Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 245 - The Zodiac Killer - Part 1

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

In what might be our biggest topic we've tackled yet, Alex, Mike and Jesse begin the 4 part descent into one of the most mind bending true crime tales of all time. MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Special thanks to our sponsors this episode - All you lovely people at HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Art Commissioned by - http://www.mollyheadycarroll.com Theme - Matt Proft

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Chaluminati podcast episode 244. As always, I'm one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined by the Charles Xavier and Blackagar Boltigan of L.A. I get to be Professor X. He can be Blackagar Boltigan. I'm Black Bolt. He's my favorite Marvel character. If you know, you know. S if you don't you fucking know, okay

Can you tell what we were talking about right before we started? Alex has some unique taste no the amount of like love you spew for x-men and then to come out of nowhere and be like Oh, we have a black and garb bolt again is my favorite. It's just like what creations are the same guy. They're both excellent and awesome. Why didn't you enjoy X-Men V in humans, the event or whatever? Cause it was, it was not good. It wasn't well written. Anyway.

Hi everyone listening. Hi everyone. Alex is standing a character named Black Bolt who's a real name. His name is Black Agar Bolt again. And that's not standing. I'm not in love with him. He's just name is Blackgar Bolt again and that's not just good he's not good he's not good this man has not read one single in humans comic book and he's trying to tell me Black Bolt is not good that's why like it's like saying my favorite fucking ex like a mutant is Toad Toad from Ray Park yeah I actually Ray Park you know oh he's sick

but yeah you know what I'm not gonna fight I'm actually not gonna fight you know, he's sick, but you know what? I'm not going to fight. I'm actually not going to fight you on that. I love, I love this character. And the first one was when he twirled the thing, just like a double bladed lightsaber, right? Cause he was, he was literally only known for that. Doesn't storm like strike him with lightning and then say some like, she says, what happened?

Yeah. Oh my God. One of the worst lines in history. What is it? Do you know what happens to a toad when it gets struck by lightning? And then she's like, same thing as everything else. It's the dumbest, the dumbest line in movie history. Wolverine's like, what was that about? She's like, I had nothing. I'm sorry.

Halle Berry was doing like a weird accent with Storm. She kind of, she kind of gave it up after like a movie or two. Yeah. 100% gave it up. Yeah. Yeah. Thank God. Maybe she just lived in New York long enough that she kind of just it up after like a movie 100% gave it up. Yeah. Thank God. Maybe she just lived in New York long enough that she kind of just assimilated. I don't know. Storm also storm second place to black agar bolt to gun as baddest ass. She's way cooler than black ball. Agreed.

The episode one in x-men 97 where she strikes sand with lightning and turns it to glass. It's just like you need to read Al Ewing. X-Men read you will lose your mind. Jesse, you should read that too. You lose your mind. That is not the inhuman. So you won't have to clown on it. It's just real good. Just like the stuff we put on our Patreon. Yeah, but I'm not going to do that because this is a very highly structured episode, you know? And so we're going to pretend like you didn't even say that. And I'm just going to jump right into my outline. So look folks,

give me a warning. I would have, there's no warnings needed. Nobody gets a warning when this guy's coming around before we dive in. Cause it's going to be maybe the biggest topic we've done. Certainly the one with the most involved people doing research, including you being the lead, obviously doing a ton of it. We have Deanna in on this. I'm in on this. Jesse's just along for the ride. I don't know what this is. Yeah, that's great.

A shout out to r2r2 again on our subreddit for drawing Richard Vagina. Oh my god. Like the most amazing fucking like dentist. I listen to the voice and then I look at the picture and I see it. You know what I mean? That's exactly like the kind of person I also pictured when you know the voice was happening. I love that. And that's on the subreddit, right?

Yes. You can go see that at r slash jilluminaughty pod. So look, folks, it's time for another enormous undertaking here on the show, a topic which has claimed many victims, both in terms of actual human life lost and just our lives in books. People who have dedicated their lives to a mystery that is so deep and so perfectly exemplifies a lot of the types of problems that Americans romantically see in themselves today. It's kind of like a very symbolic crime case, especially the types of Americans with the bravery to

actually look back in the past and learn about who we are and internalize it and try and be better. But before we get into any of that, I'm just going to attempt to lay out this whole complicated structure again for everybody out there interested in exactly what wild strangeness it is I'm building to in 2024 because I have all this extra time that I spend doing my thing in my episodes. Or is the truth just exactly what Jesse thinks it is? A bunch of meaningless noise by someone half clever who cares less about the big picture and more about staying in the spotlight. Alex Fossiani, right?

Or am I talking about the subject of today's episode? Oh, what? Oh, fuck. Anyway. How come I had the angry video game nerd theme song playing in my head. He's going to kill you in the past. Imagine an angry video game nerd version of a true crime YouTuber.

What would that even be like? There's probably a subreddit that has exactly that same tone. Anyway, yes, as you likely already know, because I have an annoying but meticulous habit of constantly recapping for everybody that I'm doing eight major episodes this year tied to eight different key phrases, and all of them start with the letter H. There have been rumblings in the past about a mysterious episode, H8, but really, what does it all mean? Can you use my keywords to help you predict what topics I'm covering next?

H8 helium on the periodic table or something? Look, no. First, there was hidden about defense contractors hiding UFO technology in plain sight. That was hidden. Then there was heavyweights covering some of the strangest mysteries in the history of the WWE. Third, it was horse, which was a reference to the giant blue demon horse in front of the bizarrely cryptic and like kind of chill vibes cryptic Denver airport. Yeah, that's a fun one. Up now. Now this is this is a last one we did. We got three chunky episodes on the mystical and psychedelic aspects of dreams, courtesy of our ever present and very, very cool headed overlords, the Chalubanati.

And thanks for Pat for being there. Yeah, shout outs to Pat. And with this being the fifth episode in the sequence, we have crossed the halfway point with the keyword, hello, which is now revealed to be my very special multi-part mini series on the Zodiac Killer, which I'm officially calling Zodiac, the Great American Rabbit Hole. I'm gonna go ahead and put on paper. We solved it. We did not solve it.

Somebody, we're just gonna like point at somebody who I think solved it. And before we get any more distracted by that. Same thing. Yeah, the other three remaining keywords in the list are huge, him again, and hero. Huge, him again, and hero huge him again and Hero write them down discuss them on the subreddit that I was talking about earlier

Yeah, guess what else I'm gonna do episodes on and what this is all leading to now that I figured it all out What topic are and do you think he's gonna be revisiting for him again, right? I don't know who knows it's JFK probably think about that later though, because right now it is episode time to begin This is a quick disclaimer that even though I'm just an internet guy talking about some incredibly famous cultural and historical events with the expertise of a comedian, and it has certainly already been covered better and more thoroughly elsewhere, wrong facts will only ever be repeated accidentally and with the best intentions. Also, I don't usually do serial killers.

That's one thing I wanted to say. That's more Mathis' thing. Yeah, as you'll soon see, this one is a little different. Nevertheless, graphic depictions of violence and cruelty lie ahead. Scoot the little ones out of the room for this one. And before I forget, you can bet that each one of us is going to display some serious insensitivity about these topics at one point or another throughout. So apologies for that in advance. We mean no harm. And just like always, more than anything, we promise we're working our hardest to try and put on the best show possible

for all you kind folks out there listening. That sounds scripted, dude. I don't know. You know, maybe let the kid stay in on an episode and if he starts looking like he's having too much fun, take him to a doctor. Yeah. It could be a warning sign.

It could be like Canary in the Coal Mine, catch your serial killer early. And speaking of catching your serial killer early, because you wouldn't be able to do, we wouldn't be able to do big giant episodes like this without listeners like you over at patreon.com slash Chiluminaudipod. We let one lucky fan write today's Patreon ad. That's right. In a new segment, we're calling the Patreon Advertainment of the Week. This one comes from somebody called, let's see here, Tarl Cabot from somewhere near Vallejo,

California. And now, Jesse's going to read this for everybody right now. Dear Editor, I am the patron of that one subscription last Christmas at Patreon.com slash ChaluminatiPod and the one last fourth of July. To prove this, I shall state some facts which only the police know. ChristMoss. Period. One access to Discord and ad-free episodes. I'm already committed.

I realize now what Alex has done, but I'm already committed to the bet and I can't back out now. We're in. We're in. I'm here for this ride. Two bonus episode fired every time a new Chaluminati episode drops! Three video episodes are great for watching on your back with car- feet to car. Four unreleased episodes of Rotten Popcorn Pod great for lying on right side, feet to West. Fourth of July, one girl was wearing a new piece of

Trilluminati merch. I don't like what this is. I don't like what's going on here. Yeah, yeah, it's getting a little weirder and weirder. Every time we release one, two boy was also shot $10,000 to believe in ghosts or aliens. Three! Ammo was made by Western! Here is a cipher!

The other parts are being mailed to other parts of the miniseries. I want these edited in by deed by Sat Afternoon! If you do not include this cipher, I will go on a shill rampage sat night. This will last the whole weekend. I will cruise around shilling to people who are alone at night until some- why do I have to do this? Sunday night? Or until I shill to a dozen people? You could be done with this if you hadn't made this very specific. You know what? You know, I'm aware. I'm aware. Then there's a symbol of some kind that I can't decipher, all caps. But I'd say it was brought, all caps, by a true visionary, all caps. Now,

by a true visionary, all caps. Now play close attention to this next part because it has to be exactly right. T-Y-R-S-F-V-C-T-Z-Y-Q-D-H-I-P-G-Q-I-P-D-Z-O-O-Z-Z, oh wait, only one O, Z-Z-Z. Read that last part one more time for everybody. Trickster! You want me to let her by all one- Yeah, just one time through again, just for everybody.

