Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 247 - The Zodiac Killer - A Great American Rabbit Hole Part 3

Episode Date: April 21, 2024

In this weeks Zodiac Killer part, Alex, Jesse and Mike shed some light on the most likely Zodiac suspects... MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Special thanks to our sponsors this episode - Talkspace - http://www.talkspace.com/chill Promocode SPACE80 Stamps - http://www.stamps.com Promo Code Chill Hero Forge - http://www.heroforge.com Promo Code: Chill 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 to the July Maddy podcast episode 247 as always I am one of your hosts Mike Martin joined by the ghoul and Mr. Handy of LA. Hello. And Alex. Yeah I'm definitely. Hey there. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, nevermind. I was about to be Elvis all of a sudden. My ghoul was like, hey there, pretty mama. Johnny Bravo. It's me, the ghoul, mama. Where you going, mama? What happened to my nose? It's me, Walton Goggins, baby.

Hey there. My skin bubbled off, baby. Where to go now? Bubble. I guess we just have two Elvis impersonators instead of a sort of ghoul. You know what? That's who we are. Elvis and other Elvis.

I'm Mr. Gutsy I'm like the I'm like the 76 comeback special Elvis Jesse's like the I'm not going to the military Taking a break Elvis who looks like I'm gonna try to get me some Nazis Give me some Nazi scalps, baby, I want my scalps maybe World War two was he? He was... No, no. Well, I just don't like Nazis is what I'm saying. I'm going back to Germany in 1955. Finish them all.

They were going to send me to Korea, but I said, I'm going to Germany. Welcome back to the show, everybody. Welcome back to the show. We got to get through another episode of the Zodiac because we have to go talk about aliens on the mini-soad, which is the real thing that I can't wait to talk about. Now this is fired up. Not just fired up. I wanna let everyone know I didn't, I didn't answer any of these messages.

I just let them pile up. And last night, starting at, So you have no idea what we were talking about. I have no idea what we were talking about. I have no idea what we're talking about. What I do know is I have that way. I guess 36 messages back and forth between Alex and Mathis that started at sometime yesterday and went all day. 7 58 PM is when it started and it just kept going. And I don't know what it's about, but I knew immediately aliens. Like I just knew.

The classified document dropped yesterday. It's pretty, it's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's not like the one yet, but it's pretty good. No, but it made what we heard as rumors factual now. We know what we know as rumors actually did happen. I cannot wait for the bonus show though. Particularly with, particularly with Senator Harry Reid

and stuff he was involved with. Yeah, it legitimizes like very specific things. You mean airport famed Harry Reid? Oh yeah. Airport famed Harry Reid. Oh yeah. We'll get to that in the after show over at Patreon. I'm not the shill. I shouldn't be shilling. It feels wrong. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. This don't worry, darling. Oh, Elvis will show for you, but oh, baby, don't worry. I'll have a Tazel website to you. I'm now turning into what's his name from Dune. Austin Butler. What happened to Gerard Butler? He he just he he Gerard Butler is down the White House. Yeah, he went down. Everything around him went down. Nothing in the

White House. England. I remember down. Everything around him went down and nothing in the White House. England. I remember he wasn't even Phantom of the Opera. He was he was the Phantom of the Opera. That's isn't that crazy. And he was Leonidas. What a what a mid 2000s he had. Yes, he did. What a what a what an early arts.

What an early 2010s he had. What a 2010 he had. What a 2009. I just know he was like his career started going down when he did that video game movie. I feel like it was where you die in the video game. You die for real before that was. I think that was mid. I think that was mid mid success before that. I don't know. Doesn't matter. Should I get in character now?

This is Alex speaking and welcome to part two of our three part Zodiac series. Zodiac, the great American rabbit hole. Well, hold on, hold on. Is this part three of our three part zodiac series. Zodiac, the great American rabbit hole. Well, hold on, hold on. Isn't this part three? Yeah. Part three. No, this is part two of our three part series and part one is two episodes. Welcome to it. Right. What is saying is part episode one and episode two were a pet or part of a singular part. Yeah. I mean, I know what he's saying, but it doesn't make it real. It's just like when someone says Bigfoot talk to him. It doesn't make it real.

This is episode three, part two. Unless that lady who sucks Bigfoot's dick gets it on camera. Doesn't make it real. You know what? I believe that. I believe that, though. That's what I believe living in the wild. And if I ever once in a while, I wouldn't say that to the news if it wasn't true. Yeah. Why would you say that? Yeah, you wouldn't just make that up.

Anyway, yeah, it's going to be four episodes all told. This is the third one today. After spending the last two weeks learning the basics of the case and introducing yourself to my five phantom versions of Zodiac in part one, which was aptly titled The Five Phantoms, we are now in part two, which is called Ghostbusters, because today we're going to briefly catch ourselves up to the present in terms of other things that have happened in the story since the 1986 Robert Greisman book Zodiac.

And also now that it's almost 20 years old, the excellent 2007 movie adaptation of that book by David Fincher, which you should watch. Which of the Ghostbusters movies would this be most akin to this what we're in right now even Ghostbusters 2 is a different feel than Ghostbusters. No, this is Ghostbusters 1 of part two. And you should watch Zodiac by David Fincher. It fucking rules.

And now guided by some of the excellent information compiled by the writer Jarrett Kovec in his first Zodiac book, Motor Spirit, which you should also purchase and read for yourself because I'm gonna go with the facts here, and there's a lot more thinking going on in this book and a lot more, you know, just contextualizing going on that you're going to miss if you don't read the book. And we're going to go back through that timeline one more time. We're going to poke some holes. We're going to fill in some gray areas and we're going to set the stage for part three,

which is called The Sixth Phantom, and which is based on Koubek's second book, which is called How to Find Zodiac, where we take a close look at his favorite suspect for the case, based off an entirely new set of leads which he discovered himself during COVID, and which is very compelling. But also, before I get into that, there's a bit of business. Seeing as this Zodiac series is actually the fifth of eight big episodes i've been planning to tackle in the next few months dude i i there are commenters and redditors out

there like i can't do i can't keep up with the ar neither can i homie you yeah i don't know you can don't worry about it yeah i don't know what to tell you guys yeah we we are just here for the ride you just there's. This is the fifth of eight I've been planning to tackle them in the month about but part two, right? This is part three of a four This is part. This is episode three part two of a four part series of of an eight That's right. That's right. Extremely easy to follow. Yeah, super easy to follow.

That's single-lose listeners. Yeah. I'm not losing a single listener. If anything, interest is building into a green wave of Chiluminati fans. A crescendo. Don't say a green wave. How dare you? Shut your mouth.

PTSD, dude. No. Anyway, this is all leading to something called episode H8, and which I'm being very mysterious about. You can solve my puzzles, among other things, have some fun guessing what's coming next over at r slash Chalumnaughty Pod on Reddit. The sequence of eight words associated with these episodes, again, are hidden, heavyweights, horse, today's episode, which is hello, then huge him again and hero.

What do you guys think those last three mean? Huge him again and hero. Huge. Yeah. Jesse Cox him again, Mathis hero, Alex for wrapping this whole damn thing up for just finally for just finally moving on from this wild idea. The villain becomes the hero. Yeah. When it ends, he saved us. Yeah, but he also created the problem. Doesn't that make him like more like Mysterio? No. From the more recent Spider-Man movie. So along those lines, though, also having sat through everything so far, what's your vibes going into part two of this series?

Like, who is this fucking guy? You know, do you think the Zodiac is more like of a legit guy who like is really a genius or do you think he's more like a wannabe super important mastermind who's increasingly desperate for any kind of attention? I feel like the biggest problem is that at a certain point it becomes very obvious that there's a lot of people trying to like get in on the legend. Yep. And it muddies the water of what is real Zodiac communication and what is fake. It's it. I don't know.

It's funny because they like, I mean, we can look at our Bell star series is another example of where that happened, where the legend of who she was overtook the reality in the media and just fucking took fire. Yeah. Definitely happened here also. Yeah. Do you guys, do you guys think that episode H8 is like my zodiac buttons? In that it's insane? Absolutely. Interesting. Absolutely. Yes. All right.

Yeah. You know what? I'll take that. And that you potentially have killed or will kill someone? Yes, I absolutely believe that. It could be. It could be that. Anyway, this one. Let's start taking applications for a third host now then. Yeah, take it. I'm gonna make it. I'm gonna pull through. Now I say we still bring them on from jail. It's good.

We're gonna get views, dude. We're gonna get views. You think I'm gonna be the mystery in episode eight, Shane? It's gonna be my own murder that I did, like my own card. You're giving yourself up? Yeah. Okay. Anyway, this one should be a nice light episode after last week's big chunker of an episode

and next week's pretty big chunker of an episode. And so in that spirit, instead of doing any sort of shilling today, I'm just going to share something with the boys that we received at the mail room at Shaluma Naughty HQ in an envelope with no address on it. It just said, please rush. It just said, please rush to patreon.com slash children on a pod on it twice. Wait, Chilunamati HQ has a mail room?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mathis admittedly, it's only a mail room. Yeah. Oh, that's the entire HQ. The entire building is just one mail room. Yeah, that's it. Okay, that makes so much more sense. Anyway, yeah, it said, please rush to patreon.com

slash Chilunamati pod on it twice in a row with five I have Providence stamps attached in the corner and that this really weird symbol, you'll see it. Yeah, anyway, here's what was in the envelope. This is so weird. We can toss it up on the subreddit when the episode goes live to in case people. Hang on, let me, I'm gonna copy paste send this to Dean

so he has this for later. You don't have to worry about that. There may be a way to get an original copy of this. Do you think, do you know a guy? I, I, I, I have a connection with the mail room. Is that connection that you sent this to the mail room? Is that the connection? No, I, this isn't even, I look, I'm just here.

Look, I'm just, I happen to be doing a thing on Zodiac right now. That's it. I don't. It's listed as Chodiak Cypher five. So look, I, I can't help who's organized. Let's be real. He's not very creative with his logo. He kept the cross and just threw it into a triangle instead. Yeah, whoever

this Chodiak is not very creative. 20 lines of garbled random letters. It looks like matrix code. Literally the Zodiac sign, but instead of a circle, it's a triangle. It's, it's, it's insanity to Alex. Interesting. Yeah. He's not creative. He just changed a circle to a triangle and listen, uh, probably like went to some website and put in a code. Anyway, we can toss it up on the subreddit when the episode goes live too, just in case anybody wants to see it. Alex is going to break few people's like brains in real life. No way. I love that the branding on this is so on point.

Whoever had this, they knew what show it was going to be on. They really did a good job. Finally, before we jump into the episode, I just want to say as a disclaimer that I'm a comedian who's telling you about some stuff I read online in a funny casual way. I am not an expert on this case. It has certainly been covered more thoroughly on much better, more expensively produced and well researched shows. This is our take on it. We do take pride in the research we do. So special thanks to Deanna, who you can say what's up to on Twitter at Deanna writes ink, like D E A N N A writes ink for all her incredible help putting this together

with us. And I assure any mistakes we make were unintentional and not for lack of trying. Also, this is a series about a real murderer who killed people in violent ways. We're not going to be letting up on that aspect of this case anytime soon, unfortunately. So send the kids away to boarding school until we're done. Once the show's over, feel free to have a change of heart and send for them to be collected and brought home

before the end of the semester. Also, sorry for being insensitive sometimes, but we mean no harm. We're just trying to make the best version of our show possible, so thanks for listening. And enjoy. That's the most important thing, is for you to enjoy. First things first, now that we're all boned up on the major players and events in this

case, at least according to Toskey, Graysmith, Fincher, I just want to take a moment to continue our thought process from part one, list out all the five phantom versions of Zodiac we're talking about so far, since today we're going to kind of see how none of them really fully creates a full picture of the man behind these crimes and letters and find out what kind of traps people investigating high profile cases often have to delicately navigate or too often just fall into and get stuck in and never get out. So the first phantom is the one we call the not zodiac. He's the one who's just a fairly run-of-the-mill mundane suspect in two possibly related shooting attacks,

which resulted in the deaths of three teenagers, right? Just a criminal, a generic criminal. At this point, though it's rare, he's something the cops in NorCal have, they can like wrap their minds around the idea of somebody shooting somebody in a car. Sadly, these kids are far from the first murders that have ever happened in the area, but you know they don't notice that much weird about it yet. Even in this early form though he does seem to be enjoying himself. He's already taunting police by calling his own crimes in on the like 911 line, being cocky, being creepy on the phone.

But until things develop and we meet the second phantom, nobody sees this guy as a genius or a dark folk hero or a pulp villain or any of that because there's no reason to. He's not famous for any reason. But this doesn't last for long because once the second phantom emerges, who seems to be getting away with all his crimes scot-free and receiving free front page news coverage and several major newspapers for his bizarre letters and his secret codes he uses to communicate with the police and the media, the true zodiac killer appears. Fully formed, mega mind, batman, rogues gallery style bad guy.

