by Mark Hewitt
The Zodiac’s near capture in San Francisco may have profoundly affected him. He may have felt as fortunate to be out of jail as Mageau and Hartnell were lucky to be alive. He could have been apprehended or fatally shot near the cab had one of any number of things been different that night: had the dispatch broadcast gone out on October 11 that the perpetrator was Caucasian rather than Black, had Fouke and Zelms been a few seconds quicker to the scene, had the perpetrator been seen by adults and not children.
The bold tone of the letters following the incident can be interpreted to suggest that he was embarrassed, and possibly humiliated, by the narrow escape. His egotistical claims may have been overcompensations for nearly being captured, an attack that did not go as smoothly as planned.
Furthermore, he may have been shaken by the Manson Family attacks. In the Southern California carnage, the Zodiac could observe a killer at work from an objective perspective, and it may have been a sobering experience. He may have come to realize that the perpetrators of the two brutal Southern California events would eventually be captured. The December 1, 1969 announcement that the members of the Manson Family responsible for two nights of mayhem were in custody may have confirmed his worst fears. Not wanting to face the same consequences, the Zodiac may have chosen to go straight.
He may have suspected that law enforcement was closing in on him.
Quotes in newspapers following Stine’s murder reflected the confidence of the police in the enthusiastic pursuit of their quarry. Marvin Lee, SFPD Chief of Inspectors, in proclaiming the murderer legally sane, declared, “…our knowledge of this man is increasing… I am confident we will get him.” He went on to boast of the “considerable evidence of many different kinds” gathered at the crimes scenes and from within the letters. By this time, he added, 20 officers—in San Francisco, Napa, and Vallejo—were working the case full time. He speculated that the perpetrator was a minor office worker who though severely disturbed rarely if ever gave overt signs of being “psychotic.” He noted that the police were checking his letters, word by word, for some slip-up that would lead to his capture.
Lee was not alone in his optimism. Two weeks after the attack on the cabby, Chronicle reporter Paul Avery wrote that all the investigators expected the Zodiac to be caught. Their confidence was buoyed by the four eyewitnesses who saw him without his hood, and the three who had heard his voice. Avery noted that samples of handwriting and fingerprints that “may be his” were being compared to those of suspects. Additionally, there were tire tracks and other evidence not disclosed by the police. The very next day, Avery added that the police had a reasonably complete description of killer: age 25 to 35, height five feet eight inches to five feet ten inches, white, stockily built, short cropped hair, and heavy-rimmed eyeglasses. The real possibility that the killer would be caught loomed large in the minds of many detectives.
The headway gained by the police may have frightened the killer as much as he terrified the residents of the Bay Area—and forced a change in his actions.
There are at least two other possible reasons for the radical transformation in the fall of 1969. The Zodiac may have experienced some kind of mental breakdown, as a result of his fear, or entirely separate from it. The Belli letter, received in December of 1969, gave investigators the impression that the writer had gone through some psychological change. The oddness of other Zodiac mailings also hinted at a mental unraveling.
Or, the change may have been induced by something in the killer’s own personal journey. He may have run his course with the murder of Stine, and achieved, at least for an instant, that to which he aspired. He may have come to realize that his psychopathy had reached its end. The Zodiac’s final confirmed murder—committed on a single male—may have caused something in him to click into place, like the final tumbler for a safecracker. Some manner of emotional burnout may have played a role.
Whatever precipitated the change—whether fear, a psychological unraveling, or a loss of interest—what appeared to be a major transformation in the actions of the Zodiac may instead have been the product of a series of smaller changes, a slow evolution over a number of hurdles, brought about by these, and any number of other, forces in his life. Since he remained unidentified, the distant spectators to his crimes could only guess at his motivation. His actions, however, demonstrated that a major change in trajectory occurred sometime during the months of October and November, 1969.
The Zodiac’s reinvented persona coincided with the introducing two new ideas: harm to children and the construction of bombs. His future letters obsessed about both. The killer developed an interest in targeting school children on school buses, and he became consumed with the idea of creating public fear with drawings of a bomb-like device. He threatened in the Stine letter to “pick off” school children as they exited a school bus, promised to blow up a school bus full of children (with two different ominous bomb diagrams), and demanded that his diabolical threats be made public, including the publication of the details of his bomb design.
In addition to letters, he also began to send greeting cards, which he adapted with his own wording to supplement the preprinted pictures and messages. After the murder of Stine, and the penning of the Stine letter, he sent his first. Received by The San Francisco Chronicle, postmarked on November 8 in San Francisco, the Pen card was the first Zodiac communication that failed to report on a specific prior murder.
The Pen card
The Pen card was the killer’s first, but by no means last, use of a greeting card in his public communication. The two Roosevelt stamps were correctly affixed to an envelope that recorded the address in unusually large letters, “S.F. Chronicle / San Fran. Calif / Please Rush to Editor.” There was no return address, but on the back the order had been repeated in smaller lettering running diagonally across the entire envelope, “Please Rush to Editor.” The mailing was received two days after its November 8, 1969 postmarked date. (It may instead have been postmarked on November 9, confusion existing over the timing of this and the next Zodiac mailing.)
