Five people were killed and two more were wounded in four attacks around the northern San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. Police attribute all of them to one unidentified man who called himself the Zodiac. He shot a teenage couple on a country road outside Benicia, shot a young woman and her friend in a Vallejo park, stabbed two college students on the shore of Lake Berryessa and shot a cab driver in San Francisco's Presidio Heights. In between, he telephoned police to claim the attacks and mailed letters and ciphers to Bay Area newspapers, demanding that they be printed.
No one has ever been arrested or charged in any of the attacks. Police in Vallejo, San Francisco and Napa and Solano counties, the California Department of Justice and the FBI have kept files open for more than half a century. One man, Arthur Leigh Allen of Vallejo, was the leading suspect for decades, but he was never charged, and the fingerprint, handwriting and partial DNA comparisons reported in the press did not tie him to the crimes. He died in 1992. The case is best known now for its letters: the first cipher was broken by a schoolteacher and his wife within days, while a second went unread for 51 years until three amateur codebreakers solved it in December 2020. It did not contain a name.
David Faraday was 17, a senior at Vallejo High School who planned to become a teacher. He was an Eagle Scout, active with Boy Scout Troop 12 in Vallejo and a member of the school's Interact Club, and at Camp Silverado he had been in charge of the waterfront. He lived with his mother, Jean, who worked in passenger reservations at Travis Air Force Base, and three younger siblings. His mother later told The Benicia Herald that he was careful about curfew, which on Friday nights was 12:30 a.m. A boy who knew him at camp remembered looking up to him.
Betty Lou Jensen was 16, a student at Hogan High School in Vallejo, an excellent student and an artist who hoped to win an art scholarship. Her father, Verne Jensen, had retired from a 21-year Army career in 1963 and worked as a supply officer for the General Services Administration in San Francisco. The Benicia Herald reported that the evening of December 20, 1968, was the first date her parents had allowed her. She and David had been seeing each other for about two weeks.
That night the couple parked in Faraday's Rambler station wagon at a gravel turnout on Lake Herman Road, near the Benicia water pumping station, a spot local teenagers used to park. Witnesses later placed them there for about an hour before the shooting. Shortly after 11:15 p.m., Benicia police were called to a report of a car and a body. Faraday was shot once behind the left ear and was still breathing when officers arrived; he was pronounced dead at the hospital. Jensen was shot five times in the back as she ran, and died at the scene. Stella Borges, who drove past at about the time of the shooting, saw the car and the bodies in her headlights and sped toward Benicia, flashing her lights, to get help.
Benicia police Sergeant Pierre Bidou was among the first officers there. He later said the gunman appeared to have shot the boy, chased the girl and then returned. Because the turnout lay in Solano County jurisdiction, the Solano County Sheriff's Department led the inquiry, under Detective Sergeant Leslie Lundblad. Investigators believed the weapon was a .22 caliber automatic and ruled out robbery and sexual assault as motives. Lundblad appealed for anyone who had driven Lake Herman Road between 9 and 11:30 p.m. that night to come forward, and asked residents to bring in small-caliber guns. By April 1969 his officers had interviewed at least 50 people, and his file was about four inches thick, but there was no suspect. Students at Vallejo and Hogan high schools raised money for a reward.
The Bay Area Television Archive at San Francisco State University holds KRON film shot the next day, December 21, 1968, with an interview with Lundblad and views of the scene and the car. The archive's catalog describes these as the first killings widely attributed to the Zodiac. Nothing connected them to anything else until the following summer.
Darlene Ferrin was 22, a popular waitress in Vallejo, and a wife and mother. Her younger sister, Kris Chambers, who was 16 in 1969, described her in 2023 as a friendly, loving woman and a good mother. The restaurant where she worked was Terry's, in Vallejo, ABC7 reported. Michael Mageau, 19, was her friend.
On the night of July 4, 1969, the two were parked at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo when a gunman approached and fired into the car. Both were hit several times. Ferrin died; Mageau survived. About 45 minutes later a man telephoned the Vallejo Police Department, claimed the attack, and also claimed the killings on Lake Herman Road the previous December. Fox News, summarizing the case in 2023, and Cox Media Group's 2018 account both describe the call this way. It was the first link anyone had drawn between the two scenes.
