1969: The Zodiac Killer Threatens to Blow Up a School Bus Full of Children
The Zodiac Killer never attacked a school bus, but on this day in 1969 he described exactly how he would do it. In a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, he detailed a bomb rigged to a car battery and timer, built to be buried or hidden near a road so he could detonate it the moment a bus full of children passed overhead.
The letter became known as the Bus Bomb or Death Machine letter, one of a string of taunting messages the killer sent to newspapers claiming credit for a series of unsolved murders across Northern California. No such bomb was ever found, and the threat was never carried out, but it hardened the terror the case had already created and deepened a mystery that remains unsolved to this day.
