Speaker 1: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely
Speaker 1: those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast,
Speaker 1: and do not necessarily represent those of iHeartMedia, How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: or its employees.
Speaker 2: For law enforcement, every homicide case is a puzzle, some
Speaker 2: more difficult than others.
Speaker 3: Two hundred pieces versus two hundred thousands.
Speaker 2: The Zodiac killer took the idea of a puzzle quite literally,
Speaker 2: forcing everyone to play his little game. This may be
Speaker 2: with the Zodiac is known for best codes and taunting
Speaker 2: letters to press and police, But would there be any
Speaker 2: answers to his riddle?
Speaker 3: Any content to his code?
Speaker 2: Was all this affront a powerplay and not worth the
Speaker 2: attention he so desperately sought That was left up to
Speaker 2: the press.
Speaker 3: Game on.
Speaker 4: A man in a match, robbed, tied, and stab them,
Speaker 4: leaving them for.
Speaker 5: Damn subjects stated, I want to report a murder, no
Speaker 5: a double murder.
Speaker 4: I did it a man who wore a medieval style
Speaker 4: executioners hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to
Speaker 4: use them.
Speaker 5: They haven't arrested me because they can't prove a thing.
Speaker 6: I'm not the damn Zodiac.
Speaker 4: Who is the Zodiac? And where is he.
Speaker 2: From iHeartRadio, Helstuff Works and Tenderfoot TV.
Speaker 3: This is Monster, the Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 7: When he committed the murders on Lake Kerman Road, he
Speaker 7: didn't make any effort to communicate with the media or
Speaker 7: take responsibility for it, but there was a lot of
Speaker 7: media attention around it. And then when he struck again
Speaker 7: in July of nineteen sixty nine, there was enormous media coverage,
Speaker 7: largely because of the phone call he made afterwards where
Speaker 7: he took credit for that crime and the murders on
Speaker 7: Lake Kerman Road.
Speaker 8: If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway,
Speaker 8: you'll kids in a brown car. They were shot with
Speaker 8: a nine milimeter luger. I also killed those kids last year.
Speaker 7: So now he's created this sensational story that there's a
Speaker 7: psychotic killer out there, a serial killer who's responsible for
Speaker 7: two crimes, not just one. Twenty six days later is
Speaker 7: when I get the first Zodiac letters.
Speaker 4: A strange letter arrives at the offices of three Northern
Speaker 4: California newspapers.
Speaker 7: He's created a whole other game.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: On July thirty first, nineteen sixty nine, the zodiaccent envelopes
Speaker 1: to three Bay area newspapers. Each envelope included two sheets,
Speaker 1: a handwritten letter, and one third of a three part
Speaker 1: coded message known as a cryptogram or a cipher. This
Speaker 1: coded message is very important to the case, but let's
Speaker 1: focus on the letter first. Duffy Jennings was working at
Speaker 1: the San Francisco Chronicle when the first or arrived.
Speaker 6: I'll never forget my first day walking into the Chronicle.
Speaker 6: The day before, I had come in to do an interview,
Speaker 6: but it was in the morning, and there's not a
Speaker 6: lot of activity, you know, mostly activity in the morning papers,
Speaker 6: late afternoon. But when I came in to start work
Speaker 6: the next afternoon, I think it was probably two o'clock.
Speaker 6: It was equivalent the first time I walked into the
Speaker 6: Yankee Stadium and saw that grass, and everybody talks about
Speaker 6: that first experience overwhelming. It is the majesty of it.
Speaker 6: And that's what I sensed at the Chronicle. It was
Speaker 6: total chaos. Desks were disheveled and crowded with papers, and
Speaker 6: there was stuff everywhere, and people were smoking. I could
Speaker 6: smell pencil shavings, glue, printers, ink, lots of people talking
Speaker 6: loudly and guys yelling copy and guys at the desk
Speaker 6: yelling first edition. It was just a typical day. But
Speaker 6: that's how it was every afternoon. The closer I got
Speaker 6: to five o'clock, people were on deadline. Editors were yelling,
Speaker 6: you need to explain this, or rewrite this, or you know,
Speaker 6: whatever it was, And I was just captivated. But I
Speaker 6: was mesmerized by this. It was just kind of an
Speaker 6: overwhelming sensory experience to be in and around this environment.
