The Megyn Kelly Show - The Zodiac Killer： A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special

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00:00:30.960 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:33.140 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:42.580 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:44.360 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and the beginning of our hot crime summer week.

00:00:48.840 The Zodiac was a serial killer who terrorized the Bay Area of California in the late 1960s.

00:00:54.880 He committed a series of murders across California in acts of pure violence and evil.

00:01:00.000 He taunted the press and the authorities, calling by payphone on more than one occasion

00:01:04.620 to take responsibility for the murders.

00:01:06.840 He sent letters to major newspapers detailing the killings and mocking the police.

00:01:12.440 Some of those letters included ciphers, which he demanded be printed on the front pages of the papers.

00:01:18.440 In a chilling 1969 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the killer stated,

00:01:24.500 schoolchildren make nice targets.

00:01:27.360 Think about that. Sick. Sick.

00:01:29.780 Causing increased safety concerns across the region.

00:01:32.460 This went on for years as he claimed more and more victims.

00:01:37.080 Now, there are five confirmed Zodiac killings, but the real number is believed to be much higher.

00:01:43.800 And after years of investigating, our case here remains technically unsolved.

00:01:49.580 But our guest today, Tom Colbert, is an investigative journalist and author and founder of a group called

00:01:56.860 The Case Breakers that deals in cold cases.

00:01:59.920 And his team of highly trained experts has spent years investigating the Zodiac.

00:02:06.080 They think they know who it is.

00:02:08.920 Before we get to Tom, I want to tell you that you're going to hear during this show

00:02:12.120 who Tom and his team believe the Zodiac killer was.

00:02:16.280 We're going to discuss his theory at length, and he is convincing.

00:02:19.580 But I also want to point out to you that we do not know who the Zodiac killer was.

00:02:24.580 And there are so many theories on this.

00:02:26.440 I could have put on a different expert with a different theory today.

00:02:29.460 In fact, on my NBC show back in February 2018, I had two guests on who were convinced they knew

00:02:34.780 who the Zodiac killer was.

00:02:36.640 Listen to that.

00:02:38.140 Why?

00:02:38.820 What is your best evidence that Ed Edwards was the Zodiac killer?

00:02:42.820 There were two cryptograms sent in by the Zodiac killer.

00:02:45.680 One in 69 and one in 70.

00:02:47.580 They were like puzzles.

00:02:48.660 And he basically said, if you solve these puzzles, you'll have my name.

00:02:52.660 And in 2010, when we confronted Ed Edwards about being a Zodiac killer,

00:02:57.020 after we solved the 13-character cipher, Edward Edwards' name is 13 characters.

00:03:03.120 And what he had done is taken the letters in his name and reversed imaged the letters as hieroglyphics.

00:03:09.560 So you could never solve the Zodiac case without knowing the name Edward Edwards.

00:03:13.460 And once we did, we confronted him.

00:03:16.100 He sent us a letter saying, it's me.

00:03:18.620 You don't know the whole story.

00:03:21.100 I have a lot to tell you.

00:03:22.780 And that he framed people his whole life.

00:03:24.960 Later in the interview with Tom, I asked him about this guy, Ed Edwards, and that theory.

00:03:31.160 You'll hear what he has to say.

00:03:32.220 And then at the end of today's show, we're going to bring you a sound bite from a longtime cold case investigator who we really know and trust.

00:03:41.180 And he, too, has looked into the Zodiac case and has a word of caution for everyone.

00:03:46.100 So you will make up your own minds, but I think you're going to enjoy the exchange.

00:03:50.520 Now, my interview with Tom Colbert.

00:03:52.540 We'll be right back.

00:04:22.540 Tom, welcome to the show.

00:04:28.960 Thanks so much for the invitation, Megan.

00:04:31.760 Of course.

00:04:32.420 All right.

00:04:32.660 So let's go back.

00:04:33.940 As near as I can tell from what I've read, the murders that we know the Zodiac was responsible for took place, began in the late 1960s and then went on to like the early 1970s.

00:04:48.860 Five that we had it like.

00:04:50.420 How do we know that those are his?

00:04:51.920 It was defined by the San Francisco and Vallejo police departments who were in charge of all these murder cases strictly around the San Francisco Bay Area.

00:05:02.640 But I will tell you, and I may be jumping the gun, but our team is really believes it's now closer to 10 victims around the country from San Diego to Lake Tahoe.

00:05:14.960 During what time frame?

00:05:17.600 Time frame starts from 62.

00:05:19.780 A couple killed on the beach and all the way up to 1970 in Lake Tahoe.

00:05:28.300 And that victim is still missing.

00:05:30.800 We have a very good idea where she is.

00:05:33.500 What do you mean?

00:05:34.120 She is the only one never found.

00:05:38.020 And through, as you mentioned, the letters and the codes, we have an incredible source that brought this case to us a couple of years ago.

00:05:47.460 And he deciphered the codes, according to our team.

00:05:52.220 And that led us to a burial spot.

00:05:56.200 And?

00:05:58.260 That's TBA.

00:05:59.800 Okay, you're working on something that you want to keep confidential?

00:06:04.720 Well, we not only are planning to go there, we have several other places to go.

00:06:11.320 We know also where we believe he buried his murder weapons at 6,500 feet in the High Sierra.

00:06:18.940 That will be another trip.

00:06:21.840 So you think you know who it is?

00:06:23.880 And are you prepared to say that?

00:06:26.660 Gary Francis Post.

00:06:28.220 And we have mounds of evidence now after two years.

00:06:32.940 And again, it's because of this, you know, 1,500 years of skill sets with our 40-member team.

00:06:38.420 These are all volunteers.

00:06:40.120 We've gathered them from around the country in every part of forensics you need, from ballistics to DNA.

00:06:47.000 We have six universities and labs working with us pro bono to solve this, not for our egos, not for fame and fortune, for the 20 siblings of the dead.

00:07:00.560 All right, let's get to Gary in a minute.

00:07:03.780 We'll postpone that for one second, because we want to set up the crimes so people can have a feeling for what we're talking about.

00:07:11.920 So you say the earliest one, I think you said 62.

00:07:14.160 I thought that the earliest confirmed one, according to police, was 68, that this was the attack on David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.

00:07:24.620 Is that not correct?

00:07:25.580 Well, according to our team, and they've not been wrong in 10 years on this quest on cases, they feel there are matching M.O.s and profiles of murders in other parts of the states.

00:07:45.420 The other part of the states have other bullets that match the caliber of the Zodiac in San Francisco Bay.

00:07:55.580 Okay, and so the one in 1962 was of whom, that murder that you're talking about earlier?

00:08:01.120 That was a Navy couple on the beach of San Diego, walking on the beach, a sniper, shot them both, and then he up close.

00:08:11.480 Yes, okay, that was actually very disturbing.

00:08:14.120 It's like people seem to have been minding their own business.

00:08:17.800 This is Johnny Swindle and Joyce Swindle, killed by snipers as they walked along the San Diego beach.

00:08:23.180 Okay, and that murder was committed with a .22.

00:08:26.500 She died almost instantly, and he died later that night.

00:08:30.280 The police believe the two were victims of a, quote, thrill killer, but that's as much as I guess they would say.

00:08:37.420 So that was February 7th, 1964.

00:08:42.040 And other than the fact that the bullets were the same, it was from a .22, as murders we know he committed, the Zodiac, what's the evidence tying him to that crime?

00:08:53.180 Same caliber, same MO, and similar to a Santa Barbara murder in 63.

00:09:03.800 There was also a cabbie killed in 62 in Oceanside Police Department.

00:09:10.280 All of these are the MO of what happened in San Francisco.

00:09:15.240 Again, we have ballistics experts that are about to compare the ballistics we have from our alleged Zodiac.

00:09:24.580 We collected over 1,000 bullets with 24 calibers from neighbors in this high Sierra town.

00:09:31.300 And we have them.

00:09:33.720 There is a new technology that allows us to literally dunk a bullet into a liquid and off falls the DNA.

00:09:42.900 And that is something we're going to be doing with these various calibers, and again, particularly 9mm and .22s.

00:09:51.640 He had all sorts of guns after World War II, collected Polish guns, French guns, and so forth.

00:09:57.640 But the departments we are working with are saying 9mm and .22s are the key calibers they're looking for.

00:10:07.120 And we're planning to meet with one of the departments with those calibers.

00:10:11.860 I mean, it's very common, so it's not like a rare caliber gun.

00:10:16.540 And of course, just because a similar gun was used doesn't mean it's the same person.

00:10:20.780 But let's just go back.

00:10:21.700 So the first confirmed killings are David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, December 20th, 1968, that we know from authorities were the Zodiac.

00:10:30.560 And the thing that grabs anybody when they're looking at the Zodiac killings is how heartless they are.

00:10:38.860 I mean, there's no murder that is kind and loving.

00:10:41.800 But just, there's no reason.

00:10:44.780 There's no robbery.

00:10:46.000 There's no beef.

00:10:47.440 There's no, you know, you look for some sort of sense, even though you can't make sense of murder, because I think it makes us feel better.

00:10:55.060 It makes us feel like it won't happen to us.

00:10:57.060 But these felt so random and merciless, absolutely merciless.

00:11:02.680 So tell us what happened with David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.

00:11:07.620 Tell me where the city is on that one.

00:11:10.080 That was, let's see, and he approached their park station wagon at Lake Herman Road in Benicia, California.

00:11:20.500 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:11:22.180 That was an ambush in a lover's lane spot.

00:11:27.420 He went after lover's lanes couples twice.

00:11:31.500 And 9mm and .22s were involved in those cases.

00:11:36.780 And were they ever able to say why?

00:11:41.780 Because this case, like the others, no indication of a robbery, no indication of a sexual assault.

00:11:48.500 It appears that they were, that shots were fired into the vehicle to force them out.

00:11:54.480 And Betty Lou exited the front passenger door first, followed by David Faraday.

00:12:00.240 He was 17.

00:12:01.860 She was 16.

00:12:03.480 He shot David once in the head at point blank range.

00:12:07.760 Betty Lou was shot five times in the back as she fled, and she was killed instantly.

00:12:11.720 It was Betty Lou Jensen's first date, age 16.

00:12:15.520 No one understood why.

00:12:17.660 Like, what would you do?

00:12:19.180 And then six, why would you do it?

00:12:20.880 And then six to seven months later, there was another attack on another couple, Darlene

00:12:25.580 Farron and Mike Mago.

00:12:28.720 He lived.

00:12:29.780 This is in Vallejo.

00:12:30.780 He lived to tell about it.

00:12:31.920 And that was important.

00:12:32.780 Yes.

00:12:35.500 And there are two men that lived, young men that lived.

00:12:39.060 All the rest died.

00:12:40.640 And multi shots into cars, into people, stabbings.

00:12:47.180 The common thread of this is the why, Megan.

00:12:52.160 It's the why.

00:12:53.720 And being the son of a shrink, I've heard these cases over the years through my father,

00:12:58.480 from D.B. Cooper all the way up to Zodiac and Hoffa and Atlanta.

00:13:07.200 It's something my dad and I talked about when he was alive.

