THE AGE OF ZODIAC-Michael Benson

and so perhaps a Zodiac club. Many Zodiac experts assumed that in later Zodiac letters, when he wrote the San Francisco Examiner letters claiming a prolific kill count, that the guy responsible for the murders of Betty Loo Jensen, David Faraday, Darlene Farren, Cecilia Sheppard, and Paul Stein and maybe Cherry Joe Bates was just bragging about the other forty or so. Benson looks at it another way, all of them could have been the Zodiac. If the Zodiac was a psycho squad,

not alone Nut. Each and every victim gets Benson's full attention as the body count grows. There is ongoing analysis involving hard and circumstantial evidence commonalities between the murders, geographic profiling, and pertinent connections to known Zodiac suspects. Many murders are examined. It was the era of serial murder, an epidemic especially bad in northern California where privacy, seclusion, dusty wilderness, and

hitchhiking were prevalent. Some of these cases were found to not be the Zodiac at all, but perhaps a glimpse at the early work of a Ted Bundy, at Kemper, Golden State killer, Joseph DiAngelo, and other known killers. The next wave of psycho serial carnage. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Age of Zodiac, with my special guests, journalist and author Michael Benson. Welcome back to the program. Thank you so much for this interview. Michael Benson,

Thank you, Dan, thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure. Michael. I'm always looking forward to any new work of yours, and this is no exception. As you said before this, just before this interview. Finally we get to talk about Zodiac.

Robert Graysmith's book, I loved David Fincher's movie. But the subject came up more recently when I was planning a book called Killers who Taunt about serial killers weren't content to just kill their victims, but they need to brag about it. They're usually in letters. They write to the press of the police, so the terror becomes part of the package. Jack the Ripper is the prototype of that kind of killer. He gave himself the name Jack the

Ripper in a letter he wrote. Since then, there's been the Black Dolly Avenge btk Unibomb, son of Sam and Hear. The top of that list is Zodiac, who's credited for five kills, maybe six, but may.

at night, he killed during the day. He killed rural, he killed urban. He killed with a knife, He killed with a variety of guns.

put in the book, but I'll mention here. April nineteen sixty two, cab driver named Ray Davis was shot in an upscale section of Oceanside, California, with twenty two super Rex long twenty two twenty two Suprex long ammunition, and he called the cops. He threatened bus drivers, He acted clever, but didn't strike again. That anybody knew about. My book starts a year later in June of nineteen sixty three,

and it's senior ditch Day. I don't know if you had senior ditch day where you went to school, but usually somewhere before a few days before graduation, when finals are over, seniors get amongst themselves and on one day they just don't come to school. They ditch class on moss and what are they going to do about it?

So then our two kids, Linda and Robert, Linda Edwards and Robert Domingos went to the beach in Santa Barbara County and they found a private spot and they were shot with twenty two super Rex long rifle ammunition, and the killer created a little scene. He dragged their bodies into a nearby lean to where a beach bum lived, and he cut Linda's panties and opened them and then placed her body on top of Roberts. Now a year done,

not even a year. The seven months later, also on a beach in Southern California, Ocean Beach in San Diego, another couple, Johnny Ray and Joyce Swindle, newly read newlyweds, are taking a stroll along the beach and their shot with a Remington twenty two rifle. First shots come from a far sniperlike and then the killer finishes the job up close. Ray was a navy man radio ban verse first class and that's why he was stationed in San

Diego and then in the summer nineteen sixty five. This is really a very modern crime for nineteen sixty five in the most horrible way. Diane Garish. It's sometimes known as the black Sapphire murder because she wore a black sapphire ring which was missing and she could have a book to herself. She was killed August wayne nine, thineteen sixty five, found nude and strangled with her own bronze stockings just outside the Presidio Army Post in San Francisco.

