The New York Zodiac Killer The Twisted Crimes of Heriberto Seda
The New York Zodiac Killer The Twisted Crimes of Heriberto Seda
Speaker 1: In the early hours of the tenth of August nineteen
ninety two, in Brooklyn, New York City, a thirty nine
year old woman suffering with long term mental health issues
found herself in an unfamiliar area near Highland Park.
Speaker 2: Patricia Farante, who was at times homeless, A very.
Speaker 1: Vulnerable woman, Patricia was lured to the park by a stranger.
The man then shot her twice and stabbed her more
than one hundred times. The vicious murder was carried out
by Heliberto Eddie Sada, who believed he was following in
the footsteps of the notorious Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 3: He took the legacy of another serial killer and tried
to make it his own.
Speaker 4: He preyed on the vulnerable, He killed at random, and
he was utterly heartless.
Speaker 1: Within four years, Sada attacked more than nine innocent victims,
killing three.
Speaker 5: Being the carbucat Zoriak was in his DNA, was in
his soul, and he liked the attention.
Speaker 6: He liked the media, He liked the results.
Speaker 1: He sought out and stalked victims on the fringes of
society to feed his lust for power and status. Confirming
Heliberto Eddie Zada the New York Zodiac as one of
the world's most evil killers. In the early nineteen nineties,
terroot grip the city of New York, USA, Heliberto Eddie
Zada roamed the streets late at night masquerading the San
Francisco Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 7: It caused a lot of fear within the citizens of
New York City, in particular Brooklyn and Queens that there
was now a serial killer claiming to be the Zodiac.
And everybody recalled that the Zodiac in the San Francisco
Bay area in the sixties and he was never apprehended,
and this guy was claiming to be one and the same.
Speaker 1: Inner city, already overwhelmed with crime. Sada was shooting strangers
in the street, but his attacks went unnoticed until he
left a series of enigmatic notes purporting to be from
the Zodiac Killer.
Speaker 7: It caused the media frenzy. So we had to deal
with this publicity and reporters, and it put a lot
of pressure on the NYPD.
Speaker 1: Sergeant Joseph Herbert was one of the investigator who spent
years pursuing the New York Zodiac.
Speaker 6: What the Zodiac was done.
Speaker 5: He was doing males, females, black, white, Spanish. He had
no pacific target. I think it was just the best
opportunity that he had, you know, he could get away
with him.
Speaker 2: He prided himself on the idea that he got better
and better at it, that he had trained himself to
use stealth and surprise more and more and more, and
that he became more accomplished as a murder.
Speaker 1: The chilling story of Heliberto Eddie Sada the New York
Zodiac begins in New York City. Born in nineteen sixty seven,
he was the eldest of two children.
Speaker 4: It was a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, but at his
mother was very proud. She wanted to do the very
best for her two children.
Speaker 3: It was quite a dangerous part of the city to
be in, and I think their mother really struggled in
terms of keeping her children out of that kind of lifestyle.
Speaker 1: Sada's father was absent during his impoverished childhood.
Speaker 3: They barely had enough money to eat at times, so
Sada stepped into that role as the patriarch of the family.
He was quite controlling, especially when it came to his
younger half sister, in terms of the kind of things
that she did, the kind of people that she hung
out with. He was somebody who voluntarily excluded himself from
drugs and from gang crime.
Speaker 4: Eddie grew up being rather religious, but also strangely reclusive. Nevertheless,
Eddie sada was, by all accounts, a good student, very
anti drugs, anti alcohol addiction.
Speaker 3: Sadah really hated the drug dealers in the neighborhood, and
he really didn't like the fact that his younger half
sister had some friends who were involved in drug dealing.
He was casting judgment on other people for their choices,
for their behaviors, for their decisions.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three, at the age of sixteen, Eddie said,
who was suspended from high school for carrying a weapon,
he would never return, no longer in education.
Speaker 8: He now lacked a focus.
