At about ten o'clock on the night of October 11, 1969, three teenagers in a second-floor window at Washington and Cherry Streets in San Francisco watched a man lean into a parked taxi and wipe it down with a cloth. The driver was slumped toward the passenger side. They called the police while the man was still at the cab, and the dispatcher put the description out over the air as a Black male. Minutes later, patrol officers Donald Fouke and Eric Zelms passed a heavyset white man walking east on Jackson Street, got a good look at him, and drove on. When the corrected description was broadcast, both officers understood what they had driven past. Nothing in the fifty-seven years since has brought anyone closer.
Paul Lee Stine was twenty-nine. He had taken the fare at Mason and Geary, and the destination given was Washington and Maple, at the edge of the Presidio. The cab came to rest a block further west, at Cherry, where Stine was shot once in the head at point-blank range with a 9mm automatic. His wallet and keys were gone. A large panel of his shirt had been carefully torn away and carried off. To the San Francisco homicide inspectors who caught the case, Dave Toschi and Bill Armstrong, it looked like a cab robbery that had ended badly, and for two days that is what it was.
On October 13 the San Francisco Chronicle opened an envelope containing a swatch of bloodstained cloth. The letter with it claimed Stine and closed with a threat to shoot out the front tire of a school bus and pick off the children as they came out. The cloth was the missing piece of Stine's shirt. The robbery theory collapsed in a newsroom before it collapsed in the homicide detail, and that inversion is the case in miniature: almost everything investigators learned about the killer, he told them himself, in the mail.
Between July 1969 and the last letter generally accepted as his, in 1974, he sent more than twenty communications to Bay Area newspapers, to attorneys and to police, most of them signed with a crossed circle. Four carried ciphers. The name was his own invention and it arrived early. On August 4, 1969, the San Francisco Examiner received a letter opening with the line he would use for the rest of his correspondence, This is the Zodiac speaking. He was answering Vallejo police chief Jack Stiltz, who had told reporters he was not satisfied the letter writer was the killer and had asked publicly for details only the murderer could know. The letter gave them, correcting the press account of the Vallejo shooting down to the position of a car window.
Four days before that, three envelopes had gone out, one each to the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. Each held a third of a 408-symbol cipher and an instruction to print it on the front page. The writer promised the cipher contained his identity and threatened a weekend of killing if the papers refused. They printed. Donald Harden, a high school teacher in Salinas, and his wife Bettye broke the code at home and submitted a solution on August 8; the FBI worked it independently and confirmed theirs. It was a homophonic substitution cipher, and the plaintext said that killing people was more fun than killing wild game because man is the most dangerous animal of all, and that the people he killed would become his slaves in the afterlife. The final eighteen symbols have never been explained. There was no name in it.
The next cipher was harder, and he knew it. The 340 reached the Chronicle on November 8, 1969, and defeated the FBI's cryptographers, naval intelligence and every amateur who tried it for fifty-one years. It came apart in December 2020, when David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Sam Blake, a mathematician in Australia, and Jarl Van Eycke, a programmer in Belgium, worked out that the text had been transposed before it was enciphered and ran hundreds of thousands of reading schemes until fragments of English surfaced. The FBI verified the solution on December 5 and waited to confirm it publicly until the victims' families had been told. The message was a taunt about how much fun he hoped they were having trying to catch him, and a line about the gas chamber sending him to paradise all the sooner. Again there was no name, though one line, that it had not been him on the TV show, appeared to refer to the caller who had reached Melvin Belli on the air. Two of the four ciphers, both short, have never been read.
The killings had begun ten months before Stine, at a gravel turnout on Lake Herman Road on the eastern edge of Vallejo. Betty Lou Jensen was sixteen, and it was the first date her parents had allowed her. David Faraday was seventeen. They parked at about 11:15 on the night of December 20, 1968. Shots were fired into Faraday's station wagon to drive them out of it. Jensen came out the passenger door first; Faraday was shot once in the head as he followed, and Jensen was shot five times in the back as she ran. The weapon was a .22 semiautomatic loaded with Winchester Western Super X rounds. Nothing was taken from either of them and neither was sexually assaulted. A woman who lived nearby, Stella Borges, found the scene and drove for help. No letter came for more than seven months, which is one reason some investigators doubted for years that this pair belonged with the rest. When the writer did claim them, he described the shooting in detail that had never been made public.