00:13:10.000 And he talked about, you know, the psychopath that would come into a community and make no

00:13:19.260 sense to anyone, no robbery, no jealousy, no love triangle.

00:13:23.340 Uh, that is what we believe our suspect fits the profile.

00:13:29.100 Uh, and that's why we're so strongly in the belief that we're on the right now.

00:13:35.720 So if you look as an investigator, you've got to see what the similarities are.

00:13:40.700 Like, what is his MO?

00:13:41.880 What, how do we know it's Zodiac?

00:13:43.500 And this will become relevant when you try to extrapolate to these other cases that you

00:13:48.620 and your team are trying to figure out where, whether they were Zodiac cases or not, the

00:13:52.960 attack on Darlene Farron and Mike Mago, July 5, 1969.

00:13:57.880 Um, Darlene was 22.

00:14:00.720 Um, Mike was 19 again, parked at an isolated location in Vallejo.

00:14:07.760 They were talking a car, possibly a light Brown Ford Mustang or a Chevrolet Corvair pulled

00:14:14.840 into the lot a few feet away.

00:14:16.980 Now I'm imagining this is six or seven months after the other murder, but it's, it's, as

00:14:22.820 far as we know, the only, the second like publicized murder, you know, of this type.

00:14:28.160 So they didn't necessarily know that somebody is running around killing young people who

00:14:32.360 park, you know, and talk or make out or whatever they were doing.

00:14:36.660 A man with a flashlight exited the vehicle, approached the couple, no other cars in the

00:14:41.120 parking lot.

00:14:41.700 They thought it was a cop, had their ID ready.

00:14:43.560 And just as in the other murder, we just discussed, the man began firing at them five shots at

00:14:49.160 the man.

00:14:50.520 Um, after five shots, the man walked slowly back to his car.

00:14:54.120 Mike screamed out in pain and the guy returned firing two more shots at each victim.

00:14:59.500 Mike was able to see the Zodiac.

00:15:02.820 And as far as I know, he's the only one who ever gave like a detailed description of him.

00:15:07.060 He said he was white, five, eight to five, nine in his late twenties to thirties.

00:15:12.460 Again, this would have been 1969.

00:15:14.740 So, uh, you know, subtract 30 years from 1969.

00:15:18.840 He's born around, around 1940.

00:15:21.300 Um, stocky build round face, brown hair, no conversation.

00:15:26.840 Again, it's so disturbing.

00:15:28.140 He, there was no ask, there was no attempt to negotiate.

00:15:31.700 There was no, it was just murder for the sake of murder, which really is a true psychopath.

00:15:38.200 Somebody once described the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is neither one

00:15:42.380 has any empathy or feeling for the killing at all, but the psychopath actually enjoys it.

00:15:47.360 Like looks forward to it.

00:15:48.860 Not only the psychological aspect of, uh, this is interesting to us, but obviously the evidence

00:15:57.520 and the, and the, the greatest spot for evidence was Riverside police department, Riverside police

00:16:04.660 department found, uh, military style boots size 10, uh, that matches three of the Zodiac other

00:16:13.980 locations, size 10 military boots, uh, all sorts of other things, uh, in, in Riverside.

00:16:21.720 Uh, the, the most intriguing one is a piece of evidence that the, uh, FBI, which did the lab

00:16:29.200 work and Riverside technically owns it for a potential case are four hairs found in the

00:16:36.700 hand of a college coed in Riverside, uh, and literally took it off his head. This was 1966 way

00:16:47.440 before DNA, but God bless the lab work and the corners in Riverside County. Uh, they kept those in a

00:16:56.160 fridge until DNA came around that DNA, the hairs has cleared several local boys in that town. Uh, but for

00:17:06.580 some strange reason, the department will not consider people that are not locals. Uh, the

00:17:14.480 only person, uh, in law enforcement, there've been nine police chiefs in Riverside. The first one at

00:17:21.740 the murder scene, uh, in, uh, with the coed, uh, what happened there was that. Wait, just, can I just,

00:17:32.100 can I just reset? Cause I'm getting a little lost. Riverside is not one that we've talked about yet,

00:17:37.600 but you're saying that they had a boot print size 10 that matched boot prints found at ones.

00:17:43.100 We know the Zodiac did. That's correct. Same size. Okay. So it hasn't, if Riverside didn't

00:17:49.300 actually get pinned on the Zodiac, but you're looking at it and you think that we should test

00:17:52.640 these hairs because given the boot print and the way it was committed, it's worth seeing what the

00:17:57.980 connection is. And if we can get a DNA match so much, the better, but what happened in Riverside?

00:18:01.860 What was the crime? Well, you should also know though, that the FBI in 1975 declared the Riverside

00:18:08.840 case as a Zodiac case. For some reason, they pulled it off of that many years ago, uh, in about 2000,

00:18:16.980 but he, uh, that was a Zodiac case on an FBI memo. And I sent that to you. So that would interest your

00:18:25.240 audience. So what happened in Riverside?

00:18:27.980 This is a, uh, very, uh, junior college. Uh, a victim was at a library. She came out,

00:18:38.500 uh, her VW bug, uh, starter was unconnected. Uh, it just happened to be somebody watching her

00:18:47.020 in the library came out to help her said, I'll drive you home. And, uh, what proceeded was one

00:18:53.660 of the most horrific knife tax attacks in the case. Uh, I was close to 40 stab wounds as the police chief

00:19:02.140 at the time said, uh, she was almost decapitated. Uh, this is the Zodiac because of footprints. We know

00:19:12.180 that the Zodiac, uh, our suspect, uh, was a painter. They found paint spots on the watch that fell off of

00:19:20.600 the attacker. Uh, he was also at March air force base, 15 minutes away for regular medical checkups.

00:19:31.080 So we have about a half dozen, uh, pieces of information that absolutely have convinced,

00:19:39.760 convinced our team that she definitely needs to be on the list.

00:19:43.620 And when you say he was at an air force, you're talking about Gary post. He was at an air force

00:19:47.600 nearby. Okay. Yeah. He was at several bases. He left in 63, but he continued with veteran care

00:19:54.320 and he could be placed near the spot of this murder. This woman's name was Sherry Jo Bates,

00:20:00.180 October 30, 1966. She was 18. She visited the river city college library. And we know that her car,

00:20:08.120 her Volkswagen Beetle was disabled because somebody, whoever the killer was, we feel wrote a letter

00:20:14.600 explaining exactly what they did to her. I'm not going to read it because it's too disturbing,

00:20:18.700 but he said that he disabled her car, that, um, that she, he came upon her and, um, that they found

00:20:27.980 this Timex watch in a military style heel print on site about size eight to 10, again, 10. And then the

00:20:34.740 watch was traced to a military post. Um, and the shoes could have been sold at, as at nearby March

00:20:40.620 air force base. Now the, the, they're the letter that was sent after this woman's murder was not

00:20:47.680 signed. It was not signed. So Zodiac did wind up, he started to send letters and that's why we know

00:20:53.680 to call him Zodiac. That's what he called himself. This one wasn't signed Zodiac, but it definitely

00:20:58.600 claims ownership of this murder and says, um, he's talking about how there was only one thing on his

00:21:05.940 mind when he killed her, making her pay for all the brush offs that she had given me during the

00:21:11.520 years prior. Now that's interesting to me because that seems like there's a motive behind this one

00:21:17.120 versus the others. Uh, you're absolutely correct. And that is the line I was about to talk to you

00:21:23.520 about that seems like a red herring lung and the police departments, uh, after the current, uh,

00:21:32.260 the police departments, especially the chief of the murder date, uh, said, this is intriguing,

00:21:39.600 but it, uh, it doesn't mean it's a local guy, but all the other detectives disagreed. And there've

00:21:46.860 been eight police chiefs since that say, we're only going to go after local guys. You want to believe

00:21:52.540 that in this day and age, traveling serial killers, they won't even look at, uh, that is the line

00:21:59.480 that you just read that convinced us that this was a red herring and could possibly be from the Zodiac.

00:22:06.320 Here is something else you should know. There is one word that's re there are three words that are

00:22:13.260 repeated. I shall twitch and squirm. Those are found in Zodiac letters in San Francisco, but here's what's

00:22:21.960 key. Twitch is spelled T W I C H in Riverside and the letters in San Francisco. Very intriguing.

00:22:32.380 Wait. Oh, in all you're saying that's misspelled in all three of those.

00:22:37.360 Correct. Oh, that's fascinating because your belief is that the Zodiac liked, he wanted credit sort of,

00:22:45.260 but he also would throw out misdirections. It's like, it feels like he wanted to get caught,

00:22:52.440 but he didn't want to get caught.

00:22:55.360 The letter was mailed from the town too, to make it in our view, extra, uh, clear that he was a local

00:23:05.240 boy. So you have them describing, she blew me off paraphrasing and mailing it from town. Uh,

00:23:13.280 what a great way to get them off the trail. And as I said, the chief at that time in 1968,

00:23:20.360 when the murders were identified as Zodiac in Vallejo and in San Francisco and so forth,

00:23:26.480 he contacted the whole task force and said, I have the same MO. I have the same details.

00:23:33.960 I have a size 10. I have this and that. So do you. I think it's the right guy.

00:23:39.200 No one agreed with him after that. It was always a local boy.

00:23:44.780 How far away is Riverside from Vallejo and, um, uh, the first location that we discussed. I can't

00:23:51.780 remember what town it was in those days, probably about three and a half, four hours.

00:23:57.760 Okay. So it's doable. I mean, why would they, no, that's an easy connection to draw. It's not like

00:24:03.380 they were, they were all in California so far. And don't forget that the Vallejo, I'm sorry,

00:24:09.180 let me say it again. Don't forget that the, uh, the air force base he was going to was just 15

00:24:15.200 minutes away from the murder site. And he was there for several days for treatment.

00:24:20.960 Again, you're talking about your suspect, Gary post, but we, we don't know that this is the,

00:24:25.300 the actual killer. Now, actually I should ask you that separately, whether he was Zodiac or not,

00:24:30.840 do we know that Gary post killed anybody? Gary post was in the air force, uh, radar systems,

00:24:38.040 part of the early warning system in Indiana. Uh, we know that, uh, he, he is not connected to

00:24:45.840 any murders. He was in meticulous and careful. Uh, and that's how he wound up in the middle of this

00:24:53.500 because we found all the evidence that connected him. Okay. We'll go there again in a second. Just

00:24:58.380 wanted to see if we knew we were dealing with an identified killer in under the heading of Gary

00:25:03.540 post or not. And the answer is no, but we'll get to why he's your, he's your favorite suspect on why

00:25:09.080 Tom and his team believe he did it. So that we talked about the first two confirmed Zodiac and

00:25:14.200 they look very similar to one another with the, with the couples in the cars. And, um, then there

00:25:20.320 was another one about two, three months after that second one of Darlene and Mike Mago. Um,

00:25:28.540 there was a, there was an attack on Cecilia Shepard and Brian Hartnell, September 27th, 1969.

