Original subtitles

In 1992, when I called Mr. Allen,

I said...

Mr. Allen, you drugged us?

Yes, I did.

He goes, "I molested your sister."

There were periods where we were groggy. We had no explanation for it.

I realized then exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it.

At that point, he starts sobbing and blubbering

and trying to catch his breath.

At that second, I thought, "Okay, here we go."

I asked...

Mr. Allen, were you the Zodiac?

There was deathly silence.

I didn't hear anything for a second.

I hear this gasping noise.

He was just crying.

He collected himself enough, and he came back on in a real weak voice.

He goes, "Yes, it was me."

I'm thinking in my mind,

"I can't deal with this anymore. I can't hear this."

This fucker molested my sister

and just confessed to being the Zodiac.

I didn't know how to react,

and I couldn't believe what he said.

And to think that somebody I knew and loved at one time

was capable of doing that

just freaked me out.

I said, "Mr. Allen, I've got to go."

At that point, I'd heard enough.

And that was it.

And he hung up,

and that was the last time I ever actually talked to him.

I sat there stunned, and I thought, "What should I do? What should I do?"

I called the police,

and I talked to this detective from the San Francisco Task Force,

and I told him exactly what happened.

But he said that basically, "There's nothing we can do about it."

I only talked to him for... for 15 minutes before he hung up on me, so...

I called my mother and said, "Look, I've gotta tell you something."

She didn't react the way I thought she was gonna react.

You know, most mothers would've gone, "Oh my God. What?"

You know?

But she starts laughing.

"What the heck are you laughing at?"

"Oh, he was so funny. He was such a joker."

And I said, "Not the way he told me this time."

"Wasn't funny, and it wasn't a joke."

All of a sudden, she sounded really bothered and weird.

She told me not to tell anybody, ever tell anybody.

At that point, I knew something was going on,

but I still didn't put it together.

And I remember saying, "Why? Why?"

She told me she had a box that would explain everything,

if I promised not to open it until after she died.

She goes, "Don't let this out till I'm gone."

I said, "Mom, I'm gonna tell Don and Connie."

She, from then on, put me down for doing it.

My brother called me.

Then he told me Mr. Allen confessed to him to being The Zodiac Killer

and that he had, uh, drugged us.

And I'm going, "What the hell?"

You know, just, "What the hell? Is, uh... Is this possible?"

I feel in my heart and in my soul that it was him

because he told me, and I believed him when he told me.

I really believed him.

But Don and Connie both really had their doubts about it.

I said, "No, there's no way. I don't believe that at all."

Yeah, I didn't wanna hear it. I didn't pay attention to it.

I... just flat wouldn't... Wouldn't.

I couldn't believe that this guy could possibly do these things.

We'd argue back and forth about it.

David told me he'd molested me, and he goes, "Do you remember?"

And I told him, "I really don't remember."

I remember the pedal pusher incident,

but, you know, I don't remember anything that I thought was bad.

I couldn't get past my childhood happiness with him.

I didn't believe it was him.

That's when I had a falling out with my brother and sister.

I was 42.

I was living in Hawaii,

and we lost track of each other for a while after that.

It was extremely hard.

And I hated myself for my inability to protect my brother and sister.

At that time, I'd moved back to California from New York,

and I was living in Clearlake.

I was 40.

My daughter lived close.

And we went sailing with Mr. Allen,

gosh, every weekend, every other weekend.

Mostly on the weekends

because of his dialysis Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

David warned me not to go anywhere with him alone

and not to let him around my kids or grandchildren.

And I just laughed at him.

I said, you know, "You're crazy."

"I'm not worried about him. He's not gonna do anything."

One time, we were out there, and he's got it sailing beautifully,

and I get over there and I start steering.

And I just totally blew it, and the sail filled with wind,

and we caught a crosswind and the boat... ...tipped over.

The sail slapped the water.

