Zodiac Killer suspects

A composite sketch of the Zodiac Killer made in 1969

Thousands of men have been named as a possible suspect for the Zodiac Killer, an unidentified serial killer active between December 1968 and October 1969. The Zodiac murdered five known victims in the San Francisco Bay Area, operating in rural, urban and suburban settings. He targeted three young couples and a lone male cab driver. The case has been described as "arguably the most famous unsolved murder case in American history," and has become both a fixture of popular culture and a focus for efforts by amateur detectives.

In 2007, The Guardian wrote that over 2,500 people have been brought up as a possible Zodiac suspect, and at least a half-dozen names were credible. The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) had investigated an estimated 2,500 suspects by 2009. Richard Grinell, who runs the website Zodiac Ciphers, said in 2022 that "there are probably 50 or 100 suspects named every year."

While many theories regarding the identity of the Zodiac have been suggested, the only suspect authorities ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died in 1992. Other suspects seen as viable include Earl Van Best Jr., Gary Francis Poste, Giuseppe Bevilacqua, Lawrence Kane, Paul Doerr, Richard Gaikowski and Richard Marshall.

Background

The Zodiac Killer claimed in messages to newspapers to have committed thirty-seven murders. Investigators agree on seven confirmed assault victims, all in Northern California, of whom five died and two survived:

• David Arthur Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot and killed on December 20, 1968, on Lake Herman Road in Benicia.
• Michael Renault Mageau and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin were shot around midnight between July 4 and 5, 1969, in the parking lot of Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo. Mageau survived the attack; Ferrin was later pronounced dead.
• Bryan Calvin Hartnell and Cecelia Ann Shepard were stabbed on September 27, 1969, at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Hartnell survived, but Shepard died as a result of her injuries on September 29.
• Paul Lee Stine was shot and killed on October 11, 1969, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.

The Zodiac coined his name in a series of taunting messages that he mailed to regional newspapers, threatening killing sprees and bombings if they were not printed. He also said that he was collecting his victims as slaves for the afterlife. Some letters included cryptograms or ciphers; of the four codes he produced, two remain unsolved while the others were cracked in 1969 and 2020. The last confirmed Zodiac letter was sent in 1974, in which he claimed to have killed thirty-seven victims. He had said earlier that many of them were in Southern California, including Cheri Jo Bates, who was murdered in Riverside in 1966; a connection between the two has not been proven.

Arthur Leigh Allen

The only man ever named by the police as a suspect is Arthur Leigh Allen, a former elementary school teacher and convicted sex offender who died of a heart attack in 1992. He denied being the culprit. In his books Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002), author Robert Graysmith advanced Allen as a likely suspect based on circumstantial evidence.

Allen had been interviewed by police from the early days of the Zodiac investigation and was the subject of several search warrants over a twenty-year period. In 2007, Graysmith noted that several detectives described Allen as the most likely suspect. However, in 2010, SFPD investigator Dave Toschi stated that all the evidence against Allen ultimately "turned out to be negative."

In the 2024 documentary This Is the Zodiac Speaking, allegations were made by a family who were friends of Allen which, if true, would reinforce his culpability; this includes Allen admitting to being the Zodiac before his death in 1992.

Background

Allen in 1991 being interviewed by KTVU News in his home

Allen lived in Atascadero, California, before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in June 1963. Allen enlisted in the United States Navy in 1951 and served until he was honorably discharged in 1959. During his time in the Navy, Allen served mostly in the reserves but spent some time on active duty. He served on multiple submarines and earned the China Service Medal for his service in Southeast Asia. In 1958, Allen faced a special court-martial at Naval Station Treasure Island for bringing a loaded .45 caliber pistol onto a naval base; he was found not guilty.

Allen lived in Vallejo, where he worked minutes away from the home of Zodiac victim Darlene Ferrin and from the scene of one of the killings. Jack Mulanax of the Vallejo Police Department wrote that Allen had been fired as an elementary school teacher after allegations of sexual misconduct with students in March 1968. Allen was generally well-regarded by those who knew him, but was also described as "fixated on young children and angry at women."

Investigation

Toschi's daughter stated that her father had always thought Allen was the Zodiac, but that police did not have the evidence to prove it. Actor Mark Ruffalo, who portrayed Toschi in the 2007 film about the Zodiac, commented:

If you get into who these cops were, you realize how they have to take their hunches, their personal beliefs, out of it. Dave Toschi said to me, 'As soon as that guy walked in the door, I knew it was him.' He was sure he had him, but he never had a solid piece of evidence. So he had to keep investigating every other lead.

