Zodiac and Unabomber - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 2/13/23

George Noory and true crime author Dr. Mark G. Hewitt discuss the theory that the Zodiac Killer is Ted Kaczynski.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast am on
iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast. Doctor Mark
Hewett with us DBA is a true crime of author
who travels the world in his quest for intriguing, unanswered
questions and enduring mysteries. Mark earned his master's degrees from
Calvin Theological Seminary and the University of Phoenix and a

(00:22):
doctorate from California Coast University with California inmate Guillermo E. Mendez.
He is the co author of Charles Manson Behind Bars
and the first Manson book From the Inside. He wrote
the critically acclaimed Zodiac serial killer trilogy, Hunted the Zodiac, Murders,
Profiled the Zodiac, Examined and exposed the Zodiac, Revealed which

(00:46):
we are talking about tonight. Mark, Welcome to the program.
Great to have you with us. It's an honor to
speak with you, George. Thank you for having me on
your show. What DBA normally in business means doing business
as right after your name is that That is no,
it is not. It stands for Doctor of Business Administration.
All right. I love that we're going to talk about

(01:08):
the Zodiac. We'll talk about Ted Kaczynski. We'll talk about
the tie in that you have gotten together, but let's
talk a little bit about the Zodiac Killer. For a while.
It has gone unsolved. It happened in the sixties. What
do you what can you tell us about the Zodiac Killer? Mark? Well,
to me, it's one of the greatest stories I've ever encountered.

(01:31):
It's a mystery on so many levels. It's not only
an unsolved serial killing case, but there are many side
issues within the case that are continuing to be debated
to this day. It's one thing to not catch a
killer and not know who's responsible for this series of events,
but it's it's even more fascinating to discuss a number

(01:55):
of cases beforehand, before the canonical five murders, and after
the canonical five murders, whether or not the Zodiac was
involved with those, and various aspects of the case within
those five differences of opinions, but also differences of facts.
People involved in the case remember things differently, and they

(02:17):
have differing accounts of what took place, So you know,
what is the actual series of events, how exactly did
they take place? To me, that's very fascinating. They blame
five murders on the Zodiac Killer, Yet the Zodiac claimed
in letters to newspapers that he killed thirty seven people.
Do you think it's somewhere in between? Almost certainly that

(02:40):
number thirty seven is running up the telly trying to
invoke more fear among the citizens of the Bay area.
I am firmly convinced at least one of there is
one prior to the canonical five that was the zodiacs,
and a number of that he has made reference to

(03:01):
have not been solved. So we have to say, why
haven't they been solved? Maybe he was involved in them.
Only one person, only one suspect, was ever publicly named.
His name is Arthur Lee Allen, a former elementary school
teacher convicted sex offender, but he died in nineteen ninety two.
Have you ruled him out too? I have. It's no

(03:26):
wonder that the place took a very close look at him,
because there were a number of eerie coincidences that made
him look like a good suspect. The problem is, if
you dig into each one of those so called coincidences,
you realize that it may be nothing more than a coincidence,
and that he was not involved in them. A lot

(03:48):
of people have made Arthur Lee Allen out to be
this big, larger than life, scary villain and said, you know,
because he's large and scary, that makes him a serial color.
But what always happens when we catch a serial killer,
as all the neighbors say, well, he was such a
quiet person. We never suspected anything of him. We would
never believe that he would be involved in anything like that.

(04:10):
And yet every time there's an unidentified serial killer, people
start looking for somebody who's big and scary. What got
me off the Arthur Lee Allen case was the temperament
and the mode of interacting with the world. Arthur Leallen
was an attention seeking individual that he would walk into

(04:31):
the room and he would get attention one way or
the other. If he couldn't get an attention by being
by doing something positive, he would do something negative or
threatening or outrageous or inappropriate. He was very good at
getting attention. Somebody like that does not need to write
letters to the press to try to get attention of

(04:51):
the people of the Bay Area. The characteristic of the
letters of what the Zodiac revealed himself through his letters.
Somebody who was much more quiet and introspective, Probably somebody
who didn't get a lot of attention in his life,
somebody who was crying out for attention but didn't know
how to get it in either appropriate or inappropriate means.

