![School Bus [6] - podcast episode cover](https://assets.metacast.app/images/episode/artwork/9YLJEjWp)
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. The Zodiac was now in San Francisco. He had killed a cab driver and took credit for the murder in a new letter inside a piece of bloody cloth from the cab driver's shirt. The Zodiac now had the city's attention, and he gripped the entire Bay
Area in fear with his deadly game. It was clear that anyone could be next. People walked the streets with caution as they went about their everyday lives. But as Michael Butterfield says, Pallstein's murder wasn't the most terrifying detail. For the first time, the Zodiac had included a very real threat.
School children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning, Just shoot at the front tire and then pick off the kiddies that they come bouncing out, signed Zodiac.
This was, of course terrifying, because he had already demonstrated that he was capable of extreme acts of violence, and now he was threatening school children. The fact that he had moved to a major metropolitan city and murdered a cab driver for no apparent reason, which was completely outside of his previous victim preference, indicated that this man was very unpredictable, and when he started threatening school children, there was no reason to believe that he was bluffing.
In San Francisco, we have been since the first day, since the reception of this note, we have a number of playing clothes officers following buses in the morning and in the.
Evening, so there was a concerted effort to protect school children on school buses and all around the Bay Area. There were police officers that were following the buses, police officers sheriff's deputies who were assigned to ride on the buses with shotguns. There were helicopters following buses, and bus drivers were given instructions on what to do in the event that someone did shoot at them.
We have specifically requested that they alert their drivers to not stop under any conditions if a shot is fired or if the bus is subjected to a flat tire by the sniper. Further, that they get the children down immediately and proceed with all speed out of the airth to try and attract all the possible attention by blowing their horns and therefore get out of the situation.
So every effort was made to avoid the scenario that the Zodiac preferred, and that of course created a rather traumatic childhood for a lot of children who were growing up in the Bay area and who at this time now remember him as some sort of boogeyman who scared them the death.
I heard this loud shot from the left hand side of the bus.
What do the children do?
They heard it. My reaction was get them off the bus, get them into school as fast as I could, and I was right behind them.
Now, conversely, there's also a great piece of video from that period, a piece of film footage shot by a local news station where they're interviewing one of the bus drivers.
Have any of the drivers trust any concern over their job?
Now, there's naturally talk everybody, so I guess there's chanced about it, but they all seem to be in good spirits and all seem to be going on with the job. I don't know of anybody that's quit.
And the bus driver saying, well, you know, I'm not really that concerned about it or whatever, but we're going to be careful. And in the background there's a little kid who shouts out, you're not afraid.
No, no, no, not too afraid.
And it kind of puts things in perspective for you that children really didn't understand what was going on. They knew enough to be scared, and they knew enough that there was something happening around them, but they had no concept like the adults did, of what was really going on. The children just knew someone was threatening them. The adults knew that they were being threatened by a man had already killed before and was perfectly capable of doing it again.
So that bus threat changed everything in the case. It not only terrified people and created this whole situation where they'd have to protect children all over the Bay area, but it also elevated the Zodiac to a level he had not been at before, which was someone who could attack anyone at any time.
A man in a mask, robbed, tied, and stabbed them, leaving them for.
Dam subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no a double murder.
I did it.
A man who wore an evil style executionershood, carried a knife and gun and intended to use them.
They haven't arrested me because they 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. There's nothing like the hysteria and paranoia of fearing for their child's life. The Zodiac preyed on hysteria and fear like the Joker from Batman. Fear made him feel powerful, and it created a difficult problem for journalists and civic figures. Should one continue reporting the misdeeds of the Zodiac or does that only fuel him? Is that
doing what he wants? The worst part about fear mongering is it a bomb doesn't even have to be there to accomplish the goal of Mayhem.
Zodiac's threat to harm school children created a ripple effect across the Bay Area. In Valeo, the local community was still reeling from the recent attacks. It had only been a few months since the Zodiac killed Darlene Farrin at Blue Rock Springs. Now Valeo police were also taking precautions to protect school buses. While San Francisco was no stranger to high pressure situations, Valeo was different. Suburban quiet back then.
Valeo was a really really nice town, nice place to live. Me and my little sister walked to school all the time. I was, you know, ride along Sonoma Boulevard there at seven eight years old, and nobody thought anything of it. My name is Mark Ibner. I'm fifty six. I live in Loomis, California, and I was born and raised in Balo. In the neighborhood that we lived in California Meadows, we had a huge, huge field or lot. As kids, we could just go play around and collect lady bugs and
a lot of friends. You know, we'd just go ride bikes and do kid things. I'd be five six years old and be gone for hours with my friends in the neighborhood and out in that field, and I think my mom ever had any worry about that until.
Just shoot out the front tire and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.
