Zodiac Killer is the pseudonym of an unidentified serial killer who operated in Northern California from at least the late s to the early s. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted, with two of the men surviving attempted murder. The Zodiac himself claimed up to 37 victims. The killer originated the name 'Zodiac' in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press.
These letters included four cryptograms or ciphers. Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved. Suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. The San Francisco Police Department marked the case 'inactive' in April , but re-opened it at some point prior to March The killer, who targeted sex workers and drug addicts, carried out the murders between April and September of that year.
By that point, the killer had stopped and possibly moved on. The police pursued two men as suspects. Although the Zodiac claimed 37 murders in letters to the newspapers, investigators agree on only seven confirmed victims, two of whom survived.
They are:. The following murder victims are suspected to be victims of Zodiac, though none have been confirmed:. The couple were on their first date and planned to attend a Christmas concert at Hogan High School about three blocks from Jensen's home.
The couple instead visited a friend before stopping at a local restaurant and then driving out on Lake Herman Road. At about p. Shortly after p. The Solano County Sheriff's Department investigated the crime but no leads developed. Utilizing available forensic data, Robert Graysmith postulated that another car pulled into the turnout, just prior to pm and parked beside the couple.
The killer apparently exited the second car and walked toward the Rambler, possibly ordering the couple out of the Rambler. Jensen appeared to have exited the car first, yet when Faraday was halfway out, the killer apparently shot Faraday in the head.
Fleeing from the killer, Jensen was gunned down twenty-eight feet from the car with five shots through her back. The killer then drove off.
While the couple sat in Ferrin's car, a second car drove into the lot and parked alongside them but almost immediately drove away. Returning about 10 minutes later, this second car parked behind them. The driver of the second car then exited the vehicle, approaching the passenger side door of Ferrin's car, carrying a flashlight and a 9 mm Luger.
The killer directed the flashlight into Mageau's and Ferrin's eyes before shooting at them, firing five times. Both victims were hit, and several bullets had passed through Mageau and into Ferrin. The killer walked away from the car but upon hearing Mageau's moaning, returned and shot each victim twice more before driving off.
On July 5, , at a. The caller also took credit for the murders of Jensen and Faraday six-and-a-half months earlier.
Police traced the call to a phone booth at a gas station at Springs Road and Tuolumne, located about three-tenths of a mile m from Ferrin's home and only a few blocks from the Vallejo Police Department. Mageau survived the attack despite being shot in the face, neck and chest. The nearly identical letters—subsequently described by a psychiatrist to have been written by 'someone you would expect to be brooding and isolated' [17] —took credit for the shootings at Lake Herman Road and Blue Rock Springs.
Each letter also included one-third of a symbol cryptogram which the killer claimed contained his identity. The killer demanded they be printed on each paper's front page or he would 'cruse [ sic ] around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend. The meaning, if any, of the final eighteen letters has not been determined.
The Chronicle published its third of the cryptogram on page four of the next day's edition. Stiltz as saying 'We're not satisfied that the letter was written by the murderer' and requested the writer send a second letter with more facts to prove his identity.
The letter was a response to Chief Stiltz's request for more details that would prove he had killed Faraday, Jensen and Ferrin. In it, the Zodiac included details about the murders which had not yet been released to the public, as well as a message to the police that when they cracked his code 'they will have me.
It contained a misspelled message in which the killer said he was collecting slaves for the afterlife. No name appears in the decoded text, and the killer said that he would not give away his identity because it would slow down or stop his slave collection.
A white man, about 5 feet 11 inches 1. He approached them with a gun, which Hartnell believed to be a. The hooded man claimed to be an escaped convict from a jail with a two-word name, in either Colorado or Montana a police officer later inferred he had been referring to a jail in Deer Lodge, Montana , where he had killed a guard and subsequently stolen a car, explaining that he now needed their car and money to go to Mexico, as the vehicle he had been driving was 'too hot'.
The killer checked, and tightened Hartnell's bonds after discovering Shepard had bound Hartnell's hands loosely. Hartnell initially believed this event to be a weird robbery, but the man drew a knife and stabbed them both repeatedly, Hartnell suffering six and Shepard ten wounds in the process. At p. The caller first stated to the operator that he wished to 'report a murder - no, a double murder,' [27] before stating that he had been the perpetrator of the crime.
The phone was found, still off the hook, minutes later at the Napa Car Wash on Main Street in Napa by KVON radio reporter Pat Stanley, only a few blocks from the sheriff's office, yet 27 miles 43 km from the crime scene. Detectives were able to lift a still-wet palm print from the telephone but were never able to match it to any suspect.