She'd been dancing with soldiers at a club there, and she was last seen as the Fort Scott Presidio Enlisted Men's Club in Presidio Hill, and the killer took the ring and took off. And the one after that is the one I think a lot of Zodiac fans know about. Familure is the word fan, but you know what I mean. We don't like the Zodiac. We're just fascinated by him or it. But this is Cherry Jobates and she's killed the day before Halloween in nineteen sixty six, founding a

driveway on the campus of Riverside City College. Her car is disabled while she's in the school library, so when she comes out to go home, car won't start. Man offers to help her and next thing we know, she's dead at the end of a driveway, stabbed brutally. And this is the thing that clinches it as a Zodiac crime is that the killer writes a letter or someone writes a letter, certainly to the newspaper, and.

with the with the known Zodiac crimes. But the first universally universally accepted Zodiac murder murders are David Faride and Betty lou Jensen, who were obviously teenagers and they lived in Vallejo, went to different schools, and were out on their first real date and they were killed. December twentieth, nineteen sixty eight, was the first evening of Christmas vacation, and about eleven twenty pm they were parked just off Lake Herman Road, which is a desolate road next Falletjo

with Benicia. Two three cars an hour go down it no street lights, can't see your hand in front of your face, and they're found with David lying on his back directly beside the front passenger side of the door. The door's open, all other doors are closed and locked, and cops knew it was a fresh scene because it's freezing outside. It's twenty eight degrees outside and the engine

is still warm. Betty loos dead at the scene. She's twenty eight feet from the car in the direction of the road, shot five times in the back as she fled, and David's doa at Vallejo General Hospital, shot point blank in the head. Now there's a bullet hole in the back window of the rambler, perhaps an indication that the

victims were forced off the road. The common thinking is that they were parked to make out, but if you look at the photos, they're only two or three feet off of the road, and it's on a curve, so every time a car goes by, the inside of their car lights up, so it's not the best place to park.

a J. C. Higgins Model eighty twenty two automatic pistol. Now, the kids had no dangerous enemies, but witnesses said that there had been an incident sometime in the recent past in which David Faraday had spotted a guy selling marijuana at the International House of Pancakes I hop on Tennessee Street in Vallejoe. David's an eagle scout, and he threatened to turn the guy in, and the popular and response

threatened David. We don't know who the drug dealer was, but that ihop becomes an epicenter of Zodiac activity in.

the patience of a second husband. And unlike the kids on Lake Kerman Road, Darlene has enemies and I swear I can't believe nobody's noticed this Darlene bore a strong resemblance to Betty Lou. Now, if you knew them, you may not confuse the two, because they gave off a very different aura. But going buying a car, you could confuse the two. Well scrunch faces cute but not necessarily

glamorously pretty. But it's enough of a resemblance for me anyway to at least consider the possibility that Betty Lou's murder was a case of mistaken identity.

was a Mustang. You know, either he knows more than he sang or less than he sang, But what he says keeps changing. He's still changing his story to this day. And nine millimeter shells are found at the scene, so it's a different gun.

Darlene had been there many times. They parked at approximately eleven thirty five pm and for a couple of minutes quietly, but their solitude was interrupted by a car driving Northeastern Springs Road. The car pulled into the parking lot, up to a spot seven feet from the rear of Darling's car and turned off its lights. Micheau asked what was up, and Darling said, oh, never mind, so he didn't and the car sat there for about a minute and then left,

and they breathed a common sigh of relief. Alone again, but in a few minutes the car came back and once again parked behind Darling's car now about ten feet away.

and he survives. And there are weirdnesses about this crime that have nothing to do with the killer. Mijeaux is wearing three pairs of trousers, one t shirt, three sweaters, and one long sleeved button shirt. And it's a hot, steamy forth of July night, so this is extremely odd. You can imagine the people in the emergency room trying to undress them so they can get a look at his wounds, and the clothes just keep coming. He would later claim that he wore the extra clothes even on

the steamy night because he was insecure about his skinniness. Well, trouble with that is he's six foot one seventy, which is about normal weight for a teenager, and he seemed confused and unreliable. So there are indications that maybe Darlene and Michael are in the parking lot at the golf course at night for reasons than to get to know

each other better. It is a spot known to buy nickel bags, and Darlene's husband was perhaps being euphemistic when he told police he sent Darlene to buy fireworks, even though it was the middle of the night after the Fourth of Jiant, an unlikely time to set off fireworks. Darlene only had thirteen cents on her at the time of her death. Migelle said the car came left and came back, which could be the way it went if you paid the guy and then he came back to

give you the drugs. Only something obviously went very bad. Then there are weirdnesses that have everything to do with the zoiac. About a half hour also the crime scene was discovered, the Valejoll police switchboard operator received a phone call from a man in a slow monitonne slow but forceful. I want to report a double murder. If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park. You will find the kids in a brown car. They

were shot with a nine millimeter luger. I also killed those kids last year.

