Jacob Morales

Mav Murder: A true crime analysis was started by Alice Stewart.

This article covers sensitive topics that may not be comforting to some readers. Reader discretion is advised. 

After over 50 years with no new confirmed evidence or leads, the Zodiac Killer has never been identified and remains one of the most widespread unsolved cases ever. While countless new theories about the Zodiac exist, there is no new evidence.

“Zodiac” is a name given by the killer. He is known for all of the ciphers and letters he sent to the press during the time of his murders, taunting the police and mocking them. It has been confirmed that he has murdered at least five victims and injured two in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. He deliberately attacked three young couples and a male cab driver and got away with each murder, stumping the police.

The first officially known attack was on December 20, 1968. Betty Lou Jensen, 16, and David Arthur Faraday, 17, were reportedly on their first date. Faraday was a student at Vallejo High School, while Jensen was a student at Hogan High School. The police reported they had met a week before the killings at a church committee, and it was love at first sight. Faraday started to cut classes and drove her home after school so he could spend more time with her.

The night of the murder, Faraday arrived at Jensen’s house by 8:00 p.m. to meet her parents. They were supposed to attend a festival at Hogan High School and be home by 11:00 p.m. However, Jensen’s parents found out later that the couple had other plans for the evening, as Hogan High had no festival. They went to see Sheron Stustman, a friend of Jensen, at her house at 8:30 p.m. and left around 9:00 p.m., never telling her their plans for the rest of the evening.

At about 11:20 p.m., their dead bodies were found by a passerby, both bodies shot multiple times at Lake Herman Road in Benicia, about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco. Jensen had five gunshot wounds to her back, while Faraday had also been shot and was barely alive after attempting to crawl away from the car. He died before the ambulance could even get him to the hospital.

The next attack didn’t occur until about seven months later, on July 4, 1969. Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Ferrin, 22, were shot while sitting in Ferrin’s car. Around midnight, Ferrin was reported to have been shot nine times, while Michael was shot four times. They were sitting in the parking lot of a Blue Rock Springs Park around Vallejo, California, another very secluded area. Ferrin was pronounced dead before she could even arrive at the hospital.

But that wasn’t all that happened that night. The Zodiac called up the police station near Vallejo, 45 minutes after the murder, stating, “You will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a nine-millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year.” And then hung up.

Between July 31 and August 4, 1969, there were four letters written by the Zodiac Killer to different newspapers, such as the Vallejo Times-Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Francisco Examiner. In his third letter to The San Francisco Examiner, the Zodiac wrote, “I like killing people because it’s so much fun.”

On September 27, 1969, college student Cecelia Shepard ran into her long-time friend and ex-boyfriend Bryan Hartnell at Pacific Union College. They decided to drive to Lake Berryessa, where they had a picnic for some alone time. At one point, Shepard said she saw a weird man in the corner of her eye, but Hartnell was not concerned and said he was probably looking for a spot to use the bathroom.

The man reappeared with a knife in hand, a ski mask over his face, dark pants, and a shirt that had a circle that was crossed out in the middle, which soon went on to be the Zodiac Killer’s symbol. The Zodiac made Shepard tie Hartnell up and stabbed Hartnell in the back six times before he turned to stab her multiple times. Hartnell ended up surviving the assault, while Shepard was in a coma before dying two days later.

After the attack, there was a note left on the passenger door of Hartnell’s car, which included the dates of the two shootings. It had the iconic symbol, which concluded that the door message was written by the Zodiac.

On October 11, 1969, a 28-year-old student and husband of cab driver Paul Stine was shot in the head at the intersection of Washington and Cherry Streets. After the attack, the office of The San Francisco Chronicle received a letter from the Zodiac, which included the words, “I am the murderer of the taxi driver,” which included a piece of Paul’s blood-stained shirt.

Between November 8 and December 20, 1969, the killer sent two more letters to The San Francisco Chronicle and a letter addressed to attorney Melvin Belli. The first letter contained another piece of Stine’s shirt with a cipher consisting of 340 symbols.

The second letter was a seven-page letter, where he says he will “no longer announce to anyone when I commit my murders, they shall look like routine robberies, killings in anger, and a few fake accidents, etc.” He also includes a bomb recipe and a diagram of the explosive in this letter and calls his victims “slaves” on multiple occasions. He claimed that police stopped him near a crime scene but let him go.

His third letter, addressed to attorney Melvin Belli, asked Belli to intervene. The letter ended saying, “Please help me, I can not remain in control for much longer.”

There are countless more letters the Zodiac addressed to The San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times between 1970 and 1974. While the Zodiac Killer claimed to be responsible for the killings of 37 people in another letter to The San Francisco Chronicle, investigators were only able to confirm seven victims, five of whom were murdered, and two who survived.

In total, the Zodiac sent out four ciphers between 1969 and 1970 in his letters, with only two out of the four ciphers being solved. The first to be solved was his longest, 408 characters. Schoolteacher Donald Harden and his wife Bettye solved it. “I like killing people because it is so much fun,” the cipher read. “It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all.”

The next cipher wasn’t solved until December 2020, about 51 years after it was sent out. The letter was mocking the police once again, reading, “I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me.”

None of the suspects of the Zodiac Killer match all of the evidence, and most suspects have even died over time. The FBI states there are no new official clues or evidence, and local departments in Vallejo and Napa County still consider the Zodiac case an open investigation, as they are still determined to find the Zodiac Killer’s identity once and for all.