Infamous America - ZODIAC KILLER Ep. 6 | “This Is The Zodiac Speaking”

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

A year and a half after the first Zodiac crime, a man kidnaps a pregnant mother and her daughter. Their terrifying ordeal becomes associated with the Zodiac and eventually leads reporter Paul Avery to look backward in time for other Zodiac crimes. He discovers a murder in Riverside, California that might be connected. Meanwhile, detectives focus on their top suspect and spend more than 20 years trying to catch him.   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

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Throughout the second half of 1969, a mysterious killer who called himself the Zodiac became a growing specter in northern California. He had shot and killed two teenagers outside the city of Vallejo at the end of 1968. He shot two more people in July 1969. He stabbed two college students in September 1969, and he shot and killed a taxi driver in San Francisco in October, in October, 1969. All told, he had killed five people and severely injured two more. And by the end of the year, he had made two phone calls to the police,

written seven letters, mostly to the newspapers, created two ciphers, which were coded messages, threatened to kill kids as they stepped off a school bus and threatened to blow up a bus with a bomb. At least three people had heard the killer's voice. At least five people had seen the killer from various angles and distances and a composite sketch of a potential suspect

circulated in the press. He was believed to be between 5 foot 8 and 6 feet tall, weighed about 200 pounds, had brownish hair, and wore heavy-rimmed eyeglasses, is at least some of the time. And he probably owned a pair of low-cut, military-style boots known as wing walkers. Unfortunately, none of those details led to a specific person. And then, the new year of 1970 started with another shooting. On January 25th, a taxi driver named Chris

Jarman was shot and killed in the same neighborhood where Paul Stein was killed. Everyone's first thought was that it was the work of the Zodiac. Investigators waited for a communication from the killer, but none came. Three days after the murder, a set of fingerprints in the taxi pointed to a suspect with a criminal record. The suspect confessed to the crime and led police to the spot where he buried Jarman's wallet, as well as the murder weapon. Case closed, no Zodiac. Three weeks after the murder of Chris Jarman, a bomb exploded at a San Francisco police station. Nine officers were injured, and one later died of his wounds.

Zodiac had never explicitly threatened the police, but he certainly taunted them with every opportunity. He might be the bomber, but most people believe the bomb was the work of the radical group the Weather Underground, and the crime remains unsolved to this day. Time passed, and there was no word from the elusive killer. By the end of February 1970, there had been no communication. communication from the Zodiac for two months, and no confirmed attacks for four months. The first part definitely changed in April, and the second may have happened one month earlier with the terrifying experience of a 23-year-old pregnant mother.

From BlackBarrel 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 six. This is the Zodiac speaking. On March 22nd, 1970, Kathleen Johns and her 10-month-old daughter started the long drive from Southern California to Northern California. Kathleen's mother had called and said she was feeling sick, and she wanted Kathleen to come north to be with her. Kathleen was seven months pregnant with her second child, but she loaded her daughter into the car and began the trip to her mother's home in pedaling. Luma, an hour north of San Francisco.

She took Highway 99 up through California's Central Valley from Bakersfield, through Fresno to Modesto. At Modesto, she was about two hours from her mother's home, and she turned on to a dark stretch of road called Highway 132. She would follow Highway 132 for 20 miles until it connected to a major interstate, which would then take her the rest of the way to Petaluma. It was Sunday night at about 11 o'clock, and there were probably few cars on Highway 132. But shortly after she turned on to the highway, a car raced up behind her. The driver flashed his lights and honked his horn in an attempt to get her to pull over. At that time of night, on that dark stretch of road, and with her daughter in the car, Kathleen kept driving. Over the next 10 to 15 minutes, he continued to try to get her attention.

Finally, as she drew closer to the major interstate, she saw a gas station in the distance and decided to pull over to the side of the road to see what the driver wanted. The next two hours would be the most terrifying of her life. The car behind Kathleen stopped in front of her. A man got out and walked back to her car. He said one of her rear wheels was wobbly and he offered to fix it. She agreed. The man retrieved a tire iron from his car and went to watch.

on the passenger side rear wheel. A few minutes later, he said it was good to go, and he returned to his car. Kathleen started to pull back onto the highway, and almost immediately, her car crunched to a stop. She got out and discovered that the wheel the man had supposedly fixed was about to fall off. She didn't know it at the time, but instead of fixing it, he had sabotaged it. The man reversed his car and drove back to her. He claimed the wheel must have been worse than he thought, and he offered to drive her a short distance up the road to the gas station. She accepted, gathered her daughter and her baby supplies, and climbed into the man's car.

