‘This Is the Zodiac Speaking’

The History of America’s Most Mysterious Killer

By guest contributor Charles Carroll.

Out of all the serial killers who have stalked the American landscape, the mysterious Zodiac Killer has haunted the American imagination and public’s curiosity more than any other. It’s certainly not because he was the most prolific and lethal serial killer — his five confirmed homicides wouldn’t put him anywhere near the top ten serial killers by murder count in the United States. For reference, America’s most prolific serial killer was Samuel Little, active between 1970 and 2005 before his arrest, with a horrific record of 60 confirmed victims (although he did confess to 93). No, what made the Zodiac Killer so legendary is the image he marketed for himself and sold to the public.

In popular American lore, the Zodiac is seen as an evil genius, a man who was intelligent enough never to have been caught, and also confident enough to leave behind taunting letters and unsolvable cryptograms. He is seen as a man who stalked his prey and painstakingly planned out every minute detail to ensure that no fatal clues were left behind. He was a formidable foe to the police, and would terrorize Northern California from 1968 to 1978. In sum, the public sees him as the perfect villain, something you would see only in movies.

Yet that mythos does not tell the real story of the Zodiac. In fact, a careful analysis of his psychological profile demonstrates an evil, pathetic, little man who was marred by mental illness. There is value in studying this profile outside of just mere curiosity. The Zodiac can be seen as an archetype of our political enemies today. Similar to how Eric Hoffer in his book The True Believer developed the archetype of the type of person to become fully invested into an ideological movement, or how Edward Dutton developed the archetype of the witch in his book Witches, Feminism, and the Fall of the West to describe a certain type of mischievous and antagonizing woman, we can develop an archetype of the Zodiac to apply to the mentally ill and psychopathic foot soldiers of the Left.

It’s beneficial to plumb the depths of the darker side of Man, in order to understand the dangers we face. We should always remember that this particular archetype we are exploring may not necessarily apply to the majority of the Left — possibly no more than 10%, to be absolutely fair to them — but they are still enough to pose a danger to us. In order to examine and understand the mind and personality of the Zodiac, we will first have to narrate the history of the Zodiac murders and his correspondence with the media.

For those interested in reading more about the psychology of the Zodiac, much of the inspiration for this post comes from reading This Is the Zodiac Speaking: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer by violence expert Michael D. Kelleher and psychologist David Van Nuys. While they were more interested in determining a possible diagnosis for the Zodiac, their analysis of his crimes and how his letters read did help me draw parallels between that loon bag and today’s Left. Van Nuys comes to the conclusion that the Zodiac suffered from multiple personality disorder. That diagnosis is not my focus in this post; instead, my focus here is to draw parallels between an obviously crazy man and the crazies on the Left. Besides that, it’s the Halloween season, so might as well enjoy a little spooky fun.

We will first be required to read over the history of the Zodiac murders and his correspondence. I will discuss more in-depth the first few crimes and letters versus the later ones, mostly for brevity’s sake but also because the first few examples will be enough to establish his character thoroughly.

A History of the Zodiac Killer

The Bates Murder (October 30–31, 1966)

The murder of Cheri Jo Bates is tied to the Zodiac case, but not for the reason you would think. Most likely this wasn’t actually his doing, but that’s never been definitively ruled, either. We do know that the first two murders that can without a doubt be attributed to the Zodiac do not happen until December 20, 1968, and that the Zodiac never made mention of the murder of Bates until March 13, 1971, well after his last murder. I find the opinions of Kelleher and Van Nuys to be compelling, but I am always willing to side either way, since there are very weird connections between this murder and the verified Zodiac murders. For now, I side with the authors in suggesting that the Zodiac was unashamedly taking credit for crimes he did not commit, which we will often see him do. So why should we start here in our history of the Zodiac, especially if he’s not the murderer? Simply put, we have our first piece of physical evidence of the Zodiac prowling around California.

Cheri Jo Bates, a student at Riverside City College, was murdered sometime between 9 PM on October 30 and 12:30 AM on October 31. The killer had stalked her beforehand as she was in the school library on a Sunday night. The killer disabled her Volkswagen Beetle while she was inside the library, setting her up for his diabolical trap. When she returned and found her car not able to start, she ran into the killer, who offered her his assistance, which she regrettably accepted. From there he drove her into a secluded, unpaved alleyway, where he proceeded to slash her to death.

About a month after the murder, November 29, a typed confession letter was sent to a local newspaper. The letter is considered legitimate since it contained details known only to the murderer and law enforcement. What made this unique was that the letter was prepared in such a way that only capital letters were used and that the copy sent to the newspaper was faded and diffuse since it was written behind several sheets of carbon copy paper. The killer was clever enough to use this method to avoid the police being able to identify his typewriter if he were ever caught.

