Podcast Forensic Files

00:00 Thanks for listening to the show. Listen and follow your favorite ID podcasts ad-free on Amazon Music. With Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks, all in the Amazon Music app. 00:18 For six years, a serial killer prowled the streets of New York City, haunting his victims. 00:26 He promised to kill 12 people, one for each astrological sign. And he only struck while certain constellations were visible. It took forensic astronomy, handwriting analysis, and the World War II codebreaker to find him. 00:57 Late one cold night in March 1990, 49-year-old Mario Orozco was walking home from his restaurant job in Brooklyn. Without warning, he was shot in the back. 01:11 Mario survived, but he couldn't describe his attacker. 01:17 Three weeks later, there was a similar incident a few blocks away. 01:22 Thirty-four-year-old factory worker Herman Montenegro was walking home after a serious night of drinking when someone shot him in the back. 01:31 He, too, survived, but he didn't see the gunman either. 01:36 Police recovered the 9mm bullet. 01:39 There were no grooves on the bullets, and we're probably dealing with a zip gun type of homemade weapon. 01:52 Two months later, a short distance away in Queens, 78-year-old Joe Procci was about to open the door to his apartment when he was shot with a 9mm zip gun. 02:03 Prochi died later at the hospital. This time, the killer left a note beside the victim. 02:10 It was a threat to kill 12 people, one for each astrological sign of the zodiac. 02:18 This is the zodiac. The 12 signs will die when the belts in heaven are seen. 02:24 The next day, a similar note arrived at the offices of the New York Post newspaper. 02:30 The killer called himself the Zodiac. 02:34 The Zodiac claimed responsibility for the three shootings, but he mistakenly believed that he had killed all three. 02:43 It was apparent the Zodiac knew his victims' birthdays and astrological signs. 02:50 Mario Orozco was a Scorpio, Herman Montenegro was a Gemini, and Joe Proci was a Taurus. 03:00 But how did the Zodiac know the victim's astrological signs? 03:06 Are you kidding? It freaked them out completely. 03:09 The New York City Police Department went into the biggest manhunt. It was mammoth, and it was driving them crazy. 03:16 At this point, investigators realized the Zodiac had contacted them before. They just didn't know it. 03:26 Three months earlier, he had written a letter to police headquarters, but it was ignored. 03:32 And basically, it was viewed humorously. Here's a nut letter. I believe it was posted on a bulletin board. It was not taken very seriously. 03:42 This letter held yet another clue. 03:46 The Zodiac will kill the 12 signs in the belt when the zodiacal light is seen. 03:51 Orion is the one that could stop Zodiac and the Seven Sisters. 03:57 An astrologer told police that the constellations Orion and the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades were not visible on the nights of the shootings. 04:07 The Zodiac's letter implied he wouldn't strike when Orion and the Seven Sisters were in the sky. 04:14 This thing was all over the newspaper now. 04:17 I mean, it's like the biggest case in years in New York City. 04:23 25 years earlier, a man in San Francisco killed six people and wrote taunting letters to police. He, too, called himself the Zodiac and was never apprehended. 04:34 Was it possible the San Francisco Zodiac was now in New York City? 04:41 If the Zodiac from California in the 60s had resurfaced in New York, they knew this was a complete law enforcement nightmare. 05:00 Some of the family thought that he was guilty. It broke him. He was never the same. Because family's supposed to be there for you. 05:07 On the Murder in the Heartland podcast from I.D., we'll examine true stories that happened in a town a lot like yours. 05:13 Deep down, we all kind of had a little bit of a hatred towards one another. 05:18 If you had anything to do with it, I pray to God they would come down so hard on you and you would know what pain is. 05:25 Listen to Murder in the Heartland wherever you get your podcasts. 05:39 New York City police were searching for a killer who called himself the Zodiac. 05:45 He promised to kill one victim for each of the 12 astrological signs. 05:52 Before the Zodiac killer in New York, when the guy said to a girl, what's your sign? 05:57 He was hitting on her. Afterwards, I mean, there was literally a case where a guy asked a girl a sign and she screamed for the police. 06:04 Handwriting experts compared the New York Zodiac letters to those written by San Francisco Zodiac killer 25 years earlier. 06:13 One characteristic of this writer is that he makes his horizontal lines in a descending way. His T-bars tend to descend. The crossbar on his lowercase F's tend to descend. 06:28 Handwriting experts concluded that the San Francisco Zodiac and the New York Zodiac were two different men. 06:37 Investigators now realized they were dealing with a very sophisticated copycat. 06:44 The shootings had taken place at 21 and 63 day intervals, suggesting variations of a three week cycle. 06:54 And they happened on nights when the constellations Orion and the seven sisters of the Pleiades were not visible in the sky. 07:04 The planets are just named after gods and goddesses. They were the gods and goddesses. The stars also were either homes of gods or the lights into heaven. 