This guy, that's the second phantom. That's like the real deal supervill villain. This is the one that has like gone out through culture, like the vibe of him is like repeated through culture. He's made a lasting mark on media, like we talked about Dirty Harry and how the Scorpio killer is Zodiac and the movie is Zodiac and there's just, there's other Zodiac-esque movies, the Riddler and the recent Batman is very Z zodiac-esque. And whether intentional or not, he absolutely obliterated anyone's chance of easily figuring out who he was, thanks to the literal avalanche of bogus tips and evidence and speculation happening all over the country about

him because he's so famous at this time. Personally, I think he probably found this level of attention much more than he expected even at this time. And while he was probably feeling himself super hard at this point and excited to make the next big media frenzy thing happen every time that he does something, I think it's also kind of like the peak for him and simultaneously the beginning of the end for him because he clearly starts to become hungrier and hungrier for attention as time goes on and he realizes how fickle the media

cycle is. Even in 1969 when you're a fucking comic book villain driving around at night, murdering teenagers with a gun and taunting the cops. Even that is like not enough. That's what's most frustrating about him for me is that he did attain, at least in media, this super villain kind of air with him, which is the one thing that when we talk about serial killers, we try to make you realize is like, that's not true. And the time they get arrested, the reality of them being mundane, nobodies

with no talent to do anything other than kill. And I guarantee if the Zodiac had ever gotten arrested, that's exactly what they'd see. A general mundane, boring dude who's not a fucking actual mega mind super villain who thinks he's more clever than he is. He just existed at a time where it was way easier to hide your footprint because of technology at the time we had access to. And because of that and the media doing what the media does, he was maybe one of the only, if the only serial killer who got let level without being torn down to the nobody that he actually was. Yeah. And it's just because you don't know who he is that he

seems like he's done literally everything right. Like, when you actually when you find out who he is, you're going to look at the evidence, you're gonna be like, Oh, wow, we could have caught him here. We could have caught him here. We could have caught him here. Yep. And that's how it always is. Remember John Wayne Gacy? Fucking gay people buckets of chicken. They came to his house three times. It was like, Hey, what's up? Oh, it smells a little funny, but whatever. Have a good one. When he had bodies under his floor, the cops always do

that. It's insane. Right. And like for all we know, like could fucking be Arthur Lee Allen. You know what I mean? Like also, you know what I mean? That's the other thing is I remember walking out of that fucking movie theater, like in 2007, having just watched Zodiac on the big screen and been like, is an injustice this is this guy must go down yeah you know what I mean and like you can read about it even at the time and be like oh my god uh anyway anyway anyway uh after stabbing some kids by the lake in a crazy outfit and blowing away that cab driver to use his bloody clothes as id for his letters and the huge sham TV appearance and a million false leads later. The legend becomes too big for one man to contain it,

just like Bell Star, right? Zodiac, the man loses control of his brand and the second Phantom evolves into Sam because when you don't say who you are, you can't prove who you are. Right. So, yeah. So it evolves into Sam, who is now the third phantom. And the third phantom is the guy who could literally be anybody from the weird guy who lives in your apartment building and never opens his door to the guy one table over at a restaurant who's talking too loud and he's like sexist and he's

disrupting your dinner. You're just like, that's the fucking Zodiac killer. Uh, this is, this is when the shift moves away from actually solving the case for most people who care about it to the idea of Zodiac just being a meme that you can break out anytime you need to explain something quickly that doesn't quite have a name or a feeling that's hard to describe,

or you just wanna basically mess with people, right? Like Sam messes with people. Or for example, in a way, if you think about it, even like Ted Cruz is the third Phantom of Zodiac, right? Like, because he like, not only being fingered as somebody who's like creepy in a weird way that makes him seem like the Zodiac killer, and he kind of looks like the Zodiac killer,

obviously he's not, he's way too young to be the Zodiac killer. Even that, and then he also like, has joked about it more than once himself. It's a meme, right? But if Ted Cruz was also proven to be a killer or decided to actually pretend to be zodiac, he would be evolving from the third phantom, who called Melvin Belli from the mental hospital, to the fourth phantom, who can basically just be described as intentional or unintentional Zodiac fan art. Like Kathleen Johns getting driven around for 90 minutes by some weird guy who may or

may not be Zodiac, or William Joseph Grant, that guy who was teasing the cop by switching places with him under the freeway whenever he'd come to look at him and mad-dogging him, or Stanley Dean Baker, this guy who almost chopped that dude's head off in the apartment and on the walls. He drew Satan's Saves and Zodiac and all that stuff. Or the tip that came through to Paul Avery that led him to the Cherry Joe Bates murder at Riverside City College, which also featured scary letters and sent to newspapers and cops. So even though that happened three years before, now that Zodiac's here in the meme, you can reach backwards and make old shit Zodiac now too, which is crazy. he mentioned his name is Zodiac,

like three letters in. Like there's no way he was like, I'm gonna be Zodiac, like from the beginning, right? Because you would have come out strong with that. Anyway, it doesn't matter. That's all the fourth phantom. Even Zodiac himself begging people to wear the buttons with his name on them, that's the fourth phantom.

Or trying to help solve his ciphers himself begging people to wear the buttons with his name on them. That's the fourth phantom. Or trying to help solve his ciphers or people giving up on his ciphers and him having a tantrum. And that's the fourth phantom. And then finally, after Marco Spinelli gets a threatening letter that might not even be from the Zodiac and retires to Hawaii after 15 years just to be safe. Or after years of inactivity when another letter appears and Dave Toskey, the lead San Francisco detective on the case for a decade, is taken off the case because he's strongly suspected of writing the letter

himself or arguably even when Robert Graysmith publishes his book Zodiac and kind of like knowingly smudges some of his facts to better support his pet suspect Arthur Lee Allen, you start to realize that the fifth and last phantom is you, right? Possibly the last phantom. Maybe part three is called the sixth phantom, but we'll talk about that in a minute. Thank you so much to our longtime partners Talkspace for sponsoring today's episode. I want to sit here with my giant piece of mental health armor and the giant flag that says mental health is important, that I'm going to be one of the hugest proponents for mental health and that therapy is not something that you go to when things are the worst or

when things are just something you can't handle anymore. No, you pay attention to your body, your teeth, your eyes, your ears, you go to the doctor for all those things. You go to make sure they're taken care of. Emotions are real, and getting, you know, having hard times is real. Don't let that affect your life or affect your decision making.

Therapy is something that can be a huge tool to help you move forward in your life or keep the positive momentum going. If you think seeing a therapist or psychiatrist would be helpful, but you don't really have the time to actually find one and meet with them or even afford them, then you should definitely be trying Talkspace.

By doing everything online, Talkspace is made getting the help that you want easy, accessible, and most importantly, affordable. And yeah, sometimes people wait until something bad happens to talk to a therapist, but why wait at all, man? You can get a therapist through Talkspace right now, and you can help shift your own perspective, find tools to cope in difficult times,

or just have a guiding life. With Talkspace, you can sign up online and get a personalized match with a provider that's right for you, usually within 48 hours. It's incredibly convenient to have virtual sessions with your licensed therapist from the comfort of your own home, trust me, that's how I've been doing therapy for like three years now.

Having no need to commute to appointments, miss time at work, or line up childcare in order to attend sessions is a huge burden off of, I would imagine, most people's shoulders. It's mental health care made easy. Talkspace is affordable and in network with most major insurers. As a listener of this podcast,

you'll get $80 off of your first month with Talkspace when you go to Talkspace.com slash chill and enter promo code SPACE80. So that's it, matched with a licensed therapist today. Just go to Talkspace.com slash chill and enter promo code space 80. So that's it. Match with a licensed therapist today. Just go to Talkspace.com slash chill and enter promo code S P A C E eight zero to get $80 off of your first month and show your support for the show. Talkspace.com slash chill promo code space 80. It's you going insane from all the conflicting information about the case and the ever growing

pressure to draw some sort of definitive conclusion out of it, which after listening to these past few episodes, hopefully some of you are already going a little crazy and trying to bend the facts to your own conclusions. And hopefully after all this, we can kind of agree that the best way to get any sort of clearer picture of this thing is to zoom all the way back out, approach it again like you're the first person who's ever heard about it, collect all possible information that's out there to help you find the correct answer rather than the chosen gut one. And though I can't promise you we're going to solve this thing today, I hope that you at least feel some

more truth and humanity in this version of events though admittedly at first they will cause everything to fit together less cleanly and be more confusing right just because we're gonna start not drawing lines between things which is also why I would say that if this is the first episode of this series that you're listening to you should definitely go back and listen to the first two episodes already unless you're already extremely familiar with the case or you've like just watched Zodiac 2007. Because we're not going to be telling a linear story anymore. We're just going to be going back and revisiting and poking holes in things we've already said. Because like

I've already said, this case is very much constantly being investigated and evolving a lot. So here's a few crazy developments first that have happened since Gray Smith's book came out in 1986 and absolutely dominated the popular narrative. And then we're going to go into the timeline one more time. So the next major book that comes out is called Time 17, the amazing story of the Zodiac murders in California and Massachusetts, 1966 to 1981 by Gareth Penn. And it brings an entirely new suspect to the table called Michael O'Hare, who is a professor from UC Berkeley.

But it doesn't get taken very seriously because the theories tying him to the Zodiac murders are all like really weird and out there and like kind of depend on things like binary math and Morse code kind of stuff, like numerology adjacent things. And in true third phantom fashion, some people even start to accuse the author of the book of being a better suspect for Zodiac than the professor that he's accusing in the book.

So that's a funny thing that happened. The next major book involving Zodiac we're going to look at is from a writer called Morrie Terry that same year, 1987. And it's called The Ultimate Evil, An Investigation into a Dangerous Cult. And this book actually is mostly about Son of Sam, who we talked about recently on the show. He has a super, he has a lot of superficial similarities with Zodiac. Like he shoots couples, he writes letters, right? Like, but it's not not really, if you know more about the case, it's not really that much like Zodiac.

Right, he claimed his neighbor's dog had demons speaking through it to tell him to kill Blakey. It might be like Zodiac if we knew who Zodiac was more. It might be more like Zodiac if we knew, but we pretty much, it's superficial. But it also goes full third Third Phantom eventually in this book because Terry connects the cult that we're talking about with the son of Sam and his neighbors, which may have been like an actual lead, right? At one point, I think it was like one true thing

that he kind of found this guy, Terry. And he tries to say from that he extrapolates from that and tries to say that zodiac is like Another operative in this weird murder crime religion That's operating on the opposite coast with like a similar modus, right? because of the superficial similarities, which is just That's why I'm saying it's a third Phantom It's like I don't know that's like not based in like that's like based on the comic book version or something, you know what I mean? That doesn't seem like something that a real person would do. From 1990 to 1993, we go from the third Phantom to the fourth Phantom when just like Miles

Morales and Peter Parker are both Spider-Man, another murderer in New York City starts using the name Zodiac to shoot and stab people throughout the city, killing some, leaving some alive, taunting the police and newspapers with complex codes and letters. Here is Jesse with an excerpt from one of his letters, which was also covered in symbols and a coat diagrams, including the crosshair symbol, but this is a different guy. I just want to say for the record, I can't tell if this is what you're telling me right now is more akin to the Sandman serial killer convention or the minions evil doer convention.

But it feels like somewhere in between we're like every year they all get together and like, okay, here's the plan for evil guys, right? Who's reading this? Sorry, Jesse. Oh, Jesse. This is the zodiac. I have seen the post and you say the note sent to the post, not similar to any of the San Francisco zodiac letters.

You are wrong to handwriting look different. What am I saying? You are wrong. The handwriting look different? What am I saying? You're wrong. The handwriting look different. It is one of the same zodiac, one zodiac in San Francisco killed a man in the park with a gun and killed a woman with a knife and killed a man in the taxi cab with a gun, honies, so it Queen mall, a Penn say, which means shame on those who think evil of it. Yeah. Jack the est alia.

Which means the die is cast. Yeah. So this is not the same guy. Obviously, unlike the original zodiac, this guy actually did kind of ties murders to astrology. Like astrology experts could predict loosely when he was going to murder again, even though he himself didn't really seem to know that much about astrology once he was caught. And he used his own kind of weird handmade weapon to evade tracing attempts.

And he was eventually caught when he got arrested after a standoff for shooting his half sister in the ass during a domestic dispute. And when he wrote his handwritten statement to the police, he actually signed it with one of the same symbols from one of the letters, and they were like, what the fuck? And now he's serving a 232-year sentence in prison. His name was Heriberto Seda. He's also known as the Brooklyn Sniper or the New York Zodiac or Zodiac 2 is another one that he's known as. So you can read more about him.

