BONUS: The Zodiac Killer with Michael Butterfield (Part 1)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
My name is Bill Thomas. I'm a writer, consulting, producer,
and now podcaster. I am now trying to use my
experience as the brother of a murder victim to help
other victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book
on the unsolved Colonial Parkway murders and I'm the co
administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
My name is Kristin Dilly.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
I'm a writer, a researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate,
as well as the social media manager and co administrator
for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Over Murder.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas.

Speaker 3 (00:46):
We're joined today by Michael Butterfield, author of The Zodiac Killer,
The story of America's most elusive murderer. Michael, thank you
for joining us today.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 3 (00:58):
We are so thrilled to have our first Zodiac expert
on the case. We tend to shy away from Zodiac
because there is so much to it and we have
yet to find a truly superlative experts. So thank you
for joining us. We really appreciate you lending your expertise.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
I appreciate the invitation, So.

Speaker 3 (01:18):
Start by telling us what actually sparked your interest in
the Zodiac case, because you've been with this case for
quite a while.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
Oh yeah, longer than I care to admit. Basically, for me,
it started very early on because of my interest in
true crime. I don't know how old you guys are
or the listeners, but when I was growing up, a
big part of my life was the Scholastic book fair
at school, and I used to order as many books

(01:48):
as I was able to, mostly Peanuts books or BC
or things like that. But at a certain point I started,
maybe because of television, things like in SA and things
like that. I'd heard about Jack the Ripper and I
bought a book which I may actually still have in
a box somewhere, I'm not sure, but it was a

(02:11):
book about legends and werewolves and vampires and things like that,
and in it there were these wood cuttings and engravings,
very old depictions of were wolves and vampires. And also,
I believe you pronounced it, Jill day Killer, who there
was a picture of him, like crawling on all fours

(02:31):
with a child in his mouth, and I remember just
being horrified by that and wanting to understand more about it.
Because of that, I started at the library I was
probably ten years old or something like that and looking
at things about Jack the Ripper, And because of that,
I was drawn to this movie that came out in

(02:52):
nineteen seventy nine called Time After Time, which I think
is just an amazing film, and it's story about HG.
Wells who builds a time machine and his friend, a surgeon,
turns out to be Jack the Ripper, and he steals
the time machine and goes to nineteen seventy nine San

(03:13):
Francisco and HG. Wells chases him there and tries to
bring him back to justice and everything, and it's a
fantastic movie. Malcolm McDowell plays HG. Wells and David Warner
plays Jack the Ripper. But in that movie they mentioned
the Zodiac. A neighbor of ours who was a detective
here in Arizona who was involved in a lot of
high profile cases, used to mention the Zodiac as a

(03:37):
boogeyman kind of character because I had asked him about it.
Piqued my interest, and of course I went to the
library and try to look through old newspaper articles and
things like that. So by the time nineteen eighty six
rolled around, in the book Zodiac came out, I was
primed for that and reignited more interest in it. And

(03:59):
then over the years my desire to learn more about
the case beyond what was in that book led to
what has now been a decades long effort.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
So the nineteen eighty six book Zodiac that you're referencing,
this is the Robert Graysmith book.

Speaker 4 (04:15):
Yes, what they often refer to as the yellow Book.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Yes, that's funny. Mine has a reddish cover. It cussed
the way there.

Speaker 4 (04:23):
Yeah, well, the hard back was I think black black
cover on it, but the paperback, which became the version
that most people got, was a yellow cover.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
And is that the first book that kind of covered
the case in an in depth way?

Speaker 4 (04:39):
Yes? Yes, there were other books where the Zodiac was
a subject in the book, like Great Crimes of San
Francisco and I think Order of the Assassins by Colin
Wilson and things like that, compilations of true crime stories
where the Zodiac was one of the stories in it,
but I believe Zodiac was the first in depth examination
of the case.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
At this point, there is no shortage of books on
the Zodiac case, and of course you've written the most
recent entry into that storied canon. What would you say
if you had to pick, like a best resource or
best resources that have been written on the case, what
would you choose? Would you say that Gray Smith's book

(05:21):
is right up there. As you've been involved in the
case for so long, I'm sure that you have favorites
and least favorites.

