Ko-Ko: Hate you? Oh, Katisha! is there not beauty even in bloodthirstiness?

Line delivered by Ko-Ko, the "Lord High Executioner" from Act II of The Mikado

Authors Note: Many of the Zodiac killer's letters contained references to the Gilbert and Sullivan light opera, The Mikado.  What follows is a brief discussion of that opera, along with my own musings as to what we may possibly infer from Zodiac's own comments about it.

(The sound file you hear playing when this page loads is a snippet from I've Got a Little List recorded during a theater performance of The Mikado).

The Mikado: A Brief History and Discussion

Often referred to as Gilbert and Sullivan's "Japanese" opera, The Mikado, Or, The Town of Titipu, first opened on March 14, 1885 at London's Savoy opera house and ran for nearly two years for a total of 672 performances. (To give you some perspective on the age of this play, Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn was published in 1886, the year after the first performances of The Mikado). The play went on to successful performances in both Germany and the United States, with the first American run beginning on July 6, 1885. It was/is one of the most well received and longest running operas of all time. (The Mikado was also the subject of a 1939 film of the same name, directed by Victor Schertzinger).

The Mikado is essentially a comic opera in two acts, set in a small Japanese village. The Victor Book of the Opera describes The Mikado as an opera that is "a masterpiece of comic writing [in] a refreshingly colorful background [where] the characters are by no means Japanese, but [rather] ourselves in a very thin disguise."

Synopsis of The Mikado: The story of The Mikado revolves around a young fellow named Nanki-Poo who has banished himself from the little town of Titipu. Nanki-Poo, it seems, has fallen in love with a beautiful young lady called Yum-Yum. Unfortunately, Yum-Yum is engaged to be married to her guardian, the tailor Ko-Ko. However, when Nanki-Poo hears that Ko-Ko has been condemned to death for the capital crime of flirting, he hastily returns to Titipu, only to learn that Ko-Ko has not only been granted a reprieve, but has been promoted to the post of Lord High Executioner.

Apparently, those in power, wishing to slow down the rash of executions, reason that since Ko-Ko was next in line for execution, he can't cut off anyone else's head until he cuts off his own! The Mikado, however, soon takes notice of the lack of executions in Titipu and decrees that if no executions take place within the time of one month, the city shall be reduced to the status of a village. Ko-Ko, desperate to avoid cutting off his own head, vows to find a substitute, and as luck would have it, just at that moment, Nanki-Poo wanders onto the stage with a rope determined to take his own life rather than live life without his beloved Yum-Yum. Ko-Ko immediately seizes on this opportunity and offers the young lad one month of luxurious living at the end of which he would be relatively painlessly decapitated. Nanki-Poo agrees on the condition that he be married to Yum-Yum right away so that he can spend his last month in wedded bliss. But just as the wedding celebration begins, a law is discovered, much to Yum-Yum's distress, which decrees that a condemned man's wife must be buried alive with his corpse!

One of the central figures (and the one exclusively quoted from by Zodiac and a character with whom he seems to have quite strongly identified) is "Ko-Ko," also known as the "Lord High Executioner." A small sample of the dialogue from the first act gives us some idea why Zodiac might have wanted to parallel himself with Ko-Ko:

Nank: Ko-Ko, the cheap tailor, Lord High Executioner of Titipu! Why, that's the highest rank a citizen can attain!

Pooh: It is. Our logical Mikado, seeing no moral difference between the dignified judge who condemns a criminal to die, and the industrious mechanic who carries out the sentence, has rolled the two offices into one, and every judge is now his own executioner.

In the play, Ko-Ko was once condemned to death for "flirting," but was instead reprieved at the last moment and raised to the exalted rank of Lord High Executioner:

And so we straight let out on bail, a convict from the county jail, whose head was next, on some pretext, condemned to be mown off, and made him Headsman, for we said, who's next to be decapitated, cannot cut off another's head until he's cut his own off.

Anyone who is a film or theater lover has found themselves identifying with a figure in a favorite movie or play. Usually this is because of some quality that the character possesses which we believe is present in ourselves. Zodiac's fascination with characters from various films is well documented. He seems to have drawn inspiration from The Most Dangerous Game, The Yellow Submarine and even offered up his own private critique of the movies The Badlands and The Exorcist. In light of the quote from The Mikado above, can we then infer that Zodiac's strong identification with the Ko-Ko character may have resulted from a similar sort of persecution or abuse in his own life?

