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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening. Serial Slaughter is the story of the infamous Zodiac Killer, the killer Rome California, especially Northern California, for decades, he announced himself for dramatic flair, corresponding with law enforcement in the media in order to gain the attention he craved. This is the Zodiac speaking, and this is the murderer of the two teenagers last Christmas at Lake Kerman and the girl on the fourth of July, making sure they knew
his kills, connecting the dots for them. Fading away as promised in nineteen sixty nine, he continued to kill and ceased to help those who would hunt him. Details now included are new. The crimes are looked at, thoroughly researched, investigated, and written about with a new perspective, great new finds of information. At last, to add to the story, the cases of murdered women and girls are brought back to the surface as the author works to bring attention once
again to their cases. A book that we're featuring this evening is Serial Flauters Zodiac Killer, with my special guest journalist and author and Penn. Welcome to the program and thank you for this interview, and Penn.
Hi Dan, thank you for having me.
Thank you so much. An incredible story and incredible timing for this, especially in light of just a recent post on Facebook regarding a certain Gary post and the claim that the Zodiac was finally named. Let's talk about how you first became involved with this, why you wanted to tell this story, and what this story is really about.
Well, it's just further research, deeper dive into what is out there to be found about the Statisica Killer. There's just so many murders in the state of California. Being California native, it's important to solve cold cases.
You say that you have to go back to the beginning. You say there was more than one serial killer roaming California in the sixties and the seventies, and you want to answer the question what happened to the Zodiac killer? And you say, in what in reality, what could be true about what happened? So that was your goal and that's your intent of this book. You say that in nineteen sixty nine that there was more than what happened
with the Zodiac. After sixty nine, people say he walked away, and you say he just walked away from aspects of the Zodiac persona.
Correct, he continued to kill the Psychi said he would, and he did go too far away to do it. And many a serial killer when it comes to how he drove into areas and committed crimes and drove out. And that's what he did at Zodiac. As we know anybody that's familiar with the story. Each kill was usually during a weekend or a holiday, and he would just decide that he was going to do this particular kill after he'd talked to someone most likely, and drive off.
And that's what he did over and over and it was almost like a testing ground for him for that one year.
Yes, you say that he said, I shall no longer announced anyone when I commit my murders. They show look like routine robbery's killings of anger and a few fake accidents, et cetera. Early in this book you talk about some of the evidence that you've on Earth in terms of you say that the Zodiac was an avid reader and would read newspapers. Tell us what you found in your theory about articles and him reading articles and then his list right.
Well, what it looks like in researching in depth is that one of the things we know that he did was like to get media attention law enforcement, and he liked to have not only his information posted in the newspapers, but he wanted to see what he could find out about his crimes and what they said about him. And you know, he was a media hog, and so what he did he was absolutely addicted, in my opinion, to
reading the newspaper. And when I researched further into to different people who were murdered over time from nineteen sixty nine moving forward, what it looks like happened from the research was that if someone was on his list, like for example, there's a Leona Roberts who was murdered, and she had had her announcement in the newspaper for getting married, and it looks really suspicious that here a few months later she's murdered. And this is in December of nineteen
sixty nine. And so there were lots of different things that happened over time where there were murders decade after decade where if you look back and you go, Okay, what happened prior to this person being murdered. Were they in the newspaper a lot? Did they get a lot
of attention? What is the connection? And so that's what I went after in many many of these murders that happened over time in different areas, and a lot of those are around the Sacramento area, and interestingly enough, it appears that there were a lot of times where law enforcement would talk amongst themselves and even mentioned it in the new newspaper that maybe these murders were the Zodiac in Sacramento.
Right. You talk about these crimes in California, and you talk about the crime wave that was happening in the sixties and seventies regarding rape and murder, you say that there was a lot of rapes and murders, but there was a lot of similarities in a lot of the rapes and murders that were never solved.
Well, what it shows is there was a serial killer. There was more than one. Of course, there were several actually during the eighties in particular, but there were others out there killing people and picking up hitchhikers and dumping bodies and so on. But what the pattern around Sacramento looked like was that there were murder after murder where women were picked up and dumped right across the county
line from Sacramento County into Sutter County, for example. There were so many of them that were picked up in the North Highlands area and driven right across into less than miles and dumps in that same area. And this also went decade after decade, and there were just so
many of them. It's amazing to me that the task force wasn't put together in a very serious way to figure out who was doing this, because what it appeared was not only did the detectives talk about what it might be and that eventually Donna Last might be connected to the Takari murder, and did the Vnole murder and so on, they would talk about it, and then nothing would come of it. They just wandered off and didn't talk about it anymore.
In the news, you talk about the descriptions of Zodiac as well, what were you What does your investigation on Earth about the conflicting descriptions.
