BONUS: The Zodiac Killer with Michael Butterfield (Part 2)

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 3 (00:26):
My name is Kristin Dilly.

Speaker 4 (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.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Welcome to Mind Over Murder.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas. This is part
two of our conversation with author Michael Butterfield, whose brand
new book The Zodiac Killer, The Story of America's Most
Elusive Murder, is just out. Now we pick up the
conversation discussing the recent Netflix television special This is the

(01:06):
Zodiac Speaking, So does that make you a fan or not?

Speaker 5 (01:12):
Of that October.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Twenty twenty four series this is the Zodiac Speaking that
was on Netflix that focused on Arthur Lee Allen and
his pretty odd relationship with a woman and her children.

Speaker 5 (01:26):
Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm a fan. I haven't seen it.
And this might sound like an odd thing to say.
I've been doing this for a long time. That means
that I have seen a lot of theories over the years.
A lot of people come forth with stories and things
like that, and it makes you jaded in some ways

(01:47):
because a lot of these things they're not what they've seen. Now.
I haven't seen that because at a certain point in
my life, I decided that I can't keep devoting hours
and days of my life to reading and watching all
these things that people come forward with. If I kept
doing that, my life would be like what it used

(02:07):
to be like. But I had no free time and
I just can't let that dominate my life anymore. Now.
Having said that, I probably should note that a couple
of years before this documentary came out, I was contacted
by somebody who said they were working with this trio
of siblings who are featured in the show. They wanted

(02:27):
me to essentially help them get a show produced about
these claims. We had a zoom call and talked about things,
and I clearly was not the best choice for them
because of my skepticism and my history about this issue.
But I always have. I'm very skeptical about people who

(02:47):
come forward with stories decades later, even if they sound compelling.
So I don't really know what else to say about
that series, except I don't find it to be as
compelling as other people do, knowing what I know about
the claims that are made in the show and about
what those claims that were made before the show. Now,
obviously I had to tell them I don't think I'm

(03:10):
a good pick for you, and they went and found
somebody else to do that, and the show got made.
But I think that's part and parcel to the way
that the true crime genre is right now. I think
that it's in some cases it's just irresponsible, just blatantly irresponsible,
to give certain people a platform to espouse their theories

(03:32):
and their ideas. And people have a right to their
theories and their claims, but I don't think anybody has
a right to be taken seriously without solid evidence. So
when you have people who come forward with a story,
that's great, that's a story. That's all it is. Until
it's backed up by evidence, you really shouldn't give it
any more credence than you would anything else. I do

(03:55):
think it's odd that things have changed so much from
the way they were thirty forty years ago. Back then,
you'd have to convince an editor of a newspaper or
a producer of a television show or something to give
you a platform, and they'd have to agree to take
the risk with you, and they often would avoid these
things because they saw them as risky. They didn't want

(04:17):
to get sued, they didn't want to be embarrassed. Now
that doesn't mean that things didn't still get through, especially
with people with their local news. They could get a
lot of things on television that a major network wouldn't
put on. But now, because of the interest in true
crime and all of the streaming series and online platforms
for shows, they need content, they need to come up

(04:40):
with content, and so a lot of those rules or
guidelines that used to govern those kinds of decisions have
gone out the window now, and it seems that everybody
thinks they're entitled to their fifteen seconds of infamy now,
so a lot of these things just get put through
get produced like the most data Injurious Animal of all

(05:02):
guy who claimed it was his father. It's just absolutely
absurd garbage, just unbelievable garbage that's already been debunked many
different ways already. But I just saw the other day
that they're making the movie out of it now, and
it's what are you going to make a movie about it?

