Hunted: The Zodiac Murders (The Zodiac Serial Killer Book 1)
Page 29
Of course, the cipher may comprise a series of randomly placed symbols with no real solution, a reality that the police soon began to consider. This would not be out of character for a killer who claimed in the 6-Page letter to have given the police “bu[s]y work” to have them run all over town. A nonsense cipher, if that is what the 340 cipher was, would indeed chew up hours of investigative time and not a little computer memory.
The new cryptograph contained an odd correction. One of the cypher’s symbols, a “K,” was crossed out, with a backwards “K” written above it. The correction was cited by several investigators, some in support of and others against proof of a valid decryption. A few believed it implied that the cipher was not gibberish. Others, because the 408 cipher had numerous misspellings and coding errors with no revisions, held that a deviously clever criminal could have amended a non-existent mistake to goad law enforcement into believing that the writer must possess a solution if he took the time and assiduous effort to correct it. FBI cryptologists in the twenty-first century, including Dan Olsen, chief of the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Units, appeal to a computer analysis of certain rows in the belief that at least several lines of encryption contain decipherable information. So far, none has emerged.
Whether it was decipherable or not, the police danced to the killer’s tune, which may have been the Zodiac’s ultimate purpose. Law enforcement spent a multitude of hours on a task that to date has not reaped any rewards. The unbroken cipher has only reinforced the idea that the brilliant criminal was in fact cunning, clever, and unstoppable.
There was an intriguing possibility that the police had to confront. The coder may have performed some simple, but unfair—and devastatingly difficult-to-solve—change to the layout or concept of the cipher. If he intended the symbols to be read from bottom to top in a diagonal layout, to be understood to include only some of the symbols, or to be translated into a language other than English, no computer without the specific instruction would be able to solve it for the author’s concealed communiqué. Such a twist would provide its creator bragging rights with little chance that the cryptograph might actually be solved.
Additionally, it could have been a different type of encryption. There was no inherent reason for cryptanalysts to believe that its solution was to be found in a simple, homophonic substitution with variations cipher, the type represented in the 408 cipher. The myriad unsuccessful attempts to solve it actually suggest against the possibility of it being in the same format as the 408. Perhaps each character had been substituted with two symbols rather than one, some or half of the symbols being meaningless, or some other clever solution having to do with shapes or other random interpretation. If that was the case, many came to acknowledge, no one was ever likely to solve it without further assistance from its creator.
The 340 cipher remains an interesting challenge for the layperson with an excess of leisure time. A correct solution could be a ticket to fame and fortune—or so some apparently believe. Since a mere high school teacher and his wife cracked the 408 cipher, many people were drawn as if by a magnet to the new cipher. Numerous dubious solutions were suggested in the decades following its receipt; none has impressed professional cryptographers. Eventually, the 340 cipher was forgotten by all but the most determined cipher specialists and die-hard Zodiac enthusiasts.
The FBI reviewed the 6-Page letter and the Pen card on November 18. The next day it reported on its lack of progress in the cryptanalysis. In response to the November 11 airtel requesting comparisons with the two new mailings, which the FBI received on November 10, the Bureau noted that all the writing, with the exception of the 340 cipher, matched the Zodiac’s previous letters. Because the page of the Pen card cipher that was supplied to the FBI laboratory was a copy, and not an original, it could not be meaningfully compared to the previous letters.
The individual pieces of the 6-Page letter and the Pen card mailings were assigned laboratory numbers Qc21 to Qc32, the final document being the 340 cipher.
The 6-Page letter read as follows:
1/6
This is the Zodiac speaking
up to the end of Oct I have
killed 7 people. I have grown
rather angry with the police
for their telling lies about me.
So I shall change the way the
collecting of slaves. I shall
no longer announce to anyone.
when I comitt my murders,
they shall look like routine
robberies, killings of anger, &
a few fake accidents, etc.
[a horizontal line the width of the page]
The police shall never catch me,
because I have been too clever
for them.
I look like the description
passed out only when I do
my thing, the rest of the time
I look entirle different. I
shall not tell you what my
descise consists of when I kill
As of yet I have left no
fingerprints behind me contrary
to what the police say
—
2/6
in my killings I wear trans -
parent finger tip guards. All it
is is 2 coats of airplane cement
coated on my finger tips—quite
unnoticible & very efective.
my killing tools have been bought
en through the mail order out-
fits before the ban went into
efect. except one & it was
bought out of the state.