While this sounds like something the Zodiac would do — he is known, after all, for writing letters like this, albeit by hand, to the police — there is no definitive link to the Zodiac. Any similarities in style could be just coincidental, and further examination between the genuine Zodiac letters and this typed confessional show more of a divergence in style than one would think if it had in fact been the Zodiac. The fact that it was also typed doesn’t fit his later habit of writing by hand with pen. The more damning thing to consider here is that the confession hints that the murderer knew Cheri Jo, whereas in the confirmed Zodiac murders, the victims were all picked at random. There’s just not enough evidence to say that the Zodiac typed this confession letter or committed the murder.

So where does the Zodiac come in? About five months later, in April 1967, a janitor at Riverside City College found a faded poem on a desk in the library that hinted at the murder of Cheri Jo:

Police had no idea what to make of this piece of evidence, so they took photographs of it and stored it away, forgotten. Paul Avery would later come upon this piece of evidence and have it sent to a handwriting expert in November 1970, whereupon it was determined that the handwriting matched that of the Zodiac in his later letters! But this poem was not all the Zodiac left behind here. Exactly six months and one day after the murder, a series of three anonymous letters were sent to the police, the local newspaper, and Cheri Jo’s father that taunted all of them and promised more murders to come. Later handwriting analysis nailed these three letters down to the Zodiac as well!

There’s just a lot of oddities to be able to say definitively that the Zodiac was the murderer and/or that he authored the typed confession letter. Interestingly enough, he (speaking as “the Zodiac”) didn’t mention or claim the Riverside case until Paul Avery reported on a possible link to it in 1970. It would have been quite uncharacteristic of him not to seek attention for his actual crimes. My hypothesis is that the Zodiac was clearly in the Riverside area when the murder occurred and that he did write on the desk, but he wasn’t the murderer. Most likely, he wanted a taste of the publicity and thrill of it without having the murder actually attributed to him. It’s possible that he was “dipping his toe in the water,” as the saying goes, to experience the hysteria he could generate all the while waiting to see whether the police would go after him. We can reasonably speculate that he was a copycat killer, taking inspiration from this particular crime, and had already been engaging in fantasies about being a criminal who could taunt and confound the police.

Lake Herman Road: The Zodiac’s First Attack (December 20, 1968)

It is beyond doubt that the Zodiac murdered 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen and 17-year-old David Arthur Faraday on December 20, 1968. The two were going on their first date and would drive together in David’s Rambler station wagon around Vallejo, California, where they lived. Their date would end at Lake Herman Road, which happened to be the city’s “lovers’ lane.” Unfortunately, the story only takes a turn for the worse. The combination of his targets being young, unaware, defenseless teenagers, coupled with being in a secluded and dark area, would prove to be the ultimate temptation for the Zodiac.

An unknown car soon parked nearby, most likely startling the young couple. The Zodiac exited his vehicle and immediately began to shoot a barrage of bullets from his .22 caliber semi-automatic pistol in an attempt to get the couple to exit their vehicle. He shot David directly in his head, killing him. As would be observed in the rest of the Zodiac’s murders, he always sought to neutralize the male first. He set his sights upon Betty Lou, who ran as fast as she could, before he shot her five times in the back, taking her life as well. The Zodiac would then flee the scene, and the police who came upon the crime scene were left scratching their heads at how vicious and random the murders were. The police decided to hedge their bets and declare this a drug-related crime, and thought no more of it until the Zodiac committed his second attack and began his correspondence with the media.

Blue Rock Springs Park: Zodiac Strikes Again (July 4–5, 1969)

The Zodiac would strike again, and it was basically the same play as before. It was the Fourth of July, 1969, when 19-year-old Michael Mageau would get into the car of 22-year-old Darlene Ferrin. Much in the same way as above, the two would drive off to another lovers’ lane, this time a secluded and isolated road along the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course. Unbeknownst to them, the Zodiac was traveling around these secluded roads to find his next victims, and unfortunately for them, their paths crossed.

The Zodiac’s car would park right behind theirs, and the Zodiac would exit with his gun drawn and a bright flashlight blinding them. Mageau and Ferrin could not see, and assumed it must have been a police officer, so Darlene rolled down her window and began fumbling around for her ID as Michael did as well. The Zodiac began to unload his 9mm upon the two, hitting first Michael in his right arm and Darlene right into her neck. In a panic Michael tried to escape the car, but discovered that the passenger side handle was missing. The Zodiac walked calmly back to his car to observe the mess, and saw that Michael, who was still alive, was trying to make his escape. The Zodiac made his way back to Darlene’s car, firing two bullets into each of the two before leaving the crime scene behind. In a stroke of fortune for Michael, he would survive this whole ordeal after the Zodiac thought he was finally dead, but Darlene would succumb to her fatal injuries.

Vallejo Police would soon receive a phone call from a pay phone just thirty minutes after the gruesome attack. As for the operator who picked up the Zodiac’s phone call, it would forever be stuck in her head the cold and scripted words: “I wish to report a double murder. If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to a public park, you will find the kids in a brown car. They have been shot by a 9mm Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye.” It was monotone, robotic, and scripted — no wonder she found it haunting. Oddly enough, he would emphasize the goodbye to make the whole ordeal even more ominous to her. Suddenly the case took on a whole new trajectory.