The second attack set the pattern that would be recognized later: a couple, a parked car, a dark place at the edge of a town. Darlene Ferrin, twenty-two, waited tables at Terry's Restaurant in Vallejo. Mike Mageau was nineteen and worked as a laborer. Just after midnight on July 5, 1969, they were sitting in the lot at Blue Rock Springs Park when a car pulled in a few feet away and a man walked over carrying a flashlight. Taking him for a police officer, they had their identification ready. He fired nine rounds into Ferrin and four into Mageau, started back toward his car, then turned around when Mageau screamed and shot them both again. Ferrin died. Mageau, hit in the face, neck and chest, survived to describe a stocky white man with a round face and brown hair, late twenties to early thirties. Forty-five minutes later a man telephoned the Vallejo police from a booth, claimed the shooting, correctly identified the weapon as a 9mm and took credit for the Lake Herman Road murders as well. That call, not any physical evidence, is what first joined the two scenes.
Then came Lake Berryessa, and a costume. Bryan Hartnell, twenty, and Cecelia Shepard, twenty-two, were on a blanket on a remote stretch of shoreline near Napa in the late afternoon of September 27, 1969, when Shepard noticed a man walking toward them in a black hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eyeholes and a crossed circle on the chest. He had a gun and a story: an escaped convict out of Montana or Colorado, in need of money and a car to reach Mexico. Hartnell offered his wallet and keys. The man took neither, had Shepard tie Hartnell with plastic clothesline, tied her himself, and then used a wood-handled knife with a blade close to a foot long. Hartnell was stabbed six times in the back. Shepard was stabbed ten times, five in front and five behind. He walked away unhurriedly, stopped at Hartnell's car and wrote the dates of his two earlier attacks on the door beneath the crossed circle, then drove into Napa and called the police from a downtown booth, where investigators later lifted prints. A fisherman heard the screaming and got word to park rangers. The ambulance took nearly an hour. Cecelia Shepard died on September 29. Hartnell recovered, became an attorney in Southern California, and in time stopped discussing the case with the press.
For a case with no defendant, the evidentiary record is unusually full. Two of the people he attacked lived and described him. Three witnesses watched the Stine killing from about sixty feet and worked with a police artist on a composite, then asked for it to be redrawn because the first version was wrong. Bloody fingerprints came out of the cab. More prints came off the phone booths. Size ten-and-a-half Wing Walker boot prints at Lake Berryessa indicated a man over two hundred pounds. What the record has never contained is a match. Even the guns were different guns: a .22 on Lake Herman Road, a 9mm at Blue Rock Springs, another 9mm in Presidio Heights. Ted Bundy was among the thousands of names run against the file and was excluded on a fingerprint comparison in February 1989. A caller who reached the Oakland police in October 1969 and asked to speak with the attorney Melvin Belli on a live morning television show was credible enough that Belli took the call on the air; police concluded afterward that the man was not the Zodiac.
One suspect has outlasted all the others. Arthur Leigh Allen, a Vallejo man and former elementary school teacher with a conviction for molesting a child, was interviewed by Toschi, Armstrong and Vallejo detective Jack Mulanax in August 1971. He wore a Zodiac-brand watch carrying the crossed-circle logo. Friends told investigators he had spoken about shooting couples in lovers' lanes and about using the name. In 1991 Vallejo detective George Bawart showed Mike Mageau a photographic lineup and Mageau picked Allen, saying that in the twenty years Allen had been the leading suspect nobody had ever put a photograph in front of him. The identification is weaker than it sounds. Mageau also indicated that another man in the array resembled the shooter, and investigators did not treat the pick as a valid identification. Handwriting examiners could not tie Allen to the letters. He died in 1992, and he remains the only suspect any police agency has ever named publicly.