On October 6, 1969, Allen was interviewed by Detective John Lynch of the Vallejo Police Department. Allen had been reported in the vicinity of the Lake Berryessa attack on September 27. He told Lynch that he had been scuba diving at Salt Point State Park that day. Graysmith reports that a Vallejo police officer pulled Allen over for speeding and noticed a bloody knife in his car on the day of the attack. Allen dismissed it, saying, "I used that to kill a couple of chickens."

In 1971, Allen's former friend, Donald Cheney, reported to Manhattan Beach police that Allen had spoken of his desire to kill people, used the name Zodiac and secured a flashlight to a firearm for visibility at night. Cheney said this conversation occurred no later than January 1, 1969. Allen was interviewed again on August 4, 1971, this time by Detective Mulanax of the Vallejo Police Department and Inspectors Toschi and Bill Armstrong of SFPD. In September 1972, the SFPD obtained a search warrant for Allen's residence.

In 1974, Allen was arrested for lewdness with a nine-year-old boy. After pleading guilty he was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for pre-sentence evaluation and treatment. On May 13, 1977, Allen was given a suspended prison sentence and five years of felony probation. He completed probation successfully in 1982. Allen's arrest and sentencing could provide a potential reason for why the Zodiac's communications stopped in 1974. The Vallejo Police Department served another search warrant at Allen's residence in February 1991. Two days after his death in 1992, they served another warrant and seized property from his residence.

Evidence

An advertisement for the Zodiac Watch, Allen's watch, which has the same logo as the Zodiac Killer

On August 16, 1991, Michael Mageau identified Allen from a photo lineup of 1968 driver's licenses as the man who shot him in 1969, saying, "That's him! It's the man who shot me!" In contrast, police officer Donald Fouke, who (with officer Eric Zelms) possibly saw the Zodiac fleeing the Paul Stine murder scene, said in the 2007 documentary His Name Was Arthur Leigh Allen that Allen weighed about 100 pounds more than the man Fouke saw, and that Allen's face was "too round". Allen and the Zodiac did, however, both wear shoes sized 10.5. Nancy Slover, the police dispatcher who received the call from the Zodiac after the Mageau-Ferrin shooting, said in the documentary that Allen did not sound like the man with whom she spoke. Allen also owned and wore a Zodiac Watch, a brand that uses a logo similar to the killer's symbol.

Allen's driver's license from 1967, showing his handwriting and appearance then

The letter sent to the Riverside Police Department from Cheri Jo Bates' killer was printed with either Elite or Pica typeface on a Royal typewriter; during the 1991 search of Allen's residence, police seized a Royal typewriter with Elite type. Shortly before his death, Allen wrote a letter to Rita Williams, a reporter from San Francisco station KTVU who had just interviewed him. The letter contained grammatical mistakes similar to those of the Zodiac letters. Williams firmly believes that Allen was the Zodiac. Retired police handwriting expert Lloyd Cunningham, who worked on the Zodiac case for decades, stated in 2009, "They gave me banana boxes full of Allen's writing, and none of his writing even came close to the Zodiac. Nor did DNA extracted from the envelopes [on the Zodiac letters] come close to Arthur Leigh Allen."

In 2002, Cydne Holt of the SFPD crime lab developed a partial DNA profile from saliva on stamps and envelopes of the Zodiac's letters—especially the stamp on the November 8, 1969, card—for the ABC News program Primetime Thursday. A partial DNA profile can't "point to just one person", "[it] can only rule someone in as a possibility or exclude them if it isn't a match." The SFPD compared this partial profile to that of Allen and Cheney. Since neither test result indicated a match, the two were excluded as the contributors of the DNA. Allen's fingerprints also did not match those lifted from the Stine murder. In 2018, Tom Voigt stated that the partial profile's efficacy was dubious, as he had learned the DNA was "collected from the outside of the stamp" on the November 1969 card; "No genetic material was obtained from behind the stamp, or the seal of the envelope, or anywhere else that would have most certainly belonged to the Zodiac". Voigt claimed that this had been confirmed by Holt as well as an unnamed retired SFPD inspector, and that this discovery reaffirmed Allen's status as a viable suspect.

This Is the Zodiac Speaking

A three-episode documentary, This Is the Zodiac Speaking, debuted on Netflix in 2024. In the film, Allen's former students fondly recall his interest in cryptology. They remembered him playing records like "Tom Dooley", about a woman's murder, and "I've Got a Little List" from The Mikado. He also brought dead animals into the classroom. Numerous allegations are also made by former acquaintances, members of the Seawater family, that greatly inculpate Allen. Zodiac researcher Michael Butterfield was skeptical of the documentary's allegations.

