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Skin care Face Body. Low to High Price: Articles on Confidence Tricksters, Including: Caught in the Act: Unlocking the Mystery of the Texarkana Serial Murders: The Story of a Town in Terror Edge of Evil - The story of a serial killer 6. The serial killer isn't on trial. There was no poll done or statements taken from local officials in over 20 different cities where drownings occurred.
Please provide a source for claim or leave unsubstantiated claim out of article-- Yankee talk Again an unsubstantiated argument is made.
Many of the drownings are undetermined. It is not like law enforcement agencies across the country wrote off the drownings as being accidental. Cases have been classified as homicides. There are many clusters and within them there is a suspected homicide or a drowning or disappearance called suspicious by law enforcement.
Kondracki in LaCrosse and a FBI spokesperson said alcohol was the cause in the majority of drownings. There were no unusual drownings or clusters after in LaCrosse. There were drownings of young men there that had consumed a lot of alcohol after that time period. Another argument was made by a law enforcement official in the northeast they were not linked. No one knows what the majority opinion is.
It is known there were murders,suspicious drownings and disappearances. It is not known if there is a link between them or more than one person in a cluster was actually a victim. There are too many unknowns because there is not a complete list of probable victims,besides just because a few people may have been murdered a similar way is far from being proof they are linked. The detectives did not make a very good case for a smiley face gang theory. Without further evidence of something besides smiley faces or other things that could easily be coincidence, the drownings look to be unrelated incidents.
The suspicious drownings are spread too far apart. Detective Gannon named all the possible Minnesota and Wisconsin victims. The majority of Wisconsin victims are believed to be alcohol related accidents. There was no determination made of many of the Minnesota deaths. They know Jenkin's was probably murdered in Minneapolis,but there is no belief by local authorities the drownings are linked. Some local authorities commented on the lack of evidence of a link and others commented on alcohol being a factor. Kondracki would have every reason to believe the majority were accidents because of the high alcohol level of victims in LaCrosse.
I am being asked to back up my claim ,yet I am not the one making assumptions. This just does not make any sense. I never assumed there was a book deal. I never assumed Pat Brown thought all of Gannon's theories were wrong. I never assumed they were accidental deaths. I never assumed they were murders. I never assumed more than one person could be the killer. I never assumed I should take the word of a few people in law enforcement that they were accidents.
I never assumed the graffiti was related to murders. I do assume the editors are biased because the facts do back that up. If someone thinks differently then prove it. Keep making things up about me all you want. Now for some facts on serial killers. Law enforcement almost always catches them from either dumb luck or help from the public. Pat Brown agrees with this. It also is common knowledge. It also is not unheard of that someone from outside of law enforcement reached the correct conclusion before law enforcement did.
Some parents believe their kids could have been murdered by a serial killer drowning victims. From an article on The Atlanta child killer. Were they conspiracy nuts that believed in a fringe theory just because law enforcement disagreed? Would they only be conspiracy nuts if they also claimed smiley faces were left behind?
The parents were right and law enforcement was wrong. A fringe theory is something not considered mainstream. Even if the majority in law enforcement did not believe no sources provided by lazy editors there was no killers that hardly makes them the mainstream. The public has been an important factor in catching killers.
Killers are caught more often from correct information from the public then from the investigative skills of law enforcement personal. It was law enforcement that brought Jeffrey Dahmer's victim back to him and let him go on to murder several more young men. If the whole truth never came out the editors here would try to influence that story. They would have you believe the officer was right and the witness that called in and reported the incident was wrong.
They would have you believe the lady witness was some kind of conspiracy nut,after all the policemen are the experts. They would look the other way and not wonder if there were going to be more victims. The experts so called experts that people have used statements from have a credibility problem. Kondracki called drownings alcohol related accidents before test results came back.
Other Law enforcement agencies also reached unsubstantiated conclusions. Editors ignorance of facts about the cases has caused a bias to promote this as a fringe theory. After all this time they have not even made a case that this is a fringe theory. Police said toxicology reports will not be available for several weeks, but Kondracki said that interviews with Homan's acquaintances and a blood- alcohol test issued Friday night to a person who had been with Homan led police to rule out other conclusions. The person last know to be with Homan could not explain why it looked like he had been in a fight.
Below was from the Forensic examiner. Back in , a man entered a police station in St. Charles, Missouri, and claimed to be the next Jeffrey Dahmer. The police ignored this man, but he finally got the attention of one detective when he shared his detailed fantasies about drowning young men.
A well-known profiler, Pat Brown, got involved with the case and has been monitoring this man for years. Nicknamed John Doe to avoid revealing his identity, this man reportedly wanders from town to town. Based on her interactions with Doe, Brown believes that it is very possible that Doe, or someone like him, could be behind many of these mysterious drownings. This article has Pat Brown talking about smiley face as if that is the only graffiti the detectives found.
