RedHanded - The Zodiac Killer: Part Two | #401

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

Last week we left you with the absolutely massive cliffhanger of a 408-character cipher, which in theory contained valuable information on the Bay Area’s most infamous killer “The Zodiac���. But first it needed to be solved. And amazingly it wasn’t cracked by the police, or the FBI: it was solved by a 41-year-old history teacher and his wife, and we’re going to tell you exactly how they did it. In this week’s episode, the Zodiac’s killing spree continues – claiming the lives of young lovers Bryan Hartnell & Cecelia Sheppard, along with San Francisco Taxi driver Paul Stine – while the police work furiously to beat the cyphers, and uncover his identity once and for all.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Premium Blackjack Pro, where strategy meets top-tier gameplay. Drop in on the exciting Sugar Rush and Crazy Time slot games, or play the dazzling MGM Grand Emerald Nights, a slot experience that captures the magic of MGM. With so many games, it's time to make your move. Download the app and visit BedMGM Ontario today to experience the next level of gaming. Visit BedMGM.com for terms and conditions.

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the host of Wondry's American History Tellers. In our latest series, at the turn of the 20th century, rapid industrialization, urbanization, and political corruption were ravaging America. But soon President Theodore Roosevelt and a diverse group of reformers known as progressives would fight back. Listen to American History Tellers on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Inspired by the hit podcast Against the Odds comes the gripping guidebook, How to Survive Against the Odds. Learn how to handle whatever nature throws at you through gut-wrenching true stories of life or death situations. This might just be the most important book you'll ever read. Go to SurvivalGuidebook.com to pre-order How to Survive Against the Odds today. I'm Saruti. I'm Hannah. And welcome to Right-Handed. Where it is. Part 2. Of the Zodiac.

401. Uh-huh. Oh Oh my god yes, 401. So obviously it goes without saying if you haven't listened to episode 400, just go do that. It's quite obvious. And last week we left you on a bit of a cliffhanger. After two brutal attacks on two young couples in the San Francisco Bay Area, an anonymous letter had been sent to several local newspapers. These letters took credit for the murders, but that's not all. Because they also included three extra pages containing a jumbled mess of backwards letters, shapes and strange symbols. It was the killer's

first cipher. And this wasn't just a fun extra puzzle for the police to solve on their lunch break. It was life or death. Whoever had written the letter said that the three newspapers must print the cipher on their front page or they would kill again. The killer also hinted that if investigators could crack the code, they might even find clues to his identity. In the end, only one of these papers printed the cipher on the front page, and even then, they missed the killer's deadline. Luckily though, that was enough.

Deadlines didn't really matter. What the mystery letter writer actually wanted was the attention. Because he's such a little fucking bitch. Yeah, the timeline doesn't seem to matter too much. And even though it was a day late and a buck short, he was overjoyed with all of his press coverage so the mystery letter writer couldn't wait to write all over again and look I'm not saying I want him to kill more people but that's so lame you made a very clear demand they didn't follow it yeah and you're still happy? Yeah. Lame!

On the 4th of August 1969, just a few days after the first cipher was printed, another letter was hand-delivered to the San Francisco Examiner. It began. Maybe we should have saved the robot voice for this. Oh my god. We started recording this morning and we could not figure out why, like the interface that we use is called Roadcast, why it was like making us sound like robots? And who the fuck knew? I went on YouTube to see why is it doing this. There are three

different robot voices that this machine can do, with little pictures of robots. Why would you need three different types of robots? I don't know. But we have resolved that problem. Or we haven't. And we couldn't be bothered to re-record this and you're listening to us do it all in a robot voice. Okay. Without robot voice, this is how the second letter went. You've gotta sound like a loser though. Dear Edi- Guess. I can't do it for the whole thing, my face will fall off. Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking. In answer to your asking for more details about the good times I have had in Vallejo, I shall be very happy to supply even more material.

By the way, are the police having, which he misspelled, putting an E in there, a good time with the code. If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do crack it, they will have me." The letter then went on to describe in great detail the murders of David Faraday, Betty Dugenson and Darlene Ferrin and the very nearly fatal attack on Michael Magoo. It was evident to the police that this wasn't a hoax, written by some crank. The mystery writer, who was now calling himself the Zodiac, was almost certainly their murderer.

And I just think, you know, let's talk about the letter itself and like what he says. I think it speaks so much again, and none of this is a surprise, just to hear like obsessive narcissism. And I think narcissism is a word that is thrown around quite a lot in pop culture, no shock to anybody listening. And I think a great number of people fundamentally misunderstand what it actually is. Totally agree. They call anyone who was like self-centered, vain, a narcissist. I'm like, that is not what narcissism is. If you find somebody who is self-obsessed, maybeism. I'm like, that is not what narcissism is.

If you find somebody who is self-obsessed, maybe a bit vain, like Hannah said, just say that, just say that they're obsessed with themselves. Don't call them a narcissist because that is a very, very different thing. Narcissism, especially narcissistic personality disorder. We're talking about like getting into the spectrum of like, psychopathy. Like it is a very specific personality disorder. We're talking about like getting into the spectrum of like, psychopathy. Like it is a very specific personality disorder. And look, I'm not going to diagnose the zodiac without having met him. And also obviously because I'm not a fucking doctor.

But the things that he talks about in the letter, the way that he writes them, the way that he talks about himself, this is what we're talking about. It is that inflated sense of like grandiosity. This idea of like, I'm so much smarter than you. I'm so much better than the police. Like, are they having fun trying to crack that impossible to crack code that I put together and don't worry when you get it, you'll have me the most important person. There could be two exist.