TYR SFV CT ZYQ DHI PGQ IPD O ZZZ Oops and yep, sorry about that. I-P-D-O-Z-Z-Z. Oops, and yep, sorry about that. I've just now received word in my earpiece that after several complaints, the Patreon Advertainment of the Week segment has now been cancelled until further notice, and I guess I'll just keep doing all of the shilling myself. Anyway, now that that's all out of the way, come with me in your mind. I was set up for failure and I don't like it. Come with me in your mind. I'm serious.

Like close your eyes. Even while you listen to this, use the dream techniques. You think Alex is the Chiluminati? You think those people aren't real and he's actually starting to think you might be, I'm starting to think you might be. I don't think, I don't think there is a most chill one. I don't know about that. I'm starting to, I'm starting to get curious. I feel like he's making it up.

I'm pretty sure I have the letters, so I'm not, I'm getting the letters from somewhere. Yeah. Uh, not the AI. Close your eyes. Use your, you use the dream techniques that we flirted with last time. Use them to literally try astral project yourself to the long stretches of the highway in an area of quiet, open, Northern California. This place is called Cordelia. Okay. It's Cordelia.

It is named after the wife of the clipper ship captain who founded it. And nowadays it is not known for much more than a spot where two freeways meet on the road to Sacramento or Lake Tahoe. And it's also known for being haunted by a very particular type of ghost. And this is Mathis with a quote from an archived post in Archive X, which is an old online repository for ghost stories, which was by user Alex Breitler from like 2007 at the absolute latest. So here you go. Read this for us. The Phantom of Cordelia. It is said that the ghost of a now probably dead mass murderer

haunts the lonely roads in the area, tailgating women on moonless nights in his Chevy. Also, it is believed that on cold December nights, the killings are reenacted as they occurred so long ago. Nobody knows who the killer was, but many say they have seen that ghastly car on the roads hunting for yet more victims. A stocky man is behind the wheel, glasses reflecting in oncoming headlights like snake eyes, and he is doomed to roam the deserted back roads of Solano County for all time. For it is on those same roads that he committed his worst atrocities if you are alone in the area late at night and you pick up a tail

maybe a white car maybe flashing a type the issue whatever you do do not stop pretty interesting stuff i'm really if you think about ghosts as entities that stick around even after they're dead and gone because they have unfinished business, maybe that is exactly what the Zodiac, who this post is obviously about, maybe that's exactly what he is. Or maybe, to be more accurate than that, it is about the ghost of Zodiac. And maybe, if you have enough unfinished business, somebody like Zodiac can leave lots of different phantoms behind.

I'm going to put quotes around phantoms. Which when you make a splash into the cultural mindset as big as he did, even though no one knows who you are, nobody ever figured out who this was. So many different types of people have their own weird guess and somehow it kind of makes sense altogether. So this mini series, Zodiac, the great American rabbit hole, whose first chapter, which is called the five phantoms, will be diving into today is based on my own experience during COVID when I was watching the movie Zodiac for the first time in a couple of years.

And I got fully swept up the mystery because I was like, I wonder, like the thought was like what has happened since the movie ended because the movie's now like 15 years old. And I was totally gobsmacked by a pair of books that recently were published on the matter by a writer journalist guy called Jarrett Kovac, a person I'd really love to interview. There's some way to contact this man. And the sort of stunning way he was able to recontextualize and refresh the whole vibe surrounding this case for me is pretty cool. However, first for the sake of cultural rather than just factual accuracy, which is a distinction

that we can talk about further in due time, this story is going to be told in three separate parts. So today, starting today in part one, we're going to begin by discussing the Zodiac Killer as he exists in the zeitgeist now. Like the popular image of this, like the popular story of the Zodiac Killer that everybody knows. We're going to like kind of dive deep into that story. We're going to use the, again, incredible David Fincher movie, which I think is like a masterpiece movie. It's just called Zodiac. And the book that inspired it, which is also called Zodiac by Robert Graysmith, who was a cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle at one point, and he became

like a true crime writer and is actually Jake Gyllenhaal's character in the movie. So this first part is where we're going to establish our basic timeline for these crimes and just the entire Zodiac event and go over the crimes foundation, if you will. Yeah, and we're going to go over the crimes as they happened according to popular understanding and specifically without any of the knowledge of any further discoveries made in the case since this sort of 1986 version of this, that's the main version that everybody knows, just sort of like crystallized for a while. Okay, so that's gonna be like part one,

that's gonna probably be this week and next week. And then once you're all experts, in part two, we're gonna cross examine that story with the help of the first book that Jared Kovec wrote on the topic, which is called Motor Spirit, which is the book that he meant to write about this, uh, as well as additional research, as Mathis said, undertaken by myself and, uh, our in-house researcher and like very good friend Deanna, uh, who I've now worked with now like two or three times.

Always a pleasure. And as, as Mathis often says, uh, she's completely indispensable. Uh, shout out Deanna at DeannaWritesInc on Twitter, aka X, aka Living Digital Hell. Koubek's book is a particularly great read because not only does he write with an ear for good writing, like beautiful writing, but he also revisits the timeline that Graysmith established, reframes it, takes all the timeline that Gray Smith established, reframes it, takes all the information that was available, goes back to the police reports and the newspaper articles and the actual primary sources.

Starts with like no assumptions, fresh slate, and it recontextualizes a lot of stuff. And I think that the fact that he has this sort of like intuitive human thinking that Gray Smith doesn't really have. Graysmith seems to kind of be writing more towards some kind of like he kind of picked a suspect and kind of like wrapped his whole story around that and he was maybe a little bit because of that was kind of willing to kind of like distort things a little bit more. That's later because right now we need to learn that distorted version. So now it's time for part one which is called the five phantoms. It's mostly

factual. I try to keep it I'm not like gonna lie to you straight up I'm gonna keep it as accurate as possible while telling you something close to the story that everybody knows already so part one the five phantoms let's go right back to northern California's back roads one more time but this time we're also going to be going 60 years back in time to December 20th, 1968. It's 11.15 PM at the Benicio water pumping station in a small gravel turnout near gate number 10 on the Lake Herman Road, which is about 3.2 miles south of Columbus Parkway.

And by the way, if you have never heard a single thing about Zodiac before, buckle your ass up because this is about to be fucking wild, bro. Yeah, if this is your intro, you're going to probably lose a month of your life just trying to figure it out on your own. Yeah. This is your warning. Anyway, uh,

this little turnout by the pumping station was a popular lovers lane at the time because of its remoteness and because you could only comfortable, you can, you can only really fit like three or four cars in there without, uh, like without it getting overcrowded. So it's kind of like low key. If you look at a picture of it, it's very small. It was also a popular meeting place for shady groups of teenagers,

which is probably what petite, quiet little Stella Borges thought as she drove from her ranch down the road to pick up her grandson at Benicia High School and her headlights lit up the scene that she arrived at at the turnout. At first she saw the Rambler parked there with its door open and thought that the man lying on the ground was drunk and had fallen out of his car or something and gotten hurt. But then closer to the road by the yellow street sign she noticed the body of 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen, who was a student at Hogan High School in Vallejo, California, who had been out on a date with the guy over by the car, who was a 17-year-old from Vallejo High

School, a nearby high school called David Faraday. Earlier that night, around 8 p.m., David had picked up Betty Lou from her parents' house, allegedly to go see a Christmas concert at her school however That's pretty late for a concert. And what actually happens is they swing by their friend Sharon's house for an hour to like nine And then headed over to this place. Mr. Ed's after that to grab a soda It's kind of like happy days vibes if you're trying to imagine it, but it's like the 60s It's a little after happy days vibes. According to two passing raccoon hunters who were driving past the turnout at around 9.30,

unbeknownst to Betty Lou and David, there was already someone parked at their makeout spot in a car that looked like a Chevy Impala around 9.30. However, according to the person in that Chevy who was there, those people were chased away by a second car, which looked like a Plymouth Valiant that chases them for several miles after. They like, like chases them out of the parking lot and then follows them for several miles.

And then like the guy like gives up or misses a turn or something. David and Betty Lou never see any of this. They get there 45 minutes later, 1015. A couple people saw this car parked there alone one witness named Peggy our or you were said she saw them around 11 out in front of the car so that's they were there for 45 minutes they got out of the car at some point 10 minutes later a worker at Humble Oil sees them passing in a truck and another car is also there parked at the turnout with nobody outside of their

cars. So that's at like 11, 10. And then five minutes later, in comes Stella, who saw all the blood and who immediately drives off to find help. And thanks to that timeline, we know whatever violence happens here fits right in those five minutes between the oil man seeing them and Stella finding them. So it's a quick moment, a quick hit and run. To underline this point, when the police arrive moments later, the car is still running. All doors besides the front one are locked. This is a dark road, rural road in California if you know what that's like. It's probably the only lights in the area are these headlights. All doors besides the front door are locked. There's a 22 caliber

shell casing on the floor of the passenger side of the car. One ricochet mark on the inside ceiling. There's a bullet hole in the left rear wheel housing and the rear right window is shattered. They find eight more casings at the scene, seven slugs, and around the car, going around it on the passenger side, they found very very light footprints and then like one other pretty deep footprint but it was on the other side of a locked gate so like probably not involved. The bullets themselves are thought to be from a 22 caliber JC Higgins model 80 or high standard model 101 which if you look them up are very like lugary looking guns with super x copper coated long rifle ammo made by Winchester. Betty Liu is facing the road five bullet wounds in her back as if she was killed running towards

the road probably trying to flag down help or something. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Faraday is on the ground by the car, face down. He almost opened the door and fell out of it with a single gunshot wound to the back of his head, a lump on his right cheek, powder burns behind his left ear. He was still breathing when he left the scene in an ambulance, but he was pronounced dead at the hospital five minutes after midnight on December 21st, the next day. That's pretty much all there is to say about this part of the case for now, since taken on its own, even though this is likely the first in a series of sensationalized crimes.

