Infamous America - ZODIAC KILLER Ep. 3 | “The Cipher”

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

While the police, the FBI, the U.S. Navy, and random civilians try to break the code of the killer’s cipher, the killer sends another letter to the press. He gives himself a name, the Zodiac, and taunts the police departments that are unable to catch him. Within a few days, a pair of teachers break the code of the Zodiac’s cipher and reveal the twisted ramblings of a killer. Meanwhile, the Zodiac prepares for his next crime.   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

My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN, so you can get something that's very low in THC, but higher in CBD, which helps turn off the stress,

and CBN, which is the thing that makes you sleepy. The brain shuts up, the racing thoughts stop, and it's off to sleep. Mood is federally compliant. The gummies are legal and delivered right to your door. At Mood.com, get 20% off your first order with our promo code, Infamous. Go to Mood.com and use the code infamous to get 20% off your first order. your first order. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. For the decision makers at three San Francisco area newspapers, the clock was ticking.

At some point on the morning of Friday, August 1st, 1969, they had received the strangest pieces of mail in their histories. Someone, presumably a killer, had mailed a letter to the Vallejo Times Herald, the San Francisco Examiner, and the San Francisco Examiner. San Francisco Chronicle. Each letter was a poorly written scrawl in blue ink that claimed credit for the murders of David Faraday, Betty Lou Jensen, and Darlene Farron, without calling any of them by name. Most importantly, the killer included a coded puzzle in each letter and demanded the newspapers print their puzzles that afternoon, Friday, August 1st.

If they didn't, the author said he would go on a quote, kill rampage that would last all weekend. So now, the top brass at the newspapers had to decide what to do. If the author of the letters was, in fact, the killer, and at the moment he certainly seemed to be, he had proved himself capable of extreme violence. In December 1968, he shot and killed 17-year-old David Faraday and 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen. Seven months later, he shot and killed 22-year-old Darlene Farron. He had tried to kill her date, 19-year-old Mike Mijou, but Mike survived multiple gunshot wounds. He had been able to provide the Vallejo Police with a basic description of the killer and his car, but both were too generic to be of use. Then, 40 minutes after the shooting,

the killer made a short phone call to the Vallejo Police Department in which he claimed credit for both attacks. That step, in and of itself, was rare in critical. criminal history. Few killers take the risk of directly taunting the police or drawing attention to themselves. But 27 days later, the Bay Area killer did both, again and much more, by sending the letters and the cryptograms to the press. That Friday morning, the newspapers all made different decisions. Now, believe it or not, there was an era before the internet and computers and cell phones. In those ancient times, which many would be justified in calling the good old days, there were morning editions of newspapers, afternoon editions, and sometimes even evening

editions. In Vallejo, the morning newspaper was the Vallejo Times Herald. The afternoon newspaper was the Vallejo News Chronicle. Even though the letter had been addressed to the Times Harold, the killer presumably knew that his cipher, if printed as instructed, would appear in the afternoon paper, the Vallejo News Chronicle. And that's what happened. Vallejo fully complied with the killer's demand. That Friday afternoon, the cipher appeared on page one of the News Chronicle. In San Francisco, there was the same dynamic of morning and afternoon newspapers. The examiner was the afternoon paper, but it did not fully comply. It printed a story about the letter on page three, and it did not print the cipher.

The next morning, Saturday, August 2nd, the Vallejo Times Herald made the situation more messy and complicated. It printed a story about the letter on page one, as requested. But for some reason, it printed the ciphers that had been sent to the San Francisco newspapers. It did not print its own cipher. The San Francisco Chronicle fully complied. It printed a story and its cipher on page one on Saturday morning. The following morning, Sunday, August 3rd, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle printed a joint edition like they did every Sunday morning.

That paper, finally, featured all three pieces of the puzzle. And the race was on to crack the code. From BlackBarrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the story of of the Zodiac Killer, one of the most notorious, unsolved criminal cases in American history. This is episode 3, The Cipher. The first three days of August, 1969, were a blur of activity for the press and the police. As the newspapers made the process of printing the ciphers far more complicated than it needed to be,

the Vallejo police were trying to crack the code of the cipher and lure the killer into making a mistake at the same time. When the three pieces of the puzzle that had been sent to the three newspapers were added up, the total number of characters in the cipher was 408. Over time, that first cipher became known as the 408 cipher, and the police and the press had a two-day head start on cracking it, since they were the only ones who had seen all three pieces. Vallejo Police Chief Jack Stilts immediately enlisted the help of the cryptographic unit at Skaggs Island Naval Communication Station,

