We're kicking off Season 2 of the CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour Podcast with special guest Dr. Mark Hewitt. He is a Zodiologist who has meticulously studied the unsolved case of the Zodiac killer and has a strange an compelling theory outlined in his Zodiac Killer Trilogy . The identity of the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1970s, has never been discovered - not in the codes he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications, not by police, not by anyone who witnessed his murders or survived his attacks...but Dr. Mark's got a pretty compelling idea of who he might be.
Dr. Mark Hewitt's work is available on his website http://www.doctorhewitt.com/ and his books are available on Amazon.
This episode is produced with support from critically acclaimed musical comedian Jessica Delfino - check her out on Instagram and Twitter @JessicaDelfino and on TikTok @JustSomeMom - and by the delightfully dark podcast Old Timey Crimey, available everywhere you get your podcasts.
Want to support the CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour and get access to bonus episodes, exclusive expert interviews, CrimeJuicy Presents miniseries, and more? Join our Patreon community at www.Patreon.com/CrimeJuicyGang.
We're kicking off Season 2 of the CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour Podcast with special guest Dr. Mark Hewitt. He is a Zodiologist who has meticulously studied the unsolved case of the Zodiac killer and has a strange an compelling theory outlined in his Zodiac Killer Trilogy . The identity of the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the Bay Area in the 1970s, has never been discovered - not in the codes he sent to the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications, not by police, not by anyone who witnessed his murders or survived his attacks...but Dr. Mark's got a pretty compelling idea of who he might be.
Dr. Mark Hewitt's work is available on his website http://www.doctorhewitt.com/ and his books are available on Amazon.
This episode is produced with support from critically acclaimed musical comedian Jessica Delfino - check her out on Instagram and Twitter @JessicaDelfino and on TikTok @JustSomeMom - and by the delightfully dark podcast Old Timey Crimey, available everywhere you get your podcasts.
Want to support the CrimeJuicy Cocktail Hour and get access to bonus episodes, exclusive expert interviews, CrimeJuicy Presents miniseries, and more? Join our Patreon community at www.Patreon.com/CrimeJuicyGang.
Zodiac w_ Dr. Mark
Dr. Mark: [00:00:00] Let's do it
Carrie: Welcome to Crime Juicy Cocktail Hour. I'm Carrie Anne.
Becca: I'm Becca
Krista: I'm Krista
Carrie: With us. We have Dr. Mark Hewitt. He is a specialist on the Zodiac Killer and the Unabomber as a theory. We'd like to talk about that, Mark.
Dr. Mark: Thank you for having me.
Becca: Mark has published three books regarding the Zodiac Killer, serial killer in California who was notable for his pretty randomized murdering streak.
Carrie: Who loved taunting the police and the media.
Becca: He definitely drew people in. He caused a lot of ethical dilemmas for the media organizations that he drew in. At one point he was kind of holding the media hostage where he's like, if you don't publish this, I will kill someone. Would write to them and say that he killed so many more people, blah, blah, blah. It became this panopticon thing where it's this jail, where there's a watch tower and there's no walls, but all of the cells around the circumference of the area and the watch tower, there's always someone in the Watchtower. And if you try to escape you'll get shot. How many people have to be in the watch tower? The answer is no one. You just have to believe that there's this murderous possibility to keep you behaving a certain way. I was thinking about that analogy when I was thinking about the Zodiac killer and his whole like, if you don't do this, this and that, I'm going to kill four more people. And then he'll be like killed like four more people.
Krista: Send this chain letter or you're not going to get that job. And 500 families is going to die.
Becca: He had some weird demands like the buttons thing.
Carrie: We've had some pretty fun talks about the Melvin button.
Dr. Mark: Yes. That's correct. Dragon card letter in a paragraph he had been threatening with bombs previously, but the authorities wouldn't publish them. They didn't want to scare the public, so it didn't publish them. The Zodiac sent a letter and in it he said, I'm going to have my blast, or I'm going to kill people unless you do two things. One is publicize the letters, including the bomb diagrams. And the second one was he requested that the people of the San Francisco Bay area wear his buttons, he wanted to see some nice Zodiac buttons about town. Was a weird demand and it was never carried out by anybody, even though it was mentioned, and then repeated in three following letters.
Becca: I've killed 80 people, please wear my buttons.
Krista: It's my fan club. And did he also give like a weird movie review of the Exorcist?
Dr. Mark: Yes. He called the Exorcist a satirical comedy, the best satirical comedy that he's ever seen. Know,
Krista: I'm not going to lie, kind of agree with that one.
Becca: But the idea of the Zodiac killer, having a movie review column and the San Francisco Chronicle. Publish my movie reviews or I’ll kill a baby. It's fine. You have your own column douche bag. And he's like, I'm not trying to be a murderer I'm trying to be a journalist or I guess a columnist.
Carrie: Mark. Can you give us a brief of the Zodiac killer and your theories regarding him?
Dr. Mark: He's a serial killer from the late sixties, early seventies, who is known to have attack at four locations, killing five people and wounding two others. There are other suspected attacks both before and after those canonical four. And in his letters, he seemed to provide a score of how many people he had killed at any given time. And he ran the score up much higher than he probably ever killed anybody. But people were always left to wonder gee, did he really kill that many people or is he just a padding the number? He killed and he also wrote letters to the police into the press. That's very rare amongst serial killers. They tend not to want publicity. They want to do what they do and not publicize their activity. He seemed to want to taunt the police taunt the press.
