Zodiac Unmasked: The Identity of America's Most Elusive Serial Killers Revealed

by Robert Graysmith

  At 1:30 P.M., Inspectors Armstrong and Toschi, like travelers into a foreign land, crossed into Solano County for their appointment with Mulanax. Since 1969 they had examined hundreds of suspects, were, in fact, weary. However, Starr was beginning to look serious, beginning to look very good. Toschi, with his mass of tight, curly black hair, was wearing his trademark bow tie. A smile broadened his remarkably expressive face. They had brought along Mel Nicolai, and Toschi was beaming at being among such good company. He had a high opinion of Nicolai. “Very professional,” he told me later. “Mel enjoyed a good laugh and was a very, very good law enforcement officer. With his crew cut and glasses, he looked like a professor. Nicolai, as a State Department of Justice CI&I agent, put cases together when multiple counties were involved. He was a middle guy. We could contact him and he could get us information out of Sacramento.”

  As for Mulanax, he was a man’s man, a rugged outdoorsman, a hunter like Zodiac. “After I see Starr in person, I’ll contact you guys to come back,” he assured them as the meeting concluded. Mulanax was the kind of man you could count on. Toschi knew he would come back with the goods.

  Monday, August 2, 1971

  Mulanax continued his circumspect investigation into Starr’s past, gathering as much background information as he could before making personal contact with the suspect. He noted, as others had, that Starr’s birth date was December 18—two days shy of the December 20 date of the Lake Herman Road double murders. Mulanax knew some serial killers struck on dates that held significance for them. So far, Zodiac had shot or stabbed couples on the Fourth of July, near Halloween, Columbus Day, and a few days before Christmas. However, a few VPD investigators believed Zodiac had only taken responsibility for the Lake Herman tragedy to enhance his rep and further confuse the police. “Mulanax told me,” said Toschi, “that one day when Starr wasn’t home, he went to Starr’s house and his mother was there. He kinda just walked around and searched a little bit.”

  If Mulanax spoke conversationally with Starr himself that day (not a questioning in any respect), no record has survived. Mulanax saw the open door to Starr’s basement room yawning before him, and observed it was painted the same “near-neutral green” as the kitchen, though a shade lighter. Was Starr down there now, peering up at him? Bernice, catching his eye, said, “It was a bedroom for both my boys for many years.” The mailbox was a slot in the corner of the basement room. “All letters must drop into that hideaway,” thought Mulanax, thinking of the mail-obsessed killer. And Zodiac had said in a letter he had a basement and bombs there. Starr had moved from an upstairs room back to the basement for more privacy. Mulanax was tempted, but caution prevented him from advancing a step further. He retreated, but was still thinking over the substance of his visit and a few of Bernice’s vague remarks as the weekend ended and he prepared to confer again with the San Francisco detectives.

  Tuesday, August 3, 1971

  Many along Fresno Street had known Starr since he was a boy, knew how devoted he was to his mother. But that mutual affection existed only as smoke and mirrors—neighbors often overheard shouting matches between the two. “His mother was a little on the stern side,” said Cheney. “Yeah, she was tough. She was a tall woman, almost as tall as Starr. Both parents were tall and slender like Ron. Unlike his brother, Ron got along with everybody.” The main bone of contention was that Bernice held Starr’s younger brother, Ron, in higher regard than him.

  “There was a big rivalry between Ron and his older brother,” Panzarella told me later. “Ron got more girls. He could be more charming and the mother used to favor him, much to Starr’s disdain. She adored Ron who was a nice-looking kid. And Starr at this time had already gotten fat. I spent the weekend in the home with the dad and the mom. Starr came over. He was living in his trailer at the time and I saw how unassuming the father was. He had been wounded in an airplane wreck over Oklahoma in the late fifties or early sixties and he was never the same after that. He was a draftsman now and we drove him to work, dropped him off and picked him up later. Nice man, but very meek. He wasn’t always that way. Ron told me it was the accident that made him that way. After the accident Ethan could no longer keep his son in line. He became—how should I say this—quiet. The mother was totally the dominant personality. They were always arguing and bantering. He’d really cuss her up and down, screaming at her. I know if I had spoken to my parents that way, they would have killed me. Starr called her a ‘c—’ and stuff like that. It was awful and this was at the dinner table.”

