0:00 "I like killing people because it is so much fun." In August of 1969, those words weren't spoken.0:09 They were decoded.0:11 Last week, in the Lindbergh case, we saw how a single crime could break a family’s private world.0:20 But this… this was different.0:23 This was a killer who wanted to break the public’s mind.0:28 The message was one part of a three-part cipher, mailed to three different newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area.0:39 It arrived with a demand: publish this on your front page, or I will kill again.0:47 This time, a dozen people.0:50 The letters were signed with a symbol.0:53 A circle with a cross drawn through it.0:57 Like a target.0:58 It took a high school teacher and his wife just one week to crack the first part of the code.1:07 Donald and Bettye Harden, working at their kitchen table, pulled the confession from the jumble of symbols.1:18 And with it, they unleashed a new kind of fear.1:22 The message continued.1:24 "It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest because man is the most dangerous animal of all.1:34 To kill something gives me the most thrilling experience." He promised that the victims he collected would be his slaves in the afterlife.1:47 And then, the final chilling line: "I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my paradise." This wasn't just murder.2:04 This was a performance.2:06 And the entire Bay Area had just been made the audience.2:11 The performance had begun eight months earlier, on December twentieth, 1968.2:19 Lake Herman Road.2:20 A dark, secluded lover's lane.2:23 Two teenagers, out on their first date, shot and killed in their car.2:30 The attack was brutal, efficient, and silent.2:34 No witnesses.2:36 No warning.2:37 For months, the case went cold.2:40 It was just another tragic, unsolved homicide.2:44 Then, on the Fourth of July, 1969, it happened again.2:49 Another couple, another dark, quiet place.2:53 Blue Rock Springs Park.2:55 This time, one of them survived.2:59 Michael Mageau lived to describe the attack.3:03 A car pulled up.3:04 A man with a flashlight.3:07 Then, a barrage of gunfire.3:09 Before driving away, the killer fired two more shots into each victim.3:16 Just to be sure.3:18 Less than an hour later, the phone rang at the Vallejo Police Department.3:25 A man’s voice, calm and monotone, spoke.3:28 "I want to report a murder… no, a double murder.3:33 They are two miles east of the Columbus Parkway.3:38 They were in a brown car.3:40 I also killed those kids last year.3:43 Goodbye." He was claiming the Lake Herman Road murders.3:49 He was connecting the dots for them.3:52 He was taking credit.3:54 This is what the official statements don't mention.3:59 The sheer audacity.4:01 Most killers hide.4:03 They run.4:04 They cover their tracks.4:06 This one called the police to ANNOUNCE his work.4:11 He didn't just want to kill; he wanted the world to know HE did it.4:17 The letters to the newspapers started arriving a few weeks later.4:23 The cat-and-mouse game had begun.4:26 Psychologists would later say he was a narcissist, a sadist.4:32 Someone who derived power from the terror he created.4:37 And he was smart about it.4:40 He changed his methods.4:42 After the shootings, he struck again on September twenty-seventh, at Lake Berryessa.4:50 This time, he wore a costume.4:53 A bizarre, hooded executioner's outfit, emblazoned with his crosshair symbol.5:00 And this time, he used a knife.5:03 He stabbed a young couple, tying them up first, talking to them calmly before the attack.5:12 Again, one survived.5:14 Cecelia Shepard held on long enough to give a description.5:20 But the details were maddeningly vague.5:23 The killer was a ghost.5:25 A phantom who struck, then vanished, leaving only terror and a growing legend in his wake.5:34 His letters became more frequent.5:37 More boastful.5:39 He mocked the police.5:41 He threatened to shoot up a school bus full of children.5:46 He gave himself a name.5:48 In a letter sent on August seventh, 1969, he began with the words: "This is the Zodiac speaking." The name stuck.5:59 The Zodiac.6:00 It sounded like something from a comic book, but the fear was real.6:07 People in Northern California stopped going out at night.6:12 Lover's lanes were deserted.6:15 He had weaponized uncertainty.6:18 No one knew where or how he would strike next.6:22 He wasn't just a physical threat.6:25 He was a psychological one.6:28 He had turned an entire region into a cast of hostages.6:33 Then, on October eleventh, 1969, he changed the pattern completely.6:40 No more couples.6:41 No more secluded parks.6:44 This time, it was a cab driver.6:47 Paul Stine, shot in the head in a wealthy San Francisco neighborhood.6:53 The killer took his wallet and a piece of his bloody shirt.6:59 Three teenagers saw him from a window across thestreet and called the police.7:06 The dispatcher, in the chaos, mistakenly reported the suspect was Black.7:13 When two officers passed a white man walking calmly away from the scene, they didn't even stop him.7:23 It was likely the closest anyone ever came to catching the Zodiac.7:29 Two days later, a letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle.7:35 Inside was another coded message.7:39 And a piece of Paul Stine's shirt.7:42 Proof.7:42 The letter was a taunt.7:45 A gleeful description of outsmarting the police, of watching them fumble the investigation just blocks away.7:55 He was reveling in their failure.7:58 And then came the puzzle that would define his legacy.8:03 The 340-character cipher.8:06 Sent in November 1969, it was a dense block of symbols that resisted every attempt at decryption.8:15 The FBI's best cryptanalysts worked on it.8:19 Amateurs around the world tried to crack it.8:23 For years.8:24 For decades.8:26 Nothing.8:26 The Zodiac had murdered at least five people.8:31 He had terrorized millions.8:33 And now, he had left them with an unsolvable riddle.8:38 A final act of intellectual superiority.8:42 A monument to his own myth.8:45 And then… he went silent.8:47 The letters stopped.8:49 The killings stopped.8:51 The Zodiac, as a physical presence, simply disappeared.8:56 But the ghost he created… that remained.9:00 For fifty-one years, the 340 cipher was a silent testament to his victory.9:07 It was the ultimate withholding.9:11 He had shown the world his cruelty, his intelligence, and then vanished, leaving a question mark that hung over everything.9:22 The case never officially closed.9:26 It haunted the investigators who worked it.9:30 It became a national obsession, spawning books, movies, and endless speculation.9:37 Dozens of men were named as suspects over the years.9:42 The most famous, Arthur Leigh Allen, was investigated for decades, but no conclusive evidence ever tied him to the crimes.9:54 The Zodiac’s identity remains one of the greatest mysteries in American criminal history.10:03 The human cost is the part of the story that the legend often forgets.10:10 The families of the victims were left in a state of suspended grief.10:16 Not just mourning their dead, but living with the fact that the man who took them was never caught.10:26 He was out there, somewhere.10:28 Or he had died, taking his secrets with him.10:33 There was no closure.10:35 No justice.10:36 Only the taunting letters and the unsolved ciphers left behind.10:42 The killer’s self-created mythology outlived his crimes.10:47 In 2020, a team of amateur codebreakers finally solved the 340 cipher.10:54 After half a century of silence, the Zodiac spoke one last time.11:00 The message was not a name.11:03 It was not a confession.11:05 It was just more rambling, narcissistic defiance.11:10 "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me," it read.11:16 "I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner." He had played the game to the very end.11:28 He didn't give them his name.11:31 He just gave them more of the myth.11:35 And in the end, the Zodiac Killer’s most enduring victim was the truth.
