The Zodiac Killer | Red Thread 

If the Zodiac Killer was alive today he would 100% be a Reddit moderator.

I never knew how pathetic the Zodiac was. "Please, wear my buttons or I'll shit and piss my pants, and cry myself to sleep."

I’m convinced that Charlie is just playing RuneScape like 70% of the time

Wendigoon is the most sane appalachian man I've ever seen and I've lived in the mountains my whole life.

Ted Cruz goes wild in this episode.

He wasn't meticulous or methodical. All of his kills were horribly executed. It's shocking the reputation he garnered from this.

I will never blame someone for not stopping to help, and instead getting someone that can help better. That is usually the most effective kind of help you can give in an emergency if you are not trained. Thankfully in this day and age we have phones that can call more effective help quickly, but before that access, of course I won't blame someone for doing the safest thing for themself or let alone their child.

This episode reminds me of a long standing joke I had with a friend who passed (RIP Keifer). We used to joke about opening a restaurant called the Zodiac Griller with a bunch of different serial killer themed meals.

I love how the two adult themed sponsors were covered by Charlie and Jackson so Isaiah could cover AG1 instead 😭🙏

ah yes, i love how this podcast is about cold cases, cults, and morbid topics in general and for hosts we have the 3 most dangerous types of ppl in the entire world: a florida man, an australian man and an Appalachian man. it truly gives them more credit to talk ab those kind of stuff.

1:11:30 to be clear, "multiple personality disorder" is still recognized by the dsm, but has been changed to disossiative identity disorder to better describe it with updated symptoms and information (including the fact that it is not at all a violent disorder except possibly when the person is threatened)

"I almost spelled bussy there" lmao jackson 💀

Briefs sponsor to look good on bed, toys sponsor to get freaky on the bed and ag1 to stays healty on the bed lmao

The case being referred to around 16:53 is actually super fascinating and a little sad - the guy (Ryan Waller) wasn't just talking to the police after a robbery with a bullet in the head - they were actively interrogating him for over 6 hours because they thought he'd committed the robbery and shot his girlfriend and refused him any medical attention despite having multiple head wounds and a messed-up eye. He ended up losing part of his brain, his eye, and having constant seizures for the next year before he finally died.

the killer became popular because people love a good puzzle, then when the puzzle was solved everyone was just like, "oh..okay, so he's just a little piss boy.." and i'm here for it

“There you are, sitting on your couch listening to a podcast when all of the sudden, you’re the zodiac killer. You didn’t want this, you didn’t ask for this. But there it is”

"After 6 months, they searched the pile of skulls and found skulls" I believe is the quote about how police _actually_ operate vs. the media portrayal.

Real important thing to bring up about that guy who was in the interrogation with a bullet in his head: he absolutely did know he got shot in the head, the policeman fully ignored the fact that he told him that multiple times and refused to get him any help for the entire interrogation. They believed he was the one who killed his girlfriend (who was also shot in the break in, I don't remember if the break in was a robbery or not) so they treated him like absolute trash the entire time. The cop kept insisting that he "wouldn't be talking to them" if he had a bullet in his brain, and allegedly if he had gotten help before the interrogation he likely would've survived. As far as I'm concerned, that cop's a straight up murderer and should've been thrown in jail with the people who put the bullet in the victim.

"You look over... you see a human, holding a really loud bird..." made me SHOUT-laugh. Omfg 🤣🤣🤣🤣

The Zodiac is like the real world equivalent of The Riddler: a guy who loves to troll the police with cyphers and puzzles, is super grandiose in the letters he writes and thinks he’s so much smarter than everyone else.

YES YES YES YES, Jackson be like "you wake up to find a zodiac sign on your hand and a dead person besides you, you look in the mirror.. and you realize you're Ted Cruz!!!!"

Do the intro from the perspective of the car. "You're parked in a forest, there are two teenagers inside of you."