The case became, and has stayed, Vallejo's: because the first attacks happened in and around the city, the Vallejo Police Department has led the investigation for five decades, NBC News reported in 2018. On October 31, 1969, Vallejo's police chief, Jack E. Stiltz, asked the FBI to compare fingerprints in the case, the bureau's records show. Darlene Ferrin's brother, Leo Suennen, told NBC Bay Area in 2018, nearly half a century later: "I want to know who he is, his name." Her sister said in 2023 that their parents had died without learning who killed their daughter, and that she was still hoping for closure.
On July 31, 1969, three letters were mailed, one each to the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. Each was handwritten, claimed the shooting of a teenage couple at Christmas 1968 and the July 4 attack, and enclosed one third of a cipher made of letters and symbols. The writer demanded that the papers publish it and threatened more killings if they did not. It first appeared in print on August 1, according to the 2024 history of the ciphers written by the three men who later solved the second one.
Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, a schoolteacher and his wife, solved it at home. They sent their solution to the Chronicle on August 8, eight days after the cipher was mailed. Donald Harden had been interested in ciphers since boyhood; Bettye, the codebreakers' history records, brought insight and persistence. Donald C. B. Marsh, a Colorado School of Mines professor and former president of the American Cryptogram Association, checked the solution independently. The cipher used a homophonic substitution, in which several symbols can stand for the same letter, and its message began, "I like killing people because it is so much fun." It gave no name. The last 18 characters have never been explained; they may be filler, or need a second step to read.
On August 4, 1969, the Examiner turned over to the Vallejo police an anonymous letter it had received, according to FBI records released in the bureau's online Vault. It opened with the line the writer would use for years: "This is the Zodiac speaking." The Examiner later noted that the name was coined in a 1969 letter to the paper.
Cecelia Ann Shepard and Bryan Hartnell were students at Pacific Union College in Napa County. Hartnell was a pre-law student. Reports differ on Shepard's age: the Napa Valley Register gave both students as 20, while other accounts give her age as 22 and Hartnell's as 20. On September 27, 1969, they drove to Lake Berryessa for a picnic and settled on an isolated peninsula in an area called the Oaks, about a quarter mile north of park headquarters.
Shepard noticed a man watching them from the roadway about 15 minutes before the attack, the Register reported, drawing on what she told deputies. He came within 50 to 75 feet and then was gone. Next she saw him step out from behind an oak tree, pull a hood over his head and walk quickly toward them with a gun. He ordered them to stay on the ground and said he was an escaped convict from Montana with a stolen car, who wanted their car and money to get to Mexico. They did what he said and put their money and keys on the ground. He tied Hartnell with clothesline, then Shepard. Then he drew a knife with a blade of about 11 or 12 inches and stabbed them both repeatedly. Each eventually pretended to be dead, and he walked away. Shepard described him as calm.
Before he left the area he went to Hartnell's car, a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, and wrote on the door: a circle crossed by two lines, the dates of the two Vallejo-area attacks, the date and time of this one and the words "by knife." UPI later gave the inscription's last line as "Sept 27-69-6:30, by knife."
The two students worked themselves free; Hartnell untied Shepard with his teeth. They shouted for help. A fisherman and his son in a cove nearby heard them, but feared a robbery lure. When the cries went on, the fisherman looked through binoculars, saw that the couple were hurt and went to tell park rangers at the headquarters. Hartnell, believing they had been left, tried to crawl to the road and got about halfway before ranger Dennis Land found him. Napa County Deputy Sheriff Dave Collins, on patrol at Vichy Avenue and Monticello Road when the call came in, raced to the lake with Deputy Ray Land. Collins found Shepard in great pain and asking for medication. He wrapped her in his uniform jacket and a blanket and held her. "When I got to the scene I found the kids critically injured," he told the Register. He said later that the night changed his life.
An ambulance took them to Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa. The round trip from the hospital to the lake was more than 50 miles. Shepard lost consciousness and never regained it; she died two days later, on September 29. Hartnell survived. In a pool interview a few days afterward in a guarded hospital room, the only one he gave at the time, he suggested that she might have lived had she reached a hospital sooner. Largely because of that story by the Register's L. Pierce Carson, the Napa County grand jury urged that an ambulance be stationed at the lake, and Harold Moskowite, who lived near the lake and later became a county supervisor, set up the area's ambulance service.