At the time, it didn't really seem that different from your average senseless act of violence, maybe a jealous boyfriend or whatever. But just to give you an idea of the vibe at the time, here's a quote from Grace Smith's book for Jesse to read. I'm going to just drop that in the chat for you right now. The victim's last day was exactly reconstructed minute by minute. 34 detailed statements were taken. The family and friends of Betty Lou and David were questioned, as well as the routine local suspects. friends of Betty Lou and David were questioned, as well as the routine local suspects. Among other possibilities, there were 290 registrants from Napa State Hospital for the

insane living in the area. From Betty Lou's family, the police learned that there was a lovesick boy who had been bugging her at school and who had threatened David, I'm thinking about using brass knuckles on you. They also suspected this boy might have been the one prowling about the yard at night. The police passed this information on to an investigator who discovered the suspect had an airtight alibi. After his sister's birthday party, the boy watched global affair on TV until 11 in the company of a

Merr Island policeman. Leads from the public were followed up, but there seemed to be no motive to the brutal slayings outside of killing for the sheer joy of it. The police could find no attempted robbery or sexual molestation of the victims. Perhaps the killing itself had served as a sexual release for the murderer. Later, of course, we find that this killer had much bigger things in mind. And from now on is when we get into the kind of like much more canonized part of the Zodiac story. Like the first murder that we just talked about is not in the movie at all. Just referenced. The movie actually starts with this one.

This one is the one that has lots and lots of details and stuff many of you out there may already know or at least familiar with thanks to the movie. Again, we're going to lay these out as faithfully to popular understanding as possible before we start dismantling questioning everything. Because I think for the new info to really hit you kind of need to be familiar with what the popular thinking on it is out there in the world. Because kind of like JFK or whatever, a lot of people care about it and have their pet theories about it and things have become kind of like politicized around it in the world of internet sleuthing. So I kind of want to like arm you with some foreknowledge.

What does that mean exactly? Just like there's like a lot of like toxicity and stuff out there amongst investigators of this who are like on the R zodiac killer subreddit and stuff. They, you know, certain people feel about one theory. It's like, it's like a fandom versus like the console wars of true. It's exactly the same as like keeping of the zodiac killer. Yeah, no joke. It's like exactly the same thing as like people arguing about like Steven Moffat versus Chris Chibnall versus- People still think the Menendez brothers are innocent. There's always like people on the other side.

Okay. All right. It's interesting. I don't know why there'd be like, no, this is, no, you're, this is incorrect facts. What you're saying here. What you're talking about right now, like the thing, the incredulity that you're showing right now is like exactly like the, like if I was like a, like a journalist pitching this to a newspaper, that's like the angle that we're going with. Um, yeah. So yeah, just people, it's like politicized. Like I say, uh, so to me, having this in your bat belt or whatever, this version, even though it's not fully accurate, 100 it's kinda like neutral ground. Like as weird as that is like knowing the story kind of like arms you to have a conversation so that's why i'm doing this anyway.

Almost eight months past after that first crime and now back in imaginary old time in northern california. It is now midnight between July 4th and July 5th, 1969, literally midnight, in the parking lot of the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course still. A very quiet, remote place to be at that time of night, only a couple of miles away from the Lake Herman Road turnout where Betty, Lou, and David were shot last Christmas. Just a couple miles. Now in the days before the internet, one thing that teenagers used to do, and which in my heart I wish some people still do today,

and just I hope somebody's doing this, because other than getting murdered or like profiled by the cops or whatever's gonna happen while you're out, this is an awesome thing to do. Pile into a car, cruise around town for shits and giggles, parking in private places to do private things, cultivate a budding sense of independence for yourself as a youth, learn how to, you know, be out, go be a human. Right. But have you heard of chat rooms?

They're fine, but you don't go anywhere. They're fine, but you don't go anywhere. I'm pretty sure that's the point. I know. Because if you don't go anywhere, you can't be brutally murdered by like a dude in the middle of the night. Odds are you're going to make it, but that's kind of part of the lesson. That's kind of how you're going to make it. To be fair, just show you could be talking to somebody who will murder you in the talk in the chat room. That never happened. That never happens. Yeah. I bet you, I'm not ASL is always legit, dude. That's true. It's the same.

It's always the same law that cops have to tell you they're cops. Yeah. You have to, you have to tell us. Yeah. Yeah. And wouldn't you know it, cruising is exactly what Deborah, Roger, and Jerry were doing up late after all the 4th of July festivities. And they were pulling into the Blue Rock Springs lot because since it too was a popular place for kids to go to be alone, they thought it might be a good place to find Roger's friend. Since they did not yet have cell phones at this time in history and since she was a teenager just like them They figured the best place is the best way to see if she was there was to just literally get in the car all of

Them drive to where they thought she may be and see if she was there. Isn't that crazy? Unfortunately What they find isn't their mysterious friend But another unlucky couple who ran into some evil out on the road that night and got shot up for it. 22-year-old Darlene Farron, who lives in Vallejo and works at Terry's Waffle Shop in town, is slumped over the steering wheel in the front seat of the car, while 19-year-old Mike Mageau, who regularly fought with his twin brother Stephen for Darlene's

affection and talked to her on the phone at home almost twice a day, is on the ground in front of the car covered in blood and writhing in pain. The three teenagers, who are not even suspicious enough to be asked their last names by the cops apparently, are too scared to stay away. They don't want to stay because they think maybe the guys who got Mike and Darlene are around. So, they all get together back in the car and they go get the police because they're afraid. So, months earlier, back on February 26th, and again, remember this is the midnight after

4th of July, back on February 26th, Darlene, who I should mention lives and has a daughter with her current husband, Dean Farron, in a house on Wallace Street in Vallejo, was working at the waffle shop while her babysitter, Karen, looked after her daughter, Dina, at home. And funnily enough, that Karen eventually grew up into a real kid. I'm just kidding. Just the right time. Just the right time period. Anyway, apparently, Karen notices that some weird man seems to be staking out the house that day February 26th But according to Karen when she brings it up to Darlene Darlene kind of laughs it off

makes an offhand remark that it's fine and she says something like It's only because she's I she says something like it's only because I saw him kill somebody once, don't worry about it. And she was like, what the fuck? It's not even clear whether she was being serious or what with that remark. Yeah, still. Little more about Darlene, since it's starting to seem a little weird maybe,

is that she used to be called Darlene Suenin. And even though she's only 22 at the time of her murder, she already had one marriage with a guy named Jim, who she may have spent some time beach bumming her way around the Virgin Islands with and like seeing some shit. She seems to have lived several little lives all over the country before finally landing back in Vallejo. And though I don't want to like pour fuel on the like, she's a ho fire, because I don't think that's what this is. I do know and want to just acknowledge she kind of had a less conventional relationship

with men in her life. While she was married and dating two twin brothers, allegedly among others, including several cops, she really was just like a bright light of a girl who loved a good time, seemingly in all things, fully had the blessing or whatever passed as the blessing in 1969 of her husband Dean, who also worked at a restaurant in town called Caesars by the way. Dean did not have anything bad to say about Darlene at all. So I'm just taking my Robert Graysmith mask off for a second to just say, please don't jump to conclusions about her.

Nothing really like, nobody's like she's a hoe. Like literally no one in this story who knew her says anything like that. I just want to point out again, a reminder, if this was John Smith doing the exact same things, we would not be having discussion of if someone's a hoe. So just put that out there. There's nice, there's nice good people everywhere if you're a little more open-minded. Anyway, a month after Karen sees Darlene's casual murder stalker guy person, February 26th, this is a month later. Darlene's sister Pam notices a guy, she has a big family, Darlene's sister Pam notices a guy

leaving packages on Darlene's porch one at a time over the day on March 15th. The third time she comes to drop off a package, she meets him at the door to grab it, and he gives it to her. But he says not to open any of the packages which is like a weird thing to say though apparently one of these packages according to some sources did end up containing some of the floral fabric she was eventually she eventually made into the dress she was wearing that

night but she was killed so that's a weird coincidence I don't know if that's relevant but this weird guy dropped off this package. And in that package was the material that she used to make the dress that she was wearing when she was. So the, the implication is like, make this dress, wear this dress. I'm going to kill you in this dress. It's like his vibe is part of the problem with this book is that like, there's a lot of stuff like this in here where it's like, you know, I'm not going to, you

know, just throwing out there. It's weird. Even more complicated. Yeah, it was more ritualistic. He doesn't like draw any sort of conclusion from this. Like, there's a little bit of threads that he like spins out of it to like kind of suggest things maybe about this guy nudges you in a particular direction. Sometimes sometimes about certain things, but a lot of the stuff is just kind of vague and kind of like, just, I feel like it's there to make you paranoid. I don't know. Yeah. Cause it doesn't like, it doesn't really all stack up to anything. You know, I don't know. And that's part of like the mythification of like serial killers that some authors do.

