The Zodiac Killer and the Curious Confession of Galina Trefil
Prepare yourself for a crazy rabbit hole. This goes off in a direction you likely wouldn’t expect, and it was a wild ride for us. Nearly the entire first half of this article was written as background for our original investigation that follows.
The Zodiac Killer is the pseudonym of a serial killer whose true identity remains unknown. There are seven known, widely accepted Zodiac victims from 1968 to 1969, two of whom survived.
There is no consensus on the total number of victims or the length of the Zodiac killing spree. There are suspected, disputed victims into the mid 1970s and beyond; there are suspected, disputed victims prior to 1968.
The Zodiac's accepted attacks took place between December 1968 and October 1969 in California, specifically; in Benicia; unincorporated Napa County; the San Francisco Bay area; and Vallejo.
The only suspect law enforcement ever publicly named was Arthur Leigh Allen, a former teacher and convicted sex offender who died of heart disease in 1992.
After Allen's death, a police raid of his home turned up a Zodiac Sea Wolf wristwatch, which features the killers chosen nickname as well as the same iconography seen in the killer's letters.
A 2024 Netflix documentary, This Is the Zodiac Speaking, features allegations made by the Seawater family, one time family friends of Allen.
David Seawater claims that Allen admitted to being the Zodiac Killer before his death, and that Allen was guilty of drugging the Seawater children when they were kids and molesting David’s sister, Connie Seawater.
Both David and Connie Seawater claimed that they asked Allen directly if he was the Zodiac Killer. He allegedly told David yes, while Allen allegedly responded to Connie that if he told her, he’d have to kill her. These claims have not been substantiated, and authorities consider the investigation open.
Previously, in 2002, police inspector Kelly Carroll said that DNA taken from the glue of the envelopes the Zodiac letters were mailed in did not match Allen.
In 2010, San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) investigator Dave Toschi, chief investigator on the Zodiac case, said publicly that all the evidence against Allen ultimately "turned out to be negative".
Circumstantial evidence includes the Zodiac watch found in his home and the fact that while Allen was incarcerated for child molestation in 1974, the Zodiac stopped. Not exactly a smoking gun.
The Zodiac name came from the killer himself, used to self identify in a series of correspondence known as the Zodiac letters. Its origin is unknown
These were mailed to media outlets and others threatening killings, bombings, and even an attack on a school bus full of children. Some of the letters included bits of clothing taken from his victims.
Dave Toschi, the chief investigator on the Zodiac case at SFPD, was accused but later exonerated of writing one of the Zodiac letters, which turned out to be a fake.
Armistead Maupin, then a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, was the person who connected Toschi to the Zodiac letter. Maupin’s suspicions were partly based on the fact that it was the only Zodiac letter to mention any police officer.
In addition to this, in 1976, Maupin received a series of fan letters admiring Toschi… which turned out to be from Toschi himself.
Maupin described them as transparent and self aggrandizing. When he noticed what he thought were similarities between the fake letters, Maupin contacted the SFPD.
They immediately launched an investigation which ultimately led to Toschi being removed from the case by the SFPD and essentially demoted, reassigned to what he called “the pawnshop detail.”
Toschi left the SFPD in 1986 and died in 2018. His reputation never recovered, and he was also briefly considered as a Zodiac suspect.
Toschi told the San Francisco Examiner,
“Someone from Internal Affairs asked me where I had been on the night that Zodiac murdered the cab driver Paul Stine. I told him — home in bed — but I got sick to my stomach. Apparently some reporter had asked the department: ‘Could Toschi be Zodiac?’ You’ll never know how that hurt.”
Although widely disputed, some believe that the Zodiac committed his first murder on October 30, 1966. There is circumstantial evidence connecting both the Zodiac and Arthur Leigh Allen to this crime, though the physical evidence does not support Allen’s involvement.
Cheri Jo Bates, an 18-year-old college freshman, was murdered by knife on the grounds of Riverside City College. Bates was found face down on a gravel path between two unoccupied houses near the library parking lot where she had parked her Volkswagen Beetle.
She had been repeatedly stabbed in the chest and left shoulder, and also suffered several deep slash wounds to her face and neck, but was fully dressed and had not been sexually assaulted.
Her left cheek, upper lip, hands and arms had also been cut; the slash wounds to her throat severed both the jugular and larynx. She was nearly decapitated.
Approximately ten feet from Bates' body, investigators found a cheap Timex brand wristwatch. Although Bates was slim and short, standing just 5’3” at only 110 pounds, she was athletic and quite strong for her size. Bates’ had scratched her assailant's arms, face and head, in addition to tearing off the band from his watch.
This fierce struggle ensured that DNA from her killer was recovered by police. Fragments of the killers skin and brown hair remained behind beneath the fingernails of Bates’ right hand as a result of her attempts to defend herself.
Bates' Beetle was parked less than 100 yards from where her body was found; the ignition wiring and the distributor cap of the vehicle had been tampered with.
The ignition key was in the ignition, and both windows were rolled partly down. Several palm and finger prints were found on the vehicle that police believe may have belonged to her murderer.
Investigators determined that these prints did not belong to Bates or any of her friends or relatives, and were also not a match for Arthur Leigh Allen. The DNA found underneath her nails was not a match for Allen, either.
One month after Bates' murder, on November 29, two identical type-written letters arrived at the Riverside Police Department (RPD) headquarters and the editorial offices of the Riverside Press-Enterprise.
The author described in detail how he had disabled Bates' car before allegedly watching her attempt to start it. He walked over and offered his assistance after she ran down the battery trying to start the car.
