![Prime Time [7] - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/episode/artwork/6ySxGCnL)
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.
Zodiac a symbol that now stands for terror in San Francisco. Today, there was a possibly significant development in the terrifying case of the man who calls himself Zodiac and has boasted that he is responsible for five murders in the last nine months. In Zodiac's latest letter last week, he threatened to make a busload of school children his next victims. Since then, school buses have been discreetly guarded and parents'
fears have openly risen. This morning, the people of San Francisco, during a television conversation program with attorney Melvin bell I, heard a man who claimed to be Zodiac talking on the air.
A man asked, robbed, tied, and stabbed them, leaving them for dad. 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. Fear spread across northern California as the Zodiac's pace accelerated. He continued to send letters to newspapers and to prove authenticity, he included squares of bloody clothing from the cab driver's shirt. But apparently letters weren't enough. The killer craved more attention. In October nineteen sixty nine, Californians gathered around their television in anticipation of the Zodiac's on
air debut. They were desperate to finally hear the voice of unspeakable evil.
That was the voice of a man who called himself the Zodiac Killer. He's talking to attorney Melvin Belli by phone on a television conversation show. This bizarre situation began at two o'clock this morning when the so called Zodiac telephone police headquarters. He said he was sick, he needed help, and he wanted to talk to Attorney Melvin bell I on television.
The Oakland Police Department contacted Belli that night. Bell I was a well known celebrity lawyer whose clients included the Rolling Stones in Muhammad Ali. With only hours notice, bell I came on the Jim Dunbar Show to speak with the Zodiac live on TV.
All the scheduled guests were canceled. Bell I waited for Zodiac to call on the private line. The phone was not tapped. The telephone twelve times. He spoke very little with Attorney Belly trying to draw him out that maybe he's afraid of being beaten up or something like that.
Now, why don't we just ask Sam to tell us a little bit more about what he's feeling right now? Tell us about your feeling, Sam, you know, just tell us anything you want to.
And then we'll come back and I'll give you a specific.
Answer to this question. And are going to the gas chamber. Talk to us.
Just tell us what's going on inside of you right now?
Sam?
Please, I have a headache.
How long do you had those headaches?
Sam?
In a long time?
I killed a kid. If it all balls down to the question that you're giving yourself up, if you could be assured that you wouldn't.
Get count for the punishment for myself, I want to kill a kid. Bell I finally arranged to meet Zodiac in Daily City, a suburb south of San Francisco, to talk in person. So inside the thrift shop Saint Vincent de Paul Tourney, Melvin Belli and the San Francisco police waited for the Zodiac killer.
We were told to he would lead us at the Saint Vincent de Paul Society locks in on Mission Street in Daily City. We waited about, I guess over an hour and no evidence that he was there. So, yeah, is there anything more to this afternoon that leads you to believe that the man who called indeed might have been the legitimate Zodiac killer? Well again, you know my opinion on a dime will buy you have a couple
of coffee. I don't really know. The only thing I can conclude, as I'm sure anyone listening might have concluded, is it's sounded like a fellow who does have a pretty serious problem and is pretty seriously disturbed. Whether it's Zodiac, I don't know.
The man did not show, So now all we can do is wait, perhaps for that next phone call from the man who calls himself Zodiac, who has killed five says he's going to kill again, Dickchmaker, ABC News, San Francisco.
We'll be back with more news.
In a moment, police brought in the witnesses who had heard the Zodiac speak, Brian Hartnell, the survivor from the Lake Barriesa stabbing, and two phone operators who had heard the Zodiacs calls. No one knew whether it was the real Zodiac. The Zodiac had now killed five people, and his attacks seemed to be accelerating. Half a year separated
the first two shootings. Then only three months later was the Lake Barriessa attack, and then just two weeks after that, the Zodiac shot cab driver Paul Stein in San Francisco. The La Times reported that the threat of his next crime galvanized one of the most massive manhunts and one of the greatest waves of public alarm in San Francisco history. The manhunt extended as far as Atascadero, four hours south
of San Francisco. There, police checked up on three hundred ex inmates of a hospital for the criminally insane, But despite this intensive search, the case went cold until two months later when Melvin Belli, the famous attorney you heard earlier, received a strange letter The Zodiac had sent a letter directly to Belli's home with a piece of the cab driver's bloody shirt to prove its authenticity.
Dear Melboyn, this is the Zodiac speaking. I wish you a happy Christmas. The one thing I ask of you is this, Please help me. I cannot reach out for help because of this thing in need.
Won't let me.
I am finding it extremely difficult to hold it in check. I'm afraid I will lose control again and take my ninth and possibly tenth victim.
