1970: The Zodiac Killer Mocks the Reporter Chasing Him

Paul Avery had spent months covering the unidentified killer terrorising Northern California for the San Francisco Chronicle, turning his byline into the public face of the investigation. That attention made him a target of the very man he was writing about.

On 27 October 1970, the Zodiac Killer sent a letter addressed directly to Avery, taunting the journalist for the coverage that had made his name synonymous with the case. The killer was never identified, and the letter remains one of the eeriest pieces of correspondence in a case still unsolved more than half a century later.

Symbolism
Symbolism

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1969: A Bloodstained Scrap of Shirt: the Zodiac Killer Mails Proof to a San Francisco Newsroom

Two days after shooting cabdriver Paul Stine dead in San Francisco, the Zodiac Killer sent the San Francisco Chronicle a taunting letter dated October 13, 1969. Inside was a torn piece of Stine’s bloodstained shirt, offered as proof the killer was the same man terrorising the Bay Area, not a copycat.

The letter mocked police for failing to catch him despite patrols flooding the area that night, and promised more killings to come. It remains one of several pieces of physical evidence tied to an identity that, more than fifty years on, has never been conclusively proven.

Symbolism
Symbolism

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1975: The Bystander Who Saved a President: Second Failed Attempt on Gerald Ford in San Francisco

Just seventeen days after Lynette Fromme aimed a pistol at Gerald Ford in Sacramento, a second attempt on the president’s life unfolded outside a hotel in San Francisco on September 22, 1975. Sarah Jane Moore, a 45-year-old activist and FBI informant, fired a single shot from a .38 revolver at Ford as he left the St. Francis Hotel, missing him by only a few feet.

The shot went wide largely because of a bystander, former Marine Oliver Sipple, who was standing nearby and grabbed Moore’s arm as she fired, deflecting her aim. Moore was wrestled to the ground and arrested at the scene.

She pleaded guilty to attempted assassination of a president and was sentenced to life in prison. Moore later expressed regret over the attempt, and she was eventually paroled in 2007 after more than three decades behind bars.

Gerald Ford portrait in the Michigan State Capitol at 100 N Capitol Avenue in Lansing, Michigan | ID 103716497 © Glenn Nagel | Dreamstime.com
ID 103716497 © Glenn Nagel | Dreamstime.com

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1975: The Hunt Ends: Patty Hearst, Newspaper Heiress Turned Fugitive, Captured by the FBI

Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was abducted from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974 by the self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army, a small but violent radical cell. Within weeks the group released tapes in which she renounced her family and adopted the nom de guerre Tania, and in April 1974 she was photographed wielding a rifle during the SLA’s armed robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco.

For nineteen months Hearst remained with her captors turned comrades as the group moved between safe houses, evading one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. She was finally arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975, and later stood trial for bank robbery, where her defence argued she had been brainwashed and coerced.

Convicted despite that defence, Hearst was sentenced to prison, but her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton in 2001.

Patty Hearst hideout, Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco
Patty Hearst hideout, Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco

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On This Day in True Crime History

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