Speaker 6: I would come in and wait to be assigned to
Speaker 6: cover something. When the first letter came, I was among
Speaker 6: the copy boys sorting mail. The first letter didn't cause
Speaker 6: a lot of consternation in the sense that nobody knew
Speaker 6: quite what to make of it. Time. It was viewed
Speaker 6: really as here's a nutcase playing games and say if
Speaker 6: you can guess what this is.
Speaker 1: Here's a portion of the first letter the Zodiac sent
Speaker 1: to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Speaker 8: Dear editor, this is the murderer of the two teenagers
Speaker 8: last Christmas at Lake Herman and the girl on the
Speaker 8: fourth of July near the off course in Vallejo. Here
Speaker 8: is part of a cipher. The other two parts of
Speaker 8: this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the
Speaker 8: Vallejo Times and San Francisco Examiner. I want you to
Speaker 8: print ae cipher on the front page of your paper.
Speaker 8: In this cipher is my identity. If you do not
Speaker 8: printice by the afternoon of Friday, first of August, I
Speaker 8: will go on a kill rampage Friday night. I will
Speaker 8: cruise around all weekend, killing lone people in the night,
Speaker 8: then move on to kill again.
Speaker 1: The letter was scrawled in blue felt tip pen. The
Speaker 1: handwriting was sloppy and cramped, and it was full of misspellings,
Speaker 1: like Christmas with two s's at the end. The style
Speaker 1: of this writing seemed a strange contrast to the other sheet,
Speaker 1: an orderly grid of letters and symbols that the killer
Speaker 1: said contained his true identity.
Speaker 7: When the first letters arrived, that was his introduction to
Speaker 7: the world. This is who I am. I am the murderer,
Speaker 7: so I'm may be taken seriously. I'm a very dangerous person,
Speaker 7: and if you don't do what I tell you to do,
Speaker 7: there will be real consequences.
Speaker 1: The newspapers weren't sure if the letter came from the killer,
Speaker 1: and even if it did, should they publish it. On
Speaker 1: the one hand, you want to take the threat seriously.
Speaker 1: On the other it's like bargaining with terrorists or printing
Speaker 1: a mass shooter's manifesto. Do you really want to reward
Speaker 1: a killer with attention and give them a platform to
Speaker 1: spread more fear. Two other papers, the San Francisco Examiner
Speaker 1: in the Vallejo Times, received nearly identical letters but different
Speaker 1: parts of the code, so the papers had to decide
Speaker 1: together whether or not to publish.
Speaker 6: When there's any kind of controversy or question about whether
Speaker 6: to publish things like this, particularly around threats, My guess
Speaker 6: is that we talked to the other newspapers and said,
Speaker 6: are you going to publish your third of the cryptogram?
Speaker 6: And everybody said, yes, we will. I mean, it's a
Speaker 6: news story when a killer takes credit publicly for what
Speaker 6: he's done and then taunts you or the police to
Speaker 6: solve a puzzle. But even that wasn't up front page story.
Speaker 1: Two days later, on Saturday, August second, the Chronicle ran
Speaker 1: the story coded Clue in Murders with a reproduction of
Speaker 1: the cipher. The Valejo police chief was quoted as saying,
Speaker 1: we're not satisfied the letter was written by the murderer,
Speaker 1: and he urged whoever wrote the letter to prove he
Speaker 1: was the killer by sending more details, perhaps trying to
Speaker 1: trick the Zodiac into sending something self incriminating. The chief
Speaker 1: also warned Vallejo residents to avoid lonely places.
