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Northern California's First Victims: How the Zodiac Killings Began
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In December 1968, two teenagers were murdered on Lake Herman Road — and a carefully constructed reign of terror began. This is the chapter that started everything: the first victims, the coded letters, and the killer who wanted an audience.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On December twentieth, nineteen sixty-eight, two teenagers drove out to a quiet stretch of road near Benicia, California, and never came back. What followed wasn't just a murder investigation.
Solano County investigators worked the Lake Herman Road case through the winter and into spring with little progress. Then, on July fourth, nineteen sixty-nine, the pattern repeated.
The cipher attached to those letters, known as the four-oh-eight for its total number of characters, was not cracked by the FBI. It wasn't cracked by law enforcement at all.
Through the summer of nineteen sixty-nine, investigators in multiple counties were trying to coordinate across jurisdictional lines. The murders had occurred in Solano County.
After the Stine murder, the Zodiac sent another letter to the Chronicle. This one included a swatch of Paul Stine's bloodstained shirt.
The name that would eventually dominate the investigation was Arthur Leigh Allen. A convicted child molester with a Navy background, Allen was first seriously considered as a suspect in the early nineteen seventies.
Fifty-one years passed before the second major cipher broke. The three-forty, named for its character count, had been sent by the Zodiac to the Chronicle in November nineteen sixty-nine.
There's a version of this story that reads as a failure. Five confirmed victims.
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