00:25:34.600 And similar to the fact that Mike Mago survived that earlier attack and gave that detailed

00:25:41.000 description, uh, Brian Hartnell, the man survived this one. So what happened was they were relaxing on a

00:25:48.480 blanket at a remote location by a lake in Napa. The, um, Cecilia Shepard noticed a man approaching

00:25:55.700 them wearing a costume, a black hooded costume with a white cross circle stitched onto the front.

00:26:00.740 That's interesting. Cause it's kind of like the Zodiac sign, uh, and holding a gun described as a

00:26:06.460 heavy build, no more than six feet tall. That would match up loosely with what Mike Mago described.

00:26:12.740 The man claimed he was a prison escapee from either Montana or Colorado and needed money and a car to

00:26:19.140 flee to Mexico. Uh, the, the man, Brian Hartnell offered him his wallet and car keys, which of course

00:26:26.440 they realized they were in trouble here. And the, and the man did not take the wallet or the car keys

00:26:31.700 after several minutes of conversation. Uh, the man tied up the couple with plastic clothesline, a plastic

00:26:38.180 clothesline and began stabbing them, then casually walked away. And again, amazingly, Brian Hartnell

00:26:46.140 survived. So here again, you tell me, Tom, as the investigator, they're not in a car, they're in Napa.

00:26:54.120 There's conversation this time, all different things from the previous two. And of course,

00:26:59.780 very different in that they were tied up and this is a stabbing, not a shooting. Is that unusual? Is that,

00:27:07.220 you know, for us, for a serial killer to change up his MO that much?

00:27:11.560 Well, again, because of all the calibers he had, uh, he, he was extremely brilliant. He would know to

00:27:18.100 switch calibers, switch knives, switch locations. Uh, the hammer hits on bullets. He would switch out

00:27:25.100 the actual hammers so that they couldn't be tracked from another investigation. Uh, this man, uh,

00:27:33.180 you mentioned too, he is the same height, weight of the Zodiac described in other locations. It is the

00:27:42.000 only daytime attack of the Zodiac suspected, uh, murders.

00:27:47.540 Now this murder and the one that preceded it have something else in common. And that's that he

00:28:01.080 appears to have called authorities on a payphone after he did it. Right. Jumping back to the, to the

00:28:06.940 murder of Darlene Farron and the attack on Mike Magot, um, at 1240 AM, there was a call to the police

00:28:15.360 police and it was to the Vallejo police department. The man said, I would like to report a double

00:28:22.160 murder. He didn't know that Mike Magot had survived. If you will go one mile East on Columbus

00:28:27.340 Parkway to the public park, you will find the kids in a Brown car. They were shot with a nine

00:28:32.540 millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye. An apparent reference to David Faraday

00:28:40.760 and Betty Lou Jensen. Then after the Cecilia Shepard and Brian Hartnell attack in Napa,

00:28:47.240 similar. And call to Napa County Sheriff's office at 7 40 PM. I want to report a murder. No,

00:28:54.900 a double murder. They are two miles North of park headquarters. They were in a white Volkswagen

00:28:59.600 Carmen Ghia. I'm the one who did it. What's that? What, what do we glean from these confessions,

00:29:07.440 which everyone seems to agree was Zodiac? Well, I'll give you another example too,

00:29:14.100 because it matches Oceanside PD first cab driver killed. And before he killed him,

00:29:21.060 he called the police department said, I'm going to, this is paraphrasing. I'm going to commit a crime

00:29:26.760 that you're never going to be able to figure out. And sure enough, after shooting him in the back of

00:29:32.500 the head, just like the San Francisco cab shot back in the head, he calls a few days later from that

00:29:42.500 area and said, I told you, you'd never figure it out. He was stationed at a Air Force base along the

00:29:49.580 coast in Santa Barbara area. And there is a railroad track that empties right at his base and is five

00:29:58.580 minutes from the murder scene of that cab driver in Oceanside. Now I want to keep my crime straight

00:30:06.040 because the next crime we know is committed by Zodiac was of a cab driver. It seems like you're talking

00:30:13.800 about a separate one, but the one, let me just set this one up before we get to your one. This is, this

00:30:18.820 would be Zodiac number four confirmed again. He's claimed to have killed 37 people. So it's, or maybe 34,

00:30:25.600 37, but the list is very long. We're just going with the ones that law enforcement has said, yeah,

00:30:30.260 this was him. So, uh, Paul Stein, October 11th, 1969, his cab was hailed. Um, the cab wound up a block

00:30:39.060 away from the destination that was asked for Paul Stein, 29 was shot once in the head at point blank

00:30:45.800 range. Weapon was a nine millimeter. Um, three witnesses watched the suspect from approximately 60

00:30:51.740 feet away as he wiped down the cab with a cloth after killing Stein. That's interesting. So maybe

00:30:58.000 different weapon, not a 22, not a knife. Now we're onto a nine millimeter and someone sees him clean

00:31:03.820 up, which is a new detail. They described the man as a white male, 25 to 30 years old. Again, that's all

00:31:11.580 consistent with Mark, with Mike Mago, stocky build, consistent, reddish brown hair, consistent. Mike had

00:31:18.740 said brown hair with heavy rimmed glasses. That's a new detail. Um, and they initially thought this

00:31:25.200 was a robbery gone bad, but then they realized it wasn't. And I, once again, Zodiac wrote a letter

00:31:31.600 to the San Francisco Chronicle this time. And he said, I did it. And tell us why we had every reason

00:31:37.960 to believe that was not a hoax letter. The person writing it really did kill Paul Stein.

00:31:42.740 Well, he also, uh, sent letters afterwards and one of them, he bragged the reason they were not

00:31:50.540 finding any prints of him was because he put glue on his fingertips and that left no prints. And he

00:31:58.060 bragged about it in a letter right after that too. So it matches the ocean side back of the head. Uh,

00:32:06.720 that is a one shell that was recovered on the floor of the cap. It is with right now, San Francisco PD

00:32:14.480 and our plans are to compare our nine millimeters to there. Hmm. This is the one, if I'm not mistaken,

00:32:23.000 where with the letter he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, he included

00:32:28.400 a portion of the bloody shirt of Paul Stein, which is just so chilling. And his letter, this is the one

00:32:38.140 I mentioned in the intro where he's, he talked about, uh, he said, I'm the murderer of the taxi

00:32:42.560 driver, uh, to prove it. Here's a bloodstained piece of his shirt. I am the same man who did the

00:32:47.800 people in the North Bay area. And he goes on to mock the San Francisco police. And then he makes the

00:32:53.280 comment about school children making nice targets. I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning.

00:32:58.400 It goes on to in detail what he wants to do to the children. This is signed with a Zodiac symbol.

00:33:05.900 So he's getting more aggressive and he's getting needier, right? Like needier. This to me seems like

00:33:12.020 somebody who really wants them to know who he is. Well, but, and, and that's exactly what happens

00:33:19.060 with a lot of the psychopaths. They, they're narcissistic sociopaths, psychopaths, uh, that,

00:33:24.960 that are hoping someday they can share with people who they are and they sometimes leak it out. And,

00:33:33.000 uh, that, that is just a perfect profile, uh, in that particular case.

00:33:39.120 Now that murder was October 11th, 1969 on your suspected killings list. Um, there's another

00:33:48.160 cab driver. And I don't, is this the one you were referring to? It happened seven years prior

00:33:52.560 to Paul Stein. It was a murder of a guy named Ray Davis of the checker cab company.

00:33:57.580 We believe that was the first killing by Zodiac because he was out of the military in 63,

00:34:05.960 but we believe he took a train down from the air force base in Santa Barbara and conducted

00:34:13.260 a similar cab killing back of the head and then vanished. And again, bragging, no writing,

00:34:20.340 no calling himself Zodiac, but he said, you're not going to be able to figure this one out.

00:34:25.540 And then he called him back and bragged about it. Okay. That's the one you were talking about. Now

00:34:30.400 it's, it's all coming together, right? He called the cops in advance, said, I'm going to commit a

00:34:35.560 baffling crime. Um, and, and soon after this guy, Ray Davis was killed. And again, no robbery,

00:34:44.700 police couldn't find a motive. Um, that, that is sketchy. And it does follow a pattern of no motive

00:34:52.920 shooting the back of the head, uh, and telling cops either before or after I'm the one who did it.

00:35:00.360 I'm the one like just taunting them. I mean, I have to say, as I, as I listen to all the crimes

00:35:04.380 with all due respect, I feel like were the cops bumbling because I feel like in today's day and age,

00:35:11.840 you could never get away with this. Very well put. That's exactly true. Remember in that era

00:35:19.160 from the sixties to seventies and early eighties, cops had fingerprints and a hunch. There was no

00:35:26.060 DNA. There was no other incredible, uh, uh, databases you could search things in. It was a

00:35:32.540 very simple time and, and they did the best they could. Uh, remember though, before our times,

00:35:39.740 uh, in the sixties, when this was going on, uh, there was a lot of drug experimentation, a lot of,

00:35:48.140 uh, uh, violence and murders that people were high. I mean, there's, when we went through the

00:35:55.340 California murders, we found at least a half dozen that could fit the initial profile of this man,

00:36:03.560 but it all came down to that. They were high. Uh, the six that we looked at were, uh, extremely out

00:36:10.760 of their heads. The, the reason he's known as Zodiac, as I said, is he started signing this,

00:36:18.540 these letters that he would send to the press with a little Zodiac symbol. And then some of them,

00:36:23.600 he signed it Zodiac, like the word Zodiac. Um, and his need to bring the press into it kind of

00:36:31.200 reminded me of the Unabomber. We did a special on him. That's right. You know, he couldn't,

00:36:36.280 he was totally getting away with it. Ted Kaczynski was getting away with being the Unabomber

00:36:41.840 and his own letters would wind up sinking him because his brother, they published them in the

00:36:46.980 paper and the brother saw one and read one and said, Oh my God, this is very familiar to the stuff.

00:36:50.980 He's my, my own brother sent me one thing led to another. This guy kept writing to the press,

00:36:55.500 but no one ever had that revelation, but he used the LA times, the San Francisco Chronicle,

00:37:01.060 and others for what, like, how would you describe his correspondence with the press?

00:37:07.860 You know, this is before social media. This is before the internet. This is before,

00:37:12.700 frankly, a lot of color TVs weren't in play. This was his way to, to be a celebrity in his own

00:37:21.320 warped mind. And that is in essence, what was happening. He was up. And by the way,

00:37:27.840 you talked about the shirt. Uh, he took slivers of that shirt and sent it to a very famous lawyer.

00:37:33.020 He sent it to the papers. Uh, he cut that shirt up so he could be definitively identified as the

00:37:41.020 mystery man. He wanted them to know, and he didn't, he, in some of the letters, he was like,

00:37:48.400 that one wasn't me, you know, like he, he wanted credit for his crimes and he didn't want to be

00:37:53.800 saddled with ones. He didn't commit letter to the LA times dated March 13th, 1971. So this is right.

00:37:59.800 The relevant timeframe of the murders. We know, we know the Zodiac did, and this is what he writes.