I remember as a kid having a cop car follow behind us, and I remember that because as kids we would all kind of run to the back of the bus and wave with the cop out the back window of the bus. And then certainly for a couple of years, our trick or treating had to be done in the daylight. Obviously.
With adults, what is most noticeable is the lack of teenagers and young people out at night or in the weekends. It seems that the parents are are keeping the children home.
I don't have a recollection of saying that, you know, the Zodiac killers out there. I heard the name. I just knew that there was something going on. You know, you'd see the headlines in the Valeo Times Herald. Nobody was really thinking about a serial killer so much as just a couple people that were murdered. I think that started taking on that life, you know, in the in the following years.
There's a lot of Valeo ones who have been here for generations. A lot of them you know, of course, worked at Mare Island, at the shipyard, and so even though we're in a major metropolitan area, especially, I think at that time it really had kind of a small town feel to it. It just just another typical suburb, which is why I think the events with the Zodiac were so surprising, because it doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would happen in a town like Valeo.
My name is Jim Kern. I'm the executive director of the Valeo Naval and Historical Museum. You hear about murders and violence, and it's always been, unfortunately a part of human nature, but sometimes it takes place in an environment that's, you know, a little scarier, or something that's that's not
germane to people's everyday life. So this is different because this was just everyday people that might have been your next door neighbors, and suddenly it's it's right here in your town, So that makes it quite a bit more scary. There's always been murders, and there's always scandals and crimes, and people are interested in that kind of thing. People were kind of fascinated by it, but I think the fascination is when they can read about it or see a movie, or when it's sort of one or two
or three steps removed from their everyday life. But suddenly, when it's happening all around you, that's a different thing altogether, and it's no longer quite so fascinating. It becomes more terrifying.
Valeo would be forever changed by this chapter. That feeling of small town charm had begun to fade, and maybe that's exactly what the zodiac wanted in San Francisco police took these threats even more seriously. Patrols followed dozens of buses on their routes each morning and afternoon, and this lasted for months. To achieve this, police had to dedicate a huge amount of manpower and this got me thinking
could they pull that off today? And if not, how would San Francisco officials respond to such a threat.
The response nowadays would be very different from what we probably saw in the late sixties with regards to manpower and being able to have the people to do that would be very tough. My name is Paul Cassada and I'm the director of Crisis Response and Emergency Preparedness for the San FRANCISCOO Unified School District. Crisis response is being able to deal with the day to day issues that might be affecting our schools. There's a case, an example
that I share with my staff. Two teachers were outside supervising. One of them heard loud pops from a distance. She had no idea what it was, but it felt wrong to her. She had never heard it before. The pops were getting closer and she felt we need to move the kids inside, and so she did. Small school, maybe hundred and thirty kids there, and it was a gentleman who had gone out in his vehicle and was shooting
at anything he could and pulled up into the school. Unfortunately, no one was out there because the teacher brought everyone inside.
Paul Casada deals with situations like these every year. However, he had never heard of anything like Zodiac's threat to shoot a school. Thus, these days school threats are very different.
We're following that breaking news story for you out of Texas this hour.
Police have confirmed there are multiple casualties at a local high school in Santa Fe, which is south of Houston.
These unfortunate things have been happening for years, right, and usually the warning comes from the sounds of gunfire, or the voices and distress or what have you. I think information is always key for all of us, and I think when people don't have it, that's when panic mode tends to kick in.
Luckily, Paul Casada says, the response time of law enforcement has only gotten better. That's due in large part to advancements in technology.
There was no mass way of getting this information out quickly. You know, you had to put it in the newspaper, print it and send it out, and then you had to hope yet people buying the press right to be able to see it. I think today, given our technology, where we can, you know, send out a quick message to everybody, a mass message, you know, I mean, heck, we can send out a message and a phone call to all fifty seven thousand of our students in a
matter of two seconds. It's impressive how we can do that now versus back then when you weren't able to do that.
So the first letter came, you know, and was printed in the Sunday paper, and when the second letters came, we printed our story and Examiner printed their story.
Remember Duffy Jennings, he was a copy boy who became a crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. I met up with him at a park near his home.