It is just screaming of that. And you know, you don't need a clearer example than him calling himself the Zodiac. He thinks he is the universe. Like he thinks he is quite literally above everybody and predicting what they're going to do with his horoscopes. Absolutely. So within the graphic descriptions of the two attacks, the Zodiac also included in these letters, some smaller details. One was the fact that while taunting the police on the phone, he was spotted by a shabbily dressed black man, who he referred to in this letter using

the N word. The Zodiac also confirmed, as the police suspected, that he had actually been spotted after he had hung up the phone and the police had called the phone back, which had caused a scene and attracted the other man's attention. So if you remember from episode one, the Zodiac, he can't help himself, he has to tell everybody how fucking clever he is. So he calls the police from a payphone to tell them about the murders, even though the police are already there, they're already on the scene because those three hippies had

called him. And he hangs up the phone and the police call the payphone. And this guy, I think he's a homeless guy, is hanging out in the area. Like here's the phone ringing, goes over and sees the Zodiac because he hasn't gotten away from the payphone yet. And as we'll see, he does rectify this very obvious mistake later with regards to the payphone. But in the letter, the Zodiac also made a great effort to clarify that he had not made several of the amateurish mistakes that had been printed in the papers, such as, for example, racing away from the scene of the crime with squealing tyres and

a revving engine. The Zodiac insisted that he had driven away calmly so as not to draw attention. He just can't help himself. He's like, you know, when you watch those like, when you watch Bond films and you're like, why is the villain giving them a rundown of what he is going to do? This is what he's doing. He's like, no! No, I am not stupid enough to drive away really fast from the scene of a crime and draw attention to myself. I drove away very slowly. Why would you tell them that? Other than the fact that you're a narcissist? Well, as explained in great detail and very intelligently in the masterpiece of cinema, The Incredibles.

You got me monologuing. That's how you get them. So the Zodiac dedicated the final third of this letter that he sent to what he clearly thought was the ingenious idea of taping a torch to his pistol, which he could then use as a sort of rudimentary sight, allowing him to shoot in the dark with much more accuracy. An idea which in the letter he clearly tries to pass off as his own. Oh my fucking God. You taped a torch to a gun.

Yeah, obviously the first person in history to have had that idea. Quite. Nobody could possibly have thought that being able to see with light attached to a gun might make a shot more accurate when you're in the dark. And this is my like, the thing I find the most confusing about him, but I suppose just points to his specific mind pathology. Nothing he does is that impressive. Thank you. But again, screams of nonsense. Let's round off this letter because the Zodiac ends it with the following. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page coverage. And he signed it off with a symbol, a circle with a cross through.

This letter made a few things very clear. Firstly that the author was shit at spelling or at least pretending to be. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things where it's just like people are like, oh, he's shit at spelling. But I'm like, we've seen this with other killers. I believe BTK did this, but I can't remember for sure. But we've definitely seen this with other kids where they'll try and manipulate the way in which they're writing, especially down to things like spelling in order to throw people off the scent.

Yeah. Don't know if that's the case here or if he literally is such a genius that he knows to tape a torch to a gun but he doesn't know how to spell the word having. Yeah, I think, I don't know how much stock I put in handwriting experts. Like, you know, when like,

oh, I can tell that your mom's dead because of the way you do your E's. I don't buy it. I don't either. I did see something quite interesting that I don't think I believe in sort of like personality traits. I think you can probably discern things about the way someone's brain might work from their handwriting. I think you can tell if somebody is forcing their own hand to look different to what it actually is.

I believe you can obviously find multiple samples and match to some level of certainty whether it's been written by the same person. And I absolutely believe in forensic linguistics, like the words that people are choosing to write and what that tells you about their mentality, et cetera. I mean, go listen to our episode on Jean-Mene Ramsey and the ransom note in that case for that kind of thing. But yeah, I don't know if he's pretending or not. That's the bottom line here. Mm.

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would fight back. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry's podcast, American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, we explore the Progressive Era, which came to be defined by Teddy Roosevelt and others who believed in a strong, active government that worked on behalf of all Americans, rather than the privileged few. As the United States entered the 20th century, these progressives hoped to steer the nation in

a bold new direction, to launch an era of reform to restore power to the people. Follow American history tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. The second thing that this letter made clear was that the author was almost certainly the killer. Information about the killings had been sparse in the press. There'd been a lot of other stuff going on. And the anonymous writer had far too much knowledge of the positioning of the bodies and the chain of events that led up to the murders and attack for them not to have been there.

Another notable thing about this one is the first line, this is the Zodiac speaking. For the first time, the killer had a name. And we're not sure where this zodiac name came from. Unless we ever catch him, which we haven't, spoilers, we'll probably never know. However it's likely to be partially related to the symbol written at the bottom of the letter, a circle with a cross through it. That symbol is pretty much identical to the logo of a watch brand, Zodiac Watches. I don't know.

I think it's probably one of those things. I think he just likes the word Zodiac. It's a good of those things. I think he just likes the word Zodiac. Mm-hmm. It's a good word. Yeah. I'll give him that. Of all of the killers out there, and look, I know that we do use monikers for killers. I literally said BTK like about five minutes ago, and I understand people's dislike of

using those terms and instead wanting to just call them by their actual names. I do get that. But like, as far as like serial killer monikers go, I know I was like zodiac shit. It is kind of shit, but it's also kind of cool. Cause when the police name you or the media name you, you're out of control. They can name you whatever they want. He is like, nah, this is what I am. This is what I am.

I christen myself the Zodiac. And that's why it does really stand out from others. And at the time, when this was all going down, Zodiac watches were at the top of their game all of the rage. Never heard of it. Never heard of a Zodiac watch. No me, I'm not very watchy though, like I don't... No, no clue. Kehh...

The self-named Zodiac Killer would have almost certainly seen adverts for Zodiac Watchers in the papers, so perhaps that is where he got his branding. Interestingly though, he didn't use Zodiac in his first letter to the papers, the one with the cipher. He just referred to himself as the murderer of the two teenagers last Christmas. But he does use the circle and cross to sign off on both letters. So the symbol came before the name. And now the circle with the cross through it is inextricably linked to the zodiac killer and you'll quite often see it referred to as the zodiac symbol.

