by Mark Hewitt
Initially, there was nothing to tie Stine’s murder to the series of assaults on couples in the North Bay. It had little in common with the Zodiac attacks of the previous 10 months which took place in desolate rural areas, targeted couples as victims, occurred at romantic settings, and included no taxis. The attack on Stine was characterized in initial police reports and in the newspapers as a common robbery that included a homicide. The items missing from the cab seemed only to confirm that it was an armed robbery gone awry: Stine’s wallet and the cab’s keys provided the perpetrator a motive of financial gain and a disabled car that could not be used in a pursuit. The police initially did not notice, or discounted, the missing tail from Stine’s black and white striped shirt.
It wasn’t a Zodiac attack until the Zodiac declared it a Zodiac attack.
The Stine letter
A letter arrived at the formidable gray building that housed the offices of The San Francisco Chronicle on Monday, the first day of mail delivery following Stine’s murder. Carol Fisher Cots opened it. The “Stine” letter began with the familiar, “This is the Zodiac speaking,” and included a small swatch of Stine’s bloody shirttail. Instantly, the routine attack took on an important historical and criminological context. The murder of Paul Stine was not a botched robbery or some unfortunately accident. It was another in a series of ruthlessly calculated attacks. It was not a surprise that officers struggled to recall exactly what had happened, provided different versions of events, and minimized (or exaggerated) their involvement in the case. Until the arrival of the new Zodiac note, the investigation was nothing out of the ordinary.
The now high profile murder case soon elicited strange reactions from its participants, as these types of cases invariably do. The limelight can urge officers to claim to have done things they know they should have carried out, or deny doing things they know they should not have done. The glare of publicity affects the general public too, causing some to shy away from its light, others to exaggerate their own importance, and still others to seize its promises of fame and fortune with bald-face lies.
Because the killing of Paul Stine occurred on a Saturday night, and the Stine letter arrived with the next delivery of The San Francisco Chronicle’s mail on Monday, it is not clear when precisely the missive was posted. It could have been placed in a mailbox soon after the attack; it could have been mailed early Monday morning. It was postmarked in San Francisco on October 13, the day it was both picked up and delivered.
The envelope containing the Stine letter was addressed in a familiar, slanted scrawl, “S.F. Chronicle/ San Fran. / Calif. / Please Rush to Editor.” It was posted with two Roosevelt stamps affixed sideways to make the former president appear to look downward. In the space usually reserved for a return address, its creator had drawn a small crosshair symbol, or gunsight.
Upon its receipt of the letter, The Chronicle immediately contacted the SFPD. Toschi and Armstrong were initially unaware of the missing piece of Stine’s shirt. The murder was being investigated as a robbery gone wrong so the cabby’s clothing had been packed away in the morgue, the missing shirttail not deemed important enough to notify the police. Eventually, Criminologist John Williams matched the swatch of cloth that arrived with the letter to part of the missing section of the victim’s shirt. He noted that there remained additional outstanding material from the garment, removed from the scene but not included in the Stine letter.
Investigators carefully examined the new note, which comprised three paragraphs on a single page. Each paragraph was completely unrelated to the other two. What the author had written was essentially three ideas, each expanded to several sentences. There was no transition material to join the disparate thoughts, and no suggestion that the three themes had anything to do with one another.
Surprisingly, none of these paragraphs was indented; the Zodiac would never indent any of his paragraphs, though he was perfectly capable of indenting bullet points, which he did in several other letters. If any of his communications cried out for indentation, it was this one. The paragraphs were differentiated by a return of the author’s pen to the left margin whether or not there was room for additional words on the previous line. The killer was apparently aware that he had three ideas to relate, and was cognizant of the necessary breaks between them, but would indent none of them.
The first paragraph answered the question, who am I? It presented the second use of the iconic phrase “This is the Zodiac speaking.” And the last time that the words would be followed with a period (or any punctuation). From then on, all future uses of the phrase would appear as a title, absent any punctuation mark at the end. The killer then elaborated on his identity by claiming responsibility for the death of not only the cab driver, Paul Stine, but also the brutal murders that had occurred in the “north bay area,” apparently those in Solano County—the two on Lake Herman Road and the one in the Blue Rock Springs Park—and Cecelia Shepard on the shore of Lake Berryessa.
To ensure that there was no doubt to his claims, he had deposited in the envelope a bloodied piece of Stine’s black and white striped shirt, which he had collected at the scene of the crime, macabre proof by anybody’s standards. (Because black dye is frequently manufactured from extremely dark blue pigment, The Chronicle may be forgiven for its report that the shirt was “blue and white.” Later reports changed the description to “gray and white.” The Napa Register described the garment as “gray and white.”) The shirt piece had been ripped from its owner and not cut with a blade.
The second paragraph explained how the killer could have been captured after the attack, had the investigation followed a different course of action. The writer counseled that the police should have waited for him to emerge from his hiding place. He apparently wanted the police to feel great shame at their incompetence, and by contrast, great admiration for the murderer who successfully eluded capture while remaining in the area during the massive search. Additionally, he may have been overcompensating, lying to cover up for his cowardice in having left the area just as law enforcement was assembling.
