WHAT IF? Golden State Killer-Zodiac Solved-Anne Penn

free all of those years. This is the true story of the man's patterns and attacks from the beginning until the end. The story continues. The most prolific serial criminal in California history, he could be the most prolific serial killer ever. He could not be stopped until DNA and genetic genealogy found him What if? This is truly how the story goes, and has written about the possibilities and writes about things no one else has mentioned in the

Zodiac story. The book that we're featuring this evening is What If Golden State Killer Zodiac Solve with my special guest journalist and author and Penn. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for a green this interview and Pen, Thank you.

have done. And as you start to look into that, I mean, it goes Anybody who knows anything about serial killers, of course, knows that they didn't just happen to start killing in their thirties. They probably started committing crimes when they're fifteen, you know, when they're teens. And so you go back to like maybe nineteen sixty in his case, he was about fourteen, almost fifteen that year, and you start to see where he may have been, you know,

what was going on. And as you do that, and it took quite a while really to sort of peel back all the different you know, scenarios and different opportunities he had, timelines, the geography. You start to see where in the beginning of the book I talk about the dog poisonings, which I know was talking to a gentleman about who research that in depth. And the reality is is we know that DeAngelo hated dogs, and he was arrested in seventy nine with dog repellent and a hammer.

And so if you go back to the area he grew up in, what you see is a bunch of dog poisonings in the Plaster area, which is in California, northern California, and you see this pattern emerge where they're dog killing sixteen sometimes ten, huge numbers of animals being killed with strychnine, and then there'd be burglaries. And you can see that in not only that area, but in different areas that he traveled over time, there'd be a bunch of a rash of dog poisonings and then a

bunch of burglaries and other types of crimes. So you can see something's going on.

I mean, there's one instance in the book where he was in one place that we can see raping somebody and drove another hour or two away, and the same thing happened within the same twelve hour period, and so you know, and of course we can't prove that it's in because nobody kept a kit rape kits or slides or any of that because of the statute of limitations.

But if we did have that information, we could actually prove what his travels were, what jurisdictions he did hit in because when you archives, when you look at the archives, the historical information, you can see, you know, different patterns where he would kill dogs and move, he would you know, create all kinds of havoc and do all kinds of terrible things, and then then he'd move up the road. And this continued, you know, for decades. So that's what

the pattern is. And I do have to acknowledge too that the dog poisoning articles were given to the public domain and also to a gentleman that I helped, that helped me investigate those things, and he was very instrumental in that. His name is Paulie, And I has a cheat to say that because I don't have his permission, but I call him Sam in the book. But I want to make sure he has some acknowledgment for all the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of hours that he put into this.

have committed every murder or rape. We know this, but we want to know which ones he did commit. So when you study a criminal in depth, there are certain ones that you absolutely know he had to have something to do with. So those kinds of things law enforcement are interested in, of course, because there are so many unsolved murders of women, especially in the state of California from nineteen sixty three on, and also couples.

A Murder on His Mind and Creep among Us. Tell us about the Navy, and again he's what age when he goes into the Navy from high school, and there are personal events interactions with women that are obviously shaped what happened to him later on in his crime life. Tell us a little bit about the background that you provide in this book that was crucial to understanding his mindset and development of this potential or this future serial killer, pardon me, and.

dropped him in nineteen seventy one. But I really think that when he really was triggered to, you know, really go after all these terrible things was when his parents were divorced and his father was stationed in the area in the Bay area, Evado and Van Nuys, And you know, he probably knew from being with his dad that area to a certain extent, And I wondered how much did he know about it? Did he go to Lake Berryessa when he was a kid. You know, he knows California.

He knows California in a way that somebody who has traveled it, you know, intimately knows it. And so he knew, you know, what he could do and where he could do it, and then he would move on and he did change MS.

the profile says. You have some startling information based on those rape kits that inadvertently you get this incredible information that certainly supports your MO theory.

We know that there were a lot of crimes committed even before then in the sixties in Sacramento area where he came from, in fulsome where, there were rapes and there were other things that were occurring, and he was smart enough to know when to move on. And you know, it's not a far stretch of the imagination to realize that when he got out of the Navy that he was he knew the Bay area. He you know, didn't have school yet to go get his criminal justice degree.

