OBSESSED-Mark Hewitt

the Zodiac Case on his life. Moving to California reignited his passion, leading him to explore crime scenes and connect with other enthusiasts. His relentless pursuit is not only about the Zodiac, but also about understanding the complexities of human

nature and the quest for truth. Obsessed, My Relentless Pursuit of the Zodiac Killer provides a unique blend of personal narrative and investigative insight, offering readers a compelling look at the determination and challenges faced by those who seek to solve cold cases. Join doctor Hewitt as he navigates the twists and turns of this enigmatic case, shedding light on his life's work in his unwavering commitment to uncovering the truth.

The book that we're featuring this evening is Obsessed My Relentless Pursuit of the Zodiac Killer, with my special guest, Zodiac expert and true crime author Mark Hewitt. Good evening, and welcome back to the program, Mark Hewitt, Thank you and congratulations on your latest book, Obsessed My Relentless Pursuit of the Zodiac Killer. Congratulations, Thank you.

into this? How'd you get into writing? Why are you interested in the zodiac that type of thing, And so that's kind of a question I've been wrestling with for years now, and I decided to sit down and retell

my story of how I got into it all. So in the book Obsessed, I go all the way back to my childhood and the first true crime book I ever read was about Lizzie Borden, a young woman who allegedly killed her father and stepmother with a hatchet back in eighteen ninety four in Massachusetts, And it kind of opened up a world for me when I read that book,

because it's such a fascinating story. She was acquitted at trial, but the people in the town kind of all knew that she was responsible, but they just didn't have the gumption or the ability, or the willingness to watch her hang. So she was found not guilty and then lived a life of obscurity. And that whole story just fascinated me

and stuck with me over the years. And my younger brother, A couple of years ago, said, you know that Lizzie Borden book that was your first true crime book, wasn't it? And I'd forgotten about that long ago. That's the first step of getting me into being interested in true crime.

with different words. My parents were always correcting me when I made a mistake. I guess through high school and college and grad school, I did a lot of writing. I never saw myself as a writer, but the more I got into the Zodiac case, the more I realized, you know, i'd really like to write, I would really like to get out my thoughts and my research. I guess that's how I got into it and there's a

certain amount of permanence. When you write a book, it lives long past, it leaves a legacy behind, and so that's I find that exciting as well.

ministry to true crime writing. I'm joking. Of course, a lot of people don't understand the switch I made, but true crime writing, I think there are a lot of similarities. I'm fascinated with people, I'm fascinated with and particularly with mysteries.

I'm fascinated with getting it the truth. And how do you know what is true, what is not true, who is believable, who is not believable, what writings are credible, what writings are not credible, and all of that kind of fit together in the context of dealing with other people with respect to true crime. I'm really fascinated with the psychological aberration, the criminally insane, the people who choose

the life of crime. That as well as a fascination with history, and it all kind of drew me into true crime.

internship in California. I had lived in the Bay Area for nine months, and this was in eighty six and eighty seven, and nobody mentioned the Zodiac to me, and I guess being working for a church, people assumed I wasn't interested in it or it was not a hot topic in the Bay Area at that time, even though I talked to thousands of people over those nine months, so I heard absolutely nothing about it. But as I read Gracemith's book on it soon after talking to my housemate,

I just got absolutely fascinated with the story. I knew all the places, and it fascinated me that this story was never was never resolved. Most of the true crime I was reading at the time was all about criminals who had been caught, and the books about them included a trial and what they were sentenced to. This one, the Zodiac case, does not have an ending, and in some sense that's very frustrating.

nineteen nineties. I was looking around the internet and found myself on a couple of different Zodiac websites and was quite interested that there were people discussing the case, but also that most of the people we were discussing the case didn't think Arthur Lee Allen was responsible for the killings. And if you read Gracemith's book, you kind of come to that conclusion that it was Arthur Lee Allen because of the way he shapes the material, the way he

tells the story. And so I began to study it myself and find out that, yeah, Arthur Lee Allen really does not fit the type of person that we are looking for as the Zodiac, and even today a lot of people are convinced that he's responsible, but I am not.

