What the English?!: Ep. 5, The Zodiac Killer
Hello fellow weirdos, and welcome to episode five of the “What the English? !” podcast.
This podcast is for intermediate English learners who want to listen to interesting, thought-provoking and sometimes weird content spoken in clear and natural English. I speak a little slower than I normally do for you guys, and I highlight vocabulary words and phrases and sometimes grammar features (but not too much of that because, let's face it, grammar is boring).
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In this episode we're going to explore an unsolved crime. It's a pretty famous case from California in the States. There have been many books written about it, documentaries filmed about it and even a Hollywood film by director David Fincher, which is excellent by the way. If you want to learn more about this subject after the episode, I highly recommend it. Today we're going to explore the unsolved case of the Zodiac Killer.
The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer. Have you heard that term before? It means a killer who has killed two or more people. Serial killers usually have no motive, meaning no apparent reason to kill the people they killed, and there is usually some kind of pattern to the way they kill. Perhaps they use the same weapon each time, or they kill the same kind of person each time.
The FBI, or the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in the United States defines a serial murder as “The unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.” Unlawful meaning against the law.
So now that we know what a serial killer is, let's talk about the disturbing killings of the Zodiac Killer in Northern California in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
On the evening of December 20, 1968, 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen and her boyfriend 17-year-old Arthur Faraday were on a date. They had just eaten dinner at a local restaurant in the city of Benicia, California.
At about 10:15 PM the teenagers parked Arthur's mother's car on Lake Herman Road. This was a popular “lovers' lane”... I'm sure you can figure out what that phrase means.
Just after 11PM the teens were found dead. Faraday was found half way out of his mother's car. He had been shot in the head. Jenson's body was found 28 feet from the car. She had been shot in the back eight times.
The crime was investigated by local police, but they didn't discover who the killer was. These are believed to be the first killings of the Zodiac Killer.
On the evening of July 4, 1969 another pair of young lovers, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau, drove into the Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, California and parked their car. A car drove into the park behind Ferrin and Mageau and the driver got out and walked to the passenger side door of their car where Michael was sitting. The man shone his flashlight into Ferrin and Mageau's eyes and then shot at them five times.
Darlene Ferrin died at the hospital, but Michael Mageau survived the attack, even though he had been shot in the face, neck and chest. He was able to give police a description of the killer. Mageau said the man had been a white man, aged 26-30. He was around five feet eight inches tall and weighing 200 pounds. He had light brown curly hair.
The day after the attack on Ferrin and Mageau a man called the Vallejo Police Department and claimed that he was the killer, and that he had also killed Betty Lou Jensen and Arthur Faraday.
Almost a month after the shooting in Vallejo, on August 1, 1969 three newspapers, Vallejo Times Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The San Francisco Examiner received letters claiming to be from the killer. What was in these letters? Each one contained a third of a cryptogram made of different symbols, or pictures. A cryptogram is a kind of puzzle or riddle. Each picture represents a letter. Once you have figured out which symbols represent which letters, you can read the cryptogram.
The killer demanded that the three newspapers print the three parts of the cryptogram in the next day's newspaper. If they didn't, he said he would “"cruise around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend."
All three parts of the cryptogram were published by the three newspapers over the following week. Only one newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, published their part the next day. The killer said that once the cryptogram had been solved, the police would know who he was. “They will have me” he claimed.
On August 8, 1969, Donald and Bettye Harden from California solved the cryptogram. Here's what it said:
“"I like killing people because it is so much fun it is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all to kill something gives me the most thrilling experience it is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl the best part of it is that when I die I will be reborn in paradise and the I have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife.”
There were lots of spelling and grammar mistakes and there were 18 letters left over that still today have not been figured out.
By this time, the newspapers were calling the killer “The Zodiac”. Why? Because the killer had sent a letter to the San Francisco Examiner that started "Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking." In this letter The Zodiac gave details about the killings of Betty Lou Jensen, Arthur Faraday and Darlene Ferrin that he could not have known unless he was the killer.