07:16 So these are powerful ideas. These are powerful symbols. 07:20 To predict when the zodiac would strike next, police asked astronomer Gregory Matloff to identify the next time within the 21-day cycle that Orion and the Seven Sisters would not be in the sky. 07:35 Matloff predicted... 07:37 Zodiac would strike next on June 21st, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. 07:45 So we have hundreds of plainclothes detectives out on nights when we think this guy is going to shoot again. 07:54 And the Zodiac was even more clever than anticipated. He did strike, but not in the same area as before. 08:03 This time, it was in Manhattan. 08:05 He shot a homeless man, Larry Parham, who was sleeping on a bench in Central Park. 08:12 In the victim's shoe was a note. 08:16 The Zodiac somehow knew that Larry Parham was a cancer, a sign different from the other three victims. And Zodiac registered his indignation that the newspapers were calling him a copycat. 08:31 one zodiac he's angry he's trying to convince us no no i'm i'm zodiac just one zodiac and you know we we knew it wasn't him we knew it was a copycat to look for forensic evidence criminalists saturated the letter with minhydrin a chemical that reacts with the amino acids from skin oils Then, the letter was placed in a humidity chamber for several hours. 09:02 The moisture in the chamber accelerated the chemical process, eventually revealing an almost perfect thumbprint. 09:11 This was photographed and then compared to prints in every fingerprint database available. 09:18 They did databases for city employees, department of motor vehicles, postal workers, including police officers, and nothing. 09:28 No hits. 09:30 There had been no witnesses. None of the surviving victims could give a description, and the only forensic evidence was a single fingerprint. 09:41 Zodiac claimed that only the constellation's Orion and the Seven Sisters could stop him. 09:49 New York police hope to add themselves to the list. 10:04 The Zodiac killed one man and wounded three others in New York City. And for some unexplained reason, he struck only on nights when the constellations Orion and the Seven Sisters were not in the sky. 10:19 Just as unusual was the fact that he apparently knew the birthdays of all four of his victims. 10:27 And it was clear from the Zodiac's letters that he was following the investigation in the newspaper. 10:34 I printed a story that the police had his fingerprints. He messed up. And I'm convinced that as soon as he saw that, you know, he folded his tent because he knew that once they had fingerprints, that they had comparison, he was cooked. 10:51 And for almost two years, there were no more Zodiac shootings. 10:56 It wasn't until 1994 that the Zodiac sent his next letter announcing his return. 11:04 The Zodiac claimed responsibility for the stabbing death of 39-year-old Patricia Fonte in Highland Park. 11:12 Patricia was a Leo. 11:14 And 40-year-old Joseph Diacon was shot and killed while he was walking near this highway underpass. Joseph was a Virgo. 11:24 Zodiac's next victim, 40-year-old James Weber, was shot in the same location. He was a Libra. And fortunately, he survived the attack. 11:36 He snuck up behind them and just shot them and ran away laughing, according to Weber. Weber said after he was shot in the buttocks, he heard him laughing as he jumped into the cemetery. 11:47 Amazingly, each of Zodiac's seven victims had a different astrological sign. 11:54 But the pattern stopped with his eighth victim, 40-year-old Diane Ballard, who also survived the shooting, but was a Taurus, the same sign as an earlier victim. 12:08 Zodiac also took credit for shooting a ninth man in Highland Park, although police couldn't confirm the shooting took place. 12:17 Although the Zodiac bragged that police would never catch him with this letter, he made a mistake. 12:24 He licked the envelope flap and left enough saliva for DNA testing. 12:30 Police now had the DNA profile of the Zodiac killer. 12:37 The letter also included another clue. 12:41 I knew it was a code. It was a nine towers, because there were nine victims. And I wrote down all the different symbols. And I think I had 23, very close to an alphabet. And then I did something called a frequency count, which is you write down how many times each letter is used, because, for example, E is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet. 13:04 Kieran Crowley's father-in-law had been a code-breaker in World War II. 13:08 Together, they discovered that the alphabet was based on a maritime system of international flags and pendants. 13:17 And with this discovery, they were able to decipher the Zodiac's secret message. It said, this is the Zodiac speaking. 13:25 I am in control, who mastery, be ready for more, yours truly. 13:46 The Zodiac killer had been walking the dark, deserted streets of New York City undetected for six years. 13:55 Captain Joseph Herbert worked on the Zodiac task force, and he knew that eventually the forensic evidence would catch him. 14:05 This case is actually a study in forensic investigations because I knew at the time from working on the task force that we had partial fingerprints from Tudor letters from the early shootings. The bullets that were removed from the bodies were not traditional lands and groove bullets, but they did have barrel markings on them that could be compared to other barrels. 