And I joined about twenty five other people who were discussing the case in real time, and that kind of blew my mind that we could be all over the world and here we were talking to each other. I know it sounds silly now because our whole lives are connected to the Internet, but at that time it was revolutionary and it fascinated me to be talking with other people from all over the world and hearing different perspectives and disagreeing with people or agreeing with people digging up information.

And I think that all played a part in my interest in the zodiac when that came back into my life about a decade later, I started doing the same thing with the Zodiac case.

other people about reality of change. Change is not change is inevitable. Our world changes around us, we change our bodies, change, technology changes around us. So we can't live a life without change. And I think I've been around enough people who are very traditional and who are resistant to change, and that kind of forced me to tackle that topic. How does change happen? How should change happen? And not

all changes that happen are good changes? So I wrote that up relating to interpersonal change and technological change, and I published that in What I think two thousand and four, and then soon after that I became interested in studying true crime, in fact in promoting my self help book. Sales were not good and never have been that good for that book, but I was looking around for ways to promote it. Who would be interested in reading my book and who would benefit from a in their life?

And I came up with this crazy idea, what if I write some criminals behind bars and tell them about my book and invite them to read it and offer to send them a copy. So I wrote to a couple dozen high profile killers and criminals behind bars, hoping that maybe they would write back to me. I wasn't sure that they actually would, but I ended up getting a back about a half a dozen responses from these letters,

and the most startling one was from Charles Manson. Of all the people of that I wrote, I was expecting I had the least expectation that he would write me back. There was one point in his life where he was the He received more mail in prison than any other prison than any other inmate like he was. His mail was delivered to him by the bagful. So I corresponded with him for a little bit and ended up collaborating with a man who was selled next to him, Willie Mendez,

Germo Mendez. We wrote Charles Manson Behind Bars.

in two thousand and seven. A friend of mine was studying true crime, and I was able to say the same thing to him that my former housemates said to me. I said, have you heard of the Zodiac before? And he hadn't. Gain a dialogue with him, and he and I began to research together into the Zodiac case, and that's how my writing evolved out of it.

that I disagree with. In fact, there's a Netflix special not too long ago that said there was no Zodiac. These are all disparate crimes that have nothing to do with one another, but some letter writer took credit for them.

And that one coffee and I don't even remember exactly where it was that we went, but that became the first of many many coffees that we got together and met in different Starbucks, different coffee shops, different restaurants, and sometimes for three four hours at a time, we would

wrestle through the case. We would go through the letters line by line, we read the research, the police, the police reports that have been released to the public, and little by little we just we just ventured down that rabbit hole and got absolutely overwhelmed with obsession over the case.

and quotes to a lot of literature. This was not a somebody who dropped out a school at the age of sixteen. This is somebody who'd had contact with literature and a good understanding of it. It makes reference to Richard Connolly's Most Dangerous Game, he quotes the Mikado, he makes reference to the movie The Exorcist, and there's other potential. Joseph Conrad seems to be somebody that he made reference

to in his letters. So we realized that this guy is a connection to a library, whether he knew something about the Riverside library where that attack took place, he at least was somebody who was familiar with literature and books, and somebody who probably had a connection to some library or libraries in general, to have this store of knowledge

and this ease with making quotes and illusions. And then the second realization that we had is that this is a guy who sits and writes, because a lot of his letters took a while to compose, and this isn't a guy who pulled out a sheet of paper while he was driving and made a couple of notes. It looked like his writing was very carefully done, and the four ciphers that he included, the four codes that he included within his letters, looked like somebody who spent some

time at it. It doesn't necessarily mean that he was brilliant and that he was a code maker and code breaker by trade, but this is somebody who had spent time working at a desk on his letters and on the codes, and maybe for that reason alone, it kind of led us to wonder whether Arthur Lee Allen really was responsible. Because Arthur Lee Allen is this guy who, by all accounts, had a bit of a verbal diarrhea. He would talk, talk, talk to anybody about anything, and

couldn't stop talking. Whereas we came to see from just from that first coffee that no, this is a guy who's a little bit more cerebral, a little quieter, or somebody who has a connection to a library and spends time sitting at a desk and writing and thinking or whatever he's doing.