The next murder by the Zodiac Killer is especially disturbing, meaning upsetting or terrible. It's a very disturbing part of the Hollywood movie I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, the 2007 movie called Zodiac.
College students Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard decided to go for a picnic at Lake Berryessa in California. A man walked up to them as they were sitting. He was a white man with brown hair. He was around five feet eleven inches tall and weighed about 170 pounds. The man was wearing a hood over his face, so he looked like an executioner. An executioner is someone who kills criminals who have been found guilty and sentenced to death. The man was also wearing a symbol on his shirt. The symbol was a cross circle, so a circle with a plus over it. The symbol used for a shooting target.
If his clothes weren't scary enough, there was something else that made Hartnell and Shepard terrified: the man was holding a gun in his hand. The killer didn't shoot Hartnell and Shepard though, he stabbed them both multiple times with a knife. Hartnell was stabbed six times and Shepard was stabbed 10 times. After brutally, which means in a violent and cruel way, stabbing the couple the killer walked to their car and drew a cross-circle, the same symbol he had on his shirt, on the car door with the following message “"Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27–69–6:30/by knife." underneath. He then walked to a payphone and called the police to tell them that he had murdered the young couple.
Hartnell and Shepard were found by a man and his son who had been fishing at the lake. They were both alive. Shepard fell into a coma, which is a deep unconsciousness, and sadly died two days later. Hartnell survived the attack though, and was able to give the police the description I just mentioned.
Two weeks after the Zodiac Killer attacked Hartnell and Shepard at Lake Berryessa, a taxi driver in San Francisco was shot dead by a passenger he had picked up. The taxi driver's name was Paul Stine.
Three people saw the killer kill the taxi driver and called the police. They described the killer as a white male, 25-to-30 years old and about 5-foot-8-inches tall. Two police officers saw a man who fit this description very closely, so he really looked like the man the three people who called the police saw, near the scene of the killing soon after. They were not looking for a white male though. For some reason, the radio dispatcher, so the person who radios the police to give them information, had said the man was black, not white. Who knows, if that mistake had not been made, maybe the police would have caught the Zodiac that night.
How do we know the murder of Paul Stine was comitted by the Zodiac Killer? Well, two days after the murder the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the newspapers I mentioned earlier that had printed part of the Zodiac Killer's pyctogram, recieved another letter from the Zodiac. In this letter he claimed that he had killed Paul Stine and added a bloody piece of his short in the envelope to prove it. The next day the same newspaper received another letter from the Zodiac. In this letter he said he was going to find a school bus full of children and "just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out." Thankfully the Zodiac never did kill a school bus full of children. On November 8, 1969, a month after he had sent that letter he sent another cryptogram to the Chronicle. This cryptogram was actually only figured out in December of 2020, so just a few months ago. Here's what it said:
"I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me
that wasn't me on the TV show
which brings up a point about me
I am not afraid of the gas chamber
because it will send me to paradise all the sooner
because I now have enough slaves to work for me
where everyone else has nothing when they reach paradise
so they are afraid of death
I am not afraid because I know that my new life
will be an easy one in paradise"
It took over 51 years to figure this out! When the Zodiac writes “that wasn't me on the TV show” he means the man who called in to a TV show and called himself “Sam” apparently was not the Zodiac.
Over the next six years the Zodiac Killer continued to send letters with cryptograms to newspapers in the same area of California. In these letters he claimed to have committed more murders and he made fun of the police for not catching him. Made fun is a great phrasal verb. It means to joke about or laugh at something or someone.
In 1974 the letters from the Zodiac stopped. Though five victims were confirmed to have been killed by the Zodiac Killer, he claims to have murdered a total of 37 people. He was never caught.
This is what makes the Zodiac Killer case one of the most well-known and mysterious serial killer cases of the past century. We may never know who he was. Did he die? Perhaps something changed in his life and made him stop. Maybe one day we will know.
There have been over 2,500 suspects over the decades. A suspect is someone who people believe committed the crime. Here are the three suspects I am most suspicious of:
Arthur Leigh Allen
Allen was questioned by police twice, in 1969 and 1971. His own friend told the police they thought he might be the Zodiac because he had talked about wanting to kill people in the same way that the Zodiac did.