He was up and cut the sheet loose,

and the sail flopped up and we sat back upright,

and it was really exciting.

I always thought he was really awesome.

Anyway, stop it.

Two weeks after that, it was Thursday.

We were supposed to go sail that weekend, but I hadn't heard from him,

so I was trying to call him.

Finally, I got tired of trying to call him and I called the dialysis place,

and they said, "Oh, he passed away. He was found with a hematoma to the head."

And oddly enough, when he died, face down in his basement lair...

...the last thing he had in his hand was a letter to the police.

And, "Oh boy, this may be it. This may be the one."

It wasn't.

It was, "You guys are just terrible." That kind of letter.

He died denying it.

Arthur Leigh Allen died at age 58.

I was surprised that he died

a little more than a year after that interview.

I thought there would be more interviews.

I thought there would be another occasion to engage with him.

To this day, I regret not contacting him after that letter to me.

I remember the press called me.

Arthur Leigh Allen had died,

and they wanted to interview me and I didn't want to.

Oh gosh, I was crying. I was really sad.

I painted him a picture of his boat sitting in a little harbor,

with whales jumping and swimming around,

and that was my memorial to him.

So I could remember him by it.

In his will, he left me all of his books and all of his records.

"She will also be given my dog Sobie if Harold doesn't want him."

I didn't know who Harold was,

but I think Harold took him, 'cause I didn't get to see him.

I knew that Mr. Allen didn't get along with his family,

but then his brother and sister-in-law called me

and tried to make me give back the boat,

and I told them that it was already in my name,

and, "He gave it to me and I'm not gonna give it back."

What did you name the boat?

Mr. Allen.

People keep coming back to the Zodiac murders.

It's the case that will never die.

I went back to it because David Fincher wanted to make a movie with my book.

And we were going all over these areas.

Up to Berryessa again, to Vallejo, to film.

Robert! Right over here, please!

2007, I had gone with a friend of mine

to watch the movie Zodiac

'cause it had just come out and I was curious,

and, you know, of course I knew he was accused of it.

And I was really shocked

at all the similarities to Mr. Allen in the movie.

I'm not the Zodiac.

And if I was, I certainly wouldn't tell you.

When we were leaving there, I was shaking.

There was just so much in that movie that was scary familiar.

It just brought back everything, just completely brought it back.

I'm trying to still save him in my heart.

But seeing the movie, it's like, visualize this guy that I grew up with

doing all these horrible things that we didn't know about.

It's hard to wrap my head around him

taking a knife or a gun and taking someone's life away.

It's just mind-boggling.

I think to myself,

"Maybe... maybe everything I did know was not who this guy really is."

As soon as I saw that movie,

I thought I should probably call Don and Connie.

I get this phone call from David,

and he says,

"I just came out of this Graysmith movie on the Zodiac."

"Do you believe me now?"

Not too long after that, we all met down at my brother Don's.

David came from Hawaii,

and we sat in one of the little cabins that I'd made

and just talked about it and talked about it.

The three of us started piecing together

these jigsaw puzzle pieces of our childhood,

and a hundred things finally fell into place.

We started researching things

and realized that we had been

to all the murder sites before the murders.

He took us to Lake Herman, Blue Rock Springs, Berryessa.

We went to somebody's house

that wasn't very far away from the Stine murder.

We were kids when we went with him,

so we didn't connect Mr. Allen to the murder sites

until we saw him in the movie.

It was very clear that we were there.

Something about the movies that clicked for me,

that hood that the Zodiac was wearing,

it looks like the hoods we made for Mr. Allen.

We used to help him make his wetsuit.

He'd get neoprene,

and one of us'd get to cut it and the other would help him glue it.

It looked so goofy when he put them on.

But the hood looked so much like that, it was spooky.

Then I found out kids had been murdered at Tajiguas Point.

I always remembered the blood on his arms,

but I didn't know somebody was killed down there.

