“bus goes bang car
pass es by ok.” —
The Zodiac’s threat from Nov. 9, 1969
By Tom Voigt | Founder: Zodiackiller.com | tomvoigt@zodiackiller.com
In October 1969, the Zodiac killer mailed a letter in which he threatened to shoot out the tire of a full school bus and then kill the children within. In another letter the following month, the Zodiac made a second threat against children when he revealed plans to hide a bomb along an unnamed road. According to the Zodiac, the road bomb was designed to specifically target a school bus. Thankfully, no such attack ever happened. And no such possible bomb was ever found…until Jan. 31st, 2015.
The envelope containing the Zodiac’s bomb threat
The Zodiac’s bomb diagram
Before we get to that old, buried bomb found in 2015, let’s first briefly examine the necessary location requirements for the Zodiac killer’s roadside school bus bomb.
Obviously, the Zodiac would have needed a stretch of road that featured school bus traffic. Easy enough.
It’s important to remember the Zodiac’s threat was to specifically target a school bus. He also claimed the roadside bomb would somehow be activated by a vehicle’s height. Therefore, the location of the bomb would have needed to be somewhere with school bus traffic, but relatively free of traffic from vehicles similar in height to a school bus, such as a regular bus used for public transportation.
The Zodiac would have also needed privacy while installing his roadside bomb. Therefore, a rural setting would have been mandatory.
Finally, a flat area with good visibility in all directions would have been a requirement, allowing the Zodiac to spot potential intruders in advance and conceal what he was doing.
Recap:
To install his roadside school bus bomb, the Zodiac killer would have needed —
*A road with school bus traffic
*A road that lacked vehicles of the same height as a school bus
*A flat stretch of seldom-used road with good visibility in all directions
The Zodiac described his bomb as a “death machine”
While we associate the Zodiac killer with San Francisco, at the time of his bomb threats the Zodiac had already committed a crime as far from San Francisco as a nearly two-hour drive. Therefore, I feel it’s likely the Zodiac’s bomb would have been placed at a location somewhere within those two hours.
AND THE PERFECT SPOT FOR A DEATH MACHINE IS…
The city of Santa Rosa, Cal…for a variety of reasons.
Downtown Santa Rosa in 1970
Santa Rosa is located about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, thus inside the Zodiac’s attack range. Additionally, the city of Santa Rosa had already seen its share of Zodiac-related activity, beginning in October 1969 with threatening phone calls to the local police station, as well as a bomb threat to a local department store…all made by someone claiming to be the Zodiac killer.
Additionally, the Zodiac killer was a suspect in a local series of (still unsolved) murders involving female hitchhikers.
Back then, Santa Rosa had a population of about 50,000. Much of the area was as rural as it gets, with buses transporting the students from their homes in the outlying areas and into the city proper where most of the schools were located. Highway 101 cut right through the city, which was primarily a valley with hills on the eastern outskirts.
The Zodiac’s list of bomb ingredients
When the Zodiac made his bomb threat — a bomb he claimed was already built and being stored in a basement — top suspect Arthur Leigh Allen occupied both his trailer in Santa Rosa, as well as the lower portion of his parents’ home about an hour away at 32 Fresno Street in Vallejo. Around the corner from the Fresno Street address was an Ace Hardware store where Allen would eventually work. The store not only had a basement, but it also sold all the necessary materials required to make the bomb exactly as described by the Zodiac killer. And when Allen’s home on Fresno Street was eventually searched by police, bomb-making materials were found inside.
The entrance to the old Ace Hardware in Vallejo. The store was demolished several years ago
Could the Zodiac killer have left behind an unexploded roadside bomb that wouldn’t be discovered for more than 45 years?
Fast-forward to Jan. 31, 2015, when a resident of Santa Rosa called police to report a suspicious device he had partially unearthed in his yard. The location was the 2500 block of Guerneville Road, about two and a half miles where the first two hitchhiker victims were last seen.
When police arrived at the Guerneville Road residence, they saw what was eventually confirmed to be an improvised explosive device measuring approximately 15 inches by 5 inches. Inside the device, 35 mm film canisters were visible, and wicks were seen sticking out of the top. The device was deteriorated and had been in the ground for so long that roots had grown all around it.
The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department deployed its explosive ordinance disposal unit, and for safety purposes, the device was destroyed. Unfortunately, nothing more could be learned about the old, buried bomb.
News report, part one
News report, part two
Today, the 2500 block of Guerneville Road is a well-developed suburb. However, if you go back several decades to the Zodiac era, what is now someone’s backyard was open terrain right next to the road.
Amazingly, the bomb location fit perfectly with the necessary requirements that I outlined earlier.
Using an aerial photo from 1968, you can see the bomb location was very rural:
The area of the old, buried bomb as it appeared back in 1968
*Guerneville Road had school bus traffic that brought students from the boonies into the city proper and back again. However, there was obviously no need for public transportation. Therefore, school buses would have been the only vehicles of that height
*Guerneville Road was flat, straight, and oncoming traffic — what little there was — could have been spotted well in advance
*While the area has since been developed, the spot where the bomb was found — right next to Guerneville Road in what is now someone’s yard — was relatively untouched by progress
The bomb that was found in 2015 didn’t really match the bomb description provided by the Zodiac in his November 1969 threat letter. However, that could have been for any number of reasons…including the Zodiac not wanting police to know exactly what to look for.
It might be worth noting that from Arthur Leigh Allen’s trailer at 2963 Santa Rosa Ave., it was only a twelve-minute drive to the bomb site:
It might also be worth noting that one of those hitchhiker victims, Kim Allen, had been living on Guerneville Road at the time of her murder, and her home was just two blocks from where the bomb was found.
Had the Zodiac truly been giving us clues to his real identity, as he once claimed, perhaps the bomb location was another clue: A clue to the name Allen.
Kim Wendy Allen
9/22/52 – 3/4/72