I will leave the article as is as proof that wikipedia has a problem with biased editors,should never be used as a reliable source and that editors ignore you or even attack you if you come to the table with facts. They are not just things I heard somewhere. You are being misleading.
They were in articles just like the parts that are in the wikipedia article. I don't take a position on Gannon's theory. There is a reason for that. It is because as I have said before ,I do not know what they found as far as the graffiti and I don't know what other information they have. My bias would be they have not shown to my satisfaction the graffiti is an indication of murder and they have not shown more than one can be involved to my satisfaction. That does not make it a fringe theory. It would be arrogant of me to assume they should show it is not a fringe theory to my personal satisfaction.
It would only be a fringe theory to someone that assumes they know more than the detectives. I make no assumptions as to if they have evidence that would indicate that their theory is true. You are making assumptions and avoiding facts. The facts about what was written about the cases. If those articles are biased then it is a problem with the articles and not me. There is obviously a problem here doing a dance around real issues and facts and the treatment of others here.
There is no point in having the article if editors are going to form an opinion first. It is better to gather the facts first. You proved my point when you suggested those facts were something that were heard somewhere. I have never promoted this as not being a fringe theory so it is not me that is controversial. I don't care how many editors disagree because you would still all be wrong.
You back up your accusation. I am not the one making accusations. I am not the one promoting this a fringe theory. Isn't there a rule about making this about the issues and not people? I have no problem with bringing up your bias because there is a bigger problem at wikipedia then one article. You other editors want to break the rules if it does not suit you. Apparently facts are only what the individual editors believe. Don't you think you are being arrogant?
Do you think someone should prove to you it is not a fringe theory? Do you believe any one that has worked law enforcement would even give you enough details about crimes to make a conclusion one way or the other every time as to what one should believe? I did say something a long time ago about how law enforcement does not make a point of sharing all their information.
Did you miss that? Or are you just seeing what you want to see? It is a fact and not something I heard that law enforcement does not want details put out that they could get a false confession for. Anyone then could give details of how a crime was committed if it were published in the newspapers.
Do you believe Pat Brown is more credible then someone that is a highly decorated detective even though she can potentially benefit from publicity while Gannon has never written a book as Pat Brown has and is one of the most decorated police officer.? Would Dreamguy like to answer that last one?
Once you are willing to admit your attacks and biases then progress can be made. Instead this article is about personal biases. I have proven that point so it is fair to bring it up. You on the other hand have not said anything you can back up with facts. You can see from other comments I don't support their theory but I am not taking a position against it either as far as the article itself is concerned. I have previously said something about them not releasing information that proves the theory. From what I wrote above The detectives did not make a very good case for a smiley face gang theory.
You put me in a situation that is catch Editors making it about other editors. I should have something to back it up because you think so. You made the false accusation. That is the reaction an arrogant person. Are you here so people see things your way? Prove I made an extraordinary claim. There is something called google. Have you ever used it. I put exactly what was in in articles. Pat Browns problem is linking the graffiti and the belief that more than one person could be doing murders.
It is not an extraordinary claim. If you assumed she never thought there could be a killer you would be wrong. By calling it an extraordinary claim you proved your bias. Pat Brown never said she does not support a serial killer theory. She said she does not support Gannon's theories. Maybe if you told me what the so called extraordinary claim is I might get around to addressing your made up theory on that.
I won't promise anything,because I don't think anyone here is interested in facts in the first place. It says this in the article Criminal profiler Pat Brown calls the serial killer theory "ludicrous. This is poorly worded. If anyone was led to believe Pat Brown thought a serial killer theory was ridiculous then they failed to realize she was commenting on gannon's theory and not a serial killer theory.
Pat Brown commented on this- the ex-cops say they found painted smiley faces near where they suspect the bodies first entered the water. Because some of the deaths occurred on the same day in different states, the detectives surmise that more than one person is committing the crimes. She commented on the theory of more than one killer and a belief the graffiti may being linked.
All the information that the detectives say led them to this conclusion was not released to the public. I did give the source. Do you even think before you accuse? If someone thinks differently then you prove it. That is what you are doing. It is rude what you are doing.. I have a question for you. Did you assume Pat Brown thought there was no killer in the first place? Why do you think the Forensic examiner is a crackpot website? For someone concerned with crackpot theories and websites ,you seem to have some crackpot theories of your own. I don't think this article has been fair to either law enforcement or Pat Brown because of the misleading statements.
It unfairly represents Pat Browns beliefs. It also for a long time made it seem as if law enforcement as a whole was dismissing deaths around the country as accidents with no citations used to back up the claim. In truth many of them just don't do things that way. They don't all jump to conclusions as Kondracki did. Sometimes it does happen.
Drownings can be ruled accidental based on the lack of evidence not because they know in fact it was not a murder. It has also not been fair to the detectives as people are misled into thinking it was only smiley faces that link the deaths. There were clusters of young men missing in short time frames along certain interstates.