He said that told her that his vehicle was down the street to lure her away from the parking lot. According to the author, after they had walked a short distance from her car, he told her, "It's about time."
Bates replied, "About time for what?"
"About time for you to die," he wrote.
According to the author, he put a hand over her mouth and pressed a knife against her neck, forcing her to walk to an alley before beating, kicking, stabbing and slashing her to death. The author claimed to have known Bates, having been rejected by her.
"Only one thing was on my mind: Making her pay for the brush-offs that she had given me during the years prior."
Due to the fact the letter included details of the murder which had not been released to the public, investigators believe that the author was the actual murderer.
On April 30, 1967, the Press-Enterprise printed an update on Bates' murder. The following day, both the RPD and Bates' father received handwritten letters with a short message on a single sheet of paper.
"Bates had to die. There will be more."
Police considered this letter a hoax, but at the bottom was an indecipherable character which was either a "2" or a "Z”.
The initial letter sent to the Riverside Police Department from Bates' killer was determined to feature either Elite or Pica typeface from a Royal brand typewriter; during a search of Allen's residence, police seized a Royal typewriter with Elite type.
Six months after the murder, a custodian at the college discovered a macabre poem scratched into the underside of a foldable desk. Although the desk was in a storage area at the time the poem was discovered, the custodian reportedly told police that the desk had been on the library floor at the time of Bates' murder.
This poem was signed “rh;” it is unknown if this someone else’s signature, an early pseudonym of the Zodiac, a code of some kind, or something else entirely.
The details of the poem conflict with the details of Bates death; when her body was found, she was wearing a long-sleeve pale yellow print blouse and faded red capri pants, not a red dress.
The Zodiac sent quite a bit of correspondence over the years, and included four known cryptograms along with this correspondence; two of these ciphers were decrypted in 1969 and 2020 respectively while two remain unsolved:
Solved 408-character cipher, referred to as Z 408
Solved 340-character cipher, referred to as Z 340
Unsolved 13-character "My name is" cipher, referred to as Z 13
Unsolved 32-character "map code" cipher, referred to as Z 32
In the documentary This Is the Zodiac Speaking, some of Arthur Leigh Allen's former students recall him having an interest in cryptology.
The Zodiac’s first known letters were sent to three different papers in the Bay Area, each containing a different part of the cipher.
The papers printed the cryptograms because Zodiac threatened to kill again if they didn’t, which of course he did anyway. This cipher, called Z 408, was solved a week later by hand on August 8, 1969, by Donald Gene and Bettye June Harden.
It reads:
"I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FORREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL OF ALL TO KILL SOMETHING GIVES ME THE MOST THRILLING EXPERENCE IT IS EVEN BETTER THAN GETTING YOUR ROCKS OFF WITH A GIRL THE BEST PART OF IT IS THAT WHEN I DIE I WILL BE REBORN IN PARADICE AND ALL THE I HAVE KILLED WILL BECOME MY SLAVES I WILL NOT GIVE YOU MY NAME BECAUSE YOU WILL TRY TO SLOW DOWN OR STOP MY COLLECTING OF SLAVES FOR MY AFTERLIFE EBEORIETEMETHHPITI".
Z 340 managed to elude decryption for 51 years until David Oranchak, Sam Blake, and Jarl Van Eycke took a crack at it using software
I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING LOTS OF FUN IN TRYING TO CATCH ME THAT WASNT ME ON THE TV SHOW WHICH BRINGS UP A POINT ABOUT ME I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE GAS CHAMBER BECAUSE IT WILL SEND ME TO PARADICE ALL THE SOONER BECAUSE I NOW HAVE ENOUGH SLAVES TO WORK FOR ME WHERE EVERYONE ELSE HAS NOTHING WHEN THEY REACH PARADICE SO THEY ARE AFRAID OF DEATH I AM NOT AFRAID BECAUSE I KNOW THAT MY NEW LIFE IS LIFE WILL BE AN EASY ONE IN PARADICE DEATH
Oranchak explained that, "Of all the things that stood out was the line 'that wasn't me on the TV show'… At this point I jumped out of my chair because I knew the cipher was received on November 8, 1969, which is about two weeks after someone calling themselves Zodiac called into a TV talk show hosted by Jim Dunbar. While the caller was on the air, he said 'I need help, I'm sick, I don't want to go to the gas chamber.'"
The team submitted their findings to the FBI, who confirmed the accuracy of the solution, saying in a statement on X, "The FBI is aware that a cipher attributed to the Zodiac Killer was recently solved by private citizens.”
It is unclear how much of the content of these letters was true, how much was a game of some kind he was trying to play, and how much may have been genuine delusion.
He claimed that he was collecting his victims as slaves for the afterlife, for instance. In another letter, he took credit for a murder that police are certain he did not commit.
SFPD Officer Richard Radetich was shot to death in his car while writing a traffic ticket six days before the letter was postmarked.
A witness to the murder identified an ex-convict named Joseph Wesley Johnson as the perpetrator; Johnson was a black man who did not bear any resemblance to any known description of the Zodiac.
Investigators believe that the Zodiac wrote the letter without the knowledge that police had already identified the suspect based on an eye witness.
In 1974, the Zodiac sent what is considered his last confirmed letter, in which he claimed to have killed 37 victims. Investigators agree on four confirmed attacks by the Zodiac Killer in California consisting of seven total victims, two of whom survived:
David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, were shot and killed sometime after on December 20, 1968 Benicia. Faraday was a student at Vallejo High School, while Jensen was a student Hogan High School, and the two were parked on a “lovers lane” located off of Lake Herman Road at the time of their murder.
