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For law enforcement, every homicide case is a puzzle, some more difficult than others.
Two hundred pieces versus two hundred thousands.
The Zodiac killer took the idea of a puzzle quite literally, forcing everyone to play his little game. This may be with the Zodiac is known for best codes and taunting letters to press and police, But would there be any answers to his riddle?
Any content to his code?
Was all this affront a powerplay and not worth the attention he so desperately sought That was left up to the press.
Game on.
A man in a match, robbed, tied, and stab them, leaving them for.
Damn subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no a double murder.
I did it a 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, Helstuff Works and Tenderfoot TV.
This is Monster, the Zodiac Killer.
When he committed the murders on Lake Kerman Road, he didn't make any effort to communicate with the media or take responsibility for it, but there was a lot of media attention around it. And then when he struck again in July of nineteen sixty nine, there was enormous media coverage, largely because of the phone call he made afterwards where he took credit for that crime and the murders on Lake Kerman Road.
If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway, you'll kids in a brown car. They were shot with a nine milimeter luger. I also killed those kids last year.
So now he's created this sensational story that there's a psychotic killer out there, a serial killer who's responsible for two crimes, not just one. Twenty six days later is when I get the first Zodiac letters.
A strange letter arrives at the offices of three Northern California newspapers.
He's created a whole other game.
Now.
On July thirty first, nineteen sixty nine, the zodiaccent envelopes to three Bay area newspapers. Each envelope included two sheets, a handwritten letter, and one third of a three part coded message known as a cryptogram or a cipher. This coded message is very important to the case, but let's focus on the letter first. Duffy Jennings was working at the San Francisco Chronicle when the first or arrived.
I'll never forget my first day walking into the Chronicle. The day before, I had come in to do an interview, but it was in the morning, and there's not a lot of activity, you know, mostly activity in the morning papers, late afternoon. But when I came in to start work the next afternoon, I think it was probably two o'clock. It was equivalent the first time I walked into the Yankee Stadium and saw that grass, and everybody talks about that first experience overwhelming. It is the majesty of it.
And that's what I sensed at the Chronicle. It was total chaos. Desks were disheveled and crowded with papers, and there was stuff everywhere, and people were smoking. I could smell pencil shavings, glue, printers, ink, lots of people talking loudly and guys yelling copy and guys at the desk yelling first edition. It was just a typical day. But that's how it was every afternoon. The closer I got
to five o'clock, people were on deadline. Editors were yelling, you need to explain this, or rewrite this, or you know, whatever it was, And I was just captivated. But I was mesmerized by this. It was just kind of an overwhelming sensory experience to be in and around this environment. I would come in and wait to be assigned to cover something. When the first letter came, I was among the copy boys sorting mail. The first letter didn't cause a lot of consternation in the sense that nobody knew
quite what to make of it. Time. It was viewed really as here's a nutcase playing games and say if you can guess what this is.
Here's a portion of the first letter the Zodiac sent to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Dear editor, this is the murderer of the two teenagers last Christmas at Lake Herman and the girl on the fourth of July near the off course in Vallejo. Here is part of a cipher. The other two parts of this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the Vallejo Times and San Francisco Examiner. I want you to print ae cipher on the front page of your paper. In this cipher is my identity. If you do not printice by the afternoon of Friday, first of August, I
will go on a kill rampage Friday night. I will cruise around all weekend, killing lone people in the night, then move on to kill again.
The letter was scrawled in blue felt tip pen. The handwriting was sloppy and cramped, and it was full of misspellings, like Christmas with two s's at the end. The style of this writing seemed a strange contrast to the other sheet, an orderly grid of letters and symbols that the killer said contained his true identity.
When the first letters arrived, that was his introduction to the world. This is who I am. I am the murderer, so I'm may be taken seriously. I'm a very dangerous person, and if you don't do what I tell you to do, there will be real consequences.