There were the same names written in graffiti. There were several other distinct symbols besides smiley faces. It is also not fair to the families and friends of victims that want the drownings investigated. Now I realize some of you around here would rather play games and pretend you just want to follow the rules and even that you are not the ones being biased but that is not the case.
If you are not being evasive,you are attacking. If not attacking then you pretend to be like robots that are just trying to play by the rules. I did not realize it was acceptable to focus on the messenger and not the message such as you have done. Or to make false and unverifiable claims. I don't take issues with rules and that is an unverifiable claim. I already proved that. I did not make an extraordinary claim. I made claims that can be backed up with verifiable facts. You see only what you want to see and attack me once again.. I don't even care if you put unverifiable claims in the article.
My only concern is people realize wikipedia sucks. Just because Pat brown or someone in law enforcement says something does not make it true. For one thing, she says, sociopaths probably wouldn't work that hard, traveling to several states to find victims. Yes they have been known to travel. Some people even travel as part part oftheir occupation. Second, a serial killer's motive is generally pretty clear. Third, serial killers prefer to work alone. Fourth, their choice of victims doesn't match the serial killer profile.
They pick on little girls, or teenage girls, or young teenage boys like 14 years old who can't fight back. Fifth, the idea that they could abduct 40 male college students and drown them all without leaving a suspicious mark on their bodies strains all credibility. Drowning a victim would also be harder to prove. Just because a certain type of killer is less common is not a very good argument against a serial killer theory. In fact just the opposite may be true because the killer would not fit the typical profile so it would be easier to stay under the radar.
Your ability to make up your own facts is disturbing and so is your lack of logic. I tell the truth the most on this discussion page and yet am confronted by the most falsehoods. Pat Brown never said a serial killer theory was ludicrous and you danced right around that point.
She said Gannons theory was. Yet the article reads that way. Yet you blabber on about an unverifiable fact. You have had absolutely no constructive comments to make. You are a crackpot and this is a crackpot site. Even the crackpot sites try to give the whole story and let people decide for themselves so this is worse then any crackpot site I am aware of. I have tried to push for accuracy in the story. I never tried to add unverifiable information.
Where is your proof? I think you resent that. I don't think you are being honest with yourself so I don't expect you to say thing that are true in regards to me. Dreamguy is another crackpot. I never heard one word from you about the unverifiable information he wanted to leave in the article. You took a side and are defending it with cheap shots at me and so did dreamguy. Why is you are concerned about unverifiabe when I am not adding it to the article?
If I want to I will but until then there is no reason to bring it up.
My concern is you are an idiot. You made an unverifiable statement that it is a not well excepted theory. The article read like that but it did it with no citation that used a source that even said that. Things get put in the article,then they become facts in peoples minds without any one even checking the source to see what it says. You don't know it is a minority opinion. I asked for the source that said it was a minority opinion a long time ago. It still has not been produced. Yes they are intelligent comments and I am not used to typing.
You have no class. You make things up. I would suggest you worry about working on yourself and quit being a retard like many of the other editors are. On November 29, , carbon copies of an anonymous letter were mailed to the Riverside Police and the Riverside Enterprise. Both copies were on low-quality white paper eight inches wide and torn at the top and bottom so as to be roughly squarish, and had been sent unstamped and with no return address from a secluded rural mailbox. Presumably, the author planned on the letters being sent by Postage Due mail.
At least one of the details referred to in this letter had not been made public, and at the time, investigators agreed that it was most likely genuine, though this opinion has changed over the years. Neither envelope bore a complete address; they were handwritten with a felt-tip pen in the following manner.
Daily Enterprise Riverside Calif Attn: Crime Homicide Detail Riverside One fingerprint was found on the envelope sent to the RPD Homicide Detail, but it has never been matched to a suspect, and whether it was left by the author, a postman, or a police officer is unknown. The killer's claim that "she did not put up a struggle" was contradicted by the numerous defense wounds on her hands and arms, as well as by the flesh and hair found beneath Bates' fingernails.
While a contemporaneous newspaper report reflects uncertainty as to whether the knife actually broke in her body, 3 no evidence of this event is reported in the autopsy report, and more recent pronouncements from RPD detectives are unanimous that the knife did not break. The phone call that is referred to near the end of the letter has never been elaborated on by authorities, though researcher Tom Voigt suggests that it was placed to the Riverside Press , rather than the police, and so went misunderstood and ignored.
The letters were delivered on the same day they were posted. The next day, November 30th, both the Enterprise and the local police submitted their copies to the Riverside County Postal Inspector, who in turn notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Murder is not a federal crime, but extortion through the mail is, and the FBI briefly considered joining the investigation under this pretense.