‘This Is the Zodiac Speaking’

The Zodiac Killer would make his big debut in the newspapers on August 1, 1969, by sending three letters, one each, to the following local newspapers: the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner. Each letter was nearly exactly the same, but each newspaper received its own unique cipher. When combined together, they formed “Z408,” a cipher of 408 characters long. To understand the kind of man we are dealing with, it is best to read his own introductory words:

Dear Editor

This is the murderer of the 2 teenagers last Christmass at Lake Herman & the girl on the 4th of July near the golf course in Vallejo

To prove I killed them I shall state some facts which only I & the police know.

Christmass

1. Brand name of ammo
   Super X

2. 10 shots were fired

3. the boy was on his back with his feet to the car

4. the girl was on her right side feet to the west

4th July

1. girl was wearing paterned slacks

2. The boy was also shot in the knee.

3. Brand name of ammo was western.

​Here is part of a cipher the other 2 parts of this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the Vallejo Times & SF Examiner.

I want you to print this cipher on the front page of your paper. In this cipher is my idenity.

If you do not print this cipher by the afternoon of Fry. 1st of Aug 69, I will go on a kill rampage Fry. night. I will cruse around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, untill I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.

⌖

Without a doubt, whoever had written this letter was the killer. It was cold, it was detailed, it was riddled with spelling errors for some reason, and it was threatening. The killer had also signed off with a symbol that would serve from then on as his own signature: a crosshair inside a circle. He was clearly confident in his work, as he issued a threat to strike again unless his demands were met.

The staff of each newspaper faced their own moral dilemma: Do we give in to this lunatic’s demands? The Vallejo Times-Herald and San Francisco Examiner printed his letter on the front page. The San Francisco Chronicle, however, wouldn’t post on their front page, but they still reluctantly posted the letter and cryptogram on page four, alongside a quote from the chief of police saying they had yet to verify whether the killer had written the letters. The chief of police was playing a mind game with the Zodiac, hoping that he would write again and inadvertently reveal more about himself.

The Zodiac couldn’t resist the spotlight and attention, and he mailed another letter to the Examiner that was received on August 4. The letter would open with the now infamous line: “Dear Editor: This is the Zodiac speaking.” He had finally introduced himself under this infamous moniker, and it forever stuck. From now on, much of his writings and correspondence would start with the haunting phrase: “Dear Editor: This is the Zodiac speaking.” Say what you want about him; he had a knack for catching people’s attention.

The letter didn’t provide much incriminating evidence to identify the Zodiac, but it did provide enough proof to the police that this indeed was the killer, for he once again provided details that only the police and killer could have known. We don’t need to read over the entire letter, but we can highlight a few phrases from it to start seeing the Zodiac’s personality unfold. For one, we start to see his contempt of authority out in the open: “By the way, are the police having a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up; when they crack it they will have me.” Further down, he taunts them again by recalling the night of the second attack: “The man who told the police that my car was brown was a negro about 40–45 rather shabbly dressed. I was in this phone booth having some fun with the Vallejo cop when he was walking by.” Besides his hatred of the police and his immature personality, we start to see another pattern: trying to become chummy with the police and media. No doubt in his real life he was certainly an outcast — I can’t imagine a serial killer would get along with normal people — and it seems he tries to act more and more familiar with the media and police the longer he corresponds with them.

At the same time, the cryptogram needed to be solved. Each newspaper had been given its own version. However, whether it was the same code with different characters or whether they were supposed to be read together in a particular order was still not known. The local authorities were desperate, since he promised his identity would be revealed in the contents of the code. As a result, the codes were sent to America’s finest code-breakers. The FBI and the CIA teamed up to give it a crack. Funny enough, while those elite institutions were using all of their brain power to solve the Zodiac’s riddle, it would take one week for a normal suburban couple to crack the code.

Donald Hayden and his wife Bettye had the distinction of being the first to crack the cipher. Donald was just a high school teacher, who along with his wife liked to dabble in cryptology and solving puzzles. They made some elementary assumptions, and with those, everything fell into place quite quickly. What they first assumed was that it was a regular homophonic substitution cipher, meaning that each letter had assigned to it just one symbol. Bettye made the assumption that the Zodiac would start his letter off with I since he was a narcissist, and then from there looked for double letters since she also assumed the word kill or some form of it would be in the letter. Turns out she was exactly correct, since the first three words are literally I like killing.

The fully deciphered message read as follows:

I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangeroue anamal of all to kill something gives me the most thrilling experence it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl the best part of it is thae when I die I will be reborn in paradice and all the I have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to sloi down or atop my collectiog of slaves for my afterlife ebeorietemethhpiti

Unfortunately for law enforcement, they didn’t get anything useful out of this letter like he promised. Turns out that the worst part about the Zodiac wasn’t that he was a serial killer, but that he was a serial liar!

