The Zodiac
“The Zodiac” is the name an unidentified offender adopted for himself in letters mailed to San Francisco Bay Area newspapers beginning in 1969. Over roughly a year he shot or stabbed seven people on four occasions between December 1968 and October 1969, killing five; he then sustained a public correspondence with the press for years, enclosing cryptograms, taunting investigators, and claiming a victim total that eventually reached thirty-seven. His identity has never been established and the case remains open.
This page describes the offender as he is known through the surviving evidence and the confirmed attacks. It does not assert who he was. Persons alleged over the years to be the Zodiac are recorded on their own pages as attributed claims; Zodiex names no offender.
The confirmed attacks
Police and investigators agree on a confirmed series of four attacks against seven victims; two survived. Each has its own page; the accounts below summarize them. See The Attacks for the series overview.
Lake Herman Road — December 20, 1968
David Faraday (17) and Betty Lou Jensen (16), high-school students on a first date, parked on a gravel turnout on Lake Herman Road just inside Benicia, a known lovers’ lane. Shortly after 11 p.m. an assailant pulled alongside and opened fire. Jensen got out of the passenger side; Faraday was shot in the head as he exited, and Jensen was shot five times in the back as she fled. Both died — Jensen at the scene, Faraday at the hospital. There were no witnesses and no usable physical evidence, and no suspect emerged from the initial investigation. Status: documented.
Blue Rock Springs — July 4–5, 1969
Darlene Ferrin (22) and Michael Mageau (19) were parked at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, about two miles from Lake Herman Road, shortly after midnight. A car pulled in, left, then returned; a man approached with a flashlight and, without speaking, fired a 9mm pistol into their car, wounding both, then returned and fired again before driving off. Ferrin died shortly after reaching the hospital; Mageau survived and described a heavyset white man, roughly 5’8” and 195–200 pounds, with a large face and curly light-brown hair.
Around 12:40 a.m., a man telephoned the Vallejo Police Department from a payphone near headquarters to report the shooting, gave its location, claimed the December murders as well, and hung up. Status: documented.
Whether Ferrin knew her attacker is a long-running open question. The theory that she did originates largely with Robert Graysmith’s interviews of her friends; Mageau gave conflicting statements, at one point naming the attacker “Richard,” and a definitive connection has never been proven. Status of the acquaintance theory: disputed — preserved as conflicting accounts.
Lake Berryessa — September 27, 1969
Bryan Hartnell (20) and Cecelia Shepard (22), college students, were picnicking on a spit of land at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. A man approached wearing a black hooded costume bearing a white crosshair symbol, brandished a gun, and had Shepard bind Hartnell with precut clothesline before binding her. He then stabbed both with a knife — Hartnell six times, Shepard ten. Hartnell survived; Shepard, who gave a description before lapsing into a coma, died two days later.
On the victims’ car door the assailant wrote the crosshair symbol and a tally of the three attacks by date. He then drove to Napa and telephoned the county sheriff from a downtown payphone to report the crime, leaving the receiver hanging; a wet palm print was lifted from it but never matched. Several people had seen a heavyset man near the lake earlier that day, and witnesses helped produce a composite sketch. Napa County detective Ken Narlow worked the case from the outset. Status: documented.
Presidio Heights — October 11, 1969
Paul Stine (29), a taxi driver and doctoral student, picked up a fare in downtown San Francisco bound for Presidio Heights. Near Washington and Cherry streets, around 9:55 p.m., the passenger shot Stine in the head and took his wallet and keys. Three teenagers watched from across the street and phoned police as the man wiped down the cab; the offender left two partial fingerprints from his right hand. A dispatcher relayed an erroneous description of the suspect as Black, and two responding officers passed and questioned a white man walking toward the Presidio, letting him continue. The Zodiac later claimed to have been that man.
Detectives Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi were assigned; Toschi eventually worked the case largely alone, accumulating eight filing cabinets of suspects. In 1976 he characterized the offender as a local “weekend killer” — intelligent and better educated than his frequent misspellings suggested, likely in a job that kept him near home. (In 1978 Toschi was removed from the case after admitting he had written anonymous letters praising his own work to a newspaper columnist; SFPD concluded he had not written any of the Zodiac letters.) Status: documented.