a local valay Ho guy. And there were several early suspects who most intriguing were a guy named George Waters, a Filipino bartender customer that Darlene wouldn't go out with and once went to her home and threatened a raper, and especially interesting because he's Filipino, and a later Zodiac letter talks about collecting slaves for the afterlife, which is

apparently a Filipino thing. And then there was Darlene's first husband, who then their their marriage had been tumultuous and violent, so he would naturally have been the first the first suspect, right, And then after that.

and the ciphers. Doesn't look like code from The first letter was broken during the first week in August by a history professor and his wife, and it started, I like killing people because it is so much fun, which is the theme of psychopaths ever since. It went on to say that hunting people was the ultimate kick, it's better than sex, and that when he died, he would be reborn in paradise and those he killed would be his slaves. Right, there was a clue to his identity,

and nobody figured it out. And a week later, the Manson murders take place in Los Angeles, and this guy loses the front page of the newspapers. Our Zodiac Club's going to have to up the ante if they want to again become the center of attention. And you know that's something comes several weeks later at Lake barri Essa.

they're on high alert. But that alertness turns to fear when the man re emerges from behind the tree, wearing a black hood over his head that falls to a crust on his chest, and neatly and precisely painted on the hood in white was the circling crosshairs symbol that became Zodiac's logo. He's holding a dark automatic pistol in his hand, which the scariest part of all, and the hooded man orders Brian to lie down on his stomach

and tell Cecilia to tie his wrists. This is interesting because we go back to Robert and Linda on the beach, the same thing appeared.

circle and Crosshair's logo is his signature. Vallejo twelve, twenty sixty eight seven four sixty nine by gun, September twenty seventh, nineteen sixty nine, six thirty pm by knife, and he also leaves footprints size ten and a half wing walker's shoes, which are government issue shoes usually worn by Air Force personnel if they won't slip when they're walking on the wings of planes. But they're available anyway. You can go to an Army Navy store and get them now, just

had been the case in July. There's a phone call. About hour and ten minutes later, man calls the NAPO police. I want to report a murder, Noah double murder. There They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Yia, and the dispatcher, whose officer, David Slate, asks from where are you calling there? And the caller responds in a terrifying whisper.

front of witnesses. And that's of course Paul Stein m H. So the evening of October eleventh, nineteen sixty nine, Stein, he's a PhD candidate, got several jobs, one of which is driving a yellow cab in San Francisco in the Graveyard Chist and he picks up a man at the corner of Mason and Geary Streets, and the man asks to be taken to Maple and Washington, which is in the Ritzy Presidio Heights section of San Francisco. There's that

word presidio again keeps coming out. When they arrive at the corner of Washington and Cherry Streets, about a block away from the intended destination, passenger pulls the gun, puts it to the cab driver's head, and pulls the trigger. Now this is important. The immediate aftermath to this murder is observed by several teenaged witnesses from a window across the street. The killer circles around to the front passenger side door opens, it pulls the cabby down across the seat,

and then does something over the boy. And we now know he's cutting a piece of shirt away so that he can use bloody shirt pieces as certificates of authenticity and future letters. But they didn't because tell he's doing something over the body. He then fussed over the side of the cab for a time with a white rag in his hand, which the witnesses interpreted as wiping away

fingerprints on the CAB's exterior. The killer took Stein's car, keys and wall, maybe his sunglass and maybe his eyeglasses, but left other items there and walked away casually on foot.

of them. The print has no known match. There's one nine millimeter shell casing found on the floor of the cab, the front of the passenger side and begun similar but not the same as the weapon used at Blue Rock Springs Park. And that was the last of the official Zodiac murders, but just the beginning of the letter writing campaign. Now you know, Paul Stein's dead and the killer still doesn't have a name. He's being called the Cipher Killer in the newspapers, but that's.