officer mean when he wrote this? What did the officer was he trying to say this or was he trying to say that? All of that came into came into it. I even went to the different crime scenes and in my mind acted out the attacks as they happened. I pictured the zodiac coming upon the scene, and I pictured the victims being there and what was taking place during that interaction? What were the feelings, What were the attitudes that each of the participants brought to the scene, What

happened minute by minute? How did it end up? Were the triggers going on and the different attack scenes, some of the we know more about than others. What precisely took place? Yeah, the more I thought about it, the more I came up with questions. Did it come down like this or did it come down like that? Did the killer know his victims? Did he meet up with them just because they were at the wrong place at

the wrong time? Was this a targeted attack? Was the killer deciding he was going to kill at the time, or was it a last second decision that did he would pull out a gun? You know what? Exactly all happened, And so there came a point where there was nothing that I wasn't willing to do to gain an understanding of each of the attacks. And I went through the

same thing with the letters. Kevin and I went through the letters line by line, sometimes word by word, and we'd have a fifteen minute discussion on one sentence of one of the letters, just because what does that line say about the person who would say that line, who would say it that way? And so we were kind of getting into the whole area of profiling. We were getting into the area of forensic linguistics, the use of language and what that says about the person.

the word choice and the way things are explained. We say something about ourselves, whether we realize it or not. But with the Zodiac letters, there's kind of a three dimensional aspect of that because obviously the killer doesn't want to get caught. So the killer is not going to say something like I live in such and such place, or he's not going to obviously leave a word in that directs attention to him. So my contention is that the Zodiac rewrote all of his letters before he actually

sent them. I suspect that he wrote a rough draft and then read it over and said, does this say anything about me? Does this give an idea of who I am, my intelligence, my level of education, where I may have come from. And after reading it a second time or reading it after writing it, he could cross out words and change words. He can mess with the punctuation. Some really interesting things going on within the text of

the letters. In one letter, it appears that the Zodiac put a comma where a period should have gone in a period where a comma should have gone. Now, why why do that? What are you trying to say? He spells some words, some difficult words correctly, such as photoelectronic, ammonium nitrate, at the same time he misspells firing F I R E I ng or having H A V E I ng. Well, what's going on there? What does this say about the person my contention? What I concluded

was he's messing with us. He knows we're looking at his words and we're trying to figure out who he is from his words, and so he's giving us a raft of data, some of which is miss leads us in the wrong direction. In the more material letter, he used three semicolons, and he used them absolutely correctly. And this was a real clue to me that this is a guy who is far more intellectual and educated than he's being given credit for. And I suspect that he

forgot to take that punctuation out. It would have been wise for him to not use that punctuation, because it showed he knows how to use a semicolon correctly. In fact, it's absolutely correctly. There's nowhere else in the letter or any of his other letters where a semicolon should have been used, but those were the exact right grammatical marks for him to use in those places. So you're dealing with the guy who's trying to conceal his his identity

through his letters. Letters in and of themselves are pieces of staging. They're meant to lead the police in the wrong direction. But at the same time, things can slip through the cracks and he can reveal more about himself than he probably wants to.

This is the very beginnings of my research. It's hard to discuss the attacks without actually having been to the places. So I did make the decision to go and visit the four scenes that are in the area here, and I became associated with a number of other Zodiac enthusiasts or zodeologists as we sometimes call ourselves, and made good friends with them, and we began meeting at these crime scenes throughout the year. We get together four or five times a year, go to the crime scenes and just

hang out. Sometimes we talk about the case. More often we talk about our families, what's going on in our lives. These are just good friends of mine. But to really understand the attacks, to get a sense of them, you really need to visit the crime scenes and visit them on anniversaries, and visit them at the specific time during the day or night when it actually happened to get a sense of what's going on in the scene and how whatever was going on comes to bear on the attack that took place.