Some more reasons why Allen was a suspect…
He owned the same gun that was used in one of the Zodiac murders. He wore a watch made by a company called Zodiac (perhaps inspiration for his name?) He had bloody knives in his car, which he told the police were used to kill chickens. Michael Mageau, who survived the Vellejio murder, even chose Allen's picture from a group of pictures shown to him by the police and said he was the man who had -shot him and his girlfriend.
This all sounds very promising, until you hear the reasons why Allen was not arrested…
His DNA did not match the DNA the police found on the envelopes that the Zodiac Killer used to send his letters to the newspapers. Allen's fingerprints did not match the fingerprints police found inside victim Paul Stine's taxi. Police searched Allen's home and found no evidence. The handwriting in the letters from the Zodiac did not match Allen's handwriting.
Perhaps Allen had a partner in crime; someone who helped him write the letters. Maybe he had a place away from his home where he kept anything connecting him to his murders. We will probably never know. Arthur Leigh Allen died of a heart attack in 1992.
Earl Van Best Junior
This suspect was accused of being the Zodiac by his own son, he even wrote a book about it. Best's son Gary Stewart wrote the book “The Most Dangerous Animal of All”. In the book he listed the reasons why he thought his biological father was the Zodiac.
Those reasons were…
Best looked like the picture police specialists drew from the information given to them by the people who had seen the Zodiac. The handwriting on his marriage certificate apparently looked a lot like the writing of the Zodiac. He was interested in riddles and cryptograms. He lived in California when the Zodiac was active. A fingerprint found in victim Paul Stine's taxi was similar to Best's (remember, fingerprint technology wasn't where it is today in the ‘60s).
Wow, these are some compelling, meaning interesting or powerful, facts. So why wasn't Earl Van Best Junior arrested?
Well, police say the fingerprint wasn't close enough to the print found in the taxi, the writing on the marriage certificate was not Best's it was the minister's who married Best and his ex-wife. Also, the drawing made by police specialists looked like lots of men in the late 1960s. Not enough evidence to arrest Best.
Lawrence Kane
Ex-police officer Harvey Hines named Lawrence Kane as a suspect in the Zodiac killings. Kane had worked at the same hotel that Donna Lass, who was believed to be a victim of the Zodiac, also worked. Kane was in the Navy as a young man, where he could have learned about code and developed the skills to create the Zodiac cryptograms. Kane also became brain damaged after a car accident. His brain damage might have made him unable to control his urges, like perhaps the urge to kill.
Harvey Hines, the ex-police officer who believed that Kane was the Zodiac, claimed that the name “Kane” was in the Zodiac cryptograms. The police officer who saw the Zodiac just after he killed taxi driver Paul Stine also said the picture of Kane he saw looked the most like the man he had seen that night.
FBI documents show that Larry Kane was investigated as a suspect, so they looked at the evidence against Kane. However, Kanes fingerprints were not a match for the fingerprints found in any of the crime scenes of the Zodiac killings.
So we may never know who the Zodiac Killer was. It is highly likely that whoever he was is dead now.
That said, another American serial killer who killed at least 13 people in the 1970s and ‘80s was found in 2018. Joseph James DeAngelo, also known as the Golden State Killer, was sentenced to life in prison just last year.
How was DeAngelo found? Through a genealogy DNA testing company. You know, companies that take your DNA and test it so you can find out more about your family history, where you're from, who your second cousins are. One of DeAngelo's family members had sent their DNA to one of these companies and it matched the DNA police found in the Golden State Killer crime scenes.
This is the first time a serial killer has been found this way. Perhaps it will happen more in the future. Just imagine, you send off your pot of saliva and find out that you're 80% Irish, you have cousins in Egypt and your uncle Bob killed 10 people in the ‘80s!
And that was episode five of What the English?! I hope it doesn't give you nightmares. As with all episodes, the link to this video as a lesson on LingQ if you're a member is in the description. Remember to subscribe or follow for more episodes.
See you next time.