Seizing on the sophomoric humor of the JESTERS branded card put out by Forget Me Not Cards, the Zodiac added a few sentences of his own. In preprinted words, the card itself stated, “Sorry I haven’t written, but I washed my pen… and i can’t do a thing with it.” It was a parody of the old saw, “I just washed my hair and can’t do a thing with it,” used at the time in pedestrian television commercials and cheap, cliché-driven romance novels. For some reason, he embraced this reference when he selected the stationary. His choice of cards may even have been a jejune reference to a haircut.
After the September 27 attack at Lake Berryessa, Bryan Hartnell reported that his assailant’s hair was brown in color and “kind of greasy.” It had been visible through an eye hole cut into the hood. This description would almost certainly have been noted by the man who carefully followed his own press. In response, the Zodiac may have shorn his hair in preparation for the attack a mere two weeks later, possibly marking a change in disguise. The card could then be a suggestion that the killer had planned to refrain from violent activity, at least for a few weeks or months, until his hair could grow back. This scenario would explain his gap in writing (as he himself perceived it), the allusion to hair, and his use of an apologetic greeting card. By this time, the crew-cut-sporting Zodiac composite pictures had been well distributed and publicized.
He added the following misspelling-laden sentences inside the card:
This is the Zodiac speaking
I though you would nead a
good laugh before you
hear the bad news.
You won’t get the
news for a while yet.
PS could you print
this new cipher
on your frunt page?
I get awfully lonely
when I am ignored,
so lonely I could
do my Thing!!!!!! [crosshair symbol]
Toward the bottom of the card’s inne
r surface, the writer added six exclamation points to the word “Thing.” Below his iconic crosshair symbol he wrote the following enigmatic phrase: “Des July Aug Sept Oct = 7”. It appeared to the investigation that the killer was claiming a total of 7 victims, taken on the months which he evidently abbreviated. Because only 5 known deaths had by this time been attributed to him—those of Jensen, Faraday, Ferrin, Shepard, and Stine—investigators wondered whether two additional murders could have taken place in “Aug” (August), the only month in the list for which they were unaware of any Zodiac killings. (When Bates was later added to the list of Zodiac victims, another October date, the number of unknown murders was reduced to 1.) But that interpretation of the words at the bottom of the card was not the only possible interpretation.
After reading about the Zodiac in his local paper—The Anderson Daily Mail—a South Carolina man wrote to The Vallejo Times Herald and to J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, in a letter dated November 13, 1969. He noted that the letters “des,” as used by the Zodiac in the Pen card (an apparent misspelling of “dec,” the abbreviation for December), was actually a German word. Hoover replied in a letter of November 19, thanking the man for his interest. The brief response made no mention of, nor expressed any appreciation for, the actual information supplied.
That year, there were two unsolved Bay Area murders that took place in the month of August. Like the victims at Lake Berryessa, both had been brutally stabbed in one location. If these killings could be tied to the Zodiac, investigators realized, the total number of known Zodiac victims would reach 7, and the “Aug” victims he claimed would be identified. Assiduously, these murders were examined as possible Zodiac kills.
On August 3, two friends, Deborah Furlong, 14, and Kathy Snoozy, 15, rode their bikes to a wooded knoll overlooking their homes in the rugged Alameda Valley section of South San Jose. The schoolmates had taken a lunch and planned to spend time alone. Their bodies were discovered that evening, severely mutilated with a total of more than 300 stab wounds, all above the waist. The coroner had stopped counting at 300. The community was shocked by the appalling carnage. But the Zodiac was not responsible.
The Zodiac’s knowledge of the murder of these two girls may have been gained through press accounts of his attack at Lake Berryessa. Following the stabbing of Hartnell and Shepard, detectives from San Jose made known their desire to speak with the man described in the composite picture for possible involvement in their case. They observed that the date of the San Jose murders was absent from the killer’s writing on Hartnell’s car door, and soon concluded that the girls were not victims of the Zodiac.
A knife attack on a third young girl two years later closed the San Jose case. On April 11, 1971, 18-year-old Kathy Bilek went bird watching at Villa Montalvo Park in Saratoga. Her mutilated body—stabbed a total of 49 times—was found the next morning. Descriptions of a suspicious man in the area led to the arrest of Karl Warner, a former classmate of Snoozy’s and Furlong’s at Oak Grove High School. He lived with his parents three blocks from the homes of the two San Jose friends. The police discovered the weapon used against Bilek at his residence, and links were established between her death and those in 1969. Warner pled guilty to three counts of murder in September, 1971, and was sentenced to life in prison. He was also a suspect in another stabbing in which the victim survived.
Warner was briefly investigated for involvement in the Zodiac murders. Because he had moved to California from Marlborough, Massachusetts in early 1969, he could not have been responsible for all of the Zodiac’s victims, and was promptly eliminated from suspicion.