Carrie: In four of the letters he included codes.
Dr. Mark: With the idea that, Hey, can you solve this? I've got a secret message in this code.
Becca: For the first one most of the letter was decoded, but the last part where he said it was his identity has never been decoded. Do you think it can actually be breakable or do you think he just strung a bunch of random stuff together?
Dr. Mark: It's possible? He divided the code up into three sections and sent it in three letters to three different news outlets. One theory is he just put 18 extra letters there too. 18 random letters so that he could make it into three equal parts, but there are theories that his name is included in those 18 letters, but it has never been successfully decoded. And that one was decoded within a weekend by a couple who lived in Salinas. Just some people who read it in the paper and said, Hey, let's work on this. They worked on it over the weekend and solved it. The second one was on the FBI's top three list of code that they wanted solved. It was a 340 simple code. And it was just decoded in December of last year. Two years later after publishing it in the paper and it showed that the Zodiac had a certain amount of understanding of coding and how to do it and how to make it very difficult to to decode. And yet the solution that came out made people think that he wanted it solved quite quickly.He expected it to be solved in a week or two. And as I say, it took 52 years.
Carrie: Were there any secrets that came out that you had not noticed before that you can talk about today?
Dr. Mark: It's still being unpacked, I believe. A lot of people have read the plain text solution to the code and said, Oh, there's nothing new in here. This doesn't tell us anything. I happen to think that there's a lot more in there than people realize. His choice of words. His use of phrases. His way in which you decoded. The complexity of the coding. The steps that were taken - all of this provides us information about who the perpetrator was. So I think it's still being unpacked.
Carrie: And you believe that? It's a good code broke, but you think it's good?
Dr. Mark: Oh yeah. Yeah. Almost everybody has agreed with that. The FBI has said that, yes, this is the correct solution. There's a few individuals on the internet who can't let go of their own solutions to the code, which are evidently and apparently very wrong, but they'll say things like, well, maybe there's two solutions to the code, or maybe the FBI doesn't know what they're talking about. And they're a bunch of crackpots there, but I have the real solution, but almost everybody has said that, yes, this is the obvious solution of the code.
Becca: So how did you're a Unabomber theory percolate?
Dr. Mark: Well, I spent 11 years of my life dedicated to the case to try to find out everything I could about it. And when I started, I was pretty ignorant and I knew I was ignorant. So I, I had no preconceived notions of what I was going to find out. I had two possible ideas. One was that at somebody that I could never identify but my research would give me a little bit of an insight into who he was and what he was like, even if I couldn't find his name. The second was that maybe Bob Graysmith was right in his book, The Zodiac and that it was Arthur Lee Allen, the one and only suspect back in the 1970s. Yeah. The police didn't have a better suspect. And so they terrorize this guy, but he's not a completely innocent victim because he apparently injected himself into the case at various times and needled the police and taunted the police in very much the same way that the Zodiac did.
Krista: And when they searched his trailer home or whatever he was living in the woods, they found a bunch of tapes of Zodiac stuff and news clippings and his weird LARPing costume.
Dr. Mark: They didn’t find anything incriminating, but they found the pretty creepy guy who was later charged with a sexual offenses against children, and three years in prison. And that's actually exonerating because I'm a serial killer of adults or teenagers is not likely to be a a pedophile because pedophiles would kill children.
Becca: Yeah. Except for in the case of the Night Stalker, he just liked to kind of catch and release those kids.
Dr. Mark: The Night Stalker?
Krista: Richard Ramirez.
Becca: Yeah. Yeah. Also molesting children and just kind of let them go. Catch and release kids. Kill the adults.
Krista: Yeah. He would like kill their parents and sexually tortured them. And then just leave. That was like his line, I guess maybe.
Becca: Yeah. Or he'd like take the kid and take them on a creepy molesting drive and then drop him back off at home and be like, night. But I think an interesting thing too about, well, something that also reminded me of the Night Stalker, even though the Night Stalker was like killing it random, but his methods were were consistent. Whereas with the Zodiac, it'd be like a shooting, a stabbing you know, carjacking, like it was so varied in the attacks.
Dr. Mark: One of his signatures that he changed his attacks. He changed his weapons. He changed his type of weapons. So as far as MO, modus operandus he changed it quite dramatically from attack to attack.
Becca: Oh yeah. Like every night was different. Like I'm going to like dress up like an execution or this time. And like, I'm gonna make a bomb and bomb a school bus this next time. Even though a bus bomb never went off. Correct.
Dr. Mark: He never. It may have just been a threat. He never actually detonated one that we know of any may never have even created it for all we know.
Becca: Yeah. And then he what kind of kidnapped a woman and her child, and then they ended up getting away and then he set their car on fire.
Dr. Mark: That's correct. That was a later attack that may have been the Zodiac. The Kathleen Johns, who was kidnapped identified him from the Zodiac poster and later the Zodiac claimed credit for it. But there's still some question whether it really was the Zodiac who did that.
Krista: Do you think he wore wigs at all? You think…
Dr. Mark: Well in his letters, he did claim to wear a disguise of some sort, but he never elaborated on what it was.
Becca: No, I don't notice me in this…I can’t…I can't even imagine.
Krista: When he killed, killed the cab driver, the red hair, and I feel like that would have the wig.
