The Megyn Kelly Show - 20220615_the-zodiac-killer-a-megyn-kelly-show-true-crime-sp
Aired: 2022-06-15
Duration: 01:42:13


=== Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show (03:46) ===

[00:00:35]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:01:11]  He sent letters to major newspapers detailing the killings and mocking the police.
[00:01:16]  Some of those letters included ciphers, which he demanded be printed on the front pages of the papers.
[00:01:23]  In a chilling 1969 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, the killer stated: Schoolchildren make nice targets.
[00:01:31]  Think about that, sick, sick, causing increased safety concerns across the region.
[00:01:37]  This went on for years as he claimed more and more victims.
[00:01:41]  Now, there are five confirmed Zodiac killings, but the real number is believed to be much higher.
[00:01:48]  And after years of investigating, our case here remains technically unsolved.
[00:01:54]  But our guest today, Tom Colbert, is an investigative journalist and author and founder of a group called the Case Breakers that deals in cold cases.
[00:02:04]  And his team of highly trained experts has spent years investigating the Zodiac.
[00:02:10]  They think they know who it is.
[00:02:13]  Before we get to Tom, I want to tell you that you're going to hear during this show who Tom and his team believe the Zodiac killer was.
[00:02:20]  We're going to discuss his theory at length, and he is convincing.
[00:02:24]  But I also want to point out to you that we do not know who the Zodiac killer was, and there are so many theories on this.
[00:02:30]  I could have put on a different expert with a different theory today.
[00:02:34]  In fact, on my NBC show back in February 2018, I had two guests on who were convinced they knew who the Zodiac killer was.
[00:02:41]  Listen to that.
[00:02:42]  Why?
[00:02:43]  What is your best evidence that Ed Edwards was the Zodiac killer?
[00:02:47]  There were two cryptograms sent in by the Zodiac killer: one in 60 and one in 70.
[00:02:52]  They were like puzzles, and he basically said, If you solve these puzzles, you'll have my name.
[00:02:57]  And in 2010, when we confronted Ed Edwards about being a Zodiac killer, after we solved the 13-character cipher, Edward Edwards' name is 13 characters.
[00:03:07]  And what he had done is taken the letters in his name and reversed imaged the letters as hieroglyphics.
[00:03:14]  So you could never solve the Zodiac case without knowing the name Edward Edwards.
[00:03:18]  And once we did, we confronted him.
[00:03:20]  He sent us a letter saying it's me, you don't know the whole story.
[00:03:25]  I have a lot to tell you.
[00:03:27]  And that he framed people his whole life.
[00:03:30]  Later in the interview with Tom, I asked him about this guy, Ed Edwards, and that theory.
[00:03:35]  You'll hear what he has to say.
[00:03:36]  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.
[00:03:45]  And he too has looked into the Zodiac case and has a word of caution for everyone.
[00:03:50]  So you will make up your own minds.
[00:03:52]  But I think you're going to enjoy the exchange.
[00:03:55]  Now, my interview with Tom Colbert.
[00:04:17]  Tom, welcome to the show.
[00:04:18]  Thanks so much for the invitation, Megan.

=== The Beach Murders and Psychopath Profile (16:09) ===

[00:04:21]  Of course.
[00:04:21]  All right, so let's go back.
[00:04:23]  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.
[00:04:38]  Five that we, how do like, how do we know that those are his?
[00:04:41]  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.
[00:04:52]  But I will tell you, and I may be jumping the gun, but our team really believes it's now closer to 10 victims around the country from San Diego to Lake Tahoe.
[00:05:04]  During what timeframe?
[00:05:07]  Timeframe starts from 62.
[00:05:10]  A couple killed on the beach and all the way up to 1970 in Lake Tahoe.
[00:05:18]  And that victim is still missing.
[00:05:20]  We have a very good idea where she is.
[00:05:23]  What do you mean?
[00:05:25]  She is the only one never found.
[00:05:27]  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.
[00:05:37]  And he deciphered the codes, according to our team.
[00:05:42]  And that led us to a burial spot.
[00:05:46]  And that's TBA.
[00:05:50]  Okay, you're working on something that you want to keep confidential.
[00:05:54]  Well, we not only are planning to go there, we have several other places to go.
[00:06:00]  We know also where we believe he buried his murder weapons at 6,500 feet in the high Sierra.
[00:06:08]  That will be another trip.
[00:06:11]  So you think you know who it is?
[00:06:13]  And are you prepared to say that?
[00:06:16]  Gary Francis Post.
[00:06:18]  And we have mounds of evidence now after two years.
[00:06:22]  And again, it's because of this, you know, 1,500 years of skill sets with our 40-member team.
[00:06:28]  These are all volunteers.
[00:06:29]  We've gathered them from around the country in every part of forensics you need from ballistics to DNA.
[00:06:37]  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.
[00:06:51]  All right, let's get to Gary in a minute.
[00:06:53]  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.
[00:07:01]  So you say the earliest one, I think you said 62.
[00:07:05]  I thought that the earliest confirmed one, according to police, was 68, that this was the attack on David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.
[00:07:14]  Is that not correct?
[00:07:16]  Well, according to our team, and they've not been wrong in 10 years on this quest on cases, they feel there are matching MOs and profiles of murders in other parts of the states.
[00:07:35]  Other parts in the other part of the states have other bullets that match the caliber of the Zodiac in San Francisco Bay.
[00:07:45]  Okay, and so the one in 1962 was of whom?
[00:07:48]  That murder that you're talking about earlier?
[00:07:51]  That was a Navy couple on the beach of San Diego walking on the beach.
[00:07:55]  A sniper shot them both, and then he up close.
[00:08:00]  Yes.
[00:08:01]  Okay.
[00:08:01]  That was actually very disturbing.
[00:08:03]  It's like they people seem to have been minding their own business.
[00:08:07]  This is Johnny Swindle and Joyce Swindle killed by sniper as they walked along a San Diego beach.
[00:08:12]  Okay.
[00:08:13]  And that murder was committed with a 22.
[00:08:16]  She died almost instantly, and he died later that night.
[00:08:19]  The police believe the two were victims of a, quote, thrill killer, but that's as much as I guess they would say.
[00:08:27]  So that was 196, that was February 7th, 1964.
[00:08:31]  And what's 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?
[00:08:43]  Same caliber, same MO, and similar to a Santa Barbara murder in 63.
[00:08:53]  There was also a Cabby kill in 62 in Oceanside Police Department.
[00:09:00]  All of these are the MO of what happened in San Francisco.
[00:09:05]  Again, we have ballistics experts that are about to compare the ballistics we have from our alleged zodiac.
[00:09:14]  We collected over a thousand bullets with 24 calibers from neighbors in his high Sierra town.
[00:09:21]  And we have them.
[00:09:23]  There is a new technology that allows us to literally dunk a bullet into a liquid and off falls the DNA.
[00:09:33]  And that is something we're going to be doing with these various calibers.
[00:09:37]  And again, particularly 9mm and 22s.
[00:09:41]  He had all sorts of guns after World War II collected, Polish guns, French guns, and so forth.
[00:09:47]  But we've department, the departments we are working with are saying 9mm and 22s are the key calibers they're looking for.
[00:09:57]  And we're planning to meet with one of the departments with those calibers.
[00:10:01]  I mean, it's very common.
[00:10:02]  So it's not like a rare caliber gun.
[00:10:06]  And of course, just because the same similar gun was used doesn't mean it's the same person.
[00:10:10]  But let's just go back.
[00:10:11]  So the first confirmed killings are David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, December 20th, 1968, that we know from authorities were the Zodiac.
[00:10:20]  And the thing that grabs anybody when they're looking at the Zodiac killings is how heartless they are.
[00:10:28]  I mean, there's no murder that is kind and loving, but just there's no reason.
[00:10:34]  There's no robbery.
[00:10:35]  There's no beef.
[00:10:36]  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.
[00:10:44]  It makes us feel like it won't happen to us.
[00:10:46]  But these felt so random and merciless, absolutely merciless.
[00:10:52]  So tell us what happened with David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.
[00:10:57]  Tell me where the city is on that one.
[00:11:00]  That was, let's see.
[00:11:02]  And he approached their park station wagon at Lake Herman Road in Benicia, Benicia, California.
[00:11:10]  Yeah.
[00:11:11]  Yeah.
[00:11:13]  That was an ambush in a lover's lane spot.
[00:11:16]  He went after lovers lanes couples twice.
[00:11:21]  And nine millimeter and 22s were involved in those cases.
[00:11:27]  And were they ever able to say why?
[00:11:31]  Because this case, like the others, no indication of a robbery, no indication of a sexual assault.
[00:11:38]  It appears that they were, that shots were fired into the vehicle to force them out.
[00:11:44]  Betty Lou exited the front passenger door first, followed by David Faraday.
[00:11:50]  He was 17.
[00:11:51]  She was 16.
[00:11:53]  He shot David once in the head at point blank range.
[00:11:57]  Betty Lou was shot five times in the back as she fled and she was killed instantly.
[00:12:01]  It was Betty Lou Jensen's first date, age 16.
[00:12:05]  No one understood why.
[00:12:07]  Like, what would you do?
[00:12:08]  And then six, why would you do it?
[00:12:10]  And then six to seven months later, there was another attack on another couple, Darlene Farron and Mike Mago.
[00:12:18]  He lived.
[00:12:19]  This is in Vallejo.
[00:12:20]  He lived to tell about it.
[00:12:21]  And that was important.
[00:12:24]  Yes.
[00:12:25]  And there are two men that lived, young men that lived.
[00:12:28]  All the rest died.
[00:12:30]  And multi-shots into cars, into people, stabbings.
[00:12:36]  The common thread of this is the why, Megan.
[00:12:42]  It's the why.
[00:12:43]  And being the son of a shrink, I've heard these cases over the years through my father from D.B. Cooper all the way up to Zodiac and Hatha and Atlanta.
[00:12:56]  It's something my dad and I talked about when he was alive.
[00:13:00]  And he talked about, you know, the psychopath that would come into a community and make no sense to anyone.
[00:13:09]  No robbery, no jealousy, no love triangle.
[00:13:14]  That is what we believe our suspect fits the profile.
[00:13:19]  And that's why we're so strongly in the belief that we're on the right man.
[00:13:25]  So if you look as an investigator, you've got to see what the similarities are.
[00:13:30]  Like what is his MO?
[00:13:31]  How do we know it's Zodiac?
[00:13:33]  And this will become relevant when you try to extrapolate to these other cases that you and your team are trying to figure out were whether they were Zodiac cases or not.
[00:13:42]  The attack on Darlene Farron and Mike Mago, July 5, 1969.
[00:13:48]  Darlene was 22.
[00:13:51]  Mike was 19.
[00:13:53]  Again, parked at an isolated location in Vallejo.
[00:13:57]  They were talking.
[00:13:58]  A car, possibly a light brown Ford Mustang or a Chevrolet Corvair, pulled into the lot a few feet away.
[00:14:06]  Now, I'm imagining this is six or seven months after the other murder, but it's, as far as we know, only the second publicized murder, you know, of this type.
[00:14:17]  So they didn't necessarily know that somebody's running around killing young people who park, you know, and talk or make out or whatever they were doing.
[00:14:26]  A man with a flashlight exited the vehicle, approached the couple, no other cars in the parking lot.
[00:14:31]  They thought it was a cop, had their ID ready.
[00:14:33]  And just as in the other murder we just discussed, the man began firing at them.
[00:14:37]  Five shots at the man.
[00:14:40]  After five shots, the man walked slowly back to his car.
[00:14:43]  Mike screamed out in pain and the guy returned, firing two more shots at each victim.
[00:14:48]  Mike was able to see the Zodiac.
[00:14:52]  And as far as I know, he's the only one who ever gave like a detailed description of him.
[00:14:56]  He said he was white, 5'8 to 5'9, in his late 20s to 30s.
[00:15:01]  Again, this would have been 1969.
[00:15:04]  So, you know, subtract 30 years from 1969.
[00:15:08]  He's born around 1940.
[00:15:11]  Stocky build, round face, brown hair, no conversation.
[00:15:16]  Again, it's so disturbing.
[00:15:18]  There was no ask.
[00:15:19]  There was no attempt to negotiate.
[00:15:21]  There was no, it was just murder for the sake of murder, which really is a true psychopath.
[00:15:27]  Somebody once described the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath is neither one has any empathy or feeling for the killing at all, but the psychopath actually enjoys it, looks forward to it.
[00:15:40]  Not only the psychological aspect of this is interesting to us, but obviously the evidence and the greatest spot for evidence was Riverside Police Department.
[00:15:53]  Riverside Police Department found military style boots size 10.
[00:16:00]  That matches three of the Zodiac other locations, size 10, military boots.
[00:16:07]  All sorts of other things in Riverside.
[00:16:13]  The most intriguing one is a piece of evidence that the FBI, which did the lab work, and Riverside technically owns it for a potential case, are four hairs found in the hand of a college co-ed in Riverside and literally took it off his head.
[00:16:33]  This was 1966, way before DNA, but God bless the lab work and the coroners in Riverside County.
[00:16:44]  They kept those in a fridge until DNA came around.
[00:16:48]  That DNA, the hairs, has cleared several local boys in that town.
[00:16:55]  But for some strange reason, the department will not consider people that are not locals.
[00:17:03]  The only person in law enforcement, there have been nine police chiefs in Riverside.
[00:17:09]  The first one at the murder scene with the co-ed.
[00:17:17]  What happened there was that.
[00:17:20]  Wait, just can I just can I just reset?
[00:17:22]  Because I'm getting a little lost.
[00:17:24]  Riverside is not one that we've talked about yet, but you're saying that they had a boot print size 10 that matched boot prints found at ones we know the Zodiac did.
[00:17:34]  That's correct.
[00:17:35]  Same size.
[00:17:36]  Okay, so it hasn't Riverside didn't actually get pinned on the Zodiac, but you're looking at it and you think we should test these hairs because given the bootprint and the way it was committed, it's worth seeing what the connection is.
[00:17:48]  And if we can get a DNA match, so much the better.
[00:17:50]  But what happened in Riverside?
[00:17:51]  What was the crime?
[00:17:52]  Well, you should also know, though, that the FBI in 1975 declared the Riverside case as a Zodiac case.
[00:18:00]  For some reason, they pulled it off of that many years ago in about 2000.
[00:18:06]  But that was a Zodiac case on an FBI memo, and I sent that to you.
[00:18:13]  So that would interest your audience.
[00:18:15]  So what happened in Riverside?
[00:18:19]  This is a very junior college.
[00:18:24]  A victim was at a library.
[00:18:27]  She came out.
[00:18:28]  Her VW bug starter was unconnected.
[00:18:34]  It just happened to be somebody watching her in the library came out to help her, said, I'll drive you home.
[00:18:40]  And what proceeded was one of the most horrific knife attacks in the case.
[00:18:47]  It was close to 40 stab wounds.
[00:18:50]  As the police chief at the time said, she was almost decapitated.
[00:18:56]  This is the Zodiac because of footprints.
[00:19:00]  We know that the Zodiac, our suspect, was a painter.
[00:19:06]  They found paint spots on the watch that fell off of the attacker.
[00:19:12]  He was also at March Air Force Base, 15 minutes away for regular medical checkups.
[00:19:21]  So we have about a half dozen pieces of information that absolutely have convinced our team that she definitely needs to be on the list.
[00:19:33]  And when you say he was at an air force, you're talking about Gary Post.
[00:19:36]  He was at an Air Force base nearby.
[00:19:38]  Okay.
[00:19:38]  Yeah, he was at several bases.
[00:19:40]  He left in 63, but he continued with veteran care.
[00:19:44]  And he could be placed near the spot of this murder.
[00:19:47]  This woman's name was Sherry Joe Bates, October 30, 1966.
[00:19:52]  She was 18.
[00:19:53]  She visited the River City College Library.
[00:19:56]  And we know that her car, her Volkswagen Beetle, was disabled because somebody, whoever the killer was, we feel, wrote a letter explaining exactly what they did to her.
[00:20:06]  I'm not going to read it because it's too disturbing, but he said that he disabled her car, that he came upon her and that they found this Time X watch in a military style heel print on site about size eight to 10, again, 10.
[00:20:23]  And then the watch was traced to a military post and the shoes could have been sold at nearby March Air Force Base.

