Infamous America - ZODIAC KILLER Ep. 4 | “Lake Berryessa”

Episode Date: October 2, 2024

Two college students relax along the shore of a lake in Napa County, California on a sunny afternoon in September of 1969. Before long, they are interrupted by a man who wears an eerie black hood and carries a gun. The man attacks the students with a knife and leaves them for dead. The killer writes a message on the students’ car and calls the police to take credit for the crime. In the process, he leaves behind new clues that investigators add to the growing list of evidence about the elusive criminal.   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

The man in the black executioner's hood with a semi-automatic handgun told Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard to stay calm. If they gave him their money and their car, they wouldn't be hurt. It was late afternoon on Saturday, September 27, 1969, and the young adults said they would willingly comply. Brian was 20 years old, and Cecilia was 22, and they were in a vulnerable spot, beyond the fact that a man in a crazy costume had them dead to rights with a gun. The pair had dated the previous year when they were both in school at Pacific Union College in Napa Valley in Northern California. But after the school year, Cecilia transferred to a school in Southern California.

She was only back in Napa to collect her remaining possessions so she could complete the move. She had bumped into Brian randomly and they had decided to hang out for the afternoon. They had driven to Lake Beriesa, a man-made reservoir on the edge of Napa Valley, to relax in a quiet spot for the rest of the day. They were now lying on a blanket on the shoreline of the lake, and a man in the black hood was pointing a gun at them. They were hundreds of yards from Brian's car. There was no one else around. There was nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. All they could do was hope the man was telling the truth.

He had made his demand for their money and their car, but then he continued by launching into an explanation of why he was robbing them. He said he had escaped from Deer Lodge Prison in Montana, and he was running to Mexico. Deer Lodge, Montana is a real place, and so is the state prison outside town. But why he picked that prison and actually named it remains a mystery. Either way, that was his excuse.

Brian said he only had 75 cents on him, which was true. He offered to write a check. He offered to help in any other way, but he didn't have any more cash. He tossed his wallet and his car keys to the stranger, but that didn't seem to help the situation. The man with the gun declared that he would have to tie up Brian and Cecilia. He pulled pre-cut lengths of clothesline from his back pocket and tossed them to Cecilia. Cecilia loosely tied Brian's hands behind him.

The stranger took the ropes and tied Cecilia's hands so tight, she started losing feeling in her arms. He tightened the knot on Brian's hands. He tied Brian's feet together, tied Brian's hands to his feet in a version of the classic hog tie, and did the same to Cecilia. Now, with both people immobilized, the stranger was free to take their money and their car and leave. But he didn't. Brian was a confident young man, and he had taken courses in psychology, and he had the presence of mind to keep the man talking in an effort to dissuade him from any further action.

Brian had read an article that said lots of armed robbers used unloaded guns during their crimes. They didn't want to take the chance that they might fire a shot accidentally and kill someone, and then their crime escalated to murder. Brian asked the stranger if his gun was loaded. The man ejected the clip from the weapon and showed it to Brian. It was fully loaded. The man was not bluffing. He was also not an escaped convict, and he was not there to rob them.

At that point, he pulled out a knife and started stabbing Brian Hartnell. 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 four, Lake Beriesa. Brian Hartnell had demonstrated an impressive amount of confidence and awareness with the assailant who had approached with the gun. Brian had tried to keep the man talking in an effort to convince the man to call off a

possible attack. Up until the time the knife came out, Brian genuinely thought the stranger's goal was robbery. But that was never the man's intent. Now, Brian demonstrated an even more impressive degree of restraint when the killer began his attack. The man stabbed Brian six to eight times in the back in quick succession. Brian absorbed the blows and found the willpower to play dead to the best of his ability, rather than to scream and thrash around. His tactic seemed to have worked.