He's kind of like a whole other guy. He's got a whole other case. He killed three guys. One of the people he killed, he stabbed a hundred times. He also shot a bunch of people. Crazy, crazy, crazy killer, but like dead ass. It is fan art of another serial killer it is a copycat crime right um and then in 1991 media shit lord heraldo revera does a segment called maniac in the mask during an

episode of his show now it can be told where he does some of these weird interviews with darlene's relatives that end up contradicting their earlier statements and kind of officially making her the one that everybody thinks was shady and connected to the killer. He interviews the crime cult guy again from earlier, Maury Terry, the son of Sam guy, who mentions that Satan saved Zodiac murder again too. Then Geraldo hits the police were in on it angle pretty hard. Now all that stuff suddenly in the early 90s a few years after the book are like even more legitimized and then the next week on the same show there's a segment called the man who knew too much about Darlene's boyfriend Mike Mageau

the guy with the extra layers of clothes and the crime cult guy comes on and talks about how Darlene was into the occult too. And then they even get Arthur Lee Allen to come on the show and he's like loving it, being silhouetted with like a voice changer vibes, like he's in a room and he's like, I am not the Zodiac killer. And they cap it all off with something Jared Kovec called, quote, the most shameful thing in all of Zodiac, which I'll have Mathis read a quote about now from the book Motor Spirit. Now it can be told wires Darlene's sister with a hidden microphone and brings her to Michael, sorry, how do you say that again?

Michelle's house. She confronts him on the front lawn. A television crew is down the street, films it all with telephoto lenses, ambush journalism of a crime victim. Michael and Pam look destroyed. They're walking wounded, they're the baseline of the killings, the decades of pain and trauma and unresolved questions,

and now they're residents of television land. Yeah, and that was the weird context of what's going on in Mike Mageau's life. A guy who was absolutely mutilated by this killer and is trying his best to escape it, is being confronted by His girlfriend's family after getting gassed up by Geraldo Rivera like that's just so crazy Yeah, but that's what's going on in Mike Mejoo's life when that same year he's shown drivers licenses

This is a famous thing that happened He was shown drivers licenses in the lineup and he picks Arthur Lee Allen's driver's license But Arthur Lee Allen dies a year later in 1992, so we'll never know. But then we surpassed the mind control properties of television in the mid-90s with the rise of the internet. And by the late 90s, zodiackiller.com is already up and running. You can still go visit it today. Just click through the pop-up that greets you and there's some pretty good stuff there because since 1998 or whatever, they've just been slowly collecting and collating data from this case, right? Which is awesome.

And by 2002, every letter is finally available for anyone to see for the first time. Not perfect, but good. And on the one hand, it information is you do exchange in private investigations become almost as though as official ones because there's so many sets of eyes looking and going over the data again and again and again and again i'm on the other hand it had this weird effect because it connected everybody together and let them like hang out without being next to each other it kind of like politicize the various conclusions, like the various theories that are out there, like politicized them by separating people

into camps of belief, if you know what I mean. And so then like social pressure gets in the way of like unbiased sleuthing. And it kind of muddies the waters even more because you then you start to like, just like Gray Smith, you start to like bend everything towards what you want because you want to beat the other theories yeah but this is still the curse of the second phantom working its unsolvable magic part of his great criminal plan and it really isn't anyone's fault besides the aliens who designed our brains anyway so you know we can't really do anything about it so in 2007 the movie drops kind of like

underlines the Grsmith story again. It's like Toskey and Graysmith are the ones who are behind this, and obviously Toskey's kind of compromised because of his weird faking the letter thing, so it's kind of weird. It takes that story. The movie's great, first of all. It's true enough to be an impactful impactful movie but it also makes it sexy. Because it's directed by David Fincher made fight club and he's adding avengers into the movie and making everybody hot and stuff. Cobeck points out that iron man comes out the next year and that while zodiac was not hit when it dropped.

Slowly became seen as an essential American movie after like 10 years passed or whatever. It's like a cult masterpiece more than it was like a runaway hit. I don't think it was nominated for much when it came out even. In 2008 though, a year after that, after the movie came out, possibly because of the extra eyes the movie put on the case, another suspect emerges in the case called Richard Gajkowski. I could do a whole episode on some of these other suspects, especially Richard Gajkowski. So I'm going to only give the broad strokes right now just in case, but basically he's kind of like this hippie-dippie kind of like counterculture, punk-focused journalist guy in San Francisco who's around for the whole time that Zodiac's active.

He basically introduced the idea of message boards to people because he was trying to figure out ways for the political left to share news and ideas quickly on the internet. And he basically literally sowed the seeds for message boards. And he was a cinephile and he did a lot of journalism around punk music. And because he's such a public figure, there's tons of stuff to interpret as circumstantial evidence and a paper trail. Some of it's pretty convincing. According to Kovac, quote, it just happens to be wrong.

I don't know exactly why he thinks that. He goes into it quite a bit in the book, but I don't want to get into it here. And also, he died of lung cancer in 2004. So not much can be done. But like I say, if you do want me to get into him, and people really care about some of these other suspects after next week when I tell you the real suspect, just kidding. But seriously, if you do want me to do more, just let me know and I'll think about it later. But for now, I'm good on Zodiac.

I'm hoping that you guys get convinced next week. And once the internet reaches full speed fever pitch into the 2000s, Zodiac suspects and potential solves appear every couple months from then till now with very little to show for it. For example, in 2016, a guy called Keith Massey, who happens to be a Latin teacher and an author and a musician and an Eastern Orthodox priest and who also holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin, posted a video to his personal YouTube channel, which also includes videos on Tamam Shud and the Dora Bella cipher called The Name of the

Zodiac Killer Deciphered. And he fingers Arthur Lee Allen again by shortening his name to Art, which is already not the best sign. And then doing a bit of decoding based on the concept, which I'm going to show you a picture of here, which maybe you guys can explain to people. This is that cipher that I said was too short for anybody to solve. Yeah, yeah, I remember that. So this is the basic idea. You could try and can explain to people. This is that cipher that I said was too short for anybody to solve. Yeah. Yeah. I remember that. So this is base, the basic idea. You could try and explain it to people. You can kind of see what, what the idea is here as he's like saying like,

Oh, if you put the name going one way above the cipher and the name going the other way under the cipher. And again, you're shortening Arthur to art in this version. Can you explain what's circled? Um, so the way to describe this is above it says Artley Allen and then in the middle is a bunch of stuff. And then at the end or underneath that it's Artley Allen, but backwards, but then there's three yellow circles. And I, what are those? I think what he's saying is these symbols represent the same letter both in the phone. They like never move in where the name rather spelled forwards or backwards like a R a art Lee Allen, right? A R T L art Lee L and then Allen L L E N like

backwards and forwards. That's two L's. So you know, you can be saying the G in the middle never changes is the vibe. Why he uses the zodiac symbol for L and first and then in a different symbol for L again. Yeah, because it's a transpositional cipher, right? But like and it's like rotating but but it's short, right? So it's hard to it's hard to solve. But what he's saying is basically like that's the beginning of his self-process. It's a whole situation. Here's his whole original blog post if you guys want to see.

Check it out. Like it's so it's so obtuse that it almost seems nonsense school and not real, but maybe, I don't know. I'd have to read the whole blog. Yeah. It didn't really make the type of splash you would expect. The video today still only has like 225 K views, which isn't nothing, but it's not like a sensation. Uh, and to give you an idea of the vibe with this guy, since then it's just kind of like sat there on his channel and he hasn't really like done much with it since and just because I don't want you guys to go clown on him, please Listening, please don't go clown on this man. Just don't don't even go visit him instead of giving you a link to it

I'll just have Jesse read a select list of some of the other videos that he's uploaded on his channel since then So you guys can get the gist of what's going on here. Hopefully you guys can just leave it at this This is for Jesse to read. All right, here's the select list. How to make the best paper airplane and the story of how my design won me a thousand dollar prize. Big Mac special sauce, a blind taste test. How to make a quarantine Big Mac.

Keith Mesa reviews the Travis Scott burger combo at McDonald's and Travis Scott. David and Goliath, a miracle or something else? Did Moses really have horns? A new proposal on the origin of the word pizza. Taste test of the double Big Mac. Why being a teacher is more stressful than being a top secret agent. Yo, I agree with this one though.

Why being a teacher is more stressful than being a top secret. Yo, I agree with this one though. Why being a teacher is more stressful than being a top secret agent. Big Mac super fan, Keith Mazzie reviews the filet of fish sandwich. We're Arthur and Mordred really enemies. Why do we have chins? A Latin version of go tell it on the mountain public domain. Taste test 30 years in the making western dressing what I'm trying to illustrate here is that like the guys that are like making breakthroughs quote-unquote at this time as as like well thought out and well reasoned as it is

I'm not trying to roast this guy's like analysis that's not the point of this point is just that like it didn't make a splash and he moved on to something else and most of the other videos on his channel have 300 views and he's just kind of makes these kind of weird eclectic videos like this all the time based around his interests and it didn't even convince him enough to continue researching after he- I was about to say yeah if he like figured it out certainly he would have made multiple videos. Yeah after he proved that Zodiac is Arthur Lee Allen, according to him, you know what I mean? And finally, as I mentioned last time, in December of 2020, the Z340 cipher was solved

with the help of some computer software written specifically for the task by Jarl van Eyck with help from David Oranchak and Sam Blake, who I'll met on Zodiac forums or whatever, message boards, and basically confirmed that it wasn't him on the TV that one time at the real, you know, the cipher said, that was not me on TV and I'm not afraid of the gas chamber because all the slaves that I'm going to have in the afterlife, yada yada yada, if that's what he believed. But that's what he says. And it's very clear to me that it's the real solution. And from all this, Jarrett Koubek, after setting out to write a book about Gaikowski as Zodiac,

because he thought that was a pretty good theory, he was in the pandemic, he didn't know what to write, and so he set out to write that. He set out to write, before that, a book of all the murders in 1974, and then that evolved into YouTuber suicidesides and that evolved into this Gaikowski book. And as he went and he went and he went, the idea just kept evolving and he got totally brain-swoggled and comes to a realization, which I'll have Mathis read for you now, which is kind of a great thesis for the next part of the episode, like the next couple of episodes

we're getting into right now. So here you go, Mathis. The problem with the American 21st century wasn't the internet. The internet was a symptom. Americans had come to believe that if they accumulated enough raw information, enough disparate facts, enough stuff, then this accumulation could be a functional substitute for an existence based in skepticism and understanding. Add up trivia about Gakowski and an equal zodiac.

But Kovac could not make the equation resolve. Its two sides were not equally true. The trivia was factoid's pointless relics of history and their collection was the byproduct of a culture so failed in its present that it could no longer believe in the future. It could only obsess over a past which it did not understand. What do you guys think about that?

Do you understand what he's saying there? I think so. People just think that if they do enough research into something that they can just kind of basically decide what's true instead of like remaining skeptical. I mean, that's a lot of people's general idea of rather than determine what facts are actual facts. It's if I read enough information, I can then determine what the facts are based on what I've read, which is not how that works at all.

Or if I make a seven-hour long video on something, I'm an authority on it. You know what I mean? Right. Yeah. But the thing is, it's been true for thousands of years. If you act with authority and speak like you know what you're doing with confidence, people just default to thinking that you know what you're talking about. Yeah. And in the world of internet time, accumulating information from somewhere to go along with that is kind of like the next, like it's the next level of that.

And it's kind of what we're doing, we're kind of, it kind of works for us because we're not taking it too serious. And we are like- But we are confident men. Some might call us confident men. Yeah. But there's still a difference because we actively at the very top of things are like, hey, we're not professionals. We're comedians. We do our research, but we don't have doctorates.

You know what I mean? We're aware of that. I'm specifically not trying to position myself as somebody who's doing anything besides being high and thinking about this, just so you know. Not me. I am a confidence man. Let me tell you, do you think there's, do you think there's any other like bodies of accumulated info that you think people sub in for skepticism sometimes when they're looking to solve mysteries? You, there's other topics like Zodiac out there that are like particularly ruined by this JFK, I think has absolutely nine.

Oh, I mean, yeah. JFK nine 11 and per I think UFOs is another one. That's just like, God, yeah. UFOs is absolutely 9-11. I mean, yeah. JFK 9-11, I think UFOs is another one that's just like. Oh God, yeah, UFOs is absolutely another one. Double fucked, yeah. There was literally a woman on TikTok for a year and a half saying the Roman Empire didn't exist. Yes, I remember that. Because she did her research.

I'm letting you know. Flat Earth, another one. It's out there. Yeah, dude. Like the ice walls and all that shit, that came out of TikTok. That's how I even learned about that shit initially. Yeah, to take that one step further. Do you guys think like, should we

investigate every mystery that we look into, like by ignoring the works of other people who've already done research? Like, should we always just go to the source and then support that with with the research? Because I think that makes sense. I think it's important, but I also think it's important to read other people's research with the understanding that if you can source where they're getting it from. Well, I think it's an order of operations thing. Like, let's say, for example, Zodiac, right?

My trajectory was, for example, is I've always been into into zodiac because the movie like affected me greatly long time ago and then in covid i watch the movie again and i was like oh shit zodiac so i so i so i read some some books about it and then after i did that i was like i'm gonna i'm gonna research this so. research this. So, you know, I went back to the police reports at that point and formed like an idea of what I think occurred. And then you go back and you read the other things that people have written and go, okay, so does this gel with the facts that I found, like the actual concrete facts that I found? And then you go, well, why did they say that instead of what I got? And then you go back that way, rather than starting with, you go, well, why did they say that instead of what I got? And then you go back that way rather than starting with, you know, I'm a mistake that a lot of people make, which is commit to a book before you come to a conclusion and then you just base your theory off of what that book says, right?