Please help me. I am drowning at the moment.
The children are safe from the bomb because it is so massive to dig in and the trigger mech requires much work to get it adjusted just right. But if I hold back too long from number nine, I will lose complete all control of myself and set the bomb up.
Please help me.
I cannot remain in control for much longer, Signed Zodiac.
It seemed like maybe the Zodiac really was reaching out to the lawyer to get help, but the letter also had his usual threats. He mentioned the bus bombs and was now claiming eight victims. The Zodiac had included specific details about his first five murders in his letters, but then he said he would start to disguise his killings, making them look like routine robberies, killings of anger, or accidents. Because of this, police were unsure which recent.
Murders might be the Zodiacs.
After attorney Melvin bell I received the Zodiac's letter, he published a response in the San Francisco Chronicle. He said he was willing to meet the killer any time, any place. Bell I said, if you want to meet with me alone, I will come alone. He continued, I believe he wants to stop killing. He knows eventually he will get apprehended, and that unless he gets proper legal representation, he will most probably be sentenced to die in the gas chamber.
Bell I was next contacted by telephone. While bell I was out, a man claiming to be the Zodiac called and asked to speak with him. Bell I alerted the FBI and the San Francisco Police Department. They tapped his phone so they could trace future calls, and again they waited, hoping the Zodiac would call back. Eventually, another call came. Police managed to trace the call and detect stives. Tosky and Armstrong drove out to arrest the Zodiac. They arrived
at a mental hospital. The caller had been a patient, a man named Eric wil He was a hippie and an amateur photographer. The detectives determined that while was the caller to the Jim Dunbar show, but ultimately they also ruled him out as a suspect. The voice on the television call in show was not the Zodiac. Reporters accounts about Eric Wylde differ. Some say he was at a mental hospital in Oakland, others say it was in Napa, north of Valeo, and it's unclear exactly how the detectives
ruled out Eric Wyle as a suspect. But serial killer expert Eric Hakey told us that while there's obviously something wrong with them, it's rare for serial killers to be mentally.
Ill killers definitely, but they don't have mental illness. When you talk about mental illness, we're talking about people who they hear voices, they hallucinate, their schizophrenic, they're psychotic. That's mental illness. We treat people for that, we get them medications for it. But then there's another group of people
who have mental disorder, like serial killers. Now some percent of them are Claire thinking, but they're they're narcissistic, they're they're antisocial, and they have those kinds of issues going on with them, but they know right from wrong. In a court of law, they would not be found to be insane. People get confused. I think, well, look at Jeffrey Dahmer. If you killed seventeen people and eighthan for dinner, you must be insane. Well, the behavior is insane. A
Dahmer was never mentally ill. He knew right from wrong. He even admitted he always knew it was wrong to do what he was doing. Now, yet there are other people who are truly mentally ill when they do these types of things. So that always has to be figured out. And you're looking at a crime scene, is this someone who's mentally ill or is this someone who's psychopathic. In my field, we examine psychopathology. What level of psychopathology would the Zodiact be? At one scale that's used or studies
psychopathology goes from zero to forty points. Most people are going to be between a four and eight on the scale, and then the occasional criminal that does things once in a while they're going to rate in the low teens. But then you get people who are kind of antisocial. Most people in prisons today are what we call sociopaths. You know, they probably rate eighteen to twenty nine on that scale. They're impulsive, they don't learn from their mistakes,
they have high recidivism rates and so on. They are anti social, but they still love their moms, they still have emotional attachments to people, whereas a true psychopath, they're thirty and above. And these people do not have emotional attachments to people. They don't have empathy, they don't have a conscience. There aren't that many of them out there, and a lot of psychopaths. True psychopaths never get caught because what differentiates them from sociopaths is that they have
a skill set that's incredible. They can manipulate and lie and charm people, and they're so good at their social skills that people just don't believe that they could be doing anything wrong. And that's a smaller group called those psychopaths. One of the mist about serial murder is that you know they're all psychopaths. Well, this is not true. Only twenty five thirty percent were found to be true psychopaths.
Doctor Hickey says the Zodiac is likely a true psychopath. You're the top of that forty point scale because of his self obsession and craving for fame.
Narcissism is one of the traits we see in true psychopaths. They are quite narcissistic and thus they want to be recognized for what they've done. So it is not surprising that the Zodiac killer that it's all about him because he's smarter than the police, he's smarter than his victims. He'll never get caught. That's kind of thinking that he's better than everybody else, And the fact that he did get him with it for this long shows that he was right.