After the rapid attack, the man seemed to have believed, he had done enough, and he moved on to Cecilia. Cecilia had just watched the attack on Brian, and as the killer approached, she shouted and squirmed and fought as best she could. Her resistance drove the man into what Brian called a frenzy. The killer stabbed her over and over, at least ten times, though the damage would be so extensive, it would be hard to get an accurate count afterward. When the frenzy subsided, the killer walked, away without another word and didn't touch Brian's wallet or car keys. Brian and Cecilia were in an incredible amount of pain, though obviously Cecilia had suffered the worst attack. Still, they were both

conscious and lucid, and they immediately started talking about ways to free themselves. It wouldn't be easy in their conditions and with their restraints, but Brian quickly settled on a plan. He wiggled and scooted and rolled himself into position to use his teeth to untie one of Cecilia's hands. That was a huge development, but the victims quickly realized they had a new problem. Cecilia couldn't move her hand, or her arm, or even feel either of them. The Zodiac killer had tied the ropes so tight she had lost all circulation in her arms and hands. Everything was numb. With no way for Cecilia to finish untying herself or to help Brian, they started yelling for help.

Several motorboats cruised through the lake nearby, but none stopped. Brian assumed their cries for help couldn't be heard over the engines. But then one boat did stop. Fisherman Richard Fong idled his boat in the narrow strip of water between the peninsula where Brian and Cecilia lay bleeding and a small island just off the coast. Brian and Cecilia continued to call out as best they could, with their voices likely losing strength with the effort. For 15 minutes, the boat sat in the water and did nothing.

There was no response to their cries for help. And then the engine started back up and the boat drove away. That was the moment of deep despair. The sun was setting, the light was fading, the temperature was dropping, and the pair believed no one was coming. to help them. But then it took a turn. During those crucial 15 minutes, Cecilia regained feeling in her free hand. She had enough strength left to loosen one of Brian's knots. He worked himself out of his bonds and then finished untying Cecilia. They were free, but Brian believed they were on their own,

and they had to save themselves. They were isolated and alone, with no way to communicate with the outside world. But since the killer had never intended to rob them, he had not taken Brian's car keys. Brian scooped up the keys and determined the only option for survival was for him to make it to his car and drive somewhere to get help. He stood up, walked about five feet, and then dropped to his knees. He nearly passed out. He experienced that faint, lightheaded feeling we've all felt when we stand up too fast. He saw bright spots in his vision, followed by darkness, but his feeling was magnified. He was losing blood, and his strength was rapidly failing. He immediately understood there was no way he could walk all the way up the hill in front of him

to his car on the road in one long trip. He would have to take it a few feet at a time, so that's what he did. He stood up, walked a few feet, then paused to regain his strength. Then repeated the process. He learned that if he bent over at the waist and clutched his arms to his chest, it helped him maintain his strength a little longer. He kept going, trudging forward a few feet at a time, moving in a half crouch, slowly making progress in the growing darkness. He never made it to his car.

But as it turned out, he didn't need to. 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. And they have a 100-day satisfaction guarantee. Mood.com promo code infamous. Fisherman Richard Fong had no way of knowing what had happened on the peninsula that afternoon at Lake Beriesa.

But something had caught his attention and he paused his boat to listen. Fifteen minutes later, when he started his engine and sped away, Brian and Cecilia believed he had abandoned them. He hadn't. He raced toward a park ranger station at the lake and reported his experience. Park Ranger William White put out a radio call, and then he and a husband and wife who were at the station jumped into Richard's boat and hauled ass back to the peninsula. While they churned through the water, Brian continued struggling toward Knoxville Road where his car was parked. About halfway to the road,

he found a dirt track that was a utility road used by the park rangers. He saw headlights in the distance moving toward him on the dirt track. He knelt on the trail and waved at the approaching lights. The vehicle stopped and the driver's door opened. Brian was blinded by the headlights and then a flashlight the driver was holding. Brian's first thought was that he had made it all this way and had just stumbled into the path of his attacker. But as the driver approached, Brian saw a patch on the driver's heavy jacket.

The driver was Park Ranger Dennis Land. He loaded Brian into his vehicle and rushed down to the peninsula where Cecilia lay in excruciating pain. When Brian and Ranger Land arrived, Richard Fong had delivered his passengers. Fong, Ranger White, and the married couple were trying to help Cecilia, but her condition grew worse by the minute. White had radioed for an ambulance, but the location was so remote that it took 45 minutes for the paramedics to arrive. Right before the ambulance showed up, deputies from the Napa County Sheriff's Department

found the isolated scene. They had been notified as well and had snaked their way through the narrow roads to make it to the lake. It was now nearly two hours since the attack. The medical personnel moved Brian and Cecilia into the ambulance and hurried to a hospital in Napa as fast as the terrain would allow.

