The Zodiac Killer: History and Profile

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Table of Contents

Victimology
Geography
Perpetrator Profiling
References

Victimology

The stories about the murders committed by the Zodiac maniac are numerous. The topic has been speculated about more than once by many people for a variety of purposes. Opinions differ in estimating the number of victims at the hands of the serial killer. Moreover, the maniac attributes many more murders to himself than law enforcement authorities have admitted. Proven victims of the Zodiac are the following people:

Boyfriend David Faraday, age 17, and his loving girlfriend, Betty Lou Jensen. The couple arranged their first date at the lakeshore. The lovers were sitting in the car when a maniac approached them in his car. He made them leave the car and shot them in cold blood. The girl tried to escape but could not escape death;
Mike Mageau at age 17 and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin at age 22. The maniac began shooting them in the parking lot of the town of Vallejo, California. Mike was lucky to stay alive, but for the girl, the story had a fatal outcome;
Brian Hartnell in his 20s and Cecilia Sheppard in her 22s. The Zodiac used a stabbing rather than a firearm in the attack. The girl died, and the boy, who was stabbed eight times in the back by the maniac, was spared his life;
Paul Lee Stein at age 29. The killer shot him in San Francisco (Wall, 2021).

The list of victims in which the Zodiac is recognized as the killer includes four cases. The maniac may have been involved in several other cases in addition to that.

Robert Domingos at the age of 18 and the girl Linda Edwards at the age of 16. Just like the maniac’s first victims, they were shot and killed on the lake shore;
Cheri Jo Bates, age 18. The Zodiac serial killer stabbed her multiple times. The girl’s head was nearly severed from her body after the attack. It was not until four years after the incident that a journalist for a San Francisco newspaper received private notice that the Zodiac had committed the crime. The facts he received in the report do not exclude the actual involvement of the maniac in the murder but do not constitute direct evidence of this version;
Donna Lass, a 25-year-old girl, had been reported missing until a postcard arrived at the paper’s editorial office. Some believe that the Zodiac maniac had been involved in her disappearance. Nevertheless, no evidence was found to support this version during the investigation (Wall, 2021).

The main feature of the choice of the victims is that they were young people and were not chosen to enrich the perpetrator.

Geography

The criminal knew geography well and knew how to calculate coordinates. Graphs with coordinates of longitude and latitude of the places of his crimes form almost parallel lines. Zodiac was familiar with astronomical and navigational instruments for calculating coordinates: astrolabe, compass, sextant, gnomon. Many of these instruments are shaped like the Zodiac emblem – a circle divided into four equal parts. It also resembles a nomogram to translate radians into degrees and back. In his 1969 letters, the killer said that the radians were the key to unlocking his identity. The experts connected the coordinates of the Zodiac crime scenes with lines on the map (Voigt & Edwards, 2021).

Perpetrator Profiling

The crimes, carefully prepared, were committed each time differently. He did not want to be boring at the risk of making a mistake. He fantasized and perhaps improvised. He was a narcissist; he craved attention and fame; he contacted his victims. They wanted them to see him. By mocking the police, he sought to assert himself. Often his crimes contained the motive of sexual gratification.

Being a skilled liar, Zodiac took offense and got angry when he was caught in a lie. He would then threaten revenge, either with more murders or more bombings. In extreme situations, he acted calmly: leaving crime scenes, moving toward the police, and calling cops from pay phones near the police headquarters to brag about the crimes (Wall, 2021). The Zodiac was a narcissist; he craved attention and fame, making contact with his victims. They wanted them to see him. Mocking the police, he sought to assert himself.

Five of the twenty letters are signed with the astrological symbol of Taurus. He may have been born between April 20 and May 19. The Zodiac follows the lunar and solar cycles, killing at the full moon or new moon. Kathleen Johnson was abducted on the day of the spring solstice. Alleged victim Donna Lass – abducted and killed on the fall solstice.

The attacks occurred on holidays (Christmas and Independence Day) or Saturday evenings and nights. Investigators came to two conclusions: Zodiac worked on weekdays, and his free time because he had no family allowed him to plan the crimes and talk to the press carefully. His income was enough to buy guns, change cars (Zodiac was seen in four different cars in 1969) and move freely around the state.

