Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast. Doctor Mark Hewett with us DBA is a true crime of author who travels the world in his quest for intriguing, unanswered questions and enduring mysteries. Mark earned his master's degrees from Calvin Theological Seminary and the University of Phoenix and a doctorate from California Coast University with California inmate Guillermo E. Mendez. He is the co author of Charles Manson Behind Bars
and the first Manson book From the Inside. He wrote the critically acclaimed Zodiac serial killer trilogy, Hunted the Zodiac, Murders, Profiled the Zodiac, Examined and exposed the Zodiac, Revealed which we are talking about tonight. Mark, Welcome to the program. Great to have you with us. It's an honor to speak with you, George. Thank you for having me on your show. What DBA normally in business means doing business as right after your name is that That is no,
it is not. It stands for Doctor of Business Administration. All right. I love that we're going to talk about the Zodiac. We'll talk about Ted Kaczynski. We'll talk about the tie in that you have gotten together, but let's talk a little bit about the Zodiac Killer. For a while. It has gone unsolved. It happened in the sixties. What do you what can you tell us about the Zodiac Killer? Mark? Well, to me, it's one of the greatest stories I've ever encountered.
It's a mystery on so many levels. It's not only an unsolved serial killing case, but there are many side issues within the case that are continuing to be debated
to this day. It's one thing to not catch a killer and not know who's responsible for this series of events, but it's it's even more fascinating to discuss a number of cases beforehand, before the canonical five murders, and after the canonical five murders, whether or not the Zodiac was involved with those, and various aspects of the case within those five differences of opinions, but also differences of facts.
People involved in the case remember things differently, and they have differing accounts of what took place, So you know, what is the actual series of events, how exactly did they take place? To me, that's very fascinating. They blame five murders on the Zodiac Killer, Yet the Zodiac claimed in letters to newspapers that he killed thirty seven people.
Do you think it's somewhere in between? Almost certainly that number thirty seven is running up the telly trying to invoke more fear among the citizens of the Bay area. I am firmly convinced at least one of there is one prior to the canonical five that was the zodiacs, and a number of that he has made reference to have not been solved. So we have to say, why haven't they been solved? Maybe he was involved in them. Only one person, only one suspect, was ever publicly named.
His name is Arthur Lee Allen, a former elementary school teacher convicted sex offender, but he died in nineteen ninety two. Have you ruled him out too? I have. It's no wonder that the place took a very close look at him, because there were a number of eerie coincidences that made him look like a good suspect. The problem is, if you dig into each one of those so called coincidences, you realize that it may be nothing more than a coincidence,
and that he was not involved in them. A lot of people have made Arthur Lee Allen out to be this big, larger than life, scary villain and said, you know, because he's large and scary, that makes him a serial color. But what always happens when we catch a serial killer, as all the neighbors say, well, he was such a quiet person. We never suspected anything of him. We would never believe that he would be involved in anything like that.
And yet every time there's an unidentified serial killer, people start looking for somebody who's big and scary. What got me off the Arthur Lee Allen case was the temperament and the mode of interacting with the world. Arthur Leallen was an attention seeking individual that he would walk into the room and he would get attention one way or the other. If he couldn't get an attention by being by doing something positive, he would do something negative or
threatening or outrageous or inappropriate. He was very good at getting attention. Somebody like that does not need to write letters to the press to try to get attention of the people of the Bay Area. The characteristic of the letters of what the Zodiac revealed himself through his letters.
Somebody who was much more quiet and introspective, Probably somebody who didn't get a lot of attention in his life, somebody who was crying out for attention but didn't know how to get it in either appropriate or inappropriate means. And so the letters were his way of reaching out and making threats and scaring people and that way getting attention. And so to me, Arthur Lee Allen just did not match up with the Zodiac mark. What got you interested
in the Zodiac serial killer case? I was first introduced to the case by our roommate back in college. We were both fans of true crime, and we were sharing with one another some of the books that we read, and he said to me, have you ever heard of the Zodiac? And I hadn't, And I began to research it after he talked to me about it, and I was absolutely smitten with the case that there's so many unanswered questions. Indeed, indeed, now let's talk a little bit
about Ted, because Ki the UNI bomber. Wasn't it his brother who turned him in close? It was actually his sister in law, his brother's wife. David was very resistant to the idea that his brother was the UNI bomber. Obviously, he didn't want to think that his brother was that person.