He didn't know Bonnie yet, but he was angry, and so you know, it's not a far start of the imagination to realize that he could have started in i say, nineteen sixty three down on the beach at Lompoc and then continued on and each time you see him do something and then he leaves. So we know that in like before he went in the Navy, So in Lompoc, the crimes that were committed down there against couples killed they That was in nineteen sixty three, nineteen sixty four.

All of a sudden, we see him vanish. He went in the navy, and nothing terrible happens for a while. So you can track him geographically and with the timeline. And the only thing that I don't have is DNA

proof of this. What I have is you know, his uh geographical profile, his m O, his timelines, and you know, every time there's a crime committed, you find that he was available for that crime or you know, so that's you know, you just kind of follow what goes on and then figure out that you know, it really could be him. So there's there's no reason that he couldn't change his m He told the whole world when he was Zodiac. And like I said, I'm saying, alleged Zodiac,

alleged Golden State killer. He you know, he's not been proven guilty in a court of law. These are these are theories and and and it's actually circumstantial evidence of him being in an area of these things happening, and there are patterns, there are clusters, and it continues over time and space, decade after decade.

were left open. Who does that sound like? It sounds like the Easter Airy rapist. He would peep, he would stalk, he would you know, go and leave gates open and just sort of try to terrorize people. So the patterns are really similar and or the same over and over again. So those are the things you have to look at when you're considering evidence of more monikers that he may deserve. So this particular woman did finally realize when the East Airy rapist was arrested that she actually knew him. She

had never seen her stalk her. He stalked her for years and years and years and kind of followed her from one place to another and left items in her home and just terrorized her in general, would make phone calls. So this went on for you know, like twenty years or more. Actually it was until twenty seventeen at least, and she didn't realize that she actually had known him at one point as a cop. And when she saw who it was when they arrested him and said his name,

she just sat down and cried. So but she had contacted me and we spoke for seven or eight months at least and discussed, you know, some of the things that went on. And people are interesting because they contact me.

And like one of the other ladies who spoke in my other book, doctor Sue Barrett, she had the Easter rapists come into her home in nineteen eighty three in the attack zones in Sacramento after everyone had said that he left, and when she told her story on Facebook, she was starting to take quite a beating from people saying I don't believe anything she said. And I didn't know her from Adam, and I just said, I believe

every word she says because it is totally him. And he did continue to do what he wanted to do in Sacramento after nineteen eighty when they thought he was gone, and as we know, he was sitting right there, had purchased a home just down the street. So and he sat there for the next thirty years. So he didn't stop. He never stopped anything that he was doing. He just

changed it up. And if you see that pattern, and he knows what to do to get out of a place within fifteen minutes to a half hour, law enforcemental show up, takes him a while to get there. He knows how to go, how to get out, and had ton Ocket caught.

but why why the zodiac? And then again explain why that that? Why such a dramatic difference? Why a mask a disguise? You also talk about that you have evidence of him using disguises, which reinforces why maybe again a completely different persona.

that area. And people don't understand in California how close Auburn is to the Presidio for example, in San Francisco. They don't understand how he could attack and leave and go to the Lejou for instance, from Lee Kerman, It's really not that far away. He could vanish easily because he typically had some place to go, and he got the heck out of there. But the thing that happened with the Zodiac murders is that after he took out a few couples, the outlier for me was the Paul

Stein murder. And after that attack, do know that someone saw him and gave a composite And so he knew that it was time to move on. And he probably was going to anyway, because he went to school after that. He came back to Auburn, went to school, got his degree, all that other stuff happened. So he knew that if somebody saw him, who cares. He was out of there.

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And he was gone. And then what's to keep him from changing up his routine and that's what I think he did.

So it was consistent throughout with some of the things that he said as both all the monikers.

Even the fact that when when he killed Paul's time, he asked him to take him to Maple and Washington, and then when they arrived there, he asked him to go another block up to Cherryot Street and that's where he walked away on Cherry Street after he tore the shirt from Paul Stein and some of the things that you see he was He was on the Navy ship Piedmont, and one of his attacks in Sacramento was Piedmont and Seamus and right off of Riverside, and Riverside is a

connection to him geographically with his family. He liked Cherry Glenn. He attacked many times in that area. In the Sacramento area, he killed more than one Sherry Cherry Lynn, Cherry Cheryl, Charlene. There's it's over and over again in the patterns from the Zodiac and from the Easterry Rapist, original Knightstalker. The name Taylor Taylor Street Eva, Taylor Taylor's all over the place in these different wanderings. So you know there's more.