I love the "ricky when I catch you ricky" energy that builds up toward the police throughout this episode because the way cases with obvious conclusions are CONSISTENTLY fumbled has me frothing at the mouth

Jackson and Isaiah: Chitting AND Chatting Charlie: （゜ー゜）

Love that Windigoon is our local gun/Christian expert, the way he explains it in such lay-man's terms is so useful to the case. I can't forget to highlight Jackson's ability to research and organize. Also Moist's pop culture knowledge. I love this colab

Imagine being in such a horrible place in your life with mental illness and such that you feel to commit “s u i c i d e” and you just so happen to get rid of your schizophrenia. What a freaking miracle…whoever actually lived that hopefully is still alive and doing much better in life.

Damn I know most people are here from Isaiahs or Charlies fanbase but Jackson is such a good host he's carrying this podcast. His writing is very cool too

With the taxi driver, I think an another scenario could also be the driver made a remark or joke about him being the Zodiac Killer. An offhand remark just making small talk about the story, inflated by his ego & paranoia at the time could definitely lead to him believing he’s “onto him”.

Never thought I would see Wendigoon with a Adam&Eve sponsor I love this channel

53:39 Speech therapist here- you’re thinking of TBI induced expressive aphasia. There are a few aphasias that result in a loss of writing ability, but you’re correct in that it isn’t necessarily connected with a loss of cognitive and/or comprehension ability unless there are injuries to other parts of the brain in addition to Broca’s area.

My mother grew up in the Bay Area, she was a teen when the zodiac killer was around, she told me how on edge she was and how scared she was when she worked late night shifts. I’ve been to the lake in Vallejo and it was an eerie feeling knowing what happened there.

Am I mistaken or did these guys get through talking about the Zodiac Killer for almost 2 hours and no one made a Ted Cruz joke?

God damn, John Zodiac talks like a fucking Redditor 😂

As someone who is dyslexic, I do have difficulty spelling words, however, I misspell words differently almost every time. I’ve misspelled the same word 3 different ways in the same sentence so probably not dyslexia.

The zodiac was born in the perfect time to do what he was doing, but now with today’s technology and everyone’s recording everything with their high-quality iPhones. He would’ve not been able to get away with it at all. 😂

What if his plan the whole time was to just build his brand to sell more buttons? It was about the buttons all along.

I didn't look at Jackson's notes last week, but wow he did an amazing job preparing for this podcast. 33 pages, with pages cited. Hat's off to Jackson for his diligence!

Why are they starting to all look like eachother??? 🤣This is actually so silly

I’ve grown up all my life in Vallejo California, I discovered Charlie and wendigoon all by myself, and now to see this come to fruition is awesome

1:11:15 Correction: He's right that Multiple Personality Disorder is not in the current DSM-5 anymore, but that's because it's been replaced with Disassociative Identity Disorder, which is a much more accurate description of what happens compared to calling it MPD. It's still very difficult to diagnose though.

I love these reoccurring guests! Maybe you should talk to them about having a permanent spot

Just wanted to point out that MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder) wasn't declared as not a disability it was just renamed to DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) to better represent how the illness actually works. Heard it mentioned and wanted to clear any confusion about that.

Fun Fact, the movie Dirty Harry is actually based on the Zodiac Killer. The main antagonist Scorpio is loosely based on him, and it takes place in the San Francisco Bay Area

I was listening to this whole doing dishes at work and MAN how'd I nor realize I was listening to it for 2 and a half hours. We had a lot of dishes

17:30 I had a buddy, who's brother, also a friend, earlier in life, put a bullet through his chin out if the top of his head. He survived, later got married had a kid, everything. He had a dent and scar on his head, otherwise you would have never known.

Man, Isaiah and Charlie were great guests! Hope we get them again soon!

Going over cases where people survived head injuries would be a cool idea for an episode. There's a lot of weird cases out there like; people being struck by lighting and suddenly being proficient at advance math, as well as, one case of a man who OD on acid and was able to speak fluently in another language once revived. The brain is weird.

