The Nightmare of San Francisco
By Kevin Jones
December 20, 1968, David Arthur Faraday, age 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, age 16, were planning to attend a Christmas concert not even two blocks from Jensen's home. Instead they visited a friend and stopped at a local restaurant. It would be a night no one would ever forget. Their bodies were found by Lake Herman Road only minutes after the gruesome crime happened. Faraday's body was found in the car with a bullet in his head and Jensen was found 28-feet away with five bullets in her back. The Solano county Sheriff's office made a thorough investigation into the double homicide but no leads were found. They only had to wait six months before the next chapter of the story would begin. Midnight, July 4th, Darlene Ferrin and Micheal Mageau drove to the Blue Rock Springs Golf Course. At 12:40 p.m. a 911 call was made at a gas station a few blocks from the Vallejo Police Department. On one end, a dispatcher asks for the callers emergency. On the other end, a man says that he's responsible for the deaths of Ferrin, Mageau, as well as, the deaths of Faraday and Jenson that took place six months earlier. Two more killings would follow for a total of five victims. Mageau and another victim survived and gave two descriptions that have been haunting the cold case file room for decades.
As you can see it's not hard to understand where people came up with the name for this killer, but why Zodiac? On August 1st, the Vallejo Times-Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner were doing what all newspapers spend most of the their time doing, looking for a good story. Here's what they received, “I like killing people because it is so much more fun than killing wild game in the forrest because man is the most dangerou anamal 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 thae when I die I will be reborn in paradice and thei I have killed will become my slaves I will not give you my name because you will try to sloi down or atop my collectiog of slaves for my afterlife Ebeorietemethhpiti...” This quote comes from one of the letters Zodiac himself sent to these newspapers. All of these letters were identical and all of them took credit for the first two killings. Each one was accompanied by a 408-symbol cypher.
The quote you just read is the only translated part of the cypher. Some experts say that the rest of the cypher exists only to play tricks with the minds of those who dare try to solve its riddle. On August 7, 1969, a fourth letter was received by the San Francisco Examiner. It was in response to Vallejo Police Chief Jack E. Stiltz's who was, "not satisfied that the letter was written by the murderer." With this next letter, he was satisfied. It began with the words, "Dear Editor, This is the Zodiac speaking..." The letter held details only the killer would know and ended with "they will have me." The meaning of the ending has never been understood and in the end this gave San Francisco no solace because even with this letter the killings continued. The final, confirmed Zodiac killing was committed on October 11, 1969 but the Zodiac's games with the police weren't over yet. Letters were still received regularly from the Killer, each one having something to prove. San Francisco was receiving these letters continually until as recent as 1990.
With all of these clues, one question still remains - who was the Zodiac killer? For a long time the lead suspect in the case was a man named Arthur Leigh Allen. Allen was seen the night of the Faraday and Jensen murders only minutes before the slaying occurred. When questioned by police, Allen said he had knives covered in chicken blood in his car. He also owned the same type of typewriter that would produce the same looking letters that appeared in the Zodiac's letters. The darkest fact of all came on April 20, 1970. A letter sent by The Zodiac stated that he was planning on blowing up a bus full of children, and all of Allen's friends say that when Allen would get angry he would say, "I'm going to blow up a school bus tomorrow." Unfortunately all of the evidence against Allen was circumstantial and on August 26, 1992 Allen died of Kidney Failure in his home in Vallerjo California. In 2002 D.N.A was successfully recovered from one of the Zodiac killers letters; when the sample was compared to Allen's the results were negative. Allen was finally cleared of these horrific crimes.
But the story doesn't end there. In early 2009, Richard Gaikowski was put on the table. Gaikowski was questioned by police during the Farady and Jenson cases but was over looked upon Allen's entrance into the case within that very week. Photos of Allen also show a striking resemblence to the man in the picture above. The original dispatcher, who answered call during the night of the Ferrin and Mageau murders, successfully matched Gaikowski's voice to the exact voice that has haunted her for decades. Gaikowski was a reporter and had many friends who worked at the papers that recieved the Zodiac letters. Even if we had 100% pure D.N.A. samples, it would all amount to nothing because in 2004 Richard Gaikowski died from Pancreotic Cancer. We are forever left to wonder the true identity of what was the nightmare of San Francisco.
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