Speaker 7: It wasn't until the police asked, would you send another
Speaker 7: letter with more details that the next letter came and said,
Speaker 7: this is the Zodiac speaking.
Speaker 1: On August fourth, nineteen sixty nine, just two days after
Speaker 1: the chronicle story, a new letter arrived with the same
Speaker 1: slanted handwriting.
Speaker 8: Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking in answer to
Speaker 8: your asking for more details about the good times I've
Speaker 8: had in Vallejo. I shall be very happy to supply
Speaker 8: even more material. By the way, are the police having
Speaker 8: a good time.
Speaker 3: With the code?
Speaker 8: If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do
Speaker 8: crack it, they will have me last Christmas. In that episode,
Speaker 8: the police were wondering as to how I could shoot
Speaker 8: and hit my victims in the dark. They did not
Speaker 8: only state this, but implied this by saying it was
Speaker 8: a well lit night and I could see the silhouettes
Speaker 8: on the horizon. Bullshit. That area is surrounded by high
Speaker 8: hills and trees. What I did was tape a small
Speaker 8: pencil flashlight to the barrel of my gun. If you notice,
Speaker 8: you'll see a black or dark spot in the center
Speaker 8: of the circle of light. One taped to a gun barrel.
Speaker 8: The bullet will strike exactly in the center of the
Speaker 8: black dot in the light. All I had to do
Speaker 8: was spray them is if it was a water hose.
Speaker 8: I was not happy to see that I did not
Speaker 8: get front page coverage.
Speaker 7: When he sends that second letter, now he's the Zodiac killer.
Speaker 7: He has chosen his own name, his own moniker. And
Speaker 7: although a lot of serial killers throughout history have nicknames,
Speaker 7: most don't choose their nicknames for themselves. So that name
Speaker 7: had some meaning to him that we don't know. But
Speaker 7: if you look at the handwriting in the Zodiac letters,
Speaker 7: especially the ones that accompany the cipher, the handwriting looks
Speaker 7: very sloppy. It looks kind of rushed and just natural handwriting,
Speaker 7: like I just fired off this letter. Then you look
Speaker 7: at the cipher, it's very clean and very careful. Each
Speaker 7: part consisted of a block of symbols, letters from the
Speaker 7: English language, symbols from astrology and other things, you know,
Speaker 7: half filled circles backwards letters. They're tidy and then straight rows.
Speaker 7: He might have used some sort of graphing paper underneath
Speaker 7: when he was doing it to make sure of that,
Speaker 7: which says something in and of itself about the killer
Speaker 7: that tells you right there, this was very.
Speaker 3: Important to him.
Speaker 7: It was more important than the letter. And when you
Speaker 7: look at the cipher itself, it's chilling just to look
Speaker 7: at it, because you know there's something in it, right,
Speaker 7: But once you realize what's in it, it's even more frightening.
Speaker 7: If he just wanted to brag about what he did,
Speaker 7: he could do that, and he did in that letter.
Speaker 7: The cipher is another element of this game he's playing.
Speaker 7: It's not just I'm somebody who has to be taken seriously.
Speaker 7: I'm dangerous. It's also I'm really clever, and I have
Speaker 7: something else I want to say. If you want to
Speaker 7: know who I am, you want to understand what I
Speaker 7: did and why I do what I do, You're gonna
Speaker 7: have to work for it. I'm not going to give
Speaker 7: you everything.
Speaker 1: The police sent the three parts cipher to the nearby
Speaker 1: Mare Island Naval Shipyard. There, navy code breakers rushed to
Speaker 1: crack the Killer's code and to discover the Zodiac's true
Speaker 1: identity before he killed again.
Speaker 9: On The published codes stopped hundreds of amateur cryptographers and
Speaker 9: several intelligence agencies.
