On December 5, 2020, three men who had never met in person and who lived on three different continents posted a video to YouTube. The video was eight minutes long. It was watched, in the first week, by more than two million people. Most of them had spent their lives only half-aware that the puzzle the three men had just solved had ever existed.

Their names were David Oranchak, a software engineer in Virginia; Sam Blake, an applied mathematician in Melbourne; and Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian programmer who had spent a decade writing custom decryption tools as a hobby. The cipher they had cracked was a 340-character message that had been mailed in a plain white envelope to the city desk of the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8, 1969 — a message that had been sitting, undeciphered, in the public record for fifty-one years and twenty-seven days.

The author of the message had signed his letters, when he signed them at all, with a circle and crossed crosshairs. He called himself the Zodiac. He had murdered at least five people in Northern California between 1968 and 1969, claimed in his letters to have murdered thirty-two more, and then — sometime in the mid-1970s — stopped writing entirely. As of 2026, no one has ever been arrested, charged, or definitively identified as the Zodiac. The case has outlasted nearly every detective who originally worked it.

A roadside on Lake Herman Road

The first attack came on the night of December 20, 1968, on a dark stretch of Lake Herman Road outside Vallejo, California, north of San Francisco. David Faraday, seventeen, and Betty Lou Jensen, sixteen, were on their first date. They had told Betty’s parents they were going to a Christmas concert at Hogan High School. They had instead driven out to a quiet gravel turnoff that local teenagers used as a parking spot.

Around eleven that night, a man approached the car. He was carrying a .22 caliber pistol. Both teenagers were shot before they could escape. Their bodies were found by a passing motorist roughly thirty minutes later. The Solano County Sheriff’s Office had no shell casings that matched a previous crime, no fingerprints on the car, and no witnesses other than the driver who found them. The case sat for almost seven months with nothing to advance it.

On the night of July 4, 1969, on a similar lover’s-lane turnout four miles away at Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, the killer struck again. Darlene Ferrin, twenty-two, a waitress at a local Vallejo coffee shop, and Mike Mageau, nineteen, were sitting in her car when a second car pulled up beside them, blinded them with a high-beam flashlight, and a man stepped out and shot through Mageau’s window. Mageau, struck three times, somehow survived. Ferrin did not. Less than an hour after the attack, the Vallejo Police Department received a call from a pay phone at a Vallejo gas station. The caller, calmly, gave the location of the shooting, said he had killed the two teenagers on Lake Herman Road the previous December, and hung up.

It was the first time anyone outside the killer himself had connected the two attacks.

The letters arrive

Four weeks after the Blue Rock Springs shooting, on August 1, 1969, three separate newspapers in Northern California received hand-addressed envelopes. Inside each was an almost-identical letter, claiming credit for both attacks and providing details about the crimes that had not been published — the brand of the ammunition, the positions of the bodies, the exact number of shots fired. The letters were typed only in the sense that the writer used block-printed capital letters with a Schaeffer ballpoint pen. They were grammatical but laced with idiosyncratic spelling errors that became signatures of the writer’s voice for the next several years.

Each of the three letters included one-third of a longer coded message — a 408-character cipher, one section per newspaper. The writer demanded that all three sections be printed on the front pages, threatening more murders if the editors refused. The San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Vallejo Times-Herald complied, after consultation with the FBI.

The 408-character cipher — known to investigators as Z-408 — was cracked within a week. The codebreakers were not professionals. They were Donald and Bettye Harden, a high-school teacher and his wife living in Salinas, who solved it over a long weekend at their kitchen table by guessing that the writer’s ego would lead him to begin with the word I. The decoded message was a chilling, self-celebratory rant whose first words were: I like killing people because it is so much fun. It claimed the writer was collecting victims for his afterlife. It did not, despite the writer’s earlier promise, contain his name.

A week after the Z-408 was solved, on August 7, 1969, a follow-up letter arrived at the Chronicle. It opened with a phrase that would become inseparable from the case: This is the Zodiac speaking.

