Darlene Ferrin was a 22-year-old waitress and young mother from Vallejo, California, who was shot and killed by the Zodiac killer at Blue Rock Springs Park just after midnight on July 4, 1969. Her murder was the second confirmed attack by the still-unidentified serial killer, and it prompted his first known phone call to police and the earliest letter in which he described a crime in his own words.
Who Darlene Ferrin Was
Ferrin was the oldest of ten children, eight girls and two boys.1Vallejo Times-Herald. Former Vallejo Woman Recalls Her Sister Murdered by the Zodiac Killer She was married to Dean Ferrin, lived with him at 1300 Virginia Street in Vallejo, and had a young daughter named Deena. At the time of her death, she worked as a waitress at Terry’s Waffle Shop on Magazine Street, having previously worked at an IHOP on Tennessee Street from 1966 to 1967.2ZodiacKillerInfo.com. Blue Rock Springs Friends described her as a “fun-loving free spirit.”3Zodiac Killer Facts. Blue Rock Springs Park, Vallejo, California
Dean Ferrin has largely stayed out of the public eye in the decades since and eventually remarried.4East Bay Times. Bay Area Still Feels Mark Left by Infamous Serial Killer Deena grew up to work as a dental assistant in the Bay Area and has a daughter of her own, according to Ferrin’s sister Pam Huckaby.5Mercury News. Former Vallejo Woman Recalls Her Sister Murdered by the Zodiac Killer
The Attack at Blue Rock Springs Park
Around midnight on July 4, 1969, Ferrin was sitting in her brown Chevrolet Corvair in the Blue Rock Springs Park parking lot on Columbus Parkway in Vallejo with 19-year-old Michael Mageau. A car pulled in, parked briefly, drove off, then returned minutes later and stopped roughly ten feet behind Ferrin’s vehicle.2ZodiacKillerInfo.com. Blue Rock Springs
The driver got out with a bright handheld flashlight and a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, walked to the passenger side, shone the light into the car, and fired five rounds through the window. Mageau, who initially thought the man was a police officer, was hit in the neck, back, and leg. He lurched into the back seat. The gunman started to walk away, but when he heard Mageau moaning, he turned back and fired two more rounds into each victim before driving off.6Shadow of the Zodiac. Victims7ZodiacCiphers.com. Blue Rock Springs Attack
Three teenagers found the victims eight to ten minutes later. Mageau, still conscious, told them he and “the girl” had been shot. Officer Richard Hoffman, a motorcycle patrolman who had checked the same lot roughly twenty minutes before the shooting, was the first officer on the scene and administered first aid. Detective Ed Rust arrived shortly afterward and tried to speak with Ferrin, but she could respond only with indecipherable sounds.8Unresolved. Zodiac Ferrin was pronounced dead at 12:38 a.m. on July 5, 1969, after arriving at a local hospital.3Zodiac Killer Facts. Blue Rock Springs Park, Vallejo, California Investigators recovered seven shell casings outside the passenger door and two more on the rear floorboard. Forensic testing confirmed the weapon was a 9mm Luger.
The Call to Vallejo Police
At 12:40 a.m., about forty minutes after the shooting, dispatcher Nancy Slover at the Vallejo Police Department picked up the phone. The caller, speaking in what Slover later described as a monotone, rehearsed voice “as if reading from a script,” reported a “double murder” and directed police to the public park on Columbus Parkway, saying the victims were “in a brown car” and had been “shot with a 9 mm Luger.”9ZodiacCiphers.com. The Recollection of the July 5th 1969 Payphone Call He then added the line that tied the attack to an earlier case: “I also killed those kids last year.” He hung up after about twenty seconds. The call was traced to a payphone at a gas station at Springs Road and Tuolumne Street in Vallejo.8Unresolved. Zodiac
The “kids last year” were David Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, who had been shot at a gravel turnout on Lake Herman Road in Benicia on December 20, 1968. That earlier crime was the Zodiac’s first confirmed attack.10Oxygen. Zodiac Killer’s Confirmed Victims
The August 4 Letter
A month after the shooting, a letter mailed to the San Francisco Examiner on August 4, 1969, described the Blue Rock Springs attack in detail only someone present would likely know. The writer, who signed later communications as the Zodiac, said “the boy” had “leaped backwards” from the front seat after the first shot and ended up on the rear floorboard, which was how he was shot in the knee. He denied fleeing with “squealling tires,” claiming he “drove away quite slowly so as not to draw attention.”7ZodiacCiphers.com. Blue Rock Springs Attack
The letter also described a tense moment at the payphone: a Vallejo officer walked by while he was still on the call, and when he hung up, the phone began to ring, drawing the officer’s attention. He said he had taped a small pencil flashlight to the barrel of his gun to aim in the dark rather than using the sights. Those details, the phone call, and the cryptographic letters that followed cemented Ferrin’s murder as a confirmed Zodiac attack.
