Zodiac Killer tips roll in like the tide, month after month, in emails, phone calls, texts, books, Twitter messages, snail mail. I’ve been getting them for 25 years. From all over the world. And just like the tide, each wave is urgent and utterly different.
I’ve got piles of letters saying the Zodiac is the creepy neighbor upstairs or down the street. Others say it’s their father — that’s a particularly popular theory. Or one of the cops who investigated the case. And the spooky ciphers Zodiac mailed to The Chronicle as he was stabbing and shooting five people to death in the Bay Area in 1968-69? Those have been decoded in hundreds of ways, naming hundreds of suspects far beyond the only one the cops ever took seriously enough to name — Arthur Leigh Allen, a convicted child molester in Vallejo who died in 1992 without being charged.
The latest of these tips made a splash when a French engineer said he’d solved the last two uncracked ciphers, known as Z32 and Z13, after just two weeks of trying. The New York Times ran a story on it last week, and the perpetually astonished world of crime buffs got all excited for a few days. Then, like with virtually all the other tips that roll in, the fever faded.
My sources at the heart of the investigation — all under orders not to discuss the Zodiac because it’s an open homicide case — say they believe there’s nothing to the theory by French engineer Fayçal Ziraoui. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t sincere. Most tipsters are.
Ziraoui emailed me in February from his suburban Paris home with his theory, a few days after the Le Point magazine in France wrote about it. He said, “the Zodiac identity could have been solved,” and named Lawrence Kaye, who amateur sleuths have scrutinized before, as the killer. Kaye, who also used the name Kane, died in 2010.
I asked Ziraoui by email this week what kind of response he’d gotten, considering the hostility his theory drew from online forums (“It’s a waste of time,” Mike Morford, who runs the popular zodiackillersite.com, told me).
Ziraoui politely emailed back: “Long-time Zodiac sleuth (sic) are more skeptical, but one can wonder about their lack of bias (sic) or scientific credentials. As of today, I did not have any response from authorities on my proposed solutions. Hopefully they will come back to me, as I have more to share.”
I check periodically with my sources about the avalanche of tips, and when I got Ziraoui’s email in February, it set off no alarm bells. So I saved it with the others. And when I say others, I mean a lot of others.
These are three victims of a killer who calls himself "Zodiac" and brags to police by letter of his deeds, in San Francisco and the northern California areas. Left to right: San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine, shot to death last Saturday; Cecilia Shepard, 22, student stabbed to death three weeks ago; and Bryan Hartnell, 20, who was stabbed but lived.
Associated PressThis year alone, I’ve received nearly 400 communications from Zodiac tipsters fingering suspects and proposing solutions to all four ciphers, even though two have now been verifiably solved. The 408 Cipher was cracked in 1969 — it rambled on about killing and having slaves in the afterlife. And that’s not counting the two giant boxes of email printouts, hand-stitched books and more I have dating back to 1996. That’s when, while covering the Unabomber’s psychotic murder spree, I started getting letters and packages claiming Ted Kaczynski was the Zodiac.
The Unabomber claim was preposterous. I wrote about it. An avalanche of mail and phone calls followed. I received so many theories about the Zodiac from all over the world — United States, Scotland, Germany, Australia, you name it — that I had to dedicate an extra-large file drawer to hold them all.
That drawer has now been seen on more documentaries, TV shows and podcasts than I remember. Because it turns out that after 25 years of writing off and on about the Zodiac and other serial killers, I’m apparently the longest-tenured Zodiac reporter in the country. It’s not a beat I take lightly.
First off, the ceaseless tsunami of tips can be unsettling and, well, wearing to wade through. There’s a galaxy of arcane details in this case — the murder tree in Lake Tahoe! the Mt. Diablo map to the bomb! and so on — that tipsters excavate and stitch together into new clues. Making quick sense of them is tough. My editors generally aren’t interested in Zodiac stories unless it’s major, so it is by far not my main beat, and some people get irritated at that.
There’s always that queasy feeling that one of these thousands of tips will be “the one,” and I’ll miss it. That DNA technology will finally progress enough to grab usable samples from the envelopes or other evidence in police files. That a verifiable confession will pop up somehow, somewhere.
And then, of course, there is the human element. As I often say when I’m interviewed about the Zodiac, Unabomber or the Doodler serial killer I recently did a podcast series about, murder is not entertainment. There are real victims involved, awful ripple effects on survivors. But people can’t resist a spine-chilling narrative. And the Zodiac has it all — taunting letters and ciphers, claims of dozens of victims (though only five were confirmed) and a weird hooded costume. Unsolved to this day. He is America’s Jack the Ripper.
So the theories proliferate. And once in awhile, there’s a surge — like in December, when I broke the story of an international trio of code-crackers finally solving the 340 Cipher, so-called because it has 340 characters. The team, led by David Oranchak of Virginia, concluded the cipher didn’t say anything helpful. An example: “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me ...”
But at least it was solved.
Oranchak contacted me for years as he worked on the cipher. So has Mike Rodelli of New Jersey, who in May published “In the Shadow of Mt. Diablo,” a meticulously researched, 476-page book laying out his case that a wealthy San Francisco car dealer was the Zodiac. He’s been picking over the case for 22 years, and he found Ziraoui’s claim “delusional.”
“I had a profile on the Zodiac worked up by (forensics psychologist) Richard Walter, and I don’t think any other person fits it like my suspect does,” Rodelli. “But, hey, I can understand all the fascination by so many people. This is one of the greatest mysteries of all time. If you’re into mysteries, who wouldn’t be interested?”
It’s impossible to count all the others in the hunt. Just this month, they include Steve Butler, a Southern California app developer who says the ciphers are truncated words indicating the Zodiac’s name is Charlie, a man fingering his military officer father in Nebraska, and a French woman who’s sure a Halloween card Zodiac mailed to The Chronicle was about Scottish nobles executed in the 1700s.
But of all the armchair detectives, none has had the success in my 25 years of covering the case that Oranchak and his team had. The reason we accepted his cipher solution was that the FBI verified it — and that agency doesn’t comment unless it’s final. Tellingly, they’re not confirming Ziraoui’s solution.
Oranchak told me this week that Ziraoui’s theory is no good because the codes “are so short they don’t have enough characters to prove anything.” But he’s sure that won’t stop the cascade of tips.
“There’s a lot of newcomers working on the solutions now, and I get contacted a lot,” said Oranchak, who’s become a celebrity in the Zodiac sleuth world. “They get excited about it and think they’re on the right track, but all I can say to them is: ‘Well, you may be right.’”
And that’s pretty much what I tell people who contact me. Because, no matter how outlandish any of those thousands of theories in my Zodiac files seems to be, we’ll never really know what’s right.
Kevin Fagan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: kfagan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @KevinChron
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