Infamous America - ZODIAC KILLER Ep. 1 | “Lake Herman Road”

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

A few days before Christmas in 1968, two teenagers from Vallejo, California go on their first date. They park at a lover’s lane pullout off of a dark road outside of town. Within an hour, a stranger parks near their car. He forces the kids out of their car, and then shoots and kills them. Investigators are baffled. There are few clues, no leads, and no suspects. Someone committed a brutal double murder with no motive, and a mystery begins…   Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join   Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial.   On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage.   For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

William Crow's girlfriend had recently bought a new sports car, and she wanted him to take it for a drive. Bill lived in Vallejo, California, a city in the San Francisco Bay region. Bill's girlfriend was from the Napa area, the world-famous winemaking valley that's 12 miles north of Vallejo. But in 1968, Bill's girlfriend had moved out of her family home and down to San Francisco. That's where she bought the sports car. It was now December 20th, and Bill's girlfriend. friend was in Napa to visit her parents. She visited Bill, who lived in his parents' house in Vallejo. She showed off the new sports car and suggested that Bill give it a spin. There are no

surviving accounts of the exact make and model of the car, but it seems likely, based on the events to come, that it was a European model. The type of car is one of hundreds, if not thousands, of details that have been obsessed over by professional investigators and amateur enthusiasts. The Fact is, no one alive today knows the make and model of the car. Bill Crow never specified the name in any of his witness statements or interviews, and he probably wasn't intentionally hiding it. Bill likely wasn't a car guy, so to speak. The detail probably didn't seem important at the time, and he didn't commit to memory. And he was right, it wasn't important. But as an unknown, it's provided endless fodder for speculation. Whatever the car was,

Bill and his girlfriend took it for a drive on the night of December 20th, 1968. Bill steered the car toward a narrow two-lane street called Lake Herman Road. Lake Herman Road is on the outer edge of the city of Vallejo, and it runs into the neighboring city of Benicia, as the locals pronounce it. Along the way, it angles past Lake Herman, a small man-made reservoir that was created in 1905 to provide drinking water for Vallejo and Benicia. In 1968, there were no streetlights on Lake Herman Road, and there still aren't. The only illumination on the road came from car headlights, which made it a great spot for a lover's lane.

Kids could turn off the road, park in one of several pullouts, and they would be virtually invisible unless car lights flashed on them. And that's what happened to Bill Crow and his girlfriend. At about 9.30 that night, they turned off Lake Herman Road and parked in one of the well-known pullouts. It was just an open section of dirt and gravel that also served as the entrance to the road that led to the Benicia water pumping station. The station was a water treatment facility that situated in the hills 100 yards or so from Lake Harmon Road. A dirt road led back to the pumping station, and the gated entrance to the dirt road, commonly referred to. as gate 10 was at the little pullout area. Bill pulled into the gate 10 area and parked,

and his girlfriend started demonstrating the use of the various toggle switches inside the car that controlled some of the car's functions. That's one of the aspects of the vehicle that makes people believe it was a European car, the switches on the inside, which were fairly rare in 1968. As they sat in the pullout messing with the switches, a car drove past them on Lake Herman Road, It was going in the opposite direction from which they had been driving, and when it passed their pullout, the driver slammed on the brakes. The car's white reverse lights popped on, which meant it was going to back up in the middle of the road. Bill saw the reverse lights and had a bad feeling about the situation. He jammed his girlfriend's car into gear and sped out of the parking lot.

They jumped back on to Lake Herman Road, heading toward Benicia. The other car made a fast three-point turn and sped after them. Half a mile later, Bill bailed off of Lake Herman Road and drove south toward the town of Benicia. The other car continued to speed down Lake Herman Road and soon disappeared from sight. Bill Crow chalked it up to a weird experience, a creepy and maybe even scary experience, but ultimately harmless. He and his girlfriend went on their way, and Bill likely would not be. not have given it a second thought if he hadn't seen an article in the Vallejo newspaper the

next day. The article said two teenagers had been shot and killed later that night at the exact spot where Bill and his girlfriend had been sitting. They were the first murders that would be attributed to the mysterious, taunting figure known as the Zodiac Killer. From Black Barrow Media, this is infamous America. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the story of the Zodiac killer, one of the most notorious unsolved criminal cases in American history. This is episode one, Lake Herman Road. On December 22nd, 1968, two days after Bill Crow's frightening encounter on Lake Herman Road, and one day after he read the article about the murders, he called the Vallejo Police Department.