  Cheney elaborated on this. “Starr’s father was a decorated jet pilot,” he told me. “I don’t know if he got shot down or he had a wreck, but he had an accident and was injured pretty badly and was medically discharged. I didn’t know him from the days when he was still in the Navy. He was still active, but apparently had lost some of his fire. He wasn’t the hot jet pilot he had once been. He still went to work and still was a draftsman on Mare Island. He wasn’t bummed up. He could walk all right and all of his functions were normal. He was a nice guy. The family had commissary privileges and had I.D. cards so they could shop on military bases. The Wing Walker shoes he wore probably came from Mare Island. They were made for pilots and crewmen.”

  From the street Mulanax idled his car and observed the smudged, practically ground-level window to Starr’s disordered basement apartment, and tried to imagine what it must be like. He still yearned to have a peek. Starr’s mother had described her son’s inner sanctum as stacked with books. Starr was quite the student, “a professional student,” his brother said. “After summer vacation,” Bernice had explained, “he intends to return to college at Cotati for the fall semester.” Mulanax thought back to 1969 and to another summer vacation—tumultuous times, violent times for Vallejo.

  Starr had been a student then too and Zodiac had been at his boldest, grasping Water Town in a grip of fear. With the intimate knowledge of a Vallejo resident, he capitalized on a citywide police and firemen’s strike. Throughout the walkout there were only two dozen California Highway Patrolmen to cruise about and enforce traffic laws for a city of 72,000. On July 21, negotiators almost had the strike licked, but Apollo 11 delayed a settlement meeting when Governor Reagan declared a moon-flight holiday.

  So far summer vacation 1971 had been less turbulent, thought Mulanax. Vallejo had a highly efficient law enforcement team in place and Starr had a job with Union Oil of California to keep him occupied. Returning to headquarters just before lunch, Mulanax rang the Union Oil refinery at Pinole and spoke with McNamara in Personnel. He confirmed Starr was employed as a junior chemist in their lab, had been since September 8, 1970. But Starr could not have been very happy at Pinole. Last April 20, the overqualified man had applied for employment at a Union 76 garage in nearby Rodeo. “His summer hours at the refinery are from 8:00 A.M. until 4:00 P.M.-4:30 P.M.,” continued McNamara, “and that’s each weekday.”

  “I’d like to interview him during working hours,” Mulanax explained.

  “That’s a bit out of the ordinary,” said the personnel chief, “and bound to cause some disruption.” Disruption was exactly what Mulanax had in mind. “Well, we can provide my private office for your purposes,” McNamara agreed.

  “Good,” said the detective. “Just don’t let on that we intend to interview him prior to his being brought to the office.” Most definitely Mulanax wanted to surprise Starr and put him off balance. He hung up, noted the appointment on his pad, then dialed Toschi and Armstrong and informed them of the meeting. Famished after a busy morning, he went to lunch.

  Armstrong and Toschi had been busy too. Toschi studied two pages of scribbled notes, munching animal crackers and dunking them in a cup of Instant Folgers. He had just learned that Starr, though born left-handed, had been compelled as a child to write with his right hand—a possible cause of serious psychological problems.

  After lunch, Morrill got back to Mulanax in Vallejo about Starr’s canceled checks. “I’ve compared them to Zodiac letterin
g,” Morrill said, “and they come up negative.” What were they missing? wondered Mulanax. If Starr was Zodiac, had he devised a way to disguise his printing? Or had a confederate written them? Right to the end that shadowy second man would be a worrisome element in the hunt for Zodiac.

  Wednesday, August 4, 1971

  Toschi, Armstrong, and Mulanax sped south from Vallejo along Interstate 80 and rattled across the Carquinez Bridge into Contra Costa County. Tracing the shore of San Pablo Bay, they swept past Selby, Tormey, Rodeo, and Hercules. To the west Hamilton AFB shimmered across clouded green water. The previous January two Standard Oil Company tankers had collided just outside the Golden Gate, spilling almost two million gallons of black gummy crude into the Bay. Shortly before 10:25 A.M. the detectives halted at the chain-link gate of a vast oil refinery. The Pinole installation was impressive. By night, when it was twinkling with a million diamond lights, great clouds of roiling steam made it otherworldly; by day fingerlike black towers shot hundreds of feet upward like the barrels of guns.