Dr. Mark: He was spotted following the murder of Paul Stein on October 11, 1969 in Presidio Heights of San Francisco. He was spotted by some [00:10:00] kids who were looking out the window when it took place. And a couple of composite photos, composite pictures were created from eyewitness accounts and there are different descriptions of what he looked like. One was, he may have had reddish a reddish tint to his hair, but it was it was in a Crew cut. So it was a, it was very short hair. So it's, it's hard to, to imagine that it was actually some kind of wig, but it's certainly possible. Or he may have dyed his hair.
Krista: Yeah. Is there if I, I might've misheard this wrong, but wasn't there one that also said that he had the light brown curly hair.
Dr. Mark: Yeah. And that would have been 4th of July 69 Blue Rock Springs Park. He he was said to have head short brown curly hair. So it's a lot of, a lot of differences between attacks. Some of even theorize that they weren't really all Zodiac attacks. These were just random attacks that some letter writers took credit for. The problem with that is every one of the that attacks he took credit for has never been solved. And he took a lot of risk in claiming credit for attack that he never did if somebody else ended up getting caught for it.
Becca: Oh, that's interesting.
Krista: He knew details that only a person that was there would know.
Dr. Mark: Yeah, he, he did a lot of work in his letters to, to prove that he was the one responsible by providing details of the different scenes, what he did, how the victims were left, what took place surrounding the events. And yet some people still say, Oh, no, he got lucky or he's a police officer so he had insight information on what took place. There are a lot of different theories but I think the obvious one is he was responsible for those four attacks and he, he linked them very carefully. He proved that he was involved in each one of them.
Carrie: I know I'm going to open up a big, huge can here, but let's go ahead and talk about the theory of the Zodiac as the Unabomber and how we link that through MK Ultra in Berkeley, University of Michigan and his travels with Harvard and his parents.
Becca: Oh, shit's supposed to get weird!
Dr. Mark: Yeah. Do you want me to answer that question in a sentence? Is that what you're looking for? Carrie Anne?
Carrie: Couple of paragraphs actually.
Dr. Mark: Okay. I don't know if I can even get it involved in the, in a couple of paragraphs, but I can give it a shot. When I entered into the research, I just read everything I possibly could. And when I heard the idea that the Unabomber was the Zodiac, I thought what a stupid idea It's kind of easy to pick one famous person and try to plug it in for a, an unknown person. That's kinda like the the people who say the Jack the Ripper was somebody from Buckingham palace. It was the Queen's nephew, or it was the Queens doctor. With respect to Jack the Ripper that's really foolish that the Buckingham palace had anything to do with the poorest of the poor area of London and five random prostitutes. But with respect to the Zodiac, I found an awful lot of connections between Ted Kaczynski and the Zodiac attacks, and I began to doubt the conventional wisdom about the Unabomber. A lot of things have been said and written about the Unabomber. I've seen the documentaries and I've read the books and read the Unabomber manifesto where Ted Kaczynski lays out his reasons for hating technology and his reasons for killing people, and a lot of it doesn't hold together. For instance, Ted Kaczynski spent 16 years laying out bombs or mailing bombs without ever saying a word about technology. And John Douglas, the FBI profiler said that when he went silent for a couple of years toward the end, not only was he working on improving his bombs, but he was also working on improving his justification for killing.
So to tell people that he was killing people only because he hated technology and he was trying to alert the world too it just doesn't make any sense because he wasn't talking about technology. Ted Kaczynski is a serial killer and he killed people because he enjoyed killing people. That's what he was about. So his manifesto is kind of a justification for what he was doing. Plus he talks about some of the victims that he selected, the reasons he hated technology and so he only wanted to kill people from the hard sciences because of what they've been doing to the world. Well, the truth is he was placing bombs in hallways or in public locations where a child or some innocent person could come along and get blown up. So his, even his reason for selecting the victims that he did, didn't really hold weight. I began to realize that Ted Kaczynski is a serial killer. That's what he is first and foremost. And there's a lot to the theory that the Zodiac went quiet in 1974 when he sent out his last confirmed - his last verified letters and when the Unabomber showed up in 1978, four years later and began planting bombs.
One of the final things that the Zodiac did, he nearly got caught in San Francisco, which led John Douglas to believe that he got so scared that that's why he stopped killing up close and personal, and turned to letter writing and turn to making threats. Soon after that attack, the Zodiac sent out letters threatening bombs, threatening to bomb a school bus, and even sent bomb diagrams. About ’78, Ted Kaczynski shows up in Chicago and starts setting, laying out bombs and sending bombs through the mail. The Zodiac also said after San Francisco, he was going to change the way he was killing. He was not going to announce the people he was killing. He was going to let the public wonder if there was an accident or there was a revenge killing or something. Was that really the Zodiac, or was that really what it looked like? Or was it the Zodiac behind it? Then the Unabomber shows up. So I make the connection between a lot of the things that the Zodiac did, his ways of doing things. I found six or seven clusters of evidence that seemed to equate Ted Kaczynski with the Zodiac. And Ted Kaczynski was a professor in the Bay Area up until the end of June, 1969. Four days later, four days after his last day of work at Berkeley, that's the Blue Rock Springs attack.
And following his time at Berkeley, there's a two-year gap where not a whole lot is known about what Ted Kaczynski was doing, where he was, what he was up to. He gave his parents' address in Chicago as his mailing address and in that same two years, the two last years of Ted Kaczynski, even as biographies kind of skim over those two years, he was a professor. And then he built his cabin in Montana. Well, during that two years in between those two highlights, most of the Zodiac activity occurred.