Every school bus has a police escort. Soon thereafter. The situation's complicated because a man claiming to be the Zodiac earns his fifty minutes of fame by calling a TV talk show in San Francisco and chatting with the famous lawyer in Melvin Belli. Dispatchers who'd received phone calls from the killer and the lady in Valley Helens and the man in Napa, along with David Hartnell listen to the

broadcast and say it's not the same guy. I mean Hartnell had a long conversation with the Zodiac, and it wasn't the guy on the television show who wanted to be called Sam. The letters continued from the killer, claiming an edward increased number of victims, and by the time the letters stopped it was up to thirty seven. He threatened to build bombs and blow stuff up. He quoted

Gilbert and Sullivan's operata The Mecado. He referred to cops as Blue Meanis, which comes from the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine. The communications, however, stopped claiming particular crimes, saying it was up to authorities to figure out who he had and hadn't killed. One letter contained a three hundred and forty character cipher, resembling the ones that had been solved. But this cipher, if that is indeed what it is, has never been solved. The letters give us a tantalizing

glimpse to the writer's personality. He's obnoxious, he's socially immature, but he never once offers anything that forwards the investigation. From a detective's viewpoint, the letters have been a big useless distraction in any theory based on decoding these clues, that call and Z is immediately suspect. After Paul Stein's murder, it wasn't long before the mentally ill of Northern California latched onto Zodiac's game. Anyone could play call in a

bomb scare, say you Zodiac kill a hitchhiker? No thingk Zodiac did it? Who did the Zodiac Club actually kill? Well, there are plenty of people to choose from, because there was an explosion of psychopathic murders in Northern California at that point, just killing for fun. It was the new game, and I go through them all in the book in pretty strong detail. I'll gome quickly. Here starts with Elaine Davis. She's petite in seventeen. Her family phone number had recently

been changed because of obscene phone calls. Leona Roberts sixteen, Her father was from Vallejo. Victim had been bound at the wrists and ankles. Cindy Lee Mellin, who's the car was disabled. She was last seen talking to a guy volunteering to help and was never found. Still technically missing. Cosette Ellison fifteen. She's found nude and partially buried. Patricia King twenty one, three days after Cosette. She's returning to

her car when her life is interrupted. Judith and Hakari twenty three years old, two days after Patricia King, and the first in a series of victims to be a nurse. She vanished returning home from work at the Southern Memorial Hospital in Sacramento, Antoinette Ansey, she's a waitress like Darlene Farren, left her home in South Vallejall on March thirteenth, nineteen seventy, gott in her mother's car and disappeared, and the nude body was found eight days later off.

Kathleen John's a twenty two year old woman. She's seven months pregnant and She's brought into the police station in Patterson, California, on the early morning of March twenty third, nineteen seventy. She's in hysterics. She told the police that she'd been abducted by a man and she and her infant daughter had managed to escape. She was driving late at night near Patterson when a car came up behind her and began blinking his lights. She pulled over and the other

car pulled alongside her. A man leaned over and said that her rear wheel was loose. He looked reliable to her. There was nothing freaky about him so well. They took a look at the wheel. The hub cap was off, there were only two lug nuts present. So he offers her rise to the gas station. Reluctantly, She carrying her child, gets into his car with him, and she asked him if he always went around helping people, and he reportedly replied that by the time he was through with people,

they didn't need any help. His His car looked lived in. There were pots and pans closed for an adult man and closed for a child, all scattered around. Now, she says, the guy drove her around for two hours, mumbling strangely and ignoring her pleas to be let out. Finally he stops at a stop sign. She jumps out, runs into a field and hides. He tries looking for her, but a farmer stops in a truck says here, what's going

on here? And the man who gave her the ride took off, So she gets the ride to the police station and she's hysterical. Cop goes to look for her car and finds it right where she said it was, only it's been torched, destroyed, And while she's being interviewed, she looks at the wall and there's a wanted poster for the Zodiac with a composite drawing based on Paulstein witnesses, and she freaks out.

So it's around this time that the Zodiac's primary function becomes extortion. He says do as I say, or bad things will happen. His requests they're stupid, and wants people to wear buttons that have his circle crosshairs logo on them or else. If you don't wear buttons, he's going to explode a bomb and kill a bunch of people. He sends authorities a map with radians and a compass drawn over Mount Diablo, supposedly clues to help find the bomb, but like the letters, no one ever figures out what

the map means. But again, we learned something. We learned that the Zodiac knows what a radian is. An a radian for those that don't know, his fifty seven point three degrees, and it's used by engineers. The writer of the Zodiac letters has some sort of background in engineering or navigation. And then there's an indication that the Zodiac had is it in Lake Tahoe, Nevada with the disappearance of another nurse named Donna laughs.

he likes the Mikado a lot. He goes to the Mikado twice in two different letters, quoting from that in one case quoting in particular the Groucho Marx version of the Mikado, who in Groucho played the Lord High Executioner in that operetta, which is an interesting coincidence because I wrote a book last year called The Lord Executioner about Mobster.