The newspapers weren't sure if the letter came from the killer, and even if it did, should they publish it. On the one hand, you want to take the threat seriously. On the other it's like bargaining with terrorists or printing a mass shooter's manifesto. Do you really want to reward a killer with attention and give them a platform to
spread more fear. Two other papers, the San Francisco Examiner in the Vallejo Times, received nearly identical letters but different parts of the code, so the papers had to decide together whether or not to publish.
When there's any kind of controversy or question about whether to publish things like this, particularly around threats, My guess is that we talked to the other newspapers and said, are you going to publish your third of the cryptogram? And everybody said, yes, we will. I mean, it's a news story when a killer takes credit publicly for what he's done and then taunts you or the police to solve a puzzle. But even that wasn't up front page story.
Two days later, on Saturday, August second, the Chronicle ran the story coded Clue in Murders with a reproduction of the cipher. The Valejo police chief was quoted as saying, we're not satisfied the letter was written by the murderer, and he urged whoever wrote the letter to prove he was the killer by sending more details, perhaps trying to trick the Zodiac into sending something self incriminating. The chief also warned Vallejo residents to avoid lonely places.
It wasn't until the police asked, would you send another letter with more details that the next letter came and said, this is the Zodiac speaking.
On August fourth, nineteen sixty nine, just two days after the chronicle story, a new letter arrived with the same slanted handwriting.
Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking in answer to your asking for more details about the good times I've had in Vallejo. I shall be very happy to supply even more material. By the way, are the police having a good time.
With the code?
If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do crack it, they will have me last Christmas. In that episode, the police were wondering as to how I could shoot and hit my victims in the dark. They did not only state this, but implied this by saying it was a well lit night and I could see the silhouettes on the horizon. Bullshit. That area is surrounded by high hills and trees. What I did was tape a small
pencil flashlight to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, you'll see a black or dark spot in the center of the circle of light. One taped to a gun barrel. The bullet will strike exactly in the center of the black dot in the light. All I had to do was spray them is if it was a water hose. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page coverage.
When he sends that second letter, now he's the Zodiac killer. He has chosen his own name, his own moniker. And although a lot of serial killers throughout history have nicknames, most don't choose their nicknames for themselves. So that name had some meaning to him that we don't know. But if you look at the handwriting in the Zodiac letters, especially the ones that accompany the cipher, the handwriting looks very sloppy. It looks kind of rushed and just natural handwriting,
like I just fired off this letter. Then you look at the cipher, it's very clean and very careful. Each part consisted of a block of symbols, letters from the English language, symbols from astrology and other things, you know, half filled circles backwards letters. They're tidy and then straight rows.
He might have used some sort of graphing paper underneath when he was doing it to make sure of that, which says something in and of itself about the killer that tells you right there, this was very.
Important to him.
It was more important than the letter. And when you look at the cipher itself, it's chilling just to look at it, because you know there's something in it, right, But once you realize what's in it, it's even more frightening. If he just wanted to brag about what he did, he could do that, and he did in that letter. The cipher is another element of this game he's playing. It's not just I'm somebody who has to be taken seriously. I'm dangerous. It's also I'm really clever, and I have
something else I want to say. If you want to know who I am, you want to understand what I did and why I do what I do, You're gonna have to work for it. I'm not going to give you everything.
The police sent the three parts cipher to the nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard. There, navy code breakers rushed to crack the Killer's code and to discover the Zodiac's true identity before he killed again.
On The published codes stopped hundreds of amateur cryptographers and several intelligence agencies.
But surprisingly it was actually two amateurs who ended up solving it. A school teacher and his wife, Don and Betty Harden, saw the code in the newspaper and just decided to give it a shot. Tom Voyd, who runs the website Zodiac killer dot com, recorded the Harden's daughter, Leslie, at a two thousand and eight conference.
Began on a Sunday morning fairly early, went on into the afternoon, into the evening, and through the night. They really became, in my eyes, the perfect code breaking team, because my dad had the scientific approach and very logical practices, and my mother had some.
Intuition that led them in the direction that they needed to go. My father at some point recognized that he had to go to work the next morning, and when he went.