He got what he wanted. It's quite Knights Templar, isn't it? It's just so... I mean look, this guy, as we're going to go on to talk about the ciphers and things like that, the killing is only part of it. The killing is only like a section of what is getting him off. The rest of it is. Maid in this kind of sitting in his bedroom somewhere,

writing up these ciphers, creating these codes, writing these letters. You know, we're talking three pages of letters he was sending and again and again and again. That's not the only letter, as we will go on to discuss. And that attention craving, that seeking, that notoriety. Like, he really does stand out as quite a unique killer in that sense. You know, if we're talking about like big hitting, you know, serial killers from this era, he really, really is far more obsessed with the press and the police and the investigation and his little side quests than anybody else. It's very interesting. I think he thought I'll do this first letter.

Oh, I guess print it on the front page. I need branding. I need a good name. The Zodiac. It's just yeah, I think as much as I don't want to say he's fascinating because that's not true. He's not fascinating at all. Does make him different. I can understand why he's so famous. Yes, absolutely. He nailed the branding. And if the ciphers hadn't been solved, I mean, obviously not all of them have been, but the one, like I genuinely would have been like,

he literally has just put some squiggles on some paper and been like, hey, hey, hey, good luck with that. It's nonsense. Absolutely. And he did do a bit of that as we'll go on to front. And I wonder whether that's what the zodiac thing is, is that he actually just thinks it's very amusing that people are going to be spending hours, possibly days of their

time trying to figure it out and it's meaningless. Now another telling segment of this second letter is Zodiac's rant about his clever idea to tape a torch to his pistol and then use it to aim at his victims. The Zodiac talks about it like it's groundbreaking, like he's some sort of genius for working it out. But that's not entirely true. Sure, these sort of things weren't available to buy in mainstream sporting stores, but torch-based sighting methods had been used in the military for quite a while. And sorry, I watched all of Criminal Minds and in that, whenever they do it, they don't have a little gun that has a light on it they just hold the torch on top of the gun

and look so like you don't even need a special gun that's got a light on it you can just hold the torch on top of it the idea that he's pretending like it was his idea again just screams to his narcissism there's no other word for it and yeah if you want to know how far back this all goes, the concept was actually written about at length in the December 1967 edition of Popular Science magazine, probably where the Zodiac got the idea. The Zodiac's most obvious plea for admiration, however, comes in the first paragraph, but he says, By the way, are the pillies having a good time with the coat?

If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do crack it, they'll have me. This line set a precedent for all of Zodiac's communications that would follow. All that having a good time and cheering up. The Zodiac could assume the persona of a nonchalant evildoer, like a movie supervillain, equal parts charisma and malice. At least in his head. Of course to us, and everyone reading us at the time, it was just pure cringe. What makes the letter even more cringe, if that is even possible, is that whilst the Zodiac taunted the police,

his code was basically solved. Oh my god, this is hilarious. Not by a crack squad, not by cryptographers, not by university professors, not by linguists, not even by the police. I love this. But by a 41 year old history teacher called Donald Hardin and his wife, Betty. Love that. They'd seen the cipher published in the Sunday papers and they just decided, once they'd

finished the crossword presumably, to just have a go. Neither of them had any serious experience cracking codes. But in his youth, Donald did have a passing interest in puzzle solving. And as a result, he had a book on his bookshelf titled Secret and Urgent, the story of codes and ciphers by someone called Fletcher Pratt. And as luck would have it, owning that book was a bit of a stroke of luck, as it contained a few key pieces of information that would help husband and wife crack the zodiac's first cipher. The code created by the zodiac is what's known as a substitution cipher, in which every

letter of the alphabet is replaced with a specific symbol. So far, so straightforward. The writer then uses this predetermined alphabet of symbols to write a message. Usually the message is then sent to someone who also knows this predetermined alphabet of symbols, and they're able to just decode it and read the text. How Hitler. So we cracked Enigma. Very, very simple.

It's one of the oldest methods of secret communication and has stood the test of time. Why? Well, because it's easy to create and, in theory, impossible to understand unless you have the key to the cipher. However, what lets this particular model of ciphering down is that language tends to be kind of predictable. It's the vowels that get you. Every language has letters that are more frequently used than others. In English, our most commonly used letters are E and then A and then R and then I and then O. Therefore, if you have a substitution cipher to solve, you can often simply find the most commonly used symbol in the cipher and assume that it represents the letter E, and then find the second most common symbol and assume that that is A, and so on and so forth, slowly

matching every symbol by process of elimination to the letter used with the same frequency of use. This method is called letter frequency analysis and is one of the most basic methods of decoding hidden text. It's not perfect, nothing is. Just because E is the most common letter used in the English language, it doesn't mean that it is guaranteed to be the most common letter used in the text that you are decoding, but it is highly likely. You can basically assume that it is. If you are sure that the text you are decoding is English. The longer the text is, the more it will start to conform with the standard letter

frequencies of the language it is written in. But you have to have that information in the first place. The cipher sent from Zodiac to the papers, what the first one, was 408 characters long. Zodiac to the papers, what the first one was 408 characters long. So it's not massive, but it was enough for Donald and for Betty to have a pretty good stab at it. Unfortunately the Zodiac was one step ahead. He clearly knew about letter frequencies and how they could be used to crack his code. So he added a few more levels to make it more difficult. Firstly, the symbols were not split into clear words. They were split equally across a grid, meaning that

words couldn't be guessed purely by how many letters they had, which, I'll give him, is quite smart. Secondly, in order to obscure the letter frequencies that we talked about earlier, the zodiac didn't just make 26 symbols for the letters of the alphabet. He actually created 54, with some letters using multiple different symbols throughout his cipher. This meant that commonly used letters such as E might have two or three different symbols, making it much harder to recognise how often they were being used. And this is called a homophonic substitution cipher, and is significantly harder to crack.

Unless you're Donald and Betty. They didn't give up when they realised what was going on, they just went back to their book. And good old Fletcher Pratt had a solution for them. Bigrams. Bigrams are commonly used double letters, like the double E in B, or the double L in spell. The most commonly used double letters in English, according to Fletcher Pratt, are double Ls. So that's where Donald and Betty decided to start. They analysed the entire cipher and looked for the symbol most commonly repeated, one after the other.