I suffered a head injury, golf club to the forehead, and it heavily impacted my ability to read. It was around 7th grade and I had to spend time relearning how to read. Sometimes I'll think a word is a different word then it is, or just seems like not a word at all, but its not outright like seeing a different letter. Also have difficulty reading books because by the time I get to the next page, I've forgotten what I just read. On the other hand, I became much faster with my learning after that, especially anything analytical. Head trauma sure is the devil's coin flip.

The bit around 1:48:00 is a song parody. "I've got a little list" from a light opera called The Mikado. It's a piece that's known to have it's lyrics changed for more relevant humor over time.

doing the opening in the perspective of a tree would actually be so good because of the saying "If trees could talk"

I'm actually 100% convinced he put his name in those letters...but in an impossible to guess way, like multiplying the 2th and 4th letter of every other word starting with c divided by 6 and moving the result 2 letters (a->c) or something dumb like that His ego was waaaay too big to not attempt something like that

“What does it take to finish off a man?” -Charles White

Charlie is the friend that loves to listen to his friends talk, Isaiah is the friend who loves talking and always knows what happening, and Jackson is the kind of friend who has the facts straight and in graved in his mind.

21:56 This is why people think that silencers are actually like those seen in movies. The gunshots were muffled, but someone about 800 feet away could hear them... Yeah, of course they could hear it. They were only 800 feet away. A silencer CANNOT make a gunshot disappear. You'd be able to hear the gunshot from a silenced 9mm pistol a quarter mile away, at least. It may not register immediately as being a gunshot, but you would definitely hear it. The Decibel scale is logarithmic, meaning that there's an integer representation of sound levels that are exponentially increasing as the distance to the sound decreased. Basically, in the logarithmic scale of dB, 3 points means the sound is 2 times as loud. 6 means that its 4 times as loud, and so forth. A normal, unsuppressed 9mm pistol will be around 150-156 dB. A suppressed 9mm pistol will be around 128-135 dB at the same distance. A loud clap with your hands registers around 120-130 dB, depending on several factors. So what would you hear if someone clapped their hands loudly from 800 feet (about 267 yards; or a par 3 hole on a golf course) away? You'd hear it, but it'd be pretty muffled. There's also a huge difference between firing a supersonic 9mm bullet or a subsonic round from a 9mm suppressed pistol. The supersonic round would have a sonic-boom between the muzzle and the target which is typically around the 135-140 dB range, regardless of using a silencer. The main reason that people use silencers on guns is to negate the necessity for hearing orotection while shooting. It also makes gunfire less obtrusive for other people in tge immediate area. But what it doesn't do, however, is make the gunshot inaudible. In fact, hunting in many European countries means that you MUST use a silencer so that it doesn't disturb the leace of others or damage anyone's hearing. We happen to be in the extreme minority with the extreme regulation of these firearm accessories in the US.

A lot of people overestimate the lethality and incapacitating effect of handguns rounds. Particularly in an era where modern style hollow point/expanding ammunition was uncommon, FMJ handgun rounds tend to just poke narrow holes (without the more 'dramatic' stuff that happens at rifle velocities). If an important organ isn't hit, the person shot may not even realize they're wounded under the effects of adrenaline. To paraphrase Clint Smith: "People shot with handguns run away. People shot with rifles fall down." Or alternatively: "Pistols poke holes in people. Rifles poke holes through people. At the right range and with the right load, shotguns will physically remove a chunk of your opponent and throw it on the ground."

That dragon letter made me believe that if the Zodiac killer was around today, he 100% wouldve made a "Deez nuts" joke

Just one point, The Pace Postcard is not Dr Suess it's quoting Gilbert and Sullivan's song 'I've got a little list' from 'The Mikado.' Which means the Zodiac was educated enough to be familiar with Victorian English musical theatre.

Had a park ranger that would tell us during class that every invasive plant we killed had to serve us in the afterlife. I know what he was referring to now.

One thing I'd say about why the police didn't release stuff about Leigh is that in cases where the prime suspect is deceased, and there's no chance of justice being served, the police will weigh the possible damage vs benefit of releasing their information on him. If Leigh has living relatives, they might not want to release that he was the killer, as being related to a famous serial killer could adversely affect those relatives, who are entirely innocent.

