The Hunt for Zodiac: The Inconceivable Double Life of a Notorious Serial Killer

From December 1968 until July 1974, a man who called himself the Zodiac terrorized the people of
the San Francisco Bay Area with cold-blooded murders and chilling hand printed letters to the editors of
the local newspapers. In these letters, he boasted of his crimes, threatened unspeakable mayhem, he
taunted and ridiculed his police pursuers, and even hinted that he was leaving clues to his true identity.
The Zodiac killer has been called a “sexual sadist,” a “sexual killer without the sex” and a “loser
who was compensating for his feelings of inadequacy” after killing five people and then writing about his
exploits under his now infamous pen name. None of that is the truth and when you learn the truth
about his identity, it will surely shock you as much as it did me.

In June 1999, I had what I thought to be a simple-minded idea to use the killer’s letter writing
behavior as a weapon to identify him. That idea led to just one name. The first step in identifying the
Zodiac killer will be to redefine him through behavioral profiling that was not available to the police in
the 1960s. That profile will be based on the killer’s crime scenes and on how he interacted with his
victims. As a result of an inaccurate profile of the Zodiac killer, for many years people both inside and
outside of law enforcement have been looking for the killer in all the wrong places.

This book is the product of over 18 years of diligent research. I have worked very hard to remain
objective and honest when interpreting the vast amount of information I amassed from my research, the
case knowledge I gained, and the evidence and findings that led me to my suspect and ultimately
revealed his behavior and the double life he led. My goal in this book is to put the truth as I see it about
the identity of the Zodiac Killer before the public…that truth may not be what people expected in their
wildest dreams, nor what anyone who knew my suspect could have imagined in their worst nightmares.