Speaker 3: This part of his life that is quite routine, that
is quite predictable and stable, has now gone, and I
think he feels an awful lot of resentment about that.
Speaker 4: He seems to create at this point his own very
elaborate fantasy world within his bedroom.
Speaker 9: He doesn't go out much, he doesn't have a.
Speaker 4: Lot of friends. One neighbor describes him as a chronically
unemployed recluse.
Speaker 1: The enraged teenager would never return to school. Instead, he
tried to enlist in the US military.
Speaker 3: He'd failed the entrance exam just by a few points,
and this was something that he didn't take very well
at all. I think this is something that he saw
as pivotal to his sense of identity and his future,
and he became incredibly angry about this. He looks at
the things that he tries to do and when he
fails to do them, it's someone else's fault. The world
is pitted against him, and I think during the course
of this rumination, he starts plotting what is he going
to do.
Speaker 6: With his life.
Speaker 1: Feeling rejected by school and now the army, Sada searched
for a new way to define himself.
Speaker 3: Sada had a real interest in and admiration for violence,
so he read a lot about guns and serial killers.
He actually had a set of serial killer playing cards.
These were the people that he admired.
Speaker 4: He watches a documentary on the San Francisco Zodiac killar
who killed five people and was never caught.
Speaker 3: The story around the Zodiac killer is one of power,
and it's one of status. Somebody who was able to
hold an entire city to.
Speaker 4: Ransom somewhere in that developing psyche, he thinks, perhaps I
could become the Zodiac killer.
Speaker 8: I can become someone who's remembered. I can be the
same person.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty nine, twenty two year old Eddie Sader's
perverse interests had grown and they were becoming increasingly practical.
Speaker 2: He wanted to be a soldier, so he purchased fatigues.
He had lots of hunting knives. He never worked, as
I could tell a day in his life. He really
had very little income, and as.
Speaker 9: A result of that, he was never going to be
able to buy a gun steadily.
Speaker 4: He began to teach himself how to create build guns
zip guns.
Speaker 7: A zip gun is a homemade gun that it's basically
a length of pipe and you put something at the
end of that pipe that acts as a firing pin.
Something very crude. It doesn't have rapid fire, multiple fire capability.
It's one shot at a time. They're not very accurate.
It's absolutely essential you have to be close up to
your target.
Speaker 1: Unemployed, unwanted, and isolated said it was preparing to act
on his darkest instincts. On the seventeenth of November nineteen
eighty nine, a cryptic letter arrived at an office of
the New York Police Department.
Speaker 2: The letter had an astrological wheel, and it had some threats,
and it had the indication that it had been someone murdered.
Speaker 1: The author of the letter claimed to be the infamous
San Francisco Zodiac Killer, resuming his attacks nearly three thousand
miles away and twenty years since his last known victim.
He'd drawn a circle divided into twelve sections. One section
was marked out alongside the words the first sign is dead.
Speaker 2: There was kind of a cursory investigation to see if
there was anything matching any of the information that was
contained in a letter, and there wasn't, and so essentially
the letter was vouchered and in more senses, I think
just forgotten about. The seventy fifth Precinct was notorious for
having the highest murder rate in the city, so they
were not really going to be able to put a
lot of resources into investigating this hardball letter that they received.
Speaker 4: It was regarded as a simply crank letter talking about
the San Franciscos.
Speaker 9: Oh yeah, kind have.
Speaker 4: Gone away for twenty years and changed coasts from the
west of the east.
Speaker 9: It defies belief.
Speaker 1: Less than four months later, twenty two year old Heliberto
eddie Zada would breathe life into that letter's murderous prophecy.
On Thursday, the eighth of March nineteen ninety, forty nine
year old Mario Olosco was making his way home from
work at one forty five am.
Speaker 5: Mister Abraska took the train home from Manhattan back to
the East New York area of Brooklyn, where he lived.
