Latest / The Evolution of Evil - True Crime Stories / Serial Killer Documentary - Heriberto Seda: New York’s Zodiac Killer
Transcript
- 0:04Speaker 1: In the early hours of the tenth of August nineteen
- 0:07Speaker 1: ninety two, in Brooklyn, New York City, a thirty nine
- 0:11Speaker 1: year old woman suffering with long term mental health issues
- 0:16Speaker 1: found herself in an unfamiliar area near Highland Park.
- 0:20Speaker 2: Patricia Fante, who was at times homeless, A.
- 0:25Speaker 1: Very vulnerable woman, Patricia was lured to the park by
- 0:29Speaker 1: a stranger. The man then shot her twice and stabbed
- 0:33Speaker 1: her more than one hundred times. The vicious murder was
- 0:37Speaker 1: carried out by Heliberto Eddie Sada, who believed he was
- 0:41Speaker 1: following in the footsteps of the notorious Zodiac Killer.
- 0:45Speaker 3: He took the legacy of another serial killer and tried
- 0:48Speaker 3: to make it his own.
- 0:51Speaker 4: He preyed on the vulnerable, He killed at random, and
- 0:54Speaker 4: he was utterly heartless.
- 0:55Speaker 1: Within four years, Sada attacked more than nine innocent victims,
- 1:00Speaker 1: killing three.
- 1:02Speaker 5: Being the carbucat Zoriak was in his DNA, was in
- 1:05Speaker 5: his soul, and he liked the attention.
- 1:06Speaker 6: He liked the media, He liked the results.
- 1:10Speaker 1: He sought out and stalked victims on the fringes of
- 1:13Speaker 1: society to feed his lust for power and status. Confirming
- 1:18Speaker 1: Heliberto Eddie Zada, the New York Zodiac as one of
- 1:22Speaker 1: the world's most evil killers. In the early nineteen nineties,
- 1:51Speaker 1: terroot Grip the city of New York, USA, Heliberto Eddie
- 1:56Speaker 1: Zada roamed the streets late at night masquerading the San
- 2:00Speaker 1: Francisco Zodiac Killer.
- 2:04Speaker 7: It caused a lot of fear within the citizens of
- 2:08Speaker 7: New York City, in particular Brooklyn and Queens that there
- 2:12Speaker 7: was now a serial.
- 2:13Speaker 8: Killer claiming to be the Zodiac.
- 2:16Speaker 7: And everybody recalled that the Zodiac in the San Francisco
- 2:20Speaker 7: Bay area in the sixties and he was never apprehended,
- 2:25Speaker 7: and this guy was claiming to be one and the same.
- 2:30Speaker 1: Inner city, already overwhelmed with crime. Sada was shooting strangers
- 2:35Speaker 1: in the street, but his attacks went unnoticed until he
- 2:39Speaker 1: left a series of enigmatic notes purporting to be from
- 2:43Speaker 1: the Zodiac Killer.
- 2:45Speaker 7: It caused the media frenzy. So we had to deal
- 2:49Speaker 7: with this publicity and reporters, and it put a lot
- 2:53Speaker 7: of pressure on the NYPD.
- 2:56Speaker 1: Sergeant Joseph Herbert was one of the investigator who spent
- 3:00Speaker 1: years pursuing the New York Zodiac.
- 3:04Speaker 6: What the Zodiac was doing.
- 3:05Speaker 5: He was doing males, females, black, white, Spanish. He had
- 3:11Speaker 5: no pacific target. I think it was just the best
- 3:14Speaker 5: opportunity that he had, you know, he could get away
- 3:17Speaker 5: with him.
- 3:18Speaker 2: He prided himself on the idea that he got better
- 3:21Speaker 2: and better at it, that he had trained himself to
- 3:25Speaker 2: use stealth and surprise more and more and more, and
- 3:30Speaker 2: that he became more accomplished as a murder.
- 3:35Speaker 1: The chilling story of Heliberto Eddie Sada the New York
- 3:40Speaker 1: Zodiac begins in New York City. Born in nineteen sixty seven,
- 3:45Speaker 1: he was the eldest of two children.
- 3:48Speaker 4: It was a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, but at his
- 3:51Speaker 4: mother was very proud. She wanted to do the very
- 3:54Speaker 4: best for her two children.
- 3:57Speaker 3: It was quite a dangerous part of the city to
- 4:00Speaker 3: be in, and I think their mother really struggled in
- 4:04Speaker 3: terms of keeping her children out of that kind of lifestyle.
- 4:09Speaker 1: Sada's father was absent during his impoverished childhood.
- 4:14Speaker 3: They barely had enough money to eat at times, so
- 4:17Speaker 3: Sada stepped into that role as the patriarch of the family.
- 4:22Speaker 3: He was quite controlling, especially when it came to his
- 4:25Speaker 3: younger half sister, in terms of the kind of things
- 4:27Speaker 3: that she did, the kind of people that she hung
- 4:30Speaker 3: out with. He was somebody who voluntarily excluded himself from
- 4:36Speaker 3: drugs and from gang crime.
- 4:40Speaker 4: Eddie grew up being rather religious, but also strangely reclusive. Nevertheless,
- 4:47Speaker 4: Eddie sada was, by all accounts, a good student, very
- 4:51Speaker 4: anti drugs, anti alcohol addiction.
- 4:55Speaker 3: Sadah really hated the drug dealers in the neighborhood, and
- 5:00Speaker 3: he really didn't like the fact that his younger half
- 5:02Speaker 3: sister had some friends who were involved in drug dealing.
- 5:06Speaker 3: He was casting judgment on other people for their choices,
- 5:09Speaker 3: for their behaviors, for their decisions.
- 5:14Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty three, at the age of sixteen, Eddie said,
- 5:18Speaker 1: who was suspended from high school for carrying a weapon,
- 5:22Speaker 1: he would never return, no longer in education.
- 5:26Speaker 9: He now lacked a focus.
