THE ZODIAC-PROFILED-Mark Hewitt

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The Zodiac serial killer murdered wrote letters, created ciphers, and taunted the police and the people of the San Francisco Bay Area from nineteen sixty six to nineteen seventy four, but over five decades has not been identified. At the time he was active, the term serial killer had not

yet been coined, and psychological profiles were practically unknown. Now, using twenty first century analytics and a sophisticated understanding of serial killers, it is possible to create a psychological profile that may help identify the kind of man who could commit these terrible crimes and get away with it for decades spite an overabundance of evidence that should have pointed

directly to him. Join the search for the killer as the evidence is compiled and analyzed in Profiled the Zodiac Examined with my special guest, journalist and author Mark Hewitt. Welcome back to the program, and thank you very much for agreeing to this interview Mark Hewitt.

my journal ratings and inches. After a couple more years, I began to think that, you know, I may even be able to put a book together on the zodiac, and so I started to make plans to actually write a zodiac book. Well, one book became two books and then became three books. So I think I've dug out so much research and I have so much to say about it. There's so much information that it became three books. It's a very complex case, and I wanted to do it justice.

crimes at that time and what they thought. Again, profiling wasn't even a thought in these people's minds. But what did they think of the crimes at that time in nineteen sixty six.

is a murderer. But if there's a bunch of people dead, whether it's all in one place like the current spree killers that we see or the mass murders that we see currently, or if it's over a period of time, it didn't matter which just they were considered a mass murderer and the background behind it. Most people just said, well, they're crazy, there's something wrong upstairs, and they're killing a

bunch of people, so that's who they are. It wasn't until the seventies and eighties that the term that the terms got expanded and the term serial killer got coined, denoting somebody who kills two or more or three or more individuals with a cooling off period in between. We look at the Zodiac today and we can say, obviously he's a serial killer because not only were they're cooling off periods in between, but there was an accelerated rate

of killing. The Zodiacs started. The first two kills that we know of, two murder scenes were three years apart, and that accelerated up until the distance between Lake Burrus and murder and murder and Paul Stein's murder was only two weeks apart.

police attention. This guy reached out for attention and declared which murders that he had committed. And mel Nikolay was a special agent with the California Departments with gathering together facts for all of the various jurisdictions that were looking into the case, because at the time, the Zodiac was wise enough to kill in different counties, different regions, even

if you include the Bates murder in southern California. And so mel Nikolay sat down and gathered all the facts as best he could and realized that, well, the Zodiac must have some kind of interes or background in cryptology, He must have some kind of interest in the occult, calling himself the Zodiac, et cetera, et cetera. And he came up with a reasonable list as far as what could be guessed about the zodiac, and that's basically all

profiling is, Robert Wrestler said. It's just the profile is best guess at the type of person they're looking for. The idea is not to specifically name a name or zero in on a single person, but a profile lets the investigation know what type of person they're looking for. Often it allows the police forces to narrow the search and save a lot of time. If they're looking for somebody who's wealthy and six feet tall, you can narrow down your search and eliminate a whole lot of people

that way. So I don't know that mel did what we would today consider a complete profile, but he listed the arcturistics based on what people had seen, that he was roughly five eleven six feet tall, that he was two hundred to two hundred and twenty pounds, et cetera, just based on what people had seen. Described his voice a little bit based on the people who had heard his voice, saying that it was flat, monotone, completely devoid

of emotion. And you know, the for the late sixties and early seventies in which you worked, it was it was a pretty good job. Of what he did.

booths and from the taxicab that Paul Stein was driving. Well, phone booths and taxicabs are public places that pick up a lot of stray fingerprints throughout the day, and so any fingerprints that were gathered may not have been the Zodiacs. And there's been a lot of talk about, oh, the cab had a bloodied fingerprint, or there were bloodied fingerprints, but if you look at the actual police reports, they say they found fingerprints that might have a trace of

blood in them. In other words, there was a speck or two of something that could have been blood, but it could also have been mud or dirt. These fingerprints are not unquestionably the Zodiac. So if investigators, the inspectors from SFPV went around and tried to eliminate people based on the fingerprints, they may have been using incorrect fingerprints to eliminate people when they should not have been eliminated.