Jackson is killing it

I think the mispellings and the cyphers go hand in hand. He leaves the mistakes there on purpose, and then the cyphers would still be mispelled, but would be consistent enough? Since the symbols can be tricky

My three favorite cryptids talking about Ted Cruz is a wild time.

Wendi is off the hook with his laughter 😂😂😂 I love his over excitement 😂❤

It's Jackson's world, we're just living in it

Iceberg Boy, Aussie Apprentice and Prophetic Penguin.

The reason why the talk show calls were hoaxes was because it was confirmed the person called 35 times, but only 12 (I think) were on air. Police also traced the call and it was from a patient from a mental hospital. They also questioned one of the people who did hear the Zodiac killers voice, AKA the police dispatcher who answered the call when he first reported himself, explained that the voice that called wasn't the Zodiac's voice and that his voice was more lower than who made the call. Going back to the fact, the Zodiac himself said in his next letter that he wasn't the one who called.

1:47:48 This is the List Song from Gilbert & Sullivan's 'The Mikado'. It is sung by Ko-ko, the Lord High Executioner, about the types of people he would be happy to execute, should the need ever arise. The Tit-willow reference later is also from one of Ko-ko's songs. So either the Zodiac Killer was a devoted theatre attendee, or he was an actor himself. Given the lack of access to information at the time, it's likely the latter; For him to be able to write the lyrics so accurately it's likely he had a script or had the song memorized. It kind of freaked me out because Ko-ko is the role I played in the Mikado many years ago, so the song was instantly recognizable.

I'm only 5 mins in, and the post-intro banter has already earned that thumbs up. Good show boys!

Zodiac (2007) is one of the best mystery thrillers

I love this podcast, and also Creepcast. I also love how Jacksons cam looks like he sits in a darkroom to develop analog photos or something lol

Thank y'all so much for covering this case! Buzzfeed Unsolved did this years ago but they didn't go nearly this in depth and they didn't provide as many comprehensive images to help with understanding. I've learned a lot more this go around. Thank you!

Petition #1 to get a Bloody Mary episode!

I always thought the cab driver theory that made the most sense was that somehow a conversation about zodiac killer was had and cabbie may have said Z was a coward and failure Z lost it

Zodiac is by far one of the most intriguing cases I’ve read about, and I am so hyped to see these 3 tackle it

Wendigoons laugh is EVERYTHING!!! This podcast is my new favorite❤

One of these "coinceedences" that stud out to me was the fact that Allen didn't buy the Zodiac watch imself, it being a gift from is mom right beefore it all started. i wander what his relasionship with his mom was like ps- sorry for bed english

"good things come in packages" is a pretty badass ad slogan for meundies lol

"What does it take to finish a man off?" Charlie is asking the real questions

Psych major here. Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) is still recognized as an actual condition, it's just now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and our understanding of how it works has changed a bit in recent years.

To add on to the conversation on the relationship between caliber and lethality: What makes a bullet deal more internal damage is it's ability to generate force from mass and velocity, yes, but the lower the force the bullet has, the more important two factors become: shot placement and force transfer. Force transfer is easy to solve, as you can change the bullet into a hollow-point so that the bullet disperses nearly all, or all, of it's energy into the body on impact. This improves wounding potential but even with a hollow-point, pistol rounds from .22 lr up to .45 are notorious for requiring volume of fire to compensate for relatively survivable single-shot injuries. This is why it's taught, and often praised by professionals, when people mag-dump a guy during a self-defense situation with a pistol. The only alternative is excellent shot placement (hitting something vital like the heart). A 5.56x45, used by the AR-15, is travelling so fast that it doesn't NEED such rounds as a hollow-point to cause a massive wound channel (a phenomenon where the force the bullet imparts to the body overwhelms the elasticity of the internal tissue, causing massive hemorrhages, contusions, and tearing). Some pistol rounds, like +P+ 9mm hollow points (Over pressure rounds, even more than +P), or full power 10mm auto, can achieve some nasty wound channeling FOR THEIR CALIBER, but it's still not a guarantee. For these murders, I don't know the specifics, but it's likely he shot these people with standard powder charge cartridge with a full metal jacket bullet. These were likely to be the most common rounds by far at the time, and if you can believe it, are not particularly lethal on their own at the moment of the shooting if nothing vital is struck. A .22 is better than a sharp stick but...I mean only in the fact that a stick might break and a .22 has a longer range lmao.

