January 8, 2019 • 31 mins
Three nearly identical letters, each containing one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram, arrive at three Bay Area newspapers.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not necessarily represent those of iHeartMedia, How Stuff Works,
or its employees.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
For law enforcement, every homicide case is a puzzle, some
more difficult than others.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Two hundred pieces versus two hundred thousands.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
The Zodiac killer took the idea of a puzzle quite literally,
forcing everyone to play his little game. This may be
with the Zodiac is known for best codes and taunting
letters to press and police, But would there be any
answers to his riddle?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Any content to his code?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Was all this affront a powerplay and not worth the
attention he so desperately sought That was left up to
the press.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Game on.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
A man in a match, robbed, tied, and stab them,
leaving them for.
Speaker 5 (01:01):
Damn subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no
a double murder.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
I did it a man who wore a medieval style
executioners hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to
use them.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
They haven't arrested me because they can't prove a thing.
Speaker 6 (01:20):
I'm not the damn Zodiac.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Who is the Zodiac? And where is he.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
From iHeartRadio, Helstuff Works and Tenderfoot TV.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
This is Monster, the Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 7 (01:34):
When he committed the murders on Lake Kerman Road, he
didn't make any effort to communicate with the media or
take responsibility for it, but there was a lot of
media attention around it. And then when he struck again
in July of nineteen sixty nine, there was enormous media coverage,
largely because of the phone call he made afterwards where
he took credit for that crime and the murders on
(01:55):
Lake Kerman Road.
Speaker 8 (01:56):
If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway,
you'll kids in a brown car. They were shot with
a nine milimeter luger. I also killed those kids last year.
Speaker 7 (02:07):
So now he's created this sensational story that there's a
psychotic killer out there, a serial killer who's responsible for
two crimes, not just one. Twenty six days later is
when I get the first Zodiac letters.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
A strange letter arrives at the offices of three Northern
California newspapers.
Speaker 7 (02:29):
He's created a whole other game.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
On July thirty first, nineteen sixty nine, the zodiaccent envelopes
to three Bay area newspapers. Each envelope included two sheets,
a handwritten letter, and one third of a three part
coded message known as a cryptogram or a cipher. This
coded message is very important to the case, but let's
(02:53):
focus on the letter first. Duffy Jennings was working at
the San Francisco Chronicle when the first or arrived.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
I'll never forget my first day walking into the Chronicle.
The day before, I had come in to do an interview,
but it was in the morning, and there's not a
lot of activity, you know, mostly activity in the morning papers,
late afternoon. But when I came in to start work
the next afternoon, I think it was probably two o'clock.
It was equivalent the first time I walked into the
Yankee Stadium and saw that grass, and everybody talks about
(03:22):
that first experience overwhelming. It is the majesty of it.
And that's what I sensed at the Chronicle. It was
total chaos. Desks were disheveled and crowded with papers, and
there was stuff everywhere, and people were smoking. I could
smell pencil shavings, glue, printers, ink, lots of people talking
(03:46):
loudly and guys yelling copy and guys at the desk
yelling first edition. It was just a typical day. But
that's how it was every afternoon. The closer I got
to five o'clock, people were on deadline. Editors were yelling,
you need to explain this, or rewrite this, or you know,
whatever it was, And I was just captivated. But I
(04:08):
was mesmerized by this. It was just kind of an
overwhelming sensory experience to be in and around this environment.
I would come in and wait to be assigned to
cover something. When the first letter came, I was among
(04:30):
the copy boys sorting mail. The first letter didn't cause
a lot of consternation in the sense that nobody knew
quite what to make of it. Time. It was viewed
really as here's a nutcase playing games and say if
you can guess what this is.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Here's a portion of the first letter the Zodiac sent
to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Speaker 8 (04:52):
Dear editor, this is the murderer of the two teenagers
last Christmas at Lake Herman and the girl on the
fourth of July near the off course in Vallejo. Here
is part of a cipher. The other two parts of
this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the
Vallejo Times and San Francisco Examiner. I want you to
print ae cipher on the front page of your paper.
(05:14):
In this cipher is my identity. If you do not
printice by the afternoon of Friday, first of August, I
will go on a kill rampage Friday night. I will
cruise around all weekend, killing lone people in the night,
then move on to kill again.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
The letter was scrawled in blue felt tip pen. The
handwriting was sloppy and cramped, and it was full of misspellings,
like Christmas with two s's at the end. The style
of this writing seemed a strange contrast to the other sheet,
an orderly grid of letters and symbols that the killer
said contained his true identity.
Speaker 7 (05:51):
When the first letters arrived, that was his introduction to
the world. This is who I am. I am the murderer,
so I'm may be taken seriously. I'm a very dangerous person,
and if you don't do what I tell you to do,
there will be real consequences.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
The newspapers weren't sure if the letter came from the killer,
and even if it did, should they publish it. On
the one hand, you want to take the threat seriously.
On the other it's like bargaining with terrorists or printing
a mass shooter's manifesto. Do you really want to reward
a killer with attention and give them a platform to
spread more fear. Two other papers, the San Francisco Examiner
(06:32):
in the Vallejo Times, received nearly identical letters but different
parts of the code, so the papers had to decide
together whether or not to publish.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
When there's any kind of controversy or question about whether
to publish things like this, particularly around threats, My guess
is that we talked to the other newspapers and said,
are you going to publish your third of the cryptogram?
And everybody said, yes, we will. I mean, it's a
news story when a killer takes credit publicly for what
(07:02):
he's done and then taunts you or the police to
solve a puzzle. But even that wasn't up front page story.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Two days later, on Saturday, August second, the Chronicle ran
the story coded Clue in Murders with a reproduction of
the cipher. The Valejo police chief was quoted as saying,
we're not satisfied the letter was written by the murderer,
and he urged whoever wrote the letter to prove he
was the killer by sending more details, perhaps trying to
(07:36):
trick the Zodiac into sending something self incriminating. The chief
also warned Vallejo residents to avoid lonely places.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
It wasn't until the police asked, would you send another
letter with more details that the next letter came and said,
this is the Zodiac speaking.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
On August fourth, nineteen sixty nine, just two days after
the chronicle story, a new letter arrived with the same
slanted handwriting.