The other thing is handwriting. They're not certain that the Zodiac's handwriting is actually his, and there's a lot of reason to believe that it's not, based on basically the fact that the handwriting that the killer used this is so distinctive and so messy and so childlike that if anybody had used that handwriting in their daily life, they would have been noticed within the first months or years of the Zodiac case, because a lot of the letters

were published in the paper so that people could see the handwriting and say, oh, that reminds me of my uncle John's handwriting. Because it's so distinctive, it's so messy, the spelling is so bad that so many rule violations and the way he wrote his letters that he would have been nailed quite quickly, I believe. So that gives me the idea that somehow he may have been involved in faking his handwriting.

how complex he was, he's much more. Let's talk about You talked about the handwriting maybe going awry, and you say, are pardon me, the fingerprints and the handwriting could be deceptive and he could have, as you say, used deceptive handwriting, not his own handwriting. What with the other evidence tell us some of the early evidence, right from the very first crime scenes, that was gathered and looked at from authorities like Nikolai.

In the subsequent years of the investigation, a lot of attention has been given to Darlene. Farren said, well, did Saron know her killer? Did she have a relationship or was this somebody who was angry with her? Well, if he was angry with her and killed her, that would have been the end of his need to kill people. But he continued to kill people, and he continued to

write letters. The focus of attention has been on Darlene because she was on her second husband and ran around with a lot of men, so there were a whole lot of men to look at to look into her background. But what we know today about Sariah Killers gives us the idea that that may have been unwarranted. There's no reason to believe that Darlene was the focus of attack.

Anymore than Betty lou Jensen was the focus of the attacks, but no attention has been given to her because it was her first date, first time she ever been out with the guy, so not a whole lot of relationships to look into. And they did look into a couple of former boyfriends who were just casual dates around high school, but there is nothing to connect her to anything, but a lot of attention has been given to Darlene Ferron.

What is that classification that fits that the known evidence of the known information and your application to this, how you think zodiac fits in completely, partly, or not at all, tell us about.

how many types there are. Generally they've settled on back in the eighties they came to the conclusion that they are basically four type to serial killers and based on motives. But what makes it very difficult is often serial killers act out of one or more, two or more of these motivations. One is the missionary serial killer who kills as a means to communicate something to the public or

based on their own ideology. Some of the mass murders who have been done by religious reasons seem to be killings as a result of missionary work of based on their ideology, their religion, they go out and kill. And the second type is the psychotic serial killer. That's the serial killer who is out of touch with reality, who kind of comes and goes off, and schizophrenic who kills because voices tell them to kill, or may not even know that they're killing and doing something wrong. A third

type is the sexually motivated serial killer. And with those we think somebody like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy, who are obviously sexually motivated in what it is that they're doing. And then the fourth type it's eluding me at the second, at the moment it yeah, it escapes me at this point. The types of.

suggesting that there was something going on sexually. The Zodiac never raped his victims or touched his victims molested the victims, but that doesn't necessity necessitate the fact that they aren't sexually motivated. Very juvenile offenders can be sexually oriented. It's sexually motivated and just don't know what to do or

afraid to do something with a body. Others are motivated to look or do something, you know, very very minor sexually, and others have a twisted relationship between violence and sex and they get those two kind of confused in their mind, and so when they're enacting violence, there's a sexual component for them. The fourth type that I couldn't think of was the power a sort of serial killer who kills

out of and needs for control. This is an individual who is out of control in almost all other areas of his or her life, and by killing somebody and taking control of them, they feel a certain amount of power. It compensates for what's lacking in their lives. And these type can be cannibals because the ultimate means of control to some people is actually ingesting the body of their victim.

motive sexually motivated killer. And what I was talking about, and you clarify that that there's motivations and then there's the basic classifications for the serial killing.

with a girl. Well, anybody who compares violence and killing to sex and favors and in favor of and falls in favor of violence, you know there's something going wrong mentally that early on in life they have somehow made the connection between sex and violence and they can't they can't separate the two. And this is probably the origin of a lot of bondage and other other types of sado masochism that that can take place in people's lives. But take into the ultimate extreme, you get a serial killer.