Speaker 4 (05:31):
You can't see it. But behind me here there is
a true crime collection on my bookshelves which is larger
than the true crime section in most bookstores, and mine
is too, because I've been accumulating it for decades. But
there's one entire column that's all Zodiac and Zodiac related books,

(05:52):
books about astrology, books about San Francisco, true crime, reference books,
and things about cryptography and stuff. There's also, unfortunately, a
very large collection of books written by people who claim
that they have solved the case. Those books dominate the
Zodiac book market, and unfortunately the overwhelming majority of them

(06:15):
are not worth reading at all. They're just wastes of time.
There are some books that I would recommend people read.
Robert Graysmith's book is something that I think everybody should read.
They just shouldn't read it to get factual information about
the case. It's one thing to make a factual error
in a book. Everybody does, and I'm sure that my

(06:37):
book has some errors in it. But it's another thing
to distort or selectively omit, or exaggerate or even fabricate.
And you'll see that in a lot of these books,
and Robert Graysmith's book, I think it's a good idea
for everybody to read it to understand how the case

(06:57):
got the way that it was. There's a lot of
misinformation in there. Now, granted he's coming at it from
a certain point of view, certain pet suspect as you
might say, and the book is in service of that theory.
But it's important to read because it is a time
capsule of what was going on and how things got

(07:18):
the way that they are. There are other books that
are worth reading, some of them for specific information that's
in them, or certain subjects that are explored, perhaps more
than in other books. I would say that this might
sound like a funny thing to say, but I would
recommend reading books written about the Zodiac case written by

(07:39):
people named Michael, and I don't say that as a
reference to myself, but Mike Cole had a book series
called Zodiac Revisited. Michael Kellerher had a book called This
is the Zodiac Speaking, which is worth reading for exploring
certain subjects. And then i'd also say that you might

(08:00):
want to pick up micro Delli's book In the Shadow
of Mount Diablo. It explores certain subjects that other books
don't get into very much. And then there's also Jarrett
Kobik's book Motor Spirit and his other book that he
wrote after that, and of course that explores a theory,
but I think that the first book is a good
look at the case. There may be some other books

(08:22):
that I'm not remembering off the top of my head
right now, but those are the ones that I would
suggest people read. When it comes to books like Most
Evil by Steve Odell or The Most Dangerous Animal of
All and things like that, I think you can skip those.

Speaker 3 (08:39):
You had mentioned on your website, And actually, you know what,
Before I get to that question, why don't you talk
to us a little bit about your website, which is
Zodiac killerfacts dot com. Tell us about why you decided
to start the website, and then I'll ask you my
question related to it.

Speaker 4 (08:56):
We started the website back in two thousand and seven,
I believe, and it was basically an attempt to just
get more information out there to the public, to explore
certain issues that perhaps get overlooked or under explored. There's
a document gallery on there where you can look at
the police files, the FBI files, the Zodiac letters, crime

(09:17):
scene photos and things like that, and other official documents.
It's basically just an attempt to get information out to people.
And also as the years went by, it became a
place to post the critical examinations of theories and other
popular books besides Gracemiths. So it was an attempt basically
to offer an alternative for people.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
So is that generally well received by people that follow
the case, because we both know this is a case
that engenders some really strong opinions.

Speaker 4 (09:51):
Yeah, I can say it's well received by a lot
of people. It has been over the years. It's usually
not well received by people whose books theories are debunked
on the website, and that's to be expected, but overall
over the years, God it's been many years now that
the site's been up. The feedback is very positive. I

(10:11):
get a lot of very positive email from people who
say that the website has been useful to them.

Speaker 3 (10:18):
One of the things that I liked most about the website, though,
is that you do state that you don't advocate for
any particular Zodiac suspect, and you actually said on there
something that I thought was very interesting. You said that
it's unlikely that any of the named suspects was actually
the Zodiac killer. Do you have a sort of pet

(10:41):
suspect of your own or are you a very open
minded on the subject and will continue to be open
minded on the subject.