(05:22):
About how a guy put forth a bunch of garbage
and made a lot of money about it. That's essentially
the story there. There's no Zodiac story there. Some years back,
I was asked to participate in the Netflix series about
that theory, and immediately I was like, I don't want
to give any credence or attention to that, and the

(05:43):
producers were like, just so you know, we really don't
believe this either, but she is. But they were trying to.
It's a business and they're making a product. I was
relieved when I saw the final series that at the
end did do a lot of debunking and basically put
it all in its proper perspective to let people know, yeah,

(06:06):
this is nonsense and you shouldn't waste your life on
this nonsense. But that doesn't mean that it stops being lucrative,
so the deals continue. Steve Hodell at one time had
a deal to make Most Evil make his theory into
some film or series or whatever. There's all that pressure
to come up with content, and all it takes is
for somebody to say, I know who the Zodiac is,

(06:29):
and now they've got an angle.

Speaker 3 (06:31):
Michael. One of the things that we've noticed that comes
along with being invested in a well known unsolved case
like the Zodiac and the Colonial Parkway murders of courses.
Also in this area unsolved and of rather important and
popular standing, is that there are a lot of people

(06:52):
who will try to link just about any serial killer
that they can think of in some way to our case.
Is we know that this has happened recently with you'd
mentioned BTK earlier. There are several new theories going around
the BTK is responsible for murders up in Oklahoma, where

(07:12):
it may not actually be the case. So it's definitely
one of the things that happens, I think with widely
known cases is that you try to pull famous other
serial killers in, throw it against the wall and.

Speaker 5 (07:23):
See what sticks.

Speaker 3 (07:24):
It's been posited by some that there are a lot
of similarities between the Colonial Parkway murders and the Zodiac crimes.
They took place in Lover's lanes, They involved couples, They
had various emos. The Zodiac, of course, had several different
types of weapons that he used, and that is the

(07:45):
case also in our cases. Some of the hallmarks of
the Zodiac are missing. However, but I think it's still
worth asking the question to our Zodiac expert, now that
we've got you here, do you feel like it's possible
that the Zodiac could have been working on the East coast,
like as late as the nineteen eighties. Would he have

(08:06):
changed his mo of taunting messages and his ciphers in
such an appreciable.

Speaker 5 (08:11):
Way if my life depended on the answer.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
It must assuredly does not.

Speaker 5 (08:17):
But I would say no. Now, I could be wrong
about that, and I try to say that as often
as I can, that I could be wrong about these things.
It's not something set in stone that I believe. But yeah,
this is part of what I used to jokingly refer
to as the Marvel Team of true crime, where you
take the two infamous criminals and try to link them together,

(08:38):
the Zodiac and the unibomber, or the Zodiac and the
Colonial Parkway murders. With the Colonial Parkway murders, I don't
see anything there that would indicate that the Zodiac was involved.
It is important to remember when you were saying how
there's some hallmarks missing. In one of those Zodiac letters,
he essentially said, I'm not going to to tell you

(09:00):
who I'm killing anymore, and they will look like routine
robberies and accidents and killings of anger and things like that.
And some people interpret that to me that he wouldn't
follow any pattern anymore. So it is possible that he
departed from those hallmarks of what we now think of
as the Zodiac mo attacking a couple, but he also

(09:23):
departed from that back in nineteen sixty nine. The first
three attacks were on young couples. The fourth attack was
on a cab driver, which was very different. With the
Colonial Parkway murders, especially Bill and the case involving your sister,
I don't see anything there that would make me think
the Zodiac was a logical suspect. I think it's also

(09:45):
important to note if correct me if I'm wrong, But
some of these cases that have been part of the
Colonial Parkway canon are now being looked at differently because
of DNA. And this is name Alan Wade Wilmer, Yes, correct,
a man who some people believe was connected to some
of these cases, and DNA has connected him to some

(10:07):
of these cases. So now you have a situation where
you had a list of crimes that you thought were
part of the Colonial Parkway canon, but now some of
them have an asterisk next to them because of Wilmer.
So does that mean that he is not responsible for

(10:27):
these other cases? Where now you have essentially a split
list the ones that can be linked to Wilmer and
the ones that can't or haven't.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
Been yet more it's more haven't been but yeah, yeah,
that possibility still exists. But these are the things that
keep us up late at night.