Speaker 1: But surprisingly it was actually two amateurs who ended up
Speaker 1: solving it. A school teacher and his wife, Don and
Speaker 1: Betty Harden, saw the code in the newspaper and just
Speaker 1: decided to give it a shot. Tom Voyd, who runs
Speaker 1: the website Zodiac killer dot com, recorded the Harden's daughter, Leslie,
Speaker 1: at a two thousand and eight conference.
Speaker 10: Began on a Sunday morning fairly early, went on into
Speaker 10: the afternoon, into the evening, and through the night. They
Speaker 10: really became, in my eyes, the perfect code breaking team,
Speaker 10: because my dad had the scientific approach and very logical practices,
Speaker 10: and my mother had some.
Speaker 11: Intuition that led them in the direction that they needed
Speaker 11: to go. My father at some point recognized that he
Speaker 11: had to go to work the next morning, and when
Speaker 11: he went.
Speaker 6: To that.
Speaker 11: Not so my mother. She did not sleep and ate
Speaker 11: very little. The next morning, he got up and went
Speaker 11: off to work.
Speaker 12: He was a school teacher, came back home and was
Speaker 12: probably mildly surprised to find that there was no dinner
Speaker 12: and nothing at all happened in the kitchen.
Speaker 13: She sat in the chair and he stood behind her.
Speaker 13: And what really captured my attention for that moment was
Speaker 13: not the code spread out in front of them at all.
Speaker 13: It was the look of love on my father's face
Speaker 13: as he paid over her.
Speaker 14: And Don Harden. He had a boyhood interest in codes.
Speaker 14: You know, if it wasn't for Betty's persistence, they wouldn't
Speaker 14: have finished it.
Speaker 1: That's David Auranjak, a programmer and amateur cryptographer. He's spent
Speaker 1: the last decade fascinated by the Zodiacs codes.
Speaker 14: The first cipher was a simple substitution cipher, basically a
Speaker 14: simple way to hide a message.
Speaker 1: Essentially, you substitute each letter with a different letter. So
Speaker 1: to make a cipher for the word kill, you might
Speaker 1: substitute J for K, H for I, and b's for
Speaker 1: both l's. And if you know which letters you substituted,
Speaker 1: you can then decode JHBB back to kill. But without
Speaker 1: knowing which letters were substituted, how do you crack that code?
Speaker 1: The Hardens started by doing what's called a frequency analysis.
Speaker 14: You count up all the letters and how many times
Speaker 14: they happen. One of the things about English is that
Speaker 14: certain letters appear more often than others. In particular, the
Speaker 14: letter E is the most frequently occurring letter in the
Speaker 14: English language, and so you can use that information to
Speaker 14: your advantage when you're looking at a ciphertext. If you
Speaker 14: find that, say, the letter V is happening a lot
Speaker 14: more often than the other letters, then there's a good
Speaker 14: chance that it stands for the letter E. But the
Speaker 14: way the Zodiac made it harder and the first cipher
Speaker 14: was he would take a common letter like E, and
Speaker 14: instead of assigning one ciphertext letter to it, he assigned
Speaker 14: seven seven different symbols.
Speaker 1: That's why the Zodiac used backwards letters in astrological symbols
Speaker 1: to make his code harder to crack. Undaunted, the Harden's
Speaker 1: next tried what's called cribbing, plugging specific words into the puzzle.
Speaker 1: On a simpler cryptogram, you could try to figure out
Speaker 1: short words first.
Speaker 14: If the ciphertext has spaces in it, then you know
Speaker 14: that certain words are likely to happen. For instance, if
Speaker 14: you see a word that only has one letter, then
Speaker 14: there's only two words that it can be A and I.
Speaker 14: But in the first side for text, he did not
Speaker 14: use word spaces, so that made it a little harder
Speaker 14: to solve.
Speaker 1: Still, even without the spaces, you can try and guess
Speaker 1: if certain groups of symbols represent common words.