You know, I still don't. I still don't have a sense that this was the biggest story of the day. But it was decided that yes, there's a bona fide threat, there's evidence that whoever wrote this letter committed these shootings, and we'd better take it seriously enough that if we don't print it and he does take out a school bus full of kids and they find out that we knew about it ahead of time, didn't tell anybody. It's
that same dilemma that editors go through every day. Is it in the public interest and benefit to publish this even though it might panic people? And the decision was made that in the interest of public safety, it was sort of compelling to publish the threat so people could take their own measures as they saw fit. And it did panic people a lot of kids. The kids were kept home from school or at least kept off their
school bus. Parents were walking their kids to school or driving them to school, and buses were you know, were empty to a large degree just because of this. So that was the impact. But I don't remember it as a story that had a lot of legs that there was a follow up the next day and the next day and the next day, as you as big stories
tend to do. Also, in nineteen seventy seventy one, there was the kidnap of the chow Chillis school bus out in the Central Valley, where three guys commandeered a school bus with twenty six kids on it, age five to fourteen, took the bus to a quarry in Livermore and buried it for several days until the driver and the kids were able to dig their way out, and the three guys who did it went to prison. So Zodiac wasn't
the only sort of school bus situation that occurred. Then here was a guy who learned to manipulate the media, a threatned public safety, and nobody knew where the next attack was going to come from. Now we have, in my view, one of the early terrorists.
The Zodiac's threat to shoot kids on a school bus was only the beginning.
Once he had committed his murders and started writing his letters and terrifying people, and then he started threatening to shoot school children and things. That wasn't enough for him. Then he moved on to the next level, where he started threatening to blow up a school bus full of children. He claimed that he had planted bombs along roadsides that would take out a school bus full of kids. He would send these diagrams, these elaborate drawings of these bombs.
He would describe the ingredients that were going to be used, and he referred to this as his death machine.
The death machine is already made. I would have sent you pictures, but you would be nasty enough to trace them back to developer and then to me, So I shall describe my masterpiece to you. Take one bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and one gallon of.
Still will again. The San Francisco Chronicle had a difficult choice to make. Would they publish the Zodiac's threat or not. The Chronicle decided not to publish.
I think it's extremely unnerving to think that there's somebody out there preying on young people more or less randomly, and then taunting the culture at large through the media.
This is Peter Richardson, historian and lecturer at San Francisco State University.
I mean, if you want to compare it to a similar case, you can think of the abduction of Patty Hearst.
Good Evening, Patty Hurst has been taken into custoding. The FBI says Patty Hurst was picked up today in San Francisco, the Hearst newspaper. Heiress has been missing for nineteen months. First she was kidnapped, Then she announced that she had joined ranks with her kidnappers, members of the Symbionese Liberation Army. She called herself Tanya. She was later indicted in connection with the San Francisco bank hold up and labeled a fugitive with.
The abduction of the granddaughter of this great media titan, William Randolph Hurst and her father, who was still connected with the San Francisco Examiner. The media frenzy that resulted, predictable as it was, was a huge part of the story itself. So in some ways we start to see the media become a player in the stories that they're covering, partly because it had to do with the media. And I think that was really true both with Zodiac but
also with the Patty Hurst induction. Whether or not the media made the right call there, I know they struggled with it. It's not obvious that you want to turn your newspaper over to a nut and let them communicate directly with your readers. We see that again with the unibomber case.
On January twenty second, nineteen ninety eight, the unibomber ted Kazinski pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. Kazinsky sent sixteen mail bombs to universities and airlines over a seventeen year period, killing three people and injuring twenty four before his arrest in nineteen ninety five. The Washington Post and New York Times reluctantly printed his thirty five thousand word manifesto under threat Kazinski would strike again if they.
Didn't, which turns out to be the key to the arrass maid in the unibomber case, because somebody realizes, Hey, that letter, that writing sounds a lot like my brothers.
So you can make arguments both ways. I think if you let this information out, you might get new information from somebody that says, boy, that sounds like you might get leads that way, but there's a real risk because if you know that your perpetrator is kind of getting energy from this and that it becomes something that he wants to keep doing, if you open that door, then you really have a kind of moral decision and a moral responsibility if you're the media.
When it comes to the ethics governing how you report on serial killers, terrorists, mass there's tons and tons of journal articles written by people trying to assert certain journalistic codes of conduct and stuff like that, but there's no clear consensus because it's so incredibly debatable.
Adam Rgusia is a professor of journalism at Mercer University.
So many of the arguments about how you should absolutely publish this or you shouldn't publish that are predicated on unprovable counterfactuals, right, like it asks us to believe that if a newspaper hadn't published a thing, then somebody wouldn't have gotten killed. Well, we can't know that. And then there's another point of view that says no, no, no, no no, we shouldn't concern ourselves with outcomes. In journalism, that's not our job. We're not activists and we're not cops, right,
we're journalists. Our job is to put information out there. If it's relevant, if it's newsworthy, then you put it out there, and then you let the chips fall where they may. There's other people whose job it is to concern themselves with the outcomes. Job is to get the
information out there. And I'm not saying you never withhold stuff, but I think if you are going withhold information, it's got to be because there's an immediate direct threat to somebody's life that would be posed by publishing that information, or some very specific way in which publishing that information would sabotage a police investigation. You know, when there's a really direct line that you can draw, that's when you hold back information. But if it's just sort of vague.
