Episode 6: He talked to two police officers minutes after the murder. They let him walk away.
Northern California, 1969.
A killer was operating in the San Francisco Bay Area — attacking couples parked in remote locations, calling the police himself after each attack, and sending coded letters to newspapers demanding they print his ciphers.
He called himself the Zodiac.
He attached one-third of a 408-symbol cipher to letters sent simultaneously to three Bay Area newspapers. He claimed the cipher contained his identity. He threatened to kill again if they didn't print it on the front page.
They printed it.
Eight days later, a high school teacher and his wife cracked the code.
It read: "I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all."
On September 27, 1969, he attacked two college students at Lake Berryessa. He wore a black executioner's hood with his crosshair symbol on the chest. He tied them up, stabbed them, then calmly walked to the road, wrote the dates of all three attacks on their car door, drove 27 miles, and called the police from a payphone to tell them what he had done. Investigators lifted a palm print from the phone.
Two weeks later — October 11, 1969 — he hailed a taxi in downtown San Francisco and shot the driver in the back of the head. He then spent several minutes in the front seat cutting a piece of the dead man's shirt, wiping down the entire cab for fingerprints, and removing the driver's wallet.
Three teenagers across the street saw everything and called the police.
Two officers arrived in under three minutes.
On the street near the crime scene, they spotted a man walking alone. They pulled alongside him and asked if he had seen anything suspicious.
He said yes — he'd seen someone with a gun, heading east.
The officers drove away in the direction he pointed.
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The man they stopped and spoke to was the Zodiac Killer.
He later wrote a letter confirming it, laughing about it.
"Two cops pulled a goof about 3 minutes after I left the cab. I was walking down the hill to the park when this cop car pulled up. I said there was a man running by waving a gun. The cops peeled rubber and went around the corner as I directed them. And I disappeared into the park. Never to be seen again."
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Over the next five years, he sent more than 20 letters. He included bomb diagrams. He threatened to shoot children off school buses — and armed officers rode buses across three counties.
His last letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1974.
Then silence.
The FBI extracted DNA from his letters. No match was ever found.
In 2020, a team of amateur codebreakers finally cracked his 340-symbol cipher — sent in 1969 and unsolved for 51 years.
It read: "I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me. I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner, because I now have enough slaves to work for me."
One cipher remains unsolved to this day. The 13-character cipher that begins:
"My name is…"
He claimed 37 victims. Police confirmed 5.
He was never caught.
Whoever he was, he is either dead or he has been among us this entire time.
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The full Zodiac investigation — every confirmed attack, every cipher, every suspect, including Arthur Leigh Allen, and the 2020 cipher breakthrough — is coming to GraveFile TV.
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