  The gate slid back and, three or four blocks later, the detectives climbed out. Toschi craned his neck upward, where processing towers boiled crude oil to 750 degrees. The heating procedure separated molecules, converting them into propane, gasoline, butane, kerosene, diesel fuel, lubricating oil, even road tar and wax. Starr was a chemist and the refinery itself no more than a giant chemical lab. Complex conduits twisted into overlapping tunnels, funneling raw petroleum into mammoth storage tanks, catalytic units, and vacuum distillation units.

  Sudden shrill whistles alerted Toschi. High above, men scrambled on gantries and towers. An unctuous mist like soot showered down on them and made Toschi queasy. His breakfast this morning and for many mornings prior had been a few aspirins washed down with cold coffee. They entered McNamara’s office and watched as he phoned a lab to summon the unsuspecting assistant chemist. “It’ll be a minute,” he said. Starr’s records were spread out like a fan on McNamara’s desk. Bill Armstrong took the time to thumb through them since he would be in charge of the questioning.

  The investigators did not hear the suspect in the hallway—only the elevator doors opening with a “whoosh.” Starr walked softly for a big man and was wearing padded shoes of some sort. At last they would see him face to face. Toschi sat rigid in his seat. He half rose. After so many suspects, after so many years and disappointments, was Zodiac finally here—within their grasp? Toschi held his breath. The door opened. Starr’s physical presence was all Toschi thought it would be and all that he knew Zodiac’s was.

  2

  robert hall starr

  Wednesday, August 4, 1971

  Starr filled the doorway. His bold, almost hairless head swiveled from face to face as the trio of detectives identified themselves. Starr seemed surprised and a little nervous that they were policemen. “I realized that he was afraid he was going to get fired,” Toschi told me later, “and that alone might have accounted for his apprehension.” Twenty-five hundred Zodiac suspects had surfaced over the years and been painstakingly checked out. Since so many counties, jurisdictions, and unincorporated areas were involved, cops did not always compare notes or even names. Starr was not their first good suspect. He was not their last. Conveniently, alarm bells should have resounded in the investigators’ minds. They didn’t. Only after the conference, when their heads were cool and time allowed them to consider what Starr had said, so much of it unbidden, did their pulses begin to race. Back at Homicide that stark black clock seemed to tick faster.

  As Mulanax had done, Toschi took in the suspect’s physical presence—Starr had blue-brown eyes and short light brown hair that was graying in the back. Hadn’t Officer Fouke mentioned something about Zodiac having “light-colored hair possibly graying in the rear,” recollected Toschi, “and the curve of Zodiac’s skull had shone through his sparse hair the night he shot the cabdriver.” The late sixties were a period of protest when people rebelled against the shorter hair of the the fifties and wore their hair long. In 1969, Zodiac had worn his short—like a military man. However, during a previous attack at Lake Berryessa, Zodiac presumably sported a healthy head of straight brown hair beneath his hood.

  “I remember a kind of greasy forehead . . .” the surviving Berryessa victim told me later. He thought the perpetrator had dark brown hair—a lock had shown through dark glasses covering narrow eyelets. Beneath those glasses, the wounded boy conjectured, were a second pair of glasses. The killer, in complete costume—a black executioner’s hood with a white circle and cross on the chest—had appeared almost magically in the twilight on September 27, 1969. Zodiac had traveled north to Napa County and targeted the student and his young girlfriend, stabbing them with a foot-long, inch-wide bayonet with a taped wooden handle. He had decorated the haft, carried at his belt in a handmade scabbard, with brass rivets. “I don’t know how tall Zodiac was, maybe five foot eight or six feet, somewhere in there. I’m a pretty poor judge of height because of my height,” said the lanky student.

  Starr’s wide brow had breadth enough for a second apple-cheeked face; his neck was thick; high-set ears flew out like horns. His broad-shouldered, six-foot-tall bulk was intimidating. “Everybody that I ever saw that met Starr underestimated his height,” Cheney later explained. “He had that fearsome look in his eyes. Thick thighs and a big butt and a belly and strong shoulders and chest.” Yes, Starr was a heavy man, but then so was Zodiac. The surviving Berryessa victim estimated Zodiac’s weight at between 225 and 250 pounds. “I described this guy as being really fat,” he said. “I don’t know, he could have been moderately heavy and wearing a thickly lined windbreaker.” But there was another way to tell.

