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The Zodiac Killer
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The Zodiac Killer is one of the great unsolved serial killer mysteries of all time, taking only second place to Jack the Ripper.
Even though police investigated over 2,500 potential suspects, the case was never officially solved. There were a few suspects that stood out, but the forensic technology of the times was not advanced enough to nail any one of them conclusively.
This October, 1966 killing began a ghoulish series of murders that panicked the people of the San Francisco area. For years the Zodiac taunted the police with weird ciphers, phone calls, insulting and cryptic messages.
Before it was all over, this clever and diabolical killer changed the lives of eight people, only two of whom lived to tell the tale.
On the night of Sunday, October 30, 1966, long before anyone was to hear of the Zodiac, an 18-year-old student named Cheri Jo Bates was brutally murdered near the parking lot of Riverside City College's library annex. Neither rape nor robbery seemed to have been a motive, as her clothes were undisturbed and her purse was present and intact.
After disabling her lime green Volkswagen by pulling out the distributor coil and the condenser, then disconnecting the middle wire of the distributor, the zodiac killer had apparently waited for Bates to return to her car and try to start it, whereupon he made a pretense of unsuccessfully tinkering with the engine.
After this ruse, and probably with the offer of a ride, he lured her into a dark, unpaved driveway between two empty houses owned by the college, where they spent approximately an hour and a half. Exactly what they did during this time is uncertain, but eventually the man attacked her, slashing her three times in the chest area, once in the back, and seven times across the throat.
Police determined that the murder weapon was a small knife with a blade about 3 1/2" long by 1/2" wide, but the wounds to Bates' throat were so deep and brutal as to nearly decapitate her, severing her larynx, jugular vein, and carotid artery. She had also been choked, beaten, and slashed about the face.
Found about ten feet from Bates' body was a paint-spattered man's Timex watch with a broken 7" wristband, stopped at around 12:23 [see illustration], which one source claims was later traced to a military PX in England. The paint was analyzed, and was found to be common exterior house paint. Also found at the scene were the heel-print from a shoe that appeared to be close to size 10, as well as hair, blood, and skin tissue found in the victim's hands and beneath her fingernails. Greasy, unidentified palm and fingerprints were also found in and on her car, about 200 feet away.
Although the library closed at 9:00 p.m. (and books found in her car verify that she had been inside before then), two separate witnesses reported hearing an "awful scream" at around 10:30, followed by "a muted scream, and then a loud sound like an old car being started up" about two minutes later. This time matches an estimation given by the coroner, and is generally accepted as the time of her death.
Judging by these details, the murder of Cheri Jo Bates would appear to be nothing more mysterious than a particularly vicious crime of passion, committed perhaps by a spurned suitor, an ex-boyfriend, or a subject somehow linked to Miss Bates. Certainly, the simple fact that Bates spent over an hour in the dark with the man who murdered her suggests that she knew and trusted him enough to converse more than casually. It was not until almost exactly one month after the attack that the case approached a bizarre new level.
The First Letter
On November 29, 1966, carbon copies of an anonymous letter were mailed to the Riverside Police and the Riverside Enterprise. [see Illustration] Typed using a portable Royal typewriter with either Pica or Elite typeface, it was entitled "The Confession," and carried a "byline" that consisted of the word "BY" followed by twelve underscores.
Both copies were on low-quality white paper eight inches wide and torn at the top and bottom so as to be roughly squarish, and had been sent unstamped and with no return address from a secluded rural mailbox. Presumably, the author planned on the letters being sent by Postage Due mail.
At least one of the details referred to in this letter had not been made public, and at the time, investigators agreed that it was most likely genuine, though this opinion has changed over the years.
This confession has been double-spaced to make reading easier.
THE CONFESSION
BY _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
SHE WAS YOUNG AND BEAUTIFUL BUT NOW SHE IS BATTERED AND DEAD. SHE IS NOT THE
FIRST AND SHE WILL NOT BE THE LAST I LAY AWAKE NIGHTS THINKING ABOUT MY NEXT
VICTIM. MAYBE SHE WILL BE THE BEAUTIFUL BLOND THAT BABYSITS NEAR THE LITTLE
STORE AND WALKS DOWN THE DARK ALLEY EACH EVENING ABOUT SEVEN. OR MAYBE SHE
WILL BE THE SHAPELY BRUNETT THAT SAID XXX NO WHEN I ASKED HER FOR A DATE IN HIGH
SCHOOL. BUT MAYBE IT WILL NOT BE EITHER. BUT I SHALL CUT OFF HER FEMALE PARTS AND
DEPOSIT THEM FOR THE WHOLE CITY TO SEE. SO DON'T MAKE IT TO EASY FOR ME. KEEP
YOUR SISTERS, DAUGHTERS, AND WIVES OFF THE STREETS AND ALLEYS. MISS BATES WAS
STUPID. SHE WENT TO THE SLAUGHTER LIKE A LAMB. SHE DID NOT PUT UP A STRUGGLE. BUT
I DID. IT WAS A BALL. I FIRST CUT THE MIDDLE WIRE FROM THE DISTRIBUTOR. THEN I
WAITED FOR HER IN THE LIBRARY AND FOLLOWED HER OUT AFTER ABOUT TWO MINUTES.