Speaker 4 (10:48):
Yeah, I don't have any pet suspects, and the reason
for that is is I don't think there's any suspect
where there's solid evidence to indicate they were the Zodiac
and if there was, I would be on board with that.
One thing that I try to point out whenever there's
a discussion about suspects, and it's important to remember that
this would be true even if I didn't exist. So

(11:09):
it's not an opinion. You could take the top ten
Zodiac suspects and instantly one thing at least nine of
them are not the Zodiac. So that's an important thing
to keep in mind, because there's this idea that the
Zodiac must be among the pool of named suspects, and

(11:30):
I don't think that's true. I don't think the evidence
supports that. But if you take that one step further,
it's not just the nine. The odds are that all
ten of them are not the Zodiac, and then you
could take the next ten and you could still eliminate
nine of them immediately. Now which nine that's up for debate.
But I personally don't believe the Zodiac is among the

(11:53):
name suspects. I think he's more likely to turn out
to be what you might refer to as an unsub
unknown subject, someone who has not come to the attention
of law enforcement, and someone who is not on the
suspect radar. Now I would love to be wrong about that.
I would love for anybody to prove that someone was

(12:14):
the Zodiac. I wouldn't care who it was at all,
as long as they could prove it and the case
was solved, that's what we all want. So I think
it's important to remember that there's a lot of people
who have devoted their lives to pursuing their theories and suspects,
and I guess people that's they're entitled to do that.

(12:34):
But just because someone has a suspect, and just because
a suspect has been named, doesn't mean that there's good
evidence against them. That doesn't mean that there's good reason
to suspect them. Often these theories fall apart under even
minimal scrutiny. And I'm sorry my cat's chiming in here
as well, but I think it's important to remember that

(12:57):
nine of them are not the zodiac, and most like
the tenth isn't either, Because I don't think it's going
to be that easy that you can just go look
through old phone books or look through old newspaper reports,
or somehow just stumble across the identity of one of
the most elusive serial killers in history. Now, if someone
does that, I'd be the first person to applaud them.

Speaker 3 (13:20):
As you were putting together first the website zodiatkillerfacts dot
com and then the book, talk to us a little
bit about how much access you were able to have
to the original case files and the evidence.

Speaker 4 (13:36):
There are a lot of police reports, FBI files, and
other official documents that have been available to the public
for years now. Some of those have been posted online
by people like Tom Voyd at Zodiac killer dot com.
Some have been obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Some of them are things that just get shared by
researchers and things like that. We're very lucky to have

(14:00):
access to a lot of the files, but I should
say that we don't have access to all the files.
There are some documents that some people have given me
over the years that I was asked not to share publicly,
although I would share them with other researchers. There are
things that you might be able to view but haven't

(14:21):
been released because there's never been an official release of
these reports. These are things that have just surfaced over
the years from reporters or people involved in the case
collecting them and then sharing them with researchers and other people.
But I was very fortunate that many years ago I
started collecting these files, and there's three ring binders on

(14:44):
my shelf full of FBI files covering years decades. So
I was very lucky to have access to a lot.
The documents relating to the first two Zodiac crimes are
fairly extended and SIV, although we don't have all of them.
Same thing with the Lake barry Essa attack. We have

(15:05):
a lot of information from there, but not everything obviously.
And then the one place where there's a void of
information is with the San Francisco Police Department. A lot
of their files have just never surfaced. I was fortunate
to get access to some and other people doing research
into them for me at various law enforcement agencies when

(15:27):
I had questions, but I was fortunate to have access
to quite a bit of information.

Speaker 2 (15:33):
In the Colonial Parkway murders, we're constantly having this is
an open case, which is now thirty eight years old.
That phrase gets thrown back in our faces. I'm talking
about the families now over and over again. Why are
things different in a case like the Zodiac.