Following the resolution of the San Jose deaths, the Zodiac investigators were puzzled. Either two additional murders had occurred somewhere else (if the common interpretation of the killer’s formula was correct), or the Zodiac was attempting to take credit for the San Jose stabbings, murders he had not committed. He may also have been running up his total number of victims to confuse the investigation, they realized. It was a reasonable suspicion that would continue to crop up in the investigation.
A search for the origin of the Pen card led nowhere. The card’s ubiquity made it impossible for the SFPD to trace.
Inside the envelope the killer had deposited another cryptograph, this one on a single sheet of paper and not in three parts. It comprised a total of 340 symbols neatly printed in 20 rows of 17 columns. The 340 cipher would in time achieve uncommon acclaim among professional cryptographers, who would wrestle with its hidden content for decades.
The new cryptograph was quickly published. The 408 cipher had been decrypted by the Hardens, a husband and wife private-citizen team. Perhaps other readers would solve this one, the police and the press hoped.
As the FBI Field Office in San Francisco waited patiently for a report on the encryption from the FBI laboratory, a man from Montana wrote the Napa Police Department (NPD), offering to decrypt the new cipher. He believed that he knew the killer’s next victim, and even named a suspect. Further investigation, however, uncovered that the man’s suspect was present in Montana during the October 11 murder of Paul Stine, and therefore could not have been the Zodiac. The Montana informant was not the only person to take up the challenge of the new cipher.
Amateur cryptographers by the hundreds worked the symbols, hoping to nudge out a message. Many wondered whether there was a decryption to be found. One of the armchair detectives was convinced that it was decipherable, claiming that “testing shows it is not just gibberish.” But not all who made the attempt at decoding the 340 cipher were qualified for the task.
On November 24, a Missoula, Montana resident, who was born in Chicago, sent a message to an FBI special agent, sharing that he knew the name of the agent’s husband and daughter. When the special agent called him, she learned that this informant had met her family members through school. He claimed to have solved the Zodiac’s message, which in his opinion revealed the name of a victim and the city of Minneapolis.
When detectives delved into his story, however, they learned that he was attempting to involve law enforcement to lend credibility to his questionable deciphering. He had already sent numerous pieces of mail to Vallejo Police Chief Jack Stiltz, and to the homicide divisions of the NPD and SFPD. The Missoula Police Department interviewed him and learned that he believed he had discovered a solution for the cipher and found numerous messages. He was convinced that he himself was a possible future Zodiac victim. He suggested that the Zodiac was in the Bay Area, and was associated with the radio station, KRON. The officers concluded that the man was “letting his imagination run rampant.”
Another Zodiac communication arrived on the same day as the Pen card, a letter of 6 pages, though this letter may actually have been postmarked one day earlier than the card.
The 6-Page letter
Postmarked November 9 (or possibly November 8 as there was some confusion about which letter came in which envelope) in San Francisco, the 6-Page letter arrived on November 10, the same day as the Pen card. That same day, a copy of it was sent to the FBI in Washington, D.C., arriving the following day, with the request for a comparison to the previous letters in the case. Even by a quick glance, the penmanship of the new letter looked similar to that of other Zodiac letters, but the FBI Field Office in San Francisco wanted to be sure. Also, San Francisco requested that the Pen card (outside and inside) and its 340-symbol cipher be deciphered. San Francisco wanted to know whether any stray marks, indentations, or deliberately planted clues could lead them to the sender. With unbounded optimism, it requested from Washington a copy of the final solution to the 340 cipher when it became available.
The lettering of the envelope for the 6-Page letter was nearly identical to that of the Pen card: “S.F Chronicle / San Fran. Calif / Please Rush to Editor.” The similarities extended even to the diagonally placed “Please Rush to Editor,” on the back of the envelope, and the lack of any return address.
Writing for The Chronicle, reporter Paul Avery was mista
ken when in a November 12 article he mentioned that another piece of Stine’s shirt had been enclosed.
The FBI informed its San Francisco Field Office in mid-November that no handwriting had been found for a suspect whose name had previously been supplied to it. Further, the analysis of the cryptograph had not yet been completed, though efforts were continuing. The 340 cipher, so called because of its number of symbols, could not be solved using the key to the 408 cipher because the new cipher contained twenty percent more unique symbols. Though longer in terms of total symbols, the 408 cipher contained fewer unique symbols. The 340 cipher did not give up its solution even when familiar Zodiac words and phrases were run through it, or when it was analyzed by columns, right to left, using even numbered symbols only, and other such ideas. All attempts proved negative, and the FBI eventually admitted in its laboratory report that, “No decryption could be effected…”
In fact, the 340 cipher never would be solved by the FBI, nor by anyone else who ever wrestled with it. When first received, it was examined by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). No result from these agencies was ever made public, or noted in the case files.
The new cryptograph—sent in the aftermath of the 408 cipher’s solution—remains on the FBI’s top ten list of unsolved but intriguing codes. After nearly five decades, despite thousands of attempts and the use of advanced algorithms, no one has been able to dislodge its hidden meaning. Even with the experience of WWII and the Allied code-breaking achievements, experts armed with supercomputers have been unable to crack it.