This whole incident does reveal a few things about the Zodiac’s personality. For one, he was clearly into some kind of new-age religious nonsense with his talks about slaves for the afterlife, although no one has been able to nail down where he might have gotten that from. He also has strange fantasies about identifying with media characters such as General Zaroff from Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” and later as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner from the opera The Mikado. Some today would call this “media literacy,” but what we see here on display is a retreat into fantasy, most likely to make up for his being a powerless social outcast. This leads to my third observation: that he craves power and respect which is something he is lacking in life, and hence why he is warring with the police and hunting innocents.

Attack at Lake Berryessa (September 27, 1969)

Arguably the most bizarre of Zodiac’s crimes occurred within two months after his first interactions with the media. After two attacks that occurred back to back using the same method of car ambushes, the Zodiac most likely felt it was time to change things up. On September 27, 1969, the Zodiac would stalk and prey upon an ordinary college couple who had gone out to Lake Berryessa to enjoy a nice, serene day, away from everybody else. This desire to enjoy a private day would leave them unfortunately vulnerable to the Zodiac.

Two college students, Cecelia Shephard (22) and Bryan Hartnell (20), were picnicking together on an isolated peninsula along the lake shoreline when Cecelia noticed an odd fellow off in the distance. Perturbed, Cecelia made mention to Bryan that there was a man walking towards them. The man hid behind a tree in the distance. It was a public park, so Bryan had initially brushed off her concern; it was probably another picnicker or someone going to take a leak. Suddenly, she blurted out loud that the man had a gun, and that’s when it snapped in Bryan’s mind that something was wrong. The couple quickly got up, after which the Zodiac calmly let them know that everything would be all right and that he just needed money and their car.

It must have been a bizarre and horrifying spectacle to behold. The Zodiac was bold, but not bold enough to show his face. He had on a black, executioner-style hood with a bib sewn onto it. On the bib he had painted his signature crosshair symbol. He further hid his appearance with a pair of sunglasses to hide his eyes. In a later interview after surviving the attack, Bryan recalled how he had agreed to cooperate fully with the Zodiac holding them at gunpoint, expecting that by cooperating with him, he would uphold his end of the bargain to let them off safely.

Bryan is an interesting character in this saga. At the time, he was taking a sociology class in college and he had hoped he could use what he had learned to pry some information out of the Zodiac in order to garner some material for a class paper. While the Zodiac introduced himself as a convict on the run who happened to kill a guard to escape, Bryan did not know it was the Zodiac he was interacting with. As he later mentioned in interviews, Bryan knew he was interacting with a murderer, but he didn’t fully appreciate how psychopathic the Zodiac was — hence why he hoped he could talk his way out of it or at least mitigate the severity of the situation. He offered all sorts of opportunities to help the Zodiac, who he thought was a convict in need. He could write him a check, give him his phone number so they could talk later, etc. The Zodiac wasn’t interested and calmly just told him he needed them to tie each other up before throwing two plastic clotheslines to the couple.

The couple had no choice, so Cecelia would bound Bryan’s hands, and then the Zodiac would tie up Cecelia. Once the two had their hands tied up, the Zodiac forced both to their stomachs before hogtying their feet as well, leaving them completely immobile. Bryan sensed that they were approaching the end of what he thought was a bizarre robbery, so he innocently enough asked the Zodiac if the gun was actually loaded. It’s not necessarily a ridiculous thing to wonder. He had read somewhere beforehand that it was actually common for robbers not to load their weapons to avoid harsher sentences if they are ever caught. The Zodiac would grimly answer in the affirmative when he showed a fully loaded magazine, leaving Bryan befuddled and quiet.

Suddenly the tense but quiet atmosphere was broken. The Zodiac unleashed a hail of blows from a knife upon Bryan first, then Cecelia. All in all, Bryan would receive six blows into his back, while Cecelia would receive ten blows all over her body, also in a much more aggressive fashion. There’s at least two reasons Cecelia received the more brutal treatment from the Zodiac. The first is that she was a woman, and the Zodiac probably had some pent-up aggression and anger towards women in general. The second is that while Bryan was being stabbed and quickly incapacitated, she reacted only naturally as any of us would, by beginning to squirm and scream. This resulted in the Zodiac directing blows all over her body instead of just her back. Bryan shrewdly feigned death while Cecelia was stabbed within an inch of her life, leaving her unresponsive. The Zodiac, seeing that his work was done, retreated into the distance where he first graffitied their car, before fleeing the area entirely. Amazingly, Bryan was able to get up later in the night and make his way slowly and agonizingly to get help. Bryan would survive the whole ordeal, while Cecelia would succumb to her gruesome injuries in the hospital two days later.

