Three envelopes reached three Bay Area newspaper offices at the end of July 1969. The writer’s demand was the same. Print the enclosed symbols. Each editor held only part of the message. To read it in full, someone would have to bring the three pieces together.
The writer claimed responsibility for two shootings near Vallejo and supplied details investigators could check. Decoding the letters would become an investigation of its own, one that occasionally made progress even while the murders remained unsolved.
That is also why it sits naturally beside archives like Unsolved True Crime Cases That Still Have No Answers. The Zodiac story is bigger than one crime scene. It became a running conversation between a killer, the press, the police, and a terrified public. And like Jack the Ripper, it survived long after the violence itself because the mystery learned how to feed on attention.
On December 20, 1968, David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot on Lake Herman Road. The two teenagers died. Nothing like the later letters announced who had killed them. For their families, the story began on that road, months before anyone knew the name Zodiac.
Near midnight on July 4–5, Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau were shot in a parked car at Blue Rock Springs. Ferrin died. Mageau survived. A caller reported the attack to Vallejo police and claimed the earlier killings as well. Now police had a voice linking two scenes. By the end of the month they also had handwriting to compare.
Timeline of the murders and letters
- December 20, 1968. Faraday and Jensen are killed on Lake Herman Road.
- July 4–5, 1969. Ferrin is killed and Mageau wounded at Blue Rock Springs.
- July 31, 1969. Letters bearing this date divide a cipher among three newspapers. An August follow-up uses the Zodiac name.
- August 1969. Donald and Bettye Harden read most of the 408-symbol message. It supplies no verifiable name.
- September 27, 1969. Two students are stabbed at Lake Berryessa.
- October 11, 1969. Cabdriver Paul Stine is shot in San Francisco.
- December 2020. Codebreakers announce a solution to a different, 340-symbol message sent in 1969.
At Lake Berryessa, Bryan Hartnell could describe something the newspapers could never have learned from a code. He and Cecelia Shepard had faced a man in a hood bearing a crossed circle. Both were bound and stabbed. Hartnell lived to give an account. Shepard died from her injuries.
The next attack looked different. On October 11 a passenger shot cabdriver Paul Stine in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights. Witnesses saw a man at the cab, and their descriptions helped police prepare a sketch. A letter that followed contained a piece of Stine’s bloodstained shirt. Here was something investigators could take to the evidence room and compare with the garment itself.
Key evidence and clues
What the shirt fragment established was narrower, and more valuable, than a likeness to a sketch. The person who sent it had access to material from the cab. A person who later claimed to recognize a face might offer a lead, but recognition alone could never establish that same connection.
What separates the evidence from the legend?
Four attacks account for five deaths and two survivors. Claims of a larger toll came from the correspondence. They need independent evidence before another person’s death can be counted as part of this series. The same care matters in reading about the Black Dahlia investigation, another case with more proposed solutions than established answers.
The FBI’s files preserve the ordinary work behind the famous symbols. Local investigators sent material for examination, compared writing and looked for connections between documents. In that setting a letter was an object with a date, an envelope and handwriting before it was a message anyone could interpret.
And that is why the case still belongs in the same larger archive conversation as the JonBenét Ramsey case and the Gardner Museum heist. These are cases that survive because they create the same maddening sensation: the file is not empty. It is crowded. The problem is that the crowd never arranges itself into certainty.
Even the solved parts create new unease. The 408-symbol cipher was cracked quickly. The Z340 was finally solved in 2020 by a team of codebreakers using patience, collaboration, and software. But neither cipher answered the question that keeps the entire case alive. Not who the Zodiac wanted to be. Who he actually was. The decoded message contained a reference to a television appearance the writer denied making. It did not put handcuffs on a name.
The last widely accepted attack in the series was Stine’s murder. The correspondence carried on, leaving investigators a problem that persists with every proposed identification. To read a document is one achievement. To connect the hand that wrote it to a particular person is another.
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Why the letters have lasted
Decades later, people who could contribute to the investigation without ever visiting a crime scene found a way to test a reading of the 340 cipher. Their solution changed what readers could know about a page sent in 1969. It did nothing to diminish the importance of the testimony of the two men who survived the attacks or the evidence recovered after Stine’s death.
FAQ
Was the Zodiac Killer identified?
No identification has been established by investigators.
How many victims are linked to the known attacks?
Five people died and two survived across four attacks in 1968 and 1969.
Did the ciphers name the killer?
Neither the 408-symbol solution nor the 340-symbol solution produced an identifying name.
What linked a letter to Paul Stine?
A letter contained material from the shirt he wore when he was killed.
Research Sources
The following resources were consulted to verify and update this article.
- FBI Vault, Zodiac Killer investigative file — Reproduces the correspondence, laboratory requests and contemporary reports about the first cipher.
- HISTORY, a chronology of the Zodiac attacks — Identifies the victims, the attacks and the evidence sent to newspapers.
- SFGATE, the solution to the 340 cipher — Reports the December 2020 solution and what the decoded message revealed.
🔎 If this story stayed with you, the author suggests these real cases next:
- The Victorian killer whose identity disappeared into fog, rumor, and history
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- The Hollywood-era killing that became one of America’s darkest unsolved legends
- The art-theft mystery where a bold crime became a decades-long ghost story
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