![Origins [8] - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/episode/artwork/a6ZNUEgw)
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not necessarily represent those of iHeartMedia, how Stuff Works,
or its employees. In earlier episodes of Monster, we've mentioned all the witnesses that might be able to identify the Zodiac killer, Michael Majeaux, the young man who survived the attack at Blue Rock Springs, Brian Hartnell, the survivor of the knife attack at Lake Barriessa, and SFPD officer Don Fouk that encountered the Zodiac fleeing the Paulstein murder scene.
A combination of the physical descriptions from these brief encounters were used to create the infamous police sketch you've probably seen floating around the internet. But in nineteen seventy, there was another possible witness that had the best chance yet of identifying the Zodiac Kathleen Johns.
In March of nineteen seventy, a young woman claimed that she had been driving along a freeway and a vehicle pulled up alongside her, and the man inside gestured towards her vehicle as if there was something wrong.
Was there any any sensation to your vehicle that there was something wrong with your vehicle while you're driving.
You know, it was an old Wrangley car. Anything could have been wrong. The back of lights would have been out, anything could have been wrong with it.
I wouldn't it was running fire.
So she pulled over, and according to the story, the man pulled over and said, hey, your tires loose. I'll tighten it for you.
So he went back and got a tire iron, came back, went to the back, settled around, stopped again at the window and said.
It's okay.
You know her, it should be okay.
What he did was actually loosen the tire and.
I'll go too far on the year across the street, not even.
And the tire fell off.
That gave him a perfect opportunity to pretend to be the good Samaritan and offer her a ride.
A man in a mask robbed, tied, and stabbed them, leaving them for dead.
Subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no a double murder.
I did it.
A man who wore a medieval style executioner's 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. In this episode of Monster, we're going to hit rewind and talk about some things you've likely never heard before. Until the early nineteen seventies, everyone believed the first Zodiac killing was in nineteen sixty eight, the murder of Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday in Benetia. But after a while, investigators realized that the Zodiac's trail might
go back a few more years. Today, as the Zodiac case passes the fifty year anniversary without any arrests, without any answers, we're taking the opportunity to examine a few earlier unsolved cases, including the case of Kathleen John's.
On March twenty second, nineteen seventy, Kathleen Johns and her infant daughter Jennifer had a terrifying experience on a dark and desolate highway. After more than two decades of silence, Kathleen finally spoke of this incident.
I had more sense than to stop on this dark road. You know, I wanted to get where there was one night when I could hope they hurt. But when I got onto the freeway where I could see a gap the enemy, I stopped on the sidelok.
Two men interviewed Kathleen at a diner in nineteen ninety eight. We've come into possession of a rare copy of this interview. Kathleen John's account of that evening is one of the many unsolved cases that some believe to be the work of the Zodiac.
Kathleen Johns was pregnant at the time, and she also had her infant daughter with her. That's something that the person may not have known when he was driving alongside that car and trying to get her to pull over, and he may not have realized that until the last moment, when he had already offered her a ride and she gets out of the car with her stomach and her baby.
It's possible that at that moment the person reconsidered what they were doing and may have decided, well, I was intending to kill this person, but now I know she's pregnant and she's got a baby with her, I'm not sure I really want to go through with it.
Okay, let me ask you this why did you stop your car?
Well, I wanted to see what when they was wrong, but you know, I wanted to get word of it was more night in lahaw I could see a gas station.
We don't know for sure what happened, but we do know that Kathleen John's got in the car with that individual and that he appeared to be driving aimlessly away from gas station. He promised to take her to and at a certain point she became suspicious.
Now you know he said to you that he was going to kill you? Did he utter that or infer that again?
Many times? In this monotone, no feeling, no looking at me, driving on.
In her earlier statements, it indicated that he did not threaten her, but later on she claimed that he said that he was going to kill her and throw the baby out the window.
Did he change the wording or was it always you know you're gonna die. You know I'm going to kill you and throw that baby out?
How many times did he ask you to throw Jennifer off?
