"I like killing people because it is so much fun." In the summer of 1969, this chilling confession—delivered in a complex, 408-symbol cipher—was mailed to three San Francisco Bay Area newspapers. It was the public debut of a new kind of predator, one who didn't just murder but performed, turning his crimes into a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse with the entire nation as his audience. He gave himself a name and a symbol that would become synonymous with unsolved terror: The Zodiac.

Join host Ryan Fitz as Ciphered investigates the phantom who haunted Northern California. This episode traces the Zodiac's bloody timeline, from the desolate lovers' lanes where he ambushed young couples to the heart of San Francisco where he brazenly murdered a cab driver and vanished into the night. We'll delve into the killer's twisted psychology through his own words, exploring the taunting letters and cryptic puzzles he used to mock police and instill widespread fear.

The manhunt became one of the most frustrating in American history, a sprawling investigation that produced thousands of suspects but no arrests. We'll examine the case's most prominent figure, Arthur Leigh Allen, a man surrounded by a mountain of circumstantial evidence, yet always one step away from being definitively caught.

This is the story of a killer who controlled the narrative, a ghost who claimed 37 victims before his letters abruptly stopped, leaving behind a legacy of fear and one of true crime’s most compelling questions: Who was the Zodiac? And where did he go?