A hundred percent. I mean, that's the path I took for the ice walls around earth. How I backtracked it to a fucking newspaper, like drama article that was being released. You just got to keep, you can go back as far as you can. Try to find the origin of most people are not going to do that. Most people, of course not want to have their beliefs backed up by just reinforced. Yeah.

Question them. The thing is though, it just takes time and energy and most people aren't doing a podcast with a whole point. It's like looking at stuff and time and energy on it. Yeah. And, and I mean, like, here's the thing. If we're being honest with people, if you're listening to this and you've listened to the last three episodes to do your due diligence, you should definitely

be like, I'm going to go look up what they're saying myself, find out rather than taking away everything from Alex and Jesse and Mathis, you know what I mean? Like, you know, we might be giving information, but it's now as a good consumer of information, you know, if you care enough, you should be out there like, I'm gonna look into this myself. I read the police reports, but I could have made a mistake writing it down. I, you know, me and Deanna both did separate research

and we mixed our notes together to make this final episode. And sometimes what I found and what she found wasn't exactly right. So I had to go back and look and like resolve it, or leave it out because it wasn't, because I can't be definitive. Often when in these kinds of topics, I've had that happen plenty of times where I'm like,

okay, what you gave me and what I have is different. Let me figure this out. Yeah, and I always go in with an idea of what I'm gonna do. You know what I mean? Like I always go in with an idea of what I want the shape of my episode to be because I like to tell stories and I like to write articles and stuff like that. But like, for example, with JFK,

right, I went in and I was like, I'm going to teach everybody using like a basic conspiracy theorist like Jesse Ventura to like teach everybody the basics. And then I'm going to like do some research, you know, and that's kind of what I did here too. But like, as I read that, and the same thing happened with Graysmith, like, as I read the story and started to look into it as I was going through, you find out, oh my God, this is like kind of a very biased or incorrect work. And it's the one that everybody knows. It's like the main one. And it like, it's changed the perception of the case for everyone.

Even passing fans are like being memed at rather than being taught, which is kind of crazy. Even big shows shows sometimes like even episodes of television like that you watch like. That are there hugely expensive productions will just report on something that they read from a specific blog and when you look into the stuff and you and you start doing research you start being like this mother fucker just read this one website with me to typo. and you start doing research, you start being like, this motherfucker just read this one website where they made a typo and fucked up, you know? And I'll even, as we go through this, I'll tell you a specific time that I remember in this where that fucked me up.

But anyway, let's get into it with the corrections. Starting with the first big event, the murder of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen. And again, this isn't gonna be like, totally just corrections. I'm gonna still kind of go through the timeline. I'm just not gonna like, take a long time to explain anybody to who anybody is anymore because we all know who they are because we've been

listening to this for now three and a half hours. Thank you so much to stamps.com for sponsoring today's episode. And when you're running a small business, hell, you don't have to be running a small business. When you're just living life, everybody's looking to try and make those quote unquote no brain decisions. The things that you can just sit down and you know it's the right call no matter what and it saves you time. You don't have to sit there and research and think about it. That's what stamps.com is all about. It's sitting down, not have to worry about postage, not having to worry about going to the post office, not going to worry about packaging things and bringing them and sitting in line and handing it

to somebody No stamps.com is that no brainer decision where you can take care of all of your needs small businesses big businesses personal alike With stamps.com and with the stamps.com mobile app It's kind of like having the post offices in your pocket wherever you are You can take care of mailing and shipping anywhere on the go with their stamps.com mobile app All you need is a computer and printer and they even send you a free scale. You can easily schedule packaging pickups through your Stamps.com dashboard and automatically see your cheapest and fastest shipping options from different carriers.

If you're a business of any sort, mail checks, invoices, legal documents, books and everything you need to keep your business running. Seamlessly connect with every major marketplace and shopping cart if you sell online. Access the USPS and UPS mailing services you need to run your business right from your computer or phone at any time, day or night, no lines, no traffic, no waiting. And with thestamps.com, you're getting crazy discounts.

Get rates you can't find anywhere else, like up to 89% off of USPS and UPS. Order shipping and mailing supplies, labels, and even printers from the supply store when you run low. So make Stamps.com your next no-brainer decision as over one million other businesses with Stamps.com have. Sign up with the promo code CHILL for a special offer that includes a four-week trial, plus free postage,

and a free digital scale with no long-term commitments or contracts. All you have to do is go to Stamps.com and click on the microphone at the top of the page and enter code chill. That's it, nice and easy. Four week trial, free postage, free digital scale, no commitments, no contracts.

Stamps.com, microphone at the top of the page, enter code chill. Back to the show. I didn't spend a huge amount of time on this part of the case in my outline last time, so I want to fill in some holes. For a while, I'm just going to let Deanna's excellent outline guide us through this entire story one more time fresh. That day on December 20th, 1968, Faraday cuts class to see Jensen because she goes to Hogan,

not Vallejo High. After they talk, he has a verbal altercation with someone called Ricky, though I don't think we mentioned last time. Ricky happens to be the boy Betty Lou was going with just like the previous week until she met David, whoops, at a music event they were both helping set up for. Within a few days, they're talking on the phone with each other constantly, and on the 19th,

he asks them out on their first date date where at the end they get murdered their first date which is crazy but until then Ricky is pissed and calls Betty Lou to a bunch calls Betty Lou like over and over again on the phone like a crazy person someone said they saw him hiding in the bushes outside her house at one point but apparently he was mostly harmless. This was just a little week-long jealous teen thing, if you think about it. But when David runs into Ricky that day before their date, words are exchanged and Faraday goes back to his own school. So they have a fight, but if you think about think about it, right, like in, they make a big deal about Ricky in the previous book because he's like being aggro and scary and

you know, they're about to be murdered already. Right. But if you, but they, what they don't cover in that book is that literally this is like their first date after this dude kind of just yanks this guy, this, this, this girl away from this other dude in like five days time they like immediately like can't stop calling each other and like you know get very infatuated with each other and make a date and and uh so Ricky understandably is pretty pissed uh but you know what I'm saying anyway after school David and Betty Lou go together to a friend's house till 6 p.m when Betty Lou's sister

comes to pick her up and David heads home a little later than that. David takes his sister to the Pythian castle for a rainbow girls meeting a little after 7. If you don't know what that is, the Knights of Pythia- Pyth- Pythias or whatever it is, it's like a fraternal order. There's like the Knights of Columbus, stuff like that at churches sometimes too if you know what that is. Similar to that. It's like an old like order kind of. And then the Rainbow Girls are like a girl version of that. A little after seven, heads back over to grab Betty Lou for their date at 7.30 PM. And when he meets Betty Lou's parents, he promises them that she's going to be back by 11. Right? So that's the official story. Supposedly, they're meant to go to a Hogan High Christmas concert that night, which I mentioned last time, but they both go to their friend Sharon's house instead, and around 820, they get there. They stay for less than an hour because Sharon has to go to a party, so they leave around nine. And according to some witnesses, they saw Betty Lou and David at the concert that night, according to some

witnesses. But according to the Solano County Sheriff, there literally was not a concert that night. And if you take that out of context, that's pretty crazy. And you're like, Oh, what did the cops have something to do with it? But actually, Koubek makes the point that especially in extremely religious households like David and Betty, I think David's like hardcore Presbyterian and Betty Lou's like Christian science. And they're like pretty into it. Where their parents are tied up in all these local orders, like I'm saying, societies, whatnot, traditional things like that. Teens lie to cover for each other because this is the birth of the teen in like the late sixties. Teens lie to cover for each other because this is the birth of the teen in like the late 60s. Teens lie to cover for each other and that's what this sounds much more like is that these two kids just wanted to go get frisky and made up an event.

Why would they go to their friend's house before going on a date unless they were gonna be like here's what you say here's what they you know when they ask what happened we're at the concert da da da da like whatever it is, you know, when they ask what happened, we're at the concert, da da da da da, like whatever it is. Um, and you know, they just wanted to go make out. So they made up a story and then the people lied for them because they didn't want to get them in trouble even after they died. You know what I mean? Like you don't want to tell somebody's parents that they were making out when they died. If, if they're like, you know, don't go make out, you know, you want to cover for them because they're your friends, right? Kind of. And it's it like, look, it's not it's not that different of a

story in terms of sequence of events for these two kids. But it recontextualizes the emotions of the people a little bit with an added layer of like, motivation and logical human behavior. And suddenly, Ricky, like I said, it seems shady to hide in someone's plants and like have a fight at school and call someone a bunch of times but there's no cell phones so you can't text like you can't message someone online and mad dog them you have to confront them so anybody who's mad at each other is confronting them in person and he's hiding in front of the house because

he's a kid he doesn't know what to do. And it doesn't, it's not like, oh my God, that guy's definitely the killer. It's just like that guy got like totally like chatted out by like a hotter dude is what happened. And he's mad about it. And it doesn't, what he did doesn't seem that crazy. If you imagine that he doesn't know that she's about to be murdered. I'm sure he wouldn't have done that if he knew that she was about to be murdered. You know what I mean? You jilted. And even though, like if you posted that on Reddit, you know, in like one of those things where it's like,

am I the asshole for like wanting my husband to like not hit me in the face every time that he, that I serve him dinner or something like that? And people like, girl, your husband's just trying to take care of you. Or like, you know, whatever, like whatever. And people like, girl, your husband's just trying to take care of you or, you know, whatever, like, whatever. Like those people, those people are going to be all against Ricky. But really, if you think about like teens, it's not that big of a deal. After all, we're talking about a five day romance ending in the death of

two people that haven't even got their life started. Right. So now we move over to Darlene Farron and Mike Maggio and Kovac goes to extreme lengths to paint a clearer picture of Darlene because she has kind of like a weird life that where the facts don't really make up make sense with other people from this time period and so it requires a lot of nuance so Kovac goes deep into that and when when you step back a bit, things come into sharper focus. So we're going to go into that right now. So we're going back to 1933 and Leo Suenin is accidentally shot in the leg by friends and bandmates Dan Rose and Arthur Cody. And when they attempt to get him to the hospital, they're out hunting. And when they attempt to get him to the hospital, Suenin dies on the way to the hospital,

and he leaves behind four kids, and it's just a tragedy. One of the children is Leo Suenin Jr., who was only seven when his dad died. He marries Young to Norma Jean Hightower. They have eight to 10 children, including Leo Suenin III, who dies as a toddler, and Leo Suenin IV. So that's the origin of Darlene's family tree, all the way down to Leo Suenin IV.

And then on March 17, 1947, Norma Jean, who is Leo Suenin Jr.'s wife, gives birth to Darlene. Right? So, Leo Suenin IV is her brother. In 1982, Norma Jean dies, Suenin Jr. remarries and moves to Fenley. Suenin Jr. and his new wife build their dream home, according to his obituary. And on October 4, 1991, the Mason Valley News publishes an article talking about a three and a half day trial where that same guy, her dad, was found not guilty on three counts of sexual assault on a minor under the age of 14 and not guilty on one

count of lewdness with a minor child under the age of 14. And on June 4th, 2001, on one charge of open and gross lewdness and two charges of attempted lewdness with a minor child under the age of 14. And on June 4, 2001, on one charge of open and gross lewdness and two charges of attempted lewdness with a minor under the age of 14. And on the 22nd of April, 2002, the Mason Valley News publishes an article where he pleads guilty to the charges. So her dad later in life went through some serious sexual assault with minor trouble and I don't know that we can say that that happened to Darlene But it's definitely like something that could have happened to Darlene Darlene's parents say she and her husband Jim moved to Pennsylvania

around 11 January 1967, but Darlene actually moves to Reno Nevada on February 22nd 1967 so maybe they just didn't like okay so this is weird so she she's married to Jim and she like moves to Pennsylvania with Jim and maybe they go out and go to wherever they go out to like the Virgin Islands or wherever they are beach bumming for a while, which is crazy, right? And they have this other kind of like weird life there where maybe she sees that guy kill someone or whatever they're doing, but there's not that much information about what goes on over there.

But there's like divorce laws in America at this time where like Reno is like one of the places you go to get a divorce. So it makes sense that she would like go get divorced in Reno. It could be that she moved to Pennsylvania, went to Reno, got divorced. But anyway, she's in Reno now and she gets a job at a restaurant called The Huddle and she doesn't have a husband anymore. And she moves in with a co-worker named Sherry and then she gets fired from the huddle, starts working at the Palace Club and gets pregnant in March 1967, which is just two years before she's killed. Darlene's divorce is finalized in June.

She marries Arthur Dean Ferran in Carson City, Nevada in August of the same year and then they move back to Vallejo on January 24th, 1968. And Darlene gives birth to their daughter Dina. And in April, she works at the Waffle House, Terry's, that we've been talking about that the guy was like looking at her in, which is like less of a diner and more of a like weird restaurant

that has a bunch of different themed rooms that like you can have work parties in and stuff, but also people like eat in the main dining room all the time. Really weird restaurant. But yeah, it's also implied by the people in Darlene's life that she sleeps around a lot, but the husband Dean, like I said, he knew about it and was fine with it. And it didn't seem to be something that he thought any less of her for. Maybe that's just the arrangement that they had.