When we started connecting the dots,

I started seeing too many coincidences to be coincidences.

When I go looking at all of these things, I don't know what else to do.

You know? I don't know what else to think.

We could call the police again,

but Mr. Allen is now dead

and we have coincidence and circumstantial stuff.

We know he knew those places, you know, and of course, it's just kids' memories.

Can't prove a thing.

All we know is what we remember and the coincidences that we know.

When we talked to our mother again,

she denied everything.

She pooh-poohed any kind of a possible connection

between he and the Zodiac murders.

She would kind of chuckle.

"No. No, I don't believe that at all."

My mother never saw the movie 'cause she refused to see it.

She never admitted to me that she thought he was the Zodiac,

although she did tell me

that everything she knew was going with her to the grave,

except for what was in a box that would explain a lot of things.

The last time I ever talked to her,

I said, "Mama, where's that box you were telling me about

that would explain everything?"

And she goes, "What box?"

No matter what he did, no matter what she knew about him,

she stuck up for him and defended him to the end.

Early February of 2017,

Mother passed away.

After my mother died, I looked all over her place.

My younger siblings, Marlene and Hily, were there.

We found a box that had all these letters to my mother from Mr. Allen.

I know she talked to Leigh very, very often.

Sometimes she would even record videos for him.

This is where I've been getting your letters ready.

Now I'm gonna try and set this down.

These are the letters I'm gonna send to you.

Gonna get them in the mail today.

But I had no idea she still had the letters.

And with the letters, there was a package in there.

I could tell it was a VCR tape.

You know, it sounded like... You could feel it.

We opened it up.

And the tape had stickers on it.

You know, the stickers, like a joke code.

So we popped it in the VCR.

They weren't able to get me

for the simple reason that I've never killed anyone in my life

and don't intend to.

Arthur Leigh Allen,

a longtime Vallejo resident and former professional student,

is the man many still believe to be the dreaded Zodiac.

The very beginning, there was just clips of Mr. Allen.

Interviews and news things

like Geraldo Rivera talking about him and then talking to him.

I'm not The Zodiac Killer.

I know that. I know that deep in my soul.

I think there probably is a Zodiac still out there

and he's laughing his self to death.

I really can't take much more of the pressure.

It's difficult as hell and it can be ex...

It can be terribly depressing.

To me, it was like, you know, this crazy person having trophies

for stuff that he's done.

How many murders has the Zodiac really committed?

Has he ever stopped?

No matter what the death count is, Zodiac got away,

and has left many wondering, if he's still alive, where is he hiding?

After all the clips,

that he obviously put a lot of effort into putting together for her,

and it just kind of goes to the static kind of screen.

And then he has his butt in the camera.

I still can't figure out what "the living end" means though.

It's a very odd thing to say.

Then he goes and sits and talks to my mom.

Hi, Phyllis, long time no see.

And if I don't seem too cheerful, that's because I was spending...

Just spent a couple hours trying to figure out

how to make all this darned equipment work.

It's just been too long.

It was the first time I'd actually seen him in a long time

and heard him talk, and it just brought back a lot of...

It just made me sick to my stomach.

It's a little bit difficult to get him to cooperate,

but he is a very good boy.

Sobie, S-O-B.

Oh, yes, you are a good boy.

You know, being as clever as he is,

is there something there that he wanted us to see

that we just didn't see?

You know? So, I don't know.

Take care.

And stay out of trouble.

But then we start reading all the letters

inside the box that she had gotten from Mr. Allen.

And we were all looking at each other, going, "Oh my God."

Dear Phyllis.

Well, I guess this should surprise you.

Especially when you check out the return address.

I guess they've quit forwarding my letters,

as I never received the annual Christmas letter.

So please consider this a belated Merry Christmas.

I hope it was a good one for you.

Hope you and the family are doing all right.

Tell the kids I said hello and have a nice year.

Love, Leigh.

Reading the letters was like new information.