The Zodiac wasn’t quite satisfied with what he thought was a double murder. He did write with a pen upon their car to mark this crime as another victory for him. But that wasn’t enough for the man who felt a compulsion to brag and taunt. Later in the evening, police would receive a phone call from a phone booth just a few blocks from the police station and approximately 27 miles away from the crime scene. The unfortunate dispatch operator who had to answer the call would hear one of the most shocking calls of his life: “I want to report a murder, no, a double murder. They are two miles north of Park Headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.” Here the killer briefly pauses. “I’m the one that did it.”

The Killing of Paul Stine (October 11, 1969)

The final confirmed slaying by the Zodiac would occur two weeks later in the neighborhood of Presidio Heights in San Francisco. On the night of October 11, 1969, the Zodiac entered the cab of 29-year-old taxi driver Paul Stine. The Zodiac calmly requested to be driven to the intersection of Maple and Washington Street and once there, requested to be dropped just one block down further for unknown reasons. Once the car stopped, the Zodiac immediately sat behind Paul Stine’s seat and commenced a blitz-style attack, shooting Paul Stine directly in his head. The Zodiac quickly sprang into action and began cleaning up the scene of the crime. He wiped down carefully all over the car to erase any fingerprints, all the while taking as souvenirs Paul’s glasses and license, as well as pieces of his shirt. With that, the killer exited the vehicle and made his way out of the neighborhood.

He thought he was slick, but he did make a series of errors. For one, he left two partial fingerprints. These would be enough to identify him if somehow his fingerprints were ever stored in a database. Secondly, and much more detrimental to him, he left behind witnesses. While he murdered Paul Stine and proceeded to clean up the scene, three teenagers witnessed the debacle.

Of course, it would have meant the end for the Zodiac if the police had not been so severely incompetent that night. The teenage witnesses were able to give to the police a description that most likely would have helped them apprehend the Zodiac within minutes and end his crime spree once and for all. The teenagers reported that he was a husky white man wearing some kind of dark or black jacket. It was the middle of the night and not that many people would be walking around that area anyhow, so the chances of catching the Zodiac were astronomically larger than they were in the previous crimes.

Amazingly, two officers did come across a suspect who fit the description, who would turn out actually to have been the Zodiac himself! They even shouted to him and got him to reply. But as you have gathered, the police had already severely fumbled this whole case. Just before they pulled right up in front of the Zodiac, the dispatch radio alerted the police to keep their eyes out for a… black guy. Lol. Lmao even.

Yep, they let the Zodiac go, not thinking about it any further until a few days later, when the enormity of their mistake finally dawned on them. They asked the Zodiac if he had seen anything, to which the killer, probably ready to empty his bowels, told the police that he had seen a guy waving a gun down the street. The police, not recognizing the Zodiac right in front of their eyes, quickly made their way down the street. However, it wasn’t a total failure. The police would two days later develop a composite sketch from the two officers and teenagers who had seen the Zodiac’s face. As his later letter hints at, the sketch would eerily look a lot like him, clearly startling him.

This killing was a lot different from his three previous attacks. For one, it was on a lone man, not a couple. Two, it was a lot more brazen and reckless. In fact, it was so reckless that he left behind sufficient evidence that can easily identify and convict him if he were to be caught. It’s really after this murder that the once-invincible and confident Zodiac begins to unravel and spiral. So why did he change it up? The psychologists speculate that after the last two attacks in which he mistakenly allowed the men to recover and live, the Zodiac’s self-confidence was quite shaken. We already know that he had a severe hatred of authority and his vicious attacks were an outlet to try and impose some control onto others who were weaker than himself. Is it not safe to conclude that his previous mistakes of failing to kill the men made him more insecure about himself? If he needed to taunt authority and prove himself better than even them, it really would have affected his ego to see the male victims be able to get one up on him, so to speak. He wanted to taunt them, but it felt more like their existence and survival were taunting him back. He must have felt a need to prove to himself that he could master and overcome even men who normally were higher up on the social ladder than himself. This is why this was done in a more reckless and less thought-out manner than before. He would take out a man, any man he could come across. It just turns out maybe he did have a reason to doubt himself after all.

Zodiac Writes Back

Investigators at the time assumed that it was just an ordinary robbery, and they did not suspect that the Zodiac was behind it. This makes sense, since this was well outside his normal operations, and also, Paul Stine’s wallet was missing. The Zodiac, however, couldn’t stand not receiving credit for his handiwork. On October 13, the Zodiac would mail to the Chronicle evidence that he was responsible for this gruesome killing. This time, besides a formal letter, he mailed a piece of Paul Stine’s bloody shirt, just so that there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he had done it.

The contents of the October 13 letter read as follows:

This is the Zodiac speaking.

I am the murderer of the taxi driver over by Washington St + Maple St last night, to prove this here is a blood stained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did in the people in the north bay area.

The S.F. Police could have caught me last night if they had searched the park properly instead of holding road races with their motorcicles seeing who could make the most noise. The car drivers should have just 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 shoot out the front tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.

