Zodiac

Robert Graysmith, a political cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, recounts his decades-long investigation into the Zodiac killer, a hooded serial murderer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area beginning in 1968. Graysmith was present at the Chronicle when the killer's first coded letters arrived, and his initial fascination with the visual qualities of Zodiac's cipher symbols grew into an all-consuming resolve to identify the man behind them. The book traces the full arc of the Zodiac case, from the first murders through the mid-1980s, weaving together police files, witness testimony, and Graysmith's own research across multiple jurisdictions. Graysmith characterizes obsession as the key word of the entire mystery: The case destroyed marriages, derailed careers, and ruined health as over 2,500 suspects were investigated.

On December 20, 1968, seventeen-year-old David Faraday and sixteen-year-old Betty Lou Jensen parked on Lake Herman Road, a remote lovers' lane east of Vallejo, California. A stocky man in a windbreaker pulled up beside them, forced them out of the car at gunpoint, and shot David behind the left ear at point-blank range. Betty Lou ran but was hit five times in the back. Stella Borges discovered the scene while driving to Benicia and alerted police. Detective Sergeant Les Lundblad of the Solano County Sheriff's Office led the investigation but found no motive, no robbery, and no viable suspects.

Six months later, on July 4, 1969, Darlene Ferrin, a twenty-two-year-old waitress in Vallejo, picked up her friend Mike Mageau shortly before midnight. A light-colored car followed them to the Blue Rock Springs parking lot, where the driver approached with a boat-type lantern and opened fire without warning. Darlene was killed by nine rounds; Mike, wounded in the arm, leg, and neck, survived. At 12:40 A.M., the killer phoned the Vallejo Police Department from a booth within sight of Darlene's home, declaring in an even, rehearsed voice: "I also killed those kids last year" (33).

Graysmith devotes extensive attention to Darlene's troubled final months. Her babysitter reported that a heavyset, round-faced man in a white sedan watched the house repeatedly; when told, Darlene said the man was "checking up on me again" and claimed, "I saw him murder someone" (14-15). Darlene's sisters both encountered a stocky, well-dressed stranger with dark-rimmed glasses who terrified Darlene at a painting party, and multiple witnesses described the same figure following her and asking probing questions about her finances and personal life.

On August 1, 1969, the Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Vallejo Times-Herald each received letters from the killer claiming credit for the murders. Each contained one-third of a cryptogram and a threat to go on a killing spree if the cipher was not published. Naval Intelligence, the NSA, and the CIA failed to crack the code, but Donald Gene Harden, a high school teacher in Salinas, and his wife Bettye decoded it in 20 hours. The message declared killing to be "more fun than killing wild game" and promised that victims would become the killer's "slaves" in the afterlife (54-55). On August 7, the killer wrote again, providing unpublished details about the attacks and signing with a new name: Zodiac.

On September 27, 1969, Zodiac attacked Bryan Hartnell, a pre-law student, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, a music student, while they picnicked at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. A stocky man emerged wearing a black hood emblazoned with a white crossed-circle symbol, claimed to be an escaped convict, tied them up, and stabbed both repeatedly. Cecelia died two days later; Bryan survived. The killer wrote the dates of all three crimes on Bryan's car door and phoned police from a nearby pay phone: "I'm the one that did it" (75). Footprint casts revealed size 10½ "Wing Walker" boots, a government-issue shoe distributed to military installations.

Two weeks later, on October 11, Zodiac shot and killed Paul Stine, a 29-year-old cab driver, at Washington and Cherry Streets in San Francisco's Presidio Heights neighborhood. Teenagers across the street witnessed the killer wiping down the cab and called police. A dispatcher's error described the suspect as a Black man, and two patrolmen who encountered the actual killer let him pass after he misdirected them. Homicide Inspector Dave Toschi and his partner Bill Armstrong took the case. Crime lab technicians recovered bloody fingerprints from the killer's right hand on the cab's interior partition.

Zodiac's letter claiming the murder arrived on October 14, enclosing a blood-stained swatch of Stine's shirt and closing with a threat to shoot children on a school bus. The threat triggered widespread panic: Armed police rode school buses, and aircraft flew cover over routes across three counties. Through late 1969, Zodiac sent increasingly elaborate communications, including an unsolved 340-symbol cipher, a school bus bomb diagram that an army expert confirmed could work, and a December letter to attorney Melvin Belli pleading, "Please help me. I cannot reach out for help because of this thing in me won't let me" (127).

In March 1970, Kathleen Johns, a pregnant woman traveling with her infant, was lured from her car by a stranger who sabotaged her tire under the pretense of fixing it. He drove her along back roads for hours before she escaped by leaping from the car with her baby. At a police station, Johns identified the Zodiac composite on a bulletin board as her abductor. Chronicle reporter Paul Avery, who had received a death threat from Zodiac, then uncovered a link to the 1966 murder of Cheri Jo Bates, an eighteen-year-old college student stabbed to death in Riverside, California, after her car was disabled in a college parking lot. Sherwood Morrill, the state's foremost handwriting examiner, determined that letters sent after the Bates murder were "unquestionably the work of Zodiac," extending the case back two years.

After 1971, Zodiac fell largely silent. Armstrong transferred out in 1976, leaving Toschi as the sole detective on the case. When a new letter arrived in April 1978 singling out Toschi by name, Chief Charles Gain transferred Toschi to Pawn Shop Detail and publicly doubted the letter's authenticity after allegations surfaced that Toschi had sent anonymous fan letters praising himself. Morrill and other experts disagreed. Graysmith analyzes the letter and concludes it is genuine, theorizing that Zodiac used a photographic enlarger to trace individual characters, which would explain why the killer's handprinting never matched any suspect's natural writing.

Graysmith investigates several suspects. Andrew Todd Walker (name changed), a heavyset man linked to the case by unofficial investigators, is dismissed because his handwriting and fingerprints do not match. Don Andrews (name changed), an ambidextrous former Navy man favored by Napa detective Ken Narlow, has compelling circumstantial connections but proves unconvincing after Graysmith meets him. The strongest suspect is Robert "Bob" Hall Starr (name changed), a highly intelligent former student living in Vallejo and later Santa Rosa. In 1965, before any Zodiac crimes, Starr told hunting companions he would hunt people at night with "a flashlight taped to the barrel of my gun," would "write taunting letters to the police and the papers," and would "call myself the Zodiac" (273-274). His sister-in-law saw him hiding a paper covered with strange symbols in 1969 and noticed a bloody knife on his car seat the day of the Berryessa stabbing. Starr had Navy code training, studied chemistry, and wore a Zodiac brand watch.

Armstrong and Toschi searched Starr's Santa Rosa trailer in 1971 but found no definitive evidence. The bloody prints from Stine's cab did not match Starr's, and handwriting analysis showed no match. After the search, Zodiac letters ceased until 1974. Starr was convicted of child molestation in 1975; upon his release in late 1977, he wrote Toschi, and four months later the April 1978 Zodiac letter arrived. Graysmith also discovers Starr was a student at Riverside City College in 1966, placing him near the Bates murder, and maps the timing of linked murders of young women near Santa Rosa to Starr's periods of freedom.

In 1981, S.F.P.D. transferred all Zodiac files to the State Department of Justice. Graysmith drives to Lake Herman Road on the 15th anniversary of the first murders and reflects on the investigation. Of the 2,500 suspects examined over the course of the case, Graysmith identifies Starr as the best, "the gut-feeling choice of most detectives" (304). The book closes with the observation that Darlene Ferrin's sister Pam continues to be followed and to receive calls from a man who says, "This is the Zodiac speaking" (304).