Speaker 8 (08:20):
Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking in answer to
your asking for more details about the good times I've
had in Vallejo. I shall be very happy to supply
even more material. By the way, are the police having
a good time.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
With the code?
Speaker 8 (08:38):
If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do
crack it, they will have me last Christmas. In that episode,
the police were wondering as to how I could shoot
and hit my victims in the dark. They did not
only state this, but implied this by saying it was
a well lit night and I could see the silhouettes
(08:58):
on the horizon. Bullshit. That area is surrounded by high
hills and trees. What I did was tape a small
pencil flashlight to the barrel of my gun. If you notice,
you'll see a black or dark spot in the center
of the circle of light. One taped to a gun barrel.
The bullet will strike exactly in the center of the
(09:19):
black dot in the light. All I had to do
was spray them is if it was a water hose.
I was not happy to see that I did not
get front page coverage.
Speaker 7 (09:34):
When he sends that second letter, now he's the Zodiac killer.
He has chosen his own name, his own moniker. And
although a lot of serial killers throughout history have nicknames,
most don't choose their nicknames for themselves. So that name
had some meaning to him that we don't know. But
(09:55):
if you look at the handwriting in the Zodiac letters,
especially the ones that accompany the cipher, the handwriting looks
very sloppy. It looks kind of rushed and just natural handwriting,
like I just fired off this letter. Then you look
at the cipher, it's very clean and very careful. Each
part consisted of a block of symbols, letters from the
(10:16):
English language, symbols from astrology and other things, you know,
half filled circles backwards letters. They're tidy and then straight rows.
He might have used some sort of graphing paper underneath
when he was doing it to make sure of that,
which says something in and of itself about the killer
that tells you right there, this was very.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Important to him.
Speaker 7 (10:38):
It was more important than the letter. And when you
look at the cipher itself, it's chilling just to look
at it, because you know there's something in it, right,
But once you realize what's in it, it's even more frightening.
If he just wanted to brag about what he did,
he could do that, and he did in that letter.
The cipher is another element of this game he's playing.
(11:02):
It's not just I'm somebody who has to be taken seriously.
I'm dangerous. It's also I'm really clever, and I have
something else I want to say. If you want to
know who I am, you want to understand what I
did and why I do what I do, You're gonna
have to work for it. I'm not going to give
you everything.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
The police sent the three parts cipher to the nearby
Mare Island Naval Shipyard. There, navy code breakers rushed to
crack the Killer's code and to discover the Zodiac's true
identity before he killed again.
Speaker 9 (11:34):
On The published codes stopped hundreds of amateur cryptographers and
several intelligence agencies.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But surprisingly it was actually two amateurs who ended up
solving it. A school teacher and his wife, Don and
Betty Harden, saw the code in the newspaper and just
decided to give it a shot. Tom Voyd, who runs
the website Zodiac killer dot com, recorded the Harden's daughter, Leslie,
at a two thousand and eight conference.
Speaker 10 (12:00):
Began on a Sunday morning fairly early, went on into
the afternoon, into the evening, and through the night. They
really became, in my eyes, the perfect code breaking team,
because my dad had the scientific approach and very logical practices,
and my mother had some.
Speaker 11 (12:19):
Intuition that led them in the direction that they needed
to go. My father at some point recognized that he
had to go to work the next morning, and when
he went.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
To that.
Speaker 11 (12:28):
Not so my mother. She did not sleep and ate
very little. The next morning, he got up and went
off to work.
Speaker 12 (12:36):
He was a school teacher, came back home and was
probably mildly surprised to find that there was no dinner
and nothing at all happened in the kitchen.
Speaker 13 (12:45):
She sat in the chair and he stood behind her.
And what really captured my attention for that moment was
not the code spread out in front of them at all.
It was the look of love on my father's face
as he paid over her.
Speaker 14 (13:03):
And Don Harden. He had a boyhood interest in codes.
You know, if it wasn't for Betty's persistence, they wouldn't
have finished it.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
That's David Auranjak, a programmer and amateur cryptographer. He's spent
the last decade fascinated by the Zodiacs codes.
Speaker 14 (13:23):
The first cipher was a simple substitution cipher, basically a
simple way to hide a message.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Essentially, you substitute each letter with a different letter. So
to make a cipher for the word kill, you might
substitute J for K, H for I, and b's for
both l's. And if you know which letters you substituted,
you can then decode JHBB back to kill. But without
(13:50):
knowing which letters were substituted, how do you crack that code?
The Hardens started by doing what's called a frequency analysis.
Speaker 14 (13:58):
You count up all the letters and how many times
they happen. One of the things about English is that
certain letters appear more often than others. In particular, the
letter E is the most frequently occurring letter in the
English language, and so you can use that information to
your advantage when you're looking at a ciphertext. If you
find that, say, the letter V is happening a lot
(14:20):
more often than the other letters, then there's a good
chance that it stands for the letter E. But the
way the Zodiac made it harder and the first cipher
was he would take a common letter like E, and
instead of assigning one ciphertext letter to it, he assigned
seven seven different symbols.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That's why the Zodiac used backwards letters in astrological symbols
to make his code harder to crack. Undaunted, the Harden's
next tried what's called cribbing, plugging specific words into the puzzle.
On a simpler cryptogram, you could try to figure out
short words first.
Speaker 14 (14:54):
If the ciphertext has spaces in it, then you know
that certain words are likely to happen. For instance, if
you see a word that only has one letter, then
there's only two words that it can be A and I.
But in the first side for text, he did not
use word spaces, so that made it a little harder
to solve.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Still, even without the spaces, you can try and guess
if certain groups of symbols represent common words.
Speaker 14 (15:19):
If you have a right guess and you plug it
in and you do the substitutions, other parts of the
plaintext will come out. So you'll see fragments of other
words like thhe. Well, there's a lot of words to
start with THG, so you might be onto something. And
if you made a bad guess, then those fragments will
look like nonsense. There'll be letters that are next to
(15:39):
each other that wouldn't really be next to each other ZQR.
