The Zodiac Killer case is a working file. It has been open since December 1968. The suspect is unidentified. Five canonical victims are confirmed killed; two assault survivors gave statements. Three of the killer’s ciphers remain solved; two do not. The most recent procedural milestone is the December 2020 break of the Z340 cipher, which read but did not name. The case remains open in San Francisco, Vallejo, Napa County, and at the FBI. Treat that openness as the headline.
Direct Answer: What the Record Will Bear
The Zodiac Killer murdered five people across the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969 and wounded two. He sent at least four ciphers and a series of taunting letters to Bay Area newspapers. The 408 cipher was solved in August 1969; the 340-character Z340 was solved in December 2020. He was never identified. The case is open.
The Five Canonical Attacks, In Order
Build the timeline first. Five attacks, four sites, four jurisdictions. Two survivors. Each entry below comes from contemporaneous police records and the dated reporting that followed. Speculation goes in the notes column, not in the report. [1]
Lake Herman Road, Benicia. December 20, 1968.
David Arthur Faraday, born October 2, 1951, age 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, born November 30, 1952, age 16, were shot to death in a turnout off Lake Herman Road in Benicia, in Solano County, on the evening of December 20, 1968. It was their first date. Faraday was driving a 1961 Rambler. Jensen was struck by five rounds; Faraday took one to the head. Solano County deputies took the call.
Blue Rock Springs, Vallejo. July 4-5, 1969.
Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, born March 17, 1947, age 22, and Michael Renault Mageau, born October 29, 1949, age 19, were attacked in the parking lot of Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo around midnight between July 4 and July 5, 1969. A man approached the passenger side of Ferrin’s brown Corvair with a flashlight and a 9mm pistol. Ferrin died at Kaiser Foundation Hospital. Mageau survived. He gave a witness statement. About forty minutes after the shooting, a man called the Vallejo Police Department from a public phone, claimed the Ferrin shooting, and claimed the Lake Herman Road killings as well. [2]
Lake Berryessa, Napa County. September 27, 1969.
Bryan Calvin Hartnell, age 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, age 22, were picnicking on the western shore of Lake Berryessa in Napa County on the afternoon of September 27, 1969. A man wearing a black executioner’s hood with a white circle-cross symbol on the chest approached them, bound them, and stabbed both. Shepard died on September 29 at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa. Hartnell survived eight stab wounds and gave a long, careful statement. The attacker wrote dates of the previous attacks on the door of Hartnell’s white Ghia before leaving the scene. Napa County Sheriff’s deputies took the call.
Presidio Heights, San Francisco. October 11, 1969.
Paul Lee Stine, age 29, a Yellow Cab driver and a graduate student, was shot once in the head at the corner of Washington and Cherry streets in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights neighborhood at approximately 9:55 p.m. on October 11, 1969. The killer tore a piece from Stine’s bloodstained shirt and took it. SFPD homicide later assigned the case to Inspector David Ramon Toschi (1931 to 2018) and Inspector William Armstrong. The Stine murder is the case file that would define Toschi’s nine-year work on the Zodiac matter. [3]
The Cheri Jo Bates Question, Held Open
Cheri Jo Bates, age 18, was stabbed to death on the grounds of Riverside City College on the night of October 30, 1966, more than two years before Lake Herman Road. A typewritten “Confession” letter was mailed to the Riverside Police Department and the Riverside Press-Enterprise on November 29, 1966. In a letter dated March 13, 1971, the Zodiac claimed responsibility for the Bates killing. The Riverside Police Department has consistently held that Bates was killed by a local offender and that the Zodiac claim is unverified. [4]
In August 2021, the Riverside Police Department announced that DNA testing in 2020 had identified the writer of the 1966 typewritten letters; that person admitted to writing the letters but was not the killer of Bates. The attribution dispute is unresolved on the merits. The Bates case remains an open Riverside homicide. The Zodiac canonical-victims list is conventionally limited to the five 1968-1969 attacks unless a later finding warrants revision.
The Letters and Ciphers, By the Numbers
The Zodiac mailed his first known letters to three Bay Area newspapers on July 31, 1969: the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Vallejo Times-Herald. Each letter contained one third of a 408-character homophonic-substitution cipher. The killer demanded the ciphers be printed under threat of further killing. The papers printed them.
The 408 cipher was solved within a week. Donald Gene Harden, a high school history and economics teacher in North Salinas, and his wife Bettye June Harden cracked it on August 5, 1969, working by hand in roughly twenty hours. Bettye guessed two cribs: that the message would begin with the word “I,” and that it would contain the word “kill.” Both guesses held. The decoded text begins “I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN” and references Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game.” It does not name its author. [5]
A second cipher of 340 characters, conventionally labeled Z340, arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8, 1969. It resisted attempts to decode it for a half century. On December 5, 2020, three private citizens working without compensation announced a solution: David Oranchak, an American software developer who had run a long-form public investigation of the case for years, Sam Blake, an Australian applied mathematician, and Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian programmer who built the AZdecrypt tool. Their finding was that Z340 used homophonic substitution combined with a transposition step that scrambled the reading order. The FBI publicly confirmed the solution on December 11, 2020. The plaintext is taunting. It does not name its author. [6]
Two further ciphers attributed to the Zodiac, the 32-character Z32 and the 13-character Z13, remain unsolved. The Z32, mailed June 26, 1970, came with a claim that it identified the killer’s location. The Z13, mailed April 20, 1970, came with a claim that it spelled his name. Neither claim has been confirmed. Cold cases close on details warm ones swallow. The shorter the cipher, the less the room to recover signal from noise.