And pretty quickly they found that the most common double set of symbols was two fully filled black squares, so they decided that that was probably the symbol for L. With double L figured out, Betty had a moment of pure genius. Love this. The escape room enthusiast in me just got so fucking wet for this. Yeah, well, this is just reigniting my 11 plus trauma. Betty, knowing that they were dealing with a murder, she supposed that the most common double L word in the cipher was probably kill. Betty started looking at all the pairs of black squares in the cipher and then looking at the two symbols in front of them. Eventually she found several double Ls that all had the same two symbols in front of them.

And so she concluded that those two symbols, if we're assuming that word spells kill, represent the letters K and I. When they decoded all the symbols they'd found for K, I and L, the first line of the cipher began to materialise and it spelled I-L-I-K mystery symbol, K-I-L-L mystery symbol, mystery symbol, mystery symbol. And I think even the most simple-minded of us could figure out that they almost certainly were reading the sentence I like killing. So now, Betty and Donald believe that they had the symbols not just for I,

L and K but also for E, N and G. And using this method of deducing double letters, then potential words and then more letters as a result, the pair were slowly beginning to break down the zodiac's code. It wasn't quick work, however. They started on Sunday morning and worked in shifts, taking this very seriously. Betty actually stayed up several nights in a row. But they ran into a few problems. Not only was the zodiac devious, he was sloppy. Turned out he wasn't very good at following his own cipher key and would regularly get similar-looking letters and symbols mixed up. A full black square for L might be mistakenly written as a blank or half-filled square which stood for completely different letters. Or perhaps the letter W

might accidentally be written with the symbol for the letter M. And on top of that, as we already know, Zodiac was utterly dreadful at spelling, or at least pretending to be. So even when Betty and Donald decoded the cipher correctly, some of it just didn't make sense. Eventually though, Donald and Betty Hardin did break down the cipher with some guesswork and interpretation. But on the 8th of August, they were finished. And this is the message that they decoded. 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 that when I die I will be reborn in paradise and all the... there's a missing word which is probably people we think. So let's assume it's people. The best part of it is that when I die I will be reborn in paradise and all the 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 slaves for my afterlife." Fucking hell, where do you even start? Honestly. Ugh, I just, I don't know with him right, because that kind of thing, this idea of a belief that the people that he kills will come back and serve him as slaves in the afterlife speaks to quite a delusional mindset. And yes, it's obviously not unusual for serial killers to veer into the world of delusion. Of course, we've seen this before, especially when you're talking about kind of mission orientated killers who are saying that, you know, they've got to do this because they've

been told by God, I guess that falls into like kind of a visionary killer. Like delusions exist for sure. It's going to fit with the kind of psychopathology that you're going to see in a serial killer. But for me, it's weird. And I don't know if he's just sort of punking people about this, trying to make himself more infamous, trying to make himself more infamous, trying to make his story more interesting because the way in which he executes these killings, the thought that he puts in, and yes, I agree with you, absolutely nothing he really does is that

genius. He's purely killing people who are strangers, which makes it very hard to catch him. But a lot of that does scream to someone who's quite an organized person. Does a super hyper organized killer, does that framework for men like his psychopathology really fit in with someone who's also delusional? I'm not saying it could never happen, but they do seem kind of conflicting to me and I can't help but feel like this is just him having fun at everyone's expense. But I could of course be wrong. I think yes, I know what you mean. I think that's probably true. Also, you know, it's many, many people believe themselves to have skills they actually can't carry off. So I don't know it's it's so difficult to but I suppose is just driving around and waiting until you find a car on its own. Isn't that is that particularly organized? I'm not sure. Well, I think it's the ways in which he changes and develops. Right. So we'll go on to see the

mistake he makes with the payphone. He doesn't make that mistake again. In future, he leaves the payphone on the call so that the police can't phone the number back. Right. He goes and he stalks these victims. Like we said, with the first couple, there was a car that had been parked there before they arrived at that lover's lane. And they had been scared away because a blue car pulled up next to them and then followed them for a bit. I'm not saying that's necessarily organized because he doesn't seem to stalk his victims for a long time before he chooses them like say BTK did.

But he definitely shows signs of organization and the letter writing, the sending that into the newspapers, making demands that they be printed. The sitting down and writing these codes, the calling of the families. There is a lot in his behavior that screams to me of being hyper organized. And then how much does that fit with a delusional mindset? I don't know. It's just interesting to point out whether this is like the spelling and the misspelling.

Is it real or is it just him trying to make his story more interesting? Hmm. I don't know. So these letters, this code that was cracked, it actually ended with a random jumble of 18 letters, which just essentially like are a bunch of E's and B's and O's and R's, like it's just nonsense. Now this random jumble of 18 letters at the end is still one of the most hotly debated parts of this entire case, still today in 2025.

People want to know what is it, what does it mean? And I think that's exactly what he wanted. The short answer and the conclusion come to by most serious cryptographers is that these 18 letters mean nothing. By far the most likely reason for the garbled letter bunch is that in order to have a cipher to stack into that neat grid, because remember he's not breaking them up by letter, he's putting them into a neat grid like a f***ing sudoku, he needed some padding. He didn't know that it was going to lead all the way to the

end of that square or rectangle, right? So he needs some extra letters to pad it out. And maybe it was also a way to confuse and frustrate the police because again, if he throws in random symbols that mean nothing or mean letters that are corresponding to words that don't make sense in there, it's again, just a way to throw people off. I just think like, obviously it doesn't matter, but like, it's there's something about because I don't doubt that like he does this like cipher because he doesn't think anyone's going to be able to get it but he's like but I know that it was crackable like it wasn't just a bunch of nonsense for the most part but I feel like if you really are doing the puzzle thing

I don't feel like you can cheat like I feel like you just have to if like if you're making the rules you've got to stick to them. You can't just be like, well. That was one of the things I was thinking about with the Zodiac. Would he actually genuinely have sent a cipher that was uncrackable because it is nonsense? I don't think that he would because I think that if somebody like a big named cryptographer had a look at it and you know people are like we can't solve it they weren't like this is fake. I think it would have hurt his pride too much for

people to come out and be like it's actually just nonsense. Yes I agree. Because it would have made him look stupid. So I do think they are real codes that can be cracked but they're so like stacked against you as the police or anybody tried to crack it because you don't have the key. And they're imperfect. And they're imperfect. And I do believe that those end 18 was probably just to make it look neat. Or they were to throw people off. Or they were something more interesting, which I believe you're going to tell us about next.

