Zodiac Cracked: The Manifestation of a Killer

by Marianne Koerfer

  With the bomb location cipher reading “Chabot Meridian Transit Telescope,” Warren started us out with the clue of the first letter being a C and presented this as a true substitution cipher where each letter or symbol is substituted in the correct spelling order unlike the “My name is ______” cipher, which is a transposition cipher where the text letters are substituted but jumbled.

  Knowing who the killer is and knowing what his profession, background, and capabilities were, I was at a great advantage to solving the second small cipher that was sent only two months after the first small cipher. I would be looking for similar use of symbols in these two ciphers … and I found them.

  In the bomb location cipher, by separating the cipher into words, you can see the similar word traits enough to know that the answer is correct. He gives us two letters of the first word, three letters of the second word, one letter of the third word that contains yet another clue—the circle with a dot inside meaning “transit”—and visually writes the last word. Within the “My name is _______” cipher, as small as this cipher is, Zodiac uses three letters, A, E, and N, along with three E‘s (eight balls) that are actually contained in his name. Only the letter N is used as two letters, an A and a T. A reoccurring trait in all the ciphers Zodiac created is a letter represented with its actual letter substitute as well as representing a letter with several substitutes of differing letters or symbols representing the same letter. Confusing? You bet, but nothing technical going on here, just Warren as Zodiac playing his games with the cops.

  The last cipher received contained 340 letters and symbols. It was received on November 8, 1969, by the San Francisco Chronicle. This cipher was sent in what has become known as the “dripping pen card” along with yet another threat by Zodiac stating that he would “do his thing” if the cipher was not printed on the front page of the newspaper. I have seen two very probable solutions to this cipher … they are both similar in content. Both solvers considered the first three letters of this cipher, HER, as a visual clue to the name Herb Caen, another columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. In the first possible Zodiac letter, the Confession letter received in November 1966 by the Riverside Press-Enterprise, the writer used the word her eighteen times referring to Cheri Jo Bates and used the word she fifteen times but never used Cheri Jo Bates’s full name, referring to his victim only one time as “Miss Bates.” The FBI is still asking the public to submit any solutions they may have for any of the four ciphers to their Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit.

  Now, forty years after the Zodiac presented these ciphers, they are finally being solved and, in the case of these two small ciphers, solved by means of discovering the answers and inserting them into the ciphers. I use the term “solved” here with the utmost shame pertaining to the “My name is ______” cipher as there was no solving involved on my part … just substitution. Again, once you know the answer, it is just a matter of inserting the correct information. This effort was not unlike making it through a maze by going in the out and coming out the in … the goal is to make your way through the maze—solve the cipher.

  As for the bomb location cipher, like anyone trying to solve a cipher, I spent a lot of time just staring at the thing always hoping to actually see something I had not considered yet. Autostereograms have been around since 1838, when the technique was developed. By using your binocular vision fixating on a two-dimensional picture you will soon see the elusive three-dimensional image appear. Warren was an expert in making binoculars and knowing how to insert the correct focusing lens into the eyepieces. He understood stereograms and the human eyes’ binocular vision. The solution to the bomb location came off of the page at me like a stereogram.

  There are many types of secret writing–containing letters, symbols, or ciphers that a cryptographist can devise or solve, some being unbreakable, some needing a mathematical key code to break, and some needing a simple cipher disc. The more symbols, letters, or numbers used that are assigned multiple substitutions makes a cryptic message often impossible to solve, yet the longer the cipher the more the cryptographist has to work with to find patterns. A very small transposition cipher where the text is jumbled can be equally problematic as it does not give the solver enough to work with … at the very least, all present a grueling task that one must be obsessed with to work on for so long knowing that it may be unbreakable. In reviewing Zodiac’s ciphers, it is apparent that although they are clever, they are not unsolvable. Anyone with enough time on their hands could have produced the same type of ciphers. We know that Warren Estes had the time, the place, the skill, and, above all, he was driven by his determination to harass the public and the police.