A minute or two later, the man drove past the gas station. Kathleen started to get nervous, but she assumed he had a plausible reason for missing the destination. For the next two hours or so, she became increasingly scared. The man drove her around dark roads outside the town of Tracy, California, which was only a couple miles from the place where she had abandoned her car. During that time, he repeatedly threatened to kill her and her baby. Sometime between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. The man stopped his car for some reason, and Kathleen saw an opportunity. She dove out of the car with her baby and ran into a field next to the road. The field was completely dark, and the man searched for her with a flashlight, but he couldn't find her.

At some point, another vehicle stumbled upon the scene and scared away the kidnapper. Kathleen emerged from the field with her daughter, and someone drove her to a police station in the town of Patterson, roughly 30 minutes down the road from where she was rescued. The police sergeant who took her statement reported that Kathleen arrived in, quote, hysterical condition, which was understandable given the situation. As a result, the sergeant had a hard time getting a clear story out of her. She was finally safe, but the mystery of her experience was just beginning. The police generated multiple reports about her experience that night, and each is a little different.

And each time Kathleen told the story, it was a little different, which is normal, but it makes it impossible to know exactly what happened that night. The most common version of the story is the one that appeared in Robert Graysmith's book Zodiac, which was the basis for the 2007 film starring Jake Gyllenhaal. In that version, while Kathleen was hiding in the field and the kidnapper was searching for her, a truck driver drove up to the scene. His presence forced the kidnapper to leave. The truck driver offered to take Kathleen to a police station, but she refused. She was understandably scared of getting into a note.

other vehicle with a strange man. The truck driver eventually flagged down a passing car, which was driven by a family from Missouri. The family drove Kathleen to the police station and dropped her off. Then, as she was telling her story to the sergeant, she saw the composite sketch of the suspect in the murder of cab driver Paul Stein and immediately shouted, that's him. That's the man who kidnapped her. And with that exclamation, Kathleen Johns became part of the. the Zodiac story. Fifty-five years later, there's no agreement on whether or not the kidnapper was the

Zodiac killer. With so many different versions of the story out there, and so many different details, and so many gaps in the stories, it's impossible to know for sure. Kathleen was not able to provide any information about the truck driver or the people who dropped her at the police station, so investigators were not able to contact them to hear their versions. Whatever happened that night, it was clearly a traumatizing experience, and it ended with a scary coda. When sheriff's deputies found Kathleen's car on the side of the road, it was on fire. And while it's technically possible that the fire could have been a random act of vandalism, it's a near certainty that it was started by the kidnapper.

What's definitely certain is that one month after Kathleen John's experience, the Zodiac Killer resumed communication with the city of San Francisco. It was the beginning of six months of letters, cards, and ciphers that would gradually target investigative reporter and editor Paul Avery at the San Francisco Chronicle, the man who wrote most of the stories about the Zodiac. The writing spree started with a letter that was mailed on April 20, 1970. The letter contained several patterns that would become apparent over time. The Zodiac continued to tease police with the idea that he would identify himself. He continued his increasingly elaborate bomb threat against a school bus full of children. He continued his scorecard, where he increased his number of victims each time.

And he continued to make vague references to crimes he had committed. But from that point forward, he only referenced crimes that had already been described in the newspapers, and he gave no details that would only be known to the criminal and the police. In the seven months between April and October 1970, he sent four letters and three cards, and he also sent his third and fourth ciphers. The third will probably never be broken, and the fourth is in limbo. Amateur enthusiasts have proposed solutions to the fourth cipher over the years, but it's impossible to know if they're correct.

And even if they are, it's clear that the Zodiac didn't care if the puzzles were solved. It took 50 years to solve two of the four, and if one of the four still isn't solved, then the killer obviously didn't care about the payoff. He enjoyed sending them and taunting the police more than creating a path for the police to follow. At the end of July 1970, the Zodiac sent two letters within two days of each other. In the first, he seemed to take credit for Kathleen John's kidnapping. But again, the reference was so generic that it was so generic that he was a lot of the first. It could have been written by anyone who read about Kathleen's experience in the newspapers.