They were spotted by a passing motorist at 11 P.M. and their bodies were spotted by another passing motorist at At 11:10 P.M.
Police believe that their assailant parked along the passenger side of Faraday's car, firing several shots into the car as he walked around to the driver's side. None of these shots hit Faraday and Jensen, who attempted to escape through the passenger door.
As Faraday was exiting the car, he was shot in the head with a .22 caliber pistol. Jensen managed to escape only to be killed as she fled the scene on foot. The killer fired six rounds at her back, only one of which missed. Police believe the attack took less than three minutes.
Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22, were shot around midnight between July 4 and 5, 1969, in the parking lot of Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo.
After leaving Mageau's house together, the couple noticed a man in a light-colored car that seemed to be following them. Ferrin drove out towards the same Lake Herman Road, and when they pulled into an empty parking lot at Blue Rock Springs Park around midnight, the car pulled in after them, parking a fair distance away.
This was another lover's lane, just a few miles away from the site of the first murder. The driver turned his headlights off and sat motionless. Mageau asked who the driver was and Ferrin told him not to worry. The stranger abruptly sped away from the parked couple.
Five minutes later, the stranger returned, parked a few feet next to Mageau's side of the car and got out. He shone a flashlight into Ferrin's car as he approached. Assuming he was a police officer, the couple rolled down Mageau's window. Without speaking, the stranger fired a 9mm pistol into the car.
One bullet hit Mageau in the right arm, and the other hit Ferrin in the neck. The assailant returned to his car, opened the door, and did something Mageau could not see. As Mageau struggled to exit the vehicle, the attacker shot him and Ferrin two more times each before he fled the scene.
Police arrived on the scene at 12:20 A.M., and Ferrin was soon pronounced dead at the hospital. Mageau described the attacker as a heavyset white man in dark clothes without glasses, around 5'8" and 200 pounds, with a large face and curly light brown hair.
At 12:40 A.M., the Vallejo Police Department (VPD) received a phone call from a payphone two blocks from headquarters. The man on the other end of the line said:
"I want to report a double murder. If you go one mile east on Columbus Parkway to the public park you will find kids in a brown car. They were shot with a 9-millimeter Luger. I also killed those kids last year. Goodbye.
Darlene Ferrin knew Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, and many have speculated that she knew her killer. She lived less than two blocks from Jensen and attended Hogan High School with her.
While Mageau initially said he did not know the attacker, he later said the assailant's name was "Richard," and Ferrin's sister claimed one of Darlene's boyfriends was named Richard. There is a picture of Ferrin and an unknown man who resembles the composite sketch of the Zodiac.
In 1992, Mageau identified Arthur Leigh Allen in a photo line-up of 1968 driver's licenses, exclaiming, “"That's him! It's the man who shot me!"
Conflicting testimony meant police could never use this to charge him with the crime. Officer Donald Fouke, who along with officer Eric Zelms are believed to have seen the Zodiac in person at the site of the Stine murder discussed below, said in the 2007 documentary His Name Was Arthur Leigh Allen that Allen weighed about 100 pounds more than the man Fouke saw, and that Allen's face was "too round."
This documentary is available on YouTube.Nancy Slover, the police dispatcher who received the call from the Zodiac after the Mageau-Ferrin shooting, says in the documentary that Allen did not sound like the man she spoke to by telephone.
Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22, both students at Pacific Union College, were attacked by an assailant with a knife on September 27, 1969.
Sometime after 4:00 P.M. on September 27, Hartnell and Shepard were enjoying a picnic on a small island at Lake Berryessa in Napa County when Shepard noticed a man watching.
The man emerged from behind a tree wearing a black executioner's hood with a bib containing the Zodiac’s signature symbol as well as a pair of clip-on sunglasses.
The man brandished a gun, which Hartnell said he thought was a .45, and told them he had escaped from jail after killing a guard, and wanted their money as well as their car to escape to Mexico.
Before tying up Shepard, the Zodiac made Shepard bind Hartnell, and then tightened Hartnell's bonds because Shepard's knots were too loose. Hartnell still believed they were just being robbed when the Zodiac began to stab them. Hartnell suffered six wounds while Shepard was stabbed ten times.
The Zodiac hiked 500 yards to Knoxville Road, leaving several footprints behind, where he drew the Zodiac symbol on Hartnell's car door with a black felt-tip pen and left a message beneath it.
Hearing the victims' screams, a man and his son who were fishing nearby sought help from park rangers. Hartnell untied Shepard's ropes with his teeth, and she freed him in return. Two park rangers arrived, rendering aid until an ambulance arrived.
Shepard was alert enough to provide a detailed description of their attacker but lapsed into a coma en route to the hospital. She never regained consciousness and died two days later. Hartnell survived the attack.
Numerous witnesses emerged who had seen a suspicious man near Lake Berryessa. Three women noticed a strange man as they stopped on their way to Lake Berryessa. After they arrived at the lake, they noticed him again. A dentist and his son saw a heavy man looking at them from a distance before he hurried off.
The suspect was described as being roughly 6' tall and weighing 200 pounds, which matched the descriptions from Shepard and Hartnell, as well as the description from the survivor of the earlier attack, Mageau.
Since they had potentially seen the Zodiac without his disguise, the women worked with Napa Valley Register photographer Robert McKenzie to create a composite sketch for police.