Speaker 5 (10:44):
Yeah yeah. So when I looked at this list of
what I guess you would call the remaining cases, the
ones that he hasn't been definitively linked to yet, because
if I remember correctly, there's one of these cases where
he was a suspect years ago. Yes, and then I
think because of a polygraph or something else, somebody had

(11:05):
determined that he wasn't involved. But now he seems like
he's the most likely suspect still, so when you look
at these cases that are the leftovers, as you might say,
that diminishes the things that made them seem all connected
now because these other ones are either not part of
it or they're part of it. And these other cases

(11:26):
were wilmar too, we just can't prove it. Now. When
I look at that list, it seems less like a
pattern now, especially when you have the different mos. You
the victims were stabbed and nearly decapitated in the first
case they were found inside their vehicles or in their vehicle.
Then you have what is it, Brian Pettenger who was

(11:48):
killed with blunt force trauma to the head and drowning.
Then you have the other case of the couple where
we don't even know how they were killed. There seems
to be some evidence that they might have been stabbed.
Can't say for sure. The differences seem to stand out
more now to me, and I'm very skeptical when anybody's
trying to connect Zodiac to another crime. I think that

(12:12):
we've all learned a lesson in many ways with how
people have tried to link the Zodiac to other unsolved
cases before this, like the unsolved murder in Riverside, California,
or there were some letters that some handwriting experts believed
were written by the Zodiac. These three handwritten letters that said,
in effect, Bates had to die, there will be more,

(12:33):
with a little symbol on them that looked like the
letter Z that seemed to lend itself to the idea
that Zodiac could be involved. The handwriting experts thought that
he wrote those letters, although some disagreed, and the Zodiac
was often referred to as a prime suspect in that case.
Just a few years ago, the Riverside police determined that
they had identified the person who wrote those three letters,

(12:56):
and that person was not the Zodiac. So now you
remove a huge chunk of the element that seemed to
link Zodiac to that, and there's still possible Zodiac was
involved with writing the confession letter. Or maybe more it's
possible he had nothing to do with any of it,
and he just mimicked it later on and took credit
for it when it looked like it might suit him

(13:17):
to pad his resume in that regard. But I think
it's a good lesson in not getting too married to
your theories. So with the Colonial Parkway, I don't see
any reason to believe that the Zodiac was involved. I
don't see any reason to believe that he was active
on that side of the country during that time. I
know that there's some people who think that Arthur Lee

(13:38):
Allen was the person that committed those crimes at that time.
I just don't see any reason to believe that. Although
I'd love to be proven wrong and I would certainly
be interested in hearing more about what makes Wilmer a
logical suspect in some of these cases, because, especially with
the Brian Pettinger, the more that you remove the Wilmer

(13:59):
cases from that list, the more that Brian Pettinger stands
out like a sore thumb, like it seems very different.
When the list was longer, it seemed easier to factor
him in there. I think that there were some connections
or some similarities, but the more you remove the Warmer
ones from the list than what you're left with Brian
Pettinger's case really seems to me like maybe it's not

(14:22):
connected at all. Again, I could be wrong about.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
That, and I think Lorinne Powell, who also worked at
Liberty Security with Brian Pettinger, I think there's a very
strong possibility and I think Kristin agrees that those two
cases are probably related, and we I think Kristin feel
free to disagree with me. I think that Brian Pettinger
and Lorian Powell are related, but I don't think they're

(14:47):
necessarily related to the other Colonial Parkway murders. You're listening
to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this
word from our sponsors.