Lake Berryessa, and a hood with a symbol

On September 27, 1969, a college student named Bryan Hartnell, twenty, and his friend Cecelia Shepard, twenty-two, were picnicking on the southeastern shore of Lake Berryessa, an hour’s drive northeast of Vallejo. A man in a black executioner-style hood approached them across the open meadow. The hood was sewn with a white symbol on the chest: a circle and crosshairs, the same emblem that had appeared at the bottom of every Zodiac letter so far.

The man told the couple, calmly, that he was an escaped convict and needed their car and money to get to Mexico. He tied them up. He then drew a knife and stabbed them repeatedly. Hartnell survived. Shepard, who had been stabbed more times, lived long enough to give the responding deputy a description of the attacker’s voice but died two days later in the hospital. Before leaving the beach, the attacker walked back up the trail to the parking lot and used a black felt-tip pen to write on the door of Hartnell’s white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. He listed the dates of his three known attacks. He drew the crosshairs symbol. He signed nothing else.

Two weeks later, on October 11, 1969, at the corner of Washington and Cherry Streets in the affluent Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, a Yellow Cab driver named Paul Stine, twenty-nine, was shot once in the head by a passenger he had just driven up from downtown. The killer tore a piece off Stine’s bloodied shirt and walked away on foot. Two neighborhood teenagers watching from a second-floor window saw him calmly wipe the cab’s interior with a cloth. They called the police. Three responding patrol officers, racing to the scene, drove past a white man walking calmly down nearby Jackson Street — the only verified eyewitness sighting of the Zodiac ever recorded — because they had been incorrectly told over the radio to be looking for a Black suspect.

Three days later, a piece of Paul Stine’s bloodied shirt arrived in the mail at the San Francisco Chronicle, accompanied by a letter taking credit for the Stine murder and threatening to attack a school bus full of children next.

Z-340: the cipher that wouldn’t break

The Zodiac’s correspondence continued for the next several years, with letters arriving sporadically at the Chronicle and other Bay Area papers through 1974. Some of the letters contained ciphers. Most did not. The longest of the ciphers, sent in November 1969, was the 340-character message that would become known as Z-340. It was, on the surface, similar in style to the Z-408: a substitution code in which the same plaintext letter was mapped to several different cipher symbols, with three lines of nonsense at the end designed to throw off frequency analysis.

The Z-340 resisted every codebreaker who tried it for fifty-one years. The National Security Agency examined it twice. The FBI’s cryptanalysis unit examined it three times. Academic cryptographers presented papers about it at conferences. Hobbyists devoted decades to trying to crack it. The wall everyone hit was the same: the cipher was not a simple substitution like Z-408 had been. It used some additional structural transformation that the codebreakers could not identify.

In 2020, after years of collaborative work over Skype and shared cipher databases, David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke discovered the missing structure. The Zodiac had not just substituted letters — he had also shuffled the cipher in a specific diagonal pattern before writing it out, making the original message readable only if you knew to undo the shuffle first. Once they applied the right transposition, the substitution behind it cracked in a few hours of computer search.

The plaintext was not what most people had expected. It contained no name. It contained no detailed confession. It was a rambling boast about how much the writer enjoyed having law enforcement chase him, told the reader that he was not afraid of the gas chamber because it would send him to his “paradise,” and ended with the same kind of self-mythologizing tone the writer had favored in every previous letter. After fifty-one years of speculation that Z-340 would finally reveal who the Zodiac was, the answer was: it didn’t.

The FBI publicly confirmed the Oranchak-Blake-Van Eycke decryption in December 2020. Two other Zodiac ciphers, Z-13 (which the writer claimed contained his name) and Z-32 (which the writer claimed pointed to the location of a buried bomb), remain unsolved.

The suspects who never quite fit

Over five decades, more than 2,500 named suspects have been investigated. Three have become permanent fixtures in the public conversation.