That guess is probably wrong. And Betty is attributed to
the insight of thinking that he would start it by
talking about himself and so it would start with the
letter I, and that he would talk about his crime,
so he would mention killing. And those intuitions also came
from patterns that they observed in the ciphertext. They found
(16:03):
symbols that were repeating next to each other. Doing a
little research, they found, well, the most common doubled letter
in English is LL, and you know LLL appears in.
Speaker 7 (16:14):
A lot of words all.
Speaker 14 (16:16):
Will and kill, and so that was a good guess
on their part, because kill does appear in the message.
So they tried to plug in those words in different
places and eventually found other patterns, and then, through trial
and error, were able to crack the code.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Or at least almost crack the code. At the very
end of the message was a string of letters that
so far no one has been able to figure.
Speaker 14 (16:43):
Out the remaining eighteen symbols. It's just gibberish sequence of
letters that doesn't make any sense. Zodiac was claiming that
his identity was in the message, but when you decode
it with the Harden's key, it doesn't say anything about
his identity. But since the last eighteen are still undercoded,
that's led to a lot of people thinking, well, maybe
(17:04):
he did something else. There's some other process that is
different than the key for the rest of the message,
and there might be another message in there. Maybe he
really did put his identity in there and it's hidden somehow,
and those last eighteen and we just haven't figured it out.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Leslie, the Harden's daughter, remembers waking up in the middle
of the night after her parents cracked the code.
Speaker 11 (17:26):
Once the message became clear, it was a very frightening message.
Speaker 15 (17:34):
I do recall being in my room, coming in and
out of sleep, mostly nightmares and scary images, because the
words that were floating down the hallway were frightening words.
Speaker 11 (17:51):
Kill dangerous animal.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
This is the message that was hidden in the Zodia
Acts three parts cipher.
Speaker 8 (18:03):
I like killing people because it is so much fun.
It is more fun than killing weld game in the forest,
because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To
kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is
even better than getting your rocks off with a girl.
(18:24):
The best part of it is that when I die,
I'll be reborn in paradise and all that I have
killed will become my slaves. I will not give you
my name because you will try to slow down or
stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
Speaker 12 (18:53):
All of a sudden, what looks like a message, and
the question at hand was what do we do now?
They decided that they would do what the paper suggested.
The paper had said, I think you might have a solution.
Call this number.
Speaker 11 (19:08):
So they did. But once they did, it got a
whole lot more interesting.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
The decoded message didn't reveal the Zodiac's true identity, as
he had promised, but it did give clues as to
who the zodiac might be.
Speaker 7 (19:33):
In the Zodiac Seiphered message, he referred to man as
the most dangerous animal of all, which some people have
interpreted as a reference to the book and or the
movie The Most Dangerous Game. A lot of us who
are older, we had to read that story in high school.
And if you were a teenager who read that in
(19:55):
high school and you were harboring some sort of violent fantasies,
then you're not sympathizing with the victims the way most
of us do. When you read that story, do you
think about being the hunter Count Tsarov who lives on
this island where he has constructed things designed to make
ships crash on the shore so that people will be
(20:17):
deserted on this island.
Speaker 13 (20:18):
I'm not trying to intrude, but I'm in sort of
a jam. Are you the owner here? Yes?
Speaker 2 (20:23):
I am Count Zubtolf.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
And of course he pretends to be a gracious host
and invites them to stay and everything.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
God made some in kings, some big us me he
made a.
Speaker 7 (20:35):
Hunter, only for them to learn that he really intends
to hunt.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Them like animals here on my island.
Speaker 5 (20:41):
I hunt the Most Dangerous Game.
Speaker 8 (20:45):
You write me take half drowned men from ships you
wrecked and drive them out to be hunted.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
Only after the keel does man know the true extosial.
Speaker 7 (20:55):
Love Count Tzarov obviously the name starts with the letter Z.
He wears a costume of sorts, and he stalks his
victims like prey. The whole story is structured around the
idea that killing is sort of an intellectual exercise, that
(21:17):
it's sort of a right of man to hunt another
human being, that killing is part of human nature, and
the Zodiac may have been very drawn to a story
with those elements. He may have decided to emulate certain
aspects of Count Zaroff.
Speaker 16 (21:35):
And maybe that might explain the difference between those first
two attacks the Bliss create shootings at night.
Speaker 7 (21:44):
After that, it's not the same kind of crime because
in the story The Most Dangerous Game, Count Zarov doesn't
come out saying I'm going to kill you. He makes
you think that he's a friendly person. He wants you
to participate in his game. He needs you to feel
safe so that when you find out that you're no
longer safe, he can see that fear in you and
(22:07):
that fearrest part of the hunt, So I think with
the Zodiac there may have been some element of that
that he decided it's not enough for me to just
shoot these people. I need to talk to them. I
need to look in their eyes and see them going, oh,
everything's okay now, and then look in their eyes when
I flip on them and they find out that this
is not what they thought and that their lives.
Speaker 9 (22:28):
Are at statement.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Why did the Zodiac quote the villain from what at
the time was almost a fifty year old story. Maybe
it's how he saw himself a movie villain playing with
his victims. There were other possible clues about the Zodiac's
identity hidden in the cipher, such as this line, to
kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is
(22:53):
even better than getting your rocks off.
Speaker 8 (22:54):
With a girl.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Psychiatrists at the time speculate that this line reflected the
killer's feelings of sexual inadequacy, but it may have also
been literal. The Zodiac may be a sadist, someone who
feels excitement or pleasure from inflicting pain. To learn more
about sadism, we spoke with criminal psychology professor Eric Hickey.
Speaker 9 (23:18):
My name is doctor Eric Hickey. I'm a criminal psychologist.
Some days I'm just a criminalistimes I'm just a psychologist.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Professor Hickey literally wrote the book on serial killers. It's
a textbook called Serial Murderers and Their Victims.