The third and final paragraph was a clear threat. Obviously intending to send the city into paroxysms of dread, he outlined his plan to kill “school children.”
The Stine letter in its entirety reads as follows:
This is the Zodiac speaking.
I am the murderer of the
taxi driver over by
Washington St & Maple St last
night, to prove this here is
a blood stained piece of his
shirt. I am the same man
who did in the people in the
north bay area.
The S.F. Police could have caught
me last night if they had
searched the park properly
instead of holding road races
with their motorcicles seeing who
could make the most noise. The
car drivers should have just
parked their cars & sat there
quietly waiting for me to come
out of cover
School children make nice targ-
ets, I think I shall wipe out
a school bus some morning. Just
shoot out the frunt tire & then
pick off the kiddies as they come
bouncing out.
[crosshairs symbol]
The connecting link between the three paragraphs of the Stine letter, if there was one, was the word, “I/me.” The mailing reinforced the idea that the Zodiac enjoyed talking about himself, bragging about his exploits, and offering up threats of what he could and would do. The murderer of couples was now responsible for the killing of a cab driver, and was threatening to become a mass murderer of Bay Area children.
The effect was devastating. Fear swept the area, as if a dark, heavy pall had descended.
Initially, due to the incendiary nature of the words, the final portion of the letter was withheld from the public. The Chronicle agreed not to
immediately print the last paragraph at the request of the SFPD. No one wanted to be responsible for the panic that was sure to result. At the same time, no one wanted to withhold crucial, potentially life-and-death, information from those who needed it. The Chronicle’s story about the letter was published on Wednesday, October 15. The threat was made public two days later in newspapers, on the radio, on television, and across the wire services.
When the final paragraph did get released, the law enforcement agencies implemented plans to thwart the threatened attack. Because the Zodiac had perpetrated death in Solano County, Vallejo, Napa County, and now San Francisco, the entire Bay Area had to heed the killer’s warning. Each catchment area dealt with the threat in its own way. Some used officers in unmarked police vehicles to keep an eye on the children, other regions assigned police cruisers to tail buses during the morning and afternoon commutes, still others sent aircraft aloft to scan for a sharpshooter. Some communities provided armed guards to ride shotgun or rerouted their buses. Instructions were given to bus drivers in the event the shooting occurred: 1) Do not stop. 2) Tell the children to duck down. 3) Drive fast to flee the area. And 4) Honk the bus’s horn to attract attention.
The San Francisco Chronicle, in an article by Paul Avery, noted that in the Napa Valley Unified School District alone, there were 10,000 students who rode the bus. Transporting that number required 64 buses logging an estimated 4,000 miles daily for its 24 elementary schools, 3 junior highs, and 1 senior high school. No one was taking the threat lightly. Buses even had to be checked for a bomb before each run because Santa Rosa received a bomb threat by telephone that suggested one might be found. Several Cessnas from the Napa Aero Club were patrolling the hundreds of miles of roadway.
Other security measures were withheld from the public. They were being kept top secret.
Pierre Bidou, a BPD detective who responded to the December 20, 1968 attack at Lake Herman Road, noted that great fear in Benicia persisted for months, escalating after each new attack. A 10:00 p.m. curfew had already been instituted for the residents. The entire Bay Area was on edge, especially in places near previous attacks.
Thankfully, the killer never followed through on his threat, and in fact rescinded it in a future letter.
On Tuesday, October 14, at 9:00 p.m., Toschi and Armstrong traveled to Napa and met with Narlow and Townsend at the NCSO. This was followed by a more substantial gathering among area investigators on October 20 at the SFPD offices.
The incomparable Walter Cronkite, in his October 22 broadcast of the CBS evening news, introduced to the American people the pariah of the San Francisco Bay Area. The killer had now achieved a nation-wide audience.
The Yellow Cab Company, on January 27 of the following year, offered $1,000 in reward money for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the persons responsible for the deaths of cab drivers Charles Jarman and Paul Stine. If the Zodiac was keeping track, he would have realized that this raised the total amount of money that had been placed on his head, first started by the now-expired Jensen-Faraday Reward Fund, to $2000.
***
When Special Agent Mel Nicolai of the California’s Department of Justice summarized the Zodiac case, adding the murder of Stine to the other attacks, he listed the following items of evidence that had been collected in the investigation of Stine’s murder:
2 portions of victim’s shirt (white with black stripe), which had been sent in two subsequent mailings by the killer.
Hand printing from the killer’s various letters.
Latent prints.
9mm bullet and casing (the spent casing found on the passenger side of the cab had been fired from a weapon different than the one used in the crime at Blue Rock Springs Park).
Black leather men’s size 7 gloves.
Missing from the scene were Stine’s cab keys and black leather wallet, as well as the tail to his black and white striped shirt. Investigators did recover seven keys and one ring. The cab also contained one checkbook, some miscellaneous papers, an auto registration, and a motorcycle registration.