The letters and ciphers
From 1969 to 1974 the offender sent more than twenty letters to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Examiner, the Vallejo Times-Herald, the Los Angeles Times, the writer Paul Avery, and the attorney Melvin Belli — taunting police, threatening further violence, and demanding publication. Each has its own page; the chronology below is the spine.
1969
- August 1 — Three nearly identical letters reached the Vallejo Times-Herald, Chronicle, and Examiner, each enclosing one-third of a 408-symbol cipher (Z408). The writer claimed his identity lay in the cipher and threatened a weekend killing spree if it went unpublished. Vallejo’s police chief publicly doubted the letters were genuine and asked for proof.
- August 4 — A letter to the Examiner opened, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” the debut of the name. It supplied crime details and pointed investigators back to the cipher.
- August 5 — Z408 was solved by Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, schoolteachers and not cryptologists; Bettye correctly guessed the word “kill” would appear. The decoded text — heavy with misspellings and echoing Richard Connell’s story “The Most Dangerous Game” — began with the offender’s claim that he killed because it was more fun than hunting game, and that his victims would become slaves in an afterlife. It revealed no identity. A prison psychiatrist who reviewed it described a writer who felt omnipotent and was likely isolated. Status: documented (Z408 solved).
- October 13 — A letter to the Chronicle enclosed a bloodstained swatch of Paul Stine’s shirt, boasted of the murder, and threatened to shoot schoolchildren off a bus.
- November 8 — A card enclosed a 340-symbol cipher (Z340), which would remain unsolved for 51 years.
- November 9 — A seven-page letter claimed the offender had been stopped and questioned by police minutes after the Stine shooting, and included a diagram of a school-bus bomb.
- December 20 — A letter to Melvin Belli, one year after the first murders, enclosed another swatch of Stine’s shirt and pleaded that the writer could not “remain in control” much longer.
1970
- April 20 — A letter began “My name is —” followed by a 13-symbol cipher (Z13), never definitively solved. (Proposed solutions include cryptologist Craig Bauer’s “Alfred E. Neuman” and Ryan Garlick’s “Dr. Eat a Torpedo”; none is confirmed.) The same letter denied a recent SFPD station bombing and included another bus-bomb diagram.
- April 28 — A greeting card threatened a “blast” and demanded the public wear Zodiac buttons.
- June 26 — A letter enclosed a Phillips 66 map with a crosshair drawn on Mount Diablo and a 32-symbol cipher (Z32), which the writer said would reveal a buried bomb’s location. Z32 has never been decoded and no bomb was found. In 1981 Gareth Penn argued the “radians” hint aligned three attack sites along a radian centered on Mount Diablo. Status of Penn’s geometry: theory.
- July 24 & 26 — Two letters complained that no one wore the buttons, parodied “I’ve Got a Little List” from The Mikado, and referenced the woman and infant he had driven around — matching Kathleen Johns’s account of her March abduction.
- October — A “13-hole punch card” and a Halloween card to Paul Avery.
1971–1974
- March 13, 1971 — A letter to the Los Angeles Times claimed seventeen victims and referenced “Riverside activity.”
- January 29, 1974 — After nearly three years’ silence, a letter to the Chronicle praised The Exorcist, quoted The Mikado, bore an unexplained symbol, and signed off “Me = 37, SFPD = 0.” This is the last letter generally accepted as authentic.
Z340 solved (2020)
On December 5, 2020, an international team of private citizens — software engineer David Oranchak, mathematician Sam Blake, and programmer Jarl Van Eycke — cracked Z340 using Van Eycke’s AZdecrypt software. The decoded message taunted investigators, denied being a caller who had earlier contacted a TV program, and again invoked the offender’s belief in an afterlife; the FBI verified the solution and confirmed it offered no further clue to his identity. Status: documented.
