use of all the work that I've done by providing accurate information so people can separate fact from fiction
and reach their own conclusions. There are a lot of major differences between the true story of the Zodiac and the myth. A major component of the myth is that the Zodiac was some kind of master criminal who was playing some sort of elaborate game, who knew the victims, who was an expert marksman, who was responsible for dozens
of murders. It's easier for someone like me, who doesn't have a suspect or a theory, when I'm asked a question, it's easier for me to say I don't know, because that's the truth, and that's the most honest answer someone can give you. But a lot of people aren't satisfied by the truth, and they're not satisfied by a mystery. People crave answers, and if someone's telling you I have all the answers, that can be very attractive, very compelling
for a lot of people. And I think, like a lot of things in society, someone would rather be satisfied with the wrong answer than be satisfied with no answer at all. The name Zodiac is very much like the Boogeyman. Especially, it's the American version of Jack the Ripper. In many ways, we don't know who the Zodiac was. He's a mystery. That name. For me, it still scares me a lot, to be honest with you, it's terrifying what he did and what he got away with, the fact that he
got away with it at all is terrifying. So when I hear that name, the first thing that pops into my mind is he's still out there there. We don't know who he is. We don't really know anything more than what we did almost fifty years ago about him. He could be anyone. He could be you know, that guy that lives across the street from you and comes out to pick his newspaper up in the morning, or
someone in your family. The name Zodiac it's come to stand for many different things in the popular culture about true crime. You know, he's either a master criminal, or he's some kind of drooling maniac or whatever. But for me, I've always viewed him more as a person. That makes him much more terrifying to me.
At this point, I had heard and read so much about the Lover's Lane on Lake Herman Road, but I had never seen it with my own eyes. I wanted to know exactly what David Faraday and Betty lou Jensen saw when they encountered the Zodiac that night. So the team and I, including our executive producer Jason Hoak, flew out to the Bay Area, and the Lake Herman Road site was our first destination. We headed east from Valeo on Lake Herman Road for a little over three miles.
One of the first things you see is a huge rock quarry on the left, and then the relatively small Lake Herman on the right. But other than that, it's just rolling hills and very few signs of civilization. The site itself is located about a mile across the current Benisha, California line. What we're referring to as a Lover's Lane is actually just a small turnoff to a private road. That road leads down the hill to a Benicia Police Department shooting range. There's a large metal gate blocking the
road and it's secured by numerous single key locks. It's strange, this is it? This is a turnoff?
Yeah, there's nothing here.
Carve right here.
It feels unlikely right, it.
Feels very unlikely.
This is in the middle kind of a country road with a little pull off.
So if you're standing here at the entrance where the gate is and you look out, there's no human beings. I think this is the kind of place that a Zodiac killer knows kids come and make out in a car, knows they're going to be vulnerable. They just pitch black. It's like easy pray for him. Just beyond the fencing, there's an old sign that says no trespassing and no dumping. And on the front of this sign, someone at some
point spray painted a large black Zodiac symbol. The murders of Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on December twentieth, nineteen sixty eight were senseless and tragic, but at this point, for the people of Benetia, California, and the surrounding area, there was no further cause for alarm. As callous as it sounds, this was just an unsolved crime in a small town until that is, the following summer, when the Zodiac killer struck again.
The next crime occurred at Blue Rock Springs Park, which is approximately two and a half miles away from Lake Kerman Road. I think Valeo was a popular city. Was also a part of a port of entry, so there was a lot of sailors, lots of influx of people coming in, but it was still a bustling community with lots of good people in it. On the night of July fourth, nineteen sixty nine, Darlene Farrin, a twenty two year old mother and waitress, picked up a friend of
hers named Michael Migeaux. They were friends, they had met at the diner where she worked, and they decided to go to Blue Rock Springs Park, which is located across the street from a large golf course, but it is sort of outside it isolated in some ways, but it was also another lover's lane area.
Valeo, California, is the next town over, just northwest of Benetia where the first murders took place. To put this into perspective, the location where Darlene Ferren and Michael Majeaux were attacked in Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo is only a seven minute car ride away from the Lake Herman Road site, and it's a fairly straight shot. There's literally one turn. Two similar shootings, two lovers lanes just
miles apart. Things were starting to add up, but in July nineteen sixty nine, no one had the full picture yet.
Okay, yeah, my name is Clarence Edward rust are USD. I'm a retired Bleo Police Department lieutenant. On the night of July fourth, nineteen sixty nine, I was working at a lake shift with Mike partner John Lynch when the Zodiet occurred in Loyo.
A man in a match rob and stab them, leaving them for dad. Subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no a double murder.
I did it.
The man who wore a medieval style executioners hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to use them.
They haven't arrested me because they can't prove a thing. I'm not the damn Zodiac. Who is the Zodiac and where is he from?
iHeartRadio, Houstuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster the Zodiac Killer. This season on Monster the Zodiac Killer.
School children are nice targets.
I shall wipe out his school by some morning, shoot out the tires, and then.
Pick off the kiddies as they come bounding out.
That was the threat of the Zodiac Killer.
When you talk to the survivors of dictims who can kill, you get that this is not fun.
There's nothing fun about murder.
LeHo police have submitted letters and envelopes from the Zodiac Killer to a private lab to obtain a DNA profile.
I enjoy a good tussle that hey killing just for the pleasure of it.
It's got to be him, and then the lab results would come back and it's an elimination, and that's just a crushing blow.
He used to go there, even long after he retire and park his car and sit there and think about what did we miss?
Why didn't we catch him? When these individuals are arrested, one of the things that strikes us is how ordinary they are. Their ordinariess is also deeply unsettling. If we come pick these people out of a crowd, then we're faced with a situation, well, how do we know that anyone is safe?
Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced by iHeartRadio How Stuff Works in Tenderfoot TV. Donald all Right and I our executive us on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers Meredith Steedman, Mason Lindsay, and Christina Dana Jason Hope is executive producer on behalf of House stuff Works, along with producers Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Scott Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick
is our host. Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you haven't already, make sure to check out the first season of Monster called Atlanta Monster, about the Atlanta child murders from the late seventies to the early eighties. Download the ten episode season right now. Have questions or comments, email us at Monster at houstuffworks dot com, or you can call us at one eight three three two eighty five six six sixty seven. Thanks for listening.