However, since no specific victim of extortion was named or alluded to, there would be no federal aid in the investigation. In an unexplained turn of events, what appears to be a photocopy of the "Confession" was attached to an FBI report declassified in the s, but the typescript and number of words per line are different from those in the well-known copy that appears in a photograph of the letter lying either on a detective's or a reporter's desk. On the six-month anniversary of Bates' death, the Riverside Press , the police, and the victim's father whose name and address had appeared in the local newspaper the day after the murder were each sent nearly identical copies of another letter, this one written in pencil on lined notepaper.
Instead of a signature, two of the letters bore a symbol that resembled a letter Z joined with a numeral 3. In what would become a hallmark of the Zodiac's epistolary style, the envelopes were franked with excessive postage: The letters sent to the police and Press read as follows: The copy without the hieroglyph signature, sent to Joseph Bates, substituted "Bates" with "She". In mid-April , a janitor at the RCC Library discovered a poem written on the underside of a folding school desk. Some amateurs, however, have noted that the style and tone of the letter indicate otherwise: In the wake of Bates' murder, Riverside Police worked the case under the assumption that Bates knew her killer, or at least that the killer knew her.
They even identified a likely suspect from a pool of viable candidates, an ex-boyfriend bitter over their breakup and resentful of her blossoming relationship with a football player. The RPD maintains a local man as their prime suspect in the murder, and in December of even went so far as to secure a warrant for samples of this man's hair, skin, and saliva, which were sent to the FBI crime lab to be checked against the evidence found at the scene.
As of December , the FBI completed this analysis, and the results are being double-checked by state authorities. An announcement is eagerly awaited by authorities and amateurs alike. Kinkead nevertheless sent a 3-page synopsis of the local murder and the events that followed to investigators in Napa and San Francisco , a letter that seems to have been largely ignored. It wasn't until Paul Avery of the San Francisco Chronicle initiated a meeting between these investigators that they began to consider the elusive Bay Area serial killer as a possible culprit, though even then RPD Captain Irwin Cross "expressed doubt that the Zodiac [was] responsible".
Despite the stylistic similarities between the aftermath of Cheri Jo Bates' murder and the linked murders that would later take place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the current opinion of the Riverside Police Department and most other investigators is that the Riverside and Bay Area episodes were not related. Opinion is split, however, as to who authored the and documents, and whether they were even written by the same person. In the late s, the area abutting the two rough-and-tumble, working-class cities was practically uninhabited, and even now only a few paved surfaces cross the barren expanses of southern Solano County above the Vallejo-Benicia Freeway.
One of these is Lake Herman Road , running from eastern Vallejo to northern Benicia by way of the unincorporated area between them. As early as 9: The same car was also seen there at about Between these two sightings, a young man and his girlfriend were parked in the same spot when a car heading west toward Vallejo slowed to a stop several yards past their car, then began to slowly back up toward them.
The car gave them both such a bad feeling that they immediately pulled out of the gravelly area and drove off toward Benicia. The other car followed them until the first exit, which they took, watching the stranger continue east on Lake Herman Road. Having told Betty Lou's parents that they were going to a Christmas concert, they had instead driven to the isolated lover's lane and had been there for less than an hour when someone pulled in with them, exited his vehicle, and began firing into their car.
The killer was armed with either a. From light footprints and ballistic evidence, it appeared that the killer started from behind the car, shooting out the right rear window, then the left rear tire, then coming around to the front left. The two teenagers scrambled out the passenger's side door. Jensen, 16, left the car alive and must have started to run toward the road; her body was found less than 30 feet from the rear bumper.
The shot pattern -- five rounds along the right side of her back, ranging from the space between the fifth and sixth ribs all the way down to the pelvis 1 -- suggested that the killer was either competent with firearms or had fired into her body as she lay wounded by a previous shot, as a coroner's report states that the shots had come from no more than 10 feet away. In any case, the grouping does not indicate marksman-like accuracy, or even the great degree of skill that is often attributed to the killer due to this particular murder, especially considering that two rounds missed the wounded girl as she fled.
Faraday was killed by a single close-range bullet to the head; researcher Mike R. The entire episode was over in a few heartbeats, and the killer left the scene immediately upon its conclusion. This was determined by an almost minute-by-minute timeline put together from the statements of several witnesses driving by the area between 9: One of these witnesses, Stella Borges, may even have seen the killer's car, described as a light-colored Chevrolet, headed toward Benicia just before she discovered Jensen's and Faraday's bodies.
Despite the best efforts of Solano County Sheriff's Det. Les Lundblad, assistance from half a dozen local law enforcement agencies, and a reward fund set up by students at the victims' high schools, no killer was ever identified. Six months later, shortly after According to Mageau's statements to police in the days that followed, Ferrin had picked him up at his house about half an hour earlier, and they were going to get a bite to eat when Darlene said that she wanted to talk to him about something.