Robert Graysmith, author of the 1986 book Zodiac, drew a sketch of the Zodiac's costume after Hartnell described it to him. Graysmith was a political cartoonist for the San Francisco Chronicle at the time.
The Zodiac drove from the crime scene to a car wash in downtown Napa, a distance of 27 miles. He used a payphone to call the Napa County Sheriff's Department at 7:40 P.M., and told the dispatcher he wished to "report a murder – no, a double murder" and confessed to the crime.
He did not hang up the phone, and a reporter for KVON radio, Pat Stanley, found the phone off the hook a few minutes later. The payphone was located just a few blocks from the sheriff's office. Detectives lifted a palm print from the phone but were never able to match it to a suspect.
Paul Lee Stine, 29, was shot and killed on October 11, 1969. Around 9:40 P.M., the Zodiac hailed a cab driven by Stine, who was working to pay for school as he studied for a doctorate in English.
The killer gave a destination in the wealthy Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, and when the taxi arrived at the destination, the killer asked to be driven another block to the next intersection.
When they arrived at the next intersection, at roughly 9:55 P.M., the Zodiac shot Stine in the head with a 9mm handgun. Three teenagers witnessed the crime from a house directly across the street.
The Zodiac's face was clearly visible by streetlight, and despite wiping down the vehicle, he left behind two partial fingerprints from his right hand that were described as “bloody.”
The teenagers watched as the Zodiac wiped down the vehicle and rifled through Stine's effects, steaing his wallet and car keys. They called the police, describing the suspect as “a husky white man in a dark or black jacket."
The dispatcher mistakenly alerted SFPD that the suspect was Black. A patrol car reportedly passed by a man who matched the correct description but did not stop to question him because he was not black as described by the dispatcher.
Just two minutes after the call to SFPD, two nearby patrol officers responded to the radio dispatch, where they encountered a white man in dark clothes walking north towards the Presidio army base.
The officers pulled up next to the man and asked if he had seen anything suspicious, and the man told them he had seen someone waving a gun around headed east. The Zodiac later claimed he was the one that spoke with the two officers.
When police arrived at the scene, Stine was declared dead. SFPD canvassed the area, including the Presidio, but determined the Zodiac had most likely fled the area.
Police asked the witnesses to help produce a composite sketch of the killer, resulting in the most widely known image of the Zodiac.
The Zodiac responded to this news with a letter in which he dismissed the composite sketch, chastised police for failing to capture him near the scene, and claimed to have coated his fingertips with glue in order to avoid leaving fingerprints. He also included a blood stained fragment of Stine’s shirt.
On October 22, 1969, a mental patient named Eric Weill called into KGO-TV's A.M. San Francisco attorney Melvin Belli into a conversation on air in which he claimed to be the Zodiac. Weill told Belli he would not reveal his identity for fear of being executed, but arranged a meet up with Belli.
He never came, and investigators concluded Weill was not the Zodiac. On December 20, 1969, exactly one year after the initial Lake Herman Road murders, the actual Zodiac mailed a letter to Melvin Belli with part of Paul Stine's shirt enclosed.
In the letter, he begged for Belli to, "Please help me I am drownding… I can not remain in control for much longer."
From 1969 to 1974, the Zodiac mailed at least 15 heavily misspelled letters and ciphers to law enforcement, media outlets, and others.
One offered a cryptogram that would allegedly reveal the killers name; most consider this unsolvable as its thirteen characters are too few to establish a pattern to break the code. Many have tried.
Some but not all of the letters began like this one does, "This is the Zodiac speaking," and some but not all were signed with the symbol resembling crosshairs seen on the Zodiac watch at the beginning of this article.
The confirmed letters were postmarked in San Francisco and Pleasanton, but many more unconfirmed Zodiac letters were sent to the media.
On August 1, 1973, a letter was mailed to the Albany Times Union in New York. The return address was the Zodiac’s symbol, and the writer promised to kill again on August 10.
A three-line code in the letter allegedly revealed the name and location of the victim, but no murder matched the details in the deciphered clue and a handwriting analysis was “not a definitive match” for the Zodiac.
FBI cryptanalysts deciphered the code as:
"[redacted by the FBI] Albany Medical Center. This is only the beginning."
In 2007, an American Greetings Christmas card was discovered in the Chronicle's photo files. Its postmark was from 1990 in Eureka, CA, and it was given to the Vallejo police.
A photocopy of two United States Post Office keys on a magnet keychain was enclosed. The handwriting on the envelope resembled that of Zodiac however a forensic examiner determined that it was inauthentic.
The 2023 Peacock docuseries, “Myth of the Zodiac Killer,” explored the idea that the Zodiac was not one killer but several, based on apparent inconsistencies between the description of Stine’s murderer and the man seen at Lake Berryessa.
In addition to the differences in the suspects description, and the differences in modus operandi between many of the crimes, Stine’s killing featured a shift in the forensic language that the Zodiac had used in his letter — in addition to sending physical evidence for the first time.
“The changing point [in the letters] is before and after the Stine murder. In the first four letters, what distinguishes the text is use of ‘the,’” Florian Cafiero says in the series. Ciafero is a computational linguistics expert who analyzed all of the Zodiac’s correspondence.
“Then the other set of text after the Paul Stine letters is the use of ‘like,’ ‘you,’ ‘rather,’ ‘her,’ and so on and so forth… that could indicate a change not [just] in style, but even in author.”
“…if you read all the police files, you see that there’s very little linking these crimes together. Different weapons, different M.O., different victim profile, even eyewitness statements, different locations — or a trophy being taken from one, but none of the others,” director Andrew Nock told the New York Post.
