In Benicia, California, on December 20, 1968, someone murdered two teenagers — David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen — who were sitting in their car in a secluded spot while on a date by shooting them at point-blank range with a .22 caliber pistol, per History. The next murder linked to the Zodiac happened the following summer. A man attacked another couple sitting in a car, this time in Vallejo. On July 5, 1969, Mike Magau, 19, survived being shot three times, but 22-year-old Darleen Ferrin died from her wounds, according to Biography. These were the first two murders claimed by the same person in both a phone call to the Vallejo Police Department and three weeks later in a series of letters to several newspapers, according to ZodiacKiller.com. In neither the phone call nor this first batch of letters did the person identify themselves by the name Zodiac.
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The most bizarre attack followed in September 1969, when a man wearing a strange hood with a symbol featuring a cross within a circle stabbed Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard multiple times as they sat on the shore of a lake near Napa. Hartnell survived but Shepard died, per Biography. The killer wrote a message on the side of Hartnell’s car with the same cryptic symbol and the names and dates of the two previous crimes and the date, time, and weapon of the third attack. A man also called the Napa police and claimed he’d committed the stabbings, per ZodiacKiller.com.