Absolutely. So that happens in March. Not just authors, podcasters. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. YouTubers. Certainly. Media. Anyway, after March 15th, almost two months later on May 9th, Darlene and Dean move from their house on Wallace Street to a new house on Virginia Street. And a few weeks later, on the 24th of May, Darlene has a painting party at her new house with a bunch of friends, some of which are actually local Vallejo cops. But one of the ones who's not a cop is a memorable, strange character who several people call Paul without a last name, and who Darlene's sister Linda remembers Darlene warning her to stay away

from. Stay away from Paul. That's what Darlene told Linda. One month later, after that, on June 22nd, Linda, one of Darlene's sisters, is at Terry's waffle shop and sees Darlene being bothered by someone while she's working, though she's not sure who it is. Two days later, Darlene tells her younger, like an even younger sister called Christina, that some big things are going to be happening soon, but that she can't tell her what and that she's going to have to read about it in the newspaper, but she

doesn't want to say what it is. And now we've caught up to the day of the murder, July 4th. At 6.30 pm, Dean's boss at Caesar's says Darlene and her youngest sister Christina came into Caesar's to see Dean on their way to a Fourth of July boat parade at nearby Mare Island where there's a huge Naples shipyard. So they wanted to go see like a Fourth of July boat deal down there. Dean says he gets off at 10, wants to have a party at home after work with a couple friends, like kickback vibes. So Darlene says she's in and that she'll grab the fireworks on the way home, yada, yada, yada.

Fifteen minutes later, she stops by the waffle shop to tell her friend Bobby about the party and then she heads out. So now we're like close to 7 p.m. At eight o'clock, she calls Mike to make a plan to see him later, Mike Mujoe, her boyfriend. At 10.15, she calls the babysitter, who isn't Karen this time, but another babysitter called Janet to check in on her daughter. Janet says that someone's been calling the house asking for Darlene. 15 minutes later, at 10.30, she returns to the waffle shop with Christina, who notices

that someone in the restaurant is watching Darlene, but for some reason she doesn't want to worry Darlene and doesn't tell her about it. After that, Darlene drives home with Christina, but after taking a phone call in the other room, she comes back out and asks Janet if she can stay till 12 15, because she still needs to get the fireworks. So that's a weird thing that happens. But now we're after midnight on the babysitter. And she heads out at 11 55 and goes and picks up Mike Mougeau at at his house and he's so excited that he leaves without turning off the light or the TV or shutting the door to his house which maybe was just chill to do at that time I'm not sure maybe they just felt

safe doing that but that's the that's the vibe and they were allegedly briefly and scarily followed by someone who was parked under a tree just outside Mike's house before speeding up, taking turns, losing the tail. That's another thing that happened that night. And after driving a bit more to make sure that he was gone, Darlene, who was the driver, nervously turned into the Blue Rock Springs lot. Maybe they were already headed there. Gray Smith in the book says he thinks they were being, quote, herded there. Don't know. It's kind of a bold claim to make.

Again, yeah, it's another one of those nudging you in a direction. Either way, according to Mike at this point, a car pulls up next to them, parks off to their left, makes them nervous because the guy's just kind of like robo style, before speeding off seconds later. And that kind of like chills them out first. But then five minutes later, the fear becomes creeping back because they realize the car that left earlier

now has pulled up right behind them, or some car has pulled up right behind them, cutting off their escape route, and the driver has a flashlight that is so bright that they can't like see really, like it's a bright light behind them in the car. In fact the light makes them so nervous they actually got their IDs out because the way the car pulled up and blasted on them like that. They thought it might be the cops legit Mike rolls down the window to speak to somebody he believes up be a police officer and immediately he shot in the face.

Which shreds his jaw and his tongue. And then this dude who shoots him in the face just keeps shooting. And some of the bullets that are hitting Mike are also going through Mike's body and into Darlene's body. And eventually, Mike stretches his body up in pain and kind of tries to get away from it and goes over the seat and lands in the back seat on the ground. And After this, the shooter thinks he's done and goes to leave, but Mike is like, ahhh, he like comes online and starts feeling pain. So the shooter comes back, shoots each of them two more times before getting in his car and driving away. At some point, Mike says one of them tries flagging down help by flashing the headlights,

but to give you an idea of how fucked up he was, he couldn't even remember if it was him or Darlene who did that. Yeah. Your brain is at that point just fucking firing every chemical to keep you alive. Yeah. Also, according to him, the door handle was missing when he tried to get out of the car, and he ends up having to wriggle out the window to get out of the car.

Though strangely, when the car is brought in later for analysis, the handle is seemingly replaced, which is something that Graysmith puts in there to make you think that like the cops could be involved somehow. He doesn't straight up say it. He just kind of like, is like, she was having sex with cops and there's cops.

It's just weird. Rather than assuming that maybe a guy with actual brain damage remembering something wrong could happen. Like, maybe there was a handle and just… Yeah, or the traumatized mind was just misremembering. …for nothing and his brain didn't recognize the handle or just grabbed a part of the door that he was unfamiliar with. You know, I don't know.

Anyway, when the real police arrive, it's one of the guys from the painting party responding to a call about gunshots. But considering it's the 4th of July, he's thinking it's gonna be some firecrackers that are being reported as gunshots. He's wrong about that. Somehow both Darlene and Mike are still alive when they show up, but they're in a bad way. There's lots of blood everywhere,

and they do not seem to be doing very good at all. They're running out of time. The car has both windows rolled down. The engine is running. The radio is on, and the car is in low with no handbrake on, and there are 11 shell casings found at the scene. Darlene has been shot nine times, twice in each arm, five in her right side, piercing her lung and left ventricle. Mike has four gunshot wounds, one in his knee, one in his hip, one in his neck, and

one that went through the left cheek and out the right that shredded his mouth up. And you can look at him in an interview in 2007 and he's still fucked up. I think he's dead now, but at the time, there's a documentary online that's called This is the Zodiac Speaking. That's like all primary sources, not primary, but like people who were there, well, I guess primary,

but they're talking about after the fact. Darlene was witnessed by an officer on the scene trying to speak, but she couldn't breathe because her lungs were too punctured and she was making no sound. And she's pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital, 12.38 a.m. But miraculously, Mike actually pulls through,

although like I said, not without life altering injuries, both mental and physical that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Two minutes later, after they get to the hospital at 12.38, at 12.40, from a payphone near Joe's Union on Springs Road in town, which is less than half a mile away from Dean and Darlene's house, I don't know, came from a man whose calm collected voice and long, taunting pronunciation of goodbye scared the shit out of police dispenser Nancy Slover. And here's Mathis with a dramatic reading of the transcript.

I want to report a double murder. If you will go one mile east on Columbus Park way to the public park, you will find the kids in a brown car they were shot with a nine millimeter Luger I also killed those kids last year. Good bye. They traced the call and tried to ring back which got them a physical description when someone saw him take the receiver back off the hook but by the time they got there all they found was a receiver hanging off the hook. Here Graysmith takes a moment in his version of the story to everything breathe from it like a moment in a sci-fi movie. When scientists realize the eyes like smarter than they realize it's gonna kill them. Yeah i'm there in real life and then he lets the terror and the implications and the question of the not zodiac himself

sink in. The moment is admittedly quite dramatic. They find Mike's house empty, just how they left it with the door open and the TV blaring and the lights on. Then the 4th of July kickback that's still going at Dean and Darlene's house long after they're dead gets a 1.30am call with heavy breathing on the other end of the line, hours before the crime is reported to the public. They didn't know she was dead. They thought it was one of Darlene's boyfriends

trying not to get caught by her husband. That's why he was not talking. A few minutes later, Dean's parents get the same call. Then Dean's brother. Darlene's parents had an unlisted number and did not get a call, just saying. The police investigates plenty of suspects, but it never really goes anywhere. Mike moved into a second floor apartment he

called his hideout, dyed his hair red, only left the house when his dad would drive him back and forth for treatment of his injuries, which some people actually use as evidence in saying that he knew the killer. But again, Gray Smith just kind of wildin'. And here folks, we meet the first of our five phantoms of Zodiac. This version is the not Zodiac. No name, no character, just the guy who the police think did these two crimes. He could be a bartender, he could be a boyfriend, he could be a desperate drug dealer, there is no romance, no mystery yet. Just an anonymous local triple murderer made a really scary phone call who the cops are slowly developing a suspect for Based on descriptions by a bunch of people related to the victims who maybe knew the guy thanks to the shaky Circumstantial theory that the killer knew his victim

This guy's not a super genius yet. He's not a weird folk hero evil folk hero. He's not a comic book villain But still even this early on, nevertheless, he seems to be someone who's clearly finding a certain amount of enjoyment, or at least amusement in his work, based solely one on the weird goodbye, the slightly flirtatious idea that he would call in his own crimes in the first place, and even the cockiness to assume it was a double murder that night when one of his victims totally lived. It's like first contact with a predator above you on the food chain. It was probably why it freaked out that dispatcher so much.

It was like talking to a monster, like legit. From Karen, the babysitter who told Darlene there was a man watching her house, we can imagine a man with wavy dark brown hair and the round face of someone heavy set and sort of middle-aged. From Darlene's sister Pam, we know this guy also had horn-rimmed glasses. She was the one who received the packages from this guy. Though again, in 1969, it was not like horn-rimmed glasses are not like a bold, charming, memorable fashion choice. This is like everybody's fucking glasses. You know what I mean? Didn't look weird, but he had them and they're just kind of like he kind of

looked the same in those two descriptions. Coincidentally, Darlene's sister said that mysterious Paul guy that I mentioned from the party, the painting party, also wore horn-rimmed glasses, and wouldn't you know it, he too was an older guy with wavy hair who was roughly 5'8". Mike Mageau, however, with a light in his face and bullets flying into his body and a hole in his face, he still described a heavyset man but said he was younger. And slowly, the first Phantom comes into focus, congeals into a single, mysterious, still completely mundane shape.

Some things are certain, some things, no matter how you try to explain them, still seem strangely out of place about this case. Here's another one, another one of these Graysmith zingers. For example, why on earth was Mike Mageau discovered to have been wearing, and this is verifiable, why was Mike Mageau discovered to have been wearing, and this is verifiable, why was Mike Mageau discovered to have been wearing three complete sets of clothes that night, despite it being 4th of July in California, three full layers of all his clothes.

