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

by Robert Graysmith

  “And did he?” asked Toschi.

  “No, he never did.”

  “Do you know if Allen has ever owned a 1965-’66 brown Corvair?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he replied.

  “I see,” said Toschi.

  “But I did,” said Tucker.

  “You did?” said Toschi, wheeling. “You owned a 1965 brown Corvair?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever loan this car to Allen?”

  “No, I haven’t. At the time I had two cars, the Corvair and the Pontiac. I let him use my Pontiac on occasion. I was living in Berkeley at that time. In the summer of 1969 I left the Corvair parked at the Richfield Service Station at Nebraska and Broadway [in Vallejo] for about two weeks. I was trying to sell it. I left the keys at the station and at this particular time Allen was employed as an attendant at that station.”

  “Exactly when in the summer did you leave your car?”

  “I can’t recall the exact time, but it was mid-summer of 1969.”

  Tucker recollected that three weeks prior, Karen, Leigh Allen’s sister-in-law, had visited and wanted him to speak to Allen on her behalf. “The family had gotten another complaint about his recent involvement with a child,” Tucker said. “I went to Allen’s home and spoke to him about resuming psychiatric treatment. However, I was unsuccessful and so I washed my hands of him. I told him, ‘I don’t want you to come around my home in the future. Our association is at an end.’”

  Toschi studied his Timex, anxious to compare notes with Armstrong. He visualized his partner equally anxious to get on his motorbike and take to the suburban dirt trails, the warm sun in his face. The rugged trail would rattle the cobwebs from his head. On weekends, as a diversion from stress, Armstrong focused on salvaging his perpetually wilting backyard garden. As for Mulanax, he was as fired up as he had been days ago. Now he was interested in contacting Mrs. Tucker as soon as possible. He wanted to see what she recalled about the printing inside the gray box. He rang her from Kidder’s office, and learned she was working the graveyard shift at an Oakland hospital. That meeting would have to be postponed. Instead, Mulanax decided to speak with Allen’s sister-in-law, Karen Allen, a twenty-six-year-old former schoolteacher. Mulanax phoned Karen at her job and arranged to have her come into the Vallejo P.D. She arrived promptly at 2:00 P.M. and took a seat.

  “Let me tell you why I asked you in,” Mulanax said. On the surface, Karen seemed surprised that her brother-in-law was suspected of being the long-sought Zodiac killer, but offered to give whatever help she could. Mulanax wondered if she could be the original tipster. He confirmed that Karen knew of Allen’s preoccupation with children. She stated another thing positively—her brother-in-law hated women. “He has never had a serious relationship with a female of his own age,” she said. Sandy Panzarella had voiced similar remarks. “Leigh just pretended to be interested in women,” he said. “Eventually he gave up even that slender pretext.” Various women Leigh had dated afterward voiced the same opinion—their relationship with him had only been platonic. In most cases sexual psychopaths have few social or sexual affiliations, and might never have experienced normal sexual intercourse. In these uncommon individuals, for reasons unknown, aggressive and sexual impulses intertwine early in childhood. Ultimately, these confused feelings find expression in vicious sexual assaults and sadistic murders. Lacking a conscience, Zodiac had no remorse for the pain he inflicted on others. Their pain brings him pleasure.

  Karen disclosed that, after her marriage to Ron, it became apparent that Leigh viewed her as an intruder. He believed she had come to separate him from his brother, and actually made threats against her. “He was spoiled and pampered by his mother,” she said with a trace of bitterness. “She does his cooking, washes his clothes, cleans up after him, and gives him money. She even paid for his two cars and two boats.” It was odd that Allen intensely disliked his mother no matter what she did for him, and even stranger that he had expressed such feelings to Karen, whom he viewed as an interloper.

  As for Bernice Allen, she had never forgotten her son’s squandered Olympic potential. Leigh had been a talented diver. “She’s always ragging me about my weight,” he had snarled to Cheney and Panazarella. A competition photo of him in a Vallejo paper depicted a slender, almost handsome young man with blondish hair. Other pictures from the 1960s showed how much he resembled the younger, unamended San Francisco Zodiac composite drawing. If Leigh had not been steadily gaining weight, he would have been a dead ringer for the sketch. Allen’s altered appearance reminded Mulanax of a line Zodiac had written:

  “I look like the description passed out only when I do my thing, the rest of the time I look entirle different. I shall not tell you what my discise [disguise] consists of when I kill.”