I mean, Blue Rock, Blue Ravine, There's different places that he went and appeared to like to gravitate to. And I really do think one of the things that that was the game he played with himself because he thought he was smarter than everybody else and no one would figure it out and they didn't. So, yeah, you.

a serial killer, and that was Gerald Gallegos. So he was dumping bodies right not too far down the road and in the same areas that DiAngelo did, and so I think probably that was one of the reasons he probably kind of laid low after nineteen seventy eight because in that area because of that, And we see him stop attacking after the Maggiori murders in February of seventy eight, and then we see him off Asimus and Piedmont in seventy eight in April, and then he sort of doesn't

do anything again that we can track until March of seventy nine in East Sacramento. And most people don't talk about that attack. It was almost like he left in seventy eight in April, after the composits came out after the murders of the young couple. And one of the things I thought about because he did kill couples over and over again, and I think he liked to read about his crimes. He liked to see burglaries or what things popped up in the newspaper. He also probably saw

announcements for weddings, engagements and that kind of thing. And it's entirely possible in my mind that he didn't accidentally run into the Maggiori couple on February two, nineteen seventy eight. He could have stalked them, he could have decided he was going to take them out the same way that some of the couples were shot in other areas over time, and it was maybe an intentional murder. So that's something that I just recently thought about, because the pattern of

killing couples be a stabbing shooting. However he did it, that was one of the things that he did do. I mean, this couple's out walking in the dark walking their dog. How is it they just accidentally run into this guy? So I think that there might be more to that story.

let him go. And so I thought there's got to be something where he was really angry that day that night, because he was arrested for shoplifting, he had to be in a huge rage. And as I was reading some archived information about a particular Arson, I was looking for that date, which was in July of nineteen seventy nine, and that night of that day that he was arrested, we find him. You know, again, this is all speculation because I cannot prove an Arson, and I cannot prove

that this was him. But here's what happened. There was a home that was burglarized. First after it they tried to burn it down. They could see that there were where the things that had been removed had been. They could see that somebody took things. And what happened was this house was actually burned to the ground. And it was in Penren, California. Now, anybody who's from here, that Penren is just down the highway from Auburn, California, which

is not far from where DiAngelo lived and worked. And this house burned to the ground, and it was on the corner of Calwell Street. And Bonnie Calwell, as we know, was one of the people in this story. And so I found that interesting that that was a street name and that was where her parents lived in Penrid. It seems like too much of a coincidence to me.

and she said no, she wouldn't do it. He was a lot of times doing things where she was pushing, He was pushing the boundaries, and she wasn't comfortable with that at all. She knew that the rules didn't apply to him, and so she decided that really probably wasn't a good idea to marry him. And that's pretty much what I know in a nutshell about why she She was writing her gut instinct that maybe he wasn't the

guy for her. And then also he showed up after she broke it off with him with a gun, And so I talked about that a little bit in my book, because it would have been back in the day people

didn't talk about things like that. And all that her father wanted for Joe to do is to go away and leave Bonnie alone, and so he talked him down and made him go away, and he didn't want to ruin his plans for a career in law enforcement, so he didn't call the cops on him, and he didn't report that he showed up at the house and begun,

and so DeAngelo wandered away. And what's interesting is that her family didn't ever seem to recognize any of the newspaper articles later on that this might be the guy that's, you know, got a problem.

you'd leave my daughter alone kind of it. But it really was definitive like that, like go away, and so we did.