After hearing their screams for help, a man and his son who were fishing in a nearby cove discovered the victims and summoned help by contacting park rangers. Napa County Sheriff's deputies Dave Collins and Ray Land were the first law enforcement officers to arrive at the crime scene. Back in , a curious motorcyclist made his way into Soka forest in Ibadan , Oyo State, Nigeria, and what he found was like something from a HP Lovecraft story.
He found a small colonized area of decrepit buildings, and inside there were over twenty rotten corpses and severed human skulls, and most terrifyingly, ten live people chained to slaughter benches.
Other buildings had piles of clothes, boots and passports inside them. Police have attempted to trace the owners of the passports but have been unable to find them. Photo via thenationalonlineng. Exactly who might be responsible for such horrors is still unconfirmed, but rumors state that the place may have been a den for religious zealots to indulge in ritual sacrifice and flesh-eating.
Nigeria is a very religious country, and such cannibalistic acts have deep primal associations. Since the discovery of the forest, many Nigerians with missing relatives have flocked to the area to search for their loved ones. All drowned after getting intoxicated. However, the kicker is that these drownings happening in 11 different states. Despite the distance between them, some detectives think that drownings are actually the work of a serial killer or group of serial killers.
This is dubbed the Smiley Face Murder Theory. Allegedly, detectives claim that smiley faces have been found near the sites where at least twelve of the men have drowned. Firstly, date-rape drugs were found in the systems of some of the victims — enough to render them completely unconscious. The victim profile is very similar in every case — male, white, athletic, successful, popular. Lastly is the condition of the bodies.
One victim had been missing for 40 days, but the deterioration of his corpse was nowhere near consistent with someone who had been in water for 6 weeks.
This was also the case for multiple other victims. Pedro Lopez was born Columbia in He was the son of a prostitute and as a child, was forced to watch his mother partake in extreme sexual acts.
He himself was often molested too, and Lopez claimed that these events significantly affected his psyche. By the early s, Lopez had begun to rape and kill young girls across South America. When an attempted abduction went wrong in , Lopez was apprehended by locals and handed over to police in Peru. Once in custody, Lopez spewed out his colorful life story, including being captured by a native tribe and sentenced to execution for killing a young girl. Police were naturally skeptical of such a claim, but Lopez led police to a mass grave where they found the remains of 53 of his victims.
The details then a little hazy after this, with different sources reporting different stories, but what is confirmed is that Pedro Lopez was set free from prison in , despite racking up one of the highest body counts in known history. He was sent to a mental home for three years and was then set free. In , Lopez was suspected of being responsible for a new murder. However, no one has been able to find him since There are five million vending machines across the country, making an average of one vending machine per every 23 people.
Between April and November in Hiroshima, 12 people were killed as a result of paraquat poisoning and a further 35 were seriously injured. Around the same time, the company behind Oronamin C had launched a marketing campaign offering free bottles of the drink from vending machines whenever someone made a purchase.
Police soon pieced things together and found that someone had been lacing these Oronamin C drinks with paraquat and placing them back on top of the vending machine. It was almost impossible for the police to track down the person responsible since it was difficult to narrow down where a person had originally picked up the drink.
Most of the vending machines responsible were in quiet back streets with no CCTV around. Also known as the Danilovsky Maniac, the Maniac with Dull Eyes was a Russian serial killer responsible for at least seven murders between and Over in Cherepovets, Vologda Oblast , Russia, various bodies were found around the city, dumped in construction sites and in abandoned buildings. Perhaps most creepily, however, is that with each scene the killer left a calling card.
Police found crude pornographic drawings on the walls near where every body was found. After establishing that a serial killer was likely responsible for these seven murders, police also linked the Maniac with a series of murders dating back to He was also suspected in the murder of a young woman in His total assumed victim count is An ever-elusive bunch, serial killers are perhaps the most unsettling phenomenon of modern life.
Want to keep our site ad-free? Some of their comments….. Checking these comments…. You star your comment with whoever. So many opinions to labeling women who become victims, most ladies of the night are in some way addicts wether drugs or alcohol. Unfortunately the chase for there drug has put them in some tough situations but never blame victims, these opportunist are predators who watch, follow and strike at most opportune time.
We have to be mindful most of these victims have children, families, and they didnt want there life to turn out like this. Many serial killers kill gay men or prostitutes big all big a lot have.. Stop with the political nonsense already. It is not always making choices that make you more available to become a victim. When I was young I would walk most everywhere I wanted to go, such as the beach or store or to get a burger at the local burger joint.
I also locked my doors and windows and worked for law enforcement as a communications and operater. One night after getting off work I was showering, getting ready for bed when I heard this loud bang come from my apartment bedroom. I stepped out of the shower and observed a shadow move across the bedroom window which was now leaning up against the wall where the window had been. I left the water running as I decided to face whoever was out there.