Speaker 9 (23:35):
One day I got a phone call from the media
and there was a case of a mass murderer. When
they searched his car, they've found a couple of books
in the backseat of his car, and one of the
books was my book on sera murder. They said, doctor Key,
how do you feel about the fact that this serial
or mass murderer had your book in his car? Like
(23:56):
I'm supposed to feel badly that I wrote a book
about serial murders. No, And I said, well, why would
I be upset about that? The point is this is
for public education to make it more aware of these
types of people.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Professor Hickey says two thirds of serial killers are sexual predators,
and many have unusual desires like sadism. Hickey says that
even though the Zodiac didn't sexually assault his victims, the
killings could have been sexually motivated.
Speaker 9 (24:25):
So sadism is what we call it paraphilia perophilia, meaning
that they get sexual arousement and gratification through bizarre imagery, fantasies,
and behavior. There's hundreds and hundreds of paraphilia, and probably
a sixty percent of them are not criminal. If people
want to have sex with doorknobs, that's their business, it's
(24:46):
not a crime. A person could have a footfeth that's
not a crime. It is a crime. However, if they
break into people's homes and peel off their blanket while
they're asleep and stuck on their toes, that's a crime.
So there's a whole variety of criminal paraphilia that are
not physically harmful, but they are still criminal, like voyeurism, exhibitionism,
(25:09):
somnophilia where you would like to watch people asleep. Those
are criminal, but nobody gets hurt. But people who are
driven to kill serially, those not the kind out less
they're looking for. If you're a serial killer and you're statistic,
you're not into consent. You want to be able to
do what you want to do. A Zodiac and no
problem killing people and making them suffer as he did it.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Hickey thinks of the Zodiac sadism likely extended beyond the
killings to the letters, the puzzles, the.
Speaker 9 (25:38):
Way he taught the police. There was an element of
sadism there. He liked creating fear in the public's eye.
I'm sure that he liked reading about himself in newspapers.
That would have been quite gratifying to him. He could
become kind of contact the Ripper.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Jack the Ripper also sent letters to newspapers when he
terrorized London in the late eighteen hundreds. One read the
next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ears
off and send the police officers just for jolly. Many
thought it was a hoax, until three days later a
woman was found dead, her ear lobe severed.
Speaker 9 (26:12):
I think that that was something that the Zodiac and
was trying to attain. Was that sort of notoriety. He
held the city of San Francisco in fear. It was
all his doing, and that would make him feel very powerful,
and it gave him great pleasure in doing it. So
there was that sort of sadistic approach, not just to
his victims, but also to the general public.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
So the Zodiac is likely a sadist, a term named
after the Marquis de Sod, a French philosopher and novelist.
Sod wrote in his book Juliet, it is an article
of faith on the island of Borneo that all those
persons a man kills will be his slaves in the
next world. And as a result, the better a man
wishes to be served after his death, the more he
(26:59):
kills during life, which brings us to the end of
the cipher.
Speaker 8 (27:04):
When I die, I'll be reborn in paradise, and all
that I have killed will become my slaves. I will
not give you my name, because you will try to
slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Had the Zodiac read that passage from the Marquis de
Sade or heard about these beliefs somewhere else. Either way,
this fantasy of slaves in the afterlife speaks to the
Zodiac's intense desire for power and control. The Zodiac's murders
and phone call were cold hearted, his letters were twisted,
(27:43):
but the decoded cipher revealed just how truly deranged the
Zodiac was. As San Francisco would soon find out, what
they'd seen so far was just the beginning. The Zodiac
was ramping up. Professor Hickey told us serial killers often
intensify their crimes over time.
Speaker 9 (28:04):
There's sort of this evolvement with serial killers that we see.
There is a long process. Look at Jeffrey Dahmer. Nobody
wakes up in the morning and said, I'm an acrophile.
They wake up feeling that they want to be with
someone who's been buried. And that's what Dahmer did. He
wanted to be with someone who has been buried because
he has such low self esteem. He didn't feel comfortable
with the live person. And then he progressed wanted to
(28:26):
be with blow up dolls and mannequins and so on,
and then he progressed from that to dead animals, and
then from there he went into bringing people home, and
when they wanted to leave them, he'd make them unconscious,
then drill holes in their heads and put mer curic
acid in to make them into zombies. And then he
progressed from there to evisceraating them and then having sex
(28:47):
with the corpse and started cannibalizing them. He went down
this long, dark, dark pathway that each time he did,
his fantasies get more and more evolved.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac was also beginning to evolve.
His codes would become more complex, his letters increasingly bizarre,
and his murders more ritualistic and sadistic.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Next time on Monster the Zodiac.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Killer, Celia Shephard and Brian Hartnell, both in their early twenties,
were sitting on this knoll of land overlooking part of
Lake Barriessa. They thought they were alone, but there was
a third man on this knoll, a man who wore
a medieval style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun
and intended to use.
Speaker 7 (29:39):
Them whenever redrive here.
Speaker 16 (29:41):
I'm like, Wow, he drove the same exact way just
to get here and do that.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
It is crazy to think about.
Speaker 7 (29:49):
This guy is a pathological, a psycho.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
Killer found this young girl in on the shoreland here.
I've had eleven years patrol on Miss Lake and I've
seen a lot of people cut up by boat accidents
and smaticism. One of the worst things I ever witnessed.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced
by iHeartRadio, House, Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Albright
and I are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV,
alongside producers Meredith Stebman, Mason Lindsay and Christina Dana.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Jason Hoak is executive.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with producers
Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Scott
Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick is our host.
Original music is by Up in Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, make sure to check out the first season
of Monster called Atlanta Monster, about the Atlanta child murders
(31:08):
from the late seventies to the early eighties. Download the
ten episode season right now. Have questions or comments, email
us at Monster at HowStuffWorks dot com, or you can
call us at one eight three three two eight five
sixty six sixty seven.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
and do not necessarily represent those of iHeartMedia, How Stuff Works,
or its employees.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
For law enforcement, every homicide case is a puzzle, some
more difficult than others.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
Two hundred pieces versus two hundred thousands.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
The Zodiac killer took the idea of a puzzle quite literally,
forcing everyone to play his little game. This may be
with the Zodiac is known for best codes and taunting
letters to press and police, But would there be any
answers to his riddle?