Suspect Files: A Procedural Note
Many names have been written into the Zodiac suspect lists by police, by reporters, and by amateur investigators. None has produced a charge. The discipline of the cold-case desk requires that suspect names be presented as historical-procedural hypotheses, not as endorsements.
Arthur Leigh Allen (December 18, 1933 to August 26, 1992) was the only man named by police as a suspect during the active investigation. He was a former elementary school teacher in Vallejo and a convicted sex offender. SFPD interviewed him in 1971 alongside Vallejo PD’s Detective Mulanax. The Vallejo Police Department executed a search warrant at his residence in February 1991 after a tip from a former acquaintance who claimed Allen had confessed in 1971. Items seized included a Royal typewriter. Handwriting comparisons did not produce a match. Allen was never charged. He died of natural causes in 1992. Subsequent partial DNA work has, on the available samples, excluded him; SFPD’s own retrospective review concluded that the evidence base against Allen was, in then-Inspector Toschi’s later phrase, “negative.” [7]
In October 2021, a private group calling itself The Case Breakers publicly named Gary Francis Poste, an Air Force veteran who died in 2018, as the Zodiac. The claim was based on photographic facial-scar comparison, anagram interpretation of his name in Zodiac correspondence, and circumstantial association with Riverside. The FBI’s San Francisco field office responded that the Zodiac case “remained open and unsolved” and offered no further comment. No law enforcement agency has endorsed the Poste identification. The discipline of the report says: claim made, claim not verified, file remains open.
What the Z340 Break Did and Did Not Do
The Z340 break is a procedural triumph. It is also widely misread. The break did not produce a name. The 2020 plaintext continues the 1969 pattern: a taunt addressed to law enforcement and the public. It identifies neither the killer’s identity nor his location.
What the break did do is restore confidence that careful, transparent, computationally rigorous work on a half-century-old artifact can still extract signal. Oranchak, Blake, and Van Eycke published their methods. Other ciphers attributed to the Zodiac, and ciphers from other cold cases, become incrementally more tractable when the methods are open. That is how cold-case work compounds: not in dramatic identifications, but in quiet, verifiable extensions of method.
The Z32 and Z13 remain. The Bates “Confession” letter author was identified by DNA in 2020 but has been distinguished from the Bates killer. The original SFPD evidence on Stine, including the bloodstained shirt fragment, has been the subject of repeated DNA work since the 1990s; results have been inconclusive on the central question. Cold-case file status: stable, open, productive at the margins.
Why the Honor Roll Goes First
The Zodiac wrote at least twenty letters and four ciphers and signed himself with a circle-cross. He generated, by design, a half century of speculative writing. The procedural answer to that flood is to keep the victims at the head of the file: David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, on a first date in Benicia. Darlene Ferrin, a young waitress and mother, beside Michael Mageau, who survived to give evidence. Cecelia Shepard, beside Bryan Hartnell, who survived. Paul Stine, a graduate student driving a cab. The case is theirs, not the killer’s. [8]
For broader context on long-running unresolved homicide files and the methods cold-case desks use to revisit them, see the Eso Vitae Unsolved Mysteries and Enigmas hub.
Investigators of Record
Robert Graysmith, born September 17, 1942, was an editorial cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle during the Zodiac’s active period. He published “Zodiac” in 1986 and “Zodiac Unmasked” in 2002. The two books are widely cited and remain in print. They also lean on Allen as a primary suspect in a manner that subsequent forensic work has not corroborated; later readers should treat Graysmith as a near-contemporary chronicler with valuable archival access, not as a forensic verdict.
Inspector David Toschi worked the SFPD case from 1969 forward, partnered with Inspector Bill Armstrong, and was removed from the file in 1978 after the disclosure that he had written anonymous fan-letter material to a Chronicle columnist. He returned to other duties; he never named a suspect he could charge. He died in 2018.
The 2020 Z340 codebreaking team — Oranchak, Blake, Van Eycke — operated outside law enforcement, published their work, and credited dozens of contributors who had over the years posted partial decryptions and methodological notes online. That is how the file moves now: by patient, public, transparent contribution at the seams.
Where the File Sits Tonight
Open in San Francisco. Open in Vallejo. Open in Napa County. Open at the FBI as of the most recent public statement. Two ciphers unsolved. Five canonical victims, named. Two survivors who gave statements. One claim of a Riverside attribution that the responsible agency has not adopted. One suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, never charged, since deceased, on retrospective review excluded by available DNA work. One late private claim, the 2021 Poste identification, not endorsed by any law enforcement body. Speculation goes in the notes column. The report says: open file.