00:38:05.700 This is the Zodiac speaking like I have. And there are lots of misspellings in here. FYI,

00:38:10.340 like I have always said, always has two L's. I am crack proof. If the blue meanies are ever going

00:38:18.280 to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses and do something because the longer they

00:38:22.880 fiddle and fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my afterlife. I do have to give them

00:38:28.400 credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones. There are a

00:38:34.440 hell of a lot more down there. The reason I'm writing to the times is this. They don't bury me on the

00:38:39.500 back pages like some of the others. So it's, he's mad. He's not on the front page.

00:38:48.620 He's shopping for media. And when San Francisco finally realized that, hello, you're part of the

00:38:56.620 problem when you're putting it on the cover, you're, you're integrating yourself into a hostage

00:39:00.840 situation, a murder by, by exploiting his, his language. And so they made a decision to bury it.

00:39:10.260 It's not so dissimilar from what we see now. Somebody was just positing on a show. I listened

00:39:16.040 to our podcast. I can't remember what they were talking about. Why do we not have the serial

00:39:20.300 killers today? Like we used to, you know, I was born in 1970. I grew up hearing these stories and

00:39:25.620 being afraid and son of Sam in New York and all of that. And they were saying, it's not really a thing

00:39:29.900 anymore. And the answer was, it's kind of moved on to mass shootings. You know, the, the, the,

00:39:35.620 the murderous crazed lunatic has chosen a different thing now. I, but, but both, both

00:39:42.020 groups tend to want infamy. And it's one of the reasons why a lot of security experts say,

00:39:46.580 and I've been doing it for a long time, don't name the shooters in these mass shootings.

00:39:50.840 Exactly. Exactly. But I would also tell you that technology, uh, after 1970 exploded. I mean,

00:39:59.380 they had databases to track license plates. What in the last few or four or five years,

00:40:04.660 they have special banks for, for, uh, tattoos. I mean, they're tracking people left and right now.

00:40:12.000 And that's why serial killers can't stay out long. Uh, the, the cameras are everywhere. Megan,

00:40:17.780 there were no cameras back then. None. That's true. And so that's totally changed law enforcement.

00:40:23.720 And that's why serial killers have vanished. This was one of the last ones. And again,

00:40:28.920 he retired quote unquote, we'll talk about our man later. He retired in 1970, moved up to Ohio Sierra

00:40:36.340 town and spent the rest of his life up there. So, you know, he, he knew that they were getting closer

00:40:43.360 and closer and he finally made the decision. I really, he still wrote letters into the, into the,

00:40:50.980 uh, late eighties. Uh, but how many letters in all, how many letters do we think we have from the

00:40:56.880 Zodiac? We have, uh, right now, I'm just thinking they just eliminated two that turned out to be a

00:41:04.660 teenager in Riverside, believe it or not, who said she deserved to die. It was a terrible thing.

00:41:10.280 The FBI confirmed through a genealogy, uh, unit, uh, that he was, he, he confessed and he's now an older

00:41:19.020 man, but all the others, uh, there are approximately, I want to say 20, 26 or so I'd have

00:41:28.840 to double check, but it's 26. Let's just say it's close to a couple dozen.

00:41:33.260 Because as I was reading up on this, one thought I had was if I'm a murderer back in the 1970s,

00:41:39.600 I'm definitely writing a fake Zodiac letter and pinning this on him, you know, like just to try to

00:41:45.800 get the police off my trail. So how did they figure out this one's a, the real Zodiac and this

00:41:51.340 one's a phony trying to pin his murder on this serial killer? Well, again, it was primitive back

00:41:58.720 then. Uh, the handwriting, there were handwriting experts. He wrote left and right, by the way.

00:42:05.780 So does our suspect write left and right. Same age, same shoes. Don't get me started.

00:42:11.780 I'm going to in about 10 minutes. But bottom line is, is that he wrote both ways. He was very clever

00:42:20.060 and there was some extremely brilliant people that were able to, uh, not only identify the correct

00:42:28.840 writing, but, uh, they started to get into the coding. Okay. So now we haven't talked about that.

00:42:35.360 What do you mean coding? This is a military coding that goes back to a book. Uh, it's been around since

00:42:43.900 world war one. The Navajos used it in world war two to protect our radio communications between islands,

00:42:51.320 uh, in Vietnam. That's when the coding ended in Vietnam, because now with computers, of course,

00:42:57.580 you don't need coding. Uh, but, uh, it's the same code book. It's a 1950 code book. Uh, I have a Lieutenant

00:43:05.720 Colonel from Vietnam, uh, on the Cooper case who brought us that code book. When we found out these

00:43:12.480 were codes, I linked up the code buster from Cooper, who is a three time NSA man to work with

00:43:21.140 stop. Nobody knows Cooper yet and nobody understands code yet. All right. So like when you're talking

00:43:26.300 about codes, that's okay. So that's, that's what I'm here for. Um, the codes we're talking about

00:43:31.700 because he, in his letters would, would offer like a cipher, like a little riddle for people to decode

00:43:39.860 and made promises. Like if you can decode this, you'll know who I am. So of course, everybody was

00:43:45.840 trying their hardest to decode this. And you're saying there's a military book that talks about

00:43:51.960 how to make these codes and who's Cooper. Why are you mentioning somebody named Cooper?

00:43:58.580 DB Cooper is a Vietnam vet who took over a plane and asked for $200,000. And then he said,

00:44:06.860 fly me to Mexico. And he jumped by parachute. Uh, that is one of our other cases that we believe

00:44:13.480 we have solved. How does that factor into this story? The same code book used in Vietnam

00:44:21.440 is the same code book that was used by our air force man, our man, uh, Gary Francis post. It was

00:44:31.540 used at all air force bases. These codes were used to scramble signals as they spoke and protected our

00:44:38.620 country back in the sixties and seventies. So why couldn't an air force man back then take one look

00:44:44.340 at that and say, I know what this says. Well, there are, there is the code, but then there are

00:44:52.040 words that are clues. Uh, he would embed, uh, these clues so that the public couldn't just quickly get a

00:45:02.180 code book. Uh, very clever, very clever. Uh, anagrams is how they broke it. Uh, and as I said,

00:45:09.980 with the Cooper project, we brought that NSA man, a code buster three, three tours in Vietnam to work

00:45:18.360 with our team on the Zodiac. And that's how we feel. We cracked it. It's the same code book.

00:45:26.140 Hmm. So it's, it is a, it's an interesting point because you can't come up with these

00:45:31.140 ciphers and elude police this well by being a complete lunatic who isn't smart, you know,

00:45:42.720 but he's got all the misspellings. So do we think the misspellings are, as you said earlier,

00:45:49.360 a red herring, you know, an attempt to downplay his own intelligence. Um, what do we think about

00:45:55.640 his level of smarts? We had some people on the team talk about, uh, describing him as an ADHD kid

00:46:03.800 who, uh, would only pay attention if he was interested. And, uh, he, uh, our suspect, uh,

00:46:11.980 was that type of person. Uh, he was sloppy, he misspelled, but he also planted words on purpose

00:46:19.380 so that he could point to them, you know, and he would give clues with certain words.

00:46:25.640 And that is how that code became so important on both cases.

00:46:32.660 Hmm. Now, as we discussed, he starts writing to the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco

00:46:38.440 Examiner, the Vallejo Times Herald, uh, as early as July 31st, 1969. And he includes these ciphers or

00:46:47.800 cryptograms, uh, which he claims contain his identity. And he demands that they be printed on the paper's

00:46:54.900 front page or he would quote, cruise around all week, killing lone people in the night and then

00:46:59.840 move on to kill again until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend. Interestingly,

00:47:05.860 the San Francisco Chronicle published it on its third or fourth page. The threatened murders did

00:47:12.620 not happen. Um, and they eventually published all three parts of what he had sent them. That's so

00:47:18.080 interesting because it, boy, as a member of the press, that does put you in an impossible situation.

00:47:23.120 So they really did wrestle with the, the moral burden that he was trying to place on them.

00:47:27.840 Do you remember Megan in, uh, the buses in that story in San Francisco, the buses,

00:47:35.120 they threatened to blow up buses with children on them. That is what our suspect in Oceanside did

00:47:43.180 after killing the cab driver there in 62, he calls in and said, I'm going to blow up some buses.

00:47:50.780 Well, that, you know, what would happen in that town? Everybody, all the police, the military were

00:47:56.440 put on every bunch bus. There were, they, they blanketed this small town. And he meantime,

00:48:03.200 we believe our suspect got on the train and went back to the air force space. And then he called in

00:48:08.700 and said, told you. He didn't thank God follow through with his threat when the San Francisco paper

00:48:18.700 did not do as he requested. I know. Thank God. Um, but they must've been in such a, such a moral

00:48:25.100 quandary there because my God, what if he had, you know, you need to feel like you had some

00:48:30.400 responsibility and it would, even though of course you don't as the, as the newspaper. Um, yeah. So

00:48:36.380 he keeps writing, keeps writing now who's working on it. Is it the FBI's case? I imagine there are a

00:48:41.720 bunch of amateur sleuths trying to decipher everything.

00:48:45.200 When it broke the FBI and we have the memo, uh, they, all the agents in charge on the West coast

00:48:53.100 were told stand down. The only thing we're going to do, we're not going to get involved in these

00:48:57.920 murders all over the state. We will provide lab help, uh, fingerprinting help, uh, and occasionally

00:49:05.520 to a small department if they need some technology, but we are not going to get involved in these

00:49:10.240 murders. And frankly, it, it, with the Lake Tahoe killing that's across state line, but they're not

00:49:19.280 saying Lake Tahoe yet is a Zodiac case. That's one of your suspected cases. So the FBI is basically

00:49:26.420 saying this is an intrastate problem. Hasn't crossed state lines. We don't need to touch it.

00:49:31.780 Good luck, California. And so what was it? What like, so as local authorities town by town in

00:49:38.800 California, was there any mass coordination, you know, somebody running point?

00:49:43.880 There was a task force put together, uh, uh, four or five departments, uh, mostly in the

00:49:50.160 San Francisco Bay area. After the cases you spoke of, uh, again, the cases we're talking about from

00:49:56.860 San Diego to Lake Tahoe, we're not in the task force, but there are some similarities and our

00:50:02.820 former law enforcement people have pointed that out. So how, how, what, in what year did he stop

00:50:10.380 writing his letters? I want to say late, uh, mid to late eighties. Oh, so it went on for 10 plus years.

00:50:19.960 And again, that's not official. The last official letters you mentioned were 69,

00:50:25.160 69, but we have letters from, from 1970, uh, again, to the late, let me correct myself from the early

00:50:34.880 1970s, all the way to the end of, uh, 85 or 84. He was writing to newspapers.