When they arrived shortly before 9 p.m., Brian was still awake, but Cecilia had lapsed into a coma. Doctors began emergency treatment, as everyone had a long night ahead of them. And to the extent that any kind of comparison could be made, at least the doctors understood the task and the challenge before them. Even if they had never treated severe stab wounds, it wasn't like stab wounds were some science fiction insanity that had never been documented before.

But that analogy was closer to the reality for the Napa County Sheriff's Department. With the avalanche of information that buried them in the space of two hours that Saturday night in late September, they had no idea what in the blue hell they were dealing with. Brian Hartnell never made it to his car, so he didn't see the part of it that would be kept as evidence to this day, and probably forever. That night, Sheriff's deputies stared at the passenger door of his Volkswagen Carman Gia. The attacker had used a black, felt-tip pen to write a message on the door. It read,

Zodiac symbol. Beneath that, 12-20-68, 7-4-69, September 27-69-69-630, by knife. The quick translation was, a person claiming to be the Zodiac killer

was taking credit for the Lake Hermann, Road attack on December 20th, 1968, the Blue Rock Springs attack on July 4th, 1969, and the attack that day at Lake Beriesa on September 27th, 1969 at 6.30 p.m., which had been committed with a knife. As the deputies viewed the piece of evidence, which would produce another iconic image in the Zodiac story, they were unaware that their sister unit, the City of Napa Police department was receiving a phone call from the killer, just like the one the Vallejo police had received two and a half months earlier. For at least an hour after the attack, no one knows what the killer did or where he went, but he popped back up on the radar at about 7.40 p.m. In Napa,

rookie police officer David Slate was acting as the dispatcher. The woman who was the regular dispatcher at that hour of the night was on her lunch break. As a small force, it was standard procedure in the Napal Police Department for rookie officers to come off patrol and cover for the dispatchers when they took their breaks. During that relatively short window of time, when the regular dispatcher was on her break and Officer Slate was monitoring the dispatch station, the call came in. Officer Slate answered the call and heard a male voice that he estimated to be from a man in his 20s. The man said, I want to report a murder.

No, a double murder. They are two miles north of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Carmen Gia. Officer Slate thought the man was a random citizen who had stumbled upon a crime scene or was a good Samaritan. Maybe a park ranger had discovered the crime in a remote area

and had asked the caller to hurry to the nearest phone and call the police. Slate asked the caller, Where are you now? The caller responded in a quiet voice, I'm the one that did it. Those were the last words the caller spoke, but he didn't hang up.

Officer Slate heard what he later described as a clatter. At first, he didn't understand the noise, but he could see that the call had not been disconnected, and he could still hear the sounds of traffic and far away voices coming through the telephone. The caller had used a payphone, and he had simply dropped the receiver instead of placing it back on the hook. The line was still open, and the police raced to find the phone's location.

Officer Slate called the Napa County Sheriff's Department on a different phone line so he could keep the callers line open. He asked the sheriff's operator to trace the call. It was a slow process, and the only information she was able to report with any speed was that the phone was definitely in the Napa area. At the same time, one of the two departments broadcast over the radio, a quick report about the call. Pat Stanley, the news director at a radio station in Napa, heard the broadcast on his police scanner and ran out the door. He had been hearing radio chatter about the stabbings at Lake Beriesa as law enforcement coordinated their response,

and now there was a real-time development that might be right there in town. Stanley hopped in his car, drove to the sheriff's department, and then from there started driving around the city of Napa. As he drove down Main Street, he spotted a payphone booth. He initially drove past it and thought the caller probably used a phone that was closer to the lake. But then he stopped and doubled back. He pulled over, walked toward the payphone, and could see that the receiver was off the hook and dangling from the cord. Luckily for officers, Pat Stanley had the wherewithal to stop right there. Instead of going into the phone booth and grabbing the handset, he shouted from a few feet away,

Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Officer Slate could hear Pat Stanley, and they had confirmed, through some old-fashioned ingenuity, that the call had come from a phone that was less than half a mile from the Napa Police Department. If Slate had known the location immediately, an officer could have driven there in seconds. As it was, Detective Sergeant Harold Snook rushed to the phone and started processing it for fingerprints. He found 35 usable prints, some of which were so recent, they still had moisture on them. But at that moment, then as now, with fingerprints and today's DNA technology, the prints would only be helpful if the police could find a match and start

asking questions. In the days that followed, they wouldn't have luck on that score. But that night and into the next day, the work was just beginning at the crime scene on the shore of Lake Beriesa. It would yield the first real piece of evidence about the Zodiac killer. The crime scene was a blessing and a curse. On the downside, one of the park rangers had moved all of the physical evidence to park headquarters. Brian and Cecilia's possessions, the blanket, the ropes they had been tied with, and everything. The evidence was contaminated and could not be viewed in its original setting by detectives. That was incredibly frustrating to sheriff's deputies.

But on the upside, when the sun rose the next morning and investigators could get a proper look at the crime scene, they spotted their key piece of evidence. Distinctive, high-quality boot prints had been preserved in the dirt. Investigators could trace a clear path from where the killer had parked his car on Knoxville, road, right behind Brian's car, down the hill to the scene of the attack, and then back up to the road. On the return trip, the prince led straight to Brian's car, where the killer had paused to write the note on the door. Investigators took photos of the prince, made plaster casts, and began the process of trying to identify the footwear. It wouldn't be easy, but it would

lead to a good result. In the meantime, Monday, September 29th, Sheriff's investigators received interesting eyewitness statements about a possible sighting of the killer. Earlier on the day of the attack, three women who were students at Pacific Union College went to Lake Beriesza to sunbathe. They chose a spot in the same general vicinity as the peninsula where Brian and Cecilia would eventually lay their blanket, but the women parked in a different location. The entire shoreline was a series of irregular peninsulas that jutted out into the lake at all different angles. So the women probably wouldn't have been able to see the attack even if they had been there at that time. But their information was interesting. The three students were interviewed separately,

and they all told the same basic story. As they were parking their car, a man who drove a newer, light blue Chevrolet with California license plates parked nearby. The women walked down to the shore and laid down. About 30 minutes later, they saw the man standing about 50 feet away and looking at them. When they glanced at him, he looked away. For the next half an hour, the man moved closer and closer until he finally walked past them within about 20 feet of their spot. After that, they didn't see him again. When they left at about 4.30 p.m., his car was gone. The students described a white man who was roughly 30 years old, about six feet tall, weighed 200 to 225 pounds, was stocky, and had dark hair.

That was in a similar range to the description provided by Mike Mijot to the Vallejo to the Vallejo police two and a half months earlier after the Blue Rock Springs attack. Mike said the shooter was about five feet eight inches tall, weighed about 200 pounds, was stocky and had light brown hair or darker blonde hair. At the Lake Beriasa crime scene, a sheriff's detective had been able to talk to Cecilia Shepard before she lost consciousness. Cecilia had seen her attacker before he put on the hood,

and according to the detective, she gave a description that ended up being similar to the others. The attacker was a white male, about 5 foot 11 or 6 feet tall, about 200 pounds with dark hair. Brian didn't see the attacker before the man put on his hood, but Brian's description in the police reports is similar to the other descriptions, a white male, 20 to 30 years old based on the sound of his voice,

5 foot 8 to 6 feet tall, 200 to 250 pounds, and dark brown hair. Even though the killer's black hood covered his head, Brian could see hair on the man's forehead through the eye holes of the hood. Four days after the attack, a detective went to Brian's hospital room. The detective showed Brian an array of handguns, including a luger 9mm like the one referenced by the Vallejo collar. The detective also displayed a selection of bullets, since the killer had ejected the clip from his gun and shown the ammo to Brian. Brian didn't recognize any of the weapons, and he could only say that the 45-calibre bullet with a brass casing looked familiar.