  Detective Sergeant Ken Narlow of the Napa County Sheriff’s Department had done a compaction test on Zodiac’s unique footprints. He had a deputy sheriff weighing 210 pounds walk alongside them. “He didn’t sink down as deeply as Zodiac had,” Narlow told me, “In order to put that print so deeply into the sand we figured the Zodiac weighed at least 220 pounds. Clear prints at the heel had indicated that Zodiac was not running when he left.” Morrill, the handwriting examiner, as conservative with the compaction test as with handprinting, told me, “It depends on how the sand was at the time too. If the guy was taking big loping steps or mincing along. They were guessing at the size from the indentation he made. Suppose the sand the day before was different. Suppose there had been water in it.”

  But the ground had been dry and he had been striding leisurely. The prints were firm and especially clear at the heel. Napa cops arrived almost immediately because Zodiac had boldly phoned them from a booth within four and one-half blocks of their headquarters. “He was bound to have some blood on him,” Narlow told me. “To come in from Berryessa and hit that particular telephone he had to pass, I figure, some twenty to twenty-one telephones. He came in close enough to hear any possible sirens rushing out of the city of Napa. He could call in from the lake, but he would be trapping himself up there. It’s a twenty-five-minute drive down. The booth was twenty-seven miles from the crime scene. If we had found out he was calling from the lake we could have sealed the area off.”

  At the lake there was further proof that Zodiac’s considerable weight was not padding. He had impressed unique marks deeply into the earth. A circle on the sole reading “SUPERWEAR” showed clearly in Narlow’s plaster moulages. Zodiac’s military motif, suggested by a black holster at his belt containing a blue-steel semiautomatic military .45, was enhanced by the identifying logos of his shoes—black boots used primarily by the Navy. Wing Walker shoes were worn almost exclusively by aircraft maintenance crewmen for walking the wings of jets. Narlow discovered that, but only after his men culled 150 shoe boutiques with names like “The Spinning Wheel” and “Willow Tree.”

  In 1969, 103,700 pairs of Wing Walkers had been shipped to Ogden, Utah. The Weinbrenner Shoe Company of Merrill, Wisconsin, had manufactured them per a 1966 government contract for one million pairs total. The last pairs were distributed t
o Air Force and Naval installations on the West Coast. Only active-duty personnel or former active-duty personnel, or their dependents, could have purchased such shoes. These personnel were required to present an I.D. card that carried a thumbprint and photo to enter any base exchange and make any purchases there. Vallejo, its economy directly related to military operations, served as home for many skilled employees with Navy or Air Force ties. They toiled at Travis AFB, north of Vallejo near Fairfield, or at Hamilton, Mather, and McClellan Air Force Bases, nearby Mare Island, Alameda Naval Station, and Treasure Island. The FBI believed in the military connection.

  “UNSUB [unknown subject of an investigation] may have military background,” the FBI file said, “inasmuch as UNSUB used bayonet and two separate 9mm weapons and one of the surviving victims observed UNSUB to be wearing military-type boots.” Not only were these unusual-looking chucker-type boots available only through a limited outlet, but police had their size. Zodiac wore a size 10½ Regular shoe, which indicated a tall man, as did his long stride.

  Toschi, recalling Zodiac’s unusual homemade costume, later told me: “We sent our artist to Napa County [on October 24, 1969]. Surviving victim Bryan Hartnell described the Zodiac’s hood as black and sleeveless, the white circle and crosshair in the middle of the chest. The hood looked well made and well-sewn [the corners had been stitched and there was neat stitching around the flat top] with clip-on sunglasses over the eye slits.” And Starr could sew (he had been a sailmaker). But the police in that cramped refinery office scarcely wondered about the suspect’s sewing skills or paid much attention to his shoes—they were studying his face. Beyond his strength and the build of a potential Gold Medal swimmer gone to seed was a highly intelligent mind. Starr’s I.Q. was 136.