Speaker 14: If you have a right guess and you plug it
Speaker 14: in and you do the substitutions, other parts of the
Speaker 14: plaintext will come out. So you'll see fragments of other
Speaker 14: words like thhe. Well, there's a lot of words to
Speaker 14: start with THG, so you might be onto something. And
Speaker 14: if you made a bad guess, then those fragments will
Speaker 14: look like nonsense. There'll be letters that are next to
Speaker 14: each other that wouldn't really be next to each other ZQR.
Speaker 14: That guess is probably wrong. And Betty is attributed to
Speaker 14: the insight of thinking that he would start it by
Speaker 14: talking about himself and so it would start with the
Speaker 14: letter I, and that he would talk about his crime,
Speaker 14: so he would mention killing. And those intuitions also came
Speaker 14: from patterns that they observed in the ciphertext. They found
Speaker 14: symbols that were repeating next to each other. Doing a
Speaker 14: little research, they found, well, the most common doubled letter
Speaker 14: in English is LL, and you know LLL appears in.
Speaker 7: A lot of words all.
Speaker 14: Will and kill, and so that was a good guess
Speaker 14: on their part, because kill does appear in the message.
Speaker 14: So they tried to plug in those words in different
Speaker 14: places and eventually found other patterns, and then, through trial
Speaker 14: and error, were able to crack the code.
Speaker 1: Or at least almost crack the code. At the very
Speaker 1: end of the message was a string of letters that
Speaker 1: so far no one has been able to figure.
Speaker 14: Out the remaining eighteen symbols. It's just gibberish sequence of
Speaker 14: letters that doesn't make any sense. Zodiac was claiming that
Speaker 14: his identity was in the message, but when you decode
Speaker 14: it with the Harden's key, it doesn't say anything about
Speaker 14: his identity. But since the last eighteen are still undercoded,
Speaker 14: that's led to a lot of people thinking, well, maybe
Speaker 14: he did something else. There's some other process that is
Speaker 14: different than the key for the rest of the message,
Speaker 14: and there might be another message in there. Maybe he
Speaker 14: really did put his identity in there and it's hidden somehow,
Speaker 14: and those last eighteen and we just haven't figured it out.
Speaker 1: Leslie, the Harden's daughter, remembers waking up in the middle
Speaker 1: of the night after her parents cracked the code.
Speaker 11: Once the message became clear, it was a very frightening message.
Speaker 15: I do recall being in my room, coming in and
Speaker 15: out of sleep, mostly nightmares and scary images, because the
Speaker 15: words that were floating down the hallway were frightening words.
Speaker 11: Kill dangerous animal.
Speaker 1: This is the message that was hidden in the Zodia
Speaker 1: Acts three parts cipher.
Speaker 8: I like killing people because it is so much fun.
Speaker 8: It is more fun than killing weld game in the forest,
Speaker 8: because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To
Speaker 8: kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is
Speaker 8: even better than getting your rocks off with a girl.
Speaker 8: The best part of it is that when I die,
Speaker 8: I'll be reborn in paradise and all that I have
Speaker 8: killed will become my slaves. I will not give you
Speaker 8: my name because you will try to slow down or
Speaker 8: stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
Speaker 12: All of a sudden, what looks like a message, and
Speaker 12: the question at hand was what do we do now?
Speaker 12: They decided that they would do what the paper suggested.
Speaker 12: The paper had said, I think you might have a solution.
Speaker 12: Call this number.
Speaker 11: So they did. But once they did, it got a
Speaker 11: whole lot more interesting.
Speaker 1: The decoded message didn't reveal the Zodiac's true identity, as
Speaker 1: he had promised, but it did give clues as to
Speaker 1: who the zodiac might be.
Speaker 7: In the Zodiac Seiphered message, he referred to man as
Speaker 7: the most dangerous animal of all, which some people have
Speaker 7: interpreted as a reference to the book and or the
Speaker 7: movie The Most Dangerous Game. A lot of us who
Speaker 7: are older, we had to read that story in high school.
