Who are the Seawater family and how were they connected to Zodiac Killer suspect Arthur Leigh Allen?
THE Seawater family were friends with the only man ever to be named as a Zodiac Killer suspect: Arthur Leigh Allen.
The story of the Killer’s brutal rampage across Northern California is examined in the Netflix documentary This is The Zodiac Speaking.
Meeting Arthur Leigh Allen
In the series, David, Connie and Don Seawater opened up about how they were just children when they met Arthur Leigh Allen in the 1960s.
At the time, their father was in a mental institution and their mother Phyllis bonded quickly with Allen.
Soon, he began taking the children on trips and often ate dinner with them.
However, the children grew suspicious of Allen when he took them diving in 1963.
When they arrived at the beach on June 4, 1963, the children claimed that Allen immediately ran away and left them to play by themselves.
He returned to Tajiguas Beach out-of-breath and with his hands covered in something red, before bundling the children into the car and racing away.
Two teenagers, named Robert Domingos, 18, and Linda Edwards, 17, were later revealed to have been killed in the area and the Seawater children came to suspect their family friend might have been to blame.
Their suspicions grew when Allen took them to a racetrack in Riverside, California, on October 28, 1966.
On October 30, Connie found that her brother David had fallen into a sleep from which she couldn’t wake him.
She then remembers drinking some juice she found in their motel and then not being able to remember anything until the following day.
Unbeknownst to them, a girl named Cheri Jo Bates had been murdered nearby.
A former student, Darin Alvord, describes Allen teaching them how to decipher codes and thought his teacher was just trying to teach them different ways of communicating.
Allen is put behind bars
Allen was arrested in 1974 and jailed for sexually assaulting a teenage boy, though he had been fired from his teaching job years earlier.
He was dismissed from his job in 1968 when several students accused him of sexual misconduct.
When he was jailed, the Zodiac killings stopped, which have led many to believe he was the serial murderer behind the terrifying criminal rampage.
A police search of his house in 1992 found a Zodiac Sea Wolf wristwatch, which bore the same ominous logo seen on the Zodiac Killer’s letters.
According to the Seawater children, their mother never believed that Allen was the Zodiac Killer.
However, they referred to a letter sent to Phylis by Allen which reads: “the most dangerous thing is when I almost decided to confess.”
They believe that this points to Allen being the killer.
In his research, crime writer Robert Graysmith concluded that Allen was the serial killer and in the 2007 film Zodiac, which is based on Robert’s work, the killer is revealed to be Allen.
The Zodiac Killer’s crime spree
The Zodiac Killer’s crime spree ran throughout the late 1960s, beginning with the double murder of Betty Lou Jensen, aged 16, and David Arthur Faraday, aged 17.
After murdering the pair on December 20, 1968, he began to send cryptic ciphers which he claimed held the key to his identity to various newspapers.
He also sent letters to the police which mocked them for being unable to catch him and he signed each letter with an ominous symbol.
The killer named himself the Zodiac Killer in one of these letters.
He was never caught, but his cipher was eventually solved by a pair of software engineers and a cryptographer in 2020.
The cipher revealed that he believed murdering people would make them his slaves in the afterlife.
Another suspect was named by The Case Breakers, a group of cold case investigators.
They believed that Gary Francis Poste was the killer and pointed towards the fact that removing Poste’s name from the cipher allowed it to be solved.