Checking the records outside of the book, I just checked it myself. Even at the time of the attack, late at night, it was still about 60 degrees out, or 15.5 degrees. If you are a Celsius tribesman, uh, with almost no wind, uh, that night, which to me, I can wear shirt and shorts and slippers in that weather. Like I wouldn't be a hundred percent comfortable, but it is not like multiple

layers of clothing weather, 60 degrees. We do live in LA and I will say that there's sometimes during midday it's like 16, you'll see people in a parka. Fine. But no, no wind. They're in a car. Like, I don't know. It doesn't see, it doesn't seem right. I mean, not wrong. It seems weird, but, but he's him to, he's hinting that maybe he knew he was going to be attacked. That's what the, that's what the hint is. Oh, the hint is that he put those layers on. So if it was stabbed or something that it, or whatever layered up. Okay. But he doesn't straight up say it. He just kind of hints it leaves you in

that direction, which is probably why I'll keep on saying the same thing. There's always something that doesn't fit. Always. Uh, and speaking of which, uh, before the story takes its first huge left turn, let's get even more disoriented by skipping ahead for a moment to Sunday, August 3rd, 1969, almost 125 miles south of Vallejo in another slightly famous NorCal town,

familiar to fans of the author, John Steinbeck, Salinas, California. There in Salinas, a 41-year-old history and economics teacher at North Salinas High School called Donald Gene Harden was having a lazy Sunday with his wife when he noticed a strange set of ciphers in the newspaper. Having had an interest in cryptography back in college, he bust out a copy of his old

code-breaking book Secret and Urgent by somebody called Fletcher Pratt, and got to work for three hours without making too much progress beyond deciding it was a substitution cipher, which is one of those ones where the alphabet is replaced by various symbols, even though it seemed too complex for a simple 1-1 transposition. Probably something a little bit more complicated than that. After that, Donald's wife, Betty June, who's an amateur writer and poet herself, joined him. They worked on it until bed, woke up, kept going until Monday morning. According to the original story, it was around then that Betty made her breakthrough of identifying two cribs in the message, which

are cribs are words that she believed were hidden in there in specific positions in the cipher text. It's like guessing what word you think it is, kind of, to try and help you work backwards to solve it. You know what I mean? Sure. Yeah. Like if you're like, yeah. So in the case of the cipher, she imagined that the author would be vain for some reason, we'll get into a minute, and start their message with the word I. And next, for reasons that will become clearer in a moment, she guessed she'd find the word kill, or even a combo of both cribs, like I like killing, which she fucking did find.

And after a few hours of working backwards from this, they had their solution, and the Hardens would forever be enshrined in the history of this story as the people who helped reveal our killer's motivation, which was seemingly much more sinister than anybody might have thought. Here's Jesse with the transcription from their worksheet for the solution, complete with all kinds of weird grammar and spelling errors which he loves and which you'll soon see are kind of a theme with this guy. I would love to know what her like Yeah, it says kill like what was going on her besides. I know you'll see you'll see why you'll see why but let's let's read the solution First here we go. 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 to kill. Oh, no period. Most dangerous animal of all, assumed period. To kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is that when I die, I will be reborn in paradise and all the I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of Slavs for my afterlife.

You love Slavs. Yeah, like me. Yeah. After that, the message is followed by a jumbled string of extra letters, which are now thought to be garbage leftover from the encryption process. But at the time, people were trying to unscramble them into someone's name. Without an implied endorsement, my two favorites were Timothy E. Fiberty, which you really have to see spelled out to enjoy, which I'll drop that in the chat for you now. My two favorites were Timothy E. Fibberti, which you really have to see spelled out to

enjoy, which I'll drop that in the chat for you now. It'll make you, it'll give you a laugh. That's a cousin of Black Agar Bolt again. Yeah. Timothy E. Fibberti is an inhuman. Timothy E. Fibberti. And then Robert Emmett, the hippie, which straight up adds three extra letters that aren't in the ciphertext.

And funnily enough, non-starters, both of those. Those never led anywhere, surprisingly. But now, let's go back a couple days to see exactly what got everybody so excited about this cipher in the first place. On August 1st, 1969, almost a month after the attack on Darlene and Mike, three relatively local newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Vallejo Times Herald, each received a specially written copy of the same basic letter. It wasn't signed with a name, it was signed with a symbol, which was a simple crosshair over the center of a circle, a circle with

a crosshair on it. Here's Mathis with the version of that letter that was sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, since that's where Robert Graysmith, who was working at the time, he was working there. He enters our story at this point when the letter shows up. He was there. And he becomes kind of a character in the action sometimes here on out, especially in the movie version. And seriously, if I haven't convinced you to watch Zodiac yet, let me just say again, you should watch Zodiac, though maybe you should wait till after you hear next week's

episode to watch it because otherwise it'll kind of spoil it for you. Though really, this all kind of actually happened in real life too, so like, are we really spoiling it? I don't know. Let's not go too far down the webber hole with that. Here you go, Mathis. Let me give you this. Sorry that this letter sounds extremely familiar.

Dear editor, I'm not doing Jesse's voice. I learned. Probably a good call. Probably a good call. This is the murderer of the two teenagers last Christmas at Lake Herman and the girl on the Fourth of July near the golf course in Vallejo. To prove I killed them, I shall state some facts which only I and the police know. Christmas, brand name of ammo, super X, ten shots were fired. The boy was on his back with his feet to the car.

The girl was on her right side feet to the west. Fourth of July, girl was wearing patterned slacks. The boy was also shot in the knee. Brand name of ammo was western. Here is the part of a cipher. The other two parts of this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the Vallejo Times and SF Examiner. I want you to print this cipher on the front page of your paper. In this cipher is my identity. If you do not print this cipher by the afternoon of Friday, the first of August 69, I will go on a killing rampage Friday night. I will cruise around all weekend killing lone people in the night, then move on to kill again

until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend. And then for you too, here's a link to images of these actual letters and ciphers. I'm sure most of you listening have seen at least one of these before. If not, they're easily available if you look for the Z408 cipher or just a specific letter, the Zodiac letter from August 1st, 1969.

Uh, otherwise let these two describe it to you. Just go ahead and click through there. You can see it. Yeah. So first off, he is ending these letters, um, with that's that symbol, that's like a cross air. Yeah. with that symbol. That's a symbol that is like a cross air. Yeah. And the cipher is it looks like, um,

compared to the rest of the letter, much better writing, if that makes any sense. Like neater. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a mixture of letters, symbols, and letters that are backwards. A lot of them are like kind of like a culty looking symbols. It's all done. I think I would say like black felt pen or actually I think

it's blue felt blue felt pen in color. This is just Xerox, but I think it's, I think it's blue felt pen, felt tip pen. And by August 3rd, even though it was late, not every paper put on the front page. All three papers have basically complied with the letter writer's demands, and everything he asked to be printed actually shows up, which is exactly how Don and Betty were able to solve the cipher so fast.

But also, because pretty much all the info he gave about the murders could be taken from various news reports on the crimes, Vallejo police chief Jack E. Stilts issues a statement asking for more information that might eliminate any doubt that this was really the killer they were communicating with and not just some weirdo. By the way just want to point out that he did not give his name in that cipher even though he said he would don't know what that says about him nevertheless. Amazingly even though the cipher is it recorded so you know what it says about him? It says about what every serial killer says. They're cowards. Yeah, chicken shit. They're just chicken shit little fucking measly nobodies who desperately want to mean something so kill other people because it's all they can do.

Amazingly though, even though this cipher is not reported solved until like almost two weeks later on the 12th, he answers the chief's request for more info almost immediately with a letter one day later on the 4th of August. Except this time there's no cipher. Instead he just gives us something to call him. This is a pretty important letter. And Jesse, I'll have you read this letter now. Dear Editor, This is the Zodiac speaking.

An answer to your asking for more details about the good times I have had in Vallejo. I shall be very happy to supply even more material. By the way, are the police having a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do crack it, they will have me. On the 4th of July, I did not open the car door. The window was rolled down already. The boy was originally sitting in the front seat when I began firing. When I fired, the first shot was at his head. He leaped backwards at the same time, thus spoiling my aim.

He ended up in the back seat, then the floor and the back thrashing out very violently with his legs. That's how I shot him in the knee. I did not leave the scene of the killing with squealing tires and racing engine as described in the Vallejo paper. I drove away quite slowly so as not to draw attention to my car. The man who told the police that my car was brown as a Negro about 40 to 45, rather shabbily dressed.

What? The man who told the police that my car was brown. Oh, the man who told my police that my car was brown was a Negro 45. So he's ratting this dude out. Yeah. I was at this phone booth having some fun with the Vallejo cops when he was walking by, When I hung up the phone, hung the damn phone up thing, right? Sure. When I hung the phone

up the damn thing began to ring and that drew his attention to me in my car. In Jesse's defense, the Zodiac is one of those guys who loves to like spell things badly on purpose. Cene was spelled C-E-N-E. Yeah, just to give you an idea. Yeah, there's a ton of misspellings in all of these things. Last Christmas, two S's, in that episode,

the police were wondering as to how I could shoot and hit my victims in the dark. They did not openly state this, but implied this by saying it was a well lit night and I could see the silhouettes on the horizon. Bullshit. That area is surrounded by high hills and trees. What I did was tape a small pencil flashlight to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, in the center of the beam of light, if you train it at a wall or ceiling, you will see a black or dark spot in the center of the circle of light about three to six inches across. When taped to a gun

barrel, the bullet will strike exactly in the center of the black dot of the light. All I had to do was spray them as if it was a water hose. There is no need to use the gun sights. I was not happy to see that you did not, that I did not get front page coverage. Uh-huh, and here's, for you guys, here's pictures of the real thing, so you guys can see it. Also available at zodiackiller.com,

if you want us to check them out. You know, classic. And now, at this point, now that we have this letter situation going, the second phantom emerges. The real actual zodiac entity that this killer believes himself to be. Not just a crime suspect that the police are looking for, but this guy is, this is his image of himself as a criminal.