  Mulanax passed copies of Zodiac’s bizarre notes to Karen. She studied them and said she had noticed a paper with similar printing in her brother-in-law’s hand in November 1969. “What is that?” she had asked. “This is the work of an insane person,” Leigh replied. “I’ll show you later.” As with the Tuckers, he never did. However, while the printing on the Zodiac letters was not familiar to her as being that of her brother-in-law, some phrases were. Leigh had used the expression “trigger mach” instead of trigger mechanism. Finally, she thumbed to a copy of an authenticated Christmas card Zodiac had mailed to attorney Melvin Belli during a period when the master criminal wanted to give himself up.

  An FBI report, December 31, 1969, noted the note had “not been written as freely as the other threatening letters in this matter.” However, an enclosed blood-blackened portion of a victim’s shirt validated it. Zodiac’s handwriting was subject to change and in the space of months. At 1:59 P.M. the following day, a man identifying himself as Zodiac called the switchboard operator at FBI headquarters in Sacramento, then hung up after beginning to name someone he had just killed. “‘Happy Christmass,’” Karen read aloud from the photostat. “I definitely recall having received a card at Christmas from my brother-in-law,” she said. “‘Happy Christmass’ was spelled exactly the same way.”

  Karen, like Tucker, confirmed Allen was left-handed. “His elementary school teachers attempted to make him right-handed,” she said. “He learned to write that way, but soon reverted to writing with his left hand.” While Morrill believed the letters were written right-handed, he suspected that Zodiac was naturally left-handed. The obscuring effect of a felt-tip pen and a left-handed man printing firmly and unnaturally with his right hand might explain the difficulty in matching handprinting to any suspect. Sergeant Mulanax was hungry to learn more.

  “Could I drop by tonight when your husband will be home?” he said. “We want to ask him some questions too.” Ronald Gene Allen, a thirty-two-year-old landscape engineer, was currently attending Berkeley College. He had attended Cal Poly from fall 1960 until fall 1968, when he attained a bachelor of science degree. “He’ll be late,” she said, but agreed that 8:00 P.M. would be convenient. After she left, Mulanax contacted Armstrong and Toschi and asked them to rendezvous with him at 216 Aragon Street in Vallejo that night. An already long day was growing longer.

  Mulanax reached the home first. It was just off Columbus Parkway, which led directly into Blue Rock Springs to the north. He suspected Zodiac had used the parkway as an escape route after the July Fourth shootings. Mulanax stood in the deep shadows of the pleasant tree-lined cul-de-sac. Somewhere in his cozy little town, the most cunning criminal he had ever come across was waiting. A cool wind blew in from San Pablo Bay. He scanned the hedges and fences, unable to shake thoughts of a watcher. Fifteen minutes later, Toschi and Armstrong reached Ron and Karen’s home and found Mulanax already inside and glad to be in the light.

  As Karen had done, Ron offered to help in the investigation if he could. Mulanax believed his offer to be sincere. “But I can’t believe my brother is a serious suspect in the case,” he said. At first, he offered little on either side of the scale as to his brother’s guilt or inn
ocence. “I am well acquainted with your source of information.” So, thought Toschi, the informants, Cheney and Panzarella, had spoken with Ron before the Manhattan Beach P.D. He did not know that Cheney and Ron had been roommates in college. “They are responsible people,” the brother admitted. “They wouldn’t have made such statements if they were not true.” He also explained that he had received a complaint from one of the informants that Allen had made improper advances toward one of his children. “He has a definite problem as far as children are concerned and he does drink to excess.” Though Ron didn’t say so outright, Mulanax reserved the possibility that a personal motive might be behind some of the accusations against Allen. That would explain many things and it would mean they were on the wrong track. Few serial killers drank to excess. It had something to do with the lack of control.