The police had the sketch, twenty letters, three cryptograms, a pair of bloody gloves, a boot print, DNA, and fingerprints. The audio recording of the maniac’s conversations with the police dispatcher disappeared. The white male is 25-40 years old, 172-180 cm tall, and has brownish or slightly reddish hair (Voigt & Edwards, 2021). The man had a big face, massive horn-rimmed glasses. On the days of the crimes, he was seen wearing a brown sports jacket with cuffs, a black or navy blue zippered windbreaker, navy-style wool pants, black and red wool sweater, and military boots. It is not known for certain whether this man had extensive military experience. But since the perpetrator has basic military navigation skills, it can be assumed that short-term military service was involved.

Zodiac knew at least one way of ciphering: when each character in the text is replaced by a letter from the encrypted alphabet. This is how he encoded his first cryptogram (408 characters) (Voigt & Edwards, 2021). The couple from the Californian city of Salinas, schoolteacher Donald Gardens and his wife Betty decrypted it in 20 hours. The other two Zodiac cryptograms are still unresolved.

The Zodiac is a solo killer because he has a unique M.O. that remains constant throughout all the episodes in which he has confessed. The Zodiac killer emphasized his originality with a series of letters sent to newspaper editorial offices. They contained coded information about the maniac and descriptions of the details of individual episodes of his murders, which constituted investigative secrecy and had not been published anywhere. The maniac claimed that his codes contained enough information to catch him. After summarizing the data on the murders, police officers compiled a description of Zodiac’s handwriting.

These features are present in one way or another in all the murders the maniac has committed. They are used to speculate about the Zodiac’s involvement in all those murders for which there is no conclusive evidence:

Zodiac’s victims are most often young people, usually couples;
The maniac went on his bloody hunt in the dark time of the day or at dusk, but not in the daytime.
The Zodiac was not interested in money and did not commit his murders for the sake of getting rich. Sexual motives were not evident in the composition of the crime.
The maniac used different kinds of weapons to commit murders – both firearms and bladed weapons.
All of the crimes committed by Zodiac occurred either near open bodies of water or in places whose name contained a reference to water.
Zodiac reported his crimes to the police – most likely, this game gave him pleasure (Voigt & Edwards, 2021).

In addition, the Zodiac murderer repeatedly made demands that, if not met, he would kill again. According to him, 37 people have been murdered. The police opinion contradicts his statements, officially, he is credited with seven assaults. The age of the victims recognized by the investigators ranged from 19 to 39 years; four of them were men (Voigt & Edwards, 2021).We can assume that Zodiac did not intentionally create copycats or work as part of a team of people. The main reason for this is the cessation of the crimes, along with the disappearance of the killer himself. The fact that the crimes attributed to Zodiac were committed by him and not by his accomplices can be proved by the DNA evidence collected from the backs of the stamps on the envelopes.

In one way or another, during the active investigation, about 2,500 people were considered potential criminals. But I believe that the detectives’ strongest is Arthur Lee Allen since he matches best the criminal profiling. The man had been discharged from military service in 1958, after which he worked as a schoolteacher in California. But he lost that job, too, for molesting minors. Left with no money, Allen moved in with his parents and worked part-time at a car service, where he was fired in 1969 (Voigt & Edwards, 2021). In 2018, media published a large piece claiming that Zodiac committed crimes in Italy as well (Voigt & Edwards, 2021). In Florence, from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, a maniac operated, shooting up young couples. The criminal, dubbed the Florence Monster, was also never found. According to Tempi, a man named Giuseppe Bevilacqua, an American with Italian roots, was behind the crimes in Italy and the United States. He is still alive and allegedly confessed to the author of the investigation about the crimes; but the conversation was not recorded. When the information was passed to the Italian police, and they became interested in Bevilacqua, he denied the accusations – and there was no evidence other than a number of coincidences. There are no inconsistencies in the dates of the murders. Moreover, the crimes in the two countries could indeed have been committed by the same maniac since the handwriting and choice of victims are similar.

The symbol on the dial of Lee’s wristwatch (a circle with a cross in the middle) matched what the Zodiac left in his letters, a similar shoe size (investigators found footprints of the criminal at the crime scene), the man’s acquaintances recalled that he liked to solve puzzles and ciphers, and moreover, in passing, expressed fantasies about killing people. Finally, the man lived in a trailer not far from all the places where the attacks took place.

References

Voigt, T., & Edwards, G. (2021). Zodiac killer: Just the facts. Brainjar Media.

Wall, G. (2021) Zodiac maniac: The secret history of the zodiac killer Expanded Edition. Paperback.

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The Zodiac Killer: History and Profile

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