Zodiac

He's never been caught.
    And that may explain the public’s 40-year fascination with the man known as the self-described Zodiac, the serial killer who for a short while terrorized the Bay Area.
    It started five days before Christmas, 1968. Betty Lou Jensen and David Arthur Faraday were parked in an isolated area off Lake Herman Road, which traverses the sparsely inhabited, unincorporated section of land between Benicia and Vallejo. By midnight, they were dead, shot at close range with a .22-caliber handgun.
    Six months later, on the Fourth of July, another young couple—Darlene Farrin and Michael Mageau—parked in the lot of the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course in Vallejo. Around midnight, they were shot with a 9 mm handgun. Farrin died, but Mageau lived to describe to police the man who became known as the Zodiac.
    The next attack came near the end of September at Lake Berryessa. This time, the couple—Cecelia Shepard and Bryan Hartnell—were attacked in early evening and stabbed, rather than shot. Once again, the young man of the couple survived to describe the killer. Despite the differences from the previous two murders, this attack has also been attributed to the Zodiac killer.
    Two weeks after the Lake Berryessa attack, cab driver Paul Stine was shot in San Francisco. The Zodiac later took credit for this killing, providing as evidence a bloody piece torn from Stine’s shirt.
    The Stine killing in October, 1969, is the last linked to the Zodiac. So where did he go? Why did he stop killing? More importantly, will he ever be caught?
    He wasn’t the most violent serial killer, nor the one with the highest body count, not even the most extreme. But he has been one of the most mysterious, which is why Tom Voigt of Portland, Ore., has dedicated much of his free time the past ten years to zodiackiller.com, the website he developed in 1998 with the goal of obtaining and archiving all available materials related to the Zodiac. “I felt like there’d probably be a large number of people like me who’d be interested in the case, in the mystery of it all,” he said on a recent trip to Northern California. “I wanted to create a place where all the information could be kept.”
    His site now includes more than 4,000 pages and 800 images, and at one point, according to Voigt, averaged three million hits per day. The weekend the movie Zodiac was released, that figure climbed to seven million. Why are so many people fascinated with a cold-blooded killer?

Size 10.5 Wing Walker footprint at Berryessa site

 

Vicarious thrill

“They’re bored with their own lives,” Voigt says.
    Retired Concord Police Sgt. Mike Goodwin, who now teaches criminology at Solano Community College, agrees with Voigt, but adds that the morbid fascination also serves as a peculiar emotional outlet. For some people, he says, the obsession with murder “acts as a sort of reaffirmation of their so-called ‘safe’ existence that is supposedly immune from events such as these.” Still, he notes, “I don’t think people would have been as fascinated if the killer had been caught.”
    The mystery of his disappearance has resulted in various amateur solutions and accusations, many of which have been sent to Voigt. This participation in solving the crime not only connects the ordinary citizen with the excitement of police work, but for some creates a challenge to solve what the police can’t.
“Mystery and true crime subjects are extremely popular. Combine the two and you capture a lot of people,” Voigt explains, contending that because other serial killers have been caught, the public lost interest in them.
    But the Zodiac remains at large—unless the Grim Reaper has caught him. And like that other mysterious serial killer, Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac has become somewhat of a legend, his legacy far exceeding his actual deeds. For as serial killers go, the Zodiac wasn’t very successful. Although he bragged of killing 37, police actually attribute only five deaths to his murderous episodes, barely enough to consider him a serial murderer, according to attributions by the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, which classifies serial homicide as more than three victims in more than three incidents at more than three locations.

Selling murder

Times were tense in the late 1960s when the Zodiac taunted Bay Area police. Serial killings and mass murders in the U.S. had risen exponentially from the first half of the century. And no one, it seemed, was safe. In the decade following, mass murders and serial killings would quadruple from the total of 40 during the 1960s to surpass the 150 mark in the mid-1980s.
    Part of that increase, according to Northeastern University criminologists James Alan Fox and Jack Levin, has been “the selling of multiple murder.” What began as the public’s curiosity with the anomalies of the human mind has since become a contemporary series of TV sagas and movies, a trend that began with Truman Capote’s 1966 book In Cold Blood, a meticulously researched, but ultimately fictional account of two robbers whose latest scheme goes wildly awry. Since then, the notoriety of such national tragedies has been capitalized on by various media—including a California trading card company which sells mass murderer and serial killer trading cards, celebrating the likes of Charles Manson, Ted Bundy and, yes, the Zodiac.
    Goodwin believes the media attention fuels the public’s fascination with all things gory and macabre, sensationalizing events even when the reality is often mundane.
    “Many people wouldn’t even know about some of these events if the media didn’t perpetuate the stories or revisit them over and over,” he says. “Case in point: the new Zodiac movie. It is exploiting the average citizen for profit with a topic that is ripe for exploitation—an unsolved and local ‘gory’ series of events.”