- 5:28Speaker 3: This part of his life that is quite routine, that
- 5:31Speaker 3: is quite predictable and stable, has now gone, and I
- 5:34Speaker 3: think he feels an awful lot of resentment about that.
- 5:38Speaker 4: He seems to create at this point his own very
- 5:43Speaker 4: elaborate fantasy world within his bedroom.
- 5:46Speaker 8: He doesn't go out much, he doesn't have a.
- 5:48Speaker 4: Lot of friends. One neighbor describes him as a chronically
- 5:51Speaker 4: unemployed recluse.
- 5:55Speaker 1: The enraged teenager would never return to school. Instead, he
- 6:01Speaker 1: tried to enlist in the US military.
- 6:04Speaker 3: He'd failed the entrance exam just by a few points,
- 6:07Speaker 3: and this was something that he didn't take very well
- 6:09Speaker 3: at all. I think this is something that he saw
- 6:12Speaker 3: as pivotal to his sense of identity and his future,
- 6:16Speaker 3: and he became incredibly angry about this. He looks at
- 6:19Speaker 3: the things that he tries to do and when he
- 6:21Speaker 3: fails to do them, it's someone else's fault. The world
- 6:24Speaker 3: is pitted against him, and I think during the course
- 6:26Speaker 3: of this rumination, he starts plotting what is he going
- 6:31Speaker 3: to do with his life.
- 6:35Speaker 1: Feeling rejected by school and now the army, Sada searched
- 6:40Speaker 1: for a new way to define himself.
- 6:44Speaker 3: Sada had a real interest in and admiration for violence,
- 6:49Speaker 3: so he read a lot about guns and serial killers.
- 6:53Speaker 3: He actually had a set of serial killer playing cards.
- 6:56Speaker 3: These were the people that he admired.
- 7:01Speaker 4: He watches a documentary on the San Francisco Zodiac killar
- 7:06Speaker 4: who killed five people and was never caught.
- 7:11Speaker 3: The story around the Zodiac killer is one of power,
- 7:14Speaker 3: and it's one of status. Somebody who was able to
- 7:17Speaker 3: hold an entire city to ransom.
- 7:21Speaker 4: Somewhere in that developing psyche, he thinks, perhaps I could
- 7:28Speaker 4: become the Zodiac killer.
- 7:31Speaker 9: I can become someone who's remembered. I can be the
- 7:35Speaker 9: same person.
- 7:39Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty nine, twenty two year old Eddie Sader's
- 7:44Speaker 1: perverse interests had grown and they were becoming increasingly practical.
- 7:50Speaker 2: He wanted to be a soldier, so he purchased fatigues.
- 7:55Speaker 2: He had lots of hunting knives. He never worked, as
- 8:00Speaker 2: I could tell a day in his life. He really
- 8:02Speaker 2: had very little income, and as a result of that,
- 8:05Speaker 2: he was never going to be able.
- 8:06Speaker 9: To buy a gun steadily.
- 8:09Speaker 4: He began to teach himself how to create and build
- 8:11Speaker 4: guns zip guns.
- 8:14Speaker 7: A zip gun is a homemade gun that it's basically
- 8:19Speaker 7: a length of pipe and you put something at the
- 8:24Speaker 7: end of that pipe that acts as a firing pin.
- 8:27Speaker 8: Something very crude. It doesn't have rapid fire, multiple fire capability.
- 8:34Speaker 8: It's one shot at a time. They're not very accurate.
- 8:38Speaker 7: It's absolutely essential you have to be close up to
- 8:41Speaker 7: your target.
- 8:43Speaker 1: Unemployed, unwanted, and isolated said they was preparing to act
- 8:49Speaker 1: on his darkest instincts. On the seventeenth of November nineteen
- 8:57Speaker 1: eighty nine, a cryptic letter arrived at an office of
- 9:01Speaker 1: the New York Police Department.
- 9:04Speaker 2: The letter had an astrological wheel, and it had some threats,
- 9:09Speaker 2: and it had the indication that it had been someone murdered.
- 9:13Speaker 1: The author of the letter claimed to be the infamous
- 9:16Speaker 1: San Francisco Zodiac killer, resuming his attacks nearly three thousand
- 9:21Speaker 1: miles away and twenty years since his last known victim.
- 9:26Speaker 1: He'd drawn a circle divided into twelve sections. One section
- 9:31Speaker 1: was marked out alongside the words the first sign is dead.
- 9:37Speaker 2: There was kind of a cursory investigation to see if
- 9:41Speaker 2: there was anything matching any of the information that was
- 9:44Speaker 2: contained in the letter, and there wasn't, and so essentially
- 9:47Speaker 2: the letter was vouchered and in more senses, I think
- 9:51Speaker 2: just forgotten about. The seventy fifth Precinct was notorious for
- 9:56Speaker 2: having the highest murder rate in the city, so they
- 9:59Speaker 2: were not really going to be able to put a
- 10:01Speaker 2: lot of resources into investigating this hardball letter that they received.
- 10:05Speaker 4: It was regarded as a simply crank letter talking about
- 10:09Speaker 4: the San Franciscos. Oh yeah, kind have gone away for
- 10:11Speaker 4: twenty years and changed coasts from the west of the east.
- 10:15Speaker 8: It defies belief.
- 10:18Speaker 1: Less than four months later, twenty two year old Heliberto
- 10:22Speaker 1: Eddie Sada would breathe life into that letter's murderous prophecy.
- 10:28Speaker 1: On Thursday, the eighth of March nineteen ninety, forty nine
- 10:32Speaker 1: year old Mario Olosco was making his way home from
- 10:35Speaker 1: work at one forty five am.
- 10:38Speaker 5: Mister Abraska took the train home from Manhattan back to
- 10:42Speaker 5: the East New York area of Brooklyn, where he lived.