Nock also found it interesting that only after the Manson killings did the Zodiac’s behavior become more erratic — the murder at Lake Berryessa was the month after the Tate murder.
“You could argue that the biggest story in America at that time — certainly California — was the Sharon Tate murder. If you wanted to get on the page and knock off the Tate killings — they didn’t know it was Charles Manson yet — you had to commit a crime that was just as brutal and just shocking,” Nock said.
“So obviously, [the killer or killers] switch to daylight… that’s the way to get more attention. So maybe there was a team, or a couple of people who felt they wanted the publicity. They liked the press,” he said.
“It’s interesting that as the revelations about the Manson family were revealed, the more letters came into the San Francisco Chronicle.”
This brings us back to the present…
In early 2025, a woman named Galina Trefil came forward with a startling claim about her father, tying him to the Zodiac:
I’m the daughter of a serial killer and I need your help.
Dr. Jon/ John Charles Trefil, serial killer, my father, was in so many ways an extremely lonely person. He was shy, introverted, and almost completely (with only a handful of exceptions) unable to make or sustain friendships. He desperately craved long-term bonds though, and very much wanted a co-killer. Over the course of his 30 years of being a doctor, he was always on the look-out for one. As the former assistant chief psychiatrist of San Quentin and psychiatrist for the Lake County Jail, he was certainly in a position to find one. He sought out and treated thousands of murderers and rapists.
This story went viral through the true crime community as many felt that this might be the true identity of the Zodiac Killer given the strong resemblance between Trefil and the composite sketch.
To begin with, Jon Trefil is the brother of James Stanley Trefil, a famed physicist with a Ph.D. from Stanford University and the author of nearly fifty books largely focused on science for the general audience.
James Trefil was a Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia and, since 1988, Robinson Professor of Physics at George Mason University. He is also the recipient of the 2000 Andrew Gemant Award and the 2007 Science Writing Award.
Along with Dr. George Hodel and Arthur Leigh Allen, Jon Trefil may be the most likely of all the potential suspects to have the intellectual giftedness required to create complex cryptograms.
Of the three, only Allen is known to have had an interest in cryptology. Galina Trefil has also claimed that her father was friends with, treated as patients, and helped protect two other serial killers.
There were two other serial killers that he told me about, Michael Fries and Julia Strnad Houser, who were also never caught. Both were his patients. Both would have been caught, if not for his help.
Further in the post, Galina says that:
The officer acknowledged that Strnad was a known pedophile with a rap sheet. She had also been married to Dale Strnad, who had been killed in a shootout after murdering a CHP officer.
We could not verify these claims. Julia Strnad Houser does not come up in a search of the National Sex Offender Registry. Neither does Julia Strnad or Julia Houser or variations on these names such as Julie.
Galina Trefil also said that this patient threatened to kill her. In point of fact, she threatened to kill both Galina and her mother.
My sense of despair intensified when Julia Strnad accused my father of rape to the California Medical Board. That investigation lasted years, and I thought, “Aha! Someone will save me now!” My father had me copy Strnad’s patient files for the medical board, wherein I saw Strnad put in writing her intention to kill me. Surely the Medical Board would save a 16-year-old girl. But…they too did nothing for me…
A document that remains on the medical board website to this day, entitled “Exhibit A,” lists the accusation as having been levied by someone with the initials “J.G.”
It is like this is to anonymize Julia Strnad, but it is unclear if this is in fact the case. None the less the document refers to the same incident.
Dr. Trefil diagnosed “J.G.” with multiple personality disorder, a diagnosis made after he “failed to perform a psychiatric assessment” and “without a record of testing and evaluation” or “considering other diagnoses.”
The psychiatrist administered drugs for this patient including Tylenol #3 (with Codeine), flurazepam (a benzodiazepine similar to Xanax and Valium), prozac, and monthly injections of Haldol, an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia. He did this without maintaining records or conducting a physical examination and “without a medical indication therefor.”
“Exhibit A” validates the claim that this patient was introduced to his daughter and spent time in his home.
These documents also substantiate the claim that this patient threatened to kill Dr Trefil’s daughter (as well as his wife.)
Nothing in this document indicates that the patient ultimately killed herself and nothing in this document substantiates accusations of rape.
Galina also posted a copy of a letter, allegedly written by her mother, Kande Trefil to Lynne Dombrowski, then Deputy Attorney General for the State of California.
Galina Trefil says:
There is a body of water in Albion, California wherein my father claimed to have submerged the body parts of multiple young women in containers. They've been submerged for approximately thirty years at this point, so I honestly don't know what would still be left. Regardless, I know for a fact that, that spot has NOT been drained by the Mendocino County Sheriff's Department. "Water" cadaver dogs have NOT been brought to search it. Divers have NOT checked it out. These are cold, hard facts. The DA's Office knows about John's pond confessions--the very specific spots where he says the girls are.
She also shared this document, allegedly from one of her fathers diaries, titled Galina. It contains two separate dates and times, both of them long after any of this was alleged to have occurred.
The document is somewhat confusing; it’s unclear what it is, or why it was written, or what the lines have to do with each other. It almost seems as if they are written answers to verbal questions.
They appear to say:
Would I rape or murder you? I don't know.
You're sadistic based on 1975 Diary.
Mock my illnesses.
Don't touch me. Am I repulsive?
K. You've got surprises in store for me.
I'm interchangeable to you.
You don’t want to understand.
You don't care about me.
Nothing I won't deny.