I had no idea

how much my mother kept us out of the loop.

There's a tremendous amount of letters with my mother

from while he was inside Atascadero State Hospital.

Dear Phyllis, I guess you're right

about being locked up not being easy on me.

But you know, when I finally did get locked in jail,

those bars didn't look half bad.

It was finally over and done with.

And this Zodiac stuff,

every time somebody mentioned police to me, I'd jump.

And seeing a murder headline would turn my palms sweaty.

Twenty years ago,

I knew I would have gone completely crazy if I were being locked behind bars.

But this time, the most dangerous thing

was when I almost decided to "confess," to finally bring it to an end.

They wanted desperately to hang it on somebody.

And they almost did.

I shudder when I think of how close they came.

This sweet old grandmother told me that I was a louse,

that I had done the things they suspected but couldn't prove,

and that I probably really was Zodiac, but too smart to get caught.

It's something else.

It's an absolute, uh, sociopath heyday.

Dear Phyllis, I see there are still questions in your mind,

as well there should be when dealing with us mass killers and all.

First, there was an eyewitness, all right.

His girlfriend was killed at Lake Berryessa.

Well, Zodiac wore a hood.

So much for eyewitnesses.

There were other things. My handwriting is similar.

The day Zodiac mailed a letter to a newspaper in San Francisco

was the day I got a ticket in San Francisco.

I could go on, but there's no point in it.

I was extremely interested

in putting forward as low a profile as possible.

And of course,

haven't allowed myself the pleasure yet of blowing up and blasting anyone.

While he was incarcerated at Atascadero State Hospital,

they knew that all the Zodiac activity stopped.

Of course, Zodiac hasn't re-offended,

I don't think, since I've been in here.

They tell me I don't let my anger out.

Hell, they'd better be damned glad I don't.

Enough said.

Take care. Leigh.

Not long after we found the letters, my daughter called us.

"Oh my God, Mama, did you see this cipher they just deciphered?"

I was watching a show about the Zodiac.

They were investigating possible Zodiac letter

from Albany, New York.

I am alive and well, and I'm going to start killing again.

Below is the name and location of my next victim.

They had a supercomputer decrypt it.

It came back with Connie Henly.

In looking at these records, nothing on a Connie Henly.

This person doesn't even exist.

C-O-N-N-I-E. H-E-N-L-Y.

And our mother's maiden name is Hensley.

Mr. Allen was one of the few people that would know that.

Zodiac had a history of changing the spellings of things.

I thought, "Oh my God."

It's awful close.

Scary.

The same time, in '73,

I was still married to Frank, and we were living in New York.

We had just moved into our new home in Canandaigua.

When one day, I got a phone call.

It was Mr. Allen.

He told me he was coming out to get me.

And I go, "Oh, no, that's okay. I'm fine."

"You know, I'm married. I have two kids." By then, I had two kids.

Anyway, he got really mad

because he didn't, you know, approve of my husband.

I think he was jealous.

After that, he kind of quit calling.

But I'd start getting these weird phone calls,

and I'd answer, and there'd be breathing or hanging up, you know.

And I figured, "Oh, everybody gets that."

But back then, I didn't know that Zodiac or whatever sent that letter from Albany.

That was a little scary.

Imagine our surprise when they deciphered that cryptograph.

And again, here it is.

Just kind of a little too close to be coincidence.

Luckily, he didn't find me.

I think my mother was getting off on either him being The Zodiac Killer

or him being a suspect of it.

She was titillated. She was pretty good at being prey.

I think she knew he was the Zodiac, and she hid it and helped him hide it.

But my mother knew that this information reflected poorly on her.

Reflected poorly on her choice of companionship

and exposure for her children.

The families of the victims should know.

They have to know the whole story,

whether Mr. Allen really was the Zodiac or he wasn't.

When he died in 1992,

Vallejo PD kept a sample

of Arthur Leigh Allen's brain tissue that was recovered at his autopsy.

