The Most Dangerous Game [3]

This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hi, I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the Betrayal Podcast, season six. This season, we meet Carl Bryant, whose entire world begins to unravel. When a stalker targets him and everyone he loves, for nine months, someone infiltrated every aspect of Carl's life, threatening to ruin him. Every piece of evidence pointed to one man, but every piece of evidence was a lie. And now, you can binge all seasons of Betrayal, seasons one through five, and all Betrayal weekly episodes. Plus, every episode of Betrayal, season six, is completely ad-free with an "I Heart True Crime" plus subscription, available only on Apple Podcasts. Even better, Betrayal, season six episodes dropped one week early for subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for "I Heart True Crime" plus and subscribe today. As the wrong man been in prison this whole time, listen to "Examined" the "Backfire Effect" on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Darrell Bell, and I'm Kadeem Harrison. And together, we're the voices behind the newest podcast on the Black Effect Podcast Network, a different worldview with Darrell and Kadeem. Each Thursday, we're rewatching an episode of the show that changed our lines a different world. We're sharing never before heard stories from behind the scenes and sitting down with other stars from the show to hear their unique perspectives. Listen to a different worldview with Darrell and Kadeem every Thursday, from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From shocking betrayals to carefully planned murders, the Black Effect's new original podcast series, Bloodline Crimes, hosted by me, Morgan Wood, explores the darkest and bizarre cases where family became the most dangerous threat of all. Listen to the Black Effect's Bloodline Crimes every Thursday, starting October 8th, from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you've ever found yourself in a TikTok black hole at 1am, 8 months back on some influencers' boyfriends' page, well, this is a message for you. Welcome to my podcast, Oh My Cosh, I'm Hannah Cosh. Every Wednesday, we're dissecting the internet and pop culture with a journalistic integrity that it deserves. There is, um, a drama going on with "Dancing with the Stars." Here's everything from "Parallel Anthony College Wedding." Listen to "Oh My Cosh" on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And for more follow @HannahCosh and @tiktokpodcastnetwork on TikTok. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast and do not necessarily represent those of "I Heart" media, how stuff works, or its employees. For law enforcement, every homicide case is a puzzle. Some more difficult than others. 200 pieces, versus 200,000. The Zodiac Killer took the idea of a puzzle quite literally, forcing everyone to play his little game. This may be what the Zodiac is known for best, codes, and taunting letters to press and police. But would there be any answers to his riddle, any content to his code? Was all this a front, a power play, and not worth the attention he so desperately sought? That was left up to the press. Game on. A man and a mask robbed, tied, and stabbed them, leaving them for dead. Subject stated, "I want a report of murder. No, a double murder. I did it." A man who wore an evil-style executioner's hood carried a knife and gun and intended to use them. They haven't arrested me because they can't prove a thing. I'm not the damn Zodiac. Who is the Zodiac? And where is he? From I Heart Radio, Halstuff Works, and Tinderfoot TV. This is Monster, the Zodiac Killer. When he committed the murders on Lake Herman Road, he didn't make any effort to communicate with the media or take responsibility for it. But there was a lot of media attention around it. And then when he struck again in July of 1969, there was enormous media coverage, largely because of the phone call he made afterwards, where he took credit for that crime and the murders on Lake Herman Road. If you will go one mile east on Columbus Parkway, you'll find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9-millimeter luger. I also killed those kids last year. So now he's created this sensational story that there's a psychotic killer out there, a serial killer who's responsible for two crimes, not just one. 26 days later is when he get the first Zodiac letters. A strange letter arrives at the offices of three Northern California newspapers. He's created a whole 'nother game now. On July 31, 1969, the Zodiac sent envelopes to three Bay Area newspapers. Each envelope included two sheets, a handwritten letter, and one third of a three-part coded message known as a cryptogram or a cipher. This coded message is very important to the case. But let's focus on the letter first. Duffy Jennings was working at the San Francisco Chronicle when the first letter arrived. I'll never forget my first day walking into the Chronicle. The day before I had come in to do an interview, but it was in the morning and there's not a lot of activity. You know, most activity at a morning paper is late afternoon. But when I came in to start work the next afternoon, I think it was probably two o'clock. It was equivalent to the first time I walked into Yankee Stadium and saw that grass. Everybody talks about it with that first experience. It was overwhelming. It is the majesty of it. And that's what I sense at the Chronicle. It was total chaos. Desks were disheveled and