The attacker had called the police too. About half an hour after the first reports of the stabbing reached the KVON radio newsroom in Napa, police received a call from a man claiming the attack. He left the receiver off the hook, and the phone company could say only that the call came from a pay phone somewhere between the lake and Napa. The station's news director, Pat Stanley, spotted the phone on Main Street in downtown Napa, near a car wash and the Sam Key Laundry Building, with the receiver still dangling. Officers lifted a palm print from it that was still wet. It was never matched to anyone. A woman who had seen someone at the phone described Stanley and his car so exactly that for a short time he was a suspect himself.
Deputies used Shepard's description to make a composite drawing. Showing it around the lake, they found three young women who had been sunbathing nearby and had seen the same man acting suspiciously about an hour before the attack. "They were three lucky girls," Collins said. Investigators also found a print believed to be from the attacker's boot. Detective Ken Narlow led the case for the sheriff's office; his longtime partner, Richard Lonergan, later remembered him as "an awfully good cop." Captain Don Townsend of the sheriff's office told KPIX on September 30, 1969, that the attacker was a "pathological, psycho killer." In footage from that October, Hartnell said of the man who had stabbed him: "I really think he can be helped. He's not beyond hope."
The car door is still held in evidence by the Napa County Sheriff's Office. "We consider it an open case," Sheriff Doug Koford said in about 2011.
Paul Lee Stine was 29. He came from Fresno, was married and lived in the Mission District, and he was a student at San Francisco State College who planned to teach college English, according to a 2013 account in the Washington Examiner by Richard Carlson. He also drove a cab.
On October 11, 1969, a passenger got into Stine's cab and directed him to Presidio Heights, an affluent neighborhood near the Presidio army post. At Washington and Cherry streets the passenger shot him once in the head at close range. Teenage witnesses saw the man at the cab and described him to police as a white man aged 25 to 30, about 5 feet 8, with a crew cut and thick-rimmed glasses. Other accounts based on their statements describe him as stocky, between 5 feet 8 and 6 feet tall, with reddish-brown hair. The composite drawing made from their descriptions became the image of the Zodiac that has been reproduced ever since.
San Francisco homicide inspectors Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong were on weekend call and caught the case. They first took it for a robbery, Carlson wrote. Within days a letter reached the Chronicle that changed that. It claimed the killing, and it enclosed a bloodstained piece of fabric torn from Stine's shirt. Laboratory tests confirmed it, ABC7's 1969 report recorded. The letter also threatened children: "School children make nice targets," it said, "I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning." Police and the highway patrol followed school buses, and many parents kept their children at home. On October 17 a school bus driver told KRON that someone had fired a shot at her bus; the report treated the incident as alleged, and nothing linked it to the letter writer.
Police Chief Thomas Cahill confirmed that the letter appeared to come from the same writer as the earlier ones. On October 20 the San Francisco Police Department's Captain Martin Lee held a press conference on cooperation among the departments now involved. FBI records show that on October 21 the bureau began passing information to the San Francisco police and the Napa County sheriff, and that FBI fingerprint examiners spent the following weeks comparing latent prints from the case with the prints of suspects submitted by Vallejo, Napa and San Francisco. Each comparison legible in the released file is marked "not identical."
On October 22, 1969, a man claiming to be the Zodiac called again and again into Jim Dunbar's live morning program, "A.M. San Francisco," on KGO, which that day featured the attorney Melvin Belli. "I need help. I'm sick. I don't want to go to the gas chamber," the caller said, according to the codebreakers' history. Belli agreed to meet him at a St. Vincent de Paul Society building on Mission Street in Daly City. The caller never came. Dunbar told KRON afterward that he could not say whether the man was the Zodiac, but that he felt the caller had "a pretty serious problem." Bryan Hartnell, filmed outside the station, was unsure whether the voice matched that of the man at the lake.