They transferred him to the Solano County Sheriff's Department, which had jurisdiction over that remote stretch of road outside Vallejo and beneath. Bill gave a statement for Sergeant Leslie Lundblatt, an aging detective with black horn-rimmed glasses and the classic short-brimmed fedora of the 1960s who was leading the investigation of the murders on Lake Herman Road. Bill explained the strange encounter of two nights earlier, and Sergeant Lundblad added the account to the group of witness statements that were starting to form a picture of the events of a very narrow window of time. Bill recalled that the encounter had happened sometime between 9.30 and 10 p.m. There has been, and always will be, discrepancies over the type of car that chased him that night.

But maybe more important was that the sheriff's report says that Bill stated, quote, Caucasians were in the car. Caucasians, plural. The report doesn't specify any more details, but presumably it meant there were two white men in the car. That was an important development because it was the first hint of a possible suspect or suspects. Over the course of the last two days, Sergeant Lundblad had filled in a decent timeline of the victims, but there were still big gaps in the information. The day before Bill Crow gave his statement, Lundblad did an interview with a local news station in which he had to admit,

quote, We have no motive at this time. That was one of the many maddening aspects of the country. crime. There was no obvious reason for the murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen. David Faraday was a 17-year-old senior at Vallejo High School, and Betty Lou Jensen was a 16-year-old junior at nearby Hogan High School. They had met each other just one week before their lives ended at Gate 10 of the Benicia pumping station on Lake Herman Road. They had been part of a group who were decorating a building used by a local charitable organization for an upcoming

social event, and they had hit it off immediately. They were caught up in the throes of teenage love. Over the course of the next week, they found ways to spend time together as often as possible. But there was a catch, one that was common for teenagers everywhere. Betty Lou's parents wouldn't allow her to go on dates. David was able to pick her up from home to go to school, and they were able to see each other at other times of the day, but they couldn't go on a real date. Then, Betty Lou persuaded her parents to change their minds. They agreed to let her go on a date with David on Friday night, December 20, 1968. It was the young couple's first date, and again, like young couples everywhere, they didn't

stick to the agenda that they outlined for her parents. They hung out for a couple hours late that afternoon, and then they split up until the date later that evening. David arrived at Betty Lou's house at about eight. She introduced him to her parents, which presumably contained all the awkwardness and nervousness that typically plagues those moments. The teenagers told Betty Luce parents that they were going to attend a Christmas concert at Hogan High School, then go to a party at a friend's house, and then be back by 11 p.m. And again, in typical teenager fashion, they didn't stick to the schedule.

When David and Betty left Betty's house, they drove to the home of one of her friends. They stayed for maybe half an hour and left around 9 p.m. Then they went to the Christmas concert at Hogan High School, which had started at 8.30. Some of Betty's friends reported seeing the couple at the show, and that they left sometime between 10 and 10.30 p.m. Shortly after Bill Crow's scary encounter with the mystery car on Lake Herman Road. More than likely, David and Betty drove straight to the Gate 10 pullout area. Two sets of eyewitnesses reported seeing David's Rambler station wagon in the lot sometime around 11 p.m. So the two teenagers were probably there for the better part of an hour.

Betty needed to be home at 11 p.m. So the couple was probably preparing to leave at about the time the last witnesses drove past the lot. But for such a lonely stretch of highway out on the perimeter of the communities of Vallejo and Benicia, Lake Herman Road had a lot of traffic in a two-hour stretch that Friday night. A local sheep rancher had passed through the area. Bill Crow and his girlfriend had their encounter. Two men who were hunting raccoons were in and out of the area. A woman and her boyfriend drove past the lover's lane pullout. A woman and her husband passed a pull-out twice toward the end of that two-hour block of time. And shortly after them, an oil worker drove past the gate 10 pullout on his way to work.

But with all the activity on Lake Herman Road, between 9 p.m. and 11.30 p.m. on that Friday night before Christmas, there was still a tiny window of time, remarkably small, when a killer took action with no witnesses around to see the crime. Based on witness statements and evidence at the crime scene, Sergeant Lundblad at the Solano County Sheriff's Department believed a second car, pulled into the small parking area sometime between 11 and 1115 p.m. The second car parked several feet away from David Faraday's Rambler Station Wagon on the passenger side.

A suspect or suspects exited the second car and approached the passenger side of the station wagon. The killer, and for the sake of making this easier to follow, I'm just going to stick with the singular, probably ordered David and Betty to get out of the car. They were probably and understandably terrified and they didn't move. The killer fired a shot at the car, probably as a warning shot to get the couple to get out. At that point, Betty Lou shuffled out of the passenger side door and David slid across the bench seat from the driver's side and followed her. When they were both outside of the car, the killer opened fire. He shot David once at point-blank range behind the left ear.

