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.
Winnie Ruth Judd earned the tabloid name the Trunk Murderess after she shot two friends in Phoenix, Arizona, then packed their bodies into steamer trunks and shipped them by rail to Los Angeles in 1931. When the trunks began to leak, she walked into a Los Angeles police station and gave herself up.
Convicted of murder in 1932, she was declared insane and spent much of the next four decades confined to an Arizona mental institution, escaping it several times before finally being paroled in 1971. She died in Phoenix on this day in 1998, aged 93, exactly 67 years to the day after she had first surrendered to police.
Portrait of Winnie Ruth Judd convicted of murdering two nurses 1932
Winnie Ruth Judd, a medical secretary in Phoenix, shot her two friends Anne LeRoi and Hedvig Samuelson after a jealous falling out in October 1931, then packed their bodies, one dismembered, into trunks and shipped them to Los Angeles by train. A foul smell leaking from the luggage tipped off a baggage handler, and police forced the locks to find the corpses inside.
Judd vanished into Los Angeles for days before she surrendered to police at a funeral home on this day in 1931. By then her fate had already been sealed by a scrawled confession letter, torn up and flushed, that a department store cleaner fished from a ladies room wash basin. Police pieced the scraps together from the plumbing and reconstructed her own words: "It was as much a battle as Germany and the U.S. I killed in defence." The press, already calling her the Trunk Murderess, seized on a new name: the Tiger Woman.
Winnie Ruth Judd the Velvet Tigress Arizona trunk murder case 1933
On September 27, 1969, at about 6.30 pm, the Zodiac Killer attacked Bryan Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Shepard, 22, as they picnicked at Lake Berryessa in Napa County, California. He wore a black hooded costume marked with his crosshair symbol and, breaking from the shootings of his earlier attacks, stabbed both victims repeatedly. Hartnell survived; Shepard died two days later.
Before leaving, the killer used a black felt-tip pen to draw his crosshair signature on Hartnell's car door, then listed beneath it the dates and locations of his previous attacks: Vallejo, 12-20-68, 7-4-69, and the day's own assault, 6:30, by knife. The first date referred to the killing of David Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, on Lake Herman Road, and the second to the shooting of Michael Mageau, 19, and Darlene Ferrin, 22, in a Vallejo park, where Mageau survived and Ferrin died.
The note tied all three attacks together in the killer's own hand at the scene, before any letter to police or press had been sent. He then drove roughly 27 miles to a car wash in downtown Napa and, from a payphone, calmly called the Napa County Sheriff's Department himself at 7.40 pm to report the crime.