Then I think you.
Put it out there.
And I also don't think you should necessarily trust what the cops say, you know, because police and government agencies they have sort of a bias towards secrecy, they really do, and they will sometimes ask you to not publish something, and if you try to interrogate them as to why, they don't even really have a good answer. You know, it's just they have a bias towards towards secrecy. So unless they can give you a really good answer, no,
you publish because that's what you do. You're concerned more with matters spiritual than matters temporal, meaning you're concerned more with informed the public than with how that information may be used out there in the world.
These bombs, they serve the purpose of removing him from the equation. He doesn't have to be there anymore to kill you. That's frightening. I'm just going to set this up and someone's going to die, and I won't be anywhere near where this happens. And I think this was part of a change in his mo to where he didn't need to actually carry out a crime anymore to scare people and get attention. But now he was creating crimes in your head. He was making you imagine what
would happen. But people believed it could happen, and that was all the matter.
Another letter concerning the bombs arrived at the Chronicle.
I hope you enjoy yourselves when I have my blast. If you don't want me to have this blast, you must tell everyone about the bus bomb with all the details.
Now there was a direct threat. The Zodiac said he'd put the bomb to use if the Chronicle didn't write about it. And this time the paper decided that they had to publish, but they didn't publish everything.
This whole dilemma of should journalists concern themselves with simply informing the public with relevant information or should they concern themselves with the effects of their reporting. It's a really, really problematic dilemma. There's no clear answer about it. But maybe things get a little bit clearer when you start
talking about things like bomb recipes. You know, it seems like it's a pretty clear case of journalism ethics that you don't publish a bomb recipe unless the bomb recipe is like inherently newsworthy in some way, Because you can have a reasonable degree of confidence in thinking that, like, if anyone is going to use that for anything, it's going to be to film a freaking bomb and kill right. There's no no conceivable, legitimate way of using that information.
The San Francisco Chronicle decided to omit the Zodiac's bomb recipes and specifications, even though he demanded they quote publish all the details.
You got to ask yourself, like, what's the more likely scenario here that like, this guy who's killed a bunch of people is going to kill somebody again, or that somebody is going to build this bomb from this creepy recipe and kill somebody.
I don't know.
I kind of feel like the former is the more likely scenario. I don't think that this scenario would even present itself today, but let's imagine that it did. Zodiac Killer is sending me a whole bunch of stuff to my newspaper and asking me to publish it, and I'm trying to decide whether or not I should publish it. I feel like the calculus would be a little bit different because I would know that this stuff would get out anyway, Like the public is going to get access
to this information. Investigators are going to find it. I don't have to publish it. Like you know, I as a professionaljournalist and less of a direct and crucial line of information today than I was in the seventies. Right, this stuff is going to get out there. What's up to me is whether or not I boost this killer's notoriety. It's whether I amplify the signal of this bomb recipe.
It's going to be on the internet regardless. If you're a serial killer and you want to get your message out there, you could just post it pretty much anywhere on the Internet today and have a reasonable degree of confidence that people would go and find it and disseminate it after you had done your deed. I think violence is inherently powerful. Violence is power. There's no way to
take power away from violence. Anyone who is willing to wield terrible violence will acquire power as a result, and there's nothing that people in the media can do to neutralize that effect. If people want to kill somebody, they're going to gain notoriety, whether we publish their face or not.
Zodiac be satisfied without the public knowing all about his death machine.
What you do not know is whether the death machine is at the site, or whether it's being stored in my basement for future use. I think you do not have the manpower to stop this one by continually searching the roadsides looking for this thing, and it won't do to reroute and reschedule the buses. It could be rather messy if you try to bluff me. PS be sure to print the part I marked out on page three, or I shall do my thing.
Next time.
On Monster the Zodiac Killer did.
Today there was a possibly significant development this morning. The people of San Francisco heard a man who claimed to be Zodiac talking on the.
Air my opinion on a diamond by I have a cup of coffee.
I don't really know. The only thing I can conclude is it sounded like a fellow who does have a pretty storious problem.
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. Whenever I went out of the building with Paul, I had to kind of look around. Paul started to wear a holster and he got a handgun permit from the police chief.
Dear Melboyn, this is the Zodiac speaking. Please help me. I cannot reach out for help because this thing in me won't let me. I'm afraid I will lose control again and take my ninth and possibly tenth victim. I am drowning at the moment the children are stay from the bomb, but if I hold back too long from number nine, I will lose complete all control of myself. Please help me, Signed.
Zodiac.
Monster. The Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced by iHeartRadio, How Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Alright and I are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers Meredith Stebman, Mason Lindsay, and Chris to Dana Jason Hoak is executive producer on behalf of House 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.