In the 1960s, Allen was friends with Phyllis Seawater and often looked after her children. He took them on small trips, including one to Tajiguas Point in Santa Barbara County on June 3, 1963. The day before, an unsolved shooting had occurred at that beach. According to their account, after Allen and the Seawater children arrived at Tajiguas Point, Allen left them in the car and went down to the beach alone. When he returned about an hour later, he appeared to have blood on his hands. He cleaned up and sped away with the children. The next day, the bodies of Robert Domingos and Linda Edwards were found on a nearby beach.

Three years later, on October 28, 1966, Allen took two of the older Seawater children, Connie and David, to Riverside, California. They stayed in a motel, and David slept through most of the trip. Cheri Jo Bates was killed near Riverside City College on October 30. The following morning, Allen hurried the children out of the motel, and Connie recalls him molesting her in the car as they headed home.

The Seawater children initially thought it was ludicrous that Allen could be the Zodiac. In 1991, Connie directly asked Allen if he was; he said if he told her, he would have to kill her. In 1992, David thanked Allen for being so nice to them when they were young. Allen started sobbing and confessed to drugging them and molesting Connie. Alarmed, David asked Allen if he was the Zodiac, to which he allegedly responded, "It was me." The release of David Fincher's film about the Zodiac case in 2007 prodded the Seawater family to reexamine their memories of Allen.

A possible Zodiac cipher from 1973 was decoded for a 2017 History Channel show. In the letter, Zodiac named his next victim as "Connie Henly" and her location in Albany, New York. Phyllis Seawater's maiden name was "Hensley", and at the time the letter had been sent, Connie was living in New York State, just a few hours from Albany. Allen had previously fallen out with Connie for not leaving her family for him. The Seawaters also found a cache of Allen's letters to their mother, which include extensive discussions of the Zodiac.

Earl Van Best Jr.

In 2014, Gary Stewart and Susan Mustafa published a book, The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father... and Finding the Zodiac Killer, in which Stewart claimed his search for his biological father, Earl Van Best Jr., led him to conclude Van Best was the Zodiac. Stewart based his theory on circumstantial evidence, including a composite sketch resembling Van Best, partial fingerprint and handwriting matches, encrypted messages in Zodiac letters and partial DNA connections.

In 2020, the book was adapted for FX Network as a documentary series. To validate Stewart's claims, the producers enlisted private investigator Zach Fechheimer, who uncovered that Stewart had manipulated a police report and traced Van Best to being present in Europe during the Zodiac's known activities. Additionally, experts discredited the DNA analysis and the handwriting and fingerprint matches. The producers chose to withhold their findings until near the end of the documentary's production to minimize their impact on both the series and Stewart. Six months after production, director Kief Davidson stated that he thought Stewart's father was not the Zodiac, while executive producer Ross Dinerstein remained uncertain about Van Best's potential involvement.

Gary Francis Poste

Poste in a 2016 mugshot

In 2021, the Case Breakers, an independent group made up of around forty "former law enforcement officials, academics, journalists, and former military intelligence workers," claimed they had identified Gary Francis Poste, a man who died in 2018, as both the Zodiac and the murderer of Cheri Jo Bates. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stated that the case remained open and that there was "no new information to report." Local law enforcement expressed skepticism regarding the team's findings. Riverside investigator Ryan Railsback said the Case Breakers' claims largely relied on circumstantial evidence. Rumors about Poste as a suspect had been investigated by the SFPD in 2017. They visited his jail, but declined to say if they interviewed him. In 2023, the Case Breakers claimed an FBI whistleblower told them the bureau had considered Poste a suspect since 2016.

Poste was a veteran of the United States Air Force. He had a history of violence; he pushed his wife into a wall, breaking her pelvis, and a male relative claimed Poste tried to attack him with a hammer. Poste allegedly had a group of young male followers who he trained to be "killing machines", and who often attacked animals. One piece of evidence used by the Case Breakers involved forehead scars that were supposedly present on both Poste and the Zodiac. Tom Voigt called the claims "bullshit", noting that no witnesses in the case described the Zodiac as having forehead scars. The Case Breakers also said that the Zodiac and Poste had the same shoe size, and claimed that DNA from the Bates murder would match Poste's.