After seemingly carrying out his crimes scot-free, getting most somewhat front page attention in several major newspapers, and even giving himself like a gnome de guerre. In my opinion, this version of the Zodiac is the closest the world's come ever to an actual Batman-style comic book villain. And the reason that he's never been caught suddenly becomes much more clear when you realize that after this first month as the not zodiac, the effect this second version has, the second quote unquote phantom had on the national psyche, made it impossible to carry out an impartial investigation of these crimes ever again. They had like a month to like do this like any other crime and then anything useful is lost in a sea of tips, crazy people, other violent crimes that

are like sometimes conscious of this other crime, confirmation bias, people's vanity, all kinds of stuff. It's like literally like when you think about the movie The Batman and how they based Paul Dano's version of the Riddler on Zodiac a lot of someone. Yeah, yeah. It kind of makes sense. I'm not even sure that the Riddler style archetype existed before the Zodiac. It's like almost like the Riddler is Zodiac. Almost. I don't think that matches up, but...

No, I feel like Riddler was probably early. I'm curious. Yeah, I don't know. 1948 Riddler. Yeah, so Riddler's a little before, but this is a real type of serial killer now, this guy who like leaves clues, right? This is the zodiac thing that he created. For a second there, this guy really did have Gotham City in his clutches. Personally, I think he was really feeling himself too because of the bizarre way that this next situation goes down. This is,

I think, where he was feeling himself the hardest. On September 27, 1969, we're still in the same year, a couple months later, a 39-year-old man from San Francisco called Ronald Henry Fong was out fishing with his son in a beautiful cove at a man-made reservoir about 45 miles north of Vallejo. It was built in the 50s and was known to locals as Lake Berryessa. As the sun was getting low a little after 5 o'clock PM, Ronald thought he was maybe hearing someone yelling from outside the cove, but he didn't take too much stock in it because people are making noise all the time at parks. But after about 10 or 15 minutes, he thinks maybe it's real and he decides to take his boat over there and check it out.

What he finds is boats slowly going up the coast. He finds a 20 year old Pacific Union college student named Brian Hartnell One of the tallest people he's ever seen handsome strapping thick black glasses Doubled over and bloody on the shore of the lake waving his arms around legitimately screaming for help saying something like he was attacked and robbed Nearby 22 year old Cecilia and Shepherd She's a student in the process of moving over to Union College at Riverside, further south below LA, who was quickly losing strength as she tried DL2. Immediately, Ronald fired up his engine and headed to a nearby resort to contact the authorities and get help. but that doesn't come for a while. Earlier that day, these two students,

Brian and Cecilia, are meeting up to help pack up some of Cecilia's stuff for her to bring down to her new school in Riverside. And since they kind of used the date, kind of were still into each other, but they're like going to two different schools now, they decided to make a day of it, catch up, maybe, you know, I don't know. At first they thought about going to san francisco they decide on going to lake barriessa last minute because it's way closer give them more time together uh here's some pictures of it from the time so you can tell the people what it looks like uh and by the way again zodiac killer facts.com is another great website for stuff

uh but here's the here's the lake barriessa like gallery you can kind of look at see overhead you can see it's man-made you can see how it looks kind of golf-course-y. But if you've seen the movie, it's very accurate. These photos are so incredibly 1950s, 1960s. Yeah, they are. Everything about them. It looks like a Western TV program overhead shot. But I mean, it's golf-course-y, it's kind of like everything's like round landmasses I don't know. It's kind of Orbis looks like Super Nintendo somehow. I don't know how to quantify that better I mean sure you know what I'm saying. I don't know You'll feel figured out go to zodiac killer facts calm and check out the gallery even before they get there

An unassuming Chevy sedan was seen lurking at the lake by 4 p.m Brian and Cecilia are parked nearby and walking the quarter mile down to a nice little peninsula with a tree on the end, which I think you can see in one of those pictures is the shady two trees there. It's like at the end of a peninsula that's like a little further into the water, so much so that sometimes in the summer it even becomes an island from time to time. But unfortunately not today. After about an hour of being there, at 5 p.m., a dentist and his son, who are also at the park,

notice a solitary man near this area, heavy set, roughly five foot 10 inches, who quickly moves out of sight when seen. And then a little after that, Cecilia notices a man approaching from the trees before he ducks behind one like a cartoon. She tells Brian about it but Brian thinks she's talking about different trees that are much farther away and he's very surprised when a few

seconds later he's right on top of the couple walking fast and he has a pistol. Hartnell is not good at gauging height because like I said he's very tall he's six foot seven. So he's always looking down on people, so it's hard for him to tell how tall they are. But he says this guy's between 5'10 and 6'2, between 2'25, 2'50, somewhere in there, pounds-wise. And aside from the gun, which was most likely a Colt 1911,

that classic handgun based on descriptions, you guys know what that is, right? Yeah. Sure. I always have the thought, if I had to describe somebody to the cops, I feel like I would fuck it up. I feel like I have an inability to judge someone's height

and weight with any accuracy and that the person I describe would not be anywhere near the person that like assaulted. What if I told you there are entire podcasts just about that? I mean, that doesn't doesn't surprise me wouldn't surprise me at all so in addition to this gun he also had a large amount of thick white plastic clothesline and a wooden sheath hanging from his belt which contained a large bayonet or bread knife three three quarters to one inch wide,

about a foot long. So we're talking about big fucking like medieval cooking knife, like a big ass knife. Had a brass rivets, white surgical cotton tape around the hardwood handle, like medical style cotton tape around the hardwood handle. Guy was wearing a blue slash black dark windbreaker over some kind of red or black wool shirt,

black gloves, which he tucked his sleeves completely inside of and baggy dark slacks with pleats that were tucked into heavy boots. Okay. On top of this, this is the part that everybody remembers. Uh, over his head, he wears a strange black hood with a flat top, like a bag, like a paper bag upside down, that had four square corners which hung all the way down below his shoulder and over his chest like down below his nipples. He cut slits in the hood for eyes which he covered with like the clip-on front of some

sunglasses, and in the center of his chest, sewn on like a knight's insignia, was a big four-inch-wide white version of the crosshair symbol that was at the bottom of every zodiac letter. It looked like it came from a costume shop or like a novelty store. It was fairly professionally made, you know, sewn. Just visible through the eye slits was a greasy forehead and the suggestion of dark hair. And here is a composite of both the man, the Didentis, and his son saw who was not wearing this hood, as well as the guy in the hood as described by Brian Hartnell. You can pull it up and look at it. I mean, it's like when Spider-Man was in the Fantastic Four outfit and wearing a paper bag over his head.

Yeah, it looks, I mean, if you've seen the movie, this is probably the most memorable scene in the entire movie. But he's kind of iconic. Robert Graysmith is a cartoonist, and he drew a version of it that I still see everywhere on stickers that kind of looks like comic book art. I'm sure you've seen that one. Maybe?

If you've ever seen a picture of the Zodiac Killer that's not a composite drawing, this is the drawing you've seen. I left in the composite drawings because those are based off the testimony and are a little bit more accurate. Like in the movie he looks like he's wearing like an all-black suit almost, but he's actually wearing like this thing over a windbreaker and some slacks and he just tucked it in weird to make it look weird. The man says that he recently killed a

man while escaping prison in Montana and that he's not looking to hurt anybody as long as he can get some money and swap out his stolen car for a new one. Brian says he only has 75 cents, but the man is welcome to it, he says, and he's also willing to write him a check or offer any legal assistance or at least whatever assistance he can provide as a pre-law student. None of that really matters to the guy though. And eventually he just has Brian lie down on his stomach and makes Cecilia tie him up with the hollow plastic

clothesline, which he does loosely to try and give him an easy way out. Then the man hog ties Cecilia himself and then unfortunately goes back and double checks Brian's and tightens him up. At this point, he's huge. He's like a huge man. He's not used to being threatened by other people. He's like the biggest guy he's ever seen. He thinks he's being carjacked. Part of him is almost interested in what's going on. Like he's like, well, guess I'm going through a robbery. And he's like, Hey, if you're going to leave us out here,

like maybe just let us get up because it's very fucking cold out here and it's getting dark. Um, and he's like, Hey, is the gun loaded? Because like I said, he's like a, he's almost like, I don't want to say he's enjoying himself, but he's, he doesn't think he's as in much danger as he actually is. Yeah. Yeah. And he, he hears stories that, and this is from his testimony, he hears stories that sometimes people are too scared to end up actually shooting somebody. So when they do a hold up or whatever, they don't actually load the gun. Yeah. Okay. But the guy comes right up to him and you know, it's one of those guns where the clip comes out of the bottom of the, of the, of the handle. So he pops it out and is like, look at this shit, bitch.

