Unsolved: The Ciphers of California's Zodiac
Unsolved: The Ciphers of California's Zodiac
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Speaker 1: Okay, friend, go ahead and throw that last log on
the fire, and let's watch the embers glow as red
as a harvest moon. Now, we've been on quite a
journey tonight, haven't we? We've chased ghosts out across the
freezing ocean, waded through the choking mud of the Louisiana Bayou,
and dug deep into the ancient dirt to find the
nightmares of old. We've talked about curses and treasures, and
the things the earth swallowed whole. But, as the night
gets long and the shadows crawl all the way up
to the ceiling, I want to bring you back home.
I want to bring you to a place of paved roads, streetlights,
and police sirens. Because the most terrifying monster of all
is the cursed temple or scaly beast in the swamp.
Oh no. The most terrifying monster is the one who
does away with people for the sheer bloody thrill of it.
And then writes you a letter to brag about the
fun he had. So let's take a walk through the
creeping heavy fog of San Francisco in the late 1960s.
Let's talk about a phantom in a hood. Let's talk
about the unbreakable ciphers of the Zodiac Killer. Now, back
in the late 1960s, the San Francisco Bay Area was
supposed to be the capital of peace and love. Young
folks were putting flowers in their hair, strumming guitars, and
dreaming of a brighter tomorrow. But the universe demands a balance, friends.
Wherever there's a blinding light, an impossibly dark shadow is
bound to fall. Now, that shadow... started creeping along the
lonely country roads and secluded lover's lanes of Vallejo and Benicia, California.
It was a predator who hunted in the dark, targeting
young couples sitting in parked cars. He didn't rob them.
He didn't want their cars or their wallets. He just
walked up to the windows with a flashlight in one
hand and a weapon in the other, and he shattered
the quiet night. Sometimes he struck in the dead of winter.
Sometimes he struck on the 4th of July. Out at
Lake Berryessa, He even attacked a couple in the broad daylight,
wearing a terrifying hand-sewn black executioner's hood with a bizarre
symbol stitched onto the chest, a circle with a cross
running right through it, like the crosshairs of a rifle scope.
He left bodies in the gravel, and he left the
whole state of California trembling in absolute cold sweat terror. But,
if you can believe it, all that wasn't the worst part, friends.
Oh no. The worst part was that he wanted to
talk about it. Now, in the summer of 1969, the
editors at three major Bay Area newspapers opened their morning
mail and found letters written in blue felt-tip pen. The
handwriting was frantic, slanted, and strange. The sender claimed responsibility
for the murders. To prove it, he included details that
only the cops and the killer could possibly know. How
many shots were fired, the brand of ammunition, the exact
position of those left behind. Now, he didn't just confess.
He demanded the spotlight. He demanded that the newspapers print
his letters on the front page, or else he would
go on another weekend rampage. And then, he introduced himself.
This is the Zodiac speaking. But he didn't just send angry,
boastful letters. Oh no. The Zodiac wanted to play a game.
Along with his letters, he sent cryptograms. Blocks of baffling,
chaotic symbols. He used a mix of Greek letters, weather symbols,
Morse code, and strange geometric shapes he seemed to have
made up right out of his own twisted head. He
claimed that if the police could crack the codes, they
would find his true identity. He was dangling the keys
to the cell right in front of their faces, daring
them to reach out and grab them. Now, the first
cipher he sent was broken into three parts, totaling 408 symbols.
The FBI, the CIA, and Naval Intelligence all took a
crack at it. Their massive mainframe computers hummed and whirred,
spitting out reams of useless data, the government was stumped.
But down in Salinas, a high school history teacher named
Don Hardin and his wife, Betty, sat at their kitchen
table with a pencil and a piece of scratch paper.