Carrie: You guys need to know that he was as a professor at Berkeley, he was one of the youngest mathematicians who acquired tenure there.
Dr. Mark: He was one of the youngest professors ever hired cause he started Harvard at age 16. Got his bachelor's, master's degree and PhD and then went straight to Berkeley to start working. So he was he was like 26. He was actually 27 when he concluded. So he was about 24 when he was hired by Berkeley.
Carrie: He got his PhD in Michigan, right?
Dr. Mark: He did, the University of Michigan.
Carrie: So while he was there, you guys, he…There was a bomb that went off at Berkeley. And that’s the only time there's been a bomb go off.
Dr. Mark: It was a bomb connected to two gallons of gasoline and it blew up and destroyed a lecture hall doing about $300,000 worth of damage.
Carrie: And that was a lot of money back then.
Krista: So he went from checking to see if people were in lover lanes and killing them, and then taunting the press and taunting people to eh, I’d rather blow things up. This this weird delayed react, delayed satisfaction? And to hear like the speculations of what everybody was saying, but really know that it was me that did it, that’s what got him off? That’s what it seems.
Dr. Mark: Well, if he was the Zodiac for two years in California, he had reason to hide his handwriting and hide his identity, hide his true beliefs, because he still had some students who would have recognized his handwriting and coworkers who might've recognized his handwriting. And so he had reason to come up with this fake persona called the Zodiac. I'm convinced that the Zodiac wasn't a real person, but it was a caricature that he invented and faked his handwriting. However, by 1978, he had been in Montana for seven years in his little cabin. [00:20:00] Nobody knew who he was. Nobody was aware of his handwriting or his message or whatever, and he felt more free to be himself and to kill without trying to disguise himself the same way he did as the Zodiac
Becca: Must have been so freeing for him. It's like, I love Montana.
Krista: You know, that seems to be the place to go. Montana and Wyoming seem the two places to go, if you just want to say screw it all.
Becca: Yeah. So how does MK Ultra and the University of Michigan tie into all of this? Cause I love when MK Ultra shows up and stuff.
Dr. Mark: Sure. MK Ultra is a government program during the Cold War when we were at cold war with Russia, and it was designed to understand how interrogation works, how the mind works, how people can be manipulated, and is a lot of secrecy surrounding it. Even today, even though they tried to have some hearings on Capitol Hill about it back in the seventies, a lot of records were destroyed. But it seems to be the OSS, which is the name of the CIA before it changed. The OSS helped to fund some research that was taking place at Harvard. A professor there Dr. Henry Murray was very interested in understanding how to interrogate people and what people can do to prevent being interrogated themselves. In other words, certain amount of mind control. How do you manipulate somebody to give you secrets that they have and you want, or how to prepare people, to prevent them giving out secrets that they may have.
So, Henry Murray gathered together 22 students from Harvard. He found he wanted to study misfit people for some reason, people who were kind of odd balls, didn’t fit in with other people and people that outsiders. He found the 22 most alienated people he could find. And of those 22, he was most interested in Ted Kaczynski because Ted Kaczynski was the most alienated of these alienated group of people. And of course, you know, Ted started Harvard two years earlier than everybody else. He was only 16. He had skipped two grades during his earlier years, one in elementary school, one in high school, because he was so intelligent. But he had no social skills and it's quite likely that he existed on the the, the spectrum for whatever ailment he had autism, possibly schizophrenic as well. He may have developed that, but quite likely autistic. And so the, the study that Henry Murray had these students go through is, is absolutely completely unethical today. It would never be done today, but these students were brutalized. They were asked to report on what their beliefs were. And then they were told that they had to defend their beliefs against other students who are going to disagree with them and argue with them. Well, what Henry Murray did was went and got some graduate students who were in, in law graduate law, had them argue against these undergraduates, but not just disagreeing with what they were saying, but make personal attacks and, and humiliate them and degrade them. And it was just a brutal experience for every one of them. And for some reason, Henry Murray wanted to see how people would react to that and how he could understand that, how he could use that in interrogations later on. Ted Kaczynski underwent this and there's some thought that it totally fractured his personality from being, you know, autistic dealing with this humiliation week after week.
Becca: So they targeted kids or students that were already alienated and then alienated them further.
Dr. Mark: And brutalized them. Yes. Emotionally brutalized them just to see what would happen.
Becca: He sounds like a bully, like a straight up bully.
Dr. Mark: From what I've read from Henry Murray, he was into a domination and he was into humiliating other people. And he was not a very nice person.
Krista: Sounds like he has some weird things that he doesn't quite know how to address. And because he had a position of power be able to do that and disguise it as an experiment. He was all like he-yes!
Becca: Egg-shaped dick, it's always that.
Krista: It always comes back to that. But yeah, that, that sounds, I mean, if, if Kaczynski, maybe that's what pushed him into the, if he did end up with schizophrenia, which is common with people who have high IQ, right?
Dr. Mark: Right. Yeah. Math students, math students, and others seem to come down with schizophrenia.
Krista: Like how do they, I mean, they come up with some of those math problems, I think…
Becca: Unbreakable codes like that.
Carrie: He could to that. You guys, he had a paper where he did a, a paper. Mark can talk about it better than I can, where he actually followed this esoteric form of math and ended it. Am I not correct Mark?
Dr. Mark: I'm not sure what you're referring to.
Carrie: There was a paper that he wrote and when he was in Michigan, I believe, but it was a on math. And I think he finished it at Berkeley where it was an esoteric form of math and he answered it and ended it.