He required a cane and he had a severe limp
when he walked. He walked approximately four blocks when he's
approached from the rear by an individual who doesn't say anything,
should chum once in a back and runs away.
Speaker 1: Badly injured, Mario or Rosco struggled to his home across
the street and called nine to one one.
Speaker 4: The bullet is lodged in his spine, and doctors thought
it was simply too dangerous to remove it, and so
it remained there.
Speaker 1: Thankfully, or Roscoe survived, but without the bullet, investigators were
left with no meaningful evidence from the crime scene.
Speaker 8: The New York Zodiac.
Speaker 1: Twenty two year old heli Berto eddie Zada had tasted
blood for the first time.
Speaker 3: Up until this point in time, he'd just been thinking,
and he'd been planning. It had all been in his head.
But now he's doing and this is actually real.
Speaker 1: Three weeks later, in the early hours of Thursday, the
twenty ninth of March, the Zodiac would strike again. He
shot an intoxicated thirty four year old man once in
the back and again took flight.
Speaker 2: He suffered serious injuries, was fortunate that he survived. We
wound up with fragments of a bullet that were really
not useful for ballistic evidence purposes. He never saw his assailant.
We had very little evidence, so an investigation was really
very hard to mount.
Speaker 4: So this is now two victims, both of whom have survived. Nevertheless,
there are two random shootings in the middle of the night,
both in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Speaker 1: Despite some similarities, there was no apparent link between the
two crimes, so the cell style Zodiac killer remained invisible
to police as he moved on to a third target
on Thursday, the thirty first of May nineteen ninety Mister.
Speaker 5: Choseph Proachey lived right around the corner from the subway
station where the first two victims exited.
Speaker 6: The night that they were shut.
Speaker 7: Joseph Procy was an elderly seventy eight year old man.
Speaker 9: He had become a bit senile.
Speaker 4: Joseph was approaching his own apartment. Sada engaged with this
elderly man and asked for a glass of water. Joseph said,
go to your own apartment and get a glass of
water and turned his back, and at that point Adah
shot him in the back.
Speaker 1: Neighbors heard the gunshot and called the police, but Sada
had once again fled the scene. Joseph Procy was rushed
into surgery in critical condition. He was unable to provide
police with a good description of his attacker.
Speaker 2: Sada's selection of victims bespoke a level of cowardice. Somebody
that was weak, vulnerable, disoriented. He was always looking for
someone that he was certain would not fight back and
they can't do anything to stop him.
Speaker 1: Nearly a month later, Joseph Proache died as a result
of the attack. With his third attempt, the New York
Zodiac had claimed his first kill. He took the opportunity
to taunt the police.
Speaker 5: The detectives observed a letter that was on mister Proacher's
front stoop, and it was being weighted down by three stones,
and the letter had a pie circle and with then
the slices of the pie. He had documented three astrological
science and he stated that three sciens are dead.
Speaker 2: He indicated that he was responsible for the three and
the twe to the cops that they would not catch him,
just as he hadn't been caught in San Francisco. That
was one of the police recognized they had a serial
perpetrator on their hands. That became the tipping point in
the media coverage as well, because now the Zodiac could
become a murderer.
Speaker 7: Week after Joseph proach you, we shot a writer for
the New York Post. He had received a letter from
someone claiming to be the Zodiac. We were pretty certain
that the person who left the note, said Joseph Proacy
was the same person who wrote this note.
Speaker 5: So the first sign is dead, second sign is dead.
Even though some victims survived, he still called them kills.
He intended to kill every single person that he attacked.
Speaker 3: And this really does tell us about that narcissistic strand
in his personality. He doesn't want to be caught, but
he wants it to be known that there is a
serial killer on the loose.
Speaker 5: He boasted that the bullets that he was using and
his weapons had no grooves.
Speaker 2: A regular gun, the barrel is drilled out in a
certain way to leave identifiers that are unique, and they're
called lands and grooves. He believed he would be leaving
no evidence by using his zip guns.