But that's that's what that means. And then he said the postcard, which is got pine trees and references to like Tahoe and supposed the clues is to where to find the missing person there and The missing person is Donna Lass, who was a twenty five year old nurse and another nurse and she worked at the Sahara Tahoe Hotel.

She was in the first aid room at the casino, and before that she worked for five months at the Letterman Army Medical Center in the Presidio in San Francisco, near the Paulstein murder and where Diane Garrish was found horribly violated and murdered, missing her black Sciphi ring back in nineteen sixty five. How Donna was last seen at work on September sixth, nineteen seventy, around one point fifty am.

Her car was found near her apartment, but she was never seen again, and not long after she vanished, a male telephone caller called her workplace and her landlord and explained that she had to leave town abruptly due to an illness in the family. Now, a subsequent Zodiac letter seems to take credit for the disappearance plenty of other crimes that he didn't take credit. The epidemic of evil continues, and it's just you know, it.

And the killings continued through nineteen seventy three. Gale McLaughlin again in Sacramento, Roseavasquez and San Francisco, who once worked in a hospital in the Presidio, the same one where Donal last worked, Angela Thomas, whose dad had been stationed for years in the presidio, Nancy Gidley, Nancy Fusei, and to round out a really rotten nineteen seventy three, two thirteen year old girls in Sacramento, Valery Lane and Doris Garryberry were executed with a shotgun. Now the killings extended

through the first half of the decade. In Santa Rosa and in other places, girls hitchhiking, either alone or in pairs were disappearing and being found half in half, you know, in dry creek beds.

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Before I interrupted you, Michael, we were talking about the carnage, that the carnage that continued, but also that there was an interesting January development January twenty ninth, nineteen seventy four, the interrogation of Arthur Lee Allen, and anybody who's seen the movie Zodiac obviously is familiar with the name. Tell us a little bit about this interrogation of Arthur Lee Allen.

So officially there are no suspects.

file anywhere. And one appealing conspiracy theory, and I see this all the time and people love this kind of stuff, is that the Zodiac is a US government mind control experiment gone wrong, that in an attempt to create super soldiers for the war in Vietnam, they had produced a few rejects who washed out and some were released back into society. Guys like that might have had their fingerprints

erased from the system to prevent exposure. Now there's no evidence that, I mean, they're evidence that those programs existed, no evidence really connecting those programs with the Zodiac crimes. But at the Zodiac Club, I guess might have been government issue, just like the killer's wingwalker shoes. But I have another theory. At the Paul stein scene, we have a guy who plans to take away part of the victim's bloody shirt so he can include pieces in letters to.

When the teenager saw the man fussing over the side of the cab with the white rag and theory wiping prints away, Perhaps he was actually dipping the finger in Paul Steine's blood and then using it to make a clear print in blood on the cab. Now no one can ever be arrested for Paul Stein's murder because that fingerprint will never produce a match. It is the perfect murder. Yes, that's right there. Now back to Arthur Lee Allen. There are all sorts of reasons to make him suspect number one.

For one thing, he lived right around the corner from the Eye Hop, and police records show that it was a from very early on. Darlene Farron worked at that I Hop from nineteen sixty six to sixty seven. David Ferdy threatened the drug dealer and that I hop and Arthur Lee Allen lives about one hundred yards from that

I Hop. In October sixth, nineteen sixty nine, as part of the Lake Barry Assa investigation, please talk to him for the first time, and Sergeant Lynch of the Valley Jo Police Department shows up and he asked Allen.

overheard comment something. But this one has no indication of why Alan is being interviewed, so we don't know he did somebody dropped the diamond Arthur Lee Allen right after the Lake Barriessa crimes, but we don't know what He's later interviewed, and this was what you were asking about. Later interviewed by detectives Toshi and Armstrong of the San