(05:14):
And so the letters were his way of reaching out
and making threats and scaring people and that way getting attention.
And so to me, Arthur Lee Allen just did not
match up with the Zodiac mark. What got you interested
in the Zodiac serial killer case? I was first introduced
to the case by our roommate back in college. We

(05:36):
were both fans of true crime, and we were sharing
with one another some of the books that we read,
and he said to me, have you ever heard of
the Zodiac? And I hadn't, And I began to research
it after he talked to me about it, and I
was absolutely smitten with the case that there's so many
unanswered questions. Indeed, indeed, now let's talk a little bit

(05:59):
about Ted, because Ki the UNI bomber. Wasn't it his
brother who turned him in close? It was actually his
sister in law, his brother's wife. David was very resistant
to the idea that his brother was the UNI bomber. Obviously,
he didn't want to think that his brother was that person.

(06:19):
He didn't know any violence and his brother. So it
took his wife a while to actually convince him to
take a close look at it, and to take a
close look at the UNI Bomber manifesto and compare it
to some of Ted's letters and some of Ted's writings.
And it was her persistence that got Dad Ted's brother

(06:40):
to consider the idea and actually be willing to go
forward and approach attorneys and make contact with the FBI.
He's going to be eighty one in May, still alive
in prison and will probably just die there, won't he
That's correct. He was in Colorado for about twenty five years.

(07:00):
He was actually in Colorado for longer than he was
in Montana in his little cabin. But in December of
twenty twenty one, he was moved to North Carolina to
a health facility. Now, obviously the Department of Corrections is
unable to say anything about his health condition. I haven't

(07:22):
been able to confirm this, but rumor has it that
he expressed through a letter to somebody that he has
been diagnosed with cancer and told that he has two
years or that he had two years to live. So
that would be December of this year. December of twenty
twenty three is when they expect his time to run out,

(07:45):
so we could hear an announcement about him. Anytime. Have
you tried to interview him? I have. I corresponded with
him for a couple of years back in two thousand
and nine twenty ten, and what happen. Well, I got
some very interesting letters from him. I got some Zodiac

(08:07):
like wording that he sent to me, and his final
letter I call it my exorcist letter because it once
he found out who I was, I contacted him under
a guise of being interested in his manifesto, and I
really kind of sucked up to him and told him
how great he was, and told him everything that a

(08:28):
narcissist and sociopath would want to hear, just to continue
the dialogue. But once he found out that I was
studying the Zodiac case, he sent me one final, nasty,
scathing letter, which was as much anger as he could provide,
but it rang to me of a similar tone of
the Zodiac's last confirmed the Exorcist letter. Now the FBI

(08:52):
in the San Francisco Police Department, based on what they
say fingerprint and handwriting comparison ruled him out as a suspect.
How do you handle that? That's the word that's been
going around. Somebody has posted that online, that those two
departments have ruled them out. Neither of them have published
anything or come right out and said that it couldn't

(09:18):
be him. The best I could actually say is that
some people within those departments have looked into him and
were not able to make a match, and so they
moved on. I know the FBI did a fingerprint comparison
at the same time. All of the fingerprints in the
Zodiac case are from publicly available locations, and there's no

(09:40):
guarantee that those are Zodiac fingerprints. Why do you believe
Kazynski maybe the Zodiac Killer? Why do I believe? Yes?
The first thing that took me, actually, I should say,
first of all, when I heard the idea, I thought
was a ridiculous idea that he was there a the
same time. Wasn't he in California? He was? He was. Indeed,

(10:05):
he taught at UC Berkeley from sixty seven to sixty nine,
and he was in California in sixty six interviewing for
his position one that the first canonical murder took place
over the Christmas break during Kazynski's final year as a professor,
and thirty one days exactly one month after that, he

(10:26):
tendered his resignation. His final day at UC Berkeley was
June the thirtieth, nineteen sixty nine, and four days later
the murder at Blue Rock Springs Park took place. Following
his time at Berkeley, there's a two year gap in

(10:47):
Ted Kazinski's life. He gave his parents home address in Lombard,
Illinois as his mailing address, but he didn't stay there.
His mother speaks of regular travels that he took away
from that home. He would disappear suddenly without notice, so
he wasn't completely based in that location. And the bulk

(11:11):
of the Zodiac murders and the bulk of the Zodiac
letters took place during that two lost years of Kasinski's life. Now,
he pled guilty to all his charges back in nineteen
ninety eight. If he were the Zodiac killer, why wouldn't
he just come clean on that too. That's a very
appropriate question. That's a question that a lot of people ask,