=== Brian Hartnell's Watch and Red Herring (15:27) ===

[00:20:31]  Now, the letter that was sent after this woman's murder was not signed.
[00:20:37]  It was not signed.
[00:20:38]  So Zodiac did wind up.
[00:20:40]  He started to send letters.
[00:20:42]  And that's why we know to call him Zodiac.
[00:20:44]  That's what he called himself.
[00:20:45]  This one wasn't signed Zodiac, but it definitely claims ownership of this murder and says he's talking about how there was only one thing on his mind when he killed her, making her pay for all the brush offs that she had given me during the years prior.
[00:21:02]  Now, that's interesting to me because that seems like there's a motive behind this one versus the others.
[00:21:09]  You're absolutely correct.
[00:21:10]  And that is the line I was about to talk to you about.
[00:21:13]  That seems like a red herring line.
[00:21:16]  And the police departments, after the current, the police departments, especially the chief of the murder date, said, this is intriguing, but it doesn't mean it's a local guy.
[00:21:33]  But all the other detectives disagreed.
[00:21:36]  And there have been eight police chiefs since that say we're only going to go after local guys.
[00:21:41]  You want to believe that in this day and age?
[00:21:43]  Traveling serial killers, they won't even look at.
[00:21:47]  That is the line that you just read that convinced us that this was a red herring and could possibly be from the Zodiac.
[00:21:56]  Here is something else you should know.
[00:21:58]  There is one word that's re there are three words that are repeated.
[00:22:03]  I shall, twitch, and squirm.
[00:22:07]  Those are found in Zodiac letters in San Francisco.
[00:22:10]  But here's what's key.
[00:22:12]  Twitch is spelled T-W-I-C-H in Riverside and the letters in San Francisco.
[00:22:19]  Very intriguing.
[00:22:22]  Wait.
[00:22:22]  Oh, in all, you're saying it's misspelled in all three of those.
[00:22:26]  Correct.
[00:22:27]  Oh, that's fascinating.
[00:22:29]  Because your belief is that the Zodiac liked, he wanted credit, sort of, but he also would throw out misdirections.
[00:22:39]  It's like, it feels like he wanted to get caught, but he didn't want to get caught.
[00:22:45]  The letter was mailed from the town, too, to make it, in our view, extra clear that he was a local boy.
[00:22:55]  So you have them describing, she blew me off, paraphrasing, and mailing it from town.
[00:23:02]  What a great way to get them off the trail.
[00:23:05]  And as I said, the chief at that time in 1968, when the murders were identified as Zodiac in Vallejo and in San Francisco and so forth, he contacted the whole task force and said, I have the same MO.
[00:23:21]  I have the same details.
[00:23:23]  I have a size 10.
[00:23:25]  I have this and that.
[00:23:26]  So do you.
[00:23:27]  I think it's the right guy.
[00:23:29]  No one agreed with him after that.
[00:23:31]  It was always a local boy.
[00:23:34]  How far away is Riverside from Vallejo and the first location that we discussed?
[00:23:41]  I can't remember what town it was.
[00:23:43]  In those days, probably about three and a half, four hours.
[00:23:47]  Okay, so it's doable.
[00:23:48]  I mean, why would they, no, that's an easy connection to draw.
[00:23:52]  It's not like they were all in California so far.
[00:23:56]  And don't forget that the Vallejo, let me say it again.
[00:24:00]  Don't forget that the Air Force base he was going to was just 15 minutes away from the murder site.
[00:24:07]  And he was there for several days for treatment.
[00:24:10]  Again, you're talking about your suspect, Gary Post, but we don't know that this is the actual killer.
[00:24:16]  Now, actually, I should ask you that separately.
[00:24:18]  Whether he was Zodiac or not, do we know that Gary Post killed anybody?
[00:24:24]  Gary Post was in the Air Force radar systems, part of the early warning system in Indiana.
[00:24:31]  We know that he is not connected to any murders.
[00:24:36]  He was meticulous and careful.
[00:24:39]  And that's how he wound up in the middle of this, because we found all the evidence that connected him.
[00:24:46]  Okay, we'll go there again in a second.
[00:24:47]  Just wanted to see if we knew we were dealing with an identified killer under the heading of Gary Post or not.
[00:24:54]  The answer is no, but we'll get to why he's your favorite suspect, why Tom and his team believe he did it.
[00:25:00]  So we talked about the first two confirmed Zodiac, and they look very similar to one another with the couples in the cars.
[00:25:08]  And then there was another one.
[00:25:11]  About two, three months after that second one of Darlene and Mike Mago, there was an attack on Cecilia Shepard and Brian Hartnell, September 27th, 1969.
[00:25:24]  And similar to the fact that Mike Mago survived that earlier attack and gave that detailed description, Brian Hartnell, the man, survived this one.
[00:25:35]  So what happened was they were relaxing on a blanket at a remote location by a lake in Napa.
[00:25:43]  Cecilia Shepard noticed a man approaching them wearing a costume, a black hooded costume with a white cross circle stitched onto the front.
[00:25:50]  That's interesting because it's kind of like the Zodiac sign.
[00:25:54]  And holding a gun, described him as a heavy build, no more than six feet tall.
[00:25:58]  That would match up loosely with what Mike Mago described.
[00:26:02]  The man claimed he was a prison escapee from either Montana or Colorado and needed money and a car to flee to Mexico.
[00:26:11]  The man, Brian Hartnell, offered him his wallet and car keys, which of course they realized they were in trouble here.
[00:26:18]  And the man did not take the wallet or the car keys.
[00:26:21]  After several minutes of conversation, the man tied up the couple with plastic clothesline, a plastic clothesline, and began stabbing them, then casually walked away.
[00:26:33]  And again, amazingly, Brian Hartnell survived.
[00:26:37]  So here again, you tell me, Tom, as the investigator, they're not in a car.
[00:26:41]  They're in Napa.
[00:26:43]  There's conversation this time, all different things from the previous two.
[00:26:48]  And of course, very different in that they were tied up and this is a stabbing, not a shooting.
[00:26:54]  Is that unusual?
[00:26:56]  Is that, you know, for a serial killer to change up his MO that much?
[00:27:00]  Well, again, because of all the calibers he had, he was extremely brilliant.
[00:27:06]  He would know to switch calibers, switch knives, switch locations.
[00:27:11]  The hammer hits on bullets.
[00:27:13]  He would switch out the actual hammers so that they couldn't be tracked from another investigation.
[00:27:21]  This man, you mentioned too, he is the same height, weight of the Zodiac described in other locations.
[00:27:31]  It is the only daytime attack of the Zodiac suspected murders.
[00:27:59]  Now, this murder and the one that preceded it have something else in common, and that's that he appears to have called authorities on a payphone after he did it.
[00:28:09]  Yes.
[00:28:10]  Right?
[00:28:10]  Jumping back to the murder of Darlene Farron and the attack on Mike Mago.
[00:28:17]  At 12:40 a.m., there was a call to the police, and it was to the Vallejo Police Department.
[00:28:25]  The man said, I would like to report a double murder.
[00:28:28]  He didn't know that Mike Mago had survived.
[00:28:30]  If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park, you will find the kids in a brown car.
[00:28:36]  They were shot with a nine-millimeter Luger.
[00:28:40]  I also killed those kids last year.
[00:28:43]  Goodbye, an apparent reference to David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen.
[00:28:47]  Then, after the Cecilia Shepard and Brian Hartnell attack in Napa, similar.
[00:28:54]  Call to Napa County Sheriff's Office at 7:40 p.m.
[00:28:57]  I want to report a murder.
[00:28:59]  No, a double murder.
[00:29:01]  They are two miles north of Park headquarters.
[00:29:03]  They were in a white Volkswagen.
[00:29:05]  Carmen Guilla, I'm the one who did it.
[00:29:08]  What's that?
[00:29:09]  What do we glean from these confessions, which everyone seems to agree was Zodiac?
[00:29:17]  Well, I'll give you another example too, because it matches Oceanside PD, first cab driver killed.
[00:29:25]  And before he killed him, he called the police department and said, I'm going to, this is paraphrasing, I'm going to commit a crime that you're never going to be able to figure out.
[00:29:35]  And sure enough, after shooting him in the back of the head, just like the San Francisco cab shot back in the head, he calls a few days later from that area and said, I told you you'd never figure it out.
[00:29:51]  He was stationed at an Air Force base along the coast in Santa Barbara area.
[00:29:58]  And there is a railroad track that empties right at his base and is five minutes from the murder scene of that cab driver in Oceanside.
[00:30:08]  Now, I want to keep my crime straight because the next crime we know is committed by Zodiac was of a cab driver.
[00:30:18]  It seems like you're talking about a separate one.
[00:30:20]  But the one, let me just set this one up before we get to your one.
[00:30:23]  This is this would be Zodiac number four confirmed.
[00:30:26]  Again, he's claimed to have killed 37 people.
[00:30:29]  So it's, or maybe 34 or 37.
[00:30:31]  But the list is very long.
[00:30:33]  We're just going with the ones that law enforcement has said, yeah, this is him.
[00:30:36]  So Paul Stein, October 11th, 1969.
[00:30:40]  His cab was hailed.
[00:30:42]  The cab wound up a block away from the destination that was asked for.
[00:30:48]  Paul Stein, 29, was shot once in the head at point-blank range.
[00:30:51]  Weapon was a nine-millimeter.
[00:30:54]  Three witnesses watched the suspect from approximately 60 feet away as he wiped down the cab with a cloth after killing Stein.
[00:31:01]  That's interesting.
[00:31:02]  So maybe different weapon, not a 22, not a knife.
[00:31:06]  Now we're on to a nine millimeter.
[00:31:07]  And someone sees him clean up, which is a new detail.
[00:31:11]  They describe the man as a white male, 25 to 30 years old.
[00:31:16]  Again, that's all consistent with Mike Mago.
[00:31:19]  Stocky build, consistent.
[00:31:21]  Reddish brown hair, consistent, Mike had said brown hair, with heavy rimmed glasses.
[00:31:26]  That's a new detail.
[00:31:29]  And they initially thought this was a robbery gone bad, but then they realized it wasn't.
