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犯罪與劫案
1968年12月20日 – 1969年10月11日 · 加利福尼亞州瓦列霍和舊金山
謀殺與暴力狀態: 未破
詳細檔案目前僅提供英文版本。
圖片: San Francisco Police Department · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
5confirmed deaths; two others survived
At the end of the 1960s the San Francisco Bay Area was growing fast, but the surrounding hills and lakes were deserted in the evening. Young couples parked there in well-known lovers' lanes. Policing was divided among city forces and county sheriffs, each keeping its own files and exchanging hardly any information. Forensic work rested on fingerprints, bullets and handwriting; DNA analysis did not yet exist. Newspapers had a wide reach and readily printed striking letters from readers.
On 20 December 1968 the school pupils David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen were shot dead on Lake Herman Road near Benicia. On 4 July 1969 a man shot Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau in Vallejo; Ferrin died. On 27 September a masked man stabbed Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard at Lake Berryessa; Shepard died two days later. On 11 October the taxi driver Paul Stine was shot dead in San Francisco. From August 1969 a letter writer claimed the murders, with details only the killer could know.
The killer sent three newspapers one part each of a cipher of 408 characters; a schoolteacher and his wife solved it within a week. A second, of 340 characters, was cracked only in December 2020 by three amateur codebreakers, which the FBI confirmed; neither text gives a name. After the murder of Stine the police circulated a composite sketch. The best-known suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen, was questioned several times and his home searched, but fingerprints, handwriting and later DNA testing produced no match.
The letters stopped in 1974. The writer claimed to have killed 37 people; the police attribute five deaths and two woundings to him with certainty, and for a few other cases there are only suspicions. Allen died in 1992 without having been charged. Since then dozens of names have been put forward in books, films and online, but no lead has been substantiated. The case shows how poor cooperation between police forces and media attention can hamper an investigation.