DNA has carried the hope since the late 1990s and has delivered less than the headlines implied. San Francisco recovered a partial profile from a suspected Zodiac letter in the 1990s and another in 2002. Inspector Kelly Carroll said the second excluded Allen; his colleague Michael Maloney would not go that far, and neither profile was complete enough to search against a criminal database. In 2018, with the Golden State Killer arrest fresh, Vallejo sent two of the letters to a private laboratory to work the saliva on the stamps and envelope flaps, and by 2019 the department had a profile in hand. In September 2025 Vallejo disclosed what had become of it: the profile belonged to a person who could not have been the killer. No further detail was released. Whatever is on those stamps, no agency has established that it came from the man who wrote the letters.
His own arithmetic was never accepted by anyone investigating him. The last letter treated as authentic, in 1974, put his total at thirty-seven. Police have agreed on seven people attacked and five dead. The most durable of the additional claims concerns Cheri Jo Bates, an eighteen-year-old Riverside City College student who left the campus library on Halloween night in 1966 and was found the next morning in an alley beside it, beaten, stabbed repeatedly and with her throat cut. Her car had been tampered with so that it would not start. Riverside's police chief at the time, Lambert Kinkead, wrote to the Napa County sheriff in October 1969 to say his homicide resembled the Zodiac attacks, and an FBI memorandum in 1975 described Bates as a Zodiac victim. Against that, the handwritten confession note Riverside received after her murder was claimed in 2016 by an anonymous writer who said he had produced it for attention and had killed nobody, and the department's cold case unit now states flatly that the Bates murder is not related to the Zodiac. Her killing is unsolved and still open, with a reward posted. A city police department, a county sheriff's file and a federal memorandum have never been reconciled.
The other disputed claim involves someone who lived. On the night of March 22, 1970, Kathleen Johns was driving west on Highway 132 near Modesto with her ten-month-old daughter when a man flagged her down and told her a rear wheel was loose. He crouched at the wheel with a lug wrench and removed the nuts, so that the wheel came off as she pulled away. He then offered her a ride to a service station, drove past the stations instead, and kept driving for what she put at close to two hours while talking about killing her. She got out with the baby at an intersection, hid in a field, and flagged down a passing driver. At the Patterson police station she looked up at the wanted poster on the wall and said that was the man. Her car was found burned. A letter to the Chronicle in July 1970 took credit for the ride and the fire. Her account has never been squared with the record: the drive time from San Bernardino does not fit the hours she described, several elements of the newspaper version are absent from the police report, and reports give her age as twenty-two and as twenty-three. What is documented is that the letter writer claimed her.
Private claims have never stopped, and none has been adopted by any of the agencies holding the case. In April 2026 an investigator named Alex Baber, working with commercial artificial intelligence software, said publicly that the unread thirteen-character cipher spelled Marvin Merrill, which he identified as an alias of Marvin Margolis, a man on the Los Angeles police suspect list for the 1947 Black Dahlia murder, and argued that the two cases had one author. The novelist Michael Connelly built a podcast around his work. Other researchers disputed the decipherment, and no police agency endorsed it. The FBI's San Francisco office has answered each such claim in the same way, that the case remains open and it has no new information to share.
San Francisco shelved its file in April 2004, the homicide lieutenant explaining that the caseload left no room for it, and reopened it at some point before March 2007. The FBI said in 2020, in 2021 and again in 2023 that the investigation is open and unsolved, and has declined to say anything further out of respect for the families. Vallejo, Napa County and Solano County never closed theirs, and the California Department of Justice has kept a file open since 1969. Fifty-seven years on, the best description of him still comes from three teenagers at a second-floor window, a woman who got out of her abductor's car at a dark intersection, and a nineteen-year-old who was shot four times at Blue Rock Springs and lived.