Quite a few? I mean you don't have a dozen. We were out there, seemed to go for a long time.
Kathleen became very concerned. She asked him at a certain point, do you always go around helping people like this? And she said that he replied by saying, when I'm through with him, they don't need help, or something to that effect. This scared her enough that after I guess about two hours, she decided that the next time he slowed down that she was going to jump out. So she seized the first opportunity that came along. She grabbed your child, jumped out, ran away.
When I bailed, he got out to you like car like Kemon hadn't that vineyards everywhere, because he was yelling.
Come back here.
According to various reports, he either screamed at her from the car or got out of the car and tried to find her, But then another vehicle pulled up and he apparently got spooked and drove away. She got into the car with that individual, and that person took her to the nearby police department, where she was describing what happened. And while she was in the course of giving her story to police, she saw a composite sketch of the Zodiac killer and said, that's the guy who did this.
Shortly after that, which I believe four months later, another Zodiac let her arrived.
This is the Zodiac speaking. I am rather unhappy because you people will not wear some Zodiac buttons. So I now have a little list, starting with a woman and her baby that I gave a rather interesting ride for a couple hours one evening a few months back that ended in my burning her car where I found them signed Zodiac.
Kathleen John's station wagon was burned. We don't know whether or not the killer did that. We don't know whether or not the person who abducted her was actually the Zodiac. And maybe the Zodiac was just taking credit for it because that's what the media was saying. It's possible that the Zodiac liked to create confusion and thought he would
benefit from that. So if he did abduct Kathleen John's and he took the credit for it, then he was just acknowledging his involvement as already reported by the media. If he wasn't involved and he decided to take credit for it because people were already accusing him of that, that tells you something about him too, that he thought, well, this just adds to my image. It makes me look all the more scary. And at the same time, if
it wasn't him, what happens. When Kathleen Johns identifies the person or describes that person, it's not him, right, So that just creates more confusion. If the Zodiac was not responsible for that crime, he certainly enjoyed exploiting it because it added and it patted his resume. So in the end, Kathleen Johns is listed as a suspected Zodiac victim. But since she's also passed away and there was no solid evidence, I don't think we'll ever be able to answer that question.
Her interview was recorded in nineteen ninety eight, nearly twenty eight years after her encounter. By this time, Kathleen's name had changed to Smith.
On January one, nineteen ninety eight, meeting with Kathy Smith, Howard Davis is also here present.
I hope, Kathy, that this comes out with all.
Of the background noise and everything.
But I'm going to ask.
You to kind of speak up a little bit, if you would.
Even after so much time had passed, Kathleen still remembered the incident vividly.
Did you have any sense at all that views behind you?
There was the car behind me and.
Kept watching his light. I had always hoped to be able to talk to Kathleen and we were fortune to talk from before she passed away.
This is Howard Davis, one of the men who interviewed Kathleen.
He had secured an interview with Kathleen at a local Dennis. When we interviewed Kathleen for a while and then John, a reporter went out for battery. We really just got the basics from her. We just went through the interview. He really didn't get much, but we did get some information that no one had heard about before. I don't think there were any other interviews after that.
Howard Davis wholeheartedly believes that Kathleen encountered the Zodiac that day. Kathleen's description of her abductor closely resembled other eyewitness descriptions of the Zodiac.
He was wearing the bell bottom pants, the naval appearance, military dress shoes, military dress shoes. Footprints were found at the base scene where her car was That a part she was a Zodiac victim. She's the only one to escape the Zodiac, not only with her life but unharmed, even right next to the Zodiac.