THE BATTERY MUST HAVE BEEN ABOUT DEAD BY THEN. I THEN OFFERED TO HELP. SHE WAS
THEN VERY WILLING TO TALK TO ME. I TOLD HER THAT MY CAR WAS DOWN THE STREET
AND THAT I WOULD GIVE HER A LIFT HOME. WHEN WE WERE AWAY FROM THE LIBRARY
WALKING, I SAID IT WAS ABOUT TIME. SHE ASKED ME, "ABOUT TIME FOR WHAT?" I SAID IT
WAS ABOUT TIME FOR HER TO DIE. I GRABBED HER AROUND THE NECK WITH MY HAND OVER
HER MOUTH AND MY OTHER HAND WITH A SMALL KNIFE AT HER THROAT. SHE WENT VERY
WILLINGLY. HER BREAST FELT WARM AND VERY FIRM UNDER MY HANDS, BUT ONLY ONE
THING WAS ON MY MIND. MAKING HER PAY FOR ALL THE BRUSH OFFS THAT SHE HAD GIVEN
ME DURING THE YEARS PRIOR. SHE DIED HARD. SHE SQUIRMED AND SHOOK AS I CHOCKED
HER, AND HER LIPS TWICHED. SHE LET OUT A SCREAM ONCE AND I KICKED HER IN THE HEAD
TO SHUT HER UP. I PLUNGED THE KNIFE INTO HER AND IT BROKE. I THEN FINISHED THE JOB
BY CUTTING HER THROAT. I AM NOT SICK. I AM INSANE. BUT THAT WILL NOT STOP THE
GAME. THIS LETTER SHOULD BE PUBLISHED FOR ALL TO READ IT. IT JUST MIGHT SAVE THAT
GIRL IN THE ALLEY. BUT THAT'S UP TO YOU. IT WILL BE ON YOUR CONSCIENCE. NOT MINE.
YES, I DID MAKE THAT CALL TO YOU ALSO. IT WAS JUST A WARNING. BEWARE...I AM
STALKING YOUR GIRLS NOW.
CC. CHIEF OF POLICE
ENTERPRISE
Neither envelope bore a complete address; they were handwritten with a felt-tip pen in the following manner.
Daily Enterprise
Riverside Calif
Attn: Crime
Homicide Detail
Riverside
One fingerprint was found on the envelope sent to the RPD Homicide Detail, but it has never been matched to a suspect, and whether it was left by the author, a postman, or a police officer is unknown.
The killer's claim that "she did not put up a struggle" was contradicted by the numerous defense wounds on her hands and arms, as well as by the flesh and hair found beneath Bates' fingernails.
While a contemporaneous newspaper report reflects uncertainty as to whether the knife actually broke in her body, no evidence of this event is reported in the autopsy report, and more recent pronouncements from RPD detectives are unanimous that the knife did not break.
Bates' car had indeed been sabotaged in the manner described, which had not been fully revealed by the news media. The phone call that is referred to near the end of the letter has never been elaborated on by authorities, though researcher Tom Voigt suggests that it was placed to the Riverside Press, rather than the police, and so went misunderstood and ignored.
The letters were delivered on the same day they were posted. The next day, November 30th, both the Enterprise and the local police submitted their copies to the Riverside County Postal Inspector, who in turn notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Murder is not a federal crime, but extortion through the mail is, and the FBI briefly considered joining the investigation under this pretense. However, since no specific victim of extortion was named or alluded to, there would be no federal aid in the investigation.
In an unexplained turn of events, what appears to be a photocopy of the "Confession" was attached to an FBI report declassified in the 1990s, but the typescript and number of words per line are different from those in the well-known copy that appears in a photograph of the letter lying either on a detective's or a reporter's desk.
Bates Had To Die
On the six-month anniversary of Bates' death, the Riverside Press, the police, and the victim's father (whose name and address had appeared in the local newspaper the day after the murder) were each sent nearly identical copies of another letter, this one written in pencil on lined notepaper.
Instead of a signature, two of the letters bore a symbol that resembled a letter Z joined with a numeral 3. In what would become a hallmark of the Zodiac's epistolary style, the envelopes were franked with excessive postage: in this case, they each carried two of the necessary four-cent stamps. The letters sent to the police and Press read as follows:
BATES HAD
TO DIE
THERE WILL
BE MORE
The copy without the hieroglyph signature, sent to Joseph Bates, substituted "Bates" with "She." One latent fingerprint was developed on the letter sent to the Riverside Police Department, but its origins are not known, and it has never been matched to a suspect.
In mid-April 1967, a janitor at the RCC Library discovered a poem written on the underside of a folding school desk. The desk had been in storage for an unknown period of time, but the contemporary receipt of the "Bates had to die" letters led many investigators to believe that the poem described Bates' murder and was written by her killer.
Some amateurs, however, have noted that the style and tone of the letter indicate otherwise: one compelling theory is that that an unrelated student penned it following an unsuccessful suicide attempt. The handwriting is of debatable resemblance to the three "Bates" notes or any other Zodiac printing and the date of its origin is unclear, so the entire issue remains open to interpretation. The poem read:
Sick of living/unwilling to die
cut.
clean.
if red /
clean.
blood spurting,
dripping,
spilling;
all over her new
dress
oh well
it was red
anyway.
life draining into an
uncertain death.
she won't
die.
this time
someone ll find her.
just wait till
next time.
rh
The cryptic signature, "rh," may have been a reference to RCC's President at the time, R. H. Bradshaw.
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