- 10:45Speaker 5: He required a cane and he had a severe limp
- 10:48Speaker 5: when he walked. He walked approximately four blocks when he's
- 10:53Speaker 5: approached from the rear by an individual who doesn't say anything, shulchem.
- 11:00Speaker 6: Once in a back and runs away.
- 11:04Speaker 1: Badly injured, Mario or Rosco struggled to his home across
- 11:08Speaker 1: the street and called nine to one one.
- 11:13Speaker 4: The bullet is lodged in his spine, and doctors thought
- 11:16Speaker 4: it was simply too dangerous to remove it, and so
- 11:20Speaker 4: it remained there.
- 11:22Speaker 1: Thankfully, or Roscoe survived, but without the bullet, investigators were
- 11:27Speaker 1: left with no meaningful evidence from the crime scene.
- 11:32Speaker 9: The New York Zodiac.
- 11:33Speaker 1: Twenty two year old heli Berto Eddie Zada had tasted
- 11:37Speaker 1: blood for the first time.
- 11:40Speaker 3: Up until this point in time, he'd just been thinking,
- 11:43Speaker 3: and he'd been planning. It had all been in his head.
- 11:45Speaker 3: But now he's doing and this is actually real.
- 11:49Speaker 1: Three weeks later, in the early hours of Thursday, the
- 11:53Speaker 1: twenty ninth of March, the Zodiac would strike again. He
- 11:59Speaker 1: shot an intoxicated thirty four year old man once in
- 12:03Speaker 1: the back and again took flight.
- 12:06Speaker 2: He suffered serious injuries, was fortunate that he survived. We
- 12:11Speaker 2: wound up with fragments of a bullet that were really
- 12:14Speaker 2: not useful for ballistic evidence purposes. He never saw his assailant.
- 12:20Speaker 2: We had very little evidence, so an investigation was really
- 12:24Speaker 2: very hard to mount.
- 12:27Speaker 4: So this is now two victims, both of whom have survived. Nevertheless,
- 12:32Speaker 4: there are two random shootings in the middle of the night,
- 12:36Speaker 4: both in the early hours of Thursday morning.
- 12:40Speaker 1: Despite some similarities, there was no apparent link between the
- 12:44Speaker 1: two crimes, so the cell style Zodiac killer remained invisible
- 12:49Speaker 1: to police as he moved on to a third target
- 12:53Speaker 1: on Thursday, the thirty first of May nineteen ninety Mister.
- 12:57Speaker 5: Choseph Proachey lived right around the corner from the subway
- 13:00Speaker 5: station where the first two victims exited.
- 13:03Speaker 6: The night that they were shut.
- 13:06Speaker 7: Joseph Procy was an elderly seventy eight year old man.
- 13:10Speaker 8: He had become a bit senile.
- 13:15Speaker 4: Joseph was approaching his own apartment. Sada engaged with this
- 13:20Speaker 4: elderly man and asked for a glass of water. Joseph said,
- 13:25Speaker 4: go to your own apartment and get a glass of
- 13:26Speaker 4: water and turned his back, and at that point Adah
- 13:31Speaker 4: shot him in the back.
- 13:34Speaker 1: Neighbors heard the gunshot and called the police, but Sada
- 13:38Speaker 1: had once again fled the scene. Joseph Procy was rushed
- 13:44Speaker 1: into surgery in critical condition. He was unable to provide
- 13:50Speaker 1: police with a good description of his attacker.
- 13:55Speaker 2: Sada's selection of victims bespoke a level of cowardice. Somebody
- 14:01Speaker 2: that was weak, vulnerable, disoriented. He was always looking for
- 14:08Speaker 2: someone that he was certain would not fight back and
- 14:12Speaker 2: they can't do anything to stop him.
- 14:15Speaker 1: Nearly a month later, Joseph Proache died as a result
- 14:19Speaker 1: of the attack. With his third attempt, the New York
- 14:25Speaker 1: Zodiac had claimed his first kill. He took the opportunity
- 14:31Speaker 1: to taunt the police.
- 14:33Speaker 5: The detectives observed a letter that was on mister Proacher's
- 14:36Speaker 5: front stoop and it was being weighted down by three stones,
- 14:40Speaker 5: and the letter had a pie circle and with then
- 14:44Speaker 5: the slices of the pie. He had documented three astrological
- 14:49Speaker 5: science and he stated that three sciens are dead.
- 14:56Speaker 2: He indicated that he was responsible for the three and
- 15:01Speaker 2: the twe to the cops that they would not catch him,
- 15:04Speaker 2: just as he hadn't been caught in San Francisco. That
- 15:08Speaker 2: was one of the police recognized they had a serial
- 15:12Speaker 2: perpetrator on their hands. That became the tipping point in
- 15:17Speaker 2: the media coverage as well, because now the Zodiac could
- 15:20Speaker 2: become a murderer.
- 15:23Speaker 7: Week after Joseph proach you, we shot a writer for
- 15:26Speaker 7: the New York Post. He had received a letter from
- 15:30Speaker 7: someone claiming to be the Zodiac. We were pretty certain
- 15:36Speaker 7: that the person who left the note side Joseph Proacy
- 15:40Speaker 7: was the same person who wrote this note.
- 15:43Speaker 5: So the first sign is dead, the second sign is dead.
- 15:47Speaker 5: Even though some victims survived, he still called them kills.
- 15:51Speaker 5: He intended to kill every single person that he attacked.
- 15:57Speaker 3: And this really does tell us about that narcissistic strand
- 16:00Speaker 3: in his personality. He doesn't want to be caught, but
- 16:03Speaker 3: he wants it to be known that there is a
- 16:05Speaker 3: serial killer on the loose.
- 16:08Speaker 5: He boasted that the bullets that he was using and
- 16:12Speaker 5: his weapons had no grooves.
- 16:15Speaker 2: A regular gun, the barrel is drilled out in a
- 16:19Speaker 2: certain way to leave identifiers that are unique, and they're
- 16:22Speaker 2: called lands and grooves. He believed he would be leaving
- 16:26Speaker 2: no evidence by using his zip guns.