There's fucking bullets in there. Bullets there. Wow, this is kind of neat. Actually, now I'm in danger. Yeah, he's not messing around. Immediately after that, he stabs Brian with his giant foot long knife six to eight times. And it's so horrible. And Brian can't do anything. So he just decides to pretend like he's dead. And it totally works. And this guy moves on to Cecilia, stabs her 10 times, probably because she's moving around a lot more trying to get him to stop because she saw

what he did to Brian. Like Brian wasn't scared because he didn't know he was about to get stabbed. He started getting stabbed probably before he realized. He said something like he started hearing the sound before he realized that he was getting stabbed. Yeah, your body just immediately puts you into shock. Pretty crazy. When he's done, the man calmly walks the quarter mile back over to Brian's white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, and on the right side door with the black felt-tip pen, he writes, Vallejo, 12-20-68, 7-4-69, September 27th, 1969,

6-30, by knife. And and below it he writes the fucking crosshair symbol at the same time the man is riding on the door Brian and Cecilia are up and screaming at Ronald Fong in the bay again and after he takes off in his boat without coming ashore with no idea that he'll ever return Cecilia is now going down she's not doing well Brian kind of like says he hits kind of like a point where he's not going any lower. He's like, he like comes online and realizes that he might like be alright. Not alright, but he might be able to like make this. So he gets up and he like kind of goes like I would say like 300 yards up the road until he runs into the two park

rangers because he takes a really long time to do this. He runs into the two park rangers who are sent to check on him once Fong made it over to the resort. So Fong made it to the resort and radioed to the rangers and then they headed towards him and they ran into each other as he was like bloodily walking up the road. They wrap the kids up to try and stop the bleeding as best they can, but the problem is that Lake Berryessa doesn't even have like bathrooms at this point. It's like a remote park.

It's like state land and there's rangers, but there's not like trash cans or anything like that. You know what I mean? Takes almost an hour for the ambulance to get there. They're finally on their way to the hospital by 6 PM, which is, or I'm sorry, by 8pm. At 7.13 Napa sheriffs finally arrive on the scene. At 7.40, 30 miles away, at 1231 Main Street in Napa, police dispatch officer Slate is called from a payphone. And here's Mathis with a dramatic reading of what was said. I want to report a murder. No, a double murder. They are two miles north of Park headquarters.

They were in a white Volkswagen Carman Ghia. I'm the one that did it. Again, cockily guessing it was a double murder when really he only killed one person. But this time, however, he remembered- God, and he's not even good at what he wants to do. The one thing he's trying to be good at, he keeps fucking failing at. Well, we'll see if he fails or not. Well, you know what I mean? Even What he wants to do the one thing he's trying to be good at he keeps fucking failing at well You'll see if he fails. Well, you know what I mean, like even yeah It's just again that mediocrity even in the most heinous like low-level thing You can do you still keep fucking it up this time though after he finishes making the call

He remembers that the ring back is what got him and this time he just doesn't hang up the phone He just leaves it there and five minutes later after not being able this is amazing part of the story that I didn't know About before five minutes later after not being able to trace the call They put out a call for help on like the general radio waves and this guy Pat Stanley who is a news director at cave-on Radio like local radio. He took action After hearing about on the police scanner and here is a quote from the guy for Jesse to read from the Napa Valley register Pretty amazing the receiver on the phone. The zodiac used was put down but not hung up. Technology then was not like it is today. The phone company could only report that the call came from a pay telephone somewhere

between Lake Berryessa and Napa. The Napa County Sheriff's Department wanted to find the phone and fast, so virtually any official with the radio was asked to help. The reporter jumped into action. After a brief stop at the Sheriff's Department, I drove north on Main Street. Driving past a car wash in the historic Sam Key laundry building, I spotted a payphone, but thought the call must have come from closer to the lake nearly 30 miles away At the last second though I swerved my car toward the phone booth and was shocked to find the receiver off the hook. I Used my own two-way radio back to cave-on where I was instructed Aware I instructed the on-duty DJ to call police

They in turn told me not to move until officers arrived. So isn't that crazy? He just like drove out and tried to find a phone off the hook and he fucking found it. And it wasn't, I mean, apparently it's a lot of people. This was like a whole thing. People were out looking, people were out looking. This is something that I didn't look into me. I kind of maybe I will for next episode. I wonder how often there were pay phones. Like how often did you come across one? How many pay phones were in that area? Were they like every block?

I mean, at the time there would have been pay phones at least every two for sure. Every couple of blocks, yeah. There's a lot of pay phones, but like not that many in a town like this, but it wasn't like this was the closest pay phone to Lake Berry, I suppose. Right, right. I mean, it's just an interesting,

I just, they were so prominent for so long. We're talking about an hour and 10 minutes after this happened. So like he could have gotten pretty far. At this point, the police get their first nice detailed interview with the Zodiac survivor and Brian Hartnell, who is like pretty lucid even shortly after and finally start putting together some kind of psychological profile for the second version of our phantom. They see him as a killer with a strange motivation, not just sex or money, and some sort of axe

to grind against young couples, possibly more the women than the men considering that it's men that are surviving these attacks and that he seems to punish the women a little harder than the men. They imagine he likes to switch up his weapons between murders and always tries to kill near water at some type of remote lovers lane type place and always likes to involve cars. They also notice that he liked common days off for his killings like weekends and holidays when he might feel lonely and that likely for obvious reasons they always happen closer to night time than daylight. However, Graysmith also goes out of his way at this point to mention that Zodiac standing

there with his knife in that weird outfit is kind of like a dead ringer for Count Zoroff in the 1932 movie version of the most dangerous game, which immediately reminds me of that cipher that the Hardin solved earlier when Zodiac says man is the most dangerous game. Oh, that's right. Yeah. And sure enough, when I went back to check, Gray Smith mentioned the movie in that chapter too.

And here's Mathis with an excerpt from that. The 1932 RKO radio picture based on Richard Connell's famous 1924 short story, is the tale of a mad hunter, Count Zaroff, who uses fake channel lights to lure passing ships onto the reefs just off his island stronghold. The survivors of the sunken vessels become human game to be hunted in the Count's private jungle. Quote, my life has been one glorious hunt, he tells his prisoners. It would be impossible for me to tell you how many animals I have killed.

One night as I lay in my tent with this head of mine, a terrible thought crept like a snake into my brain. Hunting was beginning to bore me. When I lost my love for hunting, I lost my love of life, of love. Here on my island I hunt the most dangerous game. Only half the kill, only after the kill does man know the true ecstasy of love says Zaroff. It is the natural instinct. Kill then love. When you have known that, you have known ecstasy.

It's basically the liver king. And yeah, that's all well and good on its own, right? And tons of villains wear long sleeve black turtlenecks with dark boots but not that many use luger's and long scoped rifles and carry around extremely huge dumb knives and sheets around their ways. I need case you doubt me here are a bunch of links actually just like a bunch of pictures to the on the internet movie firearms database the I am fdb. on the internet movie firearms database, the IMFDB, which has a bunch of screenshots of Zarov completely with a Luger, a knife scabbard and a scope rifle. So you can compare them. Have a look at these pictures

and tell the people how similar they are to the Zodiac image. You'll see him, he's the guy in the black suit, not the, he's not the heroic guy, but if you scroll a bit down you can see better. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's a similar, like you said too, it's just a very common, simple

outfit as well. Yeah. But he does have a Luger. Yep. Which the Zodiac used. He does have a big knife with the Zodiac used and he does carry around a big giant rifle, which the Zodiac never officially uses a rifle, but you'll see why a rifle is still relevant. And that leads me to the question of what if the Zodiac didn't have a fixation on hot

young couples at all? What if lovers lanes are just naturally the most strategically practical human game? So what you're what you're saying is the government is right and violent movies make violent criminals. If you have not seen the most dangerous game, um, I have not. There's a couple, there's a man and a woman being hunted by the guy. So like, it kind of checks out two weeks go by suddenly we're, we're, we're down in San Francisco proper. The day before Columbus day, October 11th, 1969, still in the same year, uh,

on the corner of Washington and Cherry, in a safe upscale neighborhood of Presidio Heights, two minutes before 10 p.m. at 9.58. During a break in the action at a party going on in her house, a 14-year-old girl looks down out of her second story window and 60 feet across the street to see a man in brown pants and a dark blue black parka about five foot eight with glasses and a reddish crew cut sitting in a cab, cradling the cab driver's head in his lap. He's possibly robbing him, possibly engaging in some kind of sex acts with him. So she calls the cops, she calls her two siblings over to see.

Suddenly the whole party is now looking at the window. You know, it's like a little kickback, but they're all looking out the window. And while they're talking on the phone with the police, they watch him. He gets out of the car, walks around the cab, wipes it down with some kind of rag, and then just kind of like calmly walks away. They tell the police they're witnessing a crime in progress. They describe the same guy I just did to the police. Two minutes later, a 10 on the dot, moments after the kids finish with the dispatcher

when two cops stop a stocky clean cut white guy lumbering down the street in the fog to see if he saw anything, he says he saw a man waving a gun around headed in the opposite direction. They let that guy continue going off into the night, drive off after the gunman without even getting out of the car trying to catch the killer as quickly as possible before he gets away. The cab driver was a 29 year old San Francisco State student and part-time insurance agent who works night shifts in the cab from 9 to 5 a.m. to pay his way through school. That's the

overnight shift by the way. 30 minutes into his shift, 930 p.m., he accepts a fare over on 9th Avenue in San Francisco from where he's at over by the St. Francis Hotel, if you know where that is, a ways away from there. And on the way, trying to like make the most out of his drive time, he picks up another fare on the way to where he's going because it's kind of on the way, who directs him to the intersection of Washington and Maple Street and Presidio Heights. When he gets there, the fair notices that there's a man walking in front of the cab, walking his dog. So he asked Paul to take the car down one more block, Paul Stein. I don't know if I said his name. He asked Paul Stein to take the car down one

more block to Washington and Cherry. Just before 955, with the meter still running in the cab, the fair places a nine millimeter handgun close enough to Paul's head behind his left ear that when he pulls the trigger seconds later, the sound of the shot is so muffled that the kids don't even hear it across the street. The fair moves from the backseat to where the teenager saw him up front, he did his dirty business that he was doing, and then he vanished into the night. Or did he? At 10-10, just a little at like we're 12 minutes into this crime. 10-10, two officers finally arrive on the scene to find the kids from the house

now coming down out into the street near an active murder scene. He ushers them into an alcove in front of their house, takes the suspect's description again. He realizes that somehow the first time after the 911 call, the police put out a bolo for a black guy instead and immediately jumps in the radio to correct it. False description has only been out 15 minutes, 10 minutes or so. The damage is done. Here's Jesse with a quote from Donald Fouke, one of the officers who stalked that stocky lumbering white guy from their patrol car, didn't take a close look at him even though he would have been covered in blood at the time.

