The Zodiac case, 50 years later Tracing the decades-long fascination with ‘our Jack the Ripper,’ responsible for a series of unsolved Bay Area slayings

The Zodiac case, 50 years later Tracing the decades-long fascination with ‘our Jack the Ripper,’ responsible for a series of unsolved Bay Area slayings

He is our Jack the Ripper.

Fifty years ago this week, a psychopath with a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol sneaked up on two high school students parked on a windswept lover’s lane in Benicia. Shot down as they scrambled in terror, the young couple died in a spray of gunfire. It was an unusually messy crime scene.

The killing on Dec. 20, 1968, of David Faraday, 17, and his 16-year-old date, Betty Lou Jensen, marked the beginning of what became the twisted legend of the Zodiac Killer. By the time he was done, five more victims across the Bay Area would be shot or stabbed — three of them killed, two left barely alive but scarred for life.

Although the carnage spanned less than a year, the moniker Zodiac Killer was cemented into history. He would never be caught.

Considering the homicidal tumult of the 1960s and ’70s, the number of his victims was actually somewhat low. Charles Manson murdered eight people. Ted Bundy killed 36, the Zebra Killers 14. Unhinged San Francisco preacher Jim Jones ordered the deaths of more than 900 in Jonestown, Guyana.

But this sadistic murderer had a repulsively unusual characteristic.

As he killed, the Zodiac mailed a flurry of taunting letters and cryptograms to The Chronicle and others. “This is the Zodiac speaking,” they opened, and were often signed with a rifle-sight crosshairs symbol.

He claimed to love killing because “man is the most dangerous game,” and once threatened to massacre a dozen people unless The Chronicle printed his message. The paper published the letter. The Zodiac also threatened to wipe out an entire school bus by shooting out the front tire so he could “pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”

Timeline: Zodiac still a puzzle 50 years later

Fifty years later, with the case still unsolved, the Zodiac Killer’s death crusade is perhaps the most infamous murder mystery in America.

“There have been a lot of terrible crimes in the city, but nothing ever quite like the Zodiac case,” said San Francisco Police Homicide Inspector Gianrico Pierucci, who investigated the case for several years before retiring last year. “It was crazier than hell. There are thousands of potential suspects and lots of evidence, and it’s a tough one. Nobody ever even got arrested.

“He’s our Jack the Ripper. It’s been 50 years, and all we have is two sketches of a white male with glasses?” he said in exasperation. “Very frustrating.”

Written on greeting card mailed to a San Francisco newspaper (Chronicle) by a killer who calls himself Zodiac and included a letter and a cryptogram in San Francisco on Nov. 11, 1969. Police say Zodiac has killed five, but in his new communications Zodiac claims seven. The writer lists the months the killings took place at the bottom, with the total ?and I can?t do a thing with it!? refers to a drawing on the card showing a dripping wet pen with the salutation: ?Sorry I haven?t written, but I just washed my pen?? less Written on greeting card mailed to a San Francisco newspaper (Chronicle) by a killer who calls himself Zodiac and included a letter and a cryptogram in San Francisco on Nov. 11, 1969. Police say Zodiac has ... more Photo: Associated Press 1969 Photo: Associated Press 1969 Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Zodiac Killer case, 50 years later: Tracing the legend of ‘our Jack the Ripper’ 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Like the Zodiac, Britain’s Ripper had five confirmed kills within the space of one year in 1888 London, sent taunting letters to newspapers and never was caught. The havoc he wreaked had the same sort of effect on the population that the Zodiac did.

The Zodiac’s murders and taunts terrified people across Northern California from 1968 to 1970. His crimes inspired the 1971 movie “Dirty Harry” and spawned generations of amateur sleuths around the world who have named literally thousands of suspects they believe are absolutely, without doubt, the killer. Police investigators, meanwhile, have named only one suspect: convicted child molester Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo.

Allen owned boots identical to those worn by the Zodiac, and said in an interview once that his favorite short story was “The Most Dangerous Game,” which the killer had referenced in one of his letters. He was picked out in a photo lineup many years after the attacks by one of the Zodiac’s surviving victims. He also wore a watch with the Zodiac’s crosshairs symbol on it, reportedly partially confessed to a friend interviewed by investigators — and was fingered as the culprit in former Chronicle political cartoonist Robert Graysmith’s authoritative 2002 book, “Zodiac Unmasked.”

Allen, however, died of a heart attack in 1992 at age 58 before detectives could make enough of a case to charge him. Ever since, police from Napa, Solano and San Francisco counties, where the killings occurred, have continued to scrape through every clue they have filed in teeming storage cases and closets, not to mention the streams of tips that still pour in.

San Francisco alone has about 30 boxes of evidence, including the blood-spattered door of the taxi in which the Zodiac shot to death his last victim, cabbie Paul Stine, 29, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood on Oct. 11, 1969. Other departments also have car parts from the murder scenes and plastic rope the Zodiac used to tie up victims.