They figured somebody like the Zodiac had an ego the
size of a mountain. They guessed the message probably started
with the word I and probably included the word kill somewhere. So,
working late into the night, just two ordinary folks drinking
coffee in their kitchen They peeled back the Zodiac's first
layer of armor. They cracked the 408 cipher. But when
the translation came out, there was no name. There was
no address. There was just the chilling, dead-eyed philosophy of
a monster. The Zodiac wasn't hiding a confession. He was
hiding a nightmare. He claimed he was collecting souls to
serve as his slaves in the afterlife. Now furious that
two amateurs had bested his puzzle, the Zodiac doubled down.
He sent a new cipher, this one containing 340 characters.
And this time, he didn't make any mistakes. The 340
cipher became a legend of cryptography. For over 50 years,
it defied every supercomputer, every algorithm, and every brilliant mind
that tried to pry it open. Until a team of
international codebreakers finally cracked it in the winter of 2020.
But once again, there was no name. Just more rambling,
mocking taunts from a ghost. But here is where the
story turns truly cold, friend. Here is the mystery that
still keeps the FBI agents up at night, staring at
the ceiling and grinding their teeth. You see, in April
of 1970, the Zodiac sent a letter to the San
Francisco Chronicle. It started with his usual boastful greeting. This
is the Zodiac speaking. Then he wrote a single line
of plain English that made the blood run cold in
the veins of every detective in California. Quoting here, By
the way, have you cracked the last cipher I sent you?
My name is... End quote. And right below those words,
he didn't write a name. He wrote a brand new cipher.
It was tiny. Just 13 symbols. A mix of circle dates,
alphabetical letters and crosses. They called it the Z13. 13
little marks of ink on a piece of yellow paper.
It's the holy grail of modern true crime. The Zodiac
looked the entire world dead in the eye and said,
Here I am. Here's my true name. Come and get me. But,
you see, the terrible truth of cryptography is that a
code that short is mathematically impossible to break with absolute certainty.
There simply aren't enough repeating characters to find a pattern.
You could literally plug a thousand different names into those
13 symbols and they would all technically fit. But it's
like trying to pick a lock with a piece of
wet string. He didn't just create a puzzle. He created
a trap. He built a labyrinth with no exits. knowing
full well that the police would exhaust themselves trying to
find the center. Later that year, he sent one more puzzle,
the Z-32. 32 symbols containing the location of a bomb
he claimed he'd buried under a school bus route. Thankfully,
the bomb never went off, or perhaps it never existed
at all. But, just like his name, those 32 symbols
have stubbornly, absolutely resisted every attempt to crack them. So,
the Zodiac Killer continued to send letters for a few
more years, complaining about bad newspaper coverage, taking credit for
demises he likely didn't commit, and demanding the people of
San Francisco wear buttons with his crosshair symbol on them.
And then, one day, he just stopped. The letters ceased.
The crimes faded away. The thick, rolling fog of the
Bay Area simply swallowed him whole. The police investigated thousands
of suspects. They looked at a disgraced schoolteacher who liked
to watch people. They looked at a creepy newspaper man.
They looked at a heavyset fellow who had the same
boot size as the footprints left at Lake Berryessa. But
the DNA didn't match. The handwriting was always just a
little bit off. They could never put handcuffs on any
of them. The Zodiac slipped through their fingers like water, friends. Now,
I want you to think about that, friends, as the
fire dies down to ash. Think about the man who
wore the executioner's hood. If he was in his 20s
or 30s back in 1969, there's a very real chance
he lived to see old age. He might have stood
in line behind you at the grocery store. He might
have been the quiet, unassuming grandfather leaving three houses down,
the one who always smiled and waved when you went
to get the mail. He might have sat in a
rocking chair on his porch, watching the sun go down,
knowing that he had completely outsmarted the entire world. Knowing
that his true name was sitting in a police evidence locker,
written in thirteen little symbols that no one on earth
was smart enough to read. So you see, some mysteries, friends,
are locked away in the ancient dirt. But the Zodiac,
oh no. He locked his mystery in the ink of
a felt-tip pen, and then he just walked away into
the dark. So, make sure you lock your doors tonight, please.
And don't look too close at the shadows in the
corners of the room. Because sometimes, it's best not to know.
What's hiding in the dark?