Speaker 4 (15:51):
I think part of that is just because there's a
lot more interest in it because it was such a
public spectacle for so many years, and there were many
more people involved behind the scenes who were collecting police reports,
people like Dave Peterson, reporter in Valleo, who when he
passed away, a lot of the files that he had

(16:14):
were given over to other people, and there was a
lot of good stuff in there. Those were things that
he had accumulated over the years. Other people had gathered
these reports and made endless xerox copies of them over
the years, and they were circulating. I think part of
that is because maybe in the Colonial Parkway case, the

(16:34):
cases are more guarded with this. Things were leaking over
the years, and people shared them with other people and
had boxes of them in their closet or whatever, and
when various researchers or people would come around, they would
make copies for them. And back in the nineties, a
lot of us used to share information with each other
if we got a report with xerox it and send

(16:55):
it to somebody else and stuff, And that may just
be the reason. I'm sure that law enforcement never wanted
those documents to be made public, and I have over
the years, and I know other researchers have too been
given a file and told please don't share this publicly,
and those kinds of things, and you try to honor
those requests. And the Colonial Parkway case, it's another situation

(17:18):
like Zodiac, where there's different jurisdictions involved, different law enforcement
agencies that all have their own sort of rules or
guidelines about sharing those things. But generally, yeah, in an
open case, you don't want those files to be circulating.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
Are there fakes in the middle of these documents quietly
making their way from one research or to another. Do
fakes get mixed in?

Speaker 4 (17:42):
I don't think there's been a lot of that. What
there has been though over the years are some documents
that were written by various people that are mistaken for
official documents when they're just a case summary or somebody's
notes or whatever. But no, I think for the most
part what has been and circulating has been authentic, at
least as far as I can tell.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
That actually leads me to an interesting question about the ciphers.
For anybody who may be living under a rock and
net know anything about the Zodiac case, the Zodiac, of
course has those hallmarks that are make him stand alone
in that really crowded arena of American serial killers, and
the ciphers and the cryptography are, of course two of

(18:26):
the big things. There are people every year, it feels
like that come out and say I've solved one of
the unsolvable Zodiac ciphers. Here it is, here's the message.
It reveals this person and this person have all the
Zodiac ciphers actually been solved. If they haven't been, do
you think they will be? And are there any sort

(18:47):
of like mistaken ciphers that are rolling around in the
public consciousness right now?

Speaker 4 (18:52):
Forgive me, but I'd have to correct you there. It's
not that this happens every year. It happens every day.
Oh wow, Okay, people saw the Zodiac ciphers every day,
at least according to the email inbox that I have.
Oh my gosh, it's a public challenge. Zodiac obviously felt
that way back in the sixties when he sent these

(19:12):
out and in the early seventies. I think it was
always part of his plan that he wanted people looking
at this. He wanted that attention. The first cipher was
solved almost immediately back in nineteen sixty nine. The second cipher,
which is referred to as the z three point forty,
was not solved until December twenty twenty. Wow. And it

(19:35):
was solved by a trio of computer experts and mathematicians
and cryptographers who devoted a tremendous amount of energy to
developing software to attack the Zodiac cipher, and they were successful.
It was stunning what they were able to achieve. There
are two other remaining ciphers, what's the Z thirteen and

(19:57):
the Z thirty two, which remain on salved people think
they've solved them. Not uncommon for me to get email
and from someone who says I've solved the cipher. Here's
the solution, and it's always some sort of garbled or
forced nonsense. And I'm not knocking them for trying, but
I just think it's people are way too quick to

(20:20):
believe that they have solved it. David Ranchak, who is
one of the people who help solve the Z three
forty and pointed out on several occasions that the remaining
ciphers are not long ciphers. The first one was four
hundred and eight symbols, the second one was three hundred
and forty. Then you drop down to thirteen and thirty two,

(20:41):
and because of that, it drastically diminishes your ability to
recognize patterns right, and that's a main component of deciphering.
As Dave has pointed out, many people come up with
solutions that seem like they could be correct, but there's
no way to determine that with any certainty because the
cipher is so short, and so many other solutions could