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Any content to his code?
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Was all this affront a powerplay and not worth the
attention he so desperately sought That was left up to
the press.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Game on.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
A man in a match, robbed, tied, and stab them,
leaving them for.
Speaker 5 (01:01):
Damn subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no
a double murder.
Speaker 4 (01:08):
I did it a man who wore a medieval style
executioners hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to
use them.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
They haven't arrested me because they can't prove a thing.
Speaker 6 (01:20):
I'm not the damn Zodiac.
Speaker 4 (01:22):
Who is the Zodiac? And where is he.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
From iHeartRadio, Helstuff Works and Tenderfoot TV.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
This is Monster, the Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 7 (01:34):
When he committed the murders on Lake Kerman Road, he
didn't make any effort to communicate with the media or
take responsibility for it, but there was a lot of
media attention around it. And then when he struck again
in July of nineteen sixty nine, there was enormous media coverage,
largely because of the phone call he made afterwards where
he took credit for that crime and the murders on
(01:55):
Lake Kerman Road.
Speaker 8 (01:56):
If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway,
you'll kids in a brown car. They were shot with
a nine milimeter luger. I also killed those kids last year.
Speaker 7 (02:07):
So now he's created this sensational story that there's a
psychotic killer out there, a serial killer who's responsible for
two crimes, not just one. Twenty six days later is
when I get the first Zodiac letters.
Speaker 4 (02:23):
A strange letter arrives at the offices of three Northern
California newspapers.
Speaker 7 (02:29):
He's created a whole other game.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
On July thirty first, nineteen sixty nine, the zodiaccent envelopes
to three Bay area newspapers. Each envelope included two sheets,
a handwritten letter, and one third of a three part
coded message known as a cryptogram or a cipher. This
coded message is very important to the case, but let's
(02:53):
focus on the letter first. Duffy Jennings was working at
the San Francisco Chronicle when the first or arrived.
Speaker 6 (03:01):
I'll never forget my first day walking into the Chronicle.
The day before, I had come in to do an interview,
but it was in the morning, and there's not a
lot of activity, you know, mostly activity in the morning papers,
late afternoon. But when I came in to start work
the next afternoon, I think it was probably two o'clock.
It was equivalent the first time I walked into the
Yankee Stadium and saw that grass, and everybody talks about
(03:22):
that first experience overwhelming. It is the majesty of it.
And that's what I sensed at the Chronicle. It was
total chaos. Desks were disheveled and crowded with papers, and
there was stuff everywhere, and people were smoking. I could
smell pencil shavings, glue, printers, ink, lots of people talking
(03:46):
loudly and guys yelling copy and guys at the desk
yelling first edition. It was just a typical day. But
that's how it was every afternoon. The closer I got
to five o'clock, people were on deadline. Editors were yelling,
you need to explain this, or rewrite this, or you know,
whatever it was, And I was just captivated. But I
(04:08):
was mesmerized by this. It was just kind of an
overwhelming sensory experience to be in and around this environment.
I would come in and wait to be assigned to
cover something. When the first letter came, I was among
(04:30):
the copy boys sorting mail. The first letter didn't cause
a lot of consternation in the sense that nobody knew
quite what to make of it. Time. It was viewed
really as here's a nutcase playing games and say if
you can guess what this is.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Here's a portion of the first letter the Zodiac sent
to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Speaker 8 (04:52):
Dear editor, this is the murderer of the two teenagers
last Christmas at Lake Herman and the girl on the
fourth of July near the off course in Vallejo. Here
is part of a cipher. The other two parts of
this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the
Vallejo Times and San Francisco Examiner. I want you to
print ae cipher on the front page of your paper.
(05:14):
In this cipher is my identity. If you do not
printice by the afternoon of Friday, first of August, I
will go on a kill rampage Friday night. I will
cruise around all weekend, killing lone people in the night,
then move on to kill again.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
The letter was scrawled in blue felt tip pen. The
handwriting was sloppy and cramped, and it was full of misspellings,
like Christmas with two s's at the end. The style
of this writing seemed a strange contrast to the other sheet,
an orderly grid of letters and symbols that the killer
said contained his true identity.
Speaker 7 (05:51):
When the first letters arrived, that was his introduction to
the world. This is who I am. I am the murderer,
so I'm may be taken seriously. I'm a very dangerous person,
and if you don't do what I tell you to do,
there will be real consequences.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
The newspapers weren't sure if the letter came from the killer,
and even if it did, should they publish it. On
the one hand, you want to take the threat seriously.
On the other it's like bargaining with terrorists or printing
a mass shooter's manifesto. Do you really want to reward
a killer with attention and give them a platform to
spread more fear. Two other papers, the San Francisco Examiner
(06:32):
in the Vallejo Times, received nearly identical letters but different
parts of the code, so the papers had to decide
together whether or not to publish.
Speaker 6 (06:41):
When there's any kind of controversy or question about whether
to publish things like this, particularly around threats, My guess
is that we talked to the other newspapers and said,
are you going to publish your third of the cryptogram?
And everybody said, yes, we will. I mean, it's a
news story when a killer takes credit publicly for what
(07:02):
he's done and then taunts you or the police to
solve a puzzle. But even that wasn't up front page story.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Two days later, on Saturday, August second, the Chronicle ran
the story coded Clue in Murders with a reproduction of
the cipher. The Valejo police chief was quoted as saying,
we're not satisfied the letter was written by the murderer,
and he urged whoever wrote the letter to prove he
was the killer by sending more details, perhaps trying to
(07:36):
trick the Zodiac into sending something self incriminating. The chief
also warned Vallejo residents to avoid lonely places.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
It wasn't until the police asked, would you send another
letter with more details that the next letter came and said,
this is the Zodiac speaking.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
On August fourth, nineteen sixty nine, just two days after
the chronicle story, a new letter arrived with the same
slanted handwriting.
Speaker 8 (08:20):
Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking in answer to
your asking for more details about the good times I've
had in Vallejo. I shall be very happy to supply
even more material. By the way, are the police having
a good time.