Speaker 5: Upon examination and the ballistics laboratory, he was accurate. There
were no traditional langent grooves on the bullets that would
be covered from the victims.
Speaker 1: The New York Post turned up the heat on the investigation,
publishing the letter on its front page.
Speaker 6: The headlines are screaming Zodiac killer.
Speaker 2: Both signs the enormous crime rates that were already besieging
the city that this became even more skinned that it
was this unknown person running around, not randomly, but seeking
people by birth sign. A lot of calls came in,
mostly scraps of I met a guy who asked for
my birthday, what's your signed kind of stuff.
Speaker 9: There was very little actionable intelligence.
Speaker 3: This really is Sata at the height of his arrogance.
He's quite enjoying it. I think he feels like he
struck the right balance at this point in time between
actually being recognized for what he's done yet not being apprehended.
Speaker 1: In pursuit of the serial killer, the NYPD had formed
a Zodiac task force operating out of Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Speaker 2: And they noticed that the crimes were happening on Thursdays.
Speaker 5: The shootings were within multiples of twenty one days, so
twenty one days at the mister Prochel we shot.
Speaker 6: The NYPD flooded.
Speaker 5: The East New York and wood Have an area of
Brooklyn Queens in anticipation of.
Speaker 6: A possible shooting.
Speaker 1: Operation Watchdog was launched on the night of Thursday, the
twenty first of June nineteen ninety. Mike Saidavolo was one
of the officers who took to the streets.
Speaker 7: I think I had like fifty detectives with all kinds
of unmarked vehicles, vans that looked like ice cream trucks
and things that wouldn't readily stand out.
Speaker 9: As being a police vehicle.
Speaker 7: We were basically going to take notice of whoever was
walking the street between midnight and sunrise, and we pretty
much did that all night long.
Speaker 9: The sun came up, nothing happened.
Speaker 5: There was no shootings in the Brooklyn and Queen's area,
So the detectives were getting ready to wrap it up,
and David c a notification that there was in fact
a shooting, but this time he struck in Manhattan.
Speaker 2: In Central Park, a homeless man who had psychological problems
at substance abuse problems, was asleep on a park bench.
Speaker 9: He was shot on the park bench. He only wounded
the person and.
Speaker 2: The bullet lodged in the bench, and it actually matched
the bullet from the pro Cheese scene, so we knew
we had the same gun and likely the same perpetrator.
And more valuable than that was the note that was
left at the scene. The note had basically more indications
of the three priors, as well as birth sign.
Speaker 1: The following day, Friday, the twenty second of June nineteen ninety,
a second letter arrived at the New York Post newspaper.
Again the author claimed to be the San Francisco's.
Speaker 2: That letter had a thumb print and it matched the
thumb print that was on the letter left at the
Central Park crimes. The hope was then that we would
be able to find a suspect and match them up
to some of this information. We looked and checked to
see if there's anyone in the system that matched those
prints and we found no one.
Speaker 7: He's talking about constellations, he's talking about fouls, he's talking
about some really weird stuff that as New York City
cops we're just not familiar with. He was claiming to
be one Zodiac, one and the same.
Speaker 3: He's coming across as very angry and very frustrated because
it's been speculated that this is a copycat, this is
an imitation, this is somebody who is less than the
original Zodia.
Speaker 7: We sent those letters to the same Francisco police department
and they were able to say with one hundred percent
degree of certainty that the guy who's writing all letters
was not the guy they were dealing with in the
late sixties and early seventies. He wanted her to make
himself bigger than he really.
Speaker 6: Was, Eddiberto.
Speaker 1: Eddie Sada had struck four times but had killed only once.
The New York Police had scoured the Zodiac's communications, knowing
that before he was finished, he'd promised that another eight
lives would be ruthlessly taken.
Speaker 5: He had attacked in Manhattan and Queens and he attacked
in Brooklyn.