I'm sorry, what was the other What was the end of that question that you you asked?

that can't be a zodiac murder because it doesn't fit them. Well, m is simply the means of the modus operandi in the Latin or sometimes changed the English's mode of operation, the way things are done, what type of weapons used, what time of day it occurred, that type of thing, any details about the crime, the way that the perpetrator carried it out is them. But the reality is that killers can change their m o M changes all the time.

A killer can experiment to try to find the greatest amount of pleasure and do something different the next time because he thinks that there may be more pleasure involved. Another reason to change them is because they killers learn from experience. If they almost get caught, they say, gee, I'm not going to do it that way anymore. I almost got caught. I'm going to make a change, and so they change to become even more elusive. What doesn't

change is the signature aspect. And the signature aspect has been defined as what an individual brings to the crime scene, what they carry out in an act in order to accomplish some psychological need within them. And the way that you find a signature act is to find out what was done at the crime scene that wasn't necessary for the commission of murder and was done in such a

way that it increased the chance of this individual being caught. Obviously, intelligent serial killers don't want to get caught, and so they won't do something that makes it easier for the police to catch them. Well, if the killer is doing something that does make it easier for the killer to the police to catch them, it means they're doing something that is very important to them on some psychological level. They need to do this, they need to express themselves

this way. Excellent example of that is letter writing. Not very many serial killers actually write letters to the police. There are a few that we're aware of, Son of Sam BTK and the Zodiac, but there are not a lot of serial killers who do that. The simple reason is because when you send a letter to the police, it makes you a whole lot easier to get caught. So what doesn't change from event to event is the signature. The signature is why the killer is actually doing this.

The killer wants to kill somebody, but they want to get something out of it there and there's got to be some kind of psychological payoff for them to do it. So a number of signature acts that Zodiac did with letter writing, making phone calls after the crime scene in taunting the police. All of these tends make it easier for the police to catch them, but for some reason, the Zodiac needed to do them.

bring them together to talk specifically about serial killers. And this enabled some lively discussions between psychologists and law enforcement agents. Between profilers and the general public and the media, it came to a lot of conclusions of just in coming to an understanding with one another of what they saw,

what their perspective was. A lot of the scholarly work that had been done previous to that was done in such a way that the average patrolmen it didn't help them and didn't help them in their daily lives to recognize the serial killers. One of the big problems is that there's a whole lot of myths going around about zero killer, promoted by Hollywood primarily, but also a lot

of talking heads on TV. Anybody can go on TV and say they're an expert in serial killers and start giving information on them, and so you have in the public's mind a lot of misinformation about who serial killers are. One of the myths is that serial killers are all white males. Well, somebody once said that anytime you try to say something definitive about serial killers, you will find somebody who's an exception. You know, all serial killers are straight,

except for the ones who are gay. All serial killers come from a low associate economic status, except the ones who don't. All serial killers have terribly horrible, horrendous childhoods full with abuse, except the ones who don't. So there is a lot of misinformation.

a knife. He was involved in tying up victims. He's killed attacked victims that lover's lane areas. And then his last canonical victim was a cab driver in San Francisco. So the you know, what is his amo them oh, is that he was changing all the time, right, And there's a lot of theories and why he changed, but the simple fact is that he did change and changed drastically.

terms of information? And what was this again the slightly different or the somewhat different approach that you wanted to employ to be able to begin this profile and to be able to execute this profile.

but that's not really relevant to a situation. It's not really relevant to who the zodiac is. There's a lot of speculation. As I came to know the zodiac in my own mind and got to know the evidence, that realized that I needed some way to systematize it and say definitive things about zodiac. And the next obvious step was to research that and find out what the FBI had done and what other scholars had done as far as who are serial killers, what's the nature of serial killing?