As you can imagine, threatening a terrorist attack against schoolchildren wasn’t well received, and San Francisco went into an appropriate panic, no doubt feeding into the Zodiac’s narcissism. It should be telling that it was at this point the killings had ceased, but his communications with media began to escalate up and to the point he sounded more like a scornful and lonesome lover than a criminal mastermind.

On November 8, 1969, Zodiac sent another one of his correspondences to the media. This time he chose to spice things up, and he sent his greetings on a greetings card. Infamously known as the “Dripping Pen Card,” this card depicts on the front a pen that is dripping with ink with the caption “Sorry I haven’t written, but I just washed my pen…” I must confess that as a Zoomer I don’t understand this humor from the ’60s/’70s, but that’s beside the point. The message read as follows:

This is the Zodiac speaking

I though you would need a good laugh before you hear the bad news. You won’t get the news for a while yet. and i can’t do a thing with it!

PS could you print this new cipher on your frunt page? I get awfully lonely when I am ignored, so lonely I could do my Thing!!!!!!

⌖

Des July Aug Sept Oct = 7

Attached to this card was the newest Zodiac cipher, known as “Z340” since it had a length of 340 characters. Let me take a quick detour with this particular cipher. Its contents aren’t really relevant to the article, but it makes for good trivia. If you recall, around 2020, the Zodiac made headlines once again, not because he had struck again, but because the cipher had finally been broken. The last cipher had been relatively simple, and it most likely hurt the Zodiac’s ego to see that a simple high school teacher and his wife were the ones to break it; therefore, he had decided to complicate this next one. This time he used more than one symbol to represent the same letter. He also switched the pattern in which it was to be read. It would take the effort of a programming team and 14 years of their intensive labor and coding to break the cipher at last. It read as follows:

I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me
that wasnt me on the TV show
which brings up a point about me
I am not afraid of the gas chamber
because it will send me to paradice all the sooner
because I now have enough slaves to work for me
where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradice
so they are afraid of death
I am not afraid because I know that my new life is
life will be an easy one in paradice death

The problem with decoding ciphers is not in finding a solution, but finding which solution is the correct one out of a near-infinite number. The FBI settled on this solution since the phrase “I am not afraid of the gas chamber” was used. Context-wise, someone called into a local show pretending to be the Zodiac and saying that he was afraid of the gas chamber just before this particular letter and cipher were sent. It was proven not to have been the Zodiac calling, because the call was traced back to a local mental hospital and the patient was identified.

Literally the next day, November 9, the Zodiac mailed another letter, now infamously known as the “Bus Bomb Letter.” As you can deduce from the name, the letter is about a bomb for a bus, and in particular, a bomb designed to target a school bus full of children. The Zodiac wanted attention, and he was a master of it.

This letter, like the rest of them, doesn’t reveal his identity, but it does help us learn more about his psychology. Take, for example, this key phrase: “I look like the description passed out only when I do my thing, the rest of the time I look entirle different. I shall not tell you what my descise consists of when I kill.” It’s an odd thing to mention and reads more like a desperate attempt to deny that the sketch of him actually looks like him rather than him bragging about how clever he is. This rather vindicates the theory that he was rattled after nearly being caught; hence why he never finds it within himself to kill again.

Just prior to this and after the “This is the Zodiac speaking” greeting, he says, “Up to the end of Oct I have killed 7 people. I have grown rather angry with the police for their telling lies about me. So I shall change the way the collecting of slaves. I shall no longer announce to anyone. When I comitt my murders, they shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger, & a few fake accidents, etc.” In other words, he’s going to pretend from now on that he’s killing people. Take also this line: “Hey blue pig I was in the park — you were useing fire trucks to mask the sound of your cruzeing prowl cars.” He’s very childlike and immature, needing to resort to name-calling. Compare his initial taunts to this one, and you begin to see a regression in his personality towards more and more immaturity. Something has snapped in him.

Zodiac Winds Down

The Zodiac would continue to write well until 1978, but his murder spree ended after Paul Stine in October 1969. Paul Stine was not his last crime, however. On March 22, 1970, the Zodiac made his last public appearance. A pregnant 22-year-old Kathleen Johns was traveling along Highway 132 with her ten-month-old baby, when a motorist signaled to her to pull over during the dead of night. He made mention that her one wheel was loose and that he could tighten the lug nuts for her. She naïvely agreed to it, and when he motioned to her that she was good to go, she drove off again onto the freeway. In reality, the motorist loosened every lug nut, and quickly the tire came undone and her car was stranded. The motorist quickly came back up and offered her a ride to a station for help. This is when she made her second big mistake of the night.

Once she got into the stranger’s car with her daughter, the stranger would drive her past a few stations before she realized the predicament she was in. Once she asked why he passed some many stations, he nonchalantly told her he was going to kill her and her daughter that night. However, it seemed that he was reluctant to go through with whatever he had planned to do because he would drive aimlessly around the freeway for two hours. Eventually, he slowed down enough for her and her daughter to jump out into the field and wait for help while he sped off. Eventually a trucker and another passerby would find her and take her to the police, where she saw the sketch of the Zodiac hanging on the wall and put two and two together: it was the Zodiac! Seemingly while this was all happening, the Zodiac returned to the scene of the crime, and in a fit of rage set fire to her car to destroy all evidence before fleeing the scene. The Zodiac would take credit for this abduction later in a letter sent on July 24, 1970.