(21:05):
work just as well as any other proposed solution, So
I don't think that those ciphers have been solved. Recently,
there have been some more high profile claims to have
solved some of those ciphers. I just don't see anything
to those solutions. And more importantly, people like David Ranchak,
who once you've solved the cipher a zodiac cipher, I

(21:27):
think you have a lot of authority on that issue.
And he's pointed out that he doesn't believe that these
proposed solutions are correct either. So I tend to go
with his thinking on that, especially because I am not
a cryptographer and I can understand a lot of these things,
especially as when I first started talking to David Ranchak

(21:49):
about these things. He has an amazing ability to explain
these things in ways that make sense to people like me.
Otherwise it just sounds like gibberish people say saying all
these complex computations and things. I defer to him on
that a lot, And if he were to say that
he thought one of these solutions was correct, I would

(22:10):
certainly be open to that.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
You're listening to mind over Murder. We'll be right back
after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at
mindover murder. I was hopeful back in December twenty twenty
that the technique that was used to solve the Z

(22:35):
three forty cipher would lend itself to these other shorter ciphers.
But you're saying, actually, because there are so many fewer characters,
that actually presents even more of a problem.

Speaker 4 (22:47):
Oh yeah. When the first cipher was received in nineteen
sixty nine, a teacher and his wife, Donald and Betty Harden,
they attacked that cipher using basic psychology. Like they thought
that the killer would his ego would mean that he
would start off with the word I in the cipher.

(23:07):
They thought that he would talk about killing, and therefore
they looked for repeated pairs of symbols or combinations of
symbols that could represent the double letter L in the
word kill. That was successful in part because they had
so much to work with, the same thing with the
three forty. Now with the three forty people it looked

(23:29):
like the four to eight seemed to be constructed in
the same way. So a lot of people thought that
the same method could be used, that it was a
substitution cipher. It was more complicated than that. The Zodiac
had split this message into three parts, I believe, and
then they were rearranged and the text went diagonally through.

(23:52):
The symbols didn't go from left or they went diagonally,
and they would only match up when they were moved
into this configure aation. And again I'm not the best
person to explain all that, but when the Z three
forty was solved, it was solved because they developed this
complex attack strategy and it helped them decipher the message

(24:14):
and find these phrases which help them find how the
cipher was constructed. With the Z thirteen, it's not likely
that the same method can be used because it's a
completely different kind of cipher. It's only thirteen symbols, same
thing with the thirty two. So there was a lot
of optimism in twenty twenty that the same methods could

(24:35):
be used, but they don't appear to have led to
the solutions. And I don't think that those ciphers will
be solved using a similar strategy. I think they would
require something different.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
What do you think is in this for the Zodiac,
particularly the cipher's part of it. I get the menacing
bragging letters taking credit, and I get that I guess
from an ego perspective, just how murky the ciphers are.
What do you think is in that for him?

Speaker 4 (25:08):
I think that he likes knowing that he forces people
to reckon with his ciphers. It's a form of busy
work might but it's a demonstration of power. All he
has to do is send a cipher and say this
will lead to my identity, or this will help you
solve the case or whatever, and he knows that people

(25:28):
are going to jump into that and pour their attention
into that. I think he got off on the attention
part and knowing that he was so powerful that they
were essentially forced to take him seriously. But I think
at the same time too, it's part of his desire
to be viewed as a criminal genius, which is not
a theory about him that I subscribe to. I don't

(25:50):
think that he was a criminal genius, but I think
that he wanted to be seen as one, and this
sort of game playing was part of that. He pointed
out over the years that when he sent the first cipher,
he obviously he sent three different parts of it to
three different newspapers, demanded that they published this cipher and

(26:11):
threatened to kill if he didn't if they didn't meet
his demands, and that cipher was solved very quickly, and
I often believe that he was upset that it was
solved so quickly. So therefore, when he made the next one,
the z three forty, he made it more difficult because
he was hoping to drag it out and make it
more more difficult for people they have to spend more