- 16:31Speaker 5: Upon examination and the ballistics laboratory, he was accurate. There
- 16:36Speaker 5: were no traditional langent grooves on the bullets that would
- 16:39Speaker 5: be covered from the victims.
- 16:42Speaker 1: The New York Post turned up the heat on the investigation,
- 16:46Speaker 1: publishing the letter on its front page.
- 16:49Speaker 6: The headlines are screaming Zodiac killer.
- 16:52Speaker 2: Both signs the enormous crime rates that were already besieging
- 16:57Speaker 2: the city that this became even more scared that it
- 17:00Speaker 2: was this unknown person running around, not randomly, but seeking
- 17:05Speaker 2: people by birth sign. A lot of calls came in,
- 17:09Speaker 2: mostly scraps of I met a guy who asked for
- 17:13Speaker 2: my birthday, what's your signed kind of stuff. There was
- 17:16Speaker 2: very little actionable intelligence.
- 17:21Speaker 3: This really is Sada at the height of his arrogance.
- 17:24Speaker 3: He's quite enjoying it. I think he feels like he
- 17:27Speaker 3: struck the right balance at this point in time between
- 17:30Speaker 3: actually being recognized for what he's done yet not being apprehended.
- 17:35Speaker 1: In pursuit of the serial killer, the NYPD had formed
- 17:39Speaker 1: a Zodiac task Force operating out of Brooklyn Navy Yard, and.
- 17:44Speaker 2: They noticed that the crimes were happening on Thursdays.
- 17:49Speaker 5: The shootings were within multiples of twenty one days, so
- 17:52Speaker 5: twenty one days at the mister Prochel we shot.
- 17:55Speaker 6: The NYPD flooded.
- 17:56Speaker 5: The East New York and wood Have an area of
- 17:59Speaker 5: Brooklyn Queens in anticipation of a possible shooting.
- 18:03Speaker 1: Operation Watchdog was launched on the night of Thursday, the
- 18:07Speaker 1: twenty first of June nineteen ninety. Mike Silavolo was one
- 18:11Speaker 1: of the officers who took to the streets.
- 18:17Speaker 7: I think I had like fifty detectives with all kinds
- 18:21Speaker 7: of unmarked vehicles, vans that looked like ice cream trucks,
- 18:28Speaker 7: and things that wouldn't readily stand.
- 18:31Speaker 8: Out as being a police vehicle.
- 18:33Speaker 7: We were basically going to take notice of whoever was
- 18:37Speaker 7: walking the street between midnight and sunrise, and we pretty
- 18:42Speaker 7: much did that all night long.
- 18:47Speaker 8: The sun came up, nothing happened.
- 18:52Speaker 5: There was no shootings in the Brooklyn and Queen's area,
- 18:56Speaker 5: so the detectives were getting ready to wrap it up,
- 18:58Speaker 5: and David c a notification that there was in fact
- 19:02Speaker 5: a shooting, but this time he struck a Manhattan in
- 19:07Speaker 5: Central Park.
- 19:10Speaker 2: A homeless man who had psychological problems at substance abuse problems,
- 19:16Speaker 2: was asleep on a park bench. He was shot on
- 19:19Speaker 2: the park bench. He only wounded the person and the
- 19:24Speaker 2: bullet lodged in the bench, and it actually matched the
- 19:27Speaker 2: bullet from the pro Cheese scene, so we knew we
- 19:30Speaker 2: had the same gun and likely the same perpetrator. And
- 19:34Speaker 2: more valuable than that was the note that was left
- 19:38Speaker 2: at the scene. The note had basically more indications of
- 19:43Speaker 2: the three priors, as well as birth sign.
- 19:47Speaker 1: The following day, Friday, the twenty second of June nineteen ninety,
- 19:52Speaker 1: a second letter arrived at the New York Post newspaper.
- 19:56Speaker 1: Again the author claimed to be the San Francisco's.
- 20:00Speaker 2: That letter had a thumb print and it matched the
- 20:03Speaker 2: thumb print that was on the letter left at the
- 20:05Speaker 2: Central Park crime. The hope was then that we would
- 20:11Speaker 2: be able to find a suspect and match them up
- 20:14Speaker 2: to some of this information. We looked and checked to
- 20:18Speaker 2: see if there's anyone in the system that matched those prints,
- 20:21Speaker 2: and we found no one.
- 20:24Speaker 7: He's talking about constellations, he's talking about foulst he's talking
- 20:29Speaker 7: about some really weird stuff that as New York City
- 20:34Speaker 7: cops we're just not familiar with. He was claiming to
- 20:38Speaker 7: be one Zodiac, one and the same.
- 20:42Speaker 3: He's coming across as very angry and very frustrated because
- 20:46Speaker 3: it's been speculated that this is a copycat, this is
- 20:48Speaker 3: an imitation, this is somebody who is less than the
- 20:51Speaker 3: original Zodia.
- 20:57Speaker 7: We sent those letters to the Francisco Police Department and
- 21:02Speaker 7: they were able to say with one hundred percent degree
- 21:06Speaker 7: of certainty that the guy who's writing all letters was
- 21:11Speaker 7: not the guy they were dealing with in the late sixties.
- 21:15Speaker 8: And early seventies. He wanted her to make himself bigger
- 21:20Speaker 8: than he really.
- 21:21Speaker 9: Was, Eddiberto.
- 21:24Speaker 1: Eddie Sada had struck four times but had killed only once.
- 21:32Speaker 1: The New York Police had scoured the Zodiac's communications, knowing
- 21:37Speaker 1: that before he was finished, he'd promised that another eight
- 21:40Speaker 1: lives would be ruthlessly taken.
- 21:43Speaker 5: He had attacked in Manhattan and Queens and he attacked
- 21:47Speaker 5: in Brooklyn. Three of the five boroughs in New York
- 21:51Speaker 5: City instilled a lot of fear in the city as
- 21:55Speaker 5: a whole.