Well, you know, composites are pretty awful. You can't really tell. But back in the nineteen sixties I have a chapter about just composites. Every guy in the world looked just like Zodiac with their glasses and their crew cut hair and so on. And it's really kind of funny. But some of the descriptions that came about from some of the victims, actually we're pretty close to composites that were drawn later on about another serial killer, and they were
pretty close. And these are again from the victims like Mike Majeu and then also from Cecilia Shepherd. So one of the things that Mike talked about or identified as the perpetrator eventually was Arthur. And what's interesting about the way Arthur looked at the time, and I have pictures of what he looked like, is how similar he looked to another serial killer that would know of and that he identified. But then also we know that the witnesses to the paul Stein murder didn't think he looked like
Arthur at all. They said, no, that's not him. But Robert Graysmith did not interview them because that would have changed his story and his narrative. So it's all interesting how it all sort of crisscrossed.
You talk about this paul Stein being very important murder, and also that Robert Graysmith fictionalized one aspect of it, at least in terms of that it was a foggy, misty night, which would prevent or inhibit witnesses from getting a good look at the perpetrator. But you say that in fact that maybe police should have relied on those descriptions more so. Oh yeah, for sure explained.
What's interesting about the composite that came from the actual witnesses of the Stein murder is that they saw him in really good light. It wasn't foggy internesty, and it was it was right below their window, really and there was a lot of light. He had the door opened to the cab. What's interesting about who they saw was originally they described him as the younger version of himself.
I think it was twenty eight to thirty or twenty five to thirty, and later on when the police put out posters and composits, they ended up revising that and making him older somewhere more around forty five, and that was their narrative. And I didn't understand why that was so, because the actual witnesses saw him and he was the
younger version. That would be about the right age. He was probably around twenty four at the time, right, The guy with the that they just tried to identify a week or so ago, and it was like, oh, look, he has the same lines in his forehead as the composite, so what you know.
So yeah, let's just briefly touch on that, not to give it too much credence. But for those people that didn't see the follow up story that has uh it had looked like it had some potential because of the headlines, but in reality, there's not much to this at all. To Gary, I.
Had people contact, Yeah, I have people contacting and asked me, Hey, what's the story, And I said, it's not him, it's not real, it's not it's you know. And a few days later, the FBI came along and there's an article on the paper that said that they did not give any credence to that id either. And the thing that you know, immediately stood out to me, Well, there were a couple of things. One was the discussion about Cherry
Jobates and the Zodiac did not kill Cherry Jobates. And if you know it in the articles, the Riverside PD didn't even talk to me these guys. It appears it sounded like they really didn't want to discuss that case. And of course they didn't want to be in aid a test and so on. And the reason is because the Riverside already has a full profile of Scherry Joe Bates killer. They've had it for years and years. They feed it into code. Is it's not him? It's not
the Zodiac. It's a completely different killer. The story just took on a life of its own and it's remained there all these years. So that's the first thing that was wrong with the story that came out with these guys that said they idd them. They don't even realize that Cherry Joe Bates was not killed by Zodiac. And the second thing had to do with a story about Donna Last hanging from a tree and trying to find
her in the forest. That just this seems too far fetched to me, because I've actually talked to the detectives up here in the Tahoe I say, up here in the mountains in the Tahoe area. I've spoken to him and made him pull out all the files and all the microfilm, and unfortunately a lot of these files are so old. They mentioned that the birds got into files or something happened to him, and they had to pull reports for microfish for me, and the story is not like what they tell.
Let's get to your idea of what happened to the Zodiac after nineteen sixty nine, after supposedly police and the media believed that he had walked away, but he had made this promise. So how did authorities approach that promise and what did you find in terms of what you believed the Zodiac did after saying that he was going to.
Walk away, Well, he told them exactly what he was going to do. He told them every step of the way what he was doing and what he was going to do. And I believe every word of what he said. He said he was going to walk off and not tell them, not connect for them the murders, and what he also said was he was going to make them look like accidents. He was going to use knives and whatever. He had a different menagerie of things he was going to use to tail and not tell them about it.
And that's exactly what he did. Because he knew that if he went across the jurisdics no lines, and if he killed people by bludgend by knife, by shooting them by you know, he changed up his them all across time and space, that his chances were pretty slim that they would figure out who he was. And that's exactly what he did. It was like he drew him a map and said, Okay, here's what I'm going to do.
And it even says in some of the hidden messages that we have discovered in the letters that he sent, there are hidden messages that all the misspelled words actually spell out hidden messages, and they are about some of the things he said, like, for example, wig I like, he likes wigs. He liked wigs, He used disguises, and he did anything he felt like. And so that's what you see moving forward, that that's what he continued to do. He wasn't kidding. He continued to kill.
In your investigation, you looked at all kinds of rapes and murders, abductions, offented abductions, what was the mo the victim all and more importantly, just the thing that you felt signified that this was a zodiac continuing to perpetrate.