Speaker 6: Three of the five boroughs in New York City instilled
a lot of fear in the city as a whole.
Speaker 7: We didn't have a clear description from any of the victims.
We weren't sure if we were looking for a black man,
a Latinal man, a Caucasian man. We just didn't have
any concrete witnesses to tell us, which made it tough.
Speaker 1: By the end of nineteen ninety, the New York Zodiac
had ceased communication.
Speaker 5: The NYPD at the time thought that not only had
he stopped communicating with us, but that he had stopped
perpetrating his attacks.
Speaker 2: Nothing happened the next Thursday or the Thursday after the
task force dissolved. Over a period of time, everybody went
back to their assignments and everybody forgot about them.
Speaker 3: Sada takes a step back, and I think this is
something that he's learned through reading about lots of different
cases of serial killers and trying to learn from the
mistakes that they've made. This is to allow him to
collect his thoughts and start planning the next phase of attacks.
Speaker 1: Eddie Sada had gone silent as the New York Zodiac,
but maintained contact with police in other ways.
Speaker 4: He becomes to some extent a police informant, informing the
police about local drug lords.
Speaker 8: In his bit of Brooklyn.
Speaker 4: At one point Sada can be a killer and the
other point he can be offended by drug use and
drug dependency, another of the conflicts in an extraordinary character
of Eddie Cada.
Speaker 1: Despite this unlikely collaboration, the New York Police Department was
no closer to connecting Caeda to the New York Zodiac attacks.
Speaker 7: I had always said that this case is going to
be solved by way of a fluke, something bizarre happening.
Speaker 9: Maybe he'll jump over.
Speaker 7: A turnstile to evade the fare on the subway, grab
them and they'll fingerprint them, and then they'll say, bing,
we have a match.
Speaker 1: Four years after his first attack, on the tenth of
March nineteen ninety four, officers spotted Eddie Sada outside his
apartment carrying one of his homemade zip guns. They arrested
him for unlicensed possession of a potentially lethal weapon.
Speaker 4: The police examined the zip gun, which is made up
of the most extraordinary materials, including shoelaces and a rubber band.
Speaker 2: When this contraption is sent to ballistics, the ballistics guys
didn't know how it worked, and they couldn't figure it out,
so it was listed as inoperable.
Speaker 5: The disc attorney dismissed the case. His fingerprint card was sealed.
Speaker 1: Incredibly, sada had escaped from right under the noses of
the NYPD and his fingerprint record was inaccessible to police.
Speaker 4: Saida's conviction that he was somehow immortal and beyond reproach
is confirmed.
Speaker 1: On the third of August nineteen ninety four, three days
after Eddie Sadar's twenty seventh birthday, a third Zodiac letter
arrived at the offices of the New York Post. It
had been four years since the last Zodiac communicate and
the lust of his four known attacks.
Speaker 2: From handwriting analysis, they recognized that it's our friend the
Zodiac back from nineteen ninety Again, he's been busy.
Speaker 5: On the upper right hand part of the letter are
five documented victims, similar to the earlier letters, where he's
giving a brief description of the date, the time, and
a brief description of the victim. He had stopped communicating
with the media and the police, but he continued doing
his crimes.
Speaker 2: He had dropped the warnings in advance, so he reported
the news afterwards, which gave him a tremendous advantage.
Speaker 5: The upper left hand portion of the letter is a
series of maritime flags that he put into a code.
When they broke down the code of the letter, it said,
this is a Zodiac speaking I am in control. He
who masters there will be more yours truly. On the
bottom half of the letter, he's taunting the police. He
puts the Zodiac nine NYPD zero, so he's bragging.
Speaker 6: That he's out small on the NYPD.
Speaker 5: He had shot nine. He's threatening to shoot his three
more one. He signed the Zodiac. So they started a
second test force, and I was assigned to that task force.
What I immediately started doing was tracking down the five
victims and his claiming in this letter.