Speaker 5 (15:01):
We're back here at Mind over Murder. Yeah. Yeah, And
I'm glad that you brought that up, because I've heard
about this case over the years, and I've been asked
questions about it before, but I never really looked into
it as much as I did before doing this interview.
The thing about liberty security, when I read that, I
was like, wait a minute, there's connections here, So could

(15:22):
you expand on that a little bit about what liberty
security means in the context of all of this.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
You end up with a whole long conversation that centers
around a now deceased suspect named Ron Little who's from
New Zealand moved to the United States. It's hard to
give a short version of the Ron Little story. After
living in California and marrying a woman from New Zealand

(15:49):
out there and having a daughter together. He then left
that family and moved to Virginia. He ended up at
least allegedly purchasing a company called Liberty Security, which was
a small security firm that provided security for retail stores
and that sort of thing. Whether or not he actually

(16:11):
purchased the company or not, I have some real skepticism
in that regard, because I think that may have been
a straw man purchase. He supposedly purchased the company from
a local man and changed the name of the company
to Advance Security. He inserted himself Little inserted himself in
a very bizarre and public way into the Colonial Parkway murders.

(16:35):
He wrote letters to the President of the United States
and Oprah, senators and congress people, all the local media.
He did television interviews insisting that he knew who was
responsible for the Colonial Parkway murders and that he knew
when the next murder was going to take place the

(16:56):
same time and this is all simultaneous with the Colonial Parkway.
Two of the young people that he worked with directly
at Liberty Security slash Advanced Security, Lorient Powell and Brian Pattenger,
were both brutally murdered and their bodies were dumped in
area rivers. And this actually immediately brackets one of the

(17:17):
Colonial Parkway murders, which is the murder of Keith Colin
Cassandra Hailey, which is technically a disappearance rather than I'm
murdered per se. But it's a very bizarre and twisted tale.
In recent years, his family from New Zealand, and this
is a very non traditional family. Ron Little had five

(17:38):
different children by five different women, two or three of
whom he was married to, three in New Zealand and
two here in the United States. His family reached out
to me several years ago and told me that they
had started listening to Mind over Murder and so they
became familiar with Kristin Dilly Bill Thomas, and they wanted

(18:02):
to let me know that. In the years after their
father was deported back to New Zealand by the FBI
and THES. This would have been in August nineteen eighty nine,
which is right around the time the Colonial Parkway murders stopped,
or appeared to stop. For years afterward, their father told

(18:22):
them repeatedly, particularly his two sons, that he was involved
in a series of unsolved murders in Virginia. He didn't
call them the Colonial Parkway murders, but of course that's
a media construct to start with, and he didn't reference
specific victims' names. He didn't say I was involved in
Cathay Thomas and Rebecca Dowski's murder or anything like that,

(18:43):
but he did insist for years that he was involved,
and he means directly involved in a series of unsolved
murders in Virginia. This is all leading up to several
years ago before he died of a recurrence of cancer.
Kristin and I ended up just scratching our heads saying,
who in the world tells their family they're involved in

(19:04):
a series of unsolved murders. Yes, very weird, and this
guy was a career criminal, drug dealer, a very violent man.
The whole thing is truly bizarre that he had inserted
himself in this very public and private way.

Speaker 3 (19:21):
Ultimate plot twist here, ron Little is the Zodiac.

Speaker 5 (19:27):
It's funny because we have a mutual friend, Steve, who
was very helpful with my Zodiac book, but has also
been helpful in educating me about the Colonial Parkway case.
And when he started telling me about the DNA and
the links to Wilmer. That that's an amazing feat all
these years later that implicated him in that. I was

(19:48):
immediately struck by a detail in the Teresa Howell case. Yes,
Wilmer has been connected to that with DNA, as am
I correct about that. That's some the cases where the
showed that he was involved, and it's not likely that
he wasn't involved, because how else would his DNA get there.
It's interesting to note that the last place that Teresa

(20:09):
Howell was seen was the Zodiac.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
Club correct, which has always been a striking detail for
the two of us as well.