And based on what we do know about the Zodiac, what can we pretty constantly say about his personality, his characteristics. Obviously, you can look to earwitnesses and eyewitnesses and figure out what the Zodiac's stature is and what his voice sounded like. But when it comes to the psychological aspect of it, what has the FBI done to understand serial killers? And what did the Zodiac do with different crime scenes that screamed something about his personality. So that's what led to

my interest in profiling. I am not a professional profiler, and so there may be other people who can do a much better job of profiling the Zodiac, and in fact, I'm sure they are there are. But I've worked very hard in Profiled to do a step by step analysis showing what the FBI has done with profiling, what they have concluded in a lot of their research, and step by step put together a profile based on the very specific actions that the Zodiac did at the different crime scenes.

Whatever actions he did said something about him. The question is what does it say about him?

your approach? Because I think for me, this would be the most dangerous I think to make conclusions because just when you talk about deception and you talk about hidden meanings and the strategy of this obviously intelligent killer that's taunting police, what did you get from the FBI and your research before you went and looked at those letters, from what you saw, from what you learned from the FBI, how did you approach looking at those letters.

go wrong? What was the mistake? And I think I say about forty two times in the book there will necessarily be mistakes in my profile because a lot of it is my best guess based on the evidence that we see. Nevertheless, there are something that we can make a guess on, and the FBI and putting together profiles is very cautious to say, do not get hung up on one or two points, because these one or two

points may be absolutely wrong. And we can look at previous profiles of Dennis Raider BTK or Gary Ridgeway the Green River killer find out that there were some horrendous, horrendously bad guesses on what types of people these were. So I was very open to the idea that, you know, some of my guesses are going to be wrong, but at least it gets something on paper, and probably most of what I say is correct, but you know, we won't know until until and if the zodiac has ever identified.

would do the same thing. I guess contacting the police with letters is, like you say, fairly rare, isn't it.

at one of their crime scenes. But apart from that, I know of no Sarah killing team who has sent a letter to the police. They just don't need that correspondence. They don't need that attention, they don't need that recognition. It says something about the psychology of the individual to be writing to the police that they want recognition. And nobody did it better than the Zodiac because he demanded

that his letters get published in the paper. He played media outlets off against one another, sending notes to different different newspapers, getting them to compete with one another. He became a media darling back in the late sixties in the San Francisco Bay area because he was getting front page coverage on a regular basis, the type of thing that many politicians and movie stars is dream of getting.

He was able to get it quite easily, but of course there was the threat of murder and the actual murders that he had done that gave him this coverage.

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free shipping at blue apron dot com slash murder. Blue Apron a better way to cook now Mark Let's go to October thirtieth, nineteen sixty six and the murder of Sherry Joe Bates. As you say, you include that not everybody does. What tell us a little bit about this attack and what, in terms of your profile, you could determine from this attack?

I was able to provide some context, but I wasn't able to delve into each one of the crime scenes in the specificity that I would like to have done. So that's why in Profile, I revisited the crime scenes and go over them one by one from the perspective of a profiler to say what specifically was done and how that bears on the identity of the killer. But with respect to share Joe Bates in Riverside, California, October thirty, nineteen sixty six, what's interesting about that is that it

seems to be a very early kill. For one thing, the killer showed up with a very tiny knife. It was only about you know, it was a It was a tiny kitchen knife the type of thing that was used, and Bates put up a huge struggle. They said, it looked like the grass was plowed where she was killed. There was such an incredible struggle. So the killer learned that, you know, a tiny blade is not something to bring

to a scene to kill somebody. It could mean that the killer was not intending murder that night and was intending something else, and the knife was just there to threaten. So obviously later on it like Barry essay, he brings a foot long knife, having learned from that experience. The other was that he disabled a car apparently to have access to her. And you know what did that say

in future murders he would kill somebody. He would attack couples in their car or when they had come just getting out of their car with a weapon, so that he didn't have to go through the trouble of of the rules of disabling a car and all of that entail. So that could be something else that he learned from the experience.