Well, he mostly killed women, and that was his thing. He killed couples. He continued to do that in different ways, by blegend by shooting them. They're different murders that you can tell they have to be him. He just continued. He and one of the threats he did make was that he was going to pick off kiddies coming off buses. Well, he never blew anyone up, but what he did do was make people vanish into thin air. For example, kids getting off the bus, fourteen year old, fifteen year old,
you know, twelve year old, you name it. I mean he had a menagerie of you know, younger girls and then and he also killed women. But with the ones that he took after school off the bus or going to the bus in the morning, they were there one second and gone the next, and most of the time no one saw anything. He was like a phantom. But their bodies would turn up and want lot of times in the same jurisdiction. You know, he liked to dump them where fishermen would find them. And he just continued
on and on. And what's interesting moving forward too, is that the famous Paul Avery ended up in Sacramento doing crime writing for the Sacramento Bee, and he ended up running across the case. The first case actually right after he was hired. Within three days after he was hired, he got involved with the murder of Catherine Harlan. She was nine years old, disappeared from the bus. And also they decided after a while to charge him with abducting
someone called Katherine Hagen Bush. And eventually those charges were dropped against this guy, who had an IQ of about sixty three named Fred, but Paul Avy was very instrumental in that case. He wrote a huge story about it, the biggest story that Sacronabe had ever had about a crime. That was almost like they tried to say he was trying the case in the paper, but what he said ended up being absolutely true, and he was in to
getting talent in that world. Did you know arrest a guy with the sixty three IQ for these murders are too compact? So long story short, he was there in Sacramento writing about the crimes around Sacramento and all the murders. He had to know something was going on down there.
You talk about the Zodiac contacting law enforcement and media after this, obviously he said he wasn't going to communicate with the media. But it's interesting that he would not crave that kind of attention. And you say that there about crimes, you're saying that he moved on to a different type of taunting.
Right exactly. He changed too. He contacted and he stopped calling the media for the most part. What he did instead was he I think he wrote letters to crime beasts and said did you guys solve this? And they would write in the paper Crime Watches that know, it hadn't involved, it's an open case and so on. The Other thing that he did was call people. But what he did was call the victims. He called the victims
and the victims' family. There are murders where he calls and calls and says, you know, they're like, you know where she is and he just laughs and hangs up, you know, like I or I killed her and things like that. Just really obnoxious, rotten things that he would do to the families and the victims themselves. So he found a way to half people.
You talk about the progression and some of his behavior when he started off. Let's talk about how you connect some of these crimes to another serial killer.
Well, just what do they say about coincidences? There's too many to be coincidences. To me, thinks they're the same. You know, there was a serial killer in Sacramento for
forty years basically in surrounding areas. And admittedly, some of the crimes that I have investigated were so exactly, so absolutely the same with bludgeoning, knocking somebody's teeth out, bashing their faces and their heads in different things that were done were so exactly the same as far as his time, you know what he found, he liked to do the best, et cetera. But also some of the things he said over time about how he had to get to Mexico,
different things that he said to the victims themselves. There are people who actually survived and could tell you what was said. I spoke to Brian Hartnell at one point. I've spoken to different other people that were involved in a story, and it's interesting how similar this serial killer was, the one that morphed into what he became later on.
So when you talk about the Zodiac over the years, there have been a number of suspects that have surfaced, and in this book you go through those and you ask the question or you tell why that they were a suspect in the first place, and then why it was dismissed. Can you talk about a couple of those more primary suspects and it might have looked good to some people, and why they were dismissed.
Yeah, Well, a lot of people realize a time why most of the suspects of the Zodiac Killer of being the Zodiac Killer were dismissed because there really was no real evidence and there's no fingerprints, there's no you know, DNA. There's there's nothing to actually connect someone to the Zodiac. The profiles that they have are partial profiles at best. A criminalist on a show that I was watching was
basically going through that and saying why it's not really useful. Meanwhile, in twenty eighteen, I think it was the LAYOPD announced they were going to do retesting and we should have some results soon. And here it is three years later and you haven't heard a word from them because they really don't have any usable DNA in my opinion, and they don't have any fingerprints that tie anyone to the crimes of you know, the Zodiac when he killed Paulp's time.
People like to argue about the fingerprints left cab, there's any usable anything. The only thing I would test for, if I were to be the one to do it, would be to see if the shirt that he ripped in the cab has any touch DNA or anything. But everything is just so degraded after fifty some years that it's probably not going to be usable. And that's what they say.
You talk about Arthur Lee Allen and why he was included. Obviously, there's a movie Believe two thousand and seven I believe or to anyway, the movie Zodiac, Why is Arthur Allen Lee not a viable.
Suspect, Well, they cleared him with DNA eventually before he died, I believe, or was it right after, But basically the DNA that they have it, they can not the DNA they have that we were able to figure out that it wasn't him. Whatever profile they have, their partial profile. And also he is a pedophile only really the Zodiac would continue on and he didn't seem to discriminate between children nine year old, twelve year olds, fifteen year olds,
and then women that were twenty eight thirty. Didn't seem to matter the age of the victim. It was just the ease of taking them and ledging them to death or shooting them or whatever he felt like. There are a couple of instances later on too, where people just danished from their home, vanishing the thin air.