Speaker 5 (20:16):
But that tells you something about coincidence. Yeah, that those
kinds of things can happen and they don't have any
connection to anything. There's no reason to believe Wilmer is
the Zodiac as far as I know, So there's no
reason to believe that's an important factor in this case.
So it's just it looks like it's just a coincidence,

(20:37):
and coincidences do happen. It's just odd that the Zodiac
is somewhere in there, but it doesn't appear to be relevant.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Yeah, now we're giving you just the shortest version, just
the highlights of the run Little saga. But this is
fascinating to find someone like this who, for thirty plus
years seems to have some sort of relationship or nexus
surrounding him. All these years later, his family reaches out

(21:10):
to me and says, we think our father was involved
in the Colonial Parkway murders. It's a mighty strange place
to find yourself. And now Kristen's putting out this new
theory that Ron Little is the Zodiac. I don't think kidding.
I don't think the math works.

Speaker 5 (21:26):
No, it doesn't.

Speaker 2 (21:28):
Now sure is fun.

Speaker 5 (21:29):
It is really something. Michael.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
If you need another book project, the Colonial Parkway murders,
all these needs yet another chronicler, you're welcome to it.

Speaker 5 (21:39):
Well, I'm working on another book right now, but I'm
hoping to put out in the near future. That's about
Ted Bundy.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
Oh terrific.

Speaker 5 (21:49):
Years back, I wrote an article for a true crime
magazine called Ted Bundy Super Genius, and it was an
article that kind of went through and debunked the idea
that Bundy was this brilliant criminal because if you look
at the facts, it's stunning that he wasn't captured sooner
than he was. Yeah, how many serial killers out there

(22:10):
are known by their name before they're captured. He told people,
I'm ted. But it was funny because the editor that
I was working for at that time, the publisher of
that magazine, was in the UK, and he didn't appear
to be familiar with the origins or the popular origin
of the term super genius, which is from the Wiley

(22:31):
Coyote cartoons. And when somebody says they're a super genius,
they're not. They're Wiley Coyote. But because he wasn't familiar
with that, he changed the title of the article because
he thought I was Oh, it was serious, and it
was like, no, it's meant to be ironic. Yeah, when

(22:53):
you say that about the Colonial Parkway case. I should
say this, over the years, learning so much about the
Zodiac case, so it's really easy to see a newspaper article,
magazine article, a YouTube video, a documentary or something that
has something in it and you immediately go, that's not true.
Where did they get that from? Like the stories that
the Zodiac sent shellcasings in the mail and that they

(23:17):
matched to different crimes and stuff with all kinds of
things like that. Once I started to notice that over
the years, I started to realize how much of that
is going on in other cases, yes, that I am
not familiar with the facts about them. I was watching
something about Ted Bundy the other day and they said
that his last known victim, Kimberly Leach, was her body

(23:37):
was found in a river. And it was like, no,
it wasn't found in a river, but the narrator said
it like it was fact. So I start to wonder
how much can I trust of what I'm reading about
other things. The reasons that I feel like I know
more about the Zodiac case is because I talked to
the investigators and people involved. I write the police reports,

(23:59):
the FBI file, did all that work. But I haven't
done all that work in these other things. I can't
look at them and go, this isn't true, that isn't true.
I'd have to do a ton of research about the
Colonial Parkway murders before I'd even feel comfortable speaking about
them with any idea that I have any authority. What
happens in the true crime world, it seems to be sensationalism. Yes,

(24:23):
that's the way to sell things that the facts aren't
really that important. And I'll give you a real quick
example of something that happened to me some years ago.
I was involved in this show History's Greatest Mysteries, okay,
the History Yet with Lawrence Fishburn. They had asked me
when I do something like this, I always do it
because I want to help them find as much accurate

(24:46):
information as they can so that I'm not sitting there
screaming at the TV when it airs. And with this,
they had asked me about crime scene photos, and they
wanted to know what was available, and so I gave
them everything that was publicly available and whatever was available period.
And they said, why aren't there any true crime or
why aren't there any crime scene photos from the Blue

(25:08):
Rock Springs attack? And I said, I think part of
that's because the victims were still alive and they were
transported to a hospital. I understand that there are pictures
taken of the scene, but those pictures haven't been released
to the public, and I don't think that the victims
are probably in a lot of those pictures because they
were transported away. And I thought I explained that pretty

(25:28):
clearly when the show aired. The first time it aired.
I guess I'd turned my head for a second and
didn't notice it. It wasn't until the second time that
I watched it when I realized that they had inserted
a photo in there for the Blue Rock Springs crime
and said, this is this implying that this is a
photograph from Blue Rock Springs Park. And the first thing

(25:49):
I noticed immediately was that the cars were from the
nineteen eighties.