She also shared several other documents as evidence of his crimes which contain very little that suggests anything like murder:
“This is a fascinating situation –
Is it my fault he died? I don’t know! I suspect it was because I started Thorazine a few weeks ago- sudden death etc! Am I at fault? Is he dead because of me? This is a very important issue and time for me!”
These seems like notes regarding a patient in a situation where he had a patient die and may feel somehow responsible, struggling with guilt common to physicians. Doctors are often party to the death persons in their care, which does not make them responsible for that death, per se.
It does not come across as a personal diary entry about something sinister; more like notes he’s taken about about patients, things he felt might be important for later analysis.
Further, it does not seem to suggest that he is accustomed to murdering people. This next page seems even more innocuous:
“17 1/4% Prime Rate
Farmers need loans in spring—
Forced to sell land if can’t get loan!
Fred Astaire (79) marries a 35-year-old!
As the recession gets worse & worse—
my position & money & a job get better & better.
Here I am — Wed. March 5, 1980
⸻
Thursday, March 6, 1980
Tegretol Research on my unit—
Yale Resident to be in charge.
Midgett died. In the 10 years I’ve been a physician, this is the first time one of my patients has died!
I feel Very Very Relaxed! Tired.
17 3/4% prime rate
Land - Gold/ Silver
Hammer - US/USSR
Reb. war in 60 years!“
Tegretol is an anticonvulsant medication used in the treatment of epilepsy and neuropathic pain that was researched in the 1970s and 1980s as a possible treatment modality for bipolar disorder. It’s unclear if this is related to the death of the patient “Midgett” but also does not seem like a murder confession.
Galina claims she found records of the victim through ancestry.com, and that "Midgett" is actually William Flint Midgett.
Flint died under her father's care at age 37 in 1979 or 1980; his death was ruled to be of natural causes, according to Galina, and it’s unclear why she believes this is some kind of murder confession.
This page is most interesting to us because it includes multiple ampersands, and the Zodiac was known to use ampersands extensively. Although I am not a professional forensic handwriting analyst, these appear quite dissimilar.
“Sumner buried a very controversial issue in a hot political campaign. This would be very embarrassing for Brown in his attempt for presidency in 1980-Brown is responsible for Sumner’s decisions! Belli to call Brown! One telephone call!”
This is an apparent reference to California Governor Jerry Brown, who ran unsuccessfully as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976 and 1980.
It’s unclear exactly who many of the other names are in reference to. Bruce Sumner was a California State Assemblyman in the 1960s…
Melvin Belli was a colorful Californian lawyer from the Bay Area known as "The King of Torts" and by insurance companies as "Melvin Bellicose."
He was a very high profile attorney. He represented Jack Ruby as well as the Rolling Stones, who he helped secure the Altamont Speedway for the notorious Altamont concert that many say “ended the 60s”
In 1975, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law something called the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) after insurance companies sharply raised malpractice premiums to encourage physicians to demand just such a restriction.
This was in response to successful lawsuits by people like Belli, who had championed evidentiary rules permitting Jurors to view things like exhibits of human skeletons that showed orthopedic damage to spines, knees, and hips. This was intended to help jurors and judges to visualize injuries, leading to larger damages in malpractice suits.
Belli also once sued former speaker Willie Brown for possession of Gov. Jerry Brown’s former apartment but, we digress; much is unclear about these alleged journal entries.
In this one he writes: “The only problem is SQ. What do I do then? Burn the $200 suit? Kill someone?”
And in another:
“I should get to know myself before I know a lady! Not before I have sodomized 100… girls, women, ladies, cunts, whores… [with arrows saying that these categories are] “all the same.”
He also asks why he can’t just accept his life with “happiness & joy” adding that he’s thrown away “so much happiness and success,” presumably with the alcoholism he mentions in the paragraph prior.
In others, he writes of his “rage",” and his need to “transcend” this rage, which he likens to an “animal nature,” saying that his “animal nature is bad too.”
Below, you can compare his chicken scratch doctors handwriting in poem form side by side with the clear and easily legible script of the Zodiac killer for yourself. The poem reads:
“An aging emaciated hawk
Circling the sky
Seeking an elusive prey
not waiting to die
ever persistent”
She also alleges that she found old bottles of strychnine in her fathers medical bag. Strychnine, which we now think of as poison, was once a common stimulant in western medicine.
His daughter tied this to “one murder in California” she knows of where strychnine was the murder weapon and which she alleges her father has claimed responsibility for.
One of the Santa Rosa hitchhikers whose murder was never solved, Carolyn Davis, died from strychnine poisoning after being kidnapped when she was 15. She died in 1973 just after Trefil was issued his a medical license.
This accusation ignores that strychnine was very common at the time. The mother of another victim, Cheri Jo Bates, also died of strychnine, in what is widely believed to be a suicide. Irene Bates was said to have consumed the substance via gopher poison.
However, some have noted that strychnine is considered a very painful way to go and thus an unlikely manner of suicide. Death by strychnine typically occurs due to respiratory failure following repeated, prolonged seizures.
The entire process, from onset of symptoms (which can be rapid, within minutes to an hour) to death, is marked by extreme physical pain and psychological terror.
Strychnine and morphine was also stolen from a nearby veterinary hospital the day before Irene Bates was found to have died of strychnine poisoning.
Police believe that Irene Bates died a few days before she was found, meaning she would have been dead at the time of the theft from the veterinary hospital.
Also, a doctor would not need to break into a veterinary hospital to get strychnine. Other posts from Trefil that at first seem suggestive, on closer scrutiny, seem exculpatory.