Between the first homicides in Benicia and the Stine killing, there were two more Zodiac attacks on dating couples: In July 1969 in Vallejo, he shot Michael Mageau, 19, and Darlene Ferrin, 22; and in September 1969 at Lake Berryessa, he stabbed Cecelia Shepard, 22, and Bryan Hartnell, 20. Mageau and Hartnell both survived and gave descriptions of the killer. They rarely speak about the Zodiac in public.

None of the investigators working the case today would speak on the record for this story. A few who worked it in the past, however, refuse to give up on the idea that the killer will be identified some day. If the Zodiac turns out to be someone other than Allen and is still alive, he probably would be in his mid-80s or 90s, given that he was described at the time as appearing to be 35 to 40 years old.

“I can’t help but believe he is somewhere in our files, that the answers are in there somewhere,” said long-retired San Francisco homicide Inspector Frank Falzon, one of the earliest investigators on the case. “With all these different law enforcement agencies, it’s got to be solved someday.”

Through 1974, well after his last known victim, the Zodiac sent about two dozen letters to The Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Vallejo Times Herald, ultimately claiming 37 slayings. But investigators only ever confirmed those five killings and the two survivors.

For many years, the most hopeful new direction in the case has been DNA testing — the science that cracked the decades-old Golden State Killer case this year. Investigators in that case turned to genealogical sites to match a profile to an ex-police officer who now faces 13 counts of murder and 13 more of rape.

The Zodiac case, however, is more complicated. The letters and the few possible shreds of DNA evidence were handled extensively by detectives and others long before anyone knew DNA analysis was even a tool. The Zodiac also was apparently very careful about minimizing helpful clues in the form of saliva, fingerprints or blood. So, many investigators believe the chance of a useful hit turning up in the profiles is slim at best.

Said one police source, who couldn’t speak publicly: “With the Golden State Killer, they had a full strand of DNA. Not Zodiac. We have crumbs, and not good ones.”

How the San Francisco Chronicle was involved

“I think the hunt for DNA is an illusion, a dog-and-pony show,” said Mike Rodelli, who wrote the 2017 book “The Hunt for Zodiac” after 20 years of research. He believes the killer is not Allen, but a deceased San Francisco businessman.

“The evidence is way too old and overhandled,” he said.

Tom Voigt, another private sleuth who has researched the case for decades, disagrees.

“The only thing that could solve it is the DNA — and that could happen tomorrow,” he said.

“He could be drinking coffee next to you, he could be sitting at the bus stop. Or he could be dead. But absolutely, it will be solved,” said Voigt, who runs the exhaustively researched Zodiackiller.com site. His top suspect: a long-dead Martinez newspaperman.

Of all the Zodiac evidence, the three things seized upon most by detectives and amateur sleuths are the handwritten letters, the ciphers and the sketches generated by the two survivors. But all are so open to interpretation that new tips are made to investigators and The Chronicle every month or so from people claiming to have solved the case.

Among the many theories: The Zodiac was the Unabomber, a gang of demented cops, the crazy uncle upstairs, the edgy neighbor, and so on. Dozens insist the killer was their father. But except for one long cipher sent in pieces to The Chronicle, Examiner and Vallejo papers in 1969, no detectives have been able to confirm a translation of the killer’s cryptograms, a crazy quilt of letters and symbols laid out in straight lines. The one that was solved — by a Salinas schoolteacher and his wife — offered little beyond the boast, “I like killing because it is so much fun.” The rest, according to FBI code experts, appear to be gibberish.

The killer’s handwriting also is easy to match to numerous people because it’s in such a simple hand, and the artist’s rendering depicts the typical early-1960s fellow with a crew cut and horn-rimmed glasses. In the minds of many, this leaves the lone named suspect — Allen, of Vallejo — as the mostly likely guy.

“I believe he did it, no doubt. There are just way too many coincidences that make way too much sense,” said John Henslin of Texas, who was a friend of victim Betty Lou Jensen — and whose sister, Sharon Stutsman of Nevada, was Jensen’s best friend. “Him murdering our friend ruined Christmas for all of us for life. Every year, every anniversary, we remember that killing all over again.”

In an email, Stutsman, who is ill and cannot speak clearly, fondly remembered Jensen as an “artist in every way ... funny, always happy.” Her father worked at the same Vallejo school district where Allen was employed as a janitor, and Henslin recalled that the family thought “he was creepy.”

That’s an impression shared by former KTVU-TV crime reporter Rita Williams, the last person known to have interviewed Allen, shortly before he died, at Allen’s home in Vallejo.

Williams said that although Allen denied being the Zodiac, he fit the killer’s profile in many ways. After the interview, Allen wrote Williams a letter containing a handwritten “Z” identical to the one on a widely publicized letter that some believe the Zodiac sent in 1967 to the father of an unconfirmed Riverside victim, before the Bay Area killings began. The letter to Williams also had bad grammar similar to the Zodiac’s.

“I remember him showing me tons of things on his shelves, and so many looked like clues,” Williams said. “It was almost like a game with him ... eerie.

“I said to the cameraman when we got into our car afterward: ‘We just talked to the Zodiac.’”

Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron