The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes

THE ZODIAC KILLER by Colin Wilson

One evening just before Christmas 1968, a teenaged courting couple parked their car by a reservoir in the hills above San Francisco Bay, California. Minutes later, they were murdered in cold blood by a gun-wielding maniac. The killer was to become notorious throughout the United States as “Zodiac”. Six months later he struck again, but this time one of his victims survived and described the killer. Impatient at the inability of the police to catch him, the killer sent letters and a coded message to three different newspapers. Once deciphered, the cryptogram made chilling reading, but it took the police no nearer to the killer’s identity. After five murders, the killing stopped, but the mocking letters continued. The British author Colin Wilson (b. 1931) writes prolifically on crime, the occult and the paranormal.

It was the perfect night for young lovers: calm, moonlit and cold enough outside for the inside of the estate car to seem the most delightful place in the world. David Farraday and Bettilou Jensen were out on their first date on the night of 20 December 1968. They had spent most of the evening at the high school Christmas concert in nearby Vallejo, a small town about twenty miles (thirty kilometres) north-east of San Francisco, California. Now, at eleven-fifteen p.m., they had just parked near a concrete pump-house above Lake Herman reservoir. The heater blew warm air, the radio played pop music, and the seventeen-year-old boy and sixteen-year-old girl began to get better acquainted.

Suddenly, a man appeared at the window, and David Farraday found himself looking straight down the barrel of a gun. As the youth opened the door and started to climb out, the gun exploded. David Farraday fell dead instantly with a bullet wound behind his left ear. Bettilou flung open her own door and began to run. In the moonlight, it was impossible for the gunman to miss her; five shots ploughed into her back and she collapsed seventy-five yards (sixty-eight metres) from the car.

Only a few minutes later, another car drove past the pump-house. The woman driver saw the two bodies clearly in the headlights, but she did not stop; on the contrary, she put her foot down on the accelerator and drove fast towards the next town, Benicia, about six miles (nine kilometres) away, where she was going to meet her children from the Saturday evening cinema. A few miles further along the road she saw, with relief, the red, flashing light of an oncoming police car. Within minutes, two deputy sheriffs and a detective sergeant were on their way to the pump-house on the Vallejo-Benicia road.

The young couple were both dead, and the warmth of their bodies told Detective Sergeant Leslie Lundblad that they had died recently. But beyond that there seemed to be no clues. David Farraday’s wallet was intact in his pocket. Bettilou Jensen lay exactly as she had fallen, and her clothing was undisturbed. This, however, did not entirely rule out sex as a motive-it was conceivable that the killer had been disturbed by the passing car and taken refuge temporarily behind his victims’ car until it had gone. The woman driver had, it turned out, shown very good sense in not stopping to investigate.

There were two more possible explanations. The most obvious was jealousy. David Farraday was a good-looking young man; Bettilou was a pretty girl. Perhaps some rejected lover had followed them as they drove towards the lovers’ lane. The other possibility was rather more disturbing: that the killer was not a rejected lover, merely a reject-and a man who hated all lovers.

Lundblad’s investigations soon disposed of the jealousy theory. David and Bettilou were ordinary high-school students. Both had good scholastic records and David was a scout and a fine athlete. Neither had any “secret life” to investigate. It became clear to Lundblad that the two victims must have been chosen at random. Their killer had probably been hiding near the pump-house-a well-known resort for young lovers-waiting, like a hunter, for someone to arrive. It seemed probable that he had parked his car out of sight and sat in it until David’s estate car had arrived. Even that was only a guess; the ground was frozen too hard to show tyre tracks. Only one thing seemed clear: sooner or later, this hunter of human beings would probably experience the urge to kill again.

Six months passed and David Farraday and Bettilou Jensen became just two more statistics in California’s huge file of unsolved crimes. It looked as though their murders were an isolated incident until, shortly before midnight on 4 July 1969, another young couple parked their car in Blue Rock Springs Park, Vallejo, only two miles (three kilometres) from the place where David and Bettilou had died. The car, a brown Ford Corvair, belonged to the girl, twenty-two-year-old Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, a Vallejo waitress and mother of a young child. With her was nineteen-year-old Michael Renault Mageau, who worked for his father, a Vallejo businessman.

Soon after the couple drove into the car park, another car came and parked beside them. They were not particularly disturbed at this: there were various other cars in the park, the nearest of which contained several people. In any case, this second car soon went away, leaving them in peace. Ten minutes passed, and suddenly the same car returned, this time parking on the other side of the Corvair. A blinding beam of light, like a searchlight, shone through the window on the passenger side, which made the couple think that it was a police patrol car. A man opened the door and came over towards them. Suddenly there was an explosion of gunfire. Two shots struck Darlene Ferrin as she sat at the wheel; another ploughed into Michael Mageau’s neck and went up into his mouth, causing him to scream with agony. Then the man turned and walked back to his own car. He paused and fired another four shots, then drove away, backing out so fast that he left a smell of burning rubber behind him.

Michael Mageau, still conscious, saw him drive away. By this time he was lying on the ground beside the car, trying to reach the nearest other car in the park. But before he succeeded, this car also drove away: the occupants were obviously anxious not to get involved. Michael Mageau lost consciousness.

At four minutes past midnight, the switchboard operator at the Vallejo Police Headquarters received a call. A man’s voice told her, “I want to report a double murder. If you go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They are shot with a 9 mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye.” Then the line went dead.

When the police patrol car arrived at Blue Rock Springs Park, the officers discovered that the caller had been mistaken about one detail: it was not a double murder. Michael Mageau was still alive, although the bullet that had passed through his tongue prevented him from speaking. Darlene Ferrin was dead.

Michael Mageau slowly recovered. When he could speak, he was able to describe his assailant as a stocky, round-faced man, about five foot eight inches (1.72 metres) tall, with light brown wavy or curly hair. His age was around thirty. The gun he had used was not the same one as in the previous case; this one was a 9 mm whereas the other was a.22. But the Solano County Sheriff’s Department had little doubt that the caller was telling the truth when he admitted to killing David Farraday and Bettilou Jensen. And Lundblad now knew that his worst apprehensions were confirmed. The killer’s motive was not robbery, rape, or jealousy. This was simply a “nut”, a homicidal maniac who killed at random.

Again, there were no clues. Even the discovery that the killer had used a public telephone booth in a garage two miles from the murder scene failed to provide a lead. The garage had been closed at the time, so no one had seen the caller. The likeliest inference was that the killer was an inhabitant of Vallejo, or was at least familiar with the town, and knew where the garage was and that it would be closed. And since Vallejo was a small town, that seemed a promising lead. Surely somebody would recognize Michael Mageau’s description of the stocky, wavy-haired man who drove a brown car, probably a Ford?

But it seemed that no one did. And four weeks after the 4 July murder, the killer himself apparently became impatient with the police’s lack of progress and decided to liven up the investigation. On the morning of 1 August 1969 the editor of the Vallejo Times-Herald received a crudely scrawled letter, signed with a circle containing a cross, which looked ominously like the telescopic sight of a rifle. The letter-writer described himself as the man who had shot both couples, giving details that made it clear that he knew more about the murders than had been made public. For example, he gave precise details of the type of bullets that had killed Darlene Ferrin. He also mentioned the clothing worn by Bettilou Jensen, evidence that he had taken a close look at her body before fleeing from the scene.

The letter contained an enclosure-a third of a sheet of paper, covered with a strange cipher. What had happened to the other two thirds? The answer soon came. They were enclosed in two more letters, sent simultaneously to the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. The letters to all three newspapers were identical; the code was not. But the letter-writer explained that if the three fragments of the ciphered message were decoded and joined together, they would reveal his identity.

It was the signature on the letters-the circle with a cross inside it-that provided the killer with his nickname. The sign is the astrological symbol for the zodiac, the circle of twelve heavenly constellations. From then on, the newspapers called the killer “Zodiac”. All three letters contained the same threat: that if they were not published that same day, 1 August, the writer would “go on a rampage”: “This will last the whole weekend and I will cruise around killing people who are alone until Sun night or until I kill a dozen people.”

The letters were published-but not in their entirety. Certain details were withheld, including the murder threats. Most major murder cases provoke false confessions from the mentally ill; by withholding part of the letters, the police had a useful method of distinguishing between a harmless crank (who would not be able to say what was missing) and the real killer, if they were to make an arrest.

All three newspapers published the complete text of the cryptogram, together with a request that the letter-writer should provide more proof of his identity. Zodiac responded promptly, sending the San Francisco Examiner a letter beginning: “This is Zodiac speaking”, in which he gave more details of the crimes. But he provided no further clue to his identity.

