Every Big Suspect Accused Of Being The Zodiac Killer

In the last days of 1968, law enforcement was called to a crime scene that the San Francisco Chronicle called "unusually messy." The victims were 16-year-old Betty Lou Jensen and 17-year-old David Faraday, and they would be the first known victims of one of the nation's most notorious serial killers.

In less than a year, seven people would be attacked by the shadowy figure that would come to be known as the Zodiac Killer. Two — Michael Mageau and Bryan Hartnell — would survive an attack. It's those two survivors who gave the description of the killer that remains one of the few pieces of evidence in the case. Aside from, of course, the mysterious letters that were sent to the Chronicle.

One of those letters — called the 340 Cipher — was only cracked by code-breakers in 2020. The Chronicle reported that it had taken 51 years for the killer's code to be broken, and to reveal eerie messages like "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me. ... I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradice (sic) all the sooner because I now have enough slaves to work for me."

At that time, law enforcement confirmed that the case was still open. Let's take a look at the suspects, including one named in 2021. Who's the real deal?

When it comes to the official suspects, the San Francisco Chronicle says that there was only ever one: Arthur Leigh Allen.

Allen, a former teacher, already had a criminal record for child molestation when he was connected to the Zodiac Killer in some compelling ways — including the fact that one of the men who survived the Zodiac picked Allen out of a lineup. Allen and the killer wore the same shoes with the distinctive tread, and at least one of Allen's friends said that he'd kind of confessed to them. Allen had used only a single sick day during his time as a teacher — the same day that Cheri Jo Bates was murdered.

When Thought Catalog compared what was known about Allen to the serial killer profiles built by FBI agent John Douglas (of "Mindhunter" fame), they found there was a lot there. Allen was dishonorably discharged from the Navy, reportedly abused animals, and told a friend that he fantasized about killing random couples. Allen had also made no secret about what his favorite book was: "The Most Dangerous Game," a tale about a hunter who decides to make humans his targets. The book also crops up in one of the Zodiac's ciphers.

Ultimately, Allen was never charged. His handwriting wasn't found to match the letters, and law enforcement never built a strong enough case to charge him before he died of a heart attack in 1992.

In 2020, Vulture profiled the FX true-crime series "The Most Dangerous Animal of All," and it was... weird. The series was based on a book of almost the same name — "The Most Dangerous Animal of All: Searching for My Father... and Finding the Zodiac Killer" — written by journalist Susan Mustafa. At the heart of the story was Gary Stewart's search for Earl Van Best Jr., the man who had gotten his mother pregnant when she was 14, then later abandoned the child in the stairwell of an apartment building.

Stewart's book claimed that along the way, he found not a father, but a serial killer. He had a bucket of evidence, including sketches, handwriting, and partial DNA that seemed to match. Mustafa believed every bit of his claims, but here's where things get weird.

Director Kief Davidson and executive producer Ross Dinerstein did their own investigation, and along the way, they disproved every one of Stewart's claims. Wondering what they were going to do with their show, they followed Stewart's journey to find his father, and ultimately, told him what they'd discovered. Most tellingly, they tracked Van Best Jr. to Europe at the time of the Zodiac's confirmed killings.

When they let Stewart see the finished series — and all the debunking it did — ahead of release, he said he loved it. And that? It left producers wondering what the heck had just happened.

According to Bustle, the name Ross Sullivan pops up more often in online forums than in official investigations, but the publication also notes that since investigations are still going on, that might not be that surprising.

Sullivan is also featured in the History Channel's "The Hunt for the Zodiac Killer," and it, too, connects him to the Zodiac via the murder of Cheri Jo Bates. Sullivan was a Riverside City College student at the time Bates was killed, and he also worked at the place she was last seen alive: the library. Those who knew him have described him as the sort of person who made others uncomfortable, and said that he had constantly worn military boots — the same kind of boots that were connected to prints found at the site of Bates' murder, and the Zodiac Killer's Lake Berryessa crime scene.

What's more, Sullivan was a student of cryptology, which supporters of the theory say would be handy in writing the ciphers that have stumped law enforcement and codebreakers for decades. He also fit the physical description of the killer, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and moved into the Zodiac's killing grounds just before the murders started.

It's unclear exactly what happened to Sullivan, but it's believed he died in 1977.

Steve Hodel has an impressive law enforcement career that includes decades as a member of the Los Angeles police department, but after the death of his father, his relationship with murder suddenly got a lot different. He was going through his father's belongings when he found questionable photos — photos that looked a heck of a lot like Elizabeth Short, the aspiring actress who was murdered and immortalized as the Black Dahlia.

According to The Guardian, Steve started digging and found piles of evidence that suggested his own father, George Hodel, had been the one to kill Short, sever her body in a difficult procedure called a hemicorporectomy, and leave her to become one of the greatest mysteries in true crime history.

Steve firmly believes that Short's 1947 murder was just the beginning, publishing a book called "Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel," which argues that his father was responsible for the Zodiac killings. George's return to California from the Philippines happened about the same time the Zodiac killings started, and Steve argues that the profile matches his father too well to be a coincidence.

Others are less convinced, with The Daily Mirror citing facts like the shoe sizes of George Hodel and the killer — one of the biggest pieces of evidence — aren't even a close match (via the LA Times).

In 2021, The New York Times reported that when Faycal Ziraoui read that two of the Zodiac Killer's ciphers were still unsolved, he figured that he would give solving them a go. Two weeks later, he went public with his success story.

Ziraoui was widely condemned by online communities that had been trying for years to do the exact thing that he said had taken him two weeks, and was basically told that no one believed him. His brother explained: "He came in and told them 'end of the game.' But these people don't want the game to end."

The ciphers he decoded contained coordinates for one of the Zodiac Killer crime scenes, and the other was even more interesting. The 13-letter cipher started with "My name is..." and of course, that's the jackpot.

Ziraoui's encryption code gave him "KAYR," which he connected to one-time suspect Lawrence Kaye. (Ziraoui says he saw the same "typo" in coding in other words, too.) Kaye — who also went by the name Kane — had been on police radar at the time of the murders... sort of. A detective named Harvey Hines had pushed him forward as a suspect, but he was ultimately overlooked. SFGate says that Kaye was connected with a 1970 kidnapping and worked at the same place as one of the women the Zodiac Killer claimed to have murdered. He was never officially a suspect, and when Ziraoui posted about him in some of the Zodiac forums, it was deleted.

According to The Ringer, Rick Marshall first came to Zodiac investigator (and San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist) Robert Graysmith's attention after an hour-long phone call from a mysterious informant. When Graysmith started digging, he found there were enough coincidences that he knew he needed to find the person that the mystery caller had directed him to.

The caller claimed that Bob Vaughn — who worked with Marshall at the Avenue Theater — was in possession of evidence that Marshall had collected, kept, and stored in film canisters. Graysmith never found the evidence, but ZodiacKiller.com still lists Marshall as a suspect.

Perhaps surprisingly, Marshall has reached out to them. The site details a timeline of Marshall's life that confirms that during the time the Zodiac murders took place, he was living in San Francisco and working at a movie theater there. Marshall came under suspicion after making some odd comments overheard via a ham radio, but in 2001, he emailed ZodiacKiller.com with a correction. He claimed that all the information they had was "fifth or sixth hand," pointing out "I never lived in a warehouse in Marin. I leased an industrial property."

Marshall threatened legal action, and never responded to further attempts to contact him through the site. Things got quiet until 2008, when a nurse in the home that Marshall was living in suggested that he might be ready to talk. Detectives came to the conclusion that he wasn't the Zodiac Killer after all. No DNA testing was done, and Marshall died that same year.