[00:31:34]  And once again, Zodiac wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle this time.
[00:31:39]  And he said, I did it.
[00:31:41]  And tell us why we had every reason to believe that was not a hoax letter.
[00:31:46]  The person writing it really did kill Paul Stein.
[00:31:50]  Well, he also sent letters afterwards.
[00:31:53]  And one of them, he bragged, the reason they were not finding any prints of him was because he put glue on his fingertips.
[00:32:01]  And that left no prints.
[00:32:03]  And he bragged about it in a letter right after that, too.
[00:32:07]  So it matches the oceanside back of the head.
[00:32:12]  That is a one shell that was recovered on the floor of the cab.
[00:32:16]  It is with right now San Francisco PD.
[00:32:20]  And our plans are to compare our nine millimeters to their.
[00:32:26]  This is the one, if I'm not mistaken, where with the letter he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle, he included a portion of the bloody shirt of Paul Stein, which is just so chilling.
[00:32:42]  And his letter, this is the one I mentioned in the intro where he talked about, he said, I'm the murderer of the taxi driver.
[00:32:49]  To prove it, here's a bloodstained piece of his shirt.
[00:32:51]  I am the same man who did the people in the North Bay area.
[00:32:54]  And he goes on to mock the San Francisco police.
[00:32:57]  And then he makes the comment about school children making nice targets.
[00:33:01]  I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning and goes on in detail what he wants to do to the children.
[00:33:07]  This is signed with the Zodiac symbol.
[00:33:11]  So he's getting more aggressive and he's getting needier, right?
[00:33:15]  Like needier.
[00:33:16]  This to me seems like somebody who really wants them to know who he is.
[00:33:21]  Well put.
[00:33:22]  And that's exactly what happens with a lot of the psychopaths.
[00:33:26]  They're narcissistic sociopaths, psychopaths that are hoping someday they can share with people who they are.
[00:33:35]  And they sometimes leak it out.
[00:33:38]  And that is just a perfect profile in that particular case.
[00:33:45]  Now, that murder was October 11th, 1969.
[00:33:49]  On your suspected killings list, there's another cab driver.
[00:33:54]  And is this the one you were referring to?
[00:33:56]  It happened seven years prior to Paul Stein.
[00:33:59]  It was a murder of a guy named Ray Davis of the Checker Cab Company.
[00:34:04]  We believe that was the first killing by Zodiac because he was out of the military in 63, but we believe he took a train down from the Air Force Base in Santa Barbara and conducted a similar cab killing back of the head and then vanished.
[00:34:23]  And again, bragging, no writing, no calling himself Zodiac, but he said, you're not going to be able to figure this one out.
[00:34:31]  And then he called him back and bragged about it.
[00:34:34]  Okay, that's the one you were talking about.
[00:34:35]  Now it's all coming together, right?
[00:34:37]  He called the cops in advance, said, I'm going to commit a baffling crime.
[00:34:43]  And soon after, this guy, Ray Davis, was killed.
[00:34:47]  And again, no robbery.
[00:34:49]  Police couldn't find a motive.
[00:34:53]  That is sketchy.
[00:34:54]  And it does follow a pattern of no motive, shooting the back of the head and telling cops either before or after, I'm the one who did it.
[00:35:05]  I'm the one.
[00:35:06]  Like just taunting him.
[00:35:07]  I mean, I have to say, as I listen to all the crimes, with all due respect, I feel like, were the cops bumbling?
[00:35:14]  Because I feel like in today's day and age, you could never get away with this.
[00:35:20]  Very well put.
[00:35:21]  That's exactly true.
[00:35:23]  Remember, in that era from the 60s to 70s and early 80s, cops had fingerprints and a hunch.
[00:35:30]  There was no DNA.
[00:35:32]  There was no other incredible databases you could search things in.
[00:35:37]  It was a very simple time.
[00:35:39]  And they did the best they could.
[00:35:42]  Remember, though, before our times in the 60s, when this was going on, there was a lot of drug experimentation, a lot of violence and murders, that people were high.

=== Handwriting Analysis and Fake Letters (06:03) ===

[00:35:58]  I mean, when we went through the California murders, we found at least a half dozen that could fit the initial profile of this man.
[00:36:09]  But it all came down to that they were high.
[00:36:12]  The six that we looked at were extremely out of their heads.
[00:36:19]  The reason he's known as Zodiac, as I said, is he started signing these letters that he would send to the press with a little zodiac symbol.
[00:36:28]  And then some of them, he signed it Zodiac, like the word Zodiac.
[00:36:34]  And his need to bring the press into it kind of reminded me of the Unabomber.
[00:36:38]  We did a special on him.
[00:36:39]  That's right.
[00:36:40]  You know, he couldn't, he was totally getting away with it.
[00:36:43]  Ted Kaczynski was getting away with being the Unabomber.
[00:36:48]  And his own letters would wind up sinking him because his brother, they published them in the paper and the brother saw one and read one and said, oh my God, this is very familiar.
[00:36:56]  The stuff he's, my, my own brother sent me.
[00:36:57]  One thing led to another.
[00:36:59]  This guy kept writing to the press, but no one ever had that revelation.
[00:37:03]  But he used the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and others for what?
[00:37:08]  Like, how would you describe his correspondence with the press?
[00:37:13]  You know, this is before social media.
[00:37:15]  This is before the internet.
[00:37:17]  This is before, frankly, a lot of color TVs weren't in play.
[00:37:21]  This was his way to be a celebrity in his own warped mind.
[00:37:28]  And that is, in essence, what was happening.
[00:37:31]  He was up.
[00:37:32]  And by the way, you talked about the shirt.
[00:37:35]  He took slivers of that shirt and sent it to a very famous lawyer.
[00:37:38]  He sent it to the papers.
[00:37:41]  He cut that shirt up so he could be definitively identified as the mystery man.
[00:37:49]  He wanted them to know and he didn't.
[00:37:52]  In some of the letters, he was like, that one wasn't me.
[00:37:55]  You know, like he, he wanted credit for his crimes and he didn't want to be saddled with ones he didn't commit.
[00:38:01]  Letter to the LA Times dated March 13th, 1971.
[00:38:04]  So this is right in the relevant timeframe of the murders.
[00:38:07]  We know, we know the Zodiac did.
[00:38:10]  And this is what he writes.
[00:38:11]  This is the Zodiac speaking.
[00:38:13]  Like I have, and there are lots of misspellings in here, FYI.
[00:38:16]  Like I have always said, always has two L's, I am crack proof.
[00:38:21]  If the blue meanies are ever going to catch me, they had best get off their fat asses and do something.
[00:38:27]  Because the longer they fiddle and fart around, the more slaves I will collect for my afterlife.
[00:38:32]  I do have to give them credit for stumbling across my riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones.
[00:38:39]  There are a hell of a lot more down there.
[00:38:41]  The reason I'm writing to the Times is this.
[00:38:43]  They don't bury me on the back pages like some of the others.
[00:38:50]  So he's mad he's not on the front page.
[00:38:54]  He's shopping for media.
[00:38:56]  And when San Francisco finally realized that, hello, you're part of the problem when you're putting it on the cover.
[00:39:04]  You're integrating yourself into a hostage situation, a murder, by exploiting his language.
[00:39:12]  And so they made a decision to bury him.
[00:39:15]  It's not so difficult for what we'll see now.
[00:39:18]  Somebody was just positing on a show I listened to our podcast.
[00:39:22]  remember but they were talking about why do we not have the serial killers today like we used to you know i was born in 1970 i grew up hearing these stories and being afraid and son of sam in new york and all of that and they were saying it's not really a thing anymore and the answer was it's kind of moved on to mass shootings you know the the the the murderous craze lunatic has chosen a different thing now i but but both both groups tend to want infamy And it's one of the reasons why a lot of security experts say,
[00:39:51]  and I've been doing it for a long time, don't name the shooters in these mass shootings.
[00:39:56]  Exactly.
[00:39:57]  Exactly.
[00:39:58]  But I would also tell you that technology after 1970 exploded.
[00:40:04]  I mean, they had databases to track license plates.
[00:40:07]  What, in the last three or four or five years, they have special banks for tattoos.
[00:40:14]  I mean, they're tracking people left and right now.
[00:40:17]  And that's why serial killers can't stay out long.
[00:40:21]  The cameras are everywhere.
[00:40:22]  Megan, there were no cameras back then.
[00:40:24]  None.
[00:40:25]  That's true.
[00:40:26]  And so that's totally changed law enforcement.
[00:40:29]  And that's why serial killers have vanished.
[00:40:32]  This was one of the last ones.
[00:40:33]  And again, he retired, quote unquote.
[00:40:36]  We'll talk about our man later.
[00:40:37]  He retired in 1970, moved up to Ohi Sierra Town and spent the rest of his life up there.
[00:40:45]  So, you know, he knew that they were getting closer and closer.
[00:40:50]  And he finally made the decision.
[00:40:52]  I really, he still wrote letters into the into the late 80s.
[00:40:58]  How many letters in all?
[00:41:00]  How many letters do we think we have from the Zodiac?
[00:41:03]  We have right now, I'm just thinking, they just eliminated two that turned out to be a teenager in Riverside, believe it or not, who said she deserved to die.
[00:41:14]  It was a terrible thing.
[00:41:15]  The FBI confirmed through a genealogy unit that he was, he confessed and he's now an older man.
[00:41:25]  But all the others, there are approximately, I want to say, 2026 or so.
[00:41:33]  I'd have to double check, but it's just close to a couple dozen.
[00:41:38]  Because as I was reading up on this, one thought I had was: if I'm a murderer back in the 1970s, I'm definitely writing a fake Zodiac letter and pinning this on him, you know, like just to try to get the police off my trail.
[00:41:52]  So how did they figure out this one's the real Zodiac and this one's a phony trying to pin his murder on this serial killer?

