San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a city on the northern tip of the San Francisco Peninsula in California. Within the Zodiac case it is significant as the site of the October 1969 killing of cab driver Paul Lee Stine in the Presidio Heights neighborhood — the only one of the canonical Zodiac attacks to occur within the city itself — and as the home of the San Francisco Police Department, which investigated that murder and received several of the Zodiac letters.
Background
The city is governed under a unique consolidated city-county charter, with a mayor serving as county executive and an 11-member Board of Supervisors acting as the city council. It became a consolidated city-county in 1856. The name derives from Mission San Francisco de Asís, founded by Spanish settlers in 1776; the city was renamed from Yerba Buena to San Francisco in 1847 by alcalde Washington Allon Bartlett.
According to the 2020 United States census, the city’s population was 873,965. It is part of the broader San Francisco Bay Area, which during the late 1960s was the geographic theatre of the Zodiac attacks across San Francisco and the neighboring counties of Solano and Napa County, California.
Geography
San Francisco occupies roughly a ‘seven-by-seven-mile square’ at the north end of the peninsula, bounded by the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay. The city includes several islands, more than 50 hills, and neighborhoods such as Presidio Heights, where the Stine murder took place.