My name is Mike Rodelli.  In 1998, I was working at an office job in northern New Jersey.  In those days before computer spy ware had been perfected, when my boss was not looking I’d sneak onto the Internet to pass some of the time.  I had read Robert Graysmith’s account of the Zodiac case (Zodiac, St. Martin’s Press, 1986) several years before and was intrigued by the intricacies of the story of the Zodiac killer. I was also someone who just loved a great mystery.

As a teenager, I recall reading many Agatha Christie novels and being drawn to anything that was unsolved, intellectually challenging or was considered a “mystery.”  In addition, when I was about sixteen, I saw a show from the BBC on Jack the Ripper.  That show ignited an ember of interest in serial killer stories that smoldered inside of me for many years.  I was not attracted so much to the notion of serial murder so much as I was to the notion that some of these mysteries were still unsolved.  In short, I was interested in them an intellectual challenges more so than as stories of wanton murder.

After reading Graysmith’s seminal work, I kept it on my bookshelf and would return it from time to time when I was looking for something interesting to read.  Today, I still have that edition from the eighth printing with the title Zodiac embossed in gold letters on the cover.  However, it has now fallen apart from overuse and is held together by tape. I replaced it with a newer edition in 2001 that has also met an identical fate.

When I read about the Zodiac case, for some reason, it interested me in a very profound way, as no other mystery ever had done.  One thing I vividly recall is that I would feel a chill every time I looked at Zodiac’s coded messages:  I saw them as being so cold, sterile and mechanically arranged as to speak volumes about the nature of their author.  The maniacally perfect alignment of the seventeen columns and the rows whispered to me of a man who was completely obsessed with what he was doing.  My interest notwithstanding, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would actually try to solve such a mystery as the Zodiac case.  And why would I?  I had no background as a police officer, P.I. or investigator of any type.

In the summer of 1999, I once again turned to Graysmith’s book, which was still sitting on the shelf in my basement.  However something had changed in my knowledge base by this time.  A couple of months prior to tackling Zodiac again, I had read a book by former FBI profiler John Douglas, Journey Into Darkness.  In it I learned about the “homicidal triad”, a pattern of three childhood behaviors (bed wetting, fire starting and cruelty to animals) that can be used by profilers to predict murderous tendencies in a youth. I then had what I felt was nothing more than an idle thought, something I was certain somebody must have thought about before.  I wondered if the principles of behavioral profiling had ever been applied retrospectively to the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside, CA, in 1966, which I assumed at the time (i.e., from what I had learned in Graysmith’s book) was Zodiac’s first murder.  I therefore decided that I would attempt to learn (either from local “Police Blotter” columns in the local newspapers or from retired police officers from that era) if there were any youths from Riverside in the 1950s or early 1960s who were well-known to the local authorities as being chronic fire-starters or who were especially cruel to animals, etc.  This idea never got off the ground for logistical reasons: For one thing, I learned that the protection of youths from having their names divulged in newspaper articles related to any crimes they may commit dated back to the early 1900’s.  However, this idea served to propel me ever deeper into the Zodiac mystery.

During the summer and fall of 1998, I began locating web sites that were dedicated to the Zodiac mystery.  I also located a discussion group on the old dejanews.com (now www.deja.com).  I began “lurking” and reading over the discussions on the case, which I found completely captivating.  At the time, such people as Doug Oswell were talking about Ted Kaczynski and “MOH”, the suspect of Gareth Penn, as a possible Zodiac suspect.  There was also Jake Wark, Jonathan Zychowski, Jr., Tom Voigt, Mike Shoup, Bruce Monson, author Michael Newton, the volatile Capt John “V” (who signed his contentious and cantankerous posts with “With God’s Love”), “J. Edgar Hoover,” Roger Redding, the infamous and seemingly ubiquitous “Joe1Orbit,” and a cast of others that were discussing, debating and (at times) warring over various aspects of the case.  Not only that but they were updating readers like me with the latest developments in the case, since by now Robert Graysmith’s book was some twelve years old.  It is a nostalgic trip down memory lane for me to read over those threads from 1998 and 1999, which was a much more innocent time in my involvement in the case. 

In the summer of 1998, at just about the time that I got interested in the case, Jake Wark put his website (http://members.aol.com/jakewark) up.  Jake would eventually post several of my general theories on the case on his site, which I found very exciting and flattering.  There was also the web site of Jonathan Zychowski, Jr. (and his “look-alike” suspect “Peter O.”), as well as the web site of Jackson Garland, which had photos of and information about the Zodiac attack sites on it.  Tom Voigt’s web site, Zodiackiller.net (as it was called at the time) had come on line in March of that year.

As I got drawn deeper and deeper into the Zodiac mystery, I recall very vividly beginning to think about developing a new suspect in the case.  I allowed myself to entertain this thought because the more I learned about the various suspects the less confident I felt that the killer had yet to be identified, despite how much support there was for Graysmith’s prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, the “suspect of suspects” at that time.  However, I can remember as if it were yesterday how intimidating even the thought of developing a new suspect in the case was to me.  After all, here I was an office worker with no experience whatsoever as an investigator. The case was nearly thirty years old.  It had been heavily picked over by four police agencies and some very intelligent people worldwide for all that time (and was now even more accessible to the general public on the Internet), and I was living some 3,000 miles from where the murders took place.  Not to mention I did not have the financial means to conduct a cross-country investigation.  But still, the case continued to intrigue me and to give me an outlet to do something interesting on the Internet when work got slow.