(11:33):
and a lot of people point out the truth is
that Ted Kazinski does not want to be known as
somebody who is mentally ill. He was given a provisional
diagnosis of being schizophrenic by a quarter pointed attorney following
his arrest. He has adamantly declared that he is not
mentally ill. If he were to admit to the Zodiac killings,

(11:58):
he would be unable to make that claim that he
wasn't mentally ill, because there's a lot of craziness that
took place with that, especially the letters following the murders.
After he he turned a letter writing in lieu of killing.
Once he was cited after the final canonical killing, his
letters became more and more bizarre and more and more

(12:20):
desperate because people weren't taking him seriously anymore. It appeared
that he wasn't killing any longer. If he were to
admit that he was the Zodiac it would put into
question all of his life's work in the Unibomber manifesto
and claiming that he has a purpose in what he
is doing and has a reason and a justification for murder.

(12:43):
And what specifically, Mark, do you think was the cause
for you to believe that Kazynski is the Zodiac killer?
Wasn't anything specific I in my research gathered together evidence
of six clusters of information that linked the two. I

(13:03):
don't know if you want to go into those, please
go ahead, sure, but the first indication once I realized that,
once I thought it was a crazy idea to link
the two, then I recalled, oh yeah, the Zodiac included
two bomb diagrams as part of his letters, and obviously,
Ted Kazinski, the Unibomber, is known for his designing and

(13:26):
either setting or sending through the mail sixteen bombs over
the course of seventeen years. The bombs that the Unibomber
created Kazynski as the Unibomber, were very distinctive. The FBI
was able to identify them quite easily because they contained
redundancies such as two dowels that would go through a

(13:49):
pipe bomb instead of the usual one, or a backup.
He was very good at what he did. He was
extremely good. The two diagrams of the Zodiac bombs have
either two circus or one circuit used for two reasons
with a cloudy day disconnect, so the intricacy appears evident

(14:09):
in the universe in the Zodiac bombs as well. Another
cluster has to do with mathematics. The Zodiac was into codes.
He sent four codes as part of his letters. What
are codes? They're symbols to solve and where does coding
come from? It comes not from the military, It comes

(14:29):
from within mathematics. It's symbols, symbols that need to be solved.
And so it was no surprise that Ted Kaczynski, as
a mathematician, was very interested in coding and as somebody
who was a little bit paranoid, he put a lot
of his journaling into codes, and when he was arrested,
they found codes in his cabins that the FBI said

(14:53):
they hadn't encountered such complex codes since the Cold War,
and at least one of them they would not have
been able to solve if it were not for the
key that was also recovered from the cabin. Well. He
was a very intelligent person, extremely his IQ was measured
above one hundred and sixty. He skipped two grades, one

(15:16):
in elementary school one in high school, so he enrolled
at Harvard at the age of sixteen and then became
one of the youngest professors hired by UC Berkeley Math department,
and he hated that job. Though didn't he he did
not do well at it because he was unable to
socialize with people. His students gave him horrible feedback on

(15:40):
his lectures. They said he didn't care about his students.
He ignored questions, He just plowed through the material. He
read through the book and then left and didn't keep
his office hours. It's interesting that he only lasted about
two years when he was student teaching. When he went
to get his Masters of Mathematics, he lasted two years

(16:02):
and then gave it up so that he could focus
on his doctoral work. But then once he secured a
full time job with UC Berkeley, he only similarly lasted
two years and then quit. What was the most important
piece of information that drove you to believe that Ted
Kaczynski is the Zodiac Killer? Well, that's just it. It's

(16:26):
not one item. That's just an accumulation and stuffing. It's
it's very easy to say, oh, I noticed this connection
and then build a whole story around that. For me,
it was studying the case for several years before I
realized that a lot of it can deeal together into

(16:46):
a single story. I'll tell you one extremely important connection,
and that is the novel Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad.
To me reading it, it's almost a guide for the Zodiac.
It contains themes, it contains individual vocabulary items, phrases that

(17:07):
almost seemed to be an influence on the reader to
be fascinated by you're interested in or to actually go
out and produce the Zodiac serial Killer. And why is
that significant? Because the Secret Agent is reportedly ted Kazinski's
favorite book. He wrote to his family one time that

(17:28):
if they wanted to understand him, he was a hard
person to understand, but they needed to read that book
and they needed to especially take notice of a particular
character the professor within that book. And Kazynski claimed to
have read that book a dozen times. And I can
see how rereading that book would have an influence on
the letters that the Zodiac wrote. Listen to more Coast

(17:50):
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