Dr. Mark: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He, he did his PhD in two years in Michigan and he essentially put together three dissertations, any which could have been published as his dissertation to graduate, but he was, he had problems on one and so he put it aside and started working on a different one, even though his advisor advised them not to. But from he pumped out three dissertation.
Krista: And ended up yeah, they should've known at that point that he was a...who does a PhD in two years?
Becca: Serial killers.
Dr. Mark: It might be incorrect. It might've been two years for his master's degree and then three years, whereas a PhD.
Krista: Okay, but even still even still. It is extremely impressive.
Dr. Mark: Now, working with other people. He would, he would disappear and work on it for a number of weeks or months and then he'd show up in his professor's office with all these handwritten page after page and he figured out stuff where he did solve a number of problems that had stumped other mathematicians.
Krista: Can we not give you the certificate? Just take it.
Becca: Just take it, take it.
Krista: Just give him, just give us the money for this, you know, class and just, there.
Becca: We fractured your identity. Good luck with that.
Carrie: The thing is he didn't get to finish his PhD at Harvard, he had to go to Michigan. And I think that might've not been happy for him or it could have been happy. I don't know. What do you think Mark?
Dr. Mark: Well, he finished his undergraduate degree at Harvard and then got his two graduate degrees at the University of Michigan. Well, wherever he went, he was alienated, but he went to Michigan because they offered him a teaching fellowship. Ae didn't have a lot of money. And so he applied to three different graduate schools, but went to Michigan because he could teach and earn his keep there. He, his family was not well to do at all. They were blue collar. But I found within the Zodiac letters, as I began to study them, that there were a lot of references to mathematics and allusions to mathematics, which made me think that the individual who wrote them knew an awful lot about math, not just at the basic level, but an advanced level.
For instance, the Zodiac symbol, the crosshairs circle is a mathematical diagram of an X-Y axis with a circle on it. And it graphs out the formula X squared plus Y squared equals one. And it's so basic to mathematics that it's got its own its own term. It's called a unit circle. And two of Ted Kaczynski’s published papers, mentioned the unit circle in the very first sentence of the of these papers.
Becca: What are some other overlaps that what are some other overlaps between the writings of Ted Kaczynski and the writings of the Zodiac?
Dr. Mark: As I mentioned, I found a six or seven clusters. One was the novel, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. If you read the novel, you will find numerous words that are identical with words in the Zodiac letters, you'll find phrases, even numbers, number nine, number 10 in the State of California, these are all references mentioned within the book Secret Agent. Well, why is that important? What does that have to do with Ted Kaczynski? Well, Secret Agent is Ted Kaczynski’s favorite book. When he was in his twenties, he wrote to his family and said, if you want to understand me, you have to read the book, The Secret Agent, particularly the character of the professor. The professor was a person within the Secret Agent who carried around a bomb, who taunted the police. And of course, Joseph Conrad wrote his book from England. And so he used a lot of phrases such as I shall, which we find in the Zodiac letters. So it's quite startling. That's so much of the vocabulary and ideas come from Secret Agent in the Zodiac letters.
Becca: [00:30:00] Who uses shall in a sentence. Shall, I have ever been, like, I shall like…
Krista: It's a great lawyer term.
Dr. Mark: It is a Queen's English. I shall, the police shall never catch me.
Krista: We use it in association documents because it's a defining word as like I shall, and you are going to, I'm going to, this is going to happen. Yeah. It's one of those weird action words
Becca: …or I'll kill four people.
Krista: I mean, you know.
Carrie: What's another cluster?
Dr. Mark: Another cluster is what was found in the Unabomber’s cabin when it was unpacked. If you think of, if you went to a serial killer's home and looked at his stuff, what would you expect to find if you went to Jeffrey Dahmer's house? Or if you went to Ted Bundy's house or Richard Ramirez house, what would you find? Well, what was found in the cabin was codes, disguises, including disguises that consisted of sunglasses and hoods, not the exact items worn by the Zodiac at Lake Berryessa, but the same kind of idea.
And a lot of writings the manifesto was found. And I think there was a third thing codes. Oh, and bombs, of course there were bombs were there was a already constructed bomb made by the Unabomber already to send out and the Zodiac used codes in his letters, wrote about wearing disguises at his crime scenes, even though he didn't say what the disguises were though, we do know about what he wore at Lake Berryessa.
And the Zodiac threatened to kill with bombs. Another cluster or is just the whole idea of bombing the Zodiac sent to bomb diagrams, threatening the people, the Bay Area. They're interesting features of the bombs that he described was that they were passive detonation devices. There was no timer on them to detonate them. There was no fuse, they were passively set so that when the bus came along, the bus would cause the bomb to explode. The other feature is that they used dual circuits, not just a single circuit, but dual circuits or a single circuit to carry out two purposes, two circuits within, with two uses for a single circuit.
The Unabomber’s bombs were all, every one of them, passive detonation devices. Sent one in an airplane connected to an altimeter so that when the plane got above 3000 feet or whatever it was, and the air pressure went down, the bomb would explode. Bombs were set up in parking lots or in a hallway where if somebody picked it up, it would detonate it.
And interestingly, the Zodiac, the Unabomber’s bombs had dual circuits to them frequently a fail safe method so that if one detonation didn't go off a second one, would.
Becca: Hmm. Connections.