distance from southern California to northern California. What's interesting is that it's not until this attack that the Zodiac starts counting his murders. He doesn't mention Riverside over the next few attacks and his correspondence with the police and with what he wrote on the car door at Lake Barriessa,

he distanced himself from that. And is that because it wasn't a Zodiac kill or is that because something happened at that that makes it more obvious that he is responsible, and that maybe he made a mistake and wanted to not be associated with both southern and northern California, or he wrote something in one of his letters that can

clue us into who he is. It just kind of interesting that he started all over and then from then on numbered based on Lake Herman Road, and it wasn't until the connection was made in the press that the Zodiac wrote a letter or taking credit for the murder in Riverside.

may have injured himself in the process. He may have at different times thought that this wasn't going to work out and he wasn't going to be able to kill her, that he didn't expect her to fight back with a ferocity that she did. What happened at Lake Herman Road is he pulled out a gun and fired at them, two young people that he was attacking, so there was

no wonder about who was in control. However, even in this process, Betty lou Jensen was able to run away from the car and the Zodiac had to shoot her in the back five times before she fell down. It's quite possible that the following crime scene, fourth of July, around midnight nineteen sixty nine, the Zodiac decided to kill the couple while they remained in the car to even be more in control, but they didn't even have the

chance of running away. So this seems to be between those three crime scenes a certain amount of progression, where the Zodiac wanted to be in absolute control and where he saw a lack of control, he changed what he did for the next attack.

the Zodiac actions. At this point, there's just a lot of speculation.

gunned them down when he heard Mike Michaux scream. He returned to the car and shot the couple some more, two more shots into each victim, and yet Mike Michau still survived, so that probably it listened an awful lot of fear from the Zodiac when he realized that one of his victims had survived, one who was able to give at least a vague description of the killer. The other differences, it appears that the Zodiac pulled into the park, parked behind the couple, drove away, and then came back.

There's no certain it's not positive that it was the Zodiac who was there the first time. But the the ruse for this attack was he pretended to be a police officer. When he pulled up behind them, he turned on a light that was a spotlight, and they thought that it was a police officer, so they started a rummage for their driver's licenses, and the Zodiac showed up at the window right beside them and started a fire. Interesting interesting rust that he used. Serira killers have been

known to pretend to be police officers. Ted Bundy pretended to be a police officer and would say to a young woman, would you come with me please, taking control of the situation and intimating that either she was in trouble or whatever, and it caught the woman off guard and led her defenses down. Dismay been behind the Zodiac's idea of pretending to be a police officer, but it was very simple, using a high powered flashlight, and it

was very effective. You talk about the big change after this one was the phone call that he made to the latest police department follows about forty minutes later, about twelve forty on July the fifth, And the question is what did he why do that? He's written letters in the past, and here he is making a phone call.

