My dad may be the Zodiac Killer

I suspect that my biological father, Peter A. Lehman of Arcata, California, in addition to many other acts of violence, may be the infamous Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area with a series of murders and cryptic, braggadocious letters to newspapers in the late 1960s. I also suspect that he is responsible for many unsolved disappearances in Humboldt County over a period of over four decades.

I know Peter as well as anyone will ever know him, and the letters sent by the Zodiac Killer remind me strongly of his personality: his aggressive egotism, his need to be feared for his violence, his need to feel intellectually superior, his obsession with puzzles and riddles, his internalized, self-hating homophobia and misogyny, his addiction to taking risks, and his emotional need to express his anger and feelings of grievance and inadequacy by harming animals and innocent people.

From observing Peter’s violence durning my lifetime, I believe he gets emotional gratification from killing people, and has shown a gleeful willingness to kill for political reasons, to send messages to specific people, and for no reason at all other than he likes it.

Peter was severely abused by his father, and as a boy “hunted alone” with a shotgun for small game. I think by the time he was a young man, he had simply moved on to what he considered more challenging game.

The first murder positively correlated with the Zodiac Killer took place shortly after Peter moved to the Bay Area, as a 25-year-old postdoctoral chemistry student at UC Berkeley, and to work at Berkeley National Laboratories. He hinted several times that this work included manufacturing drugs used in covert government projects.

As a child, I unknowingly drew a symbol very similar to the “signature” used on the Zodiac Killer’s letters on the chalkboard in the kitchen where my mom wrote out grocery lists, and when Peter saw it, he reacted with extreme anxiety that he could not explain. I’d been reading ‘The Dark is Rising,’ by Susan Cooper, a YA fantasy novel, which described a repeated motif of ‘a circle, quartered by a cross,’ that protects the young protagonist from evil, and I doodled the symbol on the chalkboard. Peter saw it, and erased it quickly and thoroughly, scrubbing the chalkboard with the eraser in frenzied agitation, then he followed my to the room I shared with my brother and cornered me, shoving me against the wall and shouting at me, trembling with fear and rage, at the edge of violence, shaking me by the shoulders while staring straight into my eyes. “Where did you see that symbol?” “In a book? What book?” He didn’t seem to believe my answers and asked the questions several times. Then he said I was never allowed to draw that symbol again anywhere. “But why?” I asked. “None of your fucking business,” he said.

Another circumstantial detail that leads me to suspect Peter is the Zodiac Killer is that footprint analysis concluded that the killer wore size 10 “Wingwalker” boots, which have specialized soles for walking on aircraft surfaces, at one crime scene. Peter’s shoe size is 10, and around the time of the murders, he trained for and acquired a private pilot’s license. He was always a “gearhead,” always wanted to have all the specialized equipment for his hobbies. He liked to tinker with machines, and for many years drove a jeep that he’d built from a kit.

Also, there are specific threats made in the Zodiac Killer’s letters, detonating a fertilizer bomb, and attacking a bus full of schoolchildren, that I have good reason to believe Peter carried out later in life, using controlled individuals and technology to carry out the attacks. I have good reason to believe he directed terrorist and mass-casualty attacks specifically intended to terrorize people close to him, in much the same way that the Zodiac Killer terrorized the public. I have written about these attacks in more detail in other posts on jacoblehman.substack.com

Peter counts on his wealth, national security connections, and our family’s longstanding connections to organized crime to insulate him from consequences. But with that safety net, I think he enjoys taking risks, as if he is playing a game, and wants to be known for his acts of violence, as if they were feats of cunning or athleticism. I’ve heard him say “Jails are for stupid people,” and also chuckle that some crimes are so outrageous that “people” get away with them because nobody can or wants to believe that such concentrated evil exists. In later years, he repeatedly threatened that no one would believe me if I spoke out about his violence, and that he would frame me as being crazy if I did, which indeed he has tried to do.

I think Peter realized he came close to getting caught from the brazenness of the Zodiac murders and letters, and the case generated so much notoriety that his privilege might not be sufficient to protect him if he was identified by law enforcement. I don’t think this checked his addiction to murder, or hunger for recognition, but I think he became more cautious as he aged, and stopped leaving bodies where they could be found. Many of the unsolved disappearances in Humboldt County, where Peter has lived since the early 1980s, corresponded to times when he was emotionally stressed, and some of the disappeared physically resemble people Peter was angry with at the time, including my mother and myself. Some of the disappearances are recent, and though Peter is now in his 80s, I have good reason to believe he is still killing, with the help of accomplices, some or all of whom may be controlled through blackmail and other forms of underworld coercion.

The last purported communication from the Zodiac Killer was a postcard mailed from Eureka, California, in 1990. There is debate about whether the card was mailed by actual the Zodiac Killer.

Peter meticulously, anxiously cultivated the appearance of a normal life, and I think having a family was part of that. He rarely interacted with my brother and I, except to periodically gratify his emotions by physically, psychologically, and sexually abusing us. He made continual excuses not to be at home, and when he was, would say “I just live here.” He is currently on the Arcata Planning Commission, and is the semi-retired director of the “Schatz” Energy Research Center at Cal Poly Humboldt, a laboratory I believe he funded with his own laundered money and used as a cover for clandestine activities.

The Zodiac Killer appears to have taken elaborate precautions to hide his identity when mailing letters to newspapers, but that was before the development of DNA analysis. In 2002, a researcher found a single human hair sealed beneath a stamp on a letter sent by the Zodiac Killer. This letter is positively correlated to the Zodiac Killer, in part because it included a piece of fabric from the shirt of one of the murder victims.

If I am correct, and my biological father, Peter A. Lehman, is the Zodiac Killer, and it is possible to extract DNA from the hair sound under the stamp, it will correlate to members of my family. I won’t get into the difference between mitochondrial and chromosomal DNA, since not everyone is a biology nerd, but you can look it up. Recent advances in DNA analysis may make it possible to extract chromosomal DNA from the hair, and if so, and I am correct, it will be an approximately 50% match with my and my brother’s DNA. If mitochondrial DNA is extracted from the hair, which is more likely, it will, if I am correct, match the mitochondrial DNA of my aunt, Nancy Lehman, aka Nancy Stein, of Rutland, Vermont, and my cousin, Alyson Hackett (nee Stein) of Flowery Branch, Georgia.

This post is an allegation, no person can definitively said to have committed a crime unless or until they are convicted in a court of law, which I sincerely hope my father will be. May justice reach him.