Krista: Circuit making is one of those things where there's a signature. The how they choose to make the rounds because there's so many ways to make it. He was already like in his dia-, if the Zodiac in his diagrams was depicting that, and the Unabomber was doing that.
Carrie: He built his bombs out of wood a lot of times, is that correct Mark ? And that would increase blast compression ratios as well and he would've been able to add that in and all that.
Dr. Mark: Yeah. If you look, just look at serial killers as a whole, how many serial killers use bombs? Not very many. How many serial killers write letters to the press and taunt the press? Not many. How many serial killers are connected to codes, writing of codes? Not many. The Zodiac and the Unabomber were unified in all three of those. They wrote taunting letters. In fact, they both wrote letters to the San Francisco Chronicle. The Zodiac we mentioned earlier that the Zodiac threatened, if you don't publish my work, I will detonate a bomb. The Unabomber, a couple of decades later said, if you don't publish my manifesto, I will kill people.
Becca: Speaking of published, what are the names of your books and where can our listeners find them?
Dr. Mark: I've written The Zodiac Killer Trilogy, three books: Hunted: the Zodiac Murders. Profiled: the Zodiac Examined, and Exposed: the Zodiac Revealed. It's the a comprehensive look at the entire case from beginning to end. The first book looks at the what, where, when of the case, Profiled looks at serial killers in general and asks the question, why? And Exposed answers, the question, who? They're available on Amazon or any bookstore or any brick and mortar bookstore can order it for you. And people can also go to my website, find out more information on the books. My website is DoctorHewitt.com, D O C T O R H E W I T T.com.
Becca: And two of them were on Audible, right? So people can like, listen on audio book.
Dr. Mark: Yes, the first two are available on audio and they're all available in Kindle or softcover. And the first book, Hunted, has a limited edition hardcover that signed and numbered one through a hundred. There are some remaining but if you want one, you need to act quickly. My publisher is selling them out. You can find out information about those through my website or by contacting me through my website.
Krista: What is your thoughts on the gentleman who is accusing his father being the Zodiac killer? You think he just has some daddy issues? Or does he have some legitimate plausible connections, but it's not, not worth it.
Dr. Mark: I know three people who've accused their father of being the Zodiac. So when you say that person who's accused their father, if the police are aware of somebody being a potential serial killer, they wouldn't send a family member into research it for obvious reasons
Becca: They're like so deep, undercover. So you want to pose as your son to investigate…
Dr. Mark: You can’t look at it objectively if it's your own father. So there's, there's not a lot of credible evidence for anybody coming forward and saying that it's their father. A number of them who have come forward have been debunked, some very publicly for manufacturing evidence, or for being fast and loose with the facts.
Krista: Ted Kaczynski, he was alienated from college and probably high school, middle school, elementary. And did he alienated himself from his family or was that just his whole life?
Dr. Mark: I think it was this whole life. He didn't go looking for friends. His mother made the comment that even as a child, he would play beside other people. He would play in the area of other people, but he wouldn't play with schoolmates. In elementary school, he skipped, I believe it was fifth grade. So suddenly he was a year younger than all of his classmates. High school, he did it again. So he was two years younger than all of his classmates and even socially less able to cope with a situation like that. In high school, he would retreat to his bedroom and not want to talk to anybody and work on his own projects and do whatever he had to do. He just was a incredible introvert, incredible loner.
Krista: Wonder what happened in those two years? Right. Really, really do.
Becca: It's so interesting when there's like missing time. It's like, so what happened then?
Carrie: Can you give us a little bit about radians? I think a lot of people would like to hear a little bit about that.
Dr. Mark: Oh sure. In one of the letters, the Zodiac sent a code and a map and he said, you know, use this code to figure out where this bomb is set on the map. And people kind of scratched their head and said the code isn't long enough to meaningfully decrypt. And it just didn't make a whole lot of sense. And then a follow-up letter, he said something about the code refers to radians and inches along the radians. So people said, you know what? What's a radian? What, what are we talking about? Well, Radian is a mathematical term. It refers to an angle. So it seemed like the Zodiac was saying, well, if you find the right angle and then go the right number of inches along this angle, you'll find out where this bomb has been set. Well, there was never any evidence that there really was a bomb or that when one was set, it just seemed like it was, wasn't making a whole lot of sense.
But what people didn't do is explore the idea back in the seventies, why was somebody using the word radians and what type of person would use that word? Well it's a mathematical term referring to a and an angle of about 68 degrees. I think it is somewhere around there. And obviously Ted Kaczynski used the word radians regularly in his papers and thought in terms of radians. And in fact, his, his high school calculus book has the word angles has the word radians penciled in and his own handwriting. Right in the book.
Becca: You guys, it's obvious, I like led you right to the bodies and you didn't get it? Like, you know, those geniuses that are so smart, they don't know that everyone else doesn't know like half as much as they do. They're like, it's obvious the body was right there. The bomb, the bomb on the radian, duh.
Krista: Yeah. Or I could only imagine being that smart or I guess I can't imagine being that smart and being surrounded by people who don't see the world numbers like that. Have you seen the movie A Beautiful Mind? Russell Crow is in it. I forget the mathematician’s name that he stays, but it turns out that he turns up, turns out to be schizophrenia and he, yes, Nash. He's he believes that he's like cracking this secret code for MI-6 or some crazy thing. But in the midst of all of that he's this amazing mathematician that no one could ever fathom [00:40:00] way his brain works.
Dr. Mark: Yeah. He earned a Nobel Prize for some of his early work.