Poste had been investigated as a suspect in the Zodiac case since at least 2014, by television news anchor Dale Julin. Julin filed affidavits in court that stated he interviewed Poste in 2017, and Poste admitted to being the Zodiac. The Union Democrat newspaper found the information in the affidavits to be unverifiable. Julin also claimed he used supposed anagrams found in the Zodiac's letters to find a tree where Poste, as the Zodiac, hanged alleged victim Donna Lass. Julin's solve for the codes contained Poste's name and gave the coordinates of a specific pine tree in a section of a campground in Zephyr Cove, Nevada. The tree in question had been gouged at the base. The Case Breakers partially based their research on Julin's book on the subject, Catching Zodiac, which was released in 2024.

Giuseppe Bevilacqua

In 2017, Italian journalist Francesco Amicone conducted an investigation that implicated Joseph "Giuseppe" Bevilacqua, a retired United States Army sergeant and former superintendent of the Florence American Cemetery and Memorial, as a suspect in both the Zodiac and Monster of Florence (Il Mostro) cases. Bevilacqua had previously testified at the trial of Il Mostro suspect Pietro Pacciani in 1994. Starting in May 2017, Bevilacqua and Amicone began having multiple meetings, and according to Amicone, Bevilacqua implied his responsibility for both cases in phone correspondence. Bevilacqua agreed with Amicone's request to turn himself in but later changed his mind. The conversation was not recorded. Amicone's inquiry was published in multiple Italian magazines and has been continued since then on his blog. Italian authorities dismissed their investigation into Bevilacqua in 2021. He died on December 23, 2022. Amicone claimed a DNA profile was sent to U.S. authorities investigating the Zodiac case in November 2023.

Lawrence Kane

In a photo lineup, Kathleen Johns identified Lawrence Kane (also spelled "Lawrence Kaye") as the man who abducted her in 1970. Ferrin's sister Linda identified a photo of Kane as showing a man who had once harassed Ferrin in a restaurant. Fouke said that Kane resembled the man he and Zelms had observed near the Stine murder scene more than any other person. Kane had lived in South Lake Tahoe, California, and worked at the Sahara Tahoe casino when alleged victim Donna Less worked there. He had previously been arrested for voyeurism in 1961 and prowling in 1968, and had been diagnosed with impulse-control disorder after suffering brain injuries in a 1962 accident. Kane died in 2010.

In 2021, Fayçal Ziraoui, a French-Moroccan business consultant and engineer, claimed that he had solved the "Z13" and "Z32" ciphers. According to Ziraoui, the Z13 cipher reads "Kayr", in theory a typo of "Kaye", and the Z32 cipher gives a set of coordinates: “LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." If the coordinate system used is "based on the earth’s magnetic field [and] not the more familiar geographic coordinates," it gives the location of a school in South Lake Tahoe, lining up with the cipher's intention of being the location of a bomb in a school. Many Zodiac sleuths disputed Ziraoui's findings, while the FBI and SFPD declined to comment on his theory. Anonymous law enforcement officers investigating the Zodiac told the San Francisco Chronicle they did not believe the solutions were correct.

Paul Doerr

In 2022, author Jarrett Kobek published How to Find Zodiac, in which he named Paul Doerr as a suspect. Doerr was a North Bay resident with a post office box in Vallejo, where the first murders took place. Born in 1927, Doerr's age in 1969 (42) as well as his height (5'9") would have been consistent with witness estimates. Doerr was an avid fanzine publisher and letter-writer throughout the 1960s and '70s, and many of his writings exhibit circumstantial parallels with the Zodiac. Paul Haynes, a researcher for the true crime book I'll Be Gone in the Dark, called Doerr "the best Zodiac suspect that's ever surfaced."

Doerr's daughter read Kobek's book with the intent of suing for libel, but came away impressed with his research, adding in interviews that her father had at times been violent and abusive. Kobek sent a nineteen-page document to the SFPD's Major Crimes Division regarding the similarities, to which he did not receive a response.

Doerr was a member of the Minutemen, a right-wing militant group that sent out threatening letters to supposed communists using a symbol that resembled the Zodiac's. Some of the Zodiac attacks took place at hangout spots of Doerr's daughter. In his fanzine Pioneer, Doerr references the same formula for an ANFO bomb later given by the Zodiac, which Kobek argues was not widely known before the Internet and the publication of The Anarchist Cookbook in 1971. Doerr hinted in a 1974 letter to the journal Green Egg that he had previously killed people; Kobek writes that that part of the letter was not intended for publication, but Green Egg had a policy of publishing every letter in full.