But as he gives all this information about Darlene Extra that we did not know about, he does not mention anything about any stalkers because that's not substantiated information. And now we jump forward to July 4th, 1968, day of the murder. At around four o'clock, Darlene calls Mike Mageau. Mike is working for his father at a pest control service, and his parents have recently divorced. His twin brother, Stephen, who used to compete with for Darlene, had moved to Los Angeles. So as much as that's contextualized as like a part of Darlene's story

that she's dating this guy and her brother, like that dude doesn't even live in the town, which is weird. Farine, Farin and Mageeaux make plans to go to San Francisco that night and see a movie at around four o'clock. They make this plan and Farin says she's going to be at Mageeaux's house like at like 730 PM. So be ready. At seven, her dad picks up Janet and Pam and her babysitters and her young sister Christine.

They end up all up. This is the part where she takes her sister into town to go see the Independence Day Parade and stuff because Christine helped organize it. So they go see a parade. And then at, what is it? 2100 hours. What is that? Nine? Nine o'clock. Terrible military time. There's going to be the boat parade that they go to at 9 p.m. and then fireworks at 10. Fireworks show like a real one. So Farron calls the babysitters, Janet and Pamela to tell them and that's if you remember in the last book, I was like this time the babysitter is Janet and this time the babysitter is Pamela they were actually

both babysitting at the same time so think about that so she calls them like to tell them that she's gonna go to San Francisco with Mike sometime at that time and then Farron calls Mike and says she's sorry and that they're watching the boat parade and that they're not going to like do the thing that they originally planned and that she's going to come see him later and sorry. And I got to go stop by work because somebody wants to talk to me. So I'll see you in a little bit. Sorry about the night being like different than we expected, but we're still going to hang out, right? Then at like 10 30, they go, Darlene and Christine, her daughter, go or her sister, little sister, go to where her husband works.

And that's when they talk about the kickback that they're going to have later after work for 4th of July. And then she gets home and then she spends some time at home. And then she's like, I'm going to go get some fireworks and I'm going to be back at 12 30 in the morning, which is a weird thing to say. And then, uh, she leaves to pick up Mike and they had the blue rock Springs to talk quote unquote, which is the murder site. They turn off them really quickly for the fireworks. What's the, why was that?

We're going to get into that just right now. I'm going to explain the exact thing to you because it is like all over the other version of this story and it makes like zero fucking sense. So, so, uh, she leaves to pick them up. They go to talk, they turn off the motor and the lights, but they leave the radio on, uh, there are three other cars in the lot setting off firecrackers at the time. When they leave, another car pulls into the lot, which leaves after a few minutes. But then five minutes later, a car pulls up behind their car and they don't know

if it's the same one that was there before, a new one. The man gets out with the flashlight. They get their IDs. The shooting happens. All that stuff happens. We talked about how the door handle in the in the Graysmith book it's like the door handle was gone and when it was back in police evidence it was mysteriously re-added so maybe a police officer had something to do with it. But really it's probably just that we covered it last time Mike was probably just getting the shit shot out of him and like made a mistake. Then we meet the three teenagers that are coming around looking for their girl friend that they're looking for.

And they pull into the parking lot and they're looking for her and they hear Majeaux and they turn their headlights and they find him. And he's like, get a doctor. So they drive back to Jerry's house and they call the cops but they think that the cops maybe thought they're lying. So they head to Debbie's brother-in to Jerry's house and they call the cops, but they think that the cops maybe thought they're lying. So they head to Debbie's brother-in-law's house because Debbie's brother-in-law, Bob,

is a cop. So they call the cops again from Bob's phone and the police are like, yeah, we know, there's already people here. Thank you. So Darlene gets to the hospital at 1238. She's dead on arrival. Nancy Slover gets a call from the... She's the same person who got the call from the teens, but she's the one who gets the

goodbye call at this point. And then the caller doesn't know that both victims were alive when they were found and that only Farron died later. The calls trace to a payphone, but by the time they get there, they're gone. Lee and Dean go back to Darlene's house, but when they get there, they find out Darlene's not there. They say, oh, she said she'd be back at 1230, but Dean isn't worried about it because she's like a partier and she's late all the fucking time, so he doesn't even think about it.

That's when they also get the call where somebody calls their house and doesn't speak and they think it's like one of her boyfriends who's too nervous and then Dean's parents get a call and then Koubek says that he doesn't think that the person knew them because it seems like he checked the phone book because he checked only for Farins and called Dean's parents, which is a weird person to call for Darlene, called Dean and then didn't call anybody from Darlene's actual family, the Suenans, because it didn't say that on her license. So Darlene's parents, who you'd think a killer who would know her would call, didn't

get a call. Two o'clock in the morning, Dean takes the babysitter's home. At 2.35, they've been told that she's dead. Then we talk about Koubek's theory about why they were there and about the fireworks. Koubek thinks they were not there to make out, but to buy drugs for the party that they were going to have later, like buy some pot. And the reason that he thinks this is because the parking lot is like a perfect drug place. When they get there, they're like already people there doing illicit things. And if you think about why three teenagers in a car together are going to a parking lot, looking for their

friend and they don't want to say who that friend is to the police. Even though they're looking for somebody who they saw shot, you know, like trying to solve a murder, you know, maybe they were looking for drugs and they didn't want to tell the police they were there looking for pot. Mike Mageau is the only person that was attacked by the Zodiac who had a criminal record He had a charge from 1968 not that long ago like that September for petty theft at a grocery store And then we can go back to why he was wearing three sweaters and three pairs of pants despite it being July in California on a day where the high was 93 and the low

was around 63. Lejeune explained later he was ashamed of his scrawny physique and wanted to look bigger like Kurt Cobain when Kurt Cobain was on drugs. He did something similar. Some people today think that he was wearing it because he didn't want to get slashed by a drug dealer. Like he was like kind of wearing like body armor, not from the zodiac attack, but just from like buying drugs. And maybe he was if he thought that he was going to get caught buying the drugs, he could like run and like take off one pair of clothes and then like be in a different outfit,

you know, that kind of thing. But Leo, Sue N fourth darlings brother said that he asked her to get in pot that night. I'm and whether this is an accurate memory or not after all those years is up for debate but like. If you think about it why would she leave for a date. in the same like couple hours that there's supposed to be a party that she's supposed to be at and bring supplies for and why would you buy fireworks at 1130 PM on the 4th of July? I've never even seen somebody shoot off fireworks that late on the 4th of July. Out in Texas dude never ends. It's days and days and days. You meet for a family gathering, you hang out, you're chilling, you're sending somebody out to go get fireworks to be there at 1130 PM.m. That person goes on a date. I mean, that is weird. And after saying they're

going to be back at a specific time. I don't know. That is weird. No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Dean's boss, William Lee says Dean and Lee called the fair in house and discuss having a party after Dean gets off work and that he and that Darlene needs to pick up the fireworks. Janet and Pam say Darlene came home mentioning the fireworks because that's Darlene's story, the fireworks. But you know who never says anything about fireworks at all? Mike Mageau because he probably didn't want to take a crack at what the thing was that they were after because he figured they probably had some other cover story they didn't know about,

and Darlene's dead now. So think about that situation with that added wrinkle, and it kinda comes into focus a little bit more. Because the phone call happens that night, the police decide that the murders are connected, because he says they are, and this means immediately that Darlene is like totally slandered because like the other two kids that get killed are like teens so and it's their first date and they're like super Christian there's nothing you can touch about these kids

but Darlene has like all this stuff in her life that's like shady in general compared to most people. So automatically she's the suspect. She's like involved. She's like the reason this is all happening, right? Yeah. Like her connection to the underworld is the reason it's happening. Even though it came to nothing in the end,

even though there's not like a really great Darlene Farren theory and Geraldo Rivera in 1991 is the main reason this happened. Because she just had a weird life, that's what happened. In terms of context, I was saying there was like a month or so before the police were able to never investigate it again because the media blew up but actually on July 17th which is like two weeks later. There's a strike at the same time it's the first time in American history that the police and the firemen went on strike at the same time so the actual untainted zodiac investigation actually only went on for about thirteen days because then a state of emergency is declared and all like everything goes crazy work resumes like a week late like a couple days later on the 21st

there's no leads and then the first letter comes 10 days later it's crazy yeah so then we get the letters and they they asked to be printed on the 1st of August, but that would have been impossible because the letters came in on the 31st, so that's just like not how newspapers work. Two of the papers had morning editions, the third paper had an afternoon edition, so the papers were already typeset. It's just that time in technology. The fourth letter goes to the Times Herald because they ask him for more information

because the first letter is too broad with information so the police are like, prove you were there. And this is the letter where he gives himself the name Zodiac, but before this, he says Zodiac in the letter, but it does not catch on. No one calls him Zodiac for a very long time. he is the code killer and he is the cypher killer which was probably very frustrating to our guy that we have been psychoanalyzing so very much want some brand yeah and then. The information in letter four matches up in terms of. Darling fair and mike mcjell.

He kinda misunderstands what her pants are, but it's like an easy mistake. So he was probably still there. She was wearing a jumpsuit, but he said she was wearing pants, but it's like, they kind of look like pants. But with the other murder, with the two teens, it's not super clear that he actually,

the information that he gives to prove that he did the murders is not super clear that he actually, like the information that he gives to prove that he did the murders is not super clear that he actually did the murders. He says that he taped a pencil to a flashlight, if you remember, and that the dark spot in the center of the flashlight would be where the bullets would go. All you have to do is aim it at them and shoot it. But Betty Lou is 30 feet from the car when she's found. And there's like no way that a pencil flashlight could possibly like be a sight at 30 feet. That's so far to fire a gun at someone and like hit them accurately. Right. And actually what this information seems to come from is an article from 1967 called

Can New Non-Lethal Weapons Control Riots by Earl Stantlett Gardner. So like, it's very accurate that that tip came from this magazine, but it doesn't seem to be something he actually did, tip came from this magazine, but it doesn't seem to be something he actually did. Probably. And the information in letter four is correct for the most part outside of this, but if he had just known a single cop or anything like that, he could have also gotten a lot of this information. So that leaves three possibilities. One is that he did not kill the teens, but claimed them after he killed the two people in the car.

Well, after he shot Mike and killed Darlene. That's one possible way this went. Because we know later definitely that he claimed responsibility for crimes he didn't commit, so maybe that's what he did. Second one, maybe he did kill them, but he didn't use the pencil light technique that he read out of the magazine, and he just included that to sound like a genius, right? Um, and actually the second zodiac killer in New York, I feel like kind of picked up on this and was why he used the like traceless guns because he wanted to have like A neat piece of technology associated with him like a little trick that he could say in his letters Um, but yeah, and then the other the other, um The other possibility is that he did do that and he just like did it shitty You know what I mean?

Like it's possible that he did tape a light to his gun, because we know probably that he had a light based on what Mike said about his murder. But maybe he just kind of like did it as like a cosplay and just like, kind of was able to kill her anyway, you know? Who knows? Uh, but like I say, this is also a letter where he gives himself the name Zodiac, even though he doesn't really... get to be called Zodiac for a while.

And that's probably from the Dangerous Game, which we talked about, Most Dangerous Game, which has two film adaptations, Most Dangerous Game from 1932 and A Game of Death 1945. And it's likely that Zodiac was a film fan too because he makes all those specific references to Most Dangerous Game and all these other references throughout his letters that are references to culture and stuff. And so that's why they think that it was taken from a film, the Zodiac name. And Kovac, I think, thinks that it's Charlie Chan at Treasure Island because the villain is Dr. Zodiac, but he's often called Z zodiac in the episode and he like write a letter some point and like that's the one that.