David collapsed to the ground next to his car, and Betty took off running. The killer fired his remaining shots at Betty Lou, and five of them hit her in the back. She fell to the ground about 30 feet from the car. The killer quickly retreated to his vehicle and fled the area. At about 11.20 p.m., no more than a couple minutes after the shootings, Stella Borges drove past Gate 10. She was headed to a ranch around the corner and was on her way home when her headlights flashed on a confusing scene at the pullout. A station wagon was parked in the lot.

Its passenger door was open and a boy lay on the ground near the right rear wheel of the car. As Stella's mind raced while she tried to process what she was seeing, she initially thought the boy had somehow fallen out of the car. But then she saw a girl on the ground several feet away. The girl was wearing a nice purple dress and elegant black shoes, and she was lying face down in the dirt. Stella knew something was wrong. She turned around and raced toward Benicia for help. Luckily for her, she spotted the patrol car of Benicia Police Captain Daniel Pitta. Stella flashed her lights and honked her horn and got Pitta's attention.

She stopped him and explained what she had just seen. Pitta hurried to Lake Herman Road, and as he later recalled, arrived at the pullout at approximately 1128 p.m. He started calling in the awful scene. Paramedics and Benicia police officers scrambled to make it to the pumping station. While they were in route, Captain Pitta hurried to the two teenagers. Even though the murder weapon would turn out to be a small caliber handgun, Betty Lou's injuries were devastating and fatal. The 16-year-old was already dead on the ground in her purple party dress on the night of her first date with her new boyfriend. When Captain Pitta checked David Faraday, he was probably surprised to discover that the 17-year-old, who was unknown to him at that time, was still breathing. Faraday was unconscious and bleeding

badly, but he was still alive. Officers and paramedics converged on the scene. The paramedics rushed David into an ambulance and raced toward Vallejo General. hospital. But David didn't make it. He was pronounced dead on arrival at 12.05 a.m. At that same moment, Solano County Sheriff's detective Sergeant Leslie Lundblatt arrived at the crime scene and heard the quick version of what little was known at the time. He dispatched officers to the hospital to try to get a statement from David. They arrived at 1223 a.m. and spoke to a nurse who gave them the news. A. doctor had pronounced David. David dead 20 minutes ago. And so, with a chaotic crime scene, no surviving victims, and at that time,

a lone witness statement from Stella Borges who had discovered the bodies, the investigation of a double homicide began. While investigators hunted for more witnesses, they cataloged the crime scene. They understood three things right away. Number one, there were 10 shell casings at the scene. They were identified as 22-caliber Winchester Western Super X long rifle shells, which obviously led investigators to believe the killer had been using a rifle. But they would later discover that the bullets had been from a handgun, and they would narrow the results to one of two weapons, a J.C. Higgins Model 80, or a high-standard M-101 Duramatic. Those models are actually the same gun. They're just made by different companies. Either way, both guns had a maximum capacity of 10

rounds, which meant during the crime, the killer had fired the gun until it was empty. Number two, there was no sexual assault of either victim. Number three, the victims did not appear to have been robbed. They still had their money, their jewelry, and their watches. Sergeant Leslie Lundblad quickly learned that David Farad and Betty Lou Jensen were good kids. David was a high school wrestler and an Eagle Scout. Betty was an honor student. They had no enemies. At least that's the way it appeared initially. With further assault and robbery removed from the equation, Sergeant Lundblad was left with a very difficult, unanswered question. Why had David and Betty been killed? One day after the murders, Lundblad gave an interview to a San

Francisco News Channel in which he had to admit, we have no motive at this time. Over the coming days, Sergeant Lundblad and other investigators received a collection of statements from people who had been in the area of the Gate 10 entrance to the pumping station on Lake Herman Road on the night of December 20th. Frank Gasser and Robert Conley were the two raccoon hunters. As they drove past Gate 10 at about 9 p.m., they said they saw a white Chevrolet Impala parked in the pullout. Next, at about 9.30 p.m., Bill Crow and his girlfriend parked at Gate 10. They made no mention of any other car being parked in the lot at that time.

Then, sometime between 9.30 and 10 p.m., Bill and his girlfriend were chased out of the area by the mystery car. At about 10 p.m., local sheep rancher Bingo Wessner said he saw a white Chevy Impala parked in the Gate 10 lot. So that was two sightings of a white Impala at gate 10 in the space of an hour. The police report of Bill Crow's statement says that he was followed by a car that might have been a blue valiant. But Bill maintained he never specified the color or the type of the car. He has said that the inclusion of blue valiant in the report was a misinterpretation of his discussion about the encounter.