But of all the random crimes that were claimed by the Zodiac, the kidnapping of Kathleen Johns would become the most interesting. At the end of the year, reporter Paul Avery started investigating a crime in Southern California that was eerily similar. He found out about the case because of direct communication from the Zodiac. Right before Halloween, 1970, the killer sent a Halloween-Kalewan. card to the San Francisco Chronicle. On the envelope, he addressed the card to a specific person for the first time. All previous communications had been labeled with some version of the phrase

rush to the editor. But the Halloween card was addressed to Paul Avery. Inside, the card contained the words, peekaboo, you are doomed, which was seen as a threat on Paul Avery's life. The newspaper and the police took the threat seriously, but some of the other reporters started to have a little fun with the situation. The killer had repeatedly asked for someone to make buttons with his symbol on them that people could wear on their clothing. He had repeatedly expressed anger when he didn't see anyone wearing his zodiac buttons. So some of the staff at the Chronicle obliged him. They made buttons that said, I am not Paul Avery, and started wearing them around the office. Avery himself joined in the fun and dutifully wore one of the buttons.

But while the staff tried to break the tension with a little dark humor, the Halloween card generated a real tip. Paul Avery had received hundreds of tips over the past year of reporting on the Zodiac story, and the majority were worthless. But the one after the Halloween card was different. It was a letter written by an anonymous author who said Avery should look into an unsolved murder in Riverside, California, an hour outside long. Los Angeles. The case of 18-year-old Sherry Joe Bates bore striking similarities to crimes

associated with the Zodiac. Paul Avery contacted the Riverside Police Department and discussed the case with a captain. The author of the letter to Paul Avery was not the Zodiac killer, but the man had been writing letters to members of law enforcement since the emergence of the Zodiac story. The author admitted the case of Sherry Joe Bates may not be the work of the Zodiac, but contained enough similarities that it need to be re-examined. The Riverside Police Captain explained the case over the phone and agreed to send a file to Avery. During the conversation, Avery was skeptical about the Zodiac's involvement.

But when he received the file on November 9th, 1970, he was on his way to Riverside within two hours. The crime was a stabbing that had some loose similarities to the attack on Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard, that would happen three years later, and the setup for the crime had similarities to the recent Kathleen John's case. But the real eye-opener was the collection of communications. The killer sent a letter to the Riverside Police that described the crime in graphic detail. In the fall of 1966, Sherry Joe Bates was an 18-year-old freshman at Riverside City College.

She grew up in Riverside and lived at home with her father. Her mother had left the family the previous year, and her older brother was away serving in the Navy. On Sunday, October 30th, Sherry's father was gone most of the day. Sherry left home sometime between 4.30 and 5 p.m. Her father returned home at about 5 p.m. And saw the note she had taped to the refrigerator that said, Dad, went to RCC Library. Her father was home for a short period of time, and then he left again.

Before he did, he wrote a note to his daughter to say he would be back later that night. At that time of the evening, it's hard to say where Sherry was or what she was doing. The small library at the college was only open for three hours that night, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. So, if Sherry left her house before 5 p.m., she had an hour to kill before she could enter the library. At some point that evening, she parked her car about 30 yards from the library. She entered the small building, and the only thing that is known for certain is that she checked out three books, which were later found on the front seat of her car. Those three books are the only solid proof that she was ever in the building. It's possible she was in the library for most of the three hours it was open, but as the police would later learn, it was unlikely.

If she wasn't in the library from 6 p.m. until about 9 p.m., no one knows where she was or what she was doing. The next thing anyone knows with any certainty is the time of the scream. At about 10.15 p.m., a woman who lived in the neighborhood told police she heard a horrible scream. Other people in the neighborhood recalled hearing multiple screams between 1015 and 1045 p.m. Those were likely Sherry's screams as she fought with her killer. The killer disabled her car by disconnecting wires in the engine. He may have approached Sherry and offered to help in a stunt that was similar to the experience of Kathleen John's three and a half years later. But however it happened, the killer lured her or forced her into an alley that connected to a dirt driveway, about 75 yards from her car.

There, he attacked her. The police believed the killer tried to choke her first, but Sherry was athletic. She was a cheerleader, and she fought back. The dirt driveway was churned up in a clear. clear sign of a significant struggle. At that point, the killer pulled out a short knife and started stabbing and slashing, which likely caused the awful screams that were heard by neighbors. The killer slashed Sherry's throat three times.

The cuts were deep enough to sever her jugular vein and her voice box, so she couldn't scream anymore. The neighbors reported hearing a minute or two of silence after the screams, and then the engine of an older car as it started up, and the car. car drove away. Sherry's father arrived home that night at about midnight and saw that his daughter wasn't there. He assumed she was with friends, but when he awoke early the next morning and she still wasn't home, he called the police. Forty-five minutes later, the groundskeeper at Riverside City College found Sherry's body in the dirt driveway. Officers and detectives arrived shortly thereafter

and began the impossible task of recreating the events of that night. Two weeks after Sherry Joe Bates was murdered, the Riverside Police took a rare and complex step to try to find her killer. They asked everyone who had been at the library on the night of the murder to come back and recreate the scene. The participants should wear the same clothes, park in the same spaces, sit in the same places, and go through all their movements that night.