=== Vietnam Codebook and Clever Suspect (03:57) ===

[00:42:02]  Well, again, it was primitive back then.
[00:42:05]  The handwriting, there were handwriting experts.
[00:42:08]  He wrote left and right, by the way.
[00:42:11]  So does our suspect write left and right.
[00:42:14]  Same age, same shoes.
[00:42:16]  Don't get me started.
[00:42:18]  I'm going to in about 10 minutes.
[00:42:20]  But bottom line is, is that he wrote both ways.
[00:42:24]  He was very clever.
[00:42:25]  And there were some extremely brilliant people that were able to not only identify the correct writing, but they started to get into the coding.
[00:42:39]  Okay, so now we haven't talked about that.
[00:42:40]  What do you mean coding?
[00:42:43]  This is military coding that goes back to a book.
[00:42:48]  It's been around since World War I.
[00:42:50]  The Navajos used it in World War II to protect our radio communications between islands in Vietnam.
[00:42:58]  That's when the coding ended in Vietnam, because now with computers, of course, you don't need coding.
[00:43:05]  But it's the same codebook.
[00:43:07]  It's a 1950 codebook.
[00:43:10]  I have a lieutenant colonel from Vietnam on the Cooper case who brought us that codebook.
[00:43:16]  When we found out these were codes, I linked up the codebuster from Cooper, who is a three-time NSA man to work with nobody knows Cooper yet, and nobody understands code yet.
[00:43:30]  All right, so like when you're talking about codes, that's okay, so that's what I'm here for.
[00:43:35]  The codes we're talking about because he in his letters would offer like a cipher, like a little riddle for people to decode and made promises like, if you can decode this, you'll know who I am.
[00:43:50]  So of course, everybody was trying their hardest to decode this.
[00:43:54]  And you're saying there's a military book that talks about how to make these codes.
[00:43:59]  And who's Cooper?
[00:44:01]  Why are you mentioning somebody named Cooper?
[00:44:04]  D.B. Cooper is a Vietnam vet who took over a plane and asked for $200,000.
[00:44:11]  And then he said, fly me to Mexico.
[00:44:13]  And he jumped by parachute.
[00:44:16]  That is one of our other cases that we believe we have solved.
[00:44:20]  How does that factor into this story?
[00:44:24]  The same codebook used in Vietnam is the same codebook that was used by our Air Force man, our man, Gary Francis Post.
[00:44:36]  It was used at all Air Force bases.
[00:44:39]  These codes were used to scramble signals as they spoke and protected our country back in the 60s and 70s.
[00:44:46]  So why couldn't an Air Force man back then take one look at that and say, I know what this is?
[00:44:52]  Well, there is the code, but then there are words that are clues.
[00:45:01]  He would embed these clues so that the public couldn't just quickly get a codebook.
[00:45:09]  Very clever, very clever.
[00:45:11]  Anagrams is how they broke it.
[00:45:14]  And as I said, with the Cooper project, we brought that NSA man, a codebuster, three tours in Vietnam to work with our team on the Zodiac.
[00:45:27]  And that's how we feel we cracked it.
[00:45:30]  It's the same codebook.
[00:45:32]  So it's an interesting point because you can't come up with these ciphers and elude police this well by being a complete lunatic who isn't smart, you know, but he's got all the misspellings.
[00:45:51]  So do we think the misspellings are, as you said earlier, a red herring, you know, an attempt to downplay his own intelligence?

=== Cracking the Cipher with Evidence (09:12) ===

[00:46:00]  What do we think about his level of smarts?
[00:46:03]  We had some people on the team talk about describing him as an ADHD kid who would only pay attention if he was interested.
[00:46:14]  And he, our suspect, was that type of person.
[00:46:19]  He was sloppy, he misspelled, but he also planted words on purpose so that he could point to them, you know, and he would give clues with certain words.
[00:46:31]  And that is how that code became so important on both cases.
[00:46:38]  Now, as we discussed, he starts writing to the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the Vallejo Times-Herald as early as July 31st, 1969.
[00:46:50]  And he includes these ciphers or cryptograms, which he claims contain his identity.
[00:46:58]  And he demands that they be printed on the paper's front page, or he would, quote, cruise around all week killing lone people in the night and then move on to kill again until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend.
[00:47:10]  Interestingly, the San Francisco Chronicle published it on its third or fourth page.
[00:47:16]  The threatened murders did not happen.
[00:47:19]  And they eventually published all three parts of what he had sent them.
[00:47:22]  That's so interesting because, boy, as a member of the press, that does put you in an impossible situation.
[00:47:28]  So they really did wrestle with the moral burden that he was trying to place on them.
[00:47:34]  Do you remember, Megan, in the buses in that story in San Francisco, the buses, they threatened to blow up buses with children on them?
[00:47:44]  That is what our suspect in Oceanside did.
[00:47:49]  After killing the cab driver there in 62, he calls in and said, I'm going to blow up some buses.
[00:47:56]  Well, you know what would happen in that town.
[00:47:59]  Everybody, all the police, the military were put on every bus.
[00:48:05]  They blanketed this small town.
[00:48:07]  And he, meantime, we believe our suspect got on the train and went back to the Air Force Base.
[00:48:13]  And then he called in and said, told you.
[00:48:20]  He didn't, thank God, follow through with his threat when the San Francisco paper did not do as he requested.
[00:48:26]  I know, thank God.
[00:48:27]  But they must have been in such a moral quandary there because, my God, what if he had?
[00:48:33]  You know, you need to feel like you had some responsibility in it, even though, of course, you don't as the newspaper.
[00:48:41]  Yeah, so he keeps writing, keeps writing.
[00:48:43]  Now, who's working on it?
[00:48:44]  Is it the FBI's case?
[00:48:46]  I imagine there are a bunch of amateur sleuths trying to decipher everything.
[00:48:50]  When it broke, the FBI, and we have the memo, they, all the agents in charge on the West Coast were told, stand down.
[00:49:00]  The only thing we're going to do, we're not going to get involved in these murders all over the state.
[00:49:05]  We will provide lab help, fingerprinting help, and occasionally to a small department if they need some technology, but we are not going to get involved in these murders.
[00:49:17]  And frankly, with the Lake Tahoe killing, that's a cross-state line.
[00:49:23]  But they're not saying Lake Tahoe yet is a Zodiac case.
[00:49:29]  That's one of your suspected cases.
[00:49:30]  So the FBI is basically saying this is an intra-state problem, hasn't crossed state lines.
[00:49:36]  We don't need to touch it.
[00:49:37]  Good luck, California.
[00:49:39]  And so what was it?
[00:49:42]  So as local authorities, town by town in California, was there any mass coordination?
[00:49:46]  You know, somebody running point?
[00:49:49]  There was a task force put together, four or five departments, mostly in the San Francisco Bay Area after the cases you spoke of.
[00:50:00]  Again, the cases we're talking about from San Diego to Lake Tahoe were not in the task force, but there are some similarities and our former law enforcement people have pointed that out.
[00:50:12]  So how, how, what, in what year did he stop writing his letters?
[00:50:18]  I want to say late, mid to late 80s.
[00:50:22]  Oh, so it went on for 10 plus years.
[00:50:25]  And again, that's not official.
[00:50:27]  The last official letters you mentioned were 69, but we have letters from 1970, again, to the late, let me correct myself, from the early 1970s all the way to the end of 85 or 84.
[00:50:45]  He was writing to newspapers.
[00:50:49]  And but was he still committing murders?
[00:50:52]  Like, do we, did he change his MO?
[00:50:54]  Did he continue to say things like he said in the early letters that would show you this is definitely the murderer and not just some lunatic trying to send us on a wild goose chase?
[00:51:04]  He was no longer talking about murders.
[00:51:08]  He was commenting.
[00:51:10]  He was talking about particular movies involving murders.
[00:51:14]  I mean, he almost became a commentator and sent these letters to newspapers, as I said.
[00:51:23]  But the murders, his discussion of murders stopped in 1970.
[00:51:28]  And that was his last claim.
[00:51:31]  And after that, that's the other part of the story.
[00:51:36]  So what, so flash forward to, you know, when did DNA become the everyday thing it is now?
[00:51:43]  I mean, 2000, sometime in the 21st century, it really got hot and started to get used in all the criminal cases and so on.
[00:51:54]  I remember covering the Duke La Crosse case, you know, the fake rape case down there in 2005.
[00:51:59]  And they still were really struggling to explain what DNA is in that case.
[00:52:05]  And I obviously wound up falling apart, but I remember it was just as late as 2005.
[00:52:09]  This was still sort of a mystery to lawyers who had to try criminal cases.
[00:52:13]  So eventually we got there.
[00:52:16]  Now there's all this evidence.
[00:52:17]  There's shell casings and, you know, there's got to be, I don't know if there's any fingerprints, if there's what, what is there that they, with the benefit of now new technology, they can go back in these crime scenes and see, okay, we got something.
[00:52:30]  Well, I'll be honest with you.
[00:52:32]  We have thoroughly looked into all the cases, not only our cases, but the original cases.
[00:52:38]  And sadly, we brought them evidence to compare that they wouldn't compare with our suspect.
[00:52:45]  But what was intriguing is that they, a few years ago, on our one of our members on our team approached the departments and said, check DNA on such and such a letter flat or behind the stamp.
[00:53:03]  Well, unfortunately, Megan, back in the 60s and 70s and even into the early 80s, nobody was keeping evidence in sealed paper bags, in refrigerators.
[00:53:16]  They were just stacked in files, sometimes with the sun on them.
[00:53:20]  So heat and passage of time, they were not able to get any DNA off of shell casings and so forth.
[00:53:30]  We think we can update that technology because the only thing that we believe and the FBI agreed in 75, those hairs have been used to clear people, but they have not shared the hairs with anyone else.
[00:53:48]  Now, when you say we bring these things to them, are you talking about the FBI?
[00:53:53]  Who do you mean?
[00:53:53]  To whom do you bring the clues that you want evaluated?
[00:53:57]  We went to the police departments that had bullet shells.
[00:54:02]  We've gone to others that have DNA evidence.
[00:54:06]  We have gone for ballistics up to San Francisco.
[00:54:10]  We're in discussions with them.
[00:54:13]  And we've been everywhere.
[00:54:15]  And the only evidence left from the killings are those four hairs.
[00:54:22]  And by the way, go ahead.
[00:54:26]  By the way, the hairs are brown like our suspect.
[00:54:31]  I should reiterate that your group, the casebreakers.org, it's 40-member task force of volunteers, retired bureau agents.
[00:54:39]  You have a combined 1,500 years of skill sets.
[00:54:43]  You guys solve cases.
[00:54:44]  You try to fund more teams and you promote careers in all branches of public service.
[00:54:49]  So you've been at this for a while and you've got trained professionals with impressive histories trying to figure out these unsolved crimes.
[00:54:59]  So it's not like you're just some nutcase who walks into the police station saying, go back and test that hair.
[00:55:05]  You know, they know who you are.
[00:55:07]  And some are more cooperative than others from the sound of it.