Public attention now centred on the cryptogram. It was sent to naval code experts at the nearby Mare Island Naval Yard, but they failed to crack it. Amateur cryptanalysts all over the state experienced the same lack of success. But one man-a schoolteacher named Donald Harden, who lived in Salinas, California-had the inspired idea of looking for groups of signs that might fit the word “kill”, on the grounds that this word would be used more than once. When he had found the suspected group of signs, he began the long, slow business of working out other letters that might be associated with it-for example, endings like “-ing” or “-ed”. It took Harden and his wife ten hours to decode most of the letter. It read:

I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all to kill something gives me the most thrilling experience it is even better than getting your rock off with a girl the best part of it is when I die I will be reborn in paradise and all I have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting slaves for my afterlife…

The decoding was made more complicated by the fact that the cryptogram was full of spelling errors (such as “forrest” for forest and “sloi” for slow), and it ended in an incomprehensible jumble: “ebeori st me thh piti.”

But the threatened massacre (the “rampage”) did not materialize. Perhaps Zodiac was satisfied with the partial publication of his letter, or perhaps he never had any intention of going on a murder rampage on a weekend when every police officer in California would be looking for him. The threat was simply to cause the maximum amount of panic.

The public offered more than a thousand tips, and every one was checked by the police. Yet ten weeks after the murder of Darlene Ferrin, they were still apparently no closer to solving the crimes. The long, blazing hot summer drew to a close. On the afternoon of Saturday, 27 September, two students from Pacific Union College, a Seventh Day Adventist institution above Napa Valley, went out for a picnic on the shores of Lake Berryessa, about thirteen miles (twenty kilometres) north of Vallejo. Bryan Hartnell was twenty years old, and Cecilia Shepard was 22. They had just finished eating at about four-thirty p.m. when they heard a noise behind them. From the shadow of a tree, a hooded figure stepped out. On the part of the hood covering the figure’s chest was a zodiac sign, drawn in white. The short, pudgy figure advanced towards them, a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.

In a gruff voice, the man asked Hartnell for money, and the young man said he was welcome to the small amount he had on him. The hooded man then declared that he was an escapee from Deer Lodge State Prison in Montana, where he had killed a guard, and said that he needed to take their white sports car so that he could get to Mexico. Then he produced a length of plastic clothes-line and proceeded to tie them both up. As he tied Hartnell’s hands, the young man was able to see through the eye-slits in the hood that their assailant wore glasses and had brown hair. When he had tied both victims by the wrists and ankles, the man announced: “I’m going to have to stab you people.” Hartnell replied, “I’m chicken. Please stab me first-I couldn’t bear to see her stabbed.” “I’ll do just that,” said the man, and plunged the knife again and again into Hartnell’s back. Sick and dizzy with pain, Hartnell then watched the man attack Cecilia. This, obviously, was what the killer had been looking forward to. After the first stab he went into a frenzy, driving the knife again and again into her back. Then he turned her over and stabbed her repeatedly in the stomach. When he had finished, he went over to their car, took out a black felt-tipped pen and wrote on the passenger door. Then he left.

Fighting off unconsciousness, Bryan Hartnell managed to struggle over to Cecilia and undo her wrist bonds with his teeth. It made no difference; she was too weak to move. But fortunately help was already on the way. A fisherman on the lake had heard their screams and had seen the two bodies lying on the shore. He rowed straight to the headquarters of the park ranger and within half an hour Ranger William White was kneeling by the two victims, who both looked close to death. They had just been rushed off to hospital when the Napa police arrived. They, however, had not been summoned by the fisherman or the ranger. They had been alerted by an anonymous telephone call, a man with a gruff voice telling them: “I want to report a murder. No, a double murder. They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. I’m the one that did it.” There was no click to end the call; the man had apparently left the telephone to dangle off the hook.

Bryan Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard arrived at hospital in Napa; neither was able to speak. Cecilia died two days later without recovering from her coma; Bryan Hartnell recovered slowly, and was later able to describe their attacker. But by then the police already knew they were dealing with Zodiac. They found his sign on the passenger door of the sports car. He had also written two dates, 20 December and 4 July, the dates of the first two attacks; and a time, four-thirty, the time of the third attack.

Only six blocks from the police headquarters in Napa, the police found the public telephone from which Zodiac had made the call; the telephone receiver was still hanging off the hook. Technicians found three fingerprints on it, but this clue also led nowhere. The killer’s prints were not on police records in California; apparently he had no criminal record in the state. A check with Montana’s Deer Lodge State Prison revealed what the police already took for granted: the killer’s talk about escaping and killing a guard there was pure fantasy.

