The Zodiac Killer: Five Murders, Four Ciphers, and a Name He Gave Himself

On the night of December 20, 1968, two teenagers parked on Lake Herman Road, a dark stretch outside Benicia, California. David Faraday was 17. Betty Lou Jensen was 16. It was supposed to be their first date.

Someone pulled up beside them and opened fire. David was shot in the head next to the car. Betty Lou ran and was shot five times in the back as she fled.

There was no letter. No name. Nobody knew yet that it was the start of anything.

Blue Rock Springs

Six and a half months later, just before midnight on July 4, 1969, Darlene Ferrin, 22, and Michael Mageau, 19, sat in her car in the Blue Rock Springs parking lot in Vallejo—a few miles from Lake Herman Road.

A car pulled in behind them, left, and came back. A man walked up, blinded them with a flashlight, and started shooting. Darlene died. Michael, shot several times, survived.

Less than an hour later, a man called the Vallejo Police Department. He reported the shooting, gave its location, and said he had also killed the two teenagers the December before. Then he hung up.

The letters

On August 1, 1969, three newspapers—the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner—each received a letter. Each held one third of a 408-symbol cipher. The writer demanded they print it on their front pages or he would kill again.

Days later another letter arrived, and in it the writer gave himself a name: "This is the Zodiac speaking."

The papers published the cipher, and within about a week a Salinas schoolteacher, Donald Harden, and his wife, Bettye, had cracked it. The first line reads, in its original misspelled capitals, "I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN." It promised his name. It did not contain it.

Lake Berryessa

On September 27, 1969, Bryan Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Shepard, 22, were picnicking on the shore of Lake Berryessa in Napa County when a man walked out of the trees wearing a black hood with a bib. On the chest was a white circle crossed by two lines.

He had a gun, and he tied them up. Then he stabbed them both with a knife. Before leaving, he wrote on the door of Hartnell's car with a felt-tip pen—the dates of the earlier attacks, and the date of this one.

Hartnell survived. Shepard died two days later.

Presidio Heights

Two weeks after that, on October 11, 1969, a man got into Paul Stine's taxi in San Francisco. Stine, 29, was a cab driver working his way through graduate school. In Presidio Heights, the passenger shot him in the head, then tore off a piece of his bloodstained shirt.

Minutes later, two patrol officers, Donald Fouke and Eric Zelms, passed a white man walking on Jackson Street. They didn't stop him. The first dispatch had told them to look for a Black suspect. When the corrected description came through, they searched the Presidio. The man was gone. How close they really came is still argued over.

Days later the Chronicle received a letter. Inside was a swatch of Paul Stine's shirt.

The 340

On November 8, 1969, the Chronicle received a second cipher: 340 symbols. This one resisted every attempt to crack it for 51 years.

In December 2020, three amateur codebreakers—David Oranchak in Virginia, Sam Blake in Australia, and Jarl Van Eycke in Belgium—solved it. The message had been written in a diagonal transposition on top of the substitution, which is why straightforward frequency analysis kept failing. The FBI confirmed the solution on December 11, 2020.

It says, in part: "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me." It talks about not being afraid of the gas chamber. Like the 408, it gives no name.

Two other short ciphers he mailed—a 13-character message he said contained his name, and a 32-character one tied to a map—remain unsolved. They're too short for anyone to prove a solution.

The suspect, and the score

Investigators looked at thousands of people. The man named most often was Arthur Leigh Allen, a Vallejo resident whom police investigated for years. He was never charged. His handwriting didn't match the letters, and a partial DNA profile developed later from envelope material didn't match him either. Allen died in 1992.

The letters kept coming into the 1970s. In one from 1974, the writer kept score: "Me – 37, SFPD – 0." Police have confirmed five murders and two survivors. The 37 is his claim, not theirs.

What's actually unsolved

San Francisco police marked the case inactive in 2004 and later reopened it. It remains open with the FBI and the local agencies in Vallejo, Benicia, Napa and San Francisco.

Solved: two of his ciphers—the 408 in 1969 and the 340 in 2020.

Unsolved: two short ciphers, and the only question that matters. Who wrote them.

He told the papers again and again that they'd never catch him. So far, he's been right.

Watch the full iRunReality episode above for the ciphers on screen, then tell us which part of this case you think investigators missed.