What about other suspects like Ross Sullivan.
Well, he had mental health issues. But you know, one of the things about the serial killer is that he was organized, he was methodical. He was I think he had OCD in that he kept track of everything he did. I don't think some of the people with mental health issues that were brought forward as suspects really could do you know what he did and sustain it, you know, So Russ Sullivan, to me, he just was not a
viable suspect. And it might people feel that way about him, even if his name isn't any kind of cipher, or if it isn't, he's really not a viable suspect in my opinion.
And were there any other suspects that you dealt with in your book and dismissed.
Well, one of them, I figure out how to pronounce his name's mister bell Qvel. She was in micro Deeli, his book, and I found that fascinating, more fascinating than most actually, and it's really the only book that I've looked at. But he thought that it was him, and I can see why in a particular way because he was an older gentleman and he lived in the presidio. But I don't believe it it's him either, for many reasons. But anyway, and it was a fascinating read because of
the fact that his suspect was an older gentleman. He was old enough to have been in World War Two. But he actually knew that they were looking at him while he was so alive as a suspect for the Zodiac, and he and he sort of sat across the table from the author and an investigator and you know, went through it and said, well, why do you think I'm
the suspect? So but I don't, you know, I believe what I believe for many many reasons, and the circumstantial evidence that I've collected makes my logical sense to me. And also, mister Tuvall was too awful to the Zodiac in my opinion.
Before we talk about who you really believe the Zodiac killer morphed into, let's talk about Richard Marshall and why he was suspected, because this is a very interesting suspect, and just be I'd like to fascinating again coincidence.
A coincidence that one I'm not as familiar with off the top of my head because there's so many details and so many different suspects. I just brought forth the first five or six different suspects over time that were possibilities, but there were ones that were one in particular that really kind of caught my attention, and I thought, why would anybody I think Ted Kaczynski was a Zodiac killer, but it was because he tarted to blow up people. But his manifest was way different in what his causes
were than what the Zodiac. The Zodiac did this just for fun, just because he wanted to and because he could so and as far as he said, Richard Marshall, Marshalls you wanted to talk.
About, Yeah, Richard Marshall was the well what he was just a projectionist. But what I thought was very interesting is that he became a suspect. It looks like because he liked these old movies, including The Red Phantom, which was mentioned in a nineteen seventy four Zodiac.
Letter, right, So yeah, it was kind of interesting the circumstantial evidence that they brought forward because he was in Riverside in nineteen sixty six and he was near where Sign was murdered and things like that, so I can see why they took a look at him. And that was also The Red Pantom. He's just kind of a weird guy, so and he had a typewriter and it's hell, it's similar to what the Zodiac was using apparently at the time.
So very interesting.
They ruled him out though, Yeah, that is with their suspects, especially back in before the DNA.
Were these suspects suspects of the police or were they suspects for people online? Because this has garnered so much attention over the years.
Well, these were, you know, originally people they looked at in the beginning of different people brought other people forward, like giving the case of Arthur al and you know, somebody else said well look at this guy. He's been in trouble for this, or he's done this or that, and so other people were usually instrumental and bringing a suspects forward.
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Now. What we were talking about is you have put together an analysis of the crimes of Zodiac and then what happened afterwards in the crimes that you attribute to the Zodiac. But again you believe that there's another serial killer that he morphed into. So before we name that person, give us some more information on the similarities that struct
you as more than coincidence. And then your analysis and research and further investigation have made you, as you write in the book, one hundred and ten percent sure of your conclusions.
Right. Well, like I said, when you see serial killers and the murders that happen in the Sacramento area in particular over time, and then also around the surrounding areas, the geography is really close. The layout is not far from Sacramento. Everything around the area in San Francisco is
not very far. It's just really close by. And so I kind of get an analysis of each one of the murders at the beginning with Zodiac just a little bit of information at the beginning, and then I talk about all the different murders that happened quite a few of them are in here from seventies to sixties, and what kept happening over time was that people were killed in various ways and they were dumped across jurisdictional lines.