So as you see the police don’t
have much to work on. If you
wonder why I was wipeing the
cab down I was leaving fake clews
for the police to run all over town
with, as one might say, I gave
the cops som bussy work to do to
keep them happy. I enjoy needling
the blue pigs. Hey blue pig I
was in the park—you were useing
fire trucks to mask the sound
of your cruzeing prowl cars. The
dogs never came with in 2
blocks of me & they were to
the west & there was only 2
—
3/6
groups of barking about 10 min
apart then the motor cicles
went by about 150 ft away
going from south to north west.
ps. 2 cops pulled a goof abot 3
min after I left the cab. I was
walking down the hill to the
park when this cop car pulled up
& one of them called me over
& asked if I saw any one
acting supicisous or strange
in the last 5 to 10 min & I said
yes there was this man who
was runnig by waveing a gun
& the cops peeled rubber &
went around the corner as
I directed them & I dissap-
eared into the park a block &
a half away never to be seen
again.
Hey pig doesnt it rule you up
to have you noze rubed in your
booboos ?
If you cops think Im going to take
on a bus the way I stated I was,
you deserve to have holes in your
heads.
—
4/6
Take one bag of ammonium nitrate
fertlizer & 1 gal of stove oil &
dump a few bags of gravel on
top & then set the shit off
& will positivily ventalate any
thing that should be in the way
of the blast.
The death machiene is all ready
made. I would have sent you
pictures but you would be nasty
enough to trace them back to
developer & then
to me, So I
shall describe my masterpiece
to you. The nice part of it is
all the parts can be bought on
the open market with no quest
ions asked.
1 bat. pow clock—will run for
aprox 1 year
1 photoelectric switch
2 copper leaf springs
2 6V car bat
1 flash light bulb & reflector
1 mirror
2 18” cardboard tubes black with
shoe polish in side & oute
—
5/6
[bomb diagram]
Bus goes bang car
passes by ok.
—
6/6
The system checks out from
one end to the other in my
tests. What you do not know
is whether the death machiene
is at the sight or whether
it is being stored in my
basement for future use.
I think you do not have the
man power to stop this one
by continually searching the
road sides looking for this
thing. & it wont do to reroat
& reschedule the busses bec
ause the bomb can be adapted
to new conditions.
Have fun !! By the way
it could be rather messy
if you try to bluff me.
[large crosshair symbol with points at 1 o’clock,
2 o’clock 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock; and “X”s at 6 o’clock,
8 o’clock, 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, and 11 o’clock]
PS. Be shure to
print the part I
marked out on
page 3 or I shall
do my thing [small crosshair symbol]
—
[on the back of page 6]:
To prove that I am the
Zodiac, Ask the Vallejo
cop about my electric gun
sight which I used to start
my collecting of slaves.
There remains some confusion about the precise timing of the Pen card and the 6-Page letter. While both arrived on November 10, the FBI laboratory and early reports noted that the card was postmarked on November 9, and the long letter, November 8. When the FBI evaluated the mailings nearly a decade later, they switched the order, possibly prompted to do so by the SFPD, and matched the Pen card with the November 8 envelope, the letter with the November 9 envelope. Since both arrived together, the order of the two postmarks may not matter for the investigation, expect for one point: the letter with its bomb diagram may have been the “bad news” about which the card warned had it been sent first.
The 6-Page letter in and of itself marked a notable shift in the Zodiac’s crime spree. Seven pages in length when including the paragraph on the back of page 6, it was the longest note sent by the killer—and would remain the longest ever received. As such, it contained more information, more new information, and more new categories of writing than any other Zodiac mailing. It was one of only a few multi-page letters the killer ever penned. The writer used many paragraphs to mine the depths of a number of topics, introducing a bomb diagram, a recipe list of bomb ingredients, and details to be used for a bomb’s construction, each an entirely new avenue for the killer.
In the very first paragraph, the Zodiac wrote specifically about his metamorphosis: “I will change the way the collecting of slaves.” Additional killings, he promised, would be disguised to resemble “routine robberies, killings of anger, & a few fake accidents, etc.”
The letter included amended plans to kill children.
If you cops think Im going to take
on a bus the way I stated I was,
you deserve to have holes in your
heads.
No longer promising sniper fire directed at a bus, he now provided a new plan for a concealed roadside bomb that would detonate when passed by a bus. The letter offered a detailed diagram of such a killing system, as well as instructions to be followed to create the bomb.
He wrote about a disguise that he reputedly wore when killing—and only when killing. He refused the chance to be very specific, taunting instead that he would not disclose the details of his subterfuge. This revelation cast additional suspicion on all eyewitness sightings of the murderer. If he was reported to look a certain way by those who saw him, they may have been wrong in their descriptions due to his physical modifications, whatever they were, in addition to the fact that all eyewitness reports can in and of themselves be very unreliable.
In another innovation, the Zodiac demanded that one specific paragraph of the new letter be printed. He carefully marked it for The Chronicle editors. The police speculated that the killer was aware of an editor’s need for brevity, and was attempting to control his own press.