00:50:43.380 And, but where, was he still committing murders? Like, do we, did he change his MO? Did he continue

00:50:49.980 to say things like he said in the early letters that would show you this is definitely the murderer

00:50:54.440 and not just some lunatic trying to send us on a wild goose chase? He was no longer talking about

00:51:01.520 murders. He was commenting. He was, uh, talking about particular movies involving murders. I mean,

00:51:09.560 he almost became a commentator, uh, and sent these letters to newspapers, as I said. Uh, and, and,

00:51:18.000 but the murder is his discussion of murders stopped in 1970. Uh, and that was his last claim. Uh, and

00:51:26.840 after that, that's the other part of the story. So what, so flash forward to, you know, when did DNA

00:51:35.280 become the everyday thing it is now? I mean, 2000 sometime in the 21st century, it really got hot,

00:51:43.760 uh, and started to get used in all the criminal cases and so on. I remember, I remember covering

00:51:50.080 the Duke lacrosse case, you know, the fake rape case down there in 2005, and they still were really

00:51:55.780 struggling to explain what DNA is, uh, in that case. And I obviously wound up falling apart,

00:52:01.000 but I remember it was just as late as 2005, this was still sort of a mystery to lawyers who had to try

00:52:06.520 criminal cases. So eventually we got there. Now there's all this evidence there's shell casings

00:52:13.500 and, you know, there's gotta be, I don't know if there's any fingerprints, if there's what,

00:52:18.100 what is there that they, with the benefit of now new technology, they can go back in these crime

00:52:22.120 scenes and see, okay, we got something. Well, I'll be honest with you. We have thoroughly looked

00:52:28.400 into all the cases, not our, not only our cases, but the original cases. And sadly, uh, we brought them

00:52:35.300 evidence to compare, uh, that they wouldn't compare with our suspect. Uh, but what was intriguing

00:52:41.600 is that, uh, they, a few years ago, uh, on our, one of our members on our team, uh, approached,

00:52:50.100 uh, the departments and said, check DNA on such and such a letter flap or behind the stamp. Well,

00:52:58.540 unfortunately, Megan, back in the sixties and seventies, and even into the early eighties,

00:53:03.700 nobody was keeping evidence in sealed paper bags, uh, in refrigerators. They were just stacked in

00:53:11.900 files sometimes with the sun on them. So heat and, uh, passage of time, they were not able to get

00:53:19.780 any, uh, DNA off of shell casings and so forth. We think we can update that technology because the

00:53:28.160 only thing that we believe in the FBI agreed in 75, those hairs have been used to clear people,

00:53:37.320 but they have not shared the hairs with anyone else. Hmm. Now, when you say we, we bring these

00:53:45.380 things to them, are you talking about the FBI? Who do you mean to whom do you bring the clues that you

00:53:50.100 want to evaluate it? We, uh, went to the police departments that had bullet shells. Uh, we've gone

00:53:57.960 to others that have, uh, DNA evidence. Uh, we have gone for, uh, ballistics up to San Francisco. We're

00:54:05.580 in discussions with them. Uh, and we've been everywhere. And the only evidence left from the

00:54:12.960 killings are those four hairs. Hmm. And by the way, yeah, go ahead. Uh, the, by the way, the hairs

00:54:22.300 are Brown, like our suspect. Hmm. I should reiterate that your group, the casebreakers.org,

00:54:29.540 um, it's 40 member task force of volunteers, retired bureau agents. You have a combined 1500 years of

00:54:36.040 skill sets. Um, you guys solve cases, you try to fund more teams and you promote, uh, careers in all

00:54:42.800 branches of public service. So you've been at this for a while and you've got trained professionals

00:54:47.540 with impressive, uh, histories trying to figure out these unsolved crimes. So it's not like you're

00:54:55.540 just some nutcase who walks into the police station saying, go, go back and test that hair. You know,

00:55:00.320 they, they know who you are and some are more cooperative than others from the sound of it.

00:55:06.760 I was a CBS newsman for 10 years in LA and I was recruited by the state of California to go to an

00:55:12.420 incredible school where I met my first team. And that was California specialized training Institute

00:55:18.560 at camp San Luis. Uh, this is where they teach everyone, uh, on every imaginable horror they have

00:55:26.360 to face. And I was flown up for 18 years, every other month to teach crisis management, hostage

00:55:32.980 situations, uh, you, you name it, uh, terrorism, uh, all with a media angle. In other words,

00:55:39.920 how do you get your case out without jeopardizing it?

00:55:42.420 Uh, that's how we created our first team. And then it expanded from 10 to 40 because the word

00:55:49.740 got out. Uh, and my wife and I have dedicated the rest of our lives to, uh, making this work,

00:55:57.040 so to speak, because frankly, Megan, there's not enough tax dollars in the world for more cops.

00:56:01.980 That's we have to go after the people in their fifties and sixties and, uh, that, okay,

00:56:08.700 they have a little arthritis or they can't climb the fences, but you know what, as my dad, the shrink

00:56:13.440 used to say, when we were in trouble, they have incredible being at brains, incredible brains.

00:56:20.020 And, uh, you know, can I give you one quick example?

00:56:23.840 Yeah.

00:56:24.800 We were up in the woods of Oregon. We were tipped to the actual parachute site of D.B. Cooper,

00:56:32.400 where he jumped and buried it. And we went 10 miles from the nearest home to a particular spot.

00:56:39.440 A, believe it or not, a former cop was tipped to this and called us. We went all the way to that

00:56:45.280 spot in the middle of the woods. We dug, we found something that looked like a parachute,

00:56:50.840 but we couldn't tell. We wondered if it was a potato sack piece. So the way our team works is

00:56:58.140 we can call them on their rowboats, uh, their lazy boys with a grandkid, uh, on the golf course,

00:57:05.520 and they'll give us the technology. And we called and said, we have a piece of material

00:57:09.840 that we don't know if it's a potato sack or a parachute. And he said, take a strip of it,

00:57:16.320 light it. And we said, light it. And he said, light it, tried to light it. It dripped and smoked.

00:57:21.680 He said, that was dunked in non-flammable material. It's a parachute. This is how the team works.

00:57:28.740 And so we get their expertise wherever and whenever we want it. Uh, you should know, as far as my wife

00:57:34.800 and I, we've never been sued in 42 years. And those are the type of people we're bringing to

00:57:39.820 our team. They're phenomenal. But don't jinx it. Don't say, don't say things like that out loud,

00:57:45.160 Tom. Um, it does. I said, don't jinx it by saying something like that out loud, out loud,

00:57:50.600 you know, what a litigious society we have now. Well, yeah, but, uh, we're, we're very comfortable

00:57:57.560 and you, you, the, the zooms that we have with these people, we've got Republicans, Democrats,

00:58:04.220 every type of person, but you know what they have, they have souls and they are absolutely

00:58:09.320 committed to these families to get them answers. Well, and the other thing is the, the cops are so

00:58:15.220 undermanned right now. And just in general, they're not going to devote resources to something that

00:58:19.460 happened 50, 60 years ago. You know, they don't have the time or the manpower for that. Um,

00:58:25.180 jumping back, something you said reminded me of something I want to ask you about the hairs,

00:58:29.280 the four hairs that they have from what they believe is a suspect. Um, you know,

00:58:34.580 they have that technology now where you can, you can take DNA and create a picture of the person.

00:58:42.260 They can find out enough about the person's ethnic heritage and so on. They can engineer a picture

00:58:49.000 that they will say, this, this person was Nordic. This person probably had blue eyes.

00:58:54.420 This person probably had a nose that looked like this. It's crazy, but you know, they do it on

00:58:59.000 Dateline all the time. Um, so has anybody ever tried to do that with those hairs?

00:59:04.960 Been there doing that. Oh, Oh, we are not being given the hairs, but let me tell you, I have

00:59:11.980 three attorneys, all pro bono. They're going to convince Riverside and the other departments,

00:59:17.360 hey, let us end the pain of these families. And, and that's our approach. Uh, and, uh, that's about

00:59:27.040 to happen. Okay. So, because you think, you know, who did it and that leads us back to Gary Francis

00:59:33.380 Post, who after looking at tons of suspects, you believe is the guy. The first thing I said to my

00:59:41.560 team was, is Gary Post dead or alive? Because if he's alive, we're going to have to run a lot by

00:59:47.500 him. He's dead, which is good. Maybe on a couple of fronts, if he really was the guy. And also you

00:59:52.660 can't defame a dead man. So, uh, let's talk about Gary Post. Who's no longer here to defend himself

00:59:58.720 and tell us, what's your elevator pitch for why he did it?

01:00:04.660 Gary, uh, we got tipped, uh, to this case by a wonderful man. Uh, and this man was a TV anchor

01:00:14.540 in Salinas who had one of these members of our, of, of Gary Francis Post. Let me start this,

01:00:23.460 this way. Gary Francis Post left San Francisco area. Uh, he became a union painter. We have his

01:00:31.660 certificate. He moved up to a small town in the high Sierra. Uh, we have the, uh, background on his

01:00:38.800 move. Uh, and he befriended everyone as a painter. Uh, but when you're finding paint spots on a watch

01:00:49.160 in Riverside, uh, and when you find out that he has the same shoe size and has the, uh, same military

01:00:59.040 smarts on coding, we could go down a list of about 15 different things that have convinced us we have

01:01:07.540 it. And among those 15 are nine witnesses who, when one of Gary Francis Post's posse members,

01:01:17.620 as he called it a criminal gang, ran for it in 2014, it freaked out the town. They had no idea

01:01:25.580 the painter could be the Zodiac and that's changed. And, and to this day, we believe the best evidence

01:01:34.320 is in that town. Now, wait, let me stop. Let me stop. Let's talk about the posse. Cause people are

01:01:40.000 like, what do you mean posse that we do know enough about Gary Post to know he, he didn't exactly spend

01:01:45.700 his youth gathering friends the way the average person does. Right. Well, uh, when Gary moved up

01:01:54.740 to this small town, he found a single mom, married her, a very simpleton woman who is still alive and,

01:02:03.640 uh, loved by a lot of people. Uh, he met this woman with a child and moved them up to a very

01:02:11.140 one street town in the high Sierra, just like the old West. And he became a father figure to

01:02:17.280 about a half dozen kids who barely got through high school. Uh, and they became his so-called

01:02:23.420 posse. Well, they became a criminal posse. He not only trained them how to avoid cops, he taught them

01:02:30.660 how to take a pipe bomb and make it a bomb that could blow up a house. When cops moved into that town,

01:02:37.000 uh, he would, uh, throw rocks through the bedrooms to get them out. He had this posse up there from

01:02:45.360 about 85 and they pretty much broke it up in about 2005. And there are about 10 people he was involved

01:02:54.960 in with this posse. He'd never take more than two or three up in the mountains at a time with mules,

01:03:01.060 horses, and so forth. And what, and so the one guy escaped, ran from the posse. And what, what's his

01:03:10.920 story? Will was one of the last ones. Uh, he, uh, appeared in 87 in town and Gary befriended him.

01:03:20.320 He got in trouble with the law and Gary was the unofficial lawyer in town. He had law books covering

01:03:26.280 his a-frame and convinced him, uh, that he could get them out of his charge. It was a minor charge

01:03:32.580 and he introduced him to the gang and the gang would meet in the woods and have bonfires. And he

01:03:40.100 would, uh, he would provide marijuana and liquor. And he, in essence, uh, became like a fagin. Uh,

01:03:50.260 he trained them, uh, he trained them to kill every type of animal they ever saw.

01:03:55.560 Like fagin from Oliver Twist. Is that what you mean?

