On the night of July 4-5, 1969, a telephone rang at the police station in the US city of Vallejo. A male voice reported that he had just killed two people. Then the unknown claimed that the death of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, who were found dead on a suburban highway last year, is also the work of his hands.
From this moment, a series of brutal murders began, which was committed by a maniac, who appeared to be the name of the Zodiac. He claimed that he had 37 murders. Extensive materials have been collected in the serial killer case. There are even fingerprints and voice recordings, but his true identity has not yet been established.
Handwriting killer
The United States police are capable of investigating such crimes, but several episodes recorded in California between December 1968 and October 1969, as well as the murder of Cherie Joe Bates in 1966, remained unsolved. All cases are united by a common style:
- All crimes were committed on the street, in secluded places where couples in love traditionally meet.
- The victims of the killer are young people.
- The maniac Zodiac attacks at dusk or at night.
- Prefers weekends and holidays.
- Robbery or sexual motives are excluded.
- The weapons used are cold, firearms, etc.
- All victims were in cars or near their car.
- Places where the zodiac maniac was operating are somehow connected with water.
- The offender is interested in publicity, and therefore reports his atrocities in letters and by phone.
Police officers investigating these cases believe that the killer either died at the hands of another potential victim, who turned out to be dexterous him, or died from drugs, or hid in prison under a completely different article than murder, because for such a crime the death penalty is imposed in the USA. There are other versions.
First official victims
The murder of Jensen and Faraday was the first in the Zodiac case. For him, it became, as they say, a breakdown of the pen. All subsequent crimes of a maniac, one way or another, have something in common with the first. This was noticed by both the police and the newspaper, who later also became participants in the terrible script written by the Zodiac.
Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday just started dating. They had known each other for a long time through a mutual friend, Sharon. The girls studied in the same class and were friends, and David regularly brought them home from school. The pretty companion Sharon was liked by the young man with a cheerful character and a friendly manner of communication. David was not overly shy, but, knowing the severity of the morals that reigned in Betty's family, he was afraid that she would reject him.
The fact is that Betty's elder sister, Meloni, got married very early due to an unplanned pregnancy. The marriage was unsuccessful and soon broke up. So that the youngest daughter would not repeat the sad fate of her sister, the parents directed their efforts to keep their daughter in the bosom of the family for as long as possible. But the call of nature is pointless to resist, and the sixteen-year-old Betty fell in love. A high school student from Valleio conquered her heart. Betty and David lived in neighboring cities. According to local tradition, schools regularly held competitions, concerts and competitions, where they invited students from nearby educational institutions, and they were in Valleio (David studied here), Hogan (Betty studied here) and Benicia. The roads in America are excellent, everyone has a car, or even several, all this helps to quickly solve the problem with distances.
David, the beauty and pride of the school, an example for the younger, an athlete, the soul of the company, the secret dream of all the young ladies Valleio, Hogan and Benicia, gave his heart to the safemore. In the USA, sophomores are called sophomores or students of the eleventh grades of high school. At the time of the novel, David was already a junior, that is, a twelfth grader, a graduate student. His plans extended further than life in a town with a population of 20, 000. The young man planned to go to university, get higher education, get a good job, get married and help his mother raise two younger brothers and sister.
The tragedy that happened with a couple in love stirred up the whole district. A local newspaper posted an announcement about raising funds to investigate and capture the offender. The intersection of two roads, once a favorite place for secret romantic dates, young couples began to avoid, considering the damned.
On the eve of the misfortune, David and Betty decided that it was time to move from simple meetings in the cafe to a more serious relationship. Sharon advised them to retire to the Blue Rock Springs park or go to St. Catherine's Hill, but the lovers chose Lake Herman, or rather, the bend of the intersection of two roads - to the pumping station and Like Herman Road, popularly referred to as the "lovers' corner". Betty told her parents that she was leaving for a singing evening dedicated to the upcoming Christmas. It was nine o’clock when their Rambler, borrowed from David’s mother, drove the couple on a romantic date. At first there was dinner in a small restaurant, and an hour later the young people were already hugging, lying on the reclined seats of the car.
Crime Timeline and Investigation
The first witness who drove along this road saw two empty cars, and then he heard a sound like a shot. The zodiac parked his car very close to the Rambler to block the side doors. When cars appeared on the road, he ducked, so people thought that there was nobody in it.