The fact was he didn't know what kind of car followed him that night. Maybe it was a blue valiant. Maybe it was a white Impala. Or maybe it was something else altogether. Whatever the case, Bill Crow's encounter with the mystery car ended sometime around 10 p.m. At about 10.15 p.m.,

a woman named Helen Axe was driving past Gate 10 with her boyfriend. She reported seeing David Faraday's 1960 Rambler parked at Gate 10. That was the first sighting of David's car. So, the kids were part of David's car. the kids were parked in the pullout sometime around 10.15 p.m. 45 minutes later, Peggy Yore and her husband Homer said they passed the gate 10 pullout area twice in a short space of time, once a few

minutes before 11 p.m. and again a few minutes after 11 p.m. Peggy said she saw David's car in the lot both times, but she reported no other cars in the pullout at either siding. A few minutes later, at approximately 11.14 p.m. James Owen drove past the pullout on the way to his job as the supervisor of the graveyard shift at Humble Oil in Benicia. He gave two statements to investigators. In both, he said there were now two cars in the pullout, a station wagon, David Faraday's Rambler, and another car that was parked a few feet to the right of the station wagon. But that's where Mr. Owen's insight ended. He did not see any people near the cars, and he was not able to describe the second car in either of his statements. And then finally, at about 1120 p.m., Stella Borges drove past

Gate 10 on her way home to the ranch. She noticed two teenagers lying on the ground in the vicinity of a station wagon in the pullout area, and she hurried to the town of Benicia to get help. Eight minutes later at 11.28 p.m., Captain Daniel Pitta arrived at the pullout area to secure the scene. Based on the reported times, the killer must have pulled into the parking area between 11 and 1114 p.m. And committed the murders in the six-minute window between 1114 and 1120. That was all Sergeant Lundblad and the rest of the investigators had to go on from the crime scene. A white Chevy Impala had been spotted in the area of the pumping station multiple times on the night of the murders. Maybe it was suspicious, maybe it wasn't.

The killer or killers had committed the fast, brutal murders with a small caliber handgun. The medical examination of Betty's body revealed the five gunshot wounds to her back were grouped together in a tight pattern. To have placed five shots so close together at a person who was running away, in the dark, meant the killer had to be a good shot. Eight months later, in August 1969, a person claiming to be the killer would explain how the feat was accomplished. It was an interesting trick if it could be believed.

Either way, it didn't point to the killer. It was just a handy piece of information that could be used to eliminate suspects. Furthermore, medical examinations and crime scene analysis revealed no robbery or sexual assault of the victims. With those two obvious motivations, for murder ruled out, the police report was forced to state, as Sergeant Lundblad would repeat in his TV interview, there was no apparent motive for the crime. In an effort to find a possible motive and a

possible suspect, Sergeant Lundblad and his partner, Sergeant Russell Butterbock, had to dig into the lives of David and Betty. As a matter of routine, the detectives talked to all the friends and family members of the victims. David's family and friends said he didn't have any enemies. Betty's family and friends said much the same, with one exception. Betty's friends mentioned a boy at her high school named Richard, who could be a person of interest. Richard usually went by Ricky or Rick, and with the benefit of hindsight, the whole situation seemed like a fairly typical teenage drama. For the first two weeks of 1968, Ricky and Betty were, quote, going together, which was an old-fashioned way of describing a relationship that was maybe a little more than friends,

but not quite dating. In this case, it seemed like Ricky and Betty had been hanging out in the school hallways between classes, but they had never been on a date. Apparently, Betty ended the association two days before she met David Faraday. Detectives found a handwritten note in one of Betty's binders. It looked like she was going to give it to someone, but it wasn't addressed to anyone, and it wasn't signed. It said, do you know a kid named Richard? I was going with him until two days before the installation. He still phones me and is threatening to keep me away from Dave. He said if he's

ever close enough to Dave, he would punch him in the teeth. I told him to leave me alone if he knows what's good for him. The heat around Ricky was getting hotter. Detectives learned Ricky was known to be a loud mouth and a braggart, and he had been in trouble for burglary over the summer. His parents were separated, so there was undoubtedly some tension at home. Sargent's Lundblad and Butterbock talked to Ricky and his family members. Ricky denied making threats against David. Detectives confronted him with the note in Betty's binder. Ricky acknowledged that it was her handwriting and said it was possible he could have made a

remark on the telephone about punching David, but he didn't remember. He was surprised Betty had written the note because he wasn't upset about their breakup. Ricky initially agreed to take a polygraph test and his parents consented, but they eventually called it off. Ricky was so nervous about the ordeal that he was scared his nerves would skew the results. Regardless, the heat around Ricky was starting to fade. Yes, he had had a little trouble with the law, but nothing serious or violent. Maybe he had made some juvenile threats, but threatening to punch a guy in the teeth was a far cry from threatening to kill him.