some thinking. I think I did some of the writing of my books there, just trying to get an understanding of what took place there. That's probably one of the most fascinating attacks because of the zodiac, the type of gown he wore, the guare black hood that he had, on the fact that he used a long knife instead of a gun as he did in the other Northern California attacks. But it's a really beautiful area.

specific serial publications dedicated to that case. And that just astounded me that there would be one hundred and fifty newsletters or one hundred and fifty journals. And then I realized there wasn't a single journal dedicated to the Zodiac serial killer case. And I thought, well, part of that is the of the Jack the Ripper case. There's been a lot more time to look at that case. But also media has done much differently now than it was

back in eighteen eighty eight. But I made the decision to start writing articles, and these articles became compiled into a journal that I released four times a year. Did that over the course of about nine years, starting on the anniversary of the Lake Barriessa attack September twenty seven. It was two thousand and nine is the first year that I published it. So that was the I believe, the fortieth anniversary of the Zodiac attack that took place there.

And I had a number of friends who helped me with that journal. I opened it up to the broader community, invited people to write articles for it, and so a number of people from around the world sent me articles asking if I would publish them, and I would share them with my assistant editors and come up with the best presentation we could of the article. The different types of articles that I got. The whole purpose of it was to invite people to join in the hunt for

the Zodiac. And then I wrapped that up a number of years after that, nine years after starting it. But I was I was. That was my first baby steps into writing about the Zodiac case. And the more I researched it and the more I wrote these articles, the more I realized, you know, I'm really getting enough material to actually write a book on the case. And so I began to write a book, and I had so much information that one book became two books, which became

three books. Hunted was released in twenty sixteen, Profiled in twenty seventeen, and Exposed in twenty eighteen, and a lot of the information from the journal became kind of the basis for different pages or different chapters on my books. And at the same time I was writing the book, some of the portions of the book I used to I wrote up some of the detailed research that I had been doing, wrote them up as articles for the journal.

as adventurous as this. And you write some very interesting things about Stephen Booth, the publisher, not knowing what you had, resolved to write what you had come as a solution inexposed. So tell us about this relationship with Genius Publishing.

I found out there's a whole lot more to publishing a book than just coming up with words and saying make it happen. I got in touch with a number of publishing houses and publishing outlets on the internet and submitted proposals for my trilogy. Stephen Booth of Genius Book Publishing was probably the least the publisher that I had the least hope would actually publish my books, because there was a note on a website that said closed or submissions.

Obviously he had received enough submissions and was busy with what he was doing, and I thought, well, you know what I'm going to submit anyway. I thought, you know, maybe I'll be front of the line when he opens up for submissions again. Well, a few days later I got a message back from him, call me at once. He was so impressed with my outline and the sample chapters that I sent that he said, I want to publish your trilogy. I want to publish all three of them.

I want a contract to publish all three of them. I later found out that he had some contact with the topic because he had helped work on another zodiac book, so he was a little bit familiar with the with the subject matter, but he was also familiar with how popular it was and that there were throngs of people who were fascinated by the case, even if he himself

didn't share share in their fascination. So I ended up working with him on it and able to help with the structure, with the editing, with the layout into the books. He was the one who came up with the titles. He provided so much made up for how little I know about publishing. He was able to put that all together, and we were We collaborated in an awful lot. We had many many discussions over no, you can't use that word.

That's too formal of a word, and I would say, yes, I need to use that word because that's the exact word that I'm trying to explain. So we went back and forth on that, and we went back and forth on what the cover should look like and whatnot. Through it all, he didn't know how I was going to end off the trilogy. My research was leading me to the conclusion that demand responsible for the Zodiac attacks is Theodore Kazinski, the unibomber. Now it's not a really popular conclusion,

but all of my research that's where it led. So I never told Stephen about how it was going to end off, but I told him it's going to be okay. You know, if you get sued for what I say in the final book, we can discuss that, but it will probably be more probably be more good attention and lead to more sales than any threat that will will receive or any problems that we'll have in publishing it. And once I submitted to him the final book in the trilogy, he read it and said, man, you make

a good case. And he is as convinced as I am, and a number of other people who worked on the book have come to the same conclusion that my work was very detailed, very accurate, and my conclusions are entirely based on data. They're data driven, fact based, and very compelling.