Zodiac Fades Away

He didn’t have it in him anymore. The once-terrifying criminal was now reduced to writing petty letters and lashing out for attention. He would send letters up to 1978, and even then, they were filled with absurd claims about how many kills he had racked up — kills that, conveniently, the police had never noticed or could identify. What’s odd is that he eventually stopped identifying as the Zodiac and would take on a new persona, identifying himself allusively with the character Ko-Ko from the opera The Mikado, mentioned above. In some other letters, he writes as if he’s a normal person to the editor, voicing, for instance, his civic opinion about particular movies being screened that offended his sensibilities.

As for those letters which have nothing to do with his criminal history, we only knew that he wrote them because of handwriting analyses that matched the handwriting to his other known letters. It’s as though his entire personality had suddenly changed and he was a normal citizen in society! Yet, he couldn’t keep his inner demons suppressed forever. Eventually he would write to the Chronicle his last letter on April 24, 1978:

Dear Editor

This is the Zodiac speaking I am back with you. Tell herb caen I am here, I have always been here. That city pig toschi is good - but I am busmarter and better he will get tired then leave me alone. I am waiting for a good movie about me. who will play me. I am now in control of all things.

Yours truly:
⌖ - guess

SFPD - 0

His final letter was short, cryptic, and desperate. He had mostly lost count of how many fake killings he wanted to take credit for. It was the end of the line for him, trying to chase the dragon one last time. The Zodiac would go silent from here on out. Whatever happened to him is unknown, just like his identity. Whether he died of natural causes or by his own hand, or whether he lived a lonely and unassuming life, we will not know until one day someone accidentally comes across damning evidence in someone’s attic such as Paul Stine’s license or an actual confession letter. Either way, the Zodiac faded into irrelevance as a sad man, who needed to lash out for attention and to feel a sense of control.

The Liberal as the Zodiac Archetype

The obvious question to ask after all this is “Who did it?” Zodiac enthusiasts and law enforcement all have their preferred suspects, but there is no real consensus, nor is there really any damning, incontrovertible evidence to nail down one suspect in a court of law. Take, for example, the preferred suspect of law enforcement: Arthur Leigh Allen. Long story short, there was an insane amount of circumstantial evidence that would convince any of us that there is no way in hell that it couldn’t have been him. Yet saliva samples, fingerprint comparisons, and handwriting samples could not tie him to any of the letters or crime scenes. Taking his circumstantial evidence in isolation from that of other suspects is a sure way to lead to erroneous conclusions because if you take each of the other suspects in isolation, then you’ll draw the same false conclusion that they all must have been the Zodiac. Circumstantial evidence is just that, circumstantial. Outside of any hard, physical evidence, you can only look at the suspects and conclude that they are just weird guys and that San Francisco is just a real-life Gotham or GTA server. This erroneous way of approaching the case, assuming circumstantial evidence to be damning evidence, is why every year someone comes forward and proposes that his dead father or grandfather must have been the Zodiac Killer because he had weird vibes.

The reality is that even if these people weren’t the killer, or killers in general, they all had the same personality and peculiar habits of the Zodiac. When you take a step back, you begin to see these psychopathic personalities all throughout the country, and nowhere more so than amongst the Left. Let’s start with the most fundamental trait that gives rise to all of the bizarre actions of these people. The locus or cause of all of this is their feelings of isolation, resentment, and inferiority. In sum, they are losers, and they painfully feel and resent it. This is essentially the same reasoning behind Eric Hoffer’s theory of the “true believer,” and why they are drawn to ideology as a comfort or remedy.

The Zodiac archetype cannot stand themselves and how they feel isolated from society. This motivates their aggressive tendencies that can lead to actual violence in the extreme case of the Zodiac or by left-wing terrorists, but mostly to become public nuisances. Most of the time, those embodying the Zodiac archetype will become public nuisances as in the case of any kind of left-wing activism because it garners attention towards them and puts the rare spotlight on them for once in their lives. Part of being in a hierarchy is that the attention paid to you is proportional to how far up the hierarchy you are. By being public nuisances, or in the extreme case of striking terror into the populace, they can artificially boost themselves up the social hierarchy from the attention they receive. If it sounds childish, well, it’s because it is. You see this in the case of children who act as nuisances in public, especially classrooms, because they lack the attention they want at home. It’s really no different from how the Zodiac archetype acts. As you examine the Zodiac’s letters over his career, you begin to see that he was motivated primarily by the attention he received, even well after he had stopped killing.