The following witnesses, who were seventy-year-old Stella Borges and her daughter, nicknamed Baby Stella, were driving past the scene of the tragedy at the very moment when the maniac Zodiac had just disappeared from the scene of the crime. Women saw corpses, broken car windows and at maximum speed rushed to far from a terrible sight. In a panic, they honked with headlights and a beep, hoping to attract attention. Finally, they saw a policeman and told him everything.
The signal was transmitted to Sergeant Bid and his partner Stephen Arment. They were closer than others to the "corner of lovers." After 15 minutes, the police were already inspecting the crime scene. David was half hanging from the car. A school ring was held in his hand. The young man was still breathing, but died on the way to the hospital. He was killed with one shot to the skull. The only bullet hole was behind the left ear. Betty died before the police arrived. She lay at a distance. The girl tried to escape from the criminal, but five shots in the back stopped her a few steps from the car. A few shots broke the windows in their car and the roof was perforated.
The version of the attack for the purpose of robbery disappeared almost immediately. Most likely, the zodiac maniac made the first shot in order to attract attention to himself. Then he demanded to give him valuables. Apparently he tried on and decided what to do with the guys. When they began to make excuses and poke his ring, he fired the first shot. Betty jumped out of the car, and he finished it off on the street.
The case was entrusted to detectives Les Lundblad and Russell Butterbach. They didn’t solve the murder, but gathered a lot of material that allowed their colleagues to later determine the criminal’s handwriting. In addition, the following year, on July 31, in a letter to the Times Herald, the serial killer Zodiac confirmed his guilt by describing how he had dealt with his lovers and indicated the brand of cartridges for his pistol. These were rifle cartridges - a remarkable detail, and no one except the police knew about it. This was not written in the newspapers.
Darlene Ferrin and Michael Maggue (Maggot)
The attack on Darlene Ferrin and Michael Maggie is the second crime that the Zodiac committed. The killer has not yet taken a sonorous pseudonym, but has already begun to take steps to become famous and demonstrate his fearlessness and uniqueness.
The incident occurred on July 4, 1969, when the whole city celebrated Independence Day. Behind the roar of fireworks, no one heard the pistol shots that rang out in the Blue Rock Springs Park. At 00 hours 10 minutes, the Zodiac called the police station and reported the murder, and also added that he also committed a crime last year in the “lovers' corner”.
This time, the victims were 22-year-old Darlene and her young lover Michael Maggie. They were sitting in the Chevrolet of Darlene's husband's father when the Zodiac rode up to them. The killer hastened to conclusions - the guy was only injured. Bullets hit his face, neck and chest. The woman died 20 minutes after a phone call in an ambulance.
Darlene was married a second marriage to Dean Ferrin. In 1968, a daughter was born to the spouses, and two months before the sad event, the family bought a new home. According to the photograph, Darlene is very reminiscent of Betty Lou Jensen. Most likely, the similarity is a mere coincidence. Nothing suggests that the maniac was hunting women of the same type of appearance. Michael Maggue is not like any of the victims. He arrived on a date with Darling, pulling on three trousers, a T-shirt, a thick shirt and three sweaters. The man explained to the policeman that he was very worried about his thinness and in this way tried to give himself volume.
Adultery Darlene caused a lot of noise in Vallejo. Subsequently, the sister of the deceased, Pamela, in order to justify a relative confused the investigation, suggesting that Darlene's husband was involved in the attack on her lovers. In order to exclude the motive of revenge from the deceived spouse, the police checked the alibi of Dean Ferrin. The unfairly agreed was justified.
First letters
It is obvious that the serial killer Zodiac longed for fame, because his crimes did not trace traditional motives - profit, sex or revenge. The desire to become the main topic of conversation among residents of the whole city, to read about himself in the media made him start correspondence with reporters. At the end of July, three local newspapers, the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Examine and the San Francisco Chronicle, received letters from the Zodiac, which were parts of a single text, cryptograms, and explanations regarding the crimes described above. He promised that cryptograms encrypted information about his identity, demanded to publish letters on the front pages, otherwise he threatened to kill another 12 people this weekend. What codes the Zodiac (killer) wrote after the first disclosed texts could not be established. It is likely that in some cases it was a simple abracadabra, with the goal of misleading the investigation or showing that he was so smart that his codes were too tough for anyone.
Contact with police and journalists established
On August 1, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a Jack Stills statement on the last page. The head of the police department of the city of Vallejo expressed doubts about the identity of the offender and asked the author of the cryptogram to provide additional information about himself. Two other newspapers also published letters and ciphers.