The whole TV call in saga and then subsequent contact with Melvin Belly was puzzling. Investigators determined the caller to both the TV show and to Belly's house was mental patient Eric Wyle, and that Wyle couldn't be the Zodiac, but the actual Zodiac had written to Belly and he included a piece of Paulstein's shirt as proof. What was going on was the Zodiac's letter a real cry for help.
Had the Zodiac set up the TV call in but then Eric Wyle interrupted it, or had Wyle set up the call in, and then the Zodiac wrote to Belly to try and stir up more media attention. The timing of this letter to Belli was interesting. It was mailed the day after another California killer's face was plastered on the cover of Life.
Magazine, December nineteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Life Magazine the strange story of Charlie Manson and his brood of New Bile flower children charged with murder life in a sex and drug devoted communal family that lived on the far edge of society under the absolute, almost mystical domination of Charles Manson. Manson gave the orders and the family carried them out.
Charlie Manson so disturbed the American millions last week when he was charged with sending four dociled girls and a hairy male acolyte off to slaughter strangers in two Los Angeles houses last August. What failure of the human condition could produce a Charles Manson? What possible aspects of such a creature's example could induce sweet faced young women to acts of such numbing cruelty.
The Manson story was a media sensation the next day when the Zodiac sent his letter to Melvin BELLI was he trying to regain the attention he seemed to so desperately crave. The Manson trial and its press coverage stretched on for months, and America was repeatedly shocked by new revelations about the Manson family, but the Zodiac wasn't willing
to give up his place on the front page. If you pay attention to when the Zodiac sent his letters, it seems as if for every article published about Manson, the Zodiac responded within days with a new letter, taunting police with an ever increasing kill count and demanding the press give him the coverage he felt he deserved.
April nineteenth, nineteen seventy. San Francisco Examiner cult chief's pal guilty and.
Killing April twentieth, nineteen seventy. This is the Zodiac speaking.
Busile A twenty two testify it was Manson who killed Hinman. The baby face defendant said, Manson, leader of a nomadic hippie style clan, sought twenty thousand dollars from Hinman. Charles pulled a sword from behind his leg and stabbed busil At, said, I.
Hope you do not think that I was the one who wiped out that blue Mini with a bomb of the cop station. Even though I talked about killing school children with one, it just wouldn't do to move in on someone else's territory. I've killed ten people to date.
April twenty first, nineteen seventy. Gas chamber for a musician.
Slayer April twenty eighth, nineteen seventy. I hope you enjoy yourselves when I have my blast.
Boussolet maintained it was Manson who killed Hinman.
If you don't want me to have this blast, you must do two things. One tell everyone about the bus bomb with all the details. Two, I would like to see some nice Zodiac buttons wandering around town. Everyone else has these buttons like peace, black power, Melvin EAT's blubber cheer me up considerably. If I saw a lot of people wearing my button, please know nasty ones like Melvin's.
June twelfth, nineteen seventy. Manson battles with bailiffs. Charles Manson fought with three bailiffs trying to force him into his seat, then was led shouting out of court along with three others, charged with murdered conspiracy and the slayings of actress Sharon Tate and six others. The women sat down, then jumped up again. Miss Krinwinkle raised her arms and addressed newsmen seated in the jury section. We gave our lives once before. Don't you know who we are? You put us on
the cross once before. Why don't you do it again?
June twenty sixth, nineteen seventy. This is the Zodiac speaking. I have become very upset with the people of San fran Bay area. They have not complied with my wishes for them to wear some nice Zodiac buttons. I promised to punish them if they did not comply by annihilating a full school bus, but now school is out for the summer, so I punished them in an I shot a man sitting in a parked car with a thirty eight Zodiac twelve.
San Francisco Police Department zero.
July twenty fourth, nineteen seven. State tells bizarre Tate killing's motive. Charles Manson hoped to touch off a Negro white blood bath in the United States by making it appear that blacks had committed the Tate LaBianca murders. Manson, thirty five, appeared in court with a red cross slashed on his forehead, framed by his dangling hair. Manson did it with two slashes of a razor blade. Manson has in the past called himself Christ and Jesus.
July twenty fourth, nineteen seventy. I am rather unhappy because you people will not wear some nice 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.
July twenty fifth, nineteen seventy, Manson wanted race war with a Beatles song spinning in his mind, Charles Manson and ordered the murders of actress Sharon Tate and six others in hopes of igniting a black white war. To Manson, Helter Skelter, one of the Beatles' songs, meant the black man rising up against the white establishment and murdering the entire white race. Manson believed the race war would wipe out all whites except Manson and his clan, who intended
to escape by going to the desert. Helter Skelter was scrawled in blood on a wall at the home of two of the victims. The scrawlings and other evidence were aimed at making it look like black people had murdered the five tape victims.