Speaker 2 (25:52):
Yeah, no, I don't think yeah.

Speaker 5 (25:55):
And I was like, what the But when I rewound
it and paused it, I was shocked to see that
that wasn't the only indication that something was wrong, because
when you pause and freeze the photo that in the
driver's seat of the car is Grimace from McDonald's, a
much later character. Yes, thank guys, who, by the way, if,

(26:18):
according to my research, did not exist at the time
of that murder. But I looked at it, I was like,
am I hallucinating? What is this? So? How did this
end up in here? And doing a little bit of research,
I discovered that the photograph came from a mock website,
a parody website about a thing called the Burgerland Murders, Oh,

(26:39):
which was some sort of satire about mafia like hits
on iconic fast food figures. This photograph was part of
this website, and so apparently somebody who was searching, some
researcher who worked for the show, was going through the

(26:59):
internet and came across this picture, and somehow it went
through all the filters without being noticed and ended up
in the final product.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
Unbelievable, with no sense of their pop culture.

Speaker 5 (27:11):
Fast food Yeah, I don't think they even noticed it.
It goes by so quickly on the screen. But I
was trying to imagine somebody in an editing bay with
a giant screen in front of them not noticing that
a fictional fast food character is in a crime scene photo.
That kind of tells you something about the way that
these things are produced. They're mass produced, they're churned out.

(27:34):
There's going to be all kinds of misinformation about all
kinds of cases. I'm just not capable of recognizing all
of them because I haven't done in depth research on those.
So it's a little frightening sometimes to think about taking
on a new case arkways, but with Bundy, I've been
reading about that for so long, I've done so much

(27:56):
research over the years. I feel more confident writing something
about that. The Colonial Parkway thing would probably be another
lifetime investment, and I don't have another lifetime.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
I have something I have not mentioned to Kristen lately.
Is the last couple of weeks now, I have been
working on our podcasts and other projects, and something will
cross my one of my two computers here, and I'll
stop for a few minutes and I'll watch it. There's
been a little blip of these, their short YouTube videos,

(28:30):
say seven or eight minutes long, that purport to be
about the Colonial Parkway murders. It's clearly a computer generated voiceover.
It's not a real voiceover. Yeah, and they've got facts wrong.
For instance, they say that all four of the double

(28:51):
homicides in the Colonial Parkway murders are unsolved, and that
this mystery continues to frustrate it. And I'm thinking to myself, actually,
that's not true. Alan Wade Wilmer Sr. Was linked and
publicly announced in January twenty twenty four. He died sadly
in twenty seventeen. So we're not sadly taking him, only

(29:13):
sadly in that I like to have seen him in
a court of law. But they talk about these cases
as if they're all completely unsolved, which is not true.
And then they continue to get facts wrong, and I
just find myself I feel like I'm screaming into the
void here talking back to the computer saying that's wrong,

(29:35):
that's wrong.

Speaker 5 (29:35):
And it gets even worse with these AI generated things
where they're using words that aren't words. Yeah, and I'm
constantly going who wrote this that is? Not only is
that not proper grammar, but it's that's that's not even
a word in English language. But yeah, that's part of
the problem now too, is a lot of Again, it
goes back to this need for content. They just keep

(29:58):
pumping content out and unfor the facts suffer and the
victims as well.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Yeah. One of the things I've tried to do over
the years, which Kristen's very much aware of, is we've
tried to at least correct people. I'm not here to
tell people what happened, but let's get the basic facts right.
If you want to have a theory that I disagree with,
feel free. Let's at least get the dates in the
times and the places correct, so that if someone wants

(30:27):
to debate, are these cases all related? Could they be independent?
There's so much to talk about, but let's at least
get the basic facts in the case straight, so that
people can debate from a perspective of reality and not
just making stuff up.