Two weeks later, on the evening of 11 October 1969, a student and part-time taxi-driver named Paul Stine picked up a passenger near the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill in San Francisco; he was a stocky man with brown hair and horn-rimmed glasses. A quarter of an hour later, two youths standing at the intersection of Washington Street and Cherry Street heard the sound of a gunshot. It came from a yellow cab that had pulled in to the kerb. As they watched, a man got out of the back seat, and leaned through the window into the front of the cab. There was a tearing noise, then the man began wiping the cab with a piece of cloth. Suddenly aware that he was being watched, he left the cab and began to walk rapidly along the street towards the great open space called the Presidio.

The youths alerted the police, who were at the spot within minutes. Paul Stine was slumped forward over the wheel of the cab. The twenty-nine-year-old student of San Francisco State College was dead, shot in the back of the head. The motive was robbery-his, wallet was missing and so was the cash from previous fares. The tearing noise the witnesses had heard had been Stine’s shirt, which the killer had used to wipe the cab, presumably to eliminate fingerprints.

It looked like a typical armed robbery, the kind that often occurs in San Francisco on a Saturday night. The only unusual feature about this particular crime was its sheer ruthlessness-the driver had been killed when he could just as easily have been left alive. It was not until the following Tuesday that the police realized that they had come close to catching Zodiac. The San Francisco Chronicle received a letter that began: “This is Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington and Maple Street last night. To prove this here is a bloodstained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the south bay area. The SF [San Francisco] police could have caught me last night if they had tried…”

The letter went on to jeer at the police for not making a thorough search of the Presidio, and commented on how much the killer detested the sound of the police motor cycles. It continued: “Schoolchildren make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the tyres and then pick off all the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”

The letter was signed with the mark of the Zodiac. By that time, a check on the bullet that had killed Stine showed that it came from the same.22 that had killed the first two victims ten months before. There could be no doubt that the letter was genuine. The bloodstained piece of cloth was from the tail of a shirt, and it fitted the torn shirt left on Paul Stine.

Was the killer serious about shooting children from a school bus? Probably not-he had never, so far, taken any real risk; he liked to kill stealthily, then run away. But the threat could certainly not be ignored. Armed deputies started to ride on all school buses, not only in San Francisco but in all the surrounding towns. Drivers were instructed not, on any account, to stop even if shots were fired; they were to drive on at top speed, sounding the horn and flashing the lights.

But all these precautions proved unnecessary. The murder of Paul Stine was the last officially recorded crime of the Zodiac killer. The murderer may well have felt that the hunt was getting too close; the police by now had good descriptions of him, and had issued “Wanted” notices showing a man with a crew-cut and horn-rimmed glasses. Police from Napa to San Francisco were permanently on the alert; and there was a noticeable drop in the number of courting couples using lovers’ lanes at night. The team hunting Zodiac now believed they were getting close, and that it would only be a matter of time before their net snared the man whose fingerprints matched those found on the telephone. But this optimism proved to be unfounded.

Zodiac had decided to stop killing, but his craving for publicity was unsated. In the early hours of 21 October, ten days after the murder of Paul Stine, the switchboard operator of the Oakland Police Department heard a gruff voice saying, “This is Zodiac”. He went on to make a number of remarks that later convinced police that he was the man who had so far killed five people. What he really wanted, said the caller, was to give himself up. He would do that on condition that he was represented by a famous lawyer-preferably F. Lee Bailey or Melvin Belli, both well known lawyers at the time. He would also, he said, like to speak on a famous television talk-show that went out on breakfast television.

The requests sounded absurd, but the Zodiac squad decided that it was worth a try. They immediately contacted Melvin Belli, who had an office in San Francisco, and asked if he would be willing to try to help them trap Zodiac. He agreed without hesitation. Then they asked the chat-show host, Jim Dunbar, if he would reserve space for a telephone call on his show at six forty-five that morning. The police then got in touch with the only three people who had heard Zodiac’s voice: victim Bryan Hartnell and the two switchboard operators who had taken Zodiac’s calls.

When the show went on the air at six forty-five a.m., silver-haired Melvin Belli was sitting beside the presenter Jim Dunbar. Dunbar told his audience that they were hoping for a call from the Zodiac killer, and asked them to keep the telephone lines clear. The audience cooperated. Those who saw the opening moments of the show rang their friends to tell them what was happening and, as a result, the show reached a record audience for that time of day in the San Francisco Bay area.

