Zodiac's Riverside Connection: The 1967 Letters That Started It All

# Zodiac's Riverside Connection: The 1967 Letters That Started It All

By DeClassX

Among the thousands of pages that make up the declassified Zodiac Killer investigative case files, some of the most quietly significant are the ones that barely announce themselves. A single inventory page, tucked into the archive under the heading "ZONEAC Letters," catalogs two sets of correspondence that together raise a question investigators never fully resolved: did the Zodiac Killer claim his first victim not in the foothills of Northern California in 1968, but in Riverside, California, more than a year earlier?

The document is spare and bureaucratic by design. It lists items 15 and 16 in a numbered inventory of letters grouped under the internal case designation "ZONEAC" — an apparent working label used by investigators to organize correspondence connected to, or potentially connected to, the Zodiac case. Item 15 is a one-page letter and its envelope, postmarked April 24, 1978, notable for its opening line: "I'm back with you." Item 16 is a set of photocopies — three letters and their envelopes, postmarked April 30, 1967, along with a photocopy of a message written in ballpoint pen on a wooden desktop. The page then delivers a crucial note: the originals of the 1967 materials are held by the Riverside, California Police Department, and the three letters were mailed approximately six months after a killing — to the local newspaper, to the Riverside Police Department, and to the victim's father. The desktop message, the document explains, was discovered around the same time, on a desk that had been stored in an unused basement.

Those two short paragraphs compress an enormous amount of investigative history. To understand why this inventory page matters, it is necessary to understand what happened in Riverside in October 1966.

On the night of October 30, 1966, eighteen-year-old Cheri Jo Bates was found murdered in a dark alley near the Riverside City College library. She had been attacked with ferocious violence — stabbed repeatedly and nearly decapitated. Her car had been disabled beforehand, suggesting she had been deliberately targeted and left stranded. The crime was brutal even by the standards of the violent late 1960s, and it went unsolved.

Then, approximately six months later, in the spring of 1967, letters began to arrive. Three of them, postmarked April 30, 1967, were sent to the Riverside Press-Enterprise newspaper, to the Riverside Police Department, and to the father of Cheri Jo Bates. Each letter described the murder in chilling, gloating detail that only the killer — or someone with intimate knowledge of the crime scene — could have known. Around the same time, a desktop in a college building was found to contain a message scratched into the wood with a ballpoint pen, apparently left months earlier. The desktop had been sitting, largely forgotten, in an unused basement. Its message was dark and taunting, consistent in tone with the letters.

At the time, investigators took these communications seriously but could not definitively link them to any known offender. Then the Zodiac Killer emerged. Beginning in 1968 and escalating dramatically in 1969, the Zodiac terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with a series of murders accompanied by letters to newspapers that combined boasting, ciphers, and demands for attention. When investigators and journalists began comparing the Zodiac's writing style to the 1967 Riverside letters, the similarities were striking enough to prompt serious consideration. Both featured a distinctive voice — methodical, grandiose, contemptuous of law enforcement. Both used similar phrases and structural habits. A 1971 letter attributed to the Zodiac appeared to reference the Riverside killing directly.

The FBI and local law enforcement never reached a definitive public conclusion about whether the Zodiac and the Riverside killer were the same person. Handwriting analysts were divided. The Riverside Police Department maintained its own investigation and its own files — which is precisely why the inventory document notes that the originals remain in Riverside's possession rather than with whatever federal or state agency compiled this inventory. The photocopies in the ZONEAC file represent a sharing of investigative materials across jurisdictions, a routine but important step when agencies are trying to determine whether crimes are connected.

The second item cataloged in this document — the 1978 letter declaring "I'm back with you" — adds another layer of unease. The Zodiac had been largely silent for years by 1978. His last widely accepted letter had been sent in 1974. The emergence of a new letter after a four-year silence, with that particular phrase as its opening, was the kind of communication that investigators could not ignore, even as the years passed and the trail grew colder. Whether this letter was genuine Zodiac correspondence, a hoax, or something else entirely, the inventory does not say. Its inclusion here signals only that investigators considered it worth cataloging alongside the Riverside materials — worth keeping in the same file, under the same working designation.

What makes this document valuable for researchers today is not any single revelation it contains, but what it illustrates about the mechanics of a major unsolved case. Investigators were actively attempting to create order from chaos — numbering letters, tracking originals versus photocopies, noting which agencies held which evidence. The ZONEAC designation itself suggests a systematic approach to organizing a sprawling correspondence archive that crossed years, jurisdictions, and potentially multiple crimes.

The Riverside letters remain one of the most debated pieces of evidence in Zodiac research. If they were written by the same person who went on to taunt Bay Area investigators and news desks for years, then the Zodiac's known timeline extends back further than officially acknowledged, and Cheri Jo Bates becomes his first confirmed victim. If they were written by someone else, they represent a separate and also unsolved murder — one that generated its own set of taunting letters to a grieving father.

Decades later, neither the Zodiac murders nor the Bates killing has been officially solved. The originals of the 1967 letters remain with the Riverside Police Department. The desktop with its ballpoint inscription was discovered in a basement and photographed. And somewhere in an archive, a 1978 letter opens with the words: I'm back with you.

The question this document leaves open is the same one investigators have lived with for more than half a century: back from where, exactly — and who was doing the writing?