What is the added payoff to him? Though he may have made a phone call following the Bates in the confession letter, the writer claimed to have made some type of phone call to the police.

they're typed, and all other Zodiac letters are handwritten. They're kind of messily scribbled, and they show when insane killer or somebody completely mentally disturbed, how could the same person type a poetic type letter. Well, it could be just the opposite. That the Zodiac was experimenting with different ways of communicating with the police, and after sending the confession letters, realized, you know, I explained a little bit too much about

who I am by sending this letter. Some of the tactics that he used to cover up his activities was he wrote, he typed in all capital letters. Well, what difference does that make? Well, if you type in all caps, you provide less information to the police, because if you capitalize some letters and not others, you can be more distinctive in who you are and what you're saying. In the same way, he wrote a lot of short letters

and used very little punctuation beyond the period. All of these go to show somebody who is trying to say something, but trying to say it in such a way that the police won't figure out idiosyncrasies of that individual. Well, if the Zodiac is so cunning in the first letter, maybe the letters following that show a killer who is very cunning in dumbing down his letters and you know, reducing the big words in reducing punctuation and showing that

he can't spell, or pretending that he can't spell. All of this going to show that the Zodiac is a lot more intelligent than we've been giving him credit for.

a really good profile. I'm a little bit disappointed with Douglas's work in The Cases that Haunt Us on the Zodiac because he didn't go to original sources, and a lot of the source material that he's working with turns out is not as correct or not as accurate as it could be for him to put together a profile. He was relying more on secondary sources of what other people had written about the case rather than understanding the actual case files. So in that way it's a little

bit disturbing but a little bit unsatisfying. But at the same time he makes the point that profilers should go and take a close look at the Bates case because he had no trouble accepting it as being a Zodiac murder, the same as that I do, based on a lot of the information gathered at the scene and based on information in the letters that the Zodiac wrote. But he said profilers should take a close look at that case in two Killer because the Zodiac was responsible for it,

and yet he didn't take credit for it. He ignored it and started discounting in Northern California. Then when it was attributed to him, then he went and took credit for it. So first he doesn't take credit for it, and then he does take credit for it. On an emotional level, something is going on there that the Zodiac is proud of his work, but there may be something there that says more about him and who he is that he didn't want to let out initially.

claim that he knew her. He could claim that he had asked her out on a date and she'd refused him, and that would force the police officers to start interviewing all of the people who had asked her out on dates and completely lead them astray. So it could have been a clever means of staging. What's interesting is that the zodiac seems to give quite a few different types of provides, quite a few different motives throughout his letters

of why he killed. And you know, after a while you start to realize these and he start to think, you know, these aren't true. He's just throwing stuff in seeing what will stick, leading the police to run around in thirty different directions.

try to change up things in the letters? We just talked about talking about revenge in Sherry Joe Bates case, but in the other cases, is he consistent in any way? In these letters.

and to see what's happening with the letters. It seems like the Zodiac is frequently responding to events around him, and that kind of says something about who he is. What does he take note of, what is important to him? And what are the police doing that is causing these responses. The best example I can think of is the more material letter sent in early August of nineteen sixty nine. Following the three part letters of the end of July

sixty nine. The police went on TV and said, well, we're not really sure that these letters are from the killer. This was the three letters that had the three part cipher involved the Z four or eight cipher. Obviously this was done by the Zodiac. He provided information known only to him and the police. But they realized that he was trying to prove himself. And I think what they were doing is playing a little bit of a mind game with him and saying maybe he was trying a

little bit too hard to prove his involvement. So they tried to see how how far he would go. So they went on the TV and said, well, we're not really sure that this is from the Zodiac, and it got picked up in the papers as well. The Zodiac responded quite quickly. A couple days later the next letter arrived and the Zodiac spent a considerable amount of time, three pages worth in fact, attempting to prove his involvement in both of those two murders, to both of those

two crime scenes. And so the Zodiac was responding to police rather than he was following rather than leading, and that says something about his character. He wasn't he wasn't so set on a mission that he was doing that he was carrying it out regardless of whatever feedback he got. He was listening to feedback. He cared about what other people were saying and responded to that. Years later, the FBI began to use that as a regular approach of

dealing with material killers. Part of the work of profilers is not just making a list of attributes of a potential unknown suspect, but also what to do, how to negotiate with somebody. If somebody has caught, what to say to them? In what way do you interrogate them? Because of based on their unique psychology, some tactics will work

and others will not. So a profiler will say, well, if you interview this person, ask him about this topic or treat him this way, and you will be more likely to get the information that you want.