01:03:58.760 Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And, and so, and, and, and that's how, uh, everybody loved this man,

01:04:07.160 but then he taught them how to kill everything on site and they watched him. One story that has been

01:04:14.480 told to us by Will, that's the man who ran away, was now in his mid fifties at about 2000, he started

01:04:22.760 reading books and he loved books and he started getting into true stories. And then one day he's

01:04:30.660 given a book of serial killers and he opens it up and he looks at the sketch in San Francisco and he

01:04:36.420 has, holy cow, that's our guy. Now, all these kids were brainwashed, took him 10 years to break

01:04:44.480 away. He collected, uh, uh, examples of, uh, uh, his writing. And he, uh, in essence was chased out

01:04:57.800 of town when the other posse members heard he was gathering these things and post literally tried to

01:05:05.160 kill him with a hammer at 70 years old in his shed when he heard this. And everybody came when the fight

01:05:12.260 was going on and the kid ran for it, took him a, he hiked through the mountain. They were all in

01:05:18.500 tremendous shape. He hiked through the mountains. He stayed off of roads. He hiked all the way to

01:05:23.060 Sierra, all the way to Sacramento and walked into a newsroom. And he said, the worst thing, Megan,

01:05:30.300 that a news person wants to hear. I have a long story to tell you. And, and I was the guy who had to

01:05:37.460 answer that at CBS. And I, and I, and I know what it, it paraphrases what I would say. And that is,

01:05:43.640 can't you cut it down? No one would listen to him. So what did he do? He walks to San Francisco

01:05:53.360 off of the freeway through the desert, through the land, gets to San Francisco, talks to newsrooms,

01:06:01.340 same problem. Then he talks to the FBI later. Nobody would confirm it.

01:06:08.140 What's he saying to them? What's he saying? He's he saying I've found the Zodiac killer or

01:06:12.160 what's he saying? I know who the Zodiac is and I have a long story I need to tell you.

01:06:17.620 So no one would listen to him. Well, he goes down to Salinas because that's where he grew up with his

01:06:22.900 parents. And he said, you know, there's that newsman that I grew up with. I wonder if he's still there.

01:06:29.080 And that is Dale Julen. Dale is a retired newsman now. And Dale, he comes to his door

01:06:37.240 at the station and said, I have a long story to tell you. Well, Dale takes him to lunch. Now you

01:06:44.040 might ask, what is an anchor at the TV station spending several hours, as he called it, a wacko?

01:06:51.100 You know, I took a chance with a wacko. Well, here's the interesting story. Remember,

01:06:54.760 we mentioned the buses and the threats to blow them up. Dale was a Boy Scout on one of those buses.

01:07:02.540 And he remembered the fear and he looked at and he never forgot it. And when he looked into the eyes

01:07:08.660 of this 50 year old kid and this homeless guy smells, he's been out in the street.

01:07:14.380 He took the chance. And that's how we have the case.

01:07:18.420 So this all started from him seeing a sketch in a book of what somebody, I assume this is based on

01:07:30.180 the eyewitness IDs that we've been discussing, said the Zodiac looked like. And that sketch was

01:07:35.240 so close to your suspect that he said, it's him. Like that was enough. That plus all the weird

01:07:43.540 ways that they were living together. Yes. And, and what's very important to know when he was at

01:07:49.980 the air force base in Indiana, uh, he was in a horrible Jeep accident. The driver died, hit a

01:07:57.260 bridge. And our guy had Gary post, Gary post had chest injuries, brain injury. They had to go in to

01:08:07.140 take care, fix the brain. He lost all his teeth. They pulled them all out to save his life. And when he

01:08:12.860 got out of that months later, he's back at that base and what's sitting in the front, don't drink

01:08:18.920 and drive the Jeep all torn up. And he demands, but I got to get out of here. I can't see that every

01:08:26.000 day. I can't see it every day. Well, what did they do? They sent him to the worst place for a radar guy

01:08:31.960 on the ice of Greenland. One guy in there with the screen. And we believe that's where in the

01:08:42.460 combination of the brain damage and other things he faced, we believe that's where he lost his mind.

01:08:48.020 He came back. Uh, he wound up in, uh, in Vandenberg air force base, which is Santa Barbara.

01:08:55.740 And, uh, he was there until, until, uh, I'm trying to think, let me think for a minute.

01:09:05.980 He was there for three years and then he got out and moved to San Francisco to be a painter.

01:09:12.500 So the cities line up.

01:09:15.260 Oh yeah.

01:09:16.880 That would be one of the first things in check.

01:09:18.740 Uh, there's a murder in Santa Barbara, less than 15 minutes away from that air force base.

01:09:25.760 And that was a couple on ditch day of high school killed just like the Navy couple in San Diego

01:09:32.980 sniper. They found bullets all over the sand. He stuffed their bodies into a homeless shelter

01:09:40.020 there on the cliffs. Uh, and they have the sheriff in that town, uh, found the boxes.

01:09:48.180 That he discarded there with the bullets and those shells with the code numbers on the shell box

01:09:55.440 matched the gun shop on base at Vandenberg for hunters. It was the only gun shop and the only

01:10:03.900 place you could buy bullets at the time for a hundred miles. Why wouldn't the cops have been

01:10:09.700 our suspect, irrespective of whether that's Zodiac, a Zodiac murder or Gary post. Why wouldn't

01:10:16.460 the cops have been all over that base at the time, even with the technology they had then

01:10:21.040 saying, we want to witness, we want to interview everybody. We want to know, you know, who's been

01:10:25.460 in here, who on base, like figure out where everybody's been. Like everybody who's on the

01:10:29.540 base should have been a suspect.

01:10:31.800 Well, it was about, uh, 15 to 25 minute drive. Uh, the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's department

01:10:40.000 held a big news conference several years later and say, we have looked at the forensics. Now we

01:10:46.000 have looked at these things. This was five, eight years later after that, uh, that murder of the

01:10:52.460 couple. Uh, and they looked at it and they felt there was some connection, but San Francisco did not

01:11:00.040 accept them as a official Zodiac case that happened in Oceanside happened in San Diego is happened in,

01:11:08.580 uh, Lake Tahoe. Those are the other outliers that we strongly believe are, are the same man.

01:11:15.880 Why? Like, why, why won't they accept it as an official? Like, what does it have to have to be

01:11:21.140 deemed an official Zodiac case by authorities? Well, if you're talking about today, or are you

01:11:27.420 talking about back then? Well, I guess both. Cause it should be updated if they decided no back then.

01:11:33.520 And now today I've taken another look, but like, what did they need a letter from Zodiac with his

01:11:38.240 little cipher and saying, I did that one. Well, again, these departments at that time were very

01:11:45.760 small, no technology. Uh, they had their favorite detective. They had their favorite chief. They had

01:11:52.420 their favorite driver. They had their favorite, uh, sniper. And those are the ones they lied on.

01:11:57.860 There was no methodical, uh, who's the best person for this. We know a forensic guy who's in another

01:12:03.720 County. Let's bring them in. That was minimal back then. Now, even today, uh, you know, if,

01:12:11.740 if you looked at it today, uh, they're all so busy. I mean, Riverside, God bless them. Look,

01:12:18.120 they have over 200 unsolved murders in their own town. Do they really want to pick up a case? As you

01:12:23.740 pointed out earlier, 50 years ago. Yeah. So it's those, that's the dilemma, but that's why we have

01:12:30.540 this incredible team. So we put pictures on the board while you were talking, our YouTube audience

01:12:35.280 can check this out and you should, if you're listening to this via podcast, just go to YouTube

01:12:38.900 and check this out. But it's a drawing 1969 of what I understand is the Zodiac based. That's the,

01:12:47.160 that's the sketch artists rendering of the Zodiac killer based on the people who survived his

01:12:53.680 attacks. And then you have a picture next to it. And that's of your suspect that that right there

01:13:00.160 with like on the right with the, the actual photo is Gary post. They do look, they do look similar.

01:13:06.080 I, I mean, I'm, I'm going to say, and you're, we've got the red circle around what you think are

01:13:10.800 scars. We, that we know those are Gary Francis post scars on the photo in 1963. That was his last year

01:13:21.400 of military service on the left. It's 68. So it's five years apart. Uh, the scars, according to my

01:13:28.780 FBI members, and there's about, uh, 10 of them of the 40 members said, this can't be, can't be put

01:13:37.080 ignored. This can't be, this can't be ignored is what they said to us. Look at the jawline.

01:13:43.080 It is a match and he's Nordic from Europe. He has two brothers that are still alive and we plan to

01:13:52.200 talk to them too. And what is the other picture of a man wearing a little Zodiac sign with a,

01:14:00.200 like a grocery bag over his head at that sketch? What is that? Cause I know you've got a split

01:14:05.240 screen of, um, Gary walking in the snow in 1974 up against what is labeled Zodiac 69 Lake attack.

01:14:14.900 But what is that Zodiac? Where are we getting that sketch from?

01:14:19.240 That sketch was done by an artist with the help of the police. The police had original sketches

01:14:24.400 of the Zodiac there. And that was defined or refined, I should say, by some artists and has been

01:14:32.480 used in several documentaries. And it does, it does appear to that there is even a police sketch that

01:14:39.460 has the so-called bag or the, the head cover. And again, this was the one we talked about the only

01:14:45.620 daytime. So he worked very hard to be covered up for that. And this is like the reason, obviously

01:14:52.260 you have a pose of, of the actual, you know, Gary post right next to that. And it could be anybody,

01:14:58.500 you know, that we have no idea, but the build is definitely consistent. And Gary posts build was

01:15:05.580 consistent with what was described by those witnesses. Same weight, same hair color as found

01:15:13.320 in the hand in Riverside, uh, same height, same shoe size. And no fingerprints at any of these crime

01:15:22.860 scenes that we know are Zodiac or the ones you suspect. No, there were, there were fingerprints

01:15:28.060 found, but not of the victim or the suspect in Riverside and all the others. They found a bunch

01:15:33.620 of, look, this was a VW days back in the sixties. You remember the, the old stories where you, how many

01:15:39.420 kids can you put in a VW? Yeah. I was one of those kids. Oh, no comment. Well, anyways, so that in

01:15:46.880 essence, that's how it was treated. They went and looked at every print and couldn't match anything to

01:15:51.920 any particular suspects in Riverside and elsewhere. Again, I think he gave a pretty good explanation

01:15:58.220 and that was putting the glue on his fingertips. So you couldn't find his fingerprints anywhere.

01:16:03.080 Well, but if you didn't find, if you didn't find photo, if you didn't find prints of the victims

01:16:06.900 either, then that it's a different explanation, right? Then he would have had to wipe it down.

01:16:11.580 Yeah. Yeah. And, and because he only did two or three net, uh, knife stabbings, everything else

01:16:19.720 involved bullets and those bullets have been recovered. He did not pick them up. And again,

01:16:25.800 I think it's because he had, uh, the idea that the fingerprints would not show up. But as I said,

01:16:31.940 we have a incredible lab up in Salt Lake. Francine is the name of the owner and she has developed where

01:16:40.660 they can literally dunk a shell or a rock involved in a murder into this liquid and off falls the DNA.