  After Zodiac’s mailing lull of over two years, he mailed what we thought was his last letter, the Exorcist letter, in January of 1974. But five months later in June of 1974, he mailed one more cipher. The simple cipher, the mailing envelope, and a cipher disc that I discovered were all made and used by Warren. The cipher itself is a plaintext cipher that employs a keyword. The keyword Warren used was planet … an obvious word selection from an astronomer. Although Warren could have just hand delivered this cipher to the young girl he wrote the cryptic message to, he chose to mail it because that is what he does. The envelope was old. The price to mail a letter in June 1974 when the cipher was mailed was ten cents, but the envelope was an old preposted five-cent envelope. The last date for mailing a letter for five cents was January 7, 1968. Zodiac always used too much postage on his letters, and the stamps were always presidents. This cipher envelope did, however, have the correct amount of postage with Warren’s addition of two president stamps affixed. Warren had written his return address in the upper left corner of the envelope but did not write his name.

  It is obvious after studying the killings and the cipher- and letter-writing campaign waged by Zodiac that Warren was living out his fantasies as he moved along through his drugged rages. He started with a discreet Z that developed into his introducing himself to us as the Zodiac in the August 4, 1969, letter to the Vallejo Times-Herald newspaper. It was the first of many times we would read, “This is the Zodiac speaking” and his sign-off with the crossed circle symbol. Prior to this time, he had referred to himself as the “murderer” or the “killer” and signed his letters with what soon became his trademark crossed circle symbol. I began to scour a decade of Warren’s documents. I had no idea what I was looking for but soon found that Warren had inserted this crossed circle symbol by hand into a 1967 typewritten document I viewed. The document was created just three months after Cheri Jo Bates was murdered.

  Warren Estes was an exceptional amateur astronomer with a BA in education and science. In 1964, he began teaching astronomy A and B noncredit adult night classes at the Riverside Community College and was now calling himself “professor.” Being a teacher and being of an obsessive nature, he could not help correcting any documents he made contact with … the hand printing on the documents I viewed was unmistakably familiar, giving further credibility to the suspicion that the grammatical mistakes in the Zodiac letters were in fact intentional and dysgraphical.

  The Dr. Zodiac character featured in the Charlie Chan at Treasure Island movie publicly performed as a mind reader and gave private séances. Warren’s mother also gave private séances so Warren would have been comfortable with this character. As the celestial Zodiac is made up of constellations and the crossed circle represents earth, I decided that if both these symbols, the crossed circle earth and the Z used by the killer Zodiac, were influenced by Warren’s astronomy connection rather than a comfortable movie character, then surely the third symbol that has baffled everyone since it was first seen in the Paul Avery Halloween card must somehow refer to his astronomy connection too. The three symbols appeared only one time together, and that was at the bottom of the inside of the Avery Halloween card. That third strange symbol was never to appear again in Zodiac’s writings.

  In the killer’s Zodiac introduction letter of August
4, 1969, he closed the letter with the crossed circle symbol and the notation “NO ADDRESS” but had used only one D and went back and squeezed in the second D. At the bottom of one of Warren’s typewritten documents I examined, I found the hand-printed word address, and this time he struggled with writing the double s in address.

  I could only find three mailings (two envelopes and one postcard) in the Zodiac letters where he had written something in the return address area. On October 13, 1969, he drew a small crossed circle, and on October 27, 1970, he drew a flying wing-shaped symbol with four dots and an extended small line under the right wing; then on March 20, 1971, on a postcard Zodiac used a hole punch to make a hole in the address field and drew four lines in each direction emanating from the hole representing his standard crossed circle with the hole being the circle. But it was in the flying wing symbol that I would find a direction to solving from a handwritten notation in one of his documents.