As far as anyone knew, Ricky had no access to a gun, which would play into one of the two big obstacles to Ricky's suspicion. He had a whole family of alibi witnesses, and it was highly unlikely that he was physically capable of the crime. Many of Ricky's family members stated that he was with them on the night of the murders. They were all watching a Bob Hope movie called A Global Affair on TV. And even if Ricky had found a way to slip out, steal his mother's car, and gain access to a gun, he would not have known where David and Betty were. The only way to have known their location at the isolated Lake Herman Road pullout would have been to have followed them throughout the night,

and that was impossible based on his alibi witnesses. And even if detectives found a way to believe that it was technically possible, how likely was it that Ricky was capable of both cold-blooded murder and the really accurate shooting that killed Betty Jensen? The answer circled back to that one word, virtually impossible. With the elimination of Ricky as a suspect, sergeant's Lundblad and Butterbock were back to square one. David Farad and Betty Lou Jensen were laid to rest,

December 23rd, two days before Christmas, 1968. Within a week of their murders, investigators had done a ton of work and were running out of leads. If Ricky wasn't the killer, then it seemed unlikely the kids were specifically targeted. If they weren't specifically targeted and there was no robbery or sexual assault, the detectives faced a dark, dangerous, and daunting reality. The crime was truly random and without motive. If that was the case, it could happen again, anytime, anywhere to anyone. And with no good leads on a suspect, there was no way to predict the killer's actions. The investigation languished, and with no new information, there wasn't much press coverage. It was the end of 1968, after all, one of the most tumultuous years in American history. The hippie culture centered in San Francisco

and the Summer of Love of 1967 had given way to darker times in 1968. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April. Robert F. Kennedy, a Democratic candidate for president, was assassinated in Los Angeles in June. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August was historically crazy. And that wasn't all. The Vietnam War had escalated an alarming rate over the last four years. years, despite public statements to the contrary or attempts to downplay the escalation by a variety of American leaders. In November, less than two months before the murders of David and

Betty, Richard Nixon was elected president, and he would take the war to a whole new level. Everything was changing. Music, movies, books, fashion, technology, the 1960s saw the collapse of the old Hollywood studio system and the expiration of the censorship code that had been imposed for 40 years. It was the year of sci-fi classics 2001 a space odyssey and Planet of the Apes. Horror classics, Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead. Musical classics, Funny Girl, and Oliver. Comedy classics, the producers, and the odd couple. Drama classics, the graduate and the lion in winter. And more spaghetti westerns than you could check a stick at. The Beatles released their legendary opus, The White Album, in November 1968.

Two weeks later, the Rolling Stones released Beggars Banquet. At the time, it didn't have the prominent singles like previous albums, but it did contain two little ditties that would become world famous for all time, street fighting man and sympathy for the devil. Three weeks later, in January, 1969, both Hall of Fame British bands, would have to make way as the world was introduced to a new, ear-splitting, bone-jarring, teeth-crunching British force in rock music. Led Zeppelin. On the same day, January 12th, Led Zeppelin released its first album, the New York Jets won Super Bowl 3. It was the first AFL-N-FL championship game

that bore the name Super Bowl, and it was the stage for a young, cocky quarterback named Joe Namath to become a legend. Namath predicted his jets would upset the heavily favored Baltimore Colts, and they did. The film footage of Namath jogging off the field after the game, waving a single finger in the air above his head, has become iconic in American sports. In Vallejo, California, while the pro football season was ending and a new era of rock music was beginning, the case of the double homicide of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen remained open, and unsolved. It would be eight months before there was even a hint of new information,

and it would be only a hint. But it would signal a sharp escalation, and it would connect David and Betty's case to a much larger case, one that would soon be nationwide news. Next time on Infamous America, a killer targets two young people at Blue Rock Springs Park, but the attack doesn't go as planned. And then, whether or not the Lake Herman Road case is related to the Blue Rock Springs Park case, the whole situation turns utterly bizarre when a person purporting to be the killer sends letters to San Francisco newspapers.

The debut of the Zodiac is next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrow Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes. They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials, and they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships are just $5 per month.

This series was researched by Julia Brickland, original music by Rob Valier. I'm your writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and V-Barrell Media on Twitter, and you can stream all our episodes on YouTube.

Just search for Infamous America, podcast. Thanks for listening.