Speaker 3 (08:36):
With the code?
Speaker 8 (08:38):
If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do
crack it, they will have me last Christmas. In that episode,
the police were wondering as to how I could shoot
and hit my victims in the dark. They did not
only state this, but implied this by saying it was
a well lit night and I could see the silhouettes
(08:58):
on the horizon. Bullshit. That area is surrounded by high
hills and trees. What I did was tape a small
pencil flashlight to the barrel of my gun. If you notice,
you'll see a black or dark spot in the center
of the circle of light. One taped to a gun barrel.
The bullet will strike exactly in the center of the
(09:19):
black dot in the light. All I had to do
was spray them is if it was a water hose.
I was not happy to see that I did not
get front page coverage.
Speaker 7 (09:34):
When he sends that second letter, now he's the Zodiac killer.
He has chosen his own name, his own moniker. And
although a lot of serial killers throughout history have nicknames,
most don't choose their nicknames for themselves. So that name
had some meaning to him that we don't know. But
(09:55):
if you look at the handwriting in the Zodiac letters,
especially the ones that accompany the cipher, the handwriting looks
very sloppy. It looks kind of rushed and just natural handwriting,
like I just fired off this letter. Then you look
at the cipher, it's very clean and very careful. Each
part consisted of a block of symbols, letters from the
(10:16):
English language, symbols from astrology and other things, you know,
half filled circles backwards letters. They're tidy and then straight rows.
He might have used some sort of graphing paper underneath
when he was doing it to make sure of that,
which says something in and of itself about the killer
that tells you right there, this was very.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Important to him.
Speaker 7 (10:38):
It was more important than the letter. And when you
look at the cipher itself, it's chilling just to look
at it, because you know there's something in it, right,
But once you realize what's in it, it's even more frightening.
If he just wanted to brag about what he did,
he could do that, and he did in that letter.
The cipher is another element of this game he's playing.
(11:02):
It's not just I'm somebody who has to be taken seriously.
I'm dangerous. It's also I'm really clever, and I have
something else I want to say. If you want to
know who I am, you want to understand what I
did and why I do what I do, You're gonna
have to work for it. I'm not going to give
you everything.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
The police sent the three parts cipher to the nearby
Mare Island Naval Shipyard. There, navy code breakers rushed to
crack the Killer's code and to discover the Zodiac's true
identity before he killed again.
Speaker 9 (11:34):
On The published codes stopped hundreds of amateur cryptographers and
several intelligence agencies.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
But surprisingly it was actually two amateurs who ended up
solving it. A school teacher and his wife, Don and
Betty Harden, saw the code in the newspaper and just
decided to give it a shot. Tom Voyd, who runs
the website Zodiac killer dot com, recorded the Harden's daughter, Leslie,
at a two thousand and eight conference.
Speaker 10 (12:00):
Began on a Sunday morning fairly early, went on into
the afternoon, into the evening, and through the night. They
really became, in my eyes, the perfect code breaking team,
because my dad had the scientific approach and very logical practices,
and my mother had some.
Speaker 11 (12:19):
Intuition that led them in the direction that they needed
to go. My father at some point recognized that he
had to go to work the next morning, and when
he went.
Speaker 6 (12:26):
To that.
Speaker 11 (12:28):
Not so my mother. She did not sleep and ate
very little. The next morning, he got up and went
off to work.
Speaker 12 (12:36):
He was a school teacher, came back home and was
probably mildly surprised to find that there was no dinner
and nothing at all happened in the kitchen.
Speaker 13 (12:45):
She sat in the chair and he stood behind her.
And what really captured my attention for that moment was
not the code spread out in front of them at all.
It was the look of love on my father's face
as he paid over her.
Speaker 14 (13:03):
And Don Harden. He had a boyhood interest in codes.
You know, if it wasn't for Betty's persistence, they wouldn't
have finished it.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
That's David Auranjak, a programmer and amateur cryptographer. He's spent
the last decade fascinated by the Zodiacs codes.
Speaker 14 (13:23):
The first cipher was a simple substitution cipher, basically a
simple way to hide a message.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Essentially, you substitute each letter with a different letter. So
to make a cipher for the word kill, you might
substitute J for K, H for I, and b's for
both l's. And if you know which letters you substituted,
you can then decode JHBB back to kill. But without
(13:50):
knowing which letters were substituted, how do you crack that code?
The Hardens started by doing what's called a frequency analysis.
Speaker 14 (13:58):
You count up all the letters and how many times
they happen. One of the things about English is that
certain letters appear more often than others. In particular, the
letter E is the most frequently occurring letter in the
English language, and so you can use that information to
your advantage when you're looking at a ciphertext. If you
find that, say, the letter V is happening a lot
(14:20):
more often than the other letters, then there's a good
chance that it stands for the letter E. But the
way the Zodiac made it harder and the first cipher
was he would take a common letter like E, and
instead of assigning one ciphertext letter to it, he assigned
seven seven different symbols.
Speaker 1 (14:36):
That's why the Zodiac used backwards letters in astrological symbols
to make his code harder to crack. Undaunted, the Harden's
next tried what's called cribbing, plugging specific words into the puzzle.
On a simpler cryptogram, you could try to figure out
short words first.
Speaker 14 (14:54):
If the ciphertext has spaces in it, then you know
that certain words are likely to happen. For instance, if
you see a word that only has one letter, then
there's only two words that it can be A and I.
But in the first side for text, he did not
use word spaces, so that made it a little harder
to solve.
Speaker 1 (15:12):
Still, even without the spaces, you can try and guess
if certain groups of symbols represent common words.
Speaker 14 (15:19):
If you have a right guess and you plug it
in and you do the substitutions, other parts of the
plaintext will come out. So you'll see fragments of other
words like thhe. Well, there's a lot of words to
start with THG, so you might be onto something. And
if you made a bad guess, then those fragments will
look like nonsense. There'll be letters that are next to
(15:39):
each other that wouldn't really be next to each other ZQR.