At Mageau's suggestion, she turned around on Springs Road and headed east to Blue Rock Springs Park in Benicia , a spot popular with local teenagers cruising after dark. Ferrin turned off the car's headlights and motor but left the radio playing. After just a few minutes, three cars occupied by some young revelers entered the parking lot briefly, laughing, yelling, and throwing firecrackers. They drove off shortly thereafter, and Ferrin and Mageau were left alone again until about midnight, when another car, alone this time, pulled into the lot from the direction of Vallejo.
Its lone occupant turned off the car's headlights and pulled up next to Ferrin's car, six to eight feet away on her left. The car, a brown Ford Mustang or Chevy Corvair, idled there for a moment, and Mageau asked Ferrin if she knew the driver, to which she responded, "Oh, never mind". After about five minutes, the brown car returned to the parking lot and pulled up behind and to the right of Ferrin and Mageau, about 10 feet back.
Leaving his headlights on this time, the driver exited his vehicle with a bright lamp or flashlight. Obscuring his face by holding the light at arm's length and shining it directly at them, he walked silently up to the passenger's side door. From his manner, Mageau thought he might be a policeman, and was reaching for his ID when the man raised a handgun and fired five 9mm rounds through the window.
He shot first at Mageau, hitting him in the face and body: Fueled by pain and adrenaline, Michael kicked himself into the back seat, catching another bullet in his left knee. The attacker then fired at Ferrin, hitting her in each arm and in the back as she turned away. Mageau thought that the shots sounded quiet, perhaps fired through a silencer, but nearby resident George Bryant heard both the earlier firecrackers and the shots, and described the shots as much louder.
The killer was walking back to his car after this volley of shots when he heard Mageau begin to yell, either in pain or in rage. He returned to Ferrin's car, fired two additional shots at each of the victims, then turned around casually and got back in his own car. Mageau was able to catch a look at the man's face in profile, and described him as short, about 5'8" tall, but extremely heavyset. Though "not blubbery fat" 3 the man was at least pounds and had a large face.
In terrible pain but still conscious, Mageau managed to turn the car's blinkers on in an attempt to summon aid, then opened the passenger's side door and tumbled to the pavement. From there, he watched the attacker peel out, turn his car around, and drive back in the direction of Vallejo. Though the Zodiac would later claim that he remained under the speed limit after the attack, both Mageau and George Bryant reported that he left the scene at a high rate of speed. Several police cars and an ambulance soon arrived, summoned by more late-night teenaged drivers who had discovered the car and victims, but the aid they could offer was too little and too late for Darlene, who died in the ambulance with Mageau and Officer Richard Hoffman of the Vallejo PD.
Mageau went straight into surgery, but Darlene was not so lucky: Despite the killer's subsequent claim that the attack was committed with a 9mm Luger, this weapon was manufactured with an eight-round magazine, and the killer fired at least nine shots without reloading. While a round extended magazine for the Luger had been available for some time, Vallejo police believe the weapon was actually a 9mm Browning High-Power, which carries thirteen rounds in its factory magazine, although the weapon could have been one of several 9-round 9mm handguns available at the time.
These views are not shared by most legitimate investigators, however, nor by Darlene's widower, Dean Ferrin, who was never interviewed for ZODIAC and in subsequent conversation has stated that he noticed no unusual behavior or anxiety on his wife's part in the months before her death. The alleged "stalker" in this case was likely George Waters, a Vallejo man and would-be paramour who had been rebuffed several times by Darlene and who, by many accounts, did not take it in a gentlemanly fashion. His accounts of the night's events, to both the police and the press, uniformly describe an unknown man who walked silently up to the car and started shooting.
These and other details were maintained through all recorded interviews with Mageau, whether in horrible pain after the incident, under heavy medication at the hospital, or in the spotlight of morbid local celebrity. The lone indication that Ferrin may have known her killer -- or may have been known to him -- was a pair of calls made to Darlene's home shortly after the murder. When the calls were answered by Ferrin's friends at the house, there was no voice on the other end. According to the police dispatcher, the caller's voice was mature and without accent, and he spoke evenly and consistently as if reading from a script.
At one point, the dispatcher tried to ask the caller's identity and location, but he would not be interrupted and said, "I want to report a double murder. If you go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park, you will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9mm Luger.
I also killed those kids last year. Robert Graysmith's ZODIAC contains an apocryphal scene in which the caller hangs up, but is surprised by a call-back device on the police switchboard that causes the pay phone to start ringing.
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This allegedly caught the attention of a chance passerby who watched the caller take the receiver off the hook, leave the booth, and drive off in a brown car. This man, described in a subsequent letter from the killer, was sought by both the police and local newspapers to no avail, indicating that Graysmith may simply have been elaborating on a bogus detail provided by the Zodiac to create confusion.