  Ron confirmed that Allen’s two revolvers were .22-caliber. Zodiac had used a .22-caliber automatic pistol during the Lake Herman Road homicides, but from then on had used various 9-mm automatics, a .45-caliber weapon, and even a knife. Though Ron had never seen any of the handprinting Tucker had mentioned, he had observed the gray box. At one point it, he recalled, had been kept in his old room.

  “Ron and his wife were very cooperative,” Toschi said later. “What I heard is that he [Allen] was not close to his mother, that he just lived in the house, that’s the only place he had. Allen, we learned afterward, had many weapons and, like the brother said, was very familiar with the roads and side roads all around the area. Later, Karen just felt that her brother-in-law was the one we were looking for and that Vallejo P.D. kind of just kissed him off, and that disturbed me. We had to work with these other detectives, and it bothered me that they felt we were the big-city detectives when in fact we never came across that way at all.”

  The three policemen left. Ron followed them out and promised again to do anything he could to assist. He was as helpful as his big brother had been at the refinery that morning. Toschi looked back. Ron appeared a lonely and worried figure under the porch light. It was now 10:00 P.M. Toschi reached his Sunset District home soon after, kissed Carol good night, looked in on his three daughters, Linda, Karen, and Susan, and crawled into bed. Every bone in his body ached and cried for sleep, but he tossed and turned all night. He could not get that watch out of his mind. And a neighbor had seen a bloody knife, dying only days after glimpsing the blade.

  Wednesday, August 11, 1971

  At 11:00 A.M., Mulanax got hold of Bob Luce, owner-operator of the Arco station at 640 Broadway in Vallejo. Mulanax told Luce, “I’m conducting an investigation on a former employee.” He did not tell him why right off.

  “Leigh worked for me on a part-time schedule for about half a year,” Luce explained, “but tended to be undependable. And there were those complaints about him and children . . . he seemed too interested in small girls. In April [1969] he came to work drunk again—once too often for me. I fired him.” Mulanax wondered if the job loss had precipitated the July 4, 1969, Blue Rock Springs shootings by Zodiac. Mulanax laid his cards on the table. This was unusual. “I knew Mulanax pretty well,” Bawart told me. “Mulanax was a kind of a close-to-the-vest guy.”

  Mulanax brought up the possibility that Allen might have used Phil Tucker’s car to commit a Zodiac murder. “Tucker had his car here all right, but it wasn’t for as long as two weeks,” Luce said. “No, that’s not right.” Tucker himself hadn’t kept a record of the dates, and Mulanax badly needed Luce’s repair invoice. In spite of a diligent search, they could not uncover the exact days the Corvair had been left overnight at the station. On the July 4, 1969, date of the Blue Rock Springs shootings, Allen was no longer working at the Arco station, and so the repair record didn’t matter—unless Leigh had kept a set of keys to the station or made his own.

  At 5:00 that evening, Mulanax contacted Tucker’s wife, Joan, at her home. Joan substantiated her husband’s story about the gray box and the papers tucked inside. “I had been very interested in the content of the papers,” she said, “since I was preparing for a college psychology exam. Leigh explained he had received these papers from a patient at Atascadero, and I said my interest was directed toward the working of this person’s mind. I was impressed by the neatness and exactness of the printing and of the arcane symbols.”

  The detective showed her Zodiac ciphers clipped from three Bay Area papers. Joan identified numerous symbols as being the same as those on papers Allen had showed her. Her recollection was that these were drawn with a felt-tip pen. At 5:30 Tucker returned from work and Mulanax showed him the same cryptograms. He too thought certain symbols looked the same as those Allen had shown him.

  “And we still haven’t been able to track down the exact date you left your Corvair at the Arco station,” said Mulanax.

  “I didn’t have any luck either,” Tucker said, “but I do remember that when my car was not sold, I left it parked in front of my father-in-law’s house for a considerable period of time. It’s possible that Allen could have driven the car during this period, but I don’t know if he did. My in-laws are in Europe now, and when they get back I’ll ask them if they know.” The in-laws knew Leigh Allen as a friend of their son-in-law, and would not have thought it strange to see him around the Corvair. Tucker began to speak more freely of his former employee.

