The Zodiac Killer: A Cold Case, Reheated

I was around 7 when, having read all of my own books several times over, I sneaked into my mother’s room and pulled one off the shelf. It was entitled Zodiac, and, having become borderline obsessed with reading the horoscope pages of the newspapers before they were thrown away and waiting eagerly for the upcoming promotions at work or blossoming romantic connections that they promised to me and millions of others, I was excited to read it.

I quickly found that it was not about zodiac signs, but an elusive serial killer who had wreaked terror on the state of California in the late 1960s and taunted the police with encrypted letters, seemingly collecting servants for the afterlife. When my mother found the book in my room, she took it away thinking it would give me nightmares, but far from being scared I went back an hour later and took it back again, needing to know whether the self-styled Zodiac Killer was caught. I put it back before it was discovered in my room again, but I didn’t stop thinking about it for a while. Where did he go? Did he stop killing? Why? Eventually, more age-appropriate fixations like writing poems and the game show Catchphrase (okay, maybe not that age-appropriate) took over, and I wouldn’t think about the Zodiac again until, in 2015, Senator Ted Cruz became the focus of a meme suggesting he was responsible for the crimes.

Reminded of the first true crime book I ever read, I decided to read up on the case again, but this time many of the details seemed eerily familiar. I had since discovered documentaries and books on other cases, and as I read the Zodiac case again and began looking deeper into the similarities I saw between it and another, I realised that these two cases were not just coincidentally similar – they were, quite clearly in my eyes, one and the same.

Staring at handwriting samples and ciphers, I couldn’t help feeling a little like one of the plucky detectives in the documentaries I’d seen as I became increasingly confident in my theory: Dennis Rader was the Zodiac Killer.

Dennis Rader in court (Source: Getty Images)

If you’re unfamiliar with the gentleman – and I use the term incredibly loosely - above, his name is Dennis Lynn Rader, better known by the nickname he gave himself: BTK (which stands for bind, torture, kill), and he is a convicted serial killer, now in his 70s and serving a whole life sentence in Kansas for ten brutally sadistic murders in Wichita. He has inspired chilling characters like the Trinity Killer from hit series Dexter and the nightmare-inducing ADT service man from Mindhunter, as well as countless books and documentaries, but I strongly believe that his story has an even darker prequel.

It was a floppy disk containing a mocking message to the police that led to the arrest of BTK, but this was not his first foray into taunting them. During his murder spree, he had bombarded them with letters, much like the Zodiac, many of them containing ciphers.

Zodiac's handwriting (Source: Biography.com)

Rader's handwriting (Source: ABC News)

It was looking at these letters that truly solidified my suspicions into a theory in my mind. There is a striking resemblance between the handwriting samples, especially on certain letters such as the Fs and lower case Ds, and according to former detective Kimberly McGath, who I later found out had done her own research and come to the same conclusions I had, they use identical abbreviations and page layouts in their writing. Furthermore, Rader is severely dyslexic, while Zodiac was known for his terrible spelling to the point that many theorised it could be deliberate, and while letters were their preferred medium of communication, both killers were known on at least one occasion to call the police from a payphone to report their own murders before calmly leaving the scene.

And the similarities don’t end with the police communication; there are also clear parallels to be drawn between the modi operandi of the supposed two killers. Victims of both the Zodiac and BTK were restrained with rope and tortured psychologically before being killed, and in cases where the victims were a couple or family, both killers were known to force them to restrain each other, specifically making a woman tie up a man.

Their motives also appear to match, with Rader saying in court that he believed his first victims, the Otero family, would be his slaves in the afterlife, which, as I mentioned earlier, was the Zodiac’s intention when killing. Wait a second, the true crime buffs among you might be saying. The Zodiac Killer said in his last letter that he was going to change his MO and make his future killings look like robberies gone wrong. Why would he go to Kansas and go right back to his old methods?

Even if we take the cold-blooded psycho at his word, we can still square this reasoning with Rader’s killings. In interviews with Dr. Katherine Ramsland, who would go on to write a book about him, Rader explained that, at least on his first “hit”, he did want to make the murders look like a robbery gone wrong but his plans were scuppered when, unbeknownst to him, the man of the house was still home. He reacted to this metaphorical spanner in the works by tricking them in a way the Zodiac was known for, forcing them to tie each other up and killing them. I believe that this was Rader defaulting to his old MO – his Zodiac routine – because he’d done it so many times before, and felt safer that way.

Shortly after, he started taunting the police because, by his own admission, he wanted media attention and recognition – he wanted to be acknowledged for what he was doing. Could it be that he missed the notoriety he had as Zodiac, the fear and chaos he could cause, and the ability to manipulate the police and public alike? In my opinion, he likely realised that that was the thrilling part and felt that killing was pointless if he couldn’t be an infamous boogeyman, and decided to go back to his old ways: give himself a nickname, send some letters and bring the Zodiac terror to Kansas, however, he could not re-emerge as the Zodiac without the timelines and locations adding up far too well to be coincidental.

On the occasions when I’ve told someone that I believe Rader to be the Zodiac, the response is often something along the lines of “but they were active in different states, in different eras!” and to that I say: exactly. Dennis Rader was in the Air Force while the Zodiac was active, meaning his whereabouts were at least part of the time unknown, and the Zodiac killings stopped when he left the force and moved back to Kansas. This only becomes more suspicious when looking at survivors and witnesses’ descriptions of Zodiac, in which he invariably seems to be wearing military clothing, specifically an “army jacket” or “army boots”, but it could be coincidental if it wasn’t for Rader’s favourite ruse to get his victims to comply and let him tie them up. While the Zodiac would also claim to be a fugitive who just wanted to steal their car, Rader added an extra detail, claiming that he was wanted in California, the same state I believe he terrorised as the Zodiac.

Much later, spurred on by my own curiosity and need for answers, I wrote to Rader in prison. While I knew better than to ask him outright whether he was the Zodiac, I knew from my research that he deals in riddles and games, and asked him instead if he’d any interest in astrology, citing my suspicion that he had an interest in “Zodiac signs, for example”. He replied with a long letter, his handwriting barely legible due to his aforementioned dyslexia, mentioning that he did, in fact, have a long-standing love of astrology and is very interested in “the things I mentioned”. He then went on to ramble for several paragraphs about actual Zodiac signs and him being a Pisces, so perhaps the underlying meaning was lost and he genuinely wanted someone to discuss the alignment of the planets with, but with someone so well-versed in deadly double entendre and mind games, it’s hard to tell.

I didn’t contact him again, and once again, other ideas and preoccupations took over, putting the Zodiac to the back of my mind, but I decided to revisit it one last time and share my thoughts with the world before, unable to make a (potentially third) comeback, he finally fades into the kind of quiet irrelevance he dreads, and yet so justly deserves.