Instead of killing in a jurisdiction and then moving to another jurisdiction and killing, what he was doing was killing in what particular county and then dumping bodies in another county. Or he would move from you again, county to county, different jurisdictional lines, very aware of what he was doing, and would attack a lot of times in the same exact ways. Sometimes he would sexually assault people and sometimes
he wouldn't. Sometimes the mood was I'm going to go kill somebody that some of the dates are the same. He really, really really seemed to like over and over to kill on Labor Day weekend. September sixth was a date that heard over and over again. And the disappearance of Elast was September sixth, nineteen seventy, and this is a date that comes up over and over again. So the anniversaries of dates that he liked to kill was
a consistent it's a consistent over time. I don't want to say the fact that John Alas was taken after work the way that I see it, and I talked to the detective about it, I said, you know, he was looking at well G back in nineteen seventy. This is new new information. By the way, is that a lot of people thought that she didn't finish her her call logue that night, that she was taken maybe from the casino. She wasn't she finished her call log. I
have that in my possession. They thought possibly that she had been taken right out of work. They weren't sure if she was taken in California or Nevada. About when we look at the Nevada records of the crime, it appears that she was taken from there and then vanished. But what's interesting is is that her car was parked
in the parking lot of her apartment. And this happened also, by the way, over and over again, over time, and every single jurisdiction, there are murders of women where their car is parked where it was supposed to be, but
they're gone, They're absolutely vanished. There's a lot of murders that happened where people were taken, like for example, in Granite Bay, California, where the women are taken and they're found dead in their cars, So you know, again he changed up what he was doing to try to confuse people over jurisdictional lines. Over and over he killed by bludgeends,
by nighte by gun, by strangle, you name it. And the other thing that he did over and over was try to set other people up for what he had done. There are examples of people who got put away because of circumstantial evidence, and I'm sure he thought it was extremely funny. The other thing he did was attack in
areas where he had particular grudges with people. If people had been in the news a lot, for example, a police person was in the news, a police officer maybe would make their family member go missing or something like that would happen. So there's just I've checked it really well, and I think I've explained it pretty well in this book. How he operated.
Why is it you believe that he was able to operate undetected that some of the things that you looked at, some of the things that.
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To Busy Whatsy retails seem eerily similar, especially in light of the last few years. As you write about forensic technology and DNA advances. Why didn't they see some of the things that you're seeing? Why you was your particular perspective more crucial?
Well, I think that what's interesting is this is such a huge story. Let's go back and say, gee, first year Zodiac that we knew of him, that we actually formerly knew of him. From nineteen sixty eight to sixty nine, he contacted the media, he showed them how he was going to do this. He killed couples, and then he
killed Paul Stein, who was the outlier. And then what happened is he says, I'm not going to do it like this anymore because he knew he had to move on because if he continued doing what he was doing, sooner or later, they're going to figure out what he was doing. Well, as he continued on later on, if they had looked at him as thoroughly as they maybe could have. Because there were so many murders in Sacramento and the surrounding areas, I mean, it's insane. That's why
it's named Cereal Slaughter. Because there are so many dead bodies showing up. I'm sure that they must have been
overwhelmed in every jurisdiction. Sometimes people in Cutter County would be taken to the more there into the medical exameter there, or they'd switched him back and forth to Sack County, and so some kinds of different things were going on but a lot of times it seems as though they had so many murders that they either were so overwhelmed that they didn't really a case would go cold, and then they'd go to the next one and so on. They just didn't either have the manpower or I don't
know what to continue through to find this guy. Because if they had, if a task had been put together, like what they did with said Bundy, for example, where they worked together and they said, we're going to figure out who the heck this guy is. And of course he was kind of stupid when it came to said Bundy, was kind of a little bit more careless as he went on in time. Sure he ended up, you know, being a lot more careless than he got himself caught.
But this guy the Zodiac, he was meticulous, and he knew exactly what to do and what not to do to call attention to himself, and he threw a lot of confusion into every murder that he did. There's a couple murders in Sacramento in nineteen seventy eight and nineteen eighty, respectively, where the women who were killed were right there a green belt area. They were in the easter a rapist attack zones, and they were killed. You know, one of them jumped off of a balcony and he got hurt
somewhere along the way. So they have DNA, they have in some of these murders. They still have DNA if they've kept it in evidence and if it's still viable to be able to test to see who in the heck killed these women for real. And some people were put away for these murders. I think probably because law enforcement wanted to solve some of these crimes. They wanted to a piece of public and tell them, hey, these are solved. It makes people feel a little less uneasy.
But the sheer volume of murders was insane, and Sacramento has some of the highest murders in the country. To tell you the truth, and they did then and they do now. So he had to live somewhere and he had to He's not dead. He didn't get incarcerated, you know, he was still out there.
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ten percent off your first three months. Visit ritual dot com slash murder and turn healthy habits into a ritual that's ten percent off at ritual dot com slash murder. Now. And we were talking about all of the information that led you to believe that you were looking at another serial killer, and that serial killer was Joseph DiAngelo, former Easterio rapists original nightstalker, as we found out in twenty eighteen Vasalia Ransacker. So tell us how you came to
this conclusion. Tell us more about this conclusion.
Well, like I said, reading the news of what was going on in detail, and I have included a lot of the detail in this book about the different murders that were occurring, but one in particular really struck me. And if I can, I'd like to read a little excerpt from this. It has to do with students. Takari her body right. It was reported that she died from a combination of strangulation and a savage beating about the face.