He couldn't be positive it was the bullet he saw, but it was the closest. If he was right, and the killer was the same man from the previous attacks, the guy had significantly upgraded his ammo, from 22-calibre to 9-millimeter to 45-calibur. If all the attacks were committed by the same man, he was clearly evolving. In the years to come, it would be understood that that was a common trait of serial killers. But in 1969, the concept of a serial killer was in its infancy, and it would be close to a decade before the term was invented. In the present time in the fall of 1969, two developments were noteworthy. There were four departments investigating cases that could all be connected to the same killer. Vallejo Police,

Solano County Sheriffs, Napa County Sheriffs, and Napa Police. That list would grow within two weeks, unfortunately. But before that happened, two of the first four would start to compare notes. And the Napa Sheriff's deputies would have their breakthrough with the footprint at the lake. After dead ends at local shoe stores, Napa Sheriff's Detective Sargent's Ken Narlow and Richard Lonergan visited Travis Air Force Base outside Vacaville, California. The base is about 40 minutes from Napa and about 35 minutes from Vallejo. There, three days after the attack, the detectives learned the type of shoe or boot the killer was wearing.

Officers at the base directed the detectives to the base supply, which provided clothing and equipment to personnel. Through some trial and error, the detectives matched the plaster cast of the footprint from the lake to a type of boot that was nicknamed a wing walker. Wing walkers were designed with anti-static souls that would allow the wearer to walk on the wings of airplanes. Sargent's Narlo and Lonergan confirmed the size of the boot was at ten and a half. They learned the boots were issued by the U.S. Air Force and also sold by the Air Force. And unfortunately for the detectives, they were sold to the public by military surplus stores. But even though the boots could be bought by anyone at a store, the odds were in favor of the possibility that the attacker had a direct military connection.

Most likely, he had been in the Air Force and had been issued the boots. Like the physical descriptions and the letters and the cipher and the phone calls and the fingerprints on the payphone and the note on Brian's car and the shell casings at the crime scenes and the various cars that could be associated with suspects, the Wing Walker boots didn't point to a specific person, but little by little, it was all adding up. On October 1st, the day after Narlo and Lonergan learned about the Wing Walker boots, they drove down to Vallejo to meet Sergeant Jack Mullinax and Sergeant Dwayne Nelson, the Vallejo police detectives who were now running the Blue Rock Springs investigation. The four men spent all afternoon and part of the evening exchanging

information, especially related to the communications from the killer. The letters, the note on Brian's door that had the zodiac symbol, the two phone calls after the attacks in which the caller claimed credit, and the cipher. Narlow and Lonergan asked if the teachers from Salinas, California, Donald and Betty Hardin, had really cracked the code of the cipher. Mullenx and Nilsson confirmed they had. The Vallejo detectives told the Napa detectives that the FBI in Washington had independently broken the code and had come to the same conclusion as the Hardens. It was verified. The meeting between the detectives didn't lead to a spark that could dramatically change either investigation,

but it was an early sign that they all knew something big was happening. The Napa detectives returned home that night and then went to Cecilia Shepard's funeral the next day. On the night of the attack, Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard had, arrived at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa a little before 9 p.m. It was about two and a half hours after they had been stabbed and left for dead. Cecilia had lapsed into a coma and did not survive the attack. She passed away at 3.45 p.m. on Monday afternoon. Her family had hurried up from Southern California to be with her and they were there when she died. She was buried three days later, on Thursday, October 2, 1969 at 22 years old. Brian was not able to attend the funeral

or the burial. He was still in serious condition in the hospital, though it was clear he would survive. In the coming days, he would give interviews from his hospital bed in which he outlined the dramatic, brutal and tragic events of that day. But even in a time where there was no such thing as the 24-hour news cycle, and breaking news is replaced by more breaking news at a dizzying pace. The story of the Lake Beriesa attack would not be the most prominent story in the news for very long. Exactly two weeks after Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard were stabbed at Lake Beriesa, Paul Stein was murdered in San Francisco, and the story of the Zodiac killer vaulted into the stratosphere. Next time on Infamous America, after attacking the edges of a major city for nine months,

the mysterious and elusive killer commits a crime in San Francisco. New detectives join the hunt. New evidence is collected and compared. New letters appear from the killer. TV networks become directly involved, and the whole situation goes absolutely crazy. That's next time on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel 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.