Almost an hour went by, while Belli and Dunbar discussed the murders. Then, at seven forty-one a.m., a soft, boyish voice came on the line. He rang off immediately, but rang back five minutes later. This time he identified himself as Zodiac, but said he preferred to be called Sam. In the studio, Bryan Hartnell and the two switchboard operators shook their heads. Unless Zodiac had been deliberately lowering his voice when they heard him, this call was a hoax.

Sam rang off and rang back fifteen separate times. He stated that he had been suffering from headaches “since I killed that kid last December”, and he frequently groaned with pain, explaining, “it is the headache speaking”. Belli tried twice to persuade Sam to give himself up, without success. But finally, with the broadcast sound cut off so that the television audience could not hear, Belli persuaded the caller to meet him in front of a shop in Daly City, south of San Francisco.

Predictably perhaps, the mysterious caller failed to arrive. Members of the Zodiac squad hidden at various points near the shop told themselves in consolation that they did not believe the caller was Zodiac anyway. Yet that conclusion is by no means as obvious as it looks. If the caller was a hoaxer, then it would seem logical to expect that the real Zodiac would lose no time in denouncing him. Nothing of the sort happened. And when, that Christmas, the lawyer Melvin Belli received a letter from a man who called himself Zodiac, it began “Dear Melvin”, as if he and Belli were old acquaintances. To confirm his identity, the writer enclosed another piece of Paul Stine’s bloodstained shirt. Handwriting experts confirmed that this letter bore strong resemblances to the earlier ones. The letter seemed to indicate that the writer’s mental state was deteriorating. The spelling was worse than usual, and there was a note of desperation that sounded genuine: “The one thing I ask of you is this, please help me. I cannot reach out for help because of this thing in me won’t let me. I am finding it extremely difficult to hold it in check and I am afraid I will lose control and take my ninth and possibly tenth victim. Please help me I am drowning…”

The claim that he had killed eight people, not five, led to frenzied activity in the San Francisco Police Department, where records were checked and re-checked for other possible Zodiac murders that had gone unrecognized. The only unsolved case that seemed to fit Zodiac’s pattern was the murder of an eighteen-year-old student, Cheri Jo Bates, who had been found dead in her car in the college car park with her throat slashed. If she was a Zodiac victim, then she pre-dated all the others, and it seemed odd that Zodiac had not taken the opportunity to boast about this crime at some time, as the had done about the others. If Cheri Jo Bates was the first victim and Zodiac was counting the two men who had recovered, that would explain the “eight” mentioned in his letter.

One big problem for the police was that hoaxers and mentally disturbed people were jumping on the Zodiac bandwagon; some of these showed a disturbing note of sadism. In one letter, the writer threatened to torture his victims before he killed them by tying them over anthills to watch them squirm or driving splinters under their nails. In some cases, the writers snipped out letters or words from newspapers and glued them to postcards. One read: “The pace isn’t any slower! In fact it’s just one big thirteenth. Some of them fought. It was horrible.” But police were able to dismiss most of these; the real Zodiac usually went to some trouble to prove his identity. On 16 March 1971 the Los Angeles Times received a Zodiac letter, postmarked from Pleasanton, near Los Angeles, in which the murderer taunted the police for being unable to catch him. This letter included the figure “17 + ”-an attempt to imply that the death toll was rising.

Three years passed. In January 1974 Zodiac was still hungering for attention; a letter postmarked San Francisco hinted that the number of his victims had now reached thirty-seven; it added that he would “do something nasty” if the letter was not publicized. Internal evidence suggested that this time the letter was genuine-and there were others, too, which appeared to be authentic communications from the killer.

The 1974 letter is, in its way, as significant as any of the crimes themselves. What it reveals is a man whose deepest craving is for attention; he clamours for it like a badly behaved child. This point was noted by one of the USA’s top psychiatrists, Dr Laurence Freedman, who commented, “He kills senselessly because he is deeply frustrated. And he hates himself because he is an anonymous nonentity. When he is caught he will turn out to be a mouse, a murderous mouse.” He added that he was convinced that Zodiac was insane.

Freedman’s psychological portrait of Zodiac is based on the crimes themselves which, studied closely, reveal a certain pattern. The first element is a complete lack of courage. It appears that Zodiac ordered David Farraday out of the car, then started to shoot almost immediately, as if afraid he himself might be attacked. He approached the car containing Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin and began to shoot immediately; then he jumped into his own car and drove off so fast that he burnt the rubber of his tyres.