Speaker 6: They were all were in Highland Park.
Speaker 2: The NYPD and looking at it, recognized that the first
four they had open investigations into each of those.
Speaker 5: The fifth victim we looked high in law. We could
not come up with that victim, so we were only
able to.
Speaker 6: Come up with four of the five. In this new letter.
Speaker 1: Two of the four victims had not survived their injuries.
Looking back on these cases, investigators discovered that on Monday,
the tenth of August nineteen ninety two, twenty five year
old Eddie Sada had encountered a thirty nine year old
with mental health issues named Patricia Fonte.
Speaker 3: The attack on Patricia Fonte was quite different from the
other attacks.
Speaker 5: All the other Zodiac crimes were approached from behind, gunshot
fired and he.
Speaker 3: Flees, and this was up close and personal. He went
up to her. They started engaging in conversation.
Speaker 5: She asked them for a cigarette. He enticed her with
a cigarette that he had, and he lawed her into
Hayland Park.
Speaker 4: He proceeds to shoot her twice. He then goes into
overkill and he stabs her more than a hundred times. Now,
to stab someone one hundred times takes a very very
great deal of determination, enormous amount of effort, because it
is literally terrifying.
Speaker 2: I think he recognized that if somehow or another she
had eluded his capture at that point, that she might
have been able to laid out of find from the
amount of time that he had spent with her.
Speaker 4: Patricia Fonte, of course, died of her injuries. There was
almost no way she could have survived.
Speaker 1: Patricia Fonte was the second murder at the hands of.
Speaker 8: The New York Zodiac.
Speaker 1: More than a year later, on the twenty first of
July nineteen ninety three.
Speaker 8: He'd killed again.
Speaker 1: Joseph dire Cone, a forty six year old long term
mental health patient, had been shot in the neck whilst
wandering through Highland Park. He bled out and died instantly.
With these new attacks, Eddie Sada had sheared the constraints
of his prior methodology.
Speaker 3: These killings were not carried out on a Thursday. There
were no links to the signs of the Zodiac that
there had been with the previous four shootings, and he's
very deliberately adapted his routine here because he doesn't want
to be caught.
Speaker 1: Despite this caution, one of his surviving victims had finally
managed to get a good look at their attacker.
Speaker 5: She sues a male hispanic or a mustache and wearing
some kind of a hat, point the gun at her
and fires one shot, stragging home in a neck.
Speaker 1: The woman was partially paralyzed, but her description was used
in a police sketch. Until then, investigators had only received
patchy and inconsistent information about the appearance of the New
York Zodiac.
Speaker 3: He took quite a lot of care varying his appearance,
so he would occasionally wear hats. He would grow a
mustache and then he would shave it off after he'd
carried out an attack. So he lived for his attacks.
They were essentially his occupation. This was his day job.
Speaker 5: We've been able to lead that we could chasing finger
friends and chasing ballistics.
Speaker 6: Monster Department decided.
Speaker 5: To break up the second Task Force like they did
the first Test Force. I was assigned to become a
hostage negotiator.
Speaker 1: The pursuit of the New York Zodiac that hit another
dead end. Then two years later, on the eighteenth of
June nineteen ninety six, the NYPD received a call.
Speaker 5: The phone rang about twelve noon and they had a
hostage job where an individual had shot his sister and
he was holding her boyfriend hostage in a back bedroom
of the department. I rased the got there as fast
as I could. When I arrived, the attire area was
cordoned off. I was informed that not only had he
shot his sister and had the boyfriend still hostage in
the back bedroom, but when responding police arrived, he shouted
out With about fifteen cops. He had positioned guns at
each window in the apartment and he would run from
window to window shooting at the cops below, and they
were shooting back. So finally Emergor Services survived. They were
able to court an off the area the gunfire ceased.
Speaker 6: He's still a hostage.
Speaker 1: Taker with the hostage, Sergeant Herbert tried to establish communication
with the man who identified himself as Eddie.