fun stuff. And what they found out they started to finally test them, and they've they've had funding to do that in different states is they're finding out that the patterns are little and behold and of course most women would go duh, But and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the reality is is that they always a lot of times in law enforcement would assume that the grape victim would know her attacker, and if she didn't know her attacker, then they wouldn't test the kit or they

wouldn't put a lot of energy into solving the crime. So these tests, these rape kit tests just sat there. They didn't ever test them. And what they started finding out as they tested them is that it wasn't just usually an acquaintance that the perpetrator would rape. He actually would go out and rape other women that he didn't know, over and over and over. Decade after decade. They found

that there were serial rapists who use those kids. If they'd been tested after the first woman he raped, then would have some information about that guy and could have stopped it because he became a serial rapist. And it was decade after decade that had the same perpetrator, And they said, oh my god, these guys don't just rape people they know, they rape anybody, and they do it over and over and over. And that's why I said, duh, because yeah, of course, if somebody's going to rape someone,

why would they not do it again? If there's no consequences, nobody tests the rape kids and so it's it's they had,

you know, they could do whatever they wanted. But what they are doing is they're testing them now and they're putting these guys in jail, which is great, but they also they ended up what was I going to tell you, they had different perpetrators that, like I said, if they had tested it right off the bad and what happens then too, This is what I was going to tell you is serial killers are not just born all of

a sudden. They start out a lot of times as serial rapists and then they become serial killers because maybe somebody sees them or whatever it is that they had to up the ante, they have to up the adrena and whatever it is, and so serial rapists becomes serial killers. And yeah, that's one of the things I would have thought was logical progression.

Anthony Sewell in Cleveland. So some of these tests and governors got involved because that that makes them look good or it's it's a great idea, but you say most states aren't really participating or they don't have the conviction rates, and you provide the reasons for that as well. So when it looks like a great story that's finally come

to bear that while they're they're finally doing something. Again, you talked about the efficiency of it too, when they when they catch serial rapists, it's conclusive and it's cost effective and compared to other forms of investigation.

as much cooperation as you might have thought. It was a surprise to you.

regarding that that Mariska Hargate put together. Right, So, you know, it's one of those things that's been talked about for quite from time, you know, more than a decade. Geez. I don't even know exactly when it started to become something that people reported that these kids were in warehouses and not being tested. Thousands, I mean a couple hundred thousands across the United States. It's insane.

and so they could make convictions based on that. What also was startling was the support that these guys changed their mo so certainly they had that those investigative reports who looked at that that supported your idea that people could change their ms readily and do.

really what makes them tick and how they operate. And a lot of the time people think, like in this story, a lot of people actually will think that he The story goes exactly how it's been told, which is he started out as the Vicelia roundsucker. He was the story rapist. He was the original night stucker, and that was all. And he operated from seventy three to eighty six and

then he quit. And some people believe that, But the reality is is that most serial killers start way before we even know about them, and they don't stop until you catch them or they die or they're you know,

that's pretty how much it. They just don't stop. And even if it was just cutting back to prowlings and peepings and you know whatever, there was an instance of a woman, Susan Jacobson in Roseville, California, who's vanished into thin air from a raleighs parking lot and did I say two thousand and three and it's in the Attacks One areas and not far from where D'Angelo lived, and it's never been solved and we've never seen her again.

So you know, things happened to people. And if a man is strong, even if he's over fifty, he can still take advantage of opportunities to do what he does. So I have to also mention too that doctor Susan Barrett also was somebody who was looking at this with me along the way after we met online, and I believed her story about having this guy show up in her home and actually came back as well, and they

saw him at the time in nineteen eighty three. She also looked into these things as well, and she brought forth to faster Bill Sheriff's in the DA's office, the Granite Spring murders of Sherilyn Hockley and Cindy Wanner Lanner as well as a nervoking into that, and then also because they were murdered in nineteen ninety one, in nineteen ninety three, and also there's another couple in Orangevale, and so different things happened over time, and you know there was nobody stopping them.

just had a profile. So when they found Jedmatch and also a genealogist to work with, the site was an open site, completely open site for them to do the search for any matches or any DNA that had been put into the system that might find DiAngelo. And after he was found, and after this last year or so of you know, catching all kinds of people like the nor Cal rapists, they did the same kind of thing

to find him. He was in Berkeley and different other perpetrators the last year, so they've caught I think twenty eighteen or about thirty or more in twenty nineteen was the biggest year ever of solving cold cases across the United States historically ever, And so it's a great tool. And I was concerned that they would limit what they were allowing, you know, people to do, they would legislate it, they would change the laws so that this would cut

down on the ability to find people. And so they did change jet Maatch itself did change their policy for their customers so that now you have to opt in on their site to be aware that they could use your DNA for purposes of finding criminals, and you can opt in. So people need to know that they can do that. They can say yeah, sure, go ahead, you know.