The police interviewed everyone to see if anything stood out. The process was interesting and creative, but it didn't lead to any breakthroughs. Then, almost exactly one month after the murder, the police received a typewritten letter from the killer. It contained graphic details about the killing, and critically, a detail that was only known to the police. The author of the letter verified that he had disabled Sherry's car in order to set up the attack. The author had to be the killer, but the letter didn't provide any clues to the man's identity. Exactly six months after Sherry's murder, the Riverside newspaper wrote an article about her unsolved case. The very next day, the killer mailed three handwritten notes to three different people.

One went to the Riverside newspaper. One went to the Riverside police. And one went to Sherry's father. They contained similar wording, and the one of the one to the police read, Bates had to die. There will be more. It was signed at the bottom with a single character that could have been the number two,

or the letter Z. Four years later, when Paul Avery saw the communications in the police file, he thought he was on to something. He hurried back to Northern California and showed the documents

to the handwriting expert who had been working on the Zodiac case. After days of analysis, the expert believed the documents had been written by the same person who was writing the Zodiac letters. But then there was a twist. The Riverside Police had developed their main suspect, but they didn't have enough evidence to charge the man.

The police sent seven handwriting samples from their suspect to the documents expert. At the end of November 1970, the expert concluded that the suspect in Riverside was not the Zodiac. The suspect could definitely be the person who murdered Sherry Joe B. Bates, but he was not the same person who had committed the crimes in Northern California and written the letters to the Chronicle. The previous week, Paul Avery had written two stories about the possible link between the Riverside case and the cases in the San Francisco region.

In the first, he said the link was definite. But the Riverside police were quick to point out that the handwritten notes had arrived six months after Sherry Joe Bates' murder, and then only after an article about the case appeared in the local newspaper. The author of the notes could easily have read the article, written the notes for some sick reason, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder. But as always, the Zodiac killer was watching and reading. In March 1971, five months after Paul Avery's stories about the Riverside case, the Zodiac sent a letter to the Los Angeles Times. It was the only time he communicated with someone outside the San Francisco area.

In the letter, he didn't give any specific details or names, but he took credit for what he called the Riverside Activity and said he had committed a lot more murders down there. Nine days later, a postcard arrived at the Chronicle that featured imagery and wording about Lake Tahoe, California, three hours from San Francisco. All the words on the card were cut from newspapers, and magazines, like the classic ransom letters you see in movies, so it wasn't possible to do a

handwriting comparison. But if the card was from the Zodiac, it appeared to take credit for the disappearance of a nurse in Lake Tahoe named Donna Lass. Donna had disappeared six months earlier in September 1970. During the news coverage of her disappearance, reporters noted that she had been a nurse at the Presidio military base before she moved to Lake Tahoe. That was in the same neighborhood where taxi driver Paul Stein was killed. If the Zodiac saw or knew Donna Lass in San Francisco and then tracked her to Lake Tahoe and then killed her and disposed of her body in a way that might never be found, that scenario was much different than the known zodiac attacks. In December 1985, 15 years after Donna Lass has disappeared,

appearance. A father and his sons who were on their way to go fishing several miles outside Lake Tahoe found a human jawbone. Three weeks later, in January 1986, a human skull was found in the same area. Thirty-eight years later, in 2023, through the use of DNA technology, the remains were finally identified as those of Donna Lass. Her cause of death is still unknown, and her case is still unsolved. After the Lake Tahoe Postcard on March 22nd, 1971, the zodiac vanished for nearly three years. There was no explanation. He just went silent and then reemerged in January 1974. He sent a short message to the Chronicle that was mostly about how much he liked the movie The Exorcist, which had been released a month earlier. Oddly, he did not sign the note with his zodiac symbol,

but he did dramatically increase his victim count to 37. Over the next six months, the killer sent three more short messages. None of them have any information of relevance, and they just look like sad, desperate attempts to gain attention. By July 1974, the Zodiac killer was nearly done, in terms of both communications and crimes. The killer and the case went dark for another four years, until a letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle in April 1978

that revived the investigation and the press coverage. Unfortunately, it cost Inspector Dave Toskey his career. The short note mentioned Toski by name, and he was the lone detective who had remained on the case all those years. But a reporter at the Chronicle accused Toski of forging the letter, and the internal investigation that followed was so publicly messy that Toski was demoted from the homicide division to the pawn shop unit. Ultimately, Toski was cleared of all wrongdoing,

which meant that the killer could have written the letter. And that was the final piece of the Zodiac puzzle, except for this. The killer was still out there somewhere. The most prominent suspect will always be Arthur Lee Allen. There's a mountain of circumstantial evidence that points to Lee, as everyone called him, but no hard evidence. And in fact, there's some that seems to exonerate Allen.

