Hunted: The Zodiac Murders (The Zodiac Serial Killer Book 1)
Page 15
On the last day of July, three nearly identical letters were sent from the killer to three Bay Area newspapers: The Vallejo Times-Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Francisco Examiner. Postmarked in San Francisco and affixed with either two or four Roosevelt 6-cent stamps, the handwritten, 2-page letters informed the respective editors that the murders of December 20 and the murder on July 4 were indeed the product of one individual, just as was communicated via phone to Dispatcher Nancy Slover at the Vallejo Police Station earlier that month. The Times-Herald letter was posted with four stamps rotated to make Roosevelt appear to look up toward the top of the envelope. The Examiner’s letter had two stamps similarly affixed. The Chronicle’s letter also had two stamps, but with Roosevelt this time tilted downward.
The murderer, unidentified and still on the loose, would forever distinguish himself by including one-third of a cipher in each of these letters. Each envelope contained a separate page—roughly a third the size of a sheet of standard letter-sized paper—on which were written symbols arranged in 8 rows of 17 columns, for a total of 136 characters per page. The 408 symbols of the three pages gave rise to the cipher’s popular name, the “408,” as well as the FBI’s label, “Z408.” The symbols included letters of the alphabet, backward letters of the alphabet, mathematical signs, flag or semaphore figures as if borrowed from a Navy manual, and a few variants of circles including a crosshair circle that resembled a gun sight. A search for the origin of these ubiquitous symbols did not produce any investigative progress, except to suggest that the person responsible for selecting them may have had a connection to the Navy and may have received training in the field of encryption.
By this time, 5 mailings had been sent by the killer: 2 identical Confession letters, followed by the 3 similar Bates letters. These 3 new missives were nearly identical, though for the first time he provided his message on more than a single piece of paper. Each letter was two pages in length (two sides on a single sheet), and supplemented with the smaller sheet of coding. The variation among the new mailings was more apparent than among those for either the 2 Confession letters or the multiple Bates letters.
Of the new mailings, The Chronicle’s appeared to be written first; The Examiners’ second and copied from The Chronicle’s letter; and The Times-Herald’s, the messiest and most corrupted of the three, third, apparently reproduced from The Examiner letter rather than from The Chronicle’s. The creator had provided a contemporary use for textual criticism common in the study of Shakespeare and manuscripts of the Bible.
The intentions of the new letters were clearly laid out for all to see. The writer’s first order of business was to prove that he was, indisputably, the person who had committed the two Vallejo-area attacks. He may have felt that his claim to Dispatcher Nancy Slover and the Vallejo Police Department (VPD) was unconvincing. He would, therefore, provide absolute proof that both attacks were orchestrated by one person, and that he—and he alone—was that man. To that end, he listed information that, apart from the police, only he knew. Unless the writer was a police officer, or had been privy to the investigation of the Lake Herman Road killings and the murder of Darlene Ferrin, he was the killer.
With proof of his identity established, the killer’s next goal in writing was apparent in his demand. He wanted front page publication of the pieces of the cryptograph he had sent. If the newspapers refused to promulgate his creations, he threatened, he would carry out additional killings. No one in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time realized that the murderer had already threatened in his correspondence in Riverside—which at this point had not yet been linked to the Northern California attacks—to kill, again and again, whether or not any demands were met.
He wrote the following to The Chronicle (with some variations in wording to The Examiner and The Times-Herald):
Dear Editor
This is he murderer of the
2 teenagers last Christmass
at Lake Herman & the girl
on the 4th of July near
the golf course in Vallejo
To prove I killed them I
shall state some facts which
only I & the police know.
Christimass
1 Brand name of ammo
Super X
2 10 shots were fired
3 the boy was on his back
with his feet to the car
4 the girl was on her right
side feet to the west
4th July
1 girl was wearing paterned
slacks
2 The boy was also shot in
the knee.
3 Brand name of ammo was
Western
Over
Here is part of a cipher the
other 2 parts of this cipher are
being mailed to the editors of
the Vallejo times & SF Exam
iner.
I want you to print this cipher
on the front page of your
paper. In this cipher is my
idenity.
If you do not print this cipher
by the afternoon of Fry. 1st of
Aug 69, I will go on a kill ram-
Page Fry. night. I will cruse
around all weekend killing lone
people in the night then move
on to kill again, untill I end
up with a dozen people over
the weekend.
[crosshairs symbol]
The three 3-Part letters were processed by local police departments for latent fingerprints, after which they were delivered by car to the VPD, who then submitted the pieces of cipher to the cryptographic unit of the U.S. Navy Radio Station at Skaggs Island, which is situated near Vallejo. Naval intelligence would take a crack at solving the cipher. In one of its many communications, the Sacramento Field Office of the FBI notified Washington, D.C. of the emerging crisis in its jurisdiction. It stated that it was not actively investigating the murders, but was ready and able to support the VPD and the Solano County Sheriff’s Department who were conducting concurrent investigations. Latent prints in the case were labeled #A-10042 and added to the new FBI file #9-49911.