=== Building a 1,500-Year Expert Team (02:59) ===

[00:55:12]  I was a CBS newsman for 10 years in LA and I was recruited by the state of California to go to an incredible school where I met my first team.
[00:55:20]  And that was California Specialized Training Institute at Camp San Louis.
[00:55:26]  This is where they teach everyone on every imaginable horror they have to face.
[00:55:32]  And I was flown up for 18 years every other month to teach crisis management, hostage situations, you name it, terrorism, all with a media angle.
[00:55:44]  In other words, how do you get your case out without jeopardizing it?
[00:55:48]  That's how we created our first team.
[00:55:50]  And then it expanded from 10 to 40 because the word got out.
[00:55:56]  And my wife and I have dedicated the rest of our lives to making this work, so to speak, because frankly, Megan, there's not enough tax dollars in the world for more cops.
[00:56:07]  That's right.
[00:56:07]  We have to go after the people in their 50s and 60s.
[00:56:12]  And that, okay, they have a little arthritis, so they can't climb the fences.
[00:56:16]  But you know what?
[00:56:17]  As my dad, the shrink used to say when we were in trouble, they have incredible brains, incredible brains.
[00:56:25]  And, you know, can I give you one quick example?
[00:56:29]  Yeah.
[00:56:30]  We were up in the woods of Oregon.
[00:56:34]  We were tipped to the actual parachute site of D.B. Cooper, where he jumped and buried it.
[00:56:40]  And we went 10 miles from the nearest home to a particular spot.
[00:56:44]  Believe it or not, a former cop was tipped to this and called us.
[00:56:49]  We went all the way to that spot in the middle of the woods.
[00:56:52]  We dug.
[00:56:53]  We found something that looked like a parachute, but we couldn't tell.
[00:56:58]  We wondered if it was a potato sack piece.
[00:57:01]  So the way our team works is we can call them and they're rowboats.
[00:57:06]  They're lazy boys with a grandkid on the golf course, and they'll give us the technology.
[00:57:12]  And we called and said, we have a piece of material that we don't know if it's a potato sack or a parachute.
[00:57:19]  And he said, take a strip of it, light it.
[00:57:22]  And we said, light it.
[00:57:23]  And he said, light it.
[00:57:24]  Tried to light it.
[00:57:25]  It dripped and smoked.
[00:57:27]  He said, that was dunked in non-flammable material.
[00:57:30]  It's a parachute.
[00:57:32]  This is how the team works.
[00:57:34]  And so we get their expertise wherever and whenever we want it.
[00:57:38]  You should know, as far as my wife and I, we've never been sued in 42 years.
[00:57:43]  And those are the type of people we're bringing to our team.
[00:57:45]  They're phenomenal.
[00:57:47]  But don't jinx it.
[00:57:48]  Don't say things like that out loud, Tom.
[00:57:53]  I said, don't jinx it by saying something like that out loud.
[00:57:56]  You know what a litigious society we have now.
[00:57:59]  Well, yeah, but we're very comfortable.
[00:58:03]  And the Zooms that we have with these people, we've got Republicans, Democrats, every type of person.
[00:58:10]  But you know what they have?

=== The Team Works Across Counties (14:52) ===

[00:58:12]  They have souls and they are absolutely committed to these families to get them answers.
[00:58:18]  Well, and the other thing is the cops are so undermined right now and just in general, they're not going to devote resources to something that happened 50, 60 years ago.
[00:58:26]  You know, they don't have the time or the manpower for that.
[00:58:30]  Jumping back, something you said reminded me of something I want to ask you about the hairs, the four hairs that they have from what they believe is a suspect.
[00:58:39]  You know, they have that technology now where you can take DNA and create a picture of the person.
[00:58:47]  They can find out enough about the person's ethnic heritage and so on.
[00:58:53]  They can engineer a picture that they will say, this person was Nordic.
[00:58:58]  This person probably had blue eyes.
[00:59:00]  This person probably had a nose that looked like this.
[00:59:02]  It's crazy.
[00:59:03]  But, you know, they do it on date line all the time.
[00:59:06]  So has anybody ever tried to do that with those hairs?
[00:59:10]  Been there doing that.
[00:59:12]  Oh, oh.
[00:59:14]  We are not being given the hairs, but let me tell you, I have three attorneys, all pro bono.
[00:59:19]  They're going to convince Riverside and the other departments, hey, let us end the pain of these families.
[00:59:27]  And that's our approach.
[00:59:30]  And that's about to happen.
[00:59:33]  Okay, so because you think you know who did it.
[00:59:35]  And that leads us back to Gary Francis Post, who after looking at tons of suspects, you believe is the guy.
[00:59:45]  The first thing I said to my team was, is Gary Post dead or alive?
[00:59:50]  Because if he's alive, we're going to have to run a lot by him.
[00:59:53]  He's dead, which is good maybe on a couple of fronts if he really was the guy.
[00:59:57]  And also, you can't defame a dead man.
[00:59:59]  So let's talk about Gary Post, who's no longer here to defend himself.
[01:00:04]  And tell us what's your elevator pitch for why he did it.
[01:00:10]  Gary, we got tipped to this case by a wonderful man.
[01:00:17]  And this man was a TB anchor in Salinas who had one of these members of art of Gary Francis Post.
[01:00:28]  Let me start this this way.
[01:00:29]  Gary Francis Post left San Francisco area.
[01:00:34]  He became a union painter.
[01:00:36]  We have his certificate.
[01:00:38]  He moved up to a small town in the High Sierra.
[01:00:41]  We have the background on his move.
[01:00:45]  And he befriended everyone as a painter.
[01:00:50]  But when you're finding paint splats on a watch in Riverside, and when you find out that he has the same shoe size and has the same military smarts on coding, we could go down a list of about 15 different things that have convinced us we have it.
[01:01:13]  And among those 15 are nine witnesses who, when one of Gary Francis Post's posse members, as he called it, a criminal gang, ran for it in 2014, it freaked out the town.
[01:01:29]  They had no idea the painter could be the zodiac.
[01:01:34]  And that's changed.
[01:01:36]  And to this day, we believe the best evidence is in that town.
[01:01:41]  Now, wait, let me stop.
[01:01:43]  Let's talk about the posse because people are like, what do you mean, posse?
[01:01:47]  We do know enough about Gary Post to know he didn't exactly spend his youth gathering friends the way the average person does.
[01:01:56]  Right.
[01:01:57]  Well, when Gary moved up to this small town, he found a single mom, married her, a very simpleton woman who is still alive and loved by a lot of people.
[01:02:12]  He met this woman with a child and moved them up to a very one street town in the high Sierra, just like the old West.
[01:02:20]  And he became a father figure to about a half dozen kids who barely got through high school.
[01:02:26]  And they became his so-called posse.
[01:02:30]  Well, they became a criminal posse.
[01:02:32]  He not only trained them how to avoid cops, he taught them how to take a pipe bomb and make it a bomb that could blow up a house.
[01:02:40]  When cops moved into that town, he would throw rocks through the bedrooms to get them out.
[01:02:48]  He had this posse up there from about 85, and they pretty much broke it up in about 2005.
[01:02:57]  And there are about 10 people he was involved in with this posse.
[01:03:02]  He'd never take more than two or three up in the mountains at a time with mules, horses, and so forth.
[01:03:10]  And what?
[01:03:11]  And so the one guy escaped, ran from the posse.
[01:03:15]  And what's his story?
[01:03:18]  Will was one of the last ones.
[01:03:20]  He appeared in 87 in town, and Gary befriended him.
[01:03:25]  He got in trouble with the law, and Gary was the unofficial lawyer in town.
[01:03:30]  He had law books covering his A-frame and convinced him that he could get him out of his charge.
[01:03:36]  It was a minor charge.
[01:03:38]  And he introduced him to the gang.
[01:03:40]  And the gang would meet in the woods and have bonfires.
[01:03:44]  And he would provide marijuana and liquor.
[01:03:51]  And he, in essence, became like a Fagan.
[01:03:55]  He trained them.
[01:03:57]  He trained them to kill every type of animal they ever saw.
[01:04:01]  Like Fagan from Oliver Twist?
[01:04:02]  Is that what you mean?
[01:04:04]  Yeah.
[01:04:04]  Okay.
[01:04:05]  Yeah.
[01:04:05]  And so that's how everybody loved this man.
[01:04:12]  But then he taught them how to kill everything on site.
[01:04:16]  And they watched him.
[01:04:17]  One story that has been told to us by Will, that's the man who ran away, who's now in his mid-50s.
[01:04:25]  At about 2000, he started reading books and he loved books and he started getting into true stories.
[01:04:34]  And then one day he's given a book of serial killers and he opens it up and he looks at the sketch in San Francisco and he says, holy cow, that's our guy.
[01:04:45]  Now, all these kids were brainwashed.
[01:04:48]  Took him 10 years to break away.
[01:04:50]  He collected photos.
[01:04:52]  He collected examples of his writing.
[01:04:59]  And he, in essence, was chased out of town when the other posse members heard he was gathering these things.
[01:05:07]  And Post literally tried to kill him with a hammer at 70 years old in his shed when he heard this.
[01:05:16]  And everybody came when the fight was going on and the kid ran for it.
[01:05:20]  Took him a, he hiked through the mountain.
[01:05:23]  They were all in tremendous shape.
[01:05:24]  He hiked through the mountains.
[01:05:26]  He stayed off of roads.
[01:05:27]  He hiked all the way to Sierra, all the way to Sacramento and walked into a newsroom.
[01:05:33]  And he said, the worst thing, Megan, that a news person wants to hear, I have a long story to tell you.
[01:05:41]  And I was the guy who had to answer that at CBS.
[01:05:44]  And I know what it paraphrases what I would say, and that is, can't you cut it down?
[01:05:51]  Could you give me the Evelyn Wood version?
[01:05:54]  No one would listen to him.
[01:05:55]  So what did he do?
[01:05:56]  He walks to San Francisco off of the freeway, through the desert, through the land, gets to San Francisco, talks to newsrooms, same problem.
[01:06:08]  Then he talks to the FBI later.
[01:06:11]  Nobody would confirm it.
[01:06:13]  What's he saying to them?
[01:06:14]  What's he saying?
[01:06:15]  Is he saying, I've found the Zodiac killer, or what's he saying?
[01:06:18]  I know who the Zodiac is.
[01:06:19]  And I have a long story I need to tell you.
[01:06:23]  So no one would listen to him.
[01:06:24]  Well, he goes down to Salinas because that's where he grew up with his parents.
[01:06:29]  And he said, you know, there's that newsman that I grew up with.
[01:06:33]  I wonder if he's still there.
[01:06:34]  And that is Dale Julen.
[01:06:36]  Dale is a retired newsman now.
[01:06:39]  And Dale, he comes to his door at the station and said, I have a long story to tell you.
[01:06:46]  Well, Dale takes him to lunch.
[01:06:49]  Now, you might ask, what is an anchor at a TV station spending several hours, as he called it, a wacko?
[01:06:56]  You know, I took a chance with a wacko.
[01:06:58]  Well, here's the interesting story.
[01:06:59]  Remember, we mentioned the buses and the threats to blow them up.
[01:07:03]  Dale was a Boy Scout on one of those buses.
[01:07:08]  And he remembered the fear and he looked at and he never forgot it.
[01:07:12]  And when he looked into the eyes of this 50-year-old kid and this homeless guy, the smells he's been out in the street, he took the chance.
[01:07:22]  And that's how we have the case.
[01:07:28]  So this all started from him seeing a sketch in a book of what somebody, I assume this is based on the eyewitness IDs that we've been discussing, said the zodiac looked like.
[01:07:39]  And that sketch was so close to your suspect that he said, it's him.
[01:07:47]  Like that was enough, that plus all the weird ways that they were living together.
[01:07:52]  Yes.
[01:07:52]  And what's very important to know, when he was at the Air Force base in Indiana, he was in a horrible Jeep accident.
[01:08:00]  The driver died, hit a bridge, and our guy had Gary Post had chest injuries, brain injury.
[01:08:11]  They had to go in to take care of fix the brain.
[01:08:14]  He lost all his teeth.
[01:08:15]  They pulled him all out to save his life.
[01:08:17]  And when he got out of that, months later, he's back at that base.
[01:08:22]  And what's sitting in the front, don't drink and drive, the jeep all torn up.
[01:08:27]  And he demands, I got to get out of here.
[01:08:30]  I can't see that every day.
[01:08:31]  I can't see it every day.
[01:08:32]  Well, what do they do?
[01:08:33]  They send him to the worst place for a radar guy on the ice of Greenland.
[01:08:40]  One guy in there with the screen.
[01:08:44]  And we believe that's where in the combination of the brain damage and other things he faced, we believe that's where he lost his mind.
[01:08:53]  He came back.
[01:08:55]  He wound up in Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is Santa Barbara.
[01:09:02]  And he was there until I'm trying to think.
[01:09:09]  Let me think for a minute.
[01:09:11]  He was there for three years, and then he got out and moved to San Francisco to be a painter.
[01:09:18]  So the cities line up.
[01:09:20]  Oh, yeah.
[01:09:22]  That would be about the murder.
[01:09:25]  There's a murder in Santa Barbara, less than 15 minutes away from that Air Force base.
[01:09:31]  And that was a couple on Ditch Day of high school.
[01:09:34]  Yeah.
[01:09:34]  Killed just like the Navy couple in San Diego.
[01:09:38]  Sniper.
[01:09:40]  They found bullets all over the sand.
[01:09:42]  He stuffed their bodies into a homeless shelter there on the cliffs.
[01:09:48]  And they have the sheriff in that town found the boxes that he discarded there with the bullets.
[01:09:56]  And those shells with the code numbers on the shell box matched the gun shop on base at Vandenberg for hunters.
[01:10:07]  It was the only gun shop and the only place you could buy bullets at the time for 100 miles.
[01:10:13]  Why wouldn't the cops have been?
[01:10:15]  That was our suspect.
[01:10:16]  Irrespective of whether that's Zodiac, a Zodiac murder, or Gary Post, why wouldn't the cops have been all over that base at the time, even with the technology they had then saying, we want to witness, we want to interview everybody.
[01:10:29]  We want to know, you know, who's been in here, who on base, like figure out where everybody's been.
[01:10:33]  Like everybody who's on the base should have been a suspect.
[01:10:37]  Well, it was about 15 to 25 minute drive.
[01:10:42]  The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department held a big news conference several years later and say, we have looked at the forensics now.
[01:10:51]  We have looked at these things.
[01:10:52]  This was five, eight years later after that murder of the couple.
[01:10:59]  And they looked at it and they felt there was some connection, but San Francisco did not accept them as a official Zodiac case.
[01:11:09]  That happened in Oceanside, happened in San Diego, has happened in Lake Tahoe.
[01:11:15]  Those are the other outliers that we strongly believe are the same man.
[01:11:21]  Why?
[01:11:21]  Look, why?
[01:11:22]  Why won't they accept it as an official?
[01:11:24]  Like, what does it have to have to be deemed an official Zodiac case by authorities?
[01:11:30]  Well, if you're talking about today, or are you talking about back then?
[01:11:34]  Well, I guess both, because it should be updated if they decided no back then.
[01:11:38]  And now today I've taken another look.
[01:11:40]  But like, what did they need?
[01:11:41]  A letter from Zodiac with his little cipher saying, I did that one?
[01:11:46]  Well, again, these departments at that time were very small, no technology.
[01:11:54]  They had their favorite detective.
[01:11:55]  They had their favorite chief.
[01:11:57]  They had their favorite driver.
[01:11:59]  They had their favorite sniper.
[01:12:01]  And those are the ones they lied on.
[01:12:03]  There was no methodical, who's the best person for this.
[01:12:07]  We know a forensic guy who's in another county.
[01:12:09]  Let's bring him in.
[01:12:11]  That was minimal back then.
[01:12:14]  Now, even today, you know, if you looked at it today, they're all so busy.
[01:12:21]  I mean, Riverside, God bless them.
[01:12:23]  Look, they have over 200 unsolved murders in their own town.
[01:12:26]  Do they really want to pick up a case, as you pointed out earlier, 50 years ago?
[01:12:32]  Yeah.
[01:12:32]  So that's the dilemma, but that's why we have this incredible team.
[01:12:37]  So we put pictures on the board while you were talking.
[01:12:39]  Our YouTube audience can check this out and you should if you're listening to this via podcast.
[01:12:43]  Just go to YouTube and check this out.
[01:12:45]  But it's a drawing, 1969, of what I understand is the Zodiac.
[01:12:52]  That's the sketch artist's rendering of the Zodiac killer based on the people who survived his attacks.
[01:13:00]  And then you have a picture next to it, and that's of your suspect.