Carlson wrote in 2013 that police later traced the caller to a mental hospital in Oakland, that a survivor and two police dispatchers who had heard the real caller's voice judged him an impostor, and that Chief of Inspectors Martin Lee said he was not the Zodiac. The broadcast produced more than a thousand leads, none of which went anywhere.
On November 8, 1969, the writer mailed the Chronicle a greeting card with a message that began "This is the Zodiac speaking" and a second cipher, of 340 characters, with a demand that it be printed on the front page, according to the solvers' history. FBI records show the Chronicle received letters postmarked November 8 and November 9 on November 10, and that the bureau's laboratory was asked to compare them with the earlier material and to try to decipher the new code. The FBI's cryptanalysts reported on December 18, 1969, that no decryption could be achieved. On November 12, Captain Lee spoke to reporters at the Hall of Justice about the letters and what they might say about their author.
Just before Christmas the writer turned to Belli directly. A letter postmarked in San Francisco on December 20, 1969, the first anniversary of the Lake Herman Road shootings, reached Belli's law office on December 23 and was forwarded to him in Munich. It claimed eight killings, warned of a ninth and possibly a tenth unless the writer got help soon, and enclosed another bloodstained piece of Stine's shirt, the third such piece he had mailed, the Associated Press reported. Belli said it read as a plea for help in controlling "this thing in me," and publicly offered to meet the writer on any terms. Toschi confirmed the letter's authenticity to KPIX on December 27 but would not discuss its contents. The next day, after police released the text, Toschi described the public response, and Armstrong was filmed taking calls from people offering information.
Police said at the time that Stine was the fifth and last confirmed victim.
The letters went on after the attacks stopped. On April 20, 1970, the writer sent the Chronicle a note that asked whether the last cipher had been cracked and then said, "My name is," followed by a code of just 13 characters. Armstrong told reporters on April 22 that the letter, which included an implied bomb threat, offered useful material for a psychological profile. Another letter followed, postmarked April 28. On June 26, 1970, the writer mailed a map and a 32-character cipher, claiming that its solution would show where he had buried a bomb. The 13-character and 32-character codes are too short to be solved by ordinary analysis, and neither has an accepted solution.
On October 27, 1970, a Halloween card was mailed to the Chronicle's offices for the paper's reporter Paul Avery. It carried the words "Peek a boo you are doomed." Avery told KRON that he took it as an idle threat meant to win publicity, and described the writer as very sick and cunning, not brilliant but not dumb. The FBI laboratory examined the card and found nothing that would help identify its source. An FBI memo from that month noted that the writer now claimed 13 victims. In November 1970 Avery reported on notes sent to police in Riverside after the 1966 killing of a college student there, which he said resembled the Zodiac letters.
Then the letters slowed. In January 1974 came the first letter to the authorities in almost three years. SFPD Lieutenant Charles Ellis told KPIX that the writer said he had been stirred to write by the film The Exorcist. That letter, according to Cox Media Group's 2018 summary of the case, ended with a tally: "Me 37, SFPD 0." In July 1974 Ellis said that letters postmarked January 29, February 14 and May 8, 1974, the last signed "the Red Phantom," had been analyzed and were considered authentic, though their authorship has been debated since.
In April 1978 the Chronicle received another letter, the first in more than four years. Toschi, then heading the inquiry, told KPIX on April 26 that he and his colleagues would review all open cases in its light and suggested the writer might have been abroad or in jail. The letter appeared to single him out personally.
Within three months Toschi was off the case. At a press conference on July 11, 1978, the writer Armistead Maupin said that anonymous fan letters praising Toschi, which Maupin had received in the fall of 1976, resembled the tone of the new Zodiac letter. Toschi admitted that he had written those fan letters himself but denied any involvement in the Zodiac letter. He was reassigned to the department's pawn and burglary detail after about nine years on the case. The Associated Press, reporting his death in January 2018 at 86, said he had been removed after admitting he had written anonymous letters praising his own work. Duffy Jennings, who covered the killings for the Chronicle, said the case "gnawed at him" and that Toschi said it gave him an ulcer; for years he visited the Stine scene on the anniversary, looking for anything missed. Toschi, who joined the police department in 1953 after Army service in the Korean War, retired in 1985. He was said to have been a model for Steve McQueen's detective in "Bullitt," and Mark Ruffalo played him in David Fincher's 2007 film "Zodiac."