- 21:58Speaker 7: We didn't have a clear description from any of the victims.
- 22:03Speaker 7: We weren't sure if we were looking for a black man,
- 22:07Speaker 7: a Latinal man, a Caucasian man. We just didn't have
- 22:11Speaker 7: any concrete witnesses to tell us, which made it tough.
- 22:18Speaker 1: By the end of nineteen ninety, the New York Zodiac
- 22:22Speaker 1: had ceased communication.
- 22:26Speaker 5: The NYPD at the time thought that not only had
- 22:28Speaker 5: he stopped communicating with Dutch, but that he had stopped
- 22:32Speaker 5: perpetrating his attacks.
- 22:33Speaker 2: Nothing happened the next Thursday or the Thursday after the
- 22:37Speaker 2: task force dissolved. Over a period of time, everybody went
- 22:41Speaker 2: back to their assignments and everybody forgot about them.
- 22:46Speaker 3: Sada takes a step back, and I think this is
- 22:49Speaker 3: something that he's learned through reading about lots of different
- 22:52Speaker 3: cases of serial killers and trying to learn from the
- 22:55Speaker 3: mistakes that they've made. This is to allow him to
- 23:00Speaker 3: collect his thoughts and start planning the next phase of attacks.
- 23:07Speaker 1: Eddie Sada had gone silent as the New York Zodiac,
- 23:11Speaker 1: but maintained contact with police in other ways.
- 23:15Speaker 4: He becomes to some extent a police informant, informing the
- 23:19Speaker 4: police about local drug lords in.
- 23:21Speaker 9: His bit of Brooklyn.
- 23:23Speaker 4: At one point Sada can be a killer and the
- 23:26Speaker 4: other point he can be offended by drug use and
- 23:28Speaker 4: drug dependency, another of the conflicts an extraordinary character of
- 23:35Speaker 4: Eddie Cada.
- 23:37Speaker 1: Despite this unlikely collaboration, the New York Police Department was
- 23:42Speaker 1: no closer to connecting Caeda to the New York Zodiac attacks.
- 23:47Speaker 7: I had always said that this case is going to
- 23:51Speaker 7: be solved by way of a fluke, something bizarre happening.
- 23:55Speaker 8: Maybe he'll jump over.
- 23:56Speaker 7: A turnstile to evade the fare on the subway, grab
- 24:00Speaker 7: them and they'll fingerprint them, and then they'll say, bing,
- 24:04Speaker 7: we have a match.
- 24:07Speaker 1: Four years after his first attack, on the tenth of
- 24:10Speaker 1: March nineteen ninety four, officers spotted Eddie Sada outside his
- 24:15Speaker 1: apartment carrying one of his homemade zip guns. They arrested
- 24:20Speaker 1: him for unlicensed possession of a potentially lethal weapon.
- 24:25Speaker 4: The police examined the zip gun, which is made up
- 24:28Speaker 4: of the most extraordinary materials, including shoelaces and a rubber band.
- 24:34Speaker 2: When this contraption is sent to ballistics, the ballistics guys
- 24:40Speaker 2: didn't know how it worked, and they couldn't figure it out,
- 24:44Speaker 2: so it was listed as inoperable.
- 24:46Speaker 5: The disc attorney dismissed the case. His fingerprint card was sealed.
- 24:51Speaker 1: Incredibly, Sada had escaped from right under the noses of
- 24:56Speaker 1: the NYPD, and his fingerprint record was inaccessible to police.
- 25:02Speaker 9: Saida's conviction that he was.
- 25:04Speaker 4: Somehow immortal and beyond reproach is confirmed.
- 25:11Speaker 1: On the third of August nineteen ninety four, three days
- 25:15Speaker 1: after Eddie Sadar's twenty seventh birthday, a third Zodiac letter
- 25:20Speaker 1: arrived at the offices of the New York Post. It
- 25:23Speaker 1: had been four years since the last Zodiac communicate and
- 25:27Speaker 1: the lust of his four known attacks.
- 25:31Speaker 2: From handwriting analysis, they recognized that it's our friend the
- 25:36Speaker 2: Zodiac back from nineteen ninety Again, he's been busy.
- 25:42Speaker 5: On the upper right hand part of the letter are
- 25:45Speaker 5: five documented victims, similar to the earlier letters, where he's
- 25:50Speaker 5: giving a brief description of the date, the time, and
- 25:55Speaker 5: a brief description of a victim. He had stopped communicating
- 25:58Speaker 5: with the media and the police, but he continued doing
- 26:01Speaker 5: his crimes.
- 26:03Speaker 2: He had dropped the warnings in advance, so he reported
- 26:06Speaker 2: the news afterwards, which gave him a tremendous advantage.
- 26:14Speaker 5: The upper left hand portion of the letter is a
- 26:17Speaker 5: series of maritime flags that he put into a code.
- 26:21Speaker 5: When they broke down the code of the letter, it said,
- 26:24Speaker 5: this is a Zodiac speaking, I am in control. He
- 26:29Speaker 5: who masters there will be more yours truly. On the
- 26:36Speaker 5: bottom half of the letter, he's taunting the police. He
- 26:39Speaker 5: puts the Zodiac nine NYPD zero, so he's bragging that
- 26:44Speaker 5: he's out small on the NYPD. He had shot nine.
- 26:48Speaker 5: He's threatening to shoot his three more. One he signed
- 26:51Speaker 5: at the Zodiac. So they started a second test force,
- 26:57Speaker 5: and I was assigned to that test force. What I
- 27:01Speaker 5: immediately started doing was tracking down the five victims and
- 27:04Speaker 5: his claiming in this letter.
- 27:06Speaker 6: They were all were in Highland Park.
- 27:09Speaker 2: The NYPD, and looking at it, recognized that the first
- 27:14Speaker 2: four they had open investigations into each of those.