  As this was my first attempt to identify the baffling symbol and its meaning, I looked at it inverted, sideways, and in reverse in a mirror. The Halloween card was surely meant to be an intimidating threat to columnist Paul Avery. This is where Zodiac got his best laughs from … scaring people. Zodiac had written the flying wing symbol, the Z, and the crossed circle earth symbol across the bottom inside of the card. But the card itself also had so much going on: peering eyes, a large BOO!, a poem, two skeletons, a pumpkin, a spiderweb, a woven diatribe, and he had written the number “14” on the right hand of one of the skeletons along with the words 4-TEEN at the top of the card. This card gave way to explaining much of Zodiac’s writings.

  Zodiac had constantly written, “When I have my blast” and had seemed to up the actual count of murders by raising his tallies with no bodies found that fit his MO. During the 1960s and into the 1970s, the NASA Apollo missions were generating the daily headlines in all the newspapers. Zodiac wanted the headlines and even made threats to the papers of “doing his thing” if his letters did not appear on the front pages. It was obvious he was competing with the Apollo missions and their blasts, except Zodiac’s blast would come from a bomb, not a rocket.

  On July 20, 1969, NASA mission commander Neil A. Armstrong was the first man to step foot on the moon. He would leave the famous first boot print we have all seen in photos—the impression of his ridged-sole boot print was made in the soft sand-like area of the moon as he stepped onto its surface. With some irony, two months and one week later, on September 27, 1969, Zodiac would leave his own ridged sole boot print in the soft ground area of the Lake Berryessa murder site.

  With all this headline competition, I knew Zodiac had to have made mistakes somewhere. Now that I was closely examining Warren’s documents against Zodiac’s letters, it was apparent that Zodiac was making deliberate mistakes in his letters, but I was also seeing some unintended misspellings and signs of dysgraphia of some sort in both these sources generated by the writings of a very clever, educated madman.

  One of Warren’s documents had two handwritten words on the bottom of a typewritten page: Movies and Topology. Topology, a branch of mathematics, is used for many applications such as adding routes onto a map. I stared for a long while yet again at the flying wing symbol that had been placed along with a large Z in that return address area of the Avery Halloween card envelope. Could this symbol actually be an address or at least a map? I found it to be a topological map of the state of California. The small extending line under the right wing is an undershoot: i.e., a line that extends to a node (specific point). The full outline itself is that of the inland border of California with the lower southeast corner of jagged border stretched like a rubber band into a pointed corner thanks to the application of topology that can change shapes. The undershoot ends at the specific point (node) in the San Bernardino/Riverside area where Zodiac lived on the Joshua Tree property in San Bernardino and with his parents in Riverside. The four dots (nodes) simply represent the four Bay Area killing sites and can be placed on their proper locations: Solano County, Vallejo, Napa County (Lake Berryessa) and San Francisco, placements Zodiac could not have made or it would “spoil the game.”

  As for the “14” on the skeleton’s hand and the words 4-TEEN, three months later, Apollo 14 would “blast” off and steal the headlines again from Zodiac, who would continue to threaten to have his “blast.”

  Zodiac had made two mistakes here—writing the word Topology and placing the flying wing-shaped symbol in the return address portion of the envelope along with his Z, clueing that this strange symbol was a location … the killer’s address.

  On April 17, 1970, the USS Iwo Jima picked up the Apollo 13 command module that splashed down in the South Pacific but not before the mission had yielded a famous chilling message of their own, “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

  Thus far, Zodiac had used president stamps on all his mailings. But on both the October 1970 mailings, the “I’m crackproof” postcard postmarked October 5, 1970, and the Avery Halloween greeting card received later and postmarked October 27, 1970, Zodiac had placed one eight-cent Apollo 8 Lunar stamp issued on May 5, 1969, commemorating the Christmas Eve circumnavigating of the moon by the Apollo 8 spacecraft. Many have questioned the authenticity of the “I’m crackproof” postcard, but as it was mailed first and posted with the Apollo stamp followed by the next mailing, the Avery Halloween card, that was posted twenty-two days later, also with an Apollo stamp, and is an authenticated Zodiac letter, Warren as Zodiac did make a mistake here by interjecting his astronomy into his letters yet again.