So we had his DNA profile, his complete profile.

That was saved for future use.

Detective Distefano was the first to step in there, modernized,

brought that case up to current date.

He did a lot of foundational work

to have it ready for those of us years down the road.

Back when I was in high school,

I actually read Robert Graysmith's book on the Zodiac.

So when I had a chance

to go into investigations at the Vallejo PD,

I asked my supervisor

if I could be assigned the Zodiac case.

They handed it off to me.

When you look back, it's a long, ongoing investigation

with some really good detectives that have worked on it.

The case doesn't close because Allen's gone.

The case closes when we can prove it's Allen or whoever it was.

The Zodiac case definitely has a life of its own.

After all these years,

you still have people literally worldwide that want to help out.

There's a whole online community

that talk about their theory on the case all the time.

I was not opposed to having help from civilians

that may be more knowledgeable in a topic than I am.

There are people that have been studying it for 20 years,

the whole time I was doing my police career.

Why not have them help you?

I grew up in California in the late '60s.

Zodiac stuff was on TV.

I thought, "Wow! How come they couldn't catch this guy?"

I kind of took it with me when I grew up.

In 1995, I started doing my own research.

Over the years, I interviewed pretty much all the key players

in Vallejo, San Francisco, and Napa.

Many of them have since passed on.

I had Tom come down to the evidence viewing area

so he could help me go through all the tip boxes.

He was able to say,

"Yeah, this person has this theory about this,

and this information I've never seen before,

and this person went crazy on everybody."

It was great information.

- They think this is the Zodiac. - There we go.

So they sent the police one of his Q-Tips.

As far as Zodiac suspects, a number always gets thrown around.

"Oh, there have been 2,500 suspects."

I've had 2,500 this year that have been sent to me.

Most of them Ted Cruz, 'cause there's that meme going around.

But as far as who's the most serious suspect

from the perspective of law enforcement, it has to be Arthur Leigh Allen.

He was eventually served with three search warrants.

What I found decades later,

he had an absence slip

from November 1st, 1966, while he was an elementary school teacher,

the day after the Riverside murder of Cheri Bates.

The police did not know that.

That's what makes Zodiac so interesting,

is that there are new developments every five years or so.

New compelling developments.

A few years ago, one of his ciphers got solved.

After more than half a century,

a coded message sent by the so-called Zodiac Killer

has finally been broken.

We tried several hundred thousand incorrect ways of solving the cipher.

Just by chance,

we happened to stumble upon a fragment of how it could be solved

and reverse engineered the entire message out from the Zodiac.

I am not afraid of the gas chamber

because I now have enough slaves to work for me,

where everyone else has nothing.

In a statement, the FBI confirmed the accuracy,

adding that the cold case is still open.

It's an old case, but it's not moldy.

It's still interactive.

And who knows what the future holds? There's still two remaining ciphers.

Somebody out watching a documentary might be able to find the missing piece.

At this point in the investigation, it really comes down to physical evidence,

which means fingerprints and ballistics

or DNA.

When we started looking at all of these things,

we needed to see if there was anything,

in any way, shape, or form, material evidence.

We were determined to find out the truth about Mr. Allen.

We've recently found out that Connie's son, David,

drove with Mr. Allen a year before he passed away.

At that point,

I knew that he had been a pretty close family friend.

Mr. Allen thought it was cool that David liked his car.

He had a little convertible Karmann Ghia.

I got to drive. It was fun.

On the way back, we got a flat tire.

As I'm getting the spare tire out,

I see this knife off to the back side of the tire.

It was wrapped up in clear tape.

I just asked Mr. Allen, "What's going on with this knife?"

He said, "Why don't you keep it?"

That is the knife.

It was wrapped in cellophane tape.

And he kept it in his drawer for a bunch of years.

I hadn't put a lot of thought into what it was

until all of this started happening.