- 27:19Speaker 5: The fifth victim we looked high in law. We could
- 27:22Speaker 5: not come up with that victim, So we were only
- 27:24Speaker 5: able to come up with four of the five in
- 27:26Speaker 5: this new letter.
- 27:28Speaker 1: Two of the four victims had not survived their injuries.
- 27:33Speaker 1: Looking back on these cases, investigators discovered that on Monday,
- 27:38Speaker 1: the tenth of August nineteen ninety two, twenty five year
- 27:42Speaker 1: old Eddie Sada had encountered a thirty nine year old
- 27:45Speaker 1: with mental health issues named Patricia Fonte.
- 27:50Speaker 3: The attack on Patricia Fonte was quite different from the
- 27:54Speaker 3: other attacks.
- 27:55Speaker 5: All the other Zodiac crimes were approached from behind, gunshot
- 28:00Speaker 5: fired and.
- 28:01Speaker 3: He flees, and this was up close and personal. He
- 28:08Speaker 3: went up to her, they started engaging in conversation.
- 28:13Speaker 5: She asked them for a cigarette. He enticed her with
- 28:18Speaker 5: a cigarette that he had, and he lawed her into
- 28:22Speaker 5: Hayland Park.
- 28:24Speaker 4: He proceeds to shoot her twice. He then goes into
- 28:30Speaker 4: overkill and he stabs her more than a hundred times. Now,
- 28:36Speaker 4: to stab someone one hundred times takes a very very
- 28:39Speaker 4: great deal of determination, enormous amount of effort, because it
- 28:43Speaker 4: is literally terrifying.
- 28:47Speaker 2: I think he recognized that if somehow or another she
- 28:50Speaker 2: had eluded his capture at that point, that she might
- 28:54Speaker 2: have been able to laid out of find from the
- 28:56Speaker 2: amount of time that he had spent with her.
- 29:00Speaker 4: Patricia Fonte, of course, died of her injuries. There was
- 29:03Speaker 4: almost no way she could have survived.
- 29:08Speaker 1: Patricia Fonte was the second murder at the hands of.
- 29:11Speaker 9: The New York Zodiac.
- 29:16Speaker 1: More than a year later, on the twenty first of
- 29:19Speaker 1: July nineteen ninety three, he'd killed again. Joseph dire Cone,
- 29:25Speaker 1: a forty six year old long term mental health patient,
- 29:28Speaker 1: had been shot in the neck whilst wandering through Highland Park.
- 29:33Speaker 1: He bled out and died instantly. With these new attacks,
- 29:38Speaker 1: Eddie Sada had sheared the constraints of his prior methodology.
- 29:43Speaker 3: These killings were not carried out on a Thursday. There
- 29:46Speaker 3: were no links to the signs of the zodiac that
- 29:49Speaker 3: there had been with the previous four shootings, and he's
- 29:53Speaker 3: very deliberately adapted his routine here because he doesn't want.
- 29:57Speaker 6: To be caught.
- 30:01Speaker 1: Despite this caution, one of his surviving victims had finally
- 30:06Speaker 1: managed to get a good look at their attacker.
- 30:09Speaker 5: She ses, a male hispanic or a mustache and wearing
- 30:13Speaker 5: some kind of a hat, point the gun at her
- 30:16Speaker 5: and fires one shot, stragging home in a neck.
- 30:19Speaker 1: The woman was partially paralyzed, but her description was used
- 30:24Speaker 1: in a police sketch. Until then, investigators had only received
- 30:30Speaker 1: patchy and inconsistent information about the appearance of the New
- 30:35Speaker 1: York Zodiac.
- 30:37Speaker 3: He took quite a lot of care, varying his appearance,
- 30:40Speaker 3: so he would occasionally wear hats. He would grow a
- 30:43Speaker 3: mustache and then he would shave it off after he'd
- 30:45Speaker 3: carried out an attack. So he lived for his attacks.
- 30:49Speaker 3: They were essentially his occupation. This was his day job.
- 30:55Speaker 5: We've been able to lead that we could chasing finger
- 30:58Speaker 5: prints and chasing ballistics.
- 31:00Speaker 6: Monster Department decided.
- 31:02Speaker 5: To break up the second Task Force like they did
- 31:05Speaker 5: the first Test Force. I was assigned to become a
- 31:10Speaker 5: hostage negotiator.
- 31:13Speaker 1: The pursuit of the New York Zodiac had hit another
- 31:17Speaker 1: dead end. Then two years later, on the eighteenth of
- 31:23Speaker 1: June nineteen ninety six, the NYPD received a call.
- 31:29Speaker 5: The phone rang about twelve noon and they had a
- 31:31Speaker 5: hostage job where an individual had shot his sister and
- 31:36Speaker 5: he was holding her boyfriend hostage in a back bedroom
- 31:39Speaker 5: of the department. I rased there, got there as fast
- 31:42Speaker 5: as I could. When I arrived, the attire area was
- 31:47Speaker 5: cordoned off. I was informed that not only had he
- 31:51Speaker 5: shot his sister and had the boyfriend still hostage in
- 31:54Speaker 5: the back bedroom, but when responding police arrived, he shouted
- 32:00Speaker 5: out with about fifteen cops. He had positioned guns at
- 32:05Speaker 5: each window in the apartment and he would run from
- 32:07Speaker 5: window to window shooting at the cops below, and they
- 32:10Speaker 5: were shooting back. So finally Emergor Services survived. They were
- 32:14Speaker 5: able to court an off the area the gunfire ceased.
- 32:18Speaker 6: He's still a hostage. Taker with the.
- 32:21Speaker 1: Hostage, Sergeant Herbert tried to establish communication with the man
- 32:27Speaker 1: who identified himself as Eddie.
- 32:30Speaker 6: He's not talking to me from the window. Finally they
- 32:34Speaker 6: were able to.