Francisco Police Department. It's a surprise visit at his workplace, and he's wearing a Zodiac brand watch with the circle and crosshairs on the face, which was the logo for the brand. So there's the circle and crosshairs the word

Zodiac with each other on his wrist. During the interview, he mentioned the most Dangerous game, which is mentioned in the very first cipher, and he said he said he'd been a suspect in the Lake Barriessa because someone saw him with bloody knives in his car, but it was okay. Because he'd just been killing chickens.

the author of the Zodiac letters. His trailer. His trailer was in Santa Rosa, where he lived during the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders, which I haven't spoken about yet, but there were a separate set of killings in Santa Rosa girl's hitchhiking and his trailer was filled with porno and dead squirrels. You know, I would like to know just how many trailers are out there filled with porno and dead squirrels, and I hope it was just one. Okay, here's Dan. I think this is the most fascinating aspect

of this case. Alan possessed an odd and perhaps unique skill. He was a star diver as a teenager, and in his early twenties he was a junior College All American diver get fancy dives off the diving board, and he could do something no other diver could do. He could do his fancy dives spinning right or spinning left, and he did them equally well both ways. All other divers have to pick one direction or the other. You're either right handed or you're left handed. So that's a tremendous

level of ampithe s terry. And that comes to mind when police tried to get writing samples out of him. Right and cursive right and the left printing left, right, left, Alan claims he can't print right handed because he'd been trained to print lefty in school and felt anxiety when trying to print with his right hand. The pen falls out of his hand when he tries to write it, so the writing test that determines he didn't write the zodiac letters is woefully incomplete. Now. His personality also makes

him a suitable serial killer candidate as well. Son of a Navy commander, yet he had been a korman in the Navy but was drummed out. He was always angry at his mother. He took a job at the Tescadero State Hospital, a mental hospital, but was fired in nineteen sixty two. He's a big man boy, makes people uncomfortable with his socially immature behavior, and he's a child molester. Never had a relationship with an adult that we know of.

According to family members, he had spelling eccentricities, as did the writer of the Zodiac Letters. Here's an unlikely coincidence. Lee Allen used to write X hyphen m ass to mean Christmas right an extra s, and that's the way it's spelled in the Zodiac Letters. He also his sistern tells his sister in law that he got a letter from somebody he knew at the Attaeskadero State Mental Hospital and the letter has codes written in it and he keeps it in a gray box. His history shows a

remarkable proximity to the killer activities. He's in the area when Cherry Joe Bates is killed in Riverside. He only missed one day of work down there, and it was the day after bates murder. He's in Vallejo for the first two Zodiac attacks. He ate at the ihop were Darlene Fahren, waitress. He says he played and to go to Lake Barriassa on the day of the murders there, but he changed his mind at the last second, and

those bloody knives, those were just chickens. And he lived in Santa Rose at the time of the Santa Rose a hitchhiker murders. But his fingerprint doesn't Mactually, he's not a suspect now. The Arthur Lee Allen legend was enhanced by the incriminating statements of Alan's so called friend.

Lee Allen has to be the Zodiac. Cheney also said that Alan loved the Agatha Christie book The Murders, which is about a killer who murders victims with the same first and last initial in towns that also start with that initial, which is strange for me because that plot repeated itself in real life in Rochester, New York, and was the subject of a book I wrote with private investigator Donald da Tubman called Nightmare in Rochester. But Anla liked the book for a different reason didn't care about

the initials. The Agatha Christie book describes a series of crimes committed by one man, one crime with a clear cut motive and the others arbitrary to confuse the issue, a strategy that would have been high on any Zodiac Clubs to do list. Chaney himself has an excellent background to be a Zodiac Club member. Spent two years in the Air Force. He went to college with Paul Avery, the calumnist that the Zodiac took great light to light and satirizing. His printing was close to that in the

Zodiac Letters. He also did something that always gets an investigator's attention. He tried to explain away evidence that the authorities didn't know about.

Alan had his thumb print. Plus, Cheney was a mechanical engineer who knew what a radian was. He died in twenty oh nine. And those are the two top guys. But I have other members of the zodiac crobi resuspect as well.

we didn't talk about it. But before Betty lew and David are shot, a sports cars parked in that spot because the driver's trying to figure out what he's driving, his girlfriend's car, and he's trying to figure out what the what the button and how to put the bright lights on and off and that kind of thing, and they're chased out of there by a guy in a white Chevy, and the white Chevy reappears the brown Corvet.