And so it's just a little safeguard for jet match to make people feel a little more comfortable that people can't do anything with their DNA unless they give permission. And I get that, I understand the privacy issues, but it's going to cut down on how fast they are able to find people, I'm sure. And then also I just saw an article but I haven't had a chance to sit down and read it. Actually, it was just yesterday or last night about they did change some laws

and I'm not sure what that intails yet. So and it will cut down on how many people are discovered. Probably probably.

couple attempts when it comes to Zodiac. There's some people who I don't think really want it to be solved because it's sort of a myth and a mystery. There are other people who are absolutely adamant that it can't possibly be him because he didn't rape the victims or his m all seemed to them to be so totally different.

And I think he did that on purpose. Like I said, he was smarter than most and was able to do exactly what he said in his letter as he left, was to just sort of change it up and not announce what we're doing. And he did light fires, and he did, you know, break into houses, and he did all this other stuff too, and so he was aware of what he had to do to sort of become a different persona. And that's you know, some people out there really believe what I believe, that it's a possibility

and that it could be him. And I say in the book that I do think it's him, and that's based on all the details of reading the witness statements and the police reports, just really investigating like crazy to try to figure out, you know, if it really could be him. So but as far as changing m O, you know, people really are pretty rigid sometimes and how they think. Uh. And this guy in particular, I referred to this episode of Dexter in my last book, where

the reality was is the criminal was the criminalist. He was the blood spatter expert on Dexter. If anybody knows that that show, and what happens is he sends them a manifesto that includes all this different stuff to try to confuse them and everybody in law enforcement's reading this and they all come out with different conclusions about who it could be. I mean, some people thought that the

Zodiac was the unibomber. They all have their suspect that they really think is really the guy, and that's that's fine. I mean, we would be great to solve it one way or the other. But when what he does is he tries to make them run around in circles and chase their tails, and he's very effective at that, and that's what DiAngelo was very effective at. So people who don't think there's any way that it could be him,

the reality is it really could be him. And like I said, we can place him there in time and geography as well as some of the things he said, some of the things he did. It's real consistent if you really look at it.

basically the same way that he did it. Some of the things he said while he was doing things, the fact that he left wallets and said he was just there for money and he was going to go to Mexico and just different things like that, and there's a lot more other detail that connects them circumstantially.

not what was in my mind. But to answer your question earlier about DeAngelo and possibly being him, what I thought was when they started to figure out his history and kind of track it, and then I also heard they were testing or trying to test DNA from a stamp or from an envelope or something else. And I had also heard that they had a part profile, and so I was kind of waiting in the back of my mind for all that time for them to make some sort of announcement ruling him either in or out.

Because D'Angelo was originally before we knew who he was at all, One of the first avenues I went down was could this be the same guy? Why did I

go down that avenue? As I was starting to really look into the Eastery rapist well, because it was the geography, and all throughout my books, the geography and you know, has been an important factor in these cases, and so I looked at the possibility that the East Airy Rapist could be the Zodiac way early on, like five years ago, and I read The Most Dangerous Game, and you know how he liked to hunt people and you know, so on, and then I thought, well, I don't think he's the

right age. So I really wanted to get onto my investigations for the East Airy Rapist crimes, so I kind of put that aside, and always in the back of my mind, I was just like, I wonder so because of the geography, but then because I thought he was too young to have been the Zodiac, I really was hoping Diangela was younger so that he could be kind

of stronger when he was finally caught. I really thought that that they would make an announcement in the last year, you know, and I found out that they really couldn't do that because the DNA was not very good. So here we are, yeah, yeah, And like I said, we just kind of played with the idea for several months. It was sort of like, are we going to solve

this or you know, what's the deal? And we kind of went back and forth and back and forth, and all all of us did and and then here we all sort of ended up in the same place, you know, together.