killer's iconic phrase, this is the Zodiac speaking. From that moment on, the killer has been called the Zodiac. Interesting facet of the case is that nobody knows for sure what exactly that means, where the killer got the inspiration for that name, and what that name means to him. Every other serial killer, and there have been hundreds of them who have been given specific names by the press or in a few cases, by the killer themselves, we know what the name means. We know why they have

the mean why they have that name. Hillside Strangler or Atlanta child murderer or Green River Killer, or Jack the Ripper or the Cliff, the Yorkshire Ripper, et cetera, et cetera. We know what the name means. We have to take a step back and realize, here's the guy who gave himself a name, and we don't know why the name, what the name means, and why that is his name right exactly.

often wrote his own press by sending letters. He obviously was upset with the police and sent letters to the police and taunting them, but probably went with news media because that's where that's where he could communicate the best. If he sent something to the police, they could just keep fix it and never reveal it to the public. But if he sent letters to the press, he knew that he could manipulate the press into publishing his letters.

It seems to make more sense than the logic of the the sentence to say, you know, I'm not sick, I'm not insane, the game will continue, whereas if he says he is insane, but the game will continue. It it leads some questions. Generally, Sariah killers don't want themselves to be known as crazy unless they're trying to put forth some kind of insanity defense and lessen their jail time or less or get out of the death penalty.

went wrong. They'd never know that, they'd never suspect that he was actually the Zodiac because there's nothing to connect that crime scenes of the other murders that took place in the North Bay. So there may be have been that subterfuge involved to try to not be identified with it. Right previous two attack scenes a male survived. He may have, for whatever reason, felt like he had to prove that he could kill a male, so he went and found

a mail all by himself. The broad theory at this point is that he was wanted to move within the confines of San Francisco to increase his coverage, increase his press. He was getting some press for killing in the North Bay, but to actually kill within San Francisco, well, you know, that's the next obvious step in the development of his of his publicity and his is his recognition. So that's

why he killed within San Francisco. And to kill somebody in San Francisco would have been rather difficult to find a couple who was by themselves in the Lover's Lane area and not get caught. The easiest way to kill somebody in San Francisco, in his opinion, may have been get a cab driver, He'll go wherever you want him to go, kill him, and then flee from the scene.

The letter following that was a little bit It introduced the topic of he wanted to take on a bus and he wanted to set up a competition between himself and the SSDD. Where that came from, we can just speculate at this point, obviously he wanted to get more attention. The threats to school buses caused a panic throughout the Bay Area, where police officers followed buses, people rode shotgun and buses. Bus drivers were given specific instructions what to

do if somebody opens fire on the bus. I Napa County planes went overhead and followed buses and kind of looked for things from up above. It was it was really a time of turmoil for the Bay Area from the people that I've talked to that it's what everybody was talking about. It was what everybody was scared of. It was an incredible threat, and that was very effective because he caused the terror they apparently was trying to cause,

and nothing came of it. It was a It was a threat that was never carried out, and that tends to be typical of serial killers. They don't attack directly what it is that's bothering them. They don't carry through on a threat that they make. They kill somebody who is symbolic, and they kill somebody who who they haven't threatened. They kill somebody just out of the blue, so that there's nothing to connect them to their victim.

but he wanted it to be taken very seriously. One way to do that is to say, well, you know, I'll let you know this, but you have to work really hard to find out what it is that I'm going to tell you, kind of like a little kid who runs into the room and says I have a secret, and the adults say what is it? What is it? Well, it's really important, and this child is letting you know that this is a very important thing that he wants to say. So he doesn't just come out and say it.

He has to get people to show that they're interested and really want to know it, so that may be something to do with a cipher, and a cipher says something about the skills and background of the killer. The police spent a lot of time looking into military people, people who had code training because the Zodiac skill in codes.