  “Leigh is a schizophrenic personality,” Tucker said. During Leigh’s therapy five different personalities had been found. “At times he actually seems to live the part of whatever literature he’s reading. He can tell a lie and actually believe what he is telling is the truth.” Mulanax’s eyebrows went up. This was a very interesting talent—one that might stand a lie detector on its head. Once more Mulanax heard that Allen truly hated women and had said so on many occasions. No one hated women as much as Zodiac. The only victims that had managed to survive had been men.

  Thursday, August 12, 1971

  In the morning Mulanax typed up his reports and studied the various stories related to him about the best Zodiac suspect yet. Physically, Leigh matched Zodiac—from hair coloring to weight to height to wearing the exact size of the killer’s unique flight-line Wing Walker boots. Circumstantial evidence was compelling: Leigh had predicted he would call himself “Zodiac” and shoot couples in lovers’ lanes long before there was a Zodiac. He had spoken of an “electric gun sight” and “picking off kiddies,” used phrases like “Happy Christmass,” and “trigger mach” before Zodiac had. Allen wore a Zodiac wristwatch and kept Zodiac-like symbols in a gray box. Like Zodiac, he was enamored of “The Most Dangerous Game.” He had been headed for Lake Berryessa the day of the stabbings and been seen with a bloody knife. Mulanax did not know that Allen and his former friend, Don Cheney, had often fly-fished at Clear Lake and Grass Valley, and once at Berryessa. “We fished in a stream below the lake and fifty yards from where we parked,” he later told me. “It was crowded the one time we went.” Not only did Leigh have friends in those areas, a man and a woman at Clear Lake, for instance, but there had been a recent murder at all three.

  Meanwhile, at the refinery, Allen was in a rage—because of the questioning, he was certain he would be fired from his job at Union Oil. When McNamara had called him into his office, Leigh had known his days there were numbered.

  Friday, August 13, 1971

  After the two authenticated letters in March, all correspondence from Zodiac had ceased. Police in four counties speculated Zodiac might have been arrested for another crime, institutionalized, or died. Nonetheless, Mulanax continued to plow through the files. For just over a week he had been seeking a record of any officer questioning Leigh Allen back in 1969. Sergeant Lynch had not yet recalled questioning Leigh. His meeting at Cave School with the skin-diving chemist consumed only two paragraphs in the center of a single page. As the towering sheaves of paper became an avalanche, that page was buried in an ever-increasing snowbank. Manpower stretched to the breaking point, and everyone feared Zodiac might strike again.

  Wednesday, Septembe
r 1, 1971

  The SFPD fared scarcely better than Vallejo. Armstrong and Toschi, routinely working six murders simultaneously, felt at times that the Bay Area held a franchise on homicidal maniacs. Toschi, in spite of once being a fitness instructor, was subject to bouts of illness from stress. He was a contradiction—he was modest, but enjoyed the limelight. Some nights he slipped on his all-weather raincoat and Hush Puppies, then strolled, head down, through his Sunset neighborhood. Other nights he took long drives down the coast highway, or slumped in his easy chair listening to Big Band 78s in stereo. As he desperately tried to sort it all out, he recalled that exactly eleven years ago today Chief Tom Cahill had signed his transfer to the Bureau of Inspectors. It had been the second happiest day of his life.

  Friday, September 17, 1971

  Armstrong and Toschi later ascertained from Ron Allen that his brother spent at least two days a week at their mother’s home. Allen’s mother, Bernice, traveled abroad frequently, her trips spanning many weeks. These excursions, arranged through the Vallejo Travel Club, were financed by pension money from Leigh’s recently deceased father. During his mother’s absence, Allen would reside alone at the family residence. Though the upstairs was free to him, he still clung, leechlike, to that dank, unkempt basement bedroom where the secret box had been stored. It was as if he were guarding a fortress.

  However, Bernice had been ill and remained home. Out of respect for her, the police held back from searching her home. Allen was, after all, only one of nearly three thousand Zodiac suspects. “We were always concerned about his elderly mother who was not well,” Toschi told me. “The family had mentioned it several times and asked us not to go in. The brother is telling us, ‘I can search the basement myself. I know where he keeps things especially when he’s away.’ Jack Mulanax never wanted to talk seriously about a search warrant. He had been turned down on handprinting and on fingerprints. He just said, ‘He sure looks good, but I don’t even know if I could get a search warrant.’”