- 32:35Speaker 5: Evacuate the entire building and we were able to climb
- 32:38Speaker 5: up the steps to Eddie's front door, and I started
- 32:41Speaker 5: to try to get him to engage me a conversation then.
- 32:44Speaker 5: So we were in the hallway for about three hours
- 32:49Speaker 5: and I was speaking to him, trying to get him
- 32:51Speaker 5: to surrender. I was telling him, Eddie, and up, blood
- 32:53Speaker 5: has been shed. You know, we don't need any more violence.
- 32:57Speaker 5: In surrender, you won't be hurt. Is going to be okay,
- 33:02Speaker 5: let's end this now. So finally he says, am I
- 33:07Speaker 5: going to go to jail? I said, Eddie, I can't
- 33:09Speaker 5: lie to you.
- 33:10Speaker 6: You're going to go to jail.
- 33:11Speaker 5: You know you shot your sister, you shot the cops.
- 33:14Speaker 5: You know, it's a very serious thing. So then he
- 33:17Speaker 5: tells us that he's very surrender and he says that
- 33:20Speaker 5: he's got a lot of weapons inside the apartment and
- 33:22Speaker 5: a lot of ballistics, a lot of bullets. It took
- 33:25Speaker 5: three bucket loads to get all his zip guns and
- 33:28Speaker 5: bullets out of the department.
- 33:31Speaker 6: We had already started.
- 33:33Speaker 5: Like relaxed a little bit out in the hallway because
- 33:34Speaker 5: we know all the weapons are out. But then he said,
- 33:36Speaker 5: I gave you all my guns. What should I do
- 33:39Speaker 5: with my bombs? So I said, Eddie, you got bombs
- 33:43Speaker 5: in here.
- 33:46Speaker 1: The bomb squad was urgently dispatched and they recovered two
- 33:50Speaker 1: crude pipe bombs from the small apartments. Eddie was arrested
- 33:57Speaker 1: and charged with attempted murder of his half sis and
- 34:00Speaker 1: that of several police officers in the ensuing shootout. During
- 34:06Speaker 1: an interrogation, the twenty nine year old told police what
- 34:10Speaker 1: had happened, that.
- 34:12Speaker 4: His half sister brought a man back to the flat.
- 34:15Speaker 4: He's a drug dealer. He's not someone that Sada feels
- 34:20Speaker 4: that his half sister should be consorting with.
- 34:25Speaker 3: Sada's relationship with his younger sister is a very significant
- 34:29Speaker 3: one because it's a relationship in which he felt like
- 34:32Speaker 3: he was in control that as she got older, she
- 34:35Speaker 3: began to challenge that authority. He also hated his sister
- 34:39Speaker 3: having any relationships with men, so he became incredibly angry
- 34:44Speaker 3: about this.
- 34:46Speaker 7: He gets into a beef with his sister and he
- 34:49Speaker 7: shoots her in the butt, and that'll certainly bring you
- 34:53Speaker 7: to the attention of the police. And then when he'said
- 35:00Speaker 7: at the station house and he's writing his confession, he
- 35:03Speaker 7: just couldn't help himself.
- 35:06Speaker 5: The detective said, we want you to see this. It's
- 35:09Speaker 5: a confession that Eddie had for shooting his sister. And
- 35:12Speaker 5: the handwriting jumped out at me as the handwriting that
- 35:15Speaker 5: I've been studying.
- 35:16Speaker 6: For the last four years, five years.
- 35:19Speaker 5: At the bottom of the second page, he has an
- 35:22Speaker 5: upside down cross similar to the earlier letters. I said,
- 35:29Speaker 5: I sure, as I'm standing it is the Zodiac. Everything
- 35:32Speaker 5: starts fitting together, the zip guns, the location.
- 35:39Speaker 1: The case had been cracked wide open. Now investigators new
- 35:43Speaker 1: where to look. The evidence proving that Sada and the
- 35:47Speaker 1: Zodiac were one and the same was mounting. In his notes,
- 35:53Speaker 1: the Zodiac boasted that his homemade weapons would leave no
- 35:56Speaker 1: traceable marks on the bullets found in his victims.
- 36:00Speaker 9: He was wrong.
- 36:02Speaker 5: When a bullet travels to a pipe, it still leaves
- 36:04Speaker 5: distinctive marks on the bullet. So they were able to
- 36:08Speaker 5: identify three of the bullets from victims of the Zodiac
- 36:11Speaker 5: that we recovered from the victims with some of the
- 36:14Speaker 5: pipes and zip guns that we took out of his apartment.
- 36:18Speaker 7: When they matched his fingerprints, Bingo had a bertdough Sayla
- 36:24Speaker 7: was arrested, charged as the Zodiac killer.
- 36:28Speaker 1: Forensic experts had also confirmed a handwriting and DNA match
- 36:34Speaker 1: with the Zodiac letters.
- 36:37Speaker 5: All he wanted to talk about initially was the Bible
- 36:40Speaker 5: and religion. Eventually he realized, you know, we were telling
- 36:45Speaker 5: him about the evidence that we had. He knew the
- 36:47Speaker 5: way we were talking. We knew what we were talking about.
- 36:48Speaker 5: You know, we knew that case. We lived that case
- 36:51Speaker 5: for years. He finally confessed he believed that he was
- 36:59Speaker 5: writting society of.
- 37:00Speaker 6: Drug addicted people.
- 37:04Speaker 4: It was the first time that he in a sense,
- 37:08Speaker 4: thrown off the cloak and said here I am, I'm
- 37:11Speaker 4: the New York Zodiac.
- 37:14Speaker 1: Sadah revealed much about the Zodiac crimes, but not the
- 37:19Speaker 1: most peculiar detail.