we think maybe he did commit the murders. Pre Zodiac activity down in that area, and there were murders on the beach in nineteen sixty three, sixty four, nineteen seventy. There's just different murders that occurred in different ways that they occurred. That's being getting shot stabbed, you know. So again it's the same kind of thing with the Zodiac where he shot and stabbed and you know, different things. So and they thought, well, gee, maybe he also carried

killed Jerry Joe Bates in nineteen sixty six. And here's one of the things that people really go, well, he couldn't have because he was on that boat and he was on his way to Vietnam or whatever. And the fact is that we can't find we can't find him on any roster. He didn't actually go anywhere. From what we can gather, he was not on that boat at that time. So he was available for that murder and

he basically claimed it as the Zodiac. So so anyway, there's a lot of information, a lot of detail that you just keep looking for something to come up where you can say, oh, it couldn't have been him, it doesn't tie, it doesn't fit, you know. But the fact is that no matter what we looked at as far as how this particular story went, he was available. He was connected to an area. There's evidence that he was connected to forty three minute drive from those Beaches in

nineteen sixty three. So you know, it's sort of like, well, what does the evidence tell you? I didn't make the evidence tell me anything. The evidence just tells you, you know. So, yes, And when I those to that, I didn't read any books on the subject. I didn't read any blogs on the subject. I didn't read anything because I didn't want anybody else's bias to affect where this story took me, where the investigations took me, and where the evidence took me,

and so I had none of that. The things that I read, like I said, were the police reports, the witness statements, the timelines, the geography, and what he said. And did.

until twenty and eleven. Finally they said, oh, here, we have some evidence, and so finally they tested it and they were able to connect in two thousand and eleven, which is a long ways from the nineteen eighties the murders Terry Domingos and Greg Sanchez to other murders in southern California. That's how long the families had to wait to know for a fact that it was the same serial killer. And what was the reluctance to give that

information in that evidence. So I'm wondering what Santa Barbara County has in evidence now from the nineteen sixty three murders, sixty four, seventy and so on. What evidence do they have? And that's what I asked them in the book, is like,

did you test it recently? Can it be tested? Because if there's anything at all all that will that will tell us who the guy is, it's got to have There's got to be some kind of DNA somewhere or some kind of evidence, like there was a fishing knife left under the bodies of two of the murder victims on the beach. And you know that D'Angelo liked the fish and he carried a fishing knife. So there's just

different things. Like I said, it's all circumstantial, and it's in the book, and I didn't expect it to be where it led me. This This is you know, you have to ask, well, well, does this make sense? Is this really what happened, you know, or is this close to what happened. Even if it's close to what happened, maybe we can figure it out if we test evidence. So that's pretty.

so they can look at that. And then, like you said, as you say in the book, it's you don't have access to the DNA, you're not at a lab to do the testing, but certainly anybody would look at this information unless they could see something that you didn't see from their vantage point. It would be simple to find out the absolute truth once and for all with DNA test.

what he did. He stole a fire arm from somebody there in the area and then he used it against Claude Snelling, and then of course that probably got hitched after that. So he was clever in that he continually took firearms and ammunition. But in the very beginning back in Lompoc, he bought somebody bought him or he bought ammunition and they actually inadvertently left it at the scene.

So there's ballistics evidence. They thought possibly the Zodiac used the same kind of ammunition and weapon from the murders on the beach that day and also the first murders in the Zodiac series. So I'm a little I'm not as well versed in the types of guns, etc. And ballistics. But the descriptions of the gun are interesting because it has a long nose on it. But anyway, it'd just be interesting to see if they really, really diligently went after looking at some of this evidence, what kind of

answers would we get? And that's I also didn't expect to get to that place in my book either, but but you know, it begs the questions do you have evidence? And if you do, you know, even the ripping of shirts and different materials that were left on bodies, and there was also an instance where someone was strangled with scarf and things like that, where you know, is this him? Did he do this? Is there a way to find out? You know? And that way we could solve other murders

for other families. And that's pretty much the point.

enforcement to prove it with him. And just when I thought about him tearing the shirt, I thought about all the other crimes that were committed later on where he tore towels or he tore There was material found on the backs of Manuela with Hewan and different things that occurred over time where you can see that he was

ripping fabric. That happened to some of the EASTERI rapist victims too, And I thought, is that when he psychologically became attached to the ripping of the fabric, was that something that he enjoyed doing because of what he did in the pause time case? I don't know, but you know these are things that I wondered.