The FBI Field Office in Sacramento had first opened as a separate unit in 1966 to relieve pressure from the San Francisco and Los Angeles offices during a reorganization of sub units. Prior to September 25, 1966, the Sacramento office was a small satellite of the San Francisco Field Office. Located at 2020 J Street, the branch of 57 agents would grow in size and scope as more white collar, missing person, and serial killing cases were added to its workload. Despite its growth, the office often seemed to suffer the shame of being a mere step-child to its much larger neighbor in San Francisco.
The “signature” at the bottom of each of these letters, the crosshairs symbol (which was also present as a repeated symbol within the cipher), puzzled authorities when the letters were turned over to them from the respective news outlets. It appeared to be a gun sight or target of some sort, the writer using it to sign off on the letters as an implied salutation or casual signature. The depths of its significance to the killer would not become apparent until the arrival of his next taunting letter and the commission of his next pernicious attack.
The prose of this new letter was quite different than those that had preceded it, leading to questions years later about whether the Vallejo killer was actually responsible for the Riverside letters or the 1966 murder of Cheri Jo Bates. While the Confession letter flowed smoothly across its words, and displayed flowery, almost poetic, language, the 3-Part letters were matter of fact and to the point. They were specific in their demands, horrific in their claims, and detailed in their threats. The writing was messy; letters were haphazardly placed in uneven rows across the page. It was not typed like the Confession letters, and its contents were not splashed across the page in large block printing as had occurred in the three Bates letters. The penmanship and grammar suggested that the writer had little experience wri
ting and a poverty of education. It was a juvenile script and terseness that might be expected from a prison inmate or an elementary school child. Could it actually have been created by the same author who three years earlier had typed, “SHE WAS YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL… SHE WENT TO THE SLAUGHTER LIKE A LAMB… HER BREAST FELT VERY WARM AND FIRM…”?
Upon receipt of the letters, the editorial boards of the three newspaper organizations began to discuss whether or not they should each publish what they had received. Each paper had to weigh the threat of public disruption against the citizens’ right to know. The promise of increased newspaper sales was always a carrot dangling in front of the editors, a temptation offering to tilt the scales. Because the letters themselves threatened the murder of as many as a dozen innocent people if they were not published by August 1—a deadline only hours away—the pressure was great. If a newspaper refused to print what it had, it could arguably be responsible for a murder spree—not to mention the withholding of a threat which many in the public would want to receive in fair warning. And any paper that did not publish could in time lose market share to a paper that did. As unpleasant and distasteful as capitulating to the demands of a serial killer may have appeared, it promised to aid the media in its quest to add readers, sell newspapers, and create a huge news story that would soon metastasize into a media feeding frenzy.
The killer had stumbled upon a publicity extravaganza, which he used to forge a working relationship with the press. Each would get what they wanted. The killer was successful in what he apparently hoped for: that under pressure from a threat of violence and from the need to compete with the other news operations, his symbol arrangements would indeed be published as he demanded. The papers in turn received fascinating copy space for their readers. The 3-Part 408 cipher was therefore a stroke of advertising genius.
In and of itself, it was a tantalizing news story. Who wouldn’t want to know more about a murderer who wrote in a mysterious alphabet which if successfully deciphered would lead to the identity of the killer, as suggested by one of the letters that included the additional, taunting sentence, “in this cipher is my iden[t]ity.” This was a made-for-media story that promised to place each of these papers squarely in the middle of the violence, the story and, therefore, history as it unfolded. If the cipher was published, any solution would be attempted, and possibly found, in the presence of the media, providing the organizations extra incentive to herald it.
And if the cipher was to be solved, the more eyes that saw it the better.
How and when to publish remained a question for each paper. Newspapers, which are competitive by nature, always eager to get a scoop or an exclusive, were now forced to cooperate, all the while casting a suspicious eye on one another.
This media version of a Mexican standoff was resolved quite quickly when all three papers acceded to the writer’s demands. The cipher parts were printed, but they did not all appear on the front page or by the deadline, as their creator required.
If the killer had hoped to extend his range of publicity, he was immediately successful, as the story achieved national status. It was not exactly the 1969 equivalent of going viral, but the news of an unusual killer spread outside the Bay Area and beyond California. If the killer had hoped to extend the length of his publicity campaign, he was similarly successful because his letters and actions would continue to be studied for at least the next four decades, providing him an infamy that he apparently craved.