(26:33):
time on it. But he made it too difficult, and
because of that, it went unsolved for fifty years. And
I don't think that was ever his intention, especially because
inside the cipher, the cipher came with a note that said,
I thought you'd need a good laugh before you get
the bad news. You won't get the news for a
while yet, And inside the cipher he had said that

(26:54):
wasn't me on that TV show, which was a direct
reference to a Zodiac imposter who had called into a
local Bay area talk show and engaged the host and attorney,
Melvin Belli in a long, protracted conversation and got a
lot of media attention. And the Zodiac, apparently, as some

(27:15):
of your listeners may know, the Zodiac was often concerned
with the controlling the narrative of his case. He would
correct people or add additional facts to things to clarify things.
But in this case, he apparently was he had heard
about what happened, or maybe he even watched the show himself,
and he decided to put his denial inside the cipher.

(27:38):
And I'm sure he thought that it would have been
solved in a timely fashion and therefore people would see
this revelation, which at the time was timely and relevant.
But because he made the cipher so difficult, it wasn't
solved for fifty years, and so fifty years later we
get this message from him that had been hidden all

(27:58):
this time, that wasn't me on the TV show. It's
clear that he wanted people to learn these things, that
he wanted them to solve the cipher and get that information.
I just don't think he ever planned on it taking
fifty years. And when the other two ciphers showed up,
we don't know what's in them. One people think is

(28:20):
my name is and then there's a collection of symbols.
The other one was a cipher and a map that
he said would help find people find a buried bomb.
So I don't know whether or not those ciphers actually
contain the information that he said they would. We do
know that when he wrote his first cipher and letters,
he said that his identity was in them, and that

(28:42):
did not appear to be the case. So we don't
know if he was toying with people or if he
put that in there some other way. But I don't
think it's likely that it would be as easy as
just solve this cipher and here's my name. I think
he was probably toying with people, so we may not
ever know whether or not he was telling the truth
about those last two ciphers.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
I wonder for somebody who apparently does have quite a
large ego and who relishes the media attention and everything.
I wonder if, at some point or another Zodiac ever
considered confessing, like on his deathbed, I am the Zodiac,
it was me.

Speaker 4 (29:21):
Have you been made aware?

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Have there ever been deathbed confessions from somebody who claimed
to be the Zodiac?

Speaker 4 (29:27):
I've heard stories over the years about some people. I
think there's probably not much to that deathbed confession from somebody.
If law enforcement heard about that, they'd be they'd probably say,
that's great, where's the proof. A lot of people can
make claims. Dennis Rader, the BTK strangler who resurfaced after

(29:49):
what twenty five years of silence, Yes, in the early
two thousands. According to some sources, he had kept mementos
and things to remind him of his crime. He had
what he called Heidi holes in his house where he
just stashed things like that, if I remember correctly. According
to at least one source, he was at the time

(30:09):
that he had resurfaced before he was captured. He was
apparently a massing collection of things for his family to
find after he died. He didn't want to face the
consequences of being identified while he was alive, but a
part of him didn't want it to go unnoticed or unrecognized,
and so it appeared that he was at least at

(30:31):
one point planning to have his family discover this horrible
secret after he was gone. Then his plans backfired and
he was caught, and of course his family disowned him,
which is probably the kind of thing that he was
trying to avoid. So whether or not the Zodiac did
anything similar, I don't know. There are times when I

(30:52):
think he must have left something behind for people to find.
There's still a piece of the cab driver's shirt missing,
but I don't know. Possible that he died unexpectedly and
was never able to carry out his plans. It's possible
that he suffered from dementia and forgot that he was
the Zodiac. It's possible he had no intention of ever

(31:13):
letting anybody know and taking the secret to his grave
with him. I don't know. I don't think I know
the Zodiac well enough to say with any authority what
he would or would not do. But I sure hope
that he would leave something behind for those of us.
In some ways. It may be something as simple as
my father died, my uncle died, somebody in my family died,

(31:34):
and they left this weird box of stuff in the garage.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
I was thinking the same thing. I'm looking for a
box with information in it that would different.