Speaker 7: And if you were a teenager who read that in
Speaker 7: high school and you were harboring some sort of violent fantasies,
Speaker 7: then you're not sympathizing with the victims the way most
Speaker 7: of us do. When you read that story, do you
Speaker 7: think about being the hunter Count Tsarov who lives on
Speaker 7: this island where he has constructed things designed to make
Speaker 7: ships crash on the shore so that people will be
Speaker 7: deserted on this island.
Speaker 13: I'm not trying to intrude, but I'm in sort of
Speaker 13: a jam. Are you the owner here? Yes?
Speaker 2: I am Count Zubtolf.
Speaker 7: And of course he pretends to be a gracious host
Speaker 7: and invites them to stay and everything.
Speaker 5: God made some in kings, some big us me he
Speaker 5: made a.
Speaker 7: Hunter, only for them to learn that he really intends
Speaker 7: to hunt.
Speaker 3: Them like animals here on my island.
Speaker 5: I hunt the Most Dangerous Game.
Speaker 8: You write me take half drowned men from ships you
Speaker 8: wrecked and drive them out to be hunted.
Speaker 5: Only after the keel does man know the true extosial.
Speaker 7: Love Count Tzarov obviously the name starts with the letter Z.
Speaker 7: He wears a costume of sorts, and he stalks his
Speaker 7: victims like prey. The whole story is structured around the
Speaker 7: idea that killing is sort of an intellectual exercise, that
Speaker 7: it's sort of a right of man to hunt another
Speaker 7: human being, that killing is part of human nature, and
Speaker 7: the Zodiac may have been very drawn to a story
Speaker 7: with those elements. He may have decided to emulate certain
Speaker 7: aspects of Count Zaroff.
Speaker 16: And maybe that might explain the difference between those first
Speaker 16: two attacks the Bliss create shootings at night.
Speaker 7: After that, it's not the same kind of crime because
Speaker 7: in the story The Most Dangerous Game, Count Zarov doesn't
Speaker 7: come out saying I'm going to kill you. He makes
Speaker 7: you think that he's a friendly person. He wants you
Speaker 7: to participate in his game. He needs you to feel
Speaker 7: safe so that when you find out that you're no
Speaker 7: longer safe, he can see that fear in you and
Speaker 7: that fearrest part of the hunt, So I think with
Speaker 7: the Zodiac there may have been some element of that
Speaker 7: that he decided it's not enough for me to just
Speaker 7: shoot these people. I need to talk to them. I
Speaker 7: need to look in their eyes and see them going, oh,
Speaker 7: everything's okay now, and then look in their eyes when
Speaker 7: I flip on them and they find out that this
Speaker 7: is not what they thought and that their lives.
Speaker 9: Are at statement.
Speaker 1: Why did the Zodiac quote the villain from what at
Speaker 1: the time was almost a fifty year old story. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's how he saw himself a movie villain playing with
Speaker 1: his victims. There were other possible clues about the Zodiac's
Speaker 1: identity hidden in the cipher, such as this line, to
Speaker 1: kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is
Speaker 1: even better than getting your rocks off.
Speaker 8: With a girl.
Speaker 1: Psychiatrists at the time speculate that this line reflected the
Speaker 1: killer's feelings of sexual inadequacy, but it may have also
Speaker 1: been literal. The Zodiac may be a sadist, someone who
Speaker 1: feels excitement or pleasure from inflicting pain. To learn more
Speaker 1: about sadism, we spoke with criminal psychology professor Eric Hickey.
Speaker 9: My name is doctor Eric Hickey. I'm a criminal psychologist.
Speaker 9: Some days I'm just a criminalistimes I'm just a psychologist.
Speaker 1: Professor Hickey literally wrote the book on serial killers. It's
Speaker 1: a textbook called Serial Murderers and Their Victims.