Like when he went to the looked at them it had the most essence of zodiac to it i don't know that's the best you can say the solution to the cipher gets published on this night. Of nineteen sixty nine. of 1969. But if you thought that was a huge event that rocked the world when they solved it, you would be wrong because on October 6th, 1969, three days before, Bobby Beausoleil kills Gary Hinman in a drug deal. Beausoleil uses Hinman's blood to write political piggy on the wall. This is in Los Angeles, by the way, I believe, to try and blame the Black Panthers. It does not work. Dude is arrested. This would not the way, I believe, to try and blame the Black Panthers. Does not work. Dude is arrested. This would not be noteworthy, except Bobby Beausoleil, who used to be in love, I think,

also the band, is a member of the Manson family. They try to get Bobby Beausoleil out of jail. And to do that, their plan is to do another crime to show that the criminal that did Bobby's crime is still out there and that they should let him go, which is a crazy plan. So either the day before the cipher is solved or the day that the cipher is solved in the early morning, Tex Watson, who's I believe played by Austin Butler in the movie version by Quentin Tarantino, takes Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel to the Tate house where Sharon Tate is with Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski

were visiting. Stephen Parent, who had been visiting the Tate's house, caretaker in another house is the first victim. Everybody in the house is killed. They write her a pig on the wall in Sharon Tate's blood. She's an actress who's in a bunch of movies and is married to Roman Polanski at the time. One of the victims gets a black hood put over his head. And the next night, the four family members from the Tate murders go to the LaBianca house having picked up Leslie Van Houten and Clem Grogan and Charlie Manson and the LaBiancas are stabbed and pillowcases are put on their heads and the word war is cut into Mr. LaBianca's stomach and on the wall blood is written that says rise death to pigs helter-skelter which is a Beatles reference

but also the name that Charles Manson used for his race war against the whites and the blacks that was coming in his prophecies. So for four months between the original murder and the Manson family getting arrested, nobody knows that it's Charles Manson and every, no one has any idea who did it. Everybody's wondering who did it. So they're tributing it to to our, our, our guy. No, no, no. It's just that Zodiac didn't really make that big of a splash in the newspaper actually. And when they, when

the site took up all the air in the room, gotcha. Exactly. And so when we go now to Lake Berryessa, right. And we are with Brian Hartnell, this,-year-old from Tortville near Portland. He's the son of a chaplain at Portland Adventist Medical Center. He's super tall, like 6'7". Cecilia Ann Shepherd is 22. She's born in India. Her dad's also a chaplain who was in India. She grew up in Loma Linda, which if you know where that is in California is like, it's a blue zone zone if you know what those are, where people live a long time because they eat like these weird like, you know, new agey sort of Christian grain diets and they shop at

these supernatural stores and they're all healthy. It's like a very, very Christian, like value oriented community. She goes to La Sierra College after graduating high school as a political science major. La Sierra merges with Loma Linda in 1967 so she transfers to Pack Union College where she majors in music, transfers to the University of Riverside in 1969 for music. They're both seven-day Adventists who celebrate the Sabbath on Saturday and while they are dated in college, they are just friends at the time of the incident. So they're, you know, whatever that means. September 27th, 1969, Cecilia Ann comes down from Riverside to visit friends up in the

North, pick up some things from her old dorm. She meets with Brian around one o'clock. They go to a rummage sale with their friend Judy. Brian buys a TV and has to take it back home and then pick up the girls because he doesn't have room for the TV and the girls. So he leaves the girls and goes to get the TV and puts it in his house and goes back to get the girls. And then by the time he picks them up and drops Judy off, Judy believes that they're going to go off to San Francisco and hang out, but they decide to go to Lake Berryessa instead because when they were dating, they used to love to go there. And if they went all the way to San Francisco, they wouldn't have been back too late to be up for Sabbath Maths on Saturday morning. So that was the rationale for them going to Lake Berryessa instead.

Before they get there, there's three women there. They notice a man watching them from about 40 to 50 feet away. He watches them for an hour and then he leaves. But before he leaves, he walks within 20 feet of them. They leave around 430. They say he's six feet tall, 200 pounds, stocky or muscular. Pretty nice looking, about 30, dark pants, black, pull over, short sleeve sweater. This is the guy that we're talking about before. They go to the peninsula. A man comes up to them with a gun. He offers him 50 cents. He says all the stuff that he says is the gun loaded. I killed a man to get out of jail, yada yada yada. And then we get the description of

this weird outfit that you've seen pictures of or that you've seen in the movie and stuff like that. Hartnell, who is like an upper-class fellow, like a quite well-off middle-class type fellow, when he's in he does a very long interview with the cops and he says the guy seems low-class to him or he implies it. He kind of just like has a way of talking about the guy that makes it seem like this guy is like not like kind of like riffraffy compared to him. You know what happens here just after the attack the you know this guy and his son the dentist see the guy the fisherman sees him at the lake all that stuff happens there's a really long time before the ambulance gets there because the lake's so remote we talked about that briefly that's where we find out Hartnell has six stab wounds and Shepard has ten. He went a little harder on her because he's known to do that. And then the call comes in at

around 740 from Zodiac reporting a double murder near Park headquarters. And I did it or whatever he says. and he calls the wrong Police he calls Napa police, but it's Napa sheriff that are that are investigating And they're not actively investigating murder murders either yet because the victims are alive at this time Cecilia Anne is alive for two days The call is traced to the phone booth the phone booth gets swapped for prints That's the one where the DJ drives around and finds the phone booth. I'm and then while they're on the way the hospital they find the message on the car.

Take plaster cast from the footprints near the vehicle the same as the ones in the crime scenes and it was him so just like i said cecilia and dies two days later due to massive internal injuries attack is in the news for a couple days. internal injuries. The attack is in the news for a couple days until a ten-month-old baby is killed. The last news about it is on the 9th of October, 1969 in the Oakland Tribune. In 10th of October, 1969, the fingerprints from the phone booth are sent to see if they match the prints from the letters. I don't know if they do or not. Koubek says that he thinks that the reason, he, there's a book by Howard A. Davis called The Zodiac Manson Connection. And if you look, if you imagine this,

if you imagine this from his perspective, you're a killer, a guy who's not above killing to get in the newspaper, okay? So you think I got this figured out. I'm gonna kill these kids. I'm gonna write these letters into the paper. It's gonna be the newspaper. Okay? So you think I got this figured out. I'm going to kill these kids. I'm going to write these letters into the paper. It's going to be the craziest thing anybody's ever seen. I got this. He does it. Nothing happens. A few days later, the craziest murder in the sixties occurs in Los Angeles and rocks everyone. The fucking man some murders. It stops people from leaving their doors unlocked. You know what I

mean? It changes the world. It's like hippies rising up to murder cool people is what it is seen as, right? Thank you so much to one of today's sponsors, Heroforge, for sponsoring today's episode. I'm a nerd, bro. I'm like literally going to play D&D shortly after I record this. And I have a huge collection of minis now. I have been printing them, I have been buying them, and I've been using Hero Forge like 80% of the time. If you don't know what Hero Forge is, it's a place you can go and literally just design your own mini for whatever game you're playing or just to collect your own. You can get it printed on different types of resins and plastics whether you want a gray scale or if you want a fully colored all the options are there and

they've just updated a bunch of stuff adding new hand poses so your little miniatures can look like they're casting spells or doing rude things to people all kinds of things for fantasy and sci-fi so it's just a place if you're like me and you love having minis go check it out and if you are ending up picking up anything over there make sure you use code chill for five percent off of your physical orders and if you're like me and you also have a 3d printer you can also go to here forage design your mini do all the things you want and then buy the STL file off of them for like five bucks or something it's super cheap and I do both sometimes I have like a mini that I know I won't

be able to paint the way I want to because I lack that skill so I get it pre-colored from them but everything else things that I don't be able to paint the way I want to because I lack that skill so I get it pre-colored from them But everything else things that I don't want to worry about where I want to practice painting on I just buy the STLs and I print as many as I want goblins and elves and all kinds of stuff It's really up to my game at home I really I've had one of my players started painting things for me because he's much better at it and he's he's I promise you He's smiling the whole way so check it out And again, thank you to hero ford for sponsoring today's episode just go to heroforge.com

and use code chill to get five percent off any of your physical orders that's heroforge.com and fulfill your nerdy needs dude so the zodiac sees this and he's like fucking fucking hell, like, shit, what the fuck do I have to do? So, he, the theory here is that he looks at that crime and he sees, okay, there's like, black hoods, stabbed instead of the guns, and there's like rope involved and tying up and all this other crazy stuff. It's like he was doing a copycat crime of the Tate-LaBianca murders on these two people that still matches his MO, but that he was trying to like add some details like the Tate

scene had the writing on the walls, the LaBianca scene had the writing on the walls, so he writes on the door of the car, just stuff like that. Like that's the kind of theory here is that he sees it and he's desperate to get into the paper. So he's trying to match the look a little better. He's trying to give the people what they want some more. And then we go to the Paul Stein attack. We learned a little bit more about Paul Stein here. His parents were Teddy Stein and Audra Stein. Audra Busby Stein. His parents were Teddy Stein and Audra Busby Stein. His parents were 24 and 16 when he was born. They were from the Dust Bowl in the 30s.

They moved to Exeter, California, have two daughters before Stein's born. Dad's arrested in 1943 for disturbance of the peace. His fingerprints connected to another crime where he used brass knuckles on someone while he's there. His wife has him arrested four years later for not paying child support. He dies in 1968 abandoning his family one year before Paul Stein is murdered. Paul Stein graduates from Houston High School in 1956, graduates from Fresno State. His mother remarries a man who tried to kill a previous wife's mother and went to jail for two years, which is a crazy, I don't know. That would be a deal breaker for me. And he's

at San Francisco State in 1969 when he's killed, working on a PhD in philosophy. He had a beer before work. He had some blood alcohol level, but it was low. I told you he picks up the fare. We're going to go through that. We talked about the black suspect, white suspect mistake where Elms and Fouque, the officers, Fouque, Elms and Fouque, I don't know how to pronounce his last name. They see him, but they let him go. Again, similar sort of description as the other people. And then you get Dave Toskey and Bill Armstrong showing up. That's Ruffalo, the detective in the movie. He likes

animal crackers. I haven't heard anything about him liking animal crackers anywhere in anything that I've read. I don't know where that's from. I haven't Googled it granted, but in my readings about Dave Tosky, I've never seen anything about the fact that he loves animal crackers. Where did that information come from? It was just added. It's in the movie. I don't know. He's like, you got it. Where's my animal crackers? It's like a character choice.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't, it's weird, but it's, it's in there. Uh, and, uh, they find fingerprints in the cab, which some of them have to be him. As nobody's disturbed the cab, they discover a pair of gloves under the dashboard, uh, intact wiped away prints, and they find that he probably cut the shirt with scissors, which proves that he was like kind of planning to cut the shirt, maybe with knives or scissors, because

it doesn't look ripped. So it feels like he did this to do this. To like, have a calling card that's proven. Because now people are getting bloody stuff in the mail, which is like exciting, exciting right so i think he's like trying it's like he's hustling with a youtuber to become the next serial killers my is my feeling. I'm and that's what that's what he says in the next letter and this is the letter that really gets zodiac. In the zone because this is the one that, I told you he wrote that letter to the LA Times like later where he's like, LA Times are the only one to give me the good stuff, right?

Yeah, yeah. That's because the letter is received on October 14th and printed on 15th and it's the same day, the new letter is printed the same day that there's a big article on the front page of the LA Times about Zodiac that's like kind of been like a story so far on Zodiac and there was like a sting of cab robberies going on during the time that Paul Stein was killed they thought it was that but when

the letter shows up they're like fuck and that's when they find out that he moves the that's when they find that he moved the cab from where he stopped the cab. Koubek's theory is that letter five talks about the crimes happening last night, which means it was written on October 12th, and that was Sunday, which means letter five couldn't have been mailed until Monday because he says last night. Then the Jensen and Faraday murders happened on a late Friday. Shepard and Hartnell are attacked on Saturday. Stein's murdered on a Saturday.

Mike Maggio and Farron are attacked on 4th of July, but he still does killing in the night. All of them are late at night. And if you look at that altogether, he's like, this is somebody with a job, like a normal job, nine to five. And so he has to like do it late so that he has time to go to work. And he also thinks that the killer has a family for this reason, because he had to arrange the Darlene and Mike attack around like 4th of July festivities, which is why he didn't

do it earlier in the day. You know what I mean? And so yeah, so that's where that's at. Then we learn about a story on November 7th, 1969 that I didn't hear about before. That's about a potential zodiac attack where this guy Daniel Williams gets attacked. It's the day after the incident with Sam on the Dunbar show. And he starts getting

calls and they last for from the 23rd of October to the 2nd of November. He gets calls. And on the 2nd of November, he gets home and finds that somebody's pulled his back screen door off. So he calls the cops and the cops come and they look around and they don't find anything. So he goes into his fridge and he gets a bottle of seven up that he had already opened and it tastes fucking weird. So he spits out the drink and calls the police and the police analysis comes back on the seventh that it had enough arsenic in it to kill an adult. Damn.

And the news breaks that same day. So nobody knows if that was like him trying to kill someone and failing again because it wasn't like a direct attack. It was like a poisoning attempt. So nobody knows who did it or why. But that's another thing that could have happened that could have been a zodiac thing that kind of like continues his sort of like the idea of him just kind of like trying to find something that works because poisoning would be a very scary thing to

be to find out what's happening right and you it puts in a context the things that he writes later about like shooting kids and blowing buses up and all that shit and then we get the 340 character cipher where he says he's gonna do his thing. This is the one with the pen. I can't do a thing with it. This is the one that Graysmith said he solved but he didn't solve that was solved in 2020. And he this is this is where he this is where Kovek starts talking about the thing that we were kind of organically talking about last week where we were saying that he's not real, he's like a faker. He takes the most common denominator versions of that subculture and takes it when your dad pretends to rap

or when a boomer tries to talk like a millennial or a millennial tries to talk like somebody from Gen Z. And that's why he named himself Zodiac, which is just like a lame, like it's like, it's like naming yourself like tarot, the tarot killer. I'm like, I'm like a witchy millennial murderer and I'm called the tarot. I'm the no cap killer. Yeah, exactly. Like it's, it's, it. Yeah, exactly. It's that kind of angle that Kovec's kind of working. And also this greeting card with the pen on it was copyright 1967. So it wasn't even available in stores at the time. So it was likely something that he had lying around the house rather than something that

he bought to send to the police or to the papers, which is kind of interesting. He's almost like doing craft projects if you want to think about it that way. Then we get the bomb plan with a shirt, you know, he decides to like say, he's not going to have a strict way of doing crimes because nobody can like this, it's like plausible deniability when he claims crimes that aren't his because he's never done a killing the same way really, except for those first two. And so it's like, he's

kind of mixing it up to kind of like be anyone. And, uh, it's a harder to catch them. Yeah. And this is the one where he's also like discrediting the press a lot. He says the prints aren't mine because I use airplane cement on my fingers and all that weird shit. And then, uh, the story runs in the paper on the 12th of November and they actually talk about the, uh, the Zelms and Fouque incident where they see the paper on the 12th of November and they actually talk about the

Zelms and Fouke incident where they see the guy on the street. He says that the description they give is almost beat for beat, the description that Brian Hartner gives in his interview, minus the hood. He thinks that actually they maybe didn't see him that clearly and that maybe it's like less clear that they met him than, than it seems, but that like, they went and got a description from this guy, the Zodiac killer and said it so that they would seem like they were like saving face in the moment. Like well, we let him go, but oh, here's what he looked like.