- 37:21Speaker 2: There was nothing up his sleeve anymore, except he would
- 37:24Speaker 2: not reveal how it was he knew the birth signs
- 37:28Speaker 2: of his first four victims, and I always took that
- 37:32Speaker 2: to be his guilty pleasure of still taunting the police
- 37:37Speaker 2: that he had something that they couldn't figure out and
- 37:40Speaker 2: he would never reveal it. He described these people as
- 37:45Speaker 2: almost two dimensional. They have targets. They were stick figures.
- 37:49Speaker 2: They were not flesh and blood. They were not real people.
- 37:53Speaker 2: They didn't hurt, they didn't suffer, they didn't have lives.
- 37:57Speaker 2: They were just inanimate objects to him.
- 38:02Speaker 1: The arrogant killer had narrowly escaped justice once before. Two
- 38:08Speaker 1: years earlier, Eddie Sader had been arrested for carrying a
- 38:11Speaker 1: zip gun. Police at the time considered it to be unusable,
- 38:16Speaker 1: so he was released.
- 38:19Speaker 2: They preserved and kept that inoperable gun. Let's retest this
- 38:24Speaker 2: thing now that we've got these other guns that we
- 38:27Speaker 2: all recovered from his home, and sure enough, yeah, it
- 38:31Speaker 2: is operable, and we were able to show that ultimately
- 38:36Speaker 2: matched the bullet that had been removed from one of
- 38:40Speaker 2: the victims.
- 38:42Speaker 4: The police had had Eddie Sailer in their hands, but
- 38:45Speaker 4: because the case against Sada was closed, his fingerprints weren't
- 38:49Speaker 4: available to the police who was searching for the Zodiac Killer.
- 38:54Speaker 1: On the fourteenth of May nineteen ninety eight, thirty year
- 38:58Speaker 1: old Hedi Berto Eddie Sada began a six week trial
- 39:02Speaker 1: at Queen's Supreme Court, charged with three murders and one
- 39:06Speaker 1: attempted murder in the Queen's District of New York.
- 39:11Speaker 4: He shouts at the judge it's as if I'm not here,
- 39:14Speaker 4: I'm being ignored.
- 39:16Speaker 2: I think he felt threatened, and I think he felt
- 39:20Speaker 2: at the same point that I'm not being treated merely
- 39:25Speaker 2: as significantly as I should be as a result of
- 39:28Speaker 2: all I accomplished. There's a real vanity that attaches in
- 39:32Speaker 2: this almost puffed up sense of.
- 39:37Speaker 6: Do you know who I am?
- 39:39Speaker 2: And I think it's a confusion between fame and infamy.
- 39:45Speaker 9: After trial of.
- 39:46Speaker 4: Six weeks, the jury take barely five hours to convict him.
- 39:52Speaker 1: On the twenty second of July nineteen ninety eight, Heriberto
- 39:57Speaker 1: Eddie Sada was sentenced to eighty three at the third
- 40:00Speaker 1: years in prison. The following year, on the eighth of
- 40:05Speaker 1: July nineteen ninety nine, after a second trial for his
- 40:09Speaker 1: crimes in the district of Brooklyn, Sayda was once again
- 40:12Speaker 1: found guilty. He was convicted of three Zodiac crimes, as
- 40:17Speaker 1: well as the shooting of his half sister and four
- 40:20Speaker 1: attempts on the lives of police officers during the ensuance siege.
- 40:26Speaker 4: He is sentenced to a further one hundred and fifty
- 40:28Speaker 4: two and a half years in prison, making his total
- 40:31Speaker 4: sentence up two hundred and thirty five years.
- 40:35Speaker 8: Herr.
- 40:35Speaker 1: Berto Eddie Sada had eluded capture for over six years,
- 40:41Speaker 1: and authorities believe he was far from finished.
- 40:44Speaker 9: When his luck finally ran out.
- 40:47Speaker 2: He was upset that a number of people survived the shootings,
- 40:51Speaker 2: like if I'd made my weapon a little better, there
- 40:54Speaker 2: would have been more people dead.
- 40:56Speaker 9: That it was.
- 40:57Speaker 2: Very insulted by the fact that some of these people lived.
- 41:03Speaker 5: I believe that if he did, in fact hit the
- 41:05Speaker 5: number twelve, that he would continue killing people, although he
- 41:09Speaker 5: might have just graduated to the bombs.
- 41:12Speaker 2: He did say that as ultimate ambition was to take
- 41:16Speaker 2: pipe bombs to the big Imax movie theater in Manhattan
- 41:21Speaker 2: and lay it in the middle of a theater under
- 41:23Speaker 2: a seat and see it get detonated. It is kind
- 41:30Speaker 2: of scary to see somebody who had such a small
- 41:34Speaker 2: life as mister Sator, who never really went anywhere outside
- 41:38Speaker 2: of that square mile killing field that he invented, who
- 41:42Speaker 2: never really had any connections with anyone. On a budget
- 41:46Speaker 2: as small as his, he could kill three people, nearly
- 41:51Speaker 2: kill others, and cause the amount of misery that he did.
- 41:58Speaker 2: He was basically the lowest rent serial killer that you
- 42:02Speaker 2: were ever going to find.
- 42:04Speaker 8: Well, he's a coward.
- 42:06Speaker 7: He shoots people that are helpless, homeless, sleeping, walking with
- 42:11Speaker 7: a cane and a limb, elderly, and for someone to
- 42:16Speaker 7: shoot his own sister. He was a monster, very evil,
- 42:23Speaker 7: very evil guy.
- 42:27Speaker 1: Over six years, Eddie Sayda, the copycat Zodiac killer, stalk
- 42:32Speaker 1: the streets of New York City in search of easy targets.
- 42:37Speaker 1: His cowardly attacks culminated with the ferocious murder of a
- 42:41Speaker 1: woman who'd only asked him for a cigarette. He'd convinced
- 42:46Speaker 1: himself that he served a higher purpose, but merely indulged
- 42:51Speaker 1: his lust for notoriety and violence, marking heriberto Eddie Sada
- 42:57Speaker 1: as one of the world's most evil killer.
- 43:00Speaker 6: School