Speaker 5 (30:44):
Yeah, but people don't let facts interfere with telling what
they think is a good story. Very true. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
The book is The Zodiac Killer, The Story of America's
Most Elusive Murderer, by Michael Butterfield. Michael, Well, where can
everybody find your book?

Speaker 5 (31:02):
Right now? The official release date is tomorrow. We're recording
this before the release date, and it's available online. You
can order it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and almost
any online vendor. I think that some stores will be
carrying the book in the near future. I just don't
think that there will be available immediately tomorrow. I know
that there's some talk about there being a second printing

(31:25):
of it, because it looks like Amazon has sold out
of their stock where I got mine. Yeah, but I
know that people who have ordered the book online have
already received it in the last few weeks. Even if
you're trying to get it, I would recommend going to
Barnes and Noble or Amazon or those places, or any
online vendor, because I've seen it even available on Walmart's website. Yeah,

(31:48):
hopefully people would go out there and get the book.
And there's one thing that I should mention here real quick,
if you don't mind, and that is that I worked
on a manuscript for a book for a long time,
many years ago, and this is not that book. This
was a commissioned work. I was asked to write a
book about the Zodiac case that was a general overview

(32:11):
of the case, and I was asked to include certain
subject matter, possibly related crimes or certain suspects that were
popular in the media, things that the Zodiac may have
inspired or that may have inspired the Zodiac. So the
publisher had some requirements about what the book would be.
So this book is a general overview of the case

(32:32):
and important things that have led up to the last
few years. It's not supposed to be my book. That's
the accumulation of decades of research. It was a work
for higher situation. Hopefully, the feedback on the book has
been very good, very positive, and hopefully people will if
they understand that's what the book is supposed to be,

(32:53):
they'll see it for what it is. And like I said,
most of the feedback has been very positive so far,
and I'm lad for that because the main point of
writing the book was that the book be something that
would help people who are interested in the case. When
I was asked to write it, that's why I did it.

Speaker 2 (33:10):
And so your next book after that will be the
book on Bundy hopefully.

Speaker 5 (33:15):
Yeah, that's my plan. Life sometimes has other plans, but
that's something that I've been working on for a long
time when I have free time, and something that I
think is an interesting topic for people, because the legend
of Ted Bundy continues to grow, just like the legend
of the Zodiac. Again, Ted Bundy was no super genius.

(33:35):
That's precisely why he was caught, convicted, and executed.

Speaker 2 (33:40):
As someone who's a gigantic, wily coyote fan. I was
just so pleased that you made that reference.

Speaker 5 (33:49):
And I think it's important to note that too, that
we tend to view criminals as being criminal masterminds if
they get away with their crimes or if they continue
to get away with them for an extended period of time.
But just like with Ted Bundy the Zodiac, there's no evidence,
in my opinion, that the Zodiac was some super genius.
I think he was much more likely some sort of

(34:10):
pathetic figure who wouldn't measure up to the popular version
of him.

Speaker 2 (34:15):
I think if your book can't be called super genius,
you should at least work it into the subhead.

Speaker 5 (34:21):
Yeah yeah, Michael.

Speaker 3 (34:25):
Thank you so much for joining us. It has been
a real pleasure.

Speaker 5 (34:28):
Thank you for having me that.

Speaker 3 (34:30):
Is going to do it for this episode of mind
Ever Murder. Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 1 (34:42):
Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.

Speaker 1 (34:51):
Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod.

Speaker 1 (34:57):
Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
You can also follow our page on the Colonial Parkway
Murders on Facebook.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
And finally, you can follow Bill Thomas on Twitter at
Bill Thomas five six.

Speaker 1 (35:14):
Thank you for listening to mind Over Murders.

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