Although it contains apparent threats, he also writes that "he’s “kept this locked inside me for 36 years” implying that his “rage” has never led him to murder anyone.
Other posts are less exculpatory, but still don’t suggest a serial killer who leaves bodies lying around for the police to find.
She also shared an image of a knife she says that he used as a paperweight. Many believe they see bloodstains; we can not say that we share their confidence.
Galina Trefil’s mother, Kande Trefil, is a retired teacher who taught at Fort Bragg's Dana Gray Elementary School and a local high school.
Galina claims that Kande has a collection of skulls that the DA’s office is doing nothing about, which, “Worst case scenario, these are murder victims. Best case scenario, they are Indigenous remains that have been disrespected to an unfathomable degree.”
Kande is still married to Jon Trefil and disputes the allegations made by her daughter against her husband.
In a rebuttal to Galina’s claims that her father had already begin killing when he was med school in the late 50s, Kande writes in a series of comments:
Galina wasn't there; I WAS. Jon had no transportation. Besides...he was in ILLINOIS! So was I. He was so close to me that he'd tell me which professors he liked and then when possible, I'd attend those classes too. However I was putting his way through school as a nurse's aide (now called a CNA). He and I had a lot in common...so I imagine some of you thought I was a serial killer too, right? Tell it to my students. See if you can get them to believe you... I don't know what she's getting out of this, but I'm pretty sick of it. It was so silly I didn't think ANYONE would believe it…
He's in a dorm at University of Illinois. Try to make it more real when you give such ridiculous reasons. That was about the time I met him and he was ALWAYS up to some kind of mischief. So was I. If he was killing people I think he would have been caught. Please don't be silly.
Based on other posts made by Kande Trefil, there appears to be a long history of trauma, dysfunction, and psychiatric issues that run through the history of this family…
The family also appears to be deeply interwoven with the culture of Berkley, where Kande says she graduated from college, and the hippy movement. It is unknown how this contributed to the overall Trefil family culture, and how that may have impacted Galina’s mental health:
This is what "Country Joe" looked like when I jammed with him in Berkeley. Trying to remember some of the bands I worked with by checking out lists on the 'net, got me the Steve Miller Blues Band, which I liked the least of all the gigs I had at the Fillmore…
In the meantime, I met the musicians who played with Janis Joplin; I was in a dumpster I'd maxed out and one of them grabbed one of my piles of goodies. I grinned and shook my finger at him: "No, No, ya don't. That pile's mine." He was very co-operative. San Francisco occupies a small area; it was kind of like a cow town in the 60's, and we all got along.
Kande Trefil herself was also once arrested as a result of some kind of domestic dispute with her husband. She posted her own mugshot on Facebook, along with a vague story that doesn’t explain anything about why she was taken in by police.
Kande writes that they got together after:
One day, I picked up my mail from the Ranger Station and there was a letter from Jon, and out dropped 3 pictures of him in a karate suit. He was in California and had bought land, and would I like to see it? OF COURSE!
While the name Jon Trefil does not appear to have any connection to any murders, the names Kande and Galina Trefil do come up in another, altogether different story about a murder that has nothing to do with the Zodiac Killer.
According to archived articles in the Anderson Valley Advertiser from December 2005, Galina Trefil married a Mendocino prisoner accused of being involved in the murder of 39-year-old ex-Marine Donald Perez.
Three young Fort Bragg men, August Stuckey, 18, Aaron Channel, 20, and Tai Abreu, 19, were arrested three weeks later when August Stuckey led police to Perez's remains after telling the police that he, Channel and Abreu caused Perez to be where he was — duct-taped dead…
Abreu told [Detective] Bailey, "Aaron said he's the one who stuck him. Said he got him in the throat, pushed it in straight back like that. He was going for a direct no-questions-asked-the-guy-is-dead. August [Stuckey wore a K-bar knife on his belt] planned on killing the guy from the start because he didn't want any witnesses."
"…The only one other fact is that I went out with Hippy [Aaron Channel] to bury the stuff. I drove the car out there. I'm sorry I wasn't straight about that, but that's one thing that I didn't want you to know…"
Abreu would always insist that he'd been up on the road as lookout man when Stuckey and Channel killed Perez down in the bushes. They did the murder part of the crime, not him.
…
Perez's perfectly maintained blue Dodge Ram, its doors unlocked, the key in the ignition, was found… three miles east of his corpse and the bridge.
A young man from Albion named James Montgomery had first alerted the Fort Bragg police to the seemingly abandoned Dodge Ram… James Montgomery, as it turned out, is the half-brother of Galina Trefil, the young woman who would marry Aaron Channel at the Mendocino County Jail.
Adding yet more layers to this saga, the Advertiser is owned by a man named Bruce Anderson. In addition to owning the Advertiser, Anderson served in the Marines, Peace Corps, and ran a home for juvenile delinquents.
Anderson was also a foster parent to serial killer David Mason, who killed at least four people before he was executed in San Quentin State Prison's gas chamber in 1993…
and Randy Alana, a sex offender and convicted murderer who was convicted of killing Sandra Coke, an Oakland federal defense investigator he dated and had a child with. Coke also suspected Alana in the disappearance of her beloved dog.
Alana was also tried twice in the murder of Marilyn Pigott, 23, who was beaten to death with a hammer in 1983. The first trial ended in a hung jury, and a second panel acquitted him.