The Vallejo News Chronicle published The Vallejo Times-Herald’s piece on Friday, August 1, on its front page, noting that the letter had been sent to Gibson Publications, owner of both The Times-Herald and The News Chronicle. It published all three parts of the cryptograph in its August 4 edition, printing also the killer’s “cover letter” in the hopes that someone might recognize the unusual script. The San Francisco Chronicle published its piece on page 4 on Saturday, August 2, past the deadline and off the paper’s first page. The San Francisco Chronicle and The San Francisco Examiner published all three cipher pieces on the front page of the Sunday Chronicle-Examiner, the joint publication of the two papers.
However successful the murderer was in having his cipher published, he must have realized the danger he faced in dipping his toe in this new pool. Each tidbit of information he shared would place the investigation one step closer to his capture. An intricate and complex cipher certainly revealed something of its creator. The drawing up of the cipher evidently required a large investment in time and not a little skill. While the cipher itself—and its subsequently found solution—did not demonstrate the expertise of a professional cryptographer, as someone in the military or in the field of computer science might use to build a career, it did indicate that its author had at least rudimentary familiarity with the concept of cipher-making, not a widespread experience in most communities. Some training or exposure was obvious.
The makeup of the mailings and the information contained in the three letters similarly revealed details of the killer’s character, if not his identity. What exactly they communicated, investigators struggled to understand.
As a result of his use of cryptographs, and his history of murder, the killer was dubbed the “Cipher Slayer” in The Lodi News Chronicle, and later in The San Francisco Chronicle. An alternate name also appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle on September 30, “the Code Killer.” Either of these titles would effectively distinguish this murderer and provide him notoriety. However, he was evidently unsatisfied with a media-invented moniker. In his very next letter, sent less than a week later, the killer would identify himself in a name that would guarantee not only newspaper articles, but numerous magazine covers, a shelf of books, multiple movies, and an enduring legacy. His More Material letter, received by The San Francisco Examiner in early August, began, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” a proclamation that would set a major population center on edge for years to come, the phrase becoming his tagline and a title for many of his future letters.
The killer’s name the “Zodiac” and its associated crosshairs symbol—which the Vallejo newspaper identified as “what appeared to be a sketch of the cross-hairs in a telescopic rifle sight”—helped launch an effective advertising campaign that would rival that of any large corporation. Companies embrace and cherish familiar logos and key phrases to comfort customers and educate society about its products. The killer from instinct, experience, or sheer brilliance (or some combination of the three) was able to pull off a large-scale publicity blitz, and earned media on a grand scale. He provided murder instead of a product, used the currency of fear in place of money, and manipulated a compliant press in lieu of an advertising budget. The public was powerless against the emergence of this new macabre brand, its message so palpable, its memes so virulent.
Accordingly, the introduction of ciphers into the Zodiac murder campaign also induced many members of the public to become actively involved in the case. Some attempted, however half-heartedly, to solve the cipher. It was not an easy task. The killer did not indicate which of the three sheets contained the first part, or the second, or the third; did not suggest whether there was as a one-to-one (homophonic) correspondence from cipher symbol to English letter; and did not confirm that the symbols were to be read left-to-right and top-to-bottom. Many quickly tired of the exercise, possibly doubting that there was any solution to be found. Some citizens began to notice family members or acquaintances who had written symbols or codes, and cast a suspicious eye in their direction. Leads regarding the possible association of the cipher symbols to astrology began to trickle in to the VPD, each of which had to be pursued.
VPD Detective Sergeant John Lynch followed up one such tip. A 47- to 49-year-old former patient of Napa State Hospital who loved to hunt became a suspect after an anonymous caller brought him to the attention of the police. He was very large in stature, and he liked to create poetry and write about killing and religion. Investigation proved that the man was actually younger than the tip suggested. Though he
had been arrested in Alameda several times, and often went by another name, he was not the Zodiac.
A woman turned in her ex-husband who was known to sign notes with a crosshairs symbol. Lynch received a sample of the man’s handwriting from her, and learned that he was a hippy who lived in San Francisco. His present address was unknown. He had been arrested in San Mateo County for grand theft and armed robbery.
When another woman noticed books on astrology in the apartment of a mentally ill friend named Sharon, she reported the husband to the VPD. She explained to the police that the man, named Tommy, was known to beat her friend, especially during sex; believed in the afterlife; and was expecting his wife to be his slave in the “hereafter.” Sharon, who had spent time in the Napa State Hospital, had often complained that her husband was impotent and needed an artificial penis to perform sexually. He also allegedly attempted to kill his wife by leaving open the gas burners in their home without igniting a flame. He owned many books on astrology as well. Working as a pipefitter on the swing shift at Mare Island, he did not work weekends, when the Zodiac had struck. Detectives collected his employment forms for handwriting analysis. His neighbors reported that he had few visitors, none that were women, and that he was gone most weekends.
Tommy’s fingerprints were located and sent to the FBI laboratory in Washington, D.C. on October 1, 1970. The reply came the next day: no match was found with any prints collected in the murders being investigated.