To that.
Not so my mother. She did not sleep and ate very little. The next morning, he got up and went off to work.
He was a school teacher, came back home and was probably mildly surprised to find that there was no dinner and nothing at all happened in the kitchen.
She sat in the chair and he stood behind her. And what really captured my attention for that moment was not the code spread out in front of them at all. It was the look of love on my father's face as he paid over her.
And Don Harden. He had a boyhood interest in codes. You know, if it wasn't for Betty's persistence, they wouldn't have finished it.
That's David Auranjak, a programmer and amateur cryptographer. He's spent the last decade fascinated by the Zodiacs codes.
The first cipher was a simple substitution cipher, basically a simple way to hide a message.
Essentially, you substitute each letter with a different letter. So to make a cipher for the word kill, you might substitute J for K, H for I, and b's for both l's. And if you know which letters you substituted, you can then decode JHBB back to kill. But without knowing which letters were substituted, how do you crack that code? The Hardens started by doing what's called a frequency analysis.
You count up all the letters and how many times they happen. One of the things about English is that certain letters appear more often than others. In particular, the letter E is the most frequently occurring letter in the English language, and so you can use that information to
your advantage when you're looking at a ciphertext. If you find that, say, the letter V is happening a lot more often than the other letters, then there's a good chance that it stands for the letter E. But the way the Zodiac made it harder and the first cipher was he would take a common letter like E, and instead of assigning one ciphertext letter to it, he assigned seven seven different symbols.
That's why the Zodiac used backwards letters in astrological symbols to make his code harder to crack. Undaunted, the Harden's next tried what's called cribbing, plugging specific words into the puzzle. On a simpler cryptogram, you could try to figure out short words first.
If the ciphertext has spaces in it, then you know that certain words are likely to happen. For instance, if you see a word that only has one letter, then there's only two words that it can be A and I. But in the first side for text, he did not use word spaces, so that made it a little harder to solve.
Still, even without the spaces, you can try and guess if certain groups of symbols represent common words.
If you have a right guess and you plug it in and you do the substitutions, other parts of the plaintext will come out. So you'll see fragments of other words like thhe. Well, there's a lot of words to start with THG, so you might be onto something. And if you made a bad guess, then those fragments will look like nonsense. There'll be letters that are next to each other that wouldn't really be next to each other ZQR.
That guess is probably wrong. And Betty is attributed to the insight of thinking that he would start it by talking about himself and so it would start with the letter I, and that he would talk about his crime, so he would mention killing. And those intuitions also came from patterns that they observed in the ciphertext. They found
symbols that were repeating next to each other. Doing a little research, they found, well, the most common doubled letter in English is LL, and you know LLL appears in.
A lot of words all.
Will and kill, and so that was a good guess on their part, because kill does appear in the message. So they tried to plug in those words in different places and eventually found other patterns, and then, through trial and error, were able to crack the code.
Or at least almost crack the code. At the very end of the message was a string of letters that so far no one has been able to figure.
Out the remaining eighteen symbols. It's just gibberish sequence of letters that doesn't make any sense. Zodiac was claiming that his identity was in the message, but when you decode it with the Harden's key, it doesn't say anything about his identity. But since the last eighteen are still undercoded, that's led to a lot of people thinking, well, maybe he did something else. There's some other process that is different than the key for the rest of the message,
and there might be another message in there. Maybe he really did put his identity in there and it's hidden somehow, and those last eighteen and we just haven't figured it out.
Leslie, the Harden's daughter, remembers waking up in the middle of the night after her parents cracked the code.
Once the message became clear, it was a very frightening message.
I do recall being in my room, coming in and out of sleep, mostly nightmares and scary images, because the words that were floating down the hallway were frightening words.
Kill dangerous animal.
This is the message that was hidden in the Zodia Acts three parts cipher.
I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing weld game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is that when I die, I'll be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
All of a sudden, what looks like a message, and the question at hand was what do we do now? They decided that they would do what the paper suggested. The paper had said, I think you might have a solution. Call this number.