01:16:48.440 How did you get the bullets? Wouldn't the police departments be holding onto those and not giving

01:16:53.020 them to you? Well, we don't have the bullets, not the bullets, but the shells. We went, we don't,

01:16:59.720 we don't have the bullets that were found on the ground. What we have are the bullets that he gifted

01:17:05.380 to several people in his small town. Uh, and they held onto them and then they contact, this was only

01:17:13.400 two years after he died. He died in 19, I'm sorry, in 20, 2018. He died in 2018 and he gave them all the

01:17:23.940 shells and, uh, the hammer hits, uh, pieces of the guns. Uh, he found artists. He found people that

01:17:32.720 are collectors. Well, they stayed in the boxes in the attics or in the closets for two years. And then

01:17:39.100 we got a call from the group and said, we heard about your Riverside situation. We think we have

01:17:45.440 the Zodiac here. And we have nine witnesses up there that grew up with the Zodiac and phenomenal

01:17:51.880 stories. But wait, if they're giving you boxes of bullets that they believe Gary post handled

01:18:00.080 and you run a test on them, you should be able to figure out whether those are ideally,

01:18:05.540 whether those are Gary posts fingerprints that whether he handled those boxes, but that doesn't

01:18:11.220 answer the big question because we don't have fingerprints at a crime scene that we know the

01:18:16.820 Zodiac was at. No crime scene, but we do have hairs and we believe the DNA of those hairs are going

01:18:25.100 to match the DNA on the bullets. Oh, I see. You're going to get, okay. So you're looking for DNA.

01:18:30.980 That's the last DNA in the whole world on the whole case. And they're not putting, here's the other

01:18:36.300 thing, you know, about CODIS. Does that need an explanation? Please. CODIS is the FBI's database

01:18:44.240 for DNA. And by law in California, when somebody commits a felony, they have to have their DNA put up on

01:18:54.060 CODIS to see if he has other victims, whether it be murder or rape or whatever. Believe it or not,

01:19:01.400 we brought DNA, Dale, Dale Julen brought DNA to San Francisco and Vallejo and said, hold on to this.

01:19:09.620 We may have a suspect in the future. This is before we were involved two years ago. And so Dale left it

01:19:16.960 with them and they thanked them. They passed it around to the cities. Nothing would match because

01:19:22.440 remember their evidence, whether it be a licked envelope or the shell casing, none were secured

01:19:30.520 forensically. They weren't even envisioning DNA testing. We have it in the hairs and we have it

01:19:37.800 from the shells. We also have, you'll love this. We even have his backpacker sleeping mat. He slept on

01:19:45.740 for 30 years with his posse. Oh man. And we found DNA on that too. And that's going to be compared.

01:19:52.760 Hmm. All right. Here's a, here's a different question I have for you. Back when I was on NBC,

01:19:59.520 we did an interview. I interviewed the grandson of a man named Ed Edwards. The grandson's name was Wayne

01:20:10.740 Wolf. And he was coming out with a documentary at the time called, it was him, uh, the many murders

01:20:19.300 of Ed Edwards. And the grandson's story was just absolutely compelling. It was like, he had done

01:20:24.300 some DNA searching. It turned out his dad had a different, whatever. There was some biological link

01:20:29.100 that was, that was missing that he'd been told was legit. And long story short, Ed Edwards was a

01:20:35.860 murderer. That seems clear whether he committed any of the Zodiac murders less clear, but this

01:20:43.180 documentary done by the grandson and featuring someone named former Sergeant detective John

01:20:49.620 Cameron says Ed Edwards was the Zodiac killer. They said he pleaded guilty to five murders, including

01:20:59.000 couples on lovers' lanes. They said, um, if you solve two of the cryptograms that the Zodiac put out,

01:21:08.960 because he said, if you Zodiac said, if you solve these, you'll have my name. And they said they

01:21:14.080 solved it. And they, they determined that if you take Edward Edwards, that name, Edward Edwards,

01:21:21.460 and spell it backwards. It's 13 characters. You reverse the letters. It's, it reveals it matches

01:21:29.740 up with the cipher, but you'd have to know the name Edward Edwards in order to do that. And they

01:21:36.280 only went there because they knew Ed Edwards was, had murdered others and they decided to cross frame

01:21:41.980 it. Now I will say this in my interview, this former Sergeant detective John Cameron basically said

01:21:49.260 that this Ed Edwards killed everybody ever. Like he, it was like Jimmy Hoffa, John Benet Ramsey,

01:21:57.500 Scott, uh, Lacey Peterson. Yes. Lacey Peterson. So, which we all disclosed, you know, we were having

01:22:03.420 an interesting interview, but have you ever heard of Ed Edwards? And what do you, what do you think?

01:22:10.080 There are a half dozen we like to call, you know, in Cooper, Cooper land and DB Cooper,

01:22:15.160 we call them Cooper ice. They're called Zodiacers, uh, people that have theories, have some interesting

01:22:21.980 links, uh, and Hoffa dice is the other group that thinks they know where he's buried. And, and, uh,

01:22:29.560 surprise, surprise. We believe we know where he's buried. That's our next one.

01:22:33.740 Wait, Gary post didn't kill Jimmy Hoffa in your story. Did he?

01:22:37.140 Uh, Bigfoot did. Okay. So it all goes full circle. I appreciate that.

01:22:42.940 Yes. No, look, everybody has their own theories. I appreciate that. Uh, there are some things they

01:22:48.660 have that we integrate into our investigations, for example, on, uh, accurate, uh, locations and,

01:22:55.040 and ages, and you know how the information changes. So you have to be really meticulous.

01:23:00.000 Uh, and look, we feel we're the only ones, all these people have theories, but you know what?

01:23:08.100 We're the only ones with a 40 member cold case team and the only ones with evidence.

01:23:14.300 And that's why we're very drawn to this. The story of him, of Gary post losing his mind

01:23:20.080 and, you know, sort of going crazy is interesting. One of his letters said, I I'm, how did he put it?

01:23:26.440 He said something. He said, I am insane. He owned his mental illness. Um, and he clearly is. If you

01:23:33.780 read the body of the Zodiac letters, it's not like a Ted Bundy who's, who seems very logical and

01:23:41.220 brilliant and methodical though evil, right? This guy sounds like a lunatic that I'm amassing

01:23:47.440 slaves for the afterlife. And now I think I've got enough and the rest of you are all going to be

01:23:52.760 screwed. Cause you don't have any sleep. Like he doesn't sound well. No, he he's not. And, and

01:23:58.400 there was one example, uh, from will, uh, and I sent you some footage of will, uh, what's interesting

01:24:06.160 about who escaped. I'm sorry. He's the guy who escaped. Exactly. Uh, when will ran for it. Uh,

01:24:14.360 one thing that we, uh, learned from will was there was a time when they went up in, in the mountains,

01:24:21.000 three or four of the posse members with him. And he hung some meat in a container up in a tall tree.

01:24:29.640 And they went out in the, with the horses came back several days later, he unfolds a chair and

01:24:38.700 on the tree will notices. There are salmon hooks on the tree. And what had happened is there were

01:24:46.520 three bears leading to death on those salmon hooks, trying to get to the meat. And what is supposed to

01:24:53.900 he sits down and taunts and laughs at the animals till they die for hours. Oh God. This is why we say

01:25:01.940 this is the Zodiac. He would immerse his arms. We have photos of him immersing his arms into the

01:25:08.720 innards, the insides of dead animals, pulling out pieces, laughing about them, throwing them.

01:25:14.960 This man was in his sixties and fifties and seventies doing this with the posse.

01:25:20.680 Well, that was one of the kids had lots of nightmares after this.

01:25:25.100 That was one of my questions for you. How did he live out the rest of his life? Right? Cause you

01:25:29.060 know he died in 2018. Was anyone onto him prior to that? Had anybody, I mean,

01:25:34.320 Will had been running around saying, I think I know who it is, but had anybody looked into him,

01:25:39.480 had police ever visited him and was he married? Does he have a family? Was there anybody that you

01:25:44.720 could talk to about his mental state, how he was, et cetera? We have phenomenal witnesses. Um, and,

01:25:53.100 uh, it starts with, uh, neighbors. Uh, you want to believe this? The Zodiac and his wife became

01:25:59.980 babysitters for one of the neighbors. And that went on for seven to eight years. And the young girl,

01:26:07.660 uh, he would take them into the woods, his stepson and this young girl, he'd take them into the woods,

01:26:14.800 give them guns and show them how to shoot. And, and, uh, this was children in the ages of five to

01:26:22.860 15. And the girl told us that she was going out. He would take her out sometimes five days a week

01:26:30.760 to shoot in the woods. That was the babysitting. Maybe that's not unusual. I mean, like I'm a city

01:26:36.820 girl. I don't like in more rural parts of America. Uh, the rest of it's not so normal, but like,

01:26:42.380 wouldn't he, if he was this crazy, wouldn't everybody who knew him say, Oh my God, Gary nutcase.

01:26:48.700 And he, he got in trouble with the law here and have a long history of interactions with the

01:26:53.980 authorities. When we'll went to the authorities and the FBI, they said, we don't believe you,

01:27:00.500 but guess what? We have learned from the town that the FBI actually went up there. Now, the thing about

01:27:06.120 this town, it's on the top of the mountain. And when you're going up there, they usually call ahead

01:27:11.520 because the roads wash out the local sheriffs and our Zodiac suspect was friends with a couple

01:27:18.900 of deputies that we believe they tipped him because the minute they showed up, he somehow had

01:27:25.020 dementia. He couldn't remember things and he would, uh, uh, crash cars. He'd put sugar in gas tanks and

01:27:34.440 act crazy. He even told some of the kids, kids now in their fifties that I, I knew this is how I'll

01:27:41.580 never be put in jail. And it almost worked. He, he did abuse his wife and have the last two years

01:27:47.960 in jail, but, uh, that was just for abuse. And he died in jail. Didn't he ever, did he, I feel like

01:27:57.020 the Zodiac like would have left a note, you know, he's a prolific writer and loved writing notes about

01:28:04.600 himself. Wouldn't the Zodiac have owned it upon his death? No, he chose to, uh, he did tell a half

01:28:14.720 dozen people. We have three affidavits, two of them from prisoners, one from will where he admits who he

01:28:21.880 is. And we brought those to a courtroom in a very remote County. And again, we have them, but no one

01:28:28.180 has looked at them. Uh, and, and that'll be part of the documentary that we're pursuing is revealing, uh,

01:28:37.720 that he did tell three or four people very close to him that he was the Zodiac. By the way, when he did

01:28:44.560 die, that girl that was babysat by him and his wife, when he died, the widow was called, uh, got a call

01:28:53.820 from a 30 something woman. And that was the little girl. And the minute she got on the phone with the

01:29:01.620 widow, the widow said, I'm sorry. And I'm paraphrasing. I'm sorry. I never told you about

01:29:08.360 Gary. And I'm sorry, uh, uh, for what's happened. It was a stunning and they were stunned. That woman

01:29:16.280 was stunned to get that call. Then another neighbor called her and said, and she confirmed the same

01:29:23.260 story with the other neighbor that, but I mean, it could just be, I'm sorry, Gary was such a bastard

01:29:28.660 and that you got stuck with the worst babysitter ever, as opposed to, I'm sorry, you grew up being

01:29:34.080 tutelaged, you know, with tutelage from the Zodiac. Well, we do have her quoted talking about

01:29:40.680 the Zodiac and the murders, but you know how it is. Like in the same way these guys said,

01:29:46.280 Ed Edwards did it. Maybe this guy, Gary was like, and I'm the Zodiac too. Well, I will tell you when

01:29:53.340 the FBI went up there in 2014, after we'll ran for it. Um, what happened then is that the town split

01:30:02.600 half believed he could be the other half said, no, he's a painter. We love him. He's a great guy.

