Zodiac Killer

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By the creators of Criminology: a complete chronicle of the Zodiac serial killer investigation, including photographs and documents.

In the late 60’s and early 70’s, an enigmatic serial killer terrorized the San Francisco Bay area—and teased the police tasked with stopping him. Through bold letters and cryptic ciphers mailed to local newspapers as well as taunting calls to police, the Zodiac left his mark on the state of California. Without warning he was gone, but not before achieving infamy in the annals of true crime history. Just who was the Zodiac Killer?

In the first season of their popular podcast Criminology, Michael Morford and Mike Ferguson take a deep dive into one of true crime’s most notorious cold cases. Using actual case files, documents, and police reports they present a detailed chronicle of this mysterious investigation. In this volume, Morford and Ferguson bring the series to readers with added commentary, photographs, and documents.

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Of all the notorious serial killers of the 20th century, only San Francisco’s Zodiac remains at large. A cold-blooded psycho stalking the nightmare streets of the late 1960s, he left behind at least five dead victims. The menacing sociopath sent more than two dozen letters to the newspapers, including four weird ciphers. Only the first code was cracked, and it began: I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN. His last three ciphers, including the infamously unintelligible Z340, have confounded cryptographers and computer science professionals alike.

But the most terrifying thing about him is that he was more than one person!

The first half of ZODIAC KILLER SOLVED walks the reader through a detailed analysis of the forensics, ballistics, circumstantial evidence, and eyewitness testimony of the Zodiac crimes, and arrives at a startling conclusion:

The Zodiac murders were committed by four highly proactive and extremely intellectual conspirators:

1. a “trigger man” career academic who lectured on public policy at Harvard;

2. a “press agent” librarian and Germanic languages scholar from Cal-Berkeley;

3. a “cryptographer” statistician for the California Department of Justice; and

4. the female artistic “mastermind,” a founder of the Sculptor’s Guild in NYC.

The second half of ZODIAC KILLER SOLVED documents the author’s attempt to prevent a criminal catastrophe predicted by the Zodiac ciphers—The Terminus Event, an occurrence eerily similar to September 11th, 2001—in which a skyscraper in Cambridge, Massachusetts will be blown to bits, and innocent bystanders in Boston will then serve as targets for Zodiac snipers firing from a downtown rooftop.

No book like ZODIAC KILLER SOLVED has ever existed, and no amount of analysis offered in any other criminal procedural, however detailed its examination may be, compares with what is put forth here in depth and scope.

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In 2011, as author Glenn Wall began research on what became a book on the Valerie Percy murder case (Kenilworth, Illinois, 1966), he was unaware that there was a previously unnamed criminal whom the FBI considered to be a prime suspect for the murder. However, he did learn that police couldn't make anything of one piece of evidence found at the crime scene nor of two other area crime scenes whose crimes were linked to the murder.

It was odd, they said. He took their word for it, and it didn't mean anything to him at the time. He never thought he’d have reason to revisit the case. He couldn't have been more wrong, and that mysterious evidence is but one reason why. Wall was aware that the suspect had moved to San Francisco in the mid 1960s, and it had crossed his mind that he could have been the notorious criminal known as the Zodiac Killer, whose killings remain unsolved. But he didn't know then that there are dozens of reasons to believe that he actually was Zodiac nor that one of the most persuasive is that unusual bit of evidence discovered at crime scenes in Winnetka and Lake Forest, Illinois, and at the Percy family's house. In addition, Wall found that the crimes the suspect committed in California further implicate him in the crimes he committed in Illinois and vice versa. Wall knew, as with many high-profile unsolved cases, that baseless rumors had surrounded the Percy case for years. None of them were true. But there was, he came to believe, a cover-up—not to protect the political career of Valerie's father, Chuck Percy, nor a member of his family.

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