July twenty sixth, nineteen seventy.
Being that you will not wear some nice Zodiac buttons, how about wearing some nasty Zodiac buttons. If you do not wear any buttons, I shall, on top of everything else, torture all thirteen of my slaves that I have waiting for me in paradise. Some I shall tie over an hills and watch them scream and twitch and squirm. Others shall be placed in cages and feds salt beef until they are gorged. And then I shall listen to their
pleas for water, and I shall laugh at them. Others will hang by their thumbs and burn in the sun. Then I will rub them down with deep heat to warm them up. And all billiard players, I shall have them play in a dark and dungeon cell with crooked cues and twisted shoes. Yes, I shall have great fun inflicting the most delicious of pain to my slaves. San Francisco Police Department, zero Zodiac.
Thirteen October twenty seventh, nineteen seven. Witness describes Manson's visions of racial warfare. Manson had compounded a theory of eminent racial strife from the Bible and the Beatles. After the killings, whites were to go into the black ghetto and kill then the blacks would wipe out the white survivors. But after the blacks had won, they would not like the responsibility of governing and would call Manson and his followers
from the desert. Houston said he was under the influence of LSD in June sixty nine when he met Manson in the Sunset Boulevard home of a member of the Beach Boys rock group. He asked me if I could make love in front of twenty five people, said Postin He said he thought Manson was Jesus Christ.
October twenty seventh, nineteen seventy Paradise Slaves by fire, by gun, by knife, by rope peek a boo, you are doomed fourteen boo signed Z.
Melvin Bellie wasn't the only one to receive a personal message from the Zodiac. That last correspondence you heard from the Zodiac was actually a Halloween card, a black card with a dancing skeleton. The writer had used white out to draw cryptic symbols and thirteen peering eyes. He sent it to Paul Avery, a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle who'd been covering the Zodiac. Duffy Jennings remembers when Avery received the card.
During the course of my a couple of years as a copy boy, I got to know all the reporters pretty well, and that included Paul Avery. He'd been a war correspondent in Vietnam and he loved to do crime stuff. He kind of took a shine to me and we became sort of friends. He was a few years older around nineteen seventy. As I started to work as a reporter and we became closer friends. I'd go with him out following the leads about certain suspects or types of
evidence that would come in. Only one Zodiac letter was actually personal to Paul Avery. It was a Halloween card he sent and had kind of a creepy message to it, peekaboo, You're doomed, I think it said.
The two homicide inspectors who were working with the Zodiac case came in and tapped me on the shoulder and pulled me outside and said we received another letter from the Zodiac, and it was a to you. It was a Halloween card interpreted as being a threat to me.
At that point, he had been claiming thirteen victims. This one mentioned fourteen, and the presumption was that either he had killed fourteen people at that point and maybe I was number fifteen, or maybe I was supposed to be number fourteen.
At that time in the seventies, reporters didn't get killed in the line of duty. I think maybe in that whole decade there might have been, up to that point, one reporter, a guy named Don Bowles at the Phoenix, who had his car blown up by some organized crime figures he'd been writing about. But otherwise, reporters it wasn't an unsafe job. As we talked, there's an assault on the media going on, and there's a lot of fear of what people might do. But at that time in
the seventies, you never thought about your own safety. So when Avery was threatened, somebody in our newsroom engaged in a bit of sort of Maudlin newsroom humor, which you know we are one to do, and they had these buttons made up, big white buttons like campaign buttons, and it said, in big black block letters, I am not Avery.
We all got one and wore them when we had a great laugh about it, and Herb Caine, who was the big gossip columnist, wrote an item about it, and then TV stations sent crews over to do stories about the buttons, and then it became national news that all the people there chronicle were wearing these I'm not Avery buttons. Avery himself wore a button and I said, are you
concerned about this at all? He goes nah, He said, I'm not worried about it, but I have to tell you that in addition to wearing a button, Paul started to wear a holster. He got a handgun permit from the police chief.
I think the Zodiac is just making an idle threat, frankly, but at the same time, I'm no fool. I'm going to be very careful. There was a conference with the police department, a discussion of possible police protection for me. He was finally decided that this, you know, at this time at least is un warranted. Somebody takes a shot at me, that'll be a different case. But at this point is we don't feel any need for protection.
And I have to tell you that whenever I went out of the building with Paul. I had to kind of look around. You didn't think Zodiac was the kind of guy who was going to target someone in particular, But what if he did, and what if he missed? What if you were with the guy? All this goes through your head.