Sure am. A popular theory is that the jumble of letters at the end of the grid contains the zodiac's name. I want to believe this. Yeah. Not because I want to buy into the hype, but because I think it's quite interesting. It's just, it's unsatisfying for it to just be like jumble of letters. And that's why I don't think that it is just random. Maybe. Because I also appreciate that he might have found it unsatisfying that it didn't fill up the end of the rectangle in the little grid that he drew. But I can also imagine that somebody like him would find it frustrating that they actually meant nothing. And he did say if you crack the cipher, you will get a clue to my identity. Granted, there are many ciphers that haven't been cracked and maybe the identity is in there, but I don't know.

Naturally, people have created names from this letter jumble, including someone called Robert Graysmith, who's an author that we'll get to know later on, who has practically made his entire living from the Zodiac case. And Robert Graysmith has translated the word jumble to Robert Emmett the Hippie. Which may seem satisfying on the surface, but the issue is that neither Robert Emmett the Hippie nor any of the many other names and messages that have been found were decoded with any sort of code at all, or a formula, or a key. All of the names and or messages devised from the final 18 characters of the Zodiac's first cipher have been done

Scrabble style, just by using the letters available to write something that sounds interesting. But that's not cryptography. It's a word wheel. And even I can do those. And none of the names or messages created by amateur sleuths on their word wheel have been verified by the police or by the FBI ever. Still, Donald and Betty Harden's solution was verified by the FBI and the police before being published in all the local newspapers. A lot of the papers actually mocked Zodiac for how easy it had been to crack his code, though I do have to remind you that Betty and Donald did work in shifts to crack the code.

I don't know if it's just, it did take a certain level of ingenu- I don't want to take anything away from them, is what I'm saying. Saying that, even Donald Hardin himself publicly suggested that the code hadn't been created by anyone particularly intelligent, which coming from a teacher is just, I love the burn, I love it. Now in hindsight, this might have been a mistake, however, because the zodiac would go on to take two more lives.

And then Santa Cipher so complicated, it wouldn't be cracked for over half a century. There's that narcissistic rage for you. Hmm. Hmm. It was over 30 years ago that Clifford Olsen first called me. Secret phone calls from Canada's most notorious serial killer.

I knew I was killing the children but I couldn't stop myself. Now it's time to unearth the tapes because I believe there are still answers to be found. I'm Arlene Bynum from CBC's Uncover. Arlene Bynum from CBC's Uncover, calls from a killer. Available now. All right, very quick break because I know you are gagging to get back to this particular episode but we have to tell you a little bit about what's going on on Patreon this week. Certainly. Well, this week we have Under the Duvet where I explain how hypnosis works badly, but it works. It does work. And I will tell you how I came off the pill and now the back knee's back.

We also have a little chat about Russell Brand and contemplate the composition of the soul and whether it even fucking matters. And then I do a little review on a throwback dating TV show that I watched on Channel 4 called Perfect Match where I literally couldn't believe, A, that people were smoking in clubs because it's that old and then all the horrific things that were coming out of people's mouths. And you can listen to all of that over on Patreon and you can watch it too under the duvet is every week we release it every Wednesday morning and also on Patreon you can get Red Handed totally ad free and we also do monthly bonus episodes and you can find all of that at patreon.com forward slash red handed. On the 27th of September

1969 20 year old Brian Hartnell and 22 year old Cecilia Shepherd were lounging by the side of Lake Berry Lesser, which is about halfway between Sacramento and San Francisco, slightly to the north. The pair weren't a couple, not anymore, but they had gone out for a while back when they were both at Pacific Union College. Their relationship broke off when Cecilia moved to a different college to study music, but there were no hard feelings. Brian had even got himself a new girlfriend. That weekend, Cecilia was back at Pacific Union College to see some friends and pick up some stuff from her old room. At about 11am, Cecilia, Brian and their mutual friend

Judy had met up to go to a jumble sale in St Helena. And at this jumble sale, Brian found a TV which he bought. Then he realized he couldn't fit it in his car with a passenger. And that car was a Volkswagen Carmen Ghia which was a part VW Beetle and part Italian sports car. Unable to fit everyone and his new TV in that little car, Brian left Cecilia and Judy at the jumble sale, drove the TV back to his dorm and then returned to pick them up so they could spend the afternoon together. So when Brian and Cecilia left they headed out to Lake Berryessa as friends. Just you know a couple of friends going back to the

place where they probably used to bang. They parked up in Brian's little sports car and walked down to the edge of the lake and lay in the shade of a big tree. They sat about there for a while, chatting about old times, contemplating the future. Brian was on his back and Cecilia on her front, with her head slightly resting on her friend Brian's shoulder. After a while, Brian heard a rustling noise coming from behind them, towards the car. Brian was spooked, but he didn't have his glasses on and he couldn't see where the noise was coming from.

Why have you taken your glasses off, Brian? Bit of a face-on-face action, was there? Just hanging out with your mate. Why do you need no glasses? So yeah, Brian, who couldn't see anything, asked Cecilia to sit up and take a look. When she did, Cecilia saw a man, on his own, walking down the hill towards them. When he noticed that Cecilia was watching, the man stepped behind a tree. Cecilia told Brian, who assumed that the man was probably just having a wee or something, but he told Cecilia to keep an eye out for the mystery man anyway. A couple of seconds later the man stepped back from around the tree, this time holding out a pistol.