Unconfirmed correspondence
Numerous later letters carried the Zodiac’s hallmarks but were never authenticated, including a 1973 letter to an Albany, New York paper, a 1974 letter about the Symbionese Liberation Army, the “Badlands” and “Red Phantom” letters of 1974, and a 1990 Christmas card postmarked Eureka and discovered in Chronicle files in 2007. Status: unverified.
Disputed victim count and possible additional crimes
There is no consensus on how many people the Zodiac killed. The confirmed total is five dead and two survivors across the four attacks. The offender himself escalated his claimed total to thirty-seven; in 1976 Toschi credited “at least six,” and Graysmith later estimated as many as forty-nine. Many other crimes have been proposed as Zodiac killings, none confirmed — each is recorded here and on its own page as an attributed claim or theory, not as a finding:
- Raymond Davis (Oceanside cab driver, April 1962) — connected by a researcher in 2019 on parallels to the Stine murder; under inquiry. Theory.
- Robert Domingos & Linda Edwards (Gaviota beach, June 1963) — bound-with-precut-rope method resembling Lake Berryessa; a Santa Barbara sheriff called a connection probable in 1972. Theory.
- Johnny & Joyce Swindle (Ocean Beach, San Diego, February 1964) — .22 sniper attack with parallels noted by investigators. Theory.
- Cheri Jo Bates (Riverside, October 1966) — beaten and stabbed; followed by typed “Confession” letters and a desktop poem a state document examiner once attributed to the Zodiac; the offender’s 1971 letter referenced “Riverside.” Culpability unconfirmed. Disputed.
- Enedine Molina & Fermin Rodriguez (Alameda County, June 1967); John Hood & Sandra Garcia (Santa Barbara, February 1970) — proposed on locational and methodological parallels. Theory.
- Kathleen Johns (March 1970) — abducted while pregnant, with her infant, and escaped; the Zodiac later referenced the episode, though her account and his claim are not fully reconciled. Disputed.
- Sgt. Richard Radetich (SFPD, June 1970) — the Zodiac claimed a .38 shooting matching the date; SFPD does not consider him a suspect in it. Disputed/debunked link.
- Donna Lass (Stateline, Nevada, September 1970) — disappeared; a postcard to Avery is argued to reference her; her remains were identified by DNA in 2023. Theory.
- The Santa Rosa hitchhiker murders (1972–73) and the so-called “Astrological Murders” — clusters proposed as Zodiac-linked on thematic grounds. Theory.
Investigation and status
By 2009, SFPD was reported to have examined some 2,500 suspects, of whom only about half a dozen were considered credible. The case has been worked across multiple jurisdictions — Vallejo PD, the Napa and Solano county sheriffs, SFPD, the California Department of Justice, and the FBI. SFPD marked the case inactive in 2004 and reactivated it in 2007; it remains open in Riverside and Napa. Vallejo PD attempted a genetic-genealogy approach via GEDmatch in 2018 without a definitive result; the FBI’s investigation was described as ongoing as of 2021. Status: open / unverified.
Suspects
The only person ever named as a suspect by police was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who was interviewed from early in the investigation, subjected to search warrants over two decades, denied involvement, and died in 1992. Some detectives regarded him as the most likely suspect; Toschi said in 2010 that the evidence against Allen had ultimately “turned out to be negative.” Other names advanced over the years by professional or amateur investigators include Earl Van Best Jr., Gary Francis Poste, Giuseppe Bevilacqua, Lawrence Kane, Paul Doerr, Richard Gaikowski, Richard Marshall, and Ross Sullivan.
Each suspect is handled on their own page as an attributed claim, with the source of the allegation named. None has been confirmed. Status: claim (per page).
Legacy
The Chronicle has called this the most famous unsolved murder case in American history. It sustained a durable subculture of “Zodiologists” and a large literature, the most influential being Graysmith’s Zodiac (1986), later the basis for David Fincher’s 2007 film. The offender’s persona shaped fictional killers from Dirty Harry onward, inspired self-styled copycats, and became an internet meme — all of which has tended to inflate the legend well beyond the scale of the crimes themselves.