crowded with papers and there was stuff everywhere. And people were smoking. I could smell pencil shavings, glue, printers ink. Lots of people talking loudly and guys yelling, "Copy!" And guys at the desk yelling, "First edition!" And it was just a typical day. But that's how it was every afternoon. The closer it got to five o'clock and people were on deadline, editors were yelling, "You need to explain this or rewrite this?" Or whatever it was. And I was just captivated by, I was mesmerized by this. It was just kind of an overwhelming sensory experience to be in and around this environment. I would come in and wait to be assigned to cover something. When the first letter came, I was among the copy boys sorting mail. The first letter didn't cause a lot of consternation in the sense that nobody knew quite what to make of it. I'm as viewed as, "Here's a nutcase playing games and see if you can guess what this is." Here's a portion of the first letter the Zodiac sent to the San Francisco Chronicle. Dear editor, this is the murderer of the two teenagers last Christmas at Lake Herman. And the girl on the 4th of July near the golf course in Vallejo. Here is part of a cipher. The other two parts of this cipher are being mailed to the editors of the Vallejo Times and San Francisco Examiner. I want you to print this cipher on the front page of your paper. In this cipher is my identity. If you do not print this by the afternoon of Friday, 1st of August, I will go on a kill rampage Friday night. I will cruise around all weekend, killing lone people in the night. Then move on to kill again. The letter was scrawled in blue felt tip-pen. The handwriting was sloppy and cramped and it was full of misspellings, like Christmas with two S's at the end. The style of this writing seemed a strange contrast to the other sheet, in orderly great of letters and symbols that the killer said contained his true identity. When the first letters arrived, it was his introduction to the world. This is who I am. I am the murderer. I'm somebody to be taken seriously. I'm a very dangerous person. And if you don't do what I tell you to do, there will be real consequences. The newspapers weren't sure if the letter came from the killer, and even if it did, should they publish it? On the one hand, you want to take the threat seriously. On the other, it's like bargaining with terrorists or printing a mass shooter's manifesto. Do you really want to reward a killer with attention and give them a platform to spread more fear? Two other papers, the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times, received nearly identical letters, but different parts of the code. So the papers had to decide together whether or not to publish. when there's any kind of controversy. your question about whether to publish things like this, particularly around threats. My guess is that we talked to the other newspapers and said, "Are you going to publish your third of the cryptogram?" And everybody said, "Yes, we will." I mean, it's a news story when a killer takes credit publicly for what he's done and then taunts you or the police to solve a puzzle. And even that wasn't a front-page story. Two days later, on Saturday, August 2, the Chronicle ran the story, "Coded Clue In Murders," with a reproduction of the cipher. The Vallejo Police Chief was quoted as saying, "We're not satisfied. The letter was written by the murderer." And he urged whoever wrote the letter to prove he was the killer by sending more details. He was trying to trick the zodiac into sending something self-incriminating. The chief also warned Vallejo residents to avoid lonely places. The wasn't until the police asked, "Would you send another letter with more details?" The next letter came and said, "This is the zodiac speaking." I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and in my new podcast, What Happened To Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed, they can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these grave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. "I never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform." Listen to What Happened To Her, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hamza, and I'm Martin, and we're the host of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen hours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world, and we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had, or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters, and so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. The first thing I hate about Ulysses is they never actually tell Turks. I'm Dave and I've been it for my life. In October 2021, my brother, David, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him. This podcast. Okay, so here we go. We didn't know what we were doing, so we just started recording. We discussed cancer since the radiation I lost about 10 more pounds. We fought. Yeah, pisses me off. Did we talk openly about the fact that David was going to die? I am afraid of being forgotten. My brother, David, is the story of the last chapter of my brother's life. It's weird and messy and vulnerable, and I'm going to share all of it with you. The constant back and forth battle about how do I not just be alive, but actually live. Listen to my brother, David, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Amade, Alex Caw, Feifei Lee, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they feel, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us. But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, who's imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders, on the I Heart Radio App Apple Podcast, or ever get your podcasts. For more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. Well, are you ready, ladies? Yeah, here we go. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said, goodbye to swimsuits, now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America pageant. I never received scholarship, I need to pay for my student loans. He looks at me and goes, you don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. An exploitation of our Miss Americas is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. This is the Curse of Miss America on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. On August 4, 1969, just two days after the Chronicles story, a new letter arrived, with the same slanted handwriting. Dear editor, this is the Zodiac speaking. When answered to your asking for more details about the good times I've had in Vallejo, I shall be very happy to supply even more material. By the way, are the police having a good time with the code? If not, tell them to cheer up. When they do crack it, they will have me. Last Christmas. In that episode, the police were wondering as to how I could shoot and hit my victims in the dark. They did not only state this, but implied this by saying it was a well lit night, and I could see the silhouettes on the horizon. Bullshit. That area is surrounded by high hills and trees. What I did was tape a small pencil flashlight to the barrel of my gun. If you notice, you'll see a black or dark spot in the center of the circle of light. When taped to a gun barrel, the bullet will strike exactly in the center of the black dot in the light. All I had to do was spray them as if it was a water hose. I was not happy to see that I did not get front page coverage. When he sends that second letter, now he's the zodiac killer. He is chosen his own name, his own moniker, and although a lot of serial killers throughout history have nicknames, most don't choose their nicknames for themselves. So that name had some meaning to him that we don't know, but if you look at the handwriting in the zodiac letters, especially the ones that accompany the cypher, the handwriting looks very sloppy. It looks kind of rushed and just natural handwriting like I just fired off this letter. Then you look at the cypher, it's very clean and very careful. Each part consisted of a block of symbols, letters from the English language, symbols from astrology and other things, you know, half filled circles, backwards letters. They're tidy and then straight rows. He might have used some sort of graphing paper underneath when he was doing it to make sure of that, which says something in and of itself about the killer. That tells you right there, this was very important to him, it was more important than the letter. And when you look at the cypher itself, it's chilling just to look at it because you know there's something in it, right? But once you realize what's in it, it's even more frightening. If he just wanted to brag about what he did, he could do that and he did in that letter. The cypher is another element of this game he's playing. It's not just I'm somebody who has to be taken seriously, I'm dangerous. It's also I'm really clever and I have something else I want to say. If you want to know who I am, you want to understand what I did. why I do what I do, you're going to have to work for it. I'm not going to give you everything." The police sent the three-part cipher to the nearby Mayor Island Naval Shipyard. There, Navy codebreakers rushed to crack the killer's code and to discover the Zodiac's true identity before he killed again. "The published codes stumped hundreds of amateur cryptographers and several intelligence agencies." But surprisingly, it was actually two amateurs who ended up solving it, a schoolteacher and his wife. Don and Betty Hardin saw the code in the newspaper and just decided to give it a shot. Tom Voit, who runs the website ZodiacKiller.com, recorded the Hardin's daughter, Leslie, at a 2008 conference. "This is a project that began on a Sunday morning fairly early, went on into the afternoon, into the evening and through the night. They really became, in my eyes, the perfect codebreaking team because my dad had the scientific approach and very logical practices and my mother had some intuition that led them in the direction that they needed to go. My father at some point recognized that he had to go to work the next morning when he looked at that. Not so, my mother. She did not sleep and ate very little. The next morning, he got up and off to work. He was a schoolteacher. Came back home and was probably mildly surprised to find that there was no dinner and nothing at all happened in the kitchen." She sat in the chair and he stood behind her and what really captured my attention for that moment was not the code spread out in front of them at all. It was the look of love on my father's face as he bit over her. And put his arm around her. "Don Harden, he had a boyhood interest in codes. You know, if it wasn't for Betty's persistence, they wouldn't have finished it." That's David Arancheck, a programmer and amateur cryptographer. He spent the last decade fascinated by the Zodiacs codes. "The first cipher was a simple substitution cipher, basically a simple way to hide a message." Essentially, you substitute each letter with a different