Her nose had been smashed to a pole, her jaw had been broken in at least two places, several teeth had been knocked out. The hyoid bone at the base of her tongue had been fractured, probably by the stocking garage. She had been sexually attacked. She was the victim of one of the most god awful assaults I've ever investigated, said Chief's Deputy Coroner, Captain E. R. Presley. And then
what would I flash forward to. This was in nineteen seventy seventy one, flashboard in nineteen eighty six, and if you read the murder of Janelle Cruise in Irvine, California, it was also brudal. I said, it sound so much like the murder of Miss Takari that one could place the story one over the other as if to trace them. They're connected by the same perpetrator, although it was sixteen years later. Janelle was beaten in the face and the head.
The perpetrator demolished her face, knocked out her teeth, which were found around the room, and in Miss Cruise, she was so brutally murdered the dental records had to be obtained in order to make sure it was in fact now. And the difference is just in location in the murders, but the way that he was so brutal. The absolute horror of his rage was the same.
What else I mean, obviously when you see that that it's the same clime, you have the same mo But what are the things that you see as a progression, Like we mentioned that at first he was he obviously famously reached out to the Sacramento b and to the law,
to law enforcement. But then after it's less known because we have this movie where that goes on, but less known about the punting and the significance of the anniversaries of something happening and him calling and tormenting, which is far more horrifying than contacting the media or law enforcement. Certainly right and in.
Our case is where he called the families that I point out in the book, where he would call the victim's family the girl would be missing, and he would call them every week on a Wednesday, for example. He called every single week and a for her, just taunting the victims and the victims' families over and over again. That was one of the ways he got his kicks. I mean, this guy used to call people on the phone and try to get together with them to you know,
Pat was missing. There was an ad in the paper he found a way to hassle people on the phone over and over again and in many many different ways, and that never stopped, never stopped. He was still doing stuff by the time they arrested him. He wore a wig. There's a picture of and with a wig on where he was on somebody's porch. I mean, there's there's just so many things that he did that were so much
the same. And the conversation that Brian Hartner had with him that day at Lake Berry as he heard his voice and a lot of people had heard his voice, I know that some of the things he said to Brian that day he repeated over and over. The things that he took and didn't take for years were the same. He's you know, different other things like miscellaneous jewelry, one earring, it was the same. So some of the things he took from the cab today that he killed paulse time.
You know, he was just very meticulous and he had to have kept some sort of record to keep everyone straight and call them up on the anniversary of somebody's death or somebody's rape. He did this over and over again.
You realized that as a police officer he knew quite a bit about jurisdictions and how the police worked and how the failings of police because he was a police officer for a few years. How much did that How much was that a light bulb on top of your head when you realized that that made a lot of sense and answered a lot of questions.
Well, a lot of people thought that he was military and or a police person. Then the ballistics involved way early on would have told anyone that he was for cops. For the access to the ammunition that they used only them, They knew early on that it had to be somebody who had access to that. So there were just many clues that tell you that he had particular types of
ammunition liked, or different things that he used. He never used the forty four, He very rarely used anything larger than at thirty eight, So just different guns that he stole over time in different things. He was a very good cat burglar. He was probably one of the most brilliant serial killers I've ever tracked.
Yeah, but it would be particularly helpful to be a police officer and also intimate, Like you say, he's in these small towns. They're very small, like Auburn and Glass Valley, so he has the opportunity to be able to know people or know people related to these people that end up being his victims. But being a police officers particularly helpful, wasn't it.
And you're right he had connections to people in Drafts, Valley and Newcastle, in different places that are small towns all around the Auburn area where he was as a teenager. He ended up back there as an adult as a police officer there some of the murders I think personally that he did to keep Nick Willet busy in Auburn. He had a bone to pick with him because he
was fired from the Auburn Police Department. And you find murders that are connected, you find media people that are from that area, who came from San Francisco who ended up owning the Foster Herald for example. There's just some interesting stories and connections to all of these people. And if he if he wanted to kill, Let's say he killed Paul Stein because he was pissed off at something in the Sign family, or he killed Mary Lloyd in Auburn because she was pissed off at her brother's bost
Harold and had come from San Francisco. Because so many connections, because this man was out there and he was drawing a little map of what he wanted to do. And he really did write down things, and he did have lists. And if you don't list, to kill you sometimes he would do it for happy with some.
Book.
There's a couple of people where it was five years here, it's a news article. Show what happened to these people? Were they in the news prior to these murders? And most often ninety nine percent of the time they were in the news. That one of the murders of games, kimball her Son was in the news constantly as a Roseville Police Department official, and somehow his wife get his mother gets killed. So it's interesting the way he drew his connections to play his games, and that was one
of the things he did that was also consistent. He played games as the Zodiac, he played games as the Golden State killer, as the East Ay racist. This love to screw with them.
You write about a what almost can be considered a close call when you mentioned the police chief that he was mad at because he was fired. Tell us what you write about in the book about what almost happened in this regard with the police chief. And his anger towards him well.