Speaker 4 (31:43):
There might be Zodiac letters in there. Dennis Rader apparently
kept some copies of things that he had written when
he was active. There might be the costume that the
Zodiac wore at Lake Bury Essa.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, I've wondered that too.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
In the last minute or two, you've referred to him
in the past tense. Are you thinking that he's dead
by now?

Speaker 4 (32:08):
Part of me, the realistic part of me wants to
say that's a likely outcome, that he may be dead already.
The optimistic part of me hopes that he's still alive
so he can still be identified, captured, and punished, something
like the Golden State Killer case. That was incredibly satisfying
seeing him in courts and being reduced to the small,

(32:31):
petty little man that he was, but just totally erased
his glamorous image as this powerful, elusive serial killer. Now
he's just this pathetic guy sitting in a wheelchair in court.
I would love to see the Zodiac cut down to
size like that. I don't know that it'll ever happen.
As time goes by, it becomes increasingly unlikely that he's

(32:54):
still alive. But you never know. There are people in
their eighties who are more agile than I am. Would
Dick van Dyke turned one hundred this week and he
still dances. So it all depends on what kind of
person the Zodiac was, what his health was like, what

(33:15):
his family life was like, if he's still alive and
people are tending to him and taking care of him,
or if he's still active and moving around and living
a full life. I'm always asked do you think the
case will ever be solved? And I have to be honest,
there's the part of me that wants it to be solved.
I try to be optimistic about that, but I don't know.

(33:36):
I don't know if he's still alive. People will often
say things like when the Zodiac movie came out in
two thousand and seven, that the Zodiac must be dead
or in prison because we haven't heard from him. And
he would definitely have said something when this movie came out,
or when this happened, or when DNA came out or whatever.
If the Zodiac is smart, he wouldn't do that for

(33:57):
several reasons. He may have watched Dennis Rader be captured
because he was dumb enough for your listeners who don't know.
He resurfaced and he was communicating and everything, and then
he asked the investigators, if I send you a floppy disk,
can you trace it? Yeah, And the detectives were like, no,

(34:18):
of course not, they send that disc. Then he sent
the disk and they were immediately able to track it
to him within seconds of searching on the internet. Then,
of course, when he was confronted and being interrogated, there
was one point where he I just saw the video
the other day where he's like tapping his hand on

(34:39):
the desk, on this plastic bag with the disc in it,
and he says, why did you lie to me? And
Ken Landweer, just who had been pursuing him for years,
just said bluntly, because I was trying to catch you. Yeah, moron,
of course I lied. You would have lied to you

(35:00):
over and over again to catch you. But it tells
you something about what Dennis Raider's brain is like that
he's offended that somebody lied. You're a murderer, and you're
upset somewhere wide.

Speaker 2 (35:13):
Yeah. The cops are not being honorable.

Speaker 4 (35:16):
Yeah, yeah, And so when it comes to stuff like that,
the Zodiac may have been watching him be like, that's
not going to happen to me. With the advance in
forensic science, I wouldn't trust anybody's effort to avoid detection
by mailing anything or doing anything like that. And it's
probably also important to note that the Zodiac has been

(35:37):
silent for decades. Yes that void. People have created their
own explanations and their own theories about what happened to him,
and one of those theories is that he was Arthur
Lee Allen, the prime suspect in the Zodiac.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
That's the name we hear them most often. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (35:54):
Yeah, But if the Zodiac were to resurface today or
at any time over the years, it would immediately exclude
every suspect who's dead, including Arthur Lee Allen. So right
now people are looking for the Zodiac in all the
wrong places. For the most part, they're nowhere near him,
it appears, But as soon as he resurfaced, it would

(36:17):
redirect all of that attention into finding him. So I
think if he is alive, he's probably smart enough to say,
I'm going to let them think it's Arthur Lee Allen.
I'm going to let them think it's somebody else or
their dad or whoever else is the suspect de jure
right now. But I'm not going to risk my freedom

(36:37):
by resurfacing and giving them more evidence that could help
catch me.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Let's talk about Arthur Lee Allen for a minute. A
number of our friends who follow this case and are
very interested, A lot of them are in shall we say,
Club Arthur Lee Allen. Why do you think that is?