Arthur Leigh Allen, a Vallejo man with a 1974 conviction for child molestation, was the longest-running official suspect. He matched some witness descriptions, had military training that could have explained his comfort with codes and weapons, and reportedly had a Zodiac wristwatch in his collection. Police searched his home and trailer in 1991, found nothing definitive, and Allen died in 1992 of natural causes. DNA testing on a partial sample lifted from a Zodiac envelope, performed for the first time in the early 2000s, did not match him.

Lawrence Kane, a New Mexico car salesman who had been in the Bay Area in 1969 and had a long history of stalking and assault charges, was identified by Mike Mageau in a 1991 photo lineup as the man who had shot him at Blue Rock Springs. Kane was never charged. He died in 2010.

Gary Francis Poste, an Air Force veteran from Groveland, California, was publicly named in October 2021 by a group of self-styled cold-case investigators calling themselves the Case Breakers. They claimed scars on Poste’s forehead matched a partial fingerprint and a sketch from the Stine murder, and that decoded messages in the Zodiac letters spelled out his name backwards. Poste had died in 2018. The FBI and the San Francisco Police Department both declined to endorse the Case Breakers’ conclusion, and the family of Paul Stine publicly rejected it. The case file remains open.

The DNA still waiting

The most realistic remaining hope for an answer rests on what investigators call the envelope DNA. The Zodiac killer licked the stamps and the gummed flaps of the envelopes he sent. Partial genetic profiles were lifted from several of the letters as early as 2002. The profiles were degraded and not always complete, but enough genetic material exists, in principle, to attempt the same kind of forensic genetic genealogy work that solved the Golden State Killer and the Boy in the Box.

The work has been slow. The original DNA samples are owned, in different fragments, by several different agencies — the SFPD, the FBI, the Vallejo Police Department, and the Napa County Sheriff. Coordinating access has been difficult. There is also the same worry that haunts the JonBenét case: the samples are small, and an attempt to extract a genealogy-grade profile could consume them entirely. In 2022 and 2023, the FBI confirmed in interviews that targeted re-testing was underway. In 2025, no public results have yet been announced.

What the Zodiac left behind

The Zodiac killed five people. He almost certainly killed others he was never connected to. He almost certainly did not kill all thirty-seven he claimed in his letters. He turned five murders into the most theatrical American crime story of the second half of the twentieth century by writing letters — by understanding, decades before social media, that the way to make a murder mythological was to attach a voice and a symbol to it.

The voice fell silent sometime in 1974. The last verified Zodiac letter arrived at the San Francisco Chronicle on January 29 of that year. It was four sentences long and contained no threat. Then, nothing. Whether the writer died, was incarcerated for an unrelated crime, suffered an illness that prevented him from writing, or simply chose to stop, no one knows.

The five people he killed have, in the half-century since, become difficult to see through the layer of cipher books and movie posters and podcasts and online forums and Halloween costumes. David Faraday wanted to be a marine biologist. Betty Lou Jensen wanted to be a dental hygienist. Darlene Ferrin had a one-year-old daughter who was at home with her sister the night her mother was killed. Cecelia Shepard had been studying for finals at Pacific Union College. Paul Stine was a graduate student in English at San Francisco State University who drove a cab at night to pay tuition. They were each, at the moment they died, young people who had been planning the rest of their week.

The man who killed them is, by every honest reckoning, almost certainly dead by now. His ciphers are mostly cracked. His symbol is mostly recognized. His name, after fifty-eight years, is the only thing he ever wanted us to figure out, and the one thing he ever made sure we couldn’t.

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Sources: San Francisco Police Department case file 696314; FBI Zodiac case file (selected releases); David Oranchak, Sam Blake, Jarl Van Eycke, Z-340 decryption paper (December 2020); Robert Graysmith, Zodiac (1986) and Zodiac Unmasked (2002); Michael Butterfield, ZodiacKillerFacts.com archives; San Francisco Chronicle and Vallejo Times-Herald archival reporting, 1968–2025.