He Mailed Ciphers to the Newspapers and Dared Them to Catch Him. The Zodiac Killer.

In the summer of 1969, three Northern California newspapers opened letters from a man who said he had killed four people.

He gave details only the killer could know. He signed each letter with a circle and a cross, like the sight of a gun.

And he included a cipher. Rows of strange symbols. He said that inside it was his identity, and he demanded the papers print it on their front pages, or he would kill again.

They printed it.

He kept writing for five more years. He was never caught.

Lake Herman Road

On the night of December 20, 1968, two teenagers parked on Lake Herman Road, a quiet spot on the edge of Benicia, California, often used by couples.

David Faraday was 17. Betty Lou Jensen was 16. It was their first date.

Someone pulled up beside their car and opened fire. David was shot near the car. Betty Lou ran and was shot several times in the back. Both died.

There were no witnesses to the shooting. There was no obvious motive. Nothing was taken.

At the time, nobody connected it to anything else. There was nothing yet to connect it to.

Blue Rock Springs

On July 4, 1969, just before midnight, Darlene Ferrin, 22, and Michael Mageau, 19, were parked at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, a few miles from Lake Herman Road.

A car pulled up behind them, left, and came back. A man walked up with a bright flashlight, shone it into their eyes, and fired.

Darlene died. Michael was shot several times and survived.

About forty minutes later, a man called the Vallejo police from a payphone. He reported the attack, said he had also killed the two teenagers the year before, and hung up.

Michael described the shooter as a heavyset white man, about five feet eight inches tall, with light brown curly hair.

The letters begin

On August 1, 1969, three newspapers each received a letter: the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times-Herald.

Each letter described the attacks in detail. Each contained one third of a 408-symbol cipher. The writer demanded the ciphers be printed, or he would go on what he called a killing rampage.

A few days later, a letter introduced the name he would use for the rest of his life: "This is the Zodiac speaking."

The 408-symbol cipher was solved within a week, on August 5, 1969, by Donald and Bettye Harden, a schoolteacher and his wife in Salinas. They were not professional codebreakers.

The message said the writer killed because it was more fun than anything else, and that the people he killed would become his slaves in the afterlife.

It did not contain his name.

Lake Berryessa

On September 27, 1969, two college students, Bryan Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Shepard, 22, were relaxing by the shore of Lake Berryessa in Napa County.

A man approached wearing a black hood with a crosshair symbol on the chest. He carried a gun. He said he was an escaped prisoner and needed money and a car. He had them tie each other up.

Then he stabbed them both with a long knife.

Afterward, he walked to Bryan's car and wrote on the door in marker: the crosshair symbol, the dates of the earlier attacks, and the date of this one.

Cecelia died two days later. Bryan survived.

That evening, a man called the Napa police from a payphone to report the attack. The payphone was found with the receiver hanging. A palm print was lifted from it. It has never been matched to anyone.

Washington and Cherry

On October 11, 1969, a man got into a taxi in downtown San Francisco and asked to go to Presidio Heights.

At the corner of Washington and Cherry Streets, he shot the driver, Paul Stine, 29, in the head.

He tore off a piece of Stine's bloody shirt and walked away.

This time there were witnesses. Teenagers across the street watched from a window and called the police. They described the man, and a composite sketch was drawn. Two partial fingerprints were lifted from the cab.

Days later, a letter arrived at the Chronicle. Inside was a piece of Paul Stine's shirt.

The 340

On November 8, 1969, the Zodiac mailed a second cipher, 340 symbols long.

For 51 years, nobody could read it. Amateurs and professionals tried. It became one of the most famous unsolved codes in the world.

In December 2020, a team of three amateur codebreakers, David Oranchak in the United States, Sam Blake in Australia and Jarl Van Eycke in Belgium, solved it. The FBI confirmed their solution.

The message mocked the people trying to catch him. It denied that he was a man who had called a television talk show claiming to be the Zodiac. It said he was not afraid of the gas chamber.

Like the first cipher, it did not reveal his name.

Two shorter ciphers he sent in 1970, one of 13 symbols and one of 32, have never been solved. Most experts say they are too short to ever be solved with certainty.

The letters keep coming

The Zodiac wrote more than twenty confirmed letters between 1969 and 1974, to newspapers, to police and to a well-known San Francisco attorney.

He sent greeting cards. He threatened to attack a school bus. He mailed a map with a code he said would lead to a bomb. No bomb was ever found.

In a 1974 letter, he claimed to have killed 37 people. Investigators have confirmed only the five murders and two survivors from 1968 and 1969.

Other crimes have been suggested as his. A woman named Kathleen Johns said that in March 1970, a man pretending to help with her car drove her and her baby around for hours before they escaped. She later identified him from a wanted poster. That case has never been confirmed as his.

The last letter widely accepted as his was postmarked in January 1974. Then he stopped.

The investigation

Four police departments investigated the attacks, along with the California Department of Justice and the FBI.

San Francisco police alone estimated they looked at about 2,500 people. Only a handful were ever treated as serious suspects.

The man police focused on most was never charged. Handwriting, fingerprint and later DNA comparisons did not connect him to the letters, and he died in 1992. Under our rules, people who were never charged are not named here.

In 2002, investigators developed a partial DNA profile from saliva on the back of a stamp. In 2018, Vallejo police tried genetic genealogy, the method that caught the Golden State Killer. Neither has produced an answer.

San Francisco police called the case inactive in 2004 and reopened it a few years later. The FBI and local agencies still list it as open.

What we still don't know

Who was he? More than fifty years later, there is still no confirmed name.

How many people did he kill? Five murders are confirmed. He claimed 37.

Why did he stop writing in 1974? Did he die, move away, or go to prison for something else?

And what do the last two ciphers say? Thirteen symbols and thirty-two symbols, sent more than half a century ago, still unread.

If one of them really does hold his name, it is still waiting.