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50 Years Since First Zodiac Killings



Next Thursday, December 20, it will be 50 years since a killer with a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol sneaked up on two high school students parked on a windswept lover’s lane in Benicia, California. Shot down as they scrambled in terror to get away, the young couple died in a spray of gunfire, leaving an unusually messy crime scene. The killing 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 additional Bay Area victims would be shot or stabbed – three of them died and two others were scarred for life. Although the carnage spanned less than a year, The Zodiac earned his place in serial killer history, though he was never caught.



Considering the homicidal tumult of the 1960s and 70s, the number of his victims was actually somewhat low. Charles Manson was instrumental in the murders of eight individuals. Ted Bundy killed 30-something women and girls; the Zebra Killers, a group of black Muslims, murdered at least 15 innocent white people. Unhinged San Francisco preacher Jim Jones ordered the deaths of in excess of 900 people in Jonestown, Guyana.



Nevertheless, there was something different about The Zodiac: He sent a flurry of taunting letters and cryptograms to The Chronicle and others. “This is the Zodiac speaking” was his opening and the missives 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 if The Chronicle didn’t print his message. The paper published the letter. The Zodiac also threatened to assault a school bus by shooting out the front tire so he could “pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”



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 concluded in exasperation. “Very frustrating.”



Like the Zodiac, London’s Ripper had five confirmed kills within the space of one year in 1888, sent taunting letters to local newspapers and never was caught. The havoc he wreaked had the same sort of effect on the population that the Zodiac did 80 years later.



The Zodiac’s murders and taunts terrified people across Northern California from 1968 to 70. His crimes inspired the 1971 Dirty Harry movie and spawned generations of amateur sleuths around the world who have named hundreds of suspects they believe are absolutely, without question, the killer. Meanwhile, the authorities have named 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 died of a heart attack in 1992 at the age of 58 before detectives could gather enough evidence to charge him. Ever since, police from Napa, Solano and San Francisco counties, where the killings occurred, have pored over every clue they have filed in teeming storage boxes and closets, not to mention the streams of tips that still come in. San Francisco alone has about 30 boxes of evidence, including the blood-spattered door of the taxi in which the Zodiac shot his last victim, cab driver Paul Stine, 29, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood on October 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 murders in Benicia and the Stine killing, there were two additional 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 provided descriptions of the killer. Over the years, they have rarely spoken of the Zodiac in public.



The investigators working the case today would not speak on the record for this article. A few who worked it in the past, however, still refuse to give up on the idea the killer will be identified some day. If the perpetrator turns out to be someone other than Allen and is still alive, he likely would be in his mid-80s or 90s, given 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,” insisted 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.”



In 1974, well after he killed his last victim, the Zodiac was still sending letters to the Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and Vallejo Times-Herald, ultimately claiming 37 victims. Investigators have confirmed the aforementioned five killings only 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 earlier 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 possible. The Zodiac also was apparently very careful about minimizing helpful clues in the form of saliva, fingerprints or blood. Accordingly, many investigators believe the chance of a useful hit turning up in the profiles is slim at best. One police source who couldn’t speak publicly observed, “With the Golden State Killer, they had a full strand of DNA. Not Zodiac. We have crumbs, and not good ones.



“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 doesn’t believe Allen is the killer, but rather a deceased San Francisco businessman. “The evidence is way too old and over-handled,” he claimed.



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 insisted. “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.” Voigt maintains the exhaustively-researched Zodiackiller.com site. His top suspect: Richard Joseph Gaikowski, a Martinez newspaperman who died in 2004.



Of all the Zodiac evidence, the three items 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 received by 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 individuals because it is in such a simple hand and the artist’s rendering depicts the typical early-1960s fellow with a crewcut 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,” insisted 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.”



This is an impression shared by former KTVU-TV crime reporter Rita Williams, the last person known to have interviewed Allen, shortly before he died, at the suspect’s home in Vallejo. Williams said that although Allen denied being the Zodiac, he fit the murderer’s profile in many ways. Following the interview, Allen wrote Williams a letter containing a hand-written “Z” identical to the Z 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 poor grammar in the letter Williams received was similar to that of the Zodiac. “I remember him showing me tons of things on his shelves, and so many looked like clues,” Williams recalled. “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.’”



Sources: Kevan Fagan, The San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 2018; Tom Voigt, Zodiackiller.com; and Zodiac by Robert Graysmith.



Illustration: Robert Graysmith, The Chronicle, 1969.