The Kathleen John's abduction does not fit the Zodiac's previously established pattern, but also at the same time, he also deviated from his pattern, going from couples to a cab driver. Then he said that he was no longer going to announce his murders and they were going to look like fake accidents and routine robberies and killings of anger. So maybe he had some plan for what he wanted to do, but it did involve a drastic change in his mo Maybe he was going to murder her and make it
look like an accident. Maybe he was going to come back and wreck her car or do something. I don't know, but there's some people who believe that if he was responsible for that crime, that he burned the car to cover up evidence, because he may have touched the car
when he was loosening the lugnuts on the wheel. There's also the possibility that he had intended to kill John's and then decided not to go through with it because she was pregnant and had a kid, and then was frustrated and needed to do something, so he drove back to where the car was and set fire to it. It also possibly had nothing to do with it, and
Kathleen Johns was wrong in her identification. But then you come to the fact that During that same period of time, there was also speculation that the Zodiac may have been involved in another murder in nineteen sixty six at Riverside City College. After the Zodiac murders were being reported in the media, investigators in Riverside were watching and saying, this looks kind of familiar and maybe these crimes are connected.
So they contacted the Zodiac investigators and reported their suspicions, and after investigators looked at this, they thought it was very possible that the Zodiac had committed the crime in Riverside. You had a young woman who was apparently visiting the college library, and while she was inside, someone disabled her car, and when she came out and her car was start this person allegedly offered her a ride, and then when she went with him, he took her off into a
darkened area and stabbed her to death. So if the Zodiac was responsible for the murdered Riverside, then that does provide some indication that he may have been responsible for the Johns event, because there's a similarity of selecting a single woman, disabling her car and such. Then later on San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery learned of this possible connection and reported it in the media in what was called the Riverside Connection.
Was the Riverside killing of Sherry Joe Bates somehow connected to the midnight abduction of Kathleen John's and were both of these crimes three and a half years apart committed by the Zodiac. We learned there was a possibility of finding some unprocessed film footage of Paul Avery just after he made the Riverside connection. There was only one place to go in search of a rare piece of film like that, the Bay Area Television Archive in San Francisco.
My name is Alex Cherrian. I'm the film archivist at San Francisco State University's John Paul Nnard Library. The Bay Area Television Archive is in our Department of Special Collections. This is where we preserve and remaster local news film, documentary broadcast video tape from the nineteen fifties through to about two thousand. Before we work on it, it's just old film and tape. By the time we finished with it. What you're looking at is a screener which is viewable
online for free. I enjoy local, specific regional history a lot. I like being able to relate to it, to look at a building and know what happened there fifty years ago. I also like being on the cutting edge of finding stuff and making it available. If someone comes up with some kind of kookie idea which is patently ridiculous, I don't care. It needs to be explored in order to rule it out. And making all of our stuff available online, I enjoyed doing that. I get an excitement from doing it.
It could be the Zodiac, it could be a chess tournament, it could be something to do with Jerry Brown, who features in our collections way back to the early seventies. I don't mind. You either enjoy that or you don't, and I love it. So this is the raw news film. This is how it was put into cans before it came to us in the early nineteen eighties. So what you're looking at there is a reel of sixteen milimeter
film from the early nineteen seventies. It doesn't even have a plastic core on it, which means you can't even project it. This is just coming raw from the lab. I guarantee you no one's touched that for over forty years. It may have been covered in a similar fashion by
a different tea v station. But the sound of the reporter or the eyewitness or the detective talking about a zodiac in nineteen seventy two, no one's ever heard that, and it will be decent quality because no one's been messing around with it.
What things in this evidence you've got from the Riverside police actually lead you to believe that there could be or is some connection.
Oh there's police lineage, the motors OPERANDU of the killer, the Cherry bas space and river Side and zodioacil. Are there many eagle media wanting to get recognition for the killer writing to a new State the fact that in no cases, including the Sharrybase, has there ever been sexual molestation.
Usually in a killing of a coat, it's usually a sex herely just for the shares Ler phone, I received the letter individual in southern California pointing outre similarity was actually it was an anonymous letter, and I felt that there might be something for it, so I contacted the Riverside Police. Were very cooperative to computer and gave me information on the phone and then sent me some information
zerox copies of thirsty documents. This is the first one of the first two letters that was received by the newspaper in Riverside and by the police department. The inside was a typewritten confession, and this is known to be from the murder sary base because of details in the unsigned profession. This was received exactly one month of the day after she was killed.
You're about to hear the letter that Paul Avery just described. This letter contains graphic details. Listener discretion is advised.
Miss Bates was stupid. She went to the slaughter like a lamb. She did not put up a struggle, but I did. It was a ball. I first pulled the middle wire from the distributor. Then I waited for in the library and followed her out. After two minutes, the battery must have been about dead by then. I then offered to help. She was then very willing to talk to me. I told her that my car was down the street and I would give her a lift home. When we were away from the library walking, I said
it was about time. She asked me about time. For what I said, it was about time for her to die. I grabbed her around the neck with my hand over her mouth and my other hand with a small knife at her throat. She went very willingly. Her breast felt very warm and firm under my hands, but only one thing was on my mind, making her pay for the brush offs that she had given me during the years prior. She died hard. She squirmed and shook as I choked her, and her lips twitched. She let out a scream once,
and I kicked her head to shut her up. I plunged the knife into her and it broke. I didn't finish the job by cutting her throat. I'm not sick, I am insane, but that will not stop the game. This letter should be published for all to read it. It just might save that girl in the alley, but that's up to you. It will be on your conscious, not mine. Yes, I did make that call to you also, it was just a warning, beware, I am stalking your girls now.
Now, some of that information appears to have been available in the public media at the time, but it's still possible that it was the actual killer who wrote it,
or someone who was trying to misdirect the investigation. I'm sure that if things did go down the way that it's described in that letter, she thought that man was going to help her, and just like a lake Barry Essa, that person took advantage of her and forced her to participate in her own murder, and in the letter, he said she went to the slaughter like a lamb.
So the police potentially had a Zodiac letter as early as nineteen sixty six, just one month after the Bates murder. At the time, police thought the note was written by the actual killer because the information included in the letter was highly detailed, specifically the manner in which the attacker disabled the victim's car. I can't help but wonder why didn't the Sherry Joe Bates case get more attention prior to the nineteen sixty eight killings, but there was even
more madness to come. Presumably the same person also sent another series of letters, this time to police, the newspaper, and even to the father of Sherry Joe Bates. Paul Avery explains.
Six months later, after her murder, the Riverside Place, the local newspaper, the Press, enter Prize, and the girl's father each received a letter. And this is where Ibole he writing, you're very very similar to zodiacs. You are other things that make me think that it's quite possibly human. And inside of these onlined pre whole notebook paper. It said Bates had to die, there will be more, and right at the bottom, this is a Z.
The stylized Z at the bottom of the nineteen sixty six letter is undeniable, but it's also unlike the Zodiac's other signed letters, the ones that he ended with his circle cross signature. But even nineteen sixty six may not be the start of the Zodiac's reign of terror. His work may go back even further. Investigators on the Sherry Joe Bates case connected her murder to another fatal incident in the area. This time it was a young couple on the beach three years earlier in nineteen sixty three.
On a tip, we reached out to k EYTTV in Sacramento, California, regarding a feature from twenty ten that revealed the only known footage of the crime scene. It's a seventeen second look at an old shack on the beach where the bodies of two murdered teenagers were dragged and then burned.
If Sherry Joe Bates was not the first, who was. The answer may be buried in these forty three year old files in the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's.
Cold Case Unit.
On June fourth, nineteen sixty three, Lompo teenagers Lynda Edwards and Robert Domingo's celebrated senior Ditch Day by going to a secluded beach shack twenty five miles west of Santa Barbara. They planned to graduate in two days then get married, but the next night a CHPI officer discovered their bodies inside the shack. Robert had been shot eleven times, Linda eight times. This is the remote beach where Edwards and Domingos were gone down.
As you can see, the old beach shack is long gone, just like the killer and any evidence that might identify it. This old newsreel, just discovered in the.