I think it was the police trying to follow up on him on a clue that had been left by Michael Migeau, who was very, very confused when he said that he came off of that car being a brown Corvet almost immediately and said, well maybe it was a Mustang and he didn't really know.

nineteen seventies. Hughes was one of them. He once used a victims. He once called a victim's dad and said your daughter is dead. I know because I'm the one who killed her, which is almost word for word.

Perhaps he had a tempestuous relationship with Darlene. Came to Darlene's funeral, spoke to no one, and later, after he was arrested as a suspect in her murder, told cops he didn't know Darlene was dead.

I'm not sure how the police know that, but that's in the report. Now, Grant drove a white Chevy resembled the car scene on Lake Herman Road, and after the Lake Herman murders, but before Blue Rock Springs, Darlene's babysitter saw a white Chevy parked outside darlingne department. Darling told the sitter she was afraid of a man in a

white Chevy because she'd seen that man kill someone. Now we also have a report that Grant, or a man pretending to be Grant, went to local libraries in and near Vallejo and borrowed a book on code writing and a vinyl album of the Mikado, two things that practically defined the zodiac. So there's a lot happening there.

the Cherry Joe Bates murder. At the time of Paul Stein's murder, he worked as a movie theater projectionist and lived in a San Francisco basement apartment on Scott Street, within walking distance of the Stein crime scene. Then as Richard Gaikowski were known as Dick Gick g y k E, and two key pieces of evidence make him a suspect.

Nancy Slover, the the Vallejo police dispatcher, and Officer Slate, the NAPO police dispatcher, talked to the Zodiac minutes after the shootings, and they said Gaikowski's voice was closer than any other they'd heard to the one they spoke to in nineteen sixty nine and two. Gaikowski spent three years in a mental institution in nineteen seventy one to seventy four, and those were three years when the Zodiac stopped writing letters.

He lived for a time in Albany, New York, in the same building with Darlene Farren's first husband same building and lived ten miles from the lay house in nineteen sixty eight and sixty nine. The Albany, New York is another strange, particularly strange cluster because it's on the other side of the country, but there is a cluster Zodiac activity there that I'll get to. Some suspects, like Lawrence Kane, seem to have been jerry rigged out of the so

called clues plucked subjectively from Zodiac's various writings. Others, Ross Sullivan comes to mind better suspect for one crime in this case Cherry Jo Bates than he is for the others. John Coetrou murdered Leslie Perlow and Janet Taylor in the Stanford area. Donald Boujack was an Army vet was mental problems, and he's on the list because he was released from

prison three days before the Lake Barrys attack. And the list goes on by a special section of the for the Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders, which are important for a couple of reasons. So nineteen seventy two and seventy three, the girls and young women are all hitchhiking near Santa Rosa, and the second of these victims was Kim Wendy Allen, nineteen year old student at Santa Rosa Junior College. She was one of two Santa Rosa Junior College women on

the list of Santa Rosa hitchhiker murder victims. Arthur Lellen, of course, lived in a trailer in Santa Rosa with the dead squirrels and the porno and there was another guy though named Fred Manelli. And Fred Minelli was Kim Allen's teacher at Santa Rosa Junior College. He died on August twenty fourth, nineteen seventy six in a head on collision and in his car police found his artwork, which

was disturbing stuff. He drew pictures of women in extreme and tortuous by BTK and one of the drawings was labeled Kim Allen who died bound up, and another appeared to be of the artist in drag and was not labeled Fred. It was labeled Freedom. So we'll put he gets to be on the list. And Yeah, the last thing I want to talk about is the Albany connection, because it's one of those weird side zodiac stories and I'm not sure that this has anything to do with the zodiac.

except for Indian beads. The man and the woman had been beaten to death, and their eyes were slashed with a knife, and they were each stabbed fifty to sixty times anger overkill. They were members of the Church of Scientology, which was much smaller in nineteen sixty nine was routinely referred to as a hippie cult. It's somewhat more than that now, and one suspect in the murders was a member of a London anti establishment group called The Process, whose members were known to worship Satan.