When the police were able to trace the call to a pay phone at Tuolumne Street and Springs Road, they found that the booth in question was just a few blocks away from the Vallejo Sheriff's Office. Enclosed with each letter was one-third of a cryptogram, to be published on each newspaper's front page by August 1. Not only were the author's claims bolstered by an intimate knowledge of the two crime scenes, he also promised another murder spree if his request was not met.
Though worded slightly differently, each letter shared the same salient facts, and each was closed with the crossed-circle design that would become the Zodiac's signature. The first to be transcribed in its entirety was the one sent to the Vallejo Times-Herald:. Christmass 1 Brand name of ammo Super X 2 10 shots fired 3 Boy was on back feet to car 4 Girl was lyeing on right side feet to west 4th of July 1 Girl was wearing patterned pants 2 Boy was also shot in knee 3 Brand name of ammo was Western Here is a cyipher or that is part of one.
The other 2 parts of this cipher have been mailed to the S. I want you to print this cipher on your frunt page by Fry Afternoon Aug , If you do not do this I will go on a kill rampage Fry night that will last the whole week end. I will cruse around and pick off all stray people or coupples that are alone then move on to kill some more untill I have killed over a dozen people. The killer's letter to the Chronicle was similar, but gave an additional impetus to publish the code: Despite the claims of the Chronicle's letter, it did not appear to reveal the killer's identity.
The letters covering the cipher blocks were checked unsuccessfully for fingerprints by the Vallejo and San Francisco police; they found none, though one print may have been developed on a cipher-block. As happened after the Bates murder, local police contacted the FBI for aid in the investigation, and as in the Bates case the federal interest here was possible extortion.
In fact, many FBI reports still classify the case under the original extortion heading. A little-known letter containing a key to the cryptogram was sent anonymously to the Vallejo Police on August 10, one day after the Harden solution was made public. The key was handwritten on a sheet of white paper, and was accompanied by a short typewritten note on a 3x5 index card expressing hope that " the enclosed key will prove beneficial to you in connection with the cipher letter writer.
One useful palmprint was found on the envelope, 2 but it was never matched to any individual. By August 2, all three cipher blocks had been printed. Stiltz, requesting another letter "with more facts to prove it". It was in this three-page letter that the killer first referred to himself as "The Zodiac. This is the Zodiac speaking. In answer to your asking for more details about the good times I have had in Vallejo , I shall be very happy to supply even more material.
By the way, are the police having a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up; when they do crack it, they will have me. On the 4th of July: I did not open the car door. The window was rolled down all ready. The boy was origionaly sitting in the frunt seat when I began fireing. When I fired the first shot at his head, he leaped backwards at the same time, thus spoiling my aim. He ended up on the back seat then the floor in back thashing out very violently with his legs; that's how I shot him in the knee. I drove away quite slowly so as not to draw attention to my car.
The man who told police that my car was brown was a negro about rather shabbly dressed. I was in this phone booth having some fun with the Vallejo cop when he was walking by. What I did was tape a small pencel flash light to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, in the center of the beam of light if you aim it at a wall or ceiling you will see a black or darck spot in the center of the circle of light about 3 to 6 inches across.
When taped to a gun barrel, the bullet will strike in the center of the black dot in the light. All I had to do was spray them as if it was a water hose; there was no need to use the gun sights. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page coverage. Police were unsuccessful in developing latent fingerprints on the first set of letters; perhaps as a result, this latest letter was submitted directly to the FBI crime lab, which determined that the letter was written on Woolworth's " Fifth Avenue " brand paper. The lab found useful prints on its second and third pages, but they have never been matched to a suspect.
The next attack came on Saturday, September 27, , on the western shore of Lake Berryessa , about 60 miles northeast of San Francisco in Napa County. Without leaving his car, he sat looking downward, as if pretending to read something. The women walked down to the lakeshore and had been sunbathing for about half an hour when they noticed the same man watching them. They later described him as "clean cut and nice looking".
He wore a black short sleeved sweatshirt over a tee shirt with dark blue or black slacks. He watched them silently for another 20 minutes or so, smoking cigarettes, then walked off. When the women returned to their car at around 4: The Napa County Sheriff's Department briefly investigated another encounter at the lake. It occurred at about 6: When this man saw the father and son and realized that he had been noticed, he turned around and walked away from them. It was initially thought that he might have been involved in the Zodiac's next attack, but detectives determined that the unidentified man did not have a car in the area, and it would have been impossible for him to arrive at the crime scene in time.
Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Calvin Hartnell, two college students who had also made a spontaneous trip from Angwin, were picnicking at Twin Oak Ridge, 1 a peninsula on the western shore of the lake, at twilight when they were approached by a man later described as 5'8" to 6' tall, dark-haired, and heavyset, wearing a dark jacket and dark clothing that seemed sloppy or dishevelled. Cecelia, who saw the man first, noted that he was wearing glasses. He seemed to Hartnell at the time to be "in his thirties and fairly unremarkable", 2 though the young man would describe a larger and possibly younger individual after getting a closer and more dangerous look.
