'I LIKE KILLING,' SLAYER'S MESSAGE: DESERET NEWS, OCTOBER 16, 1969
Five days after Paul Lee Stine was shot in his taxi in San Francisco, the Deseret News in Salt Lake City gave its readers four short paragraphs from the Associated Press and a headline taken from the killer's own mail. On Wednesday, Martin Lee, the city's chief of detectives, had said that the handwriting on a letter claiming the cab driver's murder appeared identical to the writing in notes about four other killings. With that, the letter writer who signed himself Zodiac, the man the papers already called the Zodiac Killer, was no longer only a Vallejo story. He had come into the city, and he was telling the police so himself.
The paper prints the letter's opening as it had it: "This is Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington St. and Maple St. last night, to prove this here is a blood stained piece of his shirt." Stine was twenty-nine. He had picked up the fare at Mason and Geary and been shot once in the head at point-blank range, and a large panel of his shirt had been torn away and carried off. For two days detectives had treated it as a cab robbery gone wrong. Then the San Francisco Chronicle opened an envelope holding a swatch of bloodstained cloth, and the cloth was the missing piece.
The dispatch counts five dead around the Bay, and each had a name. Betty Lou Jensen, sixteen, and David Faraday, seventeen, were shot on Lake Herman Road in December 1968. Darlene Ferrin, twenty-two, a waitress, was killed at Blue Rock Springs in July 1969, and Cecelia Shepard, twenty-two, was stabbed at Lake Berryessa that September; the young men with them, Mike Mageau and Bryan Hartnell, lived. Every letter, the paper says, bore a crossed circle "like a rifle sight." The letter also said, in the words the paper quotes, "I am the same man who did in the people in the north bay area."
The Associated Press filed this from San Francisco on the strength of one detective's statement, and it is a news dispatch, not a police record. The handwriting match was Lee's judgment that the writing "appears identical," and the five victims are the writer's claim as police then accepted it; investigators still count five dead and two survivors, and they never accepted the total of thirty-seven the writer later claimed. The letter names Washington and Maple, which was the destination given for the fare; the cab came to rest a block west, at Cherry. The Zodiac Killer has never been identified or charged, and no suspect named in the years since has been proved to be him.
The Deseret News printed this Associated Press dispatch, credited "(AP)" and carrying no byline, on October 16, 1969. The page is from Utah Digital Newspapers at the University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library, which marks the issue "No Copyright - United States (NoC-US)," its determination that the item is free of copyright under United States law. A 1969 publication needed a copyright notice to hold its copyright, and this issue carries none on its masthead or on the story. The few lines of the letter it quotes were mailed anonymously to a newspaper, and no separate copyright claim in them is known. The citation and rights statement appear under the scan.
Everything in the dispatch was read straight from the scan and set down as printed; nothing was illegible. One misprint stays: "acknowledging he killing," where the paper dropped the t from "the." Two words in the letter, "murderer" and "piece," have broken letters on the page and are given as the words intended. The letter is quoted here exactly as the newspaper printed it, which is not necessarily how the original letter reads. The story is complete on page 2A, with no continuation.
Transcription
Transcribed word for word from the page scan. Original spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and typographical errors have been kept exactly as printed. Unreadable words are marked [illegible]. Nothing has been modernised or corrected.
'I Like Killing,' Slayer's Message
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — "I like killing people," boasts a weekend killer who calls himself Zodiac and numbers five San Francisco Bay area persons among his victims.
Martin Lee, city chief of detectives, said Wednesday the handwriting on a letter acknowledging he killing of a San Francisco taxi driver appears identical to that in notes telling of four other slayings.
In each case the letters from the "Zodiac killer" have gone to newspapers and all have been marked with a crossed circle symbol like a rifle sight.
The latest started: "This is Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington St. and Maple St. last night, to prove this here is a blood stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the north bay area."
Notes, kept as printed: "acknowledging he killing" ("the" printed as "he"). "murderer" and "piece" have broken letters in the scan and are set as the intended words. The letter is quoted as the paper printed it, not as the original letter reads. No words were illegible.