Speaker 6: He's not talking to me from the window. Finally they
were able to.
Speaker 5: Evacuate the entire building and we were able to climb
up the steps to Eddie's front door, and I started
to try to get him to engage me a conversation then.
So we were in the hallway for about three hours
and I was speaking to him, trying to get him
to surrender. I was telling him, Eddie, and up, blood
has been shed. You know, we don't need any more violence.
In surrender, you won't be hurt. This is going to
be okay, let's end this now. So finally he says,
am I going to go to jail? I said, Eddie,
I can't lie to you. You're going to go to jail.
You know you shot your sister, you shot the cops.
You know it's a very serious thing. So then he
tells us that he's very surrender and he says that
he's got a lot of weapons inside the apartment and
a lot of ballistics, a lot of bullets. It took
three bucket loads to get all his zip guns and
bullets out of the department.
Speaker 6: We had already started.
Speaker 5: Like relaxed a little bit out in the hallway because
we know all the weapons are out.
Speaker 6: But then he said, I gave you all my guns.
What should I do with my bombs? So I said, Eddie,
you got bombs in here.
Speaker 1: The bomb squad was urgently dispatched and they recovered two
crude pipe bombs from the small apartments. Eddie was arrested
and charged with attempted murder of his half sis and
that of several police officers in the ensuing shootout. During
an interrogation, the twenty nine year old told police what
had happened.
Speaker 4: That his half sister brought a man back to the flat.
Speaker 9: He's a drug dealer.
Speaker 4: He's not someone that Sada feels that his half sister
should be consorting with.
Speaker 3: Sada's relationship with his younger sister is a very significant
one because it's a relationship in which he felt like
he was in control that as she got older, she
began to challenge that authority. He also hated his sister
having any relationships with men, so he became incredibly angry
about this.
Speaker 7: He gets into a beef with his sister and he
shoots her in the butt, and that'll certainly bring you
to the attention of the police. And then when he's
at the station house and he's writing his confession, he
just couldn't help himself.
Speaker 5: The detective said, we want you to see this. It's
a confession that Eddie had for shooting his sister. And
the handwriting jumped out at me as the handwriting that
I've been studying.
Speaker 6: For the last four years, five years.
Speaker 5: At the bottom of the second page, he has an
upside down cross similar to the earlier letters. I said,
I sure, as I'm standing at is the Zodiac. Everything
starts fitting together. The zip guns, the location.
Speaker 1: The case had been cracked wide open, now investigates his
new where to look. The evidence proving that Sada and
the Zodiac were one and the same was mounting. In
his notes, the Zodiac boasted that his homemade weapons would
leave no traceable marks on the bullets found in his victims.
Speaker 8: He was wrong.
Speaker 5: When a bullet travels to a pipe it still leaves
distinctive marks on the bullet, so they were able to
identify three of the bullets from victims of the Zodiac
that we recovered from the victims with some of the
pipes and zip guns that we took out of his apartment.
Speaker 7: When they matched his fingerprints, Bingo had abertdough Sayla was arrested,
charged as the Zodiac killer.
Speaker 1: Forensic experts had also confirmed a handwriting and DNA match
with the Zodiac letters.
Speaker 5: All he wanted to talk about initially was the Bible
and religion. Eventually he realized, you know, we were telling
him about the evidence that we had. He knew the
way we were talking. We knew what we were talking about.
You know, we knew that case. We lived that case
for years. He finally confessed he believed that he was
writting society of.
Speaker 6: Drug addicted people.
Speaker 4: It was the first time that he, in a sense,
thrown off the cloak and said here I am, I'm
the New York Zodiac.
Speaker 1: Seedah revealed much about the Zodiac crimes, but not the
most peculiar detail.
Speaker 2: There was nothing up his sleeve anymore, except he would
not reveal how it was. He knew the birth signs
of his first four victims, and I always took that
to be his guilty pleasure of still taunting the police
that he had something that they couldn't figure out and
he would never reveal it. He described these people as
almost two dimensional. They have targets. They were stick figures.