Before getting too close to the couple, he ducked behind one of the two nearby trees, put on an unusual four-cornered hood, and emerged about 20 feet away. The hood was well sewn, black, and had a bib that fell almost to the man's waistline. Embroidered on it was the crossed-circle design that had appeared in the 3-Part Cryptogram and its cover letters and would serve as the Zodiac's signature in most of his letters to come.
Holes had been cut for the eyes and mouth, and though clip-on sunglasses had been added to further protect the killer's identity, Hartnell caught a glimpse of greasy brownish hair through the holes in the mask. On his belt, he wore a long knife in a wooden sheath and an empty leather holster. A large semiautomatic pistol was in his right hand and he pointed it at Shepard and Hartnell as he spoke. The man pocketed the coins and dropped the keys on the picnic blanket, then holstered his weapon. Hartnell made a vague offer of help to the man in order to escape injury, to which the man responded, "No.
Though the town mentioned by the killer is generally given as Deer Lodge, Montana , a reliable source reports that the state was not Montana but Colorado. An early interview with Hartnell has the badly wounded student saying that he can't remember the exact name of the town, but that it "had some double name, like Fern Lock or something. Hartnell, who survived the attack, said that the man's voice was unremarkable, sounding neither educated nor illiterate, and though Hartnell could not detect an accent, he said the killer did have a slight lilt or drawl to his voice. Hartnell balked at the idea, and the man began to shout, "Get down!
When she was finished, the hooded man tied her up and tightened the knots that she had used on Hartnell. It was at this point that the young man noticed that his attacker's hands were shaking, and that he seemed very nervous. The knife he used was double-edged and about a foot long, possibly a bayonet.
It has been described as looking made or repaired by hand, with wooden handle slabs, two brass rivets, and white tape where the guard would normally be. Hartnell was stabbed six times, and a retired police source confirms a fatal ten for Shepard, who died of her wounds two days later.
Leaving them both for dead, the attacker walked to Hartnell's nearby car and, using a black magic marker, inscribed his crossed-circle logo and the dates of his Bay Area attacks on the door. Vallejo Sept The shoes that formed them were determined to have been Wing Walkers, a style of low-cut military boot, size Set deep in the sand, the prints suggested a heavy man. Just as he had after the Blue Rock Springs attack, the killer later drove to a pay phone and placed a call through the Operator to the local police.
The call came through the Napa Police Department switchboard at 7: The call was traced to a pay phone outside a car wash at Main Street in Napa. As was the case in Vallejo , the booth was near the station. Evidence technicians later found a clear palm-print on the receiver, the print man was so nervous that he smudged it during the lifting process and any evidentiary value was ruined. They are two miles north of Park Headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Kharmann Ghia.
The destination that Stine entered in his log and called in to his dispatcher was at the corner of Washington and Maple Streets in Presidio Heights. The cab was parked one block west, however, at the intersection of Washington and Cherry Streets, when the passenger shot Stine point blank in the right side of the head. Whether the killer had made the trip in the front seat or got in front after the murder is uncertain, but witnesses saw him in front as he removed the dead man's wallet and keys, and then cut a large piece from the back of his shirt which he soaked in blood and took with him as he walked slowly north on Cherry Street.
Three teenage siblings on the second floor of Washington , directly across the street from the cab, happened to spot the killer as he cut Stine's shirt and suspected foul play. They watched him exit the cab and wipe down parts of the cab's interior and exterior, briefly leaning on the driver's side doorframe. They called the police, who logged the call at 9: Consequently, when patrolmen Donald Foukes and Eric Zelms responded in a radio car and noticed a heavyset white man sauntering east on Jackson Street , they made no effort to apprehend him.
Despite the intensive search of the area that followed, the killer's head start allowed him to escape, probably to a nearby getaway car. Foukes made a statement about his recollection of the incident, recorded in an SFPD memo dated November 12, Medium heavy build -- Barrel chested -- Medium complexion -- Light-colored hair possibly greying in rear May have been lighting that caused this effect. Navy or royal blue Elastic cuffs and waistband zipped part way up. Brown wool pants pleated type baggy in rear Rust brown.
May have been wearing low cut shoes. The subject's general appearance to classify him as a group would be that he might be of Welsh ancestry. During shooting for a documentary on the case in the mid s, Foukes stated that "The individual I saw that night was a white male adult approximately 35 to 45 years of age, 5 feet 10 inches, to lbs. Since we were looking for a negro male adult, we proceeded on Jackson Street toward Arguello, continuing our search.