As the story most people know about D'Angelo was that when he was a officer, he was arrested in the attacks zones of the Easteri rapist in nineteen seventy nine and he ended up being ultimately fired from being a police officer at that point, but he was never investigated in depth at that point. They just kind of let him wander off. He paid his fines and whatever needed to be done. But he went after Nick Willock a little bit. He threatened him really, and then he showed
up a few months later, is the story. That's what was told, that he stopped him and actually ended up outside of his house. So there was definitely bad blood between Nick Willock and Joseph DiAngelo. Joseph DiAngelo had actually even said Nick Willicks doesn't like me, and he didn't. There'd been quite a few complaints about how he got too close to people when he was working and the different things that they didn't like about how he handled things.
So there was bad blood between them. And interestingly enough, there were bodies that showed up around the Auburn. Now, yeah, I'm sure there's still some in Forest Hill. So he dunked the body across the street practically from the Auburn PD and he kept him, kept him busy. So there's stories about that what went on in Auburn after the Zodiac left in nineteen sixty nine in the Bay area.
I found it very interesting when you talk about and their sband talked about early on about abuse to dogs, and then you have this. You write about that a homemade dog repellent would be garlic onions, a couple other things, soap one of those things. But you reprote that there was people that said the Zodiac and the eastereoapists both had the smell of rotting onions.
Yeah.
I thought that was interesting. How far your investigation anyway?
Yeah, and I also speculate I kind of went through the Palstein murderer that some people thought that he had stayed in the park, or if he didn't stay in the park. I talk about how he left the park, but when in the presidio, when he you know, he spent He wrote a letter after the fact about what he had done and he said, all you had to do was sit and wait for me to come out.
And so I talked about both scenarios. Whether he sat in the park and what he might have done to avoid detection, which is to have lots of dog recount and hide in a particular place. He really did have some of the same mo as the later Easy rapist when it came to watching people scurry around and try to figure out what happened and where he went.
So, and you say, what's really important too, because this is somewhat rare, is that they both targeted couples in there.
Yeah, they did. DeAngelo admitted to killing the Maggiori couple, Brian and Katie Maggiori in nineteen seventy eight, and what he basically did was kill them in cold blood. He ran after him and shot them. Both of them died that night, and I think he stocked them ahead of time. There's connections to Katie having been at Presnell State. Sharon Huddle was at Presne State. Look, you can see the connections that he could have found someone in one place and know them that they weren't in his ase when
they ended up in Sacramento. So he tracked people. He was a great stalker. He just was meticulous and he never gave up. If he wanted to go after you, he would go after you if you want. If he wanted you to be a victim, he would be his victim. And Palstein, for example, I think that he wanted to kill Paul Stein. It just happened to be that he was a cabby made it easy for him to do it. And I think that even if Paul wasn't seeing it,
wasn't out there. He was supposed to have been hired by the San Francisco newspaper and was about to change jobs. I think that if he had not been in the cab that night, that D'Angelo would attract him and killed them anyway, somewhere else, I said, di'angelo, but that means equals Zodiac. I think he was stalking them. I think he was going to kill him.
Is the the idea of craving for celebrity makes sense to you in terms of the zodiac. Craved that celebrity and then said I'm going away. But this what he morphed into again created that notoriety.
Yeah, of course, yeah, he wanted to be known, and he was, like I said, he found different ways to satisfy his being able to be known. I mean his sheer volume of attacks no matter where he was, if he was the Vicelia around soacker if he was the EASTERI rapist, no matter what he was doing, he you know, the sheer volume of it was how he terrorized everyone so so much, and that was what would have got off on the power and control there.
Many people have looked at this geographical profile, geographical profiling, and you write that there was three places. Three main places that connected Zodiac and the Golden State Killer Joseph'angelo was Tulaire County, Sacramento and Garden Grove.
Right, there were so many murders of women in Garden Grove, which is where his brother lived. There were so many murders really in the Auburn Air up and down Highway eighty and then also Sacramento County. So it's really close geographically, all of it is. So it was not a far stretch to look at what happened when Zodiac left and where he could have gone, what he was doing. It's really not.
You Also you talk about the similarities in again obviously geography, but also VMO as well in terms of these murders, But tell us about the ones that you think are the most I guess controversial that you've uncovered in this and you offer the proof that they're one and the same.
Well, one of the things is that his own base really was around Sacramento for a very very long time, for lifetime. And what happened is that he was able to He loved to drive. He originally wanted to be a California arbitral and that didn't work out. So it's probably smarter for him to be just police officers so that he could come and go and not be tracked quite as easily. But he was, you know, in and
around the areas, up and down the highways. He knew the areas very intimately, and he just repeated what he was doing over and over. But he changed it up enough and threw enough confusion into the marriative always that somehow they seem to not connect it. What's what was really fascinating to me was reading about the crimes, the murders and Sacramento and the discussions that law enforcement had amongst themselves about maybe the by sailor manseckers of easter
A rapists. Nope, they let that go. Maybe the zodiac is, you know, here in Sacramento and he's killing these women in Sacramento. No, never mind, So and then I'm not being critical really of law enforcement. I know they had their hands full, incredibly full with all the murders, but you know, it's sort of like, why didn't anyone pursue it more? Why was this guy allowed? If he killed five people the very first year, and he tried to kill seven that we know of, then he killed in
fifty years, he killed five a year. It's over two hundred people. And that's the worst serial killer I've ever heard of. But it shows in the records. You know, there's so many primes out there that were committed that they do have DNA. They should have DNA, they should be testing them, and as far as I can tell, some of the jurisdictions are, but they are very silent and they're not telling anyone anything about what they're doing.