01:30:08.440 This is a town of 300 people, very small. And when several, we have nine witnesses, six of them,

01:30:17.160 very strong. When they heard he could have been the Zodiac, these folks slept on their couches in

01:30:23.940 their closets for months. They were freaked out, freaked out. And that's what happened to the town.

01:30:32.600 When Will ran for it, it split the town in two. This is all you say was on the top of a mountain.

01:30:38.240 This is in Northern California. This is in the high Sierra. Yes. Northern California.

01:30:43.400 Okay. And was anybody ever able to find people who knew Gary in his youth, you know, talk about

01:30:49.740 what he was like back then before he had these injuries. Have you, do you have any idea of his

01:30:54.440 childhood background? We have some of his veterans who talked about and remembers when he lost his

01:31:00.240 mind, uh, and remembers how it affected him, that accident and the surgery. That's one of his

01:31:06.360 veterans. We tracked him down. Uh, we have neighbors that knew him that worked with him in his paint

01:31:12.000 company and they all think he's a great guy. Well, he, he, he divided his world. You should know he

01:31:19.480 never went to funerals. He never went to weddings. When he went to the market, he'd make his wife go in

01:31:25.200 and sit in the car. He was off the grid, Megan. There was, you know, no cell phones, nothing. And so

01:31:32.280 he stayed off the grid in this little town, uh, until he passed. And then out came the bullets from

01:31:38.860 neighbors. Wow. So what do you think? I mean, like, I know that not everybody's cooperative

01:31:45.620 and you're still working on it and you're going to do your test, but do you think we'll know,

01:31:50.160 do you think you'll get this to a place where it is beyond doubt that it was this guy?

01:31:56.040 I think it's going to happen because of our three attorneys. I hate to go that route,

01:32:02.400 but we've taken this evidence from Riverside to the task force forces on DNA and these hairs.

01:32:10.780 We've been all the way up to the attorney general of California who turned us back to San Francisco.

01:32:17.380 Nobody wants to deal with this 50 year old headache, but look, all we need is the hairs to compare.

01:32:22.960 They're sitting in that fridge. We have DNA to compare it to. Uh, it's just a matter of time.

01:32:30.640 And the FBI, which did the lab work on the hairs, I think it's going to be awfully hard.

01:32:37.520 We hope awfully hard for the FBI to not cooperate. We went to them a couple of years ago,

01:32:43.920 not only with our Hoffa story, but Zodiac. We met with the attorney, the, uh, agent in charge in Los

01:32:50.940 Angeles who happened to be another, you know, Hey Tom, I know a guy who knows a guy. One of our team

01:32:56.560 members was buddies with him on the JTTF, the terrorism task force in Chicago. So he arranged for

01:33:03.380 me and our member, Jim Zimmerman to meet with this agent. And he looked at the evidence and he

01:33:10.260 literally said, I think you've got him. And I think this is Hoffa. I'm going to take it to the crime

01:33:16.800 division. This agent took it to the crime division three times and they turned it down.

01:33:24.620 Well, who did kill Jimmy Hoffa? Now that we're down that lane,

01:33:29.000 I don't feel like I need to know. Well, we can't go there, but I will tell you he's, uh, buried, uh,

01:33:33.800 in, uh, the Great Lakes area and, uh, no, you know, I can't give you where, but, but I will tell you

01:33:42.420 that, uh, we sent a van up there and a couple of my guys with vests and hard hats and big foot long

01:33:50.360 sandwiches and sat where the exact spot he was buried. We were brought to on a deathbed cop,

01:33:57.840 a corrupt cop who worked for a mobster who cased Hoffa. Uh, that cop on his deathbed gave us the

01:34:06.820 exact location in a map. Uh, he gave it to his niece who was another cop and that niece brought

01:34:13.960 it to her boyfriend of 10 years and he's a cop. And he said, and she said, I've got six brothers

01:34:20.140 and sisters. I don't want to break this. They'll go after my family. And the boyfriend said,

01:34:25.500 that's fine. You know, you do what you think is best. 25 years later, that boyfriend's on my team,

01:34:33.100 Jim Zimmerman. And he came into my office and said, you know, I have a 10 year girlfriend that

01:34:38.260 thinks she knows where Hoffa is. We went there with Jim and some other cops with a van set up,

01:34:46.080 like we're workers, cops waving at us, rent a cops. And suddenly out rolls a, uh, ground penetration

01:34:54.980 radar machine from the van. We go to the exact spot in the middle of nowhere. And there it goes down

01:35:01.700 five feet to clay. You can't see through clay. And the geophysicist that looked at it said, you know,

01:35:09.900 I usually use words like anomaly and disturbance, but this is a backhoe job

01:35:15.520 in the middle of nowhere. And so we are now coordinating with universities and the state

01:35:23.040 involved and the attorney general probably to tent it so that there's no interruption because if we're

01:35:30.140 wrong, we're wrong. It's 50, 50. That's what I was going to ask you. If you're wrong and if you do

01:35:35.040 get a test on these hairs and they don't match Gary, will you accept that?

01:35:39.900 There's a lot of things that match Gary. I'm not worried about that one at all.

01:35:44.340 I really am not. There's so much I haven't told you. You know, there is so many pieces of evidence,

01:35:50.780 so many clues, so many quotes, uh, affidavits, uh, shoe size. I mean, everything is all in the right

01:36:00.500 spot. Now I think, and again, I think it's, it's, I have quotes from friends at DOJ, uh, friends at,

01:36:09.740 uh, police departments that I've known because of my teaching. Uh, and they've told me, Tom,

01:36:15.180 don't go there. You're going to just be, you're going to be embarrassing us. Literally. That's

01:36:19.720 what they said. Others said, I can't after saying, getting very excited. They go to the head of their

01:36:24.980 department and they said, no, no, no. I, you know, I can't do it. Nobody wants to be embarrassed.

01:36:30.260 Hmm. So that's what we're facing. And that's where we hope these attorneys can help.

01:36:35.520 Well, we will certainly continue to follow it and have you back once you get those results,

01:36:41.160 if you want to talk about it. Fascinating discussion. Thank you so much for walking us

01:36:46.120 through such a complex case and, uh, letting us understand how this, how this thing went down.

01:36:51.160 Megan, I really appreciate your invitation. If I may, I want to mention to the audience that there

01:36:57.460 are three stats they need to understand. One is quarter million. Another one is 6,000. The other

01:37:05.620 one is 5%. There are a quarter million unsolved murders now in this country, and it grows by 6,000

01:37:12.760 a year. And only 5% of departments now can afford cold case teams. That's what this is all about.

01:37:21.720 And my wife and I are expanding. We are now a.org nonprofit. We've funded it for 10 years on this

01:37:29.620 team to, we want to spread these teams out in every state because there's no more cops coming.

01:37:36.920 We're getting retired cops to help solve these problems.

01:37:39.760 Tom. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. God bless Colbert and his team do some truly

01:37:47.060 important work, but what about his theory on the Zodiac killer's identity? It is just a theory

01:37:53.180 later this week. We're going to bring you a fascinating interview with Paul holes. Paul

01:37:59.320 is the real deal. He's a former cold case investigator who really was the guy. I mean,

01:38:05.740 he was part of a team, but he really was the guy who helped solve the Golden State killer case.

01:38:11.160 Okay. This is a guy, life, lifelong law enforcement. He's got a book too on the cold cases that he's

01:38:16.500 looked into and so on. And one of them is the Zodiac. So I asked him about this interview with Tom

01:38:23.200 Colbert and what he thinks. And here's what he said. Can I ask you about Zodiac? Because we had a guy come

01:38:28.840 on the program. The guy's name is Tom Colbert and he made the strongest case he could that the Zodiac

01:38:36.220 killer was a man named Gary Post. And I asked him about a show I did on NBC in which the the

01:38:43.420 filmmakers, because they had done a documentary, were saying the man that the Zodiac killer was

01:38:47.400 Ed Edwards. And he said, no, it wasn't Ed. I'm very certain it was it was Gary Post and presented

01:38:53.420 the case for Gary Post. As somebody who's looked into the Zodiac killer, who do you think it was?

01:38:59.020 What do you make of these pronouncements that it was definitively Ed Edwards or was definitively

01:39:03.880 Gary Post? I put no weight on them whatsoever. You know, I got involved in the Zodiac case in the

01:39:10.820 late 90s into the early 2000s. I was dealing with the early online sluice during that timeframe.

01:39:17.060 You know, they all have what they call their POIs or persons of interest. And they build these

01:39:22.440 circumstantial cases. And oftentimes, they're way off the mark, even with the circumstantial cases.

01:39:29.140 But they miss, you know, what we look at is we have to find a nexus to the crime. We can't just say,

01:39:36.140 well, this person lived in an area where these crimes were committed or this or that.

01:39:39.820 But working Golden State Killer, I have built tremendous circumstantial cases against numerous

01:39:49.560 individuals. Some of these individuals, I think, to this day, circumstantially match up better than

01:39:54.960 D'Angelo. And only I eliminated them with DNA. So when you start working these cases with this type

01:40:01.600 of notoriety, you cast such a wide net of suspects, you know, 10,000 people being looked at.

01:40:09.820 You are going to find individuals that have circumstantial aspects to them to where you go,

01:40:17.160 wow, this can't be coincident. It must be him. And I will tell you, it's coincidence.

01:40:23.080 Personally, the only way I am going to believe that the Zodiac has been identified is if they do get

01:40:30.660 that objective identifying evidence that shows this is the guy. Do they match DNA,

01:40:38.140 if they get DNA from, let's say, envelopes or stamps that the Zodiac sent in? Can they get DNA off of

01:40:45.160 the bindings that the Zodiac brought with them to Lake Berry Essacy? Or does somebody find a shoebox,

01:40:52.600 you know, in their, maybe their dad's house after he dies that has, you know, Paul Stein's bloody shirt

01:40:59.860 in it? You know, something like that. Now I'm interested, but I've seen it too many times.

01:41:06.880 They throw these, these names out there and this is, this is a Zodiac. I'm not convinced. And I don't

01:41:14.280 think the Zodiac has been identified yet. For now, the mystery continues, but we're going to stay on it.

01:41:21.280 We will bring you updates, if any, and we hope that you will join us tomorrow for hot crime summer

01:41:27.720 and the terrifying case. Oh, this is awful. Of the DC sniper who did it, how they did it,

01:41:34.380 and what we can learn from that experience. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll talk then.

01:41:41.300 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

01:41:51.280 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.

The Megyn Kelly Show - June 15, 2022

The Zodiac Killer： A Megyn Kelly Show True Crime Special ｜ Ep. 342

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