Cecilia shook Brian and they both jumped to their feet as the man walked down the hill towards them. He was heavily built, around 5'8 and stocky, wearing pleated suit trousers and a blue windbreaker. On his head, he was wearing a black mask. The mask was essentially the shape of a paper bag. It covered this man's entire face. But he had left himself some eye holes,

which were covered with black clip-on glasses. The material of the paper bag mask came all the way down to the man's chest, where it winded out, like an apron or a bib. And the symbol in the centre of that man's chest mask bag head costume was a white circle with a cross through it. The zodiac symbol. Brian understandably thought the masked man was there to mug them, so he tried to reason with the man in the mask. Brian told this mystery man that he only had a few cents on him and not much else of value, but that they might be able to help this man out as long as he didn't hurt them.

And the man with the bag on his head said, no, time's running short. A statement he backed up by explaining that he'd recently escaped from a prison in Montana, and he'd killed a guard to do it. But that didn't stop Brian, he kept going, saying that surely it would be better just to rob them and then move on rather than getting another murder charge on his name. It seemed like the masked man might be listening, but he said that he would feel less nervous if Brian was tied up. And so the masked man threw Cecilia some pre-cut lengths of rope and pointed the pistol at her while she tied Brian up.

While she did this, Brian whispered to her that he thought he could take the guy and get his gun before anything happened. And you might think, well that's a bit overconfident Brian, you haven't even got your glasses on. But something we haven't mentioned yet is that Brian was absolutely massive. He was about six foot seven and built like an ox. He could have covered the distance between him and the masked man before the man even reacted and would have had a good chance in a scuffle. But Cecilia shook her head.

She was frightened and thought that if they just played along they'd be much more likely to survive. Brian not wanting to put Cecilia in danger against her will, did as she wished, and stood still with his hands tied behind his back. Then the man in the mask came forward, tied Cecilia up and forced her to the ground. With Cecilia lying on the floor, Brian tried his best to keep the man talking, hoping that it would keep them safe, and it did. For a bit. But then suddenly the

masked man became frustrated and shouted at Brian to get on the floor as well. At first Brian protested saying they'd freeze to death if he left them there overnight, but that didn't work and Brian ended up on his chest next to his ex-girlfriend. didn't work and Brian ended up on his chest next to his ex-girlfriend. Finally Brian decided to call the man's bluff and asked if the masked man even had any bullets in his gun. He did. The masked man pulled the magazine out of his pistol and showed Brian that it was full. Then the masked man stepped back and put his pistol back in his holster. I couldn't help but laugh at that because I just feel like it shows how fucking pathetic he is. He's

got a gun aimed at this guy's face. He's tied up. And yes, he's obviously trying to be like, you don't even have any bullets. He's like, I'm going to show you that I do. Why I feel that in control, do you even need to show him? Yeah, it just seems very juvenile, doesn't it? It's so lame. Honestly. Oh my God, this guy. And even the little costume he's wearing, the fucking bag on his head. It's all just so tragic. It is tragic. It's all just so tragic. It is tragic. It's really like super villain. Yeah, but just sort of a really terrible one.

Well, absolutely. Absolutely. But that's what he's like going for and it is just so sad and you see here the escalation right first. He kills the couple then he makes the phone calls in the case of Darlene and Michael and now he's up front. He's not just bang, bang, shoot him, drive away. He is engaging with them. He's dragging this out. This is going on for far longer than it needs to, if all he wants to do is stab them. He's getting

off on all of this. So yeah, he steps back. He puts his pistol back in his holster. Brian then turned to Cecilia, wondering if now would be a good time for him to put up a fight against this guy. But it was too late. The next thing Brian knew, the man was stabbing him in the back. He stabbed him six times with a large diving knife. Cecilia turned to see what was happening and screamed. The masked man threw himself at her, stabbing her ten times in the back in a furious flurry

of blows. Then nothing. Brian assumed that the man was going to finish the job and slit their throats. But nothing came. After attacking Cecilia, the man had just upped and gone. And look, I'm pretty certain that the reason he doesn't finish the job, he doesn't use the gun, he doesn't slit their throats like Brian thinks that he's going to, is because why have this whole charade go on?

Why have this whole drawn out murder go on? Why have all these interactions with Brian and Cecilia? Why have the costume? I think he wanted one of them to survive, To be able to tell the story of this masked man who appeared out of the woods with a fucking mask on his face and terrified them and how scared he was. Particularly maybe even Brian because of how big he is. To be like, yeah he survived, but look how shit up he is by me, the Zodiac. I know what you mean and I think that yes, that's probably is a thing that would have

made him very happy. And like, look how close I can get to them and I can talk to them in daylight and I can still get away. But I want to believe that he just cacked his pants and left. Yeah, I think either or, either or. With him doing it on purpose, I know it's a big risk to take, obviously, but he also knows he's wearing a mask and he's even wearing these little sunglasses.

We've seen this time and time again, right? If you are going to kill the person, why cover your face? Maybe there's the risk that he thinks that they would get away and they will have seen him. The minute somebody who abducts you shows you their face, you're as good as dead because they're not gonna let you go now. So why does he go through the effort of putting together this little costume if he's just going to kill them? I think, and maybe I'm over mythologizing

him, which is probably exactly what he wants. I can buy into the idea that he wants Brian to survive, to tell everybody the story of the Zodiac from the point of view of a survivor. Because up until now, Michael is the only one who survived, but he's quite a slight person, as we talked about, he's wearing three layers of clothes, maybe in an effort to bulk himself up. Is it an accident that he goes after a six foot seven giant guy? I don't know, I don't know. Maybe I'm overreaching with this but yeah it is quite interesting and also we've seen this before with serial killers. They do sometimes like people to survive because in death they control you. Sure your life is ended, they did that, the God complex, but in some ways a survivor you have left as a killer an

indelible mark on them that they will carry for the rest of their lives. They will forever in some ways be your victim, a living, breathing trophy, a reminder of the fact that, again, for somebody like him, to prove that he matters, to prove that he can have an impact on somebody else, to prove that he is not irrelevant and not invisible and that he can shape through his action somebody else's life I don't know. Maybe he's just a bumbling loser Or maybe he's both With the man gone Brian still was pretty sure that