And my opinion is they might want to wait until there's nobody to prosecute anymore.
You say that there was some use of this this breakthrough genealgical advance of DNA advance used for the DiAngelo conviction, and you say that since twenty eighteen it has been used or since that time, has been used to convict. So tell us more about your idea about how the Zodiac may be linked to DeAngelo overall through this forensic technology.
Well, like I said, with the Zodiac, there's really not anything that I'm aware of, and I'm sure that there are people who have studied these cases for twenty thirty forty years who may know of some sort of DNA or something that could be tested for the Zodiac personally, don't. I don't know that because the criminalist that I listened to said that there really isn't any usable DNA. They
don't see that there will be any. People talk about a mustache here that was supposedly stuck underneath the stamp and things like that, and you never hear of anything being tested. Now it's twenty twenty one, there's there everybody's silence. The FBI will say no, it's not him, but they don't tell you who they think it is. I've talked to other jurisdictions who say, well, you're not You know
when who's thought that this? And of course, you know, anybody who is from California knows what went on, has to have thought and they said it in the nineteen seventies in the newspaper, maybe it's Zodiac who did this, But they just didn't seem to pursue it and didn't come to resolve on so many cases. There's so many cold cases. I can't even begin to tell you.
Right, So, if there isn't any DNA from Zodiac, then what how do you expect anybody to check what you've done? I mean, you've done that again. This is an exhaustive investigation that you've done. But what do you expect from this?
They can see, well, what they can see from it is the patterns, the circumstantial evidence is there the same you know, types of attacks and what occurred. We can compare it and completely compare it to what D'Angelo did. We can track him and see where he was. Plenty was someplace that he was available. And that's the other thing. You see that he was available. You can track him and see where he was and what he could have done.
There's even one one disappearance and murder and the rape all the same night in September, the September attack, and we can see that there's an attack and I believe it was stucked in and he raped somebody and then he drives up the road a few hours a couple hours actually wasn't in that far, probably that hour and a half, and then somebody's abducted and murdered. So it's not unusual for something like that to happen. He did that, as the story rapists, he would attack somebody and then
a few hours later attack somebody else. One wasn't enough for that night. And so there's so many things that are circumstantial that can be seen that you know, you can see that he was available, you can track where he was when he was doing something, what area he was in. You can see it. And monfersman can see it. They know it. They have to have him on their suspect list for the Zodiac. They have to, and some of them that I've talked to do so it's just
that nothing is forthcoming. Do you want of people don't want to see why? I just think that they don't want the negative attention. It's huge. I mean, can you imagine leaving a guy out there to kill five people a year or more for fifty years? Yeah, I mean why would you want to say, oh, he was a previous police officer and he killed all these people and he got away with it.
Yeah, I guess it's enough right now. The shame that's been brought to the profession from him as it is, and he wouldn't be the first serial killer that ended up being a former police officer in this putting this incredible investigation in an analysis together, do you expect that some police haven't put everything together like you have and have the ability to put things together so it's readable like yourself? And do you expect some police to take a look at what you've done?
And yes, I do expect them to take a look at what I've done. Definitely, they're all going to get a copy of this MAC. I have an appoint with one tomorrow in person to deliver it. But what I expect is is that they will be able to see it if they haven't already. But one of the problems is is that one is the time involved. I'm able to investigate twenty four to seven if I want to. They don't have the resources. They don't have the manpower, the woman power whatever to be able to, you know,
and investigate in depth like this. I mean, when you sit for hours and hours and hours and look at what happened. They don't have the luxury of that. Typically. I know that there's a couple of private investigators out there that do. And I think that eventually the story will be told and it will be connected, and there are people that know parts of the story that they don't know the whole story, and so I'm trying to make this cohesive and understood, and hopefully that that's what I've done.
I think you really have. I want to thank you so much and for coming on and talking about your new book, very explosive book, Serial Slaughter, Zodiac Killer. Thank you so much. And is there for people that might want to take a look at this work? Do you have a Facebook page, website, anything where people might find out more about this.
Yes, there's a WordPress site, there's a Facebook page, there's Twitter. It's on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And it was interesting the first day of published that I had it listed for free and quite a few people downloaded it. So hopefully they have an opinion about it, and that's really what this is about. It's sort of like getting the word out and saying, hey, what do you think? What do you think about what's been presented here? And what will we do about it? Yeah?
Absolutely, thank you so much and it's been a pleasure. Thanksal Slaughter A Killer. Thank you, good Night Pleasures, bybye,