The portion selected for publication was a particularly damning indictment of the police activity—if it was to be believed. He claimed that two officers interacted with him following the murder of Paul Stine and then sped away—at his direction—without apprehending him. Why that piece, of all the many paragraphs in the letter, was highlighted may have had to do with its message. No other paragraph so illustrated the killer’s apparent cunning juxtaposed against his description of law enforcement incompetence.
In fact, the theme that ran through the entire 7 pages of printing was his brilliance as a criminal. The letter’s thesis statement was obvious on the first page, “The police shall never catch me, because I have been too clever for them.” This cleverness apparently extended to a picture on page 5 of a roadside detonation device that promised to blast a busload of children. Though the killer had previously threatened children on a school bus—with a sniper attack, in the Stine letter—nowhere had he mentioned, or threaten to use, a bomb.
The U.S. Army acknowledged to the SFPD that in theory the bomb was functional. But, it cautioned, such a creation would not be easily constructed. The Chronicle agreed to not publish the diagram for fear it would evoke widespread panic, as the school bus threat in the Stine letter had, and because it was more than likely just a hoax.
The length of the letter, and the depth into which the Zodiac delved with insufferable detail, raised the inevitable question of “why?” and “why now?” Investigators realized that the answers to these questions may have resided in the Stine attack, and in the killer’s own fear of being caught. The fact that he was nearly captured on Jackson Street may have led to his extraordinarily rare—for serial killers—retirement from serial killing. The Zodiac may also have been shocked to learn that the SFPD was circulating two composite pictures of him, created with the help of the three youngsters who witnessed events following Stine’s murder. It may have been disheartening to him that the SFPD claimed to possess several latent fingerprints. He may have felt threatened by any or all of the developments in the case. In sum, fear may have been the motivating factor in the creation of the letter.
The braggadocio suggested to some that this may in fact have been the case. The Zodiac may have composed his 6-Page letter to bolster his reputation and affirm his now-questioned cleverness and superior intellect. The killer filled 6 pages with boasting and taunting, betraying a truth: he was not a confidently effective criminal, but someone who had been exposed as a craven and ineffectual coward, someone who nevertheless wanted to argue for his brilliance.
His claims of greatness rang hollow. He had been, after all, watched following the murder of Stine, sighted by police officers on Jackson Street, and observed so closely that composite pictures of him could be created and distributed.
Some of the factual content of the letter was also challenged. Lee responded to the Zodiac’s description of events in the park by saying, “That is a lot of poppycock.” Because the murderer had not mentioned floodlights, and had been wrong about his description of the tracking dogs, Lee was certain that he was nowhere in the vicinity during the se
arch.
As it became apparent that the killer would keep his promise to not announce future victims, the police began to wonder about his new strategy.
The Zodiac’s new behavior suggested that letter writing was his cathexis, that which brought him emotional fulfillment. Contact through the postal system began at the outset of his assaults, starting a mere month after Cheri Jo Bates was murdered in 1966. The mail continued throughout the period of known attacks, from 1966 to 1969, and continued even when the murders ceased, if they did, possibly after Paul Stine was killed. Only one attack was not followed up with a letter: the murders on Lake Herman Road. But even that brutality was well documented in the Zodiac’s next letters of July 31, 1969, in which he claimed credit for not only the murder of July 4, but also his deeds the previous December. The Lake Berryessa stabbing was accompanied by the numbers, symbols, and letters on Hartnell’s car door, making it a communication of sorts.
The Zodiac had clearly demonstrated that he could write without the accompaniment of a murder, as he apparently did from 1970 to 1974, but may have been unable to commit murder without writing prior to that date—or at any time. He could write without killing, but could not kill without writing. The letters, therefore, may have been the motivation fueling his attacks, and not the need to murder, killing merely the means to have his letters taken seriously, published, and allowed to create fear. In his own mind, by November, 1969, he may have achieved a place where killing was no longer necessary to accomplish his goals, which he correctly surmised he could then do with letters and telephone calls alone.
Whatever his mindset, the letters would continue even if the killing did not. But first, the case would suffer a significant detour.
8 | MELVIN BELLI
“Please help me”
On October 22, 1969, just before midnight, someone claiming to be the Zodiac telephoned the Oakland Police Department. His demand was specific. He wanted a defense attorney to join newsman Jim Dunbar on KGO TV Channel 7 the following morning, either the famed F. Lee Bailey or a local celebrity Melvin Belli, who had appeared with Dunbar approximately two weeks earlier. He promised to phone into the show if one of these two lawyers was present. His request was immediately taken seriously because the Zodiac was the hottest story coursing through the veins of conversations in the San Francisco Bay area.