the book, I include both sides of the discussions. Did the Zodiac stop and talk did the police officers stop and talk to the Zodiac on October eleven, nineteen sixty nine, following the murder of Paul Stein Or didn't he or didn't or didn't the police officers talk to him? There's different there's different views on that, and if I wasn't sure one way or the other, I left the controversies in and explain why some people believe one side and

why some people believe in the other side. I include the police response to the attacks, and I include the community's response, how each family, how each community at large dealt with what was taking place in their environment. Various times when people say, what's the best book to learn about the Zodiac case? Just the case itself, without any suspects, without any attempt to resolve the case. What's the best book, and people point to Hunted. It's a very good read.

It moves the story along very quickly. I walked it kind of a tightrope when I was writing it because I want it to be dramatic, because it's a dramatic story, but I don't want it to be overly dramatic. I don't want it to read like a case file with no drama whatsoever. But I don't want to sensationalize the events as they took place, because the events are so sensational that they really don't need any elaboration. So I've

had criticisms on both sides. Some people who say it's so it's too dry, it's not as dramatic as it could be. Other people say, oh no, you're exaggerating. I wouldn't characterize this the way you do. So I feel it's in a good place if I'm getting criticism from both ends. And so that's a great introduction to the case. Somebody said, after having read it, I feel like I now have a bachelor's degree in the Zodiac serial killing case.

police do to capture somebody? What does a profiler do to put together a criminal psychological profile or of an offender? Procedures that they use is analyzing all the details, all the data from an attack, exactly what happened, how it happened, where it happened. Once all this information is gathered, the profiler attempts to say something about the person who did it. What were his motives and what what he was doing, Why did he do it the way he did it?

Is there anything that he did that was strange or unusual? And what might that say about that individual? And I'm indebted to guys like John Douglas who he put together a profile of John Carpenter, the Trailside killer and also in Northern California, and John Carpenter, who carried out rapes and murders about the same time as the Zodiac was eventually captured. But in the profile that Douglas provided, he said, this guy, I think he has a speech impediment. People

thought it was crazy. How can you look at this information about what he did, and how can you say he's got a speech impediment? And John Douglas explained, well, he does a blitz attack with these couples that he meets in remote areas, he attacks them in a blitz style attack. Why would you do that, Well, the only reason that you would do that is because you don't feel comfortable walking up and talking to them. You know, Ted Bundy, for instance, he would he would never do

a blitz attack. But David Carpenter did blitz attacks, and once he was arrested, many many police officers were astounded to see that he had indeed a speech impediment, that he had a very strong stutter. And that's an extreme example of what a profiler can do. As far as looking at the data and figuring out the type of person in profile, I came up with about a four page list of characteristics that I thought described the zodiac based on decisions that he made, odd choices, odd things

that he did during his attacks. What it said about a person who would write letters, write letters to the police. What it said about a person who wants notoriety, who is looking for attention, Because you know, not a lot of serial killers correspond with the police. A lot of serial killers pick their own given name. You know, serial killers are known by a moniker. The Zodiac had three monikers used in the press prior to the Zodiac starting a letter saying this is the Zodiac speaking. So he

gave his own moniker. That's also very rare. So I put together several pages of a detailed look of the type of person that the Zodiac must be. As well as in the book Profile, I go into great detail on all of what is known about the Zodiac if In Hunted, I tell the story step by step about the attacks and the letters and the public and the police response. In Profiled, I go into the forensics. What forensic information do we have about the killer and how

can that be used? What's the amount of certainty we have with each of the different pieces of We have shoe impressions, there exists possible fingerprints, the types of guns that were used, the ammunition that we have collected following the attacks. We know quite a bit at a forensic level. But what does that say about the Zodiac? And then I complete that off with a criminal psychological profile of the killer without naming any suspects. In either of my first two books.