Doerr was interested in cryptography; in issue #1 of his J. R. R. Tolkien fanzine Hobbitalia, he published a cipher in Cirth. This came three days after Zodiac sent the "Z13" cipher, and Kobek argues that the solution to the Hobbitalia cipher is one of only three possible solutions to Z13. In Hobbitalia #2, Doerr praised the Society for Creative Anachronism, a group of medieval cosplayers, which could explain the executioner-style costume used at Lake Berryessa. A Renaissance Faire took place nearby on the day of the attack, and there is an undated photo that shows Doerr carrying a knife similar to the one described in the Lake Berryessa attack. Doerr also made a list of books he wanted to sell, including The Strange Ways of Man, which describes headhunters killing victims so they could have slaves in the afterlife. In a letter to a different fanzine in 1970, Doerr advocated using solely 1¢ stamps to spite the United States Postal Service, a practice the Zodiac employed on some of his letters.

Richard Gaikowski

Gaikowski in a 1965 mugshot

At the time of the Zodiac murders, Richard Gaikowski was a reporter and editor for the counterculture tabloids Good Times and the Martinez Morning News Gazette. Gaikowski had moved to the Bay Area in 1963. In 1971, he was involuntarily committed to Napa State Mental Hospital and diagnosed with a mental illness. He later operated a movie theater, and died in 2004. Gaikowski is Tom Voigt's top suspect.

Gaikowski's appearance resembled the Stine composite sketch, and the word "Gyke" also appears in the Zodiac cipher that claimed to contain his identity. When he was working for the Gazette, Gaikowski was minutes away from two Zodiac murder scenes. Stine's sister told Voigt she recognized Gaikowski at Stine's funeral. This would also match with the claim that Ferrin's attacker and boyfriend were named Richard. Gaikowski himself told Ken Narlow that he was not in the United States at the time of the Lake Herman Road murders, but was unable to prove this as he had lost his passport. According to Voigt, the FBI investigated Gaikowski but dismissed him as a suspect upon hearing the claim he had been out of the country, despite allegedly losing the passport. San Francisco and Napa police have declined to compare DNA samples of Gaikowski and the Zodiac.

A former co-worker of Gaikowski, nicknamed "Goldwatcher", wrote long letters to law enforcement accusing him of being the Zodiac. In 2009, an episode of the History Channel television series MysteryQuest investigated Gaikowski, and Goldwatcher made an appearance in disguise. On the episode, he provided recordings of Gaikowski's voice. Nancy Slover, the Vallejo police dispatcher who was contacted by the Zodiac shortly after the Blue Rock Springs attack, identified a recording of Gaikowski's voice as being the same as the Zodiac's. However, the History Channel referred to Goldwatcher as a "conspiracy theorist with low credibility", and a San Francisco police dispatcher referred to him as "one of the top three Zodiac kooks."

Richard Marshall

Richard Marshall was a ham radio operator and movie projectionist who lived in Riverside at the time of the Bates murder and in San Francisco close to the scene of the Stine murder. Visitors to his home found him "peculiar", and he often mentioned finding "something much more exciting than sex." Marshall liked the movie The Red Phantom, which is the phrase a possible Zodiac letter used. Marshall also lived in a basement apartment, which the Zodiac mentioned. Like the Zodiac, he owned felt-tip pens and "odd-sized" paper, and the two used a similar typewriter and teletype. In 1989, Marshall acknowledged that similarities existed but denied being the Zodiac. Narlow said that "Marshall makes good reading but [is] not a very good suspect in my estimation." Marshall died in 2008.

Ross Sullivan

Ross Sullivan became a person of interest through the possible link between the Zodiac and the Bates murder. Sullivan, a library assistant at Riverside City College, was suspected by co-workers after he engaged in disturbing behavior and went missing for several days following the murder. Sullivan resembled sketches of the Zodiac, as he sported a crew cut and wore glasses and military-style boots with footprints like those found at the Lake Berryessa murder scene. Sullivan had moved to Northern California in 1967 and was hospitalized multiple times for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Cleared suspects

• Following the capture of Charles Manson and his murderous cult, the Manson Family, a 1970 report by the California Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation stated that all male members of the group had been investigated and eliminated as Zodiac suspects. There have been attempts to link the two Santa Barbara County shootings with the Manson Family due to their ties to the city of Santa Barbara, but there has so far been no evidence of a connection.
• According to Voigt, fingerprint comparison in 1989 eliminated serial killer Ted Bundy as a person of interest.
• Ted Kaczynski, a domestic terrorist and mathematician also known as the Unabomber, was investigated for possible connections to the Zodiac in 1996. Kaczynski worked in Northern California at the time of the murders and, like the Zodiac, had an interest in cryptography and threatened the press into publishing his communications. Kaczynski was ruled out by both the FBI and SFPD based on fingerprint and handwriting comparisons, and by his absence from California on certain dates of known Zodiac activity.

See also

• Ted Cruz–Zodiac Killer meme