  Zodiac, as an astronomer, thought mathematically but was not putting out any mathematical equations that could only be solved by mathematicians. I have seen some amazing all-consuming mathematical versions of what this symbol represents, and, as with the ciphers, again, way too much time had been used in this pursuit. But the bigger picture here is seeing Zodiac letters and Warren Estes’s documents merging from the same person. Zodiac wrote “Rush to Editor” and “ATTN: EDITOR” on all his envelopes while Warren was the editor of his own documents.

  The third and last return address symbol—the hole in the “peek through the pines” postcard enhanced to look like the crossed circle—is no more than Zodiac encouraging the public and police to take a look through his telescope finder lens. He instructs us to “peek through the pines.” The pines are all over the back of the postcard where he pasted a Forest Pines advertisement and inserted the words “Sierra Club.” Warren was close to the Sierra Club and had participated in their star parties, some overnighters. The postcard itself was an old four-cent preposted card. The correct postage for a postcard in March, 1971, was five cents … the card was delivered anyway.

  Warren was a sociopath who managed to function in the field of astronomy, allowing him to teach, lecture, create, and be close to “boys and girls” while functioning in the adult world. Those who knew him would say “he really knew his stuff” when it came to astronomy and telescope building, but they all also added that “he was really strange or different.” And suddenly, after two years and two months of mail silence, Zodiac suddenly reappeared in a letter sent on January 29, 1974, to the San Francisco Chronicle. There was nothing unusual about the envelope, just a familiar “Please Rush To Editor” under the “San Fran. [sic] Chronicle” one-line address. Along with one eight-cent Eisenhower stamp, Zodiac also placed on the envelope two of the postal information stickers that came with the stamp package. There was no return address, no crossed circle earth symbol, and no Z or “Zodiac.” Inside was yet another taunting letter. But with no apparent Zodiac killings discovered by the police during this mail silence, the Zodiac still listed an unbelievable “score” at the bottom of the letter: Me–37 and SFPD–0. What was he counting—maybe Apollo astronauts?

  The letter did not begin with “This is the Zodiac speaking,” instead he only refers to himself as “I.” The message ends with, “Signed, yours truly:” followed by excerpted lyrics sung by Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executi
oner in The Mikado opera. The lyrics are about a distraught dicky-bird singing about suicide. Zodiac then adds a cocky threatening “Ps. [sic].” But it is the symbols appearing next that are of interest …

  The movie The Exorcist had just opened in San Francisco. Knowing Zodiac thrived on scaring people, he must have been in his glory element in the theater sitting amongst a hundred terrified people … he could not resist sending this letter telling everyone that he thought “this was the best satirical comidy [sic] that I have ever seen.” The demonized suffering young girl on the movie theater screen indeed would have been a laughing matter to Warren.

  Eight days prior to the mailing of this letter, Warren was working with his astronomy club at an advertised event from January 7 through January 21, 1974, at the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway. The Comet Kohoutek was visible during this time in the clear night sky. But at a regular “star party” in a remote dark field or someone’s backyard or driveway, gazers would gather and bring their own telescopes and supplies and settle in for a night of dark sky gazing. Warren hosted and attended these parties regularly. Various sizes of telescopes would be silhouetted in the field. The symbols at the bottom of the Exorcist letter are not symbols at all but silhouettes of telescopes that usually sit on tripods or other special mounts. The top dot would be Comet Kohoutek (note the small tail line on the dot), and the second dot is most likely just a star. Just as he gave us the clue of four nodes (dots) to places on the topological map, he now gave us enough with one small tail line to “clew [sic] us in.” He was telling us what he had been doing … another diary entry. Again we are seeing the merged killer Zodiac and astronomer Warren Estes. Zodiac in his own way had signed off on this letter as Warren Estes the amateur astronomer … he was no longer the Zodiac … and there would be no further killings or letters.