In recent years, every day in the news,

you're hearing about all the cold cases that have been solved.

I think DNA definitely has played a huge role in that.

I've worked in the field of forensic serology and DNA for 25 years.

The testing today is nothing like the testing in the '80s and '90s,

where you had to have a really pristine sample.

Now we are testing short segments of DNA,

that you can have partially degraded DNA

and you can still get really good, usable results.

All right, so let's see what we have.

When we get something like a knife,

we're typically going to divide that into the handle and the blade.

So, the knife has a lot of reddish-brown staining.

Could just be rust.

I could do a presumptive test to see if it's potentially blood.

I want to swab right around the hilt

because it could have dripped into this area.

It's kind of protected.

It's going to turn teal if it's blood.

I'm seeing color change now.

See how it's turning now? It's getting pretty intensely blue.

That is an indication of blood.

Again, it's a presumptive test.

So anytime we have a positive,

that's a potential that we have blood present.

This is a sample

that I would definitely want to do a confirmatory test on.

We test for 24 different areas on the DNA molecule.

That's the profile.

And if we get anything less than that, we call it a partial profile.

So we have better results from the handle.

Pretty good profile from multiple people.

It does appear that there's one predominant contributor.

It does look to be male.

It is a little bit degraded, and frankly, that's what I would expect.

You know, it does not look to be DNA

that was just recently applied to the knife.

The results of samples taken from the blade

were more of a minimal profile.

If we had a reference sample from either a victim or a suspect,

we could test it and see if they're included or excluded.

So, after all these years, why'd you come forward now, Dave?

You know, I wish now I would've done it earlier, sooner.

But I felt shame for my family.

I'd kept it secret

because I thought I was doing the right thing for my family,

as weird as that may sound.

When I called police, they hung up on me.

At a certain point, I didn't think anybody gave a shit.

When he died, I felt relief.

And I figured he's gone, he can't do any more damage.

Now I'm getting older,

I realize that maybe our information can help something,

somewhere along the line,

and give everybody closure that's involved in it.

I really hope we'll find out.

I really do.

I would love to be able to close this, to have it done, to be done with it.

You know, it's just been going on for so long.

And just to have it over with would be a great thing.

There he is.

We gotcha, brother.

Two years ago, we started working on this thing

because David told us we've gotta get these things done

before we're too old.

I'm so glad we did.

We did it.

You know, all he really wanted to do

was to let people know what he heard

and what it meant to him.

And then he's done. He's free.

And so, looks like he's freeing himself.

People will never give up on this.

I think I have an answer. The police think they have an answer.

But believe me, you will be able to find plenty of people

that think they have an answer.

I think we all want an ending. We all want closure.

For those victims,

the agencies owe it to them to keep working the case.

You can't ever quit it.

Sometimes I think if I knew who did it,

if I had closure,

I think I could let go of the hate.

Hate is not a good thing.

This case took a tremendous amount of twists and turns

through many, many years.

I'm not giving up hope though.

The ending is up for grabs.

If we make the right moves, then it'll have a happy ending.

Who knows what technology will give you tomorrow,

or what evidence turns up tomorrow,

or what a lab can do on this case?

It's still active, and there's still work to be done on it,

and I hope at some point that we're able to close it out.

There is no end.

Terror is fear.

It's like throwing a pebble in the water and it reverberates out,

and it has affected so many of us, even like me.

- I've turned down a lot of interviews. - Really?

A lot, 'cause I don't wanna think about it anymore.

I think there's never been a case like this.

Fifty years from now, we'll be talking about this case.

There's nothing like it.

It definitely will continue to affect generations,

and that's scary.

As a human,

you don't wanna believe the worst in somebody you trust your kids with.

It's a bizarre mystery.

Just as bizarre as they get.

The things that we connected the dots with

are real,

and if they can somehow, some way help solve this case,

whether it's him or not, that would be great.

Yeah.