=== Recovered Bullets and Ignored Sketches (09:34) ===

[01:13:04]  That right there on the right with the actual photo is Gary Post.
[01:13:10]  They do look similar.
[01:13:12]  I mean, I'm going to say, and we've got the red circle around what you think are scars.
[01:13:19]  We know those are Gary Francis Post's scars on the photo in 1963.
[01:13:25]  That was his last year of military service.
[01:13:28]  On the left, it's 68.
[01:13:30]  So it's five years apart.
[01:13:32]  The scars, according to my FBI members, and there's about 10 of them of the 40 members, said this can't be put ignored.
[01:13:44]  This can't be ignored is what they said to us.
[01:13:47]  Look at the jawline.
[01:13:48]  It is a match, and he's Nordic from Europe.
[01:13:53]  He has two brothers that are still alive, and we plan to talk to them too.
[01:13:59]  And what is the other picture of a man wearing a little zodiac sign with like a grocery bag over his head?
[01:14:08]  That sketch.
[01:14:09]  What is that?
[01:14:09]  Because I know you've got a split screen of Gary walking in the snow in 1974 up against what is labeled Zodiac 69 lake attack.
[01:14:20]  But what is that Zodiac?
[01:14:21]  Where are we getting that sketch from?
[01:14:24]  That sketch was done by an artist with the help of the police.
[01:14:28]  The police had original sketches of the Zodiac there, and that was defined or refined, I should say, by some artists and has been used in several documentaries.
[01:14:39]  And it does appear to there is even a police sketch that has the so-called bag or the head cover.
[01:14:48]  And again, this was the one we talked about the only daytime.
[01:14:51]  And so he worked very hard to be covered up for that.
[01:14:55]  And this is like the reason, obviously, you have a pose of the actual, you know, Gary Post right next to that.
[01:15:02]  And it could be anybody, you know, that we have no idea, but the build is definitely consistent.
[01:15:08]  And Gary Post's build was consistent with what was described by those witnesses.
[01:15:15]  Same weight, same hair color as found in the hand in Riverside.
[01:15:21]  Same height, same shoe size.
[01:15:25]  And no fingerprints at any of these crime scenes that we know are zodiac or the ones you suspect?
[01:15:31]  No, there were fingerprints found, but not of the victim or the suspect in Riverside and all the others.
[01:15:38]  They found a bunch of, look, this was a VW days back in the 60s.
[01:15:42]  You remember the old stories where how many kids can you put in a VW?
[01:15:46]  Yeah, I was one of those kids.
[01:15:48]  Oh, no comment.
[01:15:49]  Well, anyways, so that, in essence, that's how it was treated.
[01:15:54]  They went and looked at every print and couldn't match anything to any particular suspects in Riverside and elsewhere.
[01:16:01]  Again, I think he gave a pretty good explanation, and that was putting the glue on his fingertips so you couldn't find his fingerprints anywhere.
[01:16:08]  Well, but by the way, if you didn't find if you didn't find photo, if you didn't find prints of the victims either, then that it's a different explanation, right?
[01:16:14]  Then he would have had to wipe it down.
[01:16:16]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:16:17]  And because he only did two or three knife stabbings, everything else involved bullets.
[01:16:26]  And those bullets have been recovered.
[01:16:29]  He did not pick them up.
[01:16:30]  And again, I think it's because he had the idea that the fingerprints would not show up.
[01:16:36]  But as I said, we have an incredible lab up in Salt Lake.
[01:16:41]  Francine is the name of the owner, and she has developed where they can literally dunk a shell or a rock involved in a murder into this liquid and off falls the DNA.
[01:16:54]  How did you get the bullets?
[01:16:55]  Wouldn't the police departments be holding on to those and not giving them to you?
[01:16:59]  Well, we don't have the bullets.
[01:17:01]  Not the bullets, but the shells.
[01:17:05]  We don't have the bullets that were found on the ground.
[01:17:07]  What we have are the bullets that he gifted to several people in his small town.
[01:17:14]  And they held on to them.
[01:17:17]  And then they contact.
[01:17:18]  This was only two years after he died.
[01:17:20]  He died in 19, I'm sorry, in 2018.
[01:17:25]  He died in 2018, and he gave them all the shells and the hammer hits, pieces of the guns.
[01:17:35]  He found artists.
[01:17:37]  He found people that are collectors.
[01:17:39]  Well, they stayed in the boxes in the attics or in the closets for two years.
[01:17:44]  And then we got a call from the group and said, We heard about your Riverside situation.
[01:17:50]  We think we have the Zodiac here.
[01:17:52]  And we have nine witnesses up there that grew up with the Zodiac and phenomenal stories.
[01:17:59]  But wait, if they're giving you boxes of bullets that they believe Gary Post handled and you run a test on them, you should be able to figure out whether those are ideally whether those are Gary Post's fingerprints, whether he handled those boxes.
[01:18:16]  But that doesn't answer the big question because we don't have fingerprints at a crime scene that we know the zodiac was at.
[01:18:24]  We know a crime scene, but we do have hairs.
[01:18:27]  And we believe the DNA of those hairs are going to match the DNA on the bullets.
[01:18:33]  Oh, I see.
[01:18:34]  You're going to get.
[01:18:34]  Okay.
[01:18:35]  So you're looking at the last DNA in the whole world on the whole case.
[01:18:39]  And they're not putting.
[01:18:41]  Here's the other thing.
[01:18:42]  You know about CODIS.
[01:18:43]  Does that need an explanation?
[01:18:45]  Please.
[01:18:46]  CODIS is the FBI's database for DNA.
[01:18:52]  And by law in California, when somebody commits a felony, they have to have their DNA put up on CODIS to see if he has other victims, whether it be murder or rape or whatever.
[01:19:05]  Believe it or not, we brought DNA.
[01:19:08]  Dale Julin brought DNA to San Francisco and Vallejo and said, hold on to this.
[01:19:14]  We may have a suspect in the future.
[01:19:17]  This is before we were involved two years ago.
[01:19:20]  And so Dale left it with them and they thanked him.
[01:19:23]  They passed it around to the cities.
[01:19:26]  Nothing would match because remember their evidence, whether it be a licked envelope or the shell casing, none were secured forensically.
[01:19:37]  They weren't even envisioning DNA testing.
[01:19:39]  We have it in the hairs and we have it from the shells.
[01:19:44]  We also have, you'll love this, we even have his backpacker sleeping mat.
[01:19:50]  He slept on for 30 years with his posse.
[01:19:53]  Oh, man.
[01:19:54]  And we found DNA on that too.
[01:19:56]  And that's going to be compared.
[01:19:59]  All right.
[01:20:00]  Here's a different question I have for you.
[01:20:03]  Back when I was on NBC, we did an interview.
[01:20:06]  I interviewed the grandson of a man named Ed Edwards.
[01:20:14]  The grandson's name was Wayne Wolf, and he was coming out with a documentary at the time called It Was Him, The Many Murders of Ed Edwards.
[01:20:26]  And the grandson's story was just absolutely compelling.
[01:20:28]  It was like he had done some DNA searching.
[01:20:30]  It turned out his dad had a different, whatever.
[01:20:33]  There was some biological link that was that was missing that he'd been told was legit.
[01:20:38]  And long story short, Ed Edwards was a murderer.
[01:20:42]  That seems clear.
[01:20:43]  Whether he committed any of the Zodiac murders, less clear.
[01:20:47]  But this documentary done by the grandson and featuring someone named former Sergeant Detective John Cameron says Ed Edwards was the Zodiac killer.
[01:21:00]  They said he pleaded guilty to five murders, including couples on lover's lanes.
[01:21:07]  They said if you solve two of the cryptograms that the Zodiac put out, because he said, if you, Zodiac said, if you solve these, you'll have my name.
[01:21:18]  And they said they solved it.
[01:21:20]  And they determined that if you take Edward Edwards, that name, Edward Edwards, and spell it backwards, it's 13 characters.
[01:21:31]  You reverse the letters.
[01:21:33]  It's, it reveals, it matches up with the cipher, but you'd have to know the name Edward Edwards in order to do that.
[01:21:41]  And they only went there because they knew Ed Edwards had murdered others and they decided to cross-frame it.
[01:21:47]  Now, I will say this.
[01:21:49]  In my interview, this former sergeant detective John Cameron basically said that this Ed Edwards killed everybody ever.
[01:21:57]  Like it was like Jimmy Hoffa, John Bene Ramsey, Scott Lacey Peterson.
[01:22:05]  Yes, Lacey Peterson.
[01:22:06]  So which we all disclose, you know, we were having an interesting interview.
[01:22:10]  But have you ever heard of Ed Edwards?
[01:22:12]  And what do you think?
[01:22:15]  There are a half dozen we like to call, you know, in Cooper, Cooper Land and D.B. Cooper, we call them Cooper Ice.
[01:22:21]  They're called Zodiacers, people that have theories, have some interesting links.
[01:22:29]  And Hoffadites is the other group that thinks they know where he's buried.
[01:22:33]  And surprise, surprise, we believe we know where he's buried.
[01:22:37]  That's our next one.

