Zodiac killer, unidentified American serial killer who is believed to have murdered at least five
people in northern California between 1968 and 1969. An earlier murder, the stabbing death of
an 18-year-old college student in Riverside, California in 1966, is also sometimes attributed to
the Zodiac killer. The case inspired the influential 1971 action film Dirty Harry, which starred
Clint Eastwood, and it was the subject of the critically acclaimed David Fincher dramatic film
Zodiac (2007).
In 1968 a teenage couple was shot to death near their car in a remote area north of San
Francisco; one year later another couple was attacked in similar circumstances, though the male
victim survived. After the 1969 attack, the killer phoned police to alert them to the crime and to
take responsibility for the 1968 murders. Later that year the Zodiac killer attacked another
young couple, though once again the male survived. The last known victim, a taxi driver, was
shot in October 1969.
The murders were the subject of intense investigation and media coverage, particularly because
of the killer’s taunting letters to newspapers and phone calls to police. His letters, sent from
1969 to 1974, were signed with a symbol resembling the crosshairs of a gunsight and typically
began with the phrase, “this is the Zodiac speaking.” Included among the letters were four
ciphers or cryptograms, the first of which was sent in three parts to three Bay Area newspapers
in July 1969. Known as the “408 cipher” for the number of characters it contained, it was soon
decoded by a pair of private citizens. Its message stated in part that, “I like killing people
because it is so much fun.” Another cipher, the “340 cipher,” mailed to the San Francisco
Chronicle in November 1969, was finally decoded in 2020 by a team of three amateur code
breakers; its message began, “I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me.”
Much remains mysterious about the Zodiac case, not least the issue of when
the crimes stopped. Crime writer Robert Graysmith argued that the Zodiac
killer remained active through the 1980s and murdered dozens more people,
though this view is controversial. During the 1990s several investigators
claimed to have identified the Zodiac killer; the suspect most often cited was
Arthur Leigh Allen (1933–92), a Vallejo, California, schoolteacher who had
been institutionalized in 1975 for child molestation, though his identification
with the Zodiac killer has never been substantiated.
