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Letters, Ciphers, and a Locked Door: Why the Case Won't Close
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Zodiac Killer's confirmed murders, uncracked ciphers, and DNA evidence that cannot be tested — this episode maps everything investigators know and everything they cannot use. Fifty years of evidence, and still no arrest.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There is DNA evidence in this case. Physical evidence, recovered from a victim, preserved in police custody for decades.
The first confirmed victims were David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen. They were teenagers, parked on Lake Herman Road in Benicia on the night of December twentieth, nineteen sixty-eight.
The ciphers are the part of this case that caught the public's attention and kept it. The Zodiac sent four of them in total.
The bigger issue here is that the Zodiac wasn't just taunting police. He was using the media as a weapon, deliberately and skillfully.
The strongest suspect the case ever produced was Arthur Leigh Allen. A convicted child molester and Navy veteran who lived in the Bay Area, Allen was first investigated in nineteen seventy-one and remained under suspicion for decades.
After Allen, the next major suspect theory came from a group calling themselves the Case Breakers, a team of former law enforcement officials and forensic investigators. They identified a deceased man named Gary Francis Poste as their prime candidate.
Which brings us back to the DNA evidence that cannot be tested. A potential victim named Cheri Jo Bates was murdered in Riverside in October of nineteen sixty-six, two years before the Lake Herman Road killings.
The three-forty cipher took fifty-one years to crack and told us the killer thought about killing as a form of transportation, a way of collecting servants for an afterlife. It told us he was defensive about media portrayals.
Fifty-six years after David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot on Lake Herman Road, the case is exactly what it has always been: full of evidence that almost answers the question, and empty of the one thing that would close it for good. If the remaining ciphers are ever solved, if the Bates evidence is ever tested, if a living witness ever comes forward with something testable and new, that's when the shape of this story might finally change.
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