which was conveniently located about 10 miles from Vallejo Police Headquarters. The U.S. Navy's codebreakers went to work. Meanwhile, if the author and probable killer was so talkative and wanted to play games, Chief Stilts decided to play. When the Vallejo News Chronicle printed its story and its piece of the cipher on Friday afternoon, August 1st, It included comments from stilts that were intended to challenge the author. In the three letters, the author had provided seven details about the attacks, four about the Lake Herman Road murders of David and Betty,

and three about the Blue Rock Springs shooting that killed Darlene Farron and wounded Mike Mijot. The details were intended to prove the author's claim of being the killer. But Chief Stilts argued in the press that a person who had observed the crime scene, and carefully followed the media coverage, could have acquired those pieces of information. Now, in reality, the odds of the author and the killer being two different people were virtually nil, and Stilts knew it. It was all but guaranteed that the author of the letters was the killer, but Stilts decided to turn the killer's communications into an opportunity. He challenged the author to provide more information in order to prove his identity as the killer.

As the weekend progressed, the killer took up the challenge, unbeknownst to the police of the press. Sunday morning, August 3rd, all three pieces of the cipher appeared together in public for the first time. They were printed in the weekly joint edition of the Examiner and the Chronicle, and now everyone realized the extent of the challenge. The full cipher had been divided into three pieces, and no one knew how to connect the pieces to each other. And on a more fundamental level, the killer gave no hint as to what kind of cipher it was. There are lots of different kinds of ciphers, like the Caesar cipher, named after the code used by Julius Caesar, the transposition cipher, and the substitution cipher. And that's what it turned out to be, a substitution cipher.

There were six different types of characters in the code, and each character represented a letter of the English alphabet. Once you figured out which characters represented which letters, you could decrypt the message. For law enforcement, it was a race against time, which it always is, but in this case, there were big differences. The killer had threatened immediate action if the newspapers didn't comply with his demand, and they didn't, at least not to the extent he had instructed. On Friday afternoon, the killer's deadline, Vallejo complied, but San Francisco did not. Secondly, there was a critical piece of information in the letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that increased the tension.

The three letters to the newspapers were nearly identical. Even when the wording differed, the sentiment was the same. For instance, at the end of each letter, the killer threatened to go on a kill rampage that would last all weekend. All three letters contained the same threat, but the threat was worded slightly differently each time. There was only one exception to the content of the letters. The letter to the San Francisco Chronicle contained one short sentence, six words, that the

other two letters did not. That sentence was, in this cipher is my identity. Most people, especially law enforcement, understood that sentence to mean the killer would reveal his name. But as it would be argued endlessly afterward, the word identity didn't necessarily mean name. Either way, they waited anxiously for someone to break the code. On Sunday morning, hundreds, if not thousands of people saw the cipher in the newspaper and started trying to decrypt the puzzle. Before they could make any progress, the San Francisco Examiner heard from the

killer again. The paper would continue to call him the cipher killer for a little while longer, but for the first time, the killer gave himself a name. The same Sunday that the first Cipher was printed in the newspaper, there was another double murder in Northern California. Two girls, 14-year-old Deborah Furlong and 15-year-old Kathy Snoozy, were killed in an area that is now a neighborhood of San Jose. The murders were especially brutal. Combined, the girls were stabbed more than 300 times. Earlier that morning, while some people were reading the news of the Cypher killer in the papers, the girls packed the lunch and hiked up a train. to a hilltop. When they didn't return by 6.30 that evening, Deborah's father called the police.

The girls were discovered on the hill where they had gone for their picnic. Four months later, the Zodiac killer would claim credit for the murders. In one of the ongoing themes of the Zodiac case, he lied. He didn't do it. The real killer, Carl Werner, was caught two years later after he committed a third murder. But on Monday, August 4th, the double-mer murder would be overshadowed in the San Francisco press by another letter from the man they were calling the cipher killer. The killer had seen the comments by Vallejo Police Chief Jack Stilts over the weekend, in which Stilt said he wasn't convinced that the author of the letters was the killer. In answer to the challenge, the killer sent his most famous letter, the one that began,

This is the Zodiac speaking. The letter was delivered to the San Francisco Examiner on Monday, August 5th. From now on, the killer would not take the time and effort to communicate with multiple news outlets. And for reasons that will never be clear, this was the last time he sent a letter to the examiner. It was a three-page letter that began with this opening paragraph. Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking, an answer to your asking for more details about the good times I have had in Vallejo, I shall be happy to supply even more material. By the way, are the police having a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up.