Anderson wrote in the Advertiser that,
BEFORE YOU GO all judgmental on me with accusations that I helped create the spectacular adult psycho-sexual maladjustment of the two lads, let me say that when I knew them as 14-year-olds it was well after they’d been deformed by their formative years. The short of it is with these guys, and millions of others on the receiving end of the American class system, intervention comes way too late — take a kid out of a pathological home when he’s 12, and he’s already damaged beyond repair, already has learned to get what he wants by force and violence. He’s unlikely to change until he gets too old and tired for crime. Of course just as many damaged children who spend their youths in bad homes and bouncing around the foster care system don’t grow up to become killers, but none of them, psycho or not, have an easy time of it, and the mass psycho-social context we have going in this country cranks them out by the millions.
ALANA spent about a year in Boonville. As a kid, he had a pronounced aptitude for, and interest in, automobile mechanics. If he’d been left in Boonville instead of “reunified” with his family, a bedraggled punching bag of an immigrant German mother and an alcoholic black father, the boy might have regained some of the fellow feeling that had been beaten out of him as a much younger child. Ditto for David Mason.
Kande Trefil apparently published a letter to the editor in defense of her son-in-law in which she alleged that the murder was just because the murder victim was a child molester who had been dating then 18-year-old August Stuckey when he was still 17.
This letter from a person calling himself Juan Garcia of San Francisco was a response to Kande Trefil, Aaron Channel's mother-in-law:
"The naive, mawkish article by Kande Trefil in defense of Aaron Channel and Tai Abreu reflects the deep denial of the local hippie counter-cultural community regarding the murder of Donald Perez. How could the sons of such an enlightened culture commit such a heinous crime? Impossible! See, Aaron was a Buddhist and such a sweet guy. Uh-huh, and The Sniper was a Muslim and an upstanding family man, and of course those two kids at Columbine came from such nice families. Give us a break! Actually, these guys reflect the self-indulgent, narcissistic hippie-dippie culture they grew up in the 'Albion Nation' of New Age charlatans, welfare deadbeats, dope dealers, scam artists, and now robbers and murderers. Of course that milieu is definitely minor league compared with the environment of the Aryan Nation, Nazi Low Riders and bad boys that these guys are gonna be functioning in for some time at Pelican Bay or Corcoran or wherever. It's time they grew up and took it like men if they expect to survive because, whine as much as you will, they are not getting out for a long, long time... Yeah, you people go ahead and blame it all on August Stuckey, the youngest, physically smallest and most vulnerable of the three, and the only one who can plausibly be seen as a victim in this matter mitigating his culpability, having suffered sexual abuse at the hands of the deceased, an older man twice his age."
They now allege that the police, for some reason, destroyed evidence of child pornography on Perez’s computer, a claim which appears to have no evidence to support it.
Aaron Channel pled guilty and received a sentence of 19 years, 7 months; Stuckey and Abreu's plea bargains got them 15 years to life for the murder of Perez. Channel, now out of prison and apparently living with Galina Trefil in Nevada, runs a YouTube channel, California Convictions.
He was interviewed by the channel 30toLife in 2022, claiming that the man he was convicted of killing was a child pornographer. Galina left a comment on this video in which she says she helps Aaron with his true crime oriented YouTube channel:
His attorney from the time disputes this claim, and disputes allegations from Galina that she did not provide Aaron Channel with high quality representation.
"He may have been some kind of sexual deviant," Attorney Jan Cole-Wilson told the Advertiser, "and he was homosexual, but all that is extraneous to what happened to him. There were letters to the editor that perhaps it was a hate crime because of the porno found on Perez's computer. We all agreed that he may have been a vile person, but you can't kill him. And there was no evidence that in any of their conversations or in any of their statements that Perez was killed because he had done something really awful to one of them at that time. I know that Stuckey, it appears, had had other contacts with him that may have been sexual in nature. It's true that Stuckey was a minor then, but just barely, maybe 17, but that hardly makes Perez a child molester."
Cole-Wilson was not a public defender at the time; she was in private practice, where she spent 27 years in criminal defense before retiring to become a public defender.
She was appointed to represent Channel due to some kind of conflict of interest in the public defenders office. According to her LinkedIn, she is currently the co-chair of the Mendocino County Women's Bar Association, and the past co-president of the Mendocino County Criminal Defense Bar.
We reached out to Jan Cole-Wilson but we were told that she is on medical leave from the public defenders office. In the meantime, the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) issued a press release on March 17, 2025, confirming that they had been investigating Galina’s allegations about her father since 2023.
Based on emails she posted, she has been contacting law enforcement regarding this since at least 2017, including the FBI and local law enforcement officers in Virginia and California. Reportedly, over 40 law enforcement organizations have dismissed her claims.
According to Captain Quincy Cromer, MCSO has investigated reports from Trefil’s daughter, searched properties associated with Trefil that were alleged to be burial sites, combed through materials from Jon Trefil like recordings and journal entries, and conducted DNA tests. All rule Trefil out as a suspect.
“While we take these allegations very seriously, it’s important to clarify that, after extensive investigation, there is no conclusive evidence to substantiate the claims that Jon Trefil is responsible for a series of unsolved murders,” Captain Cromer said.
“DNA analysis of evidence related to an unsolved 1970s murder in Mendocino County did not match Trefil’s DNA. Additionally, extensive searches of properties and cabins linked to him, including those in Comptche, yielded no evidence of human remains or murder sites.”
The Sheriff’s Office also said that while they had examined the diaries and journals that Galina Trefil claims contain confessions, investigators did not find any admissions of murder.
What was she doing before all this? Writing historical fiction. She has since downplayed this in light of criticism that she’s received regarding the veracity her claims.