He and Cecilia were both going to die But he reasoned that he may as well try and get some help. So he kissed Cecilia on the head and struggled his feet. The masked man was nowhere to be seen, but there was a boat circling about a hundred feet out in the water. Brian and Cecilia both screamed at the boat for about fifteen minutes, but it never came to shore. The fisherman driving it did shout to Brian, but he was too scared to come any closer. Instead, he raced back to the local resort that he was staying at and asked for help. So, abandoned, Brian sat back down and after some struggling,

Cecilia did manage to get his hands untied. Brian then got back to his feet and started walking back towards the car, hoping he might bump into someone or even be able to drive to find help himself. As he walked though, his vision started to fade. Then he blacked out and had to sit on the floor waiting for his eyesight to come back. When his vision returned, Brian stood back up and started walking until once again things started to go fuzzy. Brian repeated this process countless times trudging his way slowly towards the car. turned, Brian stood back up and started walking until once again things started to go fuzzy.

Brian repeated this process countless times trudging his way slowly towards the car, a few feet at a time. He didn't make it to his car, but eventually he did make it to the road, where he was found at about 7.15 by a park ranger who had been called out by the local resort. Another ranger went via boat and found Cecilia pleading under a tree at about 7.20pm. Before Brian and Cecilia had even made it into the hospital, the investigation had begun. Quickly the local sheriff's department found Brian's car about three quarters of a mile from the scene of their attack. And it didn't take long before it was discovered that somebody had written

on the side door of the car in black marker pen. Here's what it read. Vallejo 12-20-68, 7-4-69 September, 27-69-6-30 by knife. And above that message was the zodiac symbol. Roughly 20 minutes after Brian and Cecilia had been found and an hour after they'd been attacked, local police received this call. I want to report a murder. No, a double murder. They were two miles north of Park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karman gear. Then there was a short pause, during which

the officer, who picked up the call, asked, Where are you now? The voice replied, I am the one who did it. And as we said earlier, he had learned his lesson from his previous payphone mistake. This time the Zodiac didn't hang up the phone. He didn't want the police to be able to call it back and maybe have a passerby come towards the phone and see him. If you walked past a payphone and it rang, would you pick it up? No. None of my fucking business.

I think I would have done when I was younger. Yeah. I'm like, I've got fucking shit to do. Don't even answer my own phone when it rings. I mean, yeah. This time the police tried to phone the payphone again, like they did last time, but the call was still active. But when they got there there they also found prints on this phone. These prints were taken and sent to the FBI. The police assumed that

they would match with the prints found on the zodiac's letters but they did not. So by the time Brian and Cecilia arrived at a hospital. It was 8.50pm. If the Zodiac's note was to be believed, that meant they'd both been bleeding for over two hours. When they arrived, Brian and Cecilia were conscious, even talking. Brian was able to give a pretty detailed statement to the police, despite having six heavy stab wounds to his back and a punctured lung. Unfortunately though, Cecilia wasn't so lucky.

She had ten deep stab wounds to her back, and sadly, shortly after arriving in hospital, her condition deteriorated, and two days later Cecilia Shepard died, aged just 22. Given the Zodiac's love of the limelight, police were expecting another letter to be delivered to the newspapers any minute. But it never came. All of the local papers had published stories about the attack on Brian and Cecilia on the front page, including detailed sketches of the Zodiac in his new costume. For two weeks the Bay Area waited with bated breath, waiting to hear from their newest celebrity. But that wasn't how he did things. Previously the Zodiac had attacked twice and then written

to the papers. This was just the first one. Before there would be another letter, the Zodiac would have to strike again. Paul Stein was 29 years old and living something of the American Dream. Paul had come from difficult circumstances. His dad had run out on the family when he was just a kid. Then, when his mother remarried, it was to an abusive alcoholic who'd done two years inside for the attempted murder of his previous wife's mother. So, not ideal. But at that time, California believed in social mobility and as a result, there were no tuition fees for California residents. Through this, and incredibly hard work no doubt, Paul had graduated from Fresno College with a degree in politics.

Then he moved in with his wife in San Francisco andno College with a degree in politics. Then he moved in with his wife in San Francisco and began studying for a PhD in philosophy. To support himself and his wife, Paul worked part-time during the day as an insurance salesman and at night he drove a taxi. And on October the 11th 1969, Stein arrived at the Yellow Cab Company at about 8.45pm and took his first fare down to the south east of the city. Then he took his second fare to the airport about 20 minutes away. By then it was about 9.45pm and Paul received a call from dispatch telling him to go to 500 9th Avenue in the city.

And that is the last thing we know for certain. At some point on his way to 9th Avenue, Paul stopped and picked up another fare who wanted to be dropped near 9th Avenue at Washington and Maple. Paul told dispatch that he was going to drop this guy off and then head straight to 9th Avenue. But Paul's taxi didn't stop at Washington and Maple. It drove one block further and parked at Washington and Cherry. About ten minutes after Paul picked up his random fare, three teenagers saw his taxi

out of the window on Washington and Cherry. They saw two men in the taxi, both sat in the front. The driver, Paul, appeared to have his head slumped into the other man's lap. And at first these teenagers thought that it was maybe two men who were, you know, getting a bit saucy in this taxi. But, as they watched, they realised that the other man was rummaging through the driver's pockets. The man then got out of the car, wiped down the passenger side with a rag and then walked

around to the driver's side, wiping that down too. So the teenagers rang the police and described all of those things having been done by a man in black. And so a call went out to police radios in the area at 9.58, just 13 minutes after Paul had picked up his mystery fare. But the report of the man in black became black man when the call went out, and as a result, when two police cruisers heading to the scene passed a barrel-chested white man with a lumbering walk they didn't stop

him. The officer driving that car would later describe this man as roughly 40 years old with a crew cut and glasses wearing a blue zip-up jacket and brown pleated trousers which is almost identical to the description of the zodiac given by Brian Hartnell at Lake Herman. And before we move on, just make a quick mental note that a police officer was apparently able to make such a detailed description of a random passerby in a moving squad car in the dark. Just put a really big pin in that for later on.