=== Lacey Peterson and Ed Edwards Theory (12:44) ===

[01:22:39]  Wait, Gary Post didn't kill Jimmy Hoffa in your story, did he?
[01:22:43]  Bigfoot did.
[01:22:44]  Okay.
[01:22:45]  It always goes full circle.
[01:22:46]  I appreciate that.
[01:22:48]  Yes.
[01:22:49]  No, look, everybody has their own theories.
[01:22:51]  I appreciate that.
[01:22:52]  There are some things they have that we integrate into our investigations.
[01:22:56]  For example, on accurate locations and ages, and you know how the information changes.
[01:23:03]  So you have to be really meticulous.
[01:23:06]  And look, we feel we're the only ones.
[01:23:10]  All these people have theories, but you know what?
[01:23:13]  We're the only ones with a 40-member cold case team and the only ones with evidence.
[01:23:19]  And that's why we're very drawn to this.
[01:23:22]  The story of him, of Gary Post losing his mind and, you know, sort of going crazy is interesting.
[01:23:28]  One of his letters said, I'm, how did he put it?
[01:23:31]  It says something.
[01:23:32]  He said, I am insane.
[01:23:34]  He owned his mental illness.
[01:23:37]  And he clearly is, if you read the body of the Zodiac letters, it's not like a Ted Bundy who's who seems very logical and brilliant and methodical, though evil, right?
[01:23:50]  This guy sounds like a lunatic that I'm amassing slaves for the afterlife.
[01:23:55]  And now I think I've got enough.
[01:23:56]  And the rest of you are all going to be screwed because you don't have any slave.
[01:23:59]  Like, he doesn't sound well.
[01:24:01]  No, he's not.
[01:24:03]  And there was one example from Will, and I sent you some footage of Will.
[01:24:10]  What's interesting about Will ran for it.
[01:24:19]  One thing that we learned from Will was there was a time when they went up in the mountains, three or four of the posse members with him, and he hung some meat in a container up in a tall tree.
[01:24:35]  And they went out with the horses, came back several days later.
[01:24:40]  He unfolds a chair.
[01:24:43]  And on the tree, Will notices there are salmon hooks on the tree.
[01:24:50]  And what had happened is there were three bears leading to death on those salmon hooks, trying to get to the meat.
[01:24:58]  And what is Post do?
[01:24:59]  He sits down and taunts and laughs at the animals till they die for hours.
[01:25:04]  Oh, God.
[01:25:06]  This is why we say this is the zodiac.
[01:25:08]  He would immerse his arms.
[01:25:10]  We have photos of him immersing his arms into the innards, the insides of dead animals, pulling out pieces, laughing about them, throwing them.
[01:25:20]  This man was in his 60s and 50s and 70s doing this with the posse.
[01:25:26]  Well, that was one of those.
[01:25:27]  Those kids had lots of nightmares after this.
[01:25:30]  That was one of my questions for you.
[01:25:32]  How did he live out the rest of his life, right?
[01:25:34]  Because you know he died in 2018.
[01:25:36]  Was anyone on to him prior to that?
[01:25:38]  Had anybody, I mean, Will had been running around saying, I think I know who it is, but had anybody looked into him?
[01:25:44]  Had police ever visited him?
[01:25:47]  And was he married?
[01:25:48]  Does he have a family?
[01:25:49]  Was there anybody that you could talk to about his mental state, how he was, et cetera?
[01:25:54]  We have phenomenal witnesses.
[01:25:58]  And it starts with neighbors.
[01:26:02]  You want to believe this?
[01:26:03]  The Zodiac and his wife became babysitters for one of the neighbors.
[01:26:07]  And that went on for seven to eight years.
[01:26:10]  And the young girl, he would take them into the woods, his stepson and this young girl, he'd take them into the woods, give them guns and show them how to shoot.
[01:26:22]  And this was children in the ages of five to 15.
[01:26:29]  And the girl told us that she was going out.
[01:26:33]  He would take her out sometimes five days a week to shoot in the woods.
[01:26:38]  That was the babysitting.
[01:26:40]  Maybe that's not unusual.
[01:26:41]  I mean, like, I'm a city girl.
[01:26:42]  I don't like in more rural parts of America.
[01:26:45]  The rest of it's not so normal.
[01:26:46]  But like, wouldn't he, if he was this crazy, wouldn't everybody who knew him say, oh my God, Gary, nutcase, and he got in trouble with the law here and have a long history of interactions with the authorities.
[01:27:01]  When Will went to the authorities and the FBI, they said, we don't believe you.
[01:27:05]  But guess what?
[01:27:06]  We have learned from the town that the FBI actually went up there.
[01:27:10]  Now, the thing about this town, it's on the top of a mountain.
[01:27:14]  And when you're going up there, they usually call ahead because the roads wash out.
[01:27:18]  The local sheriffs and our Zodiac suspect was friends with a couple of deputies that we believe they tipped him because the minute they showed up, he somehow had dementia.
[01:27:31]  He couldn't remember things.
[01:27:33]  And he would crash cars.
[01:27:37]  He'd put sugar in gas tanks and act crazy.
[01:27:40]  He even told some of the kids, kids now in their 50s, that I knew this is how I'll never be put in jail.
[01:27:48]  And it almost worked.
[01:27:50]  He did abuse his wife and had the last two years in jail.
[01:27:54]  But that was just for abuse.
[01:27:57]  And he died in jail.
[01:27:59]  Didn't he ever, did he?
[01:28:01]  I feel like the Zodiac would have left a note.
[01:28:06]  You know, he's a prolific writer and loved writing notes about himself.
[01:28:10]  Wouldn't the Zodiac have owned it upon his death?
[01:28:16]  No, he chose to, he did tell a half dozen people.
[01:28:21]  We have three affidavits, two of them from prisoners, one from Will, where he admits who he is.
[01:28:28]  And we brought those to a courtroom in a very remote county.
[01:28:31]  And again, we have them, but no one has looked at them.
[01:28:35]  And that'll be part of the documentary that we're pursuing is revealing that he did tell three or four people very close to him that he was the Zodiac.
[01:28:48]  By the way, when he did die, that girl that was babysat by him and his wife, when he died, the widow was called, got a call from a 30-something woman, and that was the little girl.
[01:29:04]  And the minute she got on the phone with the widow, the widow said, I'm sorry.
[01:29:10]  And I'm paraphrasing, I'm sorry, I never told you about Gary, and I'm sorry for what's happened.
[01:29:18]  It was a stunning, and they were stunned.
[01:29:21]  That woman was stunned to get that call.
[01:29:23]  Then another neighbor called her and said, and she confirmed the same story with the other neighbor.
[01:29:31]  But I mean, it could just be, I'm sorry, Gary was such a bastard and that you got stuck with the worst babysitter ever, as opposed to, I'm sorry, you grew up being tutelaged, you know, with tutelage from the Zodiac.
[01:29:43]  Well, we do have her quoted talking about the Zodiac and the murders.
[01:29:48]  But you know how it is.
[01:29:49]  Like in the same way, these guys said Ed Edwards did it.
[01:29:53]  Maybe this guy, Gary, was like, and I'm the Zodiac too.
[01:29:57]  Well, I will tell you when the FBI went up there in 2014 after Will ran for it.
[01:30:05]  What happened then is that the town split.
[01:30:08]  Half believed he could be.
[01:30:10]  The other half said, no, he's a painter.
[01:30:11]  We love him.
[01:30:12]  He's a great guy.
[01:30:13]  This is a town of 300 people, very small.
[01:30:17]  And when several, we have nine witnesses, six of them very strong.
[01:30:23]  When they heard he could have been the Zodiac, these folks slept on their couches in their closets for months.
[01:30:31]  They were freaked out, freaked out.
[01:30:34]  And that's what happened to the town when Will ran for it.
[01:30:39]  It split the town in two.
[01:30:41]  This is all you say was on the top of a mountain.
[01:30:43]  This is in Northern California.
[01:30:46]  This is in the high Sierra, yes, Northern California.
[01:30:48]  Okay.
[01:30:49]  And was anybody ever able to find people who knew Gary in his youth?
[01:30:54]  You know, talk about what he was like back then before he had these injuries.
[01:30:58]  Do you have any idea of his childhood background?
[01:31:01]  We have some of his veterans who talked about and remembers when he lost his mind and remembers how it affected him, that accident and the surgery.
[01:31:10]  That's one of his veterans.
[01:31:12]  We tracked him down.
[01:31:14]  We have neighbors that knew him that worked with him in his paint company, and they all think he's a great guy.
[01:31:20]  Well, he divided his world.
[01:31:24]  You should know he never went to funerals.
[01:31:26]  He never went to weddings.
[01:31:27]  When he went to the market, he'd make his wife go in and he'd sit in the car.
[01:31:32]  He was off the grid, Megan.
[01:31:34]  There was, you know, no cell phones, nothing.
[01:31:37]  And so he stayed off the grid in this little town until he passed.
[01:31:42]  And then out came the bullets from neighbors.
[01:31:45]  Wow.
[01:31:46]  So what do you think?
[01:31:48]  I mean, like, I know that not everybody's cooperative and you're still working on it and you're going to do your test.
[01:31:54]  But do you think we'll know?
[01:31:55]  Do you think you'll get this to a place where it is beyond doubt that it was this guy?
[01:32:03]  I think it's going to happen because of our three attorneys.
[01:32:06]  I hate to go that route, but we've taken this evidence from Riverside to the task force forces on DNA and these hairs.
[01:32:16]  We've been all the way up to the Attorney General of California, who turned us back to San Francisco.
[01:32:22]  Nobody wants to deal with this 50-year-old headache.
[01:32:25]  But look, all we need is the hairs to compare.
[01:32:28]  They're sitting in that fridge.
[01:32:31]  We have DNA to compare it to.
[01:32:34]  It's just a matter of time.
[01:32:36]  And the FBI, which did the lab work on the hairs, I think it's going to be awfully hard, we hope, awfully hard for the FBI to not cooperate.
[01:32:47]  We went to them a couple years ago, not only with our Hoffa story, but Zodiac.
[01:32:52]  We met with the agent in charge in Los Angeles, who happened to be another, you know, hey, Tom, I know a guy who knows a guy, one of our team members, was buddies with him on the JTTF, the Terrorism Task Force in Chicago.
[01:33:07]  So he arranged for me and our member, Jim Zimmerman, to meet with this agent.
[01:33:13]  And he looked at the evidence and he literally said, I think you caught him.
[01:33:19]  And I think this is Hoffa.
[01:33:20]  I'm going to take it to the crime division.
[01:33:23]  This agent took it to the crime division three times and they turned it down.
[01:33:30]  Well, who did kill Jimmy Hoffa?
[01:33:32]  Another word down that lane.
[01:33:34]  Well, you can't go there, but I will tell you he's buried in the Great Lakes area.
[01:33:41]  Not Giant Stadium?
[01:33:43]  No, you know, I can't give you where, but I will tell you that we sent a van up there and a couple of my guys with vests and hard hats and big foot long sandwiches and sat where the exact spot he was buried, we were brought to on a deathbed cop, a corrupt cop who worked for a mobster, who cased Hoffa.
[01:34:09]  That cop on his deathbed gave us the exact location in a map.
[01:34:14]  He gave it to his niece, who was another cop, and that niece brought it to her boyfriend of 10 years.
[01:34:21]  And he's a cop.
[01:34:23]  And he said, and she said, I've got six brothers and sisters.
[01:34:26]  I don't want to break this.
[01:34:28]  They'll go after my family.
[01:34:29]  And the boyfriend said, that's fine.
[01:34:32]  You know, you do what you think is best.
[01:34:34]  25 years later, that boyfriend's on my team, Jim Zimmerman, and he came into my office and said, you know, I have a 10-year girlfriend that thinks she knows where Hoffa is.
[01:34:45]  We went there with Jim and some other cops with a van set up like we're workers, cops waving at us, rent a cops, and suddenly out rolls a ground penetration radar machine from the van.
[01:35:02]  We go to the exact spot in the middle of nowhere, and there it goes down five feet to clay.
[01:35:09]  You can't see through clay.
[01:35:10]  And the geophysicist that looked at it said, you know, I usually use words like anomaly and disturbance, but this is a backhoe job in the middle of nowhere.