When they do crack it, they will have me. The killer went on to write a section of details about the attack on Mike Mijon and Darlene Farron at Blue Rock Springs Park, and then a section about the murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen at Lake Herman Road. In the section about Lake Herman Road, he explained a detail that had intrigued investigators. On the night of the attack, he shot Betty in the back five times. The bullets hit her in a tightly grouped pattern while she was running away. Under those conditions, it was a remarkable feat of accuracy.

The killer explained how he did it. He taped a small flashlight to the barrel of his handgun. When the beam shone on something solid, like a wall, there was a small dark spot in the center of the beam. The dark spot acted like a crude laser pointer. Wherever the spot landed, that's where the bullet struck. It was a simple yet effective trick. The killer ended the letter with a potentially ominous line. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page coverage.

He signed off with the zodiac symbol and the words, No address, written in capital letters. The letter was written in the same sloppy, slanted handwriting, and with all the same types of misspellings, grammatical errors, strange abbreviations, and unusual punctuations as the previous letters. There was no cipher in this one, as it had only been three days since the police had received the 408 cipher, and there was no direct mention of the kill rampage that he didn't perpetrate over the weekend. The only vague allusion to it was that he was not happy the

papers hadn't printed the ciphers on their front pages in the time frame he had demanded. The letter that debuted the name Zodiac and connected it to the cross hair symbol the killer used as a signature at the bottom of his letters was intended to prove authenticity. The author was the killer. In public, Chief Stilts continued to downplay the possibility that the author and the killer were the same person. But in private, lawmen knew the author was their guy. They just had to figure out how to find him. In the 81 years since the arrival of the first Jack the Ripper letter, no criminal that anyone was aware of had communicated with the press and the police to this extent.

The Zodiac's letters might provide fascinating insight into the killer's mind and character, but they didn't give any clues to his identity. For that, lawmen could only hope that someone cracked the code on the cipher. Four days after the debut of the Zodiac letter, someone did. Donald and Betty Hardin were teachers in Salinas, California, an hour south of San Francisco. Donald liked codes and puzzles, and on Sunday morning, when the full cipher appeared in the newspaper, he cleared off the dining room table of their house to create a workspace. He settled in to give the code a shot.

He worked for about three hours until Betty joined him. They spent the rest of the day and part of the evening attempting different methods to crack the code, but they had no luck. They put the cipher away for the night and returned to it the next morning. And that was when they started to make progress. They decided that if the puzzle was a substitution cipher, the word that was most likely to be in the message

was the word kill. With that in mind, and with the knowledge that the most common double letter in English is the double L, they looked for recurring sets of characters that could represent a double L. When they found them, they started testing

the theory that the characters right before the double L would represent the letters K-I. Betty figured out the sequence of characters that represented the letters I-N-G, and with that, they were often running. Over the course of five days, they spent about 20 hours total working on the code. By the fifth day, August 8th, they had decrypted the 408 cipher. It wasn't pleasant reading, but they sent their solution to the San Francisco examiner, which passed it to law enforcement, which verified the Hardin's work. After the shooting at Blue Rock Springs Park a month earlier, a Vallejo police officer had said to the press, we've got a crazy man on the loose. He was more right than he could have imagined.

The decrypted message read, I like killing people because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is when I die, I will be reborn in paradise, and all the lone or stray people I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down

or stop my collecting of slaves for the afterlife. To the disappointment of law enforcement, the killer had not given his name. or any clues to his identity. In fact, he had done the opposite. The message said he would not give his name, which probably wasn't much of a shock and would be a recurring theme

throughout the killer's communications. Another recurring theme was another debate over another mystery that will probably remain unsolved forever. The 408 cipher had 408 characters. After the Hardens completed their work, they had 18 characters left over at the bottom of the cipher that represented a collection of 18 random letters.

The letters didn't form words in the same pattern as the previous 390 letters had. For nearly 60 years, investigators and amateur enthusiasts have tried to understand why. What was the meaning of the 18 random letters at the end of the cipher? Was there any meaning? Some have suggested the killer changed the code for the 18 characters at the end of the cipher. maybe those characters do contain the name of the killer or a clue to his identity, but he encrypted them with a different code that has not been broken. Or maybe those characters are intentionally random as a way to confuse and toy with the police.

