Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics.

Listener discretion is advised.

This is Episode 5 of Criminology.

I'm Mike Ferguson with me as my co-host Mike Morphert.

Morph, how are you today?

I'm doing good.

I'm excited to get into this episode.

We're going to go deep and we're going to come up with a really interesting connection to the Zodiac.

So this should be pretty good.

Now this is one episode that I've been looking forward to and I think everyone will see why when we get into it.

Yeah, this is one of the most puzzling pieces of this whole mystery so I really hope that we can cover it and cover it thoroughly.

So just a quick reminder how we left off at the end of Episode 4.

The Zodiac had mailed a threatening Halloween card to San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery

which included the threat you are doomed and this led to publicity of the threat spreading throughout California

which included the town of Riverside just over 400 miles south of San Francisco.

One of the Riverside area people that read about the threat against Avery was a man that considered himself to be sort of an armchair detective.

Since he had first heard of the Zodiac case months earlier in 1969,

this man was convinced that the Zodiac was responsible for 1966 unsolved murder in Riverside County.

He decided to contact Paul Avery at the Chronicle with his tip, figuring Avery would be all ears.

And this tip to Avery would be in the forum of a letter.

And in the book Zodiac by Robert Graysmith, he quotes the letter as,

please forward the contents of this letter to the detective in charge of the Zodiac murder case.

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