Another consequence of being lower in the hierarchy is the inability to project power and control onto others. It’s not a surprise that the higher you are in the hierarchy, the more power you wield. In order to get their way, those on the lower end of the hierarchy must coerce people, whether directly, through force, or indirectly, by being too tiresome to argue with. A lot of the time, they resort to angry outbursts and threats — much again like children do when they don’t get their way. The Zodiac archetype relies on angry outbursts and violence to manipulate others into following their will. In the case of the real Zodiac, he resorted to murders to achieve the notoriety he craved.

Interestingly enough, they resort to these angry outbursts to appear intimidating, but they really can’t back it up. They are much like the cornered prey that resorts to fluffing up its fur to appear much larger in the presence of a threatening predator. In reality, we all know that if the predator calls the bluff, it’s going to win that confrontation easily. After the third and fourth attacks, we begin to see the Zodiac falter in his plans when he cannot seem to finish off his male victims. Possibly his failures stem from a fear of the male victim fighting back and pulling off the mask to reveal a weak individual. His attack on Paul Stine has been interpreted as an attempt to find it within himself to overcome his fear of superior males, or the male figure in general, but he still has to resort to a cowardly behind-the-back attack. Of course after the night that the police nearly caught him, he became noticeably shaken to the point where he no longer committed anymore murders. Recall the pathetic attempt to deny that the sketch of him was actually him. The Zodiac and those like him are all talk, and they only can strike when our guards are down or when we buy into their sham threats.

It should go without saying that the Zodiac obviously hated authority. His primary foes were the police, after all. It is no different for those with the Zodiac complex, but authority to them is much more than just the police. Liberals hate anything that is above them in the hierarchy, whether that be police, male figures, father figures, the rich, or people with superior talents. These types of people cling to egalitarianism, not out of a misguided notion that all people will benefit from it, but because it will drag those above them to the same level. If they were given the chance to trade places with someone above them in the hierarchy, they would immediately abandon egalitarianism and begin to oppress you vehemently and with glee. The Zodiac Left seeks to drag down and destroy all hierarchies that hurt their self-image, wherein they are not in charge. The wars on masculinity, on historical great men, on those who legitimately earned their wealth, and on the idea of meritocracy all stem from a hatred of hierarchy and the hierarchical distribution of authority.

Finally, let us consider the immaturity, narcissism, and social isolation of those who belong to the Zodiac archetype. It’s not that hard to see how the Zodiac in his real life was going to be a social outcast. It’s not hard to speculate that someone who was as immature and violent as he was would never be able to function properly in a public setting. In his writings, you glean that he was becoming chummier with the media and police, eventually addressing them as though they were his friends or familiars to a game. This was probably his only real source of contact with the outside world, which explains how he begins to open himself up a bit to strangers he was writing to.

Why was he so lonely? Obviously it’s because he’s a lunatic, but also because he’s just a narcissist who would be unbearable to be around. All his letters praise himself as a criminal mastermind and cast his foes as moronic, but when you stop to think about it, he really wasn’t that intelligent. You could cite his ciphers as an indicator of high intelligence, but the reality is, the first one was easily solved by a normal couple while the second one only took over 50 years because the Zodiac couldn’t spell to save his life. His ciphers were the work of an amateur. Let’s not also forget the multiple times he was seen and his pathetic attempt to deny that the police sketches resembled him. He might have been intelligent enough to avoid leaving behind any clues, but he still left a decent amount that could convict him if he were ever caught. In reality, the Zodiac was just luckier than he was intelligent. The man was a narcissist who overestimated his abilities. Sound familiar?

The man was also incredibly immature for someone who was probably around 30 to 40 years old. Take a look at his spelling errors in all his writings for further illustration. Either he was incredibly stupid, or he intentionally misspelled words like a child would because he thought it would be funny or cute. Later when he resorts to mailing out greeting cards, he decorates them as would a schoolgirl. No wonder he was an outcast — he was clearly a narcissistic and immature lunatic! Of course, if you paid attention to anything the Left has done, especially those who suffer from this complex, it’s quite easy to find examples of their immaturity, loneliness, and narcissism.

Conclusion

America is really just one giant Gotham in this day and age. Amongst the Left today, we see many of their most devout shock troops and foot soldiers suffer from the same personality traits as did the Zodiac Killer. While many may not be as dangerous on an individual level as the Zodiac, when they congregate together, they pose an existential danger to normal people. These people are motivated by a hatred of society and the hierarchy embedded within it. These people are at the bottom of society, and have deluded themselves into thinking that it’s because of society’s persecutions and not because of their own anti-social behaviors. Those who rioted for BLM and Antifa are some of the clearest examples of this archetype in real life.

There’s more to this idea than just being a Halloween-themed article; it’s to recognize that there is a subset of people like this living amongst us who can impulsively harm us if we let our guards down. Once we recognize that they are not invincible, and that their kryptonite is looking in the mirror, then we have a path forward to winning against them and protecting our loved ones. We shouldn’t be afraid, but we should be alert.

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