letter. So, to make a cipher for the word "kill," you might substitute j for k, h for i, and b's for both L's. And if you know which letters you substituted, you can then decode jhbb back to kill. But without knowing which letters were substituted, how do you crack that code? The Hardens started by doing what's called a frequency analysis. You count a ball of the letters and how many times they happen. One of the things about English is that certain letters appear more often than others. In particular, the letter e is the most frequently occurring letter in the English language. And so, you can use that information to your advantage when you're looking at a cipher text. If you find that, say, the letter v is happening a lot more often than the other letters, then there's a good chance that it stands for the letter e. But the way the zodiac made it harder in the first cipher was he would take a common letter like e. And instead of assigning one cipher text letter to it, he assigned seven, seven different symbols. That's why the zodiac used backwards letters and astrological symbols to make his code harder to crack. Undaunted, the Hardens next tried what's called "cribbing," plugging specific words into the puzzle. On a simpler cryptogram, you could try to figure out short words first. If the cipher text has spaces in it, then you know that certain words are likely to happen. For instance, if you see a word that only has one letter, then there's only two words that it can be a and i. But in the first cipher text, he did not use the word spaces, so that made it a little harder to solve. Still, even without the spaces, you can try and guess if certain groups of symbols represent common words. If you have a right guess and you plug it in and you do the substitutions, other parts of the plain text will come out. So you'll see fragments of other words, like THE. Well, there's a lot of words that start with THE, so you might be on to something. And if you made a bad guess, then those fragments will look like nonsense. There'll be letters that are next to each other that wouldn't really be next to each other. ZQR, that guess is probably wrong. Betty is attributed the inside of thinking that he would start it by talking about himself, and so it would start with the letter i, and that he would talk about his crime, so he would mention killing. And those intuitions also came from patterns that they observed in the cipher text. They found symbols that were repeating next to each other. Doing a little research, they found, well, the most common double letter in English is LL. And, you know, LL appears in a lot of words, all will and kill. And so that was a good guess on their part, because kill does appear in the message. So they tried to plug in those words in different places, and eventually found other patterns, and then through trial and error, were able to crack the code. Or at least, almost crack the code. At the very end of the message was a string of letters that so far, no one has been able to figure out. The remaining 18 symbols, it's just gibberish sequence of letters that doesn't make any sense. Zodiac was claiming that his identity was in the message, but when you decode it with the Hardens key, it doesn't say anything about his identity. But since the last 18 are still undecoded, that's led to a lot of people thinking, well, maybe he did something else, there's some other process that is different than the key for the rest of the message. And there might be another message in there. Maybe he really did put his identity in there, and it's hidden somehow in those last 18, and we just haven't figured it out. Leslie, the Hardens daughter, remembers waking up in the middle of the night after her parents cracked the code. Once the message became clear, it was a very frightening message. I do recall being in my room, coming in and out of sleep, mostly nightmares, and scary images, because the words that were floating down the hallway were frightening words. Kill, dangerous, animal. This is the message that was hidden in the Zodiac's three-part cipher. I like killing people, because it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing well-game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all. To kill something gives me the most thrilling experience. It is even better than getting your rocks off with a girl. The best part of it is that when I die, I'll be reborn in paradise, and all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name, because you will try to slow down or stop my collection of slaves for my afterlife. All of a sudden there looks like a message, and the question in hand was, what do we do now? They decided that they would do what the paper suggested, the paperhead said, if you think you might have a solution, call this number. So they did, but once they did, it got a whole lot more interesting. I'm Melissa Jeltsin, and in my new podcast, what happened to her? I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? And we were babies. I never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's a podcast. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. Listen to Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. Right now, I'm living through an AI arms race. Elon Musk, Derio, Amadei, Alex Carp, Fei-Fei Lee, Palmer Lucky, because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe. What they fear, and where they think this is all headed. Silicon Valley is always saying the cliché thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Listen to The Builders, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or ever get your podcasts. I'm Dave, and I've been a **** for my life. A year later, he convinced me to make a podcast with him, this podcast. Okay, so here we go. We discussed cancer. Since duration, I've lost about 10 more pounds. We fought. Yeah, pisses me off. And we talked openly about the fact that David was going to die. The constant back and forth battle about how do I, how do I not just be alive, but I should live. Listen to my brother, David, on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But more than a century, miss America's out the country of fantasy. Okay, here we go. They said, "Goodbye to swimsuits, now, hello to lawsuits." I'm Bridget Armstrong. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America. Investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America Patent. He looks and he goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." It's great, but looks too ethnic. An exploitation of our Miss America's is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Miss America. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. The decoded message didn't reveal the Zodiac's true identity as he had promised, but it did give clues as to who the Zodiac might be. In the Zodiac's ciphered message, he referred to man as the most dangerous animal of all, which some people have interpreted as a reference to the book and/or the movie the most dangerous game. A lot of us who are older, we had to read that story in high school. And if you were a teenager who read that in high school and you were harboring some sort of violent fantasies, then you're not sympathizing with the victims the way most of us do when you read that story. Do you think about being the hunter? Count Zaroff, who lives on this island, where he has constructed things designed to make ships crash on the shore, so that people will be deserted on this island. I'm not trying to intrude, but I'm in sort of a jam. Are you the owner here? Yes, I am Count Zaroff. And of course, he pretends to be a gracious host and invites them to stay in everything. God made some in kings some beggars. Me, he made a hunter. Only for them to learn that he really intends to hunt them like animals. Here on my island, I hunt the most dangerous game. You raise me. They have drawn men from ships you wrecked and drive them out to be hunted. Only after the kill, as man know the true ecstasy alone. Count Zaroff, obviously the name starts with the letter Z. He wears a costume of sorts and he stalks his victims like prey. The whole story is structured around the idea that killing is sort of an intellectual exercise, that it's sort of a right of man to hunt another human being, that killing is part of human nature. And the zodiac may have been very drawn to his story with those elements. He may have decided to emulate certain aspects of Count Zaroff. And maybe that might explain the difference between those first two attacks, the blitzkrieg shootings at night. After that, it's not the same kind of crime, because in the story, the most dangerous game. Count Zaroff doesn't come out saying, "I'm going to kill you." He makes you think that he's a friendly person. He wants you to participate in his game. He needs you to feel safe so that when you find out that you're no longer safe, he can see that fear in you and that fear is part of the hunt. So I think with the zodiac, there may have been some element of that that he decided, "It's not enough for me to just shoot these people. I need to talk to them. I need to look in their eyes and see them go, "Oh, everything's okay now." And then, looking in their eyes when I flip on them, and they find out that this is not what they thought, and that their lives are at stake. Why did the zodiac quote the villain from what at the time was almost a 50-year-old story? Maybe it's how he saw himself, a movie villain, playing with his victims. There were other possible clues about the zodiac's identity hidden in the cipher, such as this line. It is even better than getting your rocks off with the girl. Psychiatrists at the time speculated that this line reflected the killer's feelings of sexual inadequacy, but it may have also been literal. The zodiac may be a sadist, someone who feels excitement or pleasure from inflicting pain. To learn more about sadism, we spoke with criminal psychology professor Eric Hickey. My name is Dr. Eric Hickey. I'm a criminal psychologist. Sometimes I'm just a criminal, sometimes I'm just a psychologist. Professor Hickey literally wrote the book on serial killers. It's a textbook called serial murderers and their victims. One day I got a phone call from the media, and there was a case of a mass murderer. When they searched his car, they found a couple of books in the back seat of his car. And one of the books was my book on serial murder. They said, "Dr. Hickey, how do you feel about the fact that this serial or mass murderer had your book in his car?" Like, I'm supposed to feel badly that I wrote a book about serial murders, no. And I said, "Well, why would I be upset about that?" The point is, this is for public education to make us more aware of these types of people. Professor Hickey says two thirds of serial killers are sexual predators, and many have unusual desires like sadism. Hickey says that even though the zodiac didn't sexually assault his victims, the killings could have been sexually motivated. So sadism is a, what we call