That guess is probably wrong. And Betty is attributed to
the insight of thinking that he would start it by
talking about himself and so it would start with the
letter I, and that he would talk about his crime,
so he would mention killing. And those intuitions also came
from patterns that they observed in the ciphertext. They found
(16:03):
symbols that were repeating next to each other. Doing a
little research, they found, well, the most common doubled letter
in English is LL, and you know LLL appears in.
Speaker 7 (16:14):
A lot of words all.
Speaker 14 (16:16):
Will and kill, and so that was a good guess
on their part, because kill does appear in the message.
So they tried to plug in those words in different
places and eventually found other patterns, and then, through trial
and error, were able to crack the code.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Or at least almost crack the code. At the very
end of the message was a string of letters that
so far no one has been able to figure.
Speaker 14 (16:43):
Out the remaining eighteen symbols. It's just gibberish sequence of
letters that doesn't make any sense. Zodiac was claiming that
his identity was in the message, but when you decode
it with the Harden's key, it doesn't say anything about
his identity. But since the last eighteen are still undercoded,
that's led to a lot of people thinking, well, maybe
(17:04):
he did something else. There's some other process that is
different than the key for the rest of the message,
and there might be another message in there. Maybe he
really did put his identity in there and it's hidden somehow,
and those last eighteen and we just haven't figured it out.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Leslie, the Harden's daughter, remembers waking up in the middle
of the night after her parents cracked the code.
Speaker 11 (17:26):
Once the message became clear, it was a very frightening message.
Speaker 15 (17:34):
I do recall being in my room, coming in and
out of sleep, mostly nightmares and scary images, because the
words that were floating down the hallway were frightening words.
Speaker 11 (17:51):
Kill dangerous animal.
Speaker 1 (17:57):
This is the message that was hidden in the Zodia
Acts three parts cipher.
Speaker 8 (18:03):
I like killing people because it is so much fun.
It is more fun than killing weld game in the forest,
because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To
kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is
even better than getting your rocks off with a girl.
(18:24):
The best part of it is that when I die,
I'll be reborn in paradise and all that I have
killed will become my slaves. I will not give you
my name because you will try to slow down or
stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
Speaker 12 (18:53):
All of a sudden, what looks like a message, and
the question at hand was what do we do now?
They decided that they would do what the paper suggested.
The paper had said, I think you might have a solution.
Call this number.
Speaker 11 (19:08):
So they did. But once they did, it got a
whole lot more interesting.
Speaker 1 (19:24):
The decoded message didn't reveal the Zodiac's true identity, as
he had promised, but it did give clues as to
who the zodiac might be.
Speaker 7 (19:33):
In the Zodiac Seiphered message, he referred to man as
the most dangerous animal of all, which some people have
interpreted as a reference to the book and or the
movie The Most Dangerous Game. A lot of us who
are older, we had to read that story in high school.
And if you were a teenager who read that in
(19:55):
high school and you were harboring some sort of violent fantasies,
then you're not sympathizing with the victims the way most
of us do. When you read that story, do you
think about being the hunter Count Tsarov who lives on
this island where he has constructed things designed to make
ships crash on the shore so that people will be
(20:17):
deserted on this island.
Speaker 13 (20:18):
I'm not trying to intrude, but I'm in sort of
a jam. Are you the owner here? Yes?
Speaker 2 (20:23):
I am Count Zubtolf.
Speaker 7 (20:25):
And of course he pretends to be a gracious host
and invites them to stay and everything.
Speaker 5 (20:30):
God made some in kings, some big us me he
made a.
Speaker 7 (20:35):
Hunter, only for them to learn that he really intends
to hunt.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Them like animals here on my island.
Speaker 5 (20:41):
I hunt the Most Dangerous Game.
Speaker 8 (20:45):
You write me take half drowned men from ships you
wrecked and drive them out to be hunted.
Speaker 5 (20:51):
Only after the keel does man know the true extosial.
Speaker 7 (20:55):
Love Count Tzarov obviously the name starts with the letter Z.
He wears a costume of sorts, and he stalks his
victims like prey. The whole story is structured around the
idea that killing is sort of an intellectual exercise, that
(21:17):
it's sort of a right of man to hunt another
human being, that killing is part of human nature, and
the Zodiac may have been very drawn to a story
with those elements. He may have decided to emulate certain
aspects of Count Zaroff.
Speaker 16 (21:35):
And maybe that might explain the difference between those first
two attacks the Bliss create shootings at night.
Speaker 7 (21:44):
After that, it's not the same kind of crime because
in the story The Most Dangerous Game, Count Zarov doesn't
come out saying I'm going to kill you. He makes
you think that he's a friendly person. He wants you
to participate in his game. He needs you to feel
safe so that when you find out that you're no
longer safe, he can see that fear in you and
(22:07):
that fearrest part of the hunt, So I think with
the Zodiac there may have been some element of that
that he decided it's not enough for me to just
shoot these people. I need to talk to them. I
need to look in their eyes and see them going, oh,
everything's okay now, and then look in their eyes when
I flip on them and they find out that this
is not what they thought and that their lives.
Speaker 9 (22:28):
Are at statement.
Speaker 1 (22:32):
Why did the Zodiac quote the villain from what at
the time was almost a fifty year old story. Maybe
it's how he saw himself a movie villain playing with
his victims. There were other possible clues about the Zodiac's
identity hidden in the cipher, such as this line, to
kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is
(22:53):
even better than getting your rocks off.
Speaker 8 (22:54):
With a girl.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Psychiatrists at the time speculate that this line reflected the
killer's feelings of sexual inadequacy, but it may have also
been literal. The Zodiac may be a sadist, someone who
feels excitement or pleasure from inflicting pain. To learn more
about sadism, we spoke with criminal psychology professor Eric Hickey.
Speaker 9 (23:18):
My name is doctor Eric Hickey. I'm a criminal psychologist.
Some days I'm just a criminalistimes I'm just a psychologist.
Speaker 1 (23:27):
Professor Hickey literally wrote the book on serial killers. It's
a textbook called Serial Murderers and Their Victims.