As we arrived at Arguello Street , the description was changed to a white male adult. Believing that this suspect was possibly the one involved in the shooting, we entered the Presidio of San Francisco and conducted a search on West Pacific Avenue on the opposite side of the wall in the last direction we observed the suspect going. We did not find the suspect". An apocryphal passage in Robert Graysmith's book Zodiac has the officers going so far as to stop the man and ask him if he had seen anything strange in the past few minutes, but this conversation is not noted in any of the subsequent police reports.
In no known interview does either Foukes or Zelms mention any exchange of words with the unidentified subject, and the story may have been based only on a forthcoming letter from the killer. While dramatic, the Zodiac's account of the night's events cannot be confirmed, and may well be a prevarication. On the other hand, such an encounter and its repercussions would be a tremendous embarrassment to the SFPD on several levels, and if this incident did in fact occur then a concerted effort would certainly have been made to keep it under wraps.
The bullet that killed Stine was mistyped at the scene as a. It was not, however, the same 9mm used for the Blue Rock Springs attack. The latent impressions of thirty fingers, three palms, and one lower finger or palm were found in and on the cab.
In one report, a VPD detective wrote, "This might be a motive why Cheney would make such an accusation against Arthur Allen" 4 Arthur Allen, by most accounts, was something of an eccentric. This is a must have for any true collector of the strange and macabre. She is also able to identify the servant girl. Chris Pavone - The Expats. The card to Avery was widely considered a threat on his life, and the Chronicle ran a front page story about it on October If I do not see this note in your paper, I will do something nasty, which you know I'm capable of doing. You can see from other comments I don't support their theory but I am not taking a position against it either as far as the article itself is concerned.
Certain other prints, none of such clarity, were actually left in blood, and "are also believed to be prints of the suspect," according to a San Francisco Police memo. Also recovered from the cab was a pair of men's leather gloves in a size 7 XXL , though it remains uncertain whether they were left by the killer. Two days later, the Chronicle received a letter from the Zodiac claiming responsibility for the murder.
The return address on the envelope was the crossed-circle design, and enclosed with the letter was a swatch of Paul Stine's bloody shirt. Three latent fingerprints were developed on the paper by the SFPD crime lab, but remain unmatched to any suspect. I am the same man who did in the people in the north bay area. Police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcicles seeing who could make the most noise. The car drivers should have just parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover.
School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. The Zodiac would send three swatches of the bloody fabric, but square inches of Paul Stine's shirt are still unaccounted for. Thus far, authorities had observed the Zodiac to follow a few vague patterns. He had always attacked after sundown on weekends, always attacked young couples in or near their cars, and always attacked in remote suburban areas near water. If he could now break his pattern by shooting a lone year-old male in downtown San Francisco, they felt, then there was no reason why he couldn't follow through on his threat to "wipe out a school bus;" within days, Bay area bus drivers had received special instructions on how to react if fired upon.
The school bus threat was one that the Zodiac would return to in different forms. At the urging of the San Francisco Police, the Chronicle suppressed the threat for a week; on October 18, a police composite sketch based on the teenage witnesses' testimony was amended according to the descriptions given by the responding patrolmen at Cherry Street and was distributed with the full content of the letter.
It was during this time that the Zodiac case began to garner exceptional press coverage, and tips to the killer's identity poured in from points as far as Houston , Atlanta , and St. At the same time, homicide detectives along the West Coast began to consider the Bay Area killer as a suspect in their unsolved cases. Among these were L. The Zodiac's next mailing was sent to the Chronicle in early November in an envelope stamped with double the necessary postage and the instruction "Please Rush to Editor. This letter marked the first appearance of what appeared to be a body count, a number that rose steadily with each new mailing.
No evidence of any kind, however, suggests that the Zodiac was responsible for any murders beyond the six commonly attributed to him. The Zodiac also sent a second swatch of Paul Stine's bloody shirt in November, but it is unclear whether it was enclosed with this letter or the one that followed it.
This is the Zodiac speaking I though you would need a good laugh before you get the bad news you won't get the news for a while yet PS could you print this new cipher on your frunt page? I get awfully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing!!!!!! A few days later, he sent a longer letter that included a schematic drawing of a "death machine" that he claimed to have rigged and ready. It was designed to blow up buses.
The Chronicle received both of these letters on Monday, November 10, , and passed them on to police after making copies for themselves. A source at SFPD was "of opinion one or more latent prints may be developed" on this letter, but no finding was ever made public. This is the Zodiac speaking up to the end of Oct I have killed 7 people. I have grown rather angry with the police for their telling lies about me.
So I shall change the way the collecting of slaves. I shall no longer announce to anyone. The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them. I shall not tell you what my descise consists of when I kill 2 As of yet I have left no fingerprints behind me contrary to what the police say in my killings I wear transparent fingertip guards.
So as you can see the police don't have much to work on. If you wonder why I was wipeing the cab down I was leaving fake clews for the police to run all over town with, as one might say, I gave the cops som bussy work to do to keep them happy.