Krista: Yeah. So could you imagine if Mr. Kaczynski had people in his life that were like, are you okay? Like, Hey, let's let's maybe make sure you're okay. You imagine that like amazing things that he could have done with his intelligence?
Becca: We'd be having this conversation like on the Moon.
Krista: There's so many people out there who have high IQs and it's not recognized and they get bored and then they just end up killing people or committing crimes because they don't know what to do. And they say, Hey, whatever. I mean, obviously they recognized his because he arrived at Harvard when he was 16. His gifts were recognized for sure. But I don't think it was, they also didn't have the tools to know how to handle somebody who was so introverted.
Carrie: Plus they made it worse.
Krista: Yeah. Didn't help either. That's just, that's just insane. And like, if he was born in a different time, what, what would that have looked like instead of him, you know, deciding to use his brain power, to confuse people and kill people.
Becca: Yeah. They only confuse people and scare…I mean, scare the crap out of an entire area.
Carrie: The girls didn't want to go out and stuff. And that that was part of, did we talk about that a little bit, Mark? How maybe part of it was to keep the girls in, you know, scaring them, keep them in.
Dr. Mark: Oh, keep them, keep them home. Keep them from going out on dates and go to lover's lanes areas that could be in a lot of ways Ted Kaczynski’s a real prude. Saturday's his 79th birthday. And happy birthday, Ted. And he remains a virgin to this day. He's never had a real serious girlfriend. He’s had a number of crushes on women, but ends up scaring them away one way or another.
Becca: This is going to be like a dumb ass question. But Ted Kaczynski is still alive right?
Dr. Mark: He is, he's in a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
Carrie: Right here!
Becca: Everything's a Colorado.
Carrie: All the cool shit and me.
Becca: Yes. So, and he has Ted Kaczynski said anything about the Zodiac killings?
Dr. Mark: He has denied it, but not very strongly or very directly. A couple of people have written to him. I corresponded with him for a while, but I didn't talk to him about Zodiac stuff. I pretended I was really interested in the manifesto just to keep the letters coming. And he talked to somebody else who apparently did research and found out who I was and then wrote back to me and said that he thought I had an unwholesome interest in high profile murder, which I thought was a little bit ironic coming from the Unabomber.
Becca: Oh my gosh. Could we just like highlight this real quick? Mark Hewitt was told by the Unabomber that he was unwholesome.
Dr. Mark: I'm unwholesome. Yes. I have unwholesome interests. Yeah.
Carrie: I should make that into a meme.
Becca: Mark’s face, like he’s unwholesome,unwholesome, sir. Oh my God. I'm going to crack up about that all night. Getting judged by serial killers.
Dr. Mark: Yeah. So he never, in his letter to me, he never denied being the Zodiac killer, which is the only reason I could possibly have been writing him. I mean, we both knew that, but he didn't even deny being the Zodiac, but he did use the word Zodiac. He wrote it out. And in my third book, Exposed, I showed that word written by Ted Kaczynski and compare it to the instances of the Zodiac, writing the word Zodiac. And just, there are a lot of similarities from a, from a handwriting perspective. Both of them printed, both of them print, which is very unusual for somebody who went to school back in the fifties and sixties.
Carrie: Correct. Yeah. So very fascinating. Any other questions?
Becca: Is there anything I guess anything to you, you would say to people that are wanting to like, learn more about the Zodiac killings and I guess research tips in general? Cause it seems like you're able to follow a flow of work in a, in a really good way. And you know, internet research is hard because all of the search engines we use are tailored to like our own opinions, but like they have noticed about us. So yeah. Any, any tips are welcome.
Dr. Mark: Read for enlightenment, don't read to confirm your own suspicions. Read to challenge your suspicions. One really interesting idea I noted in, in looking at the Zodiac was if you look at the more material letter, the Zodiac uses three semi-colons and uses them correctly. Well, where do you learn how to write semi-colons and use them correctly? That's not - I learned about semi-colons in high school, but I didn't know how to, I didn't really use them. It's graduate. It's it's college stuff. That's university. The Zodiac in one of his letters refers to glue. He talks about airplane cement, and the Zodiac sent out bomb diagrams. Well you put those three together. You've got university where you learn to use semi-colons. You have airplane cement, airplane, and you have bombs. You've got Unabomber right there in the Zodiac's own activity. That's where the term Unabomber comes from. University Airline Bomber.
Carrie: That’s nuts.
Becca: It's nuts.
Carrie: And it's deeper. It's way deeper. We just touched we just the scratched the surface. You guys have to read the books. Just read the books.
Krista: What do you think is the most outlandish theory? Hypotheses, whatever on who the Zodiac is?
Dr. Mark: Outlandish ones. Every time I think I've heard the most outlandish one I hear another outlandish. One. What fascinates me is how much misinformation comes into the case. There are currently 51,000 people discussing the case on Reddit. And one person will come up with an idea or they'll ask a question, or they'll have a suspicion and somebody else will pick up on it and say, well, I heard somebody say that this was true. And suddenly there's whole new stories. It's whole new angles to the case that information has absolutely nothing to do with the case. And even back in the early seventies, when people were writing about the case, somebody added the idea that there was a chase to the Blue Rock Springs Park that Darlene and Mike were chased in their car to the park and that's where the, the killer chased them there and then shot them when he got there. Well, you read the police reports that not only was there no chase there, but there was no time for a chase based on events that took place before going to the park. It just amazes me how people are led astray by these different myths, different stories, different ideas. Somebody proposed that these four attacks had nothing to do with one another that they were a drug deal gone bad.
