April 20, 1970 letter: “I hope you do not think that I was the one who wiped out that blue meannie[sic] with a bomb at the cop station. Even though I talked about killing school children with one. It just wouldn’t do to move in on someone elses[sic] territory”
The bombing mentioned by Zodiac in his April 20 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle most likely refers to an explosion at the SFPD Upper Haight Park substation at 1899 Waller Street on February 16, 1970 at 10:50pm. As a result of that explosion, sergeant Brian V. McDonnell lost his life and officer Robert Fogarty sustained injuries to his face and legs as a result of shrapnel from a pipe bomb placed on a window ledge on the southern end of the station. Eight other officers were also injured.
To my knowledge, nobody was ever criminally charged in association with this explosion and it remains unsolved to this day. A fingerprint was found on a fragment of the pipe bomb in 1999 which led to the case being briefly re-opened, but this never led to any arrest. According to a 2007 article by Jim Zamora, two caucasian men in a pink VW bus were spotted by witnesses fleeing the scene with their lights off shortly before the explosion ( link )
At the time of the bombing on February 16, the most recent correspondence to have been attributed to Zodiac was the letter to Melvin Belli received December 20, 1969. The next Zodiac letter would be received by the San Francisco Chronicle on April 20, 1970 (quoted above).
The story was covered by KPIX-TV on the following day, February 17, 1970 in a report from Dave Monsees, available online from the Bay Area Television Archive, cited below. In that coverage, mayor Joseph Alioto visited the substation following the attack and made the following statement to reporters:
“…I’d say the relationship between this and the Berkeley police episode would indicate that there is some connection between the two. We are going to have a very, very vigorous investigation. It will be an all out investigation to bring these kind of maniacs to justice. We’ll get’em there. We’re offering a reward of five thousand dollars to anybody who will supply information leading to the arrest and conviction of those who did this thing.”
There was an additional article published the same day on pg. 3 of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California that included additional details about the bomb, mentioned a reported sighting of one Caucasian male associated with a pink van, and stated that a US Army bomb squad was summoned from the Presidio to provide assistance at the scene, though the nature of their participation is given no elaboration. This article offers no mention of a reward associated with the apprehension of responsible parties.
*Note: This article has been cited previously on Richard Grinell’s website in an article on this very subject, which I will link at the end. If it’s been discussed elsewhere by other researchers, I’m sorry if I’ve failed to acknowledge it. I simply haven’t encountered it out in the wild.
The televised coverage by KPIX-TV in particular might have been influential in Zodiac’s choice of talking points in the April 20 letter, in which he proffers,
“I am mildly cerous[sic] as to how much money you have on my head now.”
KPIX-TV Channel 5 is not the same channel that hosted the infamous 1969 broadcast of A.M. San Francisco with Jim Dunbar and Melvin Belli where a person claiming to be Zodiac called into. That was broadcast on KGO-TV Channel 7. In fact, that constituted multiple broadcasts, beginning with an initial call into the show by the claimant during the regularly scheduled block of A.M. San Francisco during which time arrangements were made for Mevin Belli to attend another broadcast on KGO-TV that took place around 2am. Unfortunately, many details of this, including the programming block for AM San Francisco and the exact date of the broadcast is a bit muddled online, but I believe that CBS rebroadcast portions of the call on October 22, 1969 and I assume it probably occurred either that morning or the previous day. It doesn’t really matter for the present topic other than to establish Zodiac most likely had access to a TV set prior to the February 17, 1970 KPIX-TV newscast, which we know thanks to the plaintext of the z340 cipher.
Final note regarding this coverage; my presumption is that, in 1970, the Newscast for KPIX-TV, later channel 5, consisted of a 30 minute broadcast in the evening, but I have not found original information that would further specify this programming block. Admittedly, I didn’t look that hard since my priory objective here is to aggregate information on this topic for research purposes.
While ultimately I personally consider the topic of broadcast consumption by Zodiac in regards to the Haight Park bombing to be of primarily historical import, trivial from an investigative standpoint, others might disagree and desire a broader survey of contemporary news coverage related to the bombing, so included below are notes regarding the accessibility of articles from the Vallejo Times Herald, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Francisco Examiner.
Regarding the SF Chronicle, I am unable to comment on the contents of any associated coverage on February 17, 1970. It is possibly available through their online archives, behind a pay wall, but I am not personally going to pay for it at this time.
Articles from the Vallejo Times Herald from February 17, 1970 may be on microfilm somewhere in California and I have no access to it.
The San Francisco Examiner dated February 17, 1970 led page 1 with the Headline “PARK POLICE BOMBED: Berkeley Blast Link Suspected.” This article is available from Newspapers.com and while I do not know the specific contents of that article, I do know that the word “reward” is used in the first line of paragraph 2.
The bombing at the Haight Park substation was considered by police at the time to be part of a wave of similar attacks at that time and was not exclusive to California. While the case was never solved, it is generally maintained that the likely culprits were members of the Weather Underground, a militant, counter cultural organization that originated at the University of Michigan in 1969 that sought violent action to destabilize what it considered to be an Imperialist power in the form of the US Government. They detonated bombs at the US Capitol in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972 and the US State Department building in 1975.
As mentioned, Richard Grinell has covered this topic on his website, while extending the discussion into the broader topic of bomb threats elsewhere in the canon of Zodiac correspondence and incorporation some additional biographical information about sergeant Brian McDonnell. That can be viewed here: zodiacciphers.com