14:28 We knew that we had a DNA sample of one of the letters. 14:33 Police continued to search for the Zodiac. On a dark, dreary March afternoon in 1996, their luck began to change. 14:45 Open the door. 14:46 A young man in a Brooklyn apartment apparently got angry because his younger sister and her boyfriend were together alone in her bedroom. He demanded the boyfriend leave. When they refused, he fired a shot through the bedroom door. 15:06 When the woman ran out to confront her brother, he shot her in the buttocks with a shotgun. 15:14 The police arrived to discover the man was holding his sister's boyfriend hostage. 15:20 Captain Herbert was assigned as the hostage negotiator. 15:24 I'm behind one side of the door and he's on the other side of the door. And I'm talking to him. And I'm trying to articulate to him that enough damage has been done. After about three hours, he indicated to me that he wanted to surrender. 15:38 Herbert convinced him to put all of his weapons in buckets police lowered from the roof to his apartment window, and he surrendered. 15:48 His name was Eddie Seda, a 26-year-old high school dropout, unemployed, who was still living at home with his mother and younger sister. 15:59 One day, he seemed religious and quiet and shy and strange. Another day, he seemed aggressive and scary. 16:07 At headquarters, police asked Seda to provide a written statement describing what happened inside his apartment. Seda complied, and when finished, he signed it with an odd symbol next to his name. 16:24 And the detective who did it looks at it and says, what's this? And he said that that was a symbol for God and God's love or something. 16:34 An alert police officer asked hostage negotiator Joseph Herbert to have a look. 16:40 Herbert knew immediately what he was looking at. The statement out of my mouth was, as sure as I'm standing here, this is a Zodiac killer. 16:50 To prove their suspicions, police turned to forensic science. 16:56 First, Seder was fingerprinted. 16:59 His prints were then compared with the print left on the letter in Central Park. 17:04 It was a match. 17:06 Next, handwriting experts compared the handwriting from the Zodiac's letters to Seda's known handwriting sample. 17:14 The experts concluded they were written by the same hand. 17:20 Ballistics experts examined Seda's collection of 15 zip guns. 17:26 In his letters, Zodiac claimed no one would catch him because his gun barrel didn't have the traditional lands and grooves inside for testing. 17:37 But the Zodiac apparently didn't know about forensic tool mark analysis. 17:43 A tool mark is a characteristic left behind during the process of using a tool to either cut, grind, file, or polish a piece of metal. 17:55 there can be hundreds of microscopic tool marks in a pipe used in a homemade gun. 18:02 When ballistics experts compared the bullets from the victims to those fired from Seda's zip gun, the tool marks were microscopically similar. 18:12 Finally, police asked Seda for a blood sample for DNA testing. 18:18 His DNA matched the saliva on the envelope flap of the Zodiac letter. 18:25 Hey, my introduction is Detective Louis Savarese. 18:29 Detective Savarese had the pleasure of telling Seda they knew his true identity. 18:36 I put out my hand and said, I'm looking for you for six years, and I said, you're the Zodiac. 18:42 And he says, no, I'm not. I said, you're at the Zodiac. 18:47 That was the beginning of a six, seven hour interrogation on the Zodiac shootings until finally he did give it up. He did confess to it. 18:56 He didn't want to go to jail for simply shooting his sister in the butt with a shotgun. He wanted to take credit for his years of handiwork. 19:08 In one of his first letters, the Zodiac claimed that only Orion and the Seven Sisters could stop him. 19:16 Ironically, on the day of his sister shooting, Orion and the Seven Sisters were overhead. They just weren't visible in the overcast sky. 19:27 Eddie Seda was charged with shooting six people and killing three others. 19:33 Prosecutors had so much forensic evidence, they had a hard time deciding how to hold the jury's interest. 19:40 We weren't certain that the public at large would be as interested in all of this forensic evidence, and we were curious about how the jury would receive it. And ultimately, we ultimately set aside a week that we just referred to as Forensic Week. We're shocked to see the jury sat on the edge of their seats. 19:57 And I just remember one morning sitting there, sifting through the guns and the knives, whatever it was that day, and looking at it, and just at that moment being struck by, like, wow, what am I going to do with this stuff? You beat the ballistics, you've got the fingerprint. You beat the fingerprint, you've got the handwriting. You beat the handwriting, you've got the statement. You beat one statement, you've got another statement. 20:16 All those forensic entities came back to haunt Eddie big time. 20:22 Eddie Seda was convicted and sentenced to 232 years in prison. 20:29 Eddie Seda was a coward. 20:30 He attacked his victims from the rear. He shot them for no reason other than that he could. 20:36 But one question remains. How did Seda know his victims' birthdays? 20:45 Some speculate that he looked inside his victim's wallet after each shooting and that all had different astrological signs due to nothing more than luck.