It is also significant that two of his male victims survived. In the case of Bryan Hartnell, it is obvious that the killer’s real interest was in his friend Cecilia Shepard, who was a beautiful girl. He stabbed Hartnell only in the back. But when he began to stab Cecilia he lost control, stabbing her repeatedly in the back then turning her over and stabbing her another twenty-three times in the stomach. In all probability, this violence brought him some kind of sexual satisfaction, but there was no evidence of rape or attempted rape in the case of any of his three female victims. This seemed to suggest a man who was repressed and inhibited in his relations with women.

The case of the taxi-driver Paul Stine again illustrates the same combination of nervousness and extreme caution. It took place at a late hour on a foggy night, and he ordered the driver to pull up in a deserted street. The motive was robbery, but he was not willing to risk simply holding him up and taking his money; he preferred to guard against being identified by shooting his victim in the back of the head. When he realised he was being watched, he fled instantly. The next day, his courage restored, he wrote the police a jeering note and enclosed a fragment of his victim’s bloodstained shirt.

As significant as the killer’s cowardice is his craving for attention. After the first double murder, he drove off hastily, perhaps alarmed by the headlights of the oncoming car whose driver noticed the bodies only minutes after they had been shot. He made no attempt to contact the police or to publicise the murders. Yet immediately after shooting Michael Mageau and Darlene Ferrin, he rushed to the nearest telephone to inform the police of what he had done. And it was after this shooting that he wrote the letters to three newspapers, including one in code, and threatened to go on a murder rampage and kill twelve people. By then he was convinced he had got away with it and wanted to boast, to defy authority, to make people cringe. He was no longer an “anonymous nonentity”. He would force the world to pay attention.

If, in fact, the telephone caller to the Jim Dunbar show was Zodiac-and the later letter to Melvin Belli makes this highly probable-then this episode is rather ironic. The “anonymous nonentity” had caused shock waves all over California; he had had the satisfaction of knowing that hundreds of people were trying to puzzle out his cryptogram-it must have felt rather like being a bestselling author. He had certainly achieved a kind of fame. The murder of the taxi-driver brought him yet more publicity, and after the threat of an attack on a school bus, he was the most talked-about man in the USA. When he rang the San Francisco Police Department on 21 October, he undoubtedly wanted to appear on Jim Dunbar’s show. The fact that the caller to the show had a “boyish voice” is no proof that he was not Zodiac. Various other people described Zodiac as having a gruff voice, but any man can lower his voice to make it sound gruff-in fact, this is the easiest way of disguising the voice. And if “Sam” was not Zodiac, then who was he? One thing that seems fairly certain is that if Zodiac had changed his mind about ringing through to the programme and a hoaxer had taken his place, Zodiac would have lost no time in denouncing the phoney; his sense of publicity would have guaranteed that.

Yet all this fame was ultimately self-defeating since, though he could walk along a street and think, “I am famous”, nobody knew him-he was still an anonymous nonentity. He could address the famous lawyer as “Dear Melvin”-but he did not dare to sign his own name. He tried to keep the excitement alive with more letters, hinting at more killings, but he was crying wolf too often and the newspapers eventually relegated him to the back page. The only way of keeping the excitement alive would be to commit more murders, but next time he might be caught. Besides, being a temporary “celebrity” had released some of the frustration that had turned him into a killer. As it was, the police had come dangerously close, with an accurate description of him and three fingerprints. So the “murderous mouse”-unless he has since been arrested and jailed for another crime, perhaps in another state where he was not recognized-has presumably lapsed back into obscurity, telling himself that at least he had made the world sit up and take notice of him. Other police theories are that he is in hospital or has died. The Zodiac killings could be used to illustrate one of Freud’s most disturbing assertions: that if a child only had the power, it would destroy the world.

There is one more speculation. In his first letter, Zodiac asserted that the decoding of the cipher message would reveal his identity. It did not do so. The logical assumption is that the killer never meant to reveal his identity, but intended the claim to act as bait and cause widespread effort to crack the code. Yet one thing that may strike anyone who looks at the first few lines of the cipher message is that Zodiac sometimes used the letter “Z” to signify an “E”. Might the killer have, in fact, hidden his own name in the message, and could the solution to the case now lie in the hands of another cryptanalyst?