So they did. But once they did, it got a whole lot more interesting.
The decoded message didn't reveal the Zodiac's true identity, as he had promised, but it did give clues as to who the zodiac might be.
In the Zodiac Seiphered message, he referred to man as the most dangerous animal of all, which some people have interpreted as a reference to the book and or the movie The Most Dangerous Game. A lot of us who are older, we had to read that story in high school. And if you were a teenager who read that in high school and you were harboring some sort of violent fantasies, then you're not sympathizing with the victims the way most
of us do. When you read that story, do you think about being the hunter Count Tsarov who lives on this island where he has constructed things designed to make ships crash on the shore so that people will be deserted on this island.
I'm not trying to intrude, but I'm in sort of a jam. Are you the owner here? Yes?
I am Count Zubtolf.
And of course he pretends to be a gracious host and invites them to stay and everything.
God made some in kings, some big us me he made a.
Hunter, only for them to learn that he really intends to hunt.
Them like animals here on my island.
I hunt the Most Dangerous Game.
You write me take half drowned men from ships you wrecked and drive them out to be hunted.
Only after the keel does man know the true extosial.
Love Count Tzarov obviously the name starts with the letter Z. He wears a costume of sorts, and he stalks his victims like prey. The whole story is structured around the idea that killing is sort of an intellectual exercise, that it's sort of a right of man to hunt another human being, that killing is part of human nature, and the Zodiac may have been very drawn to a story with those elements. He may have decided to emulate certain aspects of Count Zaroff.
And maybe that might explain the difference between those first two attacks the Bliss create shootings at night.
After that, it's not the same kind of crime because in the story The Most Dangerous Game, Count Zarov doesn't come out saying I'm going to kill you. He makes you think that he's a friendly person. He wants you to participate in his game. He needs you to feel safe so that when you find out that you're no longer safe, he can see that fear in you and that fearrest part of the hunt, So I think with the Zodiac there may have been some element of that that he decided it's not enough for me to just
shoot these people. I need to talk to them. I need to look in their eyes and see them going, oh, everything's okay now, and then look in their eyes when I flip on them and they find out that this is not what they thought and that their lives.
Are at statement.
Why did the Zodiac quote the villain from what at the time was almost a fifty year old story. Maybe it's how he saw himself a movie villain playing with his victims. There were other possible clues about the Zodiac's identity hidden in the cipher, such as this line, to kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is even better than getting your rocks off.
With a girl.
Psychiatrists at the time speculate that this line reflected the killer's feelings of sexual inadequacy, but it may have also been literal. The Zodiac may be a sadist, someone who feels excitement or pleasure from inflicting pain. To learn more about sadism, we spoke with criminal psychology professor Eric Hickey.
My name is doctor Eric Hickey. I'm a criminal psychologist. Some days I'm just a criminalistimes I'm just a psychologist.
Professor Hickey literally wrote the book on serial killers. It's a textbook called Serial Murderers and Their Victims.
One day I got a phone call from the media and there was a case of a mass murderer. When they searched his car, they've found a couple of books in the backseat of his car, and one of the books was my book on sera murder. They said, doctor Key, how do you feel about the fact that this serial or mass murderer had your book in his car? Like I'm supposed to feel badly that I wrote a book about serial murders. No, And I said, well, why would
I be upset about that? The point is this is for public education to make it more aware of these types of people.
Professor Hickey says two thirds of serial killers are sexual predators, and many have unusual desires like sadism. Hickey says that even though the Zodiac didn't sexually assault his victims, the killings could have been sexually motivated.