Or maybe there's a simpler answer, which is usually the case. Since the letters and ciphers were all written by hand, maybe the killer made a mistake. Maybe when he wrote one of the three pieces, he accidentally, included a sequence of characters from an earlier draft of his message. Taken altogether, the mystery deepened and darkened. The message in the cipher didn't provide clarity, it provided more questions. And the most basic was, is the killer really a criminal mastermind? The sloppy handwriting, the awkward, childlike phrasing, the terrible spelling,

punctuation, and grammar, was all of that designed on purpose by a highly intelligent man, who was creating a false persona for the police as a way to shield his true identity. Or not, was the killer just a crazy man who kept getting lucky? It would be a while before people in Northern California found out. In the meantime, the entire country and then the world would be captivated and sickened by some of the most notorious murders in American history. On August 8, 1969, the same day the Hardens cracked the Zodiac killers, first code. Four lads from Liverpool were photographed jaywalking in London. The Beatles staged their

iconic picture of walking across the white painted stripes of Abbey Road outside the EMI recording studios, later to be renamed Abbey Road Studios. The photo became the cover of their famous album, Abby Road, the last album they recorded together. And while the Beatles were taking their photo and the Hardens were solving a puzzle by one of America's most notorious killers, arguably the most famous American criminal was crafting a diabolical plan. That night, August 8, 1969, Charles Manson sent four of his followers to a home in the canyon above Beverly Hills. The home on Cello Drive in Benedict Canyon was being rented by the famous actress Sharon Tate

and her famous film director husband, Roman Polansky. That night, the members of the so-called Manson family snuck onto the grounds of the secluded house and viciously murdered five people. Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant. Jay Sebring, a famous hairstylist, Abigail Folger, whose family built the Folger Coffee Empire, Vortex Vauxley, a friend of Roman Polansky and the fiancé of Abigail Folger, and Stephen Parent, an 18-year-old kid who didn't know any of the other victims, and was only there to visit the caretaker of the property who lived in a cottage behind the main house.

The bodies of the dead were discovered the next morning, and the media circus began. That night, August 8th, the murder spree continued. Four members of the Manson family broke into a home on the other side of Los Angeles and stabbed and killed husband and wife, Lino, and Rosemary La Bianca. The killers used the blood of the victims to write the words, rise, death to pigs, and helter-skelter inside the house. Over the course of maybe 30 hours, the followers of Charles Manson murdered seven people

and launched the wild and strange saga of one of the most well-known criminals in history. Manson and his followers were arrested on August 16th, a week after the La Bianca murders, on suspicion of being part of a car theft ring. No one yet suspected them of the murders. And at that time, law enforcement did not believe the two sets of murders were connected. Manson and his followers were released a few days later. They fled the L.A. area and retreated to the desert. They hold up at a set of ramshackle buildings called Barker Ranch on the edge of Death Valley,

six hours north of Los Angeles. At the remote, isolated, desolate location, it was easy for them to disappear. They would remain hidden until October, when their story would again coincide with the zodiac story. All of that happened in the first half of August, 1969 in California, the first zodiac letters, the first cipher, the second zodiac letter, which debuted the name, the discovery of the message in the cipher, the infamous murders in Hollywood and Manson's arrest and release. What could possibly draw attention away from all that? The answer was one word.

Woodstock. Six days after the La Bianca murders, close to 500,000 people converged on a dairy farm on the other side of the country in New York to watch the most legendary rock concert of all time. Woodstock started at 507 p.m. on Friday, August 15th, 16th, 1969. Richie Havens, Arlo Guthrie, and Joan Baez highlighted the first day of music, which didn't

end until 4 o'clock in the morning on Saturday the 16th. Country Joe McDonald and Santana highlighted the early performers when the music started back up again Saturday afternoon. That night, an epic lineup played in this order. The Grateful Dead, Credence Clearwater Revival, Janice Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane. The music went all night long, and it would happen again Sunday. The final day and night included, among others, Joe Cocker, the band, Johnny Winter, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young, and finally, Jimmy Hendricks,

who would have blown the roof off the place to finish the show if there had been a roof. The historic concert finished a little after 11 a.m. on Monday, August 18th, 1969. There would be future attempts to recreate the magic of Woodstock, but none would compare to the original. Five weeks after Woodstock, Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Shepherd were lying on the shoreline of a small peninsula that jutted out into Lake Beriasa in Napa County. Like Lake Hermon in the Vallejo area, Lake Berriessa is a man-nellarer. made reservoir that was created to provide drinking water and hydroelectricity for the people of Northern California's world-famous winemaking region. It was a relatively new project, and when Brian and Cecilia visited in September of 1969, the reservoir had only been full for six years.