They go to her room and they find a type note signed the Zodiac. The letter picks up additional significance in nineteen seventy three when another clearly spurious Zodiac letter is sent to the Albany Times Union Dorien's hometown, and a code in that letter was deciphered to reference the Albany Medical Center, which is basically across the street from the home in which Doreen Gall grew up. So I have won Zodiac victim and two suspects have Albany, New

York connections. Darlene Ferron and her first husband lived in Albany after they were married in nineteen sixty six, and Jim worked for the Albany Times Union. Richard Gaikowski we talked about before, whose name has been bandied about as a Zodiac suspect also worked for an Albany paper, the Knickerbacker News. That's just the age of Zodiac.

much in competition with one another. So get people to worship science file and I'll get people to worship the devil, you know. Five bucks to the guy who recruits the most people into their cult, and I guess Scientology wins. But he wrote a book called the Satanic Bible, and it claimed that the age of God being in charge was over and that the age of Satan being in charge was to begin, and that nineteen sixty six was

year one of the Age of Satan. So, you know, I don't think that Anton LaVey Messes fairly was a criminal in his own right, but he attracted weirdos.

the first Zodiac kill. August first was another Black holiday, and that was the day that Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the tower in the University of Texas and shot a bunch of students sniper style, thus becoming the first school mass shooting in the US history, long before Columbine. So it really does seem like nineteen sixty other sixty six is an opening of a sort of Pandora's box of evil, from which the Age of Zodiac

is one of the things that emerges. I mean that summer is also Richard Speck who kills eight nurses in Chicago, and not far away from there, the strange murder of Valerie Percy, who was the senator's daughter, who is killed by someone who gets into the house using a glass cutter and you know, kills her and gets away. So that was that was a crime so startling that the CBS was playing to show the movie Cycle al for Hitchcock's movie Cycle for the first time on the network,

and they canceled it. And I think to this day CBS has never shown the movie Cycle. You can see it on TV now. Its network premiere, which was all built up and was going to be a big thing, canceled because Killing for Fun was out of control during the summer in nineteen sixty six in a way that it just hadn't been in previous years.

on the campus of Stanford University. She's been violated with a church candle and there's another one found between her breasts, and it just it just looks like a black mass has taken place.

People are going to be terrified. The The night Watchman has since been well that they finally made a DNA match with URLs Perry and linked the murder to the night watchman at the church. But we don't know, We don't know the details if he was alone or if there was a black mass going on, because when they went to his house to arrest him, he committed suicide. Yeah, so that's always going to be a mystery, the Rlest Perry.

doesn't work. But if you are a group of people and you are connected to one another in some other way, you belong to an actual club, or you were all in the service together, or you were in the wing of a mental hospital together or something, and you wanted to kill for fun. I think what you could do is create eight a all encompassing avatar, call it the Zodiac, and then you could go out do your thing. We're a phrase that the Zodiac liked, and the Zodiac would

then take credit for all of it. And since the Zodiac would be would be assumed to be one guy, no one would get calm. And obviously, if you're using fingers from people who never have or never will be fingerprinted to put down false evidence, it's close to the perfect murder.

him with a white rag fussing over there. Well, you know you don't fuss with a white rag and then leave a perfectly good fingerprint.

at kids and write taunting letters. Tell us about this comparison in New York City.

of one of the astrological signs. Some The interesting thing here is there's no word for this phenomenon, but there's a really good eyewitness early on in these series of crimes. And again, in order to become a notorious Hall of Shame psycho killer, you have to pick victims of high quality, and so you have, I mean, the richer and more beautiful your victims, the more play you will get in

the press. But sure, this guy had a zip gun and was killing people who are ineebrated at three in the morning and bums on park benches and things like that. But the original description results in a composite drawing which is identical to a fellow named Colin Ferguson, who in nineteen ninety three became known for the mass murder known as the Long Island Railroad Massacre the Little Notoriety later because he ended.

very naval. This is the captain speaking. Is the way announcements are on ship, and he he does the world's worst job of seeming innocent. He can't stop toying with the blue means. He has to mention. He has to mention the most dangerous game.

why efforts to clear him are suspicious. Not their intent, but just you know, he can't be the zodiactors. This, this and this, Well, let's take a look at those three things because they might be the things that are wrong.