39. In the Zodiac killer case, the number one suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen had a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting he was the killer. Enough for him to be certainly the Zodiac, but he was never apprehended due to the evidence coming out as negative.
Circumstantial evidence:
He lived in Vallejo near a couple of the murders
He took one sick day off work, a day after one of the suspected murders happened
His mother gave him a Zodiac watch for Christmas which had the same symbol
He was incredibly smart and had knowledge about fingerprints and DNA and may have planted false evidence
He spoke with his friend before the Zodiac murders, Don Cheney about writing a novel about a man named Zodiac who killed couples at random with a gun and a torch attached to it and taunt the police with letters
He told police he was going to Lake Berryessa on the day one of the murders happened but went to the coast instead
Also admitted to having bloody knives in his car on the day of that murder (which he claimed he killed a chicken)
The boot print left at one of the crime scene had the same shoe size as Allen and was a wing walker military boot (Allen had been in the Navy before)
Was supposedly able to write with his left and print with his right in which the Zodiac letters are written in.
A surviving victim picked his face out of a lineup in 1991
The evidence gets weirder:
He was arrested in 1974 for child molestation and released in 1977, there were no Zodiac letters sent during this period.
He was a school teacher and was fired in 1968 because he molested some of his students. And in one of the letters he threatened to kill school children.
He wanted to be a bouncer at his friend, Ralph Spinelli’s nightclub but he wouldn’t let him. He told him he will go to San Francisco to “kill a cabbie”. That night Paul Stine, a cab driver was shot point blank in the head.
Multiple search warrants were made against Allen in the early 90s and the search conducted found bombs and formulas for bombs, which were identical to the ones found in the Zodiac letters.
An unidentified man named “Lee” was known to associate with one of the victims, and Allen always went by his middle name.
He died in August 1992, a month before he was meant to meet up with investigators about the case.
Evidence against:
He was overweight, and a witness says Allen was not the man they saw on the night of the Paul Stine murder
Fingerprints did not match and a palm print found on a letter didn’t match
DNA did not match on a stamp licked (Allen had a habit for getting other people to lick his stamps because the glue made him sick)
No one was ever arrested during the Zodiac case.