He didn't know any violence and his brother. So it took his wife a while to actually convince him to take a close look at it, and to take a close look at the UNI Bomber manifesto and compare it to some of Ted's letters and some of Ted's writings. And it was her persistence that got Dad Ted's brother to consider the idea and actually be willing to go forward and approach attorneys and make contact with the FBI.
He's going to be eighty one in May, still alive in prison and will probably just die there, won't he That's correct. He was in Colorado for about twenty five years. He was actually in Colorado for longer than he was in Montana in his little cabin. But in December of twenty twenty one, he was moved to North Carolina to a health facility. Now, obviously the Department of Corrections is
unable to say anything about his health condition. I haven't been able to confirm this, but rumor has it that he expressed through a letter to somebody that he has been diagnosed with cancer and told that he has two years or that he had two years to live. So that would be December of this year. December of twenty twenty three is when they expect his time to run out, so we could hear an announcement about him. Anytime. Have
you tried to interview him? I have. I corresponded with him for a couple of years back in two thousand and nine twenty ten, and what happen. Well, I got
some very interesting letters from him. I got some Zodiac like wording that he sent to me, and his final letter I call it my exorcist letter because it once he found out who I was, I contacted him under a guise of being interested in his manifesto, and I really kind of sucked up to him and told him how great he was, and told him everything that a narcissist and sociopath would want to hear, just to continue
the dialogue. But once he found out that I was studying the Zodiac case, he sent me one final, nasty, scathing letter, which was as much anger as he could provide, but it rang to me of a similar tone of the Zodiac's last confirmed the Exorcist letter. Now the FBI in the San Francisco Police Department, based on what they say fingerprint and handwriting comparison ruled him out as a suspect. How do you handle that? That's the word that's been
going around. Somebody has posted that online, that those two departments have ruled them out. Neither of them have published anything or come right out and said that it couldn't be him. The best I could actually say is that some people within those departments have looked into him and were not able to make a match, and so they moved on. I know the FBI did a fingerprint comparison at the same time. All of the fingerprints in the Zodiac case are from publicly available locations, and there's no
guarantee that those are Zodiac fingerprints. Why do you believe Kazynski maybe the Zodiac Killer? Why do I believe? Yes? The first thing that took me, actually, I should say, first of all, when I heard the idea, I thought was a ridiculous idea that he was there a the
same time. Wasn't he in California? He was? He was. Indeed, he taught at UC Berkeley from sixty seven to sixty nine, and he was in California in sixty six interviewing for his position one that the first canonical murder took place over the Christmas break during Kazynski's final year as a professor, and thirty one days exactly one month after that, he tendered his resignation. His final day at UC Berkeley was June the thirtieth, nineteen sixty nine, and four days later
the murder at Blue Rock Springs Park took place. Following his time at Berkeley, there's a two year gap in Ted Kazinski's life. He gave his parents home address in Lombard, Illinois as his mailing address, but he didn't stay there. His mother speaks of regular travels that he took away from that home. He would disappear suddenly without notice, so he wasn't completely based in that location. And the bulk of the Zodiac murders and the bulk of the Zodiac
letters took place during that two lost years of Kasinski's life. Now, he pled guilty to all his charges back in nineteen ninety eight. If he were the Zodiac killer, why wouldn't he just come clean on that too. That's a very appropriate question. That's a question that a lot of people ask, and a lot of people point out the truth is that Ted Kazinski does not want to be known as
somebody who is mentally ill. He was given a provisional diagnosis of being schizophrenic by a quarter pointed attorney following his arrest. He has adamantly declared that he is not mentally ill. If he were to admit to the Zodiac killings, he would be unable to make that claim that he wasn't mentally ill, because there's a lot of craziness that took place with that, especially the letters following the murders. After he he turned a letter writing in lieu of killing.