SFPD homicide case #696314 (including robbery cases #692895 and #687697) was heralded on wanted posters, listing Toschi and Armstrong as the investigating officers along with their business address and phone number: 850 Bryant Street, San Francisco, 94103, (415) 553-1145. Captain Marvin Lee of the SFPD, soon after the attack, explained that the crosshair symbol meant “the center of the universe” or “the sign of the Zodiac.” He called the killer a psychopath and “a very, very seriously mentally deranged” person who was nevertheless legally sane. He was, according to Lee, a “very, very sick, and very dangerous person,” one who attacked with “no remorse” and “no justification.” Lee added that he was an “Absolutely ruthless, completely merciless killer,” noting, “he thinks killing is just killing,” He declared that the killer, due to his callous nature, was going to be “a serious problem for us.”
Problem or not, the FBI’s expansive resources were quickly ushered into a seat at the investigation. In an airtel dated October 17, the San Francisco Field Office sent the Washington, D.C. Bureau two copies of the Stine letter for comparison to material previously sent, observing that Napa, Vallejo, and San Francisco were all investigating the series of murders. Based on the bayonet-like knife used at Berryessa, military boot impressions deposited at the scene, and 9mm bullets in two attacks, it speculated that the perpetrator may have had a military background. It also sent copies of the Stine letter with its envelope, and copies of the wanted poster, to the field office in Sacramento. It further promised to remain in close contact with the SFPD and to furnish any laboratory and latent fingerprint examinations requested.
Washington, D.C. replied to the San Francisco Field Office in a letter arriving a week later from the FBI Crime Laboratory. The lab noted that most of the letters in its possession were copies. Since some were created after the letters had already been treated for fingerprints—and even clean copies are difficult to study—handwriting comparisons were not possible. However, the specimens it compared were probably the work of one person, it concluded.
On October 22, the San Francisco FBI Field Office requested via airtel that its headquarters check the fingerprints on file (either from a fingerprint card or a photograph) against a suspect that the SFPD had developed. The reply came the next day: no records of the suspect were located for comparison. Some of the prints lifted from the various crime scenes included palm prints, or latent impressions that appeared to be palm prints, in addition to several impressions from fingertips and lower joints. As fingerprint cards did not normally contain these details, the FBI was unable to make use of these impressions when it compared collected prints to known prints in its files.
Over the ensuing months, a flurry of communications crisscrossed the country between the FBI in Washington, D.C. and its field office in San Francisco. Both offices made use of new technologies, including radiograms, quickly notifying each other of new developments. Since the information was sometimes garbled using the then advanced communication tools, and instant confirmation was not yet available, hard copies of each request and each report had to be subsequently mailed. Again and again, San Francisco sent Washington sheets containing the latest slate of suspects. The FBI located suspect fingerprints from their files when it could, and compared them to the latent prints collected from the Zodiac crime scenes. Again and again, the FBI responded: no fingerprint match and no palm prints of suspect available for comparison.
In an intra-departmental memorandum sent on October 19 from the San Francisco FBI Field Office to the VPD, the fingerprints on file in San Francisco were carefully described:
“All of the latent prints in our case were obtained from a
taxi cab. The latent prints that show traces of blood are
believed to be prints of the suspect. The latent prints from
right front door handle are also believed to be prints of the
suspect. These prints are circled
with a red pen.
The other latent prints many of which are very good prints,
may or may not be prints of the suspect in this case;”
Also on October 19, The San Francisco Examiner ran a story on its front page that was directed squarely at the Zodiac. It invited the elusive murderer to turn himself in, promising him medical and legal assistance, noting, “You face life as a hunted, tormented animal…” The paper vowed not to trace any call made by the killer so that he could have an unfettered opportunity to tell his mysterious story. It explained, “We offer you no protection, and no sympathy,” and inquired, “How has life wronged you?” The killer never again wrote to The Examiner, which led to speculation that he was deeply insulted by this paper’s attitude toward him and the tone of its approach.
On the next day, October 20, the Attorney General of California, Thomas C. Lynch, called a meeting in San Francisco for 27 detectives from seven agencies to share information about the serial killer operating within each of the jurisdictions represented. The three-hour conference that made ample use of chalkboards was conducted at the Hall of Justice. As the Zodiac seminar proceeded through each of the attacks—a couple shot to death in Solano County, a woman killed in the outskirts of Vallejo, a woman fatally stabbed at the shore of Lake Berryessa in Napa County, and a San Francisco cab driver brutally executed with a bullet through the back of his head—each detective, department, and jurisdiction shared with all the others represented, hoping that the synergy would move the case forward.
Lynch himself was unavailable to attend the event as he was in Colorado at a meeting of Attorneys General. He did, however, make a plea to the Zodiac to turn himself in: he will get the help he needs and his rights will be protected, Lynch promised. Following the conference, SFPD Chief of Inspectors Captain Marvin Lee was circumspect in his optimism, “I couldn’t say we’re any closer to catching the suspect.”