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Arthur Leigh Allen: The Suspect Who Fit — Until the DNA Didn't
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Mike Mageau survived the Blue Rock Springs attack, and twenty-two years later identified Arthur Leigh Allen as the man who shot him — but the DNA from the Zodiac's own envelopes told a different story. This episode lives inside that contradiction.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Mike Mageau walked into a police station in nineteen ninety-one and pointed at a photograph, Arthur Leigh Allen was a name on a list. After that moment, he became something else entirely.
Within an hour of the shooting, Vallejo police received a phone call. A man claimed responsibility for the Blue Rock Springs attack.
Arthur Leigh Allen's name first surfaced seriously in nineteen seventy-one, two years after the Vallejo shooting. A former friend flagged him to police.
In nineteen ninety-one, police showed Mike Mageau a photo lineup. He'd been shot in the face at close range more than two decades earlier.
Pull back for a moment and look at the structure of this investigation. What the Zodiac case has always lacked is clean, convergent physical evidence.
The Allen question doesn't go away even after his death. It doesn't go away after the DNA exclusion.
Come back to Mike Mageau one more time, because his identification is the through-line of this episode and it deserves the full weight of what it represents. He was in that car.
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