But the circumstantial aspects are interesting, to say the least. It's easy to see why investigators started focusing on Lee Allen as early as 1969. Allen lived in Vallejo, California, ground zero for the Zodiac case. His driver's license listed him as six feet tall and weighing 250 pounds. In 1968, he was fired for a child. from his job as a teacher at an elementary school because of accusations of child molestation. And at the end of that year, teenagers David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot and killed on Lake Herman Road outside the city of Vallejo.

In April, 1969, Allen was fired from his job at a local gas station because of an alleged drinking problem and paying too much attention to underage girls. Three months later, on July 4th, Darlene Farron and Mike Mijou were shot at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo. Allen's house on Fresno Street was a 15-minute drive from Lake Herman Road and Blue Rock Springs Park. His house was a 10-minute walk from the payphone that was used to call the Vallejo Police Department on the night of the Blue Rock Springs attack. For Christmas, 1968, a few days after David and Betty were killed, Lee's mother gave him a watch as a present. It was made by a company

called Zodiac, which used a crosshair symbol as its logo and printed the symbol on its watches. Lee had briefly served in the Navy in the late 1950s, where he could have acquired a pair of wing walker boots like the ones that were worn by the man who stabbed Brian Hartnell and Cecilia Shepard at Lake Beriesa in September 1969. Lee's friend Don Chaney was the first to raise suspicion about Lee as a candidate for the Zodiac killer. Chaney went to the Vallejo police and told them multiple disturbing stories about Lee's behavior. Ten days after the Lake Beriasa attack, a Vallejo police sergeant interviewed Alan as a person of interest,

but there was not enough evidence to take further action. Two years later, Vallejo Sergeant Jack Mullinex, and San Francisco inspectors Bill Armstrong and Dave Toskey interviewed Alan while he was working at an oil refinery. Allen was wearing the Zodiac watch and was willing to talk freely, though he didn't divulge any strong incriminating details. He admitted he liked a book called The Most Dangerous Game, in which the antagonist hunted humans for sport, because humans were the most dangerous game. The message in the Zodiac's first cipher, the 408 cipher, that was sent with his first

letters to the press, began with the lines, I like killing people because it is. is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all. According to Allen's brother, Lee was born left-handed, but forced to learn to write with his right hand. As a result, he was ambidextrous and could write with both hands. He could have used one hand for normal correspondence and the other to write the zodiac letters. Throughout the 1970s, investigators kept an eye on Lee Allen, but they didn't have enough evidence to arrest him. That day seemed to get much closer in February 1991. Investigators secured search warrants for Lee's house in Vallejo and his single wide trailer an hour north in Santa Rosa.

They found a typewriter like the one that had been used to compose the Sherry Joe Bates letter back in 1967. They found diagrams to make bombs that could link Allen to some of the Zodiac letters from 1970, and they took handwriting samples from Lee Allen. According to a Vallejo police detective who worked on the case in the early 90s, they were close to charging Arthur Lee Allen after the raid, but he died a year and a half later in August 1992. And it has to be said that if Allen was a suspect for more than 20 years, and charges still weren't filed against him a year and a half after raiding his properties,

the legal case against him could not have been very strong. For all the circumstantial evidence in favor of Arthur Lee Allen as the Zodiac killer, there are two strong pieces of evidence that cast doubt on him as the killer. None of the fingerprints that were collected at locations or from items like the letters in the Zodiac case were matched to Allen. and DNA evidence that was extracted from a postage stamp on the 1978 letter was not a match to Alan. Neither item definitively proves that Allen was not the killer, but they show that the legal case against him was not a slam dunk. And that's where the case stands today, more than 30 years after the death of Arthur Lee Allen. He was not the only suspect, but he was the most prominent.

Virtually every part of the case still contains an element of mystery, which is one of the reasons why it remains one of the most discussed and analyzed criminal cases in American history. Next time on Infamous America, we're going to end the year 2024 with a short three-episode mini-series while we try to work through a mountain of other stuff that is unexpectedly built up over the course of the year. But we're going to keep the theme of criminal mysteries going

with three stories that have baffled people for decades. Those stories are 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 Julie, 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 B-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.