Faraday's station wagon in Benicia

 

May I have your autograph?

In a way, movies such as Zodiac may perpetuate the problem, says Fairfield psychiatrist Dr. Leonti Thompson of the Amen Clinic, which specializes in brain disorders. Serial killers are performers, attention-seekers. “They’re trying to get emotional supplies for their impoverished egos,” he explains.
    One key to understanding the serial killer is to understand the culture that produces him—for nine out of ten serial killers are men. And 90 percent of serial killings take place in the United States, where the creation of the serial killer as celluloid celebrity also creates the environment for the killer to perform. “All the world’s a stage,” Thompson says, quoting Shakespeare. “We have to look at our stage.”
    Goodwin agrees, noting that “the current culture in America is in a large sense very decadent. I think this goes a long way toward explaining the mass interest in reality-based, law enforcement TV shows.”
    Although history records serial killers going back thousands of years—Thompson cites the Roman emperor Nero and Vlad the Impaler—only recently have the actions of such a criminal achieved the status of celebrity. Through the media, the serial killer becomes the leading star not only of his own fantasy played out in the killing fields, but of larger-than-life depictions for the multitudes. “When you have a famous actor acting the part of a serial killer, it makes the ability of the public to identify with the killer easier,” Thompson explains. “If the movie were consciously repulsive, they’d walk out, but the people are mesmerized.”
    The psychiatrist, who has evaluated a number of multiple-homicide murderers, suggests that the public unconsciously identifies with the serial killer’s fantasy, particularly in terms of his control over others. “All of us have those fantasies of being in control,” Thompson notes. “At a deeper level, fantasies of killing someone are not that unusual.”
    But we are also repulsed by the killer’s actions. So, although the killer taps into some archetypal shadow side, we reject his deeds and maintain the illusion that society has control over such people. Part of the dreaded fascination with Zodiac is that he has escaped society’s control.

The mind of a killer

Although we may share an occasional desire to wish someone dead, few people act on that fantasy. Even fewer act out that fantasy over and over on strangers. The serial killer has a compulsive need to act out this fantasy until reality matches it. The real mystery in all this is the continuing mystery of the mind. What made the Zodiac kill? What made him stop?
    The FBI grades serial killers by type and apparent motivation. A psychotic killer is mentally ill and hears voices that tell him to kill. The missionary serial killer believes he is relieving people of their misery and sending them to a better life. Some killers, known as thrill-seekers, murder just for the fun of it, for the adrenaline rush they get. And some serial killers are motivated by lust. Then there is the control killer—like the Zodiac. “His desire is to control everything,” Thompson explains. “To control the police by taunting them, to control the whole public by leaving hints.”

1969 SFPD composite sketch

The questions remain

Having successfully accomplished this in a killing spree that lasted less than a year, why did he quit? Thompson believes he stopped killing because he may be dead himself. “As part of the deep depression, there’s a suicidal tendency” in serial killers, he says, but adds, “So far, the Zodiac seems to have escaped that. He must be brilliant.”
    On the other hand, Thompson acknowledges that when the circumstances are no longer appropriate or necessary for acting out their fantasies, serial killers can stop.
    But even if the Zodiac were caught, evidence for prosecuting him is tenuous, and some of it, according to Voigt, has been tainted by mishandling. “They can’t win a case,” Voigt says, dismissing the San Francisco Police Department. “They don’t even take phone calls. If the Zodiac killer called himself, he’d be put on hold so long, he’d die of natural causes.”
    Still, Voigt believes the Zodiac will eventually be identified. “Probably somebody will email me,” he says.
    More likely, he thinks, someone will find a black hood among their dead father’s belongings. It’s possible. The killer was described as a middle-aged man when he shot Shepard and Hartnell at Lake Berryessa in 1969, and nearly 40 years have passed since then, making the Zodiac—if he’s still alive—an old man. So barring a deathbed confession, the Zodiac will have accomplished the mission: he taunted police. And he will have gotten away with murder. 

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