Or there's a police conspiracy trying to hide information from the public that the police really know who the Zodiac is. They just don't want anybody else to know.
Becca: Can you imagine if your drug dealer, dropped out of a tree wearing an executioner's hood and was like, here is your dime bag?
Krista: The Golden State Killer turns out that he was a police officer.
Becca: And our Wisconsin episode last season, the WTF is up with Wisconsin. We just covered a lot of cop killers or killer cops.
Krista: Yeah. That's I mean, what if, I don't know?
Dr. Mark: A number of number of people have proposed that so-and-so a relative or somebody is the Zodiac and then have gone and decoded the, some of the unsolved codes and have said, see that person's name is in the code. I just solved the code with this person's name. Probably one of the craziest theories I've heard is that the Zodiac was a consortium of four different people, including one of the police officers who worked a couple of the cases. These four people teamed up to write the codes, write the letters, carry out the attacks. And that the final attack was to be an attack on a building in Boston. And the author of this book said that he solved the case and that he alerted the security detail that worked at the building and thwarted the attack and prevented the final attack of the Zodiac.
You can't make this stuff up. But this person is totally serious when they say that this is their solution to the case.
Becca: So could you just like call security to the building and say you thwarted an attack and
Dr. Mark: That's, I guess proof enough for this person that detect didn't happen so that he must have, he must have prevented it.
Becca: He did it! He stopped the Zodiac’s final kill!
Krista: Well they’re trying to say now that the Son of Sam was carried out by like a Satanic.
Dr. Mark: Yes. That's, that's a whole other topic, but that's an excellent documentary on Netflix. What I took away from that as a that's how not to do research, Terry Maury, Maury Terry decided that it was a satanic cult involved in the Son of Sam case and so he spent decades of his life researching to try to prove that it was a Santanic cult. And I think a lot of people told him what he wanted to hear.
Becca: Right. And then he just worked backwards from, so you like decided what he wanted, what he thought it was.
Dr. Mark: The documentary should have ended off with the FBI conclusions about the Zodiac case because different FBI agents went in to the into prisons and talked to Berkowitz and Berkowitz started saying, well, yeah, I'm crazy. A dog talked to me and told me this. And they turned to him and said cut the crap David, we know you're not crazy. We know you're really smart. We know you worked alone. Cut the crap, tell us what happened. And he basically said, yeah, okay, this is what happened. He acknowledged the FBI. The FBI knows to this day that it wasn't a satanic cult. And some people are now saying that, well, you know, [00:50:00] maybe the Zodiac was part of a satanic cult and that's how these attacks occurred.
Krista: When it goes unsolved, it's hard to not jump off those cliffs.
Becca: So you get kind of gets a fanfic where it's like, well, what if this happened? But what if that happened? But what if.
Krista: What if he's really a time traveler?
Becca: It was Prince Andrew!
Dr. Mark: Or this is possible. Well, just because something's possible doesn't mean it's true. It doesn't mean there's any evidence that it's true. I've I've heard a couple of people say, well, since it isn’t solve any theories as good as any other theory. Well, no, no, it isn't. I appeal to a big foot coming in on space with space aliens and carrying out the attack. Is that possible? Well, I suppose it's possible, but is there any evidence that big foot with space aliens carried out the attack? Well, no.
Becca: Hell yeah! it was by Northern California, which is where Big Foot likes. But like, I've never seen Big Foot and the Zodiac Killer in the same place at the same time.
Dr. Mark: There you go, there's evidence right there.
Becca: I got a theory. I got a theory, although I don't think, I don't think big foot would like, I could see big foot, seeing it all happen. Right. He's like in the trees and sees the murder and he's like, I've got to do something. So he likes, starts writing to the police pretending to be okay. I don't like do something, but I can't reveal my identity because it's like the Big Foot code. So, but like his Big Foot like cryptology is so much more advanced than like our simple human minds.
Krista: All big foots are mathematicians.
Becca: They’re like we're very good at math. All of us.
Krista: They don't speak English. They can't communicate verbally.
Becca: We speak math.
Krista: If you ask them to write a letter about math.
Becca: Oh my gosh. Like we learned to talk to him. It's just like sending like math equations back and forth until like, I don't know we hug. And then finally find out who the Zodiac killer really is. Cause like big foot's known the whole time, but just didn't have the words to express it.
Krista: Yep. There we go. Figured it out, y’all.
Becca: You're welcome.
Krista: You know he’d tell us it was Ted Kaczynski anyways. His brother has spoken extensively about him in general. They would not up the Zodiac. Right or no, that was me. Sorry.
Carrie: So what's his name? Kaczynski’s brother talked a little bit. Yeah.
Dr. Mark: Yeah. He's been asked if he thinks Ted is the Zodiac and he hasn't been really firm in his denials. He said, well, the FBI doesn't think he is then that's good enough for me.
Carrie: We can have him back on the show later, too, so.
Becca: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I think we should do a deep dive too. Not quite a JuicyBitz bits and maybe some bonus content. For our Patreon supporters at www.patrion.com/crimejuicygang, where you can get access to bonus content and unaired episodes.
Dr. Mark: I would love to come back.
Krista: We have fun here.
Dr. Mark: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Krista: He even brought a cup of juice.
Carrie: He was ready. He was ready.
Becca: Got your own juice.
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