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Presidio Heights: The Murder the Zodiac Almost Got Away With
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On October 11, 1969, the Zodiac Killer shot taxi driver Paul Stine in one of San Francisco's most residential neighborhoods — and walked past police officers who never knew what they were looking at. This chapter follows the murder, the botched response, and the investigation that would define the case for decades.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what makes the Paul Stine murder different from everything that came before it. The Zodiac had killed in darkness, in isolated spots, along quiet roads on the edges of cities.
Paul Stine was twenty-nine years old. He was a graduate student and a part-time taxi driver, working nights in San Francisco to pay his way through school.
Two days later, a letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle. Inside was a piece of Paul Stine's shirt.
The San Francisco Police Department came under intense scrutiny after the Stine murder. The dispatcher error.
The name that would come to dominate the investigation was Arthur Leigh Allen. He was a convicted child molester, a Navy veteran, and a resident of Vallejo.
The case against Allen also ran into another problem. The Zodiac's letters were written by someone with a distinct and consistent hand.
The Zodiac sent four major ciphers over the course of his correspondence. The first, known as the four-oh-eight because of its length, was solved in nineteen sixty-nine by a Salinas schoolteacher and his wife, working without computers, without FBI assistance.
Paul Stine's murder marked the end of the confirmed kill sequence, but not the end of the Zodiac's presence. The letters continued through the early nineteen seventies.
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