Here's a quote. We proceeded on Jackson Street toward Argyelo. Argyelo? How do you say that? Argyelo. Argyelo. Something like that. Argyelo probably is right. Continuing our search, as we arrived at Argyllo Street, the description of the subject was changed to a white male adult and, believing this suspect was possibly the one involved in the shooting, we entered the Presidio of San Francisco and conducted a search on West Pacific Avenue. The opposite side of the wall and

the last direction we observed the suspect going. We did not find the suspect. So yeah, extremely disappointing. Though it was the testimony of these police officers that led to the most popular Zodiac composite that we have today when they updated it after becoming convinced that it was in fact Zodiac, they probably stopped that night. And I'm not saying that it's for the same reason, but I am not surprised that the cops are looking for a black guy. Anyway, a black glove was found in the cab on the passenger side floor. They pulled one casing from the car, one fingerprint, with only eight of the possible 50 points of identification that fingerprints normally have was pulled

from the beam between the front and rear windows of the car. The rest was just wiped away as they watched him kind of wipe, so they assume that's what happened. Typically you need at least 12 points of identification on fingerprint for results to be taken seriously. I think I said that before on another episode of something maybe from JFK. But yeah, there's 50 possible, you need 12. They had eight here.

20 minutes after the correction goes out, we meet another major character in the Zodiac lore as well as a player in the creation of Graysmith's book itself, and that's homicide inspector Dave Toskey, who arrives on the scene at 10.30 PM with his partner Bill Armstrong, who were the on-call homicide team that night. You should pay attention to Toskey. He'll be around for a while. And in the Fincher movie, which you should watch, he's played by Mark Ruffalo. So you know he's gonna be important.

That's an Avenger. That's the first Avenger of several Marvel affiliated people that are in this movie. Mysterio doesn't count, but Jake Gyllenhaal also was in Marvel. Three days later on October 14th, 1969, the San Francisco Chronicle receives a fifth letter now. We're up to five letters in this episode, which this time seems to include a piece of

bloodstained fabric inside an envelope marked quote, SF Chronicle, San Fran, Calif. Please rush to editor. Please rush to editor. Instead of the return address, again, just the symbol. Now here's Mathis to read the letter to you. This is the Chodiak speaking. Make sure and get this exactly right. B-A-V-H-E-T-M-H-O-R-I-U-I-Q.

Oh, whoa, sorry man. I don't know what that was. Here's the real letter here. This is the Zodiac speaking. I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington Street and Maple Street last night to prove this. Here's a bloodstained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did and the same man who did in the people in the North Bay area.

The SF police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcycles, seeing who can make the most noise. The car drivers should have just parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover. School children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire and then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out. And there is that scoped rifle implication that we have.

Even though he never uses it, there's an implication. And of course, again, it finishes with the symbol. Immediately, they hand the thing over to Toski and Armstrong who become like the leads on the case, and that's like when he really gets locked into this case for like pretty much the rest of his like professional life. They test this letter, they confirm that the little bloody scrap is indeed a match to the fabric from Paul Stein's shirt that they found at the scene. And for the first time, they hand the letter over to Zodiac supporting character Sherwood Morrill, an expert in the currently rather pseudo-sciencey fields of graphology and forensic handwriting analysis, who is quoted in his own obituary from 1988 as saying, quote,

sometimes you feel like you're playing God when you shouldn't be, which is like a wild thing for a guy with his job to say, and which in a story about a mysterious character who writes anonymous letters is sort of the perfect thing to maintain plausible deniability for any given suspect, considering how central it becomes to a lot of the theories people love to work for this guy. You know what I mean? Like, the handwriting should not be considered nearly as much as it is, though I think in a superficial way, you can maybe rule some people out. You know what I mean? I think you can maybe see when it's definitely not the same guy's handwriting, but that's about as good as you can do.

I'm still over here thinking about the Chodiak. Don't worry about that guy. Don't worry about the Chodiak. That guy doesn't exist. Don't worry about him. Don't worry about the Chodiak. The Chodiak's fine. He'll be all right.

There's much you can hear from him a lot more times. Look for Sherwood Morrow later too. He's like the Boba Fett of this story. They simply use him too much. By the end, he quote unquote clears 9,000 people. How could you possibly do that? Anyway, suddenly, we're back on October 16th, where those two cops are being interviewed for the updated composite. And the updated description is that of a slightly older man than before. 35 to 40, with a thicker jaw and a barrel chest, coming in at least 200 pounds, reddish-brown crew cut, navy blue-black waist-length jacket, more like the one described at Lake Berryessa,

heavy-rimmed glasses. If you look at this picture, I think that he looks like D.B. Cooper in this picture. Did I not? Here are the two pictures. You can see, I believe the one on the left is the updated one. I believe, I believe this is also at zodiac killer facts.com, but you can see the top of that one. There's like the two guys that look kind of the same. They look like DB Cooper. I'm saying this is what

most UFO websites look like too. Yeah. I think the one on the left is the updated one. They look a little different from each other, but not much. Not much, really. I would not, if you showed me both, I'd be like, that's the same guy. Anyway, the next day on October 17th, the letter is published and understandably, it causes widespread panic among parents in the San Francisco area with the talk of all the buses

and the shooting of the kids and all that. It causes police resources to be spread thin, giving school buses extra security, instructions to just keep on driving even if Count Zaroff shows up and snipes out your tires. And in fact, just to give you an idea of how real this is and how serious it was taken, here's Jesse with an excerpt from the emergency bulletin as seen in The Graysmith. To all law enforcement agencies, a San Francisco cabbie was murdered by an unknown psychotic who has threatened to wipe out a school bus then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out. One, continue driving the bus on a flat tire. Do not stop. Two, tell children to get below the level of the window and lie on the floor. Three, the driver will continue driving and turn on all lights

and sound the horn. Four, the school bus shall not be stopped until arriving at a well populated area. Five, upon arrival at this location, a local law enforcement agency should be notified immediately. At this point in the Graysmith narrative, Zodiac mania has reached like a fever pitch. So much attention on the case, California State Attorney General C. Lynch convenes an actual Zodiac seminar, the San Francisco Hall of Justice for cooperation between San Francisco, Napa, Solano, Benicia, Vallejo, San Mateo, Marin, the FBI, naval intelligence for the fucking cryptography, US postal inspectors for the letters, highway patrols because of the cars, and the State Bureau of Identification and Investigation.

Though at the end, most feel they're no closer to solving the case than they were when they started, which is the exact problem. And now, at this point, you've now seen every crime that's commonly definitively linked to Zodiac between almost all the theories. And I would say that at the end of today's halfway dip into the five phantoms of Zodiac, as we've reached such a natural stopping point at this point, there's just one more thing to do, and that is to tease the next one, Phantom Number Three. For reasons that will become clear to you soon as we continue Part One next week, the third idea of Zodiac is known as Sam.

And to me, he represents a shift in our focus for the public away from thinking of Zodiac as someone who is responsible for specific crimes to someone who lives more in their own imagination. Like for people who don't know the details of this crime and just know the name, the Zodiac and the kind of vibe that he like writes letters and stuff, which is at this point, most people, because the internet does not exist

and they're just kind of picking it up in flashes. And it's kind of just like a sensation. Zodiac is just at this point, anybody that they want it to be. If your neighbor's too loud, it's probably the fucking Zodiac. Your boss is a creepy guy at work. He's the fucking Zodiac is just at this point, anybody that they want it to be. If your neighbor's too loud, it's probably the fucking Zodiac. Your boss is a creepy guy at work, he's the fucking Zodiac killer. That one dude who goes too hard into the RP at Ren Fair, he's the Zodiac. Podcast host, does too many ARG teases, teases his audience all the time, makes up stuff, Zodiac. You know what I mean? You get what I'm saying. Anyway, you come back next week, please, for the back nine of the

Graysmith Zodiac Theory. There's still like 15 more Zodiac letters to go. And after that, watch us tear it all down, replace it with a new ideal and possibly even a much newer suspect, a bonus sixth phantom who will meet a few weeks later in part four. Right? Yeah. This has been the Chiluminati. You've been listening to Zodiac, the Great American Rabbit Hole.

It's a show I'm very proud of. Thank you, Jesse and Mathis for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Robert Graysmith. Contact me, Jared Kovec, please. Deanna fucking rules. The mystery search continues. Good. Bye. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Jaluminati Podcast. As always, I'm one of your hosts, Mike Marhen, joined by the... I don't know who they are, there's two...

What? Terrence Hill and Bud Spencer. No! Neo and Bud Spencer No! Neo and Trinity No! I don't understand and I probably never will Let me just tell you right now that there's two Leon, Kennedy and Claire Redfield I'm telling you, I think he literally just looked up famous duos

Cheech and Chow And has been going through the list ever since I'm trying to dig deep Which one of you is dick Powell me I want my my I want my my I want my my I want my my I want my my I want my my

I want my my I want my my I want your Illuminati I want your Illuminati I want youraluminati Podcast. As always, I'm one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined by Alex and Jesse. Like a shooting star across the sky that's actually a UFO. Thanks for watching!