They were not flesh and blood. They were not real people.
They didn't hurt, they didn't suffer, they didn't have lives.
They were just inanimate objects to him.
Speaker 1: The arrogant killer had narrowly escaped justice once before. Two
years earlier, Eddie Sader had been arrested for carrying a
zip gun. Police at the time considered it to be unusable,
so he was released.
Speaker 2: They preserved and kept that inoperable gun. Let's retest this
thing now that we've got these other guns that we
all recovered from his home, and sure enough, yeah, it
is operable, and we were able to show that ultimately
matched the bullet that had been removed from one of
the victims.
Speaker 4: The police had had Eddie Sailer in their hands, but
because the case against Sada was closed, his fingerprints weren't
available to the police who was searching for the Zodiac
Killer on.
Speaker 1: The fourteenth of May nineteen ninety eight, thirty year old
Hedi Berto Eddie Sada began a six week trial at
Queen's Supreme Court, charged with three murders and one attempted
murder in the Queen's District of New York.
Speaker 4: He shouts at the judge it's as if I'm not here,
I'm being ignored.
Speaker 2: I think he felt threatened, and I think he felt
at the same point that I'm not being treated merely
as significantly.
Speaker 9: As I should be as a result of all I accomplished.
Speaker 2: There's a real vanity that attaches in this almost puffed
up sense of.
Speaker 9: Do you know who I am?
Speaker 2: And I think it's a confusion between fame and infamy.
Speaker 8: After trial of.
Speaker 4: Six weeks, the jury take barely five hours to convict him.
Speaker 1: On the twenty second of July nineteen ninety eight, Heriberto
Eddie Sada was sentenced to eighty three at the third
years in prison. The following year, on the eighth of
July nineteen ninety nine, after a second trial for his
crimes in the district of Brooklyn, Sada was once again
found guilty. He was convicted of three Zodiac crimes as
well as the shooting of his half sister and four
attempts on the lives of police officers during the ensuance siege.
Speaker 4: He is sentenced to a further one hundred and fifty
two and a half years in prison, making his total
sentence up two hundred and thirty five years.
Speaker 9: Herr.
Speaker 1: Berto Eddie Sada had eluded capture for over six years,
and authorities believe he was far from finished when his
luck finally ran out.
Speaker 2: He was upset that a number of people survived the shootings,
like if I'd made my weapon a little better, there
would have been more people dead.
Speaker 8: That it was.
Speaker 2: Very insulted by the fact that some of these people lived.
Speaker 5: I believe that if he did, in fact hit the
number twelve, that he would continue killing people, although he
might have just graduated to the bombs.
Speaker 2: He did say that as ultimate ambition was to take
pipe bombs to the big Imax movie theater in Manhattan
and lay it in the middle of a theater under
a seat and see it get detonated. It is kind
of scary to see somebody who had such a small
life as mister Sator, who never really went anywhere outside
of that square mile killing field that he invented, who
never really had any connections with anyone. On a budget
as small as his, he could kill three people, nearly
kill others, and cause the amount of misery that he did.
He was basically the lowest rent serial killer that you
were ever going to find.
Speaker 9: Well, he's a coward.
Speaker 7: He shoots people that are helpless, homeless, sleeping, walking with
a cane and a limb, elderly, and for someone to
shoot his own sister.
Speaker 9: He was a monster, very evil, very evil guy.
Speaker 1: Over six years, Eddie Sayda, the copycat Zodiac killer, stalk
the streets of New York City in search of easy targets.
His cowardly attacks culminated with the ferocious murder of a
woman who'd only asked him for a cigarette. He'd convinced
himself that he served a higher purpose, but merely indulged
his lust for notoriety and violence, marking heriberto Eddie Sada
as one of the world's most evil killer.
Speaker 6: School