And here's a new picture of him. Right. Um, and on the 12th, that's when the story breaks, uh, Paul Avery writes the article. Um, he's been doing a lot of the articles on Zodiac, but none of the threats go anywhere that the Zodiac makes news fizzles out, uh, because then the Manson family gets arrested on December 1st. Uh, there's a summit on the 15th and 14th and 15th of December where they try to figure out if Zodiac is Charles Manson.

Bill Armstrong goes to that. So Zodiac gets in the mix again at that point, but then kind of fizzles. And it starts to seem like to me that, and I think Kovac gets into this at some point too that Zodiac reacts to when people mention him in the press. Like he, when he sees his name, he like writes is what I think happens. Then we get the Melvin Belli letter where he's like in Munich. Uh, when he gets the letter, it's like around Christmas time on the anniversary of the first murder. And he has it like flown out to him or whatever.

But the reason that he's in Europe in the first place, I kind of got into it, but it's because of the December 6th concert that happened in 1969 where he put together with the Rolling Stones played for free at the Altamont Speedway. It was supposed to be like a peace and harmony event, free, free thing and it was supposed to be like cool that the Hells Angels were gonna be there and there was no Barriers and the Hells Angels were security so they were supposed to keep everybody from getting on stage But they were only paid with $500 worth of beer. So everybody gets fucking drunk The Hells Angels knockout Marty Bailin from just Jefferson Airplane

Steven stills gets stabbed in the leg a couple times from Crosby, Stills and Nash, Rolling Stones, one of the songs that's like during a song that the Rolling Stones are playing, The Hell's Angels stab someone to death, and actually there were actually four deaths altogether related to this concert according to Deanna. Hunter, an unnamed man who drowned in an irrigation ditch and two who died in a hit-and-run after the show, which is crazy. So, Belli just like went to let things cool off in Europe, so that's why he was gone. And this is like why, like because he was gone, he got to like pivot to be the Zodiac guy after this, which is kind of weird. And like I say, this is the this is the Zodiac gets

mentioned and this is yeah this is where Kovac mentions it too. When Zodiac gets mentioned, Zodiac rides back. Something that people never really talk about but it seems very clear. So then we talk about Zelms, one of the two guys who let Zodiac go that night. He has a new he has a new partner on a new beat in the Tenderloin in San Francisco and while his partner is taking a piss, he hears shattering glass and somebody tells him there's a pawn shot being broken into. He finds two men there, one threw a curling iron through the window to steal a watch. He gets in an altercation with the men.

Both sides pull guns. The officer is shot dead. The men run. They're caught five minutes later, end up in a shootout with those cops. Comes out at the men's trial that Zelms, the officer, was drunk while he was out on the beat that night and that he may have been the aggressor. And it's speculated that he was sent onto that beat because he was on latrine duty basically for letting Zodiac go. Upon looking into it, the person that he ended up fighting that night matched the description of Zodiac that he gave the night of Stein's

murder. So I don't know, maybe he was drunk and he saw Zodiac on the street and confronted him, but that's one of those greysmith type things where you just kind of put some facts together and go, maybe that happened, I don't't know which I don't really like so don't don't give too much don't give too much to that then we talked about Kathleen Johns who rode around the car for 90 minutes with Zodiac on March 27th 1970 when her car is found burned out all four wheels are attached so unless the zodiac went and got her tire off the side of the road took it back to the car put it on a jack and Attached it to the car again, and then lit the car on fire

There is a there is a there is something else that happened something something weird happened And it seems much more likely that she had a scary thing happen to her in the dark. She saw the Zodiac composite and was like, that was him, you know? I don't know. But it doesn't seem like her story is completely true. There's also Robert Michael Salem, the Satan Saves Zodiac guy. He has an onc on his stomach too. That's the copycat crime we were talking about. Yep. Then there's the ninth letter. That's the 13 character cipher that he says

has his name in it, but it's probably a pun. It's too short to be solved. It's funny that Kovec says that in this book because in the next book he has like a notated essay of his solution for it that like makes a lot more sense. But you have to believe his suspect for it to make sense. So I'll get into that next time. Uh, this letter is the one that talks about blue meaning, blue meanies, uh, which is from yellow submarine, which again, it's like, if you're lame,

you think that a phrase from a Beatles, like the most popular band in the world, their movie, you think that phrase is going to be like, that's like going in and quoting the fucking minions practically. You know what I mean? It's like not that vibey, right? This letter, it was sent March, it arrived April 19th, 1970, right? And apparently was sent in April based on the post postage. It't mention anything past february so he thinks that it was like written and then like not sent for two months doesn't mean that much but in the in the story line of the character that we've been creating has been listening to this guy and kind of reading his letters and stuff it kind of feels like maybe he's already kind of. Feeling the. He's feeling the burnout of trying to be Zodiac and trying to make it a thing and it's not working for him that much. Then we get the greeting card.

This card, the one that had your ass is dragging on it, remember that one? This one is now five years old. This is like a super old card. So there's another one that he had around his house. So now he's doing these weird things. He's asking for the buttons at this point another thing that's fun is that Kovac points out that buttons peaked three years earlier in 1967 so he's not even like the reason the buttons didn't take off isn't because

he's lame necessarily it's because he's like trying to do the fucking Harlem Shake right now you know what I mean he's like trying to like the fucking Harlem Shake right now. You know what I mean? He's like trying to like be like, guys, come on, Harlem Shake. Remember the Harlem Shake like don't remember. Please. You can even mean buttons, please. It's sad because it didn't make a lot of waves, this letter. But there was another multi-page analysis written about the Zodiac killer at this point by this guy, David Smith. But like just his fucking luck, the same day that that comes out, it gets

overshadowed because it's the Kent State massacre. So like another thing that's way more crazy than Zodiac boots him out of the news. That pattern continues. Then we talk about officer Richard Raticich. He was shot in the head with a.38 caliber revolver while he was in his car. This guy, Wesley Allen Johnson, was the one who was picked up for it. Witnesses say they saw him shoot from a 1916, excuse me, 1969 vinyl top Camaro with another person in the car. He gets away. He gets picked up months later in December and he gets the charges are dropped because of lack of evidence, but they don't think it was the Zodiac killer.

The guy ends up in jail anyway, so it's very likely that he lied about that. And then the next letter is where he takes credit for that killing and complains about the buttons. And even though that's the killing of a cop, which is like something that he keeps saying he's going to do, he never like mentions that again or anything like that when he's like talking about it later. He also mentions that it's weird that Kobe, like Kobe says, it's weird that he mentions that the kids are out for summer. And that's what ruins his plans to blow up the bus because it seems like he has kids for him to use that type of info. So it just another thing that kind of like

goes against what maybe you were thinking of the Zodiac. Then we talk about the one where he claims the Kathleen John's abduction, but it was in the news, so he probably just read it in the news. He doesn't say enough about it, and then he mentions the little list. And then the little list is actually in the next letter, but they think maybe the letters were written in reverse of each other and sent opposite because he like references the little list after he he references the little list before he does the little list letter and as I said before it's a version from it's this it's a song from the Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan it's

like a racist ass musical about Japan but oh damn the I mean it's just oh it's like from the 1800s don't know what the fuck they're talking about but it's a classic musical and he actually seems to be using the Groucho Marx version from 1960 from like a specific vinyl of it. And the reason that Kovac thinks this is because the lyrics match. And also remember that part where you were saying, fomping and you couldn't figure out what the fuck he was saying. Fomp it, fomp it. Oh yeah. When you, when you were reading the lyrics, I think it was Jesse was reading the lyrics. So the guy was, I was, yeah. And he was saying. Fomp it. Fomp it. Oh, yeah. When you when you were reading the lyrics, uh, I think it was Jesse was reading the lyrics. So the god of all I was. Yeah. And he was saying he was saying like, Fomp it or something. There's a couple of words where it feels like he was listening to the audio and didn't have the lyrics written in front of him. So he just guessed

what the word was because Fomp it is kind of what it sounds like he's saying in the song. When you listen to that version from Groucho Marx, but it's just he doesn't know what it is. Those are the ones that were held back. Then we get the one that has the Halloween greeting card and Apollo 9 stamp, which Apollo 8 launched the same day as like the same morning as Jensen Faraday, so there could be a connection there. Then the letter 15, this is the one that has the skeleton on it. This is the one that has the 14. It's the same day, it came the same day

as an article published by Jack the Ripper. I mean, on Jack the Ripper, Paul Avery writes about murderers all the time, and you wrote about Jack the Ripper. Then, Kovac finds something that's very important for the future, for the next episode we're gonna talk about. Look up Tim Holt, number 30, 1952.

It's a comic book. Google that right now, Tim Holt. Tim Holt, 1952. Do you see it? Uh, yeah, the death by gun wheel. Yes. So if you, the, what the, what the, uh, what the card said was by fire, by gun, by knife, by rope, right.

And if you, if you look at this cover, it arc, it's a Tim Holt is a like cowboy comic that was like pretty popular back in the day. And this one obviously is already almost twenty years old at the time. I'm but there's this cowboy called this is cowboy tied up in this lady saying you're playing for red mask and then behind is like a billiard wheel roulette wheel that has by death by gun death by knife death by fire death by rope. On it and i'm gonna tell you why that's important right now, but you should remember that. This was put on the front page because it threatened Paul Avery. And this is where, because Phil Sin saw this is when he reached out to tell him about Cherry Joe Bates and Riverside.

So the fact that Zodiac got front page coverage one more time was what sent him to Riverside. So the fact that Zodiac got front page coverage one more time was what sent him to Riverside. And then if we look at this case that I gave a rundown of last time, what I said about it last time does not gel with what I'm going to say about it this time. According to the eyewitness testimony, nobody saw her at the library. Okay. And her stomach contents indicate that she ate something around 5.15 and that her body temperature showed that she died sometime around 7.30 or to 9.30. Right? So even if witnesses who heard the screams at 10 were wrong about the time and it was 30 minutes earlier, it still leaves her sitting in the library where no one saw her for three hours.

Just doesn't make sense. Then the long confession goes to the papers. It doesn't line up with any of the details of the case. Says she was kicked in the head and choked in the letter, but the autopsy says she'd been stabbed. She didn't go like a lamb to the slaughter, like the letter said. She literally ripped his skin off and his hair off and ripped his watch off. He doesn't say where the body was left and is vague in the confession about it because nobody says where the body was found in the newspaper. Two more letters are

sent with the Z symbol, but like I said, even the letters from the actual zodiac didn't say he was the zodiac right away, so if he already knew who was the Zodiac, I don't know. It just seems weird that he wouldn't come out the gate with I'm Zodiac. If you want it to be known as Zodiac. Um, no idea. Uh, on October 2nd, I mean, I'm sorry on August 2nd, August, well, August 2nd, 2021, the Riverside police department actually announced that it had verified the authorship of the baits had to die letters. It doesn't say who they are, but they figured

out who it was and it's probably not the Zodiac. Then there's the poem, which doesn't describe Cherry Jo Bates' death in any way. And like I was saying last time, seems just like a girl writing about killing herself or girl writing about killing herself or like thinking about killing herself rather than anything having to do with murder. Then we have letter 16 which keeps claiming victims. Then letter 17 is another one that says Paul Averly, which is the second time the misspelling happens which is kind of weird. It's another one where he claims something.

This one seems like a copycat letter, the postage is wrong. And that's one thing that Zodiac never does wrong. Um, then there's something that I said I was going to, uh, mention this time because it was a research mix up between me and Deanna, which is that in, in the Zodiac book, uh, all the chapters are dated by date and the chapter says 1981, but it actually took place in 1971. So it's actually way closer to the case time. And that's something called the Zodiac Killer film sting, which I thought was so incredible. So there's a movie called The Zodiac Killer that comes out in 1971 that's made for $13,000. Paul Avery consults on the film, gets a title screen quote on the film, and nobody comes to see it. But the whole reveal was that the producers said

that the whole point was that they figured Zodiac would come to the movie if they premiered it in the Bay Area. And they put like a little suggestion box at the outside and had somebody in there checking for handwriting to see if it would match the zodiac's handwriting. So somebody was in there with like a little light reading the notes, reading the notes that were dropped in, they were going to try and catch him. Uh, but just like a giant scam to get him to show up. Yeah. That's like a hundred thousand dollars in today money. Yeah. Crazy. So funny.