And because of this, did he then come to see himself, like Ko-Ko, as a combination of judge, jury, and executioner? (The noted paradox in the quote is, of course, the fact that the Lord High Executioner, because of his "reprieve" for having committed the same "crime," cannot kill anyone unless he is willing to kill himself. Could this indicate, as some researchers suspect, that Zodiac's murders may have been a prelude to his own suicide?)

After Ko-Ko is introduced in the first act, he begins to sing a song titled, I've Got a Little List, which contains the "I've got a little list" and other lines quoted by the Zodiac killer in his July 24, 1970 and July 26, 1970 letters.  (See full text of song and Zodiac letter below). After reading those lyrics, the reason why they appealed to someone like Zodiac becomes quite obvious: the song is essentially about Ko-Ko's "hit-list" of "society offenders' who "might well be underground," meaning those who are most surely "guilty" of some offense he deems objectionable enough to be worthy of death, but perhaps not overtly so. (In fact, the light-hearted sense one gets from the song is that the "hit-list" is comprised of those whom the "Lord High Executioner" merely finds to be annoying; if we accept the premise that Zodiac was directly influenced by those lyrics -- and all indications appear to strongly suggest that he was -- it serves as a rather chilling example of Zodiac's cold-blooded and perhaps psychopathic nature).

The song also suggests the many possibilities for Ko-Ko's own professional employment as the Lord High Executioner, a job that requires him to behead those that society has deemed undesirable for being flirtatious. Perhaps in light of this we should consider the manner in which suspected Zodiac victim Cheri Jo Bates was murdered, i.e., that her head was nearly severed from her body by her assailant: a line in the second act, spoken by Ko-Ko states that, ". . . flirting is the only crime punishable with decapitation."

In the First Act, a letter is sent to Ko-Ko from the Mikado threatening to abolish the office of Lord High Executioner unless somebody is executed within a month because of the fact that no one has been beheaded in Titipu for a year.

In the Second Act, a song is sung about the Mikado (the Emperor of Japan) that contains the line, "A more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist," which contains the refrain: My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime.

Sublimity is the very essence of what Zodiac's enigmatic messages represented and something that is definitely conveyed in the more abstract hints that he offered (such as the radian clue). There is a very delicate and lighthearted sexual undertone regarding flirtation in The Mikado, an activity which was therein deemed by the Emperor to be punishable by death. Now consider that most of Zodiac's known victims were young "courting" couples who were most probably actively engaged in "flirting." Because Zodiac identified with the Lord High Executioner, the "punishment" he chose to fit his own victim's "crimes" of flirtation -- whether real or perceived by him as such -- was the same as Ko-Ko's: death. Using the psychopathic reasoning of a person such as Zodiac, the line from The Mikado, "My object all sublime, I shall achieve in time, to let the punishment fit the crime" could thus be restated as "Because I believe that my goal is of a divine nature, I shall through my own methods punish those for behavior that I deem to be unacceptable." (Students of some of the more esoteric theories within the Zodiac case will also note an occurrence of the "time" motif in the "I shall achieve in time" line).

Another example of Zodiac's paraphrasing from The Mikado can be found in the second act. There a reference is made to victims being kept in dungeons, "boiling people in oil" and other types of drawn-out tortures. Zodiac's own detailed description of the "delicious pain" he would inflict on "his slaves" very closely paraphrases the tone and dicta of the second act and he may have been so inspired by that portion of the play.

Zodiac also quoted from another song sung by Ko-Ko, Willow, tit-willow, described in review as "the pathetic story of a bird's unhappy affection," sung by Ko-Ko in order to threaten his lover that he might die of a broken heart if she does not respond to his overture of love to her. A line of dialogue that immediately follows this song is spoken by Ko-Ko and states that he "finds beauty in bloodthirstiness."

In light of Zodiac's known fascination with bombs and his threats to detonate a bomb on a school bus and "have my blast," consider the following: The Mikado characters Katisha and Ko-Ko sing a duet that includes the line, "There is beauty in the bellow of the blast."

Many researchers have long suspected that Zodiac might have been a sailor or may have even been in the Navy at some time. Throughout the first act of The Mikado, there are numerous references made to the life of sailors and the sea.

As noted in the main article, this information really does nothing more than provide a peek into the possible pop psychology rationale concerning Zodiac and what may have made him tick. And such speculation also gives us a few possible clues as to what his "motivation" might have been as far as the references to The Mikado in his letters are concerned. Most certainly it adds plenty to the mysterious package of strange clues from the weirdest murder mystery there ever was.