Speaker 9: One day I got a phone call from the media
Speaker 9: and there was a case of a mass murderer. When
Speaker 9: they searched his car, they've found a couple of books
Speaker 9: in the backseat of his car, and one of the
Speaker 9: books was my book on sera murder. They said, doctor Key,
Speaker 9: how do you feel about the fact that this serial
Speaker 9: or mass murderer had your book in his car? Like
Speaker 9: I'm supposed to feel badly that I wrote a book
Speaker 9: about serial murders. No, And I said, well, why would
Speaker 9: I be upset about that? The point is this is
Speaker 9: for public education to make it more aware of these
Speaker 9: types of people.
Speaker 1: Professor Hickey says two thirds of serial killers are sexual predators,
Speaker 1: and many have unusual desires like sadism. Hickey says that
Speaker 1: even though the Zodiac didn't sexually assault his victims, the
Speaker 1: killings could have been sexually motivated.
Speaker 9: So sadism is what we call it paraphilia perophilia, meaning
Speaker 9: that they get sexual arousement and gratification through bizarre imagery, fantasies,
Speaker 9: and behavior. There's hundreds and hundreds of paraphilia, and probably
Speaker 9: a sixty percent of them are not criminal. If people
Speaker 9: want to have sex with doorknobs, that's their business, it's
Speaker 9: not a crime. A person could have a footfeth that's
Speaker 9: not a crime. It is a crime. However, if they
Speaker 9: break into people's homes and peel off their blanket while
Speaker 9: they're asleep and stuck on their toes, that's a crime.
Speaker 9: So there's a whole variety of criminal paraphilia that are
Speaker 9: not physically harmful, but they are still criminal, like voyeurism, exhibitionism,
Speaker 9: somnophilia where you would like to watch people asleep. Those
Speaker 9: are criminal, but nobody gets hurt. But people who are
Speaker 9: driven to kill serially, those not the kind out less
Speaker 9: they're looking for. If you're a serial killer and you're statistic,
Speaker 9: you're not into consent. You want to be able to
Speaker 9: do what you want to do. A Zodiac and no
Speaker 9: problem killing people and making them suffer as he did it.
Speaker 1: Hickey thinks of the Zodiac sadism likely extended beyond the
Speaker 1: killings to the letters, the puzzles, the.
Speaker 9: Way he taught the police. There was an element of
Speaker 9: sadism there. He liked creating fear in the public's eye.
Speaker 9: I'm sure that he liked reading about himself in newspapers.
Speaker 9: That would have been quite gratifying to him. He could
Speaker 9: become kind of contact the Ripper.
Speaker 1: Jack the Ripper also sent letters to newspapers when he
Speaker 1: terrorized London in the late eighteen hundreds. One read the
Speaker 1: next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ears
Speaker 1: off and send the police officers just for jolly. Many
Speaker 1: thought it was a hoax, until three days later a
Speaker 1: woman was found dead, her ear lobe severed.
Speaker 9: I think that that was something that the Zodiac and
Speaker 9: was trying to attain. Was that sort of notoriety. He
Speaker 9: held the city of San Francisco in fear. It was
Speaker 9: all his doing, and that would make him feel very powerful,
Speaker 9: and it gave him great pleasure in doing it. So
Speaker 9: there was that sort of sadistic approach, not just to
Speaker 9: his victims, but also to the general public.
Speaker 1: So the Zodiac is likely a sadist, a term named
Speaker 1: after the Marquis de Sod, a French philosopher and novelist.
Speaker 1: Sod wrote in his book Juliet, it is an article
Speaker 1: of faith on the island of Borneo that all those
Speaker 1: persons a man kills will be his slaves in the
Speaker 1: next world. And as a result, the better a man
Speaker 1: wishes to be served after his death, the more he
Speaker 1: kills during life, which brings us to the end of
Speaker 1: the cipher.
Speaker 8: When I die, I'll be reborn in paradise, and all
Speaker 8: that I have killed will become my slaves. I will
Speaker 8: not give you my name, because you will try to
Speaker 8: slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.