The response to the publication was a new letter to the editors of the San Francisco Examine. The criminal clearly enjoyed the hype caused by him and the fact that the police were following him. It was in this letter that he signed with the name Zodiac. The pseudonym, at its core, is very strange, and does not bind to crimes in any way. He also said that decrypting the cryptogram will open information about his personal data.
All of Northern California has been involved in deciphering encrypted messages. Spouses Garden from Salinas were the first to parse the texts of the killer. They contained a lot of grammatical errors. They said that he collects slaves who will serve him in the afterlife - the offender was clearly mocking. He did not provide any information about himself, explaining this by his unwillingness to help the investigation.
Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Ann Shepard
The next crime occurred on September 27, 1969. College students Cecilia Shepard and Brian Hartnell were on the shores of Lake Bériez when a man came out of the bushes in a hood covering the top and bottom of his head. In front of his eyes are sunglasses, and on his chest is something like an apron with a pattern in the form of a circle crossed out with a cross. A strange man took a gun from his pocket and handed Cecilia a rope, ordering her to tie Brian. Otherwise, he promised to kill both. The young man took it as a joke, but the alien showed a full magazine of cartridges. Cecilia tied her companion, and the stranger twisted her. He then pulled out a long knife and struck several blows at first to Brian, and then to her. Before leaving, the killer, nicknamed the Zodiac, took a black felt-tip pen and drew a circle crossed out with a cross on the unfortunate car and wrote the dates of three previous crimes.
Having finished this, he called the police department and told about what had happened. After a few minutes, the duty attire determined the location of the telephone. When the police arrived, the handset was still wet. Fingerprints were taken from her, but subsequently they were never useful, because they were not in the file cabinet.
The wounded were taken to the hospital. Brian survived, and Cecilia fell into a coma and died a few days later.
Paul Stein
The murder of Paul Stein, a taxi driver, occurred in San Francisco. Crime is even more mysterious than the previous ones. If the taxi driver informed the control room that he had taken the passenger and named the route, then everything would have been easier, but it was the so-called left-hand side job. The zodiac killed Stein in the same way as David Faraday, a shot in the head behind the ear. Witnesses, three teenagers, saw how he put the driver with his head in his lap and did something with a knife. As it turned out, he cut off a piece of a shirt soaked in blood from a shot, and the boys thought that this Negro was cutting off the head of a taxi driver. For a Negro, they took the Zodiac because of a dark mask stretched over his face. The police arrived quickly and even ran into a white man who was asked if he had seen a black man with a gun. He, and it was the Zodiac himself, showed them a false direction. He later called the police and laughed at the stupidity of law enforcement officers.
Three days later, on October 14, 1969, another letter came to the Chronicle. The zodiac wrote that he was planning the murder of schoolchildren. To do this, he will shoot the wheel of the school bus, and then he will begin to kill the children leaving him. So that there was no doubt about his personality, he described in detail Stein's death and put a fragment of a man’s shirt in an envelope.
A week later, the Zodiac called the Auckland Police Department and said that he wanted to participate in the Jim Dunbar television talk show. Well-known lawyers must be present in the studio. Through them, he will conduct a telephone conversation. Melville Bellay agreed to come. On the show, someone called himself the Zodiac called and announced his real name - Sam. The call came from a psychiatric hospital, and Sam was an ordinary patient who had nothing to do with the serial killer.
Then in November, two more letters of the Zodiac came to the Chronicle. In one of them there was another cryptogram, but it still hasn’t been decrypted, and on December 20, the criminal sent lawyer Bellay a Christmas card and a second piece of Paul Stein’s shirt.
Kathleen Jones
At the time of the crime, Kathleen Jones was 20 years old. She was driving her own car to her mother in Petulama. The woman was 7 months pregnant. Her 10-month-old daughter was traveling with her. On the highway in the Modesto area, she was caught up by a car that gave signals, asking to stop. Kathleen obeyed. The driver of the signaling car said that her right rear wheel was staggering, offered his help and corrected the problem. As soon as the woman left the track, the wheel fell off. The man soon drove up again and offered to take her to the nearest gas station, where she would be provided with more effective assistance. They drove past several gas stations, but the man did not stop. Then he, according to Jones, braked at the crossroads and announced that he would kill her with the child. The woman jumped out of the car and rushed into the thickets of tall grass. The criminal looked for Kathleen, but could not find it and left.
In the police station, where she soon turned to, hung a photobot of the attacker Paul Stein. She recognized him as her companion. The woman’s testimony is questionable, as she was constantly confused and changed information about the circumstances of the incident.