Crazy. Then the next letter is the one where he mentions the Exorcist film, says he killed 37 people. Micro Deli has a book called The Hunt for Zodiac, which pretty much proves that this is a forgery. The one about where he's talking about the Exorcist. And it's overshadowed, letter 18 is overshadowed again by something else that happens in the news, which is the kidnapping of Patty Hearst. Do you guys know about Patty Hearst?

Have we talked about that on here? That name is, yeah, it's come up. I don't know if we've talked about it on here, but yes. You're aware of Patty Hearst. I mean, this is another very important thing. So I'm going to give this to Jesse to read. This is the description of Patty Hearst that is on FBI.gov. On the morning of February 4th, 1974, a 19-year-old college student named Patty Hearst was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by a group of armed men and women. This group of radical anarchists and extremist men and women

from different walks of life called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA was attempting to instigate a guerrilla war against the US government and had already shot two Oakland school officials, killing one and wounding the other. The SLA knew that Hearst was from a wealthy, powerful family and sure enough, the kidnapping made front page national news and captured the interest of the American

people. The SLA began releasing audio tapes demanding money and food in exchange for Hearst's release. In April 1974, the SLA released a tape in which Hearst claimed to have joined the SLA's fight against the US government herself. Days later, Hearst was caught on camera participating in a bank robbery with the SLA. Pictured are the coat worn and gun brandished by Patty Hearst during the infamous SLA bank robbery. To stop the SLA and find Hearst, the FBI launched a large-scale, agent-intensive investigation. Hearst and other SLA members went into hiding and were on the run until September 18th, 1975, when FBI agents caught up with Hearst. She was charged with bank robbery, along with

other crimes, was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison. President Carter commuted her sentence after two years and she was later pardoned. So here's the picture of her in front of the sign. She's got the gun, she's got the little coat on, she's looking kind of like babe-like in a way, which is kind of like what's interesting about this. Patty Hearst is like a perfect, well, we'll get into it in a minute. I just wanted to make sure I lined up Patty Hearst and you can see this picture of her in her weird Symbionese Liberation Army getup. You can describe to the people like it's definitely like it feels like you know those Apple posters that were like think different that have like Albert Einstein and stuff on them. It has like that vibe

except she's like a terrorist you know what I mean like she's like a yeah and and it's funny because Patty Hearst right obviously she's like an heiress right she's like William Randolph Hearst's heir, and she gets caught up in this whole thing. And at that thing that they're like breezing over where FBI agents caught up with Hearst and she was charged with bank robbery, so many people were killed. So many people were like blown away at that, but not Patty Hearst. And then she gets sentenced to jail, and then she sits in there for a little while, and then the president himself commutes her sentence and then pardons her, so she never did a crime.

So she's kind of like, and then she like, continued to be famous and like, had a career. So I don't know what that means, but we'll talk about that more in a second after we get to the end of this. Then we talk about the letter that had that weird handwriting style that was complaining about the Badlands movie.

And this one also he thinks is a forgery because it's too formulaic and it has nothing to do with the contents of the original letters and it's like it's just weird. And according to Koubek and to a lot of people, maybe the last real zodiac letter is the one with the skeleton that was sent to Paul Avery. Because maybe he was already not into it and then Paul Avery kind of like became his PR agent, but then it was almost like Paul Avery was in charge instead of the zodiac of what was going on with the zodiac and that probably turned him off. And you know, who knows? But according to Koubek and a lot of other people they think the last communication with Zodiac was letter 15 and that the last crime that he committed was either shooting

Paul Stein or trying to poison that guy but who knows. The last thing we're going to talk about today is the Toschi letter scandal. We talked about it briefly last time. That situation was that Armistead Maupin featured Toschi in his Tinkerbell killer story as Detective Tandy. And it reminds Maupin of Toschi the way that Zodiac mentions Toski, says he does a good job, wonders who's going to play him in the movie, you know, stuff like that. It's like enough that Mopin's like, hey, I got to tell you guys that this happened. And he basically like downplays how much he's like, yeah, I wrote a couple of letters.

What was the harm? My family, I was so happy to see me in the paper you know whatever whatever but actually the truth is like way weirder so like here's the deal October 3rd 1975 examiner runs a story about Tashi helping the child of an overdose woman a couple weeks later mail comes from miss. G. Rochelle. She says she's happy with his questioning. Kovac goes and finds the R.L. Polk Company Dictionary of Citizens of San Francisco and looks between 75 and 77 and cannot find a G. Rochelle. On Christmas Eve, there's a note to Tosky from a 17-year-old girl named Angel Marks.

He had to find her and her mother at a downtown hotel. Last October, her sister was arrested in Kentucky and they were accused of killing an Iranian general's son. Toski came and helped them and solved their whole situation for them. Looking into it, no Iranian general son was killed anywhere in America ever. This never happened. That's just a whole fabricated story. Then there's this other letter from Miss John Walsh saying she's impressed with the same story and their names are… Miss John Walsh is too common impressed with the same story. And Ms. John Walsh is too common of a name to confirm that it exists.

And then there's another story in February about a Vietnamese immigrant who helps Toski and his partner and the Oscar is nominated for a Citizens Award, even though he's not a citizen because it's like a goodwill gesture and it's like a nice thing. And there's this guy, Chakler, who writes in and says, Hey, good job. That's really awesome. Toskey is really awesome for doing that. Doesn't exist. Jay Whipple writes in, wow, it's really cool of you to recognize Vietnamese immigrant. No Jay Whipple exists. So he's not just writing anonymous letters. He's like making up fake people and fake things and like making him seem like a better person.

February 27th, there's an article about the murder of Steve McCurn and responses run a couple weeks later. A guy named Tom Doherty thinks Dave Toskey is the only person who knows how to do his job. A guy who doesn't exist in the registry. Miss Sanchez can't believe Toskey hasn't said to hell with it. He's so brave. There's plenty of Mrs. Sanchez's,

but no genealogical records indicate somebody by that name in Merozstav has lived in that area at the time. Another made up person, Frank Weber. No idea how Dave Toskey can do all that murder and deal with murdering and lawyers and psychiatrists. Another guy that doesn't exist. Then in June of 1976, the Examiner runs an article

talking about how Dave Toskey has a secret pal a high school student at the all-girl Catholic presentation high school And she writes a letter in as a class exercise to someone that she admires and she imagines That Toskey sees all these terrible things and she wants him to know he's a very special policeman She exists she's a real person what is failed. What has failed to mention the article is that she lives across the street from Dave Toskey. Right across the street from him. Pretty insane. August 13th, 1977, there's an article called The City Supercop, which is just literally an article about Dave Toskey. A couple weeks later, response, William Chalker, the same guy, comes back, says, I hope Dave

Toskey stays on the force for many years to come. There is less evidence that this man existed in 1977 than it is that he existed in 1976. November 6, 1977. Dwight Chaplin asks his readers to write in and tell him who they love in public life, offers 11 suggestions. On the 20th, he publishes the results of his poll with the note, the second week of my poll is a quote. The second week of my poll was like the first filled with interesting surprises. For example, Dave Toskey, San Francisco homicide inspection

got several impassioned votes. No idea. So it's very likely that Toskey was like super, super wild for the way he was writing into places. And it makes him seem very zodiac-y, which is like so fucking weird. You're like turning into zodiac the more you investigate him. There had never been a cop mentioned by name until Dave Toskey in a letter. He would taunt them, but he would never mention one. And he says Toskey did a good job in the letter, not that he sucks. He's like, he's a good cop, but he doesn't know what he's done.

He's in it over his head. Uh, it's like crazy. It's like, like, you know, a narcissist's plan. Uh, according to DNA evidence, uh, letter 20, which is the one before the Toskey letter, uh, is, uh, DNA linked to letter 21. Says they're written by the same guy. So it's possible that Dave Toskey didn't just fake one letter, but more than one letter.

And also I said this last time, but every time anybody takes a letter to anybody they take it to Sherwood Morrill, Toskey, no exception to this rule, he does it every time he takes it to Sherwood Morrill. This guy has cleared 8,000 people, 9,000 people of Zodiac. Instead, just for the one letter, letter 21, he takes it to John Samota, who has never authenticated a single Zodiac letter. And when the scandal breaks,

Samota actually says, you know what? This might not be a Zodiac letter. Why did he do this? Koubek thinks that it's because the Arthur Lee Allen theory just got him too bad and he needed to coax him back into activity by writing letters as the Zodiac and kind of trying to get Arthur Lee Allen to come back. Actually, he did go after him again in 1991, or the cops did at least, when at the same time Mike Mageau was fingering him with the driver's license, they got another warrant to search Arthur Lee Allen, but he died. So that's not a thing anymore. And then, you know, I want to go back to Patty Hearst for a second, because she's a great example

of exactly what happened. Like, you go all the way back to the Tate murders, the LaBianca murders, which happened very early in Zodiac's career. And you can see how it's events that are more real and more gritty and fact-based, less fanciful that constantly cuck Zododiac in paper over and over again. He keeps trying to do these crazy theatrical things and then real-world shit goes down that's more fucked up than what he could possibly imagine. And those things, if you look at that picture of Patty Hearst, she's looking hot in her revolutionary outfit, people want to dress like her, people want to be here.

It's a more complete story because there's a person you can idolize at the middle of it. It brings human complexity with it. And, you know, the Zodiac as an idea is very hokey, very gimmicky, very confusing. And I think that's why he kind of just fizzled out. I think it's not really about that he like, had a plan even really. I think he just wanted to be famous,

tried, never did the same thing twice and then just gave up, you know? And if you look at how Patty Hearst was handled, right? And you see how like Patty Hearst makes Zodiac look quaint, right? Like Patty Hearst is like a real thing that happened that's like crazy and political and involves a famous person and a known person.

So it dwarfs Zodiac. Then you think about how in the end, after a couple of years, Patty Hearst is like back being an actress after just a couple of years of being in jail and stuff, never having committed a crime completely forgiven by President Carter. Then you think about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. You think about what went down there and how he was like impeached because he was like a president, sitting president, like taking advantage of an intern and how that's like even higher crazy than Patty Hearst. But even that like eventually like Bill Clinton like

made it past that and like continued being the president. And then you see grab her by the pussy and how grab her by the pussy is like a super crazy flagrant version of Monica Lewinsky again, but it's like nobody even cared. And then you think about how COVID was and how COVID is the worst thing that's happened in any of our lifetimes and nobody really can get behind that 100% that it is. We can't all agree. that it is, you know, like we can't all agree. And it's just, it's easy to see how something like the Zodiac, which can in one moment be so compelling, you know, culturally be dwarfed by things that are more real. I think that's the main thing that,

I think that's the main thing that Zodiac realized. And I think like, as much as we want to give him sort of like a villain persona, or we want to give him credit, or we want to give him sort of like a villain persona or we want to give him credit or we want to make him seem awesome or interesting because the story is interesting before you know who he is, the truth is probably that he's just a shitty kind of unexciting guy and just like anyone. And it's just an accident that he got this popular and so we get to september twenty second two thousand two when i enter this my own story can i come up on the twitter thread that created this episode in the first place which i think you showed me jesse i don't remember i know we did a mini so don it

I don't remember. I know we did a mini-sode on it, but it was by Paul Haynes, who was the researcher and writer for the HBO documentary, All Be Gone in the Dark, and the book that it's based on by Patton Oswalt's late wife, Michelle McNamara, about the Golden State Killer. So this is a guy, Paul Haynes is like a crime researcher and he's seriously legit. And he's talking about Jared Kovec's second book on Zodiac and the new suspect that he had accidentally legitimized in an honest quest to eliminate him from his list. And here's Mathis with the first two tweets as a fun teaser for next time. Matthew 18 Aldoer, the Zodiac killer suspect developed by author Jarrett Kovec in his remarkable

book, How to Find Zodiac, is the best Zodiac suspect that's ever surfaced. Here's an absurdly long thread outlining why. One, it's not any one data point that sells Paul Doerr from April 1st, 1927 to August 2nd, 2007, to Zodiac, but rather all of them combined that make it appear probabilistically impossible that Zodiac was anyone other than Doher. So that's that. Get ready to find out how Zodiac couldn't be anyone other than Doher. It's weird that there was only one cipher this time from the Chodiak Shiller because I just I swear he said there was going to be two in every episode.

So that can't be right. That's weird. And anyway, part three, The Six Phantoms, coming up next. Thanks again to Deanna, D-E-A-N-N-A, right, Sink, on Twitter. Thank you for listening, patreon.com slash JeluminaudyPod, and that's it. Goodbye, everybody. Good... Bye.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Jeluminaudy Podcast. Goodbye. What? Terrence Hill 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 it's been going through the list ever since

I'm trying to dig deep Which one of you is uh... Dick Powell? Me? Your name's Jesse Cox! Hahahaha I want my my baby I want your luv and all day I want my my baby

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