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The Hood, the Knife, and the Car Door: Lake Berryessa Decoded
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Lake Berryessa attack was the Zodiac killer's most calculated crime — a costumed assault in broad daylight that left one survivor and a tally of murders written on a car door. Bryan Hartnell lived to describe what no other victim could: the voice, the hood, and the practiced calm of a killer performing for an audience.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
September twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-nine. A Saturday.
The Lake Berryessa attack is the most documented of the Zodiac's confirmed killings. Hartnell survived.
After leaving Berryessa, the Zodiac drove to a payphone in Napa. He called the police himself.
Bryan Hartnell's account remains the closest thing this case has to a direct witness description of the Zodiac in action. He described a white male, heavyset, around five feet ten or eleven inches tall, with brown hair visible beneath the hood at the back.
We're nine months into the Zodiac's confirmed killing spree by this point. David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot on Lake Herman Road in December of nineteen sixty-eight.
Three weeks after Berryessa, the Zodiac wrote to the Chronicle again. The letter included a piece of Hartnell's shirt, torn away during the attack.
Arthur Leigh Allen has been the most publicly examined suspect in this case for decades. A convicted child molester and Navy veteran, he matches several elements of what investigators assembled.
In any investigation this old, you hold onto what's concrete. Lake Berryessa gives you more concrete material than almost any other Zodiac event.
The Berryessa attack happened on September twenty-seventh, nineteen sixty-nine. Less than three weeks later, Paul Stine, a cab driver in San Francisco's Presidio Heights neighborhood, was shot dead at the intersection of Washington and Cherry Streets.
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