of about two days. I was really interested in the books because instead of actually collecting a library that models hid his, wouldn't it be cool to actually own his library. I thought, well, I'm sure there are a lot of people bidding on it, so there's no way I'm going to purchase it, but I attempted anyway. The entire library is divided into three very unequal parts. One lot was merely the family Bible, the Kasinski family Bible, with names

and dates and whatnot. A second lot had five books in it that were the five that the Unibomber specifically quoted in his writing at the manifesto. And then the third lot was the rest of the books. Well, fortunately for me, it wasn't described very well by the GSA who sold the items by auction. The third lot just said some books from the Unibomber, and the accompanying photos showed about forty different books, and I thought, do I want to bid on this? Maybe it's only about forty

books that I'm bidding on. I realized, if this has the bulk of the this has the rest of the books, that would be over two hundred and forty books. I could be bidding on two hundred and forty books, so I did. I set a limit. I actually went one dollar over my limit and was absolutely stunned to see that nobody out bid me. So I was able to purchase Ted Kaczuski's almost his entire library from his cabin and I have it now in storage. And I have to preserve the books because I don't want them to

go bad or anything. That when they first arrived they smell really, really bad because Ted's hygiene was not very good. And then I also bought copies of the other five that I don't own, so that now I do have his library.

they were able to find Joseph Evangelo and arrest him. Well, that got a number of TV show TV channels very excited about all of the other criminals could now be captured by the same means. And they were absolutely right, because within a couple of years of Joseph Dangelo's arrest, more than two hundred other criminals and cold case criminals were arrested or identified or cold cases were brought to a close by using the exact same method. Well, people

began to think, well, how about the Zodiac? Could this be used to capture the Zodiac? So I was contacted by first the Travel Channel and then by the network HLN, which is owned by CNN, and each of them was working on a television show on the Zodiac. They wanted to get shows out there in case the case there was breaking news on the capture of the Zodiac, and so I was able to interview with them and film

with them. The first one the Travel Channel. We actually went to the different crime scenes, did an episode of Mysteries of the Museum, and then with HLN I was part of one of the episodes of Very Scary People the Zodiac.

my opinions of articles coming in. I didn't want it to detract from the journal in any way, so I didn't say anything but I had both of the the networks who wanted to interview me, I had them sign non disclosure agreements so that they wouldn't talk about my conclusions until after I published Exposed, in which I did reveal my conclusions about Ted Kazinski, and they didn't. They

did a very good job of not saying anything. And then several months after Exposed came out, these shows were aired and I was given the opportunity to share that share the conclusions of my research.

he's just a nice guy. Yeah, maybe he did commit a murder or two, but you know, we can trust him, he can go and we can give him bail. And as we know today, he was a extremely dangerous person who never should have been given bail. But when Al Carlisle heard my explanation and the details of why I concluded that it was Ted Kazinski, he was very impressed

and he said, yeah, I think you got him. In fact, he expressed to me that he was he was jealous that he believed that I had identified it serial killer, and he wished that he had been able to do that over his career.

think you had a large audience that night. You were interviewing me live, yes, and people were discussing the case and discussing the interview online as we were talking, and I wasn't sure how it would my conclusions would be accepted. I kind of suspected that there would be some backlash because a lot of people thought a really stupid idea that Ted Kazinski's the Zodiac. I had the same opinion when I first heard that people were looking at Ted

Kazinski as being the Zodiac. I thought, that's kind of stupid, picking one high profile person and just plugging him into a high profile mystery. It's not unprecedented, and what I knew about Ted Kazinsky at the time just didn't make any sense whatsoever that he could have anything to do with the Zodiac case. But I have since come to realize that a lot of what we know about Ted Kazinsky, or what we think we know about Ted Kazinski, simply

isn't true. Part of that is because the Manifesto was published about a year before Ted Kazinsky was arrested, So all of us were reading the Manifesto, and the media was writing and broadcasting about the Manifesto and what it meant and what the motive was behind what Ted Kazinski was doing as the unibomber. Well, a lot of it simply wasn't true. Once he was arrested, we were given the opportunity to actually delve into the life of Ted Kazinsky, to find out who he was, what made him, what