There was some skill there. You obviously wasn't a brilliant coder, or the work didn't reveal him as a brilliant coder, but some experience and some interest in coding was obviously necessary.

have done before. So can you give us a little bit again of the profile that you came up with as a conclusion from the letters and from the crime scenes themselves, and everything that you've done in terms of looking at what has been done before comparing.

to show your work. That's all the work that I put together, showing what I have determined about the serial killer based on his letters and on his attack, and pull it together into chapter forty, which is a considerable list of visual details, but also behavioral and psychological details of the soul of the killer based on what it was he has done and what he has written. Necessarily, some of it is speculative. I'm making guesses. A lot of it is based on FBI work in what they've

done with profiles and the types of classifications. I'm back in the seventies, Robert Wrestler and others went into prisons and interviewed criminals and interviewed serial killers and tried to learn from serial killers about serial killers. They found that a lot of them were very willing to talk and share their experiences. They were in prison, they weren't going anywhere.

All their appeals have been expended. It's interesting to sit down with law enforcement agencies and talk about something that's very important to them. And so they were able to share about what they did, why they did it, how they carried it out, what some of their decision making processes were. And from that, the FBI was able to learn a lot about serial killers and their motivations and the way they did things, and they did a lot

of statistical analysis of different types of killers. Wrestler made the distinction between organized killers and disorganized killers based on the crime scene that they laughed in, the organization, the patterns of their thinking. Wrestler noted in a lot of his research and interviewing people that serial killers who were organized tend to use alcohol more before, during, and after a crime, whereas disorganized serial killers tend to use prescription

medication or illicit street drugs. It's not one hundred percent correlation, but there was a greater chance that's the way they performed. So Zodiac, as we have gotten to know him and evaluated his crime scenes and his relationship with the press and the police. Has been described as a hyper organized serial killer. He is among the most organized serial killers that have ever been noted. He put an awful lot of work into not getting caught. He put an awful

lot of work into misleading the police. In fact, the six page letter enumerates numerous ways in which he worked very hard to mislead the police and misdirect any investigation into him. So, based on that relationship i'd been, I made the guess, well, it's more likely that the Zodiac

used alcohol than prescription drugs or street drugs. But research into organized and disorganized serial killers also makes the point that there's nothing that either one of them can reveal the characteristics of another one in one or two points. So maybe the Zodiac did use street drugs. We don't know for sure.

him sober and made him stop and began writing letters alone. Well, once he was not killing any longer and writing letters, the letters became less and less fluential. People started ignoring them because there were no new murders who cares what he said. And at the same time, the letters were becoming more and more bizarre, more and more abstract ideas and weird introductions to the case. Whereas people were saying this guy is psychologically degenerating or whatever he was doing,

it was not being comprehended by the public. So at some point the Zodiac seems to have said, well, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm taking my ball and I'm going home. I'm stopping. And in the Exorcist letter he used the word suicide in the quote from the Nakado. So if it's been interpreted that maybe the Zodiac committed suicide or maybe it was just some type of metaphorical suicide. Right, So.

rough version of the book. It will now undergo a series of edits with my with my editor before it comes out in next September, and that will be exposed the zodiac revealed. Point. I can't say a whole lot about the book. My editor, my publisher, will not allow me to say much about it, but he has allowed me to say that the intention of the book is to round down to limit the number of suspects based on the profile of the book profiled.

For those that might want to take a look at your work, do you have a website where can they take a look at some of the other stuff or website for this book.

I don't know if such truckers are buying it or who's buying it, But a lot of people are buying the Hunted on audio. It's very popular. The first book, Hunted, is continuing to out sell Profile, but with the release of Profile, there's been a lot of interest in the trilogy, so that I think people are looking at Hunted first. I'm continuing to get a lot of really good feedback on Goodreads and Amazon dot Com for both of the books.