it, perifilia. Perifilia meaning that they get sexual harassment and gravification through bizarre imagery, fantasies, and behavior. There's hundreds and hundreds of perifilia, and probably 60% of them are not criminal. If people want to have sex with a door knob, that's their business. It's not a crime. A person could have a footfish, that's not a crime. It is a crime, however, if they break into people's homes, and peel off their blanket, whether it's sleep and suck on their toes, that's a crime. So there's a whole variety of criminal perifilia that are not physically harmful, but they are still criminal. Like, voyeurism, exhibitionism, salmnafilia, where you would like to watch people sleep. Those are criminal, but nobody gets hurt. But people who are driven to kill serally, those not the kind that they're looking for. If you're a serial killer and you're sadistic, you're not into consent. You want to be able to do what you want to do. A zodiac, and no problem killing people, and making them suffer as he did it. Hickey thinks the zodiac's sadism, likely extended beyond the killings. To the letters, the puzzles. The way he taunted the police, there was an element of sadism there. He liked creating fear in the public's eye. I'm sure. that he'd like to read about himself in newspapers that would have been quite gratifying to him. He'd become Con like a Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper also sent letters to newspapers when he terrorized London in the late 1800s. One read, "The next job I do, I shall clip the lady's ears off and send the police officers just for Jolly." Many thought it was a hoax until three days later a woman was found dead her earlobe severed. I think that that was something that the zodiac was trying to attain was that sort of notoriety. He held the city of San Francisco in fear. It was all his doing and that would make him feel very powerful and it gave him great pleasure in doing it so there was that sort of sadistic approach not just to these victims but also to the general public. So the zodiac is likely a sadist, a term named after the Marquis de Sade, a French philosopher and novelist. Sade wrote in his book Juliet, "It is an article of faith on the island of Borneo that all those persons a man kills will be his slaves in the next world. And as a result, the better a man wishes to be served after his death, the more he kills during life." Which brings us to the end of the cipher. When I die, I'll be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves. I will not give you my name because you will try to slow down or stop my collecting of slaves for my afterlife. Had the zodiac read that passage from the Marquis de Sade or heard about these beliefs somewhere else, either way this fantasy of slaves in the afterlife speaks to the zodiac's intense desire for power and control. The zodiac's murders and phone call were cold-hearted, his letters were twisted, but the decoded cipher revealed just how truly deranged the zodiac was. As San Francisco would soon find out what they'd seen so far was just the beginning. The zodiac was ramping up. Professor Hickey told us serial killers often intensify their crimes over time. Blob dolls and mannequins and so on and then he progressed from that to dead animals and then from there he went into bringing people home and when they wanted to leave then he'd make them unconscious then drill holes in their heads and put your curric acid in to make them into zombies and then he progressed from there to eviscerating in them and then having sex with the corpse and he started cannibalizing them. He went down this long, long dark, dark pathway that each time he did his fantasy's got more and more evolved. Like Jeffrey Dahmer, the zodiac was also beginning to evolve. His codes would become more complex. His letters increasingly bizarre and his murders more ritualistic and sadistic. Next time on monster, the zodiac killer. Celia Shepherd and Brian Hartnell, both in their early twenties, were sitting on this known of land overlooking part of Lake Berriessa. They thought they were alone but there was a third man on this knoll, a man who wore a medieval style executioner's hood, carried a knife and gun and intended to use them. Whenever we drive here and like wow he drove the same exact way just to get here and do that because it's crazy to think about. This guy is a pathological psycho killer. I found this young girl in on the shoreline here. I've had 11 years patrol on this lake and I've seen a lot of people cut up the boat accidents and this but this is one of the worst things I have ever witnessed. Monster, the zodiac killer, is a 15 episode podcast produced by iHeartRadio, How Stuff Works in Tinderfoot TV. Donald Albright and I are executive producers on behalf of Tinderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Stebman, Mason Lindsay and Christina Dana. Jason Hoek is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works. Along with producers Trevor Young, Miranda Hawkins, Ben Kieberk and Josh Thane. Scott Benjamin provides additional voice talent. Matt Frederick is our host. Original music is by makeup and vanity set. If you haven't already make sure to check out the first season of monster called Atlanta Monster about the Atlanta child murders from the late 70s to the early 80s. Download the 10 episode season right now. Have questions or comments? Email us at [email protected] or you can call us at 1-833-285-6667. 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