Over the years police investigated and cleared more than 2,500 suspects, ABC7 reported in 2014. One man stayed at the top of the list. Arthur Leigh Allen lived in Vallejo, had been a teacher and reportedly worked at the Mare Island shipyard. He had a criminal record that included a sex offense against a child. Time magazine reported that he was the only suspect ever served with a search warrant in the case, and that police found no conclusive evidence.
What drew investigators to him, as KQED summarized it in 2021, was a set of circumstances: Michael Mageau identified Allen, Bryan Hartnell said Allen's voice and build were similar to his attacker's, and Allen was reported to share the attacker's glove and shoe sizes, to own a typewriter of the same make and to drive a car like one seen near the Blue Rock Springs scene. An acquaintance, Ralph Spinelli, claimed Allen had admitted being the Zodiac. Against all that, KQED reported, Allen's fingerprints, palm prints and handwriting did not match the evidence. In 2002 a partial DNA profile was developed from saliva on a stamp and envelope from one of the letters. It did not match Allen, though, as the Chronicle noted when it revisited the result, the sample was too thin to be conclusive either way.
Allen told ABC7 in July 1991 that he was not the Zodiac. He died in Vallejo in 1992, at 58, of heart disease, and in one of his last interviews again denied it. He was never charged.
In 2024 a three-part Netflix documentary, "This Is the Zodiac Speaking," told the story of the Seawater family of Atascadero, who knew Allen in the 1960s as a family friend. David Seawater said that Allen told him, after the 2007 film came out, "Yes, it was me," and that he reported it to San Francisco police, after which nothing happened. These are family members' accounts and have not been tested in any court. The producers said DNA from a knife once owned by Allen had been shared with police in Napa, Vallejo and Riverside, and that they were awaiting results; no result has been reported since.
By the early 2000s the inquiry had slowed to a stop in most places. In 2004 Lieutenant John Hennessey declared the San Francisco case inactive, UPI reported, and the department said it had run out of viable leads. Shortly before the 2007 film, the department reopened the case and gave envelopes, possibly the ones tested in 2002, back to the Vallejo police for new DNA testing. "DNA testing of five years ago is not as efficient as it is now," Vallejo Lieutenant Rick Nichelman told the San Francisco Examiner. The FBI, asked in 2018, described its own file as "pending inactive": not under active investigation, but not closed.
The physical evidence had been handled before anyone knew about DNA. Pamela Hofsass, a former San Francisco homicide detective who had worked the Zodiac case and later ran the Contra Costa County Sheriff's forensic laboratory, said multiple people often touched items without gloves in that era. Around 2009 she found a glove labeled "Black Bloody Glove" from the Stine case; the blood on the outside matched Stine, and the material inside was a mixture. The Napa County Sheriff's Office had the car door, a blanket and other Lake Berryessa evidence retested at a state laboratory in Richmond around 2010; it yielded only a mixed, partial profile. "Things weren't preserved with that in mind," Sergeant Pat McMahon said.
When genetic genealogy led investigators to Joseph James DeAngelo, the suspected Golden State Killer, in April 2018, attention turned back to the Zodiac letters. Vallejo had already sent a private laboratory the two envelopes, with their double stamps, in which the July 31, 1969, letters reached the Chronicle and the Examiner; the Times-Herald's letter has no envelope, The Benicia Herald reported. The same stamps and flaps had been swabbed about ten years earlier without producing usable results. Detective Terry Poyser, Vallejo's lead investigator, hoped to build a full profile from saliva and search genealogy databases with it. "It really comes down to DNA," he said, as NBC Bay Area reported. "Without it, you have nothing." Vallejo's mayor, Bob Sampayan, a former homicide detective, said samples went to the lab every couple of years as methods improved. San Francisco Inspector Edward Wynkoop was doubtful; most of his department's evidence, he said, was partial.
No identification has come from that work. In December 2018, UPI reported that the results of the resubmitted envelopes were still pending.