Between that day in September, September 27th, and the end of Woodstock in mid-August, it had been quiet in California in terms of news about the cipher killer and the horror. murders in Los Angeles, which were not yet linked to Charles Manson. For Vallejo Police Chief Jack Stilts and his detectives, and for Salano County Sheriff's Sergeant Leslie Lundblad, their investigations were at another impasse. There were no new leads from the Lake Herman Road or Blue Rock Springs crime scenes, and the killer had provided no usable information in his letters or his cipher. But on September 27th, 19-7th, a whole new chapter would begin. Brian Hartnell was 20 years old, and Cecilia Shepard was 22,

nearly identical to the ages of Mike Mejou and Darlene Farron. Brian and Cecilia had dated a year earlier in 1968 while they were both students at Pacific Union College in Napa Valley. But by 1969, Cecilia had transferred to a school in Southern California that was closer to her family and her home. In now in September, she only had one remaining chore. She needed to retrieve the stuff that she had put in a storage unit in Napa Valley when she had moved out of her dorm at Pacific Union College. While she was collecting her belongings, she decided to eat lunch at the cafeteria on the college

campus. In the cafeteria, she ran into Brian and one of her other friends. They all hung out for a while, and then Brian and Cecilia decided to spend the afternoon together. The initial plan was to go into San Francisco, but the day was getting late and the drive was too long. Brian suggested they go to Lake Beriasa. He'd been there before and he knew a great spot to lounge around and spend a quiet afternoon. Unfortunately, Brian couldn't find the spot he'd been to previously, so they settled for the nearest spot at hand. They parked Brian's car on Knoxville Road, which runs along the entire western side of the lake.

They walked a couple hundred yards down to the little peninsula, spread a blanket on the ground, and laid down to relax. They chatted about old times and the beauty of the scenery around them. A little while later, Cecilia made a comment that would, in hindsight, be the first sign of trouble. She said she saw a man watching them. From the position in which Brian was laying, he couldn't see the man. Brian was laying on his back facing the lake. Cecilia was lying on her stomach with her hands and head resting on Brian's chest,

so she was facing the opposite direction. She was looking back up toward the hills above the lake where they had parked Brian's car. In Brian's later recollections, he said he misunderstood the stranger's proximity. The shoreline of Lake Beriesa is a ragged series of peninsulas. Brian thought the man was on the next peninsula over, a couple hundred yards away, and separated by a narrow stretch of water. But he was wrong. The man was on their peninsula.

He was only 50 to 75 yards away. As Cecilia became more distracted by the stranger, Brian became more frustrated. He didn't understand why she was so fixated on a guy whom Brian believed was so far away. Then Cecilia said the man went behind a tree. Brian shrugged it off and said the guy was probably going to the bathroom. And Brian didn't realize that the tree Cecilia was talking about was right behind them.

It was one of three big trees on their little peninsula and was only 10 to 20 yards away. Then Cecilia cried, oh my God, he's got a gun. At that point, Brian turned over and saw the bizarre spectacle that would become the most well-known and enduring image of the Zodiac killer. The man was not disguised when he had approached from a distance, but when he ducked behind the tree, he put on a black hood, similar to the ones worn by executioners in medieval times. The hood was flat on top and had squareish corners,

as if the material had been glued to a brown paper shopping bag. Dark clip-on glasses had been attached to the outside over the eye holes so that the man's eyes could be shielded. The cloth hung all the way down the man's chest so that it nearly reached his waist. Toward the bottom of the cloth was the neatly embroidered zodiac symbol. Brian noted that it had been created with care.

It was not a quick, sloppy, hand-drawn image. It had taken time and effort to create. At that time, the symbol didn't mean anything to Brian. He didn't recognize it as the symbol of a killer. He thought the hood could have come from a costume shop or something like that. Despite the press cover, people outside of the Vallejo area were not as in tune with the Zodiac story as those who lived in the small city where the first two attacks had happened.

And as the man marched toward Brian and Cecilia with the gun, he didn't announce himself as Zodiac. He simply said, in a fairly calm voice, words to the effect of, there's nothing to be afraid of. All I need is your money and your car. If everyone stays cool, no one will get hurt. In the moment, and despite the shock of the situation, Brian believed the hooded stranger. He would turn out to be very wrong. Next time on Infamous America, the Zodiac Killer commits a third attack in a third police jurisdiction. Once again, the killer would connect the recent attack to the previous attacks,

but this time he would do it in a new and haltingly visual way. And worse, the killer was now keeping score. That's 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 Wimma. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're BlackBarrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.