Speaker 9 (23:35):
One day I got a phone call from the media
and there was a case of a mass murderer. When
they searched his car, they've found a couple of books
in the backseat of his car, and one of the
books was my book on sera murder. They said, doctor Key,
how do you feel about the fact that this serial
or mass murderer had your book in his car? Like
(23:56):
I'm supposed to feel badly that I wrote a book
about serial murders. No, And I said, well, why would
I be upset about that? The point is this is
for public education to make it more aware of these
types of people.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
Professor Hickey says two thirds of serial killers are sexual predators,
and many have unusual desires like sadism. Hickey says that
even though the Zodiac didn't sexually assault his victims, the
killings could have been sexually motivated.
Speaker 9 (24:25):
So sadism is what we call it paraphilia perophilia, meaning
that they get sexual arousement and gratification through bizarre imagery, fantasies,
and behavior. There's hundreds and hundreds of paraphilia, and probably
a sixty percent of them are not criminal. If people
want to have sex with doorknobs, that's their business, it's
(24:46):
not a crime. A person could have a footfeth that's
not a crime. It is a crime. However, if they
break into people's homes and peel off their blanket while
they're asleep and stuck on their toes, that's a crime.
So there's a whole variety of criminal paraphilia that are
not physically harmful, but they are still criminal, like voyeurism, exhibitionism,
(25:09):
somnophilia where you would like to watch people asleep. Those
are criminal, but nobody gets hurt. But people who are
driven to kill serially, those not the kind out less
they're looking for. If you're a serial killer and you're statistic,
you're not into consent. You want to be able to
do what you want to do. A Zodiac and no
problem killing people and making them suffer as he did it.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Hickey thinks of the Zodiac sadism likely extended beyond the
killings to the letters, the puzzles, the.
Speaker 9 (25:38):
Way he taught the police. There was an element of
sadism there. He liked creating fear in the public's eye.
I'm sure that he liked reading about himself in newspapers.
That would have been quite gratifying to him. He could
become kind of contact the Ripper.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
Jack the Ripper also sent letters to newspapers when he
terrorized London in the late eighteen hundreds. One read the
next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ears
off and send the police officers just for jolly. Many
thought it was a hoax, until three days later a
woman was found dead, her ear lobe severed.
Speaker 9 (26:12):
I think that that was something that the Zodiac and
was trying to attain. Was that sort of notoriety. He
held the city of San Francisco in fear. It was
all his doing, and that would make him feel very powerful,
and it gave him great pleasure in doing it. So
there was that sort of sadistic approach, not just to
his victims, but also to the general public.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
So the Zodiac is likely a sadist, a term named
after the Marquis de Sod, a French philosopher and novelist.
Sod wrote in his book Juliet, it is an article
of faith on the island of Borneo that all those
persons a man kills will be his slaves in the
next world. And as a result, the better a man
wishes to be served after his death, the more he
(26:59):
kills during life, which brings us to the end of
the cipher.
Speaker 8 (27:04):
When I die, I'll be reborn in paradise, and all
that I have killed will become my slaves. I will
not give you my name, because you will try to
slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Had the Zodiac read that passage from the Marquis de
Sade or heard about these beliefs somewhere else. Either way,
this fantasy of slaves in the afterlife speaks to the
Zodiac's intense desire for power and control. The Zodiac's murders
and phone call were cold hearted, his letters were twisted,
(27:43):
but the decoded cipher revealed just how truly deranged the
Zodiac was. As San Francisco would soon find out, what
they'd seen so far was just the beginning. The Zodiac
was ramping up. Professor Hickey told us serial killers often
intensify their crimes over time.
Speaker 9 (28:04):
There's sort of this evolvement with serial killers that we see.
There is a long process. Look at Jeffrey Dahmer. Nobody
wakes up in the morning and said, I'm an acrophile.
They wake up feeling that they want to be with
someone who's been buried. And that's what Dahmer did. He
wanted to be with someone who has been buried because
he has such low self esteem. He didn't feel comfortable
with the live person. And then he progressed wanted to
(28:26):
be with blow up dolls and mannequins and so on,
and then he progressed from that to dead animals, and
then from there he went into bringing people home, and
when they wanted to leave them, he'd make them unconscious,
then drill holes in their heads and put mer curic
acid in to make them into zombies. And then he
progressed from there to evisceraating them and then having sex
(28:47):
with the corpse and started cannibalizing them. He went down
this long, dark, dark pathway that each time he did,
his fantasies get more and more evolved.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
Like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac was also beginning to evolve.
His codes would become more complex, his letters increasingly bizarre,
and his murders more ritualistic and sadistic.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Next time on Monster the Zodiac.
Speaker 4 (29:18):
Killer, Celia Shephard and Brian Hartnell, both in their early twenties,
were sitting on this knoll of land overlooking part of
Lake Barriessa. They thought they were alone, but there was
a third man on this knoll, a man who wore
a medieval style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun
and intended to use.
Speaker 7 (29:39):
Them whenever redrive here.
Speaker 16 (29:41):
I'm like, Wow, he drove the same exact way just
to get here and do that.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
It is crazy to think about.
Speaker 7 (29:49):
This guy is a pathological, a psycho.
Speaker 5 (29:53):
Killer found this young girl in on the shoreland here.
I've had eleven years patrol on Miss Lake and I've
seen a lot of people cut up by boat accidents
and smaticism. One of the worst things I ever witnessed.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced
by iHeartRadio, House, Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Albright
and I are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV,
alongside producers Meredith Stebman, Mason Lindsay and Christina Dana.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
Jason Hoak is executive.
Speaker 2 (30:45):
Producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with producers
Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Scott
Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick is our host.
Original music is by Up in Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, make sure to check out the first season
of Monster called Atlanta Monster, about the Atlanta child murders
(31:08):
from the late seventies to the early eighties. Download the
ten episode season right now. Have questions or comments, email
us at Monster at HowStuffWorks dot com, or you can
call us at one eight three three two eight five
sixty six sixty seven.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
Thanks for listening.
Monster: The Zodiac Killer News
Hosts And Creators
Payne Lindsey
Matt Frederick
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