Once he was cited after the final canonical killing, his letters became more and more bizarre and more and more desperate because people weren't taking him seriously anymore. It appeared that he wasn't killing any longer. If he were to admit that he was the Zodiac it would put into question all of his life's work in the Unibomber manifesto and claiming that he has a purpose in what he is doing and has a reason and a justification for murder.
And what specifically, Mark, do you think was the cause for you to believe that Kazynski is the Zodiac killer? Wasn't anything specific I in my research gathered together evidence
of six clusters of information that linked the two. I don't know if you want to go into those, please go ahead, sure, but the first indication once I realized that, once I thought it was a crazy idea to link the two, then I recalled, oh yeah, the Zodiac included two bomb diagrams as part of his letters, and obviously, Ted Kazinski, the Unibomber, is known for his designing and either setting or sending through the mail sixteen bombs over
the course of seventeen years. The bombs that the Unibomber created Kazynski as the Unibomber, were very distinctive. The FBI was able to identify them quite easily because they contained redundancies such as two dowels that would go through a pipe bomb instead of the usual one, or a backup. He was very good at what he did. He was
extremely good. The two diagrams of the Zodiac bombs have either two circus or one circuit used for two reasons with a cloudy day disconnect, so the intricacy appears evident in the universe in the Zodiac bombs as well. Another cluster has to do with mathematics. The Zodiac was into codes. He sent four codes as part of his letters. What are codes? They're symbols to solve and where does coding come from? It comes not from the military, It comes
from within mathematics. It's symbols, symbols that need to be solved. And so it was no surprise that Ted Kaczynski, as a mathematician, was very interested in coding and as somebody who was a little bit paranoid, he put a lot of his journaling into codes, and when he was arrested, they found codes in his cabins that the FBI said they hadn't encountered such complex codes since the Cold War, and at least one of them they would not have been able to solve if it were not for the
key that was also recovered from the cabin. Well. He was a very intelligent person, extremely his IQ was measured above one hundred and sixty. He skipped two grades, one in elementary school one in high school, so he enrolled at Harvard at the age of sixteen and then became one of the youngest professors hired by UC Berkeley Math department, and he hated that job. Though didn't he he did not do well at it because he was unable to socialize with people. His students gave him horrible feedback on
his lectures. They said he didn't care about his students. He ignored questions, He just plowed through the material. He read through the book and then left and didn't keep his office hours. It's interesting that he only lasted about two years when he was student teaching. When he went to get his Masters of Mathematics, he lasted two years and then gave it up so that he could focus on his doctoral work. But then once he secured a full time job with UC Berkeley, he only similarly lasted
two years and then quit. What was the most important piece of information that drove you to believe that Ted Kaczynski is the Zodiac Killer? Well, that's just it. It's not one item. That's just an accumulation and stuffing. It's it's very easy to say, oh, I noticed this connection and then build a whole story around that. For me, it was studying the case for several years before I realized that a lot of it can deeal together into
a single story. I'll tell you one extremely important connection, and that is the novel Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. To me reading it, it's almost a guide for the Zodiac. It contains themes, it contains individual vocabulary items, phrases that almost seemed to be an influence on the reader to be fascinated by you're interested in or to actually go out and produce the Zodiac serial Killer. And why is that significant? Because the Secret Agent is reportedly ted Kazinski's
favorite book. He wrote to his family one time that if they wanted to understand him, he was a hard person to understand, but they needed to read that book and they needed to especially take notice of a particular character the professor within that book. And Kazynski claimed to have read that book a dozen times. And I can see how rereading that book would have an influence on
the letters that the Zodiac wrote. Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at one am Eastern and go to Coast to Coast am dot com for more