=== Circumstantial Clues and Golden State Killer (05:41) ===

[01:35:24]  And so we are now coordinating with universities and the state involved and the attorney general probably to tent it so that there's no interruption.
[01:35:34]  Because if we're wrong, we're wrong.
[01:35:37]  That's what I was going to ask you.
[01:35:38]  If you're wrong, and if you do get a test on these hairs and they don't match Gary, will you accept that?
[01:35:45]  There's a lot of things that match Gary.
[01:35:47]  I'm not worried about that one at all.
[01:35:49]  I really am not.
[01:35:51]  There's so much I haven't told you.
[01:35:53]  You know, there is so many pieces of evidence, so many clues, so many quotes, affidavits, shoe size.
[01:36:02]  I mean, everything is all in the right spot.
[01:36:06]  Now, and again, I think it's, I have quotes from friends at DOJ, friends at police departments that I've known because of my teaching.
[01:36:19]  And they've told me, Tom, don't go there.
[01:36:21]  You're going to just be, you're going to be embarrassing us.
[01:36:24]  Literally, that's what they said.
[01:36:26]  Others said, I can't, after getting very excited, they go to the head of their department and they said, no, no, no, you know, I can't do it.
[01:36:34]  Nobody wants to be embarrassed.
[01:36:36]  So that's what we're facing.
[01:36:37]  And that's where we hope these attorneys can help.
[01:36:40]  Well, we will certainly continue to follow it and have you back once you get those results if you want to talk about it.
[01:36:48]  Fascinating discussion.
[01:36:49]  Thank you so much for walking us through such a complex case and letting us understand how this thing went down.
[01:36:57]  Megan, I really appreciate your invitation.
[01:36:59]  If I may, I want to mention to the audience that there are three stats they need to understand.
[01:37:06]  One is quarter million.
[01:37:09]  Another one is 6,000.
[01:37:10]  The other one is 5%.
[01:37:13]  There are a quarter million unsolved murders now in this country, and it grows by 6,000 a year.
[01:37:19]  And only 5% of departments now can afford cold case teams.
[01:37:25]  That's what this is all about.
[01:37:27]  And my wife and I are expanding.
[01:37:29]  We are now a .org nonprofit.
[01:37:32]  We've funded it for 10 years on this team to, we want to spread these teams out in every state because there's no more cops coming.
[01:37:42]  We're getting retired cops to help solve these problems.
[01:37:46]  Tom, thank you.
[01:37:47]  Thank you so much.
[01:37:48]  Thank you.
[01:37:49]  God bless.
[01:37:50]  Colbert and his team do some truly important work, but what about his theory on the Zodiac killer's identity?
[01:37:57]  It is just a theory.
[01:37:59]  Later this week, we're going to bring you a fascinating interview with Paul Holes.
[01:38:04]  Paul is the real deal.
[01:38:06]  He's a former cold case investigator who really was the guy.
[01:38:10]  I mean, he was part of a team, but he really was the guy who helped solve the Golden State Killer case.
[01:38:16]  Okay, this is a guy, lifelong law enforcement.
[01:38:19]  He's got a book too on the cold cases that he's looked into and so on.
[01:38:23]  And one of them is the Zodiac.
[01:38:25]  So I asked him about this interview with Tom Colbert and what he thinks.
[01:38:29]  And here is what he said.
[01:38:31]  Can I ask you about Zodiac?
[01:38:33]  We had a guy come on the program.
[01:38:35]  The guy's name is Tom Colbert, and he made the strongest case he could that the Zodiac killer was a man named Gary Post.
[01:38:44]  And I asked him about a show I did on NBC in which the filmmakers, because they had done a documentary, were saying the man that the Zodiac killer was Ed Edwards.
[01:38:54]  And he said, No, it wasn't Ed.
[01:38:55]  I'm very certain it was Gary Post, and presented the case for Gary Post.
[01:39:00]  As somebody who's looked into the Zodiac killer, who do you think it was?
[01:39:04]  What do you make of these pronouncements that it was definitively Ed Edwards or it was definitively Gary Post?
[01:39:10]  I put no weight on them whatsoever.
[01:39:12]  You know, I got involved in the Zodiac case in the late 90s into the early 2000s.
[01:39:18]  I was dealing with the early online sleuths during that timeframe.
[01:39:22]  You know, they all have what they call their POIs, the persons of interest, and they build these circumstantial cases.
[01:39:29]  And oftentimes they're way off the mark, even with the circumstantial cases.
[01:39:34]  But they miss, you know, what we look at is we have to find a nexus to the crime.
[01:39:40]  We can't just say, well, this person lived in an area where these crimes were committed or this or that.
[01:39:47]  Working Golden State Killer, I have built tremendous circumstantial cases against numerous individuals.
[01:39:56]  Some of these individuals, I think, to this day circumstantially match up better than D'Angelo and only I eliminated them with DNA.
[01:40:04]  So when you start working these cases with this type of notoriety, you cast such a wide net of suspects, you know, 10,000 people being looked at, you are going to find individuals that have circumstantial aspects to them to where you go, wow, this can't be coincident.
[01:40:24]  It must be him.
[01:40:25]  And I will tell you, it's coincidence.
[01:40:28]  Personally, the only way I am going to believe that the Zodiac has been identified is if they do get that objective identifying evidence that shows this is the guy.
[01:40:42]  Do they match DNA if they get DNA from, let's say, envelopes or stamps that the Zodiac sent in?
[01:40:48]  Can they get DNA off of the bindings that the Zodiac brought with them to the Lake Berry SSC?
[01:40:55]  Or does somebody find a shoebox, you know, in their maybe their dad's house after he dies that has Paul Stein's bloody shirt in it?

=== Waiting for Objective DNA Evidence (01:07) ===

[01:41:05]  You know, something like that.
[01:41:08]  Now I'm interested, but I've seen it too many times.
[01:41:12]  They throw these names out there and this is a Zodiac.
[01:41:17]  I'm not convinced, and I don't think the Zodiac has been identified yet.
[01:41:23]  For now, the mystery continues, but we're going to stay on it.
[01:41:26]  We will bring you updates, if any, and we hope that you will join us tomorrow for Hot Crime Summer and the terrifying case.
[01:41:35]  Oh, this is awful.
[01:41:36]  Of the DC sniper.
[01:41:38]  Who did it, how they did it, and what we can learn from that experience.
[01:41:42]  Thanks for listening, everybody.
[01:41:43]  We'll talk then.
[01:41:46]  Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
[01:41:48]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[01:42:12]  30 gigabytes for about