KYT archives, is the only known film footage of the crime scene. It shows the area around the beach shack where the killers shot the teens, and inside where he dragged their bodies and tried to burn it down to hide the evidence. The last time this footage aired publicly was forty two years ago, when no one could have known its significance. It's only seventeen seconds long, but even Sheriff's investigators who worked on the case more than thirty
years ago didn't know the film existed. They're also convinced a young, inexperienced Zodiac murdered Edwards and Domingos more than five years before his reign of terror in San Francis.
But there was more to the story. This case had several similarities to other known Zodiac crimes, especially the Lake Berriessa attack in nineteen sixty nine that left Cecilia Shepherd dead and Brian Hartnell fighting for his life. The attacker approached the teens while they were sunbathing and relaxing on the beach at gunpoint. One of the teens, Robert Domingos, was bound using rope the attacker brought to the scene.
The weapon used to kill the couple was a twenty two caliber semi automatic, possibly a rifle, again with the Winchester Western Super ex ammunition, the same rounds used by the Zodiac during the nineteen sixty eight murders on Lake Herman Road. There were no witnesses and there was no evidence of robbery or sexual assault. Attempting to hide then burn the bodies of his victims was unique to this case. That could have been due to the attacker's lack of experience.
Either way, with little evidence and no witnesses. The case had no leads for many years, and it remained open nine years later. In nineteen seventy two, the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Department issued a press release connecting the Domingos and Edwards murders to the Zodiac Killer, but that connection was
never officially confirmed. The Zodiac Killer had taken notice of Paul Avery's detective work back in nineteen seventy connecting the killing of Sherry Joe Bates and the abduction of Kathleen John's, a link that Avery called the Riverside Connection. The killer even acknowledged Avery's efforts within a letter to the La Times on March thirteenth, nineteen seventy one.
This is the Zodiac speaking like I have always said. I'm crapproof. If the Blumeni's they're ever going to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses and do something, because the longer they fiddle and fart around, the more slaves I will collect from my afterlife. I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones. There are a hell of a lot more down there. The reason
I'm writing to the Times is this. They don't bury me on the back pages like some of the others. San Francisco Police Department zero Zodiac seventeen plus.
The Zodiac was now further mocking police by claiming to have taken the lives of as many as seventeen or more victims. However, the official body count remained at five after the murder of cab driver Paul Stein. Michael Butterfield remains unconvinced that Kathleen Johns was truly abducted by the Zodiac Killer in March of nineteen seventy. He believes it
could have easily been someone else. Others, including Kathleen Johns herself, continued to believe it was the Zodiac Killer, Yet the details and the facts surrounding that evening are still a little loose. Also, what was the Zodiac's motivation for abducting her and her infant daughter that evening? Was it to keep up with the recent media attention Charles Manson was receiving, or had the Zodiac been doing this kind of thing all along and had just stopped providing details in his letters.
Whatever the situation, this was exactly the break investigators were looking for. If Kathleen Johns truly did spend two hours in a car sitting right next to the Zodiac Killer, would she be able to identify the right man.
Time time on Monster the Zodiac Killer.
This is the Ballejo man many investigators considered to be the notorious Zodiac Killer, and this is the first time his picture has been revealed.
Are you the Zodiac Killer?
There would be nothing farther from my mind. No, I'm most certainly not the Zodiac Killer.
We're pretty certain we know who he was, and he died with bombs in his basement and the Zodiac bomb formula disc in his computer that said Zodiac.
I'm pretty sure that the case is solved.
The suspect that was focused on and highlighted in the film and in Grace Smith's book, and to a certain extent even for Tusking Armstrong, Arthur Lee Allen, was what they call a good suspect.
The suspect's brother and sister in law say that Allan often spoke of man as the most dangerous game.
I enjoy oh a good tussle that hey killing just for the pleasure of it.
Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced by iHeartRadio, House stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Albright and I are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers Meredith Steedman, Mason Lindsay, and Christina Dana. Jason Hope is executive producer on behalf of hou stuff Works, along with producers Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Keebrick, and josh Than 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 eight five six six sixty seven. Thanks for listening.