So sadism is what we call it paraphilia perophilia, meaning that they get sexual arousement and gratification through bizarre imagery, fantasies, and behavior. There's hundreds and hundreds of paraphilia, and probably a sixty percent of them are not criminal. If people want to have sex with doorknobs, that's their business, it's not a crime. A person could have a footfeth that's
not a crime. It is a crime. However, if they break into people's homes and peel off their blanket while they're asleep and stuck on their toes, that's a crime. So there's a whole variety of criminal paraphilia that are not physically harmful, but they are still criminal, like voyeurism, exhibitionism, somnophilia where you would like to watch people asleep. Those are criminal, but nobody gets hurt. But people who are driven to kill serially, those not the kind out less
they're looking for. If you're a serial killer and you're statistic, you're not into consent. You want to be able to do what you want to do. A Zodiac and no problem killing people and making them suffer as he did it.
Hickey thinks of the Zodiac sadism likely extended beyond the killings to the letters, the puzzles, the.
Way he taught the police. There was an element of sadism there. He liked creating fear in the public's eye. I'm sure that he liked reading about himself in newspapers. That would have been quite gratifying to him. He could become kind of contact the Ripper.
Jack the Ripper also sent letters to newspapers when he terrorized London in the late eighteen hundreds. One read the next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ears off and send the police officers just for jolly. Many thought it was a hoax, until three days later a woman was found dead, her ear lobe severed.
I think that that was something that the Zodiac and was trying to attain. Was that sort of notoriety. He held the city of San Francisco in fear. It was all his doing, and that would make him feel very powerful, and it gave him great pleasure in doing it. So there was that sort of sadistic approach, not just to his victims, but also to the general public.
So the Zodiac is likely a sadist, a term named after the Marquis de Sod, a French philosopher and novelist. Sod wrote in his book Juliet, it is an article of faith on the island of Borneo that all those persons a man kills will be his slaves in the next world. And as a result, the better a man wishes to be served after his death, the more he kills during life, which brings us to the end of the cipher.
When I die, I'll be reborn in paradise, and all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name, because you will try to slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
Had the Zodiac read that passage from the Marquis de Sade or heard about these beliefs somewhere else. Either way, this fantasy of slaves in the afterlife speaks to the Zodiac's intense desire for power and control. The Zodiac's murders and phone call were cold hearted, his letters were twisted, but the decoded cipher revealed just how truly deranged the Zodiac was. As San Francisco would soon find out, what they'd seen so far was just the beginning. The Zodiac
was ramping up. Professor Hickey told us serial killers often intensify their crimes over time.
There's sort of this evolvement with serial killers that we see. There is a long process. Look at Jeffrey Dahmer. Nobody wakes up in the morning and said, I'm an acrophile. They wake up feeling that they want to be with someone who's been buried. And that's what Dahmer did. He wanted to be with someone who has been buried because he has such low self esteem. He didn't feel comfortable
with the live person. And then he progressed wanted to be with blow up dolls and mannequins and so on, and then he progressed from that to dead animals, and then from there he went into bringing people home, and when they wanted to leave them, he'd make them unconscious, then drill holes in their heads and put mer curic acid in to make them into zombies. And then he progressed from there to evisceraating them and then having sex
with the corpse and started cannibalizing them. He went down this long, dark, dark pathway that each time he did, his fantasies get more and more evolved.
Like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac was also beginning to evolve. His codes would become more complex, his letters increasingly bizarre, and his murders more ritualistic and sadistic.
Next time on Monster the Zodiac.
Killer, Celia Shephard and Brian Hartnell, both in their early twenties, were sitting on this knoll of land overlooking part of Lake Barriessa. They thought they were alone, but there was a third man on this knoll, a man who wore a medieval style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to use.
Them whenever redrive here.
I'm like, Wow, he drove the same exact way just to get here and do that.
It is crazy to think about.
This guy is a pathological, a psycho.
Killer found this young girl in on the shoreland here. I've had eleven years patrol on Miss Lake and I've seen a lot of people cut up by boat accidents and smaticism. One of the worst things I ever witnessed.
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 Stebman, Mason Lindsay and Christina Dana.
Jason Hoak 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 Up in 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 HowStuffWorks dot com, or you can call us at one eight three three two eight five sixty six sixty seven.
Thanks for listening.