In 2020 David Oranchak, an American who had worked on the Zodiac ciphers for about 15 years and ran a website about them, teamed up with Sam Blake, a mathematician and visiting fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Jarl Van Eycke, a programmer in Belgium who had written the decoding program AZdecrypt. Their insight was that the 340 had been rearranged before it was enciphered. On December 2, 2020, they began testing a batch of 655,088 possible rearrangements, chosen from billions of candidates, running some of the work on the university's supercomputer. Within about a day one output contained recognizable phrases, including "gas chamber," and from there they worked out the rest. The rearrangement followed a regular diagonal pattern through blocks of rows, with a mistake by the encoder in one section that the team had to correct.
On December 5 they sent their solution to the FBI's Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, which verified it independently. After the victims' families had been told, they made it public on December 11, 2020. "The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens," the bureau's San Francisco office said, adding that because the investigation was ongoing it would not comment further. "They have confirmed the solution. No joke! This is the real deal," Oranchak wrote.
The plaintext begins: "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me." It says that it was not the writer on the TV show, apparently a reference to the October 1969 call to Dunbar's program, and that he is not afraid of the gas chamber "because it will send me to paradise all the sooner." It says he now has enough slaves to work for him. It contains no name. The three solvers published a full account of the work in 2024.
The victims' relatives have lived with the case for more than 55 years. Darlene Ferrin's brother and sister have spoken publicly about wanting the man's name. Faraday's and Jensen's classmates raised a reward in 1969. Bryan Hartnell recovered and became a lawyer. Mike Mageau gave investigators their first description of the man. Officers who worked the scenes, among them Collins and Lonergan, and the retired officer Ed Rust, kept fielding questions decades later. "He might be dead for all we know," Lonergan said in about 2011. Investigators believe the man who wrote the letters is dead, ABC30 reported in 2018, but still want to establish who he was.
As of April 2026 the attacks remained unsolved and no one had been charged. In October 2021 the FBI said that "the case remains open and there is no new information to report," and San Francisco and Vallejo police said their cases were open and that they could not comment on possible suspects. The Napa County Sheriff's Office has said the same of the Lake Berryessa file. When a private claim drew attention again in April 2026, an FBI spokesperson declined to comment, Fox News reported.
Proven: nothing. No court has ever heard evidence in any of these attacks, and no person has been charged. Police attribute five killings and two nonfatal attacks to the Zodiac; that attribution rests on the letter writer's own claims, his knowledge of details, the shirt fragments and the telephone calls, not on any trial.
The writer's count of 37. The January 1974 letter claimed 37 killings, and earlier letters claimed eight and then 13. Police have never accepted those figures. Time reported in 2011 that only seven attacks were confirmed as his work; police attribute five deaths to him.
Cheri Jo Bates. Bates, 18, was killed in October 1966 near the library at Riverside City College; her car had been tampered with so it would not start. Riverside police received a handwritten letter after her death that led investigators to suspect a link to the Zodiac, and in October 1969 the Riverside police chief, Lambert Kinkead, wrote to the Napa County sheriff, Earl Randol, about similarities between the cases, according to a copy published by a private group. In 2016 Riverside police received an anonymous letter from someone who said he had written the earlier note as "a sick joke" and was not the Zodiac. The Riverside Police Department says its case is unsolved and "not related" to the Zodiac, and it has offered a 50,000 dollar reward.
Other cases considered. Investigators have at various times considered the 1963 killings of Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards in Santa Barbara County, a 1970 incident near Patterson reported by Kathleen Johns, the 1970 disappearance of Donna Lass and a 1972 knife attack on Isobel Watson in Mill Valley, about which the Napa County sheriff said it was of interest but not necessarily the Zodiac's work. None has been definitively linked.
Gary Francis Poste. In October 2021 a private group of retired investigators and journalists, the Case Breakers, named Poste, an Air Force veteran and house painter who died in 2018, as the Zodiac and as Bates's killer, citing a forehead scar, shoe size, witness accounts and a reading of the letters. The FBI called the claim inaccurate and said the case remained open. Riverside police said the Bates case was not connected. No police agency named Poste, and he was never charged.
Earl Van Best Jr. In a 2014 book, Gary Stewart said his biological father, Van Best, was the Zodiac. A San Francisco police spokesman said the author's contact with investigators "went nowhere." Van Best was never charged.