Speaker 4 (36:57):
I think because he's the most popular suspect that in
the media. Robert Graysmith's first book focused on him, although
under a pseudonym Bob hall Star, and then his follow up,
Zodiac Unmasked, was all about exposing Alan as the Zodiac.
There are a lot of other people with their own
theories about Arthur Lee Allen, and I think he fits

(37:19):
a cutout an idea of what people think the Zodiac
should be. Now, having looked at the evidence over the years,
I'm not convinced that Arthur Lee Allen is the Zodiac,
although I would be thrilled if somebody proved that he was,
because again, that would mean that the case had been solved.
But I think he fits a lot of parameters that

(37:40):
people expect. He was a child molester, so that obviously
gives him some sort of reason behind his disturbance, maybe
for his acting out against couples because he wasn't capable
of being in a relationship with a woman, or whatever
those kinds of theories that have been out there. He
was ambidextrous, which a lot of people like to glom
on too, because they say that explains why the handwriting

(38:02):
experts excluded him. He lived near the crime scenes, he
had a Zodiac watch, He made statements to people that
were suspicious. So he falls into a lot of categories
that people think fit neatly into. There's idea of zodiac,
and I think that's one of the reasons that he's
so attractive to people. Also, I think it's important to

(38:25):
note that a lot of people who think that Arthur
Lee Allen was the Zodiac, their opinions are based on
a lot of misinformation about him. If you look at
what some random person saying about Arthur Lee Allen, or
even if you look at what Robert Graysmith is saying,
it can look like, Wow, it must be him, because
look at all this information, look at all these bullet

(38:47):
points that make him look guilty or whatever. But when
you start looking a little more closely, a lot of
those things fall apart under scrutiny. They're not as potent
as they may seem. So I'm not one of those
people who believes that there's a solid case against him.
Even in the situation where he was identified by a
surviving victim. The story that we were told was that

(39:09):
Michael Majeaux, who survived the shooting at Blue Rock Springs Park,
he was shown a photo lineup that included Alan, and
he said pointed to Alan's picture and said, that's him.
That's the man that shot me. And that was the
way that story was told for a long time. But
after a couple of years of pestering people at the
Vallejo Police Department, I was actually to get a hold

(39:30):
some information that expanded on that, which was that he
pointed to the picture and said that's him, that's the
man that shot me. And they said, are you sure,
and he said, yes, he had a face like this guy,
and he pointed to a different person in the lineup. Wow,
he had a round face like this guy. And then
they said, on a scale of one to ten, how

(39:51):
sure are you? And I think he said a seven
or eight or something like that. That's not a positive identification.
And I've joked over the years that what he was
essentially saying was, yeah, Arthur Lee Allen was the person
who did it, but he was wearing someone else's face
at the time. Gets to the confusion of what you

(40:11):
just said. You said it was him, but then you
pointed to somebody else. And there's also the fact that
the description that Michael Mijaud gave of the killer at
that time in nineteen sixty nine did not match the
way Alan looked in nineteen sixty nine. Maybe he was
the person who shot Michael Migaux and these they're just
factors in all of that. But it's important to remember
when we're looking at the case against Alan that a

(40:34):
lot of these things that people bring up are not
quite as cut and dried as they've seen.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Join us again next time as we continue our conversation
with author Michael Butterfield and his new book The Zodiac Killer,
The Story of America's most Elusive murderer. He discusses his
views on the Zodiac, how the Zodiac case might feel
similar to the Colonial Parkway murders, and other fascinating issues.

(41:04):
We'll look forward to seeing you next time on mind
Over Murder.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.

Speaker 2 (41:23):
Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.

Speaker 1 (41:27):
Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
Our theme music is by Kevin McLoud.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Speaker 1 (41:40):
You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
murders on Facebook.

Speaker 2 (41:45):
And finally, You can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas. Five six.

Speaker 1 (41:50):
Thank you for listening to Mind Over Murder Aunt

Speaker 3 (42:19):
Cont

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