What's insane about this is that the police had evidence that one of these people was the zodiac killer and yet, couldn't get a search warrant for his house. I had a friend who had a cop come to his front door and harass him about how his cars registration was out of date, and he wanted to search my friends house because he was "suspicious" since he was being "uncooperative". Friend said to come back with a warrant. Cop was back three hours later with a warrant in hand. Bullshit they couldn't get a warrant for a potential serial killer. All cops are incompetent, impudent assholes.

24:08 the best firearms interview I’ve ever seen was a ex marine explaining the role of a suppressor. Wendy is %100 percent correct, the suppressors goal is to eliminate the flash. The sounds is dampened but with standard rounds you’ll still hear that initial ignition.

I never knew much about the zodiac killer. But its cool to see how much inspiration was taken from him for the Batman 2022

Great show! I’m teaching a freshman seminar course now on The World of Forensic Science, and I will be playing this episode of the podcast to the class. What a great discussion on how forensics has evolved over the decades. Thanks!!

lol I'm here for starting the episodes as random people/objects/animals. props to Jackson, so impressed with how thorough and detailed he is! my new favorite podcast.

17:36 There is also a case like that in Colombia, a man was shot right next to his nose, he bled out and all but survided, only losing movility of his legs as is to this day still alive.

Just found this today and this is my new nighttime podcast to help make me pass out

I used to think that the Z-Killer was some kind of refined guy who evaded capture and was a menace for years, but after you guys read the first cipher letter, he seems wildly immature with his language and his goals, and it kinda makes me think there was something wrong with him besides the fact that he was a crazy murder

Literally watched creep cast while waiting for a new red thread, episode finished. Then I got this notification for this. ITS A GOOD OPENING AT WORK NOW THANK YOU

You guys have produced this very well. The audio quality and volume balances is usually very poor in most RU-vid videos so its just great to hear!

I lived in the same county as Gary Poste for most of my life, and that place is definitely where someone with a history could go and be forgotten. There are a lot of remote areas and neighbors typically don't ask questions, especially the further out of town you got. I remember hearing about the Russian Mafia being tied to bodies that were dumped in New Melones, so clearly the place had a certain "disposal" allure that's just a few hours from the bay area. It was a wild place to live! I love how thorough you guys are with every episode and the content; it really helps reframe a lot of information that would be otherwise hard to chew through and incredibly entertaining and informative! I always look forward to a new episode, keep up the fantastic work guys!

Has anyone thought to take all the misspelled words, take out the specific letters that are misspelled, put them all together to try to see if it’s another cipher?

I prefer the POV myself. Also the thought of Scooby Doo being as old as the Zodiac Killer mystery is astounding to me.

Thanks Jackson for sharing what you wear. I'm one step closer to role-playing my favorite Aussie man

I was thinking that, on the Halloween greeting card thing, the symbol next to the 'Z' and the zodiac symbol was him showing that all 3 symbols are the same. They all stand for the letter Z. Maybe not tho, the guy is off his rocker. You guys are awesome!

Isaiah is such a good host he has such a wide range of information

Speaking as someone with dyslexia. This guy spells like I did in middle school. He has to be playing lol

RU-vid recommended Red Thread to me last week and I've so far seen all of the episodes. So glad to see another one is out!

Jackson has such a good voice for reading

Love the show boys, keep doing what you’re doing. ive been rooting for all of you for years now. i’ve seen all the work you’ve put in. proud of you