In the fall of 1998, I had not yet felt ready to jump into the discussions that were taking place on the dejanews.com site.  So I began email exchanges with several people (including Jake Wark, Jonathan Zychowski, Jr and later Dr. Mike Kelleher, who was chatting on the Internet as he was doing research for his excellent 2002 book This Is The Zodiac Speaking: Into the Mind of a Serial Killer, which he co-authored with Dr. David Van Nuys).  We spoke about a wide range of topics on all aspects of the case.  However, my discussions with Dr. Kelleher centered on the 1966 Riverside murder of Cheri Jo Bates, and more specifically, the letter that someone sent on November 30, 1966 taking credit for her murder called “The Confession.”  For some reason, this letter and the Riverside Bates case, as the one that I felt at the time had started Zodiac’s career, were the most interesting aspects of the Zodiac case—which to be sure has many, many interesting facets to it!

In early 1999, Jonathan Zychowski, Jr. approached me via email and asked if I’d like to be introduced to another Zodiac researcher with whom he thought I’d enjoy corresponding.  His name was Ed Neil and he lived in California.  So I told Jonathan to give Ed my email address.  Soon after, he and I began speaking about the case.  I was immediately impressed with how much Ed knew about the investigation and the crime scenes, all of which he had visited.  His knowledge of the case was, to a novice like me at the time, nearly encyclopedic.  We had many interesting conversations from about January 1999 until June of that year.  Then something happened that would immediately change my life for the next seven and a half years.

In response to an email I sent to Dr. Kelleher to discuss some point or another, he emphasized to me that Zodiac did not write his first letter until July 1969.  But I wondered if that necessarily had to be true.  I knew from Riverside that Zodiac had apparently marked the six-month anniversary of the Bates murder with the April 1967 “Bates had to die” letters.  So I wondered if he might have commemorated his first murder with a letter that was written to under his own name.

I decided that it might be profitable to prospect for a possible new suspect in the letters to the editor of the local San Francisco newspapers in a specified period of time.  However, I was in New Jersey and did not have ready access to the newspaper microfilm of the local San Francisco papers.  So I wrote to Ed and asked him if he would go to the library to carry out my research for me.  He agreed to do so, essentially acting as my “eyes and ears” by doing so.  By doing this, I unwittingly made this a “blind” sampling of these letters, since I was not at all involved in the ultimate selection process.  Ed went through several newspapers and only located one letter that met the criteria we had set out.  He emailed me that one letter on June 23, 1999.  As soon as I read the letter the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up and I was instantaneously intrigued by what the author had to say.

I recall being at work when I received the email containing the letter and immediately went to the Internet to do some research on the name of the man who had written it.  Eerily, it was a name I vaguely recognized from a hobby that I had had since the late 1970s.  Within a very few minutes I learned that he had been involved in an episode many years before the Zodiac crimes that, like Zodiac, seemed to paint him as someone who craved public attention in a big way. This immediately interested me. Within a few days, Ed and I learned that in 1969 this man also lived, by sheer coincidence, within walking distance of one of Zodiac’s murder scenes.  I saw a reference to a magazine that was for sale for about $10.00 on the Net that I felt might contain a photo of this man.  I sent for it.  A few weeks later, a package containing the magazine arrived at my home.  I opened it and turned to the article.  Sure enough, there was a photo of this man that accompanied the article.  I got out my copy of Zodiac and compared the photo to the 1969 SFPD “Revised” police sketch of the Zodiac.  They were absolute dead ringers for each other, something that I would hear repeated over and over again by numerous people after showing it to them since 1998.  I felt the hair on my neck rise again.

Much to my frustration and chagrin, and despite my best efforts to keep him on board, Ed dropped out of our research in the summer of 2000.  He had actually ceased being an active researcher several months before this, so I could see the writing on the wall long before he dropped out.  Nonetheless, I tried to keep him on board but to no avail.  More than seven years later, I am still at it.  My work is always daunting and has to be done with great care, since I am constantly under the threat of a lawsuit if I am wrong in the conclusions I draw from my carefully researched factual case.  Over the years I’ve had to rely on the strength of my convictions to keep moving forward in the face of indifference by the police, criticism on Internet message boards and physical evidence that has not to date matched this man, despite the mountain of circumstances tying him into the case. Over the years, my work has been the subject of two feature articles in the San Francisco Chronicle.  I also appeared on a segment of ABC’s Primetime Thursday in October 2002.

Among my contributions to the case, I am proud to have been a direct participant in interviews with some of the key eyewitnesses to the case, one of whom was Officer Donald Fouke, who got a brief glimpse of the Zodiac killer on the night of the murder of cab driver Paul Stine.  I also played a role in helping to obtain the interviews that retired Vallejo P.D. Det. Jim Dean did with the Stine eyewitnesses, who had not spoken to anyone about the night of the Stine murder in thirty years.  Their statements clarified many important points about the events of that night.

In the fall of 2006 I did something that I believe is unprecedented in the history of the case that would eventually lead to an important advancement in my research and the first potential crack in the façade of my suspect’s story.  One critical issue that arose out of that meeting is discussed in the next section.