Other family accusations. KQED has listed relatives' claims against Jack Tarrance (an FBI DNA comparison in 2019 was inconclusive; he died in 2006) and Guy Ward Hendrickson (another daughter strongly rejected the claim). ABC7 reported in 2014 that a man said his late friend Louie Myers, who died in 2002, had confessed to him; retired officers doubted it, and Myers was never charged. Authorities briefly looked at the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, in 1996 and found insufficient evidence, UPI reported.
The hoax theory. A 2023 Peacock series presented the view of a professor, Thomas Henry Horan, that the Zodiac was a hoax and that several killers, possibly unconnected, may have committed the attacks. This is a theory, not a finding.
The 13-character cipher. Alex Baber, co-founder of a firm called Cold Case Consultants of America, says he has deciphered the 13-character code with the help of artificial intelligence software. He told Fox News in April 2026 that it spells "Marvin Merrill," an alias, he said, of Marvin Margolis, a man who allegedly dated Elizabeth Short in the 1940s and was on the Los Angeles police suspect list after her killing in 1947. Baber argues that one man committed both crimes. ABC News's "Impact x Nightline" featured the claim in January 2026, and two retired Los Angeles police cold case detectives, Mitzi Roberts and Rick Jackson, said they agreed with his findings. Margolis has died and was never charged in either case. No agency holding a Zodiac file has endorsed the claim: an FBI spokesperson declined to comment in April 2026, and the Los Angeles police did not immediately respond to Fox News.
The solved 340. By contrast, the December 2020 solution of the 340-character cipher was verified by the FBI and is accepted by the agencies on the case. It names no one.
December 20, 1968: David Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, are shot on Lake Herman Road near Benicia.
July 4, 1969: Darlene Ferrin, 22, is shot and killed and Michael Mageau, 19, wounded at Blue Rock Springs Park, Vallejo; a caller claims both attacks.
July 31, 1969: letters and three parts of a cipher are mailed to the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle.
August 1, 1969: the cipher first appears in print.
August 4, 1969: the Examiner gives Vallejo police the first letter that opens "This is the Zodiac speaking."
August 8, 1969: Donald and Bettye Harden send their solution of the first cipher.
September 27, 1969: Cecelia Shepard and Bryan Hartnell are stabbed at Lake Berryessa; the attacker writes on the car door and calls Napa police.
September 29, 1969: Cecelia Shepard dies.
October 11, 1969: cab driver Paul Stine, 29, is shot in Presidio Heights, San Francisco.
October 1969: a letter to the Chronicle encloses part of Stine's shirt and threatens a school bus.
October 22, 1969: a caller claiming to be the Zodiac phones Jim Dunbar's KGO program with Melvin Belli.
November 8, 1969: the 340-character cipher is mailed to the Chronicle.
December 18, 1969: the FBI reports that it cannot decipher the 340.
December 20, 1969: a letter to Belli, with another piece of the shirt, is postmarked.
April 20, 1970: the "My name is" letter and 13-character cipher.
June 26, 1970: a map and 32-character cipher are mailed.
October 27, 1970: a Halloween card is mailed to Paul Avery at the Chronicle.
January 29, 1974: the first letter in almost three years, claiming 37; more letters follow in February and May.
April 1978: a new letter reaches the Chronicle.
July 11, 1978: Toschi admits writing fan letters about himself and is taken off the case.
July 1991: Arthur Leigh Allen denies to ABC7 that he is the Zodiac.
1992: Allen dies in Vallejo, never charged.
2002: a partial DNA profile from a letter does not match Allen.
2004: San Francisco declares its case inactive.
2007: San Francisco reopens the case; Fincher's film "Zodiac" is released.
About 2010: Napa evidence is retested without a usable profile.
January 2018: Dave Toschi dies at 86.
May 2018: Vallejo confirms envelopes have gone to a private lab for genetic testing.
December 11, 2020: the 340 cipher's solution is announced after FBI verification.
October 2021: the FBI calls a private group's identification of Gary Poste inaccurate.
October 2024: Netflix releases "This Is the Zodiac Speaking."
January to April 2026: Alex Baber's claimed solution of the 13-character code draws coverage; the FBI declines comment.
October 20, 2026: the case remains open; no one has been charged.