He is bragged of killing up to possibly fourteen people, but there's absolutely no evidence that he's killed more than five. I put no credence in this. I think he just wanted to get himself a little publicity. Well the killings that have gone on in this area in recent weeks that have created a very big headlines. Possibly he's a little miffed he's not the center of attention anymore.
The Zodiac had been continuously bragging about new murders in the eleven letters and cards he sent in just over a year, but he'd stopped supplying any evidence. Had he made good on his threat to disguise his murders as routine killings, or had he stopped killing altogether and the letters were just for attention. We spoke to criminal psychologist James Fox about whether serial killers ever do just stop killing.
I started studying multiple homicide, including serial murder, back in the early nineteen eighties. Back then people essentially believed that repeat killers were glassy at lunatics, and we found actually that they were extraordinarily ordinary, and that was why they're so dangerous. If they looked and acted like the serial killers in the movies Jason or Freddy Krueger, we'd avoid them like the plague. But the fact that they blend in so well and have an outward appearance of being
a nice guy makes them extramely dangerous. Many of them were quintessential sociopaths. They cared only for their own pleasures, no matter who they hurt in the process. And they also had a satiable need for power and control and dominance, and oftentimes satisfied those nees through rape and torture and mayhem. But one thing that's fairly clear is that lots of people have this excessive need for power and control and dominance, but they're able to satisfy it in socially legitimate ways.
They may be a corporate executive who hires and fires and enjoys the idea of hurting other people through these firings, or they may be a college professor who enjoys funking a student and seeing them squirm. But the thing about serial killers is they don't have that ability. They don't have an outlet to satisfy their needs for power and dominance. To give it a good example, Dennis Raider, the BTK killer, always wanted to be I'm a police officer, but wasn't
able to make it onto the force. He started killing victims. But after many years, when he got a position as a compliance officer in his neighborhood and he could give people citations if their grass was too long, gave him the authority that he always wanted to have, and then he stopped killing. He stopped killing because he had another way to satisfy that power he wanted over other people.
Were The Zodiac's letters. His outlet did manipulating the police and the media quench his desire for power and control. Here's Zodiac expert Michael Butterfield.
The Zodiac went from being a nameless killer on a road at night, to being a bizarre killer wearing a costume during daylight, to killing a cab driver in a populated area, to threatening school children, and then becoming a modern terrorist. After his last known murder cab driver Paul Stein. The Zodiac wrote a lot of letters but didn't appear to engage in any further attacks. There was never any bomb found along any roadsides. There's never any attempts to
bomb any school buses or anything. But he sure created weeks and months of terror in the Bay Area that is remembered to this day. And I think that was part of his goal. These bombs served the purpose of removing him from the equation. He doesn't have to be there anymore. He knew that all he would have to do is draw a little bomb and mail it to a newspaper, and it would not only create instant terror,
but it would be covered all over the place. Even though the Zodiac probably had stopped killing and was sitting at home just watching TV and reading the newspaper, do you still feel scared of it? Has no resolution, no end, because you still think he's out there. He became someone who could be around any corner and in any shadow at any time. But the Zodiac was also sort of
drowned out at times by other major crime stories. A lot of people were paying more attention to things like the Manson trial and all the chaos and insanity of that. And then as the sixties came to an end in
the seventies came around. That was the age of the serial killer, and I think the Zodiac was sort of overshadowed by all of this, and perhaps he sensed that in some way that time had moved on, that America had become even more violent than he was and moved to another level, and maybe that's why he in a sense stepped away from it. But then in March of nineteen seventy, a young woman claimed that she had been driving along a freeway and a vehicle pulled.
Up alongside her.
The man inside gestured towards her vehicle as if there was something wrong, so she pulled over. The man pulled over and said, hey, your tires loose. That gave him a perfect opportunity to pretend to be the good Samaritan and offer her a.
Ride next time on Monster the Zodiac killer.
Investigators at Riverside were watching and saying, this looks kind of familiar, and maybe these crimes are connected.
A young, inexperienced Zodiac murdered Edwards and Domingos more than five years before his reign of terror in San Francisco.
It said, Bates had to die. There will be more right at the bottom, is z.
In his monotone, no killing, no looking at me, Ryan or on.
He said to you that he was going to kill you.
You're gonna die.
You know I'm gonna kill you and throw that maybe out.
Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced by iHeartRadio, hou Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Alright and I are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers Meredith Stebman, Mason Lindsay, and Christina Dana. Jason Hope is executive producer on behalf of How 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 eight five six six sixty seven.
Thanks for listening.