Those thoughts were all the time it took me to make my decision to face my advisary. I stepped into my bedroom naked and wet. The man that was hiding in my closet stepped out and grabbed me. The United States had more serial killers than any other country. California has the highest number of serial killings with 1, total, followed by Texas with a total of Alaska has the highest rate of serial killings at 7. The Colonial Parkway murders consisted of eight killings between and , and the similarities between the murders have led some to believe that they might be the work of the same person.
Some theories have suggested that the killer might either be a law enforcement officer or impersonating one, because the cars of some of the victims were discovered with the driver's window rolled down.
Incidentally, the case might have faded into obscurity over time, if it wasn't for a former deputy called Fred Atwell, who emerged with a stack of 84 undiscovered crime scene photographs in , and started butting into the revitalized investigation at every opportunity.
Despite the red flags Atwell's increasingly odd behavior raised, the case remains unsolved, and the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page reported his death on December However, as Alexa Doiron of Williamsburg Yorktown Daily reported on October , the situation might be about to change. There's a TV show about the crimes in the works, and it centers around an ace team of former FBI special agents who feel that they may be able to crack the case. In , Interstate 70 was a dangerous place, and it wasn't because of the traffic.
As Vox tells us, that year's spring was marked by the bloody trail of a serial killer who murderer six clerks in stores near the I in an identical fashion, starting in Terre Haute, Indiana and ending in Wichita, Kansas.
There's little question that it was the same killer every time, seeing as he used the same rifle in all cases, and seemed to exclusively target brunette women — though one of the victims actually turned out to be a guy with a long hair. He didn't just randomly enter gas stations and attack people, either — some of the victims worked in shoe stores, others sold herbs and health products.
There were several eyewitnesses who described the man as 5'7 with "light brown or red hair," who wore a gray sports coat and slacks. Despite this, the investigators have found the case impossible to crack. There have been no known murders by the same perpetrator since the events of No one's even been able to establish a motive, and the killer only took a small amount of money from the stores' cash registers.
For around two decades, Chicago has seen a series of eerily similar strangulation murders. The first victim was found in , and bodies have turned up in empty lots, vacant buildings, dark alleys and even garbage containers ever since then, with only a short period of peace between and early The victims have largely been women with a history of sex work or addiction, and there have been a lot of them — in fact, the Chicago Police Department and the FBI are investigating no less than 51 unsolved murders, in an attempt to find out whether they might be the work of at least one serial killer.
If you ask Thomas Hargrove, the chairman of the Murder Accountability Project nonprofit, at least some of them most likely are. Hargrove says that his group has a "serial killer detector" algorithm, which has been pointing at a serial killer situation in Chicago for years. By August , the killer was suspected of murdering at least 13 and possibly as many as 16 people. The murders were pretty much the definition of hate crime.
The killer scoured for victims in a popular hangout location known as Paturis Park, and shot all but one to death, often with their pants quite literally down to their knees. Though the killings were originally investigated as individual homicides, their ruthlessness and the great number was enough to stand out from the usual violence in the city. The police soon figured out that they were dealing with a homophobe serial killer.
Unfortunately, the Rainbow Maniac may very well still be out there. In , people in Japan started dying after drinking a popular beverage called Oronamin C, which someone had laced with a herbicide called paraquat, per CBC.
The police soon started suspecting that the killer was leaving the tampered drinks in the slots of the country's omnipresent vending machines. There, they were found and eventually consumed by the unwary victims who, according to the New York Times , may simply have assumed that the extra drink was a part of a promotional campaign. It's estimated that as many as 12 people died because of the poison drinks, and many others became ill. It's hard to say whether all of these deaths were the product of one deranged mind, due to the fact that the high-profile case attracted several copycat poisoners.
Regardless of the killer's true body count, they walked free — in fact, the case remains so unsolved that it appears no suspects have ever even been arrested. It's rare to hear officials throw the term "serial killer" around before they're fairly certain that their homicide cases involve one. As such, the fact that the City of Albuquerque straight up uses the name "West Mesa Serial Killer" is a pretty good sign that one is involved.
The West Mesa Serial Killer is an unapprehended and unknown individual who murdered 11 young women, one of whom was pregnant, and buried them in clumsy graves in West Mesa, Albuquerque. The skeletal remains were discovered in , and as the Albuquerque Journal tells us, the police swiftly put together a strong task force to investigate the case. Unfortunately, it turned out that the women had been murdered — strangled, possibly — sometime between and , so the trail was colder than anyone would have wanted.
While there have been at least two potential suspects, as of there had been zero arrests.
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