Michael Mageau’s Account
Mageau survived. The first bullet entered the right side of his neck, traveled through his jaw, and exited his left cheek. Detective Rust interviewed him at Kaiser Hospital on July 6, 1969. Mageau described the attacker as a white male, roughly 26 to 30 years old, about five feet eight inches tall, with a heavy “beefy build” weighing 195 to 200 pounds or more, short curly light-colored hair, and a “particularly large face.” He said the assailant’s car was brown and similar in shape to a Corvair or a Ford Mustang.7ZodiacCiphers.com. Blue Rock Springs Attack
His account shifted over the years. In a 2007 documentary, Mageau claimed for the first time that a car had chased him and Ferrin from the restaurant to the park before the shooting, and that the gunman had called out Ferrin’s nickname, “Dee,” before firing. Neither claim appeared in his original police statements.2ZodiacKillerInfo.com. Blue Rock Springs Mageau himself later told reporters that his memory of the shooting was more of an “impression than an accurate account of the crime.”11Zodiac Killer Facts. Blue Rock Springs Park and the Silencer Myth His initial belief that the shots sounded “muffled,” as if fired through a silencer, was contradicted by a nearby witness, George Bryant, who reported hearing gunshots louder than the surrounding fireworks.
Mageau later identified Arthur Leigh Allen, a longtime Zodiac suspect, from a police photo lineup. Authorities were unable to charge Allen based on that identification because of conflicting witness testimony.12Radio Times. Arthur Leigh Allen Zodiac Killer Theories Explained
Suspects and the Myths Around Ferrin
Detective Rust’s initial report listed the motive as “jealousy – revenge,” and early work focused on Ferrin’s personal life.8Unresolved. Zodiac13Zodiac Killer Facts. Darlene Ferrin Myths: The Beginning Beyond Waters, police found no evidence supporting later claims that Ferrin had been stalked by a menacing stranger or was connected to occult activity.14Zodiac Killer Facts. Darlene Ferrin: Now It Can Be Told, the Rest of the Story
Arthur Leigh Allen, the most prominent Zodiac suspect over the decades, had attended Vallejo High School and lived in his mother’s basement in the city. He and a friend were known to camp and hike around Blue Rock Springs, but no direct personal connection between Allen and Ferrin was established.15Vallejo Times-Herald. Friend Defends Allen A scene in the 2007 film Zodiac depicted Ferrin’s sister identifying Allen’s photo as her sister’s stalker, but researcher Michael Butterfield and others have said this event “never occurred.”16History.com. Could Any of These Men Have Been the Zodiac Killer In 2002, San Francisco police tested DNA, palm prints, and fingerprints from Zodiac evidence, and none matched Allen. One San Francisco detective said Allen had been cleared, though Vallejo investigators and some San Francisco detectives continued to consider him a “strong suspect.” Allen died of a heart attack in 1992 at age 58.
Many of the more sensational stories about Ferrin’s life came from her sisters Pam and Linda. Both later recalled a “painting party” at Ferrin’s home months before the murder at which a “mysterious, well-dressed man” allegedly appeared and frightened Darlene. Neither sister mentioned these stories in her initial police interview after the killing. Dean Ferrin reportedly told investigators that his sisters-in-law were “prone to prevarication,” and a Vallejo police detective described one of the sisters as unreliable.2ZodiacKillerInfo.com. Blue Rock Springs Those accounts, amplified by Robert Graysmith’s best-selling book Zodiac and later media coverage, produced a lasting mythology around Ferrin that the police records do not support.
Where the Case Stands
No one has ever been charged in Ferrin’s murder or any of the Zodiac attacks. Ferrin’s killing was the second of four confirmed Zodiac attacks; the killer went on to stab Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard at Lake Berryessa on September 27, 1969, and to shoot San Francisco cab driver Paul Stine on October 11, 1969. He claimed 37 murders in letters to Bay Area newspapers, but investigators have confirmed only five deaths across the four attacks.10Oxygen. Zodiac Killer’s Confirmed Victims Law enforcement in San Francisco, Vallejo, and Napa have continued to work the case, and in 2018 Vallejo investigators submitted Zodiac letters to a private laboratory for DNA profiling in the hope of using genetic genealogy databases similar to those that identified the Golden State Killer.17ABC30. Vallejo Police Hoping for DNA Match to Zodiac Killer Authorities have said they believe the killer is likely deceased.
Ferrin’s sister Pam Huckaby has spoken publicly about the case for decades. “When everybody’s out celebrating the birth of our country, I am here mourning the death of my sister,” she said of each Fourth of July. Huckaby promised her dying mother in 1981 that she would find the killer, and she and other siblings have personally visited roughly 18 suspects over the years. For 35 years, Huckaby said, she received annual phone calls from someone claiming to be the Zodiac, and the family has been frequently contacted by obsessive researchers and amateur investigators.1Vallejo Times-Herald. Former Vallejo Woman Recalls Her Sister Murdered by the Zodiac Killer