Speaker 1: Had the Zodiac read that passage from the Marquis de
Speaker 1: Sade or heard about these beliefs somewhere else. Either way,
Speaker 1: this fantasy of slaves in the afterlife speaks to the
Speaker 1: Zodiac's intense desire for power and control. The Zodiac's murders
Speaker 1: and phone call were cold hearted, his letters were twisted,
Speaker 1: but the decoded cipher revealed just how truly deranged the
Speaker 1: Zodiac was. As San Francisco would soon find out, what
Speaker 1: they'd seen so far was just the beginning. The Zodiac
Speaker 1: was ramping up. Professor Hickey told us serial killers often
Speaker 1: intensify their crimes over time.
Speaker 9: There's sort of this evolvement with serial killers that we see.
Speaker 9: There is a long process. Look at Jeffrey Dahmer. Nobody
Speaker 9: wakes up in the morning and said, I'm an acrophile.
Speaker 9: They wake up feeling that they want to be with
Speaker 9: someone who's been buried. And that's what Dahmer did. He
Speaker 9: wanted to be with someone who has been buried because
Speaker 9: he has such low self esteem. He didn't feel comfortable
Speaker 9: with the live person. And then he progressed wanted to
Speaker 9: be with blow up dolls and mannequins and so on,
Speaker 9: and then he progressed from that to dead animals, and
Speaker 9: then from there he went into bringing people home, and
Speaker 9: when they wanted to leave them, he'd make them unconscious,
Speaker 9: then drill holes in their heads and put mer curic
Speaker 9: acid in to make them into zombies. And then he
Speaker 9: progressed from there to evisceraating them and then having sex
Speaker 9: with the corpse and started cannibalizing them. He went down
Speaker 9: this long, dark, dark pathway that each time he did,
Speaker 9: his fantasies get more and more evolved.
Speaker 1: Like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac was also beginning to evolve.
Speaker 1: His codes would become more complex, his letters increasingly bizarre,
Speaker 1: and his murders more ritualistic and sadistic.
Speaker 3: Next time on Monster the Zodiac.
Speaker 4: Killer, Celia Shephard and Brian Hartnell, both in their early twenties,
Speaker 4: were sitting on this knoll of land overlooking part of
Speaker 4: Lake Barriessa. They thought they were alone, but there was
Speaker 4: a third man on this knoll, a man who wore
Speaker 4: a medieval style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun
Speaker 4: and intended to use.
Speaker 7: Them whenever redrive here.
Speaker 16: I'm like, Wow, he drove the same exact way just
Speaker 16: to get here and do that.
Speaker 3: It is crazy to think about.
Speaker 7: This guy is a pathological, a psycho.
Speaker 5: Killer found this young girl in on the shoreland here.
Speaker 5: I've had eleven years patrol on Miss Lake and I've
Speaker 5: seen a lot of people cut up by boat accidents
Speaker 5: and smaticism. One of the worst things I ever witnessed.
Speaker 2: Monster the Zodiac Killer is a fifteen episode podcast produced
Speaker 2: by iHeartRadio, House, Stuff Works and Tenderfoot TV. Donald Albright
Speaker 2: and I are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV,
Speaker 2: alongside producers Meredith Stebman, Mason Lindsay and Christina Dana.
Speaker 3: Jason Hoak is executive.
Speaker 2: Producer on behalf of How Stuff Works, along with producers
Speaker 2: Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Scott
Speaker 2: Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick is our host.
Speaker 2: Original music is by Up in Vanity Set. If you
Speaker 2: haven't already, make sure to check out the first season
Speaker 2: of Monster called Atlanta Monster, about the Atlanta child murders
Speaker 2: from the late seventies to the early eighties. Download the
Speaker 2: ten episode season right now. Have questions or comments, email
Speaker 2: us at Monster at HowStuffWorks dot com, or you can
Speaker 2: call us at one eight three three two eight five
Speaker 2: sixty six sixty seven.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.