his beliefs were, what he was doing. Turns out a lot of what was being said in the media and what he published in the Manifesto was simply not true. So once I was interviewed, a lot of people who went online and started discussing my interview thought I was crazy, thought I was nuts, thought I was really stupid. They were really shocked because they loved the first two books. How could I possibly believe that Ted Kazinsky had anything

to do with it? And they're perfectly in their right to have their own opinions and to express their opinions. I support that. I was just kind of kind of perplexed. If you loved my first two books, why don't you read my third book and see for yourself. And a lot of people refuse to read it, so they don't know the arguments I made, and they don't know the conclusions and how I drew the conclusions.

The code has been cracked and a number of people looked at the solution and said, oh, it doesn't say that the person's name, and it doesn't say anything new, so we don't know anything. There's nothing there for us to learn from. But I realized that there is a lot to unpack from that. Why again, why did the Zodiac use those words? Why did he waste space in a cipher to provide this information? And what use of words and use of language does it say about the person?

I think it's still being unpacked for me secifically. I noticed a number of ideas that suggested, once again that the killer was very intelligent and very cunning and clever and cautious. And then I noticed a number of different phrases within the solution to the cipher that made me think, you know, that's something that Ted Kaczynski could write. One of the things that the cipher said is that the writer was not afraid of the death penalty. Now, not

a lot of serial killers aren't afraid. This is what the Zodiac wrote, I don't It was in response to a television show that somebody purporting to be the Zodiac called in and said, I don't want to go to the gas chamber. So in response, the Zodiac wrote within the cipher, I am not afraid of the gas chamber. Now, how many serial killers say it that way, say that

they're not afraid of the gas chamber? Well, Ted Kazinski, upon being arrested, repeatedly said I would rather die than face life imprisonment, and I am not afraid of being put to death. He fired his own lawyers at one point and wanted to represent himself, and a lot of people were really concerned about that because they were afraid that Ted Kazinski just wanted to get up and grandstand and talk about his beliefs and his views and kind

of end up on death row by representing himself. Kind of like death death by court, death by trial, rather than death by police, where somebody goes and commits suicide by rushing at a police officer to get the police officer to shoot him. The idea that he was willing to die and he wanted people to know about his beliefs and wanted to get his message out. So that kind of said something to me about the solution to the z three forty.

and screaming. I went over to an opening in kind of a clearing where I could overlook the lake and noticed that two of the six people, two guys, were swimming out in the lake. They were apparently engaging in a race to get to across the lake or whatever, and one guy made it across, and the other guy started crying out saying I can't, I can't help me, help me, And somebody else went out to help them.

I realized that I was probably the strongest swimmer of all of the people present, So I ran down to the shore, stripped down and took my shoes and glasses off, and dove in the water and went to try to help the guy. By the time I got out there, he had already slipped under the water, and those of us who were in the water frantically looked around for him and tried to find him, and we were unable

to do so. And it wasn't until the news reports of the next day said that scuba divers had found him at the bottom under twenty two feet of water, that he had drowned, and as you mentioned, there was only a couple hundred feet away from the exact spot where the Zodiac had attacked Brian and Cecilia.

and meet and discuss the case. And so tomorrow today's the twenty six So tomorrow I will be gathering with these half dozen people and probably another half dozen or more others who are friends or family members or other people who will gather with us to remember Cecilia Shepherd and her death at the hands of the Zodiac, but also all of the victims. And we'll probably use some time to discuss the case and the latest updates that

we've heard about and things that we've thought about. But mostly we get together to fellowship and to update one another what's going on in our lives. So it's kind of a kind of a dual purpose. These are friends of mine, but we use the opportunity to remember the events that took place so much years ago. Tomorrow is the fifty to fifth anniversary of the attack that took place at Lake Barriessa.

in my research. I'm not the first Zodiac researcher, and I'm indebted to many many other people who have argued with me, disagreed with me, agreed with me, did their own research, and provided insights into various aspects of the case. All of these people's contributions kind of came together and enabled me to put together and share what conclusions I've been able to make on the case.