So massive fuck up here. I'm a part of the police. The teenagers did the right thing. They called it in. They said what they saw, but something's been botched along the communication lines and they're looking for completely the wrong person. So when officers arrived at the scene shortly after letting this man walk by, they found Paul Stein dead in the passenger seat.

He had been shot behind the ear with a 9mm handgun and it had blown a 2-inch hole in the side of his head. There was blood everywhere. Closer inspection of the car also showed that the meter was still running, suggesting that Paul Stein's killer had not pounced when the ride was over, but rather at a stop sign. But there wasn't a stop sign on Washington and Cherry. There was one, however, on Washington and Maple, where the fair had originally meant to end.

Eventually, detectives came to the conclusion that the killer had shot Paul on Washington and Maple at that stop sign, then shoved Stein over and driven the taxi an extra block so that he could work with more privacy. This is why the teenagers never had a gunshot and just saw the taxi parked outside their house with the killer rummaging through Paul Stein's pockets. Or at least that's what the teenagers thought. In reality though, the killer was actually cutting off a piece of Paul's shirt as a trophy.

In his book Motor Spirit, which we would say is the best single source of Zodiac information that we found, author Jarrett Kovec describes killing someone in San Francisco as the smartest move Zodiac ever made. And he's not wrong. Zodiac's previous murders were all teenagers and young lovers in rural California, and they'd caught the headlines, but they hadn't really taken the state by storm. There were small cases handled by small local law enforcement agencies. But Paul Stein? Paul Stein's murder was handled by the big guns. The investigation was run by the SFPD's Homicide Squad, led by Dave Toschi, who was a local celebrity. Rumour has it that he even inspired Steve McQueen's stylish performance in Bullet and Clint Eastwood's iconic no-nonsense approach

in Dirty Harry. And that's exactly who the Zodiac wanted. He wasn't just a crackpot weirdo killing teenagers in the country anymore, he was a proper villain, like the Joker. And in Dave Tosche, he had his Batman. Two days after Paul Stine's murder, a package arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle. And inside this parcel was a bloody piece of cotton shirt and a letter which read, This is the Zodiac speaking.

I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington Street and Maple Street last night. To prove this, here is a bloodstained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the North Bay area. The SF police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly. Instead of holding road races with their motorcycles seeing who could make the most noise, the car drivers should have parked their cars and sat there quietly waiting for me to come out of cover. School children make nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning, just to shoot out the front tyre and then pick off the kiddies as they

come bouncing out. Again, here you see the ramping up. He knows I need to move into a more metropolitan area, kill somebody there to ramp up the fear. And then here he's making threats against children, which if anything is going to get you front page news. And this letter was published, although initially the part about shooting kids as they got off the school bus was kept out of the papers. The police didn't want the public to completely freak out. But it didn't matter because two days after the letter was published, the school bus information was leaked anyway and the whole of the Bay Area went into meltdown. Kids were kept out of school by their anxious parents and bus drivers were given special instruction on

to what to do if their wheels were shot out. Some buses were even shadowed by heavily armed plain clothes police officers. But the attacks never came. Zodiac would start making a bit of a habit out of this. He would threaten to do something entirely outrageous and very, very public, so much so that he would surely be caught, but then he would never follow through. For almost a month, the Bay Area waited to see if the Zodiac would strike again. They knew that another attack was due. But this time, the Zodiac broke his pattern. On the 8th of November, the Zodiac sent another letter, known as the Dripping Pen Letter.

It was a store-bought novelty card, with a picture of a pen made from fabric. The caption said, Sorry I haven't written, but I just washed my pen. I don't get it. So it's like the card hasn't been made by him. It's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, but what's the joke? The joke is that the pen's made of fabric. Washed my pen. Yeah.

So like my pen's been in the wash. So I haven't had it. So I haven't written. Okay. Sure. It's not funny. No, it's not funny. But anyway, it doesn't matter.

Cause inside this cart, it said, this is the Zodiac speaking. I thought you would need a good laugh before you hear the bad news. You won't get the news for a while yet. P.S. Could you print this new cipher in your front page? I get awfully lonely when I'm ignored. So lonely, I could do my thing! With lots of exclamation marks, which just undermines you straight away.

Within the letter were three pages of a 340 character cipher which is now known as the Z340. Like the previous one, it was a substitution cipher, but this time it was much more difficult to follow. cipher, but this time it was much more difficult to follow. Zodiac had even used more symbols to hide the letter frequencies and scrambled the entire cipher so there were no double letters or double symbols. For more than 50 years, this cipher was deemed unbreakable. All it would take was a community of hundreds of the world's best codebreakers, working for decades to break it. And also, as usual, a big dose of luck. Now before we talk about any of that though, we need to talk about the other letters,

threats and jibes that the Zodiac would send to the press between 1969 and 1974, along with all the potential suspects, hoaxes and dead ends, of course. And we'll also look at who, if anyone, we think is the most likely suspect in the crime world's deepest and most enduring mystery. But to do that, we need a whole other episode. So, you'll have to join us next week for the final, concluding part of Red-Handed Does the Zodiac. Heh heh heh heh. And practice your word, wheels. Because maybe all this case has been missing is you.

I love that. Thanks. We'll see you then. Goodbye. Goodbye. In the early hours of December 4th, 2024, CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him. We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the

world. And the suspect. He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione.oni became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history was targeted premeditated and it's so terror. I'm Jesse Weber host of Luigi produced by law and crime and twist this is more than a true crime investigation we explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever.

explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever. He's awoken the people to a true issue. Hey, you're my friend! Hey! Finally, maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to acknowledge the barbaric nature of our healthcare system. Listen to Law and Crime's Luigi exclusively on Wondery+. You can join Wondery+, the Wondery app, Spotify or Apple podcasts. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really question what's real? Